Collapse: The Blog

Valentine's Day and the Far-Right

Will S. at Patriactionary asks how patriarchal traditionalists ought to regard Valentine's Day.

The consensus over there seems to be that we should not take it too seriously because it's commercialized. My response is that anything worthwhile is going to be commercialized in this awful, apostate age. The more important the occasion, the more intense the commercialization (e.g., Christmas!). That's not less of a reason to celebrate it but more -- nobody wants to commercialize occasions no one gives a crap about (like Arbor Day).

I get that it's fashionable to be cynical about things like this. But it isn't right, at least not usually, and we ought not be acting like black-hearted misanthropic leftist cynics cocking our eyebrows at every social convention and asking, "But what use is it to me?" Holidays, like pretty much everything societies do, exist to structure things for us, to express some social value while commemorating a special occasion. I give gifts on certain holidays because those holidays afford me an opportunity to do so, and because I'm not mindful enough to think to do such things entirely on my own. Yes, the choice of day is semi-arbitrary: so is the choice of beloved. It doesn't mean the day or the love is without meaning or value -- or duty.

Over at The Spearhead, the title says it all: "if it isn't mutual, it isn't worth it." But the affectation of generosity in a calculated effort to extract something in return is precisely the wrong attitude to bring to any relationship, much less a romantic one; it's just a horrible way to live, period. If you give to your beloved, give simply because she is your beloved, not because you want something from her. (Even giving out of a grudging sense of social obligation is better than refusing to do anything for your beloved on the basis of some spiteful antiprinciple, although obviously, the ethical ideal would be giving out of simple generosity in response to the opportunity which Valentine's Day, however arbitrary and commercialized, has afforded). Frankly, if you're the kind of douchebag who gives gifts to a woman in the hopes that she'll put out (and I am not so vain to say that I have never been that kind of guy), you deserve to squirm through this holiday in the grips of sexual frustration.

The reverse is also true: a good woman should not expect (much less demand) anything, but accept gifts with a generous and gracious heart. Woe to the man whose wife has a cash register for a brain, for love -- if it is really love and not a seminal fluid-soaked counterfeit -- keeps no record of transactions. (And it goes without saying that men likewise should not expect or demand gifts nor women give out of calculation or pressure. But then no one, the people at The Spearhead evidently notwithstanding, believes otherwise).

In short, we on the far-right ought to be glad that society takes seriously the notion that love is essentially an act of unconditional giving, even if many people use it as an opportunity for exploitation and sexual indecency. It means that it yet recognizes some transcendent value and some basically sound ethical principle, that it is not yet so totally mired in self-worship that it cannot even move itself to give freely to another.

Maybe I'm just biased, though, on account of the fact that I have a rockin' sweetheart this year.

From Status to Contract: The PC Term is "Partner"

Larry Auster observes that yet another word has been ruined by the sinister modern drive to dehumanize every institution by discussing it in the grayest and least personal terms available:

Partner means, or used to mean, two people engaged together in some shared enterprise, or who are friends and are doing things together as a team. But now "partner" has become the quasi official term for two unmarried people--whether homosexual or heterosexual--who live together. And for the truly politically correct, "partner" is even the obligatory term for married persons, since it would "privilege" heterosexual married couples for them to be referred to as "husband" and "wife" while homosexual couples and unmarried heterosexual couples are deprived of those honored titles. Therefore, in the name of equality, husband and wife must be called partner and partner. And with the spread of homosexual "marriage," this change is working itself into the law as well, as I have pointed out many times.

The shift from "spouse" to "partner" is perfectly emblematic of the social-organizational transition from status to contract. Spousehood is a permanent arrangement, unfree after the initial choice of marriage and spouse. Partnership, by contrast, is a fluid arrangement -- fluid by virtue of its meaninglessness -- adopted when useful and casually flouted when it becomes inconvenient, another restrain imposed unjustly on sovereign and absolute wills. Husband" or "wife" is what you are. "Partner" is what you want to be, for as long as you want to be it, and no longer.

Here, as always, the muddling of language is instrumental.

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.

Tucker Max Has Gone to Therapy

Is this some kind of elaborate practical joke?

More on Comedy

There is nothing quite as funny, I said earlier, as a joke that relies on the spontaneous perception of incongruence. No one has mastered this, I think, quite like Perry Bible Fellowship, which is simply the most delightfully hilarious, well-drawn, and comedically austere comic strip I've ever seen. Check out their most recent installment here.

The Sexes in Modernity (or, Of but Not In Leftism)

Take any traditional institution or ideal destroyed by the modern project. Inevitably, this destruction engenders a negative reaction (hence why modernity is called a "crisis"; everyone intuits its falseness, even if some endeavor hard to suppress this realization). But the negative reaction never fully instantiates the traditional ideal. It is in the general direction of traditionality but always winds up being a perversion of it.

Gender roles are a good example of this. Lots of people nowadays chafe at the modern leveling of the sexes. So they react, not by returning to traditional gender roles, but by hyperexaggeration of the virtues of their respective sexes (by means of which those virtues are naturally reduced to defects). So men, who respond to modernity's denial of their natural dominance, respond by becoming impulsive, belligerent, abrasive drunks and serial fornicators. And women respond to the denial of their submissive natures by becoming megasluts.

I see this a lot in the Army, but it's everywhere -- in colleges, on television, in movies. Machismo has replaced genuine masculinity; whoredom has replaced genuine femininity.

Nor is it confined to the sexes, although of course it's most obvious there. In politics, too, the reaction against the obvious stupidity of liberal democracy has been not a movement to restore transcendental monarchy but mere anarchism (or else the grim despotism of the strongman).

Why so? Perhaps modernity has so thoroughly effaced traditional concepts (and even the language used to explain and discuss them) that they are no longer accessible to anyone.

So reactions to modernity are themselves mired in the modern paradigm -- never quite able to achieve escape velocity. (Hence, Nazism is metaphysically leftist, even if it rejects leftism in practice -- and so, too, is the "alt-right" metaphysically leftist, even if it rejects leftism in practice).

And so every modern reaction to modernity will always end in suicide: it cannot be otherwise.

Clearly, They Weren't Bullied Enough

It's the only logical explanation:

A FEW weeks ago, Katy Butler, 16, updated her status on Facebook with an enthusiastic shout-out for Google+, the social network’s latest rival. “Oh my God Google! I love it! I was signing up for Google+ and they asked me my gender and the choices were male, female or OTHER!!!!! Oh ya Google!”

Katy, a high school junior in Ann Arbor, Mich., first encountered “other” as a gender option at a meeting of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning and Allies (LGBTQQA) in seventh grade. “For those of us in the nonconforming gender community, it is great to see Google make the option more mainstream,” she said.

Though Google created the “other” option for privacy reasons rather than as a transgender choice, young supporters of preferred gender pronouns (or P.G.P.’s as they are called) could not help but rejoice. Katy is one of a growing number of high school and college students who are questioning the gender roles society assigns individuals simply because they have been born male or female.

At a meeting of the LGBTQQA. In seventh grade.

The article speaks highly of the teenagers' supposed "rebellion":

Teenagers are by nature prone to rebellion against adult conventions, and as the gender nonconformity movement gains momentum among young people, “it is about rejecting the boxes adults try to put kids in by assuming their sexual identity labels their personal identity,” said Dr. Ritch C. Savin-Williams, director of the Cornell University Sex and Gender Lab. “These teens are fighting the idea that your equipment defines what it means for you to be a boy or girl. They are saying: ‘You don’t know me by looking at me. Assume nothing.’ ”

But it would be a lot easier to take these kids' "nonconformity" seriously if it didn't consistent entirely in rank and thoughtless conformity to the utilitarian zeitgeist, which teaches them (without so much as their conscious awareness, much less consent) that everything -- even their own identities and bodies -- are little more than putty to be molded according to every vagrant whim that flits across their frontal lobes.

Here we see another case of the corruption of language endemic to modernity. What conclusion can be reached but that this movement is anything but insidious, which seeks to strip words of their objectively meaningful referents?

And where are these kids' parents in all this nonsense? Presumably, the ones who aren't off slaking their own vile lusts and therefore can't be arsed to raise their kids' properly are in thrall to the modern PC notion that parental love consists in nothing more than tolerating your children's pathologies, no matter how destructive to their souls, provided it's in accord with what few (utilitarian, natch) convictions the modern world allows you to possess. Just a guess, judging by the admonishing words of one of the sensitive-soul neckbeards from FSTDT who had the temerity to accuse me of being "unworthy of Christ" for not endorsing the obscene, soul-damning perversions of others.

What a mess modernity has made of the world.

America's State Religion

From Fox News (so take with a grain of salt):

An honors student in Fort Worth, Texas, was sent to the principal’s office and punished for telling a classmate that he believes homosexuality is wrong. ...

Dakota was in a German class at the high school when the conversation shifted to religion and homosexuality in Germany. At some point during the conversation, he turned to a friend and said that he was a Christian and “being a homosexual is wrong.”

“It wasn’t directed to anyone except my friend who was sitting behind me,” Dakota told Fox. “I guess [the teacher] heard me. He started yelling. He told me he was going to write me an infraction and send me to the office.”

Dakota was sentenced to one day in-school suspension – and two days of full suspension. His mother was flabbergasted, noting that her son had a spotless record, was an honor student, volunteered at his church and played on the school football team. ...

[Liberty Counsel attorney Matt] Krause called the incident “mind blowing” and said the teacher had frequently brought homosexuality into ninth grade classroom discussions.

“There has been a history with this teacher in the class regarding homosexual topics,” Krause said. “The teacher had posted a picture of two men kissing on a wall that offended some of the students.”

Krause said the picture was posted on the teacher’s “world wall.”

“He told the students this is happening all over the world and you need to accept the fact that homosexuality is just part of our culture now,” Krause said.

The school district would not comment on why a teacher was discussing homosexuality in a ninth grade German class.

Utilitarianism: it's no longer optional!

EDIT: Here's the relevant press release from the Liberty Counsel. And a curiously phrased statement from the Fort Worth Independent School District.

The Case Against Gay Marriage (and Why Everyone Should Care)

The degenerates' lobby continues its remorseless march through the institutions of American society -- and if you believe certain alt-right bloggers, apparently we're all supposed to not care.

Such is the story from Ferdinand Bardamu, Advocatus Diaboli, Alte, and others. From Ferd:

No really, I don’t care, and neither should you. If you’re expending any serious amount of energy opposing gay marriage, there’s something seriously wrong with your head. Defending the integrity of marriage in America at this point is like defending the chastity of a crack whore. No-fault divorce and feminist family courts, among other things, have so debased marriage that letting gays join the club isn’t going to so much as leave a ripple in the pond. Marriage has been long dead, and all the people in the gay marriage debate are doing is playing tug-of-war with the corpse.

And from AD (a deeply unimpressive and unoriginal thinker whose close connection to Ferd and the alt-right hub that is IMF makes him a useful barometer of whatever horrible thing the alt-right is about to adopt or succumb to):

I have a question-

Why do some people oppose gay marriage?

Given the absolutely pathetic state of heterosexual marriage in developed countries, especially the USA, is it even possible to debase the “institution” of marriage any further? What part of this pathetic institution can you still desecrate?

Have you ever seen shows like Bridezilla? If you think that they are fiction, you have probably never overheard a group of women talking about their upcoming wedding. Here is the unpleasant truth-

‘Empowered’ women have debased heterosexual marriage beyond repair.

Two guys marrying each other might actually raise the state of marriage. In any case, the married life of two guys is likely to be less fucked up than its heterosexual equivalent.

Some commenters at IMF argue that we should focus our efforts on combatting financial fraud rather than wasting it on gay marriage.

First, I agree completely that financial fraud is a very important issue and should be first and foremost in the attentions of our political class, especially because it's a side-effect of our unsustainable and catastrophe-bound monetary system. But that's a condemnation of the left, for distracting us from the issue by harping on about peripheral ones, not a condemnation of the right for resisting them.

Financial fraud stems from the collapse of public morality of which "gay marriage" is part and parcel. Homosexual behavior, to the extent it is self-evidently contrary to natural law, is also part of that collapse. And all morality stands and falls together. There is no sense arguing that one has an obligation to respect justice while arguing that the foundation for that justice -- that is, morality, from which sexual morality also derives -- doesn't exist or is irrelevant, as many alt-right bloggers and readers do.

But they cannot do otherwise, because to do so would be to expose the rank disorder of their own lifestyles. Most of the "game" practitioners at IMF do to unsuspecting women what bankers do to unsuspecting borrowers: they take advantage of their ignorance and simple-mindedness to screw them (literally in the former sense, figuratively in the latter). Thus, their complaints about financial fraud and the injustice propagated by our feminism-mired legal system amount to so much utilitarian argument from self-interest: they have no sound moral basis from which to criticize either, after all, since it would entail criticism of themselves, as well.

To quickly get back on topic, it's worth asking ourselves what the purpose of marriage is. The left says that justice demands that gays be allowed to marry, but obviously that is only the case if it is unjust -- that is, contrary to the purpose of marriage -- that they are denied from marrying in the first place. If it "same-sex marriage" is obviously contrary to the essential purpose of marriage, then permitting it is unjust; and if it is not contrary, then forbidding it is unjust. Either way, justice demands some positive position on same-sex marriage: "I don't care" is simply not acceptable, and is in fact a position borne of thoughtless cowardice.

Marriage as both a social and a legal institution historically was understood to arise from natural law: that is, an understanding of the general normative behavior of things which derives not from convention but from nature itself. It's a simple observation to note that men and women's physical sexual configurations exist and are different from one another because some aspect of human nature (specifically, the need to propagate the species by procreation) demands it. Thus the simple reality of physical sex (that is, the male/female dichotomy) points toward some end: procreation.

Because procreation can naturally occur only in the context of the reality of the sexual dichotomy and because male/female conjugal relations are therefore the basis for the continuity of society and the species, a number of rights and obligations follow. First, because it is good for parents to care for their children (in the sense that nature demands that they do so), parents have both an obligation to care for their children and a right to do so against the claims of society; likewise, children have a right to be cared for, and by their own parents. Marriage law is simply a legal framework within which these rights and obligations are subject to society's impetus -- society, after all, has a vested interest in the care and disposition of children, since raising children is not only a matter of individual good but of the health of the community and the state, as well.

Clearly, then, "love" is not the purpose of marriage. We might say that it is a necessary condition for marriage to operate but not a sufficient one, else it would imply a right to incest that virtually no society has ever recognized. Moreover, there is no compelling reason why the state ought to legislate based on the whims of the human heart; if it were, in fact, the case that marriage law was simply about recognizing love and commitment, that would be a case for abolishing it entirely, not extending it to include others. Obviously, "commitment" is not the purpose of marriage, either, since commitment is not an intrinsically good end in itself. Parents, after all, are generally speaking committed to their children, and children likewise to their parents, but no one would term this relationship a "marriage" (even though it, too, clearly involves love). I'd argue, too, that to say that commitment is the purpose of marriage is rather a non sequitur, since commitment is, by nature, rather causally prior to marriage.

Nor is "consent" a foundation of marriage, except in the sense that it is necessary but not sufficient for it. For one thing, to say that "the purpose of marriage is to consent to be married" is rather profoundly retarded and a non sequitur. For another, to say that consent is a sufficient basis for marriage would mean (a) that there is no compelling reason for the state to limit marriage to two people (which would imply a right to polygamy that no advanced society has, to my knowledge, ever endorsed); (b) that there is likewise no reason to limit marriage to human beings (which would imply a right to bestiality* that, again, no advanced society has, to my knowledge, ever endorsed); and (c) that there is no reason to forbid people from, say, marrying inanimate objects for which they have fetishes (like the neurotic child-abuse victim who recently "married" the Eiffel Tower and apparently masturbates with a bit of fence post for which she's developed an attraction).

Rather, the purpose of marriage is intrinsically bound up with man's conjugal nature. It is impossible to separate it. Marriage is heterosexual sex (although not all heterosexual sex is marriage). Thus, "same-sex marriage" is an ontological non sequitur.

The usual objections to traditional marriage are easily dispatched by an understanding of natural law. Because natural law is concerned with the norms that arise from nature, marriage, too, is normative: that is, because the essence of man and woman is fertile, the essence of marriage is simply the union of a man and woman, even if individual couples may, by happenstance, be unable to have children. A  marriage in which, say, the woman has had a histerectomy and therefore cannot have children may not as perfectly instantiate the essence of marriage as a fertile couple,  but it is nevertheless still a marriage. By contrast, "same-sex marriage" does no such thing because a same-sex union is intrinsically infertile.

Of course, a gay  man can still (hypothetically) have children with a woman. But under the law, he is free to marry that woman if he chooses. The typical leftist response, that people said the same thing about laws against interracial marriage (i.e., "blacks can still marry other blacks") and that opposition to gay marriage is thereby analagous to irrational racial bigotry is, again, a non sequitur: race is irrelevant to the end of marriage; sex is not.

This is what conservatives mean when they say that gay marriage is an affront to the nature of marriage : by treating marriage as any ordinary contract, it reduces it from the status of an organic institution arising from human nature to the level of a manufacturer's warranty on an old air-conditioning unit.

What's most maddening about all this is that gays in no meaningful way had their rights restricted under a traditional marriage regime. As Reason points out (in a pro-gay marriage puff piece that proves decisively that mainstream libertarianism is really just left-wing libertinism), gays were already free to go to churches and exchange rings and vows and even go around for the rest of their lives saying they're "married" and absolutely no one could do anything to stop them. And, of course, if they truly wished to enjoy marriage in a manner consistent with their nature, they could foreswear their homosexuality and  marry someone of the opposite sex. Yet this, apparently, wasn't enough: they demanded not just the freedom to practice their degeneracy but the whole of society's endorsement of it, an endorsement to which they were in no way entitled by natural law or the common good. And by way of their bullying and the sinister judicial warfare of their leftist co-conspirators, they have finally succeeded in getting that endorsement at the expense of all reason, justice, and order.

Alte, a Catholic, comes closest to making sense here:

Yeah, I don’t care either. Notice I have not been reporting on it. It’s all irrelevant. Legal marriage is totally and permanently dead. Over. Done for. The RCC needs to stop defending it, and start boycotting it.

Take a stand on something, Mother Church.

If the church hadn't already completely surrendered in the cultural war, it'd have arrested this trend years ago -- for instance, by excommunicating all the pro-gay "marriage" Catholic politicians for scandalizing the public, and perhaps even absolving married Catholics of their moral obligation to obey the legal terms of their marital contract, which has been absurdly renegotiated without any respect to their own conditions. The wages of Vatican II is moral confusion and impotence.

If the right (even the alt-right) follows suit and lays down its arms because gay marriage is "irrelevant," they will forfeit preemptively every battle to come. If morality -- including the justice that the bankers' gross criminal behavior demands -- is all a matter of personal subjectivity and irrational value judgments (a concession automatically made by declaring one's uninterest in the sanctity of the marital institution), then there is no such thing as justice, and therefore no reason to care about its violation. Seriously, can you even think of any reason to care that is not somehow related to natural law? By giving up on this, you surrender all rights in perpetuity to complain that modern society is not organized to your liking. Not that most of the alt-right would ever do anything but complain, anyway.

What happens next? These few inches being grudgingly conceded, the relativist left will proceed to demand the next several miles. Within a decade, there will be a concerted movement to compel state recognition of polygamous relationships, probably spearheaded by some celebrity degenerate, most likely in the form of expanding "civil union laws" to allow multiple-person contracts. (Ultimately, people united under such laws will be folded into marriage law by Supreme Court fiat). To the extent legalized polygamy is opposed by the left at all, it will only be because of its continuing association with the Mormons, although that may not prove to be too strong a consideration since it would demand just as equally censure of some Muslims. Prohibitions against bestiality and certain forms of incest will probably be eased (don't believe me? At least one leftist paragon is already on board). No doubt the future will be one in which people are permitted to sign contracts in life to sell their corpses after death to necrophiliacs, or allowed to donate their bodies for that purpose in a manner similar to how they're currently permitted to donate their organs.

And why not? If you divorce "marriage" (indeed, the sexual act itself) from its procreative context, all manners of absurdities follow. There is nothing except personal distaste stopping one from rationalizing those absurdities as "good." And personal taste, as the devolution of attitudes toward homosexual behavior just these last ten years suggest, is subject to revision.

*Of course, the libertarian (who sees consent as the basis for all social interactions and cannot even conceive of a nonconensual arrangement) will respond that we forbid bestiality because the animal doesn't consent. But we do not get animals consent before we kill, cook, and eat them, or sheer their excess wool to make clothes, or test hygiene products on them. Animals are by nature subordinate to man, and thus in his interactions with them it is his consent alone that ought to matter. Even this, I think, would be outrageous: to claim that consent can legitimate just any interaction with an animal. Man has a duty to cultivate the capacities that are essential to his nature, and one of these capacities is compassion, which obviously requires that animals be treated, if not necessarily with the "respect" that would accrue to a human person, certainly with no more violence or cruelty than would be justified.

**The liberal will argue that this is a "slippery slope fallacy," betraying in the process his total ignorance of rhetorical principles. The slippery slope argument is not a fallacy in and of itself; it is fallacious only when it rises (or falls, rather), to the level of a non sequitur because no clear logical relationship is demonstrated between the present act and the forewarned future ones. I have clearly so demonstrated a relationship: if sex does not exist for the purpose of procreation, and if marriage does not exist to attach society's impetus to the intrinsically fertile heterosexual relationship, then there is literally no compelling reason whatsoever to impose any further limitations on what sexual behaviors may be tolerated.

The Lexicography of Leftism

I don't know why, but the way leftists write fascinates me. I've explored left-wing lexicography before, and I recall penning one post I can't seem to find now (perhaps I never actually published it) pondering if there's some kind of book that people are given upon their induction into the leftist... illuminati or whatever.

I don't mean merely the themes they tend to talk about, but the actual styles in which they write. There is just such a style, and it's qualitatively different from the way right-wingers write. I think it says a lot about the idea that attitudes are formed by personality traits, or rather that certain personality traits predispose people to be attracted to particular sets of attitudes. Accordingly, I was hardly surprised about Charles Johnson's remorseless shift to the left the last few years; he'd always written like a leftist, with the characteristic snark and sarcasm, the pained efforts to sound clever, the insufferable moral supremacy -- he was really just going home.

So I was naturally interested in the wrathful outpouring over at Jezebel in response to Roosh's creating a new meme blasting the vapidity and general nastiness (body, mind, and soul) of American women -- a meme that the ladies at Jezebel have, perhaps unwittingly, only reinforced. Emotionality strips people of their intellectual pretensions, I think; it boils them down to who they really are, how they really think. Their rage speaks to me.

First, their woeful misreading of the average IMF reader is pretty noteworthy. Ms. Ryan evidently thinks they're a crew of sexually frustrated self-styled "nice guys" who, in their bitterness, resort to rationalizations about the undesirability of American women. I'm sure that's true of at least some IMF readers, but they hardly seem to be a majority. Many, certainly, were "nice guys" once, a long time ago. Life experience changed that, as it often does -- not only the life experience of being rejected romantically for being a nerdy suck-up but also the experience of banging chicks in various orifices by virtue of being an asshole. I certainly don't think most any of them would call themselves "nice guys" anymore, much less are they bepimpled virginal basement-dwellers. I think of them more as the guys from Swingers (who hang out, eat pizza, and play SNES games for fun) than the guys from... you know, The Big Bang Theory or something, who have scheduled weekly Halo tournaments and actually attach in-group status to the outcome of those games. So although they may  be bitter, few of their other descriptors actually stick to the IMF readership; for the most part, they're simply bizarrely inaccurate and wholly oblivious to this fact.

I suppose I can't fault Ms. Ryan for not grasping the nuances of IMF readers' personality traits. She's clearly not a regular reader. People tend to fall back on reliable memes when they are unsure how to proceed; but it's important that this is the meme she chose. Assuming that everyone who doesn't like you must not like you because you're better than them is very telling, indeed. I'll leave it up to you to decide what, exactly, it says about them.

There is, of course, the obligatory reference to somebody's "pointless existence." People have been using that phrase so long now it kind of grates on my cornea just to see it in text. Pointless existence, sometimes rendered meaningless existence, and usually welded into a sentence containing some variant of the word justify. Ugh. For people generally so enthralled to the fashions of the day, you think they'd grab a thesaurus rather than trot out cliched crap. Why not glitz it up and write, I dunno, rationalize your purposeless state of being or something?

I count the appearance of some variant of "racist" five times and "misogynist" three times, both in the main post and in the comments section. I'm frankly surprised they didn't appear more frequently. Of course, nothing about the meme is racist. "American," after all, is a nationality, not a race -- at any rate the argument is that the culture of American femininity is defective (which belies the claim of misogyny, too). Nor is it racist or misogynist to claim that women of some other race (or nationality; the commenters refer to women of eastern European descent, but again, eastern European is not a race) are preferable to American women, as, again, the argument is that Asians and eastern Europeans exhibit more desirable cultural traits, not that they're some kind of racially pure übermenschen. At any rate, our friend Inigo said it best.

And finally, the sarcasm. It abounds. It's right there in the title and appears four or five times in the body of the (rather short) post itself. I often think there's a peculiar psychology to sarcasm. As a means of humor, it's wholly ineffective (I once used the term sarcasmosis to describe the act of sucking all the humor out of a situation by means of excessive sarcasm). It literally consists of nothing but saying back to someone what they just said in a slightly more nasally voice. Any babboon capable of mashing a keyboard with his balled-up fists could, given sufficient time, emulate sarcasm with a startling degree of accuracy. But Ferdinand Bardamu has already pointed out how unfunny and blindingly literal their memes are, and I don't think they're stupid enough not to realize it, which means their sarcasm serves some other purpose. I've often felt, although I have no evidence that this is the case, that sarcasm is a response to feelings of oppression and hopelessness. The sarcastic person feels ground down by the weight of the world, and resorts to petty verbal sniping at those who complain about woes that, in their mind, pale in comparison to their own. I suppose being in thrall to an ideology that harps endlessly about unjust power dynamics, the oppressive of social structures, the futility of nonrevolutionary movements, etc., would turn me into a bitter, black-hearted harridan, too.

Before anyone asks, no, I have no plans to examine the lexicography of the right. For one thing, being a (nominal) right-winger myself, I can't get the perspective on it necessary to write a good one. (To paraphrase Machiavelli, you see the mountain best from the bottom of the valley; you see the valley best from the top of the mountain). And second, I don't really read mainstream right-wing blogs. Frankly, they bore the hell out of me.