If enough women decide to mob on some unfortunate outside their group, they may well turn physically violent and the beating will not stop once the point is made. It will stop when the target of their wrath is dead or nearly dead. Women don’t really have much of an “off switch” when we move into physical violence out of anger.
So what would a world made up totally of women really be like? It would be tyrannical beyond belief. No one would be willing to speak against the accepted narrative unless they were willing to be unpersoned or killed. Think of a mix between 1984, the very worst social aspects of socialist regimes, and the Borg. There would be constant pushing for position, usually by starting whisper campaigns or setting someone above oneself up to be badly embarrassed. Look at the SJWs of today’s world and see how they operate. That’s what it would look like, writ large across the entire planet. They attack anyone outside the group who doesn’t comply with their demands, and if someone inside the group says a single word out of line according to the ever-shifting standards the entire group turns on them without mercy. The only way to get back in their good graces is to loudly proclaim your “sin” and accept their abuse until they get bored of you. Even afterward, you’ll forever be “tainted” with the sin of noncompliance.
When you write your books and send them out into the world, please stop writing women as soft, cuddly pacifists. We aren’t. Kipling was completely right about the female of the species being the more dangerous sex. He was also right about the price of letting women control society. If any thinking individualist finds themselves in a society run by women, may God have mercy on their souls because those women will have none at all.
“outofthedarkness”, guest posting at According to Hoyt, 2017-08-09.
August 29, 2019
August 28, 2019
QotD: The secret power of Quebec separatists that Western separatists lack
Colby Cosh, “Advice on Western separatism: don’t take it any more seriously than it takes itself”, National Post, 2019-07-26.
August 27, 2019
QotD: Salvador Dali and the “benefit of clergy”
Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943
Now, if you showed this book, with its illustrations, to Lord Elton, to Mr. Alfred Noyes, to The Times leader writers who exult over the “eclipse of the highbrow” — in fact, to any “sensible” art-hating English person — it is easy to imagine what kind of response you would get. They would flatly refuse to see any merit in Dali whatever. Such people are not only unable to admit that what is morally degraded can be aesthetically right, but their real demand of every artist is that he shall pat them on the back and tell them that thought is unnecessary. And they can be especially dangerous at a time like the present, when the Ministry of Information and the British Council put power into their hands. For their impulse is not only to crush every new talent as it appears, but to castrate the past as well. Witness the renewed highbrow-baiting that is now going on in this country and America, with its outcry not only against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence, but even against T. S. Eliot.
But if you talk to the kind of person who can see Dali’s merits, the response that you get is not as a rule very much better. If you say that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman, is a dirty little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you don’t like rotting corpses, and that people who do like rotting corpses are mentally diseased, it is assumed that you lack the aesthetic sense. Since Mannequin rotting in a taxicab is a good composition. And between these two fallacies there is no middle position, but we seldom hear much about it. On the one side Kulturbolschevismus: on the other (though the phrase itself is out of fashion) “Art for Art’s sake.” Obscenity is a very difficult question to discuss honestly. People are too frightened either of seeming to be shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the relationship between art and morals.
It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art”, and everything is O.K.: kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or* is O.K. It is also O.K. that Dali should batten on France for years and then scuttle off like rat as soon as France is in danger. So long as you can paint well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven you.
One can see how false this is if one extends it to cover ordinary crime. In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear. And, after all, the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say, picking pockets at the races. One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, “This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.” Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.
* Dali mentions L’Age d’Or and adds that its first public showing was broken up by hooligans, but he does not say in detail what it was about. According to Henry Miller’s account of it, it showed among other things some fairly detailed shots of a woman defecating.
George Orwell, “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali”, Saturday Book for 1944, 1944.
August 26, 2019
QotD: Princesses
How do you spot a Princess? She’ll be keen on pampering to an extent which indicates to the casual onlooker that her natural self must be extraordinarily rank if it takes such effort and expense to keep in check. (Princesses shouldn’t be confused with Professional Beauties, most of whom retain a healthy contempt for the business of exchanging physical gifts for fiscal rewards, from Hedy Lamarr saying “Any girl can be glamorous — all you have to do is stand still and look stupid” to the catwalk models who invariably live in jeans and sneakers after shrugging off the stupid clothes which Princesses pine for.)
The Princess believes that retail therapy is the answer to everything, even though the rest of us avert our eyes from this most obvious manifestation of the essential hollowness of a life that an over-enthusiasm for clothes-shopping invariably indicates in anyone out of their teens. They’ll have long nails, ostensibly to show that they’re ladies of leisure, but signalling to the rest of us that they’re very likely parasites with low sex-drives. They like big weddings — and as a liking for big weddings often goes hand in hand with humourlessness, they often have very short marriages. They are in short practitioners of the Violet Elizabeth Bott school of feminism – less about equal rights and fulfilling one’s potential than about stamping your foot till you get what you want.
They dislike men, seeing them not as flesh-and-blood people so much as platinum-and-titanium meal-tickets, and they mistrust women, seeing them as competition. An ageing Princess is more than likely to end up lonely — and with no life of the mind to comfort her, this loneliness may make her mentally addled at a comparatively young age. Once the sheen is off her skin, the Princess has nothing that would make one seek her out; like a lot of people over-keen on spangles and glitter, they are at heart rather drab people — drains not radiators, personality-wise — who never make things happen or drive things forward but rather wait to be rescued. They tend to find themselves eternally in the passenger seat of their life’s journey, stranded on the hard shoulder with their souvenirs, waiting in vain for hunky help to arrive.
Julie Burchill, “The Princess generation needs to grow up”, The Spectator, 2017-07-18.
August 25, 2019
QotD: Bipartisan authoritarianism
Some Democrats want to double down on their party’s shameful Drug War history. Massachusetts Rep. Stephan Hay [D-Fitchfield] has introduced House Bill 1266, which treats the existence of “a hidden compartment” in a vehicle as “prima facie evidence that the conveyance was used intended for use in and for the business of unlawfully manufacturing, dispensing, or distributing controlled substances.”
This means that if a cop stops you and finds no drugs or other contraband, but decides that part of your car is a “hidden compartment,” that cop can subject your car to civil asset forfeiture — that is, they can steal it, and force you to sue them to get it back.
The role of the Democratic Party is often to take the Republicans’ stupidest, red-meat-for-the-base policies, sloppily designed and doomed to collapse under their own weight, and operationalize them, putting them on the kind of sound bureaucratic footing that they need to have real staying power. Exhibit A is the drug war, but see also Obama’s perfection of GWB’s mess of a mass-surveillance apparatus, turning it into an immortal and pluripotent weapon that Donald Trump now gets to wield.
Cory Doctorow, “Proposed Massachusetts law would let cops steal your car if it had a ‘hidden compartment'”, Boing Boing, 2017-07-16.
August 24, 2019
QotD: Strikes at non-profit organizations
[…]
Which is where we get to see the pay deal matter in the raw. At the auto companies (well, absent those in and near bankruptcy problems) it was indeed possible to start shouting “But what about the workers?” Why should they get less generous pay or terms just so that the capitalists can make out like bandits? But here we’ve got exactly the same problem. And there are no capitalists, there are no profits. The income into NPR is pretty much exclusively used to pay the employees of NPR. There are no leakages to the capitalists so, in the absence of more money, what can be done?
[…]
You can see NPR’s finances here and it becomes obvious that they have available only two of the traditional three ways of dealing with a higher wage bill. In for profit companies there is that possibility of reducing the profit to pay the workers more. In the absence of profiteering this cannot of course happen. Thus, in order to accommodate higher wages they can either raise prices to stations which carry the programs or NPR can employ fewer people at those higher wages. They’re restricted to only two of those ways normally put forward. Something which does rather aid in highlighting why and how companies, for profit ones, react the way they do to forced pay rises.
That NPR is a non-profit aids in highlighting exactly the problems that all organisations have with demands for higher wages. With no profits to cut they can either charge more or employ fewer people, nothing else.
Tim Worstall, “NPR’s Problems – Isn’t It Fun When Workers At A Non-Profit Seek To Strike?”, Forbes, 2017-07-15.
August 23, 2019
QotD: The ego of Salvador Dali
Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943
[Dali’s] aberrations are partly explicable. Perhaps they are a way of assuring himself that he is not commonplace. The two qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism. “At seven”, he says in the first paragraph of his book, “I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” This is worded in a deliberately startling way, but no doubt it is substantially true. Such feelings are common enough. “I knew I was a genius”, somebody once said to me, “long before I knew what I was going to be a genius about.” And suppose that you have nothing in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow; suppose that your real gift is for a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real métier to be an illustrator of scientific textbooks. How then do you become Napoleon?
There is always one escape: into wickedness. Always do the thing that will shock and wound people. At five, throw a little boy off a bridge, strike an old doctor across the face with a whip and break his spectacles — or, at any rate, dream about doing such things. Twenty years later, gouge the eyes out of dead donkeys with a pair of scissors. Along those lines you can always feel yourself original. And after all, it pays! It is much less dangerous than crime. Making all allowance for the probable suppressions in Dali’s autobiography, it is clear that he had not had to suffer for his eccentricities as he would have done in an earlier age. He grew up into the corrupt world of the nineteen-twenties, when sophistication was immensely widespread and every European capital swarmed with aristocrats and rentiers who had given up sport and politics and taken to patronising the arts. If you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back. A phobia for grasshoppers — which a few decades back would merely have provoked a snigger — was now an interesting “complex” which could be profitably exploited. And when that particular world collapsed before the German Army, America was waiting. You could even top it all up with religious conversion, moving at one hop and without a shadow of repentance from the fashionable salons of Paris to Abraham’s bosom.
That, perhaps is the essential outline of Dali’s history. But why his aberrations should be the particular ones they were, and why it should be so easy to “sell” such horrors as rotting corpses to a sophisticated public — those are questions for the psychologist and the sociological critic. Marxist criticism has a short way with such phenomena as Surrealism. They are “bourgeois decadence” (much play is made with the phrases “corpse poisons” and “decaying rentiers class”), and that is that. But though this probably states a fact, it does not establish a connection. One would still like to know why Dali’s leaning was towards necrophilia (and not, say, homosexuality), and why the rentiers and the aristocrats would buy his pictures instead of hunting and making love like their grandfathers. Mere moral disapproval does not get one any further. But neither ought one to pretend, in the name of “detachment”, that such pictures as Mannequin rotting in a taxicab are morally neutral. They are diseased and disgusting, and any investigation ought to start out from that fact.
George Orwell, “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali”, Saturday Book for 1944, 1944.
August 22, 2019
QotD: Stars of the silver screen
Julie Burchill, “The Princess generation needs to grow up”, The Spectator, 2017-07-18.
August 20, 2019
QotD: Autobiography
Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats. However, even the most flagrantly dishonest book (Frank Harris‘s autobiographical writings are an example) can without intending it give a true picture of its author. Dali’s recently published [The Secret Life of Salvador Dali] comes under this heading. Some of the incidents in it are flatly incredible, others have been rearranged and romanticised, and not merely the humiliation but the persistent ordinariness of everyday life has been cut out. Dali is even by his own diagnosis narcissistic, and his autobiography is simply a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight. But as a record of fantasy, of the perversion of instinct that has been made possible by the machine age, it has great value.
George Orwell, “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali”, Saturday Book for 1944, 1944.
August 19, 2019
QotD: Hitler’s “wonder weapons”
Marcus Jones, “Innovation For Its Own Sake: The Type XXI U-boat”, Naval War College Review, 2014-04.
August 18, 2019
QotD: “Hitting back” at protectionist policies
But soon a trade dispute erupts. Stump discovers – correctly, we can assume – that XYZ is charging you less for its lawn-care services than Stump agreed is acceptable for you to be charged and that XYZ agreed in the trade deal to charge. Stump, being a master negotiator, threatens to reimpose the $25 tariff on you unless and until XYZ raises the price it charges you to at least the level that Stump has divined is acceptable and that is enshrined in the terms of the trade agreement between him and XYZ. Alas, XYZ gives in and agrees to raise the price it charges you. Stump then boasts that, by not letting XYZ get away with breaking its word in the trade deal, he is not only protecting the neighborhood from dangerously low prices but is also upholding the sacred rule of law and the sanctity of contractual agreements.
Of course, in reality, Stump’s presumptuous exercise of the power to
rob youimpose a tariff on you whenever you engage in commerce that he finds objectionable is a wrong inflicted on you and on your trading partner, XYZ. The fact that the practicalities of the situation result in your and XYZ going along with the “deal” to entice Stump to stop robbing you each time you buy XYZ’s services does not ethically oblige you to stick to the terms of the deal if you can, in secret, get better terms from XYZ. When Stump threatens to reimpose on you the $25 tariff, he harms you. That is, when in response to Stump’s threat to reimpose the tariff XYZ agrees to abide by the terms of its trade agreement with Stump and raise the price that it charges you, you are made worse off, not better off.Stump’s enforcement of this agreement, in short, does not protect you from further victimization in the future; instead, that enforcement is itself an act of victimizing you. Successful enforcement of this agreement assures you a future less prosperous than it would be were Stump instead to ignore XYZ’s “violation” of the deal.
Note: we can all agree that, between the two options (1) $25 tariff and (2) no tariff but an enforced price-hike, under the trade agreement, of $15, that the second option is better for you than the first option. It is in this limited sense that trade agreements in reality are beneficial. But there’s a third option: (3) Stump does not interfere with your commerce and you pay whatever price you negotiate with XYZ without that price being artificially affected by Stump’s interference. This third option is, for you, the best of the three – and it’s the only fully ethical one of the bunch. (So when Dan Griswold, myself, and other free-traders defend trade agreements, we do so with the realistic recognition that option (3) is politically infeasible. Given this unfortunate infeasibility of option (3), we endorse option (2) over option (1).)
Don Boudreaux, “Strict Enforcement of an Impoverishing Deal Assures Continuing Impoverishment”, Café Hayek, 2017-07-07.
August 16, 2019
QotD: It’s not really accurate to call the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”
When it comes to military history, this particular bias mostly comes out in references to three weeks in May 1940, and specifically one piece of particularly crap judgement by General Gamelin and one bypassed fortress line. The fact that that the allied participants — France, Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium — have spent most of the time since blaming each other and trying to work out who sold out whom has been allowed to mask the fact that this particular campaign was successful beyond all reasonable expectations for the Germans, and that when the French actually had troops in the right places, they were perfectly capable of fighting the advancing Panzers to a standstill at a tactical or operational level. Visitors to Paris may wish to note that the big — rather bigger than you think until you actually see it in the flesh — structure at one end of the Champs Elysées is called the Arc de Triomphe, and not the Arc de Defaite; it bears an admittedly tedious and tasteless, but indubitably long, list of battles at which the French did rather well. The fact that your school history lessons may have taught you rather more about Paul Revere or Clive of India than about Charles Martel is not relevant in the greater scheme of things.
Albert Herring, “Why neither the French nor the Italians are the worst military nation”, Everything2, 2002-01-07.
August 15, 2019
QotD: Strong female characters in fiction
Today, when I telling the kids about it, I realized why. It was because the character was a strong woman. Born with the ultimate disadvantage, the ultimate lack of support, she doesn’t – like fairytale princesses – either get rescued by a strong knight nor even by fate that reveals her to be a hidden princess. Also, she never complains; she never repines – she takes the situation she finds herself in and makes the best out of it, all the while looking out for those who are weaker or in more need than her. This last characteristic nets her the all-important recipe book (supposedly created by a medieval convent, which rings true for Portugal, and lost for centuries.) When her romance doesn’t work because her very conventional suitor wants a girl of suitable family, she doesn’t go into a decline, she just goes on with life.
She is, in fact, what editors so often say they want “a strong woman heroine, self sufficient, a good role model for growing girls.” Only, from my observation and reading, by this they usually mean mouthy, aggressive, foolhardy and complains a lot about men till one wonders if said character has an issue with being born female. There are exceptions, of course, but complaining about fate and men and being bitter seems to be obligatory.
And yet, it is true that this type of character is not only a great role model for young women, she is the type of role model we do need. Earth needs women (yes, and men, but we’re talking women here) who take care of the weak and helpless. Earth needs women who don’t whine. Earth needs women who cheerfully shoulder the burden of what needs to be done.
Earth does not need women who complain about men all the while neurotically obsessing on clothes and jewelry to attract said men and pursuing the highest-status males they can possibly get. There is nothing wrong with these activities, in moderation, but when they become the focus of existence they create a generation of infantile harpies. Now, I don’t think any women in real life are as bad as that, but almost all women characters in books and movies are just like that.
Young women who read/watch these characters end up feeling they must APPEAR like them or they’ll be thought weak. And this is wrong. Strength in women – and men – can be defined not as throwing weight around but in doing what must be done for oneself and those who depend on one.
Earth needs grown up women.
I very much hate to tell people what to do, much less what to be, but I wish we could set about writing – and living – role models for the women Earth needs.
Sarah Hoyt, “Earth Needs Women a blast from the past of November 2010”, According to Hoyt, 2017-07-13.
August 14, 2019
QotD: Proto-progressive thought
Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Southey’s Colloquies on Society”, 1830.
August 13, 2019
QotD: Karl Popper on the paradox of tolerance
In note 4 of volume 1, chapter 7, of Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, he clarifies his position on how best to deal with intolerant philosophies:
… I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
It is clear from Popper’s writing that it would be unwise to resort to violence against an intolerant group that is willing to discuss and debate their ideas. So long as the intolerant group is tolerant enough to agree to debate and discuss their intolerant ideas rather than resort to violence, it is better to handle them with words.
The problem is, some groups, like Antifa, respond to arguments with violence. And it is these sorts of groups that Popper claims must not be tolerated. If a group is so intolerant that they are unwilling to discuss ideas and instead rely entirely on violence, then they must be met with violence. In other words, Popper is simply saying that a nonviolent society must, at the very least, believe in a right to use violence as a form of self-defense.
Nathan Kreider, “Misconceptions of the Paradox of Tolerance”, Being Libertarian, 2019-05-31.
