People mourn the polar bear?

A group of young Britons travelled to a remote part of Norway. There were polar bears in the area, so they set up trip wires to scare them off before retiring to bed in their tents. But the wires failed and a bear attacked them, killing one young man and injuring others. During the struggle for life, one of the British men was able to shoot the polar bear.

What is the reaction of Daily Mail readers? Many of them are mourning the polar bear and simply ignoring the death of a young man:

Daniel: Sadly today we are one more polar bear less due to human infringement.

JD: How dare they kill that beautiful animal! They were in the bear's habitat so must take the consequences.

Lucy: How dare they kill the Polar Bear..... This infuriates me!!!!

Bright & Sparking: Yet another example or the most disgusting animal on this planet.. the human being..

Paula: Poor Polar bear....RIP...

Tom: Poor polar bear

Sadie: As usual - a wild animal is killed for displaying its natural behaviour. What an ignorant and selfish species the human race is.

I enjoy nature a great deal. I chose to live in an outer suburb where we've been visited by koalas, echidnas, blue tongues, parrots of all kinds - we've even had kangaroos hopping down our street.

But I can't help but think something is wrong here. Why would your first reaction not be regret for the loss of life of a promising young man? Why put polar bears above humans?

If any of my readers disagree I'd be happy to consider their arguments. But it seems to me that this reaction of mourning the bear and not the human reveals not so much a love of nature but a diminished attitude toward mankind.

Modern forms of humanism seem to lead not to a warm and appreciative account of what humans are, but to a negative and hostile one.

Struggling in a wilderness

Who is the Plankton? She is a woman pushing 50 who decided to divorce her husband a few years ago. She has written a blog detailing her unhappiness in being unable to find another man.

The Daily Mail has an article about her, but her blog itself is even more interesting.

The first thing to note is that she really does want to be with a man. She isn't pretending otherwise:

Show me a (straight) woman of my age who is alone and who says she doesn’t want a man.

Show me a liar.

She isn't coping well at all with her life as it is:

As a divorced woman the wrong side of 45 with a brace of kids, I am a plankton on the food chain of sexuality and the prospect of a relationship.

Women die long before they actually die ...  I may live till I am ninety, but a sort of death has already come. I am already in a wilderness ... A woman’s trajectory; a barrel of laughs.

So why hasn't she found someone? She believes, rightly or wrongly, that the most eligible men are chasing after younger women:

A man can pick from a wider pool of women: his age and under, by several decades.  I have a friend who is late thirties and lives with and has children by a man in his mid sixties.  She is one of the youngest girlfriends he has had but by no means the only one of her age.  He is paunchy and has grey chest hair and is not especially rich ... They argue a lot and she is not particularly happy yet is counting herself lucky.  He plucked her out of a richesse of willing women.  All circling him like vultures, they were, before my friend “got” him.

That might be exaggerated, but you can see where she is coming from. When she married she was young enough to still have the experience of sexual power that younger women have. After her divorce, she was suddenly thrust into a different world, one in which it was the men of her age who had the better options. It seems as if she is finding it difficult to adjust to the change.

So is it all doom and gloom for women? It doesn't have to be. The traditional idea was that women would encourage the qualities in men that would make them good husbands (the family man ideal) and would give up some of the sexual power they wielded in their 20s (by committing to one man rather than pursuing casual relationships with many) and in return men would give up some of the sexual power they wielded later in life (by remaining loyal to their wives).

The "Plankton" unfortunately seems to have pursued the more modern understanding of relationships. In her 20s, at that critical time for women, she went for (you guessed it) the bad boys. In discussing what she is now looking for in a man she writes:

Kind is obvious, and absolutely the opposite of what I sought when I was young, to my cost. Then, good-looking and cool was more important.  Now, cool is what I actively do not want. I did cool men in my twenties and cool was invariably synonymous with cruel.

This is really a way of saying that she was selecting men on the basis of sexual attraction alone, rather than considering as well what kind of husband a man might make. Her orientation to sexual attraction alone is reflected too in her promiscuity at this time:

Of course, my young self consoled myself with the thought that quantity not quality validated me as an attractive sexual being, though my older self knows better – or at least thinks she does. Quantity, then, was important. Now, not so much.

Quantity, she admits, was important. Particularly with cool/cruel men.

It's not a very good way for women to secure a long-term future with a man in marriage. It distorts the culture of relationships between men and women - puts it on the wrong foundation.

The message of all this, I think, is that there are women too who have much to lose from the sexual revolution. Is the "liberation" of pursuing cruel/bad boys in your 20s really worth decades of unhappiness later on? According to the "Plankton" she was not even made happy in her 20s by her promiscuity:

It didn’t make me happy then, in my twenties ...  for the most part these notches constituted no more than notches or, at best, meaningless and at worst, malign names on a green bit of paper.

Better for women to be oriented to the creation of happy and stable marriages - and for this to inform what women select for when they are at the peak of "the food chain of sexuality".

How do leftist women justify the feminine?

A woman sits down and does some cross stitching. She is approached by another woman who glowers at her and asks if she's never heard of women's lib. Which then leads to an interesting discussion at a feminist website.

What's going on here? Why would a woman doing something traditionally feminine be so controversial?

It goes something like this, I think. The underlying principle of liberalism is that we are made human by our autonomous choices. This means that our life choices must be self-determined rather than predetermined. But our sex is something we don't get to choose - it is predetermined. Therefore, it must be made not to matter.

That explains in a general way why something as seemingly harmless as a woman cross stitching should raise the ire of a liberal true believer.

But there's one more level to the argument. Liberals have to answer some questions. The first is how sex distinctions came to exist in the first place if they are an affront to our humanity. The answer generally given is that such distinctions have no basis in nature, i.e. that there is no real essence to what is masculine or feminine. Instead, they are socially constructed.

The second question for liberals to answer is why sex distinctions would be socially constructed. The response of left-liberals is that men created the "gender binary" in order to gain an unearned privilege for themselves at the expense of women. Women were left with less opportunity to lead autonomous, self-defining lives. Therefore they were the "second sex" who were literally denied "human equality" - they played a less human role than men. Femininity, in this view of things, delivered women as inferior beings into the clutches of men.

So if you were a liberal woman, particularly a left-liberal one, the logical response seems obvious. You would reject femininity as oppressive and live your life in the manner of "privileged" men.

But .....

It seems that the feminine runs more deeply in women's nature than the theory predicted. Even the more political left-liberal women usually seek to express it in some way. So how do these women justify such expressions of the feminine?

One way is to claim that they are being "ironic" in what they are doing. Being masculine or feminine is OK, they think, as long as you somehow indicate that you're not entirely serious. If you show that you are only being feminine as a way of sending up femininity, then that's acceptable.

Another strategy is to claim to be mixing and matching, e.g. that you are wearing lipstick and high heels while drinking beer and putting up a shed in the backyard, or riding a Harley-Davidson whilst wearing lace.

It's also possible for a liberal woman to claim that all that matters is self-determining choice, so that a woman should be able to choose to be either masculine or feminine:

In my eyes, feminism isn't about forcing femininity or masculinity on anyone but rather making it more acceptable for women to be any way they want to be.

Then there's the argument that masculinity and femininity are OK as long as they are detached from biological sex, i.e. that masculinity and femininity should be randomly selected by men and women rather than femininity being connected to women and masculinity to men:

Gender expectation is when we, as a society, expect nail polish and skirts on women, and trousers and ties on men. Wouldn't it be something to live in a world where they weren't gendered, though? Where men could paint their nails without getting funny looks?
Now, should that come to fruition, where anyone could be wearing a pretty apron and baking cookies, and anyone else could be in coveralls and repairing a car, it may be that we stop viewing those things as "feminine" and "masculine," and that's certainly fine, but it's not a requirement. Feminine and masculine don't have to mean the same thing as male and female. It's about separating gender presentation from inherent gender.

These attempts to fit the feminine into liberalism, as compromised as they are, attract the ire of the more radical moderns. In a post titled "only sub-human" one radical feminist attempts to restore orthodoxy as follows:

Femininity is not a natural expression of femaleness. It is not an hereditary, hormone-based fascination for fashion, submissiveness, mani-peddies, baby-soft skin, or catfighting. It is not a fun-loving lifestyle choice. Femininity is a rigid system of behaviors imposed on us by the Global Accords Governing the Fair Use of Women as a means to control, subjugate, and marginalize us, entirely at our expense, for the benefit of the male-controlled megatheocorporatocracy.

This idea often chaps the hide of novice blamers. This is because they don’t fully appreciate the hideous essence of femininity. Some of them believe that the practice of femininity is but one facet of an exciting smorgasbord of lifestyle choices available to today’s busy autonomous gal-on-the-go. They feel that “choosing” feminine conduct is an act of feminist rebellion, on the grounds that the choicing is entirely the chooser’s own personal idea. They aver that femininity can be an expression of a woman’s personal personality, and that it is “fun.” It is irrelevant, apparently, that femininity just happens to align precisely with the pornified desires, yucky fetishes, and vulgar business interests of the entire dudely culture of domination. Sadly, the novice blamer omits to consider this greater whole, and that in “choosing” femininity she is merely making conspicuous her compliance with dudely authori-tay.

Our hardcore feminist writer goes on to complain that "the truth about femininity is so repellent, so foul, so depraved, that we don’t want to know it" and even that one of the consequences of femininity is that women get "no invitation ... to life’s rich pageant."

Whichever way liberal women go, the outcome is sad. The feminine is utterly condemned, or treated ironically, or regarded as one choice of no more significance than another, or disconnected from women as a sex.

And a woman cross stitching becomes a controversial act.

Charles Darwin in Australia

Charles Darwin visited Australia as a young man in 1836. After his first day in Sydney he wrote:

In the evening I walked through the town & returned full of admiration at the whole scene. It is a most magnificent testimony of the power of the British nation. Here, in a less promising country, scores of years have done many times more than an equal number of centuries have effected in South America. My first feeling was to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman.

I'm so unused to such a positive sense of identity from educated Anglos that this passage jumped out at me. Darwin observed that his own countrymen had in a few decades created a beautiful, well-ordered city in a difficult terrain - and he recognised the accomplishment.

Darwin also recorded his thoughts regarding the Aborigines. He was impressed with their hunting skills:

In their own arts they are admirable; a cap being fixed at 30 yards distance, they transfixed it with the spear ... In tracking animals & men they show a most wonderful sagacity.

However, he also observed that the Aborigines would not make use of opportunities to farm or to live a more settled life:

They will not however cultivate the ground, or even take the trouble of keeping flocks of sheep which have been offered them; or build houses & remain stationary

Nor did they give up their tribal warfare:

I should have mentioned that in addition to their state of independence of the Whites, the different tribes go to war. In an engagement which took place lately, the parties, very singularly, chose the centre of the village of Bathurst as the place of engagement; the conquered party took refuge in the Barracks

Darwin thought the numbers of Aborigines were declining:

The decrease in numbers must be owing to the drinking of Spirits, the European diseases, even the milder ones of which such as the Measles are very destructive, & the gradual extinction of the wild animals.

There's an interesting passage in the book in which Darwin expresses sympathy for families having to employ convict servants. He writes about the male convicts and then notes "The female servants are of course much worse". So perhaps the men of Darwin's generation did not thoughtlessly "white knight" all women as is sometimes claimed.

Although Darwin was unimpressed with certain aspects of the convict system, he nonetheless thought there was a positive larger outcome:

But as a means of making men outwardly honest - of converting vagabonds most useless in one hemisphere into active citizens of another, and thus giving birth to a new and splendid country - a grand centre of civilization - it has succeeded to a degree perhaps unparalleled in history.

DNA tests not so futile

How's this for a misleading start to a newspaper article:

MEN who owe their former lovers child support are taking DNA tests - financed by taxpayers - in a futile bid to avoid paying for their own children's upbringing.

Each year, dozens of Victorian dads demand DNA tests courtesy of Legal Aid, expecting to prove they owe their ex-spouses nothing - only to find they do.

Victorian parents are owed $4 million in maintenance by their former partners, according to the federal Child Support Agency.

That makes it sound as if the men seeking DNA tests are just trying to get out of supporting their own children. But later in the article the truth is revealed:

Figures supplied to the Herald Sun show that last year, 51 men asked for Victoria Legal Aid to conduct DNA tests after they were told to pay up.

A majority, 32, were proved to be dads and therefore financially liable.

So 37% of the men were shown not to be the father of the child that the woman was seeking 20 years of payment for. I would have thought the statistic fully justifies men who are uncertain of the parentage of a child getting it checked out. I think too we need to be harder on women seeking to deceive men in this way - it is a very low act.

Here's something else of concern. In Victoria men currently only get 28 days to to seek a test:

Melbourne lawyer Simon Bacon, partner with Manby & Scott Lawyers, said most men who challenged paternity with a DNA test were found to be correct, and more would do so if the law gave them more than a month to initiate proceedings after receiving child support orders.

"I would like to see the 28-day period expunged because it's an extraordinarily short period of time in the context of matrimonial breakdown," Mr Bacon said.

"The man is very much on the back foot if he wants to convince the court to issue proceedings out of time."

Why does there have to be such a short period of time? A deception at 28 days is still a deception later on.

Wanted elsewhere

The country of Georgia, situated between Russia and Turkey, is recruiting South African farmers to restore its agricultural sector. And some South African farmers are willing to migrate there to escape the crime directed against them in their native land:

A long way from his South African birthplace, amid the sweeping wheat fields of eastern Georgia, farmer Piet Kemp says that he has found a new home in this former Soviet republic.

And if the government gets its wish, hundreds more like Kemp will follow to help revive Georgia's ailing agricultural sector, bringing in both cash and expertise.

Shaken by violent attacks and reforms to transfer land to blacks in South Africa, many white farmers have been emigrating, and 10 have already relocated to Georgia to set up businesses under a programme launched by the government.

Kemp was the first of them to make the move, lured by local business opportunities -- and the promise of security.

"I do not want to live in constant fear," the 67-year-old said emotionally as he recalled the widespread killings of other white farmers in South Africa.

...Amid the violence, Kemp said that he felt he had no choice but to leave.

"In Georgia there is no violence, the crime rate is extremely low. So I will never go back," Kemp declared, comparing the situation here to the high violent crime rates back home, which include some 46 murders a day.

The Georgian Government values these farmers:

Earlier this year, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili called for large-scale modernisation to turn the country's "mediaeval agriculture sector into the agriculture of the 21st century" and make it a major source of income.

The plan to attract Boer farmers to relocate to this distant ex-Soviet state is part of Saakashvili's vision, but although their numbers may turn out to be small, they could make a difference, expert Shervashidze suggested.

"They are the world's best farmers. They bring in cash, create new jobs and set up efficient businesses," he said.

But it's hardly an ideal situation. Piet Kemp is being asked to give up his identity as a Boer in order to find security. Modern society has reduced him to a wandering economic asset.

Greensboro flash mobs

Interesting how things come together sometimes. I was looking up the website of a local church and mistakenly found myself linked to a church with a very similar name in far away Greensboro, North Carolina.

The homepage of this Catholic church features a mission statement, one which is desperately committed to diversity:

We, the parishioners of Saint Mary’s Catholic Church, are uniquely diverse, both ethnically and culturally, with varied economic, social and spiritual experiences. This uniqueness of diversity strengthens our unified bond

They're not just diverse, they're "uniquely diverse". Odd how liberals in so many places like to claim the same thing, that diversity somehow marks them out and makes them special, even though it's something that exists in many places in the Western world.

Anyway, it turns out that the town of Greensboro is connected in a number of ways to the history of race relations in the US, so maybe that helps to explain the particular slant of the parish mission statement.

As for the claim that diversity creates a "unified bond", that doesn't seem true of Greensboro as a town. By coincidence I came across a news report about "flash mobs" operating there. These are groups of young black Americans who use social media to suddenly gather together and cause mayhem, for instance by raiding a shop or beating up pedestrians:

Greensboro police say mobs of violent teens are meeting up on the weekends and wreaking havoc downtown. Police say it's getting worse each weekend.

This past weekend, a former mayor had his business vandalized and another community leader got beat up in Center City Park.

"One of the teenagers came up from behind and just punched me in the back and kicked me and knocked me to the floor. Then, he just continued to kick me, punch me, step on me. People were screaming," Mitchel Sommers, executive director of the Community Theatre of Greensboro said.

The swarm came from nowhere and the beating lasted seconds.

"Within a minute, I'd say, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds...I'm not being dramatic...hundreds of young people...just came descending upon this area," he said. "There were so many young people. I would say all the way from across Elm Street all the way to the park. You couldn't even get out of the swarm of young people."

...While Mitchel's story sounds unusual. It isn't.

Every weekend in July, Greensboro police have battled large, flash-mob beatings and vandalism

Lt. Cranford says police know these gatherings are a problem. "It's a significant issue for us because more often than not, we're vastly outnumbered by the kinds of crowds we're trying to deal with," he said.

Downtown leaders say they don't want to discourage people from visiting downtown, but they want everyone to be careful.

Pity because Greensboro seems to have some attractive features. The picture on the right, for instance, shows one of the buildings of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro.

A terrible idea from the Greens

The Gillard Labor Government now relies on support from the Australian Greens to hold power. That's a concern given some of the policy ideas being floated by Greens leader Bob Brown. It has been reported, for instance, that he proposed at the National Press Club the formation of "a global people's assembly based on one person, one vote, one value... a global Parliament."

It's difficult to think of any idea that would be more at odds with the interests of ordinary Australians. Australia would have 0.3% of the delegates at Bob Brown's global Parliament. We would be at the mercy of the peoples of other nations.

Breivik's odd political combination

One of my readers made this comment about the Norwegian gunman Breivik:

I think it's a bit far-fetched to to do any analysis whatsoever of his political views, he's just a nutjob.

Having read more of his manifesto I'm increasingly inclined to agree. It's not that his writing is deranged like that of Jared Loughner. But there is still something mentally "not quite right" about it. For instance, when discussing which platform he should choose Breivik rejects "hateful" ideologies and "controversial views" because these do not have "mass appeal". He then admits that he himself is part of a "relatively cynical/cruel/goal oriented armed resistance group" but believes nonetheless that this group is supported by 50-60% of Europeans "due to the fact that we oppose ALL hate ideologies and we consider it illogical to fight hate with hate." But he then immediately adds that "this does not mean that we will use less brutal methods in our operations."

He seems to think something along the lines of "we will win support by having nice beliefs whilst carrying out cynical/cruel acts of violence".

Here is how he explains why he did not join a national or ethnocentric group:

I understand that many nationalists only care for their own nation and culture. However, all Western Europeans are in the same situation ... Pooling resources and especially knowledge is essential. Obviously, this cannot be achieved if you require that your potential members follow un-appealing principles and codes such as that of the national anarchists (at least many of them). A hateful ideology (white supremacist), death metal, Odinism, conspiracy theories does NOT have mass appeal. Some of the local nationalist factions have very controversial views and lifestyles that do not appeal to a broad specter of people. ...so called national anarchists will never be potent enough unless they pool their knowledge base with pan-European organisations. Mass appeal should be the most essential factor in this strategy. Obviously, the PCCTS, Knights Templar does not have mass appeal as we are a relatively cynical/cruel/goal oriented armed resistance group. However, our primary foundational principles (a majority of them) still have mass appeal and are supported by as many as 50-60% of all Europeans. The reason for this is due to the fact that we oppose ALL hate ideologies and we consider it illogical to fight hate with hate. Of course, this does not mean that we will use less brutal methods in our operations.

He also explains in this part of the manifesto why he chose to go with Christianity. It was for pragmatic political reasons rather than from any theological commitment. He thought that the Odinism (paganism) of some Norwegian rightists would alienate central and southern Europeans:

Q: Why did you choose an allegiance to a group with Christian values and pan-European goals instead of a purely national/regional group?

A: Many have asked this question. My choice has nothing to do with the fact that I am not proud of my own traditions and heritage. My choice was based purely pragmatism. All Europeans are in this boat together so we must choose a more moderate platform that can appeal to a great number of Europeans – preferably up to 50% (realistically up to 35%). Choosing a local/national group would be counterproductive as all the groups I am familiar with are Odinist orientated and not Christian identity groups. It is essential that we choose a banner that has the potential to appeal towards central and southern Europeans as well.

It's odd that he should answer "Many have asked this question." Who could possibly have asked him this given he kept his project a secret fromt he world? But note again that he chose Christianity, on pragmatic grounds, as a "banner" rather than as a religion.

A few other observations. According to his manifesto Breivik rejected ordinary political work for change as early as the year 2000 when he was about 21 and that he met up with the "justiciar knights" group when he was 23. If true, that means that his political course was set many years before he could have come into contact with writers like Fjordman.

He also claims that this "justiciar" group was aiming to achieve its goals in the year 2083. That's odd too. If it's such a long term, multi-generational strategy, then why not take the time instead to build up a political movement? Why go off on a sudden rampage?

More news on Breivik

I've now had a chance to skim through Breivik's manifesto. It's long and detailed and mentions many people on the right, even Cardinal Pell and Keith Windschuttle. Some important points:

1. Breivik states re religion: "I’m not going to pretend I’m a very religious person as that would be a lie."

2. Breivik was a user of anabolic steroids and ephedrine. He used them for weight loss/muscle gain/mental alertness/mood elevation reasons. Some users of these drugs do experience side effects:

A 2005 review in CNS Drugs determined that "significant psychiatric symptoms including aggression and violence, mania, and less frequently psychosis and suicide have been associated with steroid abuse."

A 2006 study of two pairs of identical twins, in which one twin used anabolic steroids and the other did not, found that in both cases the steroid-using twin exhibited high levels of aggressiveness, hostility, anxiety and paranoid ideation not found in the "control" twin

Possible Side Effects of Ephedra: nausea, headache; anxiety; psychosis

3. Breivik writes in extraordinary detail about the technical aspects of committing murder. For instance, he had a great interest in biological weaponry, and he notes for his readers the pros and cons of adding different toxins to his bullets, such as the venom of the Australian taipan snake. Again, there is something not quite right mentally about spending pages of a manifesto on such matters.

A terrible day

The grim news from Norway is that 91 people have been murdered by Anders Behring Breivik. A person has committed an act of evil, of such a nature and scale, that it seems as if society has been dragged down to another low point.

We don't know much yet about Breivik or his motivations. However, he does appear to have been part of the political right. It is already the case that some on the left regard white males as the "cosmic enemy" - as the group responsible for creating privilege and hate and holding back progress toward equality and justice. Breivik's crime is going to encourage this negative way of identifying white males.

I don't know what will come out about Breivik over the next few days. However, there are a few things to be said about the information to hand.

First, the information so far does not point to Breivik being a fundamentalist Christian, as a few newspapers are reporting. It's true that he was baptised into a Protestant church and that he wanted the church to go back to basics. However, there is a picture of him in masonic uniform and he listed masonry as an interest on his Facebook page. He wrote too that he wanted to defend the "cultural aspects of Christianity" rather than Christianity itself. Finally, he listed his favourite books on his Facebook page and these are nearly all key works of non-Christian (or non-orthodox Christian) liberal philosophers such as Hobbes, Mill, Kant and Adam Smith.

The first two books he mentions are by William James and Richard Rorty. Both of these men deny the idea that there is an objective good that we should seek to live by. According to James, a belief was true if it had good consequences for the believer:

A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true. Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment, and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment. In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy; it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness.

Richard Rorty was a self-described "bourgeois liberal" who denied that there was an intrinsic structure to reality. Instead, what was "objective" was what a group of people decided amongst themselves to be true:

Maybe someday the idea of human beings answering to an independent authority called How Things Are in Themselves will be obsolete. In a thoroughly de-Platonized, fully Protagorean culture the only answerability humans would recognise would be to one another. It would never occur to them that “the objective” could mean more than “the agreed-upon upshot of argument.” In such a culture we would have as little use for the idea of the intrinsic structure of reality as for that of the will of God. We would view both as unfortunate and obsolete social constructions.

These ideas are a long way from orthodox Christianity (Rorty even describes the will of God as an "unfortunate and obsolete social construction"). They are not what you would expect a fundamentalist Christian to approve of or to recommend.

As for his politics, Breivik seems to be a radicalised right-liberal. What I mean by this is that he identified with classical liberal thinkers like John Stuart Mill (whom he quoted in his one twitter message), but he also saw the growth of Islam in Europe as a threat to such values. So he was against open borders and multiculturalism. He blamed the Frankfurt School and cultural Marxism for what had gone wrong in Europe.

But there has to be something else. None of this really explains why Breivik would commit such an act. Even if I'm correct and Breivik was a "cultural Christian" rather than a more orthodox one and a "cultural conservative" (i.e. a right-liberal who wants to defend a Western liberal culture from Islam), that still doesn't supply the motivation to commit such an atrocity.

You would have to think that certain traits of character or personality will emerge over the next few days that might help to fill in the gaps.

Educated Gen X women in no man's land

Buried amongst the stories in the Daily Mail is a very significant report on the fate of university educated Generation X women. These women were born between 1965 and 1978, so they are between 33 and 46 years old.

The report begins by noting that few of these women have succeeded in making it into the boardroom. The reason commonly given for this is that women opt out to have children and so lose motivation.

But it turns out that this is not entirely true. An incredible 43% of these women are childless. That's a depressing statistic. Given that the youngest of these women is 33, it means that the most educated of English women are failing miserably when it comes to reproducing and bringing a new generation of children into the world.

So if these 43% are not taking a detour to have children, why haven't they risen through the corporate ranks? According to the newspaper article, many of them eventually grow tired of the long hours and work pressures of the corporate world and so leave for more flexible positions, such as working as consultants:

'Anecdotally we’re seeing them moving into more flexible roles,’ says Dr Angela Carter, a research fellow at the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield. ‘They’re setting out on their own or moving into consultancy roles.

‘There has been a popular conception that flexible working appeals to women because they want children, but that’s not the whole story. Generation X women have been brought up with the expectation of “having it all” — and when they’ve found the corporate world is, in fact, often very restrictive and won’t allow this, they’ve gone looking for that freedom elsewhere.'

That ought to be kept in mind when complaints are made that women only make up 15% of company boards. If far fewer women are willing to make the sacrifices, then surely we should expect a preponderance of men on company boards.

Anyway, here is the Helen McNallen story:

Helen McNallen

Helen McNallen, 44, was formerly a high-powered trader for Goldman Sachs until her mid-30s...

‘When I left university it was the tail end of the “yuppie era”, with City traders swilling champagne and frequenting nightclubs,’ she says. ‘I was thrilled to be accepted into this testosterone-fuelled world. At the time, I became the only female trader in my department and felt that I had to work and play like one of the boys.

‘We worked crazy hours and then be out partying with colleagues or clients well into the early hours.

‘I was on a six-figure salary and had a house in the City and a renovated barn in Hampshire. But I was so exhausted I spent nearly all of the weekend in bed. I felt tremendously pressurised, and couldn’t think about having children.’

By her mid-30s, Helen was suffering from severe stress, which she refused to deal with properly for a long time on the grounds that it might make her appear weak.

‘I eventually realised I couldn’t cope any longer,’ she says. ‘The pressure of being a woman in a man’s world was just too much.’

She says she feels cheated by being sold the myth of the female businesswoman who can work like a man. And she adds: ‘I am both too old and too set in my ways to start a family, even if it was physically possible.'

I feel cheated too. Was this really the best use society had for Helen McNallen? She worked so hard that family was impossible, for a lifestyle she was too tired to enjoy and then she quit it all anyway just at the point that her childbearing years were ending. It just doesn't seem to be a rational life course for society to pitch to women. There is loss all round.

Radical quotas

How's this for an affirmative action proposal. Tanja Bergqvist at her Swedish site has linked to a newspaper story from 2007 in which Zoran Alagic and Kurdo Baksi put forward a radical new "equality" proposal.

Who are these two men? I don't know much about Baksi except that he has been involved in a Swedish multicultural magazine called Black-White. But Alagic is well and truly a member of the political class in Sweden. He was a member of the Swedish PM's press staff and then became the press officer for the Swedish Teachers' Association.

These two men made this proposal:

We need to bring about a change in economic structures of power and break the male monopoly. A quota may be the solution. It is possibly not enough of a law on quotas by gender - we should also see action to really broaden recruitment to the business community on a broad front. We therefore propose a moratorium in Swedish industry:

The next five years, all white, tall, heterosexual, blond and blue-eyed men between 40 and 50 years be set at the bottom of the employment hierarchy, in the university corridors, the newspaper editors and the Boards of Directors.

The rest - women, homosexuals, disabled, immigrants, and 55 or older - a priority for at least five years.

So they not only want gender quotas, they also want a quota based on race, height, sexuality, hair colour, eye colour and age.

It seems that "equality" knows no limits.

Good speech for Reims anniversary

Reims Cathedral in France, where the Kings of France were crowned, is celebrating its 800th anniversary. As Tiberge reports at Gallia Watch, Prince Louis de Bourbon made a speech to mark the occasion. His speech is, in part, a defence of the role of royalty, which readers may or may not agree with, but cast in very positive traditionalist language that is rare to hear today at an official event.

I like to report good news stories when I can and this is so for two reasons: first, there is the great achievement of Reims Cathedral to celebrate and second we have an example of a prominent man who is able to speak eloquently in traditionalist terms.

I won't reproduce the speech here as it is available, with the latest news from France, at Gallia Watch.

The Roman virtues: dignitas

Ominously for me, dignitas has been described as "a unique, intangible and culturally subjective social concept in the ancient Roman mindset" - which isn't going to make it easy for me, as a novice in this field, to describe.

However, from what I've read, the basic meaning seems to be "one's standing in the community". If my dignatis were great, then more weight would be put on my opinion - I would gain greater clout in society.

If this were all that dignitas consisted of, it wouldn't be that impressive a virtue. But the important issue here is how dignitas was gained. It could be gained by achievement (e.g. military victory), but also by the way a person embodied a range of virtues in the service of the state:

Dignitas and auctoritas were the end result of displaying the values of the ideal Roman and the service of the state in the forms of priesthoods, military positions, and magistracies. Dignitas was reputation for worth, honor and esteem. Thus, a Roman who displayed their gravitas, constantia [perseverence], fides [trustworthiness], pietas and other values becoming a Roman would possess dignitas among their peers. Similarly, through this path, a Roman could earn auctoritas (“prestige and respect”).

So your dignitas was not only a product of holding high office, but was also an estimation of your character as a Roman in successfully discharging your public duties.

Noble Romans did not want to suffer a blow or loss to their dignitas. That seems to have represented something like the loss of one's good name, or the loss of face, or the loss of honour. In that sense, self-worth was tied closely to dignitas.

So how then are we to assess the Roman virtue of dignitas? Seen from the world of today it has one great advantage. In today's world people try to make themselves superior in their social standing by adopting politically correct beliefs. Intellectuals are often the worst offenders here: they tend to believe that by following a liberal political orthodoxy that they stand above the crowd in their moral and social status.

But that is not only a cheap and easy way to chase distinction, it also tends to corrode society over time - it is an anti-public service (a public disservice).

In Roman times, there was at least some connection between social distinction and the cultivation of character - and that is the aspect of dignitas that we need most to restore.