Eventually the Renaissance became less of an impending threat and more of a fait accompli, and people’s worries died down a bit. Madness began to be treated more as ordinary immorality. This didn’t necessarily mean people freely chose to be mad – the classical age didn’t think in exactly the same “it’s your fault” vs. “it’s biological” terms we do – but it was considered due to a weakness of character in the same way as other failures.
In some cases, it was the result of an excess of passions, flightiness, or imagination: the most famous example is Don Quixote, who went crazy after reading too many fiction books. This was actually considered a very serious risk by practically all classical authorities, especially for women. Foucault quotes Edme-Pierre Beauchesne:
In the earliest epochs of French gallantry and manners, the less perfected minds of women were content with facts and events as marvelous as they were unbelievable; now they demand believable facts yet sentiments so marvelous that their own minds are disturbed and confounded by them; they then seek, in all that surrounds them, to realize the marvels by which they are enchanted; but everything seems to them without sentiment and without life, because they are trying to find what does not exist in nature.
And a newspaper of the time:
The existence of so many authors has produced a host of readers, and continued reading generates every nervous complaint; perhaps of all the causes that have harmed women’s health, the principal one has been the infinite multiplication of novels in the last hundred years … a girl who at ten reads instead of running will, at twenty, be a woman with the vapors and not a good nurse.
Novels weren’t the only danger, of course. There were other hazards to watch for, like waking up too late:
The moment at which our women rise in Paris is far removed from that which nature has indicated; the best hours of the day have slipped away; the purest air has disappeared; no one has benefited from it. The vapors, the harmful exhalations, attracted by the sun’s heat, are already rising in the atmosphere.
Also, freedom:
For a long time, certain forms of melancholia were considered specifically English; this was a fact in medicine and a constant in literature … Spurzheim made a synthesis of all these analyses in one of the last texts devoted to them. Madness, “more frequent in England than anywhere else,” is merely the penalty of the liberty that reigns there, and of the wealth universally enjoyed. Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism. “Religious sentiments exist without restriction; every individual is entitled to preach to anyone who will listen to him”, and by listening to such different opinions, “minds are disturbed in the search for truth.”
These are a very selective sampling of quotes from just one of Foucault’s many chapters, and some of them are separated by centuries from others, but the overall impression I got was that conformity/wholesomeness/clean living was salubrious, and deviations from these likely to cause madness. Essentially, if you deviate from your humanity a little bit of the way – by failing to be a godly, sober-living, and industrious person – then that can compound on itself and make you lose practically all of your humanity. You will end up a feral madman, little different from a beast.
Scott Alexander, “Book review: Madness and Civilization”, Slate Star Codex, 2018-01-04.
February 29, 2020
QotD: Perceived causes of madness during the Renaissance
February 19, 2020
Perhaps women just don’t want to join the infantry? Just a thought.
Barbara Kay on the long-promised yet still (unsurprisingly) unfulfilled plan to have 25% of the Canadian Army’s infantry be staffed by women:
A WW2-era recruiting poster for the Canadian Women’s Army Corps. You’d be surprised how few modern photos of women in combat roles are available online, given the Canadian government’s desire to recruit more women in those areas.
In 1997, when women comprised 14 per cent of the Canadian Forces, Gen. Maurice Baril argued that a robust recruitment campaign was all that was necessary to boost female membership to 28 per cent by 2009, when, he predicted, women would comprise a full 25 per cent of front-line infantry troops, up from 0.6 per cent at the time.
Since there wasn’t a shred of evidence from Canada or anywhere else to support such a projection — women in Russia and Israel have performed combat roles under extreme duress for national survival, but their participation never lasted past the crisis — it came as no surprise to skeptics that the recruitment campaign fell far short of its goal. Women presently comprise 15.9 per cent of Canadian Forces members, the great majority of whom are serving in support roles (the number is 14 per cent in the United States).
A realist would draw the obvious conclusion that women and men are different. Women just aren’t into combat, and so what. But gender realism hasn’t governed the Canadian Forces for decades. So its honchos are doubling down, determined to ensure that by 2026, females fill 25 per cent of the ranks. This time, they’ve assigned a “Tiger Team” to circumvent the “systemic barriers” that make the military a “less than desirable choice” for the majority of young Canadian women.
Apparently, they have chosen to ignore their own recruitment analysts, who informed them that women feel “discomfort with a profession that involves combat,” because it has the “potential of killing people (especially innocent people).” If the military’s main “systemic barrier” to recruiting women is their inherent distaste for the profession’s existential purpose, how can that barrier be overcome?
January 26, 2020
QotD: An Aboriginal woman’s view of Australia Day
I don’t begrudge any Aboriginal person a desire to fill in the blanks in their histories with romanticism, particularly given the rewards on offer. The story of white injustice and black tragedy has become the most acceptable Aboriginal tale to tell, and is now the only perspective on Aboriginal history — despite that dearth of documented accounts — that could possibly be accepted as authentic and true. To suggest that our story is not all about victimhood is bad enough; to suggest that modernity was in any way a blessing is double-plus ungood crimethink.
[…]
Those who mourn the demise of Aboriginal culture almost always regard things from the viewpoint of the men, who were indeed dispossessed of their land, and subsequently their traditions and status. Land wasn’t the only item of property they lost, however. They also lost or traded their women to the settlers, and this absorption — along with frontier warfare and disease — rapidly eroded tribal structures and doomed Aboriginal traditions to obsolescence. The settlers arrived with a wealth of goods and a shortage of females, and they were generally less enthusiastic about beating women than was customary in Aboriginal culture. In contrast, the Aboriginal men held no wealth, treated their women appallingly, and there were few taboos to prevent women from straying — and so stray they did. The men lost a lot in the invasion, while the women had little to lose and plenty to gain. Modern-day Aboriginal women who mourn the loss of traditional culture have rocks in their heads. (Metaphorically, that is. Back then, it would have been literally.)
Kerryn Pholi, “Something More: An Alternative Perspective on Australia Day”, Penthouse.au, 2018-01-22.
January 21, 2020
The United States Goes Dry – Alcohol Prohibition I THE GREAT WAR
The Great War
Published 20 Jan 2020In January 1920, after one year of preparation, the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution went into effect. From now on alcohol prohibition was the law.
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Ehmer, K. and Hindermann, B. (2015). The School of Sophisticated Drinking. New York: Greystone Books.
Miron and Zwiebel, “Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition”. In the American Economic Review, Vol. 81, No. 2, pp. 242-247, (May 1991).
Darrow, Clarence, and John Haynes Holmes. Debate On Prohibition. Haldeman-Julius Co., 1924.
Iorizzo, Luciano J. Al Capone. Greenwood Press, 2003.
Nemtsov, Aleksandr. A Contemporary History of Alcohol in Russia. Stockholm, 2011.
Sullivan, Edward D. Rattling the Cup on Chicago Crime. New York: The Vangaurd Press, 1929.
United States Government, “Codification of Internal Revenue Laws, … Published Pursuant to Section 1203(c) Revenue Act of 1926”.
18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ou…
United States Department of Agriculture. “Crop Production Historical Track Records, 2018”. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publication…
Kamieński, Łukasz: “Drugs”, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2019-03-07
Blocker, Jack S Jr. “Did prohibition really work? Alcohol prohibition as a public health innovation.” American Journal of Public Health vol. 96,2 (2006): 233-43.» SOCIAL MEDIA
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January 19, 2020
“Night Witches” – Female Soviet Pilots – Sabaton History 050 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published 18 Jan 2020This episode is about the Soviet 588th bomber regiment. They were all-female and got the nickname “Night Witches” from the sound their planes made after they killed their engines for maximum effect. This sound made German think of the broomsticks of witches, and they called them “Nachthexen“.
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Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
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Music by Sabaton.Colorizations:
– Olga Shirnina a.k.a. Klimbim – https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com/Sources:
– Tver United State Museum
– Photo of the instructor Semeon Lykin and a group of pilots posing in front of a Polikarpov Po-2 courtesy of Franco Folini on Flickr
– Po-2 “Sudstroitel”; 588th night light bomber aviation regiment – all courtesy of Segey G on Flickr
– SA-kuva 39220
– Sniper scope icon by DTDesign from the Noun ProjectAn OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.
© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.
January 18, 2020
QotD: Men and talking
Also, because many women tend to over-analyze, they assign all sorts of deep meaning to trivial gestures and then demand explanations. Sometimes a rose is just a rose and five minutes of silence is just a man thinking about what he has to do at work tomorrow. You want to get a man to talk? It’s not hard. Ask him to explain what’s going on in a UFC fight or what his favorite sexual fantasy is and you’ll have trouble getting him to shut up.
John Hawkins, “5 Things Women Do That Secretly Annoy Men”, PJ Media, 2012-08-23.
January 5, 2020
More from Severian about modern girls at university
Having regaled us with shocking tales of the Basic College Girl (linked here), Severian now gets down to the not-very-salacious details of modern female mating behaviour at US colleges:
University College, University of Toronto (not one of the post-secondary institution Severian used to teach at).
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.
When people find out I’m retired from “higher” “”education,”” if they’re anything but rabid Leftists they usually ask me a series of questions: Why are professors such hypocritical assholes? and Is there really any point to ___ Studies? and Why do they pay the football coach umpteen zillion dollars a year to never finish higher than third in the conference? If the questioner is a man, though, and we’re out drinking, after a few martinis they always get around to: But what about … you know … the girls?
Where to start? Since there’s no avoiding prurience here let’s get one thing out of the way up front. This is TLP, not me, but it holds for coeds, too:
These people are prone to two errors. A psychological one: fetishization; and a biological one: mistaking for beauty what is merely youth.
Taking the second first: I made the same mistake. I came to the ed biz later than most, having had a “real” job back in my other life, so when I first got to grad school I was amazed at how hot the girls were. Like everyone else I was a TA for Intro to Studies 101, but unlike everyone else I must’ve gotten the “sorority girls only” section, because every single chick in it was a knockout.
Now I’ll cop to being a little slow on the uptake, but I’m not that dumb. So I started looking a little closer — purely in the interests of science, you understand — and it wasn’t long until I realized that yeah, what I thought at first was smokin’ hotness was just youth. Back in the office I’d been surrounded by women who were equally attractive, but not equally young. A few years in a high-stress job puts a lot of miles on you.
But the other, fetishization element came into it too. Not like that, get your minds out of the gutter, let me explain:
I don’t think it ever really was, but if “coed” was a fetish its days are long past. In a country where the vast majority of people have at least a semester or two of college, not even “sorority girl” really moves the needle much. Rather, all the “fetish” stuff comes from the other side. After spending oh-god-sooooo-many hours getting harangued by the HR ladies about “sexual harassment,” even the most cynical teacher finds himself wondering what he’d do if some slinky young thing really did show up at office hours, close the door, and declare she’ll do anything to pass the class…
Which never happens, of course. I’ve never even heard of it, and I taught at lots of places, for many years, among male colleagues (and a lot of lesbians) who were desperately horny losers. The reason is twofold. The first, and most obvious, is that even if some girl really is that mercenary / sociopathic — and y’all have me on record, at great length, describing what little sociopaths modern kids are — there’s a much simpler alternative available: Straight-up bribery. But notice that’s the one thing you never even hear suggested, though it’s the easiest thing in the world. TAs get paid peanuts; I don’t know how low the bidding could’ve gone, but having seen the squalor in which lots of my fellow grad students lived, twenty bucks doesn’t seem unreasonable …
[…]
Ironically, I’d bet #MeToo and the rest of it actually result in more, not less, of this behavior. Like I always say, today’s blue-haired, nose-ringed slam poet is tomorrow’s obergruppenfuhrer, and one of the main reasons I say it is that I’ve been around a LOT of college people. Shrinking violets who need “safe spaces” everywhere very obviously long to knuckle under to power, any power. Goofy losers who suddenly find themselves with a lot of power naturally start carrying on like Heinrich Himmler. Put them together in the closest possible proximity, in a place explicitly designed to shield them from the real world, and, well, you figure it out.
December 5, 2019
Edith Cavell, before her execution, “patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone”
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Lawrence W. Reed relates the story of British nurse Edith Cavell:
Nazi Germany forced France to surrender on June 22, 1940. A day later, Adolf Hitler himself toured the conquered capital of Paris, where he personally ordered the destruction of two memorials to heroes from the First World War. Today — December 4, 2019 — is the 154th anniversary of the birth of one of them, a remarkable woman named Edith Cavell.
Edith Louisa Cavell
Photograph from the Wellcome Trust via Wikimedia Commons.Her story is an example of the age-old tragedy that repeats itself every single minute somewhere in the world: a genuinely good individual whose life is snuffed out by some lousy government for a pointless purpose.
Born in 1865 in Swardeston, England, Edith Cavell was 30 when she chose nursing as a professional career. The inspiration had come to her while caring for her father during a serious illness, from which he recovered. During her training, she worked at several hospitals and later traveled around southeastern England treating patients in their homes for diseases from appendicitis to cancer. She earned a sterling reputation for her attention to detail, a congenial bedside manner and, says one biographer, a “ferocious sense of duty.”
At the insistence of a surgeon in Brussels, she went to Belgium in 1907 and became instrumental in the founding of Belgium’s first school of nursing. According to Kathy Warnes of the website Windows to World History, Cavell was soon training aspiring nurses for three hospitals, 24 schools, and 13 kindergartens in Belgium. She became the first matron of the Berkendael Institute in Brussels.
[…]
When Germany occupied Belgium in the fall of 1914, the Kaiser’s troops allowed Cavell, a citizen of an enemy country (England), to stay in charge of her Institute but they kept their eyes on her as she treated combatants from both sides in the hospital and training school. […] German suspicions led to Cavell’s arrest on August 3, 1915. Accused of treason, she was court-martialed, found guilty, and sentenced to death by firing squad.
Among the notes she wrote while incarcerated was a September 14 letter to a group of nurses, thanking them for flowers they had sent to the jail. She ended it with these words:
In everything one can learn new lessons of life, and if you were in my place you would realize how precious liberty is and would certainly undertake never to abuse it. To be a good nurse one must have lots of patience; here, one learns to have that quality, I assure you.
At her subsequent trial, the prosecution posed only a dozen questions. From the first, she answered truthfully and boldly. Yes, she had helped hundreds to escape and she was proud of it. When asked if she realized what she was doing was “to the disadvantage of Germany,” she bravely replied that her preoccupation was “to help the men who applied to me to reach the frontier; once across, they were free.”
November 26, 2019
“Women’s sports are dying, and very quickly”
Mark Steyn outlines the rise and sudden fall of women’s sports:
Rachel McKinnon on the podium after winning the Union Cycliste Internationale Masters Track Cycling World Championship, October 2018.
When the Olympic Games was revived in 1896, it was assumed by all that, as in the ancient games of Greece, the competitors would be men. The inclusion of women, said Baron de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympiad, would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and incorrect”.
By “uninteresting”, he meant that the innate differences between the male and female bodies ensured that women’s participation would require one to feign interest in races that were slower and jumps that were shorter. In a competitive celebration of excellence, what’s the point? So the first female Olympians were women who could hold their own with men and compete in the chaps’ events — such as Hélène de Pourtalès, who won a gold medal at the 1900 Paris Olympics as part of the Swiss sailing crew. A week later Mesdames Guerra and Moulin competed, unsuccessfully, in the hacks and hunter rounds of the equestrian events. In the croquet competition, seven men and three women participated, with the men taking all the medals.
And then came the tennis, for which they introduced a ladies’ singles event, at which Miss Charlotte Cooper (a five-times Wimbledon champ) prevailed.
These were the two models for female sportsmen, if you’ll forgive the expression: Compete in mixed events and spend most of your life losing to blokes, or compete only against other women where the lesser achievements are, as M le Baron saw it, “uninteresting”. In the case of certain activities, male sports felt obliged to spin off more genteel and (in Coubertin terms) even less interesting female variants — softball and netball, rather than baseball and basketball.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the latter model — female-only sports — prevailed, as part of what was understood by the general trend of “women’s rights”, loosely defined, and indeed more explicitly so by things like America’s Title Nine legislation.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Charlotte Cooper model is collapsing, very fast. Women are back to losing to rivals who, whatever their lipstick, skirts or breast implants, are biologically male with all the inherent advantages. Miss Hannah Mouncey, for example, is six-foot-two and 220 pounds, which is rather heavier than me and an inch taller. The average Australian woman is five-foot-four-and-a-quarter and just under 157 pounds. If you have to catch a ball, standing six inches above anybody else on court comes in helpful:
Seleção feminina de handebol da Austrália.
.
É só isso o tuíte.— Ana Paula Henkel (@AnaPaulaVolei) November 23, 2019
Did Miss Mouncey procure her advantages over her sisters through a rigorous workout regime? No. She gained them by being born male. She played for Oz’s national men’s handball team until 2016, when she revealed she was transitioning and thus would henceforth play for the women’s team. She also announced she was taking up Aussie football, again for the ladies.
November 21, 2019
QotD: Honour
Honor has got a bad rep lately. It’s been dragged through the mud, and its garments are draggled. Association of its names with such egregious ideas as “honor killings” has done it no good.
It’s particularly unjust since honor killings are more shame-killings. I grew up in a culture that still shows a lot of Arab influence, (well, they were there almost as long as the Romans, you know?) and I almost understand honor killings – if I squint and look sideways. I was, after all, raised in a village (so like Miss Marple I’ve seen all there is to see of human wickedness.) Of course Portuguese – at least civilized ones – don’t honor-kill their daughters. But we had a case in the village where a father shaved his daughter’s head because she was talking to a strange boy. And even with my family’s rather odd behavior, since we were all readers and a fair number of us engaged in creative work, I came across that “how could you talk to him when you were alone in the house? What will people think? You have shamed us all.” I came across it more than once, because I have trouble wrapping my mind across the nonsensical. And to me – particularly when this started, when I was about eight – seeing a little friend who happened to be a boy was no different from seeing a little friend who happened to be a girl.
But the overwrought minds of village spinsters and old women looked at this the way “enlightened” militant “feminists” do. Like the one who accused my nine year old of sexual harassment for touching a girl’s behind while trying to get her attention. (He didn’t fondle her. He reached through a crowd and poked her, to ask if she wanted to play a space exploration game.) If you’re a male you have lust and evil on your mind, and any woman allowing you near has lost her virtue. (They must live MUCH more interesting lives than I do.)
Anyway, honor viewed that way is more what the public thinks of you and what you allow the public to know. You can lose your honor through all sorts of stupid things that have nothing to do with what is in your heart and mind. You can be “disgraced” the way a regency maiden was disgraced because she tripped in public and fell across a gentleman, and didn’t immediately faint or whatever. (Well, at least in regency romances. I believe true society had more leniency. I mean, even in the village, even with my eccentric behavior and the fact I wore shorts outside the house – oh, the humanity! – only half the people considered me a slut.)
Sarah Hoyt, “An Affair of Honor a blast from the past from April 24 2012”, According to Hoyt, 2017-10-11.
November 7, 2019
QotD: Evolved sexual differences
Women co-evolved to try to make themselves look reproductively hot, though that’s not how we think of it. […] Because men are turned on by disembodied photos of boobs, butts, and coochies, they’re quick to pull down their pants, click their cameraphone, and text some woman they just met a close-up of their zipperwurst. Really bad idea.
Men who’ve done this should pick up a Harlequin romance, which is basically porn for women (from the ravishing by some hot gazillionaire to the final commitment-gasm).
See any photo spreads of male crotch shots tucked in there anywhere, boys?
This is not an error of omission. Women aren’t fantasizing about seeing your willy; they’re fantasizing that somebody in the royal family will pluck them out of suburbia and marry them in Westminster Abbey.
Amy Alkon, Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck, 2014.
November 2, 2019
When entertainment morphs into propaganda
One of the key elements aiding Hitler and the NSDAP to take power and stay in power in Germany in the 1930s was the constant, ongoing propaganda campaign orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels. Hitler and the Nazi party were lauded as the perfect Germanic solution to every problem and Jews, socialists, homosexuals, and other undesireable elements were belittled and used as targets of hate. A big part of Goebbels’ propaganda revolved around one idea, the “Big Lie”:
Hitler, Göring, Goebbels and Hess.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
By suppressing competing voices and having all the methods of reaching the people repeating the same story, the Nazis solidified their control on power in Germany that lasted until 1945, and was only demolished by massive military effort by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Commonwealth. Propaganda is a very powerful tool that works distressingly well to implant and nurture evil ideas in a subject population.
Modern propagandists in the west generally don’t have the power of the state aiding them, but if they get enough of the channels of communication — especially the entertainment channels — to co-ordinate the message, the effects can be very strong:
… 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.
My point is that it is altogether possible — and eminently desirable — to say “you go boy” with as much vigor as “you go girl.” And both the boys and the girls will be better for it.
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 27, 2019
A visual masterclass in trolling
For all that Donald Trump is known for trolling his opponents on Twitter, he’s certainly not the only one, as these makeshift posters in Massachusetts illustrate:
The locals are outraged, but as Alaa Al-Ameri describes, they’re not quite sure how to safely express their fury:
Think of Posie Parker’s billboards quoting the dictionary definition of the word “woman”. The power of such acts comes from two things. First, they acknowledge – usually with irreducible simplicity – that something that went without saying a moment ago has suddenly become unsayable. Secondly, the outrage they provoke does not come from any epithet, caricature or insult, but rather from having the nerve to draw the viewer’s attention to an act of cognitive dissonance that we are all engaging in, but would rather not acknowledge.
The result is that those who attempt to explain why the act is offensive end up simply tying themselves in knots, while revealing that they have never given a moment’s thought to the position they find themselves defending. This seems to generate even more anger, with the inevitable online mob quickly joined by politicians, journalists and other public figures, eager to see that the heretic is made an example of.
At their best, these acts of public disobedience are examples of real-life Winston Smiths pointing out to the rest of us that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”. Their persecutors, like his, are those who know and fear the truth of Smith’s next sentence: “If that is granted, all else follows.”
The example of perfectly crafted dissent that I’d like to submit here appears in this video from Massachusetts local TV news, showing some reactions to the fly-posting of white sheets of paper bearing the statement “Islam is right about women”. The reactions are deeply revealing. Nobody can clearly point out why they object to the statement – indeed, nobody seems to object to the statement at all on its face. Yet most seem to express offence at it – if a little unconvincingly.
The reason for their dilemma is obvious enough to anyone who has been paying attention. Western society has managed to convince itself (at least in public) that any statement criticising any aspect of Islam is, by definition, bigotry. As a result, Western societies have effectively decided to enforce Islamic restrictions on blasphemy, and called it “tolerance”.
The strain of conforming to this lie is evident in the fumbling attempts by the interviewees to explain their objections. Do they believe that Islam is right about women? If so, why the objection? Do they believe that Islam is wrong about women? If so, in what sense is the statement an attack on Islam or Muslims? Do they believe that the author of the poster is saying that “Islam is right about women”, but doing so ironically? In which case, the objection can only be that the author is guilty of a thoughtcrime by stating that “two and two make five” with insufficient sincerity. Or do they worry that they are guilty of thoughtcrime for noticing the irony?
September 18, 2019
QotD: Debunking the notion of “peaceful” Vikings
[…]
Which brings us to the next part. All through the exhibit, people told us over and over again that the Vikings were — contrary to legend — peaceful, peaceful I tell you. Most of the Vikings were, after all, farmers and householders.
I wasn’t buying it. Yeah, sure, most Vikings, if you count women, children, and people to old to go aViking, just stayed put. But no civilization where dying in bed gets you sent to Hel (which was cold rather than hot but much like our Hell) is a peaceful one. In the same way I didn’t buy the continuous reassurances there were as many women as men aboard those ships. Cooeeeeee! Really? The men saddled themselves with a liability likely to get pregnant, give birth, etc AND be weaker in battle? That’s … amazing. Oh, I forget. The idiots writing these cards think women are naturally as strong and physically as fast as men and that the “patriarchy” is a six-thousand-year-old conspiracy to hide this. Sure, there probably was the occasional female in a male role. Contrary to much bleating on the left, the patriarchy didn’t enforce strict gender roles, life generally did, and there are always outliers, and Helga the Ugly who could lift a pig under each arm, probably was allowed to join the guys in their expeditions. For one, who was going to tell her no? For another, no guy ever got drunk enough for her to be at risk.
Other than that, sure, there were as many women as men aboard Viking ships. Coming back from a raid. They called those women “slaves.”
[…]
But no, like the beliefs in powerful women Vikings, (who apparently can ONLY be powerful by pillaging and plundering. Being mistress of a farm is not enough), and in peaceful Vikings too they’re simply an upending of long-held beliefs about something. I.e. if Western culture has long believed something, progressives will believe the opposite, because that’s about as hard as any of them can reason, and congruent with their initial mission to topple civilization so perfect communism will emerge.
Sarah Hoyt, “I Aten’t Dead”, According to Hoyt, 2017-07-27.
