A new paradigm for dealing with Men’s issues
There has been a lot of debate recently on MENZ regarding the approach to solving the issues fathers/men face. A lot of it extremely negative and divisive.
Most contributors use what is caused a deficit research approach characterised by :
- Identification of problems
- Analysis of causes
- Analysis of possible solutions
- Plan of action (How will we “treat” this
- Issues are seen as problems to be solved.
The issues with this paradigm are best summed up by a quote from Einstein
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Or put another way:
- Focus is on yesterday (past)
- Responses are fragmented
- Positive images of the future are rare
- Resources (people) are exhausted before the problem is solved
- Teamwork tends to be weakened and inter-group relationships poor (Blame Culture)
- Leads to a negative identity and culture — e.g woman are the enemy and the cause of all evil
- Effecting change is very slow
Men’s issues become problems to be solved.
What could we do differently — how can we change the paradigm and effect real change for Fathers and men?
Its summed by a quote from Robert Kennedy
Some men see things as they are and ask why I dream things that never were and ask why not!
It’s a different paradigm called Appreciative Inquiry (AI)
It involves:
- Appreciating the best of what is.
- Focusing on the solution (what might be)
- Dialoguing on what the solution should be
- Innovating the solution (what will be)
Men’s issues become opportunities to be embraced
AI innovates real change not pointless arguing by:
- Remaining positively focused on the solution
- Is highly participative (all knowledge is valued)
- Focuses on the whole system
- Builds strong teams
- Simulates vision and creativity
- Transforms the dialogue to focusing on the solution (not personalities)
- Creates cooperation and synergy
From a change management perspective Positive solutions focus leads to positive action.
Our culture is a collection of the stories we tell about ourselves : Cultures on the rise are characterized by :
- A belief that people can positively influence their future
- Freedom to come together as a web community (Not individuals posting on the web lost in their own story)
- Encourages the creative, artistic and spiritual qualities (Utilising each others strengths)
 So its a challenge to you guys to change your thinking and look to a new paradigm for MENZ .To move beyond blame to solutions focused action and be real change agents.
All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble…They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This “outgrowing” proves on further investigation to require a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest appeared on the horizon and through this broadening of outlook the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically on its own terms but faded when confronted with a new and stronger life urge. Carl Jung.
Beautiful!!
Comment by MurrayBacon — Mon 23rd August 2010 @ 9:39 pm
Thanks Scrap,
in the spirit of AI (No, not artificial intelligence LOL!)
I’m still offering and suggesting that personal differences and conflict be dealt with OFF the threads at MENZ.
So far only Julie has responded, but positively.
I’m also informing people through the MENZ threads and elsewhere about developments of the new male birth control pills.
I’m connecting what I think are noteworthy contributions to MENZ with much larger more widely read Men’s Rites Sites.
I’m currently acting as an adult Male mentor to several hundred children, many who are fatherless.
I’m also mentoring several younger men about pitfalls to avoid in the west.
I’m writing a science fiction book about men and feminism.
I’m relentlessly challenging a feminist female colleague to move beyond her sexist misandric workplace practices
I’m also about to contribute money to a Men’s Rights organization so they can build on the work they are doing.
As my dear departed Grandfather use to say –
It’s good to keep busy; it keeps me off street corners!
Comment by Skeptik — Mon 23rd August 2010 @ 9:43 pm
I’m also awaiting a response from Amnesty Internation new Zealand to this –
Dear Sir/Madam,
I forward this document to you as I am much perplexed about the lack of human rights men in NZ suffer.
Please read it and respond to me and my friends in New Zealand.
What is Amnesty International NZ prepared to do to see that men going through the family court get due process of law?
What is your organization doing about Domestic Violence laws which allow for routine false allegations against men to be construed as proof of guilt.
Please reassure us you are doing something to overcome the widespread practice of genital mutilation of newborn males.
What are you doing to stop the ministry of women’s affairs from spreading hatemongering untruths about NZ men?
Finally please tell me what you are doing to release the many male political prisoners now in NZ jails on false charges of various crimes
Yours Sincerely,
Human Rights or Wrongs?
Amnesty International’s commitment to freedom is questionable
Amnesty International has long been regarded as among the world’s leading human rights organizations. Having worked with Amnesty for some years in their campaign to free political prisoners, I know that they deserved this reputation.
So it is sad to see the group squander their credibility. Amnesty has been so captured by political ideology that, far from defending human rights, they have become advocates for violating them.
The latest example comes from Sweden, where Amnesty is no longer fighting for political prisoners but instead advocates for authoritarian ideology. Amnesty sponsored a film competition, but when some finalists produced a film that angered feminists, the film was pulled from Amnesty’s YouTube site. Amnesty denies that pressure from an Uppsala women’s shelter was responsible for suppressing the film, but the shelter itself is gloating about its political clout.
The film, created by four high school students and titled, The Right To Be a Father, is a powerful depiction of how children are taken from their fathers by Sweden’s feminist family courts. Separating children from their fathers is not only a bedrock principle of the war against “patriarchy,” but also the bread-and-butter of the lucrative child custody industry, so it is not surprising that the sisterhood would come down hard on the heresy that feminists violate human rights.
The film was nominated for the final stage of the competition. Amnesty posted it on YouTube, and the creators were invited to the film gala in Gothenburg. “But our film was never shown at the festival, and the day after it also disappeared from Amnesty’s YouTube channel,” says Sara Sivesson, one of the creators. Further, the students claim they obtained an email from the Uppsala feminists bragging, “Thanks to the protests Amnesty did not show the film at the festival and they also dropped it from their website.”
The matter was publicized by blogger Joakim Ramstedt, who alleges that his government health benefits were then revoked because of his blogging and that confidential information from his own custody case (he has not seen his five-year-old daughter for over a year) was leaked and posted on the internet in an effort to smear him. Sweden prides itself on protections for privacy and civil liberties, but this may be what we can all expect when a welfare state manages our lives.
This is not isolated. In recent years Amnesty has become a mouthpiece for the radical feminist agenda, to the point of pushing programs that violate human rights. Amnesty’s campaign against “domestic violence,” for example, is a prescription for criminalizing the innocent on a huge scale.
Even on its face, “domestic violence” is a matter not of human rights but of crime. No one suggests that ordinary theft or assault, when not perpetrated by government agents, are “human rights” violations. They are crimes for which the criminal justice system either provides or it does not. If not, the system is dysfunctional, but it has nothing to do with “human rights.”
But this is precisely what is wrong with the trumped-up hysteria over “domestic violence” (and most accusations are indeed trumped-up): It exists precisely to circumvent the legal safeguards and protections for the rights of the accused that make free countries free. Newfangled gender crimes like “domestic violence” exist to punish those who cannot be convicted with evidence.
Why can alleged assailants not be charged and tried according to standard laws against violent assault? Because domestic “violence” criminalizes almost anything, even if it is not violent or even physical.
In domestic violence cases there is seldom a trial, almost never a jury, and no one is ever acquitted. One study published in Criminology and Public Policy found that everyone arrested for domestic violence receives some punishment. Special “domestic violence courts” now exist for the express purpose of processing more convictions.
It is based on this presumption of guilt that Amnesty can claim that in the US “a woman is battered every 15 seconds.” Amnesty provides no documentation for this preposterous figure, because none exists. We also learn that “Amnesty International considers domestic violence a form of torture,” demonstrating an Orwellian willingness to redefine words and cheapening their own campaign against real torture.
Amnesty is quite clear that it is stretching the meaning of “human rights” into a backdoor penal instrument. “A human rights framework…enables Amnesty International to use international human rights standards and laws…to hold governments accountable if they fail to meet their obligations to protect women.” In other words, far from limiting government reach and repression, Amnesty is working to expand them.
This in turn points to a larger problem in the trajectory of human rights law. When you accuse people of violating human rights — of crimes — you raise the question of protecting their own human rights at the most basic level of due process. Protecting the human rights of those accused of human rights violations is something for which “human rights” groups have shown little concern. On the contrary, they seem far more concerned with erecting an assortment of grand-sounding conventions, monitoring committees, and pseudo-tribunals, whose mandate seems to be to convict anyone who is accused.
The due process protections being undermined are far more fundamental than some questionable new human rights: “rights” to food or education, for example, or the “rights of the child” to be free from parental authority.
Addressing this question becomes especially urgent when an assortment of political authorities, from national foreign ministries, to the EU, to the UN, is busy creating criminal jurisdiction for itself — powers that are not limited by due process protections — culminating in the august “International Criminal Court.”
Human rights are too important to be hijacked by ideologues with an agenda. We need an extensive discussion about what we mean by human rights and what it means to accuse someone of violating them. If human rights becomes a free-for-all for every mountebank peddling a grievance, it will become a vehicle for violating human rights, as we see with Amnesty International.
July 26, 2010
Stephen Baskerville is associate professor of government at Patrick Henry College and author of Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland House, 2007).
Comment by Skeptik — Mon 23rd August 2010 @ 10:07 pm
Wow, good piece thanks Skeptik
Comment by Hans Laven — Mon 23rd August 2010 @ 10:16 pm
I generally work on the principle of breaking big problems down into a mumber of small ones. Then create plans for each. These plans can also have many small, quite manageable parts. It has always worked successfully.
Lately I have been building in a new strategic thrust. I ensure that the first ten steps involve little more than sittng here with a cup of coffee and a pipe full of tobacco.
I am having great success bedding-in the new strategy.
Comment by amfortas — Mon 23rd August 2010 @ 11:42 pm
Be careful with those strategic thrusts, Amfortas. The male birth control pill isn’t available yet!
Comment by Hans Laven — Mon 23rd August 2010 @ 11:59 pm
Far from having credibility or squandering it, Amnesty was started by two members of the British Communist Party and funded by ComIntern to represent the interests of communist sympathisers incarcerated after the Spanish Civil War.
How anyone gets the idea that Amnesty ever had the slightest interest in Human Rights is a testament to the success of their propaganda.
Comment by amfortas — Tue 24th August 2010 @ 12:14 am
Amnesty International was actually formed in 1961, 22 years AFTER the end of the Spanish civil war.
There were 2 main founders, Peter Benensen who was a jewish lawyer who started off in his youth , helping orphans of the Spanish Civil War and Eric Baker who was a Quaker, connected with CND in the 60s. Benensen frequently spoke against the Soviet Untion, invasion of Hungary etc.
Yes nobody defends mens’ human rights do they ?
Comment by Kiwi InThailand — Tue 24th August 2010 @ 3:33 am
MMMMMMMMM. My head’s gonna explode.
Comment by Darryl X — Tue 24th August 2010 @ 1:59 pm
I’m positively focused on war.
Comment by Darryl X — Tue 24th August 2010 @ 2:01 pm
Thanks Murray
Solutions focused thinking is I believe the way forward. It will be an itellectual challenge to many it requires them to focus on the future and what the solution is.
Regards
Scrap
Comment by Scrap_The_CSA — Tue 24th August 2010 @ 2:13 pm
Hi Skeptik,
I would suggest that you become solutions focused as what you are publishing here is problem focused.
For example – The solution is male control of his reproductive rights (which is completely different from a male contraceptive pill, although that is a possible part of it)
REgards
Scrap
Comment by Scrap_The_CSA — Tue 24th August 2010 @ 2:19 pm
IF the paradigm of classical root cause analysis works for the problems we face why so little real change for men?
I must admit a cup of tea is a vital part of my thinking process :o)
Regards
Scrap
Comment by Scrap_The_CSA — Tue 24th August 2010 @ 2:23 pm
Hardly a solution Darryl – TRy focusing on the future perfect view of what you want to achieve.
Regards
SCrap
Comment by Scrap_The_CSA — Tue 24th August 2010 @ 2:24 pm
I agree with Murray – beautiful. You’ve got awesome strengths and I’m glad you’re here.
Comment by julie — Wed 25th August 2010 @ 11:18 am
Thanks Julie.
Whilst looking at the future, a good understanding of history is often essential to making a good stab at a new system, rather than just creating a new set of problems, possibly worse than the previous one. If we respond inappropriately and too late, then our new system will almost certainly be a new disaster. The sins of the grandfather…
“Those who don’t understand history, are doomed to repeat it…” Cheers.
Comment by MurrayBacon — Thu 26th August 2010 @ 8:26 am
Murray agree that it is imperative that we dont forget the history, but at the same time a lot of men get trapped in it and cant see a better future and create a vision to achieve it.
What we all need to do is get off the dance floor and get on the balcony. When on the dance floor you can only see those immeadiately around you the balcony gives you a bigger picture and a view of al that is going on.
Regards
Scrap
Comment by Scrap_The_CSA — Thu 26th August 2010 @ 9:53 am