What Marriage?

Posted on September 2, 2019 by Davd

… in Canadian Law, there are only Civil Unions, and those not very civil to men.
(draft) 2019, Davd

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer is being shamed by Liberals and to some extent by NDP Leader Singh, for saying, over a dozen years ago, that same-sex couples should be allowed “civil unions” but not Christian marriage. So strange are the ways of political campaigning, that the facts of the matter have been largely, perhaps entirely ignored. There is no recognition of, no support for Christian marriage and its ilk, in Canadian law. What Scheer said same-sex couples should be allowed in 2005, is the best Canadian law allows to any couples today.

Christian marriage ceremonies typically include promises to stay together
“For better or for worse,
whether richer or poorer,
in sickness and in health
so long as we both shall live.”

Canadian law uses the 8-letter M-word, but does not support, much less enforce, those promises. Under Canadian law as practiced, one of the couple can get a divorce without the consent of the other, and without being shown to have wronged the other.

The rather famous “Misandry Bubble” blog asserts that marriage along the lines of the Christian model that happens to be familiar to me, is what, “[w]hen applied over an entire population of humans, … was known as ‘civilization’.” Civilization depended on marriage, lifelong faithful marriage, to motivate the work force… and such marriage was a foundation aspect of civilizations with several different, dominant religions.1

The CBC’s Aaron Wherry recently wrote, “The Conservatives, [in 2005], were proposing that same-sex couples could instead be covered by ‘civil unions’.” Neither Wherry nor Scheer seems to have noticed that the “Civil Marriage Act” now provides “civil unions”, and weak ones, nothing better; not only for same-sex couples, but all couples. The Christian model is not a supported option; while at least one familiar, widely cited source affirms socially healthy marriage to be more like the Christian model than like today’s Canadian law.

Feminism is also mentioned in Glubb’s The Fate of Empires… as associated with their decadence [p. 15]2. It seems that a relatively respected Indo-American “Futurist” blogger and the British military officer and historian who founded the first modern Arab army (and wrote three-plus decades earlier), concur that Feminism is not good for civilizations.

The degradation of marriage, according to “the Futurist” especially, is destructive of civilization. He writes more of the United States than of Canada, but Nathanson and Young [2006] indicate that the baleful effects of divorce laws and precedents are similar in the two countries. Civil unions, easily dissolved to the disadvantage of men and especially disadvantage of fathers [Brown, 2013, Nathanson and Young, 2006], are societally destructive.

The 8-letter M-word is used for its name, but what Canadian ‘marriage’ constitutes is not a lifelong covenant; it is a civil contract and weaker than most.

That’s all any Canadian can have in 2019, and all that Canadian law has respected (I hesitate to say “enforced” because of the unhappy state of divorce law as practiced in recent years; cf. Brown, 2013, Nathanson and Young, 2001, 2006)

What Liberal Governments have provided for same-sex couples, is the sort of “civil union” Scheer said they should be allowed in 2005 — or less — and they are shaming him for saying it? Considering the beneficial effects of traditional marriage, the shame should be theirs…and apparently, the NDP’s as well.

References:
Brown, Grant A. (2004). “Gender as a Factor in the Response of the Law-Enforcement System to Violence Against Partners,” Sexuality and Culture, Vol. 8, Issues 3 & 4, pp. 3-139.
Brown, Grant A. (2006). “The Curious Case of Country C,” in In the Agora: The Public Face of Canadian Philosophy, Andrew Irvine, ed., University of Toronto Press, pp. 261-263
Brown, Grant A., 2013. Ideology And Dysfunction In Family Law: How Courts Disenfranchise Fathers. Calgary and Winnipeg: Canadian Constitution Foundation and Frontier Centre For Public Policy
“Futurist”, 2010. The Misandry Bubble. January 1.
Glubb, John Bagot, 1978. The Fate of Empires. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd.
Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2001. Spreading Misandry:“The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry“: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Notes:
1. I do not myself know Buddhist, Hebrew, Hindu, Islamic, Sikh, etc. teachings on marriage as well as the Indo-American author of “The Misandry Bubble“, a classic blog from 2010. He states:
“… all major religions constructed an institution to force constructive conduct out of both genders while penalizing the natural primate tendencies of each. This institution was known as ‘marriage’. Societies that enforced monogamous marriage made sure all beta men had wives, thus unlocking productive output out of these men who in pre-modern times would have had no incentive to be productive. Women, in turn, received a provider, a protector, and higher social status than unmarried women, who often were trapped in poverty. When applied over an entire population of humans, this system was known as ‘civilization’.“
“The Misandry Bubble” goes on to list no-fault divorce, abortion, modern contraception, and “female-centric social engineering” as having taken the civilizing merits from what still is called marriage, but no longer is.
2. “An increase in the influence of women in public life has often been associated with national decline. The later Romans complained that, although Rome ruled the world, women ruled Rome. In the tenth century, a similar tendency was observable in the Arab Empire, the women demanding admission to the professions hitherto monopolised by men. . . .
“Soon after this period, government and public order collapsed, and foreign invaders overran the country. The resulting increase in confusion and violence made it unsafe for women to move unescorted in the streets, with the result that this feminist movement collapsed.”
Posted in Female Privilege, Marriage-and-Family Reform | Leave a comment

Wild West 2019: an Exercise in Speculation

Posted on August 9, 2019 by Davd

… Misogynist, they warn’t
(c) 2019, Davd

The Lone Ranger and Tonto, Pancho and Cisco, Matt Dillon [the hero of Gunsmoke] and his limping sidekick Chester, … the theme1 is at least two generations older than two 19-year-old killers from Vancouver Island: Two men wander the Wild West with guns, having dramatic adventures. In the 1950s [and iirc, late 1940s] the pairs of men were fictional heroes doing good deeds (and selling boxes of breakfast cereal.) This week the pair in the news are real villains.

This is a blog, not an essay, not analysis, and the first thing I noticed as I read through my file of news notes, is that both sexes are named among the reporters (while in a file of notes I have on serial killer Elizabeth Wettlaufer, all the authors named are women. This is not an androcentrically reported story in the way one might perhaps call Wettaufer’s, gynocentrically reported.)

As the story that their bodies were found appeared August 7, I was also reading a “Regarding Men” website article on “Couples Therapy”,2 in which author Tom Golden, a therapist himself, explicated gynocentric biases in that style of therapy, whose essence entails “sitting face to face and talking about emotions and hurt”3. One could call it a cheap laugh, to imagine McLeod and Schmegelsky “doing couples therapy” — but some good science has begun with weird-looking speculation.

What might those two, if still alive, have chosen to “work on in their relationship”? I quite doubt they would have shamed one another for yelling, nor demanded one another hear out long lists of complaints about how he evoked unhappy feelings in the other.

I’ll second instead, what therapist Golden speculates: men are much more forgiving of minor annoyances … which might be one good reason why the Abrahamic faiths endorse patriarchy: “Father have mercy” is a more hopeful request than “Mother have mercy.”

If they sat talking about emotions at all, it probably was shoulder to shoulder, in the front seats of one of those vehicles they drove, and it probably was not about negative emotions toward each other, but toward outsiders. Positive emotions toward each other? — more plausible.

CBC reporting of the story mentioned the two both had strong interest in video gaming; Schmegelsky at least, via the Internet. This is such a common interest among boys approaching the age of majority, that my guess [speculation if you prefer that word] is that not taking any interest in video games would now be “less normal4.”

The fact that many video games include gun violence may be relevant — but since the vast majority of boys who are video-game enthusiasts do not go out shooting strangers, the relevance falls far short of explaining the adventure of McLeod and Schmegelsky. The boys who grew up in the 1950s and watched Wild West TV shows that sold them boxed dry cereal, saw a lot of gun violence in those TV adventure shows, too.

I myself was more interested in Boy Scouts, camping, fishing and hiking; so correct this recollection if I err — but from the TV Westerns of the middle of the past century, to the video-games of this one, wasn’t most of the violence, men shooting and battering other men? — and consistently, Schmegelsky and McLeod are reported charged with killing one man, plus suspected of killing one other, and one woman. Misogyny, that ain’t.

Guns are not part of human nature. “Man the Hunter” killed first with spears, later with arrows. By the time guns became common, hunting was no longer the main way people got meat to eat. But human nature is probably part of the problem and the puzzle, and maybe part of the answer to the story of the gun toting duo from Port Alberni.

“Man the Hunter” is different from “Woman the Gatherer”, and perhaps the ecology of hunting vs. gathering is cause for the ethology difference. Hunters meet the game they kill for meat in different places because meat animals can walk; while gathering spots for roots and berries, with their rewards and dangers5, tend to be the same from year to year. Perhaps those stored up memories conventional Couples Therapy evokes to men’s disadvantage, are the consequence of gathering being women’s work much more than men’s: The speculation is at least plausible.

Gun-toting Wild West adventure is more like hunting than it is like gathering… and so is war. The boys who watched 1950s Wild West TV could grow up and join the military, and a significant fraction of them did. Why McLeod and Schmegelsky didn’t, might turn out to be an important part of this story6 — one I did not find among the news websites this week.

Primitive hunters hunted in groups. Most soldiers fight in groups; (and most of those groups number more than two.)

It is worth asking, whether human overpopulation is part of the problem. Hunting opportunities in Canada and the US are much fewer and briefer than they were when my generation was that age. If men’s nature was formed by team hunting, an overpopulated world is less friendly to our nature than the one in which it evolved… and today’s world, being far more overpopulated than the one in which I grew up and gun-toting TV heroes sold breakfast cereal, logically is far less friendly to “Man the Hunter”.

Gun control is much stricter now. Imaginably, the fact those two carried guns was criminal by itself, which it would not so likely have been 50-60 years ago. Once guilty of a crime, one tends to become more nearly a desperado, as at least one CBC story affirmed. Is it mere speculation that a driver who knows [she or] he is “impaired”, and thus guilty of a criminal offence (US readers can approximately translate that to “felony”) will more likely try to evade police, than one who knows his [or her] tail lights have a loose connection?

No, I haven’t proven that gynocentrism set off two 19 year old Port Alberni lads on a very small scale killing spree… nor that video-games did.  Neither have I shown, not even speculated, whether the next such killers will be similarly motivated to whatever motivated this pair… nor have I contended that McLeod and Schmegelsky “were really normal”.

Perhaps, though, some of these speculations can lead to ways to make being a young, male human in an overpopulated, excessively gynocentric world, … well, more human.

Brotherhood is a good thing. If McLeod and Schmegelsky misused it, or downright missed it in some pathological way — we don’t know yet.  Most brotherhood is healthy and beneficial. Who knows? maybe making an androcentric variation on “Couples Therapy” and-or developing ways to make “Man the Hunter” more rather than less a part of men’s experience, are beginnings to lessons we should learn.

Notes:
1. I leave out Roy Rogers because he had a wife and a home as part of his TV persona, which even the somewhat residentially stable Matt Dillon, did not have.
2. There is a link to Part Two of the article, at the end of the Regarding-Men “Part One”.
3. As Golden points out, face-to-face is gynocentric: “Men might feel more comfortable taking this sort of problem and hashing it out as they play a game …” (or, I would add, work or even study. Boys learn better when somewhat active; girls, when sitting still {CBC Radio, “The Current”, 2009 10 23). Yes, the stereotypical school is that gynocentric.)
“Couples therapy” might be a way for a man to learn to act gynocentric, if a man wanted to. (Myself, I’d rather learn Greek or Anishinabe.) Is there a parallel, equally encouraged way for women to learn to be androcentric? — not likely! On this website and others, it is old news that gynocentrism is “Politically Correct” and androcentrism, seldom welcomed.
4. For one negative speculation, I’m going to minimize the significance of Nazi imagery. The Nazi regime, especially their Wehrmacht, “had style” (as had knights in shining armour.) A respected professor in the US, who I met when we were both graduate students, was a “Nazi buff”; and while it did not lead to him doing evil, it might rather have been of some value in getting him his first promotion. (I should perhaps add that finding new facts about a fearsome disease would probably help a professor of medicine get promoted, too.)
5… think scorpions, rattlesnakes, wasp nests … and competing species like bears.
6. One response to the draft of this blog, was, “Were the two shooters on psych meds? Many of the American shooters have been.” I have not read any “news” to that effect so far; a search for drug influence might be cause for conducting autopsies; and “being on psychiatric medication” reads like good cause for rejection by military recruiters.
I do wonder “what condition the bodies were found were in”, if autopsies be required to definitely determine their identities.

 

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Heat Warning

Posted on August 1, 2019 by Davd

…perhaps 28C is too warm for a summer office.
(c) 2019, Davd

I recently published a ‘blog’ advocating modest clothing for all office workers. Not long after, the Royal Weather Magicians1 provided some important context in the form of a Heat Warning for east-central Alberta.

My modesty blog responded to a “business column” on the CBC website, arguing that men should dress more casually, and in clothing that enables them to be comfortable at say, 28C [82 Fahrenheit], so that office buildings need not be cooled below that temperature.

About ten days later, a Heat Warning was issued for Vegreville and several cities, towns, and rural regions east of Edmonton. It accompanied forecast high temperatures of 29 and 28 degrees [Celsius] for the dates about which the public is being warned. Notice, please: 28 degrees is what the CBC’s Mr. Pittis wanted all office workers to dress for, in office buildings. Now the weather experts and Alberta Health are warning the public that 28-29 C can be quite dangerous:

, a very warm airmass will produce daytime high temperatures near 30 degrees on [dates] ….
…..Residents of and visitors to the warned regions are advised to take the following precautions to protect themselves, their families and their neighbours:
—  Consider rescheduling outdoor activities to cooler hours of the day.
— Take frequent breaks from the heat, spending time indoors in cooled buildings such as malls or indoor pools.
— Drink plenty of water and other non-alcoholic, non-caffeinated beverages to stay hydrated.
— Check for your children or pets before you exit your vehicle. Do not leave any person or pet inside a closed vehicle, for any length of time.

Monitor for symptoms of heat stroke or heat exhaustion, such as high body temperature, lack of sweat, confusion, fainting, and unconsciousness.

Pay particular attention to individuals that can experience earlier or more severe effects from heat including infants, children, seniors, and individuals with pre-existing lung, heart, kidney, nervous system, mental health or diabetic conditions, outdoor workers, as well as those who are socially isolated.

Heat warnings are issued when very high temperature conditions are expected to pose an elevated risk of heat illnesses, such as heat stroke or heat exhaustion.

In my previous blog, i supposed Pittis and CBC had checked their facts and health science, and took their claim that 28C can be a comfortable office temperature, as plausible. Apparently, weather experts and health experts have serious doubts about that!

Among those who the warning states are heat susceptible, “infants, children, outdoor workers, and those who are socially isolated,” should be rare or absent among office workers. Seniors are likely to be present, as a minority. Individuals with pre-existing lung, heart, kidney, nervous system, mental health or diabetic conditions, are probably minority categories as well. Summing seniors, individuals with pre-existing lung, heart, kidney, nervous system, mental health and-or diabetic conditions, the total might be a minority among office workers, or a majority; if a minority, it is likely to be rather greater than tiny.

The warning urges the public generally to

Take frequent breaks from the heat, spending time indoors in cooled buildings such as malls or indoor pools.

It seems only consistent, to cool office buildings to a temperature in which the heat stressed can take refuge, and nobody working there will risk heat stress.

Mr. Pittis’ ‘bio’ has stated that he worked earlier as a forest fire fighter; which might perhaps indicate his heat tolerance is higher than the average. He might feel comfortable at 28C [82F] wearing light slacks, a T-shirt [and i will presume, no long-johns].

Somebody between him and publication, though, should have checked. Those heat warnings are serious, and they have been used for a while. Heat sickness, heart attacks, strokes, diabetic attacks, etc. are serious health concerns — and not good for productivity.

If you’re an office worker who wants your workplace cooled below 80 Fahrenheit (down to or below 26C) you can cite Government Heat Warnings as good reason.

Notes:
1. A title derived from one of the most widely read books of the 20th Century, Bartholomew and the Oobleck. (Arthur C. Clarke is often quoted more generally: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”)
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Warm Modest Clothing for the Office

Posted on July 10, 2019 by Davd

… ought to make workers more productive
(c) 2019, Davd

Female workers are more productive if they feel warm enough. CBC Business producer Don Pittis backed up this obvious looking point with some recent research and some quotations from a woman architecture professor; and all I have to add to that part of the business, is that I expect men who feel warm enough are more productive than men who feel too cold, same as among women.

Pittis’ main demand was that men should dress more casually, and in clothing that enables them to be comfortable at say, 28C [82 Fahrenheit], so that office buildings need not be cooled below that temperature. I will support such a rule if the women [and the men] can dress modestly1 at 82 Fahrenheit without being too warm; but if they cannot, it be more important that they do dress modestly.

Being “too cold” is not the only kind of office experience that degrades performance. Being distracted also degrades.

One book i reviewed in 2016 took note of women’s sexuality displays distracting men, recounting a vignette of a decent working class man talking about distraction… and since the author was a Lesbian columnist disguised as a man, it seems safe to treat her account as free of misogyny.

Norah Vincent quotes Jim, one of the men with whom she bowled, saying,

I can work with a [plain] chick. There’s a [plain] chick works in my office with me every day and I’m fine. But every now and then there’s this hot, hot woman who comes into the office, and for the whole time she’s there I’m completely f[….]d. Everything’s out the window. I don’t get s[…] done. All I can do is stare at her like this

he made a dumbfounded expression”. [Vincent, 2006: 352]

Jim is an office worker, and it’s only fair that his workplace should be free of performance degrading distraction. That woman he described as “hot, hot”, was doubtless dressed to exhibit her sexuality. Had she been dressed as many apparently Hutterite, Mennonite, and Muslim women are dressed in Central Alberta towns, “Jim” would have been able to pay attention to his work, in her presence.

Repeat: women who are sexually attractive when they choose to be, can be merely pleasant looking, if they choose not to project their sexuality3.  Choosing not to project sexuality is work-facilitating. (Choosing to project sexuality in a workplace, is disruptive to the work efforts of some, likely many men present.4)

If women in an office can dress modestly and be comfortable at 28C [82F], my guess is that the men can find some kind of summer clothing that is modest and comfortable for them, at the same temperature. Then “fine”, let both sexes dress, modestly but lightly, for the summer.

Summer will end, of course; winter is coming, as it comes to conclude every Canadian year.

I write this from Alberta, where winters are longer than summers, and colder than the summers are hot. One day this past February the temperature fell to -46C [about -50F] in the town where I was that day; and i am assured it never got up to +46C, not even to +40, in that town. When buildings need heating rather than cooling, let’s encourage men and women to dress warmly, so the thermostat can be set at 20C [68F] or even 18C [65F]? Makes sense to me; and if i find myself working in a winter office, I’m even willing to wear long-johns.

I’m not demanding that the men in any office wear suits and neckties5.  Sweaters and tweed jackets with easily washable “slacks” were my preference as a professor; sweaters, slacks and long-johns would be good enough for me now.

I am demanding that modesty have clear and strong priority over fashion; and that if men should dress for the season to help keep down summer cooling costs; then women should dress for the opposite season, to help keep down winter heating costs… and distraction of the men.

Referenced:

Vincent, Norah, 2006. Self Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man. New York: Viking Penguin.

Notes: follow in most html displays
1. Modesty for working purposes, can be defined as “not distracting.” Most immodesty seems likely to manifest as displays of sexuality (which can include cosmetics as well as clothing, but cosmetics are unlikely to make the user warmer or colder.)
2… censored to this website’s PG-13 norm.
3… and dress [posture, etc,] accordingly. Pittis refers to “Men [being] overdressed while women in summer fashion shiver.” It should be possible for both men and women to find modest summer clothing; and if women’s modest summer clothing is not “fashionable” — so much the worse for fashion.
4. Why might a woman choose to disrupt the work efforts of men in the office where she works? One plausible guess is that the “hot” woman is in competition with the men who she distracts, and deliberately chooses to lower their work efficiency. No fair!
5. In Western Canada, and the Western U$A, “necktie party” had an ominous meaning …,.
Posted in Davd, Gender Equality, Male Lifestyle, Uncategorized, Working | Leave a comment

There’s More to Chastity than Sexual Abstinence

Posted on July 2, 2019 by Davd

… Much of the rest is commonly called “Modesty”, and is good for society.
(c) 2019, Davd

Chastity, along with abstinence from erotic actions1, includes abstinence from erotic display — from showing off one’s sexuality by dress, cosmetics, perfumes, postures and talk — which abstinence from erotic display is one definition of modesty2: If sexual actions are not appropriate, sexual display has no good purpose.

Because they were friends with lively intelligent minds, I often refer to two good Roman-Catholic nuns as exemplars of chastity3. Their chastity was expressed in their habitual dress; in their practical and spiritual, but never erotic ways of speaking, and by the absence of flirtation from their postures and facial expressions4.

Their manners of speech and posture, when I think of other women who have behaved similarly with me, remind me of my sister and grandmother. Nuns often go by the title “Sister” for good reason… as do women of some other churches, (as do other women allied in interdependence or common cause [from college “sororities” to militant labour unions].)

In east-central Alberta, I see many women wearing modest but not drab clothing in public. I usually see such women shopping (likely because a good deal of my time in public is spent shopping; and because there are many more people to see when shopping than at the bank or Post Office.) These women, long-time residents tell me, are Mennonites and Hutterites mostly — women of Christian ‘denominations’ with traditional moral doctrines. Muslim women are fewer in this region, and dress at least as modestly — but in ways i would more often call drab.

Women of two Anabaptist Christian ‘churches’ and one or more Muslim sects regularly dress in modest attire which is distinctive enough to be identified with their religious membership. Nuns — members of any of several Roman-Catholic “orders” — do likewise, in differently distinctive garb. I see many other women in the region dressed modestly but not with distinctive cultural attire.

Some women do dress immodestly.  I haven’t kept notes on the numbers I see dressed modestly and not; I can safely say many more women are modestly dressed in east-central Alberta, in ordinary public places as well as in religious venues… and that nearly all the men I see are dressed modestly.

Modest dress is more common, it seems — but erotic projection is more conspicuous. My observations do not prove that, merely indicate, especially for east-central Alberta; but indicate they do; and there is some parallel to the Apex Fallacy.

Flirting, another way of erotic projection, is also more conspicuous than it is common [at least, as visible to me]5. Even if done wearing modest clothing, flirting is not modest: It is by definition, distracting… and in the direction of eros. “Chaste conduct” excludes that. Perhaps one of the things I appreciated about my nun friends, was the absence of such distraction.

Modesty definitely has social benefits: If modesty were the norm governing public appearance and behaviour, then sexual harassment would be very rare, “healthcare” would cost less, and people would get more useful work done.

My friends the nuns never reported being sexually harassed; and their chastity gets much of the credit. Seeing them, talking with them, did not distract anyone’s attention toward eros. Likewise for my sister and grandmother.

Modesty is less expensive. Modest clothing and practical skin lotions cost much less than “sexy” clothing [including “sexy” shoes], perfumes and cosmetics. Those, it seems feasible to tax, and any government that needs revenue (what government doesn’t?) ought to be taxing them heavily… at least as surely as taxing gasoline and fossil heating fuel. Some people need to drive, nobody needs to project sexuality.

When it leads to erotic ‘action’, immodesty has huge economic costs, which are often hidden, and often paid by people other than those who indulge themselves. The greatest costs are likely “medical” or “health care”, and paid by Government in Canada and a combination of Government, insurance companies, and the people who suffer, in the US.

Few married women and no sexually abstinent women have abortions6.

The obvious purpose of sexuality display is sexual activity — and reasonably, sexual initiative short of copulation, including immodesty, should mitigate any accusation of harassment. Sexual display logically leads to ‘sexual relations”, and in reality it often does.

The phrase “Sexually Transmitted Diseases” [STDs] means what it says7. The World Health Organization recently reported that one million [new] STD infections occur each day… and treating them is now many times more costly than one or two million shots of generic penicillin.

STD treatment, it seems, was cheap in the short term last century, and has become expensive in the present and future. Gonorrhea strains now exist that are resistant to nearly all the antibiotics that were once “cheap treatment”… and if you read that url, it says gonorrhea may become untreatable. Syphilis treatment has become more difficult because of a “shortage in the specific kind of penicillin needed“, reports the BBC, while they report elsewhere in that article that the disease was, in effect, eradicated in the UK in the mid-80s… and came back. The “eradication” was achieved when more antibiotics could reliably kill the syphilis bacterium.

The modesty aspect of chastity also helps people work more efficiently, by reducing distraction — a point I mentioned in early 2018 and intend to further develop soon, as it applies to office work and apparel.

The BBC reports evidence that young adults and adolescents in the US and UK, support chastity more than do their parents… which is a good, hopeful sign.. and that more young men are choosing chastity than young women.  Prudent citizens, as taxpayers, as workers, and as people who do not want to get sick, have ample good reason to support chastity, including modesty.

Notes: follow in most html displays
1. Two qualifications: First, “erotic actions” include [genital coupling], and also erotic stimulation “short of doing that.” What is considered erotic is vague at the margins: Garrison Keillor, a folksy US radio personality famous for the “Prairie Home Companion” show, was fired because his hand accidentally touched a woman’s bare back while he was trying to console her.
Second, there may be some ambiguity in usage, as to whether married [wo]men may be called “chaste”; both men and women monastics often take “vows of chastity” that entail complete abstinence from sexuality. In most usages, it seems, married couples who are sexually active only with one another are called “chaste”; and some writers use “celibate” to refer to nearly anyone who is not cohabiting with a sexual partner.
2. Modesty for working purposes, can be defined as “not distracting.” Most immodesty seems likely to manifest as displays of sexuality (which can include cosmetics as well as clothing, but cosmetics are unlikely to make the user warmer or colder.)
The words modest and to a lesser extent modesty, are also used to refer to levels of ambition [not aiming for the top], and wealth [less than rich but not downright poor]; but those usages won’t appear in this blog.
3. I could name more than two, perhaps more than two dozen Roman-Catholic and Orthodox monks and priests as about equally exemplary — but it is not at me that men who do project their sexuality, would project it.
4. They also wore no cosmetics nor perfumes that I can ever recall …
5. The fact that I am old and “chaste myself” may mean that less flirtation is shown to me than to some other men.
6. The moral cost of abortion is worse than its economic cost. In funding abortions, Governments are subsidizing homicide, and those who they kill are innocent.
7. It seems to have become customary, at least in some news media, to refer to “Sexually Transmitted Infections” [STIs] and some readers may wish to mentally substitute the current media phrase.

 

Posted in Davd, Human Nature, Male Lifestyle, Working | Leave a comment

Chastity by Its Right Name

Posted on June 8, 2019 by Davd

… Sexual Restraint Should not be Striking
(c) 2019, Davd

The BBC recently reported a call for a “sex strike” by an actress associated with the “MeToo movement”. Neither the actress nor the BBC seemed aware that her call, which was reported as if something radical, went part way to something prudently traditional — chastity.

The U.S. State of Georgia, the report states, has enacted a law that “… bans abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected – which is at about six weeks into a pregnancy.” More recently, the State Legislature of Alabama has “pass[ed] a bill to outlaw the procedure [abortion] in almost all cases.”

In reaction at the time of the Alabama Legislature vote, one woman lawmaker made a point worth examining, saying: “We have never policed men’s bodies the way we do women’s.” She was reacting to legislation limiting abortion, which men “don’t have and can’t have.”1

Why police women’s bodies? To protect unborn persons. A demonstrator was shown on the BBC website holding up a sign “… get out of my uterus”

and die. That is the point. A fetus taken prematurely out of its mother’s uterus — dies. In the first half of a pregnancy, death is certain. Abortion is homicide. If the woman’s life is not in danger, it is ending an innocent human life because she does not want to become a mother in the near future … does not even want to suffer the bother of completing a pregnancy, giving birth, and then offering a newborn baby for adoption. The fetus is innocent… and dies because the woman carrying it does not feel willing to complete a pregnancy.

(If that last paragraph belabours the point, is is to strongly distinguish abortion, and reckless homicide generally, from “the death penalty” for crime. “A case can be made for” the death penalty, and the holy books of the Abrahamic faiths bless the death penalty in many specific instances reported there. The cases I have seen for easy abortion are based on the notion that a fetus is part of the body of the woman who is carrying it; which is false. Anyone who utters them and is not lying, is avoiding the truth.)

Considering that the fetus is an individual of the human species, distinct anatomically and genetically from its mother, the Alabama and Georgia laws read to this old man as banning homicide. Homicide is wrong, all humanist and most religious people agreed when I was a schoolboy and when I was a young man. What the State of Georgia has done, what the Alabama Legislature has voted to do, is ban something that is wrong; and banning something wrong, ought to be right — right?

Either that, or right and wrong have changed drastically since I was a young man.

Obviously perhaps, I don’t believe that right and wrong have changed. The general public willingness to do right, general avoidance of wrong, have changed.

As an indicative example from outside what we usually call morality, a major food marketing empire advertises cookies (and if i recall correctly, other sweets prepared for pleasure rather than nutrition) as decadent — and those advertisements have appeared repeatedly for well more than a year, so the food marketing empire seems convinced that decadence appeals to food shoppers.

Shoppers will pay for decadent foods. Sexual decadence is the opposite of chastity. If public attitudes toward sex and foodstuffs are aligned, then the actress reported by the BBC is telling her audience that if she cannot have easy abortions when her decadent sexual behaviour leads to pregnancy, she will (i doubt she thought of it that way) resort to chastity.

Resort to chastity, I quite approve. Calling it a “sex strike” seems a foolish way of labelling it — why not call chastity by its right name?

The merits of chastity include protection from STDs2, and a recent CBC business article seems to imply that when women dress chastely rather than scantily, their work performance (as well as that of men in the office), improves. STDs and poor work performance are bad for the economy and society.

Don’t call it a sex strike, call it desisting from unwise sexual hyperactivity… or just call it chastity, and a virtue.

Notes:
1. If the subject were military service and conscription for U. S. military service, men’s bodies would be the ones being controlled.
2. The BBC quotes Dr Peter Salama, of the World Health Organization: “We’re seeing a concerning lack of progress in stopping the spread of sexually transmitted infections worldwide.” WHO recently released a report stating that a million new sexually transmitted infections (STIs) occur each day.

 

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Poor Man’s Peas and Carrots

Posted on May 11, 2019 by Davd

… Variety, Taste, Nutrition, Modest Cost
(c) 2019, Davd

Eating is more fun if there’s more variety to what you eat. A monotonous diet of fancy food—say, asparagus and sauce Hollandaise every evening of the week—is less enjoyable than a varied diet of good regular fare like—for instance—peas and carrots two days a week, frozen spinach for one, beets cooked plain one evening and picklish another, and two evenings of steamed cabbage with caraway.1 Of the seven evenings, in this hypothetical example, no three have the same vegetable. None of the vegetables listed is half as fancy as asparagus with sauce Hollandaise, but the variety more than makes up for that.

This winter 2019 — and for Canadian gardeners east of Hope and north of Parry Sound, who don’t have greenhouses, it’s still winter in the kitchen, though spring has just begun out in the garden2 — the prices of “fresh” vegetables have been so high that most people with average or lower incomes aren’t buying enough. Plus which, “fresh” vegetables trucked north from somewhere on one side or the other of the US-Mexican border, are not fresh like what a gardener can pick and carry indoors come summer.

In a Canadian winter, living from locally grown basic winter vegetables, the list is fairly small: Beets, cabbage, carrots, onions, turnips and bean sprouts,3 Adding another vegetable to the list really does improve the variety experience.

If you grew many more peas than you wanted to eat, back in late spring and late fall, you might still have a stock of frozen peas. Use them first. Peas are frost-tolerant. They can be seeded now and the first fresh pods picked in June, the peas themselves, still tender, in July.

But today, it’s early May. Most gardeners are out of frozen peas. Carrots are losing quality. And cabbage in the supermarket was priced above $1.25 per pound.

That’s my situation too: I had some carrots that were losing quality but still fit to eat, and a few kilos of dried whole green peas. Fresh peas and carrots would be very expensive; so I made a quite tasty pot of peas and carrots from what I had.

I brought maybe a litre of water to boiling, soaked two cups of dried peas in that water, and when they had swelled to about full size4, and added a half teaspoon of soda, because legumes [“pulses”] including peas, cook more quickly if the water is slightly alkaline. I brought them to the boil and lowered the heat to where the peas were barely boiling.

An hour or two later, when a pea taken from the pot was almost as soft as I wanted for eating as cooked vegetable, I chopped the softest, least appealing carrots. From one or two i had to cut off doubtful looking parts; but the rest looked and smelled like carrots still fit to eat. That chopped carrot was added to the pot, the bot brought back to boiling, and I cooked the carrots 10-20 minutes.

While the carrots were cooking, I chopped a thin slice of onion and added that to the pot. Thin and chopped, it needed very little cooking time; and its flavour worked through the broth.

The result tasted mighty good! Not gourmet, but good, somewhat hearty, winter vegetables that at most, cost me 40 cents per pound plus cooking energy. I hadn’t eaten peas in weeks; so the change of taste was a positive experience. With rice and canned diced tomatoes, those peas and carrots made a protein balanced, meatless, satisfying meal.

I hadn’t planned to publish this technique this year; it’s marginal between cooking vegetables and cooking pulses for meatless meals with adequate protein. What has me publishing it now, is
‣ the high price of trucked “fresh” vegetables and the facts that it offers
‣ a good use for carrots gone soft but not rotten; and
‣ a way to use dried whole peas as a “vegetable” that also provides good protein and fibre contributions to your diet.

This is frugal, “poor people’s food.” It can be a blessing in variety of taste and texture, and in nutrition, if you like me, aren’t rich.

Notes:
1. This list is a simplified illustration; in fact, most people eat vegetables two meals of the day and fruit, one or two, so it would be more exact to list vegetables for a dozen meals per week at least. The evening vegetables for seven days, will give an idea.
2… meaning, that frost-tolerant vegetables can be planted out and should be coming up from seed, but it’s still weeks too early to plant out cucumbers, sweet peppers, and tomatoes; and a gamble to be seeding beans.
3. Many people eat parsnips, but apparently, not nearly as many as eat those five cellar storables plus sprouted mung beans.
4. This took 2-4 hours. If i had savory handy, which this month I don’t have, i would have added some to the water before heating it to boiling.
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One Pan Pasta with Tomato-Beef Sauce

Posted on May 4, 2019 by Davd

… a hearty way to use cheap beef and canned tomatoes
(c) 2019, Davd

As published here, this technique is “for one man living alone”, who knows basic cooking but not fancy seasoning. I’m thinking of men like “Timo” whose cabin I described recently, who can cook but don’t choose to get elaborate about it. It should be possible for a fairly ordinary cook to “scale it up” for two, three, or more men eating together… in which case, the “one pan” becomes a medium to large sized cooking pot, and there will be more men fed per cooking time, but also more dishes to wash1.

This is a technique to use when you have cheap ground beef such as i found last month, or have left ground beef long enough in the fridge, that it should be cooked thoroughly. It uses canned crushed tomatoes, one of the lower cost, good winter vegetables in Canada. Pasta is generally an economical grain food and because it is made from durum wheat, is less worrisome to those who might not trust modern wheat varieties.

Cooking pasta calls for a separate pot, if you don’t have cooked pasta waiting in the ‘fridge. Half-fill a pot of water for cooking it and start that heating, with the dry pasta standing by2. A wee bit of oil in the pasta cooking water helps prevent sticking. Cook enough pasta, if you haven’t any waiting in the fridge, that the next time you want pasta, you will have. (It can always become pasta and cheese, or pasta salad with olive oil or mayonnaise, and I’ve written up an easy way to cook chicken cacciatore.) When you have eaten the pasta you want for the meal, the rest of the water can be poured through a strainer before it gets cold, leaving the pasta in the strainer for easy transfer to a ‘fridge container.

My one-man batch of pasta sauce began with a ball of lean ground beef, slightly smaller than a tennis ball. I heated the stainless steel pan, flattened the ground beef when the pan was just hot enough to make a sizzling sound, browned it, turned it and browned the other side, then crumbled the meat, turned down the heat, and cooked it slowly with maybe a quarter that volume of chopped onion, a teaspoon or less of dried oregano and of dried basil, a wee bit of crumbled dried celery leaf, and a generous teaspoon of paprika. That was the basic sauce before the tomatoes went in.

I chose to add 3-4 small mushrooms because they had been on special that week; and when the mushrooms were cooked, added 1/2 can [almost 400 ml, or a scant two cups] of canned crushed tomatoes. When they began to bubble, I took the pan off the heat and added cold or lukewarm cooked spaghetti, which brought the near-boiling temperature down to warm for eating. Really quite tasty, a hearty way to use cheap beef and canned tomatoes, which cooked the beef very thoroughly and the tomatoes (which were already fully cooked) just enough to combine their flavour with the beef, mushrooms, and herbs. The amounts used here would make one man two small meals or one big one.

The mushrooms were optional, and if i had foraged lots of mushrooms last autumn, rather than buying, i might have used more. The celery leaf could have been chopped celery trimmings or a quarter to half an outer stem, the ones that are a bit coarse for eating raw. The paprika was also optional, i usually use paprika because I seldom have surplus sweet peppers, and this year and last they have been more expensive, per pound or per kilo, than the meat was that went into this meal. That red rather than black pepper flavour seems to me to make the sauce better; but you need not agree. Please the men who eat the meal, eh?

I ate the meal out of the stainless steel pan, which was easier to clean than a cast iron pan would be: When I finished the meal, I let Fritz lick the pan (I don’t let him lick plates and bowls, but a frying pan works at and above boiling temperature.) By using this bachelor trick, I gave Fritz an extra treat, and he helped slightly with washing the pan.

This technique is most valuable when there are no tomatoes in the garden (in most of Canada, the first garden tomatoes ripen in August) and none in the spare room ripening after first frost. Canned tomatoes, in the dead of winter and in the spring before local outdoor tomatoes can ripen, taste better than ‘fresh’ tomatoes which have reddened in trucks hauling them north3 … and they cost less. Beef is such a good source of iron that physicians have advised me to eat beef at least once, preferably twice or more per week4. (If you can get moose meat or venison, they should have all the merits of beef.)

This month, next month, and July, you can use this technique to take advantage of the fact that canned tomatoes cost less and have more flavour than trucked ones. Come late summer and early autumn when the fresh tomatoes are abundant, you can enjoy them with a different technique, and then come back to this one in October or November. Tomatoes and red meat are foods worth eating so often, that two ways to make pasta sauce with them are better than one.

Notes: follow in most html displays

1. I cooked this meal, late this winter, in a stainless steel frying pan, ate it from that pan, and let Fritz lick out the pan when I finished. There are disputes about how good canine saliva is as a disinfectant, but nearly everyone who cares, agrees that boiling heat kills nearly all unhealthy bacteria; or in a two word slogan “Boiling sterilizes.” Frying pans operate at least boiling hot, often hotter; so I scrub out the pan in a kitchen sink, rinse, and use it normally — boiling hot or hotter.

2. Spaghetti works fine, fusilli, rotini, and linguine do also. Penne and elbows, i’d use for something else; and vermicelli is too thin, really

3. I find that canned diced tomatoes and cooked rice, eaten together, perhaps with a little salt, are quite tasty but not likely to make you over-indulge. I doubt that “fresh” truck tomatoes, cooked briefly, would taste good enough. Have beans, lentils or peas for protein balance and quantity, in a separate dish, and you have a high-fibre, fairly high protein, meatless meal.

4. I eat legumes as alternatives to meat, 4-8 times per week. If i had an abundant moderate cost supply, i would eat salmon and trout more often than that.

Posted in Davd, Food, Male Lifestyle, Men's Health, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Acceptance Speech

Posted on April 17, 2019 by Davd

… we should ideally have heard?
(c) 2019, Davd.

This is the acceptance speech i wanted to hear, written yesterday evening when Alberta’s polls were still open*. It is about general policy, and this being a men’s website, it emphasizes men’s health and well-being.

Voters of Alberta, thank you!

It was your decision, not mine and not this party’s, that we will form the next Provincial Government.

I have, our whole Party team has, listened to your comments on politics, economics, ecological concerns, and human relations generally during this campaign. There is much that no Government can control, economically and ecologically — but there is much we can do and we mean to get to work.

Economic growth has been a big theme in Alberta’s history since that first oil well came into production at Leduc. It cannot be as big in the next 60 years as it was in the last 60 — the land area of Alberta has stayed almost exactly the same, we have taken the easiest and best of the fossil resources, and the provincial economy has gone from growing like a child to growing like a mushroom to where I sometimes have been reminded of bubble gum. You know what happens when you try to blow the bubble too big.

We need not live worse than we have, if we emphasize frugality and social efficiency and go for those aspects of economic growth that can be frugal and efficient. Bureaucracy is not in a position to grow frugally and efficiently, not overall. This government will make our bureaucracies smaller and more efficient. We will put some volunteers from the campaign and some volunteers we met on the campaign, to work finding errors in the bureaucratic rules, and bringing forward draft corrections for us to put into law.

For instance, the previous government mandated — forced on schools that did not want them — something called “Gay-Straight Alliances” to prevent or reduce bullying. People do not get bullied because they are gay, they get bullied because they are wimps. Find me a two-metre-tall, well muscled homosexual man, and he will not be a bully’s victim. Now I know that “wimp appreciation clubs” is not the best title for what I have in mind, but I can say that Einstein was a wimp and he well deserved appreciation. We will find an improvement on “Gay-Straight Alliances” and we will make being homosexual something you can be and do if nobody else suffers for it, somewhat like drinking whisky.

For instance, Service Dogs have privileges, including acceptance when renting apartments, whether Management likes it or not. But the bureaucracy has ruled that when a Service Dog reaches the age of ten years, it loses its privileges. There are two things wrong with that: First, Service Dogs are expensive to train, in time and money, and hundreds of thousands of people in Alberta can benefit from canine companionship and support without that expensive training. One way or another, we need more canine-friendly housing, especially for seniors and veterans.

Second, many, many dogs are healthy and valuable well past their tenth birthdays. To put down a healthy, faithful, valuable canine friend at age ten is evil; and evicting somebody who is faithful to his or her dog because of that dog’s age, is evil. This government will probably make some mistakes, but we will not do evil.

For instance, there are hundreds of special programs for women, and very few for men… yet men die younger on average, suffer more violence, die more often by suicide. Many worthwhile women’s programs can be continued by the charitable sector. Many worthwhile men’s programs can be facilitated by the same charitable sector. I have seen men live as brothers in monasteries; why cannot that fellowship and social efficiency be enjoyed by men whose first work in life is something other than religious ritual?

I plan to rename the Women’s Ministry, with more hope than certainty, the Ministry for Gender Co-operation. I know women who call themselves Feminists and do not believe in nor practice misandry; but I have read enough about the subject of “gender-based-analysis” and gender politics, to know that overall, Feminism has been more misandric than egalitarian. This government will be egalitarian. Specifically, our policy will be to assure equal opportunity for all who function in the public sphere, the policy asserted by Susan Pinker in her book The Sexual Paradox.

I will name as the Gender Co-operation Minister’s #1 assignment, to make that ministry unnecessary by the end of our mandate. Creator meant for men and women to co-operate; Feminism named itself evil by and to the extent it promoted gender conflict, and I have enough hope in human nature to seriously try to restore Creator’s purpose and let the nature we ought to have, take its course.

I plan to look at ways that Alberta’s contributions to others’ well-being are either reciprocated, or paid for. Wild geese eat a lot of Alberta’s crops, and then fly south where they are targets for US hunters. I’m not sure how to collect for those migratory birds, but I have some eager young students who will be working on it. Donald Trump, let’s be fair, reasonable, and logical, eh?

The Energy East pipeline was a Canadian national unity project if ever there was one. If the kind of oil planned for shipment through it was dangerously corrosive, and I have heard arguments on both sides; then a pre-refinery or upgrader could have been built at Alberta’s end of the pipeline, with some of that equalization transfer money Ottawa has taken from us since that Leduc well. I am totally convinced it would have cost a mere fraction. Justin Trudeau, let’s be fair, reasonable, and logical, eh?

These are not fat and easy times. Alberta’s is not a fat and easy style. We are practical, we are pragmatic, we are willing to work for the satisfaction of a job well done and the subsistence we get from the sum of those good jobs. I am ready to listen to good ideas from those who campaigned with me and those who competed with us in the campaign. We all live here. We just had a vote, not a war.

Let’s go to work.

Notes:

* I sent a draft to the Webmaster then, to document I did not know when I wrote it, what the winner said nor even who won.

Posted in Gender Equality, Men's Health, Working | Leave a comment

What I Want to Vote For

Posted on March 25, 2019 by Davd

… If Politics Were Reasonable, if Democracy Prevailed
(c) 2019, Davd


Alberta’s election was called last week; voting day will be April 16. The Ottawa Government has promised a Federal Election for October. Before reading about what the politicians want to persuade us with, I decided to spend several hours thinking about what I want to vote for: Now I wonder how much of it i will get how good a chance to vote for.

I want to vote for Truth and Equal Treatment. For instance, Governments should admit that “carbon taxes” are more a way to collect money than a simple fix for a complex climate1.

For an instance everyone who shops can appreciate, “there oughta be a law” that requires the most visible number on any price tag, whether on the package or on the shelf, be the total amount the customer will pay for the item. That means including sales taxes and all other required payments in the most visible price.

If a litre of apple juice or milk is on special for 97 cents, then I should be able to take a dollar and that litre of fluid food, to the checkout, and not be told i don’t have enough money. If some bureaucracy wants to charge for the milk or juice carton, that tax should be included in the most visible price — the total the customer pays.

I want to vote for equal treatment for men and women, and the genders-reversed principle as a default measure of equal treatment.

Think about how radical the genders-reversed criterion really is. It means that schools will be designed to be as boy friendly as they now are girl friendly. It means that when a divorce occurs, there is joint custody of the children; or the man gets custody of the boy children, the woman of the girls; or else the genuine best interests of each actual child be fairly assessed.

When child custody decisions reach equality by that genders-reversed standard, children as well as fathers will benefit.

It means no double standards for jobs like police constable2.

It is difficult in the 21st Century, to find an aspect of social life in Europe and North America, that exhibits male privilege, but easy to find examples of female privilege. I want to vote for no privilege.

I want to vote for Frugality. It’s the famous Scots virtue, and means organizing to get the most benefit from expenditures, whether of money, time, work …. When I cook a big batch of sauce, and freeze more than half of it to be eaten days later — that’s being frugal with my time (and with the electricity I use for cooking.) When i buy boneless pork loin for $4 per kilo, and cut it into chops, instead of buying chops cut by the store for $7 per kilo, that’s being frugal.

When I chopped firewood and heated and cooked with it, rather than using bought electricity, that was both frugal, and healthy, or as I wrote in a weekly newspaper column a few decades ago, “my exercise program pays me about $10 per hour.” Gardening is frugal exercise which produces better, fresher food than you can buy at “supermarkets”. My good Métis grandfather walked to work until he retired; that was another example of health enhancing frugality.

I want to vote for Social Efficiency: Less bureaucracy, more accomplished per bureaucrat. Facilitating volunteer and sharing alternatives to bureaucracies.3

Social efficiency includes valuing everyone’s time: Waiting for hours is wrong, morally and in health terms. If waiting time were valued at minimum wage or more, many “call centres” and waiting rooms would quickly show themselves wasteful. Frugality and Social Efficiency go together.

Fraternal households are an excellent example of frugal efficiency. The monks with whom I sojourned several years ago, lived well from a few hours of work per day — less than half a full-time job. They chose to spend more time chanting prayers and passages from holy books, than they spent in subsistence work. Their frugal lifestyle is possible for men who might choose study, teaching, fishing and hunting, nurturing fatherless boys, or many other uses for their other time; prayer and ritual appeal to the monks while efficiency should appeal to us all. The efficiency is in sharing costs like paperwork, taxes, “utilities”4; upkeep of common space and common chores; and having their private space be what they really need and want to have private — usually a bedroom — rather than maintaining one kitchen, one sitting room, one library, etc. per man.

Frugality and social efficiency are more logical ways than “economic growth” to make the best of resource scarcity and “limit global warming.” Let the Government tax less rather than more, and spend the money it collects in the ways that produce the greatest public benefit and the least disruption of healthy behavior.

Let the laws and regulations favour efficiency and tolerance rather than “enforce Political Correctness”: No interference with “ethnic” or “religious” values unless they can be proven to harm others. If a Feminist MP believes matriarchy is the best basis for social organization, she should be free to say so — as a Muslim MP should be free to say that patriarchy is the best basis.

Even if there were no budget deficit, forcing abortion endorsement or “gay-straight alliances” on people and religious schools, who believe they are morally wrong, is abusive. Perhaps some research should be done on the social costs and benefits of abortion and homosexuality, with the biological fact that abortion is homicide, acknowledged.

Tolerance of homosexuality, I support — to the extent that homosexuality does not harass or harm others. Tolerance of easy abortion, I oppose, because of that unborn human being who is killed. The fact that abortion is biologically homicide, is one good reason to be intolerant of heterosexual promiscuity; while the high cost of STDs is good reason to be intolerant of homosexual and heterosexual promiscuity5.

Sexual harassment, I oppose, and I include distracting public shows of sexuality as harassment. Since sexuality is distracting at schools and workplaces, those places should require modesty… the usual men’s way of not showing off sexuality at work and at school, is the efficient, the frugal way.

Equality, frugality, social efficiency, truth: What better things to vote for? — if the campaign offers the choice. How good a choice to vote for these virtues, do you think the campaign will offer? in Alberta’s April or October’s Federal election? And if the campaigns won’t offer such choices, what are the politicians saying about themselves and their games?

Actions speak louder than words. Are political campaigns saying, that it takes more and better than multiple-choice elections to make a democracy?

References:

Brown, Grant A., 2013. Ideology And Dysfunction In Family Law“: How Courts Disenfranchise Fathers. Calgary and Winnipeg: Canadian Constitution Foundation and Frontier Centre For Public Policy

“The Futurist”, 2010. The Misandry Bubble . January 1. “A single man does not require much in order to survive. Most single men could eke out a comfortable existence by working for two months out of the year.”

Glubb, John Bagot, 1978. The Fate of Empires. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd.

Gwynne, Peter, 1975. “The Cooling World.” Newsweek, April 28: p. 64

Hays, J.D . J Imbrie and NJ Shackleton, 1976. “Precession of the Equinoxes … Ice Age” Science, v194, #4270, p1121,

Kemp, Luke 2019. “Are We On The Road To Civilisation Collapse?” BBC Future website, February 19 and 20.

Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry“: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Reviewed here.

Schneider, Stephen and Lynne Mesirow (1976) The Genesis Strategy: Climate and Global Survival. New York and London: Plenum.

Notes:

i1. Peter Gwynne wrote a major news magazine article in 1975. “The Cooling World.” (Newsweek, April 28: p. 64; cf. Hays, Imbrie and Shackleton, 1976.) More recent articles have stated that global warming to date may have protected us from an impending Ice Age. Schneider and Mesirow (1976) wrote that climate and weather had been unusually kind for the past century or two, which meant the population/food problem was worse than statistics suggest. .. food and other production should not push ecosystems close to their limits, since these limits are not constant and may contract leaving one over carrying capacity [p. 145]. “Uncertainty is not biased toward optimism” [p. 148; italics in orig.]

I do not advocate increased fossil fuel use; I do believe that we should consider “climate change” to be less certain and more complex than to claim CO2 taxation will solve all or even most of our problems. It is convenient for governments to tax CO2, because it is always convenient for governments to collect more taxes.

2. There should be a minimum fraction of women police, to do such tasks as strip searching women suspects. There should similarly be a minimum fraction of male nurses.

3. Perhaps it should include making “civil service” jobs more like they were decades ago, with security but lower pay than the less secure jobs in private enterprises. That “retreat from big-spending on bureaucracies” might require that for a while, job security is not as good as it was when i was young; or it might be that enough high-paid bureaucrats would quit on their own rather than become lower-paid.

4. In east-central Alberta, an electric connection can cost $100+ per month, additional to the electricity; and a gas connection, about the same. Five men sharing one building would pay for one connection, or about $20 for electricity and $20 for gas, per man. Each man would save $160+ per month, roughly $2000 per year, on two utility connections, compared to “living alone”… the five together would save about $10,000! Sharing heating, appliances, Internet fees, taxes, possibly vehicles would save more than that.

The construction or rent cost would be lower per man, or the amenity enjoyed, greater; because working and leisure spaces are shared.

5. Last i studied the subject, which was several years ago now, homosexuals, male homosexuals especially, were more promiscuous than heterosexuals. They also had higher STD rates. As a heterosexual, abstinent-because-divorced Christian, i support tolerance by civil law, and abstinence by those who are homosexually inclined and try to keep Christian teachings — as I abstain from heterosexual activity.

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