The Clare Spark Blog

November 26, 2017

The Sex Scandals: where do we go from here?

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 10:08 pm
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Biggest Sex Scandals (radaronline.com)

Where we are now: women still emerging with horror stories about male sexual harassment in the media and politics; so far the debate has to do with male perversity and female victimhood. The melodrama continues with predictable finger pointing and sensational firings or demands for (political) resignations, or silly lawsuits. (On melodrama’s categories see https://clarespark.com/2013/08/09/melodrama-and-its-appeal.)

What is missing? 1. The nature of sexuality, both female and male; 2. competition among women for the favors of potential husbands, a competition inflamed by all elements of popular culture, but especially mass media.

Have feminist movements helped or hindered the cause of female independence? What would a more constructive feminism look like?

Conservative women point to such 19th century classics such as Little Women (1868) and similar tracts supporting “domestic feminism” (the notion that women gain power by embracing the comparatively matriarchal domestic sphere or other agencies of uplift). Some radical or liberal feminists find power in invading what were once were male clubs, including the imitation of what is taken to be male aggressive and promiscuous sexuality.

No commentators, to my knowledge, point to built-in “pedophilia”—the glorification of “innocence”—- usually ascribed to early childhood (as if youngsters were not sensual beings). Add this consideration to the partly changing life expectancy, and you get mass amnesia: we may forget that biology fits both male and female to reproductive capacity after puberty (see https://clarespark.com/2013/05/02/teen-age-sex/.)

Is it any wonder that many adult males are attracted to [nymphets]? Is it any wonder that women try to prolong youthfulness/sexual attractiveness well into middle-, even old, age?

JFK and Marilyn (alternet.com)

How should we “take responsibility” for our actions when we are the playthings of our biological inheritance?https://clarespark.com/2013/05/02/teen-age-sex/

December 3, 2016

Apocalypse today (post-election 2016)

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 9:59 pm
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Charlotte NC 2012 Getty Images

Charlotte NC 2012 Harvest Moon Grille
Getty Images

This posting is about my response to the mass media hysteria after the Trump victory and transition to the Trump presidency.

The media, controlled as they are by “moderates,” is unable to explain the quandaries that the progressive movement is facing as it tries to grapple with its future, especially as it relates to the “white working class.” I might have been similarly baffled had I not studied social movements in U.S. history. I refer to the sharp turn to the pseudo-Left enacted by the inheritors of the Mugwump-ish conservatives after the shock of the Bolshevik revolution and the growing sympathy in this country for revolt among the working class and its allies. Behold how the (“moderate”) Nation magazine reacted to another apocalypse—this time to Woodrow Wilson’s contribution to the Versailles Conference that ended World War I: https://clarespark.com/2009/09/19/populism-progressivism-and-corporatist-liberalism-in-the-nation-1919/. Briefly, editor Villard urged his readers to emulate the populist-progressives to prevent looming socialist revolution and the rule of the international Big Money.

(Yet Oswald Garrison Villard was no democrat in his preference for elite, non-Jewish rule. Such is the vexed lineage of social democracy. Is it any wonder that “the Left” is unable to unmask itself?)

“Nativist” is the more polite term for “racist”—a moniker that Democrats prefer to affix to their rivals among Trump supporters. It is no surprise, then, that liberals, unembarrassed by 20th century New Left history, should not publicly understand that affirmative action, like all of “identity politics,” is inherently a quota system that is racist in its conception. Some on the Right complain that reverse racism exists. Such persons are apparently oblivious to the leftist insistence on “white supremacy,” a variant on the anti-imperialism of the counter-culture/New Left. (I.e., Dems insist that white workers are structurally unable to modify their own racism, because they indirectly profit from non-white subordination; we remain mired in the social relations of slavery. Upward mobility is only a fond fantasy perpetrated by laissez-faire capitalists to fool “the people.”)

acceptancepetergriffin

The Old Left believed in “history”—in the inevitable triumph of socialism through class consciousness.

The New Left said goodbye to all that, and counted on its own inherited moralism, elitism and subtle racism to vanquish threats from below. Is it any wonder that the Democrat Party is boxed in, with nowhere to go?

Ben Tillman 1906, Pinterest

Ben Tillman 1906, Pinterest

November 13, 2016

Apocalypse now

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 7:50 pm
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Apocalypse Kingofwallpapers.com

Apocalypse: Kingofwallpapers.com

This blog is about the requirement to understand the socially-induced misconceptions of the protesters, including the destructive anarchists among them.

I have changed my mind about the election blog I would write, partly because I have seen the conservative responses written by many of my Facebook friends, which roundly criticize the protesters.

Indeed, my first response was to post a message from Jenny, one of my daughters: “I know many are mourning, crying, and panicked over the election results, a reaction to which I honestly cannot relate, but let people feel their feelings, I say. I cannot understand and find totally irresponsible, however, parents who have demonized the president elect, making their children believe he is a bad man and will hurt them and our world. Children need to feel secure and confident in order to grow into happy and successful adults. Shame on parents who feed their children unfounded ideas which then make them feel unsafe. This country is home to citizens and their families with a vast spectrum of valid values and beliefs. We can’t get our way all of the time. Liberals had eight years to get it right and now it’s time to take a different approach. Let us not put our children in the crossfire while battling different opinions. Oh, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we all act like grownups—inform ourselves, work to make ourselves and the world better, and be an example to the children of how to move forward in a constructive, generous, and faithful way. Let us leave tantrums to the two-year- olds.”(end of Jenny’s post-election comment.)

I agree with this analysis, but I also see the results of a partisan education outside the family, that has thwarted the political education of the youthful protesters, even the violent ones among them. This partisan education is also a form of child abuse that should be more widely recognized. (And Jenny concurs, noting that her comment was only one thread among many.)

The protesters (including the anarchists) are a product of an education that has left them terrified. In no particular order, these are the deficiencies that have fueled their panic (this fear of annihilation was brought to my attention by my daughter Rachel). In no particular order:

  1. The notion that the Democrat Party is left-wing. It is common for many conservatives to view “the Left” as if they are all communists, ignoring the obvious fact that Democrats/progressives have co-opted and neutralized the demands of revolutionary socialists: i.e., the radical demands of the 19th and early 20th century labor movements for worker control of production.
  2. The notion that identity politics/multiculturalism is a radical innovation, and is similarly communist-inspired. Indeed, it is another example of co-optation and neutralization, substituting “race” and “ethnicity” for class interest. Here came the notion of “political correctness” that Trump appears to have violated, leaving the masses unprotected from “racist” and “sexist” conservatives.
  3. The notion that the Constitution protected “white supremacy.” Again, this is context-ignoring factor. It is true that the Constitution was a compromise between Northern and Southern slaveholding elites, but that was dramatically changed by the Civil War and the social movements it spawned. Again, the progressives were aristocratic and racist, though this is too obvious a distinction for the “tenured radicals” controlling education today. Although progressives claim the mantle of science, balance, and enlightenment for themselves, in their zeal for the social relationships of the medieval period (e.g., deference to the Good King), they may be said to have dumbed down our population by denying the sharp tools of history.

This website has been devoted the misconceptions of our socialization. The media have always been partisan, but the 1960s movements developed a cadre of activists claiming the mantle of social justice, while trashing opponents as fascists, while some conservatives, just as foolishly, equated communism and fascism. (Both forms of social organization are statist and repressive, but fascism was a counter-revolution to the Soviet coup of 1917, not its structural twin.)

Is it any wonder that our young folk are in the streets? In their own eyes, they are doing the right thing by averting apocalypse now!

3-14-16, demo outside GOP headquarters. CBS News/AP

3-14-16, demo outside GOP headquarters. CBS News/AP

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