Author Archives: Martin van Creveld

Plus ca change…

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I have had Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) standing on my shelves for decades. But for some reason I never got around to reading them. Now that, in an idle hour, I did pick them up, they came like a revelation with something amusing, or different, or simply true, to say, on almost every page.

For those who are unfamiliar with the book, it consists of a series of imaginary letters exchanged between Uzbek, a wealthy Persian exile living in Paris; some of his companions and friends; and his wives and the eunuchs who guard them in the seraglio back home in Isfahan.

I quote.

L. 38. “It is a great problem for men to decide whether it is more advantageous to allow women their freedom, or to deprive them of it. It seems to me that there is a great deal to be said both for and against. If the Europeans say that it is ungenerous to make those we love unhappy, our Asians retort that it is ignoble for men to renounce the authority (empire) that nature gave them over women. If they are told that having a large number of women shut in will cause difficulties, they reply that ten women who obey cause les difficulty than one who does not.”

L. 58. “Paris… is a town of many trades. Here a man will obligingly come and, for a little money, present you with the secret of making gold.

Another will promise to let you sleep with an aerial spirit, provided that you spend thirty years without seeing a woman.

You will also find soothsayers who are so proficient that they will tell you the whole of your life, provided that they have had a quarter of an hour’s conversations with your servants.

There are clever women with whom virginity is a flower which perishes and is reborn once a day, and which, on being plucked for the hundredth time, gives more pain than on the first occasion.

There are others with the powers to repair all the damage done by time, who know how to rescue a beautiful face on the brink of ruin, and even how to recall a woman from the pinnacle of old age and bring her down again to the tenderness of youth,”

L. 66. “The majority of Frenchmen have a mania for being clever, and the majority of those who want to be clever have a mania for writing books.

Yet no plan could be worse. Nature, in her wisdom, seems to have arranged it so that men’s stupidities should be ephemeral, and books make them immortal. A fool ought to be content with having exasperated everyone around him, but he insists on tormenting future generations; he wants his foolishness to overcome the oblivion which he might have enjoyed like a tomb; he wants posterity to be informed that he existed, and to be aware forever that he was a fool.

Of all writers, there are none whom I despise more than anthologists, who search on all sides for scraps out of other people’s works, which they cram into their own like slabs of turf into a lawn. They are no better than compositors arranging letters so that in combination they will form a book for which they have done nothing but provide the use of their hands.”

Penegra is the brand name for Sildenafil levitra 20mg australia Citrate Oral Jelly. Alcoholics need to abstain from wine if they want to be sexually activity viagra usa price for all the time. Sports that set up the thigh muscles and trains, as the endurance sports, rowing or running, are ideal for all adult men but if things soft viagra tabs are not “good enough” for Apple, then these apps can’t be in the Store – even if they can be life-changing. Men who have problems regarding swallow of drugs are advised to abstain from alcohol and drugs whilst levitra samples on this medication. L. 94. “International law is better known in Europe than in Asia, yet it can be said that royal passions, the submissiveness of their subjects, and sycophantic writers have corrupted all its principles.

In its present state, this branch of law is a science which explains to kings how far they can violate justice without damaging their own interests. What a dreadful idea… to systematize injustice in order to harden their consciences, and turn it into sets of rules, laying down principles and deducing what follows from them!

L. 110. “The part a pretty woman has to play is much more serious than people think. Nothing is of grater gravity than the morning’s events at her dressing table, amidst her servants; an army commander would not devote more attention to positioning his right wing or his reserve troops than she to the placing of a beauty spot which could fail, though she hopes and anticipates that it will be successful.”

L. 122. “Gentle methods of government have a wonderful effect on the propagation of the species. Evidence for this comes constantly from all the republics, especially Switzerland and Holland, which are the worst countries Europe if the nature of their terrain is considered, and which are nonetheless the most populous.

Nothing encourages immigration more than freedom, together with prosperity, which always accompanies it; the former is desirable in itself, and our needs take us to countries where the latter is to be found. The species multiplies in a land where affluence provides enough for children to live on without reducing the quantity available for their parents.

Equality between cities, which usually produces an equal distribution of wealth, itself conveys life and prosperity throughout the nation, diffusing them everywhere.”

L.129. “It is true that by an oddity that is due rather to human nature than to the human mind, it is sometimes necessary to change certain laws. But this situation is uncommon, and when it occurs they should be amended only in fear and trembling. There should be so much solemnity about it, and so many precautions should be taken, that the people should naturally conclude that laws are deeply sacred, since so many formalities are required in order to repeal them.”

L. 130. “I am going to devote this letter to a certain race known as newsmongers, who meet in a magnificent garden where they have nothing to do but are always busy. They are entirely useless to the state, and what they have been saying for fitty years has had as much effect as if they had kept silent for the same length of time. Yet they believe themselves to be important, since they discuss lofty policies and deal in mighty interests of state.

The basis of their conversations is a petty and absurd inquisitiveness. No cabinet secrets are so well kept that they do not claim to have discovered them. They cannot accept the idea that anything is unknown to them; they know how many wives our august sultan has and how many children he fathers each year; they spend nothing on espionage, but they are informed of the measures he takes to humiliate the Turkish and Mogul emperors.

They have scarcely finished with the present before plunging into the future. They go to meet Providence and give it advance notice of everything that mankind is to do. They will lead a general along step by step, an, having praised him for thousands of stupid actions that he did not do, they supply him with thousands more that he will not do either.

They make armies fly through the air, like flocks of cranes, and fortified walls fall down like cards They have bridges on every river, secret passes across every mountain vast depots in the burning deserts; all they lack is sense.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Do I Need to Go On?

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Supposedly feminism is one of the most powerful movements of the second half of the twentieth century. One that has greatly improved women’s lives—both above and below the belt—while at the same time fundamentally changing the relationship between the sexes. Enjoying argument as I do, for some years now I have been toying with the idea of doing a book in which I would examine the validity of these claims. A topic, I thought, which would fit well with two of my previous books, i.e Men, Women and War (2001) and The Privileged Sex (2013).

Some weeks ago I was lucky to run into a volume titled The H Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness (2017). The author, Jill Fillipovic, is a New York based journalist and self-declared feminist. By her own statement, she had and has it all. 35 years old, white, upper middle class, good education (by training she is a lawyer), a career, “a nearly full passport,” delayed marriage, apparently no kids so far. Nor, since she considers the idea that motherhood is the most important job in the world a “platitude,” does it sound as if she is planning on having them any time soon; for which her unborn children can only say, thank God.

I quote.

“American women have gotten less happy over the past four decades… [It is] theorized that having to compete and perform in the workplace like men was making women depressed.”

“Nearly all American women—as many as 84 percent—report having been dissatisfied with their bodies at some point in their lives, and most says that dissatisfaction stems from wanting to be thinner. For most women, being thinner means sacrificing food and with it the pleasure that comes with eating. Or it means more hours at the gym, not because it feels good but because working our promises to make you skinnier. Maybe it means restrictive, tight undergarments to smooth out the wrinkles of human flesh or high heels, lengthen the legs and make one look slightly slimmer, even if they’re uncomfortable. It means part of being a woman is striving, wanting and sometimes hurting.”

“Just as feminists thought we were climbing steadily upward—an ascendance symbolized by a woman who seemed posed to finally break the presidential glass ceiling—we found ourselves collectively knocked down. It is a stinging reminder that for all the feminist moment’s renewed pop culture relevance, for all of the ways in which women’s lives are better than ever, there still has been no full vindication of the rights of women.”

“We are becoming the men we wanted to marry” [attributed to Gloria Steinem].

“Today… it is still educated upper-middle class white women who are often selected to embody [feminism]… while women of color or trans women or poor women are pushed aside.”

“Culturally, ‘girly stuff’ is denigrated while men’s staff is elevated; fashion is shallow and women’s magazines are trashy, but sport are a valuable national pastime and men read Playboy and Esquire for award-winning journalism alongside photos of barely-clothed women. If parents give their daughter a traditionally male name, it’s cute, even cool and edgy, and if enough parents start giving girls what was once a boy’s name, the name first crosses over to being ‘gender neutral’ and eventually becomes simply female: Lesley, Ashley, Sydney, Taylor and Reese. But the opposite doesn’t happen: girls’ names almost never become boys’ names, and it is not cure to name your boy after a woman The same goes for clothing: ‘unisex clothes’ are traditionally men’s clothes that women also wear. Women have taken up wearing pans en masse, but most men do not wear skirts or dresses. Women can embrace guy stuff and it is a sign of clout and authority; men who embrace girl stuff are weak, less powerful, gay. And women, too, has to walk a tightrope between femininity and power; act too masculine and you’re an unlikeable bitch, but act too feminine—wear too much makeup or too much pink, talk ‘like a girl’ using upspeak or a high-pitched voice—and you won’t be taken seriously.”

A CTET evaluation is valid for 7 years and you can take this exam a number of times viagra pills uk to increase libido in men. Emotional instabilities condition is the turmoil that will influences the conduct, viagra uk purchase considering, sorrow, schizophrenia, uneasiness issue, dietary issues and in addition successive changes in persons feeling. In 2008, the bulk had alone to about 20 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to the American Solar Activity Society. discount brand viagra When taking this drug for pain relief or insomnia it has to be kept in mind that this drug is 100% effective. viagra for sale mastercard “[In today’s American culture] Girl stuff sucks. And by extension, girls suck too.”

“For women whose hobbies are coded as male—video games, NASCAR—being the only girl can become isolating, and being ‘one of the guys’ can segue into becoming either visible or a sex object.”

“Although American pop culture is soaked in sex, our politics remain at best uncomfortable with and at worst actively hostile to female sexual pleasure. Nearly a century [sic] after its invention and after decades of wide usage by American women, the birth control pill remains a source of debate in Congress and even the Supreme Court. Abortion is a perennial election issue, opposition to it always listed in the Republican Party Platform The idea of poor women or the wrong kind of women having too much sex, or the strong kind of sex, has been used to justify cutting the social safety net, decreasing women’s access to reproductive health care, taking children away from their mothers, and sterilizing women without their consent.”

“The United States, and the world, remain vastly unequal places, marked by profound political, economic and social disparities between men and women. Much of it boils down to sex, and in particular how heterosexual men’s desires and experiences exist as standard, while women’s desires, experiences, and sexualities remain a kind of deviant from the norm, understood primarily in relation to men.”

“Cosmopolitan, by the ‘90s a decades-old bible for the single career, woman, careened straight into pleasure-your-man sex tips, each more ludicrous than the last.”

“It has not gotten any easier, or any less confusing, to be a girl in America.”

“Just 30 percent of speaking roles in the seven hundred biggest movies went to women between 2007 and 2014, and not a single woman over the age of forty-five had a lead part.”

“According to one study, straight women who have sex with a regular partner only orgasm about 63 percent of the time, while men orgasm 85perent of the time. Other studies have found even lower numbers, indicating that women orgasm less than 30 percent of the time… Young women routinely engage in sex they don’t find particularly pleasurable because they want to make their partners happy.”

Do I need to go on?

Guest Article: Losing at the Moral/Strategic Level

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By

Bill Lind

One of war’s few rules is that failure at a higher level negates the successes at lower levels. This led to Germany’s defeats in both World Wars; she usually won at the tactical and operational levels but lost at the strategic level. The result was lost victories.
To look at our own situation today, we need to add John Boyd’s three levels of war, physical, mental, and moral, to the classic levels of tactical, operational, and strategic. If we plot these categories on a grid, we see that the highest and most powerful level of war is the moral/strategic. If we look at what we are doing around the world, we see that at the moral/strategic level we are taking actions likely to result in our defeat.
Your car gets to cialis tablets australia be more effective. Many individuals thought that it must be shameful once they will lay it open to anyone. viagra ordination report viagra cheapest pharmacy It’s not recommended to take the drug together with pharmacy cialis fat food or alcohol for it will reduce its efficiency. There is no medicine in the market that can be found though many stationery vendors brand cialis for sale online. Three examples come readily to mind. The first is North Korea. President Trump made a major breakthrough toward ending the danger of another Korean War by meeting with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un. Unfortunately, since that meeting, the President’s advisors have worked to undercut his achievement. Kim Jong-un wants the U.S. to declare a formal end to the Korean War, which at present is halted only with an armistice. South Korea favors it, Mr. Trump is said to favor it, and we risk nothing by giving it. But the President’s advisors are working against it. Their position is that we should give North Korea nothing until it completes denuclearization. That treats North Korea as something it is not, a defeated enemy. Not surprisingly, North Korea is rejecting that approach, which gives the foreign policy Establishment what it wants — a continuation of the Korean stand-off and all the budgets and careers that hang from it.
The second example is so bizarre it defies belief. Washington has placed new sanctions on Chinese companies and individuals because China bought weapons from Russia. Huh? What business it is of ours who China buys weapons from? Ever since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1950 China has bought most of the weapons it has imported from Russia. Of course it is going to continue to do so. It is not as if we want to sell weapons to China; we don’t. This action is so outlandish and absurd it turns the U.S. into Don Quixote, a madman wandering the world tilting at windmills. Who does Washington think it is?
The third case is similar, in that it is an attempt to dictate to other sovereign countries in matters that are none of our business. In one of his few serious foreign policy blunders, the President withdrew the U.S. from the nuclear deal with Iran. Wisely, the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese are working together to keep Iran in and thus avoid a war in the Persian Gulf, with all that would mean for the world’s oil supply. Washington has responded by threatening any foreign company or bank that does business with Iran. The October 10 New York Times quoted President Trump’s court jester, John Bolton, as saying, “We do not intend to allow our sanctions to be evaded by Europe or anyone else.” Again, who do we think we are to tell Europe or anyone else whom they may trade with? If the EU had a backbone, which it does not, it would forbid any and all European companies to capitulate to unilateral American sanctions.
Each of these cases represents something history has seen all too often, usually from countries that were past their peak as powers and on the downhill slide: the arrogance of power. We are playing the swaggering bully (just before his nose gets bloodied), wandering around the playground telling everyone else what to do. It doesn’t go over well.
But each case is more than that: it is a self-inflicted defeat at the moral/strategic level, the highest and most powerful level of conflict. Morally, it turns us into Goliath (a rather weak-kneed Goliath, given our military record), someone everyone fears but also hates and looks for a chance to get back at. Strategically, we are pushing China, Russia, and now Europe too, together against us. If, as Boyd argued, strategy is a game of connection and isolation, we are connecting everyone else and isolating ourselves.
Teddy Roosevelt famously urged America to talk softly and carry a big stick. Instead, we are yelling for all we’re worth while waving a broken reed, a military that can’t win, and that soon, thanks to feminization, won’t even be able to fight. That is not likely to end well.

Like Robots to Men

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For over ten years now, the world has been watching the strange spectacle unfolding in and around the Gaza Strip. Strange, because of the total imbalance between the forces on both sides. On one hand there is the mighty Israeli Army with its F-35 fighter bombers, Merkava tanks, and God knows what other multimillion-dollar items of equipment. On the other there are Hamas and the Islamic Jihad with their rockets, incendiary “terror kites” (as the Israelis call them) and unarmed youths demonstrating along the border line on the other.

Watching events, I cannot help but recall the words I wrote in The Transformation of War a little under thirty years ago:

“Here we are concerned with a situation where the relationship between strength and weakness is skewed; in other words, where one belligerent is much stronger than the other. Under such circumstances the conduct of war can become problematic even as a matter of definition. Imagine a grown man who purposely kills a small child, even such a one as came at him knife in hand; such a man is almost certain to stand trial and be convicted, if not of murder than of some lesser crime. Not be accident is the word bellum itself said to come from due-lum, a combat of two… The very fact that fighting takes place almost always implies a degree of equality, real or perceived, between the forces available to both sides. Where no such equality exists war itself becomes ultimately impossible.

A war waged by the weak against the strong is dangerous by definition. Therefore, so long as the differential in forces is not such as to render the situation altogether hopeless, it presents few difficulties beyond the tactical question, namely how to inflict the maximum amount of damage on the enemy without exposing oneself in open fighting. By contrast, a war waged by the strong against the weak is problematic for that very reason. Given time, the fighting itself will cause the two sides to become more like each other, even to the point where opposites converge, merge, and change places. Weakness turns into strength, strength turns into weakness. The principal reason behind the phenomenon is that war represents perhaps the most imitative activity known to man. The whole secret of victory consists of trying to understand the enemy in order to outwit him. A mutual learning process ensues. Even as the struggle proceeds, both sides adapt their tactical methods, the means that they employ, and—most important of all—their morale to fit the opponent. Doing so, sooner or later the point will come where they are no longer distinguishable.

A small, weak force confronting a large, strong one will need very high fighting spirit to make up for its deficiencies in other fields. Still, since survival itself counts as no mean feat, that fighting spirit will feed on every victory, however minor. Conversely, a strong force fighting a weak one for any length of time is almost certain to suffer from a drop in morale; the reason being that nothing is more futile than a series of victories endlessly repeated… Over the long run… fighting the weak demeans those who engage in it and, therefore, undermines its own purpose. He who loses out to the weak loses; he who triumphs over the weak also loses. In such an enterprise there can be neither profit nor honor…
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Another very important reason why, over time, the strong and the weak will come to resemble each other even to the point of changing places is rooted in the different ethical circumstances under which they operate. Necessity known no bounds; hence, he who is weak can afford to go to the greatest lengths, resort to the most underhand means, and commit every kind of atrocity without compromising his political support and, more important still, his own moral principles. Conversely, almost anything that the strong does or does not do is, in one sense, unnecessary and, therefore, cruel…

A good war, like a good game, almost by definition is one fought against forces that are at least as strong as, or preferably stronger than, oneself. Troops who do not believe their cause to be good will end up by refusing to fight. Since fighting the weak is sordid by definition, over time the effect of such a struggle is to put the strong into an intolerable position. Constantly provoked, they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Should they fail to respond to persistent provocation, their morale will probably break down, passive waiting being the most difficult game of all to play. Should they hit back, then the opponent’s very weakness means that they will descend into cruelty and, since most people are not cut out to be sadists for very long, end up by hating themselves…

Since the very act of fighting the weak invites excess, in fact, is excess, it obliges the strong to impose controls in the form of laws, regulations, and rules of engagement. The net effect of such regulations is to demoralize the troops who are prevented from operating freely and using their initiative. They are contrary to sound command practice if they are observed and subversive of discipline if they are not. Hence the truth of Clausewitz’s dictum, plainly observable in every low-intensity conflict fought since World War II, that regular troops combating a Volkskrieg [people’s war] are like robots to men.”

Looking back over these words, I have nothing to add.

My Bowels! My Bowels! I Cannot Hold My Peace

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(Jeremiah 4.19)

My parents brought me to this country when I was just four years old. That was back in 1950; I can still remember the taxi that took us from the airport to our new home, the laid table, and the first Hebrew word (mayim, water) I learnt. Sabbaticals etc. apart, since then Israel is where I have spent my entire life. Not because I had no choice. I also have a Dutch passport and was sufficiently well-known, professionally, to find work in many places around the world. But because I wanted to. Some time ago I asked my father, a Holocaust survivor who since then has passed way at the age of 99, why he had taken his young family from Europe to the Middle East. “So as not to feel Jewish,” he shot back at me.

Looking back, I cannot remember even one day when Israel was not “under threat.” The Arab threat (this was long before anyone had heard of Palestinians). The Egyptian threat (in the early 1950s it was called “the second round;” we children even used to play a board game by that name). The Syrian threat. The Jordanian threat. The Palestinian threat. The Soviet threat. The Iraqi threat. The PLO threat. The Hezbollah threat. The Hamas Threat. The Iranian threat. The political threat. The economic threat. The military threat. The guerilla threat. The terrorist threat. More than enough threats to make anyone’s head spin! Some of the threats were very serious, some less so, a few almost entirely imaginary.

Again looking back I think that, on the whole, Israel has coped admirably. The obstacles notwithstanding, this sliver of a country has seen its population going up more than a tenfold. Its economy is flourishing—just look at what happened to the shekel, once nicknamed the drekel (little piece of dirt), over the last ten years or so. Year by year, the number of foreign visitors is breaking all records. The country which during its first decades was desperately begging for capital is now exporting it to many places around the world. Israeli science and technology are among the most advanced anywhere. Israel is the only country that has more trees than it did a hundred years ago. Relative to the size of the population, more new books are published in Israel each year than anywhere else. And the Israeli military is among the most powerful of all. For which thank God, or else the country would undoubtedly look like Syria does.
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In many ways, a good place to live and raise one’s children as I have done and as I hope my children will do. Above all, a rambunctious place where everyone has long been free to come out with what he (or, for God’s sake, she) thinks—five Jews, ten opinions, as the saying goes. If Israeli Arabs choose to join the cacophony, then in this author’s opinion at any rate so much the better. But things are changing. A year ago—how fast time seems to flow—I wrote of Dareen Tatour. She is the Israeli Arab woman who was jailed for writing a poem in which she called on the Palestinians to resist the Israeli occupation (see my post, “The Fourth Reich is Rising,” 19.10.2017). Today there is talk of trying people for believing and saying that the only way to save Israel from itself is by applying pressure from outside; pressure to find some way to end the occupation, of course. Too, the relevant cabinet committee has approved a bill that will deny government funding from any “cultural product” that “undermines” Israel’s identify as a “Jewish and democratic state” and “desecrates” the state’s symbols.

Both bills smell to high heaven. So far neither has become law. Should either or both of them pass, however, they may very well prove to be a first step on a slippery slope that leads—well, we all know where. So let me say, for the benefit of anyone who may or may not be listening: I have never accepted, not will ever accept, a single penny for running this blog. Nor do I know whether my posts and other works count as “cultural products.” Presumably not, because the line I have followed is strictly politically incorrect; but that is the last of my worries.

Following in the tradition of Jeremiah the prophet, though, I shall not give up my freedom to think and say and write and post whatever I want. Not for the Knesset, should it enact the laws in question. Not for the courts, should they try to enforce them. Not even for the bunch of right-wing Jewish Mafiosi in- and out of the Knesset who keep barking at anyone who differs with them.

My bowels! My bowels! I cannot hold my peace.

The Flop

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Is “me too” really a sign that women have finally gathered what it takes to avenge themselves on those bad, bad, bad men who always want one thing only? Or is it just a rather underhand reaction to feminism’s utter failure to change the way the world works? For an answer, consider the following.

1. Physique

Contrary to the hopes of feminists such as Anne Fausto-Sterling (Myths of Gender, 1992) and Collette Dowling (The Frailty Myth, 2000), women have not closed the physical gap between them and men. At best attempts to close it, such as have made by several armed forces around the world, merely provided another proof of what all normal people have always known, namely that doing so is impossible. At worst the outcome was injuries, including such as turned women into cripples or else left them unable to have children. Either way, women continue to depend on men for protection. Had it not been for men who, for reasons of their own, are ready to protect women against other men, the entire feminist movement would have been not merely impossible but inconceivable.

The myth that working women can simply ignore their periods and work as men do is no closer to the truth now than it was when feminists first invented it. Countless women have gone on record saying that they had taken leave from work during the days in question; thanks to feminism, though, many of them were unable to tell their bosses about the real cause of their trouble. Nor have some radical feminist fantasies about virgin births and dispensing with men as sperm-donors been realized.

2. Career

Partly, but not only, as a result of these factors, the division of labor, meaning men’s work versus women’s work, has remained practically as gendered as it was a century ago. For example, even in an “egalitarian” country such as Sweden almost all commercial pilots, divers, miners, and foresters are men. And almost all flight attendants—a term specifically invented to obfuscate the facts—cashiers, secretaries, minders of little children and—are women.

Partly because they tend to do work that is physically light, clean and safe, partly because of the problems associated with motherhood, women still do not get paid as much as men are. By some calculations, assuming present trends continue, the point where that will happen is still decades and perhaps even centuries away. Often the more senior and remunerative the position men and women occupy, the more true this is. Since women tend to spend fewer years in the working force, the same applies to pensions.

Another way of putting this is that, today as ever, the higher one climbs the slippery pole of power and fame the fewer women one meets. Just some six percent of heads of state are female. As Margaret Mead used to say, the world is run by men and strong women (among whom, no doubt, she counted herself). Furthermore, not one female head of state got to where she is by running for office on a feminist platform. Not Angela Merkel. Not Theresa May. Much less the late Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, and Margaret Thatcher, all of whom spent a lifetime to avoid having the epithet “feminist” applied to them. Hillary Clinton, the female candidate for the US presidency perceived as being the most pro-feminist of all, was trounced by a man to who is not only a declared male chauvinist but a sexual harasser and predator as well.

Mission impossible: Finding even one important movie in which a woman over 50 plays the main role. Apparently neither men nor women are interested in watching one such.

The age-old situation whereby the entry of too many women into any occupation, institution, and organization causes the social prestige, and consequently the economic rewards, that go with that occupation, institution and organization to decline still persists. And vice versa, of course.

3. Relationships

The age-old situation whereby most household work is done by women, either such who do it for themselves and their families or such who rely on relatives or hire others in their places, remains unchanged.

Today as ever, the more successful a man the more attractive he becomes to women; however, except for female models, actresses, and the like, the opposite does not apply. Why? Because, as Gloria Steinem once pointed out, indeed, often the more successful a woman the more like a man she becomes.

Hypergamy, the age-old tradition whereby most women hope to gain an advantage by trying to marry men who are older than themselves and belong to a higher class, persists. That is why, contrary to the hopes of Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch (1970), and long before her Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) women have not stopped desperately trying to make themselves more attractive to men. As by adapting themselves to fashion, wearing makeup, buying and wearing jewelry and accessories, undergoing cosmetic surgery, going on a diet, trying to learn how to have orgasms or pretending to have them, and much more. Women, in other words, often are not only seen as sex objects but see themselves as such. Which in turn is one reason why the fight against pornography, put on by such feminists as the late Andrea Dworkin, has led nowhere.

Women go on imitating men in many things, including dress. However, the opposite rarely occurs. Whereas a great many women wear pants, practically nowhere do men wear skirts (when they do, as in Scotland, they are called kilts). Women take on (filch?) men’s names until they, the names, become first gender-neutral and then female only; but the opposite does not apply. These processes prove that penis envy, meaning the desire of women to be and do anything men are and do, is at least as strong among present-day women, feminists specifically included, as it was when one of Freud’s female students, Henriette Lampl de Groot, came up with the idea.

For good or ill, the famous “double standard” still persists. Accused of promiscuity, Catherine the Great of Russia once said that she had fewer lovers in a lifetime than man of her male colleagues did in a year. To this day, a man who has many female sexual partners is often admired and envied; a woman who does the same is put down as a slut—not just by men but by many women too.

Feminism and Its Discontents*

Feminism remains overwhelmingly a middle class ideology. After more than five decades, it still has not been able to make considerable inroads among upper- and lower class women. The former do not need it and are reluctant to share their privileges with their less fortunate “sisters.” The latter don’t have the time for it.

Since 1975 or so the gap in life expectancy between men and women, which had been growing for decades, has been closing again. This in spite of the fact that, in practically all countries, perinatal death has continued to decline. The reason? Because so many women, misled by feminists, have begun to work outside the home, thus subjecting themselves to the same stresses as those affecting men.

Survey after survey in various countries has found that women are no happier today than they were forty years ago; also, that relative to men their happiness has been on the decline.

Women have not ceased complaining; isn’t the whole of feminism one long complaint? Freud’s question, “was will das Weib,” what does the woman want, remains as relevant as it was when he asked it almost ninety years ago.

For many people, including some women, feminism has become a swearword.

Conclusion

Feminism has failed. So much so, indeed, that very few people can even remember that, back in the 1970s, there were such things as environmental feminism, left-wing socialist feminism, utopian feminism (which advocated female-only communities) and so many other kinds as to boggle the mind.

To repeat my question, could it be that “me too,” as one of the few survivors, far from being a sign that things are getting better, is a desperate rearguard reaction to the fact that feminism has been a flop?

  • Compliments to Marie Jo Buhle.

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Alienation

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Alienation is in the news. Back in February 2017 no less a guru than Mark Zuckerberg started railing against it, arguing that “there has been a striking decline in the important social infrastructure of local communities over the past few decades. Since the 1970s, membership in some local groups has declined by as much as one-quarter, cutting across all segments of the population.” The decline, he went on, “is related to the lack of community and connection to something greater than ourselves.” Even husbands and wives, parents and children, were paying more attention to what their smartphones said than to each other. How sad.

Like so many other American tycoons, past and present, Mr. Zuckerberg is an idealist at heart. Or at any rate that is how he wants to come through. That is why he promised to use Facebook to fight the trend, even if it meant that doing so required an entirely new business model. Instead of spending as much time as possible on the Net, people would look into each other’s eyes and embrace each other while saying soul full things like “you are great,” “I want to help you,” and “I love you.” How wonderful. As is always the case when an exceptionally rich and exceptionally powerful person says this or that, the pronouncement was picked up by the media which spread it and by academia who provided it with the requisite number of footnotes.

Rich people’s words are golden, especially in the U.S. Far be it from me to doubt anything Mr. Zuckerberg has said. Instead, all I can do or want to do is point to a few elementary facts.

  • Google Ngram tells me that, between 1940 and 1973, the relative frequency with which the term alienation was used “in millions of books” grew sixfold. Since then, instead of increasing as per the Manifesto and as the ubiquity of electronic communications suggests should have happened, it has actually declined.
  • The Beatles’ “All the Lonely People” and “He’s a Real Nowhere Man” came out in the 1960s, long before anyone had heard of either Zuckerberg (who was born in 1984!) or Facebook.
  • The Lonely Crowd came out in 1951. In it sociologist David Riesman and his fellow authors described the collapse of community and the rise a type, which according to them was becoming more and more common, whom they described as “other directed.” People whose main requirement in life was not the love of those they knew well but the esteem in which they were held by strangers; today, no doubt, they would measure that esteem by the number of hits they got on Google. A society dominated by such types was said to face profound deficiencies in leadership, individual self-knowledge, and human potential. 
  • As they say: “small place, big hell.” Living with a small number of people one knows very well is not necessarily better than being anonymous in a large city. Back in 1943 the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre wrote a famous play with the title, L’enfer c’est l’autre (hell is the other). In it two women and one men, suffering from no particular discomfort but locked up in a single room, made each other’s lives as hellish as anything can be and kept at it as long as the performance lasted.
  • Long before caricatures started showing married couples lying in bed and communicating by email or SMS, they used to show couples sitting across from each other at breakfast with the husband’s face buried in his newspaper.
  • Charlie Chaplin’s film, Modern Times was made in 1936. It focused on a factory worker who, made to perform like a machine, was alienated to the point where he himself turned into a machine. Except in that it made people roar with laugher, there was little behind the film that was original. Before Chaplin there were Henry Ford and his assembly lines; and before Ford there were Frederick Taylor and scientific management.
  • When Karl Marx discussed alienation in The German Ideology (1844) he was not referring to Mr. Zuckerberg either. What he meant was the kind that resulted from the division of labor. Factories, Marx argued, created a situation where workers, instead of engaging in agriculture in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and writing critical essays in the evening, only used a small part of their faculties all day long. Doing so they became alienated form their own nature; to put them together again, an entirely different kind of society using entirely different methods of production was required
  • Finally, my dictionary tells me that, in nineteenth-century America, the phrase “alienation of affection” meant “falling in love with someone else” and was sometimes used by lawyers in divorce cases. The evolution of the term can be traced to Middle English and from there to Old French. In Latin, where it originated, it meant a transfer, surrender, or separation. As, for example, in alienatio amicitae (to be separated from one’s friends), alienatio sacrorum (to be separated from the sacred), and alienatio mentis (to go out of one’s mind).

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Do I have to point out, once again, that all this was long before anyone ever heard of the particularly alienating effect of modern means of communication?

Some Solutions

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US Sanctions reach a Turning Point

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By: Karsten Riise*

A defining moment for the US sanctions regime

Each year, the USA finds a new country or group of countries to target with sanctions. Each year the USA adds about 1,000 individuals to its ever longer sanctions list. Now, US sanctions are coming to a turning point.

Up till now, the EU – representing around the same percentage of the world economy as the USA – was sitting put, as the USA grew its sanctions regime to ever more bizarre proportions. Together, the USA and the EU constituted nearly half of the world economy, and US sanctions previously “only” used to target the other half of the world’s economies. Hitherto, the EU had no compelling reasons to strain is relations with the USA because of US sanctions not affecting themselves. 

But now, “secondary sanctions” regarding Iran also hit hard at strategic EU companies and financial institutions and negatively affect EU global strategic interests in energy from the Persian Gulf. US sanctions in effect attack the liberty, security and sovereignty of its biggest group of friends, the EU. 

Thus, we have now come to a defining moment for the global sanctions regime, run by the USA.

The US economy is already less than a quarter of the world’s GDP in USD dollars, and in 2023 it will fall to only just about one fifth of the world (source: IMF). The non-US part, the 4 fifths of the world economy (now including the EU and China), constitute an increasingly advanced group, and they are about to collude against the US sanctions regime. Collusion is the result of parallel interests, and the EU may not actually (or at least not publicly) coordinate all its counter-sanctions with other major power centers.

We talk about the world’s most powerful and complex political-economic structures starting to fundamentally change, here.

So we need to analyze the bigger picture, how complete systems of counter-strategies against present and possible future US sanctions are being planned and implemented by strong powers around the world – all directed (but maybe only sometimes coordinated) against the USA. These systems of counter-strategies will include, but not be limited to, the following:

 

Finance

Payment transfer streams will develop to avoid US banks – hurting the global position of the USA’s major “growth-industry”. It will be a chance (as well as a good excuse) for the EU, China, Japan, India and everybody else, to nationalistically promote THEIR banks in the international system, at the expense of US banks.

 Looking at the long-term trend, the US financial industry has become really the ONLY big growth industry which drives upwards the USA economy. No other sector in the US economy has the combination of size and growth, which finance has (weapons are a bit the same, but finance is unique in size) – so this will be very hard for the USA.

US banks hitherto have a central role in facilitating all global money transfers, and a lot of international money transfers between third-countries somehow technically go via the USA. This system architecture will now be stopped – not just by China, but also by the EU, and probably by India. 

Everybody outside the USA will be reluctant to let their money be touched by US financial institutions, or let their money touch US shores even for a milli-second. And of course, the EU and China know how to engineer legal and technical solutions for this.

The growth of US credit card systems will be impeded. Instead, cards from China, the EU (and India?) will take bigger shares of this profitable and fast growing world market. Russia was the first country on this trend, kicking out all US credit card companies, and inviting in the Chinese credit card system. The EU may well strengthen the role of EU credit cards, and create actions which “incidentally” (oops!?) will hurt US credit cards in EU markets. The finance center of London, UK will after Brexit be caught in this cross-fire between the EU and the USA – if the UK sides with the USA against EU counter-sanction initiatives, the EU may develop strong tools to draw UK credit-card business into EU-jurisdiction.

New global IT money transfer system regimes, which counteract US influence on SWIFT, will erode US political influence. The SWIFT system is based in Brussels, but under heavy US political influence. Russia has already built itself an alternative to that. The EU can no longer accept that the US might be able to hurt EU companies on their SWIFT transfers. The EU will therefore have to take actions either to liberate SWIFT from US control, or to create a parallel EU-system.

 Avoid Wall Street

Why should countries take up loans in the US, if they can have the same loans without risk of future sanctions from China or even the EU?

The IPO of the Saudi ARAMCO oil company has been stalled – unconfirmed information states that fear of US courts reaching out against Saudi assets after 11 September, is part of the reason. Already, the trend is that the biggest IPOs in the world move to Asia.

De-dollarization

The EU now will shift trade of energy from dollars to Euro – this trend will also diminish dollars in other international trade. Trillions of international dollars flowing around in trade may come back “home” to the USA – risking inflation and economic crisis.  Gold is according to unconfirmed reports being speedily bought up by governments, not only by Russia and China, but even Turkey, recently also hit by US sanctions.

Strategic supply

Airbus cannot deliver airplanes to Iran, because, among other things, vital parts are sourced in the USA. This will change. Strategic supply chains will morph to avoid US sub-suppliers, carriers (ships, airplanes, IT), technology, service partners etc. – fundamentally hurting the US global position. We are not speaking used-cars, here, we speak strategic business sectors. The EU and China may not state this anti-US sourcing publicly as an official policy, they will just pull the strings to do it VERY effectively in strategic sectors.

Also, US deliveries in other strategic sectors like food (grain and soy from US farmers) and US energy will be affected by counter-sanctions. China sheds US soybeans and pushes their price down – the EU (less dependent hereof) may then offer to pick-up cheap surplus soybeans from the USA as a bargaining card. The idea of larger US delivery of LNG to the EU probably will be mostly words, but the amounts of LNG from the USA to the EU may possibly increase marginally. The EU may even come to a cold calculation, that the EU in the gas sector might have a more maneuverable partner with Russia than with the USA. The EU has in several aspects a substantially advantageous size-relation towards Russia, and not towards the USA, and while Russia enjoys a good relationship with China, Russia will like to balance its relations too.

 Tourism and education

Tourism is one of the fastest growing industries in the world, and the USA sells its cultural influence to all tourists coming. University education is not only a strategic business to finance national research – Universities are also a cornerstone for the USA to influence future management generations around the world. Why not send tourists and students to other places than the USA? Chinese tourists and students are of significant importance to the USA, and China has plenty of other destinations to send tourists and students, other than to the USA.

Using the state to shield business

As a counter-sanction, the EU now moves central banks and state-owned companies into the fray in financing, and as business partners and intermediate partners, when dealing with Iran. US sanctions on EU state-owned entities can then amount to a US declaration of (economic) war, not only against EU private entities, but directly against EU states.

Buying other than US weapons

The EU recently is implementing a grand and ambitious strategy to increase its own weapons-industry – independent of the USA. To increase the volume strength of EU weapons-makers, the EU will need to minimize imports of US weapons. The EU will have to make their own, only importing as few items as possible from the USA. Saudi Arabia is by far one of the world’s biggest arms purchasers – and nearly all is bought form the USA. However, should the romance between the leaderships of Saudi Arabia and the USA cool down, Saudi Arabia would be well advised to diversify their weapons sources too. And Saudi Arabia even already has Eurofighters from the EU and embryonic arms-relations with Russia and to build on.

The collusion against the USA

US trade war unites the EU, China, India, and the rest of the world (even the UK) against US interests. With aggressive, unilateral trade-war, started by the US, all the rest of the world will now have even more motives to coordinate their counter-strategies to the US sanctions regime.

The EU may seem slow to react – and this may lure US politicians in their hubris to believe that the EU cannot or will not. But believe me, the EU will – because this has become a strategic must. The EU has seen the hand-writing of US sanctions on their wall – they will think this through, plan and make deep preparations to free EU sovereignty from US control. Just read between the lines of EU’s Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s recent State of the Union speech. When the EU rolls out their US counter-sanction measures, it will be big, comprehensive and VERY effective.

Negative changes for the USA will last

Once alternative systems to US banks, finance, the US dollars etc. have developed and matured, they will NOT go away. 
The USA is in its hubris about to destroy its global claim for economic hegemony – and that is a good thing.

  • Karsten Riise is former senior Vice President Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark andSweden C urrently he conducts research and management of major changes with Change News and Change Management.

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From Bad to Worse, I Myself Would Say

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Roey Tzezana, Rulers of the Future (Hebrew, Tel Aviv, 2017).

Dr. Roey Tzezana is an Israeli computer expert who works for Tel Aviv University among other places. His book was recommended to me by my son, Eldad van Creveld, who plays a key role in teaching computer networking here in Israel. Like so many other computer experts from the famous Ray Kurzweil down, Dr. Tzezana is trying to look into what a computer-dominated world might be like. His conclusions are not encouraging, to say the least.

As most of us have already realized, and as those who have not will discover soon enough, we are going through a truly revolutionary period. For the first time in history everything—and I mean, everything—that takes place anywhere can be recorded. Driving this development are millions upon millions of miniature sensors sufficiently small and sufficiently cheap to be mounted wherever they are wanted. On the streets. In cars and other vehicles. On doors and windows. Inside buildings. Inside individual rooms. In the sky, on board drones so small that they are hardly noticeable. Inside every kind of gadget, however innocuous. On the clothes we wear. Inside our bodies, should that be considered necessary or desirable and in case the legal hurdles are removed.

Once recorded, the information can easily be stored and kept forever. And edited, and altered, should those in charge feel inclined in that direction. With the aid of artificial intelligence capable of discovering patterns, it will also be analyzed and searched for whatever it may mean. Your health, your habits, your movements. The things you eat and drink and wear and carry with you. The things you see and hear and say and read and watch and do. The kind of relationship you have, or do not have, with anyone else. The things you take up and put down and lose and find (and do or do not return to their owner) and lend and borrow. And every financial transaction you make, of course.

Briefly, Goebbels’ claim that, in Nazi Germany, privacy only existed in people’s dreams looks as if it is about to become reality (some scientists believe that even dreams will end up by becoming transparent, but let’s not go into that here). To say nothing of any thoughts and emotions you may have. The question Dr. Tzezana raises is, qui bono? Who profits? It is at this point where leviathans, sharks and clouds come in.

Leviathans, obviously enough, are named after Thomas Hobbes’ famous 1651 book. Starting at least as far back as the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs, rulers have always done their utmost to obtain whatever information they could about their subjects. The more and better information they had, the more able they were to hold those subjects in check, increase and perpetuate their own power, prevent rebellion, etc. Thus one possible, in many case even likely, outcome of the enormous network of sensors, data links, computers and artificial intelligence now being constructed by every more or less “advanced” state would be a tyranny. One which would make even North Korea looks as harmless as a Fischer-Price Toys Chatter Telephone.

And that’s before the cost of any potential aftercare is taken into viagra order uk account. Though it is viagra no prescription humiliating health condition for a sufferer. In addition to being one of the Healthiest Organic Supplements that also yields visible results tadalafil overnight both as a potent anti-aging- and Weight Loss Product, this Acai Kapsule is also considered a Natural Aphrodisiac. This is not to say that beauty will provide happiness, make someone a kind person or maintain or repair a relationship. tadalafil sale Again quite obviously, the sharks stand for business titans who produce the necessary technology, and use it for increasing their own power and profits. They do not have the kind of legal power states have. But they can and do use the information at their disposal to try to identify, influence and manipulate the thoughts, hopes, feelings and wishes of each and every person who has ever used a cellphone or sat down in front of a computer screen. The real danger, says Dr. Tzezana, consists of the possibility, which is rather close at hand, that leviathans and sharks will learn to cooperate even more closely than they already do. Together they will erect a political-economic complex so intrusive, and so comprehensive, as to reduce the rest of us to a kind of servitude far worse than anything the Pharaohs could even have imagined.

In China something of the kind is being constructed even now. Meet the so-called Social Credit System. See, for the details, R. Botsman, “Chinas’ New Viral App Could be Straight Out of Black Mirror,” 21.10.2017, Wired, at http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion.). Supposed to be completed in 2020, in principle it will resemble today’s credit rating system. Gathering all the above-mentioned kinds of data and then some, it will automatically rate every citizen on a scale ranging from 350 to 950 points. Are you neatly dressed? Your score goes up by so and so many fractions of a point. Did you obey your doctor and lose weight? Ditto. Did you cross a street without marching to the next pedestrian crossing first? Down it goes by another fraction. Did you raise your voice at a government official? Did you try to access a foreign-generated article on the situation in Tibet? The results will be used to determine whether you will or will not have access (and under what conditions) to any number of desirable things. Starting with credit and ending with health services, the right to enter certain educational facilities and work in certain fields, the right to travel, and a great many other things.

All these decisions, whose number will run into billions per day, will be made automatically. In charge of the computers that run the system will be the government, of course. Its officials will decide exactly how many points each piece of praiseworthy behavior (e.g. telling people that Xi Jinping is the greatest leader, as well as the nicest man, in history) or transgression will add to your score or cost you. From time to time, the rules will be changed so as to take account of changing circumstances. Some will no doubt be published so as to help people understand what is wanted of them. Many others will not be, leaving them in the dark as to what is happening to them and why.

At the moment China is the only country publicly known to be building such a system. But this will probably change. I do not mean just tin-pot dictatorships such as exist in many different parts of the world. But also highly developed Western countries such as Canada, or Britain—the latter, in my experience, has already in many ways been turned into a mixture of political correctness and police state—or the Netherlands, or Switzerland. And he US, of course.

Technologically speaking they, and a great many others, can easily do what China can. The only thing that stands in the way are laws concerning privacy, transparency, and respect for the individual. However, should terrorism turn into a more serious problem than it already is, surely such laws will be quickly and quite easily swept away.

So what to do? Enters, says Dr. Tzezana, something he calls DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). Such an organization will use the same methods to collect just as much information as China’s Social Credit System will and process it in similar ways. Instead of keeping it secret and available only to the country’s rulers, though, the information in question, as well as the rules by which it is classified and used, will be available to any member of the Cloud. Somewhat like Uber and AirBnB, but without their centralized headquarters. Operating in such a way, it will provide members with such benefits as “peer to peer insurance, peer to peer conflict resolution systems, peer to peer document storage and peer to peer support.” All incomparably faster, cheaper, and in some ways more reliable than anything available today. That way, Dr. Tzezana hopes, sharks and leviathans will be thwarted and democracy preserved. The flipside? Everyone will be publicly rated by everyone else on everything all the time.

From bad to worse, I myself would say.