Jordan Peterson had this to say about sex-differentiated status hierarchies:
Girls can win by winning in their own hierarchy — by being good at what girls value, as girls. They can add to this victory by winning in the boys’ hierarchy. Boys, however, can only win by winning in the male hierarchy. They will lose status, among girls and boys, by being good at what girls value. It costs them in reputation among the boys, and in attractiveness among the girls. Girls aren’t attracted to boys who are their friends, even though they might like them, whatever that means. They are attracted to boys who win status contests with other boys.
“whatever that means”. Heh. Shivvy way to say, “which means nothing”.
When JP discusses sex differences, he could be reading CH posts. Whatever one thinks of the criticisms leveled against him (some are valid), he does have a decent grasp of the sexual market and how men and women navigate divergent routes through an ocean of mate prospects to get what they want.
However, this is one of the rare instances when I disagree with his premise. He’s generally correct that, at least within the bounds of our current cultural arrangement, women have two status hierarchies available to them while men only have one. Our gynarcho-tyranny not only encourages but aggressively impresses upon women the urgency and even moral duty of succeeding in male domains (leaning in), while simultaneously encouraging men to sacrifice their status within their own male domains to make way for more women (and consequently rendering themselves less sexually attractive to women who are now their equal or higher in social status).
Women who do succeed in the man’s world can expect to ascend the intrafemale status ladder (more precisely, the intra-feminist status ladder), but where JP is wrong is assuming these women don’t also suffer an SMV status loss the near-equivalent of the SMV status loss suffered by men who succeed at girlie games of one-uppance.
Just as girls aren’t attracted to effeminate males, and other men are repulsed by nancyboys, the inverse is as true: men aren’t attracted to masculine, status-striving girls, and other women don’t subconsciously look up to mouthy careerist shrikes with the same mix of envy and admiration that they look up to physically beautiful women.
CH, “Sex-Based Status”, Chateau Heartiste, 2018-06-04.
August 22, 2020
QotD: Sex-differentiated status hierarchies
August 14, 2020
How Feminism Came to the Middle East – Women’s Emancipation – WW2 – On the Homefront 006
World War Two
Published 13 Aug 2020While battles rage across the world, women at home are fighting for their basic emancipation. In Egypt, Huda Shaarawi stands at the centre of this struggle.
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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesHosted by: Anna Deinhard
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Fiona Rachel Fischer
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Fiona Rachel Fischer
Edited by: Miki Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)Colorizations by:
Daniel Weiss
Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations – https://www.instagram.com/blaucoloriz…
Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/Sources:
TIMEA
Bundesarchiv
IWM E 817
USHMM
From the Noun Project: Letter by Mochammad KafiSoundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Rune Dale – “Scented Nectar”
Deskant – “Genie’s Bane”
Deskant – “Divine Serpent”
Deskant – “Dunes of Despair”
Sight of Wonders – “Call of Muezzin”
Philip Ayers – “Trapped in a Maze”
Skrya – “First Responders”Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
August 3, 2020
QotD: History or “Her” story?
In my last year in college, I had American Literature taught by a Fullbright exchange professor. I will never forget the moment the poor man — talking to a class of 36, all women as such classes often are — let slip the innocent word “him” to mean an indeterminate gender. He paused, went white, his eyes widened, and he said, “I mean, I mean, he or she.”
Meanwhile, the class of 36 was staring at him in puzzlement. It took us a while to take it all apart and realize he thought we’d be offended by the use of “he” to mean someone generic, of indeterminate gender.
I think we patted him kindly on the shoulder and told him that no, really, we weren’t offended. The usage was the same in Portuguese and we’d been told it was the same in most Indo-European languages. And who on Earth would get offended over semantics? The language was the language. It meant nothing about us personally.
This was of course before I married, came to the U.S. and found that for the American woman circa 1985, the language was not just personal, it was personally offensive.
I remember standing in horror underneath a bookstore section proudly labeled Herstory.
Of course the etymology of the word history is not his + story, the sort of pseudo-clever deduction about language that I was used to from the near-illiterate elderly people in the village. (It would be too complex and involve Portuguese, but there was this old farmer who had somehow deduced from the Portuguese word for farmer that farmers were the only ones who would be saved at the end of time.)
History, of course, is not originally an English word. It comes from the Latin historia — meaning a relation of events — by way of the French estoire, meaning story. Note please that in neither of those languages does “his” mean “belonging to him.” And that making the same sort of illiterate assumptions about the French word, we’d get “It is oire.”
I thought that the store must have hired an illiterate employee, but no, over the next ten years, in various circumstances, and possibly still except for the fact that I’ve learned to silence such fools with a death glare, I’ve come across the same smug-idiot assumption and “corrections” of the English word, so as to “fight against the patriarchy.”
That this is done by people who paid more money than I make in a couple of years for a college degree, and who, doubtlessly, think that etymology is a dish made with onions, or perhaps a conspiracy of the patriarchy fills me with a sort of dull rage that has no outlet.
Sarah Hoyt, “The Semantic Whoredom of the Left”, PJ Media, 2018-05-11.
June 10, 2020
“Gender critical” feminism
Barbara Kay finds herself in agreement with an academic who, having come from a Marxist and radical feminist background, she would not normally have much in common:
Kathleen Lowrey, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, ascribes much of her intellectual formation to Marxism and radical feminism. Not, I think my regular readers would agree, someone with whom I would normally have a great deal in common. And yet, in this strange cultural moment, Prof. Lowrey and I find ourselves amicably united in the service of a mutually revered ideal. I write this column with ardent sympathy for her in her present predicament.
Academics’ time is generally split 40/40/20 amongst, respectively, research, teaching and “service” to their community — meaning committees, mainly. Until late March, Lowrey served as associate chair for undergraduate programs on behalf of the department of anthropology. Following anonymous complaints about her views from one or more students to the university’s office of safe disclosure and human rights, as well as to the dean of students, Lowrey was asked to resign. She was not given a precise reason, only told that because she holds “gender critical” opinions, she was making the learning environment “unsafe” for the anonymous complainants who felt that her views caused them “harm.” (It’s not clear — Lowrey believes it is doubtful — that the complainants were even taking her courses.)
“Gender critical” refers to what was shortly ago normative feminism doctrine in considering biological sex of primordial importance in fighting for women’s rights. Where the traditional rights of biological women collide with asserted rights of trans women — sport, intimate spaces, rape crisis centres, prisons — gender-critical feminists join with conservatives like me in insisting that biological women’s rights must prevail: for the sake of their safety, privacy and right to a level playing field.
Until what seems like a few minutes ago, there was nothing controversial about this opinion. But now there is. The only “correct” opinion to hold is that gender expression trumps biology in any rights-based claims. And in academic circles, Lowrey’s views, which she is at no pains to hide on campus and off, are a form of apostasy that cries out for punishment.
March 5, 2020
Chain Your Woman to the Stove – Feminism in the 1930s | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1938 Part 2 of 4
TimeGhost History
Published 4 Mar 2020Under the yoke of economic depression and more and more authoritarian rulers, Western women face renewed misogyny, patriarchy, and decreasing independence. But not all women think this is such a bad thing.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek KamińskiSources:
Bundesarchiv_Bild:
101III-Alber-174-14A, 102-04517A, 102-17313, 102-17818,
111-098-069, 137-055879, 146-1973-010-31, 146-1975-069-35,
146-1976-112-03A, 146-2006-205, 146-2008-0271,
183-2000-0110-500, 183-2005-0502-502, 183-2005-0530-500,
183-E10868, 183-E20457, 183-H28245, 183-J02040,
183-S08630, 183-S68014, 183-S68021, 183-S68029,
noun_pipe By Icon Lauk,
noun_company By wardehpillai,
noun_Farmer By Francisca Muñoz Colina.Colorizations by:
– Daniel Weiss
– Norman StewartSoundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Sophisticated Gentlemen” – Golden Age Radio
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Magnificent March 3” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
– “Step On It 5” – Magnus Ringblom
– “First Responders” – Skrya
– “Step Lightly” – Farrell Wooten
– “Try and Catch Us Now” – David Celeste
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “The Dominion” – Bonnie Grace
– “The Charleston 3” – Håkan ErikssonA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
2 days ago (edited)
So, we take a little break from the geopolitical developments in 1938 to look at the situation of women in the Western World in 1938. We’ve received a lot of requests on the WW2 channel to cover the situation on the home fronts. While we do mention it in the weekly episodes, and War Against Humanity covers the horrid parts of it, WWII was so much more. It literally changed the world’s culture in just six years. To do that subject justice we have asked Anna to join us as host for a new monthly WW2 series: On the Homefront.A few years back Anna was a regular feature on German YouTube on her own channel and some of the bigger YouTube entertainment channels. She left YouTube to finish her studies, and because she was searching for more depth than YT entertainment content was offering her. As Astrid’s and my daughter, and having grown up with Indy around all the time, she has a passion for human history form childhood, especially cultural history.
She also has a personal relationship to this time through her grandparents, Herbert and Renate, Astrid’s parents who served in Germany during the war, on the front and at home. Herbert, a career administrator and later NCO in the Wehrmacht engineer corps, went on after the war to work for the British as translator, and then as a public servant supporting the creation of the Bundeswehr, the German defense forces, and eventually Germany’s contribution as NATO member.
Renate’s father, a bank director, died under mysterious circumstance in 1936 after repeatedly refusing to pay out money belonging to Jewish families to the Nazis. Her mother and sisters soldiered on under the Nazis as best they could, When the war broke out they first suffered under the Allied bombing, losing their home three times. When the bombing became a daily occurrence, Renate was drafted to the German flak and only barely survived the war.
Several years after the war Herbert and Renate met and started a family together. They both passed away only a few years ago, late enough so that Anna had a chance to spend countless hours over 23 years listening to their war stories, and what they took away from it: hope for a better world, and the knowledge that what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945, must never happen again. Please join us to welcome Anna, our daughter to TimeGhost.
Spartacus
January 22, 2020
You – yes, you – and your “White Supremacy” issues
Antonia Senior is shocked, shocked to discover that she’s struggling with a whole bunch of internalized issues, according to a new book by Layla F. Saad:
I am a white supremacist. Who knew? I didn’t. I have, however, just read Me and White Supremacy by Layla F Saad, published next month by Quercus, which has made clear to me that I am white, therefore I am a racist. In fact, Ms Saad told me in the introduction to prepare to “become overwhelmed when you begin to discover the depths of your internalised white supremacy”.
On a similar note, a friend recently told me that my failure to recognise a vast malevolent patriarchy was as a result of “internalising your own oppression”. There seems to be a lot of internalised weirdness going on: gender victim battling it out with racist in my gut. I thought it was wind.
The publisher is pretty sure that the ranks of underpaid, bookish folk who work for them are also all white supremacists. It is distributing the tome to all the British employees of its parent company Hachette, and telling them to spend 28 days “reflecting on manifestations of white supremacy, including white privilege”.
The self-flagellation of all the white supremacists at Hachette is yet another example of how much the Woke borrow from the Church. Identity politics has become a secular religion, and “white privilege” is one of its shibboleths. Indeed Ms Saad makes the point clearly in her book, stating that “I strongly believe that anti-racism practice and social justice work are also spiritual work.”
To be woke demands faith in certain creeds, with the twins Equality and Diversity as unassailable deities. It demands a knowledge of the right language. You must believe in certain disprovable evils — like the existence of a malevolent patriarchy — and like many strict sects, it punishes its apostates most severely. The Twitter storms are fierce for those who express a non-woke view but should have known better than for those outside of the faith altogether.
Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, The making of the Western Mind, identifies the “trace elements” of Christianity in the woke world. The example he used was the intersectional feminists in the #MeToo movement offering white feminists the chance to “acknowledge their own entitlement, to confess their sins and to be granted absolution”.
December 15, 2019
From “mascupathy” to “toxic masculinity”
Suzanne Venker on the well-aired notion that males are suffering from “toxic masculinity”, and must be “cured” by being more like females:
“End Toxic Masculinity” by labnusantara is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
I’ve always been fascinated at the ease with which specious ideas spread. One day you’re living your life, and unbeknownst to you, someone who holds a reasonable measure of power has an idea based on his or her “research.” That person tells someone else, and then that person tells someone else, and the next thing you know, this new idea has spread like wildfire and people everywhere who are clamoring for answers to complex problems jump on board and say, “Yes, that’s it! That must be it!” All of a sudden, you start reading and hearing about it in the news. An idea has been born. It is now a fact.
That’s how I imagine we arrived at the bogus concept known as “toxic masculinity,” which was apparently deemed “mascupathy” 10 years go by psychotherapist Randy Flood. Mascupathy, Flood and his colleagues decided, is the failure of a man to shed his traditional manly ways. At that point, he officially has a disease.
“We just believe,” writes Flood in Mascupathy: Understanding and Healing The Malaise of American Manhood, “that there is a disease process that goes on when we raise boys to cut off half of their humanity in order to pursue the pinnacle of masculinity.”
This is the conclusion some, such as Flood, have come to for why men and boys are struggling:
Women are graduating from college at higher levels. the male suicide rate is four times that of women, men have a harder time moving out of their parents’ homes than women. There are so many statistics that are telling us that men are struggling. Ninety-eight percent of mass shooters are men, but when there is a shooting we don’t talk about men’s mental health.
Actually, many people have addressed men’s mental health. We simply didn’t arrive at the same conclusion. Men and boys aren’t suffering from an overdose of masculinity; they’re suffering from a dearth of masculinity.
How could it be the former when millions of boys come from fatherless homes and when most boys are products of public schools, where only 23% of teachers are male? Single motherhood has skyrocketed over the last five decades — a whopping 40% increase. Who do we suppose is encouraging boys to “pursue the pinnacle of masculinity”? Their mothers and their female teachers?
Hardly. In schools, girls have the upper hand while boys go along for the ride. Their interests and their innate aggression were stifled the moment we got rid of recess and told boys to sit still and read books centered on women and girls. At home, boys of single mothers are largely responsible for themselves, which is why so many get into trouble. To the extent that single mothers are home, they may be very good at mothering. But they can’t be a father.
October 24, 2019
QotD: “Binders full of women”
I had the chance to pull together a cabinet, and all the applicants seemed to be men … I went to a number of women’s groups and said, “Can you help us find folks?” and they brought us whole binders full of women.
Now, I’ll happily grant that the phrase “binders full of women” is an awkward one. It sounds like the menus they bring out on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane when Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein settle in for a weekend getaway.
But here’s the thing: What Romney did was exactly what feminist groups insist elected politicians should do. He saw that there were “too many” men in the applicant pool, so he reached out to some feminist groups and asked for help. Some feminist groups reached out to him — and he listened to them, too. And then he hired more women.
The monster!
Here’s Jon Stewart mocking him for it. Here’s Ronan Farrow. And here’s Bill Maher, a man who must be sweating like a hooker in church over Hollywood’s post-Weinstein zero-tolerance for piggishness toward women.
Jonah Goldberg, “Binders Full of Asininity”, National Review, 2017-10-13.
September 16, 2019
QotD: If we’d been taken over by aliens, how would we know?
- Our schools in America teach that the system under which America lives, from constitutional protections to (relatively … very relatively) free markets are evil and the cause of all evils in the world.
- Our schools further teach that all the problems in the world at large are the fault of “Imperialists” to include not just America, but the West which is America’s mother culture. They ignore the sins of other nations, many of which, still today, commit female mutilation and slavery, to concentrate ONLY on the West and the sins of the West, thereby obviating any possible pride the students might have in their own culture.
- Further, the schools, under the guise of environmentalism, promote the view that humanity is the worst plague on the planet. Without pointing out that any species can drive others to extinction, or that humans are the only species capable of self-regulating their impact on the environment, they concentrate on those extinctions humans have caused and fantasize that without humans the world would be a paradise.
- Without pointing out the difficulty of global censuses or that in fact we don’t and can’t know how large the world population is, our learning institutions, our cultural institutions, even our entertainment continually scare us with the idea of overpopulation. Without taking into account that there are more trees now in North America than when the colonists arrived, they picture humanity as creating deserts. Schools push middle schoolers to sign agreements never to reproduce.
- As if this weren’t enough, feminists picture women – in Western, well off, more or less equalitarian (at least before the law as it existed before feminist tampering made it take sides with women most of the time) systems – as perpetual victims, stoke a sense of outrage and anger at any and all males, and encourage women to consider normal intercourse “rape” and marriage a prison.
- As if this weren’t enough, the insanity has descended to preaching that there is no such thing as biological sex, and that one’s gender is a sort of “mood” which can be determined before a child is even fully developed. Parents giving hormones to children, to change their sex before the age of reason (let alone physical or emotional maturity) and effectively encouraging castration/neutering and precluding future generations aren’t considered deranged abusers. In fact, educational and medical establishments will encourage parents to thus destroy their progeny and will take the children away if the parents don’t do it, on the flimsiest of pretexts based on stereotypes, such as a boy who disdains male toys, or a girl who doesn’t like dolls. The rich panoply of human expression is ignored in a – dare we say it – alien attempt to make individual people fit stereotypes.
- Three generations into this, our leading lights in intellectual life, be it fiction, non-fiction, academia or even research, get plaudits and advancement ONLY from conclusions and policies that objectively hurt humans and prevent humans from reproducing. A subset of this is hate of the West, the most successful culture in the world, ever, in terms of extending life, preventing early death, preventing or curing disease and preventing and curing famine. Another and even more vociferous subset is the hatred of America, which took all of Western virtues and made them more so.
If aliens, hostile to the very idea of humanity and wanting to prevent us from prospering, let alone going into space (another cause that all so called “progressives” hate with a burning passion and try to prevent by all means possible, from telling us that there is still need on Earth so we shouldn’t spend money on going to space, to telling us that we must first learn to “take care of this planet” to just sustained screaming that the human plague shouldn’t propagate) had managed to take control of our culture, what would they do differently?
Sarah Hoyt, “What if We Have Been Invaded by Aliens?”, PJ Media, 2017-07-21.
August 11, 2019
QotD: Deconstructing “Minoan Crete”
Perhaps the most prominent high priestess of the Great Goddess was Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994). During the 1950s and 60s Gimbutas developed her so-called “Kurgan Thesis;” basically the idea that the archaeological marker of the arrival in Europe of Indo-European-speakers was to be found in the Bronze Age Kurgan mound burials of the Pontic Steppe, a vast region incorporating most of present-day Ukraine, southern Russia and northern Kazakhstan. Controversially, Gimbutas further claimed that these nomadic Indo-Europeans brought with them a warrior-culture dominated by male sky-gods, which supplanted earlier matriarchal and goddess-worshipping cultures. In this, she echoed ideas already expressed at great length by Robert Graves in his 1948 book The White Goddess. Over the next three decades Gimbutas developed her ideas further in a series of books, articles and lectures delivered at campuses throughout America and Europe, where she was immensely influential amongst the burgeoning women’s movement. Three major works, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974), The Language of the Goddess (1989), and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), presented an overview of her conclusions regarding what she saw as Europe’s primeval matriarchy.
The importance of Gimbutas in the development of the matriarchal myth, and also by extension in the development of modern radical feminism, cannot be overstated. Her archaeological experience and expertise, together with her wide knowledge of linguistics and anthropology, seemed to give academic credibility to the romantic and poetic ramblings of Arthur Evans and Robert Graves. Yet in retrospect it is hard to imagine why anyone with even a modicum of common sense could have been taken in.
There were warning signals everywhere. Right from the beginning, for example, many historians were critical of Evans’ interpretation of Minoan Crete, and a devastating blow was delivered in 1974 when German author Hans Georg Wunderlich published his Wohin der Stier Europa trug? (Where did the Bull carry Europa? published in English in 1975 as The Secret of Crete). Here Wunderlich, a trained geologist, examined the structure of the “palace” of Knossos in Crete in detail and came to the conclusion that the building could never have been a palace for the living. It was, instead, a charnel house, a massive necropolis which doubled as an arena for human sacrifice. For the happy-go-lucky “bull vaulting game”, said Wunderlich, was nothing of the sort: it was a ferocious form of human sacrifice which involved young men and women being gored and trampled to death by a sacred bull. This, said Wunderlich, was the origin of the legend of the Minotaur. Since Wunderlich’s time human sacrifice has been confirmed as an integral part of Cretan religious practice, whilst the supposed “pacifism” which Evans and others had imagined, was exposed as nonsensical.
Emmet Scott, “The Myth of the Primeval Matriarchy”, The Gates of Vienna, 2016-07-13.
June 27, 2019
QotD: “Misandropologies”
Even though black women live longer than white men in the USA … and even though women control more disposable wealth than men do … and even though women are snagging most of the college degrees these days … and even though the law and public sympathy heavily lean toward women in any dispute between the sexes … and even though the media portray men as either bumbling incompetents or bloodthirsty rape-monsters … and even though men are far more likely to commit suicide, die on the job, or be homeless than women … we’re still lectured by these bitter fat blobs and their testosterone-free male enablers that misandry isn’t real because men still benefit from certain mysterious “systemic” and “institutional” advantages that none of these assholes seem able to enumerate even when calmly asked to do so.
It’s a funny sort of “patriarchy” we inhabit.
To allege that women are capable of malice and violence and deception is only to allege that they’re human. To expect anything less of them would be dehumanizing and patronizing — which, ironically, shares a root word with “patriarchy.” When feminism ditched the “equity” rhetoric in favor of a menses-splattered pagan goddess religion that depicts men as irredeemable worker drones and women as innocent angels, men who weren’t entirely asleep or pussy-whipped realized that the rules had changed and that they were under attack. But even to notice that a lot of women openly exult in hating men gets you labeled a “woman-hater.”
Misandry is real, and those who seek to deny or justify it deserve a stern paddling. And even if you acknowledge that it’s real, don’t try to make excuses for it using some postmodern gobbledygook, because then you become a misandry apologist — a misandropologist. Just admit that women can be every bit as mean, nasty, horrid, foul, vile, shitty, and hateful as men. It’s part of the human condition.
Naïve as it may be, I envision an enlightened future where there is no longer any misogyny or misandry — only a beautiful, sweet, shared sense of misanthropy.
Jim Goad, “Confronting the Misandropologists”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-05-08.
June 14, 2019
QotD: Kink-shaming
And now sexual perverts (among whom, on occasion, I happily count myself) are the latest group to demand “inclusion”. Please! When I was young, we thought nothing more desirable than being An Outsider – why are the young of today so obsessed with getting a tick on the register, rather than playing hooky? There is a happy place between believing that no one should be excluded on the basis of race, sex or social class, and believing that official validation of every life choice any person freely makes are the same. Someone who likes dressing up in a gimp mask is not Rosa Parks, and I find the increasing lack of ability to differentiate between the two in some quarters highly risible at best and downright insulting at worst.
The latest snowflake flutter is “Don’t kink-shame me!”. At a Vancouver university last year, a man insisting he was an “adult baby” pestered a university nurse to change his dirty nappy and perved over his repulsed female classmates. A whistle-blowing workplace-safety director was sacked for standing up for the women. In Wolverhampton a few months back, a tattooist calling himself “Dr Evil” was charged with grievous bodily harm after slicing ears and nipples from paying customers. He was reported as having support from “the body-modification community” who set up a petition in his favour.
Perhaps the most gobsmacking illustration of how mainstream perversion has become is a photograph of a Pride march showing a gaggle of kiddies (whose parents obviously got the memo that Pride is family-friendly) staring in what looks like confused repulsion at a man in front of them who leads a group of men, crawling on all fours and dressed as dogs, on leashes. Personally, I don’t think Pride needs to be family-friendly – it’s about the very adult desire to connect your genitalia to the genitalia of the same sex, which is pretty specific. But neither is it about kinks. Considering its origins, lesbians have far more right to be there than men who pretend to be dogs at weekends. Lesbians are now routinely removed from Pride marches by police due to their insistence that lesbians don’t have penises and the hurty feelz this causes in people who believe they can and do.
I’m a broad-minded broad, so I’m not offended by these people – but I do despise them for being so wimpy that they need their kink validated by straight society. When did perverts start being ashamed to be perverts and need to be a community? “Community” used to be such a jolly word, redolent of cheery singing or a nice place to land on the Monopoly board. Now it just means a bunch of whiners whining about stuff.
Julie Burchill, “The pervert community? Oh please”, Spiked!, 2019-05-08
May 17, 2019
Was Shakespeare really an illiterate illegal immigrant disabled asexual woman of colour?
Oliver Kamm discusses the most recent “Was Shakespeare really …?” article, this one published in The Atlantic by Elizabeth Winkler:
This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.
[Winkler] accuses what she calls orthodox Shakespeare scholars of “a dogmatism of their own” on the issue, whereby “even to dabble in authorship questions is considered a sign of bad faith, a blinkered failure to countenance genius in a glover’s son.” Armed with this tendentious premise, along with the less contentious one that Shakespeare depicts female characters with unrivalled sympathy and insight, Winkler spins a hypothesis that Emilia Bassano, born in London in 1569 to Venetian immigrants, is a viable candidate for the true author.
Even as I read Winkler’s piece, I expected a denouement that it was all a piece of fiction, analogous to the enjoyable 2009 caper St Trinian’s 2: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold, which ends with buried treasure under the Globe Theatre and the discovery of Shakespeare’s true identity. It never came. The article was presented as a serious contribution to a debate in which Winkler has made a potentially historic discovery.
In British newspapers, there is a longstanding technique of obscuring a paucity of evidence in support of a preposterous thesis by posing it as a question. It’s been dubbed by the political commentator John Rentoul “Questions to Which the Answer is No” (QTWAIN). Winkler’s article employs the stratagem liberally. “Was Shakespeare’s name useful camouflage, allowing [Bassano] to publish what she otherwise couldn’t?” “Could Bassano have contributed [to literature] even more widely and directly?” In a moment of self-knowledge, Winkler asks: “Was I getting carried away, reinventing Shakespeare in the image of our age?” Yet she immediately supplies not the correct answer but yet another QTWAIN: “Or was I seeing past gendered assumptions to the woman who — like Shakespeare’s heroines — had fashioned herself a clever disguise?”
Feminist readings of Shakespeare have enriched literary criticism and scholarship in, among other areas, reconsidering genre distinctions and examining the effects of patriarchal structures on relations between the sexes. There is no decorous way of saying that Winkler’s article, by contrast, is a farrago that should never have been conceived, pitched, commissioned or published. Winkler credulously retails a series of purported mysteries about Shakespeare’s authorship that are no mystery at all, and repeats claims derived from Shakespeare denialists that any capable scholar would have been able to correct. She places particular stress on the work of a “meticulous scholar” Diana Price, who claims: “Writers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England left behind records of their professional activities. Shakespeare left behind documentation of his professional activities, but none is literary… He is the only alleged [emphasis added] writer of any consequence from the time period who left behind no personal evidence of his career as a professional writer.”
Price is neither meticulous nor a scholar (she designates herself “an independent scholar,” which should have caused Winkler greater wariness). As Alan Nelson of Berkeley University has put it, Price knows how to put a sentence together but she doesn’t know how to put an argument together.
We in fact have unimpeachable evidence of Shakespeare’s activities as a writer, far more than we do for, say, his fellow-dramatists John Webster or Cyril Tourneur, but by a series of rhetorical sleights-of-hand Price rules it all inadmissible. To give a single but weighty example: Shakespeare’s fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell assembled the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, published in 1623, with Shakespeare’s name on the title page and his engraved image in the frontispiece, and with a laudatory poem by Ben Jonson referring to the author as “Sweet Swan of Avon.” Price dismisses this as evidence of authorship because it’s posthumous, coming seven years after Shakespeare’s death, even though the planning and publishing of the book must have taken years, and Heminge, Condell and Jonson all knew Shakespeare personally. This isn’t scholarship but sophistry.
A noteworthy example of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. (As is, of course, the headline on this post.)
March 10, 2019
Canada’s “feminist” Prime Minister
In the Post Millennial, Ali Taghva recounts the apparently awkward interactions between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and outgoing Whitby MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau allegedly screamed at Liberal MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes when she originally informed him that she would not be seeking re-election this coming October.
According to a Globe and Mail article, the MP informed Trudeau that she would not be seeking re-election around the same time as Jody Wilson-Raybould’s resignation.
She allegedly told the PM that political life had seriously harmed her family life, and in response, according to Ms. Chavannes, the Prime Minister grew hostile and yelled at her. Specifically, he allegedly claimed that the MP did not appreciate him, especially when he had provided her with so much.
“He was yelling. He was yelling that I didn’t appreciate him, that he’d given me so much,” Caesar-Chavannes said.
A full week later, Caesar-Chavannes attempted to approach the PM again, and once more was met with “anger and hostility” before Mr. Trudeau allegedly stormed out of the room after staring her down, according to the Globe and Mail article.
Highlighting the cross-partisan importance behind Ms. Caesar-Chavannes public outcry, she finished her statements by noting that she did not drink “the Kool-Aid and then sign my name in blood to this party politics thing. Maybe politics is not for me because I clearly don’t follow what the handbook says I’m supposed to do,”
This Globe and Mail article follows a Tweet in which the MP publically called out the Prime Minister for his use of open leadership in speeches, while allegedly ignoring her.
[…]
Justin Trudeau himself has yet to publicly comment on the matter. In 2018, he famously said, “when women speak up, it is our duty to listen to them and to believe them.”
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.
