Collapse: The Blog

Reactionary Entertainment: The Tudors

Lots of breasts, Renaissance Ken dolls, and screaming.

Skip it.

Reflections on the Anime Subculture

Back when I was in college, when I was still basically a liberal (although even then I hated other liberals), I joined my university's Shakespearean acting troupe as a tech guy. There were a few different reasons for this. It got me out of the dorm. It curried favor with the English department (where I ultimately landed for my minor studies). It was worth three very easy 400-level credits a semester. Shakespeare's just cool. I got to learn cool tech stuff -- sound boards, lighting, etc. And so on. But I realized very quickly that I was not like most of the other people "doing the Rudes." For me, it was instrumental: something I enjoyed and which was of material benefit to me. For them, it was like an end in itself. I also noticed that they were generally deviant in other ways. They were screechy, neurotic bisexuals with lip piercings and black clothes. They had sex with each other constantly and went off after practice to have video game parties. One of them would sometimes wear a strange headband with little conical horns attached to them. They wrote anime fanfiction (because apparently animes with romantic subplots always have desperately unsatisfactory endings) and dressed up like anime characters to go to anime conventions. They were anime kids.

I confess to having watched very little anime in the past, most of which I was forced to watch by an anime-loving friend. I've been mixed about what I've seen. Elfenlied was intriguing, Beautiful Dreamer charming and whimsical, Spirited Away weird and incoherent, and Naruto just annoying, with its screechy theatrics and agonizingly long-winded dialogue (my efforts to get into the Pokemon fad when I was in elementary and middle school failed, and for the same reason). I don't get the appeal, perhaps because of my instinctive dislike for the idea of being a grown man sitting around watching cartoons all day. I think what turned me off most was just the casual and unquestioned weirdness of it all. It's not even divergent enough to be surreal, because it takes itself too seriously. People in these shows and movies casually accept the presence of large minorities of vampires, aliens, weird horned half-men half-animal hybrids, people with ESP and other strange powers, and the like. Watching them is like a bad LSD trip.

So I suppose it's a good fit for people who are themselves casually weird, the kind who grow greasy, patchy beards and wear oversized coats with way too many pockets and chains and collars and all that crap. The awkward, out-group dweebs who populate the corner of every college bistro playing Magic: The Gathering. You know the type. (I wonder, does the weirdness of the person derive from their early exposure to the weirdness of anime? Or are they drawn to anime because they're weird people?)

In college, I dated a relatively pretty girl with several friends in this group and every time I stood in their presence, I felt like the brutish jock in a chick flick who steals away the nerdy main character's love interest. Me! At best, I had the build of a second-rate swimmer in college. But their group was so vacuously negative of masculinity that I slid almost by default into the role of alpha horse. I hated being hated by these mewling, oleaginous things.

I feel like I could write a book on this subculture, but I'll content myself for the sake of economy with just a few observations. Their in-group dynamics, such as they are, are disordered almost to the point of psychosis. It seems they can barely even relate to one another in any kind of meaningful fashion; I once saw two anime kids sitting next to each other on a couch, playing the same video game at the same time, but on different consoles attached to different TVs! "Lest you interact with another person?" I thought to myself.

Far from being sexually frustrated, as you might suspect, in my experience they set up these strange sexual covens wherein the women (and certain men; sexual deviancy is not uncommon here) are passed around more than their old pirated copies of Boondock Saints. Strangely, this produces very little drama, like it would in a group of normal people in which one woman slept with multiple men. I have no idea why; maybe an aggressive response is beyond people so totally empty of masculinity, or maybe their stunted souls were never capable of forming meaningful attachments to others in the first place.

I've certainly never had a conversation with an anime kid and thought, afterwards, "Wow, I'm really glad I met that person." Come to think of it, I'm not so sure I've ever had a memorable conversation with one at all. I don't think I've ever seen them read anything that wasn't (a) a comic book or graphic novel, (b) a textbook for class, or (c) some slice of schlocky left-wing cant to make themselves look intelligent, a bookmark always strategically inserted around two-thirds of the way in (because they're so smart!). With few exceptions, dumpiness was the general norm, although I'm not sure if this is just poverty or an intentional snubbing of basic politeness to others. Some things, such as the long, stringy, oily ponytails the men tended to grow, were simply inexcusable; surely they could've borrowed an electric razor from someone, and who would begrudge a grown man the Bruce Willis pate? Pronounced body odor was not the norm but was certainly more evident among them than in the general population.

There are various strata of the subculture that get weirder the deeper you go. At my first school, there was a sub-subculture of people who called themselves furries and who walked around with fake animal tails hanging from their waistband. (All of the furries were anime kids but not all anime kids were furries -- very few were, in fact, and I sort of got the impression that some of the anime kids were "above" the furries and had no social truck with them). I talked with one of them about it, and she evidently believed she had some kind of "animal spirit" dwelling inside her or something and wore her tail as a means of identifying with it. I couldn't help but notice they all identified with foxes, squirrels, and the like. (Of course! Why would your "spirit animal" be a macaque or an alligator or a tapeworm or something? They're gross!)

And, of course, the anime kids were spiritual autists to the last man. The closest thing to religion any of them exhibited was one who was an actual autist and (cafeteria) Catholic; the rest were basically run-of-the-mill atheists possessed of a bitter and irrational hatred of the faith. I gathered from my conversations with several of them that they had all had bad childhoods of some sort which had a vaguely evangelical flavor and which thus soured them forever on the idea of religious. They were pretty much the perfect instantiation of Dr. Charlton's distraction-seeking utilitarian.

Anyway, these anecdotes are just that -- anecdotal -- so I have no idea how well they generalize to other places. That said, I went to school in the mid-Atlantic and my Texas-raised coworker insists my description here matches the anime kids group at each of the three colleges she attended, so I'm inclined to think I'm on to something.

Reactionary Entertainment: Black Death

An intriguing-seeming movie popped up on Netflix, one I'd never heard of before: Black Death, a 2010 film starring Sean Bean and Eddie Redmayne (Jack Builder from Pillars of the Earth). I was initially suspecting a bit of hokey trash along the lines of the awful Season of the Witch. What I got, instead, was a fascinating period piece, gritty and grim, of a medieval world in the throes of a pestilence-induced crisis of faith. No spoilers here, sorry to say, but suffice to say it resonates with our occasional discussions of atheism and religion.

The cinematography alone makes it worth watching: check it out.

On Masculinity, Chivalry, and Women-and-Children First

Are men morally obligated to self-sacrifice for women and children? The answer, I think, is resoundingly yes. (The following post is based on an exchange in the comments section of the above-linked post, with some addenda; see also Justin at The Truth Shall Set You Free's here and then here.)

The reductive treatment:

1. Women are more necessary and thus more valuable than men with respect to procreation.
2. Procreation is essential for social continuity.
3. Therefore, women are more necessary and thus more valuable than men with respect to social continuity.

There is a datum which supports this treatment without question: the fact that, in the entire history of the human race, the percentage of women who successfully procreated is roughly double the percentage of men, to the tune of 80%/40%, according to Roy Baumeister. (Baumeister's talk, by the way, is a very subtle but nevertheless quite savage attack on feminist presuppositions, even though it's phrased with the mealy-mouthed esotericism typical of a university professor. It's enough to make me question if he's one of us).

Why is this so? Successful procreation depends on one woman and one man. The man's biological involvement in the reproductive act is more or less instantaneous: the act of ejaculation. The woman's is continuous and of considerable duration: the nine months of pregnancy. If the man subsequently dies, oh well -- his involvement is done. If the woman dies post-conception, her unborn child generally dies with her.

A logical consequence of this is that the average man can impregnate, at least hypothetically, a thousand or more women in the course of his life. (I had originally formulated this as "easily ten thousand," for which commenter Bill rightly roasted me: "That’s two impregnations a day for more than 13 and a half years. I quail before your manliness.") By contrast, the average woman can bear, perhaps, no more than two dozen pregnancies in extreme cases, and most nowhere near that many. Social continuity, then, requires a much greater number of women, who must be kept in much greater health, than it does men.

Evolutionarily speaking, a predictable consequence of this is that men face a much steeper difficult in obtaining reproductive advantage than do women. They must do more to achieve the same reward. Thus, as Baumeister notes, men are rightly overrepresented at the highest strata of society: there are more men in the highest levels of government and of the economy. The converse is that many men try and fail to acquire this advantage, and so there are also many men represented at the lowest strata of society: in prison, on death row, killed in combat, or maimed in workplace injuries. Baumeister intriguingly suggests this is related to the IQ distribution (the validity of which, note, he doesn't question -- again, is he one of us?): men and women have the same mean IQ, but men's standard deviation is greater than women's. In other words, women cluster around the mean IQ of 100 more tightly than do men. There are many more male geniuses, but also many more male retards.

This also suggests that a sane society is one that prioritizes the care of its women. Thus men go to war while women stay home. A society that sent its women to war in any appreciable numbers would probably soon go extinct. Seriously, think about it. European nations' populations were positively devastated during World Wars I and II, but the casualties were largely male. If that devastation had been mostly female, there'd be vast tracts of unpopulated land in Europe right now.

It does no good pointing to the fact that early societies tended to favor male children over female ones, because this only proves what I'm saying: primitive peoples favored male children because they were disposable and because the radical resource scarcity they faced made the prospect of caring for a pregnant woman frightening and difficult. It also does no good to point to the institutionalization of women-and-children-first as relatively recent, as if the moral character of the act were invented whole-hog alongside the widespread public acceptance of the duty. The failure of previous societies to take this duty seriously is not evidence that it didn't exist: it's only evidence that they were deficient.

Heretofore, I have talked about the fact of the rationality of men's natures being ordered toward self-sacrifice. In other words, I have been talking about women-and-children first as an is, not an ought. I have established that it's rational to self-sacrifice for women and children; I have not established that it's obligatory to do so.

But bear in mind that, from a natural law perspective, there are no accidental features of human nature. Human nature, by definition, is essential. And whatever is essential to a thing contributes to our understanding of its goodness, for the goodness of a thing is simply the degree of its existence according to its mode of being. A good knife is sharp, a good meal nutritious, a good sleep restful, and so on. Our nature is not, as moderns hold, a mere prison within which we are unjustly held, and which we may licitly rebel against it. The mere fact of our participation in the order of being -- an order of being necessarily headed by an all-good, all-actual God -- means we matter, and thus the mode of our participation also matters.

In other words, there are no "is's" where human nature is concerned where there is not a conjoined "ought." Human nature is human goodness: and so to act according to our natures is to act in a fashion that is good. It's in our nature to sacrifice for women and children, even women and children we don't like, even ones we don't know. Put simply, if our natures are such that it is good for us to self-sacrifice, then perhaps we ought to ask why this is so, instead of simply objecting to the fact. And perhaps we ought to respond with gratitude to a God who so loves His creation that he enscribed on his heart the means of emulating His virtues.

What if Tim Tebow Were Muslim?

Asks a Salon columnist.

Assuming Muslim Tim Tebow would be as high-profile as Christian Tim Tebow, they'd probably regard him with suspicion and contempt as he prostrates himself on the sidelines facing east, touching his forehead to the turf. And probably, in this alternate universe, some Salon columnist would be asking, "What if Tim Tebow Were Christian?" and he would be adored by the leftist establishment instead of slathered with its hatred.

Evidently, we're to regard Christians as hypocrites for not feeling warm-n'-fuzzy about Muslim athletes. Why should they, though? Christians worship Christ, not generic displays of piety. It's precisely this that makes them not hypocrites and their religion not merely the empty and insubstantial theatrics their secular enemies accuse them of being. Why should they feel anything but unease toward the practitioners of what they see as a false religion? No one reasonably expects anything else from Muslims.

Here's a better question: what if Tim Tebow were Christian but America was Muslim? Would the social reaction to him be analagous if the roles were reversed and it was Christian America reflecting on Muslim Tebow? I think we all know the answer to this.

More on the FSTDT Crowd

The last day or two I've seen quite a bit of traffic coming from what appears to be a subforum called "Flame and Burn" (judging by the referrer's URL) over at Fundies Say the Darndest Things!, the group with which I tussled a while back after they responded to my something-less-than-unequivocal-hatred of bullying with insinuated threats of violence.

(Threats, ultimately, as hollow as the points of the rounds in the Springfield I carry concealed).

I don't have access to the forum and don't care enough to go register and check it out, but I can guess by the URL that that's where the goblins gather, the earlier Two Minutes' Hate having been insufficient to sate their monstrous appetites. Small wonder they hide it -- the better to disguise their own venomous natures, lest it undermine their preening. No doubt it's brimming with posts expressing rage at my apostasy or high-mindedly venturing to diagnose my illiberalism as a function of my personal deficiencies.

(I guess I can't complain about  that last part, since I do it to them all the time. In fairness to myself, though, my analyses of leftism are born of a studied consideration of human nature and a close reading of relevant philosophical work, not mere vulgarity-laced recycling of Hitchensean cant paired with twitching rage at the merest thought of heterodoxy. My writings also have the advantage of being obviously sincerely held, as I clearly don't expect to win brownie points with the vast majority of people by writing them).

I wonder if any of them would ever stop to consider if things I believe are actually true or that, moreover, this is the reason I believe them. I doubt it, really. The funny thing is, the reactive horror and rage with which they respond to attacks on liberalism is probably pretty much symmetrical with the horror and rage which Christians have historically felt in response to the liberal dismantling of their social order. To some extent, sputtering and instinctive contempt, beyond the reach of articulation or rational examination, is a natural and indeed somewhat sympathetic response, one that is remarkable and even a little admirable in them precisely because it is so illiberal, so very reactionary. There are, it seems, limits to the extent to which liberals will take their radical reductionism, their rebellion against the principle of order, that they will not allow revolution to threaten the revolution. Small comfort, that, but you take what you can get, here in the end times.

But just on the off chance that any of them are reading and are actually interested in critically examining their own beliefs (which is difficult, I know, but ought to be done; it's how I arrived at where I am), here's a few worthwhile reads:

• Jim Kalb's talk "PC: The Cultural Antichrist." Also his conservatism FAQ, religious establishment FAQ and sexual morality FAQ. Pretty much everything on his site is essential.
• Bonald's "The Conservative Vision of Authority," "In Defense of Religion," and "In Defense of Monarchy," just to get started. Nothing there is not worth reading.
• Lawrence Auster's collection of posts on Gnosticism, the "perennial human temptation" underlying most of the modern (liberal) project. I have previously identified this condition as spiritual autism. Friedrich Schelling called it pneumopathology, meaning basically the same thing.
• Alan Roebuck's writings on liberalism, also archived at American Nation.
• Edward Feser's "Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation," for an introduction to premodern, nonutilitarian "natural law" ethics. For some reason, clicking the link forces you to download the HTML file before you can view it.
• While we're on the topic of Edward Feser, check out his blog, which includes many, many refutations of popular atheist arguments against the existence of God (e.g., here and here) and correcting popular misconceptions about theistic arguments (e.g., here).
• Bruce Charlton's "Psychology of an Atheist," written in his typical experiential/existential style, documents his abandonment of leftist atheism, and the reasons why. For a fuller treatment of these reasons, check out his book Thought Prison.

By the way, in case any of my regular readers were wondering just how unhinged and reactive some of these fellows are: Ferdinand Bardamu of In Mala Fide recently got a visit from them after he was mistaken... for a Muslim.

First, Kill All the Comedians

Remember the old meme (based, if I remember right, on an exchange between two characters in Shakespeare's otherwise-forgettable Henry VI cycle) that, when the revolution comes, the first task will be to kill all the lawyers? I think a better idea would be to kill all the comedians.

Comedy is the perfect profession for modern liberal materialists and atheists who make an ideology and a movement out of taking nothing seriously. Unsurprisingly, nearly all stand-up comics nowadays are either hardcore liberals or entirely apolitical*, and are almost universally venomous, hateful, ignorant dicks. What better way to smash tradition, civilizational order, basic decency, respect for elders and the dead, etc., than to subject the people who represent and defend them to ruthless, withering, and usually grossly unfair (often baseless) mockery?

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that comedy is the primary method of advancing the left's reductionist agenda. Want to shock people out of their respect for the dead? Burst into hysterical laughter at a funeral. Want to generate rebellion against the Church? Stage a fake news interview with an actor pretending to be a priest. In general, want to attack and destroy people's reverence for the order of being? Declare that nothing means anything -- then heap ridicule on all who beg to differ.

They are also one of the most highly-visible symptoms of the constant modern push for novelty. Remember that joke "The Aristocrats"? Or the documentary version made of it, in which high-profile comedians were invited to tell their own renderings of the joke? Most of them were simply brutish and vulgar, reeling off long chains of obscenity and profanity, which quickly became as funny as... well, as any of them normally are, really. (Sarah Silverman probably won when she deadpanned into the camera, after a long and awkward silence: "Joe Franklin raped me.")

The hypocrisy of the comedian is what is most galling. Just as surely as the leftist will never question the authority of the authority who commands him to question authority, so too will the comedian never permit his own mockery to be turned against him. Witness the treatment of any heckler at any comedy show. Some, like Jimmy Carr (who, I'm fairly sure, stages them), handle it with composure; most, like Michael Richardson, simply degenerate into insane, vulgar, arm-flailing rage. Jerry Seinfeld lampooned comedians' over-the-top response to heckling on his own show; after he's heckled by his neighbor's girlfriend at one of his own shows, he loses his mind and storms into her office to heckle her. (She runs outside crying and is promptly hit by a street-sweeper).

Where will the stand-up business be when there are no sensibilities left to offend and no taboos left to transgress? Most jokes rely on the perception of incongruence; for an ideology formally dedicated to the belief that there's nothing so absurd it can't be embraced, subsidized, and ultimately mandated, those jokes will quick fall by the wayside. Mockery and criticism will be all that's left. The leftist dystopia of the near-future, then, will have two options. It can co-opt the comics and turn them into its Two Minutes' Hate squad. Or it can simply kill them.

Conversely, if they want to keep along the progressive-novelty-of-shock shtick, I think the only thing left soon will be suicide-comedy. It's a sad day when the only thing the next 20 years has to offer anyone is the sight of Eddie Izzard slicing off his own fingers for laughs.

*There are, of course, "rightish" comedians. They are generally amateurs and usually so painfully unfunny that I hesitate to classify them even as comedians.

Is Propositional Nationalism a Kind of Good?

I wonder if religious conservatives aren't actually somewhat admirable for their embrace of propositional nationalism. They intuit that love of country is a good (and, in principle, it is). They also intuit that their country is a total moral wreck, their countrymen stupid, greedy degenerates, and their leaders vile schemers, liars, adulterers, and highway robbers. If they treated America as what it is -- a particular nation of a particular people governed by a particular authority -- they would have no choice but to condemn it violently for its many egregious faults, not the least of which is the ongoing slaughter of its children, a death toll three times that of the entire Holocaust (Jews and gentiles alike; over eight times that of Jews alone).

Saying "America is freedom" (or something) conveniently gives religious conservatives the leeway to love their nation while simultaneously overlooking all that makes it unloveable. After all, whatever is bad is bad because it isn't American but some kind of intrusive, alien force.

That's usually as far as this line of thought goes. If this is true, then these people are intentionally affecting ignorance of evil -- an evil act in and of itself. He who excuses mass murder so he can celebrate "freedom" with an easy conscience is not admirable: he's simply a bastard.

On the Burial of the Dead

Apropos the hubbub of Alan Colmes' attempted kneecapping of Rick Santorum, I was musing recently about what I consider to be one of the most bizarre funereal rituals of the modern world: the open-casket viewing. (Which I have read is basically unique to the United States and Canada).

I've never been to an open-casket funeral,  but I'm given to understand that they are simply horrifying affairs. If the mortician is anything less than extremely skilled, the dead take on a number of features that have been described to me as a strange mix of the comical and the grotesque.

I suppose I can understand the impulse to see the dead one last time, but surely it's better not to? If John dies, what is... exhibited... at his funeral is not him. It is the corpse of him. It is substance conjoined to a radically diminished form. What is there to see?

The funeral industry, I'm told, often tells people that open-casket funerals are therapeutic. I would love for them to muster evidence to that effect. I could not imagine subjecting my family to the sight of my pallid corpse lying featureless in an overdone coffin -- the last image they'll have of me, shutting out a long life of laughter and sunburns and gentle snoring during mid-day naps and bouncing my children on my knee. There would be no seeing me one last time. "Me" would be gone.

A closed coffin seems appropriate: darkness for the deceased and separation from the living. A fitting symbol for the wages of sin.

On the other hand, it is wise to hide ourselves from death? Perhaps it's the case that Americans and Canadians are simply more honest about death than their European peers: that the open-casket funeral is the way we actually acknowledge death, personally, intimately. We stare it in its waxy, hollow face, with the full knowledge that it (and ours) will soon crumble to dust. We make our peace with the fact.

But back to the first hand, there are surely some truths that need not be confronted, or at least need not be confronted so viscerally. Is there anything on this earth that can prepare the soul for death?

More Reactionary Entertainment: Breaking Bad

I've recently become a huge fan of AMC's Breaking Bad, which is not only desperately entertaining but also, I think, ideologically sound. (Huge spoilers ahead).

The show follows Walter White , a high-strung high school chemistry teacher who turns to manufacturing crystal meth to provide for his family and pay his medical bills after he is diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer.

Much of it focuses on family drama, but a few of the primary themes are absolutely critical. The first is the absoluteness of a man's duty to provide for his family, without recognition of which Walt would simply be a thoroughly despicable bastard. He goes to extraordinary lengths to provide for his family, erecting a vast but fragile network of lies to shield them from his secret life of crime.

The second is the problematic deadening of conscience. In the first season, Walt, clearly in over his head, is forced to kill a rival drug dealer who wanted to kill him, but unable to bring himself to do it, he keeps the man locked up in his basement. He finally does the deed but only after much internal turmoil. At the end of season three, he casually orders the murder of a mostly-innocent and basically good-hearted man just to protect his own life (and business arrangement). The result is Walt's slow transmogrification from a deeply flawed but mostly decent man into a ruthless and unrepentant killer, hobnobbing with drug lords and hatching elaborate schemes to protect himself and his family. The change is most clearly witnessed by the perpetual scowl that later-seasons Walt seems to wear (not to mention the Satanic van dyke he decides to grow). His partner Jessie (a former student of his and a meth addict himself), by contrast, does not deal with the change well, gradually turning into a badly traumatized and broken man, alternately raging and retreating within himself. Their life of evil destroys the latter emotionally and the former spiritually.

And a third is the far-reaching and unforeseen consequences of evil. Walt's life of crime constantly comes back to harm those around him (even those only tenuously connected to him) in various ways, most especially when cartel hit men sent for Walt instead shoot and maim his brother-in-law, a DEA agent, or when Jessie's efforts to avenge the shooting of one of his drug-dealing henchmen results directly in the murder of his girlfriend's eleven-year-old son.

The various meth addicts they encounter are absolutely wasted and pathetic individuals: paranoid, rambling, pasty, twitchy, bleary-eyed, pockmarked with sores, toothless and generally disgusting. No leftist/libertarian romanticization of drugs is to be found here: meth ruins everyone who touches it.

One of the best things about the show is its general lack of flashiness; the story draws you in not with explosions but with subtle and lingering glances and perfectly-timed lines. The performance of Giancarlo Esposito as a stony-faced drug lord is simply impeccable.

If the show is spiritually honest with itself, it can end in only one way: the imprisonment of Walt and the impoverishment and humiliation of his family, the death of Jessie, and the ruination of countless dozens of lives. We'll see about that, but for now, Breaking Bad is absolutely worth watching, if only as a rare instance of the real consequences of evil.