Some selected COVID-19 Statistics

Some selected COVID-19 statistics and research were posted to my FB status, 2021 08 11 10:41 am. They are no longer accessible at FB but now posted here.

Those graphs and comments are now posted here, before they become completely lost. Here goes:

Some selected COVID-19 Statistics

  • Vaccinations – 22 top-ranking countries

    Vaccinations – 22 top-ranking countries

    Vaccinations – 22 top-ranking countries

    Source of graph (graph is interactive at the source)

  • Daily new COVID-19 deaths per million people – US, UK, Israel, India, Canada

    Daily new COVID-19 deaths per million people – US, UK, Israel, India, Canada

    Daily new COVID-19 deaths per million people – US, UK, Israel, India, Canada

    Source of graph (graph is interactive at the source)

  • Daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases per million people – US, UK, Israel, India, Canada

    Daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases per million people – US, UK, Israel, India, Canada

    Daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases per million people – US, UK, Israel, India, Canada

    Source of graph (graph is interactive at the source)

From the American Journal of Therapeutics:

THERAPEUTIC ADVANCES

Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection: A Systematic Review, Meta-analysis, and Trial Sequential Analysis to Inform Clinical Guidelines

Bryant, Andrew MSc1,*; Lawrie, Theresa A. MBBCh, PhD2; Dowswell, Therese PhD2; Fordham, Edmund J. PhD2; Mitchell, Scott MBChB, MRCS3; Hill, Sarah R. PhD1; Tham, Tony C. MD, FRCP4

Author Information

American Journal of Therapeutics: July/August 2021 – Volume 28 – Issue 4 – p e434-e460
doi: 10.1097/MJT.0000000000001402

Abstract

Background:

Repurposed medicines may have a role against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The antiparasitic ivermectin, with antiviral and anti-inflammatory properties, has now been tested in numerous clinical trials.

Areas of uncertainty:

We assessed the efficacy of ivermectin treatment in reducing mortality, in secondary outcomes, and in chemoprophylaxis, among people with, or at high risk of, COVID-19 infection.

Data sources:

We searched bibliographic databases up to April 25, 2021. Two review authors sifted for studies, extracted data, and assessed risk of bias. Meta-analyses were conducted and certainty of the evidence was assessed using the GRADE approach and additionally in trial sequential analyses for mortality. Twenty-four randomized controlled trials involving 3406 participants met review inclusion.

Therapeutic Advances:

Meta-analysis of 15 trials found that ivermectin reduced risk of death compared with no ivermectin (average risk ratio 0.38, 95% confidence interval 0.19–0.73; n = 2438; I2 = 49%; moderate-certainty evidence). This result was confirmed in a trial sequential analysis using the same DerSimonian–Laird method that underpinned the unadjusted analysis. This was also robust against a trial sequential analysis using the Biggerstaff–Tweedie method. Low-certainty evidence found that ivermectin prophylaxis reduced COVID-19 infection by an average 86% (95% confidence interval 79%–91%). Secondary outcomes provided less certain evidence. Low-certainty evidence suggested that there may be no benefit with ivermectin for “need for mechanical ventilation,” whereas effect estimates for “improvement” and “deterioration” clearly favored ivermectin use. Severe adverse events were rare among treatment trials and evidence of no difference was assessed as low certainty. Evidence on other secondary outcomes was very low certainty.

Conclusions:

Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.

Full Text

If one searches the Internet for “India and Ivermectin”, contrary and controversial information on the efficacy of Ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 will be found.

Although I am not qualified to sort with any certainty the wheat from the chaff in the profusion of controversial claims, the question remains why India appears to be doing better in fighting off the COVID-19 pandemic than most – if not all – developed nations.

The case of India is not at all clear. At least one Indian state, Tamil Nadu, ruled against the use of Ivermectin as the preferred medication for the treatment of COVID-19. Mind you, there are reports that Tamil Nadu now has the highest COVID-19 infection rate in India. (Video on more on those circumstances – It will take about five minutes for the VIMEO video of an interview by Dr, Bret Weinstein of Dr, Pierre Kory to begin playing, but the wait is worth it.)

Posted in Censorship, Health | Comments Off on Some selected COVID-19 Statistics

FB censorship is capricious and illogical

FB censorship is capricious and illogical. Apparently FB fact checkers prefer irrelevant climate information to that from reputable sources.

Yesterday, 2021 08 10 at 2:03 AM, Randall Stone had posted a meme, as the initial posting for a FB discussion thread:

1000 year Storm
CYCLE
Is proof of climate change!
Is it me or do others see something wrong here?

The first comment posted (by FB) after that initial posting stated:

[FB] See how the average temperature in your area is changing.
Explore Climate Science Info 

I responded to that:

How “the average temperature in your area is changing” has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of this discussion thread.

Randall Stone replied:

Walter H. Schneider that makes no sense! Who said anything about temperature in any area? Apparently who have no clue about this post nor the thread, this was the new media narrative news report headline, do it has EVERYTHING to do with the topic! Besides the fact that post is a question between wheather CYCLE and the climate change narrative, as it can’t be both, it is climate change OR it is a cycle!
Mama taught me to put Brain in gear before putting mouth in gear, in your case before putting finger in gear.

My response:

Randall Stone Wrt what your mama told you, are you seeing a different version of this discussion thread than I do?

My comment that you object to is in response to the first comment shown after your initial posting for this discussion thread, as per the appended screenshot: “See how the average temperature in your area is changing”, with a link that encourages the reader to “Explore Climate Science Info”. [The preceding quotes are from the screenshot of the FB annotation. –WHS]

When I follow that link, I am shown a graph that is being introduced with the statement, “The average annual temperature in Alberta has increased since 1950.” The indicated time interval of 70 years does not permit me to see 1000-year climate cycles, but there are many sources of information produced by credible and trusted climate researchers (including NASA) that show declining long term temperature trends for many locations and varying intervals that FB does not refer to, for example: https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/vostok-10kd1.jpg

More: https://wattsupwiththat.com/paleoclimate/

FB did not permit me to post that comment. The comment simply vanished. On 2021 08 11 I discovered this notification:

Today at 10:50 AM
About your comment

Your comment goes against our Community Standards on spam
No one else can see your comment.

We have these standards to prevent things like false advertising, fraud and security breaches.

Apparently FB does not like objective and informative climate facts from reputable, trusted sources. It is impossible to escape the impression that FB censorship is capricious and illogical. After all, the comment that FB objects to has nothing to do with “things like false advertising, fraud and security breaches.”

At any rate, after my initial response to Randal Stone vanished, I posted another one to Randal Stone:

Randall Stone Wrt what your mama told you, my previous response to you vanished. I’ll make a shorter one: read the first response (by FB) after your initial posting.

That comment apparently escaped the FB censorship algorithms, because it is still being shown in Randall Stone’s discussion thread. As of the time of posting this blog entry, Randall Stone had not responded to that comment.

Update 2021 08 25

FB did not let me post a link to this book review:

«Customer Review
By VEL – The Contemporary Heretic
5.0 out of 5 stars

Were Women Oppressed in the Past? A Masterpiece of Masculism from the Forgotten Forefather of the Modern Men’s Rights Movement

Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2014»
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1L2QZSCU5Q3PZ/

That review is of this:

The Legal Subjection of Men” (Dodo Press), by Ernest Belfort Bax

After trying for an hour, I still could not post those links. No notification was provided as to why I experienced the inability to post the links.

Posted in Censorship | Comments Off on FB censorship is capricious and illogical

History of child- and youth-mortality rates

Especially with respect to the history of child- and youth-mortality rates, one should never judge the past by today’s standards.

There is a serious flaw in the reasoning related to children who died while attending Canadian residential schools. Was the mortality rate for children much better in general society?

Never blindly trust statistics that are shown in isolation and don’t permit comparisons. Invariably, such statistics present advocacy numbers that brush the history of objective mortality statistics out of existence.

The reality of mortality rates for children in developed nations during the interval the Canadian residential schools were in operation was that during the end of the 19th Century, in general society, about one-third of children died before reaching age 12.

That means that about one out of three children died in general society before reaching age 12, while some of the estimates of the mortality rate in Canadian residential schools cite a mortality rate of one in twenty. That means that children in residential schools may have experienced better life expectancies than those in general society or those living on reservations.

Consider:

Many researchers have independently studied mortality rates for children in the past: in different societies, locations, and historical periods. The average across a large number of historical studies suggests that in the past around one-quarter of infants died in their first year of life and around half of all children died before they reached the end of puberty. Since then the risk of death for children has fallen around the world. The global average today is 10 times lower than the average of the past. In countries with the best child health today an infant is 170 times more likely to survive….

Historical estimates of mortality

This visualization shows the historical estimates Volk and Atkinson brought together from a large number of different studies. Shown with the blue marks are estimates of the share of newborns that died in the first year of life – the infant mortality rate. And shown with the red marks you see different estimates of the share that never reached adulthood – what we here refer to as the ‘youth mortality rate’.

Across the entire historical sample the authors found that on average, 26.9% of newborns died in their first year of life and 46.2% died before they reached adulthood. Two estimates that are easy to remember: Around a quarter died in the first year of life. Around half died as children.

What is striking about the historical estimates is how similar the mortality rates for children were across this very wide range of 43 historical cultures. Whether in Ancient Rome; Ancient Greece; the pre-Columbian Americas; Medieval Japan or Medieval England; the European Renaissance; or Imperial China: Every fourth newborn died in the first year of life. One out of two died in childhood…. »

More: https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past 

While the average youth mortality rate was 46.2% across 23 historical societies during the past 2400 years, up to the year 1900, the global youth mortality rate fell to 27% by 1950 and to 4.6% by 2017.

In Canada, youth mortality had fallen to 5.62% by 2050 and 0.62% by 2017. It would have been substantially higher for much of the time during which Canada’s residential schools operated. Consider that the “Average youth mortality rate across 20 different hunter-gatherer societies [had been] 48.8%.

Posted in False Allegations, Health, Propaganda Exposed | Comments Off on History of child- and youth-mortality rates

The face of FB shadow banning

Updates
2021 04 11: to show FB censorship in the guise of a support message
2021 05 31: to illustrate FB censorship of a link to an article in Canada’s National Post

The face of FB shadow banning shows itself quite clearly in this:

Given that they are interesting if not hot topics for which I had wanted to start discussion threads, and that I have close to 3000 FB friends, it seems hardly possible that as much as a week or even a month later there has not been a single like or comment on many of my initial postings at my FB timeline. Postings since just May 1:

For more instances of FB shadow banning, go down the entries in my FB Timeline.

Update 2021 05 27

Of course, often, and lately increasingly more often, FB employs straight censorship, over and above plain old shadow banning, such as in this case, where I had tried to post a comment to someone’s remark that giving the U.S. voting franchise to women was not necessarily a good thing:

FB cesorship in the guise of a support message

FB censorship in the guise of a support message

Update 2021 05 31

Facebook sent me a notification that informed me that sharing a link to a National Post article about “The (very strong) case of COVID-19 leaking from a Chinese lab” is spam. That is even though lately there were news that Facebook relented on its customary censorship of all information about a COVID-19 leak from the Wuhan lab. Obviously the news of Facebook relenting on the censoring of such news are fake news, but here is a screenshot of the notification FB had send to me:

FB_censorship_NP-article_wuhan-virus.png

FB deems an attempt to share a link to a National Post article to be spam. 

The screenshot is linked to the censored National Post article.

 

Posted in Censorship | Comments Off on The face of FB shadow banning

Is this FB shadow banning?

Is this FB shadow banning? On 2021 04 29 I posted a link to an ABC article on my FB timeline. 19 hours later the posting had not received a single like or comment. Here is a screen shot of the posting:

Given that it is a hot topic for which I had wanted to start a discussion thread, and that I have close to 3000 FB friends, it seems hardly possible that almost a whole day later there has not been a single like or comment on the initial FB posting.

The posting is listed in my FB activity log. I have no problem with accessing it on my timeline.  It is fairly obvious that no one else has seen the posting. That is shadow banning.

The following article explains some of the circumstances and aspects of shadow banning.

How to Tell If Your Content Is Being “Shadow Banned” on Facebook

A screenshot of the facebook app which is know for shadowbanning.

Published November 9, 2020

Facebook has not exactly been the role model in privacy and security, as they have undergone numerous investigations for how they handle user data. The world’s largest social media platform reportedly uses user data as a bargaining chip in striking deals with competitors. Consequently, the government plans to slap antitrust lawsuits against Facebook by year’s end for apparently using its powerful market position to stifle competition. These are just among the several privacy issues raised against Facebook, and that’s without mentioning “shadowbanning.”….

See the full article.

More postings I made during the last little while were shadow banned. Just check my FB timeline for the last week or the last month.

gab is a good alternative to Facebook

I am now subscribed to gab, where there is no censorship. I like it.

See also:

Posted in Censorship | Comments Off on Is this FB shadow banning?

FB censorship reaches absurd levels

FB censorship reaches absurd levels. Today I tried to post a comment on a FB-friend’s timeline. Facebook prevented me from doing so, twice, without offering an explanation. Here is the comment that offended Facebook.

My previous comment vanished into the black void.

To put the COVID-19 pandemic [în India] into context, have a look at the appended graph (interactive at its source).

Source of appended graph: https://tinyurl.com/4vb87562

The curious aspect of that is that not even the fact that the graph came from a reputable source (Our World in Data), and that the data displayed in the graph comes from an impeccable source (Johns Hopkins University) prevented Facebook from censoring the comment. That is not all.

It cannot possibly be a coincidence that, after I had made the two attempts to post the comment, my keyboard layout mysteriously got changed to the QWERTZ layout. That did not happen by accident and required hacking into my laptop.

You can comment on this posting here.

Posted in Censorship | 1 Comment

FB censorship intrudes into family life

FB censorship intrudes into family life but not only that. In the name of political correctness, it censors the truth and not merely opinions.

The other day, on Facebook, I shared a photo that showed a car with a sheet of plywood stuck in the windshield.  The caption was, “Was gonna go through insurance but sold the plywood and bought a brand new car.”

Lumber prices have gone through the roof. The caption of the photo is almost too true to be funny. My daughter shared the photo and posted it at her FB time line, as the initial posting for a new discussion thread. She explained there to someone that lumber prices had gone up due to supply and demand. 

Supply and Demand

In some cases lumber prices have doubled and tripled during the past year.

I responded to that and posted two links, one to a chart displaying a trendline of lumber prices during the past five years, and another one to a CBC article that explains how much and why COVID-19 measures contributed in Canada to the enormously increased Lumber prices.

Lumber price history:

historical lumber prices as of 2021 04 21

historical lumber prices as of 2021 04 21

What the CBC article states:

COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on just about every industry — sticking a wrench into the normal forces of supply and demand — and lumber is a prime example.

When the pandemic hit, lumber mills were forced to close. Then, a nation of people stuck at home started building more decks and fences. People renovated to accommodate their new work-from-home lives.

And that’s left [saw]mills scrambling to get logs, lumber yards short on supply, and contractors forced to pay more for what supply is available.

To my surprise, yesterday I received a notification from Facebook, informing me that my response to my daughter Nancy’s comment on lumber prices being driven by supply and demand violates their “community standards” on spam, and that only I was able to see my response to Nancy. Who did my response spam?

FB notification

Facebook judges that the truth violates their “community standards” on spam

Well, what do you know? Facebook does not want anyone to tell the truth about what caused lumber prices to go up, even though the truth about that has nothing to do with my opinion on it, other than that my opinion on that is that it is futile to argue against the truth on that.

See also:

 

Posted in Censorship | Comments Off on FB censorship intrudes into family life

Support, a euphemism for censorship

Updates
2021 04 11: to show  screen shot of FB spam notification
2021 04 12: to describe the next stage of FB censorship

Support, a euphemism for censorship — A “support message” is not a support message when FB sends it to its clients. That is when the  support message is a notification that a comment a FB client had wanted to post in a FB discussion thread will not be displayed by FB.

The other day I wanted to post a comment but found that it never made its appearance in the FB discussion thread it had been intended for. Today I received a Facebook “support message” that solved the mystery:

When a FB Support Message is a notification of censorship

It does not matter how intensely one tries to understand why that comment deserves to be censored, it is impossible to discern the justification for censoring it.

Perhaps the graph that was appended to the comment is the problem.  Here it is:

Interest over time in MGTOW vs feminism
(Click on the image to get to the source of the graph. That will enable 
you to make comparisons to other terms, such as Trump or COVID.)

It is hard to see what, if anything, in that graph deserves to be censored.

Well, just now I received another notification from Facebook. This time they called the comment that they for unknown reasons don’t like, “Spam”.

FB "spam" notification

No explanation was offered why they consider the comment to be spam. Who does the comment spam? Facebook doesn’t say. I insist that, going by hard and cold logic, no spam is involved and that the graph I had appended provides a perspective of the impact of the influence of MGTOW that no one other than I ever presented to anyone, and, as I recall, I did it no more than once or twice before over a good number of years.

The odd thing about Facebook’s objection, namely that they “have these standards to prevent things like false advertising, fraud and security breaches,” is that my comment does not falsely advertise anything, commits no fraud and breaches no one’s security. My comment and its appended graph does nothing more than present the truth. What possible harm could that truth represent? Why does Facebook try so hard to censure that truth? Facebook needs to examine its algorithms.

Facebook wants to rule the world through algorithms, but algorithms, as imposed by Facebook, are a very poor substitute for intelligent exchange of intelligence. It should not surprise anyone that Facebook’s censoring of my “objectionable” comment occurred for no other reason than that the comment mentioned nothing more objectionable than the word “Trump”, which gave Facebook’s censorship algorithms something to latch on to.

Facebook’s censorship affects how billions of human communicate with one-another, but it will be a long time and perhaps take forever before Facebook’s collective intelligence equals that of all of human intelligence.

Update 2021 04 12

Yesterday a link to this blog article was provided at the FB discussion thread at which FB had prevented me from posting my original comment. This morning it was found that FB had deleted the comment containing that link. 

Regardless of how one looks at all of what FB did and does to censor my original comment and the reactions to it on that discussion thread, it is evidence of a deep determination by FB to micro-manage its efforts to censor the communications of billions of people.

Certainly, Facebook’s algorithms serve that purpose very effectively, but that still does not provide them with any intelligence. The principle of GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) applies, to the detriment of humanity.

See also:

Posted in Censorship, Civil Rights, Feminism, Men's Issues | Comments Off on Support, a euphemism for censorship

Recovering All the Past with Amaury de Riencourt

Recovering All the Past with Amaury de Riencourt, a review by Frank Zepezauer (first published in the Jan/Feb 2000 issue of The Liberator)

Recovering All the Past with Amaury de Riencourt

By Frank Zepezauer, Resident Philosopher

In 1974, Amaury de Riencourt wrote a book which helped to recover a past that feminists were busily trashing. It was Sex and Power in History[1]. The title is somewhat misleading. Feminists at the time were trashing the entire past, all of humanity’s story going back to our departure from the higher primates. Which meant not only all of history, what has been written, but all of pre-history everything that happened before the written word.

And feminists were saying that the entire process, all of humanity’s history, started wrong and the woman’s movement was here to set everything right. Feminists always thought big and planned big, supplying us with a new example of “chutzpa.” The word means big time brazen boldness, breathtaking nerviness. An often-used example was the man who killed his parents and then begged for mercy on the grounds he was an orphan. Feminists have given us a better example: a small group of determined woman who believe they know how to reinvent the universe and are hell bent on getting the job done.

Among the critics who examined this megalomania was Amaury de Riencourt who went with feminists all the way back to the beginning, and concluded that they got the whole thing wrong. He then issued a warning, that if they ever got enough power to bring off their hare-brained project, they would generate a disaster. He said that the feminist revolt, “if not understood and coped with at its cultural root, could destroy Western society.”[2]

It’s now twenty-five years later and events have proved Amaury de Riencourt a prophet. We are just now beginning to understand the feminist project—what these madwoman ideologues really want to do—but we have not yet adequately coped with it. Radical feminists in the 1990s were the big gorilla in domestic policy, shoving through one piece of legislation after another, and, at the beginning of the 21st century, they enjoy enough power to push through still more, enough to destroy our culture right down to its roots.

Amaury de Riencourt is therefore worth reading, but his Sex and Power is out of print and hard to get. In this and following columns I will try to give you enough of a summary so that you will get the substance of what he said. At this point, I’d like to offer you an overview of his main ideas, but before I do that I want to say something that needs to be said as a preface to any discussion about women and power in society. It is the demographic reality that nearly every society seeks to perpetuate itself, to become a people with a future as well as a past. We see ourselves as Americans, for example, not only in terms of who we have been and who we are now but who we will be in the future. The “we” we talk about includes the living and the dead and those yet to be born.

To perpetuate ourselves we must have children who will continue our story. And to perpetuate ourselves at the same level, each woman living today must bear at least two children. Demographers take into account women who can’t or won’t bear children so the replacement rate is something like 2.2 children per woman. This demographic truth is not part of a patriarchal conspiracy. It is not something men conjured up to bedevil women. It is what each woman has to do to take us into the future. Simone de Beauvoir, who incidentally de Riencourt finds to be terribly wrongheaded, called this reality women’s enslavement to the species. It may be so. But it hasn’t been men who did the enslaving.

Throughout most of history, nearly every society not only wanted to keep its population at replacement level but to grow larger. That meant that each woman had to bear more than the basic two children. She had to bear three or four or five or more. And she had to bear them under circumstances that obtained in most societies throughout history. They included the fact that many children did not survive their infancy. It was a common experience to lose at least one child, and many families lost two or more. That meant that each woman had to bear more than four children to insure that at least two would grow into adulthood.

Another circumstance was the fact that many women did not survive childbirth. It is a terrible truth. In most societies in most of the past until well into the 19th Century, each woman risked her life to bear a child. It is a terrible truth but it is not a condition imposed on women by men and men have had their own terrible truths to live with. In most societies in most of the past right down to the 21st Century men have also had to risk their lives, often in defense of their wives and children. Throughout history, motherhood and fatherhood were risky professions and every decade has piled up casualties.

These facts have applied throughout most of history, but they do not apply to American society going into the 21st Century. We have since 1970 experienced a great fear of population explosion and have sharply cut back our birth rate. At present, it is just about at replacement level and we have achieved “zero population growth.” It is now going past that level to a point where our population will shrink. We have not noticed the effects because we have boosted our immigration rates. But even with immigration, if we continue the way we are going we will shrink.

A lot of people believe that’s a good thing and are celebrating. But Amaury de Riencourt sees it as a sign of cultural decline. It has happened before in Western history. The great Greek civilization died out fairly soon after it had reached its greatest achievements in the fifth century BC. And it died out in large part because Greeks were no longer reproducing themselves. Some spirit in them had shriveled and many of them stopped having children.

The same thing happened later to the Romans, which is why I will now repeat de Riencourt’s warning, this time quoting it in full: “…the feminist revolt which, if not understood and coped with at its cultural root could destroy Western society as a similar movement destroyed Roman civilization. [3]

The “feminist revolt” de Riencourt is speaking of began in Augustan times and was a major cause of Rome’s decline. There had been a similar feminist revolt in Greece, which began at the end of the great Periclean Age. There have also been feminist revolts since then, during the Renaissance for example, at the beginning of the 19th Century, and once again in the middle of the 20th Century.

These revolts constitute evidence for a point that de Riencourt makes throughout Sex and Power in History. It is that Western Civilization is the only civilization that has had feminist revolts. He attributes that fact to a fundamental imbalance between the masculine and the feminine principle that set in at its very beginnings. De Riencourt follows Jungian psychology on this point, that each individual as well as the society at large has a combination of anima, the feminine principle, and animus, the masculine principle. In a healthy individual both principles are at work, but in men the animus should dominate and in women the anima should dominate, but it should not prevail exclusively. Each man should have some anima and each woman should have some animus. In that sense, de Riencourt says, we are all psychologically androgynous.

(This is, incidentally, not the kind of androgyny feminists have tried to foster. Feminists believe that masculinity and femininity are social constructs, essentially fictions created by the patriarchy. Thus neither exists naturally in the male or female. It is only imposed on them by society. All we are, feminists believe, are packages of human potential. Each male or female has the same potential, all the same feelings and appetites and instincts, and, in the kind of society feminists would establish, each male and female would be free to develop their potential as they please without having to accommodate to artificial “sex roles.” Thus, in the feminist view, we are all born free androgynes and are enslaved by the imposition of a femininity and masculinity which pleases the patriarchy, and enslaves the individual man or woman.)

By the same token a healthy society has a balance between the anima and the animus. In that sense Western Civilization has not been as healthy as it could be. From its beginning the animus has been too dominant, suppressing the anima almost, sometimes, to the point of extinction. This is due in large part to the fact that it was formed by a blending of Jewish and Greek culture and both cultures were emphatically, exuberantly masculine.

De Riencourt’s theory is that both cultures were founded by nomads and nomadic societies tend to be strongly masculine. Agricultural societies, which prevailed during a great part of pre-history, tend to emphasize the feminine. In such societies women are involved in the farm work, and women enjoy more social equality. In addition, farmers rely on the bounty of “Mother Earth” and adapt themselves to a seasonal cycle which sees growth, harvesting, death, and rebirth… and this cycle inclines societies toward worshipping female deities, in particular “the Great Mother.” In those societies the anima is very strong if not dominant.

Nomadic societies, on the other hand, are less bound to the earth and its cyclic rhythms. They develop no attachment to any particular piece of terrain and guide their movements by the sun and the stars. They are thus inclined to worship sky gods, particularly the sun. Historians who traced a major shift in mythology from Great Mother families to sky god families, call the shift “solarization.” Worshipping the sun was a guy thing and that’s what nomads tended to do.

The early Hebrews, for example, were mostly sheepherders who moved up and down the fertile crescent. They had little to do at that time with farming, a disinclination which appears in the story of Cain, the farmer who is rejected by Jehovah and Abel, the shepherd who enjoys his favor.

Orthodox Judaism has since remained heavily masculine, retaining for example an all-male clergy and sharply dividing the sexes. To this day a woman may not pray at the Wailing Wall.

The early Greeks were also herdsmen but they did not originate in what is now Greece. They came in from the Asian steppes where they had roamed for centuries. They were tough and warlike and macho, and when they came down into Europe in the second millennium BC, they tore up the place. This event is called the “Dorian Invasion,” and it initiated a dark age.

Little is known about what happened during a three century period. What little we do know tells us that the existing civilizations, based on Great Mother worship, were all but extinguished. By the end of the period the Greek pantheon was headed by a male god, Zeus, and the entire mythology was male oriented. However, the barbaric Dorians slowly became civilized themselves, largely by assimilating the cultures they conquered. We see them moving in that direction in the Homeric epics where they are still tough, warlike, and macho but are showing signs of the cultivation which flowered in the Periclean Age.

But that great epoch was so heavily masculinized that women, who had more status and power in the pre-Homeric ages, rebelled. I will tell about that event in Part 2 of this series.

It turns out that Western Civilization was not only founded by two heavily masculine cultures. It has been periodically reinvigorated by still other masculine cultures. There have been a number of invasions into Europe initiated by barbaric Asian tribes, such as the Goths, the Huns, and the Mongols, all of them herdsmen, all of them super macho. I’ll tell more about them in parts of my review of Sex and Power in History. Till then, have a happy new year, century, and millennium.

____________

1.Amaury de Riencourt, Sex and Power in History, (New York, NY: Dell, 1974.

2.Amaury de Riencourt, p. ix.

3.Amaury de Riencourt, Sex and Power in History, p. ix. My emphasis.


See also:

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Recovering All the Past with Amaury de Riencourt

Recovering the American Past with Brian C. Robertson

Recovering the American Past with Brian C. Robertson, a review by Frank Zepezauer (first published in the Mar/Apr 2000 issue of The Liberator), presents information about gender roles that modern feminism opposes, censors, or derogates.

Recovering the American Past with Brian C. Robertson

by Frank Zepezauer, resident philosopher

Have you ever heard of the National Congress of Mothers? Until recently I didn’t know about them myself and I’ve spent a lot of time studying women’s organizations. It so happens that the NCM was actually the biggest women’s lobby in American history. Founded during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, it had 190,000 members by 1920 and over one million by 1930. The National Organization for Women, even in its heyday, could never claim such numbers.

I learned about the National Congress of Mothers in a short but highly informative book, There’s No Place Like Work by Brian C. Robertson. It has a provocative sub-title: How Business, Government, and Our Obsession with Work Have Driven Parents From Home. The title pretty well tells you what the book is about, an account of how the workplace has replaced the home as the center of our lives.

I found it particularly instructive because Robertson’s account challenges recently formed misperceptions about our gender political history since the founding of the nation. It is in that sense an effort to recover the American past.

Robertson makes it clear who formed the misperceptions of our past 200 years. He writes that – “in order to propagate the notion (central to their ideology of women’s liberation) that before the dawn of modern feminism mothers stayed at home to raise their children only because they had no alternative – feminist writers have been forced into a tortuous and self-contradictory interpretation of the pre-1960s women’s movement, its goals and its guiding principles.”

Who created the housewife role?

What are these misperceptions? The first is that the women’s movement of the 19th Century was like its 20th Century counterpart, an effort to liberate women from the bondage of housewifery.

The facts show exactly the opposite. Women’s organizations throughout that century fought to liberate women not from the kitchen but from the workplace.

The nineteenth was also the first century of capitalism, and as early as its first decade it was pulling women and children into the workforce because businesses needed workers and wanted to depress wages. To combat this system a movement was organized, led largely by women. It was these activists, family-centered Christian women, who fashioned the “separate spheres” concept which feminists would later claim was the work of the woman-enslaving Patriarchy.

The term itself was coined by a woman, Catherine Beecher, who, Robertson says, “saw the mission of the homemaker and mother in explicitly Christian terms.” He quotes her as saying, “The distinctive feature of the family is self-sacrificing labor of the stronger and wiser members to raise the weaker and more ignorant to equal advantages. The father undergoes toil and self-denial to provide a home, and then the mother becomes a self-sacrificing laborer to train its inmates.”

Alexis de Tocqueville took note of how the separate spheres concept was working in the America of the 1830. “American women engaged themselves exclusively in “the quiet circle of domestic employments…in no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes and to make them keep pace one with the other, but in two pathways that are always different.” In other words, Americans responding to the guidance of the early woman’s movement worked out a separate but equal gender role system.

Who created unequal wage rates?

These developments reveal the fallacies of the second feminist misperception. It is that “the Patriarchy” connived to subject women to separate but unequal wage rates. The facts, as Robertson discloses them, again show otherwise. The women’s movement of the 19th Century struggled to establish not a male but a family wage. It did not favor men; it favored breadwinners. This policy derived from their primary concern that mothers should be able to devote full time to raising children and managing a home. To do that they had to be provided for, and it was the husband and father who had to do the providing, which meant that he had to earn a wage sufficient to support not only himself but his entire family.

The long enduring effort to institutionalize the family wage eventually succeeded. Robertson writes that “it has been estimated that by 1960 a family wage was paid by 65 percent of all employers in the United States and by 80 percent of the major industrial companies.” He adds, “Although feminist historians today call the family-wage ideal a ‘myth” designed to keep married women oppressed, few myths have come closer to becoming reality.” He later states that “the family-wage economy that prevailed from 1945 to 1970 was the product of an ideal pursued deliberately, primarily by women’s organizations, through the political process….”

A third misperception is that the beginnings of the modern feminist movement was a brave and lonely effort by a few women fighting against great odds. They were a vanguard which gradually gathered enough strength by 1970 to launch the high-powered woman’s movement we live with today. It’s a movement whose leaders consider equality as equal distribution of men and women throughout the workforce, at every level in every enterprise…50/50 across the board. It is therefore the sworn enemy of the homemaker role that so many women struggled to establish during the previous 150 years.

This misperception about the small lonely vanguard is wrong in several ways. It’s wrong first of all in its depiction of the opposition these new feminists faced. It was supposed to be the established order, the Patriarchy. In fact, a great part of the opposition to the new feminism were leaders of the old feminism. They were the family-friendly women who in the mid-twentieth century came to be known as “social feminists.” There were social feminists like Frances Perkins, the first female Secretary of Labor, who fought to maintain the family wage system and who helped establish mother support systems, such as Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) based on the traditional family structure. The effort to ensure that mothers would be adequately supported extended to mothers who had lost their providers. But governmental support for such women was limited to once-married women who lost their husbands through death or disablement. Unwed mothers were not eligible. Social feminists wanted it that way, not Patriarchs.

Also consider the fact that the major opposition to the new feminist’s first major campaign, the effort to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, did not come primarily from men but from women. A coalition of women led by Phyllis Schlafly, who were very much like the activists in the old National Congress of Mothers, led the successful fight to kill the ERA. If it had been left to men to oppose it, it would be a part of the constitution today.

The new and radical feminists [more accurately called redfems — WHS] that emerged in the 1960s, the ones who pushed the “ratify ERA campaign,” were in the beginning not all that lonely, nor were they all that impoverished. Even before the Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan’s trashing of the housewife, appeared in 1963 there was increasing hostility to the traditional family in the academy and the government There was, for example, a 1957 conference on “Work in the Lives of Married Women” which was already outlining the great social transformation that would occur in the next decade.

One of its speakers, Katherine Brownell Oettinger, stated that “we cannot realistically expect to reverse” the trend of mothers working in ever larger numbers…On the basis of our present information we do not believe it is necessarily damaging to a child to be separated from his mother for substantial periods during the day, if adequate substitute care is provided. [No known study] “has established a causal relation between maternal employment and either juvenile delinquency or the maladjustment of children.”

The reversal of the traditional family order, the work of countless family women and men during the previous century, quickly accelerated. By 1963, President Kennedy had established a Women’s Commission which was stacked with career oriented women and in the same year Congress passed an Equal Pay Act, which dealt a blow to the family wage concept.

In 1964, in an attempt to kill a civil rights bill, a Southern congressmen inserted the word “sex” among the groups who would be protected from discrimination. His ploy failed because there were already enough feminist Congresswomen to recognize the opportunity the proposed addition opened up. The word “sex” was retained in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, another severe blow to the breadwinner/housewife system.

The feminists who helped engineer these revolutionary changes had help from another source, the business elites. It appears that capitalism has not been all that family friendly. It took enormous effort in the 19th Century to protect women and children from the forces pulling them into the workforce and it would require the same effort in the 20th Century. But by the middle of that century, the business forces were stronger and, by supplying aid and comfort to anti-family radicals, they managed to bring women back into the workforce.

To bring this off, the same market efficiency arguments were put to work. For example, the Economist magazine published a “Survey of Women and Work” which Robertson said, “summarized the advantages to employers of an expanded labor pool in which the great majority of married women work. One is that as the formerly non-monetary functions of the household are commercialized, new markets are created.” And there are other advantages: “In America, with its booming economy and tight labor market, women are proving a godsend to many employers. They usually cost less to employ than men, are more prepared to be flexible and less inclined to kick up a fuss if working conditions are poor….Employers like them because they allow more flexibility and command lower pay, and because part-timers can be pushed harder while they are at work.”

Thus, as Robertson put it, the old system was destroyed “By conscious effort on the part of a feminist and business elite [as well as] neglect on the part of a comfortable society that had ceased to see any need to shield home and family from destructive market and state pressures.”

If one defines “the Patriarchy” as the male power elite, then it is clear that it was not the Patriarchy who put the housewife in the home nor was it the Patriarchy that resisted efforts to take her out of the home and put her back in the workplace. The Patriarchy wanted her there all the time acting not as radical feminism’s worst enemy but as radical feminism’s best friend.

Who killed fatherhood?

Robertson’s story therefore corrects a pile of misperceptions laid on our doorstep by the feminist movement. It also tends to confirm a theory I have about the fate of fatherhood in the late twentieth century. I believe that the separate spheres system helped to undermine the father role. It had always consisted of three basic responsibilities: to provide, to protect, and to parent. When men separated from their household to earn money for their families, they however tended to concentrate more on providing and less on protecting and parenting.

This tendency was reinforced by the exaltation of motherhood which was part of the 19th Century woman’s movement. Women’s separate sphere became women’s domain and increasingly most of the essential parenting in the family was handled by women. The focus throughout was, therefore, mother-centered. The basic social policy question was “How can we support the work of mothers.” The family wage system was devised as the best way to resolve that problem. Contrary to what feminists have claimed for the past thirty years, it was devised not to serve the interests of men but to serve the interests of women.

Fathers nevertheless remained integral members of the family because they were needed as providers. Their contribution as parents was however increasingly downplayed and the average family came to resemble a military platoon with a second lieutenant officially in command but with a master sergeant really running the outfit.

In the 20th Century, with the drive to send women into the workplace, the titular head of the family was no longer needed. There was then another answer to the question, “How can we support the work of mothers?” It was by making mothers financially independent and by assisting mothers with tax-supported daycare and by assisting mothers, married or not, with government outlays. Of all the blows to fatherhood, perhaps the single most significant was the decision, made somewhere in the Johnson Administration bureaucracy, to open AFDC to unwed mothers.

From that point on, the final answer to the question was “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”  Fathers had become disposable. 


Additional Reading:

The protectors of women time and again praise to ‘Wessi’ (Westie) women the wonderfully complete world of the ‘Ossi’ (Eastie) women, ever since the end of the GDR, whose all-encompassing children-crèche system secured full-time earning potential and thereby the personal freedom of mothers.

What a full-day program for the children of fully-employed looks like has been thoroughly experienced by the mothers of the former GDR. Marlene, herself a crèche-child and subsequently an educator for child-‘educatetresses’ from Potsdam, told it to me. [Full Story]

— Karin Jäckel, in Germany devours its children — Families today: Exploited  and burned out

Posted in Civil Rights, Family, History | 1 Comment