Stephen Baskerville: a rehash

Started by poiuyt, Feb 13, 2008, 05:21 AM

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poiuyt

HOW TO TURN A FREE PEOPLE INTO SLAVES
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By Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D
January 15, 2008
NewsWithViews.com

A commonplace of the American Revolution held that citizens must have a love for liberty and a willingness to sacrifice and fight for it. Otherwise, no paper constitution alone can ever preserve their freedom.

Today, it is becoming equally commonplace that this spirit of liberty is leaving Americans, that we are becoming "a nation of sheep," as Judge Andrew Napolitano puts it in a new book, who acquiesce in the progressive abrogation of our Constitution and liberty.

This is plausibly attributed to several factors: mass affluence, cultural decadence, the loss of religious faith. But I believe one major factor has been seriously overlooked: the breakdown of the family and the growth of divorce. Moreover, this is not some nebulous "cultural" contributor that somehow saps Americans' willingness to defend their freedom. The cause-and-effect is directly demonstrable. The reason is that we are now raising our children according to the principles of tyranny.

Divorce sends many harmful messages to children and future citizens: that we can break vows we make to God and others; that family members may be discarded at will. But among the most destructive are about the role of government: that government is their de facto parent that may exercise unlimited power (including remove and criminalize their real parent) merely by claiming to act for their greater good.

While feminists push divorce-on-demand as a "civil liberty," in practice divorce has become our society's most authoritarian institution.

Some 80% of divorces are unilateral: the action of one spouse alone and over the objection of the other. One spouse's "freedom" to leave a freely contracted marriage, therefore, means tyranny over the other spouse in forcibly separating him from his home, property, and most seriously, his children. And while marriage is an agreement freely entered into by both parties, with only a nominal role for the government, unilateral divorce must be enforced by the coercive machinery of the state. Otherwise, the involuntary divorced spouse may continue to claim the right to live in the common home, to enjoy the common property, and above all, to parent the common children. These must be curtailed, or at least controlled, by the state.

This entails a massive extension of government power - and straight into precisely the realm from which its exclusion until now virtually defines freedom and limited government: the realm of private life.

The moment either spouse files for divorce, even if the other is legally unimpeachable, the government takes control of the children, who become effectively wards of the state. Unauthorized contact by a parent becomes a crime, and the excluded parent can be arrested and incarcerated without trial through a variety of other means that by-pass constitutional due process protections: domestic violence accusations, child abuse accusations, inability to pay "child support," even inability to pay attorneys' fees.

Legal jargon and clichés like "divorce," "custody battle," and "child support" have led Americans to acquiesce in this massive intrusion of state power over their freedom. We don't say that the government arbitrarily took away someone's children; we say he "lost custody." We don't say a legally innocent citizen was interrogated by government agents over how he lives his private life; we say there was a "custody battle." We don't say a citizen was incarcerated without trial or charge for debt he could not possibly pay and did nothing to incur; we say he "didn't pay his child support." These clichés and jargon inure us to tyranny.

But worst of all, we are raising generations of children to believe that police and jails exist not to protect us from dangerous criminals but to keep away one of their parents, and that the criminal justice apparatus may be marshaled against family members who have committed no legal infraction.

Using instruments of public criminal justice to punish private hurts turns the family into government-occupied territory. The children experience family life not as a place of love, cooperation, compromise, trust, and forgiveness. Instead they receive a firsthand lesson in tyranny. Empowered by the state and functioning essentially as a government official, the custodial parent can issue orders to the non-custodial parent, undermine his authority with the children, dictate the terms of his access to them, talk to and about him contemptuously and condescendingly in the presence of the children as if he were himself a naughty child - all with the backing of state officials.

Eventually the children understand that the force keeping away one of their parents is the police, who are the guarantors of the custodial parent's supremacy. Thus the message the children receive about both the family and the state is that they are dictatorships, ruled by an arbitrary power which can be marshaled against private enemies and even family members for personal grievances. If a loved one disagrees with us or hurts our feelings or is simply no longer desired, there is no need for forgiveness because a telephone call will have him removed, and the police will make sure he stays away. And if the police can be used to arrest Dad because he does something Mom doesn't like, what will they do to me if I do something Mom doesn't like?

After witnessing this dictatorship over the non-custodial parent, the children may then experience it themselves. Lacking firm authority that is in any sense moral, as well as any effective restraints on her behavior, the custodial parent now exercises unchecked power over the children as well, a relationship that becomes increasingly strained and acrimonious as the children grow older, less credulous, and more rebellious. As the children react adversely to this destruction of their home and father, or as the cute and cuddly children become rebellious adolescents, they can be turned over to state agencies by their mothers, as large numbers now are. If more vigorous instruments are required, various arms of the state - psychotherapists, police, and penal institutions - can be marshaled against the children as well. Thus the drugging and institutionalization of children in foster care, psychiatric hospitals, juvenile detention facilities, and jails that has become increasingly familiar.

In July 2001, The Progressive magazine detailed how "parents" are now turning their troublesome teenagers whom they cannot control over to the police. Overwhelmingly, though the politically correct article does not point this out, these parents are single mothers. In the single-mother home, "Wait till your father gets home," has been replaced by, "I can turn you over to Social Services."

On the other hand, perhaps someday they can commandeer the police and jails against family members with whom they have differences or against anyone who hurts their feelings. While many children are materially impoverished by family breakdown, in other cases the systematic bribery dispensed by the divorce industry extends to the children themselves, who may be rewarded for their cooperation with material opulence, forcibly extracted from their father and used to corrupt his children and give them too a stake in his plunder and exile.

It is not difficult to see that this is a highly unhealthy system to have in a free society. In fact, the logic is reminiscent of another system of domestic dictatorship that once tried unsuccessfully to co-exist with free civil government. Politically, the most powerful argument against slavery - and what eventually did more than any other to bring about the realization of how threatening it was to democratic freedom - was less its physical cruelty than its moral degeneracy: the tyrannical habits it encouraged in the slaveholder, the servile ones it fostered in the slave, and the moral degradation it engendered in both. Such dispositions were said to be incompatible with the kind of republican virtue required for free self-government.

Abolitionist Charles Sumner's warning of slavery's impact on the moral development of white children growing up in slave societies was at least as alarming as concerns about cruelty to black ones. "Their hearts, while yet tender with childhood, are necessarily hardened by this conduct, and their subsequent lives perhaps bear enduring testimony to this legalized uncharitableness," he wrote. "They are unable to eradicate it from their natures.... Their characters are debased, and they become less fit for the magnanimous duties of a good citizen." Something similar may be seen today in the children of the divorce regime. No people can remain free who harbor within themselves a system of dictatorship or raise their children according to its principles.

© 2008 Stephen Baskerville - All Rights Reserved



Better developed nations eventually come to civillise themeselves by overcoming their inherent religious, racial, and nationalistic biggotry. By force of law if necessary.

But an enduring sentiment still holding back human progress in many of these first-world States is their sexist-gender bigottry against males.

It is hoped that those aspiring polititians whom inceassantly tout themselves as representative of broadscale "CHANGE", really mean it in the fullest sense of the term.

dr e

Yet another superb piece by Stephen Baskerville!   :engel2: :engel2: :engel2:
Contact dr e  Lifeboats for the ladies and children, icy waters for the men.  Women have rights and men have responsibilties.

outdoors

superb!!!

Libertariandadd

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In July 2001, The Progressive magazine detailed how "parents" are now turning their troublesome teenagers whom they cannot control over to the police. Overwhelmingly, though the politically correct article does not point this out, these parents are single mothers. In the single-mother home, "Wait till your father gets home," has been replaced by, "I can turn you over to Social Services."

This is why we we should be using war powers statutes to indict feminist ideologues and their leaders for subversion, treason and conspiracy. This isnt happening by accident and civil law is being subverted deliberately by the very same group that gave the atomic bomb to Joseph Stalin! The leopard has changed its spots but the threat remains the same. :angryfire:

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The Communist Takeover Of
America - 45 Declared Goals

Communist Goals (1963) Congressional Record--Appendix, pp. A34-A35 January 10, 1963
Current Communist Goals EXTENSION OF REMARKS OF HON. A. S. HERLONG, JR. OF FLORIDA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Thursday, January 10, 1963.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
 
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.


'It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.' George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

poiuyt

If anyone had any doubt about the extent to which society hates males and will stop at nothing to set them up for a life of usury, exploitation and diminishment, read the following further justification for their contemptible treatment. A malicious justification for male hatred, which however doesnt stop society and mothers from depriving these infant males from their fathers at such a tender age.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7243460.stm
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Giving birth to a boy can increase the likelihood of severe postnatal depression, a study suggests.

French researchers examined 181 mothers, and found 9% had severe depression - three-quarters of these had delivered a male child.

The Journal of Clinical Nursing study suggested earlier poor relationships with men could be a factor for some.

However, a specialist in the UK said the finding, although interesting, could be a "statistical quirk".

Postnatal depression is common among new mothers - the latest study at the University of Nancy found a third of those taking part were affected to some degree.

In some societies, having a female baby has been linked to the condition - due to the cultural preference for a male child.

However, the idea that having a male baby could exacerbate the problem is an unexpected one.

The women involved were questioned on several different areas of their health, including physical fitness, pain and mental and emotional health.

The researchers, led by Professor Claude de Tychey, found that seven out of ten women who had given birth to a boy reported a lower quality of life compared with the average of women who had given birth to a girl, regardless of whether they had postnatal depression.

Although mothers of girl babies were more likely to have mild postnatal depression, among the 17 women diagnosed with severe postnatal depression, 13 had had male babies.

Emotional difference

The researchers did not have any evidence of a reason behind this difference, and called for further research to discover it.

However, although they suggested there might be subtle psychological differences in the attitudes of new mothers towards boy and girl babies which might affect their emotional state - particularly if they were already prone to depression.

They suggested a negative attitude to a son might be a legacy of unsatisfactory relationships with important male figures in their life, such as their father, or partner.

Professor de Tychey said: "The overwhelming finding of the study was the fact that gender appears to play a significant role in reduced quality of life as well as an increased chance of severe postnatal depression.

"Women had the same scores regardless of whether the recent birth was their first or second baby."

However, Dr Cosmo Hallstrom, a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said the numbers of women with severe depression were too low to draw firm conclusions.

He said severe depression results were compromised by the finding that a majority of the mothers with mild depression were more likely to have given birth to girls.

He said: "It's an interesting talking point, but I'm not entirely convinced by this, and would like to see it replicated in larger trials.

"It's probably a statistical quirk."


Kyo

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And if the police can be used to arrest Dad because he does something Mom doesn't like, what will they do to me if I do something Mom doesn't like?


If the child is female, very little.  It would be a battle between an irresistible force (Mom) and an immovable object (the precious girl child) and who could decide between two aristocratic super-citizens?

Thomas

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among the 17 women diagnosed with severe postnatal depression, 13 had had male babies.


Thirteen. Now there's a valid statistical sampling for a nation of about 65 million.

Can you say "advocacy research"?
We Are Self-Exterminating Through The Collapse Of Fertility Rates.
The Death of Birth.
Fertility Rates Magazine.

Aegis


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among the 17 women diagnosed with severe postnatal depression, 13 had had male babies.


Thirteen. Now there's a valid statistical sampling for a nation of about 65 million.

Can you say "advocacy research"?



As I've commented here before, statistics is a difficult thing to understand without training.  13 out of 17 is significant, but not conclusive.  If it was say 16 out of 17 I think that would be enough to draw a solid conclusion.

Here's an example of an unintuitive result.  When Ross Perot was doing his run for President in 1992, he wanted to get on the ballot in Texas.  Under Texas law, to be a 3rd party candidate and on the ballot, he needed to have 54,275 signatures.  He brought in 200,000 signatures.  However, it was inevitable that not all of them were going to be valid.  The elections commission didn't have the manpower to contact all 200,000 of these people, obviously.  It just needed to check some of them until it could be sure that there really were at least 54,275 good ones in there.  So the question that they asked statisticians was, How many do we need to check to be sure.  Can anyone guess what the answer was?

Eight.

That's right, after investigating only eight signatures, they would have been able to decide by a comfortable margin whether he really did have enough signatures in that pile to get on the ballot.  The reason for this improbable result was the large number of signatures that he brought in compared to the number that was needed.  If in truth, only about one in four of the signatures was any good, then getting the first eight to check out by sheer luck would be a 1/(2^16) = .003 % chance.  And if one of them didn't check out but the other seven did, then it would still be exceedingly unlikely that there were less than 54k good ones in the pile.  But the election commission couldn't go outside and tell the press that they were only going to check eight.  That would make it look to the public like something was amiss.  The Perot supporters would think that they were trying to disqualify him with an unrepresentative sampling and risk all their hard work, and Perot's opponents would take umbrage with the commission's laziness and unwillingness to simply verify that he should be on the ballot.  It was a no-win, so they had to invent some number of signatures to verify that was far beyond the number needed but sounded good.

Out of 17, 13 had male babies.  Look at it this way.  If the gender of the baby had nothing to do with it, how odd is the result.  If you had 17 people lined up taking marbles out of a bag and then putting them back, and each bag had ten blue marbles and ten pink marbles, and you had them do this again and again, in how many of these demonstrations (Bernoulli trials) would you have 7 get a blue and 8 get a pink versus all of them pulling out a blue, for example?  If you know that each of them are just as likely to pull out a blue as a pink (probability = 0.50 for a blue), then everybody pulling a blue would be pretty unusual.  In this case it would be 1 in 131072 unusual (17 consecutive successful coin flips, or 0.5^17).  If 13 of them pulled out a blue, the frequency of a result like that ends up being 0.018.  The frequency overall of a trial in which 13 or more of the marbles are the same color (blue or pink doesn't matter, as long as there are at least 13 of them) comes out to about 4.9%.

In other words, if we assume that post-natal depression is completely unrelated the the infant's gender, then the fact that 13 out of 17 of the depressed mothers had boys would have to be just some 1 in 20 chance that happened.  But we don't know that the underlying probability is truly 50/50.  That bag of blue and pink marbles might just have more blue ones than pink ones, making this a rather typical result.  Because this result was under the 5% range, it is what is called significant.  That means that researchers pay attention to it and gather more data in that area to more definitively draw conclusions.  Professor Claude de Tychey was quoted in the articles as saying "It's an interesting talking point, but I'm not entirely convinced by this, and would like to see it replicated in larger trials.  It's probably a statistical quirk."  So he says basically that one such quirk would be expected to be seen when you do 20 studies, and he doesn't think it means anything.  My opinion is that whenever a significant outlier like this is found, it warrants further study.  After all, you only have to waste your time once in 20 times, and in the other 19 cases, you actually found something.

Thomas

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As I've commented here before, statistics is a difficult thing to understand without training.


Wow.

Your statement about one needing training to understand statistics is wildly out of line. When I got my Ph.D. in physics, statistical physics was one of my strongest subjects. So intro to high school statistics doesn't impress.

Make of this what you will, but I'm not going to try to explain the problem with your reasoning. It would take far too long. I will simply point out that, while I can't read his mind, Professor Claude de Tychey probably stated that these results are "probably a statistical quirk" because the sample is absurdly small.

Statistics is an extremely complex field, but, when handled properly, it has immense power. It could take months to teach the importance of sample sizes in the field of statistics. Leave it suffice to state that statistical physics is so powerful because to a large extent it deals with sample sizes on the order of 10^23. (Avogadro's number is 6.023x 10^23, the number of atoms or molecules in a mole of any substance.)

If a sample of 17 were representative, physics would be a lot easier.
We Are Self-Exterminating Through The Collapse Of Fertility Rates.
The Death of Birth.
Fertility Rates Magazine.

Galt

I think the major factor is how representive a random sample is of the whole. If something varies wildly, you need more samples to get a grip on the behavior.

Obviously different situations will have different required sample sizes for a given level of certainty.

But what's your specific beef about his statement, Thomas?

Thomas

Galt asked:
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But what's your specific beef about his statement, Thomas?


My "beef" is with the belief that the sample size involved in this study offers any validity. Anyone who wants to get an idea of required sample sizes, for analyzing different population sizes, should take a look at this. (I gave it a quick look and it seems like a valid analysis.) Warning: it's about at the level of undergraduate intro to statistics. Take a look in particular at the table on page six. For a reasonable statistical analysis of a population of 10^4 (10,000), sample sizes run from 83 to 623, depending on alpha and p values. This is for a statistical uncertainty of 0.03 or 0.05.

France has a population of some 65 million. With roughly half of these female, and not all of them having had babies, the population for analysis in this "study" on post-natal depression is on the order of 10^7 (10,000,000), or 10^3 times as large as the population requiring a sample size of 83 to 623.

Using a sample size on the order of 10^1, for this "study" is patently absurd. This is the sort of "research" that would have gotten a person laughed out of a conference hall just a few years ago. Unfortunately, it now gets wide publicity and, in many cases, publication in reviewed journals.
We Are Self-Exterminating Through The Collapse Of Fertility Rates.
The Death of Birth.
Fertility Rates Magazine.

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