Ruth Institute Blog

Gilder’s analysis of marriage abolition via redefinition is excellent.

Hey, if lefties can make fun of our logo, we can make fun of theirs.

Here’s a good article filled with advice for older women to meet a husband.

Seeing as how I’m quickly approaching forty, and I can see fifty coming over the horizon, I evaluated the advice given in this article with one question in mind: would this work on me if I were single and approached by the woman who posed the question?

My conclusion:  it’s the best advice that can be offered for the question that was asked.

…is no way to go through life, son.

Further than you could possibly, possibly imagine.  Much further.

…don’t forget to thank the single mothers, the welfare state, and the culture of fatherlessness that helped make these riots possible.

Here’s Theodore Dalrymple:

British youth leads the Western world in almost all aspects of social pathology, from teenage pregnancy to drug taking, from drunkenness to violent criminality. There is no form of bad behaviour that our version of the welfare state has not sought out and subsidised. Read more…

An excellent post from Athol Kay.

You are correct that monogamy isn’t natural and that men and women are biologically wired to have a primary partner and opportunistic sex with others. However much of our modern society isn’t natural. Democracy isn’t natural, nor is capitalism, or education, the rule of law, hospitals, flushing toilets and plentiful food. (Autotuned pop music isn’t natural either, so that I guess slightly ruins the point I’m making because let’s face it, autotune is awful.) Read more…

“This is what happens when you take bad advice.”

Here’s a relevant video from the Jewish outreach organization Aish haTorah.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_ez-QeYuxk&feature=share

Since it’s me posting it, you can know that the video advocates an attitude towards love and marriage that is much less romantic than that pushed on us by Hollywood and the culture.

Ari Mendelson is the author of Bias Incident: The World’s Most Politically Incorrect Novel.  Available here.

I am pleased to announce the release of my new book Bias Incident: The World’s Most Politically Incorrect Novel.

Here’s the description from the website:

Lured by brochures promising limitless intellectual freedom, Jeff Jackson arrives at picturesque Tinsley College, eager to experience college life to the fullest. He does not know that the freedom he has been promised is in short supply at Tinsley, a college so dedicated to leftist ideals that the administration changed the name of the anthropology department to “anthrogynology” in order to make the name more “gender inclusive.”

Jeff makes the mistake of believing that the renowned Professor Bancroft Tarlton would be willing to debate the left wing politics that the professor advocates in his classes. Not realizing that there are just some questions one does not ask on a college campus, Jeff submits an essay outlining his provocative theories about happiness and human sexuality.

Professor Tarlton is not the only one furious at Jeff for his lack of devotion to left wing norms. Calling himself a “pomosexual” and believing Jeff to be not only a homophobe, but a “pomophobe” as well, Carl Fitzgerald, Jeff’s classmate, begins a feud with Jeff. The battle escalates from insults, to vandalism, to shattered love affairs and a dorm room inhabited by a fainting goat. In a college obsessed with political correctness, a clash between the writer of a “homophobic” essay and the “pomosexual” victim of a college prank can only end one way: with a showdown in a campus courtroom.

I am also pleased to mention that Dr. J was an inspiration for some parts of this book.  Dr. J was the one that called my attention to Friedrich Engels’s views on marriage, views revered by Bancroft Tarlton, the one of the villains.  Dr. J’s words also find their way into a discussion that Jeff Jackson has with a rabbi.  I find it remarkable that Dr. J’s words seemed so natural coming from the mouth of a rabbi.  I guess we have more in common than I first thought.

You can purchase Bias Incident at this link (the ebook is less than a buck).

Oh, I couldn’t have predicted this with a crystal ball.

No, sirree, Bob.  This one was almost impossible to foresee.  I mean, really.  Who would have even thought that this could possibly be on the horizon.

Nobody.  That’s how hard this one was to see coming.

It’s a real pity that our opponents are so married to their habit of yelling “HOMOPHOBIA” rather than engaging in substantive debate.  Otherwise, we might actually be able to have an interesting discussion.  Here’s a pretty interesting article.

The upshot: Read more…

I bet it’s becoming a challenge for some of these gay rights groups to say with a straight face that they are not America-Hating, Freedom-Hating goons.  (Luckily, there are counterexamples.  Gay individuals like Gay Patriot, Charles Winecoff, Tammy Bruce and others who publicly share their love of the USA).

Radio Derb documents the following depressing incident:

Every time I think I’m inured to the follies and depravities of our age, something comes along to assure me that my stomach can still be turned. This week it was the story of 11-year-old Will Phillips, who lives in West Fork, Arkansas. Little Will is a crusader for gay rights. He refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in his fifth-grade classroom, saying, quote: “It’s not true when gay people don’t have the same rights as everyone else … I feel like I’m lying if I say that pledge.” Little Will is of course a hero to the buggery brigades, and — here’s the news — he has been chosen as one of the leaders in this year’s San Antonio gay pride parade. Eleven years old. The lines have already been written, listeners, I need only quote them.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

New York became the latest state to abolish marriage via redefinition.  Here’s Radio Derb’s take on the matter:  (Emphasis added).

This week Radio Derb’s home state of New York became the sixth in the Union to legalize marriage for homosexuals.Same-sex marriage seems like a lousy idea to me. Heterosexual pairing-off is the customary foundation of Western society, and the foundation of the self-support that has allowed liberty to flourish in the West as it never has elsewhere. Anything that subtracts from the general acceptance of that foundational institution, anything that puts it under a skeptical light or subjects it to critical self-consciousness, weakens the tradition of self-support and endangers our liberty.

Having said that, those of us who are hostile to same-sex marriage all have the feeling we’re spitting into the wind. There’s some great slow shift taking place in our social life that’s undermining marriage in far more ways than just this one. Among our meritocratic elites, the high bourgeoisie who went to the best schools and hold the most prestigious jobs, marriage is pretty solid. At the other end of society it’s disappearing.

Charles Murray gave some of the key numbers at his American Enterprise Institute lecture in April. He separated out for observation the top 20 percent and the bottom 30 percent of the non-Hispanic white population, just to keep race factors out of the analysis. That top 20 and bottom 30 he defined by education and occupation.

Here’s the key comparison: Among that top 20 percent, the upper-middle class, the rate of being married fell slightly across the half century from 1960 to 2010. To be exact, it fell from 88 percent to 83 percent.

Among the bottom 30 percent, however, across that same half century, the rate of being married plummeted from 83 percent to 48 percent.

We are increasingly a class-stratified society; and all the great changes in thinking and behaving that came upon us in the past few decades are playing out differently in the different social classes. Expressive individualism in particular is being incorporated as a mere style element in the lives of the upper-middle classes, whose sensibilities remain fundamentally bourgeois, dutiful and responsible. Among the bottom 30 percent of society, expressive individualism has led to a riot of self-indulgence and folly, with the welfare state picking up the bills.

In this context, same-sex marriage is one more outlet for expressive individualism, which is the real ideology of our age. The top 20 percent will incorporate same-sex marriage into their lives, those who choose to, with very little effect on their work, their health, or their child-raising practices. For the bottom 30 percent it will be one more cause of chaos, disintegration, disease, delinquency, and dependency.

In common with, I suspect, most conservatives, I look on with a sense of helplessness as these tremendous, apparently unstoppable changes transform society. What they mostly transform is the bottom of society. What they mostly bring about is more loss of control among people who didn’t have much control to begin with, more dysfunction among citizens who needed all their abilities to function in a simpler time, more dependents for a welfare state that can’t afford the dependents it already has.

We should, of course, stand athwart this trend crying “Stop!” Nobody’s listening, though: the appeal of expressive individualism is just too great. What the end of it all will be, I cannot guess, though I feel sure it won’t be good.

Our wise and sagacious elite have done a lot of  monkeying around with the institution of the family.  This has left the ordinary citizen with no idea what acts will require him to pay child support (and which acts will sever his parental rights).

Witness.

They’re the ones who control what gets broadcast to your television.  This is how they convince your neighbors, your children, your society.

They don’t want you to think.  They don’t want you to question what would happen if their plans come to fruition.  They just want you to watch, and be entertained.  Eventually, if you mind is sufficiently numb, you will come to agree.

The same people who are trying to abolish marriage via redefinition are doing this.

When they say their project of marriage abolition is about getting “equality” don’t believe them.  This is about a war on values.  Nothing more.  The evidence is right in front of you.

About ten years ago, I set the goal for myself to perform a one-arm pullup.

Working diligently and using a variety of training techniques, I got very close to that goal.  Agonizingly close.  Despite years of effort, the feat eluded me.  Yet I never gave up.

Finally, I got the idea to radically restrict my carbohydrate intake, lose the belly I was developing and thereby increase my strength-to-weight ratio.  I cut out sugar, grain and other starchy foods.  Fifteen pounds came right off, and I was able to get my chin over the bar using one hand.  This makes me very happy.

You might ask, Ari, what the heck does this have to do with anything that the Ruth Institute stands for?  Are you just writing this to brag? Read more…