45 Comments »

1. 

   Oh, right, not doing anything next weekend – let’s jump the ditch to the Gold Coast for an international men’s conference.

   Comment by Downunder — Sat 3rd June 2017 @ 11:18 am

2. 

   1, thats great, can you grab a ticket for me too…

   Comment by Voices back from the bush — Sat 3rd June 2017 @ 11:39 am

3. 

   Actually this is interesting.

   Five minutes research on the net and you can see what’s going on.

   I don’t know if you will remember this JP, but we had a good set-to over exactly this at the NSMC in the days of the print version.

   Comment by Downunder — Sat 3rd June 2017 @ 12:20 pm

4. 

   Paul Elam’s summary from ICM 2016 is excellent and challenging.
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UqNTF44Bl0&list=PLHLREeMe4S0NpD28I_Z0I2bAh40h8X_UM&index=17

   Comment by MurrayBacon — Sat 3rd June 2017 @ 1:45 pm

5. 

   TheAntiGynocentrist said 9 months ago, in the comments under Paul Elam’s speech:

   Overall this was an excellent speech. My only criticism was the conflation of biological importance solely being related to reproductive investment and this notion that therefore women are more “important” physically than men. Something that I hear from female supremacists and don’t expect to hear at a men rights conference and amusingly both groups use the same arguments about what happens if you kill most of one sex off. There is much more involved in genetic success than simply producing offspring, especially when it comes to higher order animals like humans. Humans are not microbes. I have a previous background in the life sciences. The fact is without male provision and protection few of the children women produced in prehistoric times would have reached sexual maturity for reasons that should be obvious, not to mention the sharp rise in female mortality without male support which would have severely curtailed their reproductive capacity. So it is wrong to just automatically assume a tribe with mostly women will fair better than a tribe with mostly men simply because there are more wombs. Women can’t reproduce at an optimal rate if their survival prospects are severely curtailed without male support and those babies they do produce will die before they pass on their genes and be genetic dead ends as if they were never born. Then there is the genetic bottleneck that puts a negative selection pressure on either gender becoming a minority due a reduction in genetic diversity, risk of reduced fertility (as you increase the risk of a sterile male having large impacts on the future reproductive success of that tribe if they are part of the leftover male minority). Neither sex is more important than the other biologically speaking. I could explain further but that would require me to write an essay on this page and this comment is already quite long. We have different evolutionary roles. It very easy for this culture to arrive at the conclusion men are disposable when we all live with the creature comforts of modern technology and don’t see the men making the marvel of modern civilisation operate. Sadly it is my belief that it will take a collapse for society to break free of gynocentrism by seeing how valuable and reliant society is on men. When people dont have food, shelter, infrastructure etc and are exposed to our natural world, then we will see how needed versus disposable men really are (how many people will be so cavalier as to dispose of the very people they depend on to survive in such a situation). It is technology that shields us from this reality. Technology that men created and maintain. Technology that can make women as obsolete with artificial uteri as it can men. It is far too simplistic to imply women simply are more important because they produce children. Last time I checked women don’t get pregnant without men and simply getting pregnant omits the very crucial fact that women had to survive long enough in prehistoric times thanks to male support to 1. Get pregnant in the first place. 2. Get pregnant at an optimal rate. 3. Support and ensure the offspring survive to sexual maturity and dont become a genetic dead end. It is this complete lack of understanding for the value of men through this misunderstanding of evolutionary biology (some of which has been deliberately propagated by some scientists with a feminist agenda) that made me slow as a young man to support the mens movement years back. As a young man the last thing I wanted or thought I would hear from a men’s movement is how I am disposable. I heard the same rhetoric from female supremacists which led me to the men’s movement in the first place! What young men need to hear and what is required if we want real change is for men to hear that they are valuable. Just as valuable as women. But like I said I suspect society will have to learn the hard way what happens when you devalue the very people that keep civilisation running and the lights and heating on at night. If you can’t survive you can’t reproduce and your children won’t last. Human biology is far more complex than solely relying on reproduction to pass on genes. We developed from microbes because there is more to evolution than reproduction. There is adaptation to survive and we all know which sex has developed those adaptations in greater degrees and which sex selects for them in their mates to a greater extent. Clearly reproduction is merely one part of a more complex equation of evolutionary successs.

   Comment on Paul Elam’s speech

   Comment by MurrayBacon — Sat 3rd June 2017 @ 1:51 pm

6. 

   The disposable male concept is a recognizable thread from the Warren Farrell dialogue. While accepting it had a basis, but seeing after further discussion, that it was an historical representation, and only in part, I switched to pushing percieved security or the perception of security by society as a preferable reference to that train of thought.

   We may at times have been disposed of, but we are not disposable – the good intentions of such comments are sometimes our worst enemy when we repeat them, with no other good reason, than hoping it will make a difference.

   Comment by Downunder — Sat 3rd June 2017 @ 2:38 pm

7. 

   I see our Women’s Magazine Stuff.co.nz recently headlining

   Native bird at risk of extinction from limited gene pool.

   Their editor is widely recognized as a bird brain.

   Comment by Evan Myers — Sat 3rd June 2017 @ 3:17 pm

8. 

   Downunder,

   …..than hoping it will make a difference.

   To me, this is exactly the point about why the Men’s Movement has had surprisingly little impact, even over 20 or 30 years.
   My conclusion (but unfortunately I haven’t had anyone agree with me yet), is that to constructively take these issues further, requires accurate, quantitative policy analysis. This is easy to say and astonishingly complex to do.
   In my opinion, most of the gains made by the women’s movement, were based on fairly simple qualitative analyses. These have been able to be done for 50, even 100 years fairly satisfactorily.
   The results of these analyses appear self evident, because the issues were framed in a simple and fairly obvious way. (Seductively simple but missing out many important issues too and that is why the results suggested policy actions that didn’t work as predicted in actual societies.
   Quite properly, most politicians are now more cautious about applying research results, even too cautious. So we are stuck with a set of dangerous and fairly defective policies.

   The next step is more careful quantitative analyses of desired effects and perverse effects of policies that have been proposed. Easy to say and very difficult to do.
   Peter Davis is one of the academics at the forefront of analyses of this type, even going ten steps further by setting up a system which claims to offer quick predictions of the total outcomes of policy changes. His claims are adventurous, but definitely in the right direction.

   Another limitation of quantitative analysis, is that often statistical data is needed, that was never gathered at the time. Peter Davis’ system even offers a solution to this problem, though it is necessarily uses extrapolation.

   Examples of perverse effects that were clearly warned about, but never properly investigated before policy implementation are:
   Return to community of many mental hospital patients (many of the women bore quite a few children each).
   child [and spousal] support (open to manipulation by parents with mental health problems, quite to the detriment of children, mothers and fathers.
   familycaught$ and District Caught open to manipulation by legal workers for personal gain, (against the interests of children, men and mothers).

   The list is far longer than this. I have just listed three egregious examples.

   NZ shows up well in top quintile student performance in international comparisons. It also shows up surprisingly poorly, in the performance of the lowest quintile. In time this problem becomes a worker performance problem and an unemployment problem. Unsolved, this problem hangs over us for say 80 years, as it impacts not just work, but social cohesiveness, which elderly people contribute significantly too, if they are healthy, in body and mind.

   As a society, there are huge benefits available, if we choose to use more careful and incisive policy analysis techniques.

   Comment by MurrayBacon — Sun 4th June 2017 @ 8:47 am

9. 

   All politicians have done, is take a step back, and say, I’ve taken advice on this, not my problem.

   But it isn’t as simple as policy analysis, when we’ve increased the number of derivatives from the logical base.

   If you think about that for long enough, you might even be able to quantify the amount of confusion.

   Comment by Downunder — Sun 4th June 2017 @ 10:27 am

10. 

    NZ shows up well in top quintile student performance in international comparisons. It also shows up surprisingly poorly, in the performance of the lowest quintile.

    Parrots should be confined to economics, students should be taught to think.

    Comment by Evan Myers — Sun 4th June 2017 @ 10:38 am

11. 

    MurrayBacon #8: Good points.

    The feminists used a lot of shonky quantitative claims that were very influential in changing laws and policies. It’s important we highlight the unreliable nature of many of those quantitative claims and provide more valid statistics where possible.

    Comment by Ministry of Men's Affairs — Sun 4th June 2017 @ 11:51 am

12. 

    Thanks MoMA, though the accuracy of gathered statistics is a serious problem, the biggest problem is failure to gather sufficiently detailed statistics.
    When a question is asked, the statistics available and relevant are gathered, it isn’t always possible to answer the question or answer it reliably enough.
    The bigger quantitative problem, is that direct desired effects have been partially analysed, but perverse effects and possibilities for manipulating the system have not been considered at all – let alone analysed competently.
    Typically, gathered statistics are sufficient for analysis of desired effects, but it takes a lot more data to analyse for possible perverse and manipulated outcomes.
    To me, the painful aspect of that is the large disparity between policy analyst’s salaries, between Treasury and the more social departments. Too often well qualified men have taken Treasury jobs and the women are left with much lower paid jobs in the social departments.

    Men’s greed (or evolutionary driven “need” for higher salaries to impress mythical women) has left the social policy analyst’s jobs to women.
    To make the problem worse still, policy analysis projects in the social departments are underfunded, not by a few per cent, more like a ratio of 10x. Thus there just isn’t sufficient time available to perform a full and competent policy analysis. We save several hundreds of millions of dollars per year and saddle ourselves with multi billion per year long term losses.
    The women complain about their salaries, but are ignored by civil service bosses and politicians.
    As far as I can see, we can only blame short sighted men for this expensive fiasco.

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Sun 4th June 2017 @ 2:32 pm

13. 

    Sexism ‘mansplained’ in this article.

    https://m.townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2017/06/03/sorry-feminists-but-the-truth-is-sexist-n2335718

    Comment by Voices back from the bush — Sun 4th June 2017 @ 3:09 pm

14. 

    @Murray

    If you had a look at parliamentary records in the Clark Ministry, you would find that the best female analysts were going straight from university to ‘parliamentary jobs’ starting on $100k

    Comment by Downunder — Sun 4th June 2017 @ 3:24 pm

15. 

    @13

    that probably explains why more men are in jail

    I don’t know if he said anything sensible after that, because I stopped reading, which can happen when you get hit between the eyes by gross stupidity.

    Comment by Downunder — Sun 4th June 2017 @ 4:25 pm

16. 

    Thanks Downunder. When you say Parliamentary records, exactly what records are you talking about?
    I was comparing Treasury to “justice” or Social Welfare policy analysts.
    I still believe that my comment about gross underfunding of policy analysis projects is the larger issue. If analyst’s wages vary over maybe 2:1 range, the general underfunding to what is justified by the social needs is more like 10:1.

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Mon 5th June 2017 @ 10:20 am

17. 

    You would need to talk to parliamentary services.

    Clark and her bunch had their own behind the scenes policy team. What happened in the Ministries didn’t matter, effectively cheap Labour producing rubbish.

    What you’re saying is the girls got ripped off.

    If think about what I said. The smart girls were going straight on Auntie Helen’s payroll, 100k straight off the back of study.

    They fucked with the system. If the system is fucked, then you need to do that research and put the blame where it fits.

    Women need to understand Clark was no women’s hero. Why didn’t the smart girls get good jobs within the ministry, like they should have?

    Comment by Downunder — Mon 5th June 2017 @ 10:52 am

18. 

    And they were three year contracts with secrecy causes.

    Comment by Downunder — Mon 5th June 2017 @ 11:00 am

19. 

    I’m not sure that in general conversation you would immediately grasp the implications of high jacking the intellectual capacity of a population.

    Perhaps a good comparison would be the effects of Maori Chiefs sending their best educated, finest sportsman, toughest fighters to the front lines of WW1 – that had a devastating effect on their social development.

    While the chiefs were in competition for status, Clark in a similar way was using the female tribe against the male tribe.

    Recovery is a slow process and one not helped by ignorance of the causes.

    Comment by Evan Myers — Mon 5th June 2017 @ 11:14 am

20. 

    Downunder, thank you for widening the net. I take it you are meaning policy analysts in the Prime Ministers Department?
    In the last 30 years, PM’s Dept has been much more politicised, somewhat USA style. As you say, contracts for the foreseeable duration of the administration. style.
    I suspect that Muldoon was the start of the PM’s Dept serving PM and party, over the public and civil service?
    I admit I have never seen pay rates quoted, other than annual totals spent on “consultants”.

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Tue 6th June 2017 @ 7:53 am

21. 

    @Murray

    never seen payrates quoted?

    You don’t recall reading the news, that the Commissioner’s Office was reestablished as the Office of the Commissioner and ten new (externally filled) jobs were created with starting salaries of $100,000?

    It would be in the Herald Archives under Police.

    Comment by Downunder — Tue 6th June 2017 @ 8:35 am

22. 

    @downunder

    I did come across a post or a comment about a policy team being established within the Police producing protocols from its own research and data collection.

    Top down research may go some way to explaining

    Comment by Evan Myers — Tue 6th June 2017 @ 9:13 am

23. 

    the bottom up effect.

    Comment by Evan Myers — Tue 6th June 2017 @ 9:14 am

24. 

    There’s a degree of confusion when you think the policy came from one place, and you start asking why that policy failed, and caused a mess, when you’ve got another policy machine causing a mess and those people asking; why didn’t that get us what we wanted?

    If we were dealing in currency rather than ideas, you’d call it corruption.

    Comment by Downunder — Tue 6th June 2017 @ 9:39 am

25. 

    I don’t think we should be so ‘economical’ with our definition of corruption – the word can be corrupted also.

    If we asked;

    On whose authority?
    Why the secret?
    Who benefits?

    Comment by Evan Myers — Tue 6th June 2017 @ 9:50 am

26. 

    Then there was, and still is I believe, the policy for the Ministry for Women to ‘gender audit’ every piece of legislation before it proceeds to be passed. ‘Gender audit’ of course only means ‘audit for its implications for women’, the male gender not being important enough to worry about.

    Comment by Man X Norton — Tue 6th June 2017 @ 9:50 am

27. 

    However, it would be good to see the source of the information about $100,000 starting salaries for women.

    Comment by Man X Norton — Tue 6th June 2017 @ 9:56 am

28. 

    @27 why?

    To argue over privilege?

    Is that a means to unmasking social corruption?

    Comment by Downunder — Tue 6th June 2017 @ 10:26 am

29. 

    @ 28. Why? Because I think the person who makes a claim has a responsibility to provide the evidence, rather than telling others to go find the evidence. And because I would find it good to know more about the matter.

    Comment by Man X Norton — Tue 6th June 2017 @ 11:53 pm

30. 

    It wasn’t a claim, or an opinion, It was evidence.

    I didn’t provide a source, and I won’t be either.

    Comment by Downunder — Wed 7th June 2017 @ 7:22 am

31. 

    No it wasn’t evidence, it was just your claim. Without evidence or a source, it’s better ignored.

    Comment by Man X Norton — Wed 7th June 2017 @ 10:24 pm

32. 

    Obviously Man X Norton you have a difficulty with the correlation between evidence and proof, in which case you would be better ignored.

    Comment by Downunder — Thu 8th June 2017 @ 8:19 am

33. 

    Downunder @32 – proof is a misused word (such as pedophile when we mean to say child sex offender) – there is no real correlation between proof and evidence. Evidence is something that we produce in court, proof is something we produce in the classroom – Quod Erat Demonstrandum (QED) – that which had to be proved.

    Comment by martin — Thu 8th June 2017 @ 9:56 am

34. 

    The weight of evidence should be determined by a person’s demands?

    Sounds a bit too much like the Family Court to me.

    Comment by Evan Myers — Thu 8th June 2017 @ 10:02 am

35. 

    @Martin, proof eliminates assumption, not evidence.

    Didn’t I just see you post something about woman not lying?

    Comment by Downunder — Thu 8th June 2017 @ 10:11 am

36. 

    Proof is just that – I want to prove 4-2 =2; 1+1=2, 1+1+1+1=4 therefore 4-2=2, that is a proof. Another exmple might be 0/0 = 1. If I hd to prove this I would suggest 1/1 =1, 2/2=1, -5/-5 =0 therefore any number (0 being a number) divided by itself has to be =1. That is proof.

    Evidence is what is given in court.

    One cannot provide evidence or apply “proof” that women don’t lie, because I only have to find one woman who lies to make that assertion false. That said, I couldn’t now say that ALL women lie, that could not follow either. I think a more reasonable assertion would be based on other evidence (be it from life experience, research etc) that everyone lies, including researchers, judges, politicians, children, everyone – but not all the time.

    Comment by martin — Thu 8th June 2017 @ 11:27 am

37. 

    @Martin proof is a degree of evidence, but some people will always prefer the assumption.

    Comment by Downunder — Thu 8th June 2017 @ 11:35 am

38. 

    Proof is a red herring. While a claimed memory may amount to evidence and has unfortunately been allowed to become treated as proof in criminal cases against men, the quality of such evidence is necessarily poor without supporting evidence. We have had no supporting evidence for a claim about female policy analysts starting at $100,000 per annum.

    Comment by Man X Norton — Thu 8th June 2017 @ 11:49 am

39. 

    All evidence is not proof but all proof is evidence.

    Comment by Downunder — Thu 8th June 2017 @ 12:20 pm

40. 

    Manufacturing proof. Is that right up there with high jacking intellectual capacity?

    Comment by Evan Myers — Thu 8th June 2017 @ 3:24 pm

41. 

    Social regression?

    They are no longer the mothers, the sisters, the friends of men, just battery hens spitting out eggs with legs.

    Comment by Downunder — Fri 9th June 2017 @ 10:19 am

42. 

    @36-Bravo! Proof of possession or evidence of lack of basic reasoning skills?

    Comment by WrongGender — Fri 9th June 2017 @ 8:00 pm

43. 

    If you have a look at Jacinda Adern’s profile on Wikipedia you will see it (as discussed above) names her as one of the university graduates who went from university to parliament and in her case from Waikato in 2001.

    Comment by Downunder — Fri 20th October 2017 @ 8:31 pm

44. 

    This link leads to an index that covers all of the ICMIs 2014 to 2019.
    https://menz.org.nz/2017/international-conference-on-mens-issues-gold-coast-june-9th-11th/

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Tue 5th March 2019 @ 1:08 pm

45. 

    Is this another incorrect link Murray or are you taking the piss here?

    Comment by Downunder — Thu 7th March 2019 @ 10:42 am

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment

Please note that comments which do not conform with the rules of this site are likely to be removed. They should be on-topic for the page they are on. Discussions about moderation are specifically forbidden. All spam will be deleted within a few hours and blacklisted on the stopforumspam database.

This site is cached. Comments will not appear immediately unless you are logged in. Please do not make multiple attempts.

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Δ