Saying ‘we are back to the enlightenment’ with science and reason on one hand, and reactionary conservatives on the other, is incorrect, because liberalism and science were buddies back than, now science has more in common with conservatism.

We’ve had the age of dogma, and the age of reason, perhaps now its time for the age of realism.

I often try to defend my abhorrence to female tatoos,(particularly those ‘tailbone’ ones) by stating that, the last thing i want to do while having sex with a beautiful woman is to be mentally pulled into a homosexual sterotype (leaning toward a ‘biker’ gang) – everytime i look down at her hips as i thrust.

One is prompted to wonder whether Bobby’s ever tried doing it another way. Someone might tell him there are books, and so on.

I am sorry I have nothing substantive to add (and am so late in saying even this), but my brain has gone to mush since my baby was born recently. Heh.

One of the significant problems with the new family favoured by HREOC is that there is no necessary role in it for men. For the short time that women are to stay home with their children they are to be supported by government funded maternity leave; after this, men and women are to work equally and to achieve equal incomes. Nor is there to be a distinctive paternal role for men within family life; instead there is to be an equal sharing of what was once the maternal role.

Again, in your comment you imply that women who choose a traditional arrangement are oppressed in doing so. That it is a case of men doing what they like and women shutting up.

Hasn’t it occurred to you that women today could, if they really wanted to, be full-time careerists, but that most women past a certain age simply don’t want to?

Why can’t you respect the choices of these women? Why force them into something only a minority of women opt for?

Finally, it’s contradictory to claim that traditionally men could do whatever they liked, but that the HREOC measures will enlarge their sphere of choice.

Obviously, men didn’t just “do what they liked” in previous generations. If they had, there would be no functioning society. Men did what they believed to be the right thing to do by their families and by their societies.

1. Women should not be able to engage in paid employment, or at least not on the same terms as men, or
2. To the extent they do so, it must be in circumstances where the decision to do so is made as uncomfortable, and as difficult as possible, in order to discourage them from thinking/acting, as though they have some right to the same aspirations and desires as men. You know, being able to earn money, and be able to have a family and ensure their care.

Just what is so objecionable to the proopsals in principle (as opposed to criticism of the specifics) here?

Why are policies that actually enlarge the sphere of choices for women and men always decried as policies that ‘destroy the family’? Your position is an old and ultimaetly reactionary one. Women should just shut up and men should be allowed to do what they like. Because you know it makes (biological) sense.

Nonetheless, the real assault on the family today is an ideological one, rather than a capitalist one.

The latest HREOC campaign is a case in point. The human rights commission wants to change the family so that there are no distinctive motherhood and fatherhood roles (no ‘gendered’ roles). It has urged the government to use the force of the tax, legal and educational systems to achieve this aim.

For years the wider culture was “condescending” to men, telling men that masculinity was mentally unhealthy and that they ought to follow the lead of women and be more emotional.

Then the whole argument was overturned, not by me, but by a number of health professionals quoted in The Age. These professionals claimed that one reason why women suffer greater levels of depression than men is because of a greater tendency to dwell on perceived slights, rather than brushing them off and moving on to other things.

So this is the sense in which health professionals believe that women “think too much”. It doesn’t refer to everyday thought, but something specific, the “tendency to dwell on petty slights, to mentally replay testy encounters and to wallow in sad feelings”.

If men are generally less affected by this, and if I then note that men can therefore be a source of emotional stability within women’s lives, does this mean that I am being condescending to women?

Yes, I am arguing for the benefit of a masculine presence within a woman’s life. I don’t see why this is so difficult to accept.

Most men would readily accept the idea that having a feminine presence in their life is of benefit to them. Nobody would think this to be a condescending idea.

So why the problem arguing the other way around? And why wouldn’t a man think his presence in the life of his wife or daughters to be beneficial?

My criticism with your overall philosophical position is that you appear to have absolutely no idea how to account for social change, other than as an outcome of liberal philosophers’ mistaken understandings about the essentially biological basis for traditionalist views about gender for example. I would be interested in reading your views about an appropioate social program to prevent the undermining of social change by pernicious and mistaken liberalism and I would be particuallry interested in knowing how you would propose to maintain an economic system which relies on constant change and revolutions in production techniques and technology, with unchanging, conservative and ‘traditionalist’ social structures. When you have something to say about those matters, I will be interested to read and I may respond, but cease telling me what I think on the basis of what you think I meant when I wrote a post. Thanks.

I pointed out that this information runs counter to the advice which is frequently given to men, that they must “get in touch with their feminine side” to avoid mental health problems; and that it can be supportive of women if men keep to the masculine way of dealing with things.

(I’m reminded of the comment of Ruby Wax who once described her husband as her “human Valium”.)

Yet your comment seems to imply that the traditional family (which, far from being a figment of the imagination is easily the predominant form of family life where I live) represents women being “put in their place” and is “misogynistic”.

The left can’t have it both ways. Either the left admits that it wants to exclude traditional choices which very large numbers of people are still making, or else it doesn’t disqualify such choices as being oppressive or misogynistic.

One obvious conclusion to draw from all this is that the presence of a masculine man in a woman’s life is likely to be beneficial in helping to prevent her from “overthinking problems”. There is still an important role, in other words, for a strong male figure in a woman’s life to protect her from the more vulnerable aspects of her own nature.

http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2004/07/masculinity-is-good-for-you.html

That overthinking us chicks do… well!

yuk.

Like the iraq war, you mean?

At it’s most essential, it’s probably that Liberals believe there’s no progress without change all the time whereas conservatives would be skeptical of that notion. The former have some idealised notion of some increasing logarithmic function of progress over time, approaching some asymptotic nirvana in the future, whereas the latter reject that notion completely.

Er no, Obby, if you check your Popper, you’ll find that Utopian vision is actually the Marxist, wholesale big-picture social-engineering one. With maybe a hint of Trotskyist “continual revolution” tossed in (think that was Leon’s contribution to theory)

Conservatives are prone to a Utopian vision of their own – the myth of the Golden Age. For the past ten years, going on eleven, John Howard – the self-styled “Burkean Conservative” is having a great time engineering a trade union-free back to the glorious 19th Century free market economy on one hand while, on cultural and so-called “values” issues he wants to wind back to the nineteen fifties. He’s just shifted utopia into the past, that’s all. He’s more of a Bismarckian reactionary when it comes down to it. It’s easy to imagine Old Blood and Iron boasting about Prussia punching above its weight on the European stage.

You know- what seems like a good idea at the time, quickly becomes the object of affirmative action and then the downright compulsory.

In your case obby, I’ve decided, on behalf of the left-liberal-eschatological-utopian-zombie-sheep collective, that come the revolution you’ll be booked in to a sex reassignment clinic, followed by several weeks of intensive re-education in lesbian separatism. Expect the midnight knock on the door as soon as we’ve knocked off all the anarchists and deviationists.

As for the link – next time give us a precis of whatever weird irrelevant shit you’ve decided to throw into the mix. Those news.com pages are a bugger to download and I’m not prepared to waste bandwidth on them any more.

We wont get that from Devine/Bolt/Ackerman or even Kelly as they are products of the party machine and more interested in internal party politics and grabbing up audiences. Matt Price’s recent blog post was a good example of how removed that lot are from citizen understanding of politics. Mark Richardson, the Wild Colonial Boy and Righthinker are three of the most interesting conservatives in the Au blogosphere. Righthinker would be more powerful if he dropped his reliance on strawmen; if he got past that it would probably produce some good discussions and he might be surprised on the amount of common ground.

The other issue I find is that 80/20 rule, which conservatives are going to come up against. Which is individual vs state that is the only binary political differentiation that can be made. Fi we make that distinction, left-right becomes meaningless; if anything it becomes a fraud perpetuated by the conservatives seeking to divide the world in 50/50 terms.

If we divide the political world between those that think the individual being dominant political, or the state being dominant politically, suddenly we find all the liberals, progressives, republicans and libertarians on one side, and the conservatives, nationalists and big-statists on the other.

The argument, rather then being the impression of 50/50 with political groups that are supposedly diametrically opposed to each other under the left-right rules of thumb, becomes 80/20, with groups supposedly in opposition under left-right dichotomy discovering they are in union because they put the individual first politically. We otherwise know this as political and legal equality.

That is the other problem for conservatism. Liberalism has moved the goal posts for what is political, and hence legal, equality. The cries of multiculturalism making the nation weak or unsafe are all about the state’s ability to leverage inequality and be discriminative. If you look at the ABS statistics they are highly sexualised. The next battle is to make to make individualism sufficiently dominant that sexualisation of statistics is irrelevant. The muslims are the current beating pad for conservatives, yet immigration statistics suggest that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the Australian born (Victoria IIRC is the only state that records the country of birth). Interestingly the next generation, the children of immigrants, get integrated so well that they commit crimes at the same rate as Australians.

This goes back to conservatism seeing economic liberalism as the vector for human progress, where liberalism allows for maximum liberty which enables social, cultural, political and economic liberty as the mechanisms for progress. Under conservatism there is too many contradictions in economic liberalism being progress as it directly undermines social, cultural and political tradition. A recent example of this undermining is women becoming part of the workforce. Conservatism has no answer to this. Which I think is why US conservatives have turned to authoritarianism and an Aristotlean ‘best man’ thesis to supply the answers. Which is self defeating; no-one likes tyranny.

http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/search/label/gender

Or masculinity:

http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/search/label/masculinity

What’s more significant, I think, Gummo, is why Mr Richardson’s almost invariable line of attack on “liberalism” is fundamentally misogynist. I will give him credit where it’s due though and observe that the other issue that gets up his nose is “multiculti”. It’s a reactionary blog. Not a conservative one.

That isn’t true. That is a conservative fallacy that liberals deny the power of empiricism. Yet the enlightenment, which was based on reason through empiricism, is firmly grounded on practical and pragmatic change; where conservatism blesses tradition for the sake of it – despite empirical proof where tradition is a negative on political, social, cultural and economic mores.

This goes back to the internal inconsistency conservatism has with itself that it cannot translate to human progress with its ideology. A conservative would argue that it is tradition, history and community which give the individual meaning- but economic progress, which is one of the few areas that conservatism allows for non-empirical experimentation, is dependent on disruptive technologies; which are ideas for the sake of being ideas, and under the empirical scrutiny of market decisions change an economy.

This is why conservatism has arguments inside itself that are debilitating; and why it cannot realistically challenge liberalism until it solves these internal contradictions.