"[C]hildren who get murdered ... were definitely short of ... love and care. That is what lies at the heart of New Zealand's high rate of child abuse and neglect. Not material poverty. Not a lack of money.
"It's a fact ex-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern either wilfully or naively chose to ignore. Her solution to the plight of too many suffering children was [instead] greater wealth redistribution. Inventing new payments for families with babies, lifting benefit rates and installing families in motels were three major policies designed to alleviate poverty. But the mayhem goes on. ... 'Violence against children is increasing. The number of children admitted to hospital with injuries because of assault, abuse or neglect increased sharply in 2024 to the highest number in at least a decade. Violent offending against children also continued to increase ....'"
"Throwing money at people who become parents willy-nilly, who lack any financial or emotional wherewithal, who can't look after themselves let alone a demanding, time-intensive baby, is nothing more than a salve to the conscience of people who have misdiagnosed the problem. Led by the likes of Jacinda Ardern.
"This is what Ardern's famous form of kindness and compassion actually looks like. ...
"So while we endure the massive media-hype around Ardern's biography, and most detractors focus on her horribly hypocritical claim to a compassion-driven Covid response, remember, her main reason for entering politics was to help children.
"Not only did she fail, but she may have made matters worse."~ Lindsay Mitchell from her post 'Ardern: If she insists on being remembered, I will oblige'
Wednesday, 4 June 2025
"This is what Ardern's famous form of kindness and compassion actually looks like."
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Yet despite that I don’t hate Jacinda Ardern, as many on the right do. With a few exceptions (Ayn Rand, Margaret Thatcher, perhaps a few others) women prioritise emotions over facts. When we put them into a position where facts matter more and give them authority, and then don’t like the results, we only have ourselves rather than them to blame.
Actually, I think many female politicians do NOT do what Ardern does, which is to prioritise feelings first. Looking at the likes of Clark, Shipley, Richardson, Collins, they were all tough and focused, regardless of their policies/philosophy, they were about achieving goals. LIkewise overseas, such as Merkel, May, Clinton, none simpered like Ardern (leaving aside their actual politics). Ardern really was different, combining her goal of "being kind", with the power of a coercive state, and she was unafraid to use that coercion on a grand scale, and evaded like any other politician when the results inevitably were underwhelming. It's such emptiness, but she was different and that generated a lot of enthusiasm until it was faced with doing more than delivering hugs and kind words.
You make a good point Scott. I'll adapt what I said then. Women generally prioritise emotions over facts, but female political leaders are often atypical in that respect. Ardern was more of a typical female. Seeing her interviewed the other night she looked genuinely happy, relaxed, and genuine; presumably because she's doing something now that aligns more with her true nature. She at least had the grace to come to the realisation that being PM wasn't for her, and probably had some sense of her ineffectiveness, rather than clinging to power as long as possible as most politicians would.
@MarkT: you noted that "female political leaders are often atypical in that respect." I feel obliged to point out that Ayn Rand observed they would have to be. ;-)
Ardern doesn't have a genuine bone in her body. She quit her leadership to avoid the humiliation of what would have been a certain and resounding defeat in 2023.
Thanks Pete for the prompt to re-read her essay “About a Woman President”. It makes much more sense to me now than when I last read it more than a decade ago. It’s generally consistent with what I’m saying, but helps to refine my views further. As Rand said, women have the ability to fulfil this leadership role (even then I’d say a minority of women), but at a psychological cost to their femininity - and I think Ardern resigned because she started to recognise this. By contrast someone more comfortably masculine like Helen Clark carried on and still does to this day.
"She at least had the grace to come to the realisation that being PM wasn't for her"
Are you kidding me? She left because she knew that Labour was going to lose the next election badly, and didn't want her reputation tainted, because she was already planning her next career steps.
Don't for a moment buy into the "kindness" "emotive" narrative that Ardern and her handlers were / are pushing. She's as kind and emotive as the next highly successful career politician - i.e. about as much as a lizard.
(Also, there's nob-all research to back up the claim that women are more emotional than rational when making decisions. Meta-studies show either small, or negligible, differences between men and women in this area - and it's not even clear to what extent the small results are culturally mediated rather than innate. Certainly in leadership roles, the women executives I've worked with have been every bit as hard-nosed as the men.)
"Meta-studies show either small, or negligible, differences between men and women in this area"
I'll state my position more precisely. Both men and women experience emotions, perhaps even to a similar degree. The difference is in what we prioritise as most important, and what tends to be our default in the moment. For most men the default tends to be fact based or rational, then the emotional response comes second. For women the emotional response generally comes first, and then the rational analysis kicks in second. I don't need studies to validate this, just life experience - whatever the studies in this era of fem-empowerment purport to show.
If you have a wife or long time female partner, replay disagreements or frustrating discussions you've had with her in your head. Situations where she can't seem to absorb the facts you're presenting her, and however logical your argument is, it can't calm her (if anything makes her more upset). I'll bet the model I'm presenting will generally explain it. She's feeling bad about the situation, and she wants you appreciate that and acknowledge her emotions. You're focused on the facts, and you want her to appreciate them. You're arguing about different things. She sees your facts as a dismissal of her emotions. The best response from a man in this situation is to acknowledge the way she's feeling, without conceding the correctness of the facts as you perceive them. There's even a name for this - fogging.
As for the studies, suggest you conduct a quick google search, framing the question either negatively or positively. Search for "are women more emotional than men", and the general response you get back is no, that's a myth, and women can do anything men can do. However rephrase it a more positively, such as "are women more emotionally intelligent", or "are women more emotionally expressive", the general answer you get is yes, women are generally superior in this regard, and the fact men can't be the same is a real problem for them. In other words the studies purport to show whatever's most complimentary to women, and critical of men, even though they're contradictory.
"Certainly in leadership roles, the women executives I've worked with have been every bit as hard-nosed as the men"
This can be explained by several overlapping phenomena:
1. Leadership roles probably self-select for atypical women. If they were more typical, there probably wouldn't be the "gender pay gap".
2. For the past 50 years, the culture has encouraged women to be more like men, and men to be more like women.
3. Even to the extent the women are typical, she's learnt to get over her initial emotional reaction and process it in a hard headed way.
4. A male leader these days be contrast is encouraged to do the opposite - to be less hard-headed and more emotionally expressive.
5. Men have a hard-wired tendency to be sympathetic to women. Put most women in a position of power though, and they typically have no qualms about throwing men under a bus. In that context, men are generally more sentimental than women.
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