Inclusive? Are you sure?

I've been chatting online with a Unitatian minister in the UK for a while now.  He is doing something very un-Unitarian in that he is very actively promoting the church.  I think this is a very good thing.

Unitarians tend to be very open on the subject of creed.  I know Christians, Jews, Atheist, Agnostics, Buddhists & Pagans who are members of various Unintarian-Universalist churches.  Now, he has made a point of saying that Heathens were welcome.  Since some of the heathens I know are Asatru, I'm wondering how welcome they would actually be.  You see, unlike most Pagan and Wiccan traditions, Asatru tend to have very old fashioned beliefs about gender roles. women should be in charge of hearth, home and family, and men should do the providing and protecting.  This is not going to sit well with the usual politically liberal narrative that most Unitarians follow.

In addition, this minister seems to be very intelligent and has deep technical knowledge from his previous career, but he lacks a lot of cultural awareness.  I was amazed to discover that he had no idea who Terry Pratchett is.  For someone who is working in a church in England that is dedicated to social change, not having read Terry Pratchett's social commentaries that are disguised as fantasy is a major failing.

I wish him well and hope I can actually help with the success of the church, but I think he needs to get out more.

All genders are equal,

but some are more equal than others.  I suppose George Orwell isn't popular in schools these days, he told cautionary tales that are all to appropriate today.

I have seen a sharp increase in the "women are being oppressed" theme in the last few weeks.  Even though most of the arguments have been thoroughly debunked, they keep repeating them over and over.  The strategy of telling the same lie over and over has been proven to work in other venues, so why try something new?

I'm tired of it.  I'm tired of being told that I'm a horrible, evil, oppressing white male.  I often wish I didn't have as strong morals and ethics as I do, it's the sociopaths who are succeeding and prospering in today's society.

Liberal narrative?

I've recently started reading a number of blogs again.  One of them is written by a very talented and well known writer who is typically a flaming liberal.  Yeah, he has a Ph.D. as well, why do you ask?

In a recent blog post he attacked the conservatives and Republicans (again) picking on a number of issues.  One of them was education.  He made a big deal about the fact that teen pregnancy in red states was much higher than in blue states.  I will certainly agree that there has been a failure in education.  However, like many liberals, he fails to consider the long term implications of his beliefs.  For all his yammering about evolution, he fails to take into consideration what is happening right now.  Liberals are a dying breed, the conservatives are just plain out-breeding them.  The liberal ideology is a losing strategy in the reproductive lottery.

I'm not happy about it either, but I'm not going to delude myself into thinking the moral high ground is going to be successful in the long term.  Reality is what it is.

On a related note, I have objected to the small-minded attacks that some liberals have been making about Dick Cheney's heart transplant.  As much as I dislike the man and think American politics would be much better off without him involved, as a human being he still deserves a minimal level of compassion.  Dehumanizing those you disagree with has led to atrocities throughout history, I really don't want to see that happen again.

I didn't follow the script

As I have been known to do, I pointed out something that didn't follow the Liberal narrative and I'm being painted as a bad person because of it.  The short summary is that I referred to the Wall Street Journal article of last year that observed that not only are women graduating from college in greater numbers than men, they are also making more money at least until their mid-30s.  This disagrees with the liberal worldview that women are always victims.

I'm really tired of the whole "victim" thing.  We, as a society, have been telling members of too many groups that they are victims for far too long.  Instead we need to start telling them that they can succeed, not that they will fail because they are always being oppressed.  People will live down to expectations, so we need to raise them.

Yeah, I have a history of asking uncomfortable questions and pointing out awkward facts.  This has led to quite a few liberals despising me.  Mind you, I've also been known to point out the same sort of things to conservatives, but the liberals seem to take a much greater dislike to me.

I'm feeling like a bit of an outcast right now.  I have realized that I can more easily reach many of my life's goals by going and joining a fundamentalist Christian megachurch than I can by being a member of a liberal church that claims to support people with open minds.  It's a paradox that I'm still pondering.

Guilt is exhausting

Yet again the media is full of how women are being abused and oppressed. This has led to another round of "why aren't there more women in IT?" and the usual response that it must be because IT is full of misogynists. After decades of being beat on and told that I'm a bad person and that I'm to blame for all the troubles that women have in society, I've had it. I'm no longer able to feel guilty about it. In fact, I'm tired of being used as a scapegoat. I've been in the business for a long time and I've never seen women treated in the discriminatory way that I keep hearing about. These days when somebody starts spouting off that particular line of Politically Correct bullshit, I no longer am willing to give them a lot of credence on anything else they may have to say.

Yeah, there has been a decrease in the number of women in IT and I don't think it is a good thing. There are a lot of factors leading to the change. There was an interesting article publish by the Association of Computing Machinery about a year ago that went into a lot of the social reasons. It was very un-PC. At this point the IT business is no longer a level playing ground for women, instead they have a lot of advantages and they still want more. This sort of behaviour is starting to lead to a strong backlash, which is also going to be a bit unpleasant.

I'm happy to treat women as equals, it just seems that's not what they actually want and they probably aren't wired for. Too bad, it's their loss.

A nice fantasy versus the harsh reality

On one of the mailing lists I'm on (yeah, antique technology, but I've been on it since the mid-1990's) someone commented that if anyone understood how the female brain actually worked, they should write a book on the subject. So I recommended Athol Kay's "Married Mand Sex Life Primer". Wow, I wound up receiving an incredibly vitriolic response about how abusive whole idea was.

So I guess there are still a lot of people out there who don't want to know the truth even though they say they do. They still think gender is merely a social construct. The reality is that men's and women's brains really are wired differently. Understanding how the female mind works can be used to do some very abusive things. It can also be used to provide a very comfortable and happy environment for a woman. Not understanding it is a major contributor to the sky high divorce rate we see today. Being an asshole is currently very effective, being a nice guy is typically a losing strategy in the mating game. However, I think and Mr. Kay has certainly demonstrated that there is a middle ground between being an abusive asshole and a unattractive milktoast, that's what I strive for and I hope others do the same. Just because I know how to do terrible things doesn't mean that I'm going to them, knowledge itself is neither good nor evil, it's how we apply that makes the difference.

Forward into the past...

Yet again there is more and more press about the plight of women in Afghanistan. There is the unspoken assumption that they deserve special treatment just because they are women. That's a very 19th century attitude, which I don't really have a problem with, at least as long as that attitude applies across the board. If we are going to insist on some of the older gender roles, like that of men protecting women, I'm going to insist on the other roles, like women being wives and mothers.

Is this likely to happen? Not a chance. Besides the feminist opposition, there's also that massive drop in consumption that would result in there being fewer total households. I don't think the Powers That Be would ever accept that happening. Politicians and economists would scream about the loss of GDP, even when the average quality of life is improving. Even worse, if we managed to go back to the 19th century values of having extended families, consumption would drop even more. In addition, this sort of return to older values would reduce te need for government assistance. Given that government agencies areloathe to give up any funding or power, there is another opponent to older social structures.