Underclass News

Those two sadly-departed organs of the State, the Coppersblog and Inspector Gadget, frequently opined that they spent too much police time on the psychodramas of the local underclass - Shayne would complain that Wayne was harassing her by text or on Facebook just because she'd been with Dwayne, Wayne would counter-complain etc etc. It was very hard to establish who was telling the truth and nine times out of ten would lead to "no further action".

This seems to be spreading to people who actually work for a living. A worrying trend.

It could of course be a sign of the End Times. 

"This is the last territorial claim I have to make in Europe"

Former life assurance salesman turned Tory A-lister Ivan Massow on the Tory Taliban (© Alan Duncan):

“Those same shire people didn’t agree that a man and a man should live together. They are always one step behind the curve unfortunately. But there aren’t many more reforms for them to tolerate. There’s just nothing left after this. When we can get this last thing through the gate I can’t see anything else, any other slights on their lifestyle or their beliefs that they have to tolerate.” 

Also in today's Telegraph :

"The idea that mothers rather than fathers should take charge of raising children needs to be "shattered", a minister said today."

It'll end in tears before bedtime, mark my words. But it all makes a kind of sense from one perspective. It all depends on whether you think that being a Master Of The Universe, high above a shattered, atomised and poverty-stricken mass of competing and variegated cultures, is better than being a more-than-comfortable member of a civil, ordered, prosperous and relatively homogenous society. You and I may go for the latter option. But that's not necessarily what an elite will want*.


(In other news, "a widow has died after being left to starve for nine days as her care agency was closed and the council forgot about her.")





* Laban - "It's true that in a rational economic world, a high-earning working class might be considered a good thing for a nation - and that therefore it's not in our rulers' interest to take us back a hundred years - but that would also have applied for the several hundred years prior to, say, 1860-1960. The post-1945 settlement is not the natural order of things. Before that it was the plebs and the rest - and the will to power, even constrained by Christianity, was strong. Unconstrained, what limits are there?"

Reality vs Blank Slate Theory - Lego Edition

"The debut of Lego Friends, featuring a more prominent use of pink than your typical Lego fan would be used to, drew criticism that it would reinforce gender stereotypes. As well as the usual trucks, policemen and rugged houses, the line now includes Stephanie's cool convertible in distinctive pink and purple, and Mia's Puppy House, accessorised with flowers and full pet grooming kit."

And .... ??


The world-famous plastic brick maker said net profit rose 35% to 2bn kroner (£213m) in the first six months of 2012, from 1.48bn kroner for the same period last year. Sales rose 24% to Kr9.1bn, spurred by the success of the Lego Friends line, which was launched in January in an attempt to expand the company's appeal beyond boys. It has been a runaway hit, selling twice as many sets as expected.

"It has been amazing to experience the enthusiastic welcome that consumers have given the new range," said the Lego chief executive, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp. "Sales have been quite astonishing."

What's amusing is that Blank Slaters tend to be militant atheistic types, priding themselves on following reason and science - unless the science tells them things they don't want to hear. In a sense, a Christian should be in awe of such a faith as theirs, utterly unbuttressed by reality. It's a real triumph of the will.

Shulamith Firestone 1945-2012

Radical feminist and author of "The Dialectic of Sex" Shulamith Firestone has died aged 67.

"Firestone wanted to eliminate the following things: sex roles, procreative sex, gender, childhood, monogamy, mothering, the family unit, capitalism, the government, and especially the physiological phenomena of pregnancy and childbirth. She wanted to mechanize reproduction -- gestating fetuses in artificial wombs -- and raise the offspring communally, treating them no differently from adults at the earliest possible age."

In my teens I was a big fan. I thought I couldn't love, wasn't happy about it, and she said "men can't love". At 17 you are the world, so I swallowed her ideas whole. After all, a sample of one proved her right.

In hindsight (although I still have the book, long time no read - it's somewhere in the loft with Marx's complete works), her ideas were mostly idiotic - although she was right about the massive link between "the female condition" and childrearing - which isn't exactly an original insight. Her solution was to abolish the link entirely - she was a follower of Mustapha Mond :

Mustapha Mond leaned forward, shook a finger at them. "Just try to realize it," he said, and his voice sent a strange thrill quivering along their diaphragms. "Try to realize what it was like to have a viviparous mother."
That smutty word again. But none of them dreamed, this time, of smiling.
"Try to imagine what 'living with one's family' meant."
They tried; but obviously without the smallest success.
"And do you know what a 'home' was?"
They shook their heads.

The Atlantic obituarist notes the contrast between the success of the late Helen Gurley Brown and the obscurity of Ms Firestone, who died alone and remained alone for the next week until a neighbour alerted the landlord (how's that childlessness thing working out for you?).
  
The Laban take is that, while the HGB brand of Bridget Jones feminism is in many ways as toxic as Ms Firestone's, it at least is grounded in biological and evolutionary reality.

Remember this post ?

If I understand these evolutionary biologist chappies aright, before the Great Cultural (and contraceptive) Revolution women really really wanted two things (from an evolutionary biology perspective ... remember we've only just come out of the trees ...)

a) a chap with top genes to father her children - a real alpha male to produce alpha babies

b) a chap who'd provide for said children and stick around to help raise them, or at a minimum to facilitate her raising them

and from the same evolutionary biology perspective men wanted

a) only one thing

the point of both approaches being to maximise the survival of your genes

Now you might have noticed a potential issue with the female strategy - that Mr Alpha and Mr Provider may not necessarily be the same chap.

While your mileage may vary, it's safe to say that most women don't want to be celibate or to raise children in glass bottles. On the other hand, they do want to have the good things in life, including the attentions (however defined) of high-status (however defined - may be different on the estate to in the boardroom) males. Helen Gurley Brown's Cosmopolitan was one of the first  "how-to" guides for hypergamy - aka mating upwards. HGB got famous (and rich) by giving women what they really want, because it addressed real women's desires.

Firestone's feminism was not grounded in most people's reality. Which is why she was, in Andrea Dworkin's view : "poor and crazy. She rents a room in a house and fills it with junk, then gets kicked out and moves into another room and fills that with junk."

Whatever the intentions of its original visionaries, feminism in practice has had the effect of reducing the costs of hypergamy to a woman, and transferring those costs to men in particular/society in general*. As the feminists would say, "it is no coincidence".



UPDATE - comment on the Villager :

"I was the neighbor who alerted the landlord; there were no neighbors-- plural -- who did so, There was no strong odor which alerted me; only a rent check that hadn't left the crack in the door since August 1. Despite the lack of odor in the hallway, she had been dead for well longer than a week . I saw the body and she didn't die peacefully in her bed. (I mention this only because the article is graphic, and false). No one, no friend, had been around - I don't know this Lopez woman, nor did I ever meet any of her family. I did talk with her network of feminist friends, two of whom came to the building (I called one) on Tuesday night and paid their respects as the body was taken away. They were, are, good women. Bob Perl I won't comment on. Shulamith was a tormented woman living with severe mental illness, and I lived with her screams and pain for years."







(*It's exemplified on a micro scale by a friend of mine, whose wife left him and got the house and child custody. He now lives in a one-bedroomed flat - but he still gets to have the kids - whenever she's jetting off for a weekend in St Petersburg or Prague with her new boyfriend. I know another guy, a great father to his kids - at 47 he's in a council flat in the worst part of town while new man is in his old house, bed, and ex-wife - and he's just lost his job when it was outsourced. Great.) 

Woman Wins Ladies Singles Shock Horror

What's women's tennis coming to, when someone who doesn't seem to have spent the last five years on the weights bench (or the steroids), and who doesn't grunt or squeal like a pig on every point, can win a major tournament ?

You never know, she might even be straight as well. I know, I'm expecting too much.

On Ken Clarke and Rape Stats

Clarke is a let-em-all-out Euro fanatic, and I will unsay no word I've spoken about him. But his main failing in his now-notorious interview was to be ill-prepared and ill-briefed to discuss what he should have known is an incendiary topic.

The good Inspector speaks - I merely report :

As a serving policeman, there are several things I am not allowed to talk about.

There are plenty of operational secrets we cannot discuss, but I’m not referring to those. I’m talking about the taboo subjects. The ‘detection’ rate for rape is one of these.

It’s very frustrating to sit and listen to pundits talking about the low number of rape convictions in Court, when as police officers we all know what lies behind these poor numbers.

For example, I couldn’t possibly tell you that out of every ten rapes which are reported in Ruraltown, at least eight turn out to be nonsense. To be fair, eight out of ten of everything reported at Ruraltown police station is nonsense, why should rape be any different?

I couldn’t tell you that of the remaining two, an existing alcohol-fuelled chaotic drug-based relationship is a factor in at least one of these, and ‘consent’ is probably present in the other to some degree. In my whole service I can only recall three stranger rapes and a half a dozen where consent was withdrawn at the time and he carried on. But I can’t tell you that.

I can’t tell you that most of the adult rapes reported in Ruraltown represent either the latest in a series of allegations designed to score points against an ‘ex, lies designed to fend off an angry parent when a curfew has been missed or a defence mechanism when a jilted ‘partner’ discovers an infidelity.

A rape once reported, even if withdrawn later, is in the system and a failure to bring someone to justice, even if it never happened, shows up in the ‘detection’ rate. The ‘detection rate’ is low because the number of rapes which actually happen is low. I couldn’t possibly say that though...

The facts about rape seen from the street are this: most genuine rapes are against children under 13 years old and are within the family or family circle. Genuine adult rape is rare and nearly always charged to Court; what a jury do next is for them, but it usually comes down to ‘consent’ issues, and being as they were not in the bedroom at the time, and we are not simply proving intercourse because that is already admitted by the defendant, it’s not really within our gift to prove or disprove consent. Consent can amount to one word, said in a half whisper six months before in a darkened room where no one else was present.

But we can’t possibly say any of this. We will simply accept that it’s all our fault and promise to do better in the future.

I don't know. The one thing I'll say is that from purely anecdotal evidence, the chats a young man has with young women, is that an awful lot of girls seem to have had some kind of assault in their early teenage years - from the groper on the bus who you dread to see getting on board (and of course you've not told your parents although it's happened several times) to the one-off stranger exposing himself as you take a short-cut though the churchyard. There are definitely some bad people out there.


Meanwhile, back in lovely Croydon - into what category would the inspector put this alleged attack :

A teenager was chased down a residential street after being raped by her new “boyfriend” and his flatmate, a court heard. Cousins Corrie Pinney, 35, of Yardbridge Close, Belmont, and Jermaine Kraftner, 27, from Poole, Dorset, also invited Desmond Enwright, their uncle and father respectively, into the room to join in the attack, Croydon Crown Court heard on Monday... the group stayed up drinking, smoking cannabis and listening to music before Mr Kraftner said: “You don’t know what you’ve signed yourself up for.”

Charming. I keep hearing that most sexual assaults take place within the family, not with the participation of a family.

Mr Pinney and Mr Kraftner deny charges of rape, sexual assault, false imprisonment and ABH against two victims in separate attacks. They have admitted charges of ABH relating to a second alleged rape, which Cassie Webb, 20, from Croydon, denies aiding and abetting. She also denies false imprisonment during the attack in 2010.

Hmm.

Also in Croydon :

The mother and daughter were visiting Taryn’s boyfriend Jason Stevens, who had lost his 17-year-old sister in a car accident in August, when the trio spotted Georgia Marney walking down Cudham Drive. She had been banned from the road pending her upcoming court case for causing death by dangerous driving.

As Mrs Price was driving towards Marney she shouted at her out of the window of her car. She told the court: “I said ‘What the hell are you doing here, you are not supposed to be here. I did call her a murderer, which I should not have done. She was shouting rubbish at us, f-ing and blinding.” Marney walked towards the car, punching the window three times to make it shatter. Her daughter Taryn jumped out of the car to protect Mrs Price, whom she feared Marney was going to punch, and began grappling with her in the street. She also admitted calling the teenager a murderer as they fought and pulled each other’s hair, before Mrs Price stood on Marney’s hair so her daughter could escape.

As Taryn Price got up to collect her phone from the middle of the road, Marney kicked her mother in the face, breaking her glasses and leaving a cut above her eyebrow which required hospital treatment.

Ho hum.

Topical Tunes

I don't know why, but people seem to be linking this old song all over the Web :



While we're on Neil Young, there can surely be fewer finer exponents of the jangly guitar than he.

'Tis 40-plus years since a chap walked into the Lower Sixth Common Room and put on this, by a band we'd never heard of called Crazy Horse.

Bad Timing

I suppose publishing a piece on how Socialist candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn may be a bit of a lad with the women (but the sophisticated French electorate won't let that bother them) on Friday the 13th was always tempting fate.

"There was a fuss last year when a young French author, Tristane Banon, described her encounter with him. She explained that she had interviewed him for a book about public figures and their missteps, and claimed she had to fight him off physically. She said she hadn't made a complaint at the time, because she didn't want to be "the girl who had a problem with a politician".This side of DSK's life has almost become folklore in France. In 2009, humourist Stéphane Guillon even dedicated his comedy slot on the popular morning radio show La Matinale de France Inter (the French equivalent for Radio 4) to this particular side of the politician:

"Exceptional measures have been taken at Radio France in order not to awaken the Beast. Here are the measures, as detailed by the trade unions. I quote: 'In order to guarantee the safety of the personnel, female workers are asked to wear long, unrevealing and anti-sex clothes. High heels, leather pants and chic lingerie are banned. The head of information, who will greet DSK, will wear a burqa. Dark corners like the toilets, car park, some cupboards, have been momentarily closed off." He added: "But no panic. We have put bromide in his coffee ... and we have two cameras, the usual one on the table and a second under it.'."

Will DSK's reputation matter in the election? Do we, female voters, care about male politicians' sex lives? We all heard the stories in the news, and it is true that he might not be really popular among feminists. But the answer is no. As old-fashioned as it might seem, French voters tend to judge politicians according to their projects...We will have to keep an eye on him. But not in his bedroom."

Or, as another Guardianista put it a while ago, "Womaniser? He's just French".

Well, either the author has very bad timing, or ("puts on tinfoil hat") someone in Chateau Sarkozy has very good timing.

He was taken off an Air France flight by officers from the Port Authority of New York and turned over to Manhattan police, according to a spokesman from the agency. Plainclothes officers boarded the flight at 4.45pm, moments before take-off, and took the 62-year-old out of the first-class cabin and into custody. He had been due to meet German chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday. "It was 10 minutes before its scheduled departure," said John Kelly, a Port Authority spokesman.

Port Authority officers were acting on information from the New York Police Department, whose detectives had been investigating a brutal alleged attack on a woman employee at the Sofitel New York on West 44th Street in the heart of the city's theatre district. The 32-year-old woman told police that she entered Strauss-Kahn's room at about 1pm on Saturday and he emerged from the bedroom naked, threw her down and tried to sexually assault her (a/c/t this story he's alleged to have done more than try - not to mention this story - LT), NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. She broke free and escaped the room and told hotel staff what had happened who called the police. When New York City police detectives arrived moments later, Strauss-Kahn had already left the hotel, leaving behind his mobile phone and other personal items. "It looked like he got out of there in a hurry," Browne added.

In the UK an extremely wealthy economist and lobbyist with a reputation as a sexual harasser wouldn't necessarily be top of the list when choosing a Labour leader (Labour leaders are supposed to lay the groundwork during office for self-enrichment after office) - but they do things differently in France, where Socialist leaders are quite happy to use the Security Services and tax authorities as private enforcers of their personal interests.

"Among other verifiable events, Hallier's telephone conversations were continually eavesdropped on by the Elysée palace from 1985 onward. He and any potential publisher were hounded by tax inspectors dispatched to instill the fear of "God" (Mitterrand's nickname) into them, his apartment burned, etc."

'KeyWalk' marches sparked by Toronto officer's remarks

A new protest movement sparked by a policeman's ill-judged advice to motorists "not to leave their keys in the dash" has taken root in the US and Canada.

Thousands of people are arriving at car parks, some leaving their cars unlocked, others leaving the key in the dash provocatively - and then taking part in marches round the car park, or "KeyWalks".

The aim, say organisers, is to highlight a culture in which the victim rather than the car thief is blamed.

About 2,000 people took part in a "KeyWalk" in Boston on Saturday.

Boston organiser Siobhan Connors explained: "The event is in protest of a culture that we think is too permissive when it comes to car theft and break-ins.

"It's to bring awareness to the shame and abuse car owners still face for expressing their ownership of their own cars... essentially for behaving in a healthy and non-paranoid way" the 20-year-old told the Associated Press (AP) news agency.


Police Constable Michael Sanguinetti had been giving a talk on health and safety to a group of students at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto when he made the now infamous remarks.

"You know, I think we're beating around the bush here," he reportedly told them. "I've been told I'm not supposed to say this - however, car owners should avoid leaving the vehicle unlocked, or the keys in the dash, in order not to be a victim of car crime."

He has since apologised for his remarks and has been disciplined by the Toronto police, but remains on duty.

Some 3,000 people took part in the first "Keywalk" in Toronto last month. The Keywalk Toronto website said the aim of the movement is to "re-appropriate" the phrase "perhaps not the wisest thing to do".

"Ownership of a motor vehicle should not mean that we are opening ourselves to an expectation of theft of property or of the vehicle, regardless if it is locked or unlocked," it says.

"KeyWalks" have now been held in Dallas, Asheville in North Carolina, and in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, and are planned for Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Reno and Austin.

Everybody, from singles, couples, parents, sisters, brothers, children and friends, are encouraged to join in.

The rallies typically end with speakers and workshops on stopping car crime and calling on law enforcement agencies not to blame victims after break-ins or thefts, AP says.

In a similarly-inspired protest, thousands of demonstrators failed to turn up at the first 'MoWalk' planned for Bethnal Green, London yesterday. The protest, where marchers were to wear T-shirts showing cartoons of Mohammed, was planned after a senior Metropolitan police officer said that anyone planning to wear a T-shirt bearing an image of the Prophet Mohammed in East London "needs their head examining", "must be tired of life" and would be "arrested for their own safety".

The aim, said organisers, was to highlight a culture in which the victim of an assault rather than the assailant is blamed. But they were disappointed with the turnout, as no marchers turned up. It is believed a mass outbreak of a little-known disease called timor mortis caused the no-show. Other "MoWalks" planned for Bradford, Burnley and Balsall Heath have been cancelled.

Of course the protesters are right. If you drive to New York City, and leave your keys on the hood, it is never, ever your fault if the car or its contents are stolen. The fault lies fairly and squarely with the thief. Nonetheless, the fact is that there are car thieves in the world. The cultural history of the twentieth century tells us that cars are very desireable objects, the subject of thousands of pieces of verse, art, literature and music. As Steven Pinker, in his review of Randy Thornhill's controversial "A Natural History of Car Theft" puts it :

"Men will spend huge amounts of money on cars; will spend hundreds of hours underneath them, repairing, restoring or enhancing them; will devote their leisure time to studying them. Many people desire cars that they do not own, cannot afford and never will be able to afford. It would run contrary to everything we know about human beings if they were NOT prepared to steal them."

The fact of leaving keys in your car, or doors unlocked, can be interpreted by unscrupulous and unethical people as an invitation to steal your goods or your vehicle, despite the fact that you have every right not to be violated in this way. I can see the unfortunate police officer's point - it's probably true that fewer cars would be stolen were their owners to lock them up and not leave the keys on show.

But that, in the end, is not what this issue and these demonstrations are about. They are about the absolute and unfettered right of car owners to conduct themselves (within the law) in any and every way they wish, with no limits or restrictions.

"A Mother Is The Truest Friend We Have ..."

(in which the writer lauds dishonesty, perjury and assisting an offender)

" ...when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts."

Thus Washington Irving. He'd have been impressed with Jacqueline Binley.
















Photo - the magnificently named Heathcliff O'Malley.

"The son of Conservative MP Brian Binley has been jailed and his wife has narrowly avoided imprisonment after they concocted a string of lies to cover up a drink driving offence. Former police officer Matthew Binley, 27, was arrested after he crashed his Alfa Romeo in Northampton, Northants, whilst twice the drink-drive limit. He had attempted to evade capture by fleeing the vehicle but was taken into custody after officers spotted him hiding in a nearby bush. His mother Jacqueline Binley, 50, tried to take the blame, claiming she had been the one driving his car.
Despite not being at the scene of the accident she told officers she had caught a taxi home minutes before police arrived and arrested her son. The pair admitted attempting to pervert the course of justice while Mr Binley pleaded guilty to a further charge of drink driving."

Now young (? 27 !) Mr Binley sounds like he's been just about all the kinds of fool a young fool can be.

"Matthew was dropped off at his Northampton flat at 11.30pm on May 22 last year after attending a friend's wedding and carried on the party at city centre nightclubs. However, for an unknown reason he decided to go for a late night drive in his Alfa Romeo, which he then crashed into a kerb before calling the RAC at 1.30am. The recovery driver noticed he 'appeared drunk' and immediately called police who found Mr Binley hiding in a nearby bush and arrested him on suspicion of drink driving. "

Now you or I might not decide on a quick spin round the block while soused - but we've all done things that with hindsight were inadvisable. Having pranged the car with no other vehicle or person involved, you'd think he'd give thanks for that fact, park the car as tidily as can, then put as much distance between himself and it as possible before calling the garage the following day. What possessed him to call the RAC ? (in the old days the RAC man would have called a taxi, not the police).

Having done the above, involving your blameless mother in an attempted cover-up is surely adding not just a cherry on the confection of foolishness, but a whole fruitbowl - with whipped cream and hundreds and thousands to boot, not to mention strawberry and chocolate sauce. But when a job (he was a police officer) is at stake, people will do a lot.

And she stepped up to the plate, despite considerable reservations. Fair play to her and to her fierce maternal instinct. The fact that it was a mad thing to do, with little chance of success, makes it all the more commendable.

'Wish Matthew would just bite the bullet and take the rap. I'm beginning to resent him asking me but I daren't tell him to his face.''

While she and her husband, MP Brian Binley, are entitled to think their son's been very silly, I hope Mr Binley is very proud of his wife (even if he can't say so publicly), and that his son's had the grace to apologise, to thank her, and to swear never to be such an idiot again.





(It's rarely that I bitterly regret not being a wealthy man. In such case, I would offer the Binleys a fortnight anywhere in the world, with all the spas, pampering and dining a woman could want*, and an expensive trip to the jewellers at the end. I know there are far more worthy people in the world, but something about this story just touches me, as it might touch any father with sons and a redhead wife)



* my experience in this area being limited, I'm making it up as I go along.


UPDATE - Susan looked at the story over my shoulder. "She's as daft as he is. I wouldn't lie for him if it were my son". Women are so unromantic.

A Dodgy Decision

Here.

According to the complaint filed by the woman, the two met in a Jerusalem street in 2008 and had sex that day. When she discovered he was not Jewish, but an Arab, she went to the police. Kashur was arrested and charged with rape and indecent assault, but the charges were later replaced by a different charge of "rape by deception".

Hmm. I thought it was a truism that a young man will say pretty much anything to get a woman into bed.

The inventive and resourceful Syrian Fadi Sbano was acquitted of rape by a UK court for a lot more than that. Not sure he'd have got that verdict in Israel.

UPDATE

In the verdict, deputy president of the Jerusalem district court Tzvi Segal, along with fellow judges Moshe Drori and Yoram Noam, wrote that although this wasn't "a classical rape by force," and the sex was consensual, the consent itself was obtained through deception and under false pretenses. "If she hadn't thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have cooperated," the judges wrote.

I see. They'd been together for months before he had his wicked way ?

According to the indictment, Kashur met the complainant in September 2008 in downtown Jerusalem.. the couple then went to a nearby building and had sex, after which Kashur left the building without waiting for the woman to get dressed.

Hmm. Not a gentleman, then. But didn't exactly take a lot of persuasion, did she ?

"The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price - the sanctity of their bodies and souls," Segal wrote.

Hmm.

Friday Night Dixie - Money Talks

I think this is quite a way better than the original.

It's a delicate suggestion - nothing more ...

A feminist classic of Edwardian times, recorded in 1932 by the Spanish mezzo-soprano Conchita Supervia.

I once walked with her by the Arno, in Florence, where navvies engaged in road work put down their picks and stared in frank admiration as she passed. Supervia, without even a glance in their direction, sensed their admiration and visibly preened herself.

"You surely don’t enjoy men looking at you like that?" I asked.

"I do," she replied, amused at such a very Anglo-Saxon question. "I don’t find it unpleasant to think that they are all saying to themselves, “If I was a rich man, that’s what I’d want.”"

If you want to learn a lesson with the fan,
I'm quite prepared to teach you all I can
So ladies, every one, pray observe how it is done,
It's a simple little lesson with the fan.

If you chance to be invited to a ball,
And meet someone that you don't expect at all,
And you want him close beside you,
While a dozen friends divide you,
Well of course, it's most unladylike to call,

So you look at him a minute - nothing more
And you cast your eyes demurely on the floor,
And you wave your fan just so,
Well, towards you, don't you know,
It's a delicate suggestion - nothing more ...

When you see him coming to you, simple you,
Oh be very, very careful what you do
With your fan just kindly play,
And look down as if to say
It's a matter of indifference to you,

Then you flutter and you fidget with it so,
And you hide your little nose behind it so,
And when he begins to speak
You just lay it on your cheek,
In that fascinating manner that you know,

And when he tells the old tale o'er and o'er,
And vows that he will love you evermore,
Gather up your little fan
And secure him while you can,
It's a delicate suggestion - nothing more ...

(When she takes a crack at an English song the results are quite charming.)

Saturday Night Music - Baron of Brackley

One of my hobby-horses is the biological and evolutionary underpinning of male/female relationships :

"Evolutionary psychologists postulate that the same physical and psychological drives prevail among modern humans: Men, eager for replication, are naturally polygamous, while women are naturally monogamous—but only until a man they perceive as of higher status than their current mate comes along.

Hypergamy—marrying up, or, in the absence of any constrained linkage between sex and marriage, mating up—is a more accurate description of women’s natural inclinations. Long-term monogamy—one spouse for one person at one time—may be the most desirable condition for ensuring personal happiness, accumulating property, and raising children, but it is an artifact of civilization, Western civilization in particular. In the view of many evolutionary psychologists, long-term monogamy is natural for neither men nor women."

Which in times past produced winner-take-all males - and an awful lot of losers :

Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.

I think this difference is the single most underappreciated fact about gender. To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.

A situation which Christian civilisation was destined and designed to correct and struggle against. Although sin was always with us, any male proclaiming to the world that he took whatever he wanted was likely to be given short shrift by pre-1945 Britons. That was the cry of "primitive man", as far as they were concerned - people like the Papua New Guineans quoted in the foreword to Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" :

"Woman after woman, when asked to name her husband, named several sequential husbands who had died violent deaths. A typical answer went like this: "My first husband was killed by Elopi raiders. My second husband was killed by a man who wanted me, and who became my third husband. That husband was killed by the brother of my second husband, seeking to avenge his murder."

The wife welcoming her husband's killer to her bed is a narrative with a literary pedigree and plenty of historical exemplars. The ballad of Brackley, based on a Deeside raid in 1666 by Farquharson of Inverey against John Gordon of Brackley, is a grim example where the husband's death sentence consists of the words 'if you were a man you'd go out and fight' - at odds of fifteen to one.

From Dee side came Inverey whistlin' and playin'
And he is to Brackley's gates ere the day is dawnin'
Saying, Baron O'Brackley oh are ye within?
There are sharp swords at your gates, to gar your bluid spin

Oh rise up my husband and turn back your kye (cattle - LT)
For the lads frae Dunwharrum are driving them by
Oh how might I rise up and turn them again
For where I have one man I'm sure they have ten

If I had a husband the like I have nane
He'd no lie in his bed and watch his kye ta'en
Then up spake the baron, said gi'e me my gun
Saying I may go out but I'll never win home

There rode wi' bold Inverey full thirty and three
But along wi' bonny Brackley just his brother and he
Twa gallanter Gordons did ne'er the sword draw
But against three and thirty, wae's me, what is twa?

Wi' swords and wi' pistols they did him surround
And they pierced bonny Brackley wi' monys a wound
Frae the head o the Dee, tae the banks of the Spey
Oh the Gordons will mourn him and will ban Inverey

Oh came ye from Brackley's, and was you in there?
And saw ye his Peggy a-rivin' her hair
Aye, I came by Brackley's, and I was in there
And I saw his bonny Peggy she was makin' good cheer

She was rantin', she was dancin', she was singin' wi' joy
And she swears this same nicht she will feast Inverey
She laughed wi' him, danced wi' him, welcomed him in
And she kept him while morning whae slain her good man

There's grief in the kitchen, there's mirth in the hall
For the Baron o Brackley lies dead and awa'
Then up spake his son from his own nurse's knee
If I live to be a man 'tis avenged I'll be

UPDATE - Robert Whelan, in the foreword to Patricia Morgan's "Farewell To The Family" put his finger on where modern warriors are coming from.

"We have created the classic conditions for the emergence of a warrior class: separation of economic activity from family maintenance; children reared apart from fathers; wealth subject to predation; and male status determined by combat and sexual conquest."

Presented in slightly idiotic socialese, this Atlantic piece describes urban warrior culture :

"At the heart of the code is the issue of respect--loosely defined as being treated "right," or granted the deference one deserves. However, in the troublesome public environment of the inner city, as people increasingly feel buffeted by forces beyond their control, what one deserves in the way of respect becomes more and more problematic and uncertain. This in turn further opens the issue of respect to sometimes intense interpersonal negotiation."

Ha ! That's one phrase for it.

UPDATE 2 - new blogger Hexe Froschbein ("Frog-legs the Witch" ?) points out in the comments that Christian culture was neither the first nor the only monogamous culture (never said it was, mind). Thoughtful Romans (a/c/t 'I, Claudius') considered the Germanic tribes to have a particularly strict code of sexual morality, which contrasted favourably with that of decadent Imperial Rome.
She links to this text-and-audio of Tacitus' Germania - "Tacitus’ descriptions of the Germanic character are at times favorable in contrast to the opinions of the Romans of his day. He holds the strict monogamy and chastity of Germanic marriage customs worthy of the highest praise, in contrast to what he saw as the vice and immorality rampant in Roman society of his day, and he admires their open hospitality, their simplicity, and their bravery in battle. One should not, however, think that Tacitus’ portrayal of Germanic customs is entirely favorable; he notes a tendency in the Germanic people for what he saw as their habitual drunkenness, laziness, and barbarism, among other traits."

I think we should remember, however, that from these noble savages sprang the French.

Signs Of The Times

Standard :

Street adverts featuring women in bikinis have been defaced in apparently targeted attacks. Most show women in swimwear by chain store H&M but another features a couple kissing to promote the Bollywood film Kites. Residents in affected London areas suggested the images, which were daubed with black paint, could have been targeted by religious conservatives or radical feminists. Police have not linked the campaign to any religious group but the damage is similar to attacks in Pakistan on billboard ads branded "un-Islamic" and "obscene" by hardliners. Today women's rights and anti-censorship activists joined Muslims and Christians to condemn the vandals. Police said 14 bus shelters around Tower Hamlets, including many in Limehouse, were hit last month.

Tower Hamlets is a hotbed of radical feminism, I hear.

A Fine Romance ...

The local candidate standing for election for a party I find altogether despicable, is handsome -in a tall, dark kind of way; a Mr Rochester if ever I saw one.

Curiously I find him all the more attractive because his views on life and liberty would never correspond with mine.

Just before seven pm I was cooking chicken pie and making some Cornish pasties. There was a knock at the door.

This could have been the opening to one of the great love stories - or alternatively one of the great erotic fantasies.

Tragically, our dashing hero doesn't play up to the script.

He seemed at a loss, and remarked upon the number of shoes we have in our hall.

Maybe real life can never be like that. No vote here, time is short, many doors to knock on.

But I really wanted him to ask me why I wasn't going to vote for him.

I wanted him to fix me to the spot with a gimlet stare and demand an answer.

And perhaps one or two other things. It's an interesting thought - a candidate responding to an opposition voter with a passionate appeal as a starter for ten. No wife or daughter safe. Would certainly enliven the campaign, one way or the other.

I guess a candidate in a hopeless seat might take a punt. But it would have been a grand, romantic , quixotic and politically highly dangerous gamble in what should be a reasonably safe Tory seat. As the ancient joke puts it, chiselled candidate James Morris didn't realise how close he was to getting in well before polling day.

The Rules Of The Game Are Changing

The basic instincts needed regulating too. Copulation meant children, and of the two available models (monogamy or winner-takes-all), Christian Britain went heavily for the first, with a leavening of the second for princes and mighty lords.

Laban's "2,000 years of British history in five paragraphs"

So all of that culture and sex difference comes from our need to reproduce. And those novels and movies where the heroine prefers the bad lad to the steady guy, Heathcliffe to Linton, those complaints that 'women go for bastards' or that 'every woman loves a fascist' - there is or was some evolutionary truth there.

Laban's "Money, Men and Women"

In ancient days (the Golden Age that never was) the disciplines of work and marriage subdued man's natural tendencies to naughtiness of all kinds. No work meant no food - and perhaps more important for socialisation, no respect from your peers. It also meant no marriage - and no marriage meant no sex - unless you were wealthy, lucky or unusually desirable.

Now ... reliable contraception has removed the link between sex and childbearing.

Laban's "It's Sick Bag Time Again"


If I understand these evolutionary biologist chappies aright, before the Great Cultural (and contraceptive) Revolution women really really wanted two things (from an evolutionary biology perspective ... remember we've only just come out of the trees ...)

a) a chap with top genes to father her children - a real alpha male to produce alpha babies

b) a chap who'd provide for said children and stick around to help raise them, or at a minimum to facilitate her raising them

and from the same evolutionary biology perspective men wanted

a) only one thing

the point of both approaches being to maximise the survival of your genes

Now you might have noticed a potential issue with the female strategy - that Mr Alpha and Mr Provider may not necessarily be the same chap. And even today scientists find that female infidelity is more likely during fertile periods - and that chaps find women more attractive (pdf - I bet they weren't short of volunteer researchers) when they're fertile, even though they have no conscious way of determining fertility. IIRC (I can't find a link), when university genetics courses started up, some used to get the students to bring in samples of parental DNA and compare with their own to show the common factors - but then had to stop after the occasional distressing finding.

So Mr Provider had a potential problem - he didn't want to spend the rest of his short life putting in a hard day's mammoth hunting to feed someone else's kids. Rigidly enforced monogamy was the solution which evolved over time - and it worked pretty well for the Mr Providers of this world.

"People often quote a figure of one in ten for the number of people born illegitimately," says Professor Jobling. "Our study shows that this is likely to be an exaggeration. The real figure is more likely to be less that one in twenty-five."

(He's talking about historical illegitimacy and children produced by infidelity in history - before the numbers reached industrial scale)

Then came the Great Cultural Revolution. This fascinating Charlotte Allen piece in the Weekly Standard describes what would appear to be a reversion to our primate days for young professional singles. Here's the theory bit :

Evolutionary psychologists postulate that the same physical and psychological drives prevail among modern humans: Men, eager for replication, are naturally polygamous, while women are naturally monogamous—but only until a man they perceive as of higher status than their current mate comes along. Hypergamy—marrying up, or, in the absence of any constrained linkage between sex and marriage, mating up—is a more accurate description of women’s natural inclinations. Long-term monogamy—one spouse for one person at one time—may be the most desirable condition for ensuring personal happiness, accumulating property, and raising children, but it is an artifact of civilization, Western civilization in particular. In the view of many evolutionary psychologists, long-term monogamy is natural for neither men nor women.

All of this is obviously pure speculation, if imaginatively rendered and bolstered by anthropological observations of hunter-gatherer societies today... Yet evolutionary psychology offers a persuasive explanation for many things that we are supposed to pretend are culturally conditioned: that the natures of men and women are fundamentally different and that, pace Naomi Wolf and the cougar-empowerment movement, women don’t get sexier as they get older, at least not in the eyes of the man sitting on the next barstool. Youth and beauty are markers of fertility. As Mystery wrote in his book, it may be sexist to say out loud, but women are well aware “that their social value can be rated largely on their looks” or they wouldn’t devote so many hours to toning muscles and adjusting makeup.

Evolutionary psychology also provides support for a truth universally denied: Women crave dominant men. And it seems that where men are forbidden to dominate in a socially beneficial way—as husbands and fathers, for example—women will seek out assertive, self-confident men whose displays of power aren’t so socially beneficial. This game of sexual Whack-a-Mole is played regularly these days in a culture that, starting with children’s schoolbooks and moving up through films and television, targets as oppressors and mocks as bumblers the entire male sex.

And the practice bit :

Late last September a college student who called herself Courtney A. posted a story on the feminist website Lemondrop: “I Slept With Tucker Max, the Internet’s Biggest Asshat” ...

Many of the commenters to Courtney’s tell-all expressed “disgust” at Max’s manifestly unchivalrous behavior. In a September op-ed for the Washington Post, feminist Jaclyn Friedman, who inexplicably blamed Max’s perverse success with females (half his fans, perhaps the more enthusiastic half, are female) on abstinence-only sex education, sniffed that she found his “antics revolting,” blasted his “unapologetic misogyny,” and accused him of contributing to a campus atmosphere that allows 150,000 young women to be raped every academic year. (Friedman derived that extraordinarily high figure by counting drunken sexual encounters between students as rape.) Amanda Marcotte, the feminist blogger briefly hired by John Edwards during his presidential campaign, chimed in, accusing Max of a “bone-deep hatred of sexual women”—and also of possible “sexual assault” because he had bragged on his website about sleeping with a drunk girl while a friend hidden in a closet filmed the encounter. In May, feminist picketers so disrupted an appearance by Max at Ohio State University that he needed a police escort to get away.

Yet it’s hard to believe that Courtney A. herself shared any of this dudgeon. Next to her story she posted a photograph of her with Max that she had a friend take at the bar. The photo shows a rosy-cheeked strawberry blonde who, although no Scarlett Johansson, is no Ugly Betty either (her C-cup bustline, much in evidence both underneath and spilling over her strapless top, doesn’t hurt). She is also grinning from ear to ear, her smile as wide as a cantaloupe slice. Max, mugging for the camera, has his arm draped proprietarily, if not exactly affectionately, around her shoulder as she leans into his chest. No disapproving peers, either. When Courtney left her apartment to meet Max at the bar, her roommates called after her, “Make sure to bring him back.” She and Max rode off to the inn “with everyone at the bar waving and giving the thumbs up.”

Welcome to the New Paleolithic.

You really need to read the whole thing - there's a lot in it. And the criticisms and comments at Steve Sailer's are (mostly) illuminating, especially on the vexed question of what constitutes an alpha male in todays society.

"We know all about equality and independence — we've been there"

The practicalities are all, it seems - Marie Claire (!) on Russia's classes for millionaire-hunters :

To the Western feminist mind, it might seem a bit retrograde, yet Varra insists that Russian women are the ultimate post-feminists. "We know all about equality and independence — we've been there," she tells me. During the Soviet era, which ended in 1991, millions of men died in wars and labor camps. Women often ran their households alone, while also working in factories. The problem is that Russian men, says Varra, remain deeply patriarchal and still expect women to be subservient. "Rather than try to change men, which will take another 200 years," she says, "we might as well get whatever we can out of them now."

Quote Of The Day

David Duff on erogenous zones, real or imagined :

I was always a very attentive and tender lover who never forgot to ask afterwards, "How was it for you, darling?" even if I never quite managed to stay awake long enough to catch the reply.

CLANNGG !

Amanda Craig (who she ?) in the Mail bemoans the tyranny of pink (for those of you who've been rightly ignoring it, some (childless) Labour dimwit called Bridget Prentice (nee Corr) thinks pink stuff for girlies is just socialisation by the partriarchy) :

Occasionally, I would get together with other pink refuseniks at the local mothers' club.

While our daughters squabbled over whose turn it was to use the glittery pink crayon, we would moan on about the tyranny of this repulsive colour.

Where had we all gone so wrong? If our children are born blank slates, as the scientist Stephen Pinker (no, I haven't made up his name) claims, then all this mania for a particular colour has to be culturally imposed, an addiction caused by nurture, not nature.

Alas, commenter Harry Storm of Vancouver (I think he made that name up) puts his finger on the flaw in the above :

Since Amanda Craig obviously hasn't read "The Blank Slate" by Stephen Pinker, she shouldn't be using it to make her point. In fact, the entire point of Pinker's book is that we're NOT born as "blank slates." Since she thinks it says the opposite, there are only two possibilities: a) she hasn't read the book, in which case she shouldn't use it to make a point, as it makes her look silly; or b) she's an idiot who doesn't deserve a column in a daily newspaper.