And I wonder whether you’ve noticed a character that can be found in practically every movie made today? I call her the “all conquering female.” Almost without exception, she is underestimated by men and then proves herself more intelligent, cleverer, more courageous, and more skilled than any man. Whether we’re talking about a romantic comedy, an office-drama, or an adventure movie, the all conquering female will almost inevitably show up. And she has to show her worth in a domineering way, that is to say, over and against the men. For her to appear strong, they have to appear weak. For a particularly good case in point, watch the most recent Star Wars film.
Now I perfectly understand the legitimacy of feminist concerns regarding the portrayal of women in the media as consistently demure, retiring, and subservient to men. I grant that, in most of the action/adventure movies that I saw growing up, women would typically twist an ankle or get captured and then require rescuing by the swashbuckling male hero — and I realize how galling this must have been to generations of women. And therefore, a certain correction was undoubtedly in order. But what is problematic now is the Nietzschean quality of the reaction, by which I mean, the insistence that female power has to be asserted over and against males, that there is an either/or, zero-sum conflict between men and women. It is not enough, in a word, to show women as intelligent, savvy, and good; you have to portray men as stupid, witless, and irresponsible. That this savage contrast is having an effect especially on younger men is becoming increasingly apparent.
In the midst of a “you-go-girl” feminist culture, many boys and young men feel adrift, afraid that any expression of their own good qualities will be construed as aggressive or insensitive. If you want concrete proof of this, take a look at the statistics contrasting female and male success at the university level. And you can see the phenomenon in films such as Fight Club and The Intern. In the former, the Brad Pitt character turns to his friend and laments, “we’re thirty year old boys;” and in the latter, Robert De Niro’s classic male type tries to whip into shape a number of twenty-something male colleagues who are rumpled, unsure of themselves, without ambition — and of course under the dominance of an all conquering female.
It might be the case that, in regard to money, power, and honor, a zero-sum dynamic obtains, but it decidedly does not obtain in regard to real virtue. The truly courageous person is not threatened by another person’s courage; the truly temperate man is not intimidated by the temperance of someone else; the truly just person is not put off by the justice of a countryman; and authentic love positively rejoices in the love shown by another. And therefore, it should be altogether possible to hold up the virtue of a woman without denying virtue to a man. In point of fact, if we consult the “all conquering female” characters in films and TV, we see that they often exemplify the very worst of the traditional male qualities: aggression, suspicion, hyper-sensitivity, cruelty, etc. This is what happens when a Nietzschean framework has replaced a classical one.
Bishop Robert Barron, “The Trouble With the ‘You Go Girl’ Culture”, Word on Fire, 2016-10-18.
July 30, 2020
QotD: The “strong female protagonist” in movies and on TV
July 19, 2020
QotD: How to raise a God-Emperor son
Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, 2018.
July 13, 2020
Sarah Hoyt on noblesse oblige
In the latest edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt explains how noblesse oblige can and is used as a tool to benefit the powerful:
Of all the traps a culture can fall into, the fact that Americans tend to fall into Noblesse Oblige traps says very good things about us. It also doesn’t make the trap any less dangerous.
Noblesse Oblige, aka “nobility obligates” was a way that the excesses of a hierarchical society was kept in check. While the peasants were obligated to obey the nobleman, the nobleman was obligated to look after them/not put extreme demands on them/behave in certain paternalistic ways. (One of these days I need to do a post on paternalistic versus patriarchal. remind me.)
It is what is notably lacking from ideologically driven totalitarianisms and hierarchies, probably because their basis being atheistic they don’t seem the humans they have power over as being worth anything or commanding any duty from them. This is why in places like Cuba, Venezuela or China, the officials of the “democratic” government give themselves airs as long-suffering public servants while treating the people under their power worse than any of us would treat a stray animal (let alone a pet.)
In the US — where the citizen is king! — we have evolved a form of noblesse oblige best described as “Them who can, do what they can for those who can’t.”
[…]
But the noblesse oblige that affects the common individual in America is the foundation of worse traps.
Most of the idiotic compliance with ridiculous Winnie the Flu rules and restrictions hooked directly into Noblesse Oblige. For instance, the brilliant idea that you should wear masks to show you care even though we pretty much know they are completely ineffective and quite deleterious for a vast swath of people.
The idea that our kids should be forced to perform “volunteer” labor to graduate school, to “teach them to care for others.” The idea that you can always do a little more/sacrifice a little more for “those worse off” (Who often aren’t.)
When Noblesse Oblige turns into toxic altruism, it can take society apart.
Much of the “Green” mania is part of the noblesse oblige trap. They’re trying to convince us that if we just do these little things — most of them counterproductive, like, say recycling, which uses more resources and causes more issues than just using stuff — we’ll make it better for everyone.
In a bigger sense, they’re trying to make it so that we commit polite suicide so that “others live better.”
It can result in truly horrible racism, too. A great part of the left’s being convinced, say, that meritocracy is white supremacy comes from the fact that, being white, (and racist) they assume that they’re more competent than any other race, and therefore following “merit” causes white people to rise to the top.
July 10, 2020
QotD: Marcus Aurelius for the incel demographic
You just can’t beat it. But […] Our Thing has lots of potential Trigglypuffs. They’re called “incels,” I’m informed, but whatever the nomenclature, there are a lot of young single dudes out there who while away their pointless hours with video games and porn. Those are our potential storm troopers (it’s a metaphor, FBI goons). Why haven’t we weaponized them? (again: metaphor).
It’s probably as simple as giving them a role model. It goes without saying that your “incel” (or whatever) was raised by women. Even if there was a biological male living in the house during his childhood, it’s a thousand to one he was just that: a cohabiting male. Certainly not a father. And even if by some miracle he was, the poor guy can only do so much. You’ve got to let your sons out of the house sometime … where they’ll immediately be snapped up by the sour, shrieking cat ladies that control our educational system, our media, our professions, our culture. Both the son and his father have to be very, very hard-headed, and not a little lucky, to escape a poz infection …
… and that’s the best-case scenario. For the worst, look around — you’ll find incel and his soy-enfeebled twerp of a “male” parent cowering under the bed, scrubbing their hands and faces with Lysol, while Mommy scolds and caterwauls on Facebook.
There are role models out there, y’all. Stoicism in general, and Marcus Aurelius in particular, have seen a real upswing in popularity, especially on “Game” sites. This doesn’t represent a return to a Classical education; it’s that Marcus seems to be — Marcus is — a worthwhile role model for a fatherless boy. Strip out the “credits” at the start of book one and a few of the denser, more philosophical passages, and you could subtitle Meditations “how to drop your nuts on the carpet and act like a fucking man for once.” Loosely translated, of course.
Severian, “Be a Centurion!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-07.
July 7, 2020
L. Neil Smith on the Progressive agenda
His latest article in the Libertarian Enterprise:
For the full length of the last century, Western culture has been commanded by the blind, deaf, but never speechless entities who see things stubbornly as they prefer to see them, and “dream the impossible dream”, rather than see them as they really are. This mental habit has led to various messes that we find ourselves in today. To any extent that it might help us to get out of those messes, it might help to understand how we got into them.
Don’t look to the wrong assistance. Psychology, for example, is nothing at all like a science and those who practice it are nothing at all like scientists. Mostly they’re hyper-opinionated liberals. No two shrinks ever agree on a diagnosis, and official definitions of various mental illnesses are a grammatical and logical laugh riot. The great truth of life is that understanding character is an art, best left to master novelists and story-tellers.
Although they’ll seldom admit it, even to themselves, so-called Progressives know by now that they are wrong, that they have always been wrong. You might say that their wrongness has stood the test of time. So what is it that they really want? Their high-flown theories and values having failed them embarrassingly — a good example of that is the minimum wage, which destroys employment for entry-level and minority youth — rather than seeking new theories and values that might serve them and everybody better, they have turned to a kind of bitter nihilism. They hate and fear the society that has stubbornly refused to bend to their wills, and so it must die. Every single policy recommendation that they make — like the $15 minimum wage, for example, or defunding the police — is directed to that purpose.
Another good example would be “gun control”, which its opponents correctly label “victim disarmament”. As unconstitutional political pressures on private gun ownership increased, and self-defense culture was forced to organize itself (contrary to liberal belief, gun companies and the National Rifle Association were followers in this, not leaders) existing gun laws were gradually weakened. It became easier to obtain and carry a weapon — and necessary, in the view of those of us “delorables” who were constantly being threatened by left-wing political figures. During the Obama-Biden regime, at least 100 million guns were sold. And as they were, violent criminality began to decrease in double digits.
Today, except for many liberal-dominated hell-holes like Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, and a dozen others, Americans are headed to 19th century crime levels. Did Progressives ever notice or admit that crime had diminished? They did not. The process conflicted with their erroneous belief system, so they still call today for various measures punishing firearms manufacturers and retailers, and disarming individuals who have solved the problem that the politicians and the police have only made much worse for decades.
And so it goes, in all such matters as economics, education, the environment, nutrition, and everything else. Psychologists (who, like a broken clock, are right just this once) call the phenomenon projection: if Progressives can’t run their own lives (and very largely, judging from the kids they raise, they can’t), naturally that makes them and the rest of the bizarre menagerie that was typical of the Obama-Biden Administration qualified to run everybody else’s lives. And because Progressive policies are (at least one hopes) unconsciously suicidal, the rest of us are in for a rough ride.
June 30, 2020
QotD: Ideologies and belief systems
People get unbelievable upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak, and it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why. There’s a fundamental truth that they’re standing on. It’s like they’re on a raft in the middle of the ocean. You’re starting to pull out the logs, and they’re afraid they’re going to fall in and drown. Drown in what? What are the logs protecting them from? Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system? These are not obvious things. I’ve been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time. […]
Nietzsche’s idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values. He understood that we had bodies and that we had motivations and emotions. He was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time. He knew that our capacity to think wasn’t some free-floating soul but was embedded in our physiology, constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, shaped by our body. He understood that. But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values. He talked about the person who created their own values as the overman, or the superman. That was one part of the Nietzschean philosophy that the Nazis took out of context and used to fuel their superior man ideology. We know what happened with that. That didn’t seem to turn out very well, that’s for sure.
Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God” {transcript], jordanbpeterson.com, 2018-03-12.
June 18, 2020
QotD: The feminization of culture
“The Z Man”, “The Soundtrack Of This Age”, The Z Blog, 2018-03-15.
June 9, 2020
QotD: Groupthink
Rule two is that, because they have shut their minds to any evidence which might contradict their belief, they like to insist that it is supported by a “consensus.” The one thing those caught up in groupthink cannot tolerate is that anyone should question it.
This leads on to the third rule, which is that they cannot properly debate the matter with those who disagree with their belief. Anyone holding a contrary view must simply be ignored, ridiculed, and dismissed as not worth listening to.
Christopher Booker, “Groupthink on Climate Change Ignores Inconvenient Facts”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2018-02-24.
June 6, 2020
Cognitive dissonance is real
Matt Gurney had a discussion with one of his readers that left him shaking his head in disbelief:
I had an interaction today with a reader that's indicative of a lot of things that are wrong with our society and why we can't have nice things. A short (promise) thread.
The reader had read something I'd written a few months ago that was mildly critical of a conservative. +
— Matt Gurney (@mattgurney) June 5, 2020
The reader haughtily asked if I’d ever make such a criticism for a Liberal.
I said yes.
The reader didn’t believe me, and said, oh yeah, show me an example?
As it so happened, I actually had a column of mine open in another tab; I was referring back to it for research. +
—
The column in question contained a perfect example of me saying a very comparable thing about a Liberal as I had about the Conservative. So I had, OK, here you go. Pasted the link and replied.And the reader replied right away. The reader was very confused.
—
The reader had questions about how I could criticize both a Conservative and a Liberal. The reader asked about agendas — who had insisted I write one piece, and why had they then permitted me to write the other?I wrote both on my own initiative, I explained. +
—
And I made criticisms of both gentlemen, the Conservative and the Liberal, because they’d both done things that pissed me off.The reader didn’t believe this was possible. There had to be another explanation, or an ulterior motive. +
—
I eventually disengaged. But I’ve been thinking about that all day. There’s a grown-ass person in Canada, totally literate and presents very normally, who really struggled to understand that someone could be critical of both the left and right without being compromised.END
May 31, 2020
On “spontaneous” riots
David Warren had a brush with a riot as a youngster — not as a participant, but as a near-victim — so the psychology of riots has a personal edge:
To a trained observer, the organizers of the riot stand out. They are dressed distinctly, they are giving orders; they are directing the attacks. They will usually be wearing expensive communications equipment. A drama coach would notice that their harangues are premeditated and rehearsed, to stir violence. That anger in the crowd was available to them, as their raw material, goes without saying; their art consists of “weaponizing” it.
Fascists — the real ones, in pre-war Italy and Germany — were masters of this art. So were the Communists with whom they had streetfights. The blackshirts today, a near-monopoly of the Left, descend from this rich tradition. When Antifa and other leftist scum shut down public discussions in universities and elsewhere, they may use the latest technology, but to old-fashioned ends.
What is alarming is not that these people exist — radical evil is a fact in human nature — but that they are given permission to act lawlessly. Rather than arrest and prosecute them, the liberal authorities agree to silence the legitimate speaker. They are trying to avoid confrontation, with people who sought confrontation, and will seek a larger confrontation next time. The prestige of these devils in human flesh is increased by their victories.
An injustice, such as the apparent murder of George Flynn by a vicious cop, while three more stood and watched, was the pretext for the riots. It was convenient for aggravating racial tensions, by which the Democrat party hopes to retrieve black votes that had been getting away from them. I would not wish to omit this dimension of the permission they grant to rioters. Politics are a cynical business.
But note, the mostly white folk in Antifa, prefer black neighbourhoods to start race riots, for that is where resentments will be easiest to exploit. (Masks help to conceal their whiteness.) This means that the victims of the riots, whose property and businesses are gutted, will also be mostly black. The media elide this aspect of the lawlessness, because they want Republicans to be defeated, too.
The moral stench is overpowering.
May 29, 2020
Aldous Huxley and Brave New World: The Dark Side of Pleasure
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May 25, 2020
QotD: Sociopaths and politicians
The key thing about the modern sociopath is the ambivalence toward the truth. They think saying something is the same as doing something. What matters is if the words get the listener to do what the sociopath wants them to do. Standing in front of crowd, making false claims, is fine if it causes people to buy product. If the truth sells more product, then the truth is better. From the perspective of the modern sociopath, the difference is about the results, not the accuracy of the statements. The truth or a lie, whichever works.
Now replace “sociopath” with “politician” and “product” with “votes” and you have the modern managerial democracy. It’s not that our politicians lie. It’s that for them, a lie is indistinguishable from the truth. That’s why they seem so utterly shameless. Shame requires a sense of right and wrong, a knowledge that what you said or did is intrinsically wrong. For the people who rule over us, right and wrong only exist in the context of their own ambitions. Something is “right” if it benefits the person in the moment.
“The Z Man”, “Rule by Sociopath”, The Z Blog, 2018-02-21.
May 21, 2020
QotD: Gullibility and belief in conspiracy theories
Anecdotal thinking vs. statistical thinking. We evolved to do the former so it is natural; science teaches us to do the latter, and it is unnatural. What is natural is to connect two temporally-close events as causally connected. A happens and then B happens. So they must be causally connected, right? I vaccinated my child and shortly after he was diagnosed with autism. They must be connected, right? Not necessarily (and in this case definitely not).
Patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise. If you already believe in UFOs or Bigfoot, strange lights in the sky or shadowy figures in the trees are interpreted as a meaningful pattern that supports the belief. Often such patterns carry an additional component that I call …
Agenticity: the tendency to infuse those patterns with intentional agents who act in the world. From conspiracies to ghosts, angels, demons, and gods, we tend to impute agency to the goings on around us, as if there’s someone/something out there pulling the strings.
Confirmation Bias: we look for and find confirming evidence for what we already believe and ignore or rationalize away disconfirming evidence. Once you believe that, say, “the Jews” are running the world, or that the U.S. government (or the Bush administration in the case of the 9/11 truthers) is involved in vast global cabals to control oil, it is easy to interpret daily news stories about the goings on of governments in the light of the conspiracy theory in question. Every bit of minutia becomes pregnant with meaning. It’s not chance or contingency, it’s a Vast Right Wing (or Left Wing) Conspiracy!
Michael Shermer, interviewed by Claire Lehmann, “The Skeptical Optimist: Interview with Michael Shermer”, Quillette, 2018-02-24.
May 20, 2020
QotD: Behavioural economics, aka the applied theory of bossing people around
Adam Smith spoke of “the man of system” who “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.” Thaler and his benevolent friends are men, and some few women, of system. They hate the Chicago School, have never heard of the Austrian School, dismiss spontaneous order, and favor bossing people around — for their own good, understand. Employing the third most unbelievable sentence in English (the other two are “The check is in the mail” and “Of course I’ll respect you in the morning”), they declare cheerily, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.”
We humans face a choice of treating people as children or as adults. A liberal society, Smith’s “liberal plan of [social] equality, [economic] liberty, and [legal] justice,” treats adults as adults. The principle of an illiberal society, from Thaler’s to the much worse kind, is that you are to be corrected not through respectful dialog that treats you as an equal, but by compulsion or trickery, which treats you like a toddler about to walk into traffic.
Wikipedia lists fully 257 cognitive biases. In the category of decision-making biases alone there are anchoring, the availability heuristic, the bandwagon effect, the baseline fallacy, choice-supportive bias, confirmation bias, belief-revision conservatism, courtesy bias, and on and on. According to the psychologists, it’s a miracle you can get across the street.
For Thaler, every one of the biases is a reason not to trust people to make their own choices about money. It’s an old routine in economics. Since 1848, one expert after another has set up shop finding “imperfections” in the market economy that Smith and Mill and Bastiat had come to understand as a pretty good system for supporting human flourishing.
Dierdre McCloskey, “The Applied Theory of Bossing People Around”, Reason, 2018-02-11.
May 19, 2020
QotD: Amour-propre
Really there is nothing new under the sun, and the concept comes much earlier from Saint Augustine of Hippo who in his City of God calls it in Latin, amor sui, and puts it about the centre of his review of human tawdriness. That, in turn, is how it came to Pascal: via the French Augustinians, with whom Pascal was in thick, about the time he was writing his Lettres provinciales. One might add, contre Rousseau (and perhaps with Joseph de Maistre) that it goes back farther, to Adam and Eve.
Ye devill appeals to Eve’s amour-propre. She then appeals to Adam’s. That’s how this whole wretched mess got started. Note that this couple predeceased all Rousseau’s noble savages, and that the field anthropologists have since discovered that the primitive tribal types are a lot like us. Which is to say, bad, in many colourful ways, and quite invariably self-regarding.
David Warren, “Amour-propre”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-06-01.
