<A "belief" is not evidence.
Posted by Sarah Russell, Monday, 1 June 2015 7:34:34 AM

That is true, and people will often conduct research to confirm their beliefs.

Researcher bias is well known, the only problem is that researchers become better at hiding their bias, which is similar to trying to reform psychopaths.

There is evidence that in trying to reform Psychopaths, all that is achieved is teaching them new skills, which they then can use to exploit more people and avoid detection.

"When research stops showing women as victims, the research stops!"

Staying on message, is a typical tactic used by our politicians when they want us to believe their porkies.

Many years ago I was introduced to the concept of Concrete thinkers;

>Abstract thinkers are able to reflect on events and ideas, and on
< attributes and relationships separate from the objects that have
<those attributes or share those relationships. Thus, for example, a
<concrete thinker can think about this particular dog; a more abstract
< thinker can think about dogs in general.

By this definition, feminist thinkers display the characteristics of being concrete thinkers.

I watched Rosie Batty's performance at the Canberra Press Club on ABC TV today? What she spoke about was all very predictable.

In the question and answer segment, Ms Batty was given a free run up until the penultimate question when a Fairfax Press reporter had the temerity to ask Ms Batty about women's violence against men and violence against children. As could have been expected her response was dismissive. She said inter alia it comes down to the statistics. Nope I'd say to that because the Family Court & Local courts make it easy for mothers to become gatekeepers to the children as in her own case. She also said that women fear for the lives of themselves and their children. Well on the day of the deaths of her son and his father, it did NOT seem she was in fear of her life. She was lurking in the background since in press articles that I've read it is said her son asked her if he could stay longer playing with his father. She said he could stay longer but who in fact really knows what she said to her son and in turn what he said to his father because it was around that time he went berserk. To me there seems to be inconsistencies in her story.

Anyway, if you didn't get to see Ms Batty's Press Club address, here is a link on ABC Iview:

http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/national-press-club-address/NC1506C018S00

Erin Pizzey, in an interview about her own experiences;

Pizzey: Well you can't make actually your own unique human experience — you cannot "EXTRAPOLATE" that to then include everybody else. If your father, like mine, was a violent bully, it doesn't mean that every man I know is going to be a violent bully. It simply means that he was a product of his own background which I understand.

Rosie Batty's experience is her own unique human experience, that has a powerful emotive hook. We don't hear about the little boy who died from blood poisoning after cutting his foot on a dirty can. We don't have people speaking out about the young girl who died from brain injuries after being forced to ride a motorbike.

We don't hear the national calls to protect these children from horrendous abuse, perpetrated by their parent. That is unless that parent happens to be male.

On domestic violence, no one wants to hear the truth

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=a41532d6-d4df-46a2-a784-f6499938f3b0

Dr Russell,
I don't dispute that feminism was motivated by a genuine desire to enhance the lives of women. There can be no question that a life as a 60s housewife in an outer-suburban lower-middle-class suburb would have been crushingly dull.

The thing is that life as a single mother in an outer-suburban lower middle-class suburb is still crushingly dull! That is a fact whether the woman in question works or not.

Similarly, life as the wife of a well-off professional in the 60s may have been dull, but it was also largely self-determined with very few obligations other than those relating to maintaining social status. Funnily enough, that hasn't changed much either.

In other words, feminism has largely failed in its own terms. To a very large extent women have fewer choices than they once had, although some choices are different. For example, choosing not to work while rearing children is reserved for the wealthy today, where once it was open to even working class women.

Choosing to marry early and make child-rearing a life priority is almost universally denied as an option today, unless the woman is very wealthy or wishes to resign herself to endemic poverty.

There are very many other examples of the failure of feminist-driven policies failing to produce the promised outcomes, not because of any nasty patriarchal conspiracy, but because they simply weren't well thought through.

Give me a properly examined feminist model, with a plan, a specified final design based on clearly stated aims and reasoning, that includes analysis of the impacts across demographics and economic classes and offers a balanced set of measures to ameliorate negative outcomes without reducing incentives to work toward positive ones and I'll support it.

Otherwise, I won't. It's not a matter of ideology, other than to the extent that I am ideologically driven to be pragmatic.

Good points Craig.

In 1956 a book was published "The man in a Grey Flannel Suit"
and I quote;

"The novel continues to appear in the references of sociologists to America's discontented businessman. Columnist Bob Greene wrote, "The title of Sloan Wilson's best-selling novel became part of the American vernacular—the book was a ground-breaking fictional look at conformity in the executive suite, and it was a piece of writing that helped the nation's business community start to examine the effects of its perceived stodginess and sameness."[4] Historian Robert Schultz argues that the film and the novel are cultural representations of what two-time presidential candidate (1952 and 1956) Adlai Stevenson described in a 1955 commencement address to Smith College women as a "crisis" in the western world, one Stevenson defined as "collectivism colliding with individualism," the collective corporate organization of postwar social and economic life.[5] That increased corporate organization of society, Schultz notes, reduced white-collar workers' (represented by Tom Rath and the other gray-suited "yes men") control over what they did and how they did it as they adapted to the "organized system" described and critiqued by contemporary social critics"