Last day of Gnat’s school. They had a picnic outside with a band: a guy with a guitar and a guy with a bass. Nice patter and good musicianship, but they should tour high school and teach the kids a very important lesson. Look at us! We’re in our late forties, excellent musicians, skilled in the Path of Rock, and in the end it’s parties for four year olds. No doubt they enjoy their work; that’s irrelevant. Point to young rockers: they are not living in a mansion with a limo in the bedroom with gold-plated champagne spigots in the backseat Jacuzzi; nor do they have a stable of foxy groupies waiting in the van. Maybe it’s enough to keep playing and enjoy what you’re doing — in fact, given that most who take up the Path of Rock fall by the wayside and forswear the Axe, they’re ahead of the game. A gig is a gig. And the audience not only loved them, but was entirely sober, for a nice change. Still: if you young rockers out there think that the Path will lead to awesome debauchery for, like, forever: heed the Bear. It’s not all TV sets tossed off motel balconies. Sometimes it’s leading kids around a meadow making choo-choo sounds on your wirelessly miked bass.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-06-03.
October 7, 2021
QotD: Music as a career choice
October 6, 2021
QotD: British military incompetence
It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful the methods of the British ruling class served them well enough. Their own people manifestly tolerated them. However unjustly England might be organized, it was at any rate not torn by class warfare or haunted by secret police. The Empire was peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state. As people to live under, and looking at them merely from a liberal, negative standpoint, the British ruling class had their points. They were preferable to the truly modern men, the Nazis and Fascists. But it had long been obvious that they would be helpless against any serious attack from the outside.
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
October 5, 2021
QotD: Entrepreneurship
In fact, one could almost create a new economic law: the amount of abuse raining down on entrepreneurs is directly proportional to the good they do. I haven’t seen much reason to doubt this law yet.
Johnathan Pearce, “Gordon Gekko goes to Germany”, Samizdata.net, 2005-05-05.
October 4, 2021
QotD: Theresa May is to Boris as Neville Chamberlain was to Winston
Exactly two years ago, our second female Prime Minister was bowing out. After a torrid time in office it was finally over, and it ended with characteristic grace. In her resignation statement, she blamed no one for her fall, expressing only gratitude for the chance she’d had to serve the country she loved.
Her critics were not so generous. Ranked against other Prime Ministers […] she fares poorly. In particular, she suffers by comparison to her successor. He delivered Brexit; she didn’t. He won a majority; she lost one. But that’s not the whole story. Two years on from the end of her premiership, we need to tell the truth: which is that Boris owes it all to Theresa.
It wouldn’t be the first time that a successful PM is found to be in debt to a predecessor. Winston Churchill, for instance, owed a great deal to the much-maligned Neville Chamberlain. The reason why Britain was able to hold out against Hitler was that, before the war, Chamberlain had rearmed the country. In particular, he built up the fighter capacity of the RAF, which proved so crucial in the Battle of Britain.
As for Chamberlain’s infamous failures, these too were foundational to Churchill’s success. It’s unlikely that the great man would have become Prime Minister had Chamberlain not exhausted the credibility of appeasement. Indeed she did more than Chamberlain to ensure ultimate triumph of her successor, and looking beyond the obvious low points of her premiership a very different picture emerges. Indeed, she provided the key ingredients for the victories that followed.
Peter Franklin, “Boris owes it all to Theresa May”, UnHerd, 2021-05-23.
October 3, 2021
QotD: Taxes
If you don’t pay taxes, you’ll be fined.
If you don’t pay the fine, you’ll be jailed.
If you try to escape from jail, you’ll be shot.
Thus I — in my role as citizen and voter — am going to shoot you — in your role as taxpayer and ripe suck — if you don’t pay your fair share of the national tab.
Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, “Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?”P.J. O’Rourke
October 2, 2021
QotD: Cat-haters
Steve H. “Time to Shoot All the Cats”, Hog on Ice, 2005-04-14.
October 1, 2021
QotD: Raising your daughter to be “premium dating fodder”
Which is surprising, because for the last twenty years or so, American girls have been raised from birth to be premium dating fodder, primed from the first whiff of puberty to be Available for Sex on Saturday Night. So why are they being ghosted in droves? Abandoned and left to die alone, clutching their pets and Warren for President signs?
You’d think these girls would be experts at snagging a mate. Years of sex ed, birth control pills, and permission to date early and often with no judgement from the grownups should have guaranteed they’d have suitors dangling from their every finger, lines outside the door, dates every night, so many engagement rings shoved under their noses they’d be blinded by the shimmering sight of all those diamonds nestled against black velvet.
What happened?
Parenting: The New Sex Trafficking
Munchausen by proxy is a mental illness in which the mother (it’s almost always the mother) injures or sickens her own child on purpose for attention and sympathy. Grooming is a crime in which an adult nurtures a child over a long period of time to be open to receiving sexual advances.
American parenting is starting to resemble a terrifying combination of both.
How else to explain why girls are being turned out — groomed for extreme antisocial sexual behavior from a young age — not by pimps, but by their parents and teachers?
When it comes to sex ed, I believe in the screenwriting theory known as Chekhov’s gun: if you show a gun in the first act, it must be fired by the third. If you show kids the sex toys (and worse) in the first grade, the sex toys will be used by high school.
Recently, NPR published “What Your Teen Wishes You Knew About Sex Education”. In the article, we meet Electra McGrath-Skrzydlewski, who made a point of telling her fourth-grade daughter Lily, well, everything. “She was very open from the get-go, even before those were things that I needed to know about,” her daughter recounts.
Lily came out as pansexual at age 12.
At an institutional level, we are creating a cursed generation of females expert at every imaginable permutation of sex with an infinite number of partners, while largely shunning the other thing, the main thing, the only thing still emitting any heat in the cold, merciless hearth of contemporary life: the dream of forming a family.
Because the shocking truth is: No one wants to wife a sex expert.
Peachy Keenan, “Big Pimping: How American Parents Turn Their Daughters Out”, The American Mind, 2020-03-05.
September 30, 2021
QotD: Hate speech
Daphne Patai, Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism, 1998.
September 29, 2021
QotD: Lizard people
In this telling, to understand UFO reports and the weird little subculture that has grown up around their believers, you need to understand that for those people the imagery of the cheesiest sort of B-movie science fiction has taken up the same receptors in their minds that religious mythology does for the conventionally devout. What they are really grappling with is mystical experience – altered states of consciousness, mindstorms that are very real phenomena in themselves but one which they lack any context to understand in a rational and generative way.
When I remembered this, I found a fruitful question to ask. That is, what is it about their experience of reality that believers in lizard people are coding in this cheesy SFnal imagery? What are they actually trying to talk about?
The answer came to me almost immediately once I managed to formulate the question. That was the moment at which I realized that, barring one unimportant detail, lizard-people theory is actually true.
The unimportant detail is the part about the lizard people being actual extraterrestrials. But let’s look at the rest of it. The believer says: Our elites behave as though they are heavily infiltrated by beings hostile to the interests of ordinary humans. They hide behind a mask of humanity but they have alien minds. They are predators and exploiters, cunning at hiding their nature – but sometimes the mask slips.
Nothing about this is in any way wrong, once you realize that “lizard” is code for “sociopath”. Sociopaths do, differentially, seek power over others, and are rather good at getting it. The few studies that have dared to look have found they are concentrated in political and business elites where drive and ruthlessness are rewarded.
“Lizard” is actually a rather clever code, if you happen to know your evolutionary neuroanatomy. Oversimplifying a little, humans have an exceptionally elaborate neocortex wrapped around a monkey brain wrapped around a lizard brain. The neocortex does what we are pleased to consider higher cognitive functions, the monkey brain does emotions and social behavior, and the lizard brain does territoriality/aggression/dominance.
What is wrong with sociopaths (and psychopaths – these categories are not clearly distinguished) is not entirely clear, but it is certain that their ability to experience emotions is damaged. The monkey brain is compromised; sociopaths live more in their lizard brain and display a lizard-like ability to go from flat affect to aggressive violence and back again in two blinks of an eye.
So, yeah, aliens. We have a live conspiracy theory because a lot of people can sense the alienness in their sociopathic/psychopathic bosses and politicians – and sometimes the mask slips. Not having any grasp of the language of abnormal psychology, they reach for the nearest metaphor handy. There’s a close relative of lizard-people theory in which which many of our elites are held to be members of an ancient Satanic conspiracy and have become demon-ridden; this is different language carrying the same freight.
Eric S. Raymond, “The reality of the lizard people”, Armed and Dangerous, 2020-02-15.
September 28, 2021
QotD: I have literally no idea what this means
Judith Butler, “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time”, Diacritics, 1997, as quoted by Christina Hoff Sommers, 2019-01-04.
September 27, 2021
QotD: The functions of the state
John Nance Garner, Vice President of the United States 1933-1937.
September 26, 2021
QotD: Euphemism
Andrew Coyne, “False Sensitivity”, andrewcoyne.com, 2005-05-07.
September 25, 2021
QotD: The 2nd Amendment is obsolete because … the government has nukes?
And everybody was like, wait, what?
Of course the congressman is now saying that using nuclear weapons on American gun owners was an exaggeration, he just wanted to rhetorically demonstrate that the all-powerful government could crush us peasants like bugs, they hold our pathetic lives in their iron hand, and he’d never ever advocate for the use of nuclear weapons on American soil (that would be bad for the environment!), and instead he merely wants to send a SWAT team to your house to shoot you in the face if you don’t comply.
See? That’s way better.
Larry Correia, “The 2nd Amendment Is Obsolete, Says Congressman Who Wants To Nuke Omaha”, Monster Hunter Nation, 2018-11-19.
September 24, 2021
QotD: The LGBT advocacy group Stonewall proves Hoffer right — “every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket”
The reason is simple: by the time an issue has been solved, or almost solved, the business is at its peak. Employees’ salaries and pensions are at stake, reputations have been built and influence has been secured. And so it is that Eric Hoffer’s great insight is fulfilled: every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.
Very few causes have degenerated into a racket so completely as the former gay-rights group known as Stonewall. When it was founded in 1989, gay rights in Britain, as across Europe, had some way to go to reach equality. Back then, there was a different age of consent for homosexuals and heterosexuals, homosexuals did not have the right to marry or to have their partnerships legally recognised and, most pertinently, a Conservative government had made it impossible for young gay people to be in any way informed about their sexuality during their time at school.
There was certainly a long way to go, and Ian McKellen, Matthew Parris, Simon Fanshawe and the rest of the group’s founders faced an uphill battle for many years. But it was a battle which they helped to win.
Once most of their objectives had been achieved, though, what were Stonewall to do? There were several options in front of them. The most obvious, one might think, would have been to scale down and remain in place to deal with residual issues, such as the existence of homophobia in schools and other remaining pockets of society.
Douglas Murray, “How Stonewall sacrificed gay rights”, UnHerd, 2021-05-25.
September 23, 2021
QotD: The problem with “free” tech stuff
It has gotten so bad lately that they don’t just barrage you with ads, they’re now starting to force-feed you content. I used to have Amazon Music — the free one, of course — because it was a good way to listen to The Z Man’s podcasts and my classical library during my commute. I’d download albums to my phone, switch to “offline” mode, and listen that way. Which Amazon obviously considers no good, because they pushed out some “car mode” bullshit that now automatically turns your wifi on, then starts blasting hip hop at you. And that’s not all! A few weeks back, while trying to figure out a way to turn the damn thing off, I noticed that it now has a “your playlist” feature, based on “your” music … which is, of course, the same force-fed rap shit I’ve been trying so desperately to avoid. It has decided that not only shall I listen to Young Jeezy, Big Weezy, and MC Funetik Spelyn, I will also like it, to such a degree that they will start force-feeding me other shit based on my “likes”.
Yeah. Uninstalled. Fuck you, Bezos. I’ve got a CD player. And when Microsoft decides that I’m not listening to the right music on that, and uninstalls the driver, I’ve got a tape deck. And when that breaks, I will sing to myself as I go down the highway. 99 bottles of beer on the wall, motherfucker, just like bus trips back in Boy Scouts. Enough is enough.
Severian, “Mailbag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-18.
