Shaden, who is veiled at 17, spoke with her father as her younger sister looked on in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in March 2008.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — The dance party in Atheer Jassem al-Othman’s living room was in full swing. The guests — about two dozen girls in their late teens — had arrived, and Ms. Othman and her mother were passing around cups of sweet tea and dishes of dates. 
About half the girls were swaying and gyrating, without the slightest self-consciousness, among overstuffed sofas, heavy draperies, tables larded with figurines and ornately-covered tissue boxes. Their head-to-toe abayas, balled up and tossed onto chairs, looked like black cloth puddles.
Suddenly, the music stopped, and an 18-year-old named Alia tottered forward.
“Girls? I have something to tell you,” Alia faltered, appearing to sway slightly on her high heels. She paused anxiously, and the next words came out in a rush. “I’ve gotten engaged!” There was a chorus of shrieks at the surprise announcement and Alia burst into tears, as did several of the other girls.
Ms. Othman’s mother smiled knowingly and left the room, leaving the girls to their moment of emotion. The group has been friends since they were of middle-school age, and Alia would be the first of them to marry.
20 comments:
The teenager is a post World War II capitalist construction. Formerly, a young person, particularly one with limited prospects, assumed adult responsibilities and went into the workforce or the military. The teen is a radically individual commodity designed for consumption.
Sexually uninhibited youths are definitely not the products of leftist social engineering. Do you believe that kids selectively imbibe sex education but not World History? Are they keenly attentive to the scattered lectures on alternative lifestyles and condom use but not the lesson plans for the three R's?
These kids are the design of the very free market that Intellectual Insurgent champions relentlessly. Sexuality is used as a hook to get them to buy things. The rest of us then act surprised when that unrepressed sensuality reaches the surface.
If you truly want to eradicate such behavior, then you should be advocating for technocracy or greater state control, along the China model, that isn't completely subservient to capitalist interests. Otherwise, get used to it.
Sub,
You must be joking. We need more State control? If you want to be a slave, just go commit a crime and get yourself locked up to work for free in a for-profit prison. But please save that for yourself and let the rest of us be free.
These kids are a direct product of years of social engineering.
Not only have girls and boys been bombarded with the feminist mantra of "sexual liberation" in schools, it has been echoed in the media and in the family. No-fault divorce made sure that any woman who had to change more than 50% of diapers could leave her husband because he wasn't doing enough. Feminism told women that having sex anywhere with anyone was a sign of liberation and homosexualism has decried masculinity as oppressive.
Public schools, one of the most un-capitalist, un-free market institution known to man, is responsible for creating a generation of sheeple who are unable to think of anything but what they will consume next.
In 1918, Alexander Inglis, for whom a Harvard lecture hall was named, published the definitive book, Principles of Secondary Education, which defines modern schooling. He specifically stated that its purpose is to support a command economy and society.
According to Inglis, there are six functions filled by the new mandatory "education" system:
1. Adjustive: Creating reflexive, fixed responses, as opposed to creative thinking.
2. Integrative: Making children conform, making them be predictable and easy to manipulate in a large labor force.
3. Diagnosis and Direction: Schools are intended to identify and enforce each child's role in society and the labor force.
4. Differentiation: Once diagnosed, children are trained as far as their role in labor has been determined.
5. Selection: Children are tagged with punishments, poor grades, poor classroom placement, and any other humiliation that can be thought of. The purpose is to separate out those the system determines to be unfit and allow them to be treated as inferiors by the rest.
6. Preparation (called propaedeutic by Inglis): Those few deemed to be leaders, often only by their birth, are taught to be the controllers of the masses described in the other five functions.
It seems that Ingliss' program has worked out remarkably well.
um..., other than "ornery dickishness" - I'm very hard pressed to identify a specific point of disagreement betwixt the two of you.
Actually, Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget were much more influential on our system of education.
If the girl in the burkha were raised in the same neighborhood as the young people pictured, she would be getting her freak on as well. As it stands, Arab and Muslim nations maintain their conventional standards of morality precisely because of censorship and government imposed limits on capitalism. But even that moral stature has its origin in social control. You simply trade one prison for another and argue for the benefits of gold over copper in constructing the jail cell.
Censorship is what the affluent visitors to this blog do. I doubt that you and Denmark have uncensored rap songs playing in the background with your kids present. I doubt that sexually suggestive images with fine sisters adorn the Vesey home.(By the way, I definitely appreciate his discerning eye.) As members of a cultural and educational elite we constantly exercise censorship in our lives.
Haven't you noticed that the sexual liberties that you rail against became prevalent when the US assumed its hypercapitalist superpower? It wasn't pervasive in the Jazz or Gilded Age. Abortion, people with loose morals, homosexuality, all existed before the Seventies. It's just that these were choices available to the rich.
Public schools are perfectly suited to the free market. Parents go to work and the kids need to be warehoused. The same applies to prison and surplus labor. The capitalist system couldn't survive without them. These institutions are joint private and state enterprises.
In general, I abstain from charged cultural issues. But I just wanted to add a little perspective. I'm not saying that I desire more state intervention. If most people find it so offensive the solution goes far beyond mere accusations aimed at educational theorists or reinstating prayer in schools. Just censor all media and diminish corporate influence on the public realm. Otherwise, accept it as a consequence of modern American life.
Sub,
That was a thoughtful response, but I think there are a few misunderstandings that need to be clarified.
You seem to suggest that morality is a luxury of the rich, but chastity, fatherhood, morality, etc. existed long before people had flat screen tv's and SUV's.
The fundamental of human behavior is that people model what they see. Or, as DV likes to say, we become what we gaze upon.
Thus, social engineers set out to alter what we gaze upon. Target #1 - the family. Because that is where all humans have always shaped their values. By instituting no-fault divorce at the same time ramming feminist ideology through media and schools, they made marriage and monogamy endangered species.
As a result, children grew up gazing upon destruction in their personal lives. They grew up watching their mothers and fathers "date". Single mother or father had to be at work to support the family, so the kids stayed busy watching tv and playing video games, which is yet another realm of social engineering.
We went from Brady Bunch to Will and Grace. And that shift cannot simply be reduced to a matter of capitalism.
You point to the fact that everyone exercises censorship. Of course people do, but that is their personal decision and not one to be put in the hands of bureaucrats. Freedom means the right to make decisions for myself and family, even bad ones. And it is not a luxury of the rich. Poor families can choose church instead of tv for a weeknight activity, can choose reading and talking over iPod's anyday, but they don't. They were making such choices before iPod's were invented, but something shifted.
And that something is the leftist social engineering.
Oh, and America is not "hypercapitalist". We have one of the most centralized, socialist, command economies in history. And it is that assumption of control over American economics and cancer of socialism that coincides with the social engineering we discuss each day.
We went from Brady Bunch to Will and Grace. And that shift cannot simply be reduced to a matter of capitalism.
Well, actually, it can.
You seem to suggest that morality is a luxury of the rich,..
Not at all. To quote from Henry V:
O Kate, nice customs curtsy to great kings. Dear
Kate, you and I cannot be confined within the weak
list of a country's fashion: we are the makers of
manners, Kate; and the liberty that follows our
places stops the mouth of all find-faults; as I will
do yours, for upholding the nice fashion of your
country in denying me a kiss: therefore, patiently
and yielding.
At the risk of this becoming an uh huh, nu uh, exchange, Sub, please explain the Russian model.
They too have seen a breakdown in the family to the point where the population is declining in #'s and the government is offering money to citizens to have babies. Presumably, you will not attribute that phenomenon to capitalism.
USSR was a wonderful example of state control, which, coincidentally with the attack on the family, attacked the church and imposed atheism as the state religion. Kinda like socialist America and the obsession with keeping religion out of public discourse.
I simply don't see how you get from here to there without the state telling MTV and BET that they can't air certain programs or magazines can't display certain images. Again, this is not my bete noir but if it bothers you so much I see no other way to prevail.
America is hardly a socialist country. As outlined in the Constitution, ours is a grand exercise in the free market ethos also known as liberty. The marginalization of religion just represents its limited utility in social cohesion and control in Western polities.
I simply don't see how you get from here to there without the state telling MTV and BET that they can't air certain programs or magazines can't display certain images. Again, this is not my bete noir but if it bothers you so much I see no other way to prevail.
America is hardly a socialist country. As outlined in the Constitution, ours is a grand exercise in the free market ethos also known as liberty. The marginalization of religion just represents its limited utility in social cohesion and control in Western polities.
Sub,
A central bank and a free market are incompatible, especially in the model our nation has. America has never been capitalist, whether it was slavery, Jim Crow, Mexican "migrant" workers or subsidies to farmers.
I don't really understand your point about BET and MTV. They should air whatever they want. It is up to each person to decide whether to consume the poison.
But I can guarantee you that if there were intact, stable families with strong fathers, BET and MTV wouldn't have nearly the audience it has. It wouldn't be playing the role of surrogate parent for latch-key kids.
America is the ultimate capitalist country, despite the protests from you and the John Birch Society. The ultimate capitalist enterprise was slavery. It doesn't get any more unregulated than free trade in human beings. This free market was enshrined in the Constitution.
How can MTV or BET be unfettered but people should conform to an arbitrary moral standard?
Our definitions differ. Slavery was the ultimate non-capitalist enterprise. But I suppose we could go around in circles for days.
But, tell me, what is the alternative?
With regard to MTV or BET, you're asking the wrong question.
Those who produce the shows and those who air them are free to make them. And we, as consumers, are free to purchase or not. That is the essence of freedom.
Morals come from home, which brings us back to the leftist social engineers who have gone out of their way to destroy the family through government intrusion.
While you think more government intrusion is needed to preserve morality, it seems apparent that government intrusion and constant bureaucratic social engineering has been the cause of wide spread immorality.
Actually, I'm not inclined to preserving any morality beyond what I establish for myself and my family. I really don't let things like sexual preferences, musical stylings, clothing, etcetera get to me. There's very little return on fretting about declining values. But if you want to do something about it other than point fingers, the solution is clear.
As for alternatives to capitalism, Technocracy seems decent enough.
But if you want to do something about it other than point fingers, the solution is clear.
It is indeed. Rebuild the family and keep the government out of our personal lives.
Ok, I have to laugh that you are giving a nod to Skip's movement. He'll be thrilled to know he's found a convert after all his efforts here.
So how exactly does one "rebuild the family"? It must be enforceable policies rather than Cosby-style admonitions of 'man up' or playing Tupac records and encouraging brothers to go to church and read the Bible.
From where I sit two things would immediately pay dividends. Legalize drugs or at least decriminalize them so that families are no longer fractured when one or more members participate in narcotics traficking and tax the shit out of said participants to make up for costs they impose. (Cigarettes, firearearms, and alcohol provide a useful model.)
Abolish public housing. Because when you herd poor people they're automatically marginalized and occupy a subordinate position. Make them players in the same game as the rest of us. Give them supplemental wage insurance and housing subsidies to cover no more than twenty percent of rent or mortgage.
Sub
Your question bears repeating- "How exactly does one "rebuild the family"?"- especially in light of II assertion that powerful leftist social engineers destroyed the family through government intrusion. I'm puzzled if families were strong back in the days (before 60s) how would this disintegration even have occurred; and second, what would prevent this disintegration from occurring again even if the family was to be rebuilt? Quite frankly there's something larger at play here than the "liberal social engineers" boogeyman.
Exactly. Even if you believe in a conspiracy theory you need a policy to produce an outcome. What I see in the case of black families is a decline in the industrial base just as we secured the rights of citizenship and the establishment of a carceral state to control urban space through asymmetric drug enforcement. To criticize black people's choice of music, hairstyles, clothing, names, and linguistic expression is just as misguided as blaming sociologists and bureaucrats. At best these folks are foot soldiers carrying out orders or justifying plans for existence.
Even if you believe in a conspiracy theory you need a policy to produce an outcome.
Asking the government to solve the problem it created is long a battered wife asking her abusive husband to help her improve her self-esteem.
Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Outsourcing the solving of individual problems to the government time and time again, and witnessing lack of improvement, should be a wake-up call that a different path is needed.
And that starts with the individual. No more group politics, no more slicing and dicing people into bits so they can be played off against each other.
How to rebuild the family?
Build one yourself. Encourage everyone around you to do the same. Head back to church and stop going along with the social engineer fashion of bashing religion, shut off the tv and start communicating again, counter the slogans of the social engineers.
Funny
No one here is advocating the government to do or solve any "problems". There's just a disagreement as to whether "liberal social engineers" or capitalism bears the most blame for the destruction of the nuclear family.
Frankly Sub I too believe this quote you said bears repeating- "How can MTV or BET be unfettered but people should conform to an arbitrary moral standard?"
Again with II, this is going to go around in circles until to answer this question.
- If families were strong back in the days (before 60s) how would this disintegration even have occurred in the first place; and second, what would prevent this disintegration from occurring again even if the family was to be rebuilt?
Also I find it a little amusing how one cannot see how capitalism (even if one is in disagreement about whether capitalism was ever practiced to the fullest extent in the US) and "liberal social engineering" go hand in hand... connect the dots (Sub you did a good job explaining this).
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