Are Men Better Inventors?

February is Black History month and this poster is making the rounds on social media.

Before you keep scrolling, take a look at the list carefully.  Do you notice anything about this list? They are all black inventors, but did you notice anything else in common? Take a few minutes if you're not sure. I can wait.









They are mostly men. Women make up roughly half of the population so why the gender disparity when it comes to inventions? It's not even a slight majority of men or any other number near half of that list. Only 3 of the 53 black inventors are women. 

It's been often remarked that everything that we enjoy in the world--everything that benefits us and makes our lives better--is due to the work of men.  This goes far beyond inventions and discoveries.  Explorers were predominantly men.  Soldiers were predominantly men. Rulers were predominantly men.  So were poets, artists and philosophers.  Things today that we take for granted are done mostly by men: plumbing, construction, waste management, distribution of goods, etc.  Even things we don't really notice because it's difficult to imagine the world organized any other way are developments brought forth by men such as economies, bureaucracies, government, military organizations, and the scientific method.  All of this has been brought forth by men.

Wishful Thinking

At this point, a rabid feminist will interrupt the dialog by claiming that women could have just as easily accomplished these things if they weren't oppressed and chained to their stoves the whole time throughout history.  Well, what about the poster?  Black people were an oppressed class for much of America's history, and yet, they still managed to invent things.

First, even if true, I would expect that these oppressed women, while chained to their stove, could still invent a better stove or develop a logically coherent philosophy (which would only require pen and paper), but we have no historical record of this.  And it's not due to "The Patriarchy©" or men stealing the women's ideas and inventions.  Rosalind Franklin eventually got credit for playing a crucial role in discovering the structure of DNA. Also, despite attempts to literally obliterate Hatsheput from Egyptian history, historians were still able to piece together who she was and what she did as Pharaoh.

Yes, there are many gaps in the historical record.  So we can't rely on this as evidence that women haven't invented many things?  I disagree.  How about we consider a couple of modern-day examples.

Aviation

It's interesting that when a woman accomplishes something in a male dominated field, it tends to be hyped more than if a man accomplished it.

Let's consider Amelia Earhart.  You know who she is, right?

She was the first woman to conduct a transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to  Northern Ireland in 1932 using a Lockheed Vega 5B.

The Lockheed Vega 5B

The flight earned her a nickname of Lady Lindy.  Why?  Because a man named Charles Lindbergh completed a longer transatlantic flight from New York to Paris 5 years earlier in 1927 using a custom built, single engine airplane called the Spirit of St. Louis.

The Spirit of St Louis

Lindbergh gets recognition because his flight was between the mainland US and Europe.  But there was an earlier transatlantic flight that was truly death-defying!

Thirteen years prior to Earhart's flight, in 1919, John Alcock and Arthur Brown also flew from Newfoundland to Ireland using a WWI era bomber.  Here's a photo of the plane that they flew.

Alcock and Brown nearly died.  They were in an open cockpit and had to cope with ice, northerly winds and fog.  One of them had to repeatedly crawl out onto the wings in mid flight to chip ice off of the engines.  Here's a photo after they landed in Ireland.

Apparently you don't have to stick the landing.  As long as you can walk away, it counts!

These flights I'm describing are transatlantic flights.  The first plane to fly around the world  was piloted by Wiley Post and Harold Gatty in 1931.  Here is the aircraft they used called the Winnie Mae.

If you think it looks a lot like Earhart's plane it's because it is.  You're looking at another Lockheed Vega!

So let me recap this historical digression for the slow people.  Earhart's achievement came 5 years after Lindbergh's record-setting flight using the same plane that two men used to fly around the world one year prior!  Earhart's achievement was all feminist hype and she gets my nomination for being the most overrated figure in history.

I picked aviation because early in it's history it was an extremely dangerous endeavor.  I pointed out the successful high points but many people lost their lives trying to push aviation limits.  People were still trying to figure out the technology and discover what technology was needed and which designs worked best.

Finally, one puzzling thing about aviation history is that there were female pilots during this time; pilots that were a lot better and more competent than Earhart.  Yet, if I asked 1000 people nobody would be able to name one other female pilot from this era besides Earhart. So it's obvious that there was no evil patriarchy keeping women from flying planes.  My first question is why none of these female pilots attempted a transatlantic flight?  Or even a flight around the world?  Second, why did the feminists tap Earhart for the trip instead of a more competent pilot who can live up to the hype?

Facebook

Facebook is an interesting example because most of us can still remember a time when the internet didn't exist.  It wasn't that long ago which means that certainly by this time women were already fully indoctrinated into believing that they can do anything men can do (even better than men can do) while going into STEM fields to cheers of you go grrrll--which would include computer programming.

Then the internet was born (developed my men), including the establishment of the necessary infrastructure (developed by men), the hardware (developed by men), the HTML and browser software (developed by men) and the services that allow us to access it (developed by men).

Where were you ladies during all this?

Then Mark Zuckerberg creates Facebook with a couple of friends in his college dorm room while attending Harvard as an undergrad.  A lot of technical pursuits in the modern day live or die based on funding, but that is the beauty of Facebook.  It required no start up costs beyond the nominal investment of a computer plus some programming knowledge and skill--skills that Zuckerberg cultivated at a very early age.

Feminists like to complain that institutionalized sexism or male privilege is discouraging or thwarting women's careers and ambitions, but none of this would have gotten in a girl's way of creating Facebook.  You simply sit at a computer and do it.

Oh, you need skills also, and knowledge about how the internet works beyond using your mouse and remembering your passwords.  I find it hard to believe that schools were keeping women out of computer classes.  Even if they did, the internet was already established with some areas of the world wide web offering free tutorials and literature on writing HTML.  The requisite knowledge was easily accessible and available.

So I ask again, "Where were you ladies during all this?"

 

It's Not About Ability

Don't misunderstand me.  There are many women who do quite well in STEM fields, especially when a particular field has already been developed and mature.  So my examples aren't meant to be an assertion that women can't do anything or that they are incompetent.  Certainly, men fall on a broad spectrum of ability as well.  Not every man can be a pilot to fly around the world or a computer wiz to invent Facebook.

The point of my historical digression is that there is no patriarchy or oppression that is keeping women from becoming inventors.  Our poster of black inventors even includes three women.  When I talk about invention, I'm not discussing the ability to learn or perform highly technical tasks.  History and our modern age has demonstrated that women are capable of doing this (individual results will vary, just like with men). When I talk about invention, I'm talking about origins--it could be a machine, a physical object, a political system or philosophy. There seems to be something in the nature of men that allow them to visualize things that don't yet exist and find the means to bring that vision into reality. The ability to invent, for better or for worse, seems to be a masculine trait.

Even if Earhart was a good pilot, it still took two men to invent the airplane and bring it into existence to begin with (the Wright Brothers).  Also, as much as we laude Sheryl Sandberg for becoming the COO of Facebook, both the website and the company were invented and developed by Mark Zuckerberg.

This is only a blog post but any careful contemplation of the past 10,000 years of documented human history shows that female subjugation by males is a myth.  If there is any burden or enslavement placed on women, it is from nature itself and not the work of men. In fact as civilization progressed, man's ingenuity has succeeded in subduing his environment, eliminating threats and raising the quality of life to the point that female intellectualism should have flourished if it had existed in equal capacity to a man, but it's noticeably absent or of diminished character instead.

The question is why?  Why is it like this?

Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

The ability to invent would seem to be rooted in somebody's intelligence in some fashion.  The ability to think creatively and logically seems critical to this.  So it would seem IQ would be a good way to measure tendencies of people and populations to invent.  Discussions involving IQ are more complicated than they appear.  There is a lot of discussion about different types of intelligence and whether or not the tests that are designed actually measures intelligence accurately. However, IQ is a good proxy for this discussion and its what most people are familiar with when discussing intelligence.

Nevertheless, IQ doesn't measure raw intelligence absolutely.  It's a normalized aggregate. The Flynn Effect describes the phenomenon that average IQ among various populations around the world has steadily increased over the past century.  Given enough time, we'll all be geniuses which would be absurd.  So IQ scores get updated periodically and test results get normalized based on how well a test subject did in comparison to a group of other people who took the same test. The average IQ score is automatically adjusted to 100, if your score lands more than two standard deviations away from this average (about 130), then you're considered gifted and can join Mensa if you wanted.  A score lower than two standard deviations (about 70) makes you mentally retarded and you may have trouble performing some tasks that require a high level of cognition.

Likewise, average IQ of men and women are both normalized to be 100.  It is assumed that men and women, on average, are of equal intelligence, but this is debatable.  For example, it's often observed that women do better at verbal portions of the test where men do better at spacial recognition, but in the aggregate these complementary differences wash out so the average, normalized intelligence (the hump or the bell curve) might not tell us much about why men may be better inventors.

To get a true indication of why men may make better inventors, we may need to look at extremes--the tail end of the curve.  We have a lot of data on IQ testing.  When you plot out IQ scores by gender you get curves that look like this.

from Quora.com

The differences of the curves are exaggerated for effect in this diagram, but scholars have noted that men tend to outnumber women at the extreme far ends of the curves--both at high intelligence and low intelligence.  In fact the further down you go on the curves, the greater the gender disparity in favor of men.  This would seem to make sense.  It explains why most of our inventors and nobel prize winners are men while most of our prisons and special education classes are also full of men.  Women, on the other hand, are over-represented in the center of the curve--they cluster around the average IQ of 100.

The IQ scores also shed some additional insight.  As I already noted.  IQ is an aggregate of several types of intelligence.  Initially, it would seem that spacial recognition and logical deduction would be required to make better inventors, and men do excel in this generally speaking, but inventors are rare.  We should be seeing a lot more inventors if this was true.  In order to score higher on the IQ test a person needs to master other forms of intelligence that scientists try to measure, including verbal intelligence which women tend to do well on.

If creativity is required to make an inventor (it makes sense to me), then creativity would entail drawing from as broad a base of knowledge and experience as possible and try to recombine them or restructure them differently to create something new.  So it would seem that one would need to master a plethora of cognitive skills and not specialize too much in order to make a good inventor.  Generally speaking, men seem to be born in a better position to accomplish this.

This is also why I find the feminist argument for the historical oppression of women to explain the disparity of inventors so vacuous.  True genius and resourcefulness can't be suppressed--not for long.  It will always overcome obstacles in its way.  This is invention by definition.  But for thousands of years of recorded history we don't see this with many women.  We see women eventually participate in rolls and in fields with men, like Amelia Earhart or Sheryl Sandberg, but we always see that men were at all the groundbreaking events in history.

Invention Correlates With Test Scores

If you're still not convinced that high IQ tends to make inventors, then consider a recent meta-analysis done by Jonathan Wei from Duke University.  After analyzing millions of test scores over several decades he found that there was a strong link between how well college students did on standardized testing and what college majors they ended up completing.  Students that scored the highest tended to be enrolled in STEM majors at college.  The meta-analysis included many different standardized tests such as the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT).

And the Graduate Record Examination (GRE)

The differences in test scores between majors or fields of study don't seem very large, but when you consider a sample of size of millions, the differences are significant.  Read the study yourself but it seems like students that consistently scored the highest on standardized tests end up majoring in STEM fields such as engineering, mathematics and physical sciences.  These are fields where invention and discovery seems most likely to occur.  As already noted, men tend to achieve the highest scores in these types of tests.  They also seem to enter STEM fields in greater numbers than women.

This gender disparity in STEM hasn't gone unnoticed.  Feminists, politicians and the university system have expended great effort in trying to recruit more women in STEM fields.  The image in the title bar of the article I linked to is very telling.

Look at all these women in STEM!

Having a photo of female graduates in an article discussing high test scores and STEM majors is a subtle attempt at trying to raise a woman's self-esteem enough to start studying STEM.  I also, saw recent advertisements for colleges that look something like this.

Grrrllll  Power!

And there are woman's outreach efforts much more explicit than this.  There are workshops, clubs, guidance counselors, etc all trying to push women into STEM.  Everybody in the educational system is in on it.  But what usually ends up happening is this:

To many people, especially the feminists, gender equality means equality in outcome.  So unless there's a 50/50 gender balance in all fields, they will see it as a problem and lobby for more money to be spent and programs created to try and get more women into STEM and other male dominated spaces.  But if it's an issue of intelligence, than these lobbying efforts are going to flop.  There are simply more men than women scoring higher on the intelligence tests that would determine how well you would do in a STEM field, and hence, become an inventor.


Speaking as somebody who is in a STEM field, coming up with new and innovative ideas is extremely difficult, even for somebody with the intellectual chops to do well in these fields.  Most of the time we are just tinkering--it's high level tinkering, but still just tinkering.  Maybe one idea may lead to something that is life changing or truly innovative, but most of the time, attempts at innovation and invention will fail.

Looking at modern research and the historical record, there doesn't seem to be systematic oppression of women.  Logically, there's no reason why women can't be inventors and some of them do, but in much smaller numbers than men.  The capacity to invent seems to be rooted in biology that is ultimately reflected in intelligence scores in several different areas of intelligence (verbal, science and math).  Why this seems to be a trait more common in men isn't very well understood.  It would require more advancements in neuroscience and studies in cognition.

A Practical Guide to Buying an Engagement Ring

I've been in the position of buying jewelry for a special somebody at least several times, and in the case of diamond engagement rings, I've done this three times.  So I want to impart some experience to some up and coming, love-struck men who will be following after me.  A lot about diamond shopping is confusing because we don't think about it much.  To the diamond experts out there, I won't be getting into too many technical details so there's no sense trying to pick a bone with me.  The truth is that emotion governs a lot of diamond shopping and nobody does this very frequently.  So this is more of a practical guide to keep somebody from getting ripped off without needing a lot of expert knowledge.  A normal man buys houses more frequently that he buys diamonds so he's going to need some advice he can implement in the store.

Diamonds Are Worthless

Gentlemen, the diamond may be a girl's best friend but they are worthless to us.  I'm not just talking about the cabal of diamond miners and producers that have conspired to restrict diamond supply to the market to keep diamond prices high.  Everybody knows this.  Diamond producers and jewelry makers know this.  I've even read articles from diamond experts that openly talk about this. So this is no secret.

What I mean by worthless is that once you buy a diamond ring, that money is gone for good.  You're never going to see it again.  A diamond isn't an investment.  It won't appreciate.  That appraisal you got for it is worth less than the paper it was printed on.  If you don't believe me then try selling it.  You will never get an offer anywhere close to what you paid for it.  Pawn shops and other jewelers will low ball you so much it will be insulting. Yes, there are cases in the news where somebody like Elizabeth Taylor can sell a diamond for a tidy profit of millions of dollars.  Those are the exception and not the rule.  Unless you are going to a celebrity auction there is nothing exceptional about the diamond that you'll be buying.

Jewelers don't like to buy back their own diamonds.  They were never their own diamonds to begin with.  They were loaned to them by a diamond dealer or distributor on consignment.  This means they don't have to buy the diamond for it to sit in their jewelry case.  They don't need to pay for it until they sell it.  Buying the diamond back from you would put their own money at risk.  Not gonna happen!  Of course, some places will offer you some store credit or a trade in value on other merchandise in their store, but you'll still get hosed on the deal.

So that $5,000 you spent on an engagement ring?  It's gone.  I don't like it either, but that's the point.  Women are wired through eons of evolution to seek men that are good providers and will stay with them.  Because of this, men have to find a way to demonstrate that they are such men to win a woman's affection.  Buying a car, a house, or power tools isn't good enough.  Items like these contain intrinsic value to a man though their utility.  You have to give her something that has no intrinsic value to you and diamonds fit the bill nicely.  We may shake our fists at De Beers for monopolizing the diamond supply, but realistically, if it weren't diamonds being considered proof of commitment and providership, then it would be something else and that luxury commodity would be hoarded by a corporate cabal.

Guys, let's face it.  We want to do this for a woman we really like.  We'll also want to spend just enough for it to satisfy our own primal desire to take care of her.  This is why buying costume jewelry isn't going to satisfy that urge.  It will require a parting with a significant portion of your wealth knowing that it's gone for good.  So it's our responsibility to make sure that the girl is worth it. If you chose your girl wisely then you'll only need to be held over a barrel like this once in your life.

Cut is All That Matters

Cut is all that matters.  I'll repeat: Cut is all that matters!  Let me say it again for the cheap seats: Cut is all that matters!

You may have heard about the four C's--Color, Clarity, Cut and Carat. They are four criteria that diamond experts use to grade and price diamonds.  Jewelers will be more than happy to explain the scales they use because an educated customer is usually more satisfied with their purchase and less likely to bring it back for a refund or exchange. So jewelers will tell you all that you want to know about the four C's.

A lot of diamond shoppers want to find the perfect diamond and consider every C as important.  This isn't the way you should shop for diamonds. You have to think of each C as a piece of pie.  It isn't possible to increase one slice without shrinking one or more of the others.  There will be trade-offs.  The C you should consider most important, or the biggest slice of the pie, is the cut.

 The key thing to remember is that every diamond that you are likely to see in the store is flawed in some way.  Examining the diamond at only 10x magnification will reveal defects called inclusions. A jeweler is more than willing to let you look at the diamond for yourself.  Keep in mind that the grading scale is subjective.  You will see inclusions but you won't be able to tell how included the diamond is without a standard scale in front of you.  Even if you had such a scale, your diamond isn't going to match to any standard precisely.  There will be a judgement call being made.

Color is even more subjective.  Since diamond is transparent, it will be difficult to determine a true color value unless you had perfect lighting and the diamond was placed against the right background. Despite all the diamonds I've seen at varying color grades, I could never see a difference in color with my untrained eye.

There's also an incentive among dealers to exaggerate color and clarity grades for their own benefit which only makes the diamonds more expensive.  Legally, it isn't considered fraud as long as the grade on the certificate in the jewelry store is within 2 grades of it's true grade.  Why?  Because the scales are subjective.  Yes, there are standards for the clarity and color scales, but very few diamonds match the standards precisely.  Assigning the grade is often a judgement call, even among experts who are unbiased or have no vested interest in your transaction.

So there's no such thing as a perfect diamond? Yes, there are, but they aren't sitting in a jewelry store waiting for you to buy them.  More likely, they are sitting in a museum or somebody's safe. The perfect diamonds are referred to as investment grade and have already been purchased, auctioned and traded by dealers and distributors.  We are too far down the supply chain to even have a chance of seeing them.

You won't likely notice the color or the flaws if the cut is good and the diamond is set properly. A well cut diamond will have enough brilliance to wash out any defects or color making them imperceptible to the naked eye.  For this reason, I recommend the round cut or the princess cut.  Both shapes are cut to maximize brilliance and sparkle.  This is why I suspect they are the most popular cuts.  Something like an emerald cut would be a poor choice because the emerald cut emphasizes clarity and gives the diamond a very transparent, glassy look which makes inclusions much easier to see. An inclusion can often be concealed if it is near the edge of the diamond or under one of the prongs in a setting.  If you notice any color, it's probably the color of the setting being transmitted through the stone.  Even a white gold or platinum setting can effect a diamond's perceived color.


The important thing to keep in mind is that you only need to worry about the cut of the diamond.  How beautiful your fiance is going to think the engagement ring is will be determined by it's cut because the diamond's cut determines how well it sparkles and it's apparent beauty. Jewelers have different grades of cut, but do you think you can tell the difference between an excellent cut and a very good cut?  Maybe not.  You might as well look at a few stones and pick out the one that sparkles the best.

Size Doesn't Matter Much

There's one more C to cover and that is carat weight. The size of the diamond, or carat weight, tends to be regarded as crucial.  Out of the four C's of diamond grading, this is the only one you can verify independently and objectively.  In reality, it doesn't matter much.  It's effect on you or your fiance is entirely psychological. 

This isn't to say that the diamond's weight doesn't effect its price.  It does.   Larger diamonds are more rare than smaller diamonds, and therefore, more expensive. One would expect that if we were to plot a graph of price versus carat size, we would see something like this:

Price should dramatically increase with carat size when considering diamonds of equal quality.  However, this is the idealized case.  This graph isn't what we see in reality.  In reality a price versus carat weight graph would look like this:

The price per carat still trends upwards, but in a stepwise fashion.  The important thing you should notice is that the dramatic increases (the steps) occur at popular sizes.  There's a step (a dramatic price increase) at 0.25 carat, 0.50 carat and so on.  This is because these are the sizes that most people ask for and are in high demand.

You can use this information to your advantage. Most people can't determine a diamond's carat weight by eye.  You would have to weigh the unmounted diamond on a scale.  Considering the different shapes and cuts that are available for diamonds as well as the different settings that a diamond can be mounted in, I would say determination of carat weight by eye is virtually impossible.

A 1-carat diamond, considered by many people to be a good size, weighs only 200 milligrams.  Each carat is divided into 100 points, meaning that each point is about 2 milligrams, or the weight of 2-3 grains of sugar.  Few people can tell the difference between a diamond that is 0.5 carat and 0.49 carat, or even 0.45 carat for that matter.  With 0.5 carat being a popular size, you can save a significant amount of money by buying a diamond that is 0.45-0.49 carat, which places your diamond right before one of the steps on the graph and a lot less expensive.  In industry parlance this is known as buying shy.  You can buy a 0.45 carat diamond for your girlfriend and say its "about half a carat" and you should be fine, unless she was looking for something dramatically bigger!

If your feeling guilty about adding a few points to a diamond to impress your girlfriend and save a few bucks, don't be.  A person's inability to determine carat weight is why jewelers tend to round up or exaggerate the size of premounted diamonds.  A jeweler can take a diamond that weighs 0.30 carats, mount it in a setting, call it a 1/3 carat diamond ring and make an extra $500.  But can anybody really detect a 0.03 carat difference (a measly 3 points)?  Not a chance!  So don't rely on your eye.  Make sure you shop at a store that has loose diamonds that can be weighed on a scale at the shop.

Diamond cutters further up the supply chain can also play fast and loose with carats and points.  They also know that certain carat sizes bring in significantly more money and they may cut the diamond for size instead of brilliance.  Did I mention that cut is the only thing that matters? All the angles and facets for the different cuts of a diamond have been worked out and optimized for brilliance a long time ago.  All the stones are scanned and modeled on computer.  There should be little margin for error.  The only reason why diamond cutters would change the cut is to produce a larger diamond that they can sell for more money. Stick with beauty instead, even if the diamond is a couple points smaller.

So don't feel guilty over a few points difference.  Jewelers and diamond dealers certainly aren't being to ethical about it. You're also insuring quality while being a little more flexible on the carat weight.

 

What About Synthetic Diamonds?

Diamonds are composed of carbon that has been crystallized within the earth under heat and pressure for long periods of time.  The pressure and heat requirements have been duplicated in the laboratory in recent years so now it's possible to manufacture diamonds.  Although there is no chemical distinction, the industry designates these man-made diamonds as synthetic diamonds.

So does this make diamonds cheaper?  Can I can save money by buying synthetic diamonds?

No, not really.  It takes significant energy and time to make diamonds of an appreciable size and that is a cost that needs to be recovered when sold.  Having said that, the synthetic diamond will be cheaper than a natural diamond of comparable quality.  But there's a catch. The manufacturer isn't going to go through all the trouble of making diamonds that don't end up being completely flawless.  Certainly, such synthetic diamonds will be cheaper than the natural variety, but remember, we're not ever able to buy such diamonds to begin with. The diamonds we get to choose from at the store are all flawed in some way.  So while the flawless synthetic diamond is significantly cheaper than a flawless natural diamond, the flawless synthetic diamond is still going to be more expensive than the flawed diamonds you find in the store.

There are some websites that claim to offer synthetic diamonds at cheap prices but they are really cubic zirconia (ziroconium oxide) or moissanite (a silicon-carbon mineral) so read carefully and buyer beware.

The Human Cost

An unfortunate reality is that many diamonds come from areas of the world that are at war (civil war or war with another country), flagrantly commit human rights abuses, and under control of brutal and corrupt governments.  Countries in Africa have had a well documented history of mining diamonds with slave labor and selling them on the international market to fund wars and rebellions.  It should be unnerving that buying diamond jewelry could be supporting these abuses, but nobody seems to care, and a man will probably be accused of being a cheapskate if he was to seek an alternative means to show commitment than a diamond engagement ring. 

The Kimberly Certification Process was ostensibly created to ensure that the proceeds from diamonds being sold internationally aren't being used to fund wars, but I'm skeptical about how effective this certification process is.  Who is policing these countries and enforcing this and how can we tell if the certification is valid while we are talking about an area of the world where bribes for political favors is commonplace?  What about us, the end users of diamonds?  How do we tell where the diamonds came from?  The fact is we don't know anything about the source of the diamonds we buy and we won't anytime soon since there's no transparency in the diamond trade.

On the other hand, diamond mining seems to be the only viable option for income and trade for a lot of poor countries.  If done properly, it could mean the difference between prosperity or a bleak future.  But this doesn't mean that you need to pay more than you should for diamonds.

Get an Appraisal

Lastly, I would recommend getting the ring appraised by an independent appraiser, not the jewelry store itself.  Just because you dropped $5,000, it doesn't mean that it's worth that much, although many will guarantee that it will appraise for that amount you paid or more.

Like I said earlier, you're never going to get the appraised price when you try and sell it, but insurance companies like to know the values of things that they insure.  A lost or stolen ring might be insurable in some cases and you can be reimbursed for the loss.

Also, there's going to be a roughly 50% chance that your marriage isn't going to make it 'till death.  I hate to be a cynic, but divorce is a realistic possibility for you.  There's nothing keeping you together and you can dissolve the marriage at any time--often against your will because most divorces are filed by women.  The appraisal will be useful for assigning value when dividing the marital assets.  You don't want the judge or lawyers to assign a low value for the ring and have you pay more in the settlement so the appraisal will come in handy.  It might not seem like a big deal, and you'll think there's more important things to fight over, but letting her keep the $5,000 dollar engagement ring might mean you can keep the living room set or the car.

I can't tell you how much you should spend.  The rule of thumb says two months salary but that's a bunch of bologna.  This rule was peddled by the same people selling the diamonds to begin with.  But I believe that you should get what you pay for, and then some.  So I hope this article helps.

Gay Marriage, Pedophilia and the Overton Window

The recent Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges legalized gay marriage in all 50 states of the United States and its territories. It was a controversial decision with supporters of gay marriage celebrating it as the civil rights victory of our time.  Critics cited it as another example of judicial overreach and legislation by judicial fiat.

I found the fight for gay marriage ironic.  Marriage rates have been in decline for some time while divorce, with the corresponding decline in living standards, is becoming more prevalent.  A gay person demanding the right to marry seems like demanding the right to board the Titanic while it's sinking.

The remarkable issue is that the case illustrates how powerful framing is as a means to persuade and influence groups or populations.  When marriage is framed (or defined, if you will) as a legal union between a man and a woman then gay marriage is an absurd idea. However, when gay marriage was reframed as a civil rights issue, public support for it sky-rocketed.  The reframe also allowed supporters of gay marriage to label the opposition as bigots or relics from a more prejudiced past.  Today's cultural meme equates support for civil rights to being a good person, ergo, opposition to civil rights means that you aren't.  Since opposition to gay marriage came from conservative sectors of the American public, it's conservatives enduring the vitriol from gay marriage supporters.

What is Conservatism?

I regard myself as a conservative in the classical sense, which differs from modern conservatives somewhat.  Edmund Burke would probably be the best source of what it means to be conservative.

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity - the law of nature and of nations.

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue. 

Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.

The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. 

Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.

Being mindful of consequences of our actions is what it means to be conservative.  Practicing restraint is key to this.  We do not advocate a course of action until we consider and manage the consequences of the action.  We can't simply have the right to do anything that we want because our actions have an effect on others.  In other words, rights should be granted based on our ability and need to fulfill our obligations.  It's freedom to do what we must, not what we desire.  From a moral perspective, one cannot argue that he has a right to do something unless he is duty-bound to accept the consequences of his actions--not society, but him alone.

But gay marriage isn't harming anybody, right?  

Wouldn't it actually be immoral to deny this right to them?

I'm glad you asked.

Being a conservative means that I don't want somebody to be tearing down barriers without knowing why they were put up in the first place.  There could have been a very good reason.  Yes, those barriers can place a limitation on us, but liberty can have no virtue without restraint and the lack of such restraint can have unforeseen consequences. This idea of restraint doesn't seem to occur to liberals and progressives.  As far as they're concerned, if they want to do something that isn't permitted, they declare it a right and use the assertion to push for legislation or a court case to strike down the barrier.  As far as a liberal is concerned, any costs that are associated with the newly acquired rights are expected to be born by society for the sake of compassion.

 The importance of strong and intact families to a culture has been known since the time of the ancient Greeks--or even Confucious for that matter.  So we should ask ourselves what impact gay marriage has to families? Today's opposition to same sex relationships are deeply rooted in Christianity and Judaism.  So pursuit of homosexual relationships in these cultures tended to happen in the shadows while the people involved still lived normal lives within a traditional nuclear family.  However, it's interesting to note that in societies that were more tolerant of homosexual relationships such as the ancient Greeks, men and women were still required to take on a spouse of the opposite sex and raise a family.  Something about the traditional nuclear family was considered either desirable or essential to a culture.

Most assuredly, the idea of such families consisting of two parents of the same sex would be considered an absurd idea to these cultures.  So why is it considered so acceptable now?

The Overton Window

The Overton Window describes a range of ideas or concepts that the public is willing to accept.  Such ideas are often reflected in public opinion polls and a politician uses this knowledge to promote policies that are likely to achieve a broad consensus and increase his likelihood of remaining in public office.  Proposing or advocating for ideas outside of the Overton Window tends to be met with controversy and could be damaging to his political career because the public would consider him too extreme or on the fringes.

The Overton Window isn't static and can be quite dynamic.  We can imagine that economic or global factors can influence peoples tolerance to ideas so the Overton Window can shift or change size over time.   Current events can even shape the Overton Window.  Do you think the American public would have been as tolerant of invading Afghanistan or Iraq if the 9/11 terror attacks never happened?  How tolerant would you think the public would be towards entitlement benefits during an economic recession?

Considering that the Overton Window can vary, a lot of effort from extremists on both sides are invested into shifting the window so that their ideas are included as acceptable and not fringe.  We can see this in any contemporary discussion in America.  People that support abortion rights are rightly suspicious that a partial birth abortion ban may one day lead to an outright ban of abortion across the board if given enough time to shift the Overton Window.  Gun owners can also see an assault weapons ban leading to a ban of all guns.  The rich oppose tax increases because they know that the tax hikes may never stop once they get started.

Social Consensus

Today, most philosophical or political theory is rooted in the idea that social consensus should dictate policy.  This philosophical concept meshes very well with what most people consider democracy to be.  Unfortunately, people have a short memory.  Social consensus enslaved an entire group of people based on the color of their skin.  The institution of slavery was a concept that fit very well within the Overton window for a significant time in America's history, because it achieved broad consensus.  Certainly there were abolitionists during this time period, but they were considered a fringe position.  Social consensus also seems to consider female circumcision to be acceptable in some areas of the world.  It should be obvious that social consensus may sound nice if you're in the majority, but if your not, it can be a living hell.  The problem with social consensus is that it lacks morality. I often get criticized for making slippery slope arguments, but the slippery slope is real, and the mechanism for it is the Overton Window.

So what does the Overton Window have to do with gay marriage?  Quite a bit.  Proponents of gay marriage have spent the last couple of decades raising awareness, advocating for it and effectively shifting the window to a point where gay marriage as an institution is considered acceptable.  However, it's important to note that for gay marriage to even become a possibility, the whole institution of marriage needed to be debased and stripped of any meaning or social function.

The Debasement of Marriage

Marriage as institution was used for creating and raising families.  It created a sense of stability in society because the commitment was intended to be until death of one of the spouses.  Divorce wasn't unheard of, but it was rare and only granted under extenuating circumstances.  The only other way to get out of a marriage was to literally abandon it but it would be a horrendous ordeal for anybody who did so.  Problems within the marriage were often resolved locally or through the extended family.  For the most part, this description reflected the idea of marriage in America prior to World War II.

Then changes were made.  The Overton window was widened by allowing more exceptions to justify divorce.  The government got involved making divorce extremely easy to get, and even enabled it with lucrative divorce settlements.  Cultural revolutions deemed other types of relationships such as cohabitation and one night stands as acceptable.  Feminist influences even succeeded in framing marriage as a patriarchal institution that oppressed women and encouraged women to sow their wild oats like men (allegedly) did.  Women started having children out of wedlock, and so on.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  Certainly, the people who pushed such changes in marriage didn't have much of a clue that it would eventually lead to gay marriage.  There may have been people who predicted our social problems when we started tinkering with such a prized institution, but they were shouted down or ignored by the social consensus of the day.

So should we let the gays marry anyway?  Marriage has been made so dysfunctional that they can't make it any worse.  It's not much of our business now anyway, right?

Au Contraire!

Remember the slippery slope.  Remember that there are people still wanting to move the Overton Window to even more extreme positions and since we legalized gay marriage, we've made it easier for them to succeed.

Polygamy

It's not much of a logical leap to predict that legalizing polygamy may be the next lifestyle choice to be legalized and gain the blessings of our liberal overlords on the same grounds that we used to justify gay marriage.  For one thing, the lifestyle is already being practiced.  We simply call it different names depending on context: open marriage, swinging, serial monogamy, serial dating, hooking up, polyamory etc.  Polygamy is technically illegal in the USA but rebranding it has effectively neutered laws against it.

Polygamy is also a lifestyle that is prevalent in the gay community.  It's a topic that is frequently discussed in literature that study gay relationships.

“An important difference between gay men and heterosexuals is that the majority of gay men in committed relationships are not monogamous. Some of these men are polyamorous.… Monogamy is a morally neutral subject within the gay male community” (Bettinger, 2006).Bettinger, M. (2006). Polyamory and gay men: a family systems approach. In Bigner, J.J. (ed.), An Introduction to GLBT Family Studies. New York: Hawthorne Press

.

...Nor does polygamy seem to be condemned within the gay community:

“a distinctive feature of relationship [advice books] for gay men is the presentation of (non-) monogamy as a matter of choice and negotiation… Manuals for gay men usually contribute significant space to the question of non-monogamy…” (Klesse, 2007).Klesse, C. (2007). ‘How to be a Happy Homosexual?!’ Non-monogamy and Governmentality in Relationship Manuals for Gay Men in the 1980s and 1990s.The Sociological Review, 55(3), 571-591.

It's not unreasonable to suggest that since gays can legally participate in the institution of marriage (such as it is) they will start importing their values into the institution--values like polygamy.  What will this do to the children involved?  They certainly are unable to conceive their own, so they will need to adopt.  Are we, as a society, willing to allow children to be exposed to such an environment?  What effects will this have on their development?  Since, they are raised in an environment where polygamy is normal, how will this effect their relationships with the opposite sex? 

So how long do you think it would take once polygamy gains ground in gay marriages for heterosexual marriages wanting to participate in polygamy?  Attempts to do this in the free love counterculture in the 60's ended in disaster.  Remember those communes where everybody could have sex with anybody else? They eventually devolved into a couple alpha males monopolizing all the attention of the ladies in the commune.  Great for the alphas, but sucks for everyone else.  Now take that experience and scale it up by a factor of a million. That's the worse case scenario.

But hey, love is all that matters, right?  It's human nature, right?  Other cultures, now and in the past, have practiced polygamy so why not us?  This is just like how everybody rationalized gay marriage.  So why not nudge that Overton Window a little further to the left and  move us further down the slippery slope.  The legalization of polygamy is already being discussed in some circles it's simply being rebranded as polyamory. I have a feeling that many people that advocated for gay marriage would have a problem if their spouses started insisting on bringing other partners into the marriage like gay and lesbian marriages might.  But in another couple of decades it'll seem normal and nobody would care.  But it would be naive to assume that it won't have an impact on the next generation and a lot of it will not be good.

 Pedophilia

Pedophilia can also be legalized on the same grounds that gay marriage was.  I'm pretty sure that "love" is a factor there too.  Advocates can also cite cultures that have practiced pedophilia (aka: child brides).  People that are sexually attracted to children were born with this orientation--it's not their fault.  While most of us would balk at adults having sexual relationships with toddlers, the marriage age in some jurisdictions is only 16 years.  It wouldn't harm anybody to lower it to 14 years, would it?  What's a couple of years.  Heck, puberty starts even earlier than that.

And we move the Overton Window a little more and slide down the slippery slope even further.

That's preposterous! you say?

Can't happen here! you say?

Nobody would take legalizing pedophilia seriously!  you say?

I hate to break this to you, but it's already under discussion.  You might want to pull your head out of your echo chamber and look around.  According to this article in USA Today the question of whether or not sex with minors is actually harmful to the minor has been under discussion by some scholars since at least 2002! 

They suggest that the age of majority being 18 is a rather arbitrary distinction and ignores biology.  Biological determinism suggests that a person is ready to conceive children shortly after puberty.  Currently, the onset of puberty can occur as early as 9 years of age. So who are we to say that teenagers having sex with adults is harmful to them as long as they consent?  Are they being abused simply because we call it child abuse. Much of it is a semantic argument about where we draw the line, but then again, so was marriage and the Supreme Court ruled that the classical definition of marriage was unconstitutional.

Pedophiles are already getting their day in the limelight with some people coming forward to seriously discuss the issue. Consider an article in Salon: I'm a Pedophile, But Not a Monster by Todd Nickerson.  Nickerson makes it a point to state that he hasn't committed pedophilia (yet), but admits that he is sexually attracted to children and denies that any traumatic events in his childhood made him this way.  As far as he's concerned he was born this way.

Gay people make the claim that they were born this way also.  They also deny that any trauma has made them this way.  Yet, the successfully argued that to be excluded from the institution of marriage was unjust.

I haven't seen The New York Times advocate for pedophilia rights yet, but they recently published this editorial about encouraging parents to let underage girls wear sexy costumes for Halloween.
If we are to be mindful of consequences then pushing parents into letting girls wear sexy costumes for Halloween, while preaching tolerance for pedophiles, seems to be a disaster in the making.

Yes, It Can Happen Here!

This outcome strikes me as entirely predictable.

These articles didn't come from the dark reaches of the blogosphere.  They came from USA Today, New York Times and Salon, the modern-day bastions of the liberal left!  If conservative opposition to gay marriage made us intolerable bigots, then where does lending voice, ear and comfort to pedophilia rate on your moral scale?  It's easy to mock a conservative's intolerance.  It has made people like Jon Stewart, Bill Maher and John Oliver very rich men.  But all this talk about about pedophilia, gay marriage and sexualizing our under-aged children is coming from the left.  Conservatives don't talk about this crap.  Liberals do! 

Let this discussion marinate a few decades and then we'll see the media report on pedophilia being an "emerging new trend" or "a lifestyle that is growing in popularity".  Well see glossy magazine covers of adults embracing children with captions saying "Don't judge our Love!". I can already see carefully scripted debates and interviews with "experts" advocating for it while condemning those who oppose it as intolerant old fogies.  Social consensus changes and The Overton Window shifts. Very quickly laws against pedophilia will be challenged in court and struck down, eventually making it to the United States Supreme Court where they will have to strike down laws against pedophilia as unconstitutional because of the precedent established by Obergefell v. Hodges...And it's all because of the Overton Window.  Your guess will be as good as mine in regards to what family units will look like and what this will do to the children involved.  That is until we can grow a moral spine and enact some moral principles into law.

Dylann Roof and All the Lonely Men

Dylann Roof is a 21 year old man that shot and killed 9 people in a church in South Carolina.  Mass shootings tend to get a lot of media coverage but one notable fact in this case is that the victims were black while Roof is white, which triggered public discussions about race relations (or lack thereof).  Strangely, there were no black riots this time, but calls of forgiveness from the victim's families.  Maybe this a good sign.


Jon Stewart's monologue on The Daily Show was typical of how people were feeling and expressing their grief.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJl9iqnvkOE

What Stewart is doing is called virtue signaling.  We humans are social animals and have an instinctive desire to seek approval from our peers.  Virtue signaling is one way to accomplish this.  By casting the incident in South Carolina as a racial issue and condemning it, he elevates his moral standing in the eyes of  his peers. Stewart is also charismatic and has influence with his audience so  he would likely be able to influence policy since many of his audience will want to signal their virtue as well. In this particular case, Stewart directs our anger at South Carolina's state flag, the Battle Cross of one of the Confederate Armies during the American Civil War, which prompted a popular movement to take the flag down, hence giving people across the country an opportunity to signal virtue to their own peers by supporting Stewart's mandate. It's in cases like this where virtue signaling can be abused.  Attacking the Confederate Battle Cross allowed people to signal that they are a good person that is fighting racism while not actually being good nor doing something constructive about race relations in this country.

All of this is assuming that the shooting was motivated by racism and that the state flag of South Carolina is a symbol of this racism.  Both assumptions are false.  Something tells me that the shooting would have happened regardless of which flag was flying so it's a non sequitur.  Assuming that Stewart and others are right and this is really about racism and racial strife, changing the flag and street names would seem to aggravate the issue more than help it.  You don't fight intolerance with more intolerance and you don't repair rotten wood by repainting it. I also argue that race is peripheral to the incident and that there is a deeper root cause that we aren't seeing because we are so eager to signal our virtue in regards to issues of race.  This is ironic since a lot of this virtue signaling is coming from the same people who claim that race is a social construct and not simply genetics.

 A Chinese Finger Puzzle

Most people are familiar with Chinese finger puzzles.  You can easily insert your fingers into a small woven sleeve, but you can't easily pull them back out.  The harder you pull, the tighter the sleeve grips your fingers, which makes the situation worse.  But once you know the secret, which is pushing your fingers together to free yourself, you laugh at yourself over how difficult you made it seem.

This type of violence is our Chinese finger puzzle and right now we are pulling to try and free ourselves from it when we should be pushing. We've been locked into a racist paradigm as a country for so long that it's difficult for any of us to see past it and Jon Stewart in no exception.  The knee-jerk reaction in our culture is to assume racist motives if the shooter is white and the victim is black.  However, looking at the data we see that most violence isn't racially motivated. Black on black violence dominates the statistics with white on black  violence being the most rare.  In a city like Chicago black on black violence happens about a dozen times a week.  Yet, there isn't the virtue signalling that we've seen over South Carolina's state flag when both the shooter and the victim are black.

Looking at this table, it seems that media coverage and public outcry is very disproportionate in their response to violent events.  Despite white on black violence being the rarest type of violence, it gets the most media coverage and the most commentary in social media.  It's seems apparent that a combination of virtue signalling and opportunism explains this skewed media coverage.   It makes one wonder who the real racists in this country are and who has most to gain by inflaming the issue.


People's frustration and general helplessness over the situation suggests that we haven't discovered a root cause yet due to our inability to see past the racial angle. New ideas are needed.


NOTE:
I'll be exploring some root causes and effects that may explain this form of violence.  A sizable portion of the people reading this won't understand the nuances between describing causes and factors that contributed to tragedies versus actually advocating for them.  If this is you, then you are too ignorant to contribute meaningfully to this discussion.  Go back to playing Candy Crush and let the adults talk.


There's nothing new or unknown in what I'm presenting.  We've all heard of the information I'm presenting before.  I'll present supporting evidence and data for the salient points in this article if possible, but some data will be anecdotal.  The reader is encouraged to use their preferred search engine to verify what I'm saying is accurate and representative.  I fear that our inability to see past race is due to individuals eager to signal that they are not racist while constructing their own echo chamber in doing so.  This needs to stop.

Hypothesis: Violent Men Are Lonely Men

Jon Stewart goes off on a weird tangent in his monologue by comparing incidents like the Dylann Roof shooting with terrorist actions against the United States while suggesting  that our differences in responses to these acts reveals our hypocrisy.  But it does nothing of the sort.  For one thing, terrorism against the US is being sanctioned and encouraged by other countries or terrorist organizations that are using sympathetic countries as a sanctuary.  Who's encouraging men like Dylann Roof into committing these violent acts?

Or are there root causes that are similar?  Imagine that you're a young man, your life sucks, you're sexually frustrated, and you have no opportunities to better yourself, and then, somebody comes to you and tells you that there will be virgins in the afterlife if you hijack a plane and fly it into a skyscraper.  Would you do it?

"That's crazy!" you say? 

Do you remember Andreas Lubitz?  After his girlfriend broke up with him, he crashed his Germanwings flight into the Alps killing 144 people, including himself.  I've read nothing to suggest that Lubitz was overtly religious like our hypothetical hijacker. How crazy do you think this idea is now?

The Dead Speak, Will We Listen?
While were busy focusing on race, many seem oblivious that our boys and even some men are slipping through the proverbial cracks in society and society doesn't seem to care.  I see many common features between Dylann Roof and Elliot Rodger.

Elliot Rodger

Elliot Rodger went on a shooting spree last year near the University of California, Santa Barbara.  He shot to death six people and injured about a dozen others before killing himself.  The interesting thing about Rodger is that he left a very lengthy manifesto and some videos that explain his motives.  If you can get past Rodger nonchalantly describing the massacre he was planning in his videos, you can see that he was pretty good-looking and was well-spoken.

Yet, he was having a lot of problems attracting the attention of girls despite him doing everything right (in his opinion).  In reality, he seemed very shy and was resenting the attention that girls he had a crush on were showing to other men that he felt were beneath him.  He also seemed to come from an affluent family, albeit they were divorced and he seemed to take his parent's separation hard.  His parents tried to buy his affection by doting on him (even buying him a BMW that Rodger thought would improve his chances with women) fueling an entitlement complex.  His manifesto rambles on and on, but this is the gist of it.  He wasn't getting any interest from the ladies and he decided to target the people he thought were responsible.

George Sodini

Elliot Rodger's set of circumstances reminded me of George Sodini.  Back in 2009, Sodini entered an LA Fitness near Pittsburgh and shot to death three women and injured several others before killing himself.  A note left in his duffel bag at the scene and notes on his website chronicle his difficulties with women.  He hadn't had a girlfriend or even a date in almost 20 years despite him being good-looking and "not weird", according to his words.  He also seemed to have read literature and went to seminars about how to pick up women, but it didn't seem to have helped.  He had planned this massacre for months and chickened out a couple of times before following through.  It would be safe to assume that he was frustrated by his lack of success with women and lashed out against them.

Adam Lanza

Adam Lanza went on a shooting rampage a few years ago at a school in Connecticut that killed dozens of children and teachers but not before killing his own mother in the process.  He later turned the gun on himself when the carnage was done.  He didn't leave any manifesto but he was also from a broken family, a history of mental illness and an outcast, so I it would seem he had no success with girls either.  His mother taught him how to use guns in an attempt to bond with him so Adam was being raised by a parent that wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed.

Cho Seung-Hui

Cho went on a murderous rampage that left dozens of students dead at Virginia Tech before killing himself.  He also left a manifesto that suggests problems socializing with people, especially women.  Mental illness also likely played a factor and he may have been bullied.

James Eagan Holmes

Back in 2012 Holmes shot up a theater in Colorado during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises.  He killed at least a dozen people and injured dozens more.  Strangely, he waited outside near the theater for police to come and was apprehended without a fight.  Facts that interested me were that he was a brilliant medical student that also seemed to have trouble with the opposite sex.  He was in an on-again-off-again type of relationship before the shooting.  He had profiles on dating sites and even hired prostitutes.  One of his comments on AdultFriendFinder reportedly said, "Will you visit me in prison?"  Was he planning this massacre to get female attention while behind bars?  It's hard to say for sure.  Certainly many prisoners that have committed violent crimes get letters and marriage proposals from love-struck damsels.  But Holmes didn't strike me as douchey enough or have that alpha look to attract such feminine pathology.  Apparently, I'm mistaken.  A recent photo of Holmes' jail cell reveals a collage of many attractive women that would be interested in meeting him. Many women think Holmes is attractive and his apparent sex appeal has the "sorority journalists" at Jezebel pulling their hair out.  Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Holmes, but at least he can live out the rest of his short life knowing that women desire him.

There are many others perpetrators but I think you get the point.  These are just mass shootings that gained media attention, but this happens by one's and two's all the time.  Girl breaks up with boyfriend or dismisses an expression of interest from a man and man decides that if he can't have her than nobody will.

All the Lonely Men

The salient fact is that, for most men, the relationships that they seek with women are getting more and more uncommon and infrequent, or if he finds himself in one, he can no longer assume that it will lead to anything permanent, even if he marries her.


A man will dread the idea that he may be alone for many years if his current relationship ends so he tends to overcompensate in a fashion that will make many women think that he's clingy.  Or he may decide to turn to a darker element of his nature that ends up dominating newspaper headlines.

There are two factors at play here:

1. Divorce
Men that are lucky enough to be married (a relationship that used to be considered permanent) stand a 50% chance of losing his wife, his children, half of the accumulated wealth of the marriage and additional future income in the form of alimony and child support during the process of divorce.

Today, a divorce is a lot easier to get than ever before. Betty Friedan wrote about married women having a "problem with no name", but in reality, they were just bored. Modern conveniences such as washing machines, vacuum cleaners and prepackaged meals were making their way into millions of homes across America giving the American housewife much more free time.

In addition to this "problem" that Friedan describes, feminist influences convinced us that men were beating and raping their wives all across America and they needed an escape hatch. Efforts were made to make divorce much easier to get.  But in modern-day divorces, the woman doesn't simply end her marriage and move back in with her parents.  Many financial incentives in divorce settlements, including custody of the children and child support, encouraged many wives to file for divorce. Very quickly, marriage became the only legal contract where the person breaking it could be entitled to a big cash award instead of being penalized.  Let that fact sink in for a minute.

Feminists often chant for the government to keep their laws off their body while simultaneously directing laws onto an ex husband's wallet and argue that it's only fair. Meanwhile, the man is committed to indentured servitude against his will in the form of child support.  If he refuses or fails to pay the court mandated child support, he can end up in prison.  Let that second fact sink in for a minute.  There's a lot of discussion about how privileged men are in society, but can anybody doubt the fact that the American woman is the most privileged group of people the world has ever known?

Women are the main drivers of divorce statistics.  This is likely because it's too costly for men to even attempt it regardless of whether or not he is satisfied with the marital arrangement.  He stands to lose too much in the deal for it to be worth it. As they say, "It's cheaper to keep 'er! " Statistics vary by region but roughly 60-70% of divorces are initiated by women.  The rate of divorce declines among higher economic class and education, but women file in 9 out of every 10 of these divorces.  At first this is a puzzling observation considering that a woman's economic standing tends to decline after divorce.  Why would she attempt it?  A study conducted by researchers from the University of North Carolina summarizes and analyzes many divorce statistics by region and have concluded that presumed custody of the children was the most influential factor in determining whether or not any given spouse will file.  This is a nice gender-neutral way of saying that wives will have a greater tendency of divorcing because they have a lot less to lose during the act than a man will.  A settlement that includes child custody, alimony, child support and continued residence in the marital home are virtually guaranteed for women in any divorce proceedings.

Divorce can be extremely devastating to men, but what about the children bearing witness to it? The damage to the father being divorced by his wife is pretty straight forward to calculate, but what about the children?  There used to be a sense of shame when a couple divorced and this was likely put in place to safeguard children, but lately we've put a lot of effort into dismantling shame culture in the US.  One of these efforts was pushed by the pop psychology of the day that had suggested that children living with parents that didn't love each other were being emotionally harmed and it would be better for parents to split and do what makes them happy so that they can be better parents.  Some people even began to question whether or not a father was really needed to rear children (but he better pay his child support, or else!).

Karla Mantilla, feminist author, has been quoted as saying in Bringing Up Boys by James Dobson,

“I am highly suspicious of the upsurge of praises of fatherhood and the necessity of kids to have a male role model.  I come by this suspicion after much experience with my own two kids and their male role model, their father … The propaganda that children, especially boys, need fathers I think, has contributed incalculably to the misery of children all over the world.  Contrary to all the pro-father rhetoric of late, to the extent that we value fathers precisely for their ‘discipline’ and ‘toughening up’ qualities, we create children (especially boys) who are less empathetic and caring.  If we want kinder, gentler (and less violent) adults, we need to focus on kinder gentler parenting.”

Even by pop psychology standards of the 1980's and 90's, this is a shockingly ignorant statement.  Not only is Mantilla claiming that fathers are superfluous to the upbringing of children, she implies that fathers do more harm than good to children!

I'll be honest, the statement trips my BS-meter, big time.  I can't believe that anybody with a firm grasp of reality would even utter such nonsense.  But it seems to be quoted by a respected author in child psychology and this hasn't been the first time that a woman calling herself a feminist feels that she's qualified to comment on subjects that she hasn't studied.

But Mantilla's statement doesn't stand alone in isolation.  In the June 1999 issue of American Psychologist, Louise B. Silverstein, Ph.D.and Carl F. Auerbach, Ph.D. write in their article, "Deconstructing the Essential Father" (abstract)

Neoconservative social scientists have claimed that fathers are essential to positive child development and that responsible fathering is most likely to occur within the context of heterosexual marriage. This perspective is generating a range of governmental initiatives designed to provide social support preferences to fathers over mothers and to heterosexual married couples over alternative family forms. The authors propose that the neoconservative position is an incorrect or oversimplified interpretation of empirical research. Using a wide range of cross-species, cross-cultural, and social science research, the authors argue that neither mothers nor fathers are essential to child development and that responsible fathering can occur within a variety of family structures. The authors conclude with alternative recommendations for encouraging responsible fathering that do not discriminate against mothers and diverse family forms.

Just from reading the abstract, it's apparent that the authors are seeking to discredit the idea that the nuclear family is the best environment for raising well-adjusted children while trying to push the idea that other family structures can give equal outcomes.  This is obviously highly biased advocacy research designed to change public opinion and government policy.  I also wonder what "range of cross-species, cross-cultural" research they drew from to come to this conclusion.  Just from a casual glance at nature and around the world, it seems that the nuclear family model has been naturally selected for over the millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of recorded human history.  It most assuredly gave a species or culture the best chances of survival.  I would have to pay to get the full paper, but it looks like I don't need to.

Advocacy for the importance of fathers has come from some unusual places.  Heather Barwick was raised by two lesbians since she was about three years old.  In an open letter that she sent to The Federalist, she writes (emphasis added),

 ...as I watch my children loving and being loved by their father each day, that I can see the beauty and wisdom in traditional marriage and parenting.
Growing up, and even into my 20s, I supported and advocated for gay marriage. It’s only with some time and distance from my childhood that I’m able to reflect on my experiences and recognize the long-term consequences that same-sex parenting had on me. And it’s only now, as I watch my children loving and being loved by their father each day, that I can see the beauty and wisdom in traditional marriage and parenting.

Same-sex marriage and parenting withholds either a mother or father from a child while telling him or her that it doesn’t matter. That it’s all the same. But it’s not. A lot of us, a lot of your kids, are hurting. My father’s absence created a huge hole in me, and I ached every day for a dad. I loved my mom’s partner, but another mom could never have replaced the father I lost.

This is an interesting testimony because there's been growing acceptance in society that households where parents are the same sex are just as good of an environment for raising children as households with a mother and father, but Barwick is implying that such nontraditional arrangements are depriving children or harming them emotionally.  Even some research bears this out.  Children raised in same sex households are much more likely to witness abuse between partners.  This has become such a problem that an advocacy group called Broken Rainbow has emerged to try and deal with it (albeit in the UK).  Children raised in single parent homes are also more likely to be abused or even killed by the single parent.  Children from gay and lesbian couples may be more likely to develop emotional and social problems than with straight couples. Even then, Barwick's story can easily apply if she was raised by a single mother instead of a lesbian couple, so it has broader utility in arguing for the importance of fathers than one might think.

The importance of fathers wasn't as apparent to Barwick until much later in her life when she actually witnessed the impact that having a father has on her own children.  So we should be careful about our claims in regard to what is best for the children because it took a liberal progressive like Barwick her whole life to realize it. She felt "a huge hole" in her life because she never knew her father.  Recent research has provided insight to what that hole really is.  An article in Scientific American describes how fatherhood actually induces neurological changes in both the infant and the father and how the lack or abandonment of a father during critical years of a child's neurological and cognitive development results in more aggression, more addiction issues and more problems with the law.

These neurological changes have actually been witnessed in other animals as well.  Experiments on degu rats show that pups raised without fathers developed fewer synapses in areas of the brain designed to regulate decision making and emotion, in other words, the areas of the brain that are responsible for exercising self-control which our troubled X and Millennial generations seem to be having a problem with ever since divorce culture emerged.  That "hole" that Heather Barwick talks about in her open letter may actually be missing or underdeveloped brain cells!

If you think about it, this actually makes sense.  Who do you think is in better position to teach our youth how men are suppose to act and behave, mothers or fathers?  Who do you think could be better at teaching a boy the best way to handle his emotions and channel his aggression in constructive ways instead of snapping one day like Dylann Roof did; a father who was once young himself and knows what it feels like, or a woman that knows nothing about the minds and desires of men? 


It's at this point of the discussion that we'll have various single mothers, lesbians and gays parade their well-mannered and successful sons and daughters in front of us to show that everything I've discussed is a load of bologna.  It certainly makes good television and it gives the media an opportunity to show that they are doing balanced reporting.  Certainly, most children in these troubled circumstances can beat the odds and succeed.  Nobody suggests that this can't happen. We should look at these cases as inspiration.  Unfortunately, the data is very clear.  Children living in households without a father:

• Are at greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, suicide, and criminality 
• More likely to go to prison
• More likely to exhibit antisocial behaviors
• More likely to commit suicide 
• More likely to suffer from psychological disorders 
• Have more trouble establishing proper gender roles and identity 
• More likely to be treated for psychiatric and emotional problems
• More likely to score lower on intelligence tests
• More likely to repeat a grade in school
• More likely to drop out of high school
• More likely to be expelled or suspended from school
• More likely to experience mood disorders
• Exhibit greater levels of aggression
• More likely to live in poverty

Also consider:

• 63% of youth suicide are of youth from fatherless homes
• 90% of all homeless and runaway children come from fatherless homes
• 85% of children with behavior disorders come from fatherless homes
• 80% of rapists motivated by displaced anger come from fatherless homes
• 71% of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes
• 85% of youth sitting in prison came from fatherless homes

Either single mothers have really dropped the ball on raising our children, or fathers are more essential to their upbringing beyond the cash in their wallet. 

It doesn't seem possible to overstate the social damage that easy divorce is causing.  I personally know of one happily married couple that had a 5-year old daughter that suddenly couldn't eat or sleep despite the absence of any health problems.  The child later asked if her mom and dad would ever stop loving each other.  It turns out that at a recent birthday party, the daughter met another child who's parents were divorced.  When she asked him why he didn't have a daddy, the kid replied that sometimes mommies and daddies fall out of love (likely what he was told by his well-meaning, divorcing parents).  This caused a lot of stress in the daughter that effected her sleeping patterns and appetite because she feared that the same thing would happen to her own parents.  Her parents had to give every possible assurance that this wasn't going to happen to them and the daughter's mood subsequently improved.  The lesson seems clear, divorce even effects the health of children of happily married parents!!

I'm sure there are a lot of married couples that will insist that they are extremely devoted to their marriage vows.  That's great.  What you need to understand is that it wasn't just the married couple that decided to devote their lives to each other in the past.  Society invested in marriages as well. They recognized it as the fundamental political and economic unit of a culture and great efforts were expended to preserve it and even shame couples who didn't take the vows seriously.

Today, not only does society not invest in marriage, but they actively encourage its destruction while profiting off of it. I'm not just talking about the lawyers. Examples of divorce encouragement abound in movies such as Eat, Pray, Love and How Stella Got Her Grove Back.  Both movies feature a woman who is married to a normal guy but find that her life is missing a little bit of excitement and hits the self-destruct button, detonating her marriage.  The selfish act is presented as empowerment and the beginning of a journey of self-discovery with woman finding herself before she falls in love with a better man.

Wannabee writers in real life are getting into the act as well.  Web tabloids such as Salon, Huffington Post and Yahoo Smile often feature divorcees airing their dirty laundry about how they divorced loyal, supportive husbands who may have been a little bit boring or emotionally unavailable.  We're supposed to be inspired by her renewal on life as she lives off the spoils collected from the husk of her ruined marriage while we celebrate her courage and conviction of being a single mother that manages to juggle all of the demands of modern life while raising a well-mannered child until she finds her (second? third?) soul mate.

This is a particularly cruel fantasy that we are selling to women.  It's not just because of the men and children that are being affected, but divorced women quickly find men pretty much ignoring them when they try to get back into the dating scene with a few more wrinkles, a few more pounds and a few more kids.  The idea that they aren't as hot as they used to be is like a cold splash of reality in the face.  Unfortunately, by the time they realize how desolate the post-divorce landscape is, the damage has already been done.

While everybody celebrates their new found freedom to enter and live relationships as we see fit. We didn't bother asking the children what they thought. We assumed we knew better than that.  We didn't.

Decades pass and some of these children grew up and became Adam Lanza, Dylann Roof and Cho Seung-Hui.  Even well adjusted, law-abiding people are coming forward as adults and describing how disruptive their parents divorces were to their social development and performance in school and other endeavors.  

Nobody would dare suggest that the role of mothers were superfluous or not needed for a child's development.  It would be career ending suicide to anybody who proposed it.  Yet, we assume this is the case for fathers despite the correlation between fatherlessness and crime and antisocial behavior.  Now, scientific research is elucidating a causal mechanism.  Denying these scientific developments, and the social consequences where people end up dying violently, while recklessly pushing the rights for married couples to divorce and pushing gay and lesbian couples to marry and adopt, is a textbook example of failing to learn from history.

2. Delaying Marriage

Closely related to the divorce culture that I've described is the fact that we are delaying marriage later and later in life and that's assuming that people even get married in the first place.

A generation or two ago, in the 1950's and 1960's men would marry in their late teens or early twenties.  Now, they don't marry until almost 30 years of age!  The graph below shows that this age has been the highest it has ever been.

Many have noted that the low median ages in the 50's and 60's were a quirk and that median ages at marriage have always been a little high for men in the more distant past.  Except the median age at marriage is only half of the story.  To get a complete picture we also have to look at marriage rates.  In other words, how frequently are people getting married within a given population?  How many are divorcing?  A blogger at this website compiled over 100 years worth of data from the National Center of Health Statistics and charted it.

It's interesting how certain historical events heavily impact the marriage rates while the divorce rates only slowly increase over time.  We don't see the divorce trend really ramp up until the late 1960's as the cultural revolution changed our attitudes towards marriage and laws were passed that made divorce much easier and much more profitable for women. Both the divorce rates and marriage rates begin to decline after about 1980.  This makes sense since you can't have too many divorces when people stop getting married.

It's often noted that marriage isn't the only end goal that it used to be.  Attitudes have changed in regards to cohabitation, and entering and leaving a series of short term and long term relationships, sometimes with or without children.  To a large extent, this is true.  However, this arrangement still leaves a significant number of men unpaired at any given time.

Another blogger back in 2006 compiled data of unmarried men and women and plotted them on an interactive map by city to represent gender ratios.  Blue dots represent cities that have a man surplus and red dots represent a woman surplus.  Singles were counted as men and women that are unmarried, divorced or widowed.  It's unclear whether or not men or women that are cohabiting or in a relationship are marking themselves as single on the census questionnaire, but I suspect that this washes out of the results on a 1 for 1 basis.  You can adjust the age ranges on the map at the website to see how the gender ratios change.  I copied the map featuring the prime age ranges for marriage below and it's obviously a sausage fest in the land of opportunity.  There are simply not enough women for every man in this age range.

There's reason to believe that this is understating matters.  

The popular dating site, OKCupid posted results of an analysis that they did.  Most of the results they found aren't to surprising to people who have done any online dating.  Good looking people get most of the attention.  Women also get more attention than men, generally speaking. 

What was interesting was that the men's ranking of the attractiveness of female users resulted in a bell curve which is what one would normally expect when sampling a large population.

Considering the media saturation of airbrushed and photoshopped models and celebrities.  It was interesting to note that men generally had realistic standards of beauty for women.  On the other hand, women's ratings of male users was heavily skewed towards least attractive. The OKCupid analysis calculated that female users rated 80% of male users as unattractive!

Looking at these trends, it seems that the median age of marriage, the marriage rate, the abundance of men, the assessed lack of attractiveness of such men and acceptance of alternative pair bonding arrangements, such as long term relationships and cohabitation, is really screwing a lot of men over and leaving them dateless and single for extended periods of time.  Men like Elliot Rodger and George Sodini obviously struggled coming to terms with this.

So how does this all relate to Dylann Roof and his shooting of a bunch of black people?   Fortunately, Dylann was apprehended alive and we may get a testimony or psychological evaluation from him.  If what I've said is correct than we should hear a narrative unfold in the media suggesting that Dylann was likely infatuated by a girl or a few girls who ended up dating black men.  Bonus if these black men ended up bullying or ostracizing him. The fact that they were black would be incidental.  If Dylann's love interest ended up dating frat boys, Dylann would have shot up a fraternity.  If it were hipsters he would have shot up the nearest microbrewery.

What does this all mean?

The reason why the discussion of divorce, delaying marriage and marriage rates is important is because, like other mammals, humans are social creatures and we respond to social cues.  Much like we respond and react to virtue signaling that ended up persuading a state to give up its state flag, we also take cues from other people in our peer groups in regards to what we should be doing at various stages in our lives.  This is why parents are often worried about the effects of peer pressure if its compelling their children to act in destructive or irresponsible ways.

 In the past, men and women married early in life and nearly everyone did.  So our children and teens were getting a strong social signal that they had to mature quickly and dedicate their efforts to being a good husband or wife while looking and selecting a spouse that would exemplify the qualities of a good husband or wife.  We also regarded marriage as a permanent arrangement and not one that can be broken so easily.  Dating and courting were also being conducted with the intention that marriage would be the ultimate goal. 

When a boy sees that men around him aren't getting married until they are 30 this social signal that he receives is very weak or background noise. He sees, that he has a lot of time and won't man up to prepare and take responsibility for a family.  He also sees that a lot of girls aren't willing to date him or consider him for marriage, assuming they date him at all.  Since women aren't getting a strong social signal to marry they aren't picking men that would be responsible husbands or "good dads".  She chooses the cads with an expectation that when she has finished having her fun (and heartbreak), the "dad" will be waiting for her on bent knee. Unfortunately, men and boys that are coming of age are noticing who such women pair off and mate with.  Instead of investing themselves into being "good dads" some of them try to emulate the behaviors that are contributing to the cad's success with women.  Others will give up entirely.  A few become Dylann Roof.

Idle minds are the devil's workshop.  The Dylann Roof's, Adam Lanza's and Cho Seung-Hui's had every reason to believe that they may never be with a girl, or if they did it would be after many years of frustrating searches, and even if they succeeded, it could end at any time at the woman's whim, costing him untold pain and wealth.  Their mental problems that contributed to their violent behavior may be rooted in the fact that they had difficult times with members of the opposite sex.  Man may not be meant to be alone!

What Can Be Done?

It's difficult to say, how we would solve this problem.  I don't suggest that we force women to marry certain men.  However, a lot could be gained by making divorces a little harder to get and advocating marriage at earlier ages so more men can pick up on social cues to man up.  We can even dangle some economic incentives to encourage this.  But this is in direct contradiction to the prevailing wisdom and will likely get mocked. 

Before you sneer at this, let me ask you something:

Who do you think is more likely to be a law-abiding and productive citizen?  A man who's only supporting himself or one that has to support a family?

The data is pretty clear on this. The government and social justice advocates should be encouraging earlier marriages and discouraging divorces on economic grounds alone.  It might even pull us out of this sluggish economy and balance the federal budget.  The possibilities are endless.

Epilogue

As I finished writing this, another shooting happened at Umpqua Community College in Oregon.  Chris Harper Mercer shot and killed several people before authorities intervened and killed him.

 
This time, he was targeting Christians and not black people so race doesn't enter into this incident at all.  The media and pundits aren't getting very wound up if shooters target religious people unless they are Jews or Muslims.  The only opportunity for virtue signaling by politicians and pundits is by supporting gun control.

As usual, they miss the issue entirely.  Mercer also comes from a broken and fatherless home.  In Mercer's case, the parents were separated before he was born and he never knew his father.  Mercer is also quoted as "looking for the yin to my yang" and expressing admiration to other shooters who are lonely and unknown until they "spill blood".  This strongly indicates to me that Mercer also had trouble with girls.  Mercer and other troubled youth are obviously looking up to other shooters as role models so we might want to reconsider how we cover and discuss these incidents in the future.