Marginalising Men

Increasingly in UK advertising, men are depicted as feckless and infantile. This has been the case for some years, as men play the fool to the women. Recently I have come across a few adverts that extend that subjugation, placing the children ahead of their father. Only the family pet remains to supersede the men, and they are often on par with men.
Perhaps this is only permissible because men are so confident in their status. Perhaps it is an over compensation in the movement to promote the cause of those perceived to be marginalised in the past. Unfortunately, whatever the reason, men are marginalised in this trend and consequently offer negative role models to boys. If our boys continue to be immature into adulthood, are these role models partly to blame?

What should we do about the Credit Crunch?

Recent financial ructions prove again that people are sometimes better at creating situations than they are at understanding them. Few predicted the credit crunch coming, fewer predicted the scale of the problems and none predicted when it would happen. It is clear that society allows a privileged few to play games with complexity beyond their ability to manage. This would not ordinarily matter, but these games affect us all.
What can we do? We can punish the people who made large amounts of money from this debacle. We can also better regulate the financial services industry to try and prevent it happening again. We can distribute the burden for the normalisation of the excesses to us all over a prolonged period, in an attempt to soften the blow and recover confidence to prevent a worse collapse. Or, we could sharpen the focus on the problems to precipitate a more rapid and deep correction on the worst offenders, so we are all out of this mess more quickly. However, before we start pointing fingers, we should remember that most, if not all of us, benefited for a while from the period of sustained and now we see, unreasonable asset price growth and easy borrowing terms. It is human nature that failed us. Remove the people at the top who benefited most and they will be replaced by people just like them, possibly less ruthless for a while, but also probably less smart. Change the rules and they will find ways around the new rules, the whole silly mess will revisit us eventually. We need a deeper solution.
What should we do? The real problem is our archaic social structure and value systems. Leaving aside the obvious questions about the value of materialism for now, we still value chieftains i.e. people who look after the interests of our group at all costs against the interests of others. That is the way we always have selected our leaders. We seek people who can help us in alliances to vanquish our competitors. So we model ourselves on those chieftains and perpetuate this primordial human trait. Look around, the examples are clear, it is collaboration not conflict that benefits us. Everything we have that is good is an example of collaboration, not conflict. Competition is short-termism, the way of the beast; steal it today and forget tomorrow. People are at their best when they collaborate. Adversarial systems militate against our collective success. They waste our energy looking for short term advantage. We need systemic change. Humanity needs to change the way its governments work and the way business is organised and they very way we think.

Why Celebrity?

Many celebrities are not particularly unusual, nor have they done something excellent or noteworthy, so why are people interested in them? It would seem to be just because they are widely known. If that is true, why is it so interesting to people that someone is widely known?

Why for example is Paris Hilton interesting to many people? She garners a lot of interest for nothing exceptional, other than apparently being wealthy by someone else’s industry and antics which could broadly be summarised as childish or at best immature.

Easy Target

The good citizens among us have felt this sense of injustice; if you never felt it then you have been incredibly lucky, or perhaps you are just thick skinned about these things, or maybe you are one of life’s corner cutters, not an easy target. For example, you get a fine and points on your driving license for driving 1 mile per hour over a speed limit, but some reckless driver you have met never drove under a speed limit in their life and boasts they have a clean license. Or, perhaps you always declare all your income and pay your tax on time, but are chased relentlessly for a trivial amount missed by accident, when someone you know does not declare huge amounts they earn, because they got paid in cash. Or, perhaps you are a father from a failed marriage and you pay your child maintenance dutifully, but when you are a little stretched through no fault of your own, you get no latitude; but you know another father who skips most of his payments and always gets away with it.
The problem is target based metrics used to measure success that don’t value the difficulty of the job or its wider impact. It is difficult to ensure value is placed on these two features throughout society, but government has the opportunity to lead by ensuring they are used in the public sector. If they added these two criteria to any metric used to measure public sector performance, I think this would go some considerable way to making many of us feel happier with our society.

Intelligent Cowards

The real intelligentsia in the worlds advanced societies are allowing the lunatics to run the asylum. The example of Professor Watson being denied a platform after articulating an axiom about racial differences in intelligence, is just the latest in a long history of failings by the intellectual elite to take control of human destiny. I can not count myself among that elite, but I know enough to know they should stop being cowards and lead humanity out of this insane state, where any fool with a small minded agenda, a loud voice and some populist policies gets to run a country.
I want our world to be run by intellectual giants, not petty bigots. It is the weakness of inactivity in the intelligentsia that has doomed humanity to its current state of endless war and injustice. You intelligent people, it is time to stand up and take control. Stop allowing the children to run the household.
I did an experiment today. I posted comments that supported the views of Professor Watson to articles in both The Times and The Telegraph. As I suspected, neither published my comments. It is possible that they thought my comments were not worthy of publishing. It is also possible that they censored them because they did not kowtow to the prevailing pseudo-intellectual PC fascist views. People are silenced by fear of reprisals from aggressive dogma peddlers, we do not have freedom of speech. It is sad that we have to faun before the mental midgets and let our battles be fought by old men because we do not have the courage ourselves. Most of us do not even have the courage to endorse Professor Watson’s right to speak and remain open minded on the subject.
On the matter itself. Firstly, I would point out that in all the quotes I have seen (I have not read a transcript of the original) Professor Watson talks about a different intellectual ability, not that Africans are stupid. Secondly, it is clear that African countries are not as successful as non-African countries, by many measures. Now the out-of-Africa theory suggests that sub-Saharan Africa was the root of humanity, from where all peoples migrated. Indeed recent genetic research backs up this view by pointing out that genetic diversity decreases as we move further from that root. Also recent linguistics research backs up this view. So Africa has had the longest time to be successful, but has conspicuously failed. I would like to suggest that the reason is that those that had the gumption to move and also the skills to survive that choice were naturally selected to be better achievers. This is unlikely to be due solely to a differential in intelligence. More likely it is a combination of factors, among which I would suggest that physical endurance, social and language skills, adaptability, compassion and empathy are likely very significant. That filter of surviving and prospering through the rigours of migration has recently been destroyed by commercial movement of people, whether by their own volition or another’s. The remaining filter is the self perpetuating of an elite successful class through their adaptability to whatever obstacles are put in their way. In practice this equates to promoting the interests of one’s own offspring through the advantages and insights one has gained. It is difficult to denude this last process and those societies which have tried to have failed.
The relatively new field of epigenetic inheritance may also have something to say about how our success in life is determined by our ancestors. However, I don’t like the idea of using any inherited or environmental disadvantages as an excuse for not trying. To try ones best is a noble ideal and should be seen as an end in itself.
I can understand why people are reticent to stand up and be counted, but I hope that some of those great minds also have the courage to bring the debate forward. A prerequisite for progress is a desire to understand.

The age of politicians

What is the ideal age for a politician? Clearly neither extreme is good, so as we converge toward the middle ground there must be a best range, perhaps even a best year. It probably varies a little from person to person, but roughly where is it? I was thinking perhaps 45 to 55 might be the golden years. What do we think? Is Menzies Campbell too old, Davis Cameron too young and Gordon Brown about right?