Abusegate: A Generation Deceived

Science has come full-circle, taking a page from the medieval Church by using fear and persecution to silence skeptics. The oppressed have become the oppressors. Given that most professional scientific bodies and peer-reviewed journals have been active accomplices in this scandal, one wonders how many other so called scientific consensuses have been similarly engineered and waiting for their own ClimateGates before truth is known. —Joanne Nova

The above quote is important because it addresses the politicization of science and research. Dean Esmay, the owner of Dean’s World where I blog occasionally as part of a group, has often commented that politics and science don’t mix. While I haven’t been in the field of research myself, it’s fairly well-known that going after grants and funding has become a difficult process, often fraught with politics and cronyism.

I’ve followed the issue of Climategate with great interest, especially as it has seemed for years that the issue of global warming, climate change – whatever you choose to call it – has mirrored what was going on in the field of partner abuse. Both issues have a lot of money, political power, and careers at stake. There is also plenty of name-calling, dirty dealing and outright hatred expressed by the opposing camps for the other.

Where Abusegate is concerned, however, there is one more element – the life or death of feminism, and its determination to liberate women from the so-called “oppression” of marriage and family. The story of Abusegate is as much about the attempt by feminists to obscure their real intentions as it is about feminist attempts to conceal the reality of partner abuse, in order to claim the issue as their own, and possibly the only issue available at the time to keep this essentially destructive philosophy alive.

What feminism is supposed to be about is the definition provided by Merriam-Webster.

This is a current popular definition, however, and has little to do with the goals of feminism, which has its roots not only in Marxist ideals, but also in anti-male hatred and a desire for power and control over society where it is most beneficial to feminists themselves. According to Erin Pizzey: “There never was a feminist movement. A bunch of disenchanted women refused to support their left wing men who were fighting capitalism. They changed the goal posts and said capitalism was no longer the battle ground it was now 'Patriarchy' and declared war on all men and the family.”

In the 1970s, and into the 1980s, feminism was still an emerging movement. Except for the halls of academia, which began to offer “women’s studies” courses, and a few academicians pushing “feminist law,” and “feminist psychology,” the general public had little interest in a movement that was so clearly designed to create antipathy between not only the sexes, but between career women and those choosing more-traditional paths for themselves.

It was about the same time that the issue of partner abuse began to emerge as an issue on the public radar. In 1971, Erin Pizzey founded the first shelter for abused women in the UK. There were also a few shelters for women developing independently in various places in the US.

This did not escape the attention of the zealots of the feminist faith and other opportunistic women. Surely there was profit and power to be gained in promoting this cause.

According to the Herstory of domestic violence, “In the 1970s ‘We will not be beaten’ becomes the mantra of women across the country organizing to end domestic violence. A grassroots organizing effort begins, transforming public consciousness and women's lives. The common belief within the movement is that women face brutality from their husbands and indifference from social institutions.”

A theory regarding abuse was formulated, relying almost entirely on feminist supposition and the input from self-identified abused women. There has never been any kind of formal research or investigation of the feminist theory of abuse; it has simply been presented as a fait accompli and seldom, if ever, questioned. A look through the “Herstory,” (on the Minnesota Center Against Violence and Abuse website, funded by your tax dollars) reveals a stunning lack of mention of research of any kind behind the feminist concept of domestic violence.

Del Martin, a lesbian activist, wrote one of the earliest works on the issue in 1976. She says, “At the outset I was told I had to produce extensive and verifiable statistics on the incidence of violence against women…I concluded that incidence and incidents of violence in the home reached into the millions. My editor deleted my estimate on the grounds that I couldn’t prove it. Since then, academia has confirmed my virtual estimate and admitted that lacking uniformity in the way data are accumulated makes it impossible to provide actual statistics.” Lenore Walker, author of "The Battered Woman": “When I first began my study of the psychological impact of domestic violence on the battered woman, it was the mid 1970s and the feminist movement had a negative reaction to anything that came with a clinical psychology label…” Ellen Pence, Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project: “Many things that we did were new and groundbreaking. We introduced the power and control wheel and its accompanying theoretical framework, which tried to shift away from seeing violence against women as the problem of a few psychologically distorted men and lots of bad marriages, by linking men’s violence toward their partners to other forms of domination—class, race, gender, and colonization. We built on the work of previous projects that held individual agencies responsible to protect women and proposed a fairly bold notion of linking agencies together and forming a community-based advocacy program.” This is probably the most astonishing fact of Abusegate: While Climategate has at least some basis in research and scientific theory, there is none whatsoever behind the myriad programs and laws established since the 1970s by the so-called, “Battered Women’s Movement.” Even the term itself was created for its impact by feminists whose goals had very little to do with providing aid for women.

As radical activist Susan Schecter said, "I believe it is most urgent for this movement's future to declare that violence against women is a political problem, a question of power and domination, and not an individual, pathological, or deviant one. Continuing to make violence against women public is itself a crucial continuing task. We also must become a movement led by battered women, women of color, and working class women. We must develop a progressive agenda, a long range vision of what kind of society is needed so that violence against women would not exist, and to ally with groups sharing a vision of a just society" This statement appears on the main page of the website for the West Virginia Coalition Against Domestic Violence, also funded by your tax dollars.

Since the early days of the Battered Women’s Movement, nearly everything that has come after has been based on feminist principles devised out of thin air. Even today, in the US there is no standard definition of what domestic violence is or is not. Yet thousands of men are incarcerated, families destroyed, and women and children thrown into a permanent condition of life in turmoil because of nothing but the aberrant personal beliefs of a few women a generation ago.

While the feminists of the 20th Century are dying off or retiring, their ugly legacy of opportunism remains. Legions of divorce lawyers, shelter advocates, and organizations providing feminist education all benefit from the multi-billion dollar industry that now forms the basis of society’s approach to partner abuse.

The real tragedy of Abusegate is that victims of genuine partner abuse are still left without hope and support. They have been doubly victimized by a society that has been too willing to accept answers without first considering the problem.

“...If they have the answer to happiness, why can’t they model the behavior rather than coerce the behavior? They are an empty people with an inexhaustable appetite to control their neighbor. I really think these people are devoid of honest human emotion and interaction. To interact honestly with another human is to recognize that persons equality. The left are the patronizing saints of envy. May they fail in flagrant humiliation.” ~ equalitybeforethelaw

Amen.

Wednesday, December 27, 2006
The Original Sin of Progressives
http://tinyurl.com/cw4xcg

There is a cliche that slavery was the “original sin” of the United States, but that can’t be right. The real meaning of original sin is a primordial choice made by man as such, a choice that places him in a parallel universe that then shapes and determines everything else that follows. Not only was slavery banned within 90 years of our founding, but the framers wrote the costitution in such a way that the conflict over slavery would have to eventually come to a head. They simply put the conflict off to the future in order to make the fragile union of states possible at the outset.

There is obviously some confusion in my use of the terms “left” and “right,” because I don’t really intend to connote their contemporary usage. Rather, what ends up as this or that policy is founded upon a much deeper characterological and even spiritual divide that determines what follows. In short, I am always dealing with what the steamed Professor Chomsky would call the “deep structure” of left and right.

You might say that the founders were free of political “original sin,” and created a system that is about as close to perfection as humans can manage. The sin only came in later, eating away at the foundations of this noble country. What was it? What was the alien meme that entered the American bloodstream and infected half its inhabitants? Whatever it is, it has now come to dominate and shape most of our political debates, in a way that the original Americans would have found puzzling.

In a two part essay entitled Dangerous Obsession, I think Thomas Sowell identifies the real original sin, which is the flight from individualism amidst organic unity to an enforced political collectivism that attacks individual differences by placing equality over liberty. Although Sowell is an economist, economics is simply common sense writ large, whereas most other academic disciplines — i.e., philosophy, anthropology, psychology — often come down to error on a grandiose scale. Just as you can’t fool mother nature, you cannot fool father economics — at least not in the long run (i.e., “just wait ‘til your father comes home, Venezuela!”).

What most seems to annoy leftist intellectuals about the free market is that, not only is it something that they cannot control or understand, but it accomplishes its task much more effectively and efficiently than the most brilliant person — or group of people — ever could. Sowell cites a famous essay which pointed out that no single person knows enough to produce so much as a single lead pencil. That is, “there is no single individual anywhere who knows how to grow the wood, mine the graphite, produce the rubber, and manufacture the paint.” And yet, no one need ever worry that there won’t be enough pencils, so long as we don’t interfere with the process: “Complex economic processes cause all these things to be done and coordinated by a wide variety of people, just in order to produce something as simple as a lead pencil. Multiply that by a hundred or a thousand when it comes to the complexity of producing a car or a computer.”

Now, if you don’t even know how to produce a lead pencil or even to put lead in your husband’s pencil (Dupree, that was uncalled for), imagine the hubris of a Hillary Clinton deciding to intervene in an industry that accounts for some 17% of our economy and creating a rigid, top-down national healthcare system? Without so much as a fig leaf of economic rationality to cover this flaccid Marxism?

One of the latest memes of the left is “income disparity,” a classic instance of missing the forest for the trees. Yes, there are disparities in income for the same reason that there is so much wealth to begin with. Thus, you cannot attack the one without undermining the other. But as Sowell notes, “If you cannot understand something as simple as making a lead pencil, why should you be surprised that you don’t understand why someone is making a lot more money than somebody else?” Nevertheless, this doesn’t stop leftists from insisting that this “problem” — which they do not understand — is something that requires “fixing,” naturally by coercive governmental policy. This means that the collective — the government — will inevitably “impose policies based on [their] ignorance of what is going on.”

Sowell notes that “when income taxes were imposed in the early 20th century, they applied only to ‘the rich’ and they took a very small percentage of their income.” But “Once the floodgates are opened to this kind of political power... we have seen with the income taxes that they not only spread far beyond ‘the rich,’ they took a serious share of even middle class incomes.”

Remember, the founders saw this coming: “The people who wrote the Constitution were wise enough to understand what a dangerous thing it would be to allow government to take money from people just because those people had it.” That is why it required “a Constitutional amendment to enable the federal government to impose an income tax.”

I think that right there is our original political sin, for it is the point of entry for every subsequent leftist meme, dream, scheme and scam. The power of contemporary “progressives” is based largely on the power to tax. Its other main sources of power are the judiciary, where they can pack courts to legislate unpopular ideas from the bench, and the MSM and academia, where they control the flow of information in order to make the abnormal and aberrant appear normal and healthy. Thus, “social or ideological bias” are “added to envy and ignorance,” producing the progressive “witches’ brew on which to base national policy.”

It is a truism that progressives are obsessed with the distribution of wealth — taking it as a given — while conservatives are concerned with its creation. Nowhere is this more evident than in differing attitudes toward the third world. For just as progressives have no idea why some Americans are wealthier than others, they also have no idea why some nations are so much wealthier than others. Thus, for some 40 years we have been guided by this blinkered policy of simply pouring money into the third world, which disappears like water into a sandy hole at the beach. All of this misguided “idiot compassion” has only made matters demonstrably worse, and put off the day of reckoning when these poorer countries must address the dysfunctional ideas and institutions that keep them mired in poverty.

As usual, progressives have it backwards. They look at the disparities in wealth between various countries and then define the disparities as ipso facto inequalities. “Disparity” is a neutral term, but an “inequality” is something we must courageously do something about! Even if it makes matters much worse!

In asking why the United States, or Japan, or Western Europe have more wealth, “You might as well ask why bees have so much more honey than other creatures.” Here again, we see how the original sin insinuates itself into our economic rhetoric, which verbally “collectivizes” all of “the wealth that was produced individually,” so that the progressive becomes “aghast at the ‘disparities’ that are magically turned into ‘inequities in the distribution of ‘the world’s wealth.’”

And one of the most formidable barriers to wealth is culture. There is an ironic parallel between “progressives” and primitives, in that both have dysfunctional economic ideas, even though the one presumes to be helping the other. Although it may have been different in the past, today “the economic effects of these cultural differences often dwarf the effects of differences in material things like natural resources.” For example, “Natural resources in Uruguay and Venezuela are worth several times as much per capita as natural resources in Japan and Switzerland. But income per capita in Japan and Switzerland is about double that of Uruguay and several times that of Venezuela.”

As always, the problem is bad ideas. But instead of correcting the dysfunctional ideas, progressives want to indulge them while exercising their own equally bad and dysfunctional ideas, all in the name of compassion. We can only thank God that America has always distrusted intellectuals.

So be aware of original sin. It will always come as a seductive idea that seems both liberating and compassionate, but is actually cruel and enslaving.

****

From Taranto’s Best of the Web today:

“Cuba’s health-care system, a favorite of pinkos everywhere, turns out not to be good enough for communist dictator Fidel Castro, as Reuters reports from Madrid:

‘A renowned Spanish surgeon has been rushed to Cuba to treat ailing leader Fidel Castro....The plane carried medical equipment not available in Cuba in case the leader needs further surgery due to his progressively failing health...’”

posted by Gagdad Bob at 12/27/2006 08:28:00 AM

“...the indulgence of envy actually destroys the gratitude that is central to human happiness.

One of the reasons all studies demonstrate that [some] are so much happier and fulfilled than [others] is because they are less envious.

As Augustine teaches, “Whether he will or no, a man is necessarily a slave to the things by means of which he seeks to be happy.” As such, our love is the vector of our lives: “My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.” Thus, Augustine’s pithy definition of virtue, which he called “rightly ordered love.” In short, everyone loves, but the question is, what do they love? For if you love wrongly or unwisely, your soul will be pulled right into wrongness, right along with your wrong love.

One of the reasons [some] are so unhappy is that they love wrongly. They love envy instead of gratitude, self-expression instead of self-mastery, ....

For as the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein demonstrated, envy is both innate and insatiable. Furthermore, envy is really not so much interested in having what it wants, but rather in destroying the painful tension involved in not having it. Envy is irrational, and will not go about obtaining the desired end in a sober and rational way, but will instead take the shortcut of attacking the person who has what they want. ...

Another critical discovery of Melane Klein was that envy and gratitude had an unconscious inverse dialectical relationship, which is to say, the more envy, the less gratitude, and the more gratitude, the less envy. This has many fascinating permutations that work themselves out in different ways.

For example ... “ http://tinyurl.com/afsv62

<>bttt<>

Happiness Is a Moral Obligation
http://tinyurl.com/arb24e

You're welcome.

Here's more:

"If we could somehow eliminate envy from the human genome, there would be almost no reason for the left to exist. They would instantly lose that which animates them, for example, envy masquerading as justice or economic theory."

Here: DRUDGE: BEWARE THE OBAMA 'EVIL EYE'

Excerpt:

"...Envy is such an important but generally ignored concept, probably because people don't want to consider the sinister ways it operates in their own lives. But it is a key that unlocks many mysteries, particularly in politics. So strong and pervasive is envy, that you cannot have a political system that doesn't accommodate or find some way to manage envy. You might say that one party will generally represent the envied, the other the envious. Guess which ones.

"... envy is ubiquitous in primitive groups, and in fact, is the very thing that keeps them primitive and undeveloped.

"In order to advance into capitalism, human beings had to get past the “envy barrier” and tolerate the idea that some people will have more than others.

"In primitive groups, envy is so pervasive that no one is allowed to have more than anyone else--they are trapped in a "zero sum" theory of economics, just as are many liberals today.

"To naive leftists, a primitive culture may look like an egalitarian paradise, but it is actually a paranoid and envious hell, with everyone fearful of the “evil eye” of his envious neighbor should he acquire more than him. For this reason, primitive groups mindlessly destroy surpluses or engage in sacrifices to their “envious” gods.

"Since envy is ubiquitous, we must have a cultural means of expressing and channeling it. This is how I regard the left on a psychological level, as the institutional means through which envy may express itself. For example, this is the role of trial lawyers, who are naturally the greatest contributors to the Democratic party. Most--obviously not all--trial lawyers are free-floating agents of envy, on the prowl for deep pockets that they might empty on behalf of their envious client. The socialist countries of Western Europe are driven by the attempt to placate envy, which only ends up creating more of it. Once you inculcate a sense of entitlement in your people, you have opened the floodgates of envy.

"If you have an “ear” for envy, you will detect it everywhere in the liberal world. In psychoanalytic parlance, it is also called “spoiling,” or devaluing. Again, because the envious person cannot tolerate the good, he attacks the good and makes it bad.

"More generally, the international left does not attack the United States because they hate us. Rather, they hate the United States because they envy us. Precisely because they cannot tolerate our unparalleled goodness and success, they attack it and turn America into a uniquely bad, greedy and envious object.

"It is pure projection. In engaging in this projection of their own greed and envy, they damage what is good and conflate good and evil, but at least it helps to temporarily diminish the pain of their own envy. They do the same thing with Israel. But to use one of Freud's most famous phrases, when it comes to the projection of envy and greed, "the one who smelt it, dealt it."

"....if we could somehow eliminate envy from the human genome, there would be almost no reason for the left to exist. They would instantly lose that which animates them, for example, envy masquerading as justice or economic theory. In order to be happy, we must all keep our envy in check, because envy is the opposite of gratitude. Envy does not appreciate what one has, only what one doesn't have. And our capacity to imagine what we do not have--and that someone else is enjoying it--is literally infinite, as is envy. .." - Robert Godwin, Ph.D (Clinical psychologist) Read complete commentary HERE <>

You Shall Have No Gods Before Envy
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. --Winston Churchill

"A theory regarding abuse was formulated, relying almost entirely on feminist supposition and the input from self-identified abused women. There has never been any kind of formal research or investigation of the feminist theory of abuse; it has simply been presented as a fait accompli and seldom, if ever, questioned. A look through the “Herstory,” (on the Minnesota Center Against Violence and Abuse website, funded by your tax dollars) reveals a stunning lack of mention of research of any kind behind the feminist concept of domestic violence."

"I find no place for leftism, that is, for any ideas that can trace their squalid genealogy back to Karl Marx. Marx, like every other philosopher, was an ingegralist. In his case, he was trying to integrate Hegel and materialism, or Falsehood with falsehood. In so doing he created many seductive intellectual pathologies that continue to infect the mind of man -- the ideas of class struggle, oppression, exploitation, and collectivism, which have morphed into critical theory, deconstruction, victimology, political correctness, radical environmentalism, gender theory, feminism, afro-centrism, multicultrualism, cultural relativism..."

"One more quick point: do not confuse our philosophy with a political party. Rather, we simply identify with the party on which our philosophy might have more influence. In the present political mindscape, it just so happens that there is absolutely no place in the Democratic party for people who hold certain foundational truths, such as that the Constitution means what it says, or that racial discrimination is wrong, or that competition would cure the ills of our sick educational system, or that the Judeo-Christian tradition is fundamental to America's identity and character."

"Remember, most of the problems in the world are caused by bad ideas of intellectuals -- including, of course Islamism. Think of all the bad leftist intellectual ideas of the 1960’s for which we will be paying for the rest of our lives."

What Must We Integrate to Be Integral? bttt

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