Weekend Wrap-up 11-12-2006

For this weekend wrap-up, I'm going to wrap up a couple of topics that I brought up earlier in the week - or at least attempt to. Onward!

Women's magazines
I had asked the ladies earlier in the week about the effectiveness of the advice in women's magazines in regards to love, dating, and romance. Their responses were pretty much as I expected: The advice was helpful only for women who had little to no self-esteem, and who lived largely a hedonistic lifestlye. In other words, to your average woman, their advice was worthy only as a measuring stick of where our society is nowadays - seeing as how such mags are still being published because enough women out there are still buying them. And judging by the nature of much of that advice, we're a pretty sick society.

For balance, I also decided to ask the men and whether the mags they read presented any advice on love, dating, and relationships. Pretty much to a man, practically all of them said that they knew of no such men's mags that gave tips and advice on love, dating, and romance - and even if such mags existed, they probably wouldn't read them. Their mags of choice tended to be of sports, news, or their hobbies - and those don't generally have dating advice in them. What the women said in response to this is that women's mags tend to prey on women's insecurities, which is a tactic that works well enough, apparently, to support several such women's mags. However, a men's mag that preyed on men's insecurities would just be ignored, probably because men generally don't admit to having any faults, much less stress themselves out over them.

After all this, it seems to me that there is a readership market here that is largely untapped - specifically, a women's magazine that is tailored to women who are not of the hedonistic lifestyle, but who still seek helpful information about love and relationships. Perhaps they have to seek mags of a religious nature for something like that, because a mag put out for the general public at large probably couldn't survive, because they'd be trying to be all things to all people. I don't know exactly what to suggest, because I'm not a magazine publisher, but after all this, I can see that clearly SOMETHING is needed that isn't being provided right now.

And last, here's a cartoon that pretty much sums up the difference between men and women. I literally laughed out loud when I first saw it. :-)

My advice for Democrats
Someone asked me about my advice for Democrats that I posted on my blog earlier in the week, and why I tended to be so harsh on them. Another asked me why I even care for the Dems OR the GOP, for that matter, for they only deal with politics anyway. I feel that it is only fair that I respond to these questions here.

First, I am harsh on the Dems because I feel that they have fallen far from what they have and should be: a party of the little people. In the past:

If you were a blue collar worker, you were a Democrat.
If you were Catholic, you were a Democrat.
If you were politically liberal, you were a Democrat.
If you were African American, you were a Democrat.
If you were Hispanic, you were a Democrat.
If you were of the lower or middle class, you were a Democrat.

And so on. Today, while the above groups may still be largely Democrat, the only interests being served by today's Democratic Party is the people of a liberal point of view - and even the definition of "liberal" has changed. In the past, being liberal meant being open-minded enough to realize that many people among the poor have the potential to be great people, and that we should aid such people so that they can contribute to society as a whole. That was accomplished by providing the opportunity for such people to show what they can do. That is the kind of liberal that I am, by the way.

Nowadays being liberal means having a secular and hedonistic outlook on life, and that "religion is the opium of the masses" (a quote attributed to Karl Marx). In fact, opposition to religion must be to the point that today's liberal is anti-religious; that is, they actively seek to remove all public displays of religion wherever it appears because they take the term "separation of church and state" to its broadest and most widespread extreme. Today's liberals also support government programs that actually lock the poor in their lower class status rather than giving them hope for the future.

And last, today's liberals support legalized abortion, which is the ultimate act of age discrimination as well as being an even worse throwback to the days of slavery, in which the life of a class of people is made wholly dependent upon the rule of law. Slavery was wrong in the past, and its conceptual descendent of legalized abortion is wrong today.

I am harsh on the Democrats, because many people still believe the Dems to be the party of the little people, when clearly, they are not. So many people pin their hopes and dreams on the Dems because they still think that the class distinctions between the parties still exist; that is, that the GOP is the party of the rich and that the Dems are the party for the rest of us.

But the leaders of the Dems are often just as rich as the leaders of the GOP, so this class distinction today between the parties is largely non-existent. And yet, Democratic leaders often exploit this old and no longer applicable belief about their party to get elected. What I am saying is that they are lying to the voters and to their supporters about who and what they are, and this is wrong in so many ways. That is what angers me about today's Democrats. If the Dems want to continue to be their current hedonistic, secular, and anti-religous selves, then they should have the decency be honest and up-front about it so that some other party can be the party that the Dems used to be.

As for why I even care about the Dems or the GOP, it's because both parties have such a large impact and influence on today's society. As such major influences on society, they have a responbility to live up to the faith and trust of the people that elected them. However, many politicians act as if they are our country's version of an aristocracy rather than the public servants that they really are. They often act as if we owe them the living that they have gotten themselves accustomed to. In short, they have largely forgotten who really is the boss here and why they are in their offices - which is to serve the public trust and interests rather than special interest groups that they largely serve today. I care about what both parties do, because we deserve better from both of them than what we've been getting from them in recent decades. I simply want them to do the job that we elected them to do.

Other stuff
There's other things that I could post here, but today's entry is long enough, so I'll save that other stuff for later.

Have a great week, folks!