Bogged down in Stanleygrad.

I'll start with the good:

Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) -- Another senior Afghan Taliban leader has been arrested in Pakistan, two Pakistani intelligence officials told CNN on Monday.

Security forces arrested Mullah Abdul Kabir last week from a religious school in the district of Nowshera, 54 miles (88 km) northwest of Islamabad, the officials said.

"This arrest underscores a change in Pakistan's policy," Gul said. "This suggests their level of cooperation with the U.S. is much better than in the past."

Gul said the new level of cooperation could be in response to Washington's recent decision to tone down its criticism of the Pakistani military.

"The Pakistani military has finally convinced the U.S. military establishment not to publicly condemn it," said Gul. "When you criticize the Pakistani military publicly, it reduces room for maneuvering for Pakistan's institutions. It becomes difficult for the military to motivate the lower and middle rank officers. Finally, there is a much better equation between both military establishments."

This is a key flaw in American in particular and Western foreign policy in general. When you talk smack about people that you would like to do your dirty work, it's hardly likely to make them willing to put themselves out on your behalf. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a cornerstone of Realpolitik (even if not worded quite that bluntly) and there are times to shut up. More times in my opinion than there are to gob off about how other countries are handling their internal problems.

Now, the Bad:

The Afghan cabinet has revised the death toll from a NATO airstrike in the centre of the country down to 27 civilians killed, from 33 previously.

On Saturday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai admonished NATO troops for not doing enough to protect civilian lives. During a speech at the opening session of the Afghan parliament, Karzai called for extra caution on the part of NATO, which is currently conducting a massive offensive on the southern Taliban stronghold of Marjah in neighbouring Helmand province.

"We need to reach the point where there are no civilian casualties," Karzai said. "Our effort and our criticism will continue until we reach that goal."

Bullshit; when the opposition is using human shields this will simply not happen.

And last but far from least, the Ugly (from the main link):

MARJAH, Afghanistan — Outnumbered and outgunned, Taliban fighters are mounting a tougher fight than expected in Marjah, Afghan officials said Sunday, as U.S.-led forces converged on a pocket of militants in a western section of the town.

U.S. officials signalled their intention to attack Marjah, a major Taliban supply and opium-smuggling centre, months ago, apparently in hopes the insurgents would flee and allow the U.S.-led force to take over quickly and restore an Afghan government presence.

Instead, the insurgents rigged Marjah with bombs and booby traps to slow the allied attack, which began Feb. 13. Teams of Taliban gunmen stayed in the town, delivering sometimes intense volleys of gunfire on Marine and Afghan units slogging through the rutted streets and poppy fields.

Afghan Defence Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi said the U.S. and its allies had expected the Taliban to leave behind thousands of hidden explosives, which they did. But they were surprised to find that so many militants stayed to fight.

"Surprised", eh? Me, not so much. What the fuck did you THINK they would do if you gave them months (unmolested) to prepare? I know what I'd do in their place; each of my most zealous jihadis would be built multiple fortresses within the town with enough bombs, grenades, RPGs and small arms ammo to stage hit and run attacks every time the infidels turned a corner. Oh wait, that's they did too...

I will say it here as unequivocally as I can: Gen. Stanley McCrystal's strategy for Afghanistan is stupid. Yes, stupid, rather like Hitler's decision to leave 6th Army in Stalingrad when the Soviets enveloped it, although the scale of the impending (military) disaster is of course smaller. If you wanted to do this, (it has been done in Fallujah) give the townies 24 hours notice to leave. That's enough time to sauve qui peut and let the Taliban small fry take off (the intent here) and NOT allow them months to mine and fortify the whole town.

Months of warning and they're still killing heaps (not really, but the media...) of civilians because they're being used as shields, and just because of standard war type stuff. Errant MLRS missiles wouldn't kill civvies who aren't there, and our side wouldn't be bogged down (in what I'll call Stanleygrad) if the good General's strategy had any firm basis in ground truth.

There are some signs of hope (see top) over there, but this is NOT one of them, and a public relations minefield to boot. Hopefully this debacle gets a new commander over there, but I'm not holding my breath waiting on that.

Decline and Slide of the West

The linked article ties in nicely with the latest series of posts here. Much better researched and thought through, but you'll notice a lot of ads on his page that you don't see at AotF.

The big thing to take away from this is the concept of Material Productivity. There may be other terms, but it's exactly what I've been on about and it fits perfectly.

Yet Rome did not fall for four centuries after its moralists wrote of its decadence and decline. Why the resilience?

Entitlements and official corruption were for centuries subsidized by the profits accruing from global standardization and Romanization — brought about by the implementation and imposition of Roman law, order, and commerce throughout the Mediterranean. As long as the empire was cohesive, it brought in thousands yearly into its sphere of influence.

And:

So such global uniformity created real wealth in newfound places faster than such bounty could corrupt the citizens in the old Italian core to the degree to bring down what was now a world system. In other words, the creation of entirely new cities like Leptis or the growth of Asian centers such as Ephesus, brought previously unproductive tribal folk into the Roman system at precisely the time old Romans were no longer doing the things that had once created their own vibrant culture that swept the Mediterranean — the ancient version of the Chinese youth working 10 hours in an Adidas factory while an American counterpart is still “finding himself.”

The point? We see something like this today. What made American culture boom through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were traditional American values like the Protestant work ethic, family thrift, limited and stable government, equality of opportunity rather than result, lower taxes, personal freedom, opportunity for advancement and profit, and faith in American exceptionalism.

But the cloning and spreading of this system after WWII (“globalization”) did two things: literally billions of non-Westerners adopted the Western mode of production and began, in economic terms, becoming far more productive in creating valuable manufacturing goods, food, and exporting previously unknown or untapped natural resources; in addition, the vast rise in population added billions to the world’s productive work force.

Yes, lazily blockquoting someone else could be taken as another sign of said decline, but I do have a day job too. I am more than passingly familiar with the Roman Empire, though certainly no expert; this sounds like what happened to them, and the analogies with today are ignored at our peril.

Something I know even less about is Economics, however the same could be said for most people who specialize in it; the Dismal Science indeed. Free Trade was seen by many as the thin edge of the predicament we find ourselves in, and can't claim mastery of the intricacies of those arguments. However, if there is one thing I have learned by surviving this long is that if you need a complicated explanation of or complex scheme for anything you're doing something wrong.

Brushing aside the obvious exceptions to that statement I am reminded of that one house that remained standing in Chicoutimi during the 1996 Saguenay flood while all else around it was washed away. The reason it stood is that it was built on bedrock. The more we undermine the foundations of our economy, the closer our collapse as a society comes. I think that NAFTA could have worked, as long as we protected it against wider competition. Even that is cold comfort to people who used to do jobs that moved to Mexico. Now those jobs have moved to China, and our wealth is moving in an ever widening loop, less of it making back to us.

Again, this is a more acute problem for the U.S. than for Canada, but I am not optimistic that all the recently lost manufacturing jobs will return to Ontario when this slump is over. Watch and shoot.

Engineering Twilight, Part Two

Today I come to the subject I had in mind when I concocted this title, and ironically the tangent it spawned was more coherent and supportable than what will follow here, mais c'est la guerre.

No, the plan was something that I've been thinking about for a while, and it has to do with our decreasing vision if not our absolute decline in ability to do certain things. I was watching something on the Military Channel about the SR-71 which had video of the production process. They had to make the plane out of titanium, so Lockheed developed techniques to cast and forge the stuff. The connection here is that while watching this I said "That represents the peak of American engineering".

It was a plane, and although it was really fast, it was no Three Gorges Dam or (more contemporaneous to it) Apollo Project, so I don't mean the most sophisticated or biggest thing built by man. What it meant to me, and I could be completely wrong, was that we have lost the sort of industrial "muscle" that would allow a single company to build something as outrageous as a plane that is 90% titanium and goes Mach 3.2+ at 85,000ft (or 3.5 at over 100,000ft, depending on your source).

Of course this would never have happened at any other time or place in history than in a still-prosperous U.S.A. in the throes of an ideological struggle for the political and economic soul of the world. The Cold War isn't seen like that any more, but that was what it was and Reagan finally won it by bankrupting the U.S.S.R. Since then the West has lacked that sort of far-horizon existential threat. The war against Islam is much older, but the threat is a lot less definable than that of the 1st Guards Tank Red Banner Army facing you over the IGB (Inner German Border).

The America that built the SR-71 is gone, and not looking likely to come back. I don't disagree with the decision to can the F-22, for example, but its' demise (or scaling back) is an early symptom of the U.S.A.'s own "Recessional":

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

There are a lot of things we can do today that couldn't be done 40-50 years ago, so we're not looking at a Dark Age just yet. A lot of the "fire" has gone out though, as current achievements are at a much smaller scale than in the 1950s and 60s. When you're working on
nanotech that's a good thing, but North America has dropped out of the race for a lot of things that we used to lead. Canada peaked in the 50s with the Avro Arrow, but our loss was the Yanks' gain as our people went to the Apollo program and elsewhere.

Science fiction has worked a great deal with the idea of a future when few people are needed to keep things running, and it is one possibility that the global population will peak and recede as everyone goes "post-industrial". The chickens of the cradle-to-grave Social Security state are beginning to roost as it becomes obvious to people other than Actuaries that we can't maintain the society we have designed for ourselves. That means different things to different people, but to me we need an economy which actually produces things as a foundation for its wealth, and we need it basically now.

Back to industry and engineering. As much as I don't hold with the (increasingly discredited and shrill) AGW models, we do need to wean ourselves off of oil. With good scrubbing technology we can keep using coal and certainly natural gas, but the key to all of these electric cars is, well electricity. "Clean" coal, hydro, natural gas and nuclear power plants will give us that, but to generate the added energy that recharging all of those batteries will require a lot more juice than we have available presently. Engineering advances remain to be made in all of these areas; simple, efficient nuke plants, efficient solar cells, and the holy grail of clean low-impact power generation, orbital solar power.

I'm a well-known cynic, but I know what we have done, so I know we could do that sort of thing again. The sort of drive and sense of purpose that built SR-71s could be turned loose on the engineering requirements of launching the solar platforms and building the receiving stations.

We are victims of our own success and the resultant lowered expectations. I have no idea where our tech will top out, but it shouldn't happen in my lifetime, and I want that cheap clean energy as much as the most ardent Green. You might be able to live as a "naked savage" on tropical beaches, but in this climate it takes energy just to survive 2/3 of the year. That's my pet hypothesis why Europe was first to develop advanced tech, though the Chinese had a head start and certainly could have come out ahead.

It starts in the homes and the schools of the nation. Kids should feel that they have a contribution to make, and the schools should identify strengths and guide those children to what they are proficient in. It wouldn't work for everyone, but there would be more plumbers, electricians, technicians, engineers, chemists, etc., and a lot fewer Art History majors. This is drifting into "Credentialism", another sign of our decline, but one which can be reined under control and even directed to the good of individuals and society.

Sustainable progress is the key to survival. Cheap clean energy is the key to wealth within that model, and keeping our R&D where it needs to be to get that requires us to put our industry back in business. Canada's not as far down the road of de-industrializing as the Americans are, but they have still far more industry than we've ever had, so we've not far to fall to hit our bottom.

Engineering Twilight, Part One.

In the occasional serendipitous neuron firing/misfiring that passes for cleverness with me, I had one idea in mind for this post when I came out with the title. Thinking that it might be confusing (and in what way) led me to that which will comprise today's post.

The idea of a "global sunblock" is certainly new enough when talked about as something we'd want to try:

Proponents suggest so-called "geoengineering" would probably take effect much more quickly than cutting emissions and at a fraction of the price. They also point out that years of international debate on emissions has produced almost no results and opening a high-altitude chemical parasol may soon be the only way to keep global warming at manageable levels.
"Solar-radiation management may be the only human response that can fend off rapid and high-consequence climate impacts," wrote Keith, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment at the University of Calgary.

First off, I've no idea what planet these people are on that still think things are too hot here; probably the same one where the inhabitants explain "global warming" as being responsible for it getting colder. From here I was going to list the ways in which this was a bad idea numerically, but screw it, I'll just free-style it as usual.

The key to all of this is blocking our sun, e.g. Sol, source of all life on this planet. Partially they say, and I'm sure that's true, but how much is enough and how much is too much? I have those questions for starters, but it is conceivable that someone could answer that, at least with something that gave them the result they were looking for in a model.

Where this is not so new is that it has happened innumerable times already in Earth's history. The average reader of this blog is old enough to remember Mt Pinatubo going up in 1991. The upshot of that "high-altitude chemical parasol" was a cold miserable summer and a drop of 0.5°C in the world's temperature. Bloody cold winter too, as I recall. It is to be noted that these "average" numbers translate into something significantly less academic on the pointy end, e.g. in reality, in our lives. I strongly suggest reading the above link to get a solid idea of the forces involved, the persistence of effects and the world-wide impact of ONE VOLCANO. The effects on the ozone layer by themselves are eye-opening even though I was generally aware of it before now.

The Earth bounced back from that with the warmest decade since the 1930s, and I note that mankind's numbers increased significantly despite the horrible pleasantly-warm weather that we had for those years. Whatever chemical weirdness they have in mind, they have no way to test it. Think about that, and put any thought of computer models out of your head. The systems involved (the sun, the factors affecting atmospheric circulation and our climate) are vastly too complex to be reliably modeled, full-stop. Effects are transient (though how transient, exactly?) but if you're looking for something longer lasting, do I have a program for you!

It's called "Nuclear Winter" and you may have heard of it. You don't need nukes for it of course; a massive regional volcanic event will do it, or failing that a big enough rock hitting us. Note that both of these are leading contenders for killing off the dinosaurs, or at least most things bigger than a housecat living on land at the time.

Cold is bad. The Inuit concept of Hell is a cold place, and they know more about cold than anyone. When it's warm, things can grow; the worst droughts or hurricanes (not guaranteed results just because it gets hotter) pale in effect on the landscape and living things compared to a continental ice sheet. Compare South America to Antarctica for example.

The AGW brigade is feverishly trying to keep their agenda in the public eye, and this represents the latest angle. Note the dangling bait of "less expensive". It is obvious to the great unwashed (that's us, btw) that the implications of all of these "green" policies would be disastrous to our standard of living. This latest brainwave has the potential to flat-line agriculture if they block out a teensy bit too much sun (Oops! That's not what the model predicted...) leading to the mother-of-all unintended consequences as we all starve to death. Actually, considering the attitudes of some of these people that might not be so unintended after all as long as all of the rich white people are wiped out too...

It's treated quite glibly by these geoengineering advocates, but personally I would view a unilateral dispersal of some chemical into the atmosphere by some country as an act of war against the entire world. What this also does, although it is never mentioned in the articles, is recognize that our heat all comes from the sun. It's not a big step from there to realizing that the sun is NOT a constant and that just maybe we're trying to mess with things that aren't idly trifled with. I just hope it's not as cheap and simple as they claim so we don't find out the hard way, sort of like the dinosaurs did.

Picking sides

I'll do these in reverse chronological order and (at least partially) let you draw your own conclusions.

Religious violence kills more than 200 in Nigeria

Plateau State governor Jonah Jang said the violence was not provoked by a lack of opportunity in this rural farming community. He claimed many of the attackers were from Muslim-dominant northern Nigeria and from the nearby, predominantly Muslim nations of Niger and Chad.

"There are people masterminding this for their own selfish reasons," said Jang, who is Christian.

The Minister of Police Affairs, Ibrahim Yakubu Lame, issued a statement Tuesday blaming the violence on "some highly placed individuals in the society who were exploiting the ignorance and poverty of the people to cause mayhem in the name of religion."

Jos is not alone in being shaken by religious violence. In July, an extremist group known as Boko Haram -- translated as "Western education is sacrilege" -- attacked police stations and other government buildings, starting days of violence that left more than 700 people dead in northern Nigeria. Another wave of violence started by infighting in another Islamic extremist group left at least 38 people dead in December.

Still, nearly all violence caused by extremist sects comes from intensely local politics or grievances -- not any call for holy war against the West.

I particularly like the "...not any call for holy war against the West." The word you're looking for is JIHAD, but nice try soft-soaping it. Also, they don't seem to read their own article; the previous paragraph, for bleep's sake, talked about Boko Haram (not the first I've heard of them, either) a.k.a. "Western education is sacrilege". What is that if it's not "holy war against the West"?

That was a few days ago. The headline now is:

At least 150 Muslims reported killed in Nigerian town

JOS, Nigeria — An international human rights group is calling on Nigerian officials to investigate reports that at least 150 Muslims were killed in a central Nigerian town.

Human Rights Watch on Saturday cited reports of a massacre in a town located south of Jos, where fighting broke out between Christians and Muslims about a week ago.

Witnesses said that armed men attacked on Tuesday and that some of the victims were burned alive. One official said that the bodies of 22 young children had been recovered.

Muslim leaders told Human Rights Watch at least 364 people have been killed in the last week, while the Christian death toll was still being compiled.

Look at the sources: human rights (ha!) group using numbers from "Muslim leaders" while Christian deaths numbers were conveniently unavailable. "One official said that the bodies of 22 young children had been recovered." WHAT official?! The opening sentence "calls" for officials to look into this, so who the hell are they talking about? Note also the standard use of atrocity images; burned alive, children, etc. It's a rough neighbourhood and these things are possible, but this is sloppy and sensationalistic hack journalism with an agenda. The agenda is apparent from tracking the changing versions of the story.

Islam has spread by the sword from the beginning, and it's inherent in its' teachings that it's a primo way to do it. Submitting and paying the "second-class-citizen tax" (jizya; check the Koran) is an option, but then economic and social coercion finishes the job that the sword begins.

In Nigeria at least the Christians haven't forgotten how to fight back. They don't want to be putting their arses up in the air for Mohamed five times a day, and I don't blame them. Our media shows which side they're on with their treatment of stories.

As might not be obvious, I dislike any kind of religious idiot, and I don't like the Christian fundamentalists any more than the Muslim ones. That said (and I've said it before) if I have to pick a side I'll put the old cross of St George on the front plate of my body armour and go down shooting before I'll let Sharia take over my country. I have that much in common with the Nigerian Christians on their "bloody border" with Islam.

Whatever happens, we have got, the UAV, and they have not. For now at least...

For a while now (several years at least) I've been concerned about how the reams of paranoid stuff I'm reading is affecting my worldview. To dispel that I occasionally force myself to read the leftist equivalent, and that soon reassures me that I'm on the right track.

There are a lot of branches off the "right track", which is subjective to begin with. The key that I find to evaluating my opinions is to look at articles about contentious things which are written by those ideologically opposed to me. I frequently notice that I read something that intends to enrage with injustice, etc. and I draw the opposite from it. Polemics against violating the "rights" of terrorists (newsflash, bleeding hearts; they have none under international law) by waterboarding, keeping them up late, etc. fail to move me, and indeed usually make me feel that much more could and should be done to wring useful info out of them. Why else are we keeping them alive anyway?

So, general worldview intact, I look for the best ways to identify and defend our interests. Identifying them shouldn't be necessary, but I find it shocking the lack of direction in the West these days. What happened to "with us or against us"? THAT was the key, and we've thrown it away.

Many see that as "be like us" which is not remotely what it means to me. These jihadis of any stripe are the enemy of all reasonable people the world over. They are the most pernicious religious idiots out there, and need to be obliterated, hunted to the death and their financiers and apologists with them. With that as the objective (although the latter two groups might be a bit harder to liquidate) I see some hope that Gen McChrystal's strategy might have a chance to work, at least partially.

Putting our troops on the front line and not letting them call the shots is still a mistake, but the drone attacks are starting to bear fruit on the other side of the Durand Line:

January 1, 2010: In South Waziristan, Pakistan, a Taliban suicide truck bomb went off at a sporting event, outside a village that was organizing an anti-Taliban militia. The blast killed over a hundred and wounded 3-4 times that. The villagers were enraged, and called for vengeance, and continued use of the militia.

January 2, 2010: In the wake of the January 1st South Waziristan bombing, popular opinion became more insistent that the Islamic terrorists, particularly the Taliban, be hunted down and killed or captured. The government thus decided to go into North Waziristan to seek out Taliban who had fled there after the army moved into South Waziristan. There, police and troops continue to raid rural compounds where the Taliban have taken refuge, and hoped they would not be noticed. But too many people, even in the tribal territories, are appalled at the Taliban bombing attacks against civilians and the murder of tribal elders. For the Taliban, that means too many people willing to pass information on to the police or army. It's getting harder to hide, the more suicide bombing headlines there are.

Al Queda poisoned their own well in Iraq a few short years ago, and the same is happening in Pakistan now with both them and the Taliban. Things are starting to swing to the point where the stick (Hellfire strikes from Predators/Reapers) is being led by our carrots (rewards) and peoples' revulsion with the Taliban's methods.

Rewards were previously ineffective, but now that the shine is off the home team, people would like to watch movies and listen to music. There is nothing appealing about strict interpretations of any religion, and Islam is no exception. Pakistan is far ahead of Afghanistan, and the rules of the game are a bit different, even in the tribal areas. Even in Afghanistan, nobody wants the Taliban back in charge, as bad as things are, and in Pakistan they were never intended to take over, just keep the Indians busy in Kashmir and off-balance in Afghanistan.

I come back to my "raiding" doctrine, and it's working as I write this where it is being employed. The counterstrike on the CIA in Afghanistan is a sign that things are starting to bite, as these were the men who find targets for the UAV strikes. A setback for our side, but the locals will keep bringing us targets as long as our interests coincide, as they do at present.

Things still look shaky for us, but we can beat the jihadis if we want to. This will remain anecdotal as I can't find a source for it, but I read the other day that WW2 vintage Brits were polled, and many said they wouldn't have fought if they had seen what their country would turn into. That is our biggest fight, with ourselves, and that is the only one that can bring us down.

Ask not for whom the pendulum swings...

A discussion with a friend the other night brought up the blog, and I mentioned that I was not entirely happy with the narrowing of my focus; specifically too many “collapse of Western Civilization” items.

After a bit of reflection this is unlikely to change, because I don’t care a whole lot about pop culture, and I require motivation to write this stuff. Motivation comes from strong emotions (indignation/disgust being most productive) or interest. A number of things that I’m merely interested in don’t inspire any (I hope) clever insight, but most of all it’s the NAME of the thing. I called it “Arithmetic on the Frontier” not merely because I like Kipling and it sounds cool, but because of what I hope to put across here. It’s about the Sharp End.

The sharp end is generally taken to be the “tip of the spear”, e.g. the folks on the front line, and I certainly work that angle. Note that the front line isn’t merely military; it can be anyone dealing with difficulty or fighting stupidity and ignorance in all forms. The other thing I try to address is the “thin edge of the wedge”. This can have the same meaning as the above, but here I mean it as some fresh (or ancient) indignity being hoisted upon right-thinking people. “When I use a word, it means what I want it to mean” indeed, but I’m sure you’re used to that here by now.

What does this have to do with anything you may ask? Well, a bit of clarification in the mission statement is useful at intervals, but it leads into this:

Executive Summary: The Western World has quietly become a civilization that undervalues men and overvalues women, where the state forcibly transfers resources from men to women creating various perverse incentives for otherwise good women to conduct great evil against men and children, and where male nature is vilified but female nature is celebrated. This is unfair to both genders, and is a recipe for a rapid civilizational decline and displacement, the costs of which will ultimately be borne by a subsequent generation of innocent women, rather than men, as soon as 2020.

It’s a loooong article, be warned, but worth reading, especially the parts that link to this guy. This does NOT mean that I agree with all of it, particularly not the bits about developing “Game” so as to play the women who aren’t worth the risk to marry. Entertaining reading in its’ own way that, but not addressing the problem.

None of this is news to me, but I read a lot of this stuff yesterday (I read a hell of a lot faster than I can write) and it made me think about it. My life bears absolutely zero relation to anything described by “Roissy in D.C.” , but he links some interesting stuff, and gives a glimpse of a part of the blogosphere that I had never thought to explore. That namely is one of unmarried men (never, or divorced) who are unimpressed with the women they know.

This is deeper than mere chauvinism; many of these guys are talking about women who are not looking for “the classic provider beta” male, so to me if these “cads” pick them up for a “pump and dump” (using the lingo here) I feel scant sympathy.

Of course this is the tactical picture, and seems an adaptive response within a certain slice of the American population (urban, educated, at least the women) to the strategic problem of many men feeling marginalized by the current Western legal position of men and marriage. I have thought about the basics of this as laid out by “The Futurist” and others, and the current state of feminist-dominated family and divorce law cannot survive.

This doesn’t mean that it’ll all come apart tomorrow, but ask yourself this; do you know a man who has been taken to the cleaners by a woman who simply felt that she no longer wanted to be married to him? I’m sure you do (unless there are 20-year-olds reading this that I’m unaware of), and the follow-up question is: where is the motivation to work hard or innovate when you’ll only have it taken away from you?

Yes, there are many legitimate reasons to end a marriage, and I most certainly don’t advocate (and would in fact fight) the repeal of the rights of women to be full and productive members of society. The problem was laid out as a combination of BOTH no-fault divorce AND guaranteed alimony.

Just because they were married, women can take a great part of a man’s income for a long time (all the way sometimes) after they split. Local details differ as to the exact regulations, but this is the general rule in our soft western countries. Yes, cases exist of men doing the same to women, but the numbers of those are not statistically significant, meaning it hardly ever happens.

These laws were passed with the best of intentions, as in many cases women would traditionally be kicked to the curb with nothing, so there is no simple solution. This is anecdotal, but I believe that the situation in this regard is much worse in the US than in Canada, so the above bloggers are somewhat biased. Alimony itself is not the problem (although child support is prone to abuse) so let’s look at divorce.

No-fault divorce is comparable to using abortion as a routine method of birth control. That’s pretty inflammatory, but in both cases you thought this was a good idea at the time and then changed your mind when the consequences became inconvenient. Phrased like that it is aimed more at women, but the numbers seem to indicate that they are most likely to initiate a divorce.

So, someone can decide that they want to do something else and then penalize the other party because of it? This seems unreasonable to me. Also, if you require extensive financial support from the other party for the children, it seems to me that custody should stay with he/she possessing the necessary resources, provided they want it.

Every once in a while some guy will kill his wife and kids and then typically himself. The numbers of these occurrences are absolutely small, but not as low as they should be relative to the rates of psychopathic/suicidal proclivities that would spontaneously generate these events. While in no way excusing this sort of behaviour, I will merely point out that it is universally known to be a bad idea to corner any animal. Men are no exception to this, and depriving a man of viable options never leads anywhere you’d want to go.

Incentives and disincentives are the real issue here. These are what make people productive or otherwise and the argument is made that de-incentivising men will cause the eventual collapse or sweeping aside of our civilization.

Much is made (rightfully) about excluding 50% of the population from achievement, e.g. the economy. While women moving into the workforce have not displaced men on a one-for-one basis, men are increasingly marginalized by official policy in addition to straight competition. As more and more of our economy moves to the Public realm this will bite harder, at least if you’re a white male.

Fred Reed has said that a civilization without men “would last until the oil needed changing” and I defy anyone to convince me otherwise. As expendable as we are individually, the current male-averse social structure is upheld by the acquiescence of men. There are certain irreducible truths in life, and that men are bigger and stronger than women is a physical fact; as a group if we are pushed too far the result will be a dark age for women that Gloria Steinem can only imagine. When men no longer feel that they are valuable to society they often do bad things as they feel they have nothing to lose anyway.

It’s not as bad as that yet, but I can distantly see it from where we are. Read the stuff I linked to this for a far more thorough take on it, but the treating of men like simpletons must end and the radical feminist agenda masquerading as many of our laws must be reined in. I am but one island of political-incorrectness, but if we are to survive as a society we must remain dynamic enough for ALL of our citizens, requiring true equality of opportunity, NOT of outcome.

I have also heard a good deal about the high maintenance required of the latest generation of young women, and it all ties in. Life isn’t a fairy tale, and a lot of women (not just girls) don’t get that until far too late. There is a lot more to say on THAT, but unless someone wants to discuss it I’ll leave it out there for now.