As we all know, there are many issues on which I have passionate, strong opinions. However, I’m wary of people who feel compelled to have an opinion on everything. It is not possible to be equally well-informed and interested in everything, which means that such people probably are just parroting the party line. Here are some of the issues that I don’t care much about one way or another:

 

1)The death penalty. There are good and idiotic arguments on both sides. The side that supports the abolition of death penalty probably has a greater number of good arguments. However, the opposing side has one very weighty argument that, at least, balances out anything that the abolitioners can come up with. This argument is: what if the death penalty helps the families of the victims? If I, God forbid, were a relative of a victim, it would definitely help me. Actually, it would be the only thing to let me keep functioning in society. Not everybody is like me, obviously, but some people are, and the idea of the entire society betraying them is unsettling. I wouldn’t suffer if the death penalty were abolished tomorrow but I wouldn’t celebrate either.

2)The legalization of marijuana. What I find annoying about this issue is the complete refusal of the drug’s users to recognize that it has a serious negative effect on them. Marijuana can turn a person extremely paranoid and violent in a single use and it does have very heavy effects on habitual users. This doesn’t mean it should continue being illegal (as I said, I don’t care either way) but I can’t avoid having an enormous amount of disrespect towards the defenders, not a single one of whom has recognized, to my knowledge, that they have an addiction to a substance that is destroying their brains and personalities.

3)Common Core. I tried figuring out what my opinion is but both the defenders and the detractors tend to be excruciatingly mumbly. Both sides present their argument in such a garbled, unconvincing way that I have given up on trying to figure out what is happening. Curiously, this is very common in discussions of secondary education. For instance, every argument in favor or against charters (an issue on which I do have an opinion) is delivered in such a mumbly, incomprehensible manner that the discussion soon grows painfully boring.

4) Cuban embargo. I’m glad that Obama pissed off Putin by offering diplomatic relations to Cuba. Other than that, the embargo is a total non-issue. Cuba’s only hope for a future resides inside the country. The decrepit Castro dictatorship should die off and the people of Cuba should begin working on eradicating the Soviet mentality that infected them. This will take about 100 years, give or take. What the US does or doesn’t do is irrelevant to this process. Keep the embargo, don’t keep the embargo, the only purpose served by either measure is to let Americans go on feeling how crucial they are.

What issues leave you cold?

I love to visit the state of Florida on vacation but, with all due respect, the state is totally wackadoodle. Florida will be paying a $10,000 bonus for having high SAT/ACT scores. . . to its teachers. Yes, I said teachers, not students.

I’m guessing that even in Florida teachers tend to have college degrees. So it would make a bit (although still not a lot) of sense to reward high college GPA. But what an SAT score of a teacher who passed the test sometime during the Carter administration is supposed to tell us today is a mystery.

I just did the Canadian political quiz kindly linked by reader Shakti and it turns out that I am. . . a huge, card-carrying Liberal. Yet again, the result is unsurprising.

Of course, I’m only more Liberal than NDP by one percentage point, so that’s not a huge distance.

Maybe this video is a fake but it’s a really great one. Two Russian tourists in Ghana approach a local man and ask him for directions.

“I don’t talk to [offensive word for Russians],” the African man proudly responds in Ukrainian and walks away.

There are cultural differences in the way men from different cultures harass women. Russian – speaking men, for instance, demand sexual services from strange women with the facial expression and in a tone of whiny little boys who want you to come be their good Mommy immediately.

Even when the woman in question is an 11 – year-old child and the man is way past his middle age (I’m sharing this from vast personal experience), he still manages to demand that she service him sexually with the same heart-broken and guilt – inducing urgency that an infant cries to be fed or changed.

I took this quiz to determine which presidential candidate best represents my views and got the deeply unsurprising answer that it’s Joe Biden.

The one who’s least like me is Rick Perry.

Rupert Murdoch bought National Geographic today. I’ve got to tell N yo cancel his subscription.

While progressive English-speakers are writhing in the agonies of political correctness that clamps their mouths tightly shut, much more progressive immigrants are having an honest discussion. Reader valter 07 says:

First off, let’s admit that so much lamented lack of desire of European women to reproduce is a direct consequence of feminism, among other things. Encouraging women to work, in a situation where success requires the same effort it required from men having a housewife at home – and what else should one expect?

The idea that women deserve to be punished with harassment for refusing to reproduce has been repeated so many times that many people, me included, have taken it as true. However, once you start looking into the matter, you discover that the exact opposite is the case. The reason why women in Germany, France, Spain, etc. don’t have more children is not that there is too much feminism. It is that there is not enough. Having, say, 3 or 4 children and still having a career in Germany, the country that is admitting 800,000 of (mostly) young men – who obviously will start popping out babies immediately – remains a task that only isolated heroes can shoulder. I address everybody who is interested in the subject to the book by the great French feminist Elisabeth Badinter that details all the ways in which Germany specifically punishes the women who want to have children and keep making the money to feed those children. 

If German government at any point in time had invested the billions of euros it is now happily handing over as cash payments and benefits to the refugees into infant care or at least a campaign promoting fatherhood and suggesting that there is no shame or tragedy in a man knowing how to take care of his own children, we might be seeing a very different situation in terms of birth rates in that country. Now we will never know because the hardship faced by women who work will now be compounded 

Progressive, feminist women who are married to the best, most enlightened, most progressive, most well-read and non-sexist men the world has produced so far have to battle these man daily for the right to go to a work meeting or on a business trip, for the possibility to spend two hours away from the baby and not be told by those men that they are horrible mothers. By the way, is anybody interested in venturing a guess how the husband of the best wife in the world from the previous post reacted to her request that he stay with the kids while she goes away for two days? A hint: too much feminism or “encouragement to work” are not part of the answer.

. . . is not me.

It’s a friend of my sister’s who – get this – bought her husband a 10-day scotch – tasting  trip to Scotland and arranged for his 3 buddies to go with him. In the meanwhile, she will stay home with their two toddlers and an infant and her very responsible job that allowed her to pay for the trip. And no, she’s not cheating.

I’ve got to say, it would never even begin to occur to me to do something like this. On the positive side, N would perceive a trip without me as punishment, so I don’t have to feel so guilty for not being as good a wife.

I still feel guilty, though.

What bothers me in the discussions of the refugees in Europe is that such an enormous percentage of articles on the subject is written by men. The greatest burden of this demographic shift will be borne by women, and it would make sense to hear out what women have to say about it. Feminist groups don’t seem to be capable of saying anything on the subject, and that’s very disturbing.

Most of the refugees are young men. It is highly unlikely that they are all gay, so it follows that they will be trying to establish contact with local women. (I hope nobody here is stupid enough to believe that having wives or fiancées back home will have any impact on their eagerness to connect with local women.) The ways in which men from third world countries establish contact with women is deeply degrading to women.

As a result of 250 years of massive and heroic efforts on the part of the great Western feminist movement, it has become possible to civilize most of the men in the US, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe and make the lives of women in these areas not horrible. Everywhere else, men treat women in a disgusting, shameful way. Everywhere, people, everywhere. (If anybody wants to start with the idiotic “But American men also”, I direct them to my yesterday’s post on self-pity and then to the exit.)

If a man from, say, the horribly sexist, woman – hating societies of the Russian – speaking or Latin American world is brought to a country of significant feminist advances, he soon learns to control himself and stops trying to insult, grope, beat, grab or slap women in the street. He also finally figures out how not to make himself a nuisance at work with his need loudly to hate women. Eventually, many such men might even learn not to do abuse women inside their houses. Yes, I’m sure that your friend who is a professor of French literature from Brazil was never a sexist. I’m not talking about exceptions, though.

However, when men who grew up in woman – hating cultures are surrounded by a group of similarly woman – hating peers, there is zero incentive for them to change.

As I shared before, I experienced a huge culture shock when I moved from Canada to the US. The only welcome change among all the painful ones was that finally I could leave my apartment without any men ogling, following, pursuing me, trying to get in my face, and treating me like a piece of trash. Back in Montréal, I lived in the midst of a huge Muslim community, and this was my daily reality. Once, for instance, a Syrian man followed me from the university library to my building, angrily insisting that I provide him with oral sex immediately.

I’m hearing that women are already encountering problems when they want to go about their lives without being hassled in Brussels or Marseilles. The tragedy of Rotherham and other similar places is just a preview of how easily all the feminist advances can be erased if enough people decide it’s inconvenient to keep these advances around.

Now would be the time to demand that the governments of European countries explain what they are planning to do to prevent millions of refugees who have zero interest in learning how to see women as human beings from cracking the thin veneer of civilization that prevents Western women from being brutalized by men like their sisters everywhere else are. (And yes, the sisters in question happily advance their own brutalization. That’s their right. Just like it’s my right not to want to join them in their debasement.)

We, the women of developed countries, deserve to hear what will be done to promote our interests. We are half of the population, we work, we pay taxes, we deserve to define the terms of this conversation.