Lindybeige
Published on 10 Apr 2019Guatemala – another video from my trip there, this time looking at the jade in the local museum, plus obsidian, idols, and 1970s fashion tips.
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Camera: Jeremy Lawrence (https://www.futtfuttfutt.com)Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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May 15, 2019
Jade of the Maya
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May 11, 2019
Jonathan Haidt – Social media has altered a fundamental constant of the universe
Katie Herzog attended the first Heterodox Academy conference and reports on Haidt, the academy’s founder, and other attendees at the event:
Jonathan Haidt at the Miller Center of Public Affairs in Charlottesville, Virginia on 19 March, 2012.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
I told three people that Jonathan Haidt will be speaking in Seattle this week. One is a left-leaning university professor, another is an apolitical meditation teacher, and the last is a conservative talk radio host. Despite the chasm between their personal politics, they were all equally enthusiastic to hear Haidt speak. He seems to have that effect on people, and is one of the rare political thinkers who manages to both appeal to (and occasionally enrage) people across the political spectrum.
A professor of social psychology at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Haidt is also the author of best-selling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which he published with First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff last year. That book grew out of an article of the same name that the duo first published in the Atlantic in 2015. As anyone who was paying attention back then may recall, the article made quite a splash, and it brought some emerging trends at university campuses into the public consciousness, including the rise of trigger warnings, deplatforming speakers, and university administrators’ attempts to protect students from any perceived harm. The article, and the subsequent book, didn’t exactly make Haidt popular in some hyper-left circles, and Haidt is occasionally accused of being a conservative in disguise. What he actually is, is a centrist, which gives him a perspective outside the typically left/right binary, and much of his recent work is about tribalism and division in the U.S. It’s a trend he thinks is getting worse.
[…]
“If you are in a university that puts you into interaction with diverse ideas, that makes you smarter,” Haidt says. “You can solve more problems. You become a more critical thinker. The more you hang out with people who think like you, especially if they enforce orthodoxy, the lower your IQ gets.”
In other words, only engaging with ideas you already support can actually make you dumber. It can also damage your cause. As an example, Haidt sites student attempts to deplatform both outside speakers and faculty on campuses over the last few years. Video of protests at schools like Evergreen State were widely shared on conservative networks, and while the students may have seen themselves as warriors in the fight for social justice, those who don’t already support their ideals were more likely to see hysterical students screaming at befuddled adults. The backlash was inevitable. “The antics on campus did a lot, I think, to elect Donald Trump,” Haidt says. “Most people on the left have not seen those videos but most people on the right have seen them. And so even if you think it’s virtuous to always be fighting, in the long run, you are harming your own side.”
In an effort to reverse the trend of ideological homogeneity on campus, Haidt founded the Heterodox Academy, an organization that advocates for universities to embrace viewpoint diversity (even, yes, when those viewpoints are conservative). Last year, they hosted the first Heterodox Academy Open Minds Conference in New York, which I attended. (Full disclosure: I moderated a panel, for which I was compensated.)
The conference was remarkable: Everyone I spoke to seemed to have some story about what made them first see that the world isn’t cleanly broken up into good versus evil, from professors who’d been the subject of protests to journalists who’d been canceled. Still, this was a conference mostly made up of academics and writers, and I doubt there was a single stereotypical Trump voter or social justice warrior in attendance. For the sake of viewpoint diversity this is probably a failure, but the organization still managed to bring together a crowd that included conservatives like Bret Stephens and liberals like Alice Dreger and libertarians like Kmele Foster all in one space. There were heated discussions, to be sure, but no one called for anyone else to be fired. This, I am sure, would be appalling to a certain subset of leftist Twitter, but as Haidt reminded me, social media may be loud, but it’s not representative. “We have to distinguish between the average and the visible anecdote,” he said. “This is another thing social media has done to us: We used to have a sense of the mood in a room or the mood in our social network, and now we have no idea.”
Still, he’s not optimistic that we’ll work our way out of these divisions, at least without significant disruption in the process. “Things feel so strange to me,” he said. “It feels as though a fundamental constant of the universe has been altered. I think social media has done that.”
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May 6, 2019
“Casual sex” isn’t actually all that casual to most women
Suzanne Venker makes the case that the innate physiological and psychological differences between men and women accounting for most women’s much lower comfort level with “no-strings-attached” sexual encounters:
The differences between women and men are vast, and in no domain is this more true than sex. Our bodies alone prove this in spades! If one body carries life and the other doesn’t, this clearly makes the sexes unequal. Newsflash: The birth control pill doesn’t change a woman’s inherent nature — it merely gives the illusion she’s just like a man.
She’s not. A woman’s need to bond with a man, to feel safe and loved and committed to, is crucial for her to feel secure enough to let down her guard sexually. That’s why she feels uneasy about one-night stands. Her body won’t cooperate.
It’s also why men, not women, are the ones who gain the most from casual sex. (To be clear: I’m not arguing that it’s “OK” or even good for men to sleep around; I’m simply pointing out why, from a physical standpoint, they aren’t angst-ridden when they do.)
Women just aren’t designed for one-night stands. What do we think all those films and television programs are about where the man and the woman have sex and he doesn’t call her the next day, so she thinks he’s a jerk? If women were “just like men,” this would never be a theme in the first place.
When it comes to uncommitted sex, women are playing a game they can’t win. Feeling “used,” or like a “booty call,” is the most common experience of women who engage in casual sex, or “hookups,” whether they’re teenagers or grown women. That just isn’t the case for most men.
Every American over the age of 40 knows this to be true, and adults in schools and at home are failing our youth by not passing this wisdom along — particularly when young people are bombarded with the lie that casual sex is empowering.
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May 3, 2019
The power of the patriarchy
As we are often told, men have distinct advantages in modern society that women are still struggling to achieve for themselves. Daphne Patai doesn’t seem to have got the memo, however:
In contemporary America, women and men still act out ancient roles. From the point of view of the men, the society is a matriarchy: Women have physically less demanding jobs — with the sole exception of childbirth, by now a rare event in the average woman’s life. Women sustain far fewer injuries on the job, are not required to go to war, take better care of their health, and for these reasons and many others enjoy a lifespan significantly longer than that of men.
In this society, men use their physical strength, when necessary, on women’s behalf. Women claim to be equal partners when that suits them and claim to be entitled to special consideration when that suits them. They insist on autonomy in maintaining or aborting pregnancies, but at the same time, they determine the fathers’ duties-and rights, if any. Women claim child support. They can either demand or impede fathers’ continuing involvement with their offspring, as the women see fit. The result is that women have advantages over men in child custody suits, just as they have learned to use charges of child sexual abuse and domestic violence.
Though dozens of studies show that women, by their own account, initiate violence against their domestic partners as often as (if not more often than) men, and cause as much injury when weapons are involved, somehow the social mythologies of this country keep that fact from gaining broad public attention, let alone credence.
But worst of all, in terms of the interactions of daily life, are women’s emotional demands on men. At home, men routinely sit through harangues that demonstrate women’s greater verbal skills and emotional agility. Men, inarticulate, try to figure out what is required of them in a given situation. Not by accident, verbal therapies in this society archetypically began with men listening and women speaking. Even as little boys, males learn to be in awe of girls’ verbal fluency. The feeling of ineptness, of being no match for females at the verbal and emotional level, is the common inheritance of all but a few exceptional males.
The matriarchy here described, structured to protect women’s interests as against men’s (and, ironically, having conned men into defending such a set up) puts a premium on women’s special social and emotional skills. Everywhere, women engage men and one another in personal conversation, offering and receiving disclosures, demanding commiseration, giving advice, spreading censure. Men, trained to keep to their workhorse style, are uncomfortably cornered by women, in the workplace, and at home, demanding that they speak from the heart. When asked “How are you?” women give a detailed and precise accounting. In offices, they spend valuable time discussing personal matters.
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April 30, 2019
Japan’s monarchy
Colby Cosh looks at the astonishingly successful Japanese monarchy over the last few centuries of change:
Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko at the Tokyo Imperial Palace in Chiyoda Ward, Tōkyō Metropolis on April 24, 2014.
US State Department photo by William Ng, via Wikimedia Commons.
Most everybody knows how the office of the Japanese Emperor became “ceremonial” for the better part of 700 years, and how the archipelago was governed in isolation by what we call the shogunate. The first Westerners who established diplomatic relations with Japan in the 19th century did not think of the Emperor as analogous to Queen Victoria at all. For years they thought of the Mikado as primarily a religious functionary, a sort of pope performing funny, tedious rites in seclusion. (As anyone who has been watching Japanese news in the run-up to Golden Week knows, there is some truth to this.)
Even as reality dawned on those foreign barbarians, their presence in Japan led to social breakdown, civil war, and a sharp, sudden revival of the power of their monarchy — the Meiji Restoration. This is still an awe-inspiring event. Japan was confronted by a little-known and hated outer realm, and was able to adapt with inexplicable confidence. It did not descend into psychic and economic malaise, but almost immediately began to compete with obtrusive Western “powers.” After centuries in abeyance, their constitution somehow allowed them to conjure a enlightened despot of enormous ability, the Meiji Emperor, at the precise moment one was required.
This led in time to the war in the Pacific — and to a second miracle of the same kind. If matters had been left up to American public opinion in 1945, or to the allies of the United States, or even to the American executive branch, the Japanese monarchy would have been abolished and the Emperor given a humiliating trial and death. Such a procedure could have easily been justified then, and can be justified in retrospect now. U.S. foreign policy almost always, in practice, seems to follow the country’s republican instincts.
But while Japan was defeated, it had not been invaded. So Gen. Douglas MacArthur and a few foreign-policy brainiacs reached a magnificent, cynical modus vivendi: they would exploit and reshape the Japanese monarchy rather than smashing it. As a soldier, MacArthur, made Supreme Commander of occupied Japan, would have shot the Emperor with his own sidearm and never lost a minute’s sleep. But he and others somehow managed to overcome racial and political prejudices, and perform an act of American “nation-building” that was not a cruel joke.
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April 27, 2019
QotD: When McDonald’s came to Moscow
[In an NPR broadcast] McDonald’s is positively portrayed as being an excellent, almost heroic, force for good. McDonald’s manner of doing business is celebrated as changing social norms for the better – for making the world (or at least Russia) not only a more consumer-friendly place, but also a more pleasant, a more polite, a more respectful, and a (yes) more happy place.
Listeners are reminded at the start of the clip that Americans smile a lot, including at strangers. Russians – and, especially, Russians under Soviet domination – did not smile very much. Then McDonald’s opened in Moscow in 1990. McDonald’s trains its workers to smile at customers, and to be polite and friendly. We then learn – from one of the Russians who worked at that McDonald’s in Moscow – that that restaurant became a place of pleasant refuge for Muscovites. The simple, smiling friendliness and politeness that Americans take for granted was, in Russia, actively sought after by many Russians and embraced by their choosing to dine at McDonald’s.
Commerce – voluntary exchange – is essential for what Deirdre McCloskey calls “market-tested betterment.” This betterment, however – and Deirdre would agree – is manifested not only in new and better material products but also in the ways in which businesses treat consumers. In market economies consumers are valuable to businesses; in these economies consumers are treated by businesses as respected guests. In contrast, in non-market economies – in economies in which prices and profits are prevented from moving in market-clearing directions – consumers are treated by ‘businesses’ as repellant pests.
Don Boudreaux, “Doux Commerce, avec Sourires“, Café Hayek, 2016-06-17.
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April 20, 2019
The damage to (and the PR spin about) Notre-Dame de Paris
At Never Yet Melted, some quick analysis from Matthew Keogh (posted originally to Facebook) are quoted on the carefully curated public information made available about Notre-Dame de Paris, even while firefighters were still busy trying to contain the blaze:
Notre Dame Cathedral Fire, a few facts you should know courtesy of the mainstream media:
1. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown.
2. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown, but it has been ruled an accident (despite the fact that the exact cause of the blaze is still unknown).
3. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown, but Islam is the real victim here.
4. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown which means the damage has not been thoroughly assessed, but it’s not arson.
5. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown which means the damage has not been thoroughly assessed, but Macron is setting up an international appeal for funding to rebuild despite not knowing how much is needed because the damage has not been thoroughly assessed.
This is the sort of information you get when journalists are in bed with the politicians.
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April 19, 2019
“The Proms” may include hip-hop and break-dancing in future seasons
The BBC is eager to destroy as much as it can of British tradition, and introducing hip-hop into the Proms is a great way of furthering that goal, as Kim du Toit expostulates wildly (and for the record, I agree with him):
FFS, we don’t need more exposure to modern music — it assails our ears in shops, restaurants, malls, from passing teenagers’ inadequate headphones as they walk by us in the street, and from stereo speakers more valuable than the cars which encase them as they stand next to us at the traffic light. And it is not repeat NOT “part of the classical world”, unless your idea of “classical” includes lyrics which refer to women as bitches and whores in every other line, and four times during the chorus. It’s fucking jungle music — all beat and little melody — and if someone takes offense at the word “jungle”, I invite you to visit any part of the African wilderness and listen to the kind of music that is performed there, and explain to me the difference. And now this swill is going to be featured at the Proms… and isn’t that special?
What the Proms used to give the public was exposure to some of the greatest music ever created, music of exquisite beauty, unparalleled technical expertise and sophistication born of an unmatched cultural heritage — and boy, are we ever in need of more of that, these days. Instead, we’re going to hear “songs” from some asswipe called N’Jiggy featuring overpowering bass, over-loud drums and underwhelming artistic value other than (you heard it here first) a few “sampled” fragments of Beethoven’s Ninth scatted around like diamonds in a pigsty.
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March 29, 2019
QotD: The subtle power of cultural norms
I am a cross-cultural being. As such, I am weirdly aware of the various … gradations … of what is culture, what is biological and what is probably reinforced in biology by culture over the centuries.
Say you’re a woman in a country that puts women to death for being lippy. Most indications would be that lippy women would get weeded out of the culture. Except things are more complicated than that, when it comes to human tendencies and inclinations. I.e. “It’s not that simple.” You could be a stubborn woman but know when to confine it to where it’s safe: say bullying your close relatives, particularly the female ones. Or long-term-preference lippiness: zipping it until you’re the mother-in-law and have a couple or more daughters-in-law to be lippy to in safety. The fact is if it were a single trait and immediately lethal, then there wouldn’t be women who talk back to judges and get killed for it, even now, after 14 centuries of selecting for meek. BUT the fact is also that if you go to one of those countries, you see women putting up with things they never would in America. Even “Strong” and “spirited” women. Because culture is like that. Culture sets parameters to what is even thinkable for each individual. And then you express yourself within those patterns. Sure you can go outside the parameters. I did. But even I only went slightly outside the patterns. I think. Well, however much I went outside was enough to make most people really uncomfortable around me. And unless you’re planning to pack and leave, this is not a long-term survival strategy.
Sarah Hoyt, “Cross-Culture”, According to Hoyt, 2017-03-23.
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March 27, 2019
QotD: Gossip, rumour, and innuendo
Rumor was rife in the village as in the science fiction community. It should be. Both are the province of women. Not that men didn’t gossip/egg women on in the village, as they do in the science fiction community, but the men stupid enough to be seen doing it openly had a special name attached to them “Tricoteiros.” It was not a complementary name. And most men really didn’t get involved. They merely went along with what their wives decided and decreed. People who imagine women powerless in true patriarchal societies are out of their minds. Once the “court of public opinion” which is largely female, makes a decision, men risk falling victim to it, should they not conform to its dictates.
And this is why I loathe and despise rumor, and will stand up for a victim of it, no matter how little I like him or her: or indeed how little I know him or her. I will stand up for the victim, because rumor is a ridiculous way of ascertaining if someone should be “a part of society” (remember the charming moppets who said someone should be “cast out of society” for saying bad things) or if someone should have a job or if someone should be allowed to live somewhere in peace.
Because the one thing rumor is not concerned with is truth or true guilt, or even gradations of guilt. Yes, perhaps everything rumor says is true. Heaven knows it’s been known to happen, which is when people say “no smoke without fire” but they ignore all the times their stories and whispers were ALL wrong.
For instance, before I got married to Dan everyone knew (based on TRUST me little more than a resemblance in coloring) he was a baker from a neighboring village, whom I’d met in Italy. What was true to this tissue? Well, I was getting married and the year before, I was in Germany. (I’m still confused as to how Italy got attached to it.) Which was okay because I had no reputation to speak of. The life I lived in gossip was far more interesting than my real life. Having grown up as the “little sister” of my brother’s group of friends, they (and I) never paid any attention to the fact I was now past puberty. This meant if they saw me trudging towards the train and they happened to be driving, they’d pick me up and take me where I was supposed to go (mostly college or home) and if they were at a coffee shop and I walked by, they’d call me to sit and grab a coffee and a pastry (which they paid for, as older siblings will. Since my brother is around ten years older than I, most of them had jobs while I was in high school.) BUT the gossips knew I was having affairs will all of them (what a busy critter I must have been, what with carrying a heavier-than-full-load of courses and tutoring on the side, all this while having boyfriends/fiances. So when I got married, of course the best I could do was the baker from the nearby, poorer village. (Rolls eyes.) Which fortunately Dan couldn’t care less about, since when I told him the rumors he went off in whoops of laughter at the idea that his geeky, introverted fiance could ever be the village hussy.
Sarah Hoyt, “Painted All In Tongues”, According to Hoyt, 2017-03-20.
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March 22, 2019
“Shiroyama” – The Satsuma Rebellion – Sabaton History 007
Sabaton History
Published on 21 Mar 2019What will you do when your traditional way of life is threatened by a powerful force in your native lands? The samurai didn’t hesitate to answer this question with: our swords. During the Satsuma Rebellion, the samurai and its leader Saigō Takamori fought the Japanese Imperial Government. Their rebellion ended with the Battle of Shiroyama, where in 1877 the samurai prepared for a last stand.
Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory
Watch the official music video for Shiroyama here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKW6g…
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Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShopHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Maps by: Eastory
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek KaminskiEastory YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
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Music by Sabaton.An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.
© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.
From the comments:
Sabaton History
2 days ago (edited)
In the 19th century, Japan transitioned from a feudal society to a modern constitutional monarchy shaped after its western counterparts. A constitution was introduced which made every Japanese man equal under the law. This effectively ended the privileged status of the samurai in Japan. However, many samurai didn’t take this kindly. A group of them rebelled against the Imperial government, which is what the Sabaton song “Shiroyama” is all about.The fact that we can research, film and produce this with Indy and his team is only thanks to the people who support us on Patreon. If you don’t already, please do consider supporting us – which also gives you some cool rewards as well as early access to all our episodes!
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March 14, 2019
Life in the modern academic paradise
At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian recounts his time in the idyllic Ivory Tower of modern academia:
Imagine you’re some kind of Gulliver-type explorer, and you reach an island of perfect bliss. Clear air, gentle breezes, balmy temperatures, and all the delicious food you can eat. And the natives! They live to serve you, completely unconstrained by anything so antiquated as Western sexual morality. Limitless 5G internet. Anything you want to eat, drink, watch, read, do, say, insert, or have inserted, it’s all yours at the snap of your fingers. Got it?
Now imagine that the rulers of this little slice of paradise do nothing but sit on the side of the road all day, smashing their own toes with ball-peen hammers.
That’s life in a college town. The Left run everything. They set the admissions requirements. They have unlimited budgets, and since they do, the entire commercial ecosystem exists only for them. All cuisine is “fusion,” you have to drive to the next burg over to find milk that comes from cows, and every single item of public culture — from sidewalk graffiti to public radio to experimental theater troupe — does nothing but flatter them. There is no fetish so outre, no practice so bizarre, that you can’t find at least one other enthusiastic participant. It’s intersectional genderfluid heaven….
…. and every single person in it is miserable. I’m serious — if it’s not too far out of your way, drive down to your nearest college town, and just watch the faces. You might glimpse a grinning undergrad or two — they’re too young and dumb to know better; they’ll be fully reeducated by junior year — but you can spot the tenured faculty solely by their scowls. The only thing that temporarily alleviates the existential horror of their lives is getting outraged by something, which — since, again, they control everything — means tilting at windmills is their only sport; they play it with a cutthroat intensity the football coach can only dream of.
How can you not be fascinated by that? To utterly refute the view of man as homo economicus, all you have to do is watch the facial expressions of people who are “the 1%” by any measure that makes sense. It’s one hell of a show…
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QotD: The doubting of the experts
I think the generation of experts of the 60s looked around and realized that the accomplishments of their elders had bought them enough status as a class that people would just… believe them. And so they did what most people would do if they suddenly discovered the magic power to make people believe anything they said. They abused it.
And this magic power became an attraction for people to join the class. And so people who joined this class of “experts” who are now being told, “no, we don’t believe you” feel like they’ve been aggrieved. This wasn’t the deal they were promised. And, naturally, the reason isn’t because they don’t deserve it; it’s because we’re all inferior.
It’s the corruption of a priesthood, and nothing more. The assumption of moral supremacy, the hunts for heretics and their consequent public destruction, the appeals to authority, the diminishing virtue… it’s all happened before. “You must let us regulate all aspects of your life to fend off the Climate Gods” is only different from the Aztec demands for human sacrifice to ensure the sun would rise at the margins. The core concept is the same.
“Aaron M.” commenting on Glenn Reynolds, “MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The Suicide of Expertise”, Instapundit, 2017-03-20.
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March 1, 2019
Theodore Dalrymple on Michel Houellebecq: “Houellebecq runs an abattoir for sacred cows”
At the New English Review:
Not reading many contemporary French novels, I am not entitled to say that Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting French novelist writing today, but he is certainly very brilliant, if in a somewhat limited way. His beam is narrow but very penetrating, like that of a laser, and his theme an important, indeed a vital one: namely the vacuity of modern life in the West, its lack of transcendence, lived as it is increasingly without religious or political belief, without a worthwhile creative culture, often without deep personal attachments, and without even a struggle for survival. Into what Salman Rushdie (a much lesser writer than Houellebecq) called “a God-shaped hole” has rushed the search for sensual pleasure which, however, no more than distracts for a short while.
Something more is needed, but Western man — at least Western man at a certain level of education, intelligence and material ease — has not found it. Houellebecq’s underlying nihilism implies that it is not there to be found. The result of this lack of transcendent purpose is self-destruction not merely on a personal, but on a population, scale. Technical sophistication has been accompanied, or so it often seems, by mass incompetence in the art of living. Houellebecq is the prophet, the chronicler, of this incompetence.Even the ironic title of his latest novel, Sérotonine, is testimony to the brilliance of his diagnostic powers and his capacity to capture in a single word the civilizational malaise which is his unique subject. Serotonin, as by now every self-obsessed member of the middle classes must know, is a chemical in the brain that acts as a neurotransmitter to which is ascribed powers formerly ascribed to the Holy Ghost. All forms of undesired conduct or feeling are caused by a deficit or surplus or malalignment of this chemical, so that in essence all human problems become ones of neurochemistry.
On this view, unhappiness is a technical problem for the doctor to solve rather than a cause for reflection and perhaps even for adjustment to the way one lives. I don’t know whether in France the word malheureux has been almost completely replaced by the word déprimée, but in English unhappy has almost been replaced by depressed. In my last years of medical practice, I must have encountered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of depressed people, or those who called themselves such, but the only unhappy person I met was a prisoner who wanted to be moved to another prison, no doubt for reasons of safety.
Houellebecq’s one-word title captures this phenomenon (a semantic shift as a handmaiden to medicalisation) with a concision rarely equalled. And indeed, he has remarkably sensitive antennae to the zeitgeist in general, though it must be admitted that he is most sensitive to those aspects of it that are absurd, unpleasant, or dispiriting rather than to any that are positive.
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February 23, 2019
QotD: “Toxic masculinity”
And then we have toxic masculinity. Is there toxic masculinity? Of course there is. Well, there is toxic and it can have a masculine expression. Because of obvious biological differences, the most toxic of women will have issues beating up people or raping them. It can be done, but it won’t be common.
Is masculinity toxic? Not more than femininity. The latest insistence on doing everything the feminine way has got us “feminine business” and “feminine politics” where everything is run on image, innuendo and gossip: the female version of toxicity. You’re either with the group or out, and if you’re out we’ll demonize you.
So blaming everything on men is bad-crazy.
I have a friend who has been trying to defend the Gillette ad as in “But they’re giving to causes that help raise boys who are fatherless” etc. I love her to death, but no. While that might be laudable, the fact is that that add is another brick in the wall of “If you’re a woman and your life isn’t perfect it’s a man’s fault.”
This bad crazy not only destroys marriages, it destroys GIRLS. You see that thing above “to succeed you must sacrifice?” If you infect females with the idea that they’re owed success and if they don’t get it, it’s men’s fault, you’re both undermining them and turning them into rage-filled screeching monkeys, who are exactly zero use to society. (Oh, but they vote for Marxists, so I guess there’s that.)
Worse, this bad crazy is riding on other bad crazy. Which like most bad crazy since the twentieth century has its origins on the insane crazy of Marx.
The question is, WHY was this ad made at all? It certainly doesn’t sell razors. So, why?
Because for decades we’ve taught our children their most important role in life is the crazy cakes “change the world” or “make a difference” and the difference they’re supposed to make is in the class-war (or race war, or sex war now) sense of bringing about the Marxist paradise. We tell them they’re supposed to speak for the voiceless, then tell them the voiceless are the “designated victim classes” (whom frankly we can’t get to SHUT UP.) We tell them this is what gives meaning to life. We tell them through school, through entertainment, through news narratives, through the people who are being lionized.
And this is bad crazy. Really bad crazy. By itself it is a wrench that will take society apart. We have publishers, writers, journalists, and probably taxi drivers, policemen, engineers and who knows what, increasingly convinced their highest calling is not doing their job, but “educating” or “improving” or “raising the consciousness of” other people.
Even for a credo that worked with humanity — say Christianity — when a society becomes convinced pushing the idea is more important than doing their job, the wheels come off. BUT when the credo is neo-Marxism, or actually “increasingly elaborate excuses as for the only thing Marxism brings about is death” it’s exponentially worse.
It’s also the explanation for why the wheels come off every field that gets taken over by the left: because the people in those fields stop understanding what their actual job is.
And it’s everywhere. At such a deep level that most people — even those mad at Gillette — didn’t see that the actual problem is that no one involved in the damn ad understood it had NOTHING to do with SELLING the product.
It’s bad crazy. There’s a lot of bad crazy running in the world. And we must stop it — and build under, build over, build around — or it will kill society.
Sarah Hoyt, “Bad Crazy”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-01-20.
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