Quotulatiousness

January 27, 2025

If you’ve ever thought society is run by psychopaths … you may be right (but you’re not entitled to compensation)

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Spaceman Spiff discusses normal people, the mimics who pretend to be normal and often seem to work their way into positions of power and influence (not every mimic is a psychopath, but all psychopaths are mimics), and those who resist the mimics (and therefore also the psychopaths):

There are different types of people we can observe around us. Normals are the great mass of humanity. They don’t think too hard. They just get on with it. This is the majority.

Most Normals seek some confirmation from outside themselves, typically opinions and views from trusted sources. Many seem averse to thinking at all and almost none are independent thinkers in any meaningful sense.

This includes social mores. The majority look towards others for their cues on how to act which makes them easy to manipulate.

Social validation in differing forms is the controlling mechanism. What is the other fellow doing? That is what I must do.

Those doing the controlling are different. Many leadership positions are populated by people who display abnormal traits.

Cluster B disorders in particular are everywhere. Narcissistic, antisocial and histrionic behaviours are visible in many senior levels of society from politics to major charities.

These disordered people largely copy normal human emotions and behaviours. They are acting because they don’t experience life as the rest do.

Everything is a performance which provides enormous advantages to them as they climb their way up, but has the drawback of being fake.

We can call these people Mimics for convenience.

Today’s societies largely reflect the ascendency of Mimics as they seem to run many institutions we rely on, a situation referred to as a pathocracy.

The extreme version of the type is a psychopath, someone lacking conscience or empathy and therefore unable to enjoy the full human experience. Psychopaths are damaged people unencumbered by concerns with morality or social convention, so able to quickly get on in life.

Cluster B types have similar deficiencies that aid them in a myriad of ways and are more common than psychopaths. The end result is the same, leadership positions dominated by those with distorted thought patterns who quickly learn the majority of people prefer to be led and told what to do.

Some can resist

Both Normals and Mimics swim in the same waters. Normals because they are shaped by society and seek its approval. Mimics because they are faking it. They must scan the horizon at all times to ensure they are making it work. Their act is designed to reflect normality and the trophies it can bring so it must be calibrated to what works with an audience.

A need to seek approval draws these groups together. An external dependence they assume is universal if they even bother to think about it at all.

They are forever locked into a world dictated by the views and whims of others.

But there are individuals who can be defined by the fact they are much more self-sufficient. They do not seek external approval and are not subject to the judgment of others.

Everyone who resisted the Covid propaganda would be an example. This includes anyone who initially succumbed to the pressure but quickly worked out something was amiss.

The chief characteristic of this group is resistance to social pressure because they reject the need for external cues to guide behaviour.

The most extreme example of this phenomenon in society are schizoids, those indifferent to praise or criticism, largely motivated by inner drives and impervious to many forms of social stress.

As with the psychopaths, schizoids represent the extreme end of the insulated spectrum, but everyone resistant to today’s aggressive social controls share some schizoid traits to a greater or lesser degree.

We can call these the Resistant, individuals not dependent on external validation and naturally averse to being controlled. Independent thinkers who instinctively insulate themselves from the unthinking Normals who make up the bulk of humanity.

Because of their mental distance from the herd this group are often unmoved by the narratives controlling much of society.

Unlike the Mimics, the Resistant do not seek to control others and it is control that defines the West today, especially the ruling classes who fear the Normals waking up. They must be relentlessly managed via approved narratives lest they make the wrong decisions in life.

Mimics are naturally drawn to control since they are faking it. They run the constant risk of being discovered as fakes. Imposter syndrome rules their actions which drives the vigilance we commonly observe in their sensitivity to criticism and their enraged responses to being challenged. All this to stave off scrutiny.

It is the most broken who can be persuaded their fractured view of life is some grand vision that escapes the rest of us. Such people are everywhere and they are comically easy to control by appealing to their need for superiority which is why control is so attractive to them in turn. They assume it is a universal phenomenon.

Those who shun control are then a threat to their identity, hence the aggressiveness with which the independently minded are pursued. They cannot be left in peace, a very striking observation of today, the zeal with which nonconformists are targeted even when minding their own business.

January 20, 2025

“You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Kat Rosenfield shares her concerns about what the accusations against Neil Gaiman indicate about the problems with allowing women to be legally unreliable narrators:

There’s a moment in the Gaiman exposé where the main accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich, sends him a text message asking him how he’s doing. Gaiman says he’s struggling: he’s heard from people close to him that Pavlovich plans to accuse him of rape. “I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed,” he writes.

“It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she replies.

Except: she doesn’t mean it. We know this because Lila Shapiro, the author of the piece, breaks in to tell us as much:

    Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was terrified of upsetting Gaiman. “I was disconnected from everybody else at that point in my life,” she tells me. She rushed to reassure him.

But also, we know this because she didn’t mean it is sort of an ongoing theme, here. And that’s what I want to talk about.

By this point in the article we’ve been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can’t assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. “Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do,” Shapiro writes in one section. In another, she explains that it doesn’t matter if the women played along with Gaiman when he asked them to call him “master” or eat their own feces because “BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms” to which Gaiman didn’t strictly adhere (as the meme goes, it’s only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling feces-eating sadomasochism.)

Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich’s behavior (including the “it was wonderful” text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that’s just because women do be like that sometimes.

Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I’m more interested in what happens to women when they’re cast in this role of society’s unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.

The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they’ll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it’s not just sex they can’t reasonably consent to. It’s medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world’s adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.

QotD: Brainwashing

Filed under: Books, Europe, Germany, Health, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ve always had a fascination with “brainwashing”. It turns out that the human mind is, indeed, pretty plastic out on the far edges, and so long as you don’t care about the health and wellbeing of the object of your literal skullfuckery, you can do some interesting things. For instance, a book on every dissident’s shelf should be The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing, by Joost Meerloo. You’ll need to get it used, or on Kindle (the usual caveats apply). Meerloo was a Dutch (or Flemish or Walloon, I forget) MD who was briefly detained by the Gestapo during the war. They had nothing more than a cordial chat (by Gestapo standards), but they obviously knew what they were doing, and the only reason Meerloo didn’t get Der Prozess for real was that they didn’t feel the need at that time. He escaped, and the experience charted the course of his professional life.

Like Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (another must-read), I read Meerloo years ago, so my recall of the details is fuzzy, but the upshot is obvious: The techniques of “brainwashing” have been known since at least the Middle Ages, and they’re still the same. Suspected witches in the Early Modern period, for instance, got Der Prozess, and though the witch hunters also had recourse to the rack and thumbscrews and all the rest, none of it was really necessary — isolation, starvation, and sleep deprivation work even better, provided you hit that sweet spot when they’re just starting to go insane …

I’m being deliberately flip about a horrible thing, comrades, because as no doubt distasteful as that is to read, the fact is, we’re doing it to ourselves, everywhere, all the time. Not the starvation part, obviously, but we eat such horribly unnatural diets that our minds are indeed grossly affected. Want proof? Go hardcore keto for a week and watch what happens. Or if that’s too much, you can simulate the experience by going cold turkey off caffeine. I promise you, by the end of day two you’d give the NKVD the worst dirt on your own mother if they sat a steaming hot cup of java in front of you.

Severian, “Kickin’ It Old Skool”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-04.

January 14, 2025

QotD: Ritual in medieval daily life

Filed under: Europe, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I am not in fact claiming that medieval Catholicism was mere ritual, but let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that it was — that so long as you bought your indulgences and gave your mite to the Sacred Confraternity of the Holy Whatever and showed up and stayed awake every Sunday as the priest blathered incomprehensible Latin at you, your salvation was assured, no matter how big a reprobate you might be in your “private” life. Despite it all, there are two enormous advantages to this system:

First, n.b. that “private” is in quotation marks up there. Medieval men didn’t have private lives as we’d understand them. Indeed, I’ve heard it argued by cultural anthropology types that medieval men didn’t think of themselves as individuals at all, and while I’m in no position to judge all the evidence, it seems to accord with some of the most baffling-to-us aspects of medieval behavior. Consider a world in which a tag like “red-haired John” was sufficient to name a man for all practical purposes, and in which even literate men didn’t spell their own names the same way twice in the same letter. Perhaps this indicates a rock-solid sense of individuality, but I’d argue the opposite — it doesn’t matter what the marks on the paper are, or that there’s another guy named John in the same village with red hair. That person is so enmeshed in the life of his community — family, clan, parish, the Sacred Confraternity of the Holy Whatever — that “he” doesn’t really exist without them.

Should he find himself away from his village — maybe he’s the lone survivor of the Black Death — then he’d happily become someone completely different. The new community in which he found himself might start out as “a valley full of solitary cowboys”, as the old Stephen Leacock joke went — they were all lone survivors of the Plague — but pretty soon they’d enmesh themselves into a real community, and red-haired John would cease to be red-haired John. He’d probably literally forget it, because it doesn’t matter — now he’s “John the Blacksmith” or whatever. Since so many of our problems stem from aggressive, indeed overweening, assertions of individuality, a return to public ritual life would go a long way to fixing them.

The second huge advantage, tied to the first, is that community ritual life is objective. Maybe there was such a thing as “private life” in a medieval village, and maybe “red-haired John” really was a reprobate in his, but nonetheless, red-haired John performed all his communal functions — the ones that kept the community vital, and often quite literally alive — perfectly. You know exactly who is failing to hold up his end in a medieval village, and can censure him for it, objectively — either you’re at mass or you’re not; either you paid your tithe or you didn’t; and since the sacrament of “confession” took place in the open air — Cardinal Borromeo’s confessional box being an integral part of the Counter-Reformation — everyone knew how well you performed, or didn’t, in whatever “private” life you had.

Take all that away, and you’ve got process guys who feel it’s their sacred duty — as in, necessary for their own souls’ sake — to infer what’s going on in yours. Strip away the public ritual, and now you have to find some other way to make everyone’s private business public … I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Calvinism is really Karen-ism, and if it IS unfair, I don’t care, because fuck Calvin, the world would’ve been a much better place had he been strangled in his crib.

A man is only as good as the public performance of his public duties. And, crucially, he’s no worse than that, either. Since process guys will always pervert the process in the name of more efficiently reaching the outcome, process guys must always be kept on the shortest leash. Send them down to the countryside periodically to reconnect with the laboring masses …

Severian, “Faith vs. Works”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-07.

January 10, 2025

Even the state-subsidized flappers in the media are glad to see Justin Trudeau go

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Andrew MacDougall hits the highs and lows — mostly lows — of Justin Trudeau’s prime ministership since 2015:

Justin Trudeau has always had a strong affinity for the symbolic gesture, especially when the media are around to record it.

And so the Trudeau era ends, not with a bang, but a simper.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dialled it up to “peak emotive” on Monday during his resignation speech at Rideau Cottage, even if he was only out to sing the tunes nobody wants to dance to anymore. Not even the appearance of a few prime ministerial tears could convince Canadians this day was anything but long overdue.

Much like how 1980s Hollywood cock rock once struggled to cope with the rawness of early 90s grunge, Trudeau’s cloying, self-obsessed mid-2010s Liberalism has run straight into the buzzsaw of mid-20s proto-populism. Trudeau might still label himself a fighter, but if he ever bothered to look around he would see that precious few people remain in his corner. Canadians have simply grown tired of being told how shit they are by the man they feel has done more than his fair share of putting Canada into the shitter.

Whether that’s a fair assessment of Trudeau’s efforts as a leader is beside the point. As Brutus Freeland has taken to saying, it’s all about the “vibes”. Even the quote-unquote “Trudeau media” is gleefully writing his obituary. That’s how bad things have gotten for Trudeau the man. We’re not in 2015 anymore, Toto.

I’m not sure that Justin Trudeau “does” introspection, but it shouldn’t be hard for him to see how he got here from there. Beginning with hypocrisy.

Trudeau promised to do things differently, but kept many of the same governmental command-and-control measures implemented by the hated Stephen Harper. He promised to stop cramming legislation into budget bills and then treated his own budgets as all-you-can-eat legislative buffets. Trudeau promised to be open by default, but tightened the clamps on government information.

Early talk of “sunny ways” and Conservatives being “neighbours”, not “enemies” masked a hyper-partisan who was all too eager to ascribe ill motive to his political opponents. Whether abortion, guns, convoys or trans rights, there was only ever one “correct” position for Trudeau, and anyone on the other side, no matter how well-reasoned or well-intentioned, was a sinner. In Trudeau’s Canada, everyone was a genocidaire, even if they got their citizenship yesterday and had nothing to do with the historic wrongs of residential schools. Black Lives Matter meant everyone else were racists, whether overt or closeted. Every societal wrong was an opportunity for all of us to “learn a lesson”.

But who the teacher is matters in the giving of lessons. And Trudeau, himself once a teacher, didn’t ever appear to learn any of his own.

January 9, 2025

Hollywood’s favourite creation … the “hero forgives” scene

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I’ve never been much of a moviegoer or TV-watcher, so I hadn’t consciously noticed what kulak is discussing here:

“El Cid” (Charlton Heston) releases enemy raiders who’ve just burnt down a village … for no reason.

“All that it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
-Edmund Burke

The reason the boomers are the way they are, and the reason no one in the west fights back against their dispossession and replacement is an 80 year long program to indoctrinate an Ideology I call “Hollywood Anti-justice”.

In almost every piece of media to do with violence, crime, justice, and individual heroism of the past 80 years there is a scene: The “Hero Forgives” scene.

Upon violently defeating, disarming, and capturing the villain, the hero, in spite of his every instinct, in spite of friends screaming at him and reasoning with him with arguments he can’t counter, in spite of the villains mocking unrepentance, dead to rights evidence, gleeful confessions, and even vows to reoffend.

Even if the villain is guilty of hundreds of murders, rapes, and treason, even if the hero himself has killed hundreds of henchmen to capture the villain …

The hero will refuse to kill or punish him.

Sometimes the hero will insist that he must go through the courts … Sometimes the villain will openly mock him that the courts are corrupt and will never convict him, and the hero still will refuse to take matters into his own hands …

Sometimes the hero himself IS the lawful authority. Sometimes the hero is a Military officer, post apocalyptic militia captain, Medieval Knight, Greek Hero, Roman Centurion … etc. And in fact his private judgement IS the official lawful means of passing judgement and executing obviously guilty villains … And he STILL refuses to punish or kill them.

I recently saw El Cid, where the hero, a Knight, refused to hang brigands who had pillaged, raped, burnt a town, confessed and were themselves quite resigned to dying, and even as his fellow knights berated him that the law itself demands he hang them, that it is his sacred duty to hang them, and that it would be treason for him not to…

And the Hero simply cuts their bindings and lets them go … Choosing to be forsworn as a traitor rather than hang the confessed and red-handed guilty. Now this may be a historical, but as far as I’ve been able to find such an event never occurred, it’s been made up for the film, doubly egregious because the historical El Cid almost certainly executed many criminals and brigands, committing and ordering justice … Which is NOT depicted in the film.

Even if the hero has been in this exact position before and spared the villain only for more to die, sometimes even his own family and friends, demonstrating the failure of this unspoken philosophy, the hero will STILL let them go … AGAIN.

Ussually there is some Deus Ex Machina that makes this all workout some ironic or divine punishment will find the Villain through their own folly … but not always. Indeed entire franchises have been perpetuated on THE SAME serial killer villain being forgiven, released, allowed to escape, etc. over and over again.

And audiences consistently hate this, this is always the most cliched, poorly written, out of character, film breaking scene in the entire work … Supposedly great kings, ruthless bounty-hunters, outlaws, veteran knights, military officers, grey and black market criminal anti-heroes, smugglers … All of them transformed into the most inconsistent pacifists for exactly this scene. I’ve seen audiences groan and scream at the TV “Just kill him” and yet the hero, often entirely contrary to their character, will not.

This is not an old literary trope, this is a Hollywood trope.

You can read the original Greek legends, the tales of King Arthur and his Knights, early modern nationalist heroes’ stories, the adventure stories of the Napoleonic officer, the Boys’ Own adventures of empire, and well into contemporary fiction westerns, crime stories, military science fiction, historical fiction, etc.

And in all of them you will see heroes kill their enemies in cold blood, order executions of the guilty, demand deserters, spies, and traitors be shot, seek revenge, order mass hangings … Etc.

Nor is this some uniquely American madness … As late as the 1950s the vigilantes/terrorists of the original reconstruction era (1864-1877) Ku Klux Klan were treated as folk heroes… Birth of a Nation was played at the White House when it was released. The idea of vengeance, wild justice, and vigilante killings being some unconscionable moral horror was simply not the case in the first half of the 20th century … It was celebrated, much as it had been for the previous 3000 years of the west.

In 1915 the legitimacy of Vigilantism, Vengeance, and Private Justice was so accepted that even arch-progressive, Princeton University Professor, and US President Woodrow Wilson screened Birth of a Nation, a celebration of the Ku Klux Klan’s vigilante-terror campaign, at the White House.

Why did Hollywood invent this trope?

Where Hollywood producers just so attached to an idea of Christian forgiveness and pacifism that they just HAD to include it over the groans and often shouting of their audiences?

Were any of these writers, directors and producers even Christian to begin with!?

Why would the communists, atheists, Jews, and pedophiles that comprise the core of Hollywood writing include such an unusual Christian theme so insistently and often story breakingly?

Well. why do they insist on bullshit girl-bossery, race mixing, and woke theming today over the protests and disinterest of their audience?

Because it benefits them to brainwash the masses that way.

The Hollywood writers never identified with the hero refusing to kill an enemy … they identified with the villain and quite liked for him to get away (indeed many Hollywood writers will openly say as much, that they identify with the villains and much prefer writing them).

QotD: Teenagers

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

At some point I stopped wanting to go to the farm on Sundays; I was suffering from Sudden Onset Self-Addled Sullen Disengagement Syndrome, which strikes when you blow out 14 candles.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-08-10.

January 4, 2025

QotD: The “show pillows”

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The female need to pile a bed with useless pillows is an old and not particularly novel observation. It mystifies men. It’s like serving a meal where the plate is loaded with Show Potatoes, and you have to remove ten tubers before you can start. It’s like having a workbench in the garage with Show Hammers. Don’t pound with that! That’s the nice hammer we want company to see! It’ll get nicked and dinged. Or like going to someone’s house and finding out they have a Show Dog. No, no, don’t pat him on the head. Here, use this dog. And there’s some panting happy mutt they pull out of a closet. This is the company dog.

It reminds me of the bathrooms of my childhood, which were stocked with forbidden things: decorative soap in a nice dish engraved with intricate patterns that evaporated on contact with water, and decorative towels. You ended up drying your hands on the curtains, or patting them dry on the inevitable polyester shag toilet-seat cover.

Anyway. You’re wondering how I recovered from this grotesque embarrassment. I fetched two pillows from Daughter’s unoccupied room, apologized on behalf of the male side of the species, and figured the matter was closed. Oh no. Ohhhh, no. The next morning my wife made up the guest room, and emerged with an expression of despair.

The pillowcases did not match.

One was white. The other — and I tremble with shame to write these words — was ivory.

Well, an apology was in order. But how? Maybe bring it up in a roundabout way at breakfast.

“So … how’d you sleep?”

“Oh … okay, I guess. Weird dreams. I was in a paint store, looking at those strips with the different hues, and two of the shades of white looked different but I couldn’t really tell if they were and then I started crying tears in two different shades of white and when the tears hit the floor they burned like acid, and then horrible off-white slugs oozed out of the hole and started singing ABBA songs in two different keys.”

“Huh. And you?”

“I had weird dreams too. There were two philosophers who agreed on everything except for one minor, obscure point, but instead of focusing on their agreement they argued about the small difference until they decided to have a duel, but the guns didn’t fire.”

“Ah, those would be the Show Pistols. Freud had something to say about those. Well, that’s on me. The pillowcase hues were not in sync. I hope we can get past this and enjoy the day.”

James Lileks, “Show Me the Pillows”, LILEKS (James), 2024-09-30.

December 31, 2024

Resolutions? Meh.

Filed under: Health, Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

James Lileks considers the futility of New Year resolutions … for most of us, anyway:

New Year, New You — if you believe that all the cells in your body are replaced every 12 months. So we were told, right? I don’t think that’s the case. The brain, for example, stays constant, which is good, because the idea of the cells handing off memories to the new cells would probably end up like a game of Telegram, and after 15 years you’re convinced your first kiss was not on a boat in the lake on the 4th of July but deep in the Amazon forest on a dugout canoe during a meteor shower.

I don’t think your liver renews itself, alas. It has to sit there and take it. The bones, being the tentpoles for the cellular circus that is You, have to remain solid. No, the New You is entirely a matter of will, of resolutions and revelations undertaken on the First of the Year with solemn gravity, so you can be disappointed with yourself two weeks later.

Resolutions are always matters of self-improvement, and this presents a certain amount of difficulty. I’m at the age where the available options for self-improvement consist of the trivial and the insurmountable. Example: I should resolve to be more patient on the road with drivers who dawdle along a few miles below the speed limit, perhaps giving me adequate time to study the various political and philosophical statements glued to the rear of their auto. Why — why yes, you’re right, you cannot hug your child with nuclear arms. You also cannot defend the continental United States against the threat of ballistic bombardment with maternal limbs. A more pressing issue might be thus: Can we make the green light? No, we’re not going to make the green light.

I would indeed be happier if I could accept with zen detachment the lumbering pace of the car ahead. My impatience, my self-righteous desire to arrive at our destinations before Haley’s Comet arcs anew through the heavens — well, it brings me no joy. But this will not change. What’s the phrase? To thine own self be true. Well, being peeved because the driver ahead of me believes their face will ripple with G-forces if they go 21 MPH is my true self, and I am not about to deny who I am.

December 28, 2024

QotD: “If women ran the world” reality check

Filed under: History, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Severian “… if women were in charge there’d be no war …”

Backinmyyouth, early 20s or so, I was an even bigger smart ass than I am now. I had a class with one of those new-fangled feminists that people were talking about back then. She made that argument, about how if only women were in charge there would be no more wars. So as a polite smart ass I raised my hand, and she called on me.

I said, “I completely agree with you. I’d even say that if women had been in charge from the beginning that there would only have been one war in all of human history. It would have started in the stone age, and would still be doing on today, with no one remembering what it was about.”

After being warned by one of my spies in the feminist camp (wanted the professional hookup, but liked other kinds of hookups too if you know what I’m sayin’), I made sure to never take that professor for another class as she held a grudge against me till the end of time. An undying grudge for me pointing out that women hold undying grudges …

The reason I was aware of that particular female quirk was that I had recently been made aware that two of my aunts had been in a death-feud since before I was born. Pretty sure it’s still going on today in spite of one of them being dead.

Zorost99, commenting on “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2024-09-27.

December 18, 2024

The modern Furies

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Greek mythology, the Erinyes (the Furies) — euphemized as the Eumenides (the “Gracious ones”) were the goddesses of vengeance. You may dismiss the ancient Greeks and their beliefs, yet they often encapsulate hidden wisdom for those who know how to interpret their stories. Today, as Janice Fiamengo points out, we have no need for mythological Furies, as they’re frequently embodied in otherwise ordinary women:

The Remorse of Orestes or Orestes Pursued by the Furies
Oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1862, in the Chrysler Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons.

Feminist uproar over Trump’s election was easy to predict, and not long in coming. Within ten days of the election, Clara Jeffery wrote in Mother Jones that “Women are furious — in a Greek mythology sort of way“. Taking examples from TikTok, Jeffery chronicled abundant “sorrow, disbelief and terror, but also incandescent rage”, which many women vowed to exorcise on men: “‘If his ballot was red, his balls stay blue‘”, she quoted one.

In The New York Times, a 16-year-old girl, Naomi Beinart, charted her tumultuous emotions, which included a sense of betrayal because her male classmates had carried on with their lives on the day after the election, seemingly immune to the girls’ all-pervasive gloom and outrage. “Many of them didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair. We don’t even share the same future,” Beinart opined melodramatically.

No one with even a minimal acquaintance with social media can have missed the many similar, raging reactions: the heads being shaved, the death threats, the promised sex strikes, the fantasies of revenge against Trump-voting husbands. We are to understand that the re-election of a man rumored to lack sufficient pro-abortion commitment justifies thousands of self-recorded screams, imprecations, and poisoning plots.

At least one group of women gathered physically in Wisconsin to shout their angst and anger at Lake Michigan, and there have already been tentative (though apparently less enthusiastic than formerly) plans for a revival of the anti-Trump Women’s March protests, in which women with vulgar placards and pink hats exhibited their “collective rage“.

Women’s rage is all the rage.

It is not enough, it seems, for these women to say that they are disappointed by Trump’s win, and certainly inadequate for them to state strong disagreement with his policies or style. Expressing evidence-based positions is the sort of thing a rational person would do, and significant groups of women appear increasingly uninterested in rational talk or behavior. Instead, they reach for the most extreme language, tone of voice, postures and actions to express what feminist journalist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett called the “visceral” “body horror” produced by the Trump victory, including the “profound physical revulsion” Cosslett and many of her sisters allegedly feel simply as a result of seeing one of Trump’s tweets (talk about fragility!).

Like so many feminist pundits telling us of women’s “horror” and “fury“, the emphasis is squarely on feeling and the female body, as if to bypass the intellect and the will altogether. The idea some feminists once scorned — that women are less reasonable and self-controlled than men — seems to have become a feminist axiom.

[NR: Edited to fix the broken URL.]

December 12, 2024

The dispiriting rise of the “kidult”

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Freya India explains the need for modern parents to re-embrace some of the more traditional duties of parents in raising children:

It’s pretty much accepted as fact that parents today are overprotective. We worry about helicopter parenting, and the coddling of Gen Z. But I don’t think that’s the full story. Parents aren’t protective enough.

Or at least, what parents are protective about has changed. They are overprotective about physical safety, terrified of accidents and injuries. But are they protective by giving guidance? Involved in their children’s character development? Protective by raising boys to be respectful, by guiding girls away from bad influences? Protective by showing children how to behave, by being an example?

As far as I can see many parents today are overprotective but also strangely permissive. They hesitate to give advice or get involved, afraid of seeming controlling or outdated. They obsess over protecting their children physically, but have little interest in guiding them morally. They care more about their children’s safety than their character. Protective parenting once meant caring about who your daughter dated, the decisions she made, and guiding her in a good direction. Now it just means preventing injury. And so children today are deprived of the most fundamental protection: the passing down of morals, principles, and a framework for life.

One obvious example of this is that adults act like children now. They talk like teenagers. They use the same social media platforms, play the same video games, listen to the same music. Our world moves too rapidly to retain any wisdom, denying parents the chance to pass anything down or be taken seriously, so they try to keep up with kids, who know more about the world than they do. Fathers are “girl dads” who get told what to think. Mothers are best friends to gossip with. The difference between childhood and adulthood is disappearing, and with it, parental protection.

Beyond that, too, there’s this broader cultural message that adults should focus on their own autonomy and self-actualisation. This very modern belief that a good life means maximum freedom, with as little discomfort and constraint as possible, the way children think. Now nothing should hold adults back. They have a right to feel good, at all times. They stopped being role models of responsibility and became vessels of the only culture left, a therapeutic culture, where it’s only acceptable to be protective of one thing, your own mental health and happiness. Listen to the way adults judge decisions now, how they justify themselves. Parents are celebrated for leaving their families because they were vaguely unhappy or felt they needed to find themselves, even at the expense of their children’s security. Adults talk about finding themselves as much as teenagers do. Parents complain online about the “emotional labour” of caring for family, or express regret for even having children because they got in the way of their goals. Once growing up meant sacrificing for family, giving up some of yourself, that was an honour, that was a privilege, and in that sacrifice you found actual fulfilment, broke free from yourself, moved on from adolescent anxieties, and there, then, you became an adult.

But slowly, without thinking, we became suspicious of adulthood. We debunked every marker and milestone, from marriage to children all the way to adulthood itself. Now we aren’t just refusing to grow up but rejecting the very concept of it. Adulthood does not exist, apparently. It’s a scam, a lie, a myth. Adulthood is a marketing ploy, we say, while wearing Harry Potter merch and going to Disneyland. Adulthood is a performance, apparently, that’s going out of style. “There is nothing, there is nobody which/who would really justify the claim ‘you have to grow up’,” seems to be the sentiment. “For whom? for what?”

November 27, 2024

Scolianormativity

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Health, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At FEE, Michael Strong defines the neologism and provides evidence that it has been a long-term harm to children forced into the Prussian-originated school regimentation regime:

Scolianormative (adj.): The assumption that behaviors defined by institutionalized schooling are “normal”. An assumption that became pervasive in industrialized societies in which institutionalized schooling became the norm that resulted in marginalizing and harming millions of children. Once society began to question scolianormativity, gradually people began to realize that the norms set by institutionalized schooling were perfectly arbitrary. It turned out that it was not necessary to harm children. The institutions that led to such widespread harms were dismantled, and humanity transcended the terrible century of institutionalized schooling.

The conventional educational model, government-enforced and subsidized, is based on 13 years of schooling consisting of state-defined curriculum standards and exams leading to a high school diploma.

Young human beings are judged as either “normal” or not based on the extent to which they are “on track” with respect to grade level exams and test scores. Students who are not making the expected progress may be diagnosed with learning differences (formerly known as disabilities). Students who can’t sit still adequately may be diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. Students who find the experience soul-killing may be diagnosed with depression or anxiety. Students who can’t stand to be told what to do all day may be diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). Students who score higher on certain tests are labeled “gifted”.

Massive amounts of research and institutional authority have been invested in these and other diagnoses. When a child is not progressing appropriately in the system, the child is often sent to specialists who then perform the diagnosis. When appropriate, then the child is given some combination of medication, accommodations, and/or sent to a special program for children with “special needs”.

Many well-intentioned people regard this system as life-saving for the children who might otherwise have “not had their needs met” in the absence of such a diagnosis and intervention. And this is no doubt often true, but our fixation on scolianormativity blinds us to the fact that an entirely different perspective might actually result in better lives for more children.

How could one possibly deny mountains of evidence on behalf of such a life-saving system?

Scolianormativity

The Prussian school model, a state-led model devoted to nationalism, is only about two hundred years old. For much of its first century it was limited to a few hours per day, for a few months per year, for a few years of schooling. It has only gradually grown to encompass most of a child’s waking hours for nine months a year from ages 5 to 18. Indeed, in the U.S., it was only in the 1950s that a majority of children graduated from high school (though laws requiring compulsory attendance through age 16 had been passed in the late 19th and early 20th century). In addition, for most of its first century, it was far more flexible than it has become in its second. The increasing standardization and bureaucratization of childhood is a remarkably recent phenomenon in historical terms.

In his book Seeing Like a State, the political scientist James C. Scott documents how governments work to create societies that are “legible”, that can be perceived and managed by the state to suit the needs of the state’s bureaucrats and political leaders. Public schools are one of the most pervasive of all state institutions. The structure of public schooling has grown to suit the needs of the state bureaucrats who monitor it.

November 23, 2024

They just can’t stop themselves from taking the MAGA bait

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kat Rosenfield in UnHerd discusses the inability of American leftists from rising to the (obvious) trolling from pranksters on the right:

Carol Kane and Billy Crystal as Valerie and Miracle Max in The Princess Bride, 1987.

The current state of the American political discourse is best understood through the lens of the 1987 movie The Princess Bride — or more specifically, one scene therein. It’s the part where Miracle Max is decompensating over the insistence of his wife, Valerie, on saying the word, “Humperdinck”, the name of the movie’s evil prince, who is also Max’s most loathed nemesis.

“Why would you say that name!” he screams.

“What? Humperdinck!?” she shrieks back, gleefully.

One gets the sense that these two do this a lot — her Humperdincking, him screaming, which only makes her Humperdinck harder. That this problem has two obvious solutions only illuminates its intractability. Valerie could stop saying the name, but then again, Max could also choose not to react to its every utterance as if he’s been electrocuted. That neither of them are making different choices suggests that something about this dynamic serves them both.

I thought of this scene when the first “Your body, my choice” post from a male Trump voter skittered insect-like across my timeline in the wake of the election — closely followed by a handful of “My body, his choice” remixes by savvy OnlyFans models hoping to cash in on the moment. This crude riff on the feminist war cry that once defined the battle for abortion rights was akin to an inaugural shout of “Humperdinck!”, designed explicitly to trigger a meltdown among liberals. And lo: if you do an internet search for the phrase now, around 5% of the results are of people posting it and 95% are critics freaking out in response. “Women need to be kept safe from the ‘your body, my choice’ peddlers,” The Guardian announced, while CNN warned: “Attacks on women surge on social media following election”. And The New Yorker, for whom the phrase is a harbinger of a “coming era of gender regression”, described it as “A New Rallying Cry for the Irony-Poisoned Right”.

The phrase “irony-poisoned” in that last headline — which graces an essay by Jia Tolentino — struck me as an especially savvy bit of rhetoric. It functions as a preemptive strike against the obvious counterpoint to all this panic. Namely: “your body my choice” is a repulsive thing to say, but also the furthest thing from a legitimate threat.

The men behind these posts are not rapists-in-waiting, announcing their intent to commit sexual violence; they are trolls, gleefully trolling away in the hope of making people Mad Online. But if Tolentino knows this is bait (and she clearly does), she nevertheless cannot help taking it, hook, line, and sinker. The piece is imbued with a near-religious sense of horror at seeing the feminist catechism of “my body my choice” twisted by nonbelievers into something unfathomably malignant. This is beyond distasteful; it is heretical. And unlike the provocations in which the millennial Left once delighted, back in the days when one measly crucifix soaked in urine could trigger a weeks-long meltdown among religious conservatives, this little joke (Tolentino argues) is simply not funny.

November 20, 2024

QotD: The Chads, the Staceys, and the Incels

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I have spent some time in the twilight reaches of the manosphere researching a new book, a world of depressing forums, full of hatred and despair, where young men gather to focus on the absence of sex in their lives. There are two broad categories: The Incels hate women because they won’t sleep with them. The Men Go Their Own Way (MGTOW) guys won’t sleep with women because they hate them.

These boys have their own vocabulary and belief systems. Pretty girls (Staceys) all sleep with the same few Alpha men (Chads). The Staceys ride the Cock Carousel, ie, have sex with the same few Chads. All this sluttish behaviour gives the Staceys something called A Thousand Cock Stare.

It is a grim world, in which women are evil and manipulative, and hated both for being sluts and for being virgins. It is a world in which pictures of pretty girls with their pet dogs are unbelievably sinister. These boys choose to live in this bleak world. They are culpable. But, if you tell all young, white boys that they are damned, why should they not behave as if they are damned?

A society which does not allow for people to atone, to be redeemed, and to be judged on their intent and actions is a miserable place. Most people interact with each other without antagonism most of the time. We should start being a bit more forgiving to each other, ditch the Puritanism and learn to cherish the well-meaning stumble towards decency. Even if, sometimes, we fall.

Antonia Senior, “Identity politics is Christianity without the redemption”, UnHerd, 2020-01-20.

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