It’s impossible to choose any exact point when the State started destroying families. I’d say it’s been more of a slippery slope than anything else, so you can’t choose any point and say, “This is where it started going downhill.”
But one watershed moment was in 1943, when Americans started having taxes withheld from their paychecks. Before then, Americans paid on tax day. But when they started having money withheld from their checks…the effect was great for the State and bad for the citizens.
Income tax withholding raised revenues from $686 million in 1943 to $7.8 billion in 1944. This meant the State got richer and all the citizens got poorer. Withholding was supposed to be a temporary wartime measure, but that’s not what happened. When it comes to the State “temporary” not only means “permanent” but is also means
“ratcheted up every year.”
People thought the shortages and deprivations were caused by World War II. Some
were. But how many were caused by the government taking over eleven times as much money from citizens in 1944 as 1943?
Another watershed moment was in 1971 when Nixon went off of the gold standard, allowing the Federal Reserve Bank (which is not federal, has no reserves, and is not a bank) to merry inflate to its hearts content, thereby allowing the quick destruction of the dollar.
The result of these two devastating things (there were other causes, of course)? Wages stopped going up in 1973, and have been flat, and in many cases declining, ever since.
If the State at the minimum had not withheld taxes from citizens, and not gone off of the gold standard, allowing to Fed to run U.S over a cliff, I suspect the average salary today would be about $90,000 a year.
How did these things affect families? When you factor in the immense destructiveness
of radical left-wing feminism, oppressive taxation, Affirmative Action, and crushing economic regulations, what has happened now is that is takes both a husband and wife working to have even a middle-class existence. One with a few children.
Had the State stayed out of the economy, it would have been possible for a man and woman to both work part time and have a decent existence. Instead, these days, often both of them have to work more than full-time, which means giving their children to be raised by public schools. Very often this also means putting them in preschool so the parents can work.
Had both been able to work part time, they could spend much more time with their children and properly educate them, instead of having to scrub the dirt out of their brains that had been ground into them by the public schools.
It just astonishes me that some people still think the U.S. is a free country. Parents working more than full-time just to make ends meet, giving their children at several months old to be raised by strangers, then putting them in public schools from five to 17 (what does it take 12 years to learn anyway?) to have them taught things they don’t want them taught, having their lifeblood sucked out by the State and then being lied to by whackjob liberals that they are “undertaxed compared to Europe” (aka ‘nations of
eternal warfare’)…and this is the way things are supposed to be?
People have claimed that married women work to buy all the goodies the couple could
do without. That’s not true. These days, most of the time, if the wife quits working and they try to live on the husband’s salary, they end up living in a used mobile home. But a nice middle-class house? Get a time machine.
The U.S. is not longer at replacement rate. “Scholars,” puzzled, scratch their brains. Some do understand the destructive effect of the State on families and the economy, but not enough. How often do you see the truth in the mainstream media? Almost never.
None of these bad things can last. It never has in the past, it won’t now, and it won’t in the future. No one can predict when. But I’ll say this: it seems to be getting pretty close.
Monday, January 31, 2011
There is No Such Thing as Independence
Many years ago Leonard Read wrote a famous essay called “I, Pencil.” He pointed out no one knows how to make something as simple as a pencil. The rubber eraser, for example, comes from Indonesia. Then there were the ships to bring the rubber here. Who built the ships? Who mined the steel? Who refined the fuel? And on and on and on. It was so complicated that no one knew how many people it took to make one pencil.
Read didn’t come out and specifically write it, but there is no such thing as independence. No one is independent; everyone is dependent on everyone else. If someone tried to be completely independent he’d have to grow or hunt his own food, sew his own clothes, and everything else involved in surviving.
Yet even then they still couldn’t be independent. Who raised them? Who educated them? Who taught them to talk? They’re dependent on everyone else who came before them.
They’re also dependent on the animals they would hunt, on the earth to grow food, on the sun, on the air….and so on. Independence does not exist.
If anything does exist, it is a web of relationships. All of us are involved in an infinite web of dependent relationships, ones that cannot be completely analyzed because of their infinity.
In a sense, ‘I’ don’t even exist, not in the sense of a single unitary self. I have an infinity of selves based on each one’s relationships with someone else. A man can have a father self based on his relationships with his child, a husband self, a friend self, a work self…and so on. There is something in us, however, that makes us think we are one unified self. But we’re not.
One Western philosopher who did understand the interdependence of people was Spinoza. Antonio Damasio, in his Looking for Spinoza, interprets Spinoza thus: “…the biological reality of self-preservation leads to virtue because in our inalienable need to maintain ourselves we must, of necessity, help preserve other selves.”
This is, as Damasio noticed, the foundation of a generous ethical system, because it understands we are interdependent, all dependent on each other, all enmeshed in an infinite web of dependent relationships. Demasio notes we are literally “in a bind,” and not surprisingly, the word “religion” means “to bind together.”
This understanding that all are involved in an infinite web of dependent relationships leads to humility, in the true sense of the word: clearly understanding your limitations. When you see everything as a dependent web, you realize just how dependent you are on your garbage man, the plumber, the carpenter, the coal miner, the steel worker…
Any modern society could survive without doctors, but it could not survive without miners. So who, ultimately, is more important?
The opposite of true humility is hubris or what the Bible calls Pride: the belief you are better than everyone else. In other words, you ignore the fact you are a web of dependencies, you do things to destroy it, and doing so, destroy yourself.
That’s what hubris followed by nemesis is, or pride leading to destruction. It’s why in the West, prides is the worst of all sins, and in fact the mother of all others.
Or, as Russell Kirk observed, “The monstrous self is the source of all evil.” That is, the self that believes it is independent of others.
Read didn’t come out and specifically write it, but there is no such thing as independence. No one is independent; everyone is dependent on everyone else. If someone tried to be completely independent he’d have to grow or hunt his own food, sew his own clothes, and everything else involved in surviving.
Yet even then they still couldn’t be independent. Who raised them? Who educated them? Who taught them to talk? They’re dependent on everyone else who came before them.
They’re also dependent on the animals they would hunt, on the earth to grow food, on the sun, on the air….and so on. Independence does not exist.
If anything does exist, it is a web of relationships. All of us are involved in an infinite web of dependent relationships, ones that cannot be completely analyzed because of their infinity.
In a sense, ‘I’ don’t even exist, not in the sense of a single unitary self. I have an infinity of selves based on each one’s relationships with someone else. A man can have a father self based on his relationships with his child, a husband self, a friend self, a work self…and so on. There is something in us, however, that makes us think we are one unified self. But we’re not.
One Western philosopher who did understand the interdependence of people was Spinoza. Antonio Damasio, in his Looking for Spinoza, interprets Spinoza thus: “…the biological reality of self-preservation leads to virtue because in our inalienable need to maintain ourselves we must, of necessity, help preserve other selves.”
This is, as Damasio noticed, the foundation of a generous ethical system, because it understands we are interdependent, all dependent on each other, all enmeshed in an infinite web of dependent relationships. Demasio notes we are literally “in a bind,” and not surprisingly, the word “religion” means “to bind together.”
This understanding that all are involved in an infinite web of dependent relationships leads to humility, in the true sense of the word: clearly understanding your limitations. When you see everything as a dependent web, you realize just how dependent you are on your garbage man, the plumber, the carpenter, the coal miner, the steel worker…
Any modern society could survive without doctors, but it could not survive without miners. So who, ultimately, is more important?
The opposite of true humility is hubris or what the Bible calls Pride: the belief you are better than everyone else. In other words, you ignore the fact you are a web of dependencies, you do things to destroy it, and doing so, destroy yourself.
That’s what hubris followed by nemesis is, or pride leading to destruction. It’s why in the West, prides is the worst of all sins, and in fact the mother of all others.
Or, as Russell Kirk observed, “The monstrous self is the source of all evil.” That is, the self that believes it is independent of others.
Garbage Men are More Important then Doctors
If the United States had no doctors, the country would still survive. If it had no garbage men, it wouldn’t survive as the same country. So which is more important?
With no doctors whatsoever some people would live longer, since quite a few people die from prescription medication errors. Others would die sooner, from needing operations or from not getting treatment for accidents. But overall, what would happen to the death rate with no doctors? I don’t know, but I suspect it wouldn’t change all that much.
Now without garbage men, what would you do with your garbage? Put it in your car and sit in line to dump it in a garbage dump? Do you really want to do that?
When I was a kid we burned it in a fifty-gallon steel can. Everyone did. I have no memory of what we did with the ashes. Did we burn everything? Probably not. I’m sure we still had garbage men, but I was so little I just don’t remember.
Garbage men make life so much easier. You put your garbage in your garbage can, put it out front or in back, and it disappears! Then you bring the can back inside. There are even garbage bags to keep the can clean. If you think about it, it’s actually an impressive feat.
With no doctors whatsoever some people would live longer, since quite a few people die from prescription medication errors. Others would die sooner, from needing operations or from not getting treatment for accidents. But overall, what would happen to the death rate with no doctors? I don’t know, but I suspect it wouldn’t change all that much.
Now without garbage men, what would you do with your garbage? Put it in your car and sit in line to dump it in a garbage dump? Do you really want to do that?
When I was a kid we burned it in a fifty-gallon steel can. Everyone did. I have no memory of what we did with the ashes. Did we burn everything? Probably not. I’m sure we still had garbage men, but I was so little I just don’t remember.
Garbage men make life so much easier. You put your garbage in your garbage can, put it out front or in back, and it disappears! Then you bring the can back inside. There are even garbage bags to keep the can clean. If you think about it, it’s actually an impressive feat.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
The Coming Collapse of Sex Roles
There is a bit of a problem with sex roles these days, and I don’t think they can continue on the course they’re on.
My view is that feminism was not a response to oppression, but boredom. Men’s inventions had made life so much easier that the more intelligent women, many of them not being able to overcome the challenge of leisure, became bored and wanted to move into the traditionally male fields.
One of the problems is that they did not want to become coal miners or loggers or steel mill workers or garbage men. They didn’t want any hot, dangerous, dirty, sweaty jobs. They wanted to move into relatively easy, indoor, well-paying work.
Since they were now working full-time, they wanted men to share housework. This does seem fair, but what these women were saying is, “I want access to the more pleasant male role, but I want men to help with the less-pleasant female role.” But men changed and accepted this.
But at the same time, men were not allowed access to the more pleasant female role, such as staying home with the kids. Almost all women would be outraged if they made a very high salary and their husbands expected their wives to support them.
See what I’m saying? Women wanted access to the good part of being a male, but not the bad part. They wanted men to accept the unpleasant parts of the female role but not the pleasant parts. So where exactly did men benefit in all of this?
And at the same time, hallucinations about “patriarchy” and “male oppression” became the accepted reality. Men, who are responsible for civilization and technology, became the Bad Guys. Women, who as Camille Paglia so famously noted, would be unable to advance civilization beyond the level of grass huts, became the Good Guys.
Again, where exactly did men benefit from all of this?
Worse, Affirmative Action, which means “White Men Need Not Apply,” has enshrined quotas into law and prevented qualified men from being hired in the numbers they should be hired.
So what happened is women with advanced degrees and making good salaries looked around and found there was a shortage of men they thought were suitable. So, without husband, home and children, they became hostile and bitter – and I have seen many of them.
I have also seen many of these women making good salaries still expect men to ask them out. I’ve met women who in their entire lives never asked any man they were interested in out for a cup of coffee.
Again, they didn’t want to shoulder any of the more unpleasant aspects of the male role. They didn’t want to risk rejection, and still don’t. However, it’s still okay for the man to risk it.
I’ve met women who married the wrong guy (who asked them out), got divorced, got drunk one night, and called some guy they knew years ago, wondering if he was available. Then they found he was happily married, with children, many years ago. Who’s to blame for this – him, or her?
Years ago I drove a taxi and got to know quite a few hookers. It was enlightening the things I saw. I’d take these girls to their customers and wait for them. A noticeable number of the guys didn’t do anything but watch some videos with the girls. They were paying for their company on a lonely Friday night.
Where is “patriarchy” and “male oppression” in something like that?
I can’t see these unnatural sex roles continuing. They’ll have to change; I just don’t know when. But sooner or later, they’ll change - once the heartbreak gets bad enough.
My view is that feminism was not a response to oppression, but boredom. Men’s inventions had made life so much easier that the more intelligent women, many of them not being able to overcome the challenge of leisure, became bored and wanted to move into the traditionally male fields.
One of the problems is that they did not want to become coal miners or loggers or steel mill workers or garbage men. They didn’t want any hot, dangerous, dirty, sweaty jobs. They wanted to move into relatively easy, indoor, well-paying work.
Since they were now working full-time, they wanted men to share housework. This does seem fair, but what these women were saying is, “I want access to the more pleasant male role, but I want men to help with the less-pleasant female role.” But men changed and accepted this.
But at the same time, men were not allowed access to the more pleasant female role, such as staying home with the kids. Almost all women would be outraged if they made a very high salary and their husbands expected their wives to support them.
See what I’m saying? Women wanted access to the good part of being a male, but not the bad part. They wanted men to accept the unpleasant parts of the female role but not the pleasant parts. So where exactly did men benefit in all of this?
And at the same time, hallucinations about “patriarchy” and “male oppression” became the accepted reality. Men, who are responsible for civilization and technology, became the Bad Guys. Women, who as Camille Paglia so famously noted, would be unable to advance civilization beyond the level of grass huts, became the Good Guys.
Again, where exactly did men benefit from all of this?
Worse, Affirmative Action, which means “White Men Need Not Apply,” has enshrined quotas into law and prevented qualified men from being hired in the numbers they should be hired.
So what happened is women with advanced degrees and making good salaries looked around and found there was a shortage of men they thought were suitable. So, without husband, home and children, they became hostile and bitter – and I have seen many of them.
I have also seen many of these women making good salaries still expect men to ask them out. I’ve met women who in their entire lives never asked any man they were interested in out for a cup of coffee.
Again, they didn’t want to shoulder any of the more unpleasant aspects of the male role. They didn’t want to risk rejection, and still don’t. However, it’s still okay for the man to risk it.
I’ve met women who married the wrong guy (who asked them out), got divorced, got drunk one night, and called some guy they knew years ago, wondering if he was available. Then they found he was happily married, with children, many years ago. Who’s to blame for this – him, or her?
Years ago I drove a taxi and got to know quite a few hookers. It was enlightening the things I saw. I’d take these girls to their customers and wait for them. A noticeable number of the guys didn’t do anything but watch some videos with the girls. They were paying for their company on a lonely Friday night.
Where is “patriarchy” and “male oppression” in something like that?
I can’t see these unnatural sex roles continuing. They’ll have to change; I just don’t know when. But sooner or later, they’ll change - once the heartbreak gets bad enough.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Propaganda Works Because We Are Only Partly Self-Aware
Propaganda only works on humans because we have self-consciousness, i.e., self-awareness. Propaganda does not work at all on cats and dogs, because while they have consciousness, they have no self-awareness.
If people were totally aware of how propaganda works, it would not work on us at all.
As Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the acknowledged “Father of Spin” in the U.S. wrote, propaganda is based on three things:
1) Appeal to emotion but convince people you are appealing to logic.
2) Demonize the enemy.
3) Tell people it will be better, safer world once the enemy is vanquished.
As Paul McLean discovered, our brains are like an onion: at the bottom is the most primitive, the Reptilian Complex, with the emotional brain on top of that, followed by the cortex, or rational brain.
Unfortunately, all our perceptions are filtered through our emotional brain before they engage the thinking brain. We are not a particularly rational species, although we rationalize that we are (if people were more rational, they would have some understanding of logical fallacies and apply them).
Our emotion-drive, not-so-rational behavior is why it’s easy for propagandists to convince people they are being rational when they are not.
One of the easiest ways to make people irrational is to tell them they are under attack by people who wish to destroy them, i.e., they are insane homicidal maniacs who will not stop under they have conquered the world.
Convincing people they are under attack by insane homicidal maniacs makes it easy to demonize – dehumanize – the enemy. Then, of course, once these homicidal maniacs are eliminated, it will be a better, safer world.
The first problem is that humans are irrational, but can be easily convinced they aren’t.
The second problem is dehumanizing people. This is related to our inborn narcissism, meaning we split things into all good or all bad. Which essentially means “human” or “non-human.” We’re human; our “enemies” are not, not exactly, because they’re slavering insane monstrous homicidal maniacs bent on death and destruction and conquering the world.
The third problem is the belief we can create a better, perhaps nearly perfect world by killing enough people. Theologian Walter Wink called this “the Myth of Redemptive Violence,” the belief that violence cleanses and redeems the world.
There are ways to avoid falling for propaganda. The first one is to understand we are inherently irrational. I believe this is why there exists that old saying, when you get mad, count to ten before you say anything.
The second way is to refuse to believe there are human demons in the world. Everyone is a mixture of good and bad, positive and negative. What I believe is the biggest red flag of all is for “the enemy” to be portrayed as an evil maniac who, like Pinky of Pinky and the Brain, wants to conquer the world.
The Nazis were supposed to conquer the world, yet could not even conquer Russia. They also ran into a buzz saw in a tiny country like Serbia.
After WWII the Communist Soviet Union was, yes, supposed to conquer the world. Then Japan was supposed to conquer the world economically. Then after 9-11 Islam was supposed to conquer the world. Now it’s China that’s supposed to conquer the world.
I wonder who’s next.
Although most people don’t know it, ignore it, or agree with it, England came the closest to conquering the world. After all, there used to exist the saying, the sun never set on the British Empire.
These days, the closest there is to a country that has conquered the world is the United States of America, since we have military bases in three-quarters of the world’s countries.
Except for Britain and the United States (because they are supposed to be well-intentioned, indeed noble) the other countries and religions are supposed to be composed of maniacs who exist only to conquer. It’s nonsense, but it’s dangerous nonsense, and it works.
Propaganda is also based on the archetype of the horror story: Good attacked by Evil, Order attacked by Chaos. It’s the story of the village attacked by Frankenstein’s monster, so the villagers chase him into the windmill and burn it down.
All wars are based on the archetype of the horror story. All are irrational, based on demonizing “the enemy,” and based on extirpating them.
If people always kept in their awareness they are prone to being irrational, that no one is evil and wants to conquer the world, and that a perfect world cannot be created, especially through violence, then propaganda would never work on us.
If people were totally aware of how propaganda works, it would not work on us at all.
As Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the acknowledged “Father of Spin” in the U.S. wrote, propaganda is based on three things:
1) Appeal to emotion but convince people you are appealing to logic.
2) Demonize the enemy.
3) Tell people it will be better, safer world once the enemy is vanquished.
As Paul McLean discovered, our brains are like an onion: at the bottom is the most primitive, the Reptilian Complex, with the emotional brain on top of that, followed by the cortex, or rational brain.
Unfortunately, all our perceptions are filtered through our emotional brain before they engage the thinking brain. We are not a particularly rational species, although we rationalize that we are (if people were more rational, they would have some understanding of logical fallacies and apply them).
Our emotion-drive, not-so-rational behavior is why it’s easy for propagandists to convince people they are being rational when they are not.
One of the easiest ways to make people irrational is to tell them they are under attack by people who wish to destroy them, i.e., they are insane homicidal maniacs who will not stop under they have conquered the world.
Convincing people they are under attack by insane homicidal maniacs makes it easy to demonize – dehumanize – the enemy. Then, of course, once these homicidal maniacs are eliminated, it will be a better, safer world.
The first problem is that humans are irrational, but can be easily convinced they aren’t.
The second problem is dehumanizing people. This is related to our inborn narcissism, meaning we split things into all good or all bad. Which essentially means “human” or “non-human.” We’re human; our “enemies” are not, not exactly, because they’re slavering insane monstrous homicidal maniacs bent on death and destruction and conquering the world.
The third problem is the belief we can create a better, perhaps nearly perfect world by killing enough people. Theologian Walter Wink called this “the Myth of Redemptive Violence,” the belief that violence cleanses and redeems the world.
There are ways to avoid falling for propaganda. The first one is to understand we are inherently irrational. I believe this is why there exists that old saying, when you get mad, count to ten before you say anything.
The second way is to refuse to believe there are human demons in the world. Everyone is a mixture of good and bad, positive and negative. What I believe is the biggest red flag of all is for “the enemy” to be portrayed as an evil maniac who, like Pinky of Pinky and the Brain, wants to conquer the world.
The Nazis were supposed to conquer the world, yet could not even conquer Russia. They also ran into a buzz saw in a tiny country like Serbia.
After WWII the Communist Soviet Union was, yes, supposed to conquer the world. Then Japan was supposed to conquer the world economically. Then after 9-11 Islam was supposed to conquer the world. Now it’s China that’s supposed to conquer the world.
I wonder who’s next.
Although most people don’t know it, ignore it, or agree with it, England came the closest to conquering the world. After all, there used to exist the saying, the sun never set on the British Empire.
These days, the closest there is to a country that has conquered the world is the United States of America, since we have military bases in three-quarters of the world’s countries.
Except for Britain and the United States (because they are supposed to be well-intentioned, indeed noble) the other countries and religions are supposed to be composed of maniacs who exist only to conquer. It’s nonsense, but it’s dangerous nonsense, and it works.
Propaganda is also based on the archetype of the horror story: Good attacked by Evil, Order attacked by Chaos. It’s the story of the village attacked by Frankenstein’s monster, so the villagers chase him into the windmill and burn it down.
All wars are based on the archetype of the horror story. All are irrational, based on demonizing “the enemy,” and based on extirpating them.
If people always kept in their awareness they are prone to being irrational, that no one is evil and wants to conquer the world, and that a perfect world cannot be created, especially through violence, then propaganda would never work on us.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Education Majors Have the Lowest IQs of all College Majors
Well, except for perhaps a degree like P.E. or anything else an athlete gets, which is why the word “dumbjock” is one word. But there are so few of them they don’t impact society, and everyone knows they’re given their degrees, so they’re not taken seriously.
Education majors are a different story. I graduated from the largest producers of Education majors in a very large state. I won’t name it.
I met a lot of Education majors. None of them had any brains to speak of, except for a male friend of mine, who went on to get an M.S. in Economics.
He was the only guy I met who was an Education major. All the rest were women, and all of them were dumb. Education majors have the lowest IQs and lowest SAT/ACT scores of all majors in college. Philosophy majors have the highest, but try to get a job with a degree in Philosophy.
I did know one guy with a degree in Philosophy who managed a carwash. He redesigned them to make them more efficient, so when the company built a new one, they followed his design. But he still managed a carwash.
I was in fact more than a little disturbed at the stupidity of Education majors. I’m going to repeat: I never met a smart one, and I only met one male, who is still one of my friends.
When I got out of college I met quite a few teachers and principals. Same thing: all women, all stupid. Not stupid because they were women, but stupid because they were Education majors. And now they were principals? Oh my God.
Education degrees are worthless. They shouldn’t even be degrees. It takes four years of classes to be a teacher? Please. I’m not that stupid to believe that. After all, I have a degree, too. And mine’s worthless.
I would never let my kids go to a public school. What the heck does it take 12 years to learn anyway? I could read and do arithmetic in the first grade. I tell people I never learned a thing beyond the fourth grade, and I didn’t, either.
I was so bored in high school I did little more than daydream, and on weekends I partied, drank and got high. I was one of the wild boys, as least compared to the drones in school.
I would live in a double-wide trailer in a rural area and homeschool my kids before I let the Black Thing known as public schools get hold of them. I read an article a few years ago about an eccentric man who lived with his daughter in a tent in a park. He taught her from a Bible and a set of encyclopedias. When the authorities caught them I believe she had just turned 12.
She was described as “unusually intelligent and knowledgeable.” Do tell. Imagine that. And not one day in public schools.
The best way to teach any kid is by being a mentor. The mentor sits at one end of a log and the student at the other. If the student messes up the teacher just bounces him in the air. I’m just kidding about that, but I’m not kidding about sitting on the log.
Now that I think about it, I never dated any Education major. They bored me. Stupid people always do.
And now that I think about it, not once did I see a library in any Education major’s room. For that matter, not even one book that wasn’t a textbook.
Like I said, a worthless degree. And as teachers, worthless, too.
Education majors are a different story. I graduated from the largest producers of Education majors in a very large state. I won’t name it.
I met a lot of Education majors. None of them had any brains to speak of, except for a male friend of mine, who went on to get an M.S. in Economics.
He was the only guy I met who was an Education major. All the rest were women, and all of them were dumb. Education majors have the lowest IQs and lowest SAT/ACT scores of all majors in college. Philosophy majors have the highest, but try to get a job with a degree in Philosophy.
I did know one guy with a degree in Philosophy who managed a carwash. He redesigned them to make them more efficient, so when the company built a new one, they followed his design. But he still managed a carwash.
I was in fact more than a little disturbed at the stupidity of Education majors. I’m going to repeat: I never met a smart one, and I only met one male, who is still one of my friends.
When I got out of college I met quite a few teachers and principals. Same thing: all women, all stupid. Not stupid because they were women, but stupid because they were Education majors. And now they were principals? Oh my God.
Education degrees are worthless. They shouldn’t even be degrees. It takes four years of classes to be a teacher? Please. I’m not that stupid to believe that. After all, I have a degree, too. And mine’s worthless.
I would never let my kids go to a public school. What the heck does it take 12 years to learn anyway? I could read and do arithmetic in the first grade. I tell people I never learned a thing beyond the fourth grade, and I didn’t, either.
I was so bored in high school I did little more than daydream, and on weekends I partied, drank and got high. I was one of the wild boys, as least compared to the drones in school.
I would live in a double-wide trailer in a rural area and homeschool my kids before I let the Black Thing known as public schools get hold of them. I read an article a few years ago about an eccentric man who lived with his daughter in a tent in a park. He taught her from a Bible and a set of encyclopedias. When the authorities caught them I believe she had just turned 12.
She was described as “unusually intelligent and knowledgeable.” Do tell. Imagine that. And not one day in public schools.
The best way to teach any kid is by being a mentor. The mentor sits at one end of a log and the student at the other. If the student messes up the teacher just bounces him in the air. I’m just kidding about that, but I’m not kidding about sitting on the log.
Now that I think about it, I never dated any Education major. They bored me. Stupid people always do.
And now that I think about it, not once did I see a library in any Education major’s room. For that matter, not even one book that wasn’t a textbook.
Like I said, a worthless degree. And as teachers, worthless, too.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
“Men are Responsible for All the Problems in the World”
Within six months I’ve had two women tell me that “men are responsible for all the problems in the world.” I just smiled. I don’t argue with idiots.
The first one was a nurse making $18 to $21 an hour, who had an easy indoor job doing little more than passing out medicine. The second one worked out of her apartment and made over $50,000 a year.
They had spacious apartments, big-screen TVs, cars, central heating and air-conditioning, hospitals, dentists, ready-made food and clothes, and indoor plumbing. All of these achievements were the creations of men. Specifically, white men.
Men, in fact, are responsible for nearly all the good in the world. Again, specifically white men. If blacks had never existed, the world would have never noticed. Besides sports and music – and they have degraded both – what they have done? Essentially nothing besides crime.
Asians are better, but they did not discover political and economic liberty, or achieve but a fraction of the discoveries and inventions of Europeans. Ditto for Arabs, Asian Indians, and anyone from south of the U.S. border.
As Charles Murray pointed out in “Human Accomplishment” (and it has been noticed long before him) European men and their descendents in the world have discovered/created 97% of everything in the past several hundred years, The only race that has shown itself indispensible is whites. Again, specifically white men.
As Camille Paglia so famously noticed, if civilization had been left in the hands of women, we’d still be living in grass huts. Or, to quote the humorist P.J. O’Rourke, without men civilization would last until the next oil change.
All races have done bad things, including whites. The difference is that whites have created almost all the good in the world, too. If whites – and again specifically white men – had never existed, blacks would still be in 20,000 BC. Permanently. Arabs? They’d still be living in tents and riding camels and wouldn’t have a clue about all the oil they’re sitting on. The rest of the world wouldn’t be much better.
Proof of the superiority of Western civilization is the fact half the world wants to move here. You don’t see Westerners pouring into the Third World to experience all the wonders of it.
When people denigrate those who they believe have all the power – even if they don’t – it’s generally based on envy. The attack on white men (aka Dead White Males) is due to envy from who those have only achieved a fraction of what the West has.
As for these women, both were unmarried and without children, and with the hostile attitudes they had, the chances of husband, home and children were slim indeed. What man in his right mind would get involved with any woman, when nearly the first words of their mouths were that men were responsible for what’s wrong in the world?
Even in their case, I think their comments were due to envy. “I have been denied husband, home and children…it’s your fault…I hate you.” Such as the poisoned fruits of left-wing feminism: women all good, men all bad.
My experience has been that when women get together they do little more than talk about their relationships and abuse men. Men, contrary to women’s delusions, are loathe to talk behind women’s backs and say bad things about them. When you compare the percentage of bad things each sex says about the other, women do 95% if it, if not more.
I find the whole thing bizarre. Men created civilization and technology (imagine life without dentistry) and apparently because of the influence of leftism – and specifically left-wing feminism – women have no gratitude for the gifts they’re received and instead spurn and abuse men and make up fantasies about “patriarchy.”. Just astonishing.
None of this will last, of course.
The first one was a nurse making $18 to $21 an hour, who had an easy indoor job doing little more than passing out medicine. The second one worked out of her apartment and made over $50,000 a year.
They had spacious apartments, big-screen TVs, cars, central heating and air-conditioning, hospitals, dentists, ready-made food and clothes, and indoor plumbing. All of these achievements were the creations of men. Specifically, white men.
Men, in fact, are responsible for nearly all the good in the world. Again, specifically white men. If blacks had never existed, the world would have never noticed. Besides sports and music – and they have degraded both – what they have done? Essentially nothing besides crime.
Asians are better, but they did not discover political and economic liberty, or achieve but a fraction of the discoveries and inventions of Europeans. Ditto for Arabs, Asian Indians, and anyone from south of the U.S. border.
As Charles Murray pointed out in “Human Accomplishment” (and it has been noticed long before him) European men and their descendents in the world have discovered/created 97% of everything in the past several hundred years, The only race that has shown itself indispensible is whites. Again, specifically white men.
As Camille Paglia so famously noticed, if civilization had been left in the hands of women, we’d still be living in grass huts. Or, to quote the humorist P.J. O’Rourke, without men civilization would last until the next oil change.
All races have done bad things, including whites. The difference is that whites have created almost all the good in the world, too. If whites – and again specifically white men – had never existed, blacks would still be in 20,000 BC. Permanently. Arabs? They’d still be living in tents and riding camels and wouldn’t have a clue about all the oil they’re sitting on. The rest of the world wouldn’t be much better.
Proof of the superiority of Western civilization is the fact half the world wants to move here. You don’t see Westerners pouring into the Third World to experience all the wonders of it.
When people denigrate those who they believe have all the power – even if they don’t – it’s generally based on envy. The attack on white men (aka Dead White Males) is due to envy from who those have only achieved a fraction of what the West has.
As for these women, both were unmarried and without children, and with the hostile attitudes they had, the chances of husband, home and children were slim indeed. What man in his right mind would get involved with any woman, when nearly the first words of their mouths were that men were responsible for what’s wrong in the world?
Even in their case, I think their comments were due to envy. “I have been denied husband, home and children…it’s your fault…I hate you.” Such as the poisoned fruits of left-wing feminism: women all good, men all bad.
My experience has been that when women get together they do little more than talk about their relationships and abuse men. Men, contrary to women’s delusions, are loathe to talk behind women’s backs and say bad things about them. When you compare the percentage of bad things each sex says about the other, women do 95% if it, if not more.
I find the whole thing bizarre. Men created civilization and technology (imagine life without dentistry) and apparently because of the influence of leftism – and specifically left-wing feminism – women have no gratitude for the gifts they’re received and instead spurn and abuse men and make up fantasies about “patriarchy.”. Just astonishing.
None of this will last, of course.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Sin City: the Hero as Self-Sacrifice
“Show me a hero and I’ll show you a tragedy” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
I’ve heard Sin City called “brutal and breathless.” It is, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s about how a hero is, ultimately, someone who gives up his life to save someone else’s. That’s what the characters of Mickey Rourke and Bruce Willis did. They were heroes, and their lives were tragedies.
Specifically, they gave up their lives to save women. Rourke’s character said Goldie (whom he said “smelled like angels”) gave him something he “never knew existed,” and when she was murdered he hunted down and tortured and killed everyone involved in her death. Ultimately it led to his death, but he clearly thought it was worth it.
As for Willis, he gives up his life twice and loses everything, to protect a young woman from the Yellow Bastard, a psychopathic torturer and murderer of prepubescent girls.
For all the brutality and blood and flying body parts, this movie is actually conservative, if you define “conservative” as trying to keep the chaos at bay (a leftist is someone who wants to let the chaos in, although they’re too stupid to know it).
The archetype of the horror story is Good attacked by Evil, Order attacked by Chaos. A hero is someone who tries to keep evil and chaos at bay and restore order. That’s what Willis and Rourke did, and for that matter, Clive Owens’ character.
In order to be a hero, you not only have to risk your life, but sometimes actually lose it. What makes a real hero is what they choose to defend.
Now we come to the women. Everyone protected in the film is a woman protected by a man, except for those men who kill women. Why is this so? Is there an instinct in men to protect women? Apparently so.
There is also apparently an instinct to kill, only that instinct is directed towards both men and women, and even children, as in the case of the Yellow Bastard.
Men fix, create, discover, protect, save. The easiest way to activate a man’s instinct to protect is to put in danger the lives of children and women. The easiest way to get a man to give up his life is for him to try to save the lives of children and women.
Cultures warp that instinct by telling soldiers – who are overwhelmingly young men – that they are heroes when they risk and lose their lives to protect society from Evil. This of course means the use of propaganda to convince them those defined as “evil” truly are insane evil homicidal maniacs, even if they’re not.
Almost always they’re not protecting society but the economic interests of the elites (I use that term neutrally) who’ve captured the government and become even richer through war. War, as Randolph Bourne commented, is the health of the State.
Because of the influence of leftist feminism (and almost all feminism is leftist) and indeed leftism in general, men have for many years been portrayed as the Yellow Bastard and the other cruel and heartless men in the film. But men who discover, create, fix, save, protect? They’re invisible.
The curious inversion in Sin City is that the heroes are outsiders and the evil are the soldiers, only they’re the police. Even though Willis is a policeman, he is a rarity – an honest one, which makes him an outsider. All the rest of the police are corrupt murderers protecting corrupt murdering politicians and religious leaders.
The movie, and the Frank Miller graphic novels on which it is based, is a warning that society, government and religion are now corrupt. The heroes are the outsiders trying to keep the corruption and perversion of those things at bay.
Ezra Pound called the artist “the antennae of the human race.” He was right. Art imitates life, and Sin City, although it uses an exceedingly broad brush, certainly does that.
I’ve heard Sin City called “brutal and breathless.” It is, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s about how a hero is, ultimately, someone who gives up his life to save someone else’s. That’s what the characters of Mickey Rourke and Bruce Willis did. They were heroes, and their lives were tragedies.
Specifically, they gave up their lives to save women. Rourke’s character said Goldie (whom he said “smelled like angels”) gave him something he “never knew existed,” and when she was murdered he hunted down and tortured and killed everyone involved in her death. Ultimately it led to his death, but he clearly thought it was worth it.
As for Willis, he gives up his life twice and loses everything, to protect a young woman from the Yellow Bastard, a psychopathic torturer and murderer of prepubescent girls.
For all the brutality and blood and flying body parts, this movie is actually conservative, if you define “conservative” as trying to keep the chaos at bay (a leftist is someone who wants to let the chaos in, although they’re too stupid to know it).
The archetype of the horror story is Good attacked by Evil, Order attacked by Chaos. A hero is someone who tries to keep evil and chaos at bay and restore order. That’s what Willis and Rourke did, and for that matter, Clive Owens’ character.
In order to be a hero, you not only have to risk your life, but sometimes actually lose it. What makes a real hero is what they choose to defend.
Now we come to the women. Everyone protected in the film is a woman protected by a man, except for those men who kill women. Why is this so? Is there an instinct in men to protect women? Apparently so.
There is also apparently an instinct to kill, only that instinct is directed towards both men and women, and even children, as in the case of the Yellow Bastard.
Men fix, create, discover, protect, save. The easiest way to activate a man’s instinct to protect is to put in danger the lives of children and women. The easiest way to get a man to give up his life is for him to try to save the lives of children and women.
Cultures warp that instinct by telling soldiers – who are overwhelmingly young men – that they are heroes when they risk and lose their lives to protect society from Evil. This of course means the use of propaganda to convince them those defined as “evil” truly are insane evil homicidal maniacs, even if they’re not.
Almost always they’re not protecting society but the economic interests of the elites (I use that term neutrally) who’ve captured the government and become even richer through war. War, as Randolph Bourne commented, is the health of the State.
Because of the influence of leftist feminism (and almost all feminism is leftist) and indeed leftism in general, men have for many years been portrayed as the Yellow Bastard and the other cruel and heartless men in the film. But men who discover, create, fix, save, protect? They’re invisible.
The curious inversion in Sin City is that the heroes are outsiders and the evil are the soldiers, only they’re the police. Even though Willis is a policeman, he is a rarity – an honest one, which makes him an outsider. All the rest of the police are corrupt murderers protecting corrupt murdering politicians and religious leaders.
The movie, and the Frank Miller graphic novels on which it is based, is a warning that society, government and religion are now corrupt. The heroes are the outsiders trying to keep the corruption and perversion of those things at bay.
Ezra Pound called the artist “the antennae of the human race.” He was right. Art imitates life, and Sin City, although it uses an exceedingly broad brush, certainly does that.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
The Crushing Economic Burden of Family and Children
My grandfather only completed eighth grade and spent his life installing and finishing wooden-strip floors. His wife took in sewing part-time. They had nine kids and lived a middle-class existence.
My father did a little better educationally. He completed eighth grade but not high school, although he later got a GED. My mother also got a GED. My father was a general contractor and my mother was the night admitting clerk in the ER. We had a comfortable middle-class existence.
Wages stopped going up in 1973 and have been flat ever since. Worse, one percent of the population owns 40% of the wealth. These two things were caused 100% by the government interfering in the economy.
It used to be one man could support a family – his wife and a few kids – by himself, and all could live a middle-class existence. These days, both parents have to work, and the children have to be given to a day-care center when they’re barely beyond being babies.
There are a lot of problems with day-care centers. Parents expect the workers to be cheap and perfect. That doesn’t happen, as in a case in Chicago in which a young woman slammed a boy, less than two, onto the ground. He picked up his favorite blanket, crawled into a chair, and died.
Giving children to be raised by strangers is one of the basic tenets of Communism. Specifically, they are to be raised by the State. The destruction of the family and both parents working is also one of the basic planks of Communism.
When you give your kids to be raised by someone else, you no longer have any control over their education. They can be indoctrinated with the exact opposite of what you want them taught.
It’s got to the point the only way you can have control over how you want your kids raised is to home school them. And if you don’t want them in a daycare at less than two years old, and instead want one parent home with them, the only way to do that is to simplify your standard of living.
This simplifying essentially means living in a cheap trailer without cable or a big-screen TV. Living in a nice middle-class house on the income of one spouse and working 40 hours a week? Get a time machine.
A lot of families have opted for simplifying their lives, rather than give their children to be raised by strangers from the age to 1 ½ to 17. With college, try to 21, at the minimum.
If the government hadn’t so severely damaged their economy by interfering in it, I wouldn’t be surprised if the average salary was $70,000 a year.
Because of this crushing burden, families are no longer having children. The U.S. is no longer at replacement level – witness my grandparents easily affording nine children and my parents able to have only two. And now, parents aren’t having two children – they’re having one. Such is the crushing, oppressive burden of the Black Thing that our government has become.
My father did a little better educationally. He completed eighth grade but not high school, although he later got a GED. My mother also got a GED. My father was a general contractor and my mother was the night admitting clerk in the ER. We had a comfortable middle-class existence.
Wages stopped going up in 1973 and have been flat ever since. Worse, one percent of the population owns 40% of the wealth. These two things were caused 100% by the government interfering in the economy.
It used to be one man could support a family – his wife and a few kids – by himself, and all could live a middle-class existence. These days, both parents have to work, and the children have to be given to a day-care center when they’re barely beyond being babies.
There are a lot of problems with day-care centers. Parents expect the workers to be cheap and perfect. That doesn’t happen, as in a case in Chicago in which a young woman slammed a boy, less than two, onto the ground. He picked up his favorite blanket, crawled into a chair, and died.
Giving children to be raised by strangers is one of the basic tenets of Communism. Specifically, they are to be raised by the State. The destruction of the family and both parents working is also one of the basic planks of Communism.
When you give your kids to be raised by someone else, you no longer have any control over their education. They can be indoctrinated with the exact opposite of what you want them taught.
It’s got to the point the only way you can have control over how you want your kids raised is to home school them. And if you don’t want them in a daycare at less than two years old, and instead want one parent home with them, the only way to do that is to simplify your standard of living.
This simplifying essentially means living in a cheap trailer without cable or a big-screen TV. Living in a nice middle-class house on the income of one spouse and working 40 hours a week? Get a time machine.
A lot of families have opted for simplifying their lives, rather than give their children to be raised by strangers from the age to 1 ½ to 17. With college, try to 21, at the minimum.
If the government hadn’t so severely damaged their economy by interfering in it, I wouldn’t be surprised if the average salary was $70,000 a year.
Because of this crushing burden, families are no longer having children. The U.S. is no longer at replacement level – witness my grandparents easily affording nine children and my parents able to have only two. And now, parents aren’t having two children – they’re having one. Such is the crushing, oppressive burden of the Black Thing that our government has become.
White Men Need Not Apply
Multiply this by a few million times.
One of my friends has an undergraduate degree in Education (and was a teacher), then got a M.S. in Economics (and taught as a graduate assistant), so he applied for a position at a local community college. He was convinced he would get the job since he was more than qualified for it.
He didn’t get it. Instead, it was given to a woman. I told him the reason he did not get the job was because of Affirmative Action, which means “White Men Need Not Apply.”
When he sat in on this woman’s class, he was shocked to see that she made mistakes on the blackboard. “She didn’t really understand the material,” he told me. And she had (read: was given) an M.S. in Economics.
When he investigated, he found she was a newly-minted M.S., with no teaching experience whatsoever. The job should have been his, but he realized he was passed over because he was a white male – even though the woman was unqualified for her position.
The problems continued. He moved out of state and finally got a job at a community college teaching economics. The position was part-time, with no benefits. He figured sooner or later he’d be offered a full-time position.
After seven years he was never offered one, even though his student evaluations were always very good. He again ran across another unqualified woman who had a full-time position. “She couldn’t figure out how to do the math on the blackboard,” he told me.
Bizarrely, there was an African teaching at this college, which was in the Southwest. Students would go into my friend’s office and ask if he was teaching a certain class next semester, because they wanted to avoid the African, who, they told him, was a terrible teacher.
When I asked my friend if this African was incompetent, he said, “Yes.” Apparently this buffoon’s idea of teaching was to tell the students to read the entire micro- or macro-economics textbook (Intro to Micro/Macro are the beginning economics classes).
After seven years he just gave up, realizing he was never going to get a full-time position anywhere. Fortunately he inherited enough money to not exactly retire, but he did buy for cash a three-bedroom condo in the foothills of the local mountains. These days he works part-time at a local bowling alley as a mechanic.
“I worked my butt off,” he told me, “and what did I get?”
As he was moving out of his apartment into his condo, he met a man from California moving into his complex. He said he had taught economics for eleven years in California and was never offered a full-time position. Finally he left the state.
One of the main problems with Affirmative Action is that it promotes the unqualified and keeps the qualified under-employed or unemployed. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but how things are supposed to be and how they turn are usually not the same thing – especially when the government gets involved..
Another problem with AA is the contempt that men end up feeling towards unqualified women (or unqualified anyone). This contempt is intensified when men have to carry the burden created by the unqualified who have been promoted beyond their level of competence.
What I have found is these men are now moving into being self-employed. Who wants to work for anyone when you are not being given the raises and promotions you deserve, and instead have to work for the inept, and worse, do their work for them?
In the long run this abuse of men (and it is abuse) will only damage society. Men created both civilization and technology. Specifically, white men created them As Camille Paglia commented, if civilization had been left in the hands of women, we’d still be living in grass huts.
Civilization is already going backwards, not technologically but morally. This is what invariably what happens when the government exceeds its proper bounds – as it has done in the economy, and the relationships between men and women.
One of my friends has an undergraduate degree in Education (and was a teacher), then got a M.S. in Economics (and taught as a graduate assistant), so he applied for a position at a local community college. He was convinced he would get the job since he was more than qualified for it.
He didn’t get it. Instead, it was given to a woman. I told him the reason he did not get the job was because of Affirmative Action, which means “White Men Need Not Apply.”
When he sat in on this woman’s class, he was shocked to see that she made mistakes on the blackboard. “She didn’t really understand the material,” he told me. And she had (read: was given) an M.S. in Economics.
When he investigated, he found she was a newly-minted M.S., with no teaching experience whatsoever. The job should have been his, but he realized he was passed over because he was a white male – even though the woman was unqualified for her position.
The problems continued. He moved out of state and finally got a job at a community college teaching economics. The position was part-time, with no benefits. He figured sooner or later he’d be offered a full-time position.
After seven years he was never offered one, even though his student evaluations were always very good. He again ran across another unqualified woman who had a full-time position. “She couldn’t figure out how to do the math on the blackboard,” he told me.
Bizarrely, there was an African teaching at this college, which was in the Southwest. Students would go into my friend’s office and ask if he was teaching a certain class next semester, because they wanted to avoid the African, who, they told him, was a terrible teacher.
When I asked my friend if this African was incompetent, he said, “Yes.” Apparently this buffoon’s idea of teaching was to tell the students to read the entire micro- or macro-economics textbook (Intro to Micro/Macro are the beginning economics classes).
After seven years he just gave up, realizing he was never going to get a full-time position anywhere. Fortunately he inherited enough money to not exactly retire, but he did buy for cash a three-bedroom condo in the foothills of the local mountains. These days he works part-time at a local bowling alley as a mechanic.
“I worked my butt off,” he told me, “and what did I get?”
As he was moving out of his apartment into his condo, he met a man from California moving into his complex. He said he had taught economics for eleven years in California and was never offered a full-time position. Finally he left the state.
One of the main problems with Affirmative Action is that it promotes the unqualified and keeps the qualified under-employed or unemployed. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but how things are supposed to be and how they turn are usually not the same thing – especially when the government gets involved..
Another problem with AA is the contempt that men end up feeling towards unqualified women (or unqualified anyone). This contempt is intensified when men have to carry the burden created by the unqualified who have been promoted beyond their level of competence.
What I have found is these men are now moving into being self-employed. Who wants to work for anyone when you are not being given the raises and promotions you deserve, and instead have to work for the inept, and worse, do their work for them?
In the long run this abuse of men (and it is abuse) will only damage society. Men created both civilization and technology. Specifically, white men created them As Camille Paglia commented, if civilization had been left in the hands of women, we’d still be living in grass huts.
Civilization is already going backwards, not technologically but morally. This is what invariably what happens when the government exceeds its proper bounds – as it has done in the economy, and the relationships between men and women.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Hostile and Bitter Towards Men
I know several women who are hostile and bitter towards men and blame their problems on them. In each case they are college-educated women who make a substantial salary.
What they wanted out of life was to find a man with a similar education and salary who would accept their career and also wanted children. None of them got what they wanted.
I’ve always been mystified why women do not understand they cannot have a career and children at the same time. If she works full-time and he works full-time, who is going to raise the children?
I’ve been told companies are supposed to allow women time off, a year or so, to take care of the children. What this means is that the people left at work are supposed to involuntarily support these woman by doing her work for her when she’s gone, and also through lower wages since she’s getting unpaid leave. When I’ve asked these women about this none of it has occurred to them.
Then there is the fact that Affirmative Action means “white men need not apply.” I’ve know more than one woman – several in fact – who were promoted above her level of competence because of AA. Just as bad, and probably worse, they were promoted at the expense of men (contrary to the myth, AA overwhelmingly benefits white women, not black men or any other “minority”).
I’ve seen these women look around and wonder where men are who have a good salary. They can’t seem to find them, and when it’s explained to them white men are no longer hired for high-paying jobs (unless no one else is available) they don’t want to believe it.
Men of course are still available to be coal miners, steel workers, construction workers, garbage men, etc. but these women are simply outraged at the idea of “marrying down.” I’ve also known men who opened their own business (become entrepreneurs) but in many cases the work is hot and sweaty and blue collar and the women are outraged about that, too. Why can’t he have a comfy safe indoor high-paying job like me?!?
Most men who work in positions where women are favored over them in promotions will tell you the women hold meetings and talk and think they are working. The men are doing the vast majority of the work and carrying the women. The women never believe it. I’ve seen this myself.
If a couple gets married and the woman does not want to work and instead wants to stay home and raise the children, the man goes from supporting one person (himself) to three. This was possible in the past when the U.S. was mostly free-market but today because of our managed economy it verges on impossible.
Quite a few men today don’t particularly want to get married and have children anymore because of the crushing economic burden. Women call this “fear of commitment.” It is of course completely the man’s fault, because of a lack of a mirror for these women to look in.
What is happening today (and has been happening for quite a while) is unstable and will collapse. What it will be replaced with I don’t know. But it won’t last.
What they wanted out of life was to find a man with a similar education and salary who would accept their career and also wanted children. None of them got what they wanted.
I’ve always been mystified why women do not understand they cannot have a career and children at the same time. If she works full-time and he works full-time, who is going to raise the children?
I’ve been told companies are supposed to allow women time off, a year or so, to take care of the children. What this means is that the people left at work are supposed to involuntarily support these woman by doing her work for her when she’s gone, and also through lower wages since she’s getting unpaid leave. When I’ve asked these women about this none of it has occurred to them.
Then there is the fact that Affirmative Action means “white men need not apply.” I’ve know more than one woman – several in fact – who were promoted above her level of competence because of AA. Just as bad, and probably worse, they were promoted at the expense of men (contrary to the myth, AA overwhelmingly benefits white women, not black men or any other “minority”).
I’ve seen these women look around and wonder where men are who have a good salary. They can’t seem to find them, and when it’s explained to them white men are no longer hired for high-paying jobs (unless no one else is available) they don’t want to believe it.
Men of course are still available to be coal miners, steel workers, construction workers, garbage men, etc. but these women are simply outraged at the idea of “marrying down.” I’ve also known men who opened their own business (become entrepreneurs) but in many cases the work is hot and sweaty and blue collar and the women are outraged about that, too. Why can’t he have a comfy safe indoor high-paying job like me?!?
Most men who work in positions where women are favored over them in promotions will tell you the women hold meetings and talk and think they are working. The men are doing the vast majority of the work and carrying the women. The women never believe it. I’ve seen this myself.
If a couple gets married and the woman does not want to work and instead wants to stay home and raise the children, the man goes from supporting one person (himself) to three. This was possible in the past when the U.S. was mostly free-market but today because of our managed economy it verges on impossible.
Quite a few men today don’t particularly want to get married and have children anymore because of the crushing economic burden. Women call this “fear of commitment.” It is of course completely the man’s fault, because of a lack of a mirror for these women to look in.
What is happening today (and has been happening for quite a while) is unstable and will collapse. What it will be replaced with I don’t know. But it won’t last.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Ugly Women and Poor Men
There are two kinds of people who are basically disposable: unattractive women and economically unsuccessful men.
In college I knew a woman, who verged on beautiful, who mentioned to me once that seven guys had asked her out one weekend. I knew another one, who was very attractive, who was very popular – I believe over 30 guys asked her out.
I also knew several who weren’t attractive, and never got asked out. Attractiveness (and friendliness) was what made the popular women popular. The unattractive ones didn’t stand a chance, although I suppose unattractive guys finally asked them out.
For men, those who are economically unsuccessful are disposable. If a man cannot support himself, no one else will, so he can just become homeless and die. This is why, when the economy goes bad and men lose their jobs, the suicide rate goes up for them. They’re on their own.
In the past, unattractive women could be nurses or schoolteachers. I’m not sure what else was open to them. Secretaries. These days, women, because of Affirmative Action and other laws, have the traditional male role now open to them, so they now have access to high-paying, fairly easy inside jobs.
Yet, at the same time, access to the traditional female role is not open to men. I’m sure there are a few financially successful women who are open to it, but if there are, it’s just a handful, and I’ve never met one.
So what happens is that an unattractive woman can now support herself with a high-paying job, but a economically unsuccessful man is still on his own. The woman has become less disposable, but not the man.
Men in general have always been more disposable than women, apparently because women are the ones who give birth. But now, the imbalance has become even worse.
Can such a balance continue? I don’t think I can. Something will give, sooner or later, and then things will change. But I expect things to get a lot worse before they get better.
In college I knew a woman, who verged on beautiful, who mentioned to me once that seven guys had asked her out one weekend. I knew another one, who was very attractive, who was very popular – I believe over 30 guys asked her out.
I also knew several who weren’t attractive, and never got asked out. Attractiveness (and friendliness) was what made the popular women popular. The unattractive ones didn’t stand a chance, although I suppose unattractive guys finally asked them out.
For men, those who are economically unsuccessful are disposable. If a man cannot support himself, no one else will, so he can just become homeless and die. This is why, when the economy goes bad and men lose their jobs, the suicide rate goes up for them. They’re on their own.
In the past, unattractive women could be nurses or schoolteachers. I’m not sure what else was open to them. Secretaries. These days, women, because of Affirmative Action and other laws, have the traditional male role now open to them, so they now have access to high-paying, fairly easy inside jobs.
Yet, at the same time, access to the traditional female role is not open to men. I’m sure there are a few financially successful women who are open to it, but if there are, it’s just a handful, and I’ve never met one.
So what happens is that an unattractive woman can now support herself with a high-paying job, but a economically unsuccessful man is still on his own. The woman has become less disposable, but not the man.
Men in general have always been more disposable than women, apparently because women are the ones who give birth. But now, the imbalance has become even worse.
Can such a balance continue? I don’t think I can. Something will give, sooner or later, and then things will change. But I expect things to get a lot worse before they get better.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
The Squawking of the Chickenhawk
A blowhard and braggart I knew for less than ten days bored us for every one of those days with lies about his non-existent military service. He was just stupid enough, just self-absorbed enough, and just self-deluded enough to think we believed him. I don't think he was really conscious of lying to us; I suspect he was not aware he deluded himself first, then apparently just assumed we swallowed his fictions. After all, he did. Why shouldn't we?
If he really thought we believed him, then he was another proof of that old observation that the stupid often think they're smarter than their brainer betters. He was not only lacking in smarts, but also the slightest clue that none of us believed his huffing and puffing. With all the posturing and bravado, he reminded me of a yappy little dog telling me that if it wasn't for that fence between us, he'd rip the gizzard right out of me.
Finally, fed up with listening to such transparent fantasies, one disgusted fellow pointed to the wall clock and asked our conjurer what it read in military time. His answer? A feeble, "We didn't use military time when I was in." I was disappointed. Was that the best he could do? It was like watching a third-rate magician have the cards fly out of his hands. Not only were his brains on the fritz, his imagination had also parted company with him.
This fantasist, to be completely accurate about it, was a loser whose job was what I will politely refer to as a "career security guard." These days, $8.50 an hour, tops. Lacking in both brains and character, he could do nothing else.
Deep inside, below all that self-deception, he must have known he was a loser, one who shored up the shaky edifice of his self with grandiose Green Beret-wannabe confabulations. Of course, like all such people, he could never admit what he was to himself, not unless he wanted to pop like a hot-air-filled balloon. I would not have been surprised if the military refused him for a psychiatric disorder. I doubt it was his IQ, which would have at least placed him in the "cannon fodder, first wave" section.
All that braggadocio was a thin veneer over a ocean of stupidity, self-deception, paranoia, envy, irresponsibility, immaturity and insecurity. He couldn't lie to us about having a Ph.D in Physics, because even he knew no one would believe it. But he could lie about being in the military, which is about as hard to get into as it is to graduate high school. It gave him, at least (in fact only) to himself, an outward image of manliness that he was utterly lacking on the inside. His fantasy gave meaning to the meaningless life of a loser.
His self-image was so inflated he had no clue at all that everyone was laughing at him behind his back. In front of it, too. In some ways he was like a stuffed bird under glass, off in a little enclosed world of his own. He never even caught on to the smiles to his face. And how in the world could he be so paranoid as to believe anyone was angling for his job? But he was.
I wondered if he would be envious, or admire (which is the benign form of envy) someone who had been a corporal and a clerk-typist? I doubt it. I suspect in his mind he saw himself as a combination of Navy Seal and ninja, even if in reality he was dressed in a security guard's robin's-egg-blue blazer. What would he think of someone who had been in the Marines, even if that someone had been pudgy, bespectacled Drew Carey, who really was a jarhead? Slobber on them? Suck up to them, hoping some of what he imagined they were would rub off on him? Or could he only admire a lean, mean fighting machine who looked like Ollie North? I didn't know. I still don't.
It's not necessary for me to look up this fantabulist to ask his opinion about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I already know them, just as I know the opinions of every armchair-warrior chickenhawk: grr! grr! woof! woof! I'm all for the wars as long you fight and I don't!
I don't know what happened to this buffoon, but I do know that one day he disappeared, either transferred or fired. In all those neurons and synapses sputtering and misfiring in the disorganized clutter he used as a brain there must have swum up the vague thought that the jig was up, since one of the guards told me (with a little smile), that our story-teller had called him at home and yelled at him, blaming him for mistakes our fabricating fantasy-warrior had made. When one is a life-long FUBAR, I'm sure it's almost impossible to admit it. It sure is easy to blame your problems on someone else, though. Natural, in fact.
I had forgotten about this clown for years, until I read Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Mother Night. Vonnegut claims the moral of his book is "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Yet, what stayed in my mind beyond all else is the second encounter between the protagonist, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., and a former American soldier, Bernard B. O'Hare.
Their first encounter occured at the end of World War II, when Campbell, who is an American spy masquerading as a Nazi radio announcer, is captured by O'Hare. Since Campbell cannot prove his innocence, O'Hare sees him as only another Nazi. Still, Campbell is released on a technicality, and moves to America, where he lives quietly for many years.
Then, one day, 15 years after their first encounter, O'Hare is waiting for him at his apartment. His speech to Campbell is telling. He informs Campbell that instead of being a "doctor...a lawyer, a writer, an architect, an engineer, a newspaper reporter," he is instead "a dispatcher for frozen-custard trucks."
"I guess we've all had our disappointments," Campbell answers, in an ironic understatement from a man who had lost everything. O'Hare, who still didn't know that Campbell was an American spy and not a Nazi, doesn't even hear him. "His concern was only for himself," Vonnegut writes of him.
O'Hare, who has become a loser, decides the purpose of his life is to savagely beat Campbell, who, he tells him, is "pure evil." I won't spoil the plot, except to say that his attack on Campbell is aborted. As he leaves, Campbell has some parting words for him. They are the most important words in the book.
"I'm not your destiny, or the Devil, either!" Campbell says. "Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now you go away with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that's all the glory you deserve! That's all that any man at war with pure evil deserves."
Vonnegut, through Campbell, is being ironic; he obviously doesn't believe in pure evil. The reason? "There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," Campbell says, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part in every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive...It's the part that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly."
There is an entire book in that second encounter between the two men. O'Hare, like the lying security guard I knew, had become a loser. To give meaning to his life, to cover up his own self-hatred, he decided the purpose of his life was to destroy the Pure Evil that he mistakenly thought was Howard W. Campbell, Jr.
Self-hatred underneath, covered up with grandiosity, for both O'Hare and the story-telling security guard. Both blamed their failings on other people. The term for this is "scapegoating." It's when people take their problems and project them onto others. Once they get rid of those people, then their problems will be solved.
The psychiatrist M. Scott Peck accurately called scapegoating "the genesis of human evil." It's what the Communists and Nazis did, to the tune of 177 million people in the 20th century.
Scapegoating is why O'Hare thought that beating Campbell would solve his problems, and why the security guard tried to blame his own substantial failings on everyone else. Each had become grandiose as a defense against his own feelings of inadequacy. The greater the grandiosity shown, the greater the inadequacy it covers. You need look no further than the pillhead Rush Limbaugh.
This grandiosity on top, covering up self-hatred, makes me wonder about the typical sofa-samurai chickenhawk. Are they adults, or unfinished men with little or no meaing in life? I opt for the latter. Why? Because these losers have decided, like Bernard B. O'Hare, that their purpose in life is to eradicate Pure Evil. Their hatred gives meaning to their empty lives.
Thinking they can eradicate evil is pretty grandiose, to say the least. It's also impossible, even if one dismisses millenia of religion and instead relies on George Bush's MBA. Such delusion, such magical thinking, is for children.
These chickenhawks have decided they have good reason to hate without reservation...to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with them, too. They've decided that large part in them that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on their side...is a good thing. Even though it's that part of them that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive... the part that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly...they still see it as a good thing. Self-righteousness does that to people.
Unfortunately, our opponents on the other side of the world think exactly about us as we think about them. It why the conflict we are in will not be decided on the nebulous basis of who's right and and who's wrong, but on the basis of our might is going to make only us right. Each is convinced their side is Good and the other side is Evil. The right to hate, and to murder, is therefore loosed on the world.
I don't believe in pure good or pure evil. They're fairy tales. Vonnegut obviously thinks so, too. When one decides he is pure good, like the sad Bernard B. O'Hare, such people always think they have the right to define others as pure evil, and then rub them out. Even Jesus denied he was good when a woman referred to him as "good rabbi." I no longer wonder why he answered as he did.
The most rabid, pro-war chickenhawks I've ever met have not only never been in combat, they've never been (like our security guard) in the military. I suppose underneath all their yapping they have doubts they are real men. Would they feel manly if an artillery shell went by their heads? Chances are they'd be too busy crying and wishing they were home to feel much of anything else. I sure wouldn't want them in a foxhole with me.
There's an old saying--and I have no idea where it's from--that the best warriors are the least war-like. I'll nod and agree with this saying, which I find to be true based on what I've learned from the grandiose, and hate-filled, squawkings of chickenhawks. They'd make lousy soldiers, but good cowards.
If he really thought we believed him, then he was another proof of that old observation that the stupid often think they're smarter than their brainer betters. He was not only lacking in smarts, but also the slightest clue that none of us believed his huffing and puffing. With all the posturing and bravado, he reminded me of a yappy little dog telling me that if it wasn't for that fence between us, he'd rip the gizzard right out of me.
Finally, fed up with listening to such transparent fantasies, one disgusted fellow pointed to the wall clock and asked our conjurer what it read in military time. His answer? A feeble, "We didn't use military time when I was in." I was disappointed. Was that the best he could do? It was like watching a third-rate magician have the cards fly out of his hands. Not only were his brains on the fritz, his imagination had also parted company with him.
This fantasist, to be completely accurate about it, was a loser whose job was what I will politely refer to as a "career security guard." These days, $8.50 an hour, tops. Lacking in both brains and character, he could do nothing else.
Deep inside, below all that self-deception, he must have known he was a loser, one who shored up the shaky edifice of his self with grandiose Green Beret-wannabe confabulations. Of course, like all such people, he could never admit what he was to himself, not unless he wanted to pop like a hot-air-filled balloon. I would not have been surprised if the military refused him for a psychiatric disorder. I doubt it was his IQ, which would have at least placed him in the "cannon fodder, first wave" section.
All that braggadocio was a thin veneer over a ocean of stupidity, self-deception, paranoia, envy, irresponsibility, immaturity and insecurity. He couldn't lie to us about having a Ph.D in Physics, because even he knew no one would believe it. But he could lie about being in the military, which is about as hard to get into as it is to graduate high school. It gave him, at least (in fact only) to himself, an outward image of manliness that he was utterly lacking on the inside. His fantasy gave meaning to the meaningless life of a loser.
His self-image was so inflated he had no clue at all that everyone was laughing at him behind his back. In front of it, too. In some ways he was like a stuffed bird under glass, off in a little enclosed world of his own. He never even caught on to the smiles to his face. And how in the world could he be so paranoid as to believe anyone was angling for his job? But he was.
I wondered if he would be envious, or admire (which is the benign form of envy) someone who had been a corporal and a clerk-typist? I doubt it. I suspect in his mind he saw himself as a combination of Navy Seal and ninja, even if in reality he was dressed in a security guard's robin's-egg-blue blazer. What would he think of someone who had been in the Marines, even if that someone had been pudgy, bespectacled Drew Carey, who really was a jarhead? Slobber on them? Suck up to them, hoping some of what he imagined they were would rub off on him? Or could he only admire a lean, mean fighting machine who looked like Ollie North? I didn't know. I still don't.
It's not necessary for me to look up this fantabulist to ask his opinion about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I already know them, just as I know the opinions of every armchair-warrior chickenhawk: grr! grr! woof! woof! I'm all for the wars as long you fight and I don't!
I don't know what happened to this buffoon, but I do know that one day he disappeared, either transferred or fired. In all those neurons and synapses sputtering and misfiring in the disorganized clutter he used as a brain there must have swum up the vague thought that the jig was up, since one of the guards told me (with a little smile), that our story-teller had called him at home and yelled at him, blaming him for mistakes our fabricating fantasy-warrior had made. When one is a life-long FUBAR, I'm sure it's almost impossible to admit it. It sure is easy to blame your problems on someone else, though. Natural, in fact.
I had forgotten about this clown for years, until I read Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Mother Night. Vonnegut claims the moral of his book is "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Yet, what stayed in my mind beyond all else is the second encounter between the protagonist, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., and a former American soldier, Bernard B. O'Hare.
Their first encounter occured at the end of World War II, when Campbell, who is an American spy masquerading as a Nazi radio announcer, is captured by O'Hare. Since Campbell cannot prove his innocence, O'Hare sees him as only another Nazi. Still, Campbell is released on a technicality, and moves to America, where he lives quietly for many years.
Then, one day, 15 years after their first encounter, O'Hare is waiting for him at his apartment. His speech to Campbell is telling. He informs Campbell that instead of being a "doctor...a lawyer, a writer, an architect, an engineer, a newspaper reporter," he is instead "a dispatcher for frozen-custard trucks."
"I guess we've all had our disappointments," Campbell answers, in an ironic understatement from a man who had lost everything. O'Hare, who still didn't know that Campbell was an American spy and not a Nazi, doesn't even hear him. "His concern was only for himself," Vonnegut writes of him.
O'Hare, who has become a loser, decides the purpose of his life is to savagely beat Campbell, who, he tells him, is "pure evil." I won't spoil the plot, except to say that his attack on Campbell is aborted. As he leaves, Campbell has some parting words for him. They are the most important words in the book.
"I'm not your destiny, or the Devil, either!" Campbell says. "Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now you go away with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that's all the glory you deserve! That's all that any man at war with pure evil deserves."
Vonnegut, through Campbell, is being ironic; he obviously doesn't believe in pure evil. The reason? "There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," Campbell says, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part in every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive...It's the part that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly."
There is an entire book in that second encounter between the two men. O'Hare, like the lying security guard I knew, had become a loser. To give meaning to his life, to cover up his own self-hatred, he decided the purpose of his life was to destroy the Pure Evil that he mistakenly thought was Howard W. Campbell, Jr.
Self-hatred underneath, covered up with grandiosity, for both O'Hare and the story-telling security guard. Both blamed their failings on other people. The term for this is "scapegoating." It's when people take their problems and project them onto others. Once they get rid of those people, then their problems will be solved.
The psychiatrist M. Scott Peck accurately called scapegoating "the genesis of human evil." It's what the Communists and Nazis did, to the tune of 177 million people in the 20th century.
Scapegoating is why O'Hare thought that beating Campbell would solve his problems, and why the security guard tried to blame his own substantial failings on everyone else. Each had become grandiose as a defense against his own feelings of inadequacy. The greater the grandiosity shown, the greater the inadequacy it covers. You need look no further than the pillhead Rush Limbaugh.
This grandiosity on top, covering up self-hatred, makes me wonder about the typical sofa-samurai chickenhawk. Are they adults, or unfinished men with little or no meaing in life? I opt for the latter. Why? Because these losers have decided, like Bernard B. O'Hare, that their purpose in life is to eradicate Pure Evil. Their hatred gives meaning to their empty lives.
Thinking they can eradicate evil is pretty grandiose, to say the least. It's also impossible, even if one dismisses millenia of religion and instead relies on George Bush's MBA. Such delusion, such magical thinking, is for children.
These chickenhawks have decided they have good reason to hate without reservation...to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with them, too. They've decided that large part in them that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on their side...is a good thing. Even though it's that part of them that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive... the part that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly...they still see it as a good thing. Self-righteousness does that to people.
Unfortunately, our opponents on the other side of the world think exactly about us as we think about them. It why the conflict we are in will not be decided on the nebulous basis of who's right and and who's wrong, but on the basis of our might is going to make only us right. Each is convinced their side is Good and the other side is Evil. The right to hate, and to murder, is therefore loosed on the world.
I don't believe in pure good or pure evil. They're fairy tales. Vonnegut obviously thinks so, too. When one decides he is pure good, like the sad Bernard B. O'Hare, such people always think they have the right to define others as pure evil, and then rub them out. Even Jesus denied he was good when a woman referred to him as "good rabbi." I no longer wonder why he answered as he did.
The most rabid, pro-war chickenhawks I've ever met have not only never been in combat, they've never been (like our security guard) in the military. I suppose underneath all their yapping they have doubts they are real men. Would they feel manly if an artillery shell went by their heads? Chances are they'd be too busy crying and wishing they were home to feel much of anything else. I sure wouldn't want them in a foxhole with me.
There's an old saying--and I have no idea where it's from--that the best warriors are the least war-like. I'll nod and agree with this saying, which I find to be true based on what I've learned from the grandiose, and hate-filled, squawkings of chickenhawks. They'd make lousy soldiers, but good cowards.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Freezing in Place and Almost Dying
When I was about 23 years old I was driving though a city of about 100,000 people during the winter. The interstate was dry and clear north and south of the city, but there had been snowfall in the city itself. It also turned out there was black ice on the road, which of course I did not know about.
I found out about it, though.
My car hit a patch and started spinning. I have never been one to panic, but I had never been in a situation like this. My response was something I had never experienced before.
Time slowed down and everything became very clear. There was no fear, just a feeling of disbelief. I hit a snow bank on the side of the road, my car rolled over on its side, then its top, then on its side again, then came to rest.
I got out of my car, which was still running with the headlights still on, pushed the car onto its wheels, got in, drove it back on the highway, and continued on my way.
Later on I found out what I experienced is common. Some men panic in combat. Others freeze. I’m a freezer, not a panicker. Unfortunately, freezing can get you killed as fast as panicking, The military even teaches soldiers that some freeze, and to expect it, and how it handle it.
I remember reading that one soldier in Vietnam said he could see the bullets coming at him, because everything for him was in slow motion. I believe it.
When the planes hit the WTC, some of the people on the lower levels turned their computers off before leaving. I know why. It was the disbelief, and the moving too slow, which is freezing – the opposite of panic.
When I was 12 years old a large dog started chasing me in the dark. I froze. Even at that age, I was a freezer, not a panicker. To this day I have never panicked in my life. I freeze, understand that is my nature, and at least now know how to handle it.
Why some freeze and some panic I don’t know. Perhaps some freeze in some situations and panic in others. It helps to know which one you are. It could save your life,
I found out about it, though.
My car hit a patch and started spinning. I have never been one to panic, but I had never been in a situation like this. My response was something I had never experienced before.
Time slowed down and everything became very clear. There was no fear, just a feeling of disbelief. I hit a snow bank on the side of the road, my car rolled over on its side, then its top, then on its side again, then came to rest.
I got out of my car, which was still running with the headlights still on, pushed the car onto its wheels, got in, drove it back on the highway, and continued on my way.
Later on I found out what I experienced is common. Some men panic in combat. Others freeze. I’m a freezer, not a panicker. Unfortunately, freezing can get you killed as fast as panicking, The military even teaches soldiers that some freeze, and to expect it, and how it handle it.
I remember reading that one soldier in Vietnam said he could see the bullets coming at him, because everything for him was in slow motion. I believe it.
When the planes hit the WTC, some of the people on the lower levels turned their computers off before leaving. I know why. It was the disbelief, and the moving too slow, which is freezing – the opposite of panic.
When I was 12 years old a large dog started chasing me in the dark. I froze. Even at that age, I was a freezer, not a panicker. To this day I have never panicked in my life. I freeze, understand that is my nature, and at least now know how to handle it.
Why some freeze and some panic I don’t know. Perhaps some freeze in some situations and panic in others. It helps to know which one you are. It could save your life,
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Ivana Gonadsoff, She-Wolf of the KGB
The characters: Ivana Gonadsoff, an Innocent Man, Various Implements of Torture.
.
Ivana: So, traitor to the People and the Revolution, you claim the Bolsheviks were ten times as bad as the Nazis?
Innocent Man: Look at the facts, you perverted Commie carpet-muncher.
Electrical Generator: BZZZZTT!!!
Man: Yow! And you’re ugly, too!
Ivana: How do you testicles feel after I just fried them with this generator?
Man: You sure do seem to be awfully interested in testicles.
Ivana: You might want to pay more attention to my last name.
Man: You can torture me all you want, even kill me, but you can’t change the facts: the Communists were ten times as bad as the Nazis.
Ivana: So what? We have all kinds of willing liberal dupes in the West who’ve got Cranial-Rectal Inversion so bad they can’t see the truth until they end up in the Gulag. There is no one so blind as someone who just refuses to see.
Man: You would have never won World War II if the West hadn’t helped you.
Ivana: You mean the Great Patriotic War? Thank you, you dumbasses! You let atheistic Bolshevists take over Christian Eastern Europe for 50 years!
Man: The winner always writes the history.
Ivana: The South knows all about that, don’t they? Even though they were in the right, the North still won. Might makes right!
Man: In the long run you’ll lose.
Ivana: Don’t be too sure about that. The default position of the human race is fascism and Communism. The few who have everything and everyone else who has almost nothing. I can live with it, as long as I rule. And I rule you.
Man: Only my body, never my soul.
Ivana: Who cares? We’ll raise children to worship the State. It’s called daycare and public school.
Man: You’re deluding yourself, the way fanatics always delude themselves.
Pliers: CRUNCH!
Man: Yow! You’re still ugly!
Ivana: God! I love the war on counter-revolutionaries! What about you girls?
Students: Yay! For generators, pliers, and blowtorches! And innocent people!
.
Ivana: So, traitor to the People and the Revolution, you claim the Bolsheviks were ten times as bad as the Nazis?
Innocent Man: Look at the facts, you perverted Commie carpet-muncher.
Electrical Generator: BZZZZTT!!!
Man: Yow! And you’re ugly, too!
Ivana: How do you testicles feel after I just fried them with this generator?
Man: You sure do seem to be awfully interested in testicles.
Ivana: You might want to pay more attention to my last name.
Man: You can torture me all you want, even kill me, but you can’t change the facts: the Communists were ten times as bad as the Nazis.
Ivana: So what? We have all kinds of willing liberal dupes in the West who’ve got Cranial-Rectal Inversion so bad they can’t see the truth until they end up in the Gulag. There is no one so blind as someone who just refuses to see.
Man: You would have never won World War II if the West hadn’t helped you.
Ivana: You mean the Great Patriotic War? Thank you, you dumbasses! You let atheistic Bolshevists take over Christian Eastern Europe for 50 years!
Man: The winner always writes the history.
Ivana: The South knows all about that, don’t they? Even though they were in the right, the North still won. Might makes right!
Man: In the long run you’ll lose.
Ivana: Don’t be too sure about that. The default position of the human race is fascism and Communism. The few who have everything and everyone else who has almost nothing. I can live with it, as long as I rule. And I rule you.
Man: Only my body, never my soul.
Ivana: Who cares? We’ll raise children to worship the State. It’s called daycare and public school.
Man: You’re deluding yourself, the way fanatics always delude themselves.
Pliers: CRUNCH!
Man: Yow! You’re still ugly!
Ivana: God! I love the war on counter-revolutionaries! What about you girls?
Students: Yay! For generators, pliers, and blowtorches! And innocent people!
How to Seduce an INTJ
I don’t mean physically. I mean emotionally.
I am an INTJ – Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging. Hannibal Lector is also an INTJ (I didn't have to look up that he was one. It was clear from the movie). You’re probably wondering why I bring him up, but I have good reasons.
In both the novel and the movie, The Silence of the Lambs, when Clarice and Hannibal met, they play tit-for-tat – she tells him something, he tells her something.
The reason Hannibal did what he did is because all INTJs have a desire for knowledge. Taken to an extreme, it’s the sin of Greed. INTJs are emotionally satisfied by knowing things they want to know. But it has to be what they want to know. Gossip drives us insane.
In fact, when you start to see someone twitch angrily when someone else is running on and on, there is a good chance that person is an INTJ.
Hannibal wanted to know about Clarice, and when he got what he wanted from her, you saw the look of satisfaction on his face. Hannibal was manipulating Clarice into seducing him, while he was seducing her. It’s never a one-way street. When he got the chance, he caressed her finger with his.
Hannibal wanted intimate details from Clarice, and he had to play tit-for-tat to get them. But he got them. (There is a line from the movie, "You don't want Hannibal inside your head". You know what? You don't want any INTJ inside your head. Since we see patterns we can see things, that if we said them, would be incredibly cruel.)
INTJs are seduced by intimate emotional details – by stories of people’s lives. They don’t particularly judge what they hear. We’re too greedy to do much judging, because of our desire to understand.
You want to emotionally seduce an INTJ? Give him intimate details and stories of your life. Especially if you whisper in his ear in the dark
INTJs are almost invariably intelligent, knowledgeable, and witty. We are imaginative and intuitive first, after which reason is in the third place. If a male INTJ (I can’t speak about female ones) runs across a woman who is intelligent, witty and knowledgeable, she can easily seduce him with intimate details of her life – with stories about herself.
Intellect is not the first thing to get to us, although it does count tremendously. Engaging the imagination and the intuition does. The imagination is how we understand stories – it allows us to empathize, to feel a connection, The intuition helps the imagination.
That’s what counts with us – engaging the imagination and the emotions by intimate stories. We are in fact voyeurs -- not in the Peeping Tom sense, but in sense of wanting to know those unique stories about people's lives.
INTJs are also System Builders, i.e., they want to know the “whole” of something. When Hannibal was asking such intimate questions of Clarice, he was trying to find the most important things about her, so he would know her as a whole, as a complete system, as a whole woman.
In fact, in the second novel (but not the movie) they ended up together. I wasn’t surprised.
An INTJ will in fact start to consider such a woman his soul mate.
INTJs collect the unusual. Gossipy details about other’s lives do nothing for us,in fact, as I mentioned, drive us insane. But the unusual, the unique – that’s a different story, just as Clarice’s unusual life intrigued Hannibal.
For good or bad, INTJs are nearly impossible to read. Most people are vaguely confused by us. Oftentimes we're considered strange. It's just the way we are. We can't do much about it, although we do learn to halfway come across as normal.
The ENFP (Extroverted Feeling Perceiving) is supposed to be the natural partner of the INTJ. I have run across such women, and I know their effect on me. Some of them, the more intelligent and witty ones, do feel like my soul mates.
You can’t seduce an INTJ physically. Oh, you can, but that’s as far as it will go. A woman can be beatiful, and that will last about three days with us.
But once you can get to him emotionally, with the intimate, unusual stories, wit, intelligence, accepting the fact you’re dealing with someone who is less than one percent of the population…then you’ve found the chink in the armor.
Monday, January 3, 2011
My First-Aid Kit
This is what I have in my first-aid kit:
Marijuana. Doctors didn’t want marijuana made illegal, because it has so many medicinal uses. It is a pain-killer, a muscle relaxer (it was used for women giving birth), helps with insomnia, and increases appetite. That’s a lot of uses for one herb.
Tea Tree Oil. It’s an antiseptic and promotes healing. One of my friends stepped on a nail. The doctor told him it wouldn’t heal and it wanted to ream it out. My friend declined. I had him put tea tree oil on it and it started to heal. The doctor told him, “I don’t know what you are doing, but keep doing it.” It healed completely with no scarring. I’ve seen people use it for toenail fungus and for gum disease.
Black Pepper. Believe it or not, but if you put black pepper on a cut it will stop
bleeding.
Lavender Oil. Lavender oil is good for minor burns and promotes healing. It makes you smell good, too.
Clove oil. I once cracked a molar that had a large filling in it. Since it was in the evening, I couldn’t get to the dentist. I rubbed clove oil on the gum and the pain went away. Unfortunately, it only last half-an-hour before I had to reapply it, but it was bliss for that 30 minutes.
Peppermint/Ginger tea. This is a good one for digestive problems and an upset stomach.
Acupuncture pressure points. The main one, and it’s pretty much the only one I use, is located in the web between your thumb and first finger. You have to dig to find it, and when you do, it will hurt when you knead it. It’s pretty much a pain-killer. The first time I used it on a woman her headache and her cramps went away in about a minute.
I have found the above covers about 90% of medical problems that most people suffer from, that don’t require an ER visit – which these days costs about $500.
Marijuana. Doctors didn’t want marijuana made illegal, because it has so many medicinal uses. It is a pain-killer, a muscle relaxer (it was used for women giving birth), helps with insomnia, and increases appetite. That’s a lot of uses for one herb.
Tea Tree Oil. It’s an antiseptic and promotes healing. One of my friends stepped on a nail. The doctor told him it wouldn’t heal and it wanted to ream it out. My friend declined. I had him put tea tree oil on it and it started to heal. The doctor told him, “I don’t know what you are doing, but keep doing it.” It healed completely with no scarring. I’ve seen people use it for toenail fungus and for gum disease.
Black Pepper. Believe it or not, but if you put black pepper on a cut it will stop
bleeding.
Lavender Oil. Lavender oil is good for minor burns and promotes healing. It makes you smell good, too.
Clove oil. I once cracked a molar that had a large filling in it. Since it was in the evening, I couldn’t get to the dentist. I rubbed clove oil on the gum and the pain went away. Unfortunately, it only last half-an-hour before I had to reapply it, but it was bliss for that 30 minutes.
Peppermint/Ginger tea. This is a good one for digestive problems and an upset stomach.
Acupuncture pressure points. The main one, and it’s pretty much the only one I use, is located in the web between your thumb and first finger. You have to dig to find it, and when you do, it will hurt when you knead it. It’s pretty much a pain-killer. The first time I used it on a woman her headache and her cramps went away in about a minute.
I have found the above covers about 90% of medical problems that most people suffer from, that don’t require an ER visit – which these days costs about $500.
The State as Vampire
The “State,” strictly speaking, does not exist. The word is a short-hand, a convenient fiction. What does exist are several groups of people, the “elites” (I use the term neutrally) who have gained political power over everyone else, and use that power to economically exploit everyone.
You can, for all practical purposes, call the Elites “the non-producers” and everyone else “producers.” So, then, the State is a vampire, feeding upon the producers. This is how the United States has ended up with one percent of the people owning 40% of the wealth.
It is impossible for one percent to own 40% of the wealth under the free market. Therefore, the United States is not a free market anymore. We do have enough of it, however, for the vampirish State to grow and thrive. While everyone else gets poorer and poorer, of course.
Many people have noticed what’s going on for a long time. Andrew Jackson zeroed in on the problem close to 200 years ago – he saw the attempt by banksters to found a central bank so they could control the money supply and fleece the citizens. He put a stop to it.
The poet Ezra Pound saw the problem, too. (Parenthetically, I am amused that a poet understood political economy, something that Ph.D.s from Harvard and Yale do not).
“History, as seen by a Monetary Economist,” Pound wrote, “is a continuous struggle between producers and non-producers, and those who try to make a living by inserting a false system of book-keeping between the producers and their just recompense.”
What he meant by “a false system of book-keeping” is the central bank in any country, because the owners (counterfeiters) control the money supply to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else.
“The usurers act through fraud, falsification, superstitions, habits and, when these methods do not function, they let loose a war,” Pound continued. “Everything hinges on monopoly, and the particular monopolies hinge around the great illusionistic monetary monopoly.”
One of the most immoral things about international bankers is that they fund both sides in a war – they can make billions of dollars off of mass murder and massive destruction.
“In the case of war,” writes Carolina Hartley. “it was an easy task for a private bank with seats in several different national banks to calculate the deposits and income of the contesting states and the loans they secured to raise their armies, thus allowing the privileged few to bet on the probable winner.”
If the above quote does not describe a vampire, then I don’t know what does.
Jesus saw through these people too – the only people beat he beat (with a whip) were the money-changers in the temple, who were the banksters of that era.
Vilfredo Pareto, who is an essential read, formulated the concept of “the Circulation of the Elites.” Elites are always replaced This is why we will never have a New World Order or One World Government or an Orwellian jackpot stamping on our heads for the rest of time. The Elites always end up being guillotined or shot or hung upside down by their heels from a lamppost.
They are replaced by other Elites, who sooner or later turn into the people they displaced. Then they get displaced. And so it goes, on and on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Vampires cannot stand the light of day. In fact, it destroys them. The same thing is true of the State, or the Elites, or the non-producers, or however you want to refer to them. The one thing that will destroy them is for them is the light, because evil cannot stand being exposed.
You can, for all practical purposes, call the Elites “the non-producers” and everyone else “producers.” So, then, the State is a vampire, feeding upon the producers. This is how the United States has ended up with one percent of the people owning 40% of the wealth.
It is impossible for one percent to own 40% of the wealth under the free market. Therefore, the United States is not a free market anymore. We do have enough of it, however, for the vampirish State to grow and thrive. While everyone else gets poorer and poorer, of course.
Many people have noticed what’s going on for a long time. Andrew Jackson zeroed in on the problem close to 200 years ago – he saw the attempt by banksters to found a central bank so they could control the money supply and fleece the citizens. He put a stop to it.
The poet Ezra Pound saw the problem, too. (Parenthetically, I am amused that a poet understood political economy, something that Ph.D.s from Harvard and Yale do not).
“History, as seen by a Monetary Economist,” Pound wrote, “is a continuous struggle between producers and non-producers, and those who try to make a living by inserting a false system of book-keeping between the producers and their just recompense.”
What he meant by “a false system of book-keeping” is the central bank in any country, because the owners (counterfeiters) control the money supply to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else.
“The usurers act through fraud, falsification, superstitions, habits and, when these methods do not function, they let loose a war,” Pound continued. “Everything hinges on monopoly, and the particular monopolies hinge around the great illusionistic monetary monopoly.”
One of the most immoral things about international bankers is that they fund both sides in a war – they can make billions of dollars off of mass murder and massive destruction.
“In the case of war,” writes Carolina Hartley. “it was an easy task for a private bank with seats in several different national banks to calculate the deposits and income of the contesting states and the loans they secured to raise their armies, thus allowing the privileged few to bet on the probable winner.”
If the above quote does not describe a vampire, then I don’t know what does.
Jesus saw through these people too – the only people beat he beat (with a whip) were the money-changers in the temple, who were the banksters of that era.
Vilfredo Pareto, who is an essential read, formulated the concept of “the Circulation of the Elites.” Elites are always replaced This is why we will never have a New World Order or One World Government or an Orwellian jackpot stamping on our heads for the rest of time. The Elites always end up being guillotined or shot or hung upside down by their heels from a lamppost.
They are replaced by other Elites, who sooner or later turn into the people they displaced. Then they get displaced. And so it goes, on and on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Vampires cannot stand the light of day. In fact, it destroys them. The same thing is true of the State, or the Elites, or the non-producers, or however you want to refer to them. The one thing that will destroy them is for them is the light, because evil cannot stand being exposed.
Politics is About Exploitation
Politics is not about the general good. Aristotle thought that when he wrote about it in his Politics, over 2000 years ago, but I doubt he would think it today. Machiavelli, with over a thousand years more experience than Aristotle, had a better understanding: politics is about exploiting the public – those with more economic and political power exploiting those with less.
The most important divide, and the one that causes most of the trouble in the world, is between the Elites and the Masses, i.e., between the Non-Producers and the Producers, between the Political Class and the Economic Class, between those who have the power to steal from those who create.
Those who steal do it by gaining control of the government and creating laws to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else. This is how, in the U.S., one percent of the people have appropriated 40% of the wealth.
This appropriation was not done through the free market. The free market expands the middle class, and the middle class is shrinking. So it is clear the United States doesn’t have much of a free market anymore. It does, however, have enough for the vampiric Political Class to live off of the Economic Class, the producers and the creators.
People ignore the fact (if they ever think about it), that the two most famous deaths in the West – Socrates and Jesus – were men both killed by the State. Both in fact were murdered by the Elites.
You’d think people might keep those murders in mind, since both illustrate what politics is about – force and fraud, murder and lying. Yet instead of seeing it as a murderer and a liar, many people see it as a Good Daddy and a Good Mommy, who’ll take care of them and what give what we need! (For ‘free,’ of course/)
If there is one story in history that repeats itself, it is the attempt of the “State” (all the Elites) to expand their power and exploit everyone else.
Politics is driven by graft and special interests, and “patriotism” and “idealism” are shams perpetuated by self-promoters. That’s why I am amused when I see people at a political convention cheering when their fraud (whether Republican or Democrat) wins an election. Suckers!
In one sentence, politics is about Wolves trying to sheer the Sheep, and telling the Sheep it’s for their own good.
The most important divide, and the one that causes most of the trouble in the world, is between the Elites and the Masses, i.e., between the Non-Producers and the Producers, between the Political Class and the Economic Class, between those who have the power to steal from those who create.
Those who steal do it by gaining control of the government and creating laws to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else. This is how, in the U.S., one percent of the people have appropriated 40% of the wealth.
This appropriation was not done through the free market. The free market expands the middle class, and the middle class is shrinking. So it is clear the United States doesn’t have much of a free market anymore. It does, however, have enough for the vampiric Political Class to live off of the Economic Class, the producers and the creators.
People ignore the fact (if they ever think about it), that the two most famous deaths in the West – Socrates and Jesus – were men both killed by the State. Both in fact were murdered by the Elites.
You’d think people might keep those murders in mind, since both illustrate what politics is about – force and fraud, murder and lying. Yet instead of seeing it as a murderer and a liar, many people see it as a Good Daddy and a Good Mommy, who’ll take care of them and what give what we need! (For ‘free,’ of course/)
If there is one story in history that repeats itself, it is the attempt of the “State” (all the Elites) to expand their power and exploit everyone else.
Politics is driven by graft and special interests, and “patriotism” and “idealism” are shams perpetuated by self-promoters. That’s why I am amused when I see people at a political convention cheering when their fraud (whether Republican or Democrat) wins an election. Suckers!
In one sentence, politics is about Wolves trying to sheer the Sheep, and telling the Sheep it’s for their own good.
Libertarians, Marriage, and Children
A pure, “Big L” libertarian doesn’t believe the State has any business being involved in anything. They’d like to see it gone because of the horrors it has perpetrated throughout history. Fair enough. It’s a legitimate philosophical position, and one that I am very sympathetic to. But I am more of a “Small L” libertarian, or perhaps closer to a classical liberal (which has nothing to do with the Commie liberals of today).
To a pure libertarian, especially the anarchist variety, the State shouldn’t be involved in marriage at all. A couple would merely have to say, “We’re married” and start living together. Why should anyone pay the State to get permission?
I can’t remember her name, or the exact quote, but a woman writer in the early 1900s said that if the State didn’t meddle in the relationships between men and women (such as Affirmative Action today) the sexes would fall into their proper roles socially and economically. Overwhelmingly, I agree with her.
But there is a problem, and that problem is unmarried single women with children. Specifically, women who decide to have children by themselves.
Under a pure libertarian society would a woman fully justified in having a child without being married? To accept such a thing is leftist more than anything else. A rightist or a “conservative” would disapprove of it. This split is one of the reasons there are right-libertarians and left-libertarians, although libertarians like to delude themselves they’re “in the middle.”
History has shown the lifestyle of an unmarried single woman with children has been, overall, a catastrophe. These women have never been socially or economically viable in any culture in the world. They’re not today, in the United States.
Currently in the U.S. about 40% of children are born outside of marriage. Also currently, 25% of all children in the U.S. are on food stamps. So, it’s obvious there are a lot of single mothers on government-issued food stamps.
You can argue in a libertarian society food, clothing, housing and medical care would be given to them voluntarily by churches and other voluntary relief organizations, and this too is a legitimate position. But the fact remains these women are still being supported by someone else.
We also have to consider the fact that fatherless children, raised by single mothers, are susceptible to a wide array of physical, mental and emotional illness, such as early death, delinquency, criminality, addiction, incarceration, and dropping out of school.
To claim that some of these children without fathers turn out just fine is the Fallacy of Composition – assuming that what is true of a part is true of the whole.
How then, in a libertarian society, are these social problems of single mothers with children to be prevented? Predominately, by a married couple raising children together. How is this to be done? Denying welfare to all single mothers? No food stamps? No subsidized housing? No State-provided medical care? Is this not what would happen under a libertarian society? In the past it would have forced the women into marriage, to be economically dependent on a man - not exactly the most ideal of situations.
In the not-so-distant past men pretty much had control of a woman’s reproductive rights (although many women agreed with what was going on then). Abortion was illegal. In some cases contraception was illegal. If a woman got pregnant outside of marriage the social pressure was so enormous she was sent away to have the child, which was given to an orphanage. In a divorce the children were almost always given to the father.
All of it was to prevent single unmarried women from raising children alone. The result of this is illustrated by the word “bastard,” which has a dual meaning – a boy with no father, and a cruel, heartless man. Which means it has been noticed for a long time that boys without fathers can often grow up to be cruel, heartless men.
That now-gone system worked, but it was imperfect and had many flaws. Those days are gone, with legal abortion and wide-spread contraception, and we’re not going back to them. What we have now is that women have complete control of their reproduction.
Unfortunately, there are flaws in that system, too. Is it actually a legitimate position that a fetus is only human if the woman wants it? If she wants it, then it is considered human. If she does not want it, then it can be aborted as an annoyance. Being human is dependent on opinion?
Fathers, legally, have zero rights concerning their unborn children if they are not married to the mother. The woman can abort the fetus with no input from him. If she decides to give birth, she can legally force him to pay for bringing up the child, or cut him completely and give the child her last name.
None of it, in my opinion, is “libertarian.” If a woman had a child on her own, and there was no State assistance for her, and she could not legally force the father to pay any support, how then, could she support herself and the child?
In a libertarian society, she couldn’t - not unless she was rich and didn’t have to work. Should she work and give the child as soon as possible to a day-care center? This is exactly what Communists strove to do, and still strive to do. Get a poorly-paid nanny? (And who really wants child-care workers to cost a lot?) In other words, give children to be raised by others, as in socialist Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child”?
You can argue that the father should be legally forced to provide for the child. Again, fair enough. But then, should he not have legal rights to the child since he’s paying for it? In a libertarian society, would not all fathers automatically have “property rights” in their children? Just as much as the mother?
I have seen what happens when parents who are not married fight over their children. Again, it’s a catastrophe, one that damages the lives of the adults and the children. And it goes on for years, if not decades.
Ultimately the question is this: what is the status of children in a libertarian society when the parents are not married? What are the legal rights of the mother and father towards those children? Can there be a theory in a libertarian society that satisfactorily answers these questions?
To a pure libertarian, especially the anarchist variety, the State shouldn’t be involved in marriage at all. A couple would merely have to say, “We’re married” and start living together. Why should anyone pay the State to get permission?
I can’t remember her name, or the exact quote, but a woman writer in the early 1900s said that if the State didn’t meddle in the relationships between men and women (such as Affirmative Action today) the sexes would fall into their proper roles socially and economically. Overwhelmingly, I agree with her.
But there is a problem, and that problem is unmarried single women with children. Specifically, women who decide to have children by themselves.
Under a pure libertarian society would a woman fully justified in having a child without being married? To accept such a thing is leftist more than anything else. A rightist or a “conservative” would disapprove of it. This split is one of the reasons there are right-libertarians and left-libertarians, although libertarians like to delude themselves they’re “in the middle.”
History has shown the lifestyle of an unmarried single woman with children has been, overall, a catastrophe. These women have never been socially or economically viable in any culture in the world. They’re not today, in the United States.
Currently in the U.S. about 40% of children are born outside of marriage. Also currently, 25% of all children in the U.S. are on food stamps. So, it’s obvious there are a lot of single mothers on government-issued food stamps.
You can argue in a libertarian society food, clothing, housing and medical care would be given to them voluntarily by churches and other voluntary relief organizations, and this too is a legitimate position. But the fact remains these women are still being supported by someone else.
We also have to consider the fact that fatherless children, raised by single mothers, are susceptible to a wide array of physical, mental and emotional illness, such as early death, delinquency, criminality, addiction, incarceration, and dropping out of school.
To claim that some of these children without fathers turn out just fine is the Fallacy of Composition – assuming that what is true of a part is true of the whole.
How then, in a libertarian society, are these social problems of single mothers with children to be prevented? Predominately, by a married couple raising children together. How is this to be done? Denying welfare to all single mothers? No food stamps? No subsidized housing? No State-provided medical care? Is this not what would happen under a libertarian society? In the past it would have forced the women into marriage, to be economically dependent on a man - not exactly the most ideal of situations.
In the not-so-distant past men pretty much had control of a woman’s reproductive rights (although many women agreed with what was going on then). Abortion was illegal. In some cases contraception was illegal. If a woman got pregnant outside of marriage the social pressure was so enormous she was sent away to have the child, which was given to an orphanage. In a divorce the children were almost always given to the father.
All of it was to prevent single unmarried women from raising children alone. The result of this is illustrated by the word “bastard,” which has a dual meaning – a boy with no father, and a cruel, heartless man. Which means it has been noticed for a long time that boys without fathers can often grow up to be cruel, heartless men.
That now-gone system worked, but it was imperfect and had many flaws. Those days are gone, with legal abortion and wide-spread contraception, and we’re not going back to them. What we have now is that women have complete control of their reproduction.
Unfortunately, there are flaws in that system, too. Is it actually a legitimate position that a fetus is only human if the woman wants it? If she wants it, then it is considered human. If she does not want it, then it can be aborted as an annoyance. Being human is dependent on opinion?
Fathers, legally, have zero rights concerning their unborn children if they are not married to the mother. The woman can abort the fetus with no input from him. If she decides to give birth, she can legally force him to pay for bringing up the child, or cut him completely and give the child her last name.
None of it, in my opinion, is “libertarian.” If a woman had a child on her own, and there was no State assistance for her, and she could not legally force the father to pay any support, how then, could she support herself and the child?
In a libertarian society, she couldn’t - not unless she was rich and didn’t have to work. Should she work and give the child as soon as possible to a day-care center? This is exactly what Communists strove to do, and still strive to do. Get a poorly-paid nanny? (And who really wants child-care workers to cost a lot?) In other words, give children to be raised by others, as in socialist Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child”?
You can argue that the father should be legally forced to provide for the child. Again, fair enough. But then, should he not have legal rights to the child since he’s paying for it? In a libertarian society, would not all fathers automatically have “property rights” in their children? Just as much as the mother?
I have seen what happens when parents who are not married fight over their children. Again, it’s a catastrophe, one that damages the lives of the adults and the children. And it goes on for years, if not decades.
Ultimately the question is this: what is the status of children in a libertarian society when the parents are not married? What are the legal rights of the mother and father towards those children? Can there be a theory in a libertarian society that satisfactorily answers these questions?
Narcissism and Sexual Promiscuity
All societies that I know of have frowned on excessive sexual promiscuity. I used to wonder why but I don’t so much, not anymore.
Some years ago I lived in the St. Louis area. The city prosecuting attorney was a sleazeball named George Peach. It turned out Peach was a nut. He spent his career putting prostitutes in prison (as a misdemeanor, it’s up to a year) and putting their customers’ names and pictures in the paper.
I thought his behavior was way too extreme. I knew an old, retired city judge who told me during his time the city was involved in policing prostitution. Once a year the police would round up the girls and take them to the city health department to be tested. The police, judges, the health department – all were involved. They knew it couldn’t be stamped out, so they informally policed it.
Peach, on the other hand, while trying to eradicate something that cannot be eradicated, was frequenting prostitutes for years and using city funds to pay for them (he got caught on tape saying, “I’d like some oral sex to make me feel good”). When he got caught in a sting operation he started destroying city records to cover his criminal behavior.
The reason I know so much about that sting operation is because I got caught in it, since I was driving a taxi and was transporting a hooker to a hotel. Since I had no idea that she was a hooker, the vice cops let me go – and her, too, since they were after Peach. Although, I found out to my dismay that while being a hooker is a misdemeanor, transporting one is a felony, since it is “promoting prostitution.”
I always thought I was closer to Bob the Builder, not Bob the Inadvertent Pimp Felon.
Strangely, Peach never served time (which he should have), but did get fired, get probation and lost his law license. I don’t know if he had to pay any money back, but I hope so.
Peach had to have had a character disorder to do the things he did. He was some kind of narcissist, and was so sexually promiscuous he was paying dozens (who knows how many) of prostitutes for sex.
He caused a lot of problems because he just happened to have political power. He had to have zero empathy for the girls he put in prison and the guys whose names and pictures he put in the newspaper. I’m sure he conned himself he was doing a good thing, but of course was so disassociated from himself he could patronize hookers while simultaneously trying to put them in prison.
The only thing Peach ever regretted was that he got caught. It was always about him and how things affected him, never how he affected anyone else. That’s the way it is with all narcissistic people.
I started running across excessively promiscuous girls when I was a teenager. I noticed they all had certain things in common. For one thing, their idea of sex was something that lasted a minute. They never kissed – just like prostitutes don’t kiss.
All of them had problems with their relationships with men, not so much because of their promiscuity, but because of their character flaws that resulted in their promiscuity. Every one of them was self-absorbed and lacked empathy toward others. The sex, such that it was, was about them only, not about their partner.
How can you have any kind of relationship with someone of the opposite sex when you are self-absorbed and lack empathy? You can’t, not a successful one.
One 19-year-old girl I knew in college once told me, bitterly, that a man she had been interested in was told by one of her “friends” that this guy should stay away from her, because he considered her a nut. And she was self-absorbed, lacking in empathy, and her idea of sex lasted one minute with zero foreplay. It was for her, more than anything else, physical relief – it was just for her. She had no clue what she was like.
I knew another girl who had been a promiscuous party girl in college – sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. She ended up 51 years old, unmarried, no children, and no prospects – all she had was a cat. She was also self-absorbed and lacking in empathy. She didn’t know it, unfortunately.
When I drove a taxi for a while I worked for an escort service. There is no such thing as a hooker with a heart of gold. They’re all mercenary. It was always about the money.
None of them had a relationship with a man and I never saw one who ever did. The guys were just things to them, ones to be used, which is the classic sign or a narcissist. Did they have empathy for others? Of course not. What concern they did have was only for their selves.
I have found the more sexually promiscuous someone is, the less they understand the other sex. In fact, they barely understand them at all. It can’t be otherwise, when you’re so self-absorbed it’s always about you and other people are just props in your play.
Some years ago I lived in the St. Louis area. The city prosecuting attorney was a sleazeball named George Peach. It turned out Peach was a nut. He spent his career putting prostitutes in prison (as a misdemeanor, it’s up to a year) and putting their customers’ names and pictures in the paper.
I thought his behavior was way too extreme. I knew an old, retired city judge who told me during his time the city was involved in policing prostitution. Once a year the police would round up the girls and take them to the city health department to be tested. The police, judges, the health department – all were involved. They knew it couldn’t be stamped out, so they informally policed it.
Peach, on the other hand, while trying to eradicate something that cannot be eradicated, was frequenting prostitutes for years and using city funds to pay for them (he got caught on tape saying, “I’d like some oral sex to make me feel good”). When he got caught in a sting operation he started destroying city records to cover his criminal behavior.
The reason I know so much about that sting operation is because I got caught in it, since I was driving a taxi and was transporting a hooker to a hotel. Since I had no idea that she was a hooker, the vice cops let me go – and her, too, since they were after Peach. Although, I found out to my dismay that while being a hooker is a misdemeanor, transporting one is a felony, since it is “promoting prostitution.”
I always thought I was closer to Bob the Builder, not Bob the Inadvertent Pimp Felon.
Strangely, Peach never served time (which he should have), but did get fired, get probation and lost his law license. I don’t know if he had to pay any money back, but I hope so.
Peach had to have had a character disorder to do the things he did. He was some kind of narcissist, and was so sexually promiscuous he was paying dozens (who knows how many) of prostitutes for sex.
He caused a lot of problems because he just happened to have political power. He had to have zero empathy for the girls he put in prison and the guys whose names and pictures he put in the newspaper. I’m sure he conned himself he was doing a good thing, but of course was so disassociated from himself he could patronize hookers while simultaneously trying to put them in prison.
The only thing Peach ever regretted was that he got caught. It was always about him and how things affected him, never how he affected anyone else. That’s the way it is with all narcissistic people.
I started running across excessively promiscuous girls when I was a teenager. I noticed they all had certain things in common. For one thing, their idea of sex was something that lasted a minute. They never kissed – just like prostitutes don’t kiss.
All of them had problems with their relationships with men, not so much because of their promiscuity, but because of their character flaws that resulted in their promiscuity. Every one of them was self-absorbed and lacked empathy toward others. The sex, such that it was, was about them only, not about their partner.
How can you have any kind of relationship with someone of the opposite sex when you are self-absorbed and lack empathy? You can’t, not a successful one.
One 19-year-old girl I knew in college once told me, bitterly, that a man she had been interested in was told by one of her “friends” that this guy should stay away from her, because he considered her a nut. And she was self-absorbed, lacking in empathy, and her idea of sex lasted one minute with zero foreplay. It was for her, more than anything else, physical relief – it was just for her. She had no clue what she was like.
I knew another girl who had been a promiscuous party girl in college – sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. She ended up 51 years old, unmarried, no children, and no prospects – all she had was a cat. She was also self-absorbed and lacking in empathy. She didn’t know it, unfortunately.
When I drove a taxi for a while I worked for an escort service. There is no such thing as a hooker with a heart of gold. They’re all mercenary. It was always about the money.
None of them had a relationship with a man and I never saw one who ever did. The guys were just things to them, ones to be used, which is the classic sign or a narcissist. Did they have empathy for others? Of course not. What concern they did have was only for their selves.
I have found the more sexually promiscuous someone is, the less they understand the other sex. In fact, they barely understand them at all. It can’t be otherwise, when you’re so self-absorbed it’s always about you and other people are just props in your play.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)