gorge
5mo ago
- Large conspiracies like faking the moon landing would require so many people to be in on it as to be impossible to maintain. So concepts like “The Cathedral”
The whole point of "The Cathedral" is that it is not a conspiracy. It is a phenomenon of distributed, public coordination -- there is no inner-party doing the coordination.. It is a herd. A very powerful, important herd, and one that continually defies any attempt to be named. There are microconspiracies within the Cathedral (journolist, Climategate, etc.) There are super-influencers who to some extent can move the herd. But the overall phenomena is a herd phenomena that is not generally based on secret coordination, but rather everyone looking to their left and to their right to stay in line. "The Cathedral" has a very enviable ability in that every time someone tries to coin a term for it "The System" "The Establishment" "The Uniparty" they manage to make associate usage of the term with being a kook or "conspiracy theorist."
gorge
1yr ago
(cont, part 3)
The elephant in the room
Now that we muddled the situation by discussing all the confounders, unknowables, and conflicting evidence, we should adress the the elephant in the room: Every low-fertility country in the world today -- from South Korea to Sweden to Poland -- is wildly feminist by the standards of history, and by the standards of countries that have had high-fertility.
When we compare basic measures of modern feminism versus traditional partriachy -- % of women enrolling in college educated, % of legislatures women, divorce rate -- we see that contemporary South Korea and Japan are far closer to the modern United States and Sweden than it is to 1950s America.
Fertility Rate | Gross college enrollment rate for women | % national legistlators women | Divorce Rate |
|
America 1820 | 6.42 | 0% | 0.0% | 3% |
America 1890 | 4.39 | 0% | 0.0% | 6% |
Japan 1925 | 5.18 | 0% | 0.0% | 10% |
America 1950 | 3.31 | 5% | 0.1% | 25% |
Saudi Arabia 2020 | 2.28 | 74% | 20.0% | 48% |
Iran 2020 | 2.15 | 57% | 6.0% | 33% |
America 2020 | 1.8 | 102% | 24.0% | 39% |
South Korea 2020 | 0.84 | 88% | 17.0% | 42% |
Japan 2020 | 1.34 | 62% | 10.0% | 35% |
Poland 2020 | 1.38 | 84% | 29.0% | 33% |
Sweden 2020 | 1.8 | 96% | 47.0% | 50% |
Spain 2020 | 1.24 | 102% | 47.0% | 54% |
Finland 2020 | 1.35 | 101% | 45.0% | 56% |
Russia 2020 | 1.5 | 93% | 17.0% | 70% |
Most Americans would probably be surprised by how feminist contemporary Iran and Saudi Arabia are. When these countries entered public consciousness we saw them as ultra-patriarchal, "medieval" and "theocratic" kingdoms. But by 2022, Saudi Arabia now sends 76% of women to college, has a 47% divorce rate, and allows a modest amount of women rpresentation in parliament. Most laws against women living alone or owning property have now been rescinded. Correspondingly, its fertility rate has plummetted from 7.1 in 1980 to 2.2 today.
When we want to determine if low fertility is an inherent part of wealthy modernity or of feminism we have a problem in that we have no control group. Every country in the world post-1945 either came under the dominance of the American hegemony, the Soviet hegemony, or the Chinese hegemony. All three of these empires were explicitly feminist. Feminism has been a core part of the United Nation's declarations and intiatives. America has pushed feminism in every country that matters, whether that be via the hard power of conquering Japan and rewriting their constitution, or the soft power of requiring certain governance and "human rights" intiatives in order to gain aid and favored trade relations.
This does raise a big question of whether wealthy modernity, feminism, and low fertility are all inherently linked together -- maybe it is not just historical accident that there is no control group. Perhaps we will address that in a future post.
(cont, part 2)
The third problem is that many assertions about such-and-such country having a "traditional patriarchy" are completely wrong -- these claims are either exaggerations made by agenda-driven activists, or misconceptions of Westerners who only ever hear exceptional stories, and never the stories about how 99% time they are similar to us.
Starting the case of South Korea, we see that the New York Times has signal-boosted a few writers who have called South Korea "patriarchal":
Many men would rather not acknowledge that South Korea is an entrenched patriarchy and that toxic gender relations are taking a toll on society. source
And:
Other trends in South Korea strongly discourage births. They include rising opposition among women to child-rearing expectations by men in what remains a patriarchal society. More women in South Korea, rebelling against the country’s deeply embedded sexism, are foregoing marriage and motherhood in pursuit of education and professional careers.
But is this the true story of South Korea?
I went on a binge of reading articles and forum posts by actual South Koreans. By cherry-picking alternative evidence I can tell an entirely different story:
South Korea in the past decade has gone off the extreme feminist deep-end. Popular online communities for young women, such as WOMAD or Megalia,have been the hosts of campaigns of vitriolic attacks and physical assaults against men -- such as calling men vermin, posting secret nude pics of men up for mockery, wishing for North Korea to invade and kill Korean males. Nor is this not a fringe movement -- the online communities these views thrive on can reach up to a million young female users. While of course the majority of the content on these forums is mundane, when the topic of men comes up, only the radical feminist position is allowed. The Western media, not understanding the nature of South Korean feminism, denounces even a modest backlash against this extreme feminism as being mysoginistic.
At the government level, South Korea is more feminist than the U.S.A. in a number of ways: South Korea elected a woman president in 2013, followed by a male president who campaigned on promises to be a "feminist president." Ministry for Women claims that men are 'potential criminals' and have a 'social responsibility' to prove women that he is 'different from the others.' South korea ranks 10th in the UN's equality index, while America is 46th.
Korean media culture has villainized the domineering mother-in-law of old. The newer generation of mother-in-laws positions themselves as friends and equals of young wives. The rights of Korean women have enormously improved, and women are standing against gender discrimination and injustice. The patriarchy system has disappeared a lot, and daughter-in-law is no longer subordinate to their mother-in-law.
Korean feminism is more selfish than the Western version -- the new trend is to expect guys to be sweet k-drama fantasy men that enthusiastically cook as a hobby. Princess culture cherry picking feminist privilege, not empowerment, has really become an abomination. Korean government is pushing a female quota for police, despite women being held to lower standards and not actually doing anything at the scene of the crime.
Women are now a key part of the work force -- and held to the same standards of long hours as men are held to. Despite stories fed to western news organizations by activists about how South Korea is stuck in the 1950s, that is not true at all. Companies aren't firing women in droves as soon as they get pregnant, instead, they are often asking them how quickly they can come back to work because they cannot afford to lose them for long. There is no baby-making strike, despite what lying activists trick the gullible BBC into saying, all the professoinal working women in Korea are able to go back to work after having children and 50% of homes with children are now dual income. Korean women report that sexual harrassment is actually far greater in Europe and the USA than in in South Korea.
Which portrait of South Korea is more accurate? My own sense based on reading all the original posts and viewing the statistics is that South Korea is more feminist than the U.S. on some dimensions, and less on others. Choosing and weighting the categories in order to add up a total feminist score is an entirely arbitrary exercise. There is a general trend of extreme low-fertility among urbanites in modern cities with high real estate costs, little room for kids to play, and intense job markets. I suspect that South Korea's and Singapore's extra low fertility rates are probably more related to their population being more competitive urbanite than America's. I would guess that South Koreans in Seoul probably have a similar fertility rate to white college educated people living in New York City.
Neither are the Eastern Bloc countries some last hold-outs of patriarchy. Remember that Soviet communism was ultra-feminist for its time-period. The Bolshevik party in the 1920s set up women's departments . Divorce and abortion were available on demand (unlike in the United States at the same time):
In 1923 women's departments existed in most provinces; 35,539 women attended delegate assemblies in cities and towns, and 55,688 more in rural areas....The official message to women was that following the victory of the socialist revolution, women were equal. The Bolsheviks implemented concrete policies designed to equalize the status of women with men, improve their educational level, and involve them in society. ... The main thrust of the rural women's departments was to encourage women to participate in village soviet elections, attend women's assemblies, and promote Komsomol membership. The Bolshevik mission was to enlighten the "backward female masses," overcome their "religious superstition," undermine male domination, and draw them closer to the party. Russia After Lenin: Politics, Culture and Society, 1921 -- 1929.
Now, later on the West experienced second wave feminism while the situation in the Soviet Union was more stagnant. That is probably how the reputation arises for the Eastern Bloc being less feminist. But since the opening up the ex-Soviet bloc to western style TV, these countries are anti-traditional in their own way. Russia for instance, has American inspired reality TV shows glamorizing the "gold diggers" who leave their local towns for wealthy boyfriends in the city. Divorce rates in Russia are insane. Pick-up artists have reported on Poland being especially prime place to pick up women who cheat on their husbands.
As one prominent Russian nationalist recently wrote:
I have to admit that for many years I've been pissed off at our official Duginist rhetoric about the holy war of Russia as the center of world good, tradition and shit, with the bad West and the Euroatlantic civilization. There are two problems with these ideas.
First, it's all a lie. There is no “tradition” in Russia - not in the sense of an historical tradition and canon, but in the sense of a “living” tradition here and now. Russia is the country of total divorce, low birth rates, abandoned old age, an absence of elder men (and thus zero patriarchy), general cynicism, individualism, cult of consumption, extremely weak religiosity (unless we count DIY paganism and DIY esotericism as such), mass (not only elite) aping of any foreign fashions, torn historical and familial memory, indifference to everything national, concrete high-rise construction with no feel of the earth or a feeling of being masters on the land, and most importantly an extreme lack of trust in all social and collective institutions.
USA is an infinitely more “traditional” country than Russia. In USA, almost every other man has read the Bible - and will quote from it. But whatever, the second thing is worse.
In fairness, this is rant likely exaggerates the difference between the USA and Russia in other direction. My general sense is that in the Eastern Bloc both the men and the women are defecting harder than in the West. Outsiders with an agenda look and at this and see how poorly men are behaving and associate that with "toxic masculinity" which codes to them as "traditional patriarchy." In reality there is excessive bad behavior with both sexes and the bad male behavior has little to do with traditional patriarchy.
...on to part 3...
tired: standardized testing is on the chopping block because it has disparate impact against blacks and hispanics
wired: standardized testing is unpopular because the white upper class is losing out to Asians, but they can't say this so they use discrimination against blacks as an excuse.
inspired: standardized testing is unpopular because the head girl types who now control our politics are still mad about the class male nerd who blew off all his homework but still beat her on the tests.
expired: the majority being jealous of smart people is just the world historical normal that we are reverting back to, the era of promoting people based on objective academic achievement is the anomaly
gorge
5mo ago
I think a lot of book-smart millennials were socialized into a culture that pattern-matches anything Republican/Fox News/"homophobic" as morally bad and scientifically wrong. The big battle they witnessed was that of gay rights, where the people who not on board with gay rights in the early 2000s were, in the eyes of the culture, proven to be morally in the wrong. So the instinct is that the LGBQT/NPR team is the good guys, and the trad Christian conservatives the anti-science bad guys. This generation was also raised in a culture (epitomized Jon Stewart) where you didn't carefully examine both sides of the debate, one side was good, and the other side only deserves mocking and derision.
I have a lot of sympathy (or maybe pity) for SBF. "Stole client funds" appears to have solidified as a meme much the same way "crossed state lines" had in the Rittenhouse case.
The FTX terms of service were very clear in saying that client digital assets belonged to the client, were the property of the client, were under the control of the client and were not to be loaned or traded out. "Title to your Digital Assets shall at all times remain with you and shall not transfer to FTX Trading. None of the Digital Assets in your Account are the property of, or shall or may be loaned to, FTX Trading;"
Caroline admitted that in fact they intentionally transferred/loaned these customer deposits to Alameda. That is straight up embezzlement, go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
This is like a bank drilling into a customer's safe deposit box to take their gold, lending out the gold and then losing it. It's theft, not merely a trading mistake.
gorge
1yr ago
To go along with the others that say this is not new and this is not a mistake, I recently learned that back in 2002 the National Organization for Women -- one of the top feminist organizations -- actually pressured city bus networks to drop ads that educated women about risks to ferility:
The series of advertisements -- developed for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the nation's largest medical association devoted to fertility and reproduction -- uses provocative baby bottle images to highlight four major causes of infertility: cigarette smoking, unhealthy body weight, sexually transmitted diseases and advancing age.
When the ads appeared on buses in several U.S. cities last year, they drew the ire of the National Organization for Women. Accusing the doctors group of using "scare tactics," NOW argued that the ads sent a negative message to women who might want to delay or skip childbearing in favor of career pursuits.
Meanwhile we have a generation of women who are woefully under-informed about how early fertility drops-off and how limited the power of science is to actually extend this. Even women doctors are grossly ignorant of this, often resulting in terrible heartbreak as IVF treatments fail.
As a reproductive endocrinologist, I have seen countless 40-something-year-old female physicians seeking fertility treatment, only to be genuinely shocked that their peak egg number and quality -- that is, their peak fertility -- has long since passed.
Often the only reliable treatment in the setting of substantial reproductive aging is using donor eggs from a much younger woman, which is infrequently a desired solution.
Despite decades of medical education, most physicians and other medical professionals have never had sufficient training in basic human reproduction.
Family planning, to the limited extent is taught in our schools, focuses entirely on the prevention of undesired pregnancy. Ironically, no attention is given to the limits of human fertility and the question of how to conceive when a pregnancy is desired. There is no reliable time in any American's life -- including our physicians' -- when they are taught even the basic reality and limitations of how to become pregnant.
That NOW and feminists in general are actively trying to downplay the risks of infertility due to age says everything about whether they really are working for what is best for women.
gorge
1yr ago
Here is a citation that of thinking from Scientific America in 2009 "How Women Can Save the Planet: [Empowering young women through education will help reduce overpopulation in areas that cannot support it and avoid extremism in the children they raise"
Or United Nations University in 2019: "Female Education: a Solution for a Crowded Planet"
Time Magazine in 2013: "Why Empowering Poor Women Is Good for the Planet Overpopulation isn't the great environmental fear that it once was, but there are still parts of the planet where large family sizes are a problem. Female education can help change that"
The most charitable explanation is that they honestly believe that empowering women will lead to a more optimal level of child-bearing -- thus more children in countries who are rich and encountering problems of low fertility and less children in countries that are poor and already overcrowded.
A less charitable explanation is that these arguments aren't made by the same people, but since "feminism good" is the only acceptable opinion if over-population is presented as a problem Cathedral editors signal-boost writers who believe that feminism can prevent over-population and if population decline is presented as a problem then they signal boost writers who can take some subset of the data to show how feminism can help with under-population.
gorge
1yr ago
Peak woke would be when people who push woke too far actually get punished. It's not enough for people leading cancellation mobs to sometimes fail. The leaders themselves need to be punished for harassment. It's not enough for some college administrator pushing a crazy new DEI initiative to fail at it. They need to get punished for being stupid or for being racist against white people. When people who wish to push woke more to the left are afraid of getting punished for overreach as those those who want to push back things to the right are afraid of getting punished, then we will be at equilibrium.
That woke movement sometimes fails is meaningless. Lot's of cancellation attempts have failed and will fail, lot's of trial balloons will get popped (like that latest outrage from Stanford over inclusive language). But as long as there is no consequence for the attempt, there will be more attempts, some will succeed, and we will continue to ratchet leftward.
gorge
1yr ago
A few weeks ago I wrote about a post about the link between feminism and declining fertility rates, I used Saudi Arabia as an example. Since 1980 Saudi Arabia has gradually loosened many of its old restrictions on women, women have become more "empowered", and correspondingly fertility rates have dropped from a sky-high 7+ to just over 2 (replacement level).
User /u/2rafa objected to my claim, saying:
The collapse in Saudi tfr happened well before recent liberalization, and in fact the largest collapse occurred during the most severe period of post-Siege of Mecca religious reactionary conservatism, when Saudi society became much less feminist, the Niqab was mandated, the modern guardianship system was mandated, middle and upper-middle class women were largely removed from the professions, Saudi society became more markedly segregated even among urban elites and so on. If anything, Saudi declines in TFR match much more cleanly the rapid enrichment of much of the population with oil money.
I decided to go down a rabbit-hole tracing the history of patriarchy and liberalization in Saudi Arabia.
The first thing I found is that there is a lot of lying going on. For instance the current young prince of Saudi Arabia says:
In an interview in March 2018, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, said that before 1979, "We were living a normal life like the rest of the Gulf countries, women were driving cars, there were movie theatres in Saudi Arabia."
This is apparently just false. Religious police patrolling the streets for vice was a practice going back centuries. Saudi Arabia Women were banned from driving in 1957.
An Jamal Khashoggi (later assassinated, allegedly by Prince Salman) wrote in the Washington Post in response to the Prince:
I was a teenager in the 1970s and grew up in Medina, Saudi Arabia. My memories of those years before the twin disasters of 1979 — the siege of the Grand Mosque of Mecca and the Iranian Revolution — are quite different from the narrative that the 32-year old crown prince (known as MBS for short) advances to Western audiences. Women weren’t driving cars. I didn’t see a woman drive until I visited my sister and brother-in-law in Tempe, Ariz., in 1976. The movie theaters we had were makeshift, like American drive-ins except much more informal. The movie was beamed on a big wall. You would pay 5 or 10 riyals (then approximately $1.50-$2) to the organizer, who would then give a warning when the religious police approached. To avoid being arrested, a friend of mine broke his leg jumping off a wall. In the 1970s, the only places on the Arabian Peninsula where women were working outside the home or school were Kuwait and Bahrain.
The first rule that affected Saudi women’s rights was not the result of a campaign by Wahhabi religious authorities or a fatwa. Many Saudis remember the sad story of a 19-year-old Saudi princess who tried to flee the country with her lover. They were both executed in 1977; the episode was the subject of a 1980 British documentary drama “Death of a Princess.” The reaction of the government to the princess’s elopement was swift: The segregation of women became more severe, and no woman could travel without the consent of a male relative.
We can also corroborate this from articles at the time. Here is a NY Times article from 1975:
Princess Hussa, a slim, attractive woman of 26, is married to a senior Government official. They have one child. Like many other young women of Kuwait, she insists on a life of her own. The Princess, who speaks several languages, studies English literature at the University of Kuwait and, when she so chooses, goes out unescorted to tour the art galleries, shop for her designer clothes or visit her friends.
Such freedom for women is unknown in Saudi Arabia where women are forbidden to drive cars or hold office jobs. They may work only as teachers in girls’ schools, aides to social workers or as doctors. Women may not mingle with men other than their husbands or relatives in any public place. Even the zoo is open on separate days for men and women.
On the street and in the market places of the cities and villages, women pass by as dark shadows, veiled in black from head to foot. The veil may not be lowered even for a passport photo and photographers are forbidden to take pictures of Saudi women on the street.
In Saudi Arabia, if a Saudi woman dares to venture out without the traditional garb, the matow'ah, who are the religious police, are empowered to spray her legs with black paint. Not many years ago women could be whipped for what the matow'ah considered excessive exposure and those charged with adultery might be stoned to death.
Such attitudes toward women are colliding, however, with the efforts of the Saudi Government to modernize swiftly and, with its billions of dollars in oil revenues, to develop the structure of the society. The Government is under pressure to enlarge the role of women simply because many of its ambitious programs are being frustrated by a critical shortage of manpower.
For Saudi women, this has meant seclusion, no political rights, and, until King Faisal intervened, no schooling.
King Faisal, who mounted the throne in 1964, is a Moslem fundamentalist and the chief protector of the Islam faith in the Arab world. When he sought to introduce education for women, he was bitterly opposed by religious conservatives. He finally declared there was no law in the Koran barring such education and opened schools for girls. In some areas, he had to back up his decree with a show of military force. Today, there are as many schools for girls as for boys —but coed.
At the University of Riyadh in the capital of Saudi Arabia, Dr. S. A. Melibaky, the secretary general, said in an interview that about 20 per cent of the enrolment of 5,200 are women. They are registered as extension students in the departments of arts and commerce.
Women are accepted as full‐time students in the College of Medicine, but there are no coed classes. Women receive instruction in special ectures, some through closedircuit television, and they ake separate examinations. Drily in the final years of heir graduate studies are vomen medical students pernitted to work alongside of men in the hospitals.
It's unclear what the "conservative backlash" after the 1979 uprising amounted to. The only clear policy change I can find is banning women from roles on TV. However, this may have been more of bone thrown to the conservatives, while as a whole society continued to slowly march leftward and more feminist. Overall, seems the country gradually became more feminist as the birth rates gradually declined:
| Year | Fertility Rate | Gross female college enrollment rate |
|---|---|---|
| 1970 | 7.3 | 0% |
| 1980 | 7.2 | 4% |
| 1990 | 5.9 | 11% |
| 2000 | 4 | 25% |
| 2010 | 3 | 39% |
| 2020 | 2.2 | 74% |
(I use college attendance as a key metric of feminist advancement because it is one of the only metrics that is easy to quanitify and it is one of the most important institutions for tipping the scales from patriarchy to "women's liberation": 1) it takes women away from the oversight and tutelage of her father and family 2) it represents a big investment in skills unrelated to being a wife or mother 3) it immerses her in messaging from the universe that these job and academic skills are super important 4) university and the years preparing for university are extremely central to life.
(...part 2, in which we travel through time via newspaper articles, to be continued as a reply...)
gorge
1yr ago
Every DINK with a pet are two votes that should been a pro-child vote balancing out the other forces in politics, but instead they are absent from the fray. When you have so many adults in their prime ages of energy raising pets instead of children, it changes as a whole what the culture values.
The points about unions don’t even fit either circle unless I’ve missed recent developments in the Library Cults.
In my city, libraries have been basically non-functional since the pandemic. The official hours are ridiculously limited, but every time I actually go during those hours, it has been closed. They have rules requiring at least 4 staff members be on site all the time, so if one staff member calls in sick, and they are below the number, the entire thing closes. This is despite staffers admit they spend most of their time doing nothing. They are having trouble hiring, but despite shelving books being a task many people could do, only people with the official sheepskin are allowed to be hired, which is generally a union thing to create barriers of entry and higher pay. Of course, the library workers job can itself suck, because they are lower priority than the rule "always accommodate vagrants lest we get publicized doing something that creates bad optics."
Two more gems from the NY Times archives:
Feburary 8, 1979 -- MAPUTO, Mozambique — What kind of man is Robert Mugabe, leader of the main guerrilla army now operating in Rhodesia? What kind of country would it be if he and his movement came to power?
The strongest impression, during an interview, was of an internal confidence approaching serenity. Mr. Mugabe speaks in a low voice, without the bombast of some other Rhodesian African nationalists. But he leaves no doubt that be believes his side is winning.
Americans would probably find him personally attractive despite his Marxist politics. He is a trim 50, the best‐educated of Rhodesia's leaders, articulate, rational, a practicing Catholic. He was a teacher and has several degrees — including a London University law degree earned by correspondence while he was a political prisoner of Ian Smith for ten years.
He was uncompromising in his opposition to Mr. Smith and the black figures in the “internal settlement.” They were continuing white dominance in disguise, he said, and he would not even negotiate with them — except perhaps “to bring about the necessary surrender.”
...But when he was asked about the future, when the war finally ends and Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe, he did not sound doctrinaire. He emphasized that he was a socialist and was committed to redistributing wealth to “the dispossessed African,” but he spoke in pragmatic and gradualist terms.
His repeated talk of “realities” and what was “feasible” matched what some Westerners who know him well say of Robert Mugabe. That is that, having lived in Mozambique these last years, he does not like the ideological rigidity and economic troubles he has seen here- and does not want to make the same mistakes.
Could whites remain in a Zimbabwe ruled by Robert Mugabe? In terms of physical safety, their chances would probably be better than with any other African figure on the horizon. Even persons antagonistic to his politics concede that he is not corrupt, and the signs are that he has imposed discipline on a guerrilla army.
Four white prisoners of Mugabe's guerrillas, released here last week, spoke very favorably of the soldiers and repeated the compliments when they returned to Salisbury, to the embarrassment of the Smith Government. One of the captives was a seasoned British Army major, Thomas Wigglesworth, who said: “I was impressed with the guerrilla efficiency in the field, their discipline and particularly their high morale.”
For the American Government, Mr. Mugabe is a prickly problem. Conservatives denounce him as a “Marxist terrorist.” But he is doing well militarily and politically, and his mind does not seem closed. A Western diplomat said:
“He is the toughest but also the straightest. He doesn't say things to please people. Frankly, I think we can work with him.”
December 9, 1979 SALISBURY, Zimbabwe Rhodesia — If there was a betting line on the candidates to be this country's first internationally recognized black ruler, the shortest odds could well settle on Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, the odd‐couple guerrilla leaders who accepted the basics of a British peace plan for the territory in London last week.
...Although the tide of the war is running in their favor, the guerrilla leaders evidently have accepted the British peace terms in the expectation that power will come to them more swiftly through the ballot box than by the barrels of their Soviet and Chinese supplied guns. Zimbabwe Rhodesia has yet to see scientifically conducted public opinion poll, but straws in the wind suggest that their confidence may not be misplaced....
...Another villager interjected: “All we want is for the war to end. It looks like the people who can do that are Nkomo and Mugabe.”
...Bishop Muzorewa, with strong support among urban blacks, cannot be counted out. The peace agreement bars him from forming a coalition with former Prime Minister Ian D. Smith's 20‐seat parliamentary bloc but the prelate will have the certainty of white support if he needs it. He also probably can count on backing from some of the other splinter groups, though not all. Others may disappear as the electioneering develops, taking shelter inside one or other of the main contending parties.
So the "international community" refused to recognize the black President (Muzorewa) of a black-white coalition government, they refused to lift any sanctions, meanwhile Soviet and China was arming Mugabe to fight against the Rhodesian government. And the American government and NY Times viewed Mugabe's rule as the best option for Rhodesia. Yeah, pretty clear to me that the NY Times/American Government/British government/"International Community" was midwifing Mugabe's takeover of the country.
gorge
14d ago
I have the impression of NPR as their spin being similar to NYT: representing the most milquetoast "centrist" corporate Dem position possible,
This was true, but even then, NPR would be "too far to the left" since it is selling itself as a politically neutral, government funded non-profit and so ostensibly would be taking a position at the American political center, not the Democratic party center.
But even to the extent your critique was true, it is a stale critique.
The entire 'corporate Dem' position has moved sharply to the left in the past ten years (that is, it has moved left of where the American center was in 2010), and these political positions have enormous real world impacts. It's not just cheap signaling. For instance, the massive inflow of migrants we see are all downstream of NPR et al spending years denouncing necessary border enforcement as being inhumane in some way. We also see stats like how percent of white men among TV writers has declined from around 60% to 35% in the past 10 years. That is a major change with major impact for the media environment we all live in. There were many policy changes around police stops and bail reform and public order enforcement, etc, all downstream of NPR/NY Times media coverage on police shootings, and those policy changes have had massive real world impact. I could go on and on.
In 2000, as part of opening up Saudi Arabia to new capital markets, the government signed conventions on human rights. Presumably, these conventions had stipulations about women's rights:
The government has said it intends to set up a capital market, which would require new standards of openness for Saudi companies. It has also started work on reforming its legal system and trade regulations, all in pursuit of membership in the World Trade Organization. And it has signed international treaties and conventions on human rights.
...Saudi Arabia has ratified four conventions on human rights and discrimination against women, though it submitted formal reservations. And prompted by its acceptance of international treaties and trade rules, the government is considering creation of an appellate court and a codification of defendants' rights.
in 2001, Saudi Arabia ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), although they did so with reservations that it would only do so when not in violation of Islamic law.
In 2002, Saudi women talk about how discrimination against women still exists, but "progress" is being made:
Maha Muneef, a female pediatrician, emphasized that Saudi Arabia is progressing, albeit more slowly than many women would like. ''My mother didn't go to any school at all, because then there were no girls' schools at all,'' she said. ''My older sister, who is 20 years older than me, she went up to the sixth grade and then quit, because the feeling was that a girl only needs to learn to read and write. Then I went to college and medical school on scholarship to the States. My daughter, maybe she'll be president, or an astronaut.''
Another doctor, Hanan Balkhy, seemed ambivalent. ''I don't think women here have equal opportunities,'' she acknowledged. ''There are meetings I can't go to. There are buildings I can't go into. But you have to look at the context of development. Discrimination will take time to overcome.''
In 2005, the Saudi King started creating cities "free from the influence of Wahabi clerics":
Within the first months of ‘Abdullah’s term as King, the Saudi government pursued a number of policies to improve the Kingdom’s economic profile.... finding jobs for young Saudis, and opening up foreign investment. But they had another function too, one that was more transparent in a centerpiece of the early period of ‘Abdullah’s reign: the establishment of “economic cities” where, freed from the influence of the Wahhabi clerics, Saudis would live, work, and study as productive members of a modern economy.
....The lead project was the King ‘Abdullah Economic City, which was announced in December 2005. Three more have followed for Jizan, Hail, and Medina.
...With images of men and women in beach wear, its developer Emaar Economic City, a subsidiary of Dubai’s Emaar, proclaimed in 2005 “the dawn of a kingdom in a new colour.” Officials let it be known in foreign media that women would be allowed to drive cars, schools and universities would be co-educational, the gender restrictions in public places would be relaxed, and Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal’s entertainment firm Rotana could operate cinema houses. Housing two million people by its completion around 2020, the city was to be a model of urban renewal and modern education, as well as a zone where the rules of society were put in abeyance. Though no one has said so publicly, the city was intended to be a liberal enclave in Saudi Arabia’s sea of religious conservatism.
The economic city/liberal enclave innovation was part of a wider shift engendered by the hijacking of civilian airliners in the United States by an al-Qa‘ida cell on September 11, 2001....‘Abdullah’s calculation was that Saudi Arabia needed to offer a better image to the world if it wanted to challenge the idea fashionable among some circles close to the Bush Administration of toppling the regime, as was of course planned for Iraq. That meant smoothing the rougher edges of al-Wahhabiyya, though nothing as drastic as breaking the historical alliance with its ‘ulama’.
...The Saudi-Wahhabi state contains other liberal zones where Wahhabi social control is relaxed. They include parts of the city of Jeddah where some restaurants play music and allow unrelated men and women to sit together, on the assumption that the religious police will not drop by. Jeddah’s summer festival has included a cinema section since 2006, and concerts have featured rappers, reflecting the more liberal social attitudes of the Hejaz region compared to the Najd. The religious police generally avoid the diplomatic district in Riyadh and the town of Dhahran on the Gulf coast that houses state oil firm, Aramco. They maintain a light presence in neighboring Khobar, but a strong presence in the more conservative Dammam in the same Eastern Province vicinity.
...King ‘Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) has been fêted in Western media as one of the final gambles of an octogenarian monarch in his twilight years to outflank the repressive clerics.[2] KAUST breaks with tradition on many fronts. It is run by Saudi Aramco, widely seen as the country’s most efficient and modern corporate institution. It has a foreigner, from Singapore, as its President, and faculty hired from around the world at immense expense. It opens with a huge $10 billion endowment said to be from the King’s own pocket. Its curricula are designed by Western consultants rather than the Education Ministry where, despite the hype, Wahhabism still reigns. There is no question of marauding religious police seeking to impose gender segregation on the premises.
...Domestic media has never presented the economic city concept in the way it was described to foreigners. When foreign media used the phrase “liberal enclave” in 2008, there was a visceral reaction from conservatives.[3] The government has not even hinted that the subsequent economic cities announced for Hail, Jizan, and Medina would be similarly segregated from Wahhabi power
In 2005, Saudi Arabia banned forced marriages.
In 2009, first women minister became member of the cabinet.
In 2012, government ministries are actively helping women to seek work:
Now the Saudi Ministry of Labor has asked him to help encourage women to find work. The government turned to the start-up because many of those seeking jobs in the kingdom are women.
The government has even announced plans to form a “woman friendly” city in the eastern province of Hofuf next year, aiming to bolster employment opportunities for women without transgressing religious boundaries.
In 2012, domestic abuse is now criminalized. Male guardian consent is no longer required for women to seek work.
Women voted for the first time in 2015.
2017 women allowed to drive.
2018, the King restricted the powers of the religious police, women no longer forced to wear the hijab in public.
2019, guardianship system is mostly rolled back. Women are allowed to travel abroad without male relative permission. "Women will now receive standard employment discrimination protections. They now also have the right to register the births of their children, live apart from their husbands, and obtain family records. And along with her husband, a woman can also now register as a co-head of household."
2019 -- marriages under age 18 banned.
2021 -- women can marry and divorce without permission. Single women now can live independently without a male guardian.
Saudi Arabia is now more feminist/liberal than 1950s United States -- and accordingly, its birth-rates are significantly lower than 1950s United States.
We can still debate a few things: 1) to what extent did "women's lib" happen as a result of government support and policy, and to what extent it was the result of sattelite TV and the prestige of American culture? 2) Could the government have stopped "women's lib" if it wanted to, or is it an inevitable result of being wealthy and having modern technology? However, whatever the role of government policy, it does seem clear to me that over the last 40 years there was a gradual process whereby patriarchy eroded and women did become more liberated/empowered.
(end of posts)
"Racism" is an anti-concept. It is a word of activist power. It groups a whole bunch of unlike phenomena together, and then the people who can use the word can equivocate on the definition in order to target the people they want to target for shaming and cancellation.
An example of the game plan is:
- Create an association in the public between the word "racist" and images of white people throwing stones at black children and calling them horrible names.
- Include in the definition of a racist "a person who believes in the superiority of one racial group, such as a group being more intelligent"
- Then using that definition, call people like Charles Murray or Steve Sailer "racists" since he arguably fits definition 2) even though they are the farthest thing from definition 1).
- Cancel Charles Murray and Steve Sailer, since their ideas are a huge threat to the $2 trillion dolllar education-industrial complex.
Another way of saying this is that "racism" is any idea that opposes the current left/center-left establishment ethnogensis or ethno-preservation projects. So if you are against busing ethnic Polish and Irish white kids to black neighborhood schools, you are against a certain ethnogensis project, and therefore racist. If you are against historically black universities, or against a law making certain hair styles a protected characteristic, you are against a certain ethnology-preservation project and therefore racist. If an asian-American mom wants her daughter to marry an Asian guy, that is irrelevant to any establishment plans, so the establishment does not care and does not consider the mom a racist.
Agree 100%. In older mass media, "think of the children" was an archetypal motivator in community and political action. But today, living with children in a big American city, it does seem like making the world nice for children is a lower priority than dog parks, dogs relieving themselves on public property, automobiles, allowing crazy vagrants to roam the streets, library worker unions, teacher's unions, squeezing every bit of life expectancy from the gerontocracy, etc. The mandatory masking for children in schools and daycare -- while adults were free to go to work and bars maskless -- was a major black-pill on how society is treating children.
I'm reminded of this old quote from Plutarch:
On seeing certain wealthy foreigners in Rome carrying puppies and young monkeys about in their bosoms and fondling them, Caesar asked, we are told, if the women in their country did not bear children, thus in right princely fashion rebuking those who squander on animals that proneness to love and loving affection which is ours by nature, and which is due only to our fellow-men.
- Plutarch, Pericles. 1st century A.D.
According to William Durant, who I believe, a major underlying cause of the Fall of the Roman Empire was a gradual decline in population, in turn due to people deciding to have fewer children. This started with the elites, but eventually reached the provinces. From his Caesar and Christ:
A serious decline of population appears in the West after Hadrian. It has been questioned, but the mass importation of barbarians into the Empire by Aurelius, Valentinian, Aurelian, Probus, and Constantine leaves little room for doubt.3 Aurelius, to replenish his army, enrolled slaves, gladiators, policemen, criminals; either the crisis was greater, or the free population less, than before; and the slave population had certainly fallen. So many farms had been abandoned, above all in Italy, that Pertinax offered them gratis to anyone who would till them. A law of Septimius Severus speaks of a penuria hominum—a shortage of men.4 In Greece the depopulation had been going on for centuries. In Alexandria, which had boasted of its numbers, Bishop Dionysius calculated that the population had in his time (250) been halved. He mourned to “see the human race diminishing and constantly wasting away.”5 Only the barbarians and the Orientals were increasing, outside the Empire and within.
What had caused this fall in population? Above all, family limitation. Practiced first by the educated classes, it had now seeped down to a proletariat named for its fertility;6 by A.D. 100 it had reached the agricultural classes, as shown by the use of imperial alimenta to encourage rural parentage; by the third century it had overrun the western provinces, and was lowering man power in Gaul.7 Though branded as a crime, infanticide flourished as poverty grew.8 Sexual excesses may have reduced human fertility; the avoidance or deferment of marriage had a like effect, and the making of eunuchs increased as Oriental customs flowed into the West. Plantianus, Praetorian Prefect, had one hundred boys emasculated, and then gave them to his daughter as a wedding gift.
gorge
3mo ago
If you care about the things that Trump's base cares about (immigration, America first, bringing industry back, stopping the 'woke' agenda, curbing the establishment/Cathedral-state, etc. ) , then for all of Trump's faults, the other options may be even less unappealing:
Haley -- do I need to even explain why she is bad? She is an awful combination of 1) having the worst of neocon foreign policy 2) being an authoritarian on free speech issues 3) being weak against the woke agenda 4) being cynical 5) being dumb as bricks. Desantis -- naive boy scout who is going to be eaten alive. He simply doesn't have the charisma or the guts to take on the establishment. Ramaswamy -- I think he has a lot of trouble overcoming the "who is this guy" problem. Both in the sense of having low name recognition and no history of being a public figure, but also in the sense of how did this Harvard/Yale/Goldman Sachs guy come to be giving Trumpist talking points -- is he sincere or does he think there is a market to be tapped?
The bet with Trump is that maybe he learned from his mistakes and won't staff his administration with GOP establishment types who wanted to cave in on issues and stab Trump in the back.
Is it likely that Trump can learn from his mistakes at age 77 and be a better president this time around? Is it likely that he can overcome is own personal history of not having the back of the people who supported him or worked form him? Very doubtful.
The basic reality is that right now all the presidential options are terrible.
The Catholic Church has always maintained:
- same-sex marriage is an impossibility
- same-sex sexual/erotic relationships are disordered, immoral and sinful.
- Priests should not bless sin
- Priests have wide discretion to give blessings to anyone and everyone, for mundane things and important things, even and especially to sinners. Eg you have the priest bless your pet or your hunting rifle or many other things. It would be possible to ask for a blessing in a business partnership or a promise of livelong brotherly love and friendship.
- Priests should not give blessings to same-sex unions, or give any blessings to same sex couples in a way that would be scandalous (ie make it seem it is giving approval to sinful behavior) or that would create confusion with a sacramental marriage or confusion about church doctrine.
The recently released document reiterates all those points. The ABC headline is simply false
However, the thing that the liberals in the church are excited about is the changing emphasis in terms of pastoral care:
Paragraph 12. One must also avoid the risk of reducing the meaning of blessings to this point of view alone, for it would lead us to expect the same moral conditions for a simple blessing that are called for in the reception of the sacraments. Such a risk requires that we broaden this perspective further. Indeed, there is the danger that a pastoral gesture that is so beloved and widespread will be subjected to too many moral prerequisites, which, under the claim of control, could overshadow the unconditional power of God’s love that forms the basis for the gesture of blessing.
Paragraph 13. Precisely in this regard, Pope Francis urged us not to “lose pastoral charity, which should permeate all our decisions and attitudes” and to avoid being “judges who only deny, reject, and exclude.”[11] Let us then respond to the Holy Father’s proposal by developing a broader understanding of blessings.
So previously maybe two gay men walk into the church and ask the priest, "Can you bless our dedication of life-long love to each other?" The priest is wary and says, "Wait ... love 'amore' or love 'caritas'?" So the priest asks some questions, figures out they are asking him to bless a marriage-like relationship, a sexual relationship, and the priest would refuse it because such a blessing would be scandalous.
After this document, a liberal priest now has a winking approval from a Vatican that he is allowed to play ignorant and not "subject the couple to moral prerequisites" and avoid "being a judge who rejects." So instead of asking about the nature of their relationship or telling them to go and sin no more, he may give a blessing like, "may all that is true, good, and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit."
gorge
1yr ago
Why is Elizabeth Taylor outlandish? Remember Cleopatra was of Macedonian descent, the Egyptian ruling class all were the heirs of Alexander the Great's generals. To the untrained eye, Elizabeth Taylor doesn't look all that different than a Macedonian woman
gorge
1yr ago
I was listening to a podcast with Michael Bailey, an OG researcher on trans issues and a guy who was at the front-lines of the conflict 20 years ago, long before this was a mainstream flashpoint.
Bailey talked about the autogynephilia model of male-to-female transexuals. I had heard some of it before: that many start off by having a fetish of being aroused by the idea of themselves as a woman. But historically since doctors would not prescribe sex reassignment for a sex fetish, they could only claim that they "were really a girl inside." Even though m-t-f's like McCloskey hit every male brained stereotype.
But then Bailey went to say that over years of cross-dressing to get off on themselves, many create an identity for themselves as a woman, an identity which may come to seem like the "real" them. Hence the eventual desire to transition and really become this character.
This got me thinking that to extent that something like "gender identity" exists in the brain separable from biological sex, I think wonder if it is really the matter of an entire personal identity that gets molded and created over time.
Question: are there documented examples of this kind of thing happening outside of sex/gender? Like an actor who becomes so caught up in role he thinks that role is the "real" him.
(Perhaps some of us can feel this way, our psued life can feel more like the real us...)
Going back to the example of bias in policing that I mentioned earlier, I’d say that the vast majority of people on this forum would say that you can’t really use “lived experiences” to contradict data.
I think that almost no one believes data that contradicts what they see with their own eyes. And that is good, because there are million ways data can be limited, poorly recorded, confounded, erroneous, etc. And that applies a hundred times more so to numbers that are not "data" but complex statistical creations.
Data is useful as a check on personal experience. If the two contradict, then one simply has to do the work to see which is more likely to be wrong. There is no shortcut.
The one that bothers me personally is when I've seen people point to total crime data to show that crime hasn't risen in the major US cities. But as someone who lives in such a city, I know that simply reporting a crime is a very burdensome process of waiting hours for the police show up, and the police won't do anything anyways. I know that many (most) people don't report crimes in the city that would likely be reported as a crime in the burbs. Thus total crime number is rate-limited by the police capacity to arrive on the scene and take down a report; it has nothing to do with the actual rate of minor crimes. Thus trend data is absolutely useless. But you would only know this if you knew actually knew something about the city in question, and didn't blindly think that "data" is the highest source of truth.
However, we should remember why the specific phrase "lived experience" became the target of much ire. People have forever validly cited personal anecdotes during debates; but citing "lived experience" was a novel and obnoxious argumentation tactic. The appeal to "lived experience" was specifically being made when the person could not actually specifically describe the evidence they had seen with their own eyes. Rather than say something specific like, "I've had X many racist interactions in these situations in Y years ..." etc the person citing "lived experience" was citing something far more amorphous and undefinable. Or, the context was often that the person citing "lived experience" was claiming the sole right to interpret events that had happened to them. So person A says, "I have experience racism all the time, such as people asking me where I am really from." And B says, "Eh, I don't think that is racist, white people get asked about their ancestry to, that's just a result of living in a country that is a melting pot" and person A then responds, "how dare you deny my lived experience of racism."
In contrast something like this is a valid contribution to a debate:
HlynkaCG says he “has receipts” and linked to a 2 year old post where his local price of cheap meat went from $5/lb to $6.75 (a 35% increase) whereas the national meat price index at the time had only gone up by 9.5% over that period.
HlynkaCG's claims are worth taking seriously. We should investigate this discrepancy. And maybe we find that he just had the bad luck of liking one kind of meat which has risen in price the most and when you do a more broad analysis the government numbers are correct... or maybe we find that the government economists are actually cooking the books.
The better alternative is to use other economic data to make a point. If you think unemployment numbers don’t show the true extent of the problem, for instance, you can cite things like the prime age working ratio if you think people are discouraged from looking for work.
This only works if accurate and relevant data actually exists in published form, which often it does not. You must avoid the "looking for the keys under the lamppost fallacy."
Do you think Ezra’s lived experiences are a valid rebuttal here?
It's at least worthy of further investigation. Where did Ezra live? Who are his friends? If he grew up in a rich suburbs and all his black friends were friends he made at the Black Student Union at a private boarding school, then the reason for the discrepancy becomes obvious. His friend circle is not at all representative of the general population. If Ezra lived in very typical black neighborhood in south-side Chicago and all his friends were all from the neighborhood and public school, then his claims would be puzzling and worthy of more investigation. If Ezra was the only person saying this, I might think he was just making it up, or was ignorant of his friends behavior. But if other people like Ezra kept making the same claim, I might suspect there was something wrong with the government data.
In reality though, your Ezra is fictional The anecdotal evidence, even as supported by black activists like Ta-Nehisi Coates, corroborate the FBI numbers. Personally, I don't believe that blacks have a higher crime rate solely because of the FBI data, I believe it because of lots of anecdotes and from what I see with my own eyes. Actually, based on what I read from news stories and what I see with my own eyes, the FBI data likely significantly understates the black crime problem, because FBI data does not distinguish public crime (knock-out game against strangers) from private crime (eg, a bar fight).
gorge
1yr ago
(...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:
Expatriates call them ''religious police'', but a better term would be vigilantes. The House of Saud licences their busybodying as a useful release valve for the fundamentalist religious fervor which the Shah and Sadat both tried to suppress. And the honor and respect they are accorded by the Saudi Government helps to conceal the reality of change.
The House of Saud is getting ready for the 21st century. There is a singer on Saudi television who remembers when he used to have to sing in secret. Veteran expatriates remember how, 20 years ago, it was not permissible to smoke in the street, and how cigarettes were purchased under the counter, in plain brown envelopes. In April 1981, a committee of Islamic legal scholars ruled that a Saudi woman must be allowed to unveil in front of her prospective bridegroom: ''Any man forbidding his daughter or sister to meet her fiance face to face will be judged as sinning,'' the committee declared.
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:
As the Saudis race to invest their oil riches in ambitious economic-development programs, the roles played by Mrs. Fawzan and many other urban women indicate that the traditionally conservative Islamic social structure is gradually yielding to change.
What this means is that beyond the overall Government policy of encouraging female literacy and education, there are few specifics concerning the promotion of employment or career opportunities for women. A Government commission is reportedly examining areas of work to be officially approved for women. Women who run boutiques or beauty parlors may run the risk of having their businesses closed down, even if temporarily, by the so-called religious police or members of the Society for the Preservation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
...The recently disclosed third five-year plan calls for the participation of women in the development of the country, although few specifics are offered. Officials such as the Minister of Planning, Hisham Nazir, one of the most prominent technicians, are known to espouse the position that since more than 50 percent of the potential labor force of 2.5 million are female, the increased employment of women could help Saudi Arabia become less reliant on foreign labor.
...A number of women say that the key to change is more education. ''Education is the basis of the change that is taking place in Saudi society for women,'' Mrs. Rouchdy said. ''But for the most part Saudi women do not want to change their social norms. They don't want to run away from Islamic values and from religion. They are saying, We don't want the superficial aspects of Westernization but only the scientific part of it.''
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:
While this remains a country where women are veiled in public, cannot drive cars and must seek permission of husbands or other men who are relatives before traveling abroad, education and modernization have made Saudi women a force that neither the Government nor the religious authorities can ignore.
Elegantly dressed and armed with a doctoral degree in education from Ohio State University, Miss Dekheil, who uses her maiden name, is, at 28 years old, the director of an interdisciplinary program at a Government institute that trains women for jobs by sharpening their skills or teaching new ones.
She is one of a new breed of Saudi women dealing with the Saudi Arabia of 1989: A country with nearly a million girls going to school, 100,000 of those in higher education. They are graduating into a conservative society where traditions holding them back from an active role in the economy are slowly coming down. Saudi Arabia's women are becoming doctors, engineers, social workers and computer operators.
...Miss Mosly, who is also married and uses her maiden name, has defied many customs, going to a boarding school in Lebanon at age 4 and studying engineering, then coming back to find a job at Aramco nearly 21 years ago. She runs a department of 186 people, including 50 Saudi men who report to her.
In the battle between progressives and traditionalists, the Saudi Government, known for moving ever so cautiously, appears to be leaning toward a slow integration of women in the work force.
The Saudi Government gave a clear signal when it conferred its most prestigious award, the King Faisal Award for Islamic Studies, on Sheik Mohammed al-Ghazali, an Egyptian religious scholar who has taken a strong stand defending the rights of women to work and seek higher education.
From a 1990 article, Saudi Arabia is officially extremely patriarchal, birthrates still very high, but women's lib creeping in:
Although almost 30 years old, she is still forced to live with her family, since in Saudi Arabia it is against the law for her to live alone as an unmarried woman. If she chooses to leave the country, she said, the only way she can get a passport or board a plane is with her father's written permission.
Legally, neither she nor any other single Saudi woman can go out alone, drive, work with men, travel alone, stay in a hotel, go out to eat, or do anything else alone that might allow them to somehow encounter a man on their own.
The woman who said she was frustrated sipped a whisky at a private party, danced and, after a long conversation, confided that she was divorced and recently had a lover.
But, she said, Government officials had found out about the relationship and investigated her. Her father threatened to lock her in the house and one of her brothers threatened to kill her.
...Drinking alcohol, dancing, mixing of the sexes and a great deal else is officially prohibited here as non-Islamic. In spite of such formal strictures, drinking, dancing and a great deal else that is non-Islamic regularly goes on behind closed doors.
...A Western diplomat told of his astonishment on attending a private party of well-connected Saudis recently. Wine flowed and the men and women were arguing loudly about everything from politics to food when, his Saudi host said, "Watch this."
The lights dimmed and two beautiful women, veiled and clad in sheer but discreet dancing robes, appeared and "danced the most sensual dance I have ever seen," the diplomat said. After a few minutes, he said, he realized that the dancers were the wives of Saudis who were present.
"I still can't figure this place out," the diplomat said.
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:
King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has announced a series of changes in the Government to take place by January, including the formation of a council of Saudi citizens with whom the royal family is to consult in ruling the country, the introduction of a written body of laws and greater local autonomy for the provinces.
He told Saudis for the first time that Saudi Arabia had to borrow billions of dollars to meet what he described as the huge cost of the gulf war. He asserted, however, that the debts would not affect the welfare of citizens.
(...part 3 continues as a reply...)
Back in September a commenter here on the TheMotte posted an argument about fertility trends claiming that among rich countries fertility actually increases with feminism. I did not have time to respond at the time, but this is something that I have heard many times, so I wanted to make an effort post explaining why I don't believe the claim. Here are some examples of prestige outlets making the same claim, from a New York Times op-ed:
And here is the United Nations Population Fund:
The original TheMotte commenter wrote:
I will address three big problems with the argument, and then I want to talk about the elephant in the room.
The first problem is that this is cherry-picking examples. We could just as easily cherry-pick other countries that show a reversed trend: Spain has a parliament that is 50% women but a fertility rate of merely 1.3. Finland ranks number one on female empowerment, sharing many of the same policies as Sweden, but has a a very low fertility rate of 1.3. In Ireland, where men only do 43% of the housework (which is low for Europe), women have a fertility rate of 1.6.
You might think we could get around the problem of cherry-picking by running regressions against a broader dataset. But turns out there are still too many researcher degrees of freedom. In playing with the data myself, and in reading about others who have played with the data, I could get anything from a massively negative impact of female empowerment on fertility, to no impact, to modestly positive. Here are some charts I made:
Gender Inequality Index versus Fertility for all countries in the world -- massive correlation between less gender inequality and less fertility -- https://i.postimg.cc/8PngCpQM/gender-inequality-index-versus-fertility-all-countries.png
Gender Inequality Index versus Fertility for rich countries (>$15k GDP, as rich as Poland or Uruguay) -- small correlation of less gender inequality, lower fertility. No correlation after removing the petro-states. Big range restriction problem (more on this later) -- https://i.postimg.cc/JnWLWpwF/paid-leave-versus-fertility-oecd.png
Weeks of Paid Parental Leave versus Fertility, OECD countries (neglibile negative correlation, more paid leave, less fertility) -- https://i.postimg.cc/JnWLWpwF/paid-leave-versus-fertility-oecd.png
Net childcare costs (after government subsidies) versus Fertility, OECD countries (no correlation) -- https://i.postimg.cc/nV4LMQ07/net-childcare-costs-versus-fertility.png
That parental leave or subsized childcare has no correlation with fertility rates should dispense with any notion that these are the magic policies that will fix fertility while reconciling child bearing with women pursuing careerist paths.
The second problem is that fertility rate itself is confounded by sub-cultures within a country. The poster children for feminist family polices with high birth rates are Sweden and France. However, their fertility stats are hopelessly confounded by the fertility of more patriarchal subcultures -- that of non-European immigrants. Unfortunately, it is fiendishly hard to find accurate statistics on how much this impacts the numbers.
France, for instance, bans collecting statistics by race. But this report showed 38% of new births in the cities were considered high-risk for sickle cell anemia -- meaning the parents are of Arab or African origin. That's a huge number.
In the United States, fertility is boosted by less feminist groups, such as recent immigrants, Amish, Mormons, and evangelical Christians. Israel's fertility is boosted by ultra-Orthodox Jews who have a fertility rate three times that of secular Israelis.
(continued in the replies due to excess word count)
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