Good to learn of this conference from the estimable Mark Brooks, who leads Mankind Initiative. The conference leaflet:
The booking form:
Month: May 2013
Belinda Brown: a critique of Diane Abbott’s speech to Demos
I was pleased to be directed to an excellent critique by Belinda Brown of Diane Abbott’s recent deeply flawed speech, on the website of the Centre for Policy Studies:
http://www.cps.org.uk/blog/q/date/2013/05/19/men-need-families
Pensioner, 69, kills her ex-partner… and doesn’t get a custodial sentence
This story makes me so angry, I’m lost for words:
An email from a retired gentleman in Thurrock
One of the Conservative marginal seats we plan to contest in 2015 is Thurrock, in East London. It was won by Jackie Doyle-Price in 2010 with a majority of just 92 votes over her Labour rival. The local paper The Thurrock Gazette has just published a piece about our intention to field a candidate in 2015. Last night a retired gentleman, John Morris, went to the trouble of emailing me. I reproduce his email here, with his kind permission:
I agree totally with you, and applaud your courage in bringing the massive injustices being openly operated against men into the open, although the PC brigade which controls the civilized world will do everything they can to demonise you as an individual for daring to speak that which everybody knows. It has been a long time problem for me, and when mentioned or discussed women just laugh at you, and the modern she men in our society will ignore it, in case their dominant women give them a hard time. I wish I was younger and could have been considered as a candidate for your party as I live in Thurrock, one of the seats you plan to target, and I for one am totally fed up with being fed female candidates for MP just because they’re females, as demonstrated by our standing female conservative MP, and Labour’s female answer. Why oh why must it always be a woman? I have no problem if the person for the job is a woman, my problem is when we have a woman put forward just because she’s a woman by the PC brigade which now controls the civilized world. I used to work for the local authority before retirement, and watched men being phased out of all the top jobs to be replaced by women. Virtually all directorates are now headed by women, and this progression can only be redressed by men like you willing to utter that which others are scared out of their wits to even consider.
You have my greatest admiration.
John A Morris
Well, that’s lifted my spirits, ahead of our first public meeting today, in Bedford.
Diane Abbott
Another perceptive piece by Claire-Louise Meadows http://afternyne.com has just been published by ‘A Voice for Men’ http://avoiceformen.com, this time about remarks made in a speech by the feminist MP Diane Abbott earlier this week:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/sexual-politics/diane-abbott-creating-a-crisis-of-solipsism/
It’s worth subscribing to both websites as well as others I’ve outlined here:
http://fightingfeminism.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/recommended-websites-and-blogs/
Most British women would pick being a housewife over having a career
Why does this not come as a surprise? And why is the government torturing society in denial of this reality?
Male suicide reduction summit, May 17
In the UK the male suicide rate is three times higher than the female suicide rate, yet successive governments have done next to nothing in an effort to reduce it. Many government policy directions contribute directly or indirectly to the high male suicide rate e.g. fathers’ denial of access to children following relationship breakdowns, lack of support for homeless men, lack of support for male victims of domestic abuse, favouring the employment of women over men in the public sector… and much more besides. As many British men are killing themselves as there were 50 years ago, while the female suicide rate has steadily fallen over the same period.
We’re very interested in hearing about initiatives to reduce the male suicide rate, so I was pleased to learn a male suicide reduction summit is to be held on Friday. My thanks to Claire-Louise Meadows for giving exposure to this event:
Diane Abbott on the ‘male identity crisis’
A strong piece by Claire-Louise Meadows for ‘Afternyne’:
LBC interview at 2.00 pm today
This afternoon (some time after 2.00pm) I’ll be in a discussion with the LBC presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer. The discussion’s been prompted by newspaper reports of comments to be made by Diane Abbott MP tomorrow, in a speech to the think-tank Demos. She’ll be talking about the modern ‘male identity crisis’. A piece in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/may/14/male-identity-crisis-machismo-abbott
About two months ago I was interviewed by Julia Hartley-Brewer for the same show, and it remains one of my favourite interviews. My blog piece on the matter:
https://j4mbdotorgdotuk.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/233/
The audio file’s here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khShsJaRVrY
LBC is at 97.3FM and you can listen live on your computer through this link:
The Guardian: ‘The other gender divide – where men are losing out’
You know public consciousness about assaults on men’s and boys’ human rights is growing inexorably when a female journalist at the left-leaning Guardian writes a sympathetic piece. A few days ago the paper published an article by Mona Chalabi (link at the base of this post). The piece starts off with a silly nod to the paper’s left-leaning readers (below):
It’s difficult to deny that women suffer more than men as a result of their gender…
Er, no, Mona, it’s not difficult. In fact it’s really easy. But thereafter her piece gets interesting, even if she attributes the high male suicide rate only to mental health issues, and ignores the state’s poor (sometimes non-existent) support for men in crisis, e.g. men who are homeless, or victims of domestic abuse… But overall it’s a sound piece, and I commend the Guardian for publishing it. Now that’s not something I do often…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2013/may/07/men-gender-divide-feminism
Justice for Men & Boys 