Category Archives: Feminism

UPDATED: Princess Ameerah Al-Taweel

Aesthetics, Business, Celebrity, Classical Liberalism, Economy, Etiquette, Feminism, Free Markets, Islam, Middle East

Is Princess Ameerah Al-Taweel the most beautiful woman in the world? Indisputably. Her face is simply exquisite. Poise and manners are perfect too. Mrs. Al-Taweel’s simple, rich-girl solutions to endemic unemployment sound more left-liberal than classically liberal, but her heart is pure and she is bright. Married to “Buffett of Arabia,” Ameerah Al-Taweel is also terrifically wealthy. I hope she does not pick up any ho-like mannerisms while in America.

Ameerah Al-Taweel’s Interview With CNN’s Piers Morgan

UPDATE (Sept. 25): It would seem that Princess Al-Taweel is a “micro-credit cultist.” The role of the NGO, as she see it, is to encourage economic growth by doling out loans to plucky people who want to start a business. Her belief in the “Micro-Credit Cult” is understandable. Saudi Arabia is a rentier state, where an aristocratic, authoritarian upper-class manages the country’s vast natural resource of oil. In the Saudi situation, this custodian class is probably more benevolent than a democratic despotism would be.

Toy Makers Play Sexy Games With Toddlers

Family, Feminism, Gender, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Sex

Breast feeding is a perfectly wholesome choice but so is privacy paramount. As is age- and gender appropriate behavior. At least in a healthy society, which our post-modern culture is certainly not.

“After a successful run overseas, reports RT, “Spain-based Berjuan Toys is bringing their Breast Milk Baby to the United States. The realistic play-thing aimed at kids two and up is trying to teach the youth of America that breast-feeding is a healthy, natural way to feed a baby — and this is something that can be taught with a $90 piece of plastic complete with a realistic suckling mechanism.”

I don’t mean to be a prude, but I’m glad my daughter was raised at a time, not so long ago, when “My Little Pony” was prized above all toys—lots of My Little Ponies and paraphernalia. How innocent and sweet such play-things now seem.

I don’t want your two-year-old tot playing with mine if yours is a precocious, sexualized brat who shows mine how to append a suckling doll to her tiny chest and encourages little brother to join in the breast-feeding “fun.”

Children learn socially appropriate behavior through role models and modeling. Having breast fed my daughter until she rejected me (at 10 months), I did so in private and was modest about it. No one feels comfortable around a woman who insists that her mammary glands are not sexual object too, and foists them on bashful company (now boys, behave yourselves).

And who wants a two-year-old brat to sound like a breastfeeding advocate during playtime? Propagandized American kids are painful enough as it is.

The feminization of little boys is as serious as the sexualization of little girts. Oh for boyhood before BB guns and “bang-bang you’re dead” were banned; and for family life prior to “One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads.”

Then there is the importance of boundaries—between the private and the public, between adults and children, between experience and inexperience (the last should respect the first). Uncouth, uncivilized societies such as ours is becoming are typically without boundaries.

RELATED POST.

Junking Gender

EU, Europe, Feminism, Gender, Homosexuality, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Sex

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It is one thing to let children be who they are; a girl to play football, if she likes; a boy to bake bread. It’s quite another to engineer the obliteration of gender roles. And it is one thing for a private school to engage in “engineering equality between the sexes,” as the reporter euphemizes an experiment underway in a Swedish preschool based in Stockholm; it is quite another for the state to compel its tax base to pay and partake in such dangerous, invasive folly. Oh well, it’s good to know that American pedagogues are not the dumbest in the world:

At the “Egalia” preschool, staff avoid using words like “him” or “her” and address the 33 kids as “friends” rather than girls and boys.
From the color and placement of toys to the choice of books, every detail has been carefully planned to make sure the children don’t fall into gender stereotypes.
“Society expects girls to be girlie, nice and pretty and boys to be manly, rough and outgoing,” says Jenny Johnsson, a 31-year-old teacher. “Egalia gives them a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be.”
The taxpayer-funded preschool which opened last year in the liberal Sodermalm district of Stockholm for kids aged 1 to 6 is among the most radical examples of Sweden’s efforts to engineer equality between the sexes from childhood onward.

The literature in developmental psychology is clear—it was at least when I attended university. The development of gender identity early in life is a function of biology, psychology and learning. A small sample develops the opposite gender identity, likely because of innate, biological processes. It is a blessing that a male or female child no longer has to agonize over an innate mismatch between his or her physical being (for example, male) and the gender identity that attaches to it (female).

In these cases, acceptance and kindness is key. But to engineer gender confusion is a horrible idea. Profoundly stupid too. Going overboard and parading sexuality, any sexuality, in schools and the workplace—that’s plain vulgar, regressive and uncivilized. (See “Libertarianism Lite”)

UPDATE I: US Engineering & Egalitarian Education

Barack Obama, Bush, Business, Education, Europe, Feminism, Human Accomplishment, Israel, Labor, Technology

I heard it said that in the US there are two types of engineers: overworked or unemployed. A tough economy would indeed force increases in productivity: fewer and fewer workers are doing more and more of work. But there’s something else at play. It comports with what Eric Spiegel, chief executive in the US for Siemens, has exposed:

There’s a mismatch between the jobs that are available, at least in our portfolio, and the people that we see out there,” Mr Spiegel told the Financial Times. “There is a shortage (of workers with the right skills.)” … a recent survey from Manpower, the employment agency, found that 52 percent of leading US companies reported difficulties in recruiting essential staff, up from 14 percent in 2010.

German education is known for its rigor and high standards. But more importantly: The Germans run the same sort of schools I attended growing up in Israel, where, because no pedagogue believes all kids are created equal, students are streamed into different tracks.

Wikipedia:

… German secondary education includes five types of school. The Gymnasium is designed to prepare pupils for university education and finishes with the final examination Abitur, after grade 12 or 13. The Realschule has a broader range of emphasis for intermediate pupils and finishes with the final examination Mittlere Reife, after grade 10; the Hauptschule prepares pupils for vocational education and finishes with the final examination Hauptschulabschluss, after grade 9 or 10 and the Realschulabschluss after grade 10. There are two types of grade 10: one is the higher level called type 10b and the lower level is called type 10a; only the higher level type 10b can lead to the Realschule and this finishes with the final examination Mittlere Reife after grade 10b. This new path of achieving the Realschulabschluss at a vocationally-oriented secondary school was changed by the statutory school regulations in 1981 – with a one-year qualifying period. During the one-year qualifying period of the change to the new regulations, pupils could continue with class 10 to fulfil the statutory period of education. After 1982, the new path was compulsory, as explained above. Other than this, there is the Gesamtschule, which combines the approaches. There are also Förderschulen/Sonderschulen. One in 21 pupils attends a Förderschule.[2][3] Nevertheless the Förderschulen/Sonderschulen can also lead, in special circumstances, to a Hauptschulabschluss of both type 10a or type 10b, the latter of which is the Realschulabschluss. German children only attend school in the morning. There is no provision for serving lunch. There is a lot more homework, heavy emphasis on the “three R’s” and very few extracurricular activities.

The secondary school I attended (I grew up in Israel) provided a vocational track, just like German schools do, where kids with no academic aptitude acquired useful skills and graduated with a diploma in woodwork, welding, sewing, etc. The academically inclined were also streamed into grades in accordance with aptitude. You could take math, for example, on different levels of difficulty. We had a special math genius class of 5 kids with super high IQs. Nobody pretended everyone was equal. Kids were kept busy with the kind of work that was best suited to their abilities, not egos.

On the other hand, “evidence of how stupid American students (and teachers) are has been slowly amassing. The creeping cretinism is confirmed by reports like “A Nation at Risk.” Especially indicative are the below-international-average scores of 17-year-olds. One out of four children is dropping out and not graduating. High schools have been so dumbed down that even average students sit bone idle. Fully 50 percent of students with IQs that border on mental retardation manage to pass. Unlike our European counterparts, American universities, colleges and even corporations spend a fortune on teaching students elementary things they should have learned in high school. College professors attest to a decline in the quality of students entering colleges.” (“THE WORM IN THE APPLE OF AMERICAN EDUCATION”)

In the US of Obama’s “Yes We Can” and Bush’s “No Child Left Behind,” all kids are treated as equally able. If a subject appeals to a certain cohort—or selects for smarts—why then, we cancel it; make it fun by sucking out the hard work required to master it; make it girl/minority/Deep-Space-alien friendly. New Math replaces eternal math; social studies does away with history, etc.

Look, libertarians, yes, public schools and unions are a big part of the problem. As important, however, is the country’s progressive pedagogic philosophy, which dominates in private schools as well.

We’ve ditched canon and core curriculum. We’re replaced reason with sentimentality and attitude. We’ve manned our schools with females to the exclusion of strong male role models. I would not wish to be the parent of a young, hyper-active boy drawn to the hard sciences, in schools full of females, bent on promoting every mythical, politically correct orthodoxy that pervades the Zeitgeist.

What Herr Spiegel has observed is the end result of decades of these low or no standards.

UPDATE I (June 21): Abelard Lindsey: My sources confirm your point about HR. But you’re wrong about the MBA managers. They are no better: these are technically clueless individuals, hot-housed in America’s pinko business schools, who have no place screening for technical and temperamental competence. However, America’s most famed corporations have screening processes that go on for days and have a candidate interview in front of many higher-ups. One particularly brilliant friend, a genius who works for Apple, was regaled for days with the intellectual equivalent of a special ops training unit. He loved every minute of it. (I would have crumbled.)

Alas, the largest and richest corporation work a lot like government, the connections between private property and profits having been long since loosened. These giants consist of many fiefdoms, layered with deadwood, and governed often by nepotistic hiring practices. It takes massive failures, as Microsoft’s Kin project surely was, to instigate some corrections (but seldom any firings).