Fake Christians as Worshipers of Dionysus

Poor Nietzsche. Half genius, half insane — and after his untreated syphilis advanced far enough, totally insane.

The trigger for his breakdown was when he saw a horse being beaten. He threw his arms around it, sobbing. He never recovered, and ended his days in an insane asylum.

For all of his attempts to portray himself as a bad boy, Nietzsche (a pencil-necked mouse of a man whose one true love, Lou Salome, refused to sleep with him even once), was in real life anything but. For one thing, he was far too sensitive for his own good, even though he tried to pretend he wasn't sensitive at all. As hard as he tried to not to, he identified with victims, and that's why the horse being beaten broke him.

In one of his writings, "Dionysus vs. the Crucified," Nietzsche wrote about two totally different religions — one based on taking the point of view of the victimizer, and the other that takes the point of view of the victim.

The first religion he correctly identified as pagan, and it has nothing to do with the silly "kinder, gentler" faux-paganism that those repulsed by what Christianity has become are today trying to create (or in their minds, recreate).

The second religion Nietzsche identified as Christian. Although an atheist, he was in some ways more Christian than those who today profess to be. He could at least identify with those victimized, something today, in my opinion, many Christians cannot do.

The pagan god Dionysus, Nietzsche pointed out, was not the god of drinking and partying and having a good time. He was the god of drunken rioting, destruction, and at times tearing people to shreds. And although it sounds counter-intuitive, he was also a fertility god.

We've all seen Dionysus. Every time you see a mob of people rioting and destroying things, and breaking into businesses and carrying off the merchandise and hitting innocent people in the head with bricks, the way Reginald Denny was on the receiving of one, that's Dionysus at his worst.

There are many different myths about Dionysus — apparently each Greek town had its own version — but all of them employed the same concept: a god who is slain — in fact dismembered — and then restored to life. That's one of the reasons he was a fertility god — he died and then was reborn, just as the crops were every year.

Some of the ancient Greeks did engage in drunken destructive festivals, which brought the disapproval of the authorities, who feared revolution. A government afraid of revolution? We can use the Dionysian slaughter of the French Revolution as an example of that fear (if you want to understand ancient myths, look for the modern equivalent).

These drunken destructive orgiastic rites were finally tamed by being turned into plays, such as the ones about Oedipus and Agamemnon. In the original communal festivals, people, after their rioting, felt "cleansed" —then later, after the plays took the festivals' place, the same catharsis sent them home rid of what Aristotle famously called "pity and fear."

One of the most ominous things about these festivals is there was always a scapegoat, one onto which the sins and frustrations of the community were projected. Often they were killed. Later, in the theater, the characters were the scapegoats, only this time they were fictional and died imaginary deaths.

Scapegoating is why today in destructive rioting there are always people — the "oppressors" — who are targeted for attack (sometimes these scapegoats have been dead for hundreds of years, such as the infamous "Dead White Males" responsible for every problem in the U.S., and, indeed, the world).

After the rioting and attacks are over, those involved — however temporarily — feel renewed and rejuvenated, because they have "cleansed" themselves, not of their pity and fear, but their resentment and hate.

This scapegoating is the main thing Nietzsche noticed about Dionysus. All pagan religions, he told us, are Dionysian. They take the point of view of the victimizer; the scapegoats are always guilty and were killed for the utilitarian "greater good."

Christianity, on the other hand, for the first time in history took the point of view of the victim. As the Gospels show, Jesus was the innocent victim, although the religious leaders of the time considered him guilty ("It is expedient that one man should die for the sake of the people").

The Russian writer Dmitri Merejkowski saw the same division that Nietzsche did: he believed all religions could be divided into two basic ones: in the first, Man sacrifices Man to Man. In the second, God sacrifices Himself to Man.

Today, the French philosopher and theologian Rene Girard, author of Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, is probably the most well-known writer about scapegoating. Not surprisingly, he has been influenced by Nietzsche, whom he considered a prophet. A crazed one, but still a prophet.

Girard thought the function of a scapegoat was to renew society, however imperfectly, and another theologian, Walter Wink, agreed with him, calling it "the myth of redemptive violence," i.e., the world can be reborn through violence.

Girard has suggested scapegoating should have ended with Jesus' sacrifice, because it was the first time in history the scapegoat was considered innocent. Before that, he tells us, people always thought the scapegoats deserved exactly what they got.

The psychiatrist M. Scott Peck said scapegoating is "the genesis of human evil," because when they do it people ignore their own guilt and other flaws and project them onto other people, whom they believe have to be destroyed to rid the world of whom they have defined as evil.

In the 20th Century the Nazis and most especially the Communists (who were far, far worse than the Nazis), were masters at this killing of those they defined as scapegoats, and therefore damned as evil. Each thought their society would be renewed after violently getting rid of their scapegoats.

Each of those ideologies, as Merejkowski wrote, sacrificed Man to Man. And, as Nietzsche predicted, each were worshipers of Dionysus and his destructive frenzies. His observations allowed him to predict the carnage of the 20th Century — and in his opinion, beyond.

I've read estimates of 177 million to 200 million people in the 20th Century killed in various wars. All, ultimately were scapegoats; all, ultimately, were sacrificed to Dionysus.

All this applies to Christians? To some, yes, I believe it does. I've heard them referred to as Christian Zionists, or more insultingly (or maybe just more accurately), Rapture monkeys or Rapture nutters.

I consider these types of Christians to be Christians in name only. CHRINOs, you might say. They do little more than give lip service to the teachings of Jesus, and would be much more honest if they just called themselves Zionists, since many of them think more of Israel than they do of Jesus.

Perhaps I should just call them worshipers of Dionysus.

At first these people, who have cobbled together their beliefs out of unrelated passages in the Bible (courtesy of two itinerant preachers named John Darby and Cyrus Scofield), thought the Soviet Union was the anti-Christ, which was going to invade the Middle East and bring about the end of the world. When that didn't pan out they started pinning their hopes on the Islamic world. First the U.S.S.R. was the scapegoat; now it's Muslims.

What these people hope to do is to kick-start the Apocalypse so Jesus will come back, destroy his enemies — currently Muslims; who knows who's next? — kill about two-third of the Jews in Israel and convert the rest, and then rule over a reborn world. That's why they have to support Israel — they are convinced it's the only way they're going to be Raptured into Heaven. Which means they don't have to first die to get there.

Israel comes first for these people; Jesus, second. They don't know this and certainly wouldn't believe it if told.

Unfortunately, these people are Biblical literalists, and when this idolatry of the written word takes hold of people, it invariably leads to the justification — indeed rationalization — for the worst of crimes.

To describe these "Christians'" doings in one word: Dionysus. These people want the world to erupt in slaughter, disease, starvation and war —the ultimate party hosted by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — so their scapegoats will be destroyed, and then the world reborn. If that's not worshiping Dionysus in the worst possible way, then what is?

Dionysus belongs to what Mircea Eliade called "the myth of the eternal return." This myth has roots in non-Christian classical civilization, and in it the creation of society is followed by the degeneration of it and then by regeneration.

This notion helped the ancients deal with the uncertainty of the future, just as it helps CHRINOs deal with our uncertain future. Although, in their minds, there is nothing uncertain about it.

The writers I've quoted are telling us when certain groups of people believe society (or the world) is degenerating, a scapegoat must be found and destroyed (currently, the Islamic world, followed by the entire world), so society can be regenerated (the return of Jesus).

I doubt any of these CHRINOs has any conscious understanding that they worship a Greek god and also believe in a pagan concept — the Myth of the Eternal Return. Or, better yet, that they are scapegoaters par excellence, since they want to sacrifice the entire world, not just a goat, the way the ancient Hebrews did.

CHRINOs want to blood-sacrifice to their God millions of Muslims, Jews and Christians who do not believe as they do — in fact, everyone who does not believe as they do.

The most perverse things about these CHRINOs is that, contrary to what they so fervently tell us, they no longer believe in the sacrifice of Jesus.

If they really believed Jesus took the sins of the world onto himself to appease the wrath of God (and this belief is courtesy of St. Anselm), they wouldn't want to visit their own sins — their Dionysian slaughter and death/rebirth — onto the world. They wouldn't have replaced Jesus with Dionysus.

They wouldn't have sought political power (defined by Jesus as Satanic in one of his Temptations) in their attempts to start Holy World War I in the Middle East, or helped put into office George Bush (whose favorite "philosopher," Jesus Christ, apparently personally told him it was okay to start two unnecessary wars).

The political power of these people can be crushing. Bush once criticized something Israel did, and he received 10,000 angry emails from them. He never made that mistake again.

That's the rub. These people would just be harmless crackpots except for the fact they have gained such political influence they used the power of the State to start two wars, both still ongoing and with no end in sight.

These CHRINOs, with their lust for their "Left Behind" best-sellers, don't want to be around when the hammer comes down. They want to avoid the riots and dwell in their fiction until they get wafted up into Heaven — the Rapture — so all the unsaved can suffer the Tribulation. They want the world to end and be regenerated but expect to be watching it from on high. They don't want to experience the drunken rioting and destruction, the wars and disease and starvation.

Instead they want to read about those things vicariously, the way the Greeks had their Dionysian festivals turned into theater, then instead of going home purged of pity and fear, they expect to leave the theater permanently.

In fact, they appear to have no pity at all, but a lot of fear, which they have purged through their delusions. Perhaps they are also engaging in some gloating and self-righteousness, too. (Aristotle noticed their attitude in his Poetics, when he wrote, "If an enemy kills an enemy, there is nothing to excite pity either in the act or the intention... ")

I am not familiar with any belief in the history of the world to rival this perversion of Christianity, this replacing of Jesus with Dionysus.

CHRINOs have no guilt over what they expect, and indeed, they should be consumed with it, and as such, give up their beliefs. Where is their contrition, their sorrow for what they believe and want? It doesn't exist. They have no empathy for the innocent. They take the point of view of the victimizer, not the victim.

Instead, they believe they are innocent, their hands free of blood, because to them it's God's will. And they don't want to see it any other way.

When the Rapture and Tribulation do not happen (being that both are unbiblical), how are these people going to atone for what they've done? They won't. Instead of accepting responsibility they will instead find scapegoats and turn on them. But who will it be? That I don't know. Their own leaders, like obese blasphemer John Hagee? I certainly hope so.

Jacques Barzun, in his book, From Dawn to Decadence, wrote, "When people see futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label. A decadent culture offers opportunities chiefly to the satirist... "

Since what CHRINOs believe is both futile and absurd, it is not only decadent, but a parody of Christianity. That is why it is so easy to mock it. I'd have to describe these people the way Erasmus did in his time: "Christians... enslaved by blindness and ignorance."

I close with something Girard wrote in Violence and the Sacred: "Men can dispose of their violence more efficiently if they regard the process not as something emanating from within themselves, but as a necessity imposed from without... violence and the sacred are inseparable... violence seeks shelter in religion."

"If It Bleed It Leads"

I have zero respect for the Mainstream Media. Their purpose now is to scare you, not report the news.

The only time they do anything anymore is when they're attacked, as Obama is now doing to them. I also don't have any use for "Everything is a conspiracy!" retards on the internet.

I have a degree in Journalism and am a former newspaper reporter and editor. In college I was told the media was aimed at high-school graduates. Most of the students were clueless liberals and became clueless graduates. (I've decided liberalism is a mental illness and possibly even brain damage.)

As for people who read the news on TV, we called them "meat puppets."

It is possible to find the truth on the internet but you have to possess critical abilities. You don't need them for the MSM - just assume everything in it is false and you can't go wrong.

For some reason I don't quite understand, all institutions ultimately become leftist, including the media - which is why they don't write about the dangers of open immigration, black on white crime, or the dangers of letting Muslims into the West.

We were told the easiest way to sell a story is to memorize an old saying - "If it bleeds it leads." This is why I don't believe anything in the MSM.

I was an editor when the AIDs scare happened. It was supposed to wipe out the entire world, but when I received the statistics from the Center for Disease Control I found 99.9% of it was confined to faggots and IV drug users. There was no heterosexual AIDs. My first thought: "I was lied to. And by the media I work in."

Same thing about global warming. I blew it off. Peak oil? Don't believe it.

I left the field because of my disgust for it. I no longer watch the news, read newspapers, and very rarely read magazines. I also blow off the nonsense on the internet.

Do yourself a favor. Don't read newspapers or watch the news (I hardly watch TV). Don't support these leftist losers.

And you know what? You'll feel better and have more peace of mind.

After all, who needs to be lied to and traumatized?

The Introvert as Bureaucrat

I write quite a bit about introverts and extroverts. In general, extroverts are destroyers - the Sheeple, the Borg, the HiveMind. The low-IQ ones make up almost all prisoners, and the high-IQ ones become mass-murdering politicians. Almost all of the creative are introverts.

Yet there is a certain kind of introvert who is a trouble-maker, although he doesn't usually mean to be. The Faceless Bureaucrat.

I once knew a man who was quite introverted, as was his wife. Guess who he worked for? The IRS. He wasn't stupid, but he wasn't brilliant, either.

He got a degree in Accounting (how's that for introverted) but only had a C average. He said he put in about 20 applications and got nothing but rejections - because of the C average. Only one place hired him - the IRS. He put in about 30 years before he retired.

He was actually rather a pleasant man, but still was hobbled by all the bureaucratic rules of the IRS. And that made him a Faceless Bureaucrat.

He's not like he was an extroverted, stupid, rabid war-monger. Quite the opposite. But he was still a bureaucrat.

Bureaucrats are actually cogs in a machine - that machine known as the State. I'm always been amused by the fact the mythologist Joseph Campbell once called Darth Vader "the perfect bureaucrat" - and Vader was probably more machine than man. And what was he? The scariest representative of the Empire.

My friend the introverted IRS agent ended up as he did because he wasn't that smart of a guy, so ended up working for the State. He spent his life slaving away in a cubicle like Dilbert, another introvert. Wally, too, for that matter.

I wonder how my friend would have turned out if he had not slaved away in a bureaucracy? If he had not been a cog in a machine? If the government had not morphed into the monster that it is now?

The Mythology of the Manosphere

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." - Ecclesiastes 1:9

There is nothing new in the Manosphere. It's all been done before - and better in the past.

Let's take the belief in women as gold-digging untrustworthy "hypergamous" (ridiculous word) whores. That is, women motivated solely by selfishness and greed. In mythology, they are the Whore and Witch. Eve, who seduced and misled Adam. This is how the (non-existent) "Alphas" see them.

Then there is the Madonna, the Virgin Mary that "Betas" put on a pedestal. Those two concepts - the Madonna and the Whore - are ancient, thousands of years old.

Woman as Seductress, as Witch, as Whore. As if men in the past didn't know about these things. These concepts are common in mythology - Kali, who is Woman as Creator and Destroyer. In Star Trek it is the Borg Queen - Seductress, Creator, Destroyer. The movie, Body Heat. Fatal Attraction.

Feminism is based on the envy of men and the wish to bring them down. In the story of the Garden of Eden, Eve is seduced by the serpent - a symbol of hate and envy - and Adam is seduced by Eve. Both are weaklings, both put the blame for their actions elsewhere: for Adam, on Eve, and for Eve, on the serpent.

The lesson: blaming your problems on others is what brought evil into the world. It's called scapegoating, or projection, and it's the first defense people engage in.

As feminism is based on the envy of men and the wish to destroy them, even if women bring themselves down, so is the Manosphere based on the envy of women and the wish to bring them down (hence the belief in them as Whores) even if men destroy themselves (which is what the PUA types as Roissy and Roosh have done - or will do).

By the way, the word "sin" correctly translates as "missing the mark."

This doesn't mean there aren't a lot of just complaints in the Manosphere, but let's separate the just from the envious. The biggest red flag for envy is visciously putting someone down.

Women are not either Whores or Madonnas. They are a mixture of both "good" and "bad," just as men are. For men and women, that accepting of the good and bad in women is embodied in the Greek goddess Sophia (Wisdom). Seeing women as Whores or Madonnas is not wise. To use modern narcissistic terms, they are either devalued or idealized.

There is a lot of misguided concepts in the Manosphere. For one, the belief that women have no control over themselves and are always attracted to "Bad Boys." Which women? In reality, the Whores - the strippers, the groupies, the drug-abusers, the lower-class.

The late mythologist Joseph Campbell identified what he called the Hero on a Quest. In his Hero with a Thousand Faces he described it as "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."

Campbell liked to say that the Hero’s Journey was man’s quest to find the Feminine Divine. And you cannot find the Feminine Divine if you see women as either Whores or Madonnas.

Campbell defined the components of the Hero on a Quest as: "The hero starts in the ordinary world, and receives a call to enter an unusual world of strange powers and events (a call to adventure). If the hero accepts the call to enter this strange world, the hero must face tasks and trials (a road of trials), and may have to face these trials alone, or may have assistance. At its most intense, the hero must survive a severe challenge, often with help earned along the journey. If the hero survives, the hero may achieve a great gift (the goal or "boon"), which often results in the discovery of important self-knowledge. The hero must then decide whether to return with this boon (the return to the ordinary world), often facing challenges on the return journey. If the hero is successful in returning, the boon or gift may be used to improve the world (the application of the boon)."

You can see this sequence in Star Wars (Campbell was Lucas' mentor). The greatest danger is the Dark Side. This is what has happened to frauds and liars like Roissy and Roosh. They failed the Road of Trials. They have failed and turned to the nihilistic, power-mad Dark Side.

As Roosh as recently admitted, "...no matter how much alcohol or caffeine I pump into my body, no matter what artificial flag goal I make, no matter how much I abstain from masturbating, and no matter how I try to jack up my testosterone levels through diet or weight lifting", he no longer could find women as desirable, displayed sexual dysfunction, and admitted his current state was that "like an addict coming off a drug."

He also wrote: "...a girl's opinions on friendship, a basic element of humanity, are completely useless....if you peel back the layers of a modern woman, you'll find that her life's total education has little real-world application." This is why I use the term, "The Lost Boys of the Manosphere."

That is the Dark Side that devoting your life to meaningless sex and seeing women as Whores leads to. As I said before, investigate the life of the late porn star John Holmes, who fell completely to the Dark Side when it came to sex and drugs and power over women, which means denigrating women to objects to be dominated and controlled (he was a woman-beater).

There is such as thing as an Intellectual Hero on a Quest. These are the ones who investigate, who analyze, who seek, and if they don't fall for the Dark Side, they can come back with self-knowledge, which is their boon for mankind. Unfortunately, some of those who seek knowledge in the Mansophere fail and fall. I just mentioned two of them.

Or, as Campbell wrote: "The hero journey is one of the universal patterns through which that radiance shows brightly. What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There's always the possibility of a fiasco. But there's also the possibility of bliss."

"There is no peace, there is anger/There is no fear, there is power." - Sith Code

The Loss of Our Rites of Passage

"... a Rite of Passage – it’s a journey from boyhood to manhood. It’s the way he breaks away from his attachment to his mother and becomes part of the father tribe. To once again quote Joseph Campbell, the Rite of Passage is a way 'for the individual to die to the past and be reborn to the future.'" - Michael Hiebert.

The purpose of initiation rites, ultimately, is to make sure boys turn into men and not pussies, i.e., girls. And to make sure girls turn into women and not men, which is what the initiation rites of leftist/lesbian feminism wants to do to girls.

All "primitive" societies have forced boys, right at the age of 12, to undergo initiation rites in which they symbolically died as children and then were reborn as adults, under the direction of learned elders (I'm going to repeat that -- learned elders, not just elders).

One of the reasons for this "rebirth" is to pull away from the mother, who at her worst is represented by the motherly/destructive/seductive mythic goddess Kali (today, she's the Borg Queen and before that, the Virgin Mary/Eve), and these days by society-destroying radical feminism. This pulling away is necessary for boys to be introduced to the world of men, otherwise, under the influence under the worst aspect of the feminine, they can end up as gang members...or maybe even far, far worse.

To a much lesser extent, there have been rites of passages for girls. In both cases, it happens right at puberty, when the body and brain are changing rapidly and profoundly.

Nowadays, we're lost these rites, at least the good ones. Did we ever have good ones? I'm sure we did, but offhand, I can't think of what they were. Currently, we're got some bad ones, and the kids and society pay for it. And pay and pay and pay. The lack of them is damaging to individuals and to the culture. "Culture is the public expression of group continuity," said one commentator, and I couldn't agree more.

Many people either don't know, or don't want to admit, how fragile society is, and that one of its purposes is to repress or transform all the badness inherent in human nature. When societies lose those myths, rituals and rites that help repress or transform the badness, worse rites will take their place. That's how we end up with kids wearing tribal tattoos and acting like whiggers.

Here's an example, and it's about a woman I knew: when I was about 23, and in college, I was sitting in the room of this woman, who was about 21 years old. We were just passing time listening to her records. I even remember one of the songs -- Ten Years After's "I'd Love to Change the World." Years later I realized how appropriate that song was for our conversation.

I was casual friends with her, but had noticed she was a bit more intelligent, sensitive and creative than the other girls who lived in her house, almost all of whom, in my opinion, was callow and not-very-bright college students. The one I was talking to was an art major, the only one in her house of 11 girls. Most of the others were studying to be grade-school teachers, urp.

To this day, I have no idea why she told me the things she did. She starting telling me about her time in 7th grade, when she was pudgy and wore those kind of horn-rimmed glasses that always sit crooked on your face. She showed me a picture; personally, I thought she was rather cute.

She was certainly cute at 21, certainly much better-looking than the other girls in the house. I always wanted to jump her, but never did.

She told me that because of the way she looked, she was ostracized by the other 7th-graders. Twelve years old and an outsider and a scapegoat. Just great. No wonder Stephen King's novel Carrie was such a big hit. Public schools, blech.

Over the summer, she told me, she grew up, lost the baby fat, filled out, and got contacts. Ugly duckling to swan in less than three months. When she came back for the 8th-grade all the kids who ostracised her now wanted to be her friends. She ignored them. I thought, "Good for you."

The way she was treated in the 7th-grade affected her for the rest of her life. She told me she was never attracted to what most people would consider "good-looking" men and was instead attracted to what she called "unusual-looking guys." (It occurred to me: was why I was in her room, unlike the other guys who hung out in the house, and why was she telling me these things? Uh oh.)

I got a big laugh out of this one: she told me she liked guys who looked like Peter Noone. Peter Noone? Who's that? You know, Herman of "Herman and the Hermits." They were popular about the time she was being born.

I saw her a few years later, after we had graduated, and sure enough, she had married a guy who looked like him.

She turned out just fine, but her initiation rites in 7th-grade consisted of a bright, creative, sensitive girl being ostracized and humiliated in public school. And they were unwitting initiation rites, ones that, I repeat, affected her for the rest of her life.

Rites of Passage are certainly not about being humiliated, which they are today for many young boys. And the humiliation often continues even when they are men - because society is set up that way these days.

The woman in college was lucky enough to make it through her ordeal, even without wise elders, just teachers instead, although in a sense she was scarred for the rest of her life. She symbolically died and was reborn courtesy of being treated like crap by a bunch of dim-witted, immature 12-year-olds tossed together helter-skelter in public schools (which I think should be burned down and the ground salted). Those were good rites of passage for her? That's a rhetorical question, by the way.

As bad as it was for her, I think this lack of initiation rites is a lot worse for boys. A lot worse, and I can't emphasize just how bad I think this lack is. We still have them, to a degree, although they're exactly the same as my friend went through: being tossed into the mish-mash that is public-school 7th-grade. It ain't working.

The fact we don't have any initiation affects us politically, I'm convinced. Politically, the leftist nanny-state is Mommy. Why do men fall for it? Because, even though raised with two parents, they're still stuck in mommy-mode, due to the lack of initiation rites that pull them away from mommy and toward daddy.

This away-from-dominating-mommy/searching-for-daddy can be seen in gangs, most of whom were raised without fathers. They found all-male gangs, ones that denigrate women. Their initiation rites and lives are all in the bad-male mode.

Teenagers have a vague, inchoate, instinctive understanding of their need for initiation rites. That's why they act and dress as they do. I did it when I was a teenager. Almost all of us did. Almost all of us used drugs, although in those days it was booze and marijuana. Today it's Ecstasy and raves. I understand completely.

Looking back on it, I realize my friends and I were rather wild, at least compared to the other kids. There were a lot of us, creating our own initiation rites of drugs and booze and parties. We had no mentors, be it parents or teachers. There was no ritualistic adjustment from childhood to adulthood. Nothing. These days, we'd be given Ritalin.

The way I see it, in American society, the skyrocketing rise of gangs and reckless behavior dramatizes how youth seek some sort of initiation rites, made worse in the absence of anything provided by the culture (read "learned elders" for "culture"). Unfortunately, old geezers fear young people, not realizing their wildness and energy are really just an unending longing for initiation into the adult world.

Adolescents hunger for real tests, somewhat risky ordeals by which they can turn into adults, ones with a purpose in life. What ceremonies and rituals and rites do we have? High school graduation? College graduation? Meaningless. They're not tests. Nearly everyone wants to feel like the Hero on a Quest. Luke Skywalker, you know. Why do you think those movies are so popular?

True rites involve some risk, some pain, and self- discipline and self-sacrifice. Look how many boys want to join the Marines. When those things are offered, then there is community. It doesn't matter what it is -- it can be anything from gangs to religion.

That lack of serious rites is one of the reasons Christianity is in the trouble it is in. It's too soft; it doesn't challenge. Make it harder, make it challenging, make it involve self-discipline and self-sacrifice, and the softness that plagues it will disappear.

We don't have, and we certainly need, adolescent initiations that meet the needs of kids today, ones that draw on tribal rites, ones that are feasible in a modern, urban culture. Since we live in a highly technological society, we need new rituals appropriate to urban teenagers. Then, of course, the other essential ingredients are elders and mentors willing to devise and perform such rituals and a supportive community -- that "group continuity" -- into which the initiated teens are brought.

The way things are now, we're turning into a society without fathers, and in some cases without mothers. The law has, foolishly and destructively, decided fathers are optional, and when they aren't, when a couple has to work to make ends meet and give their six-week-old baby to a pre-school, that's just another way of saying we no longer have elders. The government is no substitute, pace Hillary Clinton.

When you're looking at young gang members, you're looking at people with no elders. So we either develop elders, or the amount of violence will increase year by year. This is not something that can be replaced by government programs.

Sooner or later, we'll have to figure it out. We have to. But until we do, all the Ph.D.s and government studies and programs, are in vain, just chaff flying in the whirlwind.

"Artists are magical helpers. Evoking symbols and motifs that connect us to our deeper selves, they can help us along the heroic journey of our own lives..." - Joseph Campbell

Corporations and Clueless Libertarians

“Corporate governance is incompatible with people’s ability to create sustainable democratic communities” – Thomas Linzey

I’ve always been mystified by libertarians who support corporations, say, Wal-Mart. Perhaps they think corporations are free market. They’re not. They are the exact opposite of the free market.

Perhaps some of the problem is what H.L. Mencken noticed: when people are allowed to do what they want, usually they imitate each other. Libertarians, who should know better, imitate pseudo “free market” theorists even when the evidence contradicts their divorced-from-reality economic explanations.

Corporations have the status of legal persons, which is preposterous (“preposterous” literally means to have your head where your butt is). Corporations are not alive, they are not conscious, and they most certainly are not people. They should not have the rights of people, as they do now, by law. Under a true free market they wouldn’t, but since we don’t have the free market they are legally the exact same thing as a human being. This isn’t a good thing. It is a very bad thing.

The purpose of a corporation is to concentrate wealth at the expense of everyone else. One of the main ways they do this is to use the power of the government to drive its competition out of business, no matter how miniscule and powerless they are. The Founding Fathers, clearly seeing the danger of corporations, kept them under firm legal control. If the government created corporations, they reasoned, they can kill them.

And that is exactly what happened when corporations abused and exploited their privileges (not rights, because again, corporations are not people and should have no rights). Their charters were pulled and they ceased to exist. They got the death penalty.

Unfortunately, things have changed much for the worse since the days of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Nowadays corporations by law are effectively immortal. The people who run them die but the corporation lives on, collecting and concentrating wealth, abusing and exploiting the powerless.

Jefferson, who was the smartest and most prescient of the Founding Fathers, so clearly understood the abuses corporations engaged in he wanted to put a clause in the Constitution forbidding monopolies. He wrote of the dangers of “the moneyed interests.” Unfortunately he failed in his attempt.

Jefferson, the other Founding Fathers and indeed nearly every American had very unpleasant experiences with corporations, specifically the East India Company. Contrary to the common belief, the Boston Tea Party was not about tax hikes. It was about tax cuts – for the East India Company (they even got a tax rebate of millions of pounds from the King) so that this world-wide corporation could drive out of business its tiny American competitors.

The East India Company was at that time the largest and most powerful transnational corporation in the world.

When presidents from Reagan to Bush have cut taxes for “the rich” those tax cuts are mostly for corporations – which is one of the things that caused the War of Independence. (The fact most of the tax cuts went to corporations is one of the mains reasons why “trickle-down” economics didn’t work).

Does tax cuts for the extremely wealthy and tax rebates for them sound familiar today? “Stimulus packages,” anyone? (They certainly can’t work when the money from those tax cuts, rebates and “stimulus packages” are sent off-shore to create jobs in China and not the U.S.)

The wealth of corporations is not shared with the mass of people. Since corporations are not free market, and have such enormous legal power, they want to eliminate their competition. Which they have been able to do through the force and fraud of "the law" (sic). Without competition, workers’ wages will not be forced up, no matter how productive they are (the GDP of the United States has doubled since 1980, and the average wage has not only not gone up, it has declined). Corporations want to, and can, pay poverty wages – and they do.

Although corporations are immortal they have no souls. That’s pretty creepy, isn’t it? Sounds like they’re…what? Monsters? Vampires? Whatever they are, they have no conscience.

As an example of the soullessness – and the enormous power of corporations – Oprah Winfrey was once sued by cattle producers for making disparaging comments about, of all things, hamburgers.

For the Supreme Court to rule that legally one person has the same power as a multibillion-dollar corporation is bizarre, to say the least. This is what the Supreme Court started to rule, starting in the 1880s - and their rulings are getting more and more bizarre. Recently it ruled that to limit corporations spending hundreds of millions of dollars to elect politicians is to limit their free speech. In other words, they ruled that one person sending $100 to a politician is the same thing as a multinational corporation sending them one million dollars. That's insanity.

(By the way, lobbying was always illegal since to buy a politiican's vote was bribery and punished by prison. Not anymore!)

The United States does not have the free market anymore. We don’t have free international trade, either. We have managed trade by corporations, and it’s not going to enrich the U.S. and or any of the countries we trade with. It’s going to enrich even further the one percent in the U.S. who own 40 percent of the wealth (Chris Hedges called what they do "...the ruthless cannibalizing of the country by corporate capitalism").

When corporations pay a dollar a day to exploited child-slave labor in Burma, that child’s standard of living isn’t going to go up until they are on par with someone in the United States, contrary to the delusions of “free market” theorists (who, by the way, don’t understand economics). Nor will these exploited and oppressed people ever become free. Why? Because they are being crushed by their State, and those child slaves are not going to suddenly revolt, rise up and throw off their oppressors.

In fact, none of those Asian countries will ever be free, just the way Africa will never be free. They will be exploited and oppressed by their own governments in collusion with corporations, but free? It’s not going to happen.

Corporations don’t want those exploited and imprisoned children to be free or their wages to go up. It would mean less profit for corporations. In fact, if wages in Burma or any other country did go up, corporations would move their operations to the lowest-wage country they could find. And if the government of that country happened to be tyrannical, that’s just fine with corporations.

Child-slave labor, child prostitutes, pollution, poverty, starvation, death, destruction of the environment…corporations look the other way. To them, the only thing that matters is profit. They’re worse than the Ferengi, who look like saints compared to the transgressions of the worst corporations.

The largest corporations in the world are more financially powerful than many countries. They can push these countries around with the carrot of moving jobs there, and the stick of pulling them out. Then we have to consider corporations enriching tyrants and dictators to keep the countries “stable,” i.e. keep the populace enslaved and impoverished through the coercion of the military and the police.

It might be better if we called such corporations Lords of Poverty and Death. 

Corporations should have their legal status as persons removed. They should be called what they are – “artificial entities.” And when those in charge of corporations break the laws, they should serve some hard time. These days, nothing happens to these people no matter what they do.

The United States is turning into a feudal society – a extremely small number of people who have gained control of the government (which they use to enrich themselves and corporations), a very small middle class, and a huge mass of impoverished people hypnotized by the bread and circuses of today – cable television and sports. And for all practical purposes, our modern-day Coliseum is Washington D.C.

I call enormous corporations Cosmodemonic Transnational Megacorporations. They are not your friend and they do not have your best interests at heart. In point of fact they are your enemy. They have profit at heart, and they put it above all – above your life, your health, your liberty, your property, your happiness and well-being.

I am reminded of the Tyrell Corporation in the movie Blade Runner. It was not just an international corporation; it was an interstellar one. And what did this corporation do? Create artificial humans called Replicants to do dangerous and dirty off-world work. And Replicants, not surprisingly, weren’t considered human (one police officer called them “skinjobs”), they had no rights whatsoever and could be killed at will. This is essentially how these transnational megacorporations treat people when they can get away with it.

(Incidentally, the leader of the Replicants, Roy Batty, hunted down and killed - by putting out his eyes - Eldon Tyrell, who ran Tyrell Corporation - and whom Roy calls "the god of biomechanics." This is humiliation followed by revenge.

Libertarians who unwittingly support transnational corporations are cutting their own throats. Usually, it takes about five years for a person to change their mind when he’s faced with the facts. Cognitive dissonance does hurt. But sooner or later, for the smarter ones, they’ll realize the truth and take that razor from their necks.

The dumber, unfortunately, never will. They’ll continue to cheer Wal-Mart – and corporations in general – no matter what it does.

The K-Selected Introvert

"Superior people need to rule inferior people or else inferior people will cause problems for each other and for their betters. Superior people need to be more free. Inferior people cannot handle freedom, need supervision, discipline, and control. Inferior people need to be substantially less free." - Jim's Blog

When I entered the seventh grade I ran across people I didn't consider quite fully human. Loud, stupid, trouble-makers, picked on the weak, ran from the strong. They appeared to have something wrong with their brains. I didn't want anything to do with them (by the way, I am a high-IQ, imaginative introvert - an INTJ on the MBTI).

Years later I realized these stupid kids were low-IQ extroverts, and many of them I still consider a lower form of human. Almost all prisoners are low-IQ extroverts, and ambitious high-IQ extroverts can become narcissistic/psychopathic politicians who murder hundreds of millions.

Is there any wonder why I consider them subhuman?

Before the introduction of IQ tests the military used to judge soldiers with two variables - Smart or Stupid and Active or Lazy. The ones the military absolutely did not want, because they were dangerous, were the Active and Stupid. Low-IQ extroverts, the ones I first encountered in middle-school, were the catastrophic Active and Stupid.

Extrovert trouble-making even extends to families and reproduction.

There are two mating strategies: r-selected and K-selected. R-selected is what rabbits do: produce a lot of off-spring they don't take much care of. K-selected produce few off-spring and invest a great deal in their upbringing.

When it comes to people I use the movie Idiocracy as an example.

The smart couple are K-selected and the dumb ones are r-selected. Introverts versus extroverts.

R-selected are usually low-to-moderate IQ and K-selected tend to be high-IQ. You can look at Africa as an example of an example of r-selected - and the place is a catastrophe.

There are additional problems with the r-selected. They are almost always extroverts, which means they gain energy from other people (no matter who are they) and generally don't have an interior life. As far as I'm concerned, extroverts can't really think. They are the perfect example of what John D. MacDonald sneered at in his The Green Ripper as "herd animals, social and imitative." I consider them the Borg.

Extroverts imitate each other, because they cannot think. In the Manosphere, anyone who spouts terms such as Alpha, Beta, Sigma, Omega, rationalization hamster, hypergamy, "Alpha Fux and Beta Bux," and really believes it and thinks it applies universally to women, is a low-to-moderate IQ, imitative extrovert. They got those ideas from someone else, and don't have the intelligence, imagination, concentration or sensitivity to see the flaws and criticize them.

Extroverts are promiscuous. Introverts are far less less promiscuous and almost always find promiscuous sex meaningless.

Extroverts generally blame their problems on other people, since having no interior lives, everything that happens to them comes from the outside. So to them it's other people's fault when they have problems. The true narcissists and psychopaths are always extroverts.

The defining characteristic of the narcissist is envy. Logically, envy is then one of the defining extrovert values. And envy has caused more problems in the world than anything else. Extroverts are far more envious than introverts because to an extrovert everything good comes from the outside.

I doubt Thomas Browne's comment, "We carry within us the wonders we seek without us" makes much sense to them.

Let's look at the story of the Garden of Eden as an example. Adam blames his transgression on Eve and Eve blames hers on the serpent, which is a symbol of envy and hate, Adam is easily influenced by Eve and Eve by the serpent. To me both Adam and Eve have to be extroverts. They show every sign of it.

The story tells us that evil is brought into the world because of envy.

Extroverts are the true destroyers. They start the wars and kill hundreds of millions of people. I like to use the example of George Bush, an unimaginative man who never used what brains he had, who started two unnecessary wars, wasted a few trillion dollars, and damaged America's freedoms.

Some extroverts have what appears to be an instinctive dislike of introverts. It's related to extroverts trying to blame their problems on people, and introverts are so different some extroverts see them as Outsiders to be blamed and scapegoated. Of course, introverts understand extroverts a better than extroverts understand introverts - whom, for all practical purposes, they don't understand at all.

Cain, the first murderer, had to be a low-IQ, impulsive, envious extrovert who blamed his problems on Abel. I call Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel the first dysfunctional family, whose sickness has spread planet-wide.

All the truly destructive political philosophies - communism and socialism being the worst ones - are based on envy - and all are leftist (so is democracy, for that matter). That means they are extrovert philosophies. Feminism is a leftist, destructive, envious extrovert belief system.

Feminism is almost pure r-selected. As for not taking care of your kids and considering them disposable, the feminist support for abortion is a perfect example of it.

The Manosphere, to the extent it denigrates women as gold-digging whores and promotes the r-selected PUA lifestyle, it is an extrovert philosophy and will not work - because it is destructive. It is based on men's envy of women, just as feminism is based on women's envy of men.

Extrovert "Game" certainly will not work for introverts.

Extroverts can't help but be destroyers. That's why they must be ruled by introverts and their values - liberty, self-responsibility, political and economic freedom. Again I'll repeat: leftism, war, murder, destruction are extrovert values, because they blame their problems on other people. And the story of the Garden of Eden tells us that blaming our problems on other people is what brought evil into the world.

For that matter, all the crazy cat lady spinsters? Extroverts, of course.

The Manosphere Isn't a Religion. It's a Cult.

"I am holier than thou, therefore I should command thee."

"By a pharisee, I mean people who claim that they know more than others, therefore should be obeyed, that they are more virtuous than others, therefore should be obeyed, are holier than thou." - Jim's Blog

One of the main characteristics of a cult is that it has an arcane private language that doesn't have much to do with reality, although the members are convinced it is reality. Think of Scientology and its bizarre concepts.

Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, "Alpha Fux and Beta Bux," hypergamy, rationalization hamsters...these are concepts without much in the way of referents, which means they are words that don't "point" to much in reality. Example: I've had people tell me that men who murdered children and women are "Alphas." That's just bullshit. They're murderers, plain and simple.

The more our concepts conform to reality the better they work. "Jumping out from a plane without a parachute and floating down to earth" is a concept that does not work, just as "Women are hypergamous untrustworthy whores who look for Alpha Fux and Beta Bux" is a concept that not only does not work, but will also poison a man's soul.

This private language allows the possessors of it to feel superior to Outsiders. "I know the Truth, and they don't! How superior I am!"

It also allows the deluded to define themselves as Alphas and Sigmas ("How superior I am!") and the heretics/blasphemers as Omegas, Gammas, etc. It's called scapegoating, and it's the basis of human sacrifice. Unbelievers cannot be tolerated and must be attacked, ostracized and expelled.

Then there are cult leaders. There are always the cult leaders. Their acolytes believe they possess the Ultimate Truth and so their followers gather around, memorize their beliefs and then imitate them. Think of Roissy, who is a nihilistic destroyer.

Everyone has a philosophy of life that they live by, whether or not it's conscious, whether or not it's articulated. Many of the ideas in the Manosphere, not-good ideas, have been articulated so the simple-minded can memorize them.

A religion is supposed to refine the beliefs and make them simpler to understand. Cults go the opposite way.

When a belief system becomes ossified it's all over for it. It will ultimately be replaced. The Manosphere is already ossifying with its cult language and cult beliefs. The believers in its concepts already cannot change their minds, since they are convinced they know the Truth. And nothing can change the mind of anyone who's already convinced they know the Truth.

And a lot of the Manosphere, with its bizarre ideas, disgusts the smarter, and drives them away.

See Dick. See Jane. See - ARGH! Clang! Clang! Clang!

I was considered a not-normal kid. My head was shaped like a light-bulb, for one thing. A Filipina I know once gasped when she saw a picture of me at nine weeks old. "American babies have big heads!" she told me, the implication being she hoped to never squeeze out such a deformed thing. I think she half-believed me when I told her my parents bought me a little toy wagon so I could roll my head around in it, and that there was a well-known American fairy-tale about a village idiot who had a huge potato for a head, which caused him to keep falling out of his father's cart.

Then there were the problems with the robot and submarine and rocket launcher. Parents used to ban me from their yards. The rocket launcher was what did it. If I had just launched rockets from a pad on the ground, straight up into the air, perhaps that would have been acceptable, even if it was in my backyard. Launching them from a cardboard bazooka on my shoulder was not, especially since I figured out the fins on the rocket were supposed to be angled, which caused the projectile to spin, thereby increasing the distance and sending it across several yards. They're lucky I never figured out how to put an M-80 fire-cracker grenade in the nose. These days, the cops probably would Taser me, followed by the courts sending me to some sort of Brave New World "therapy" that would involve the modern-day Soma that goes by the name "Ritalin."

It's pretty obvious I wasn't a good fit in school. This occurred to me in the first grade, when I was introduced to Dick and Jane and Spot and Pony. "See Dick. See Jane. See Spot. Run Spot run!" I daydreamed about sticking firecrackers up Spot and Pony's noses, which I thought would make huge gouts of smoke blow out of their nostrils, like dragons. That would have made them run, by golly. In some ways I was an awful kid, even if I didn't look like one.

I spent most of my time in school daydreaming, and as a result, my report cards were full of comments from the teachers. I still have those reports, even today. One consistent comment was, "Bobby is not paying attention in class. . .and he has such potential!"

No, I certainly wasn't paying attention. Instead, at six years old, I was dreaming I was Commando Cody, who was a pre-Rocketeer with a helmet, a way-cool black leather jacket with controls on his chest, and a jetpack on his back. If I remember correctly, he even flew to the Moon once in that getup. And he had a pistol, a .45, I believe.

To this day, I believe those Dick and Jane readers are mostly what did me in. I did not like to read back then, and I think it was because of them. They were not only boring, they were excruciatingly boring, and so was nearly everything else throughout my years in school. Not liking to read is a little odd, because I started to teach myself to read when I was four.

Fortunately, when I was 11 years old, I found a tattered, falling-apart ACE 1963 copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Fighting Man of Mars ("Hidden Menace on the Red Planet"), and boom!, just like that, I was changed forever. I immediately understood the importance of imagination, and how the purpose of school is to, however unwittingly, destroy it.

I remember thinking, whoa, what is this book? Gigantic Martian-eating apes, with six arms?! Cackling Mad Scientists? Huge spiders, with fangs? Heroes, villains, damsels in distress? Sword fights, disintegrator rays, invisibility cloaks? Battles galore, in warships floating in the sky? Wow! I was in a tizzy. I had never experienced anything like this. I was in awe, a condition I describe as a combination of love and wonder and fear. And I liked it.

Why, I wondered, wasn't I given stuff like this to read when I was six, instead of Dick and Jane? I don't care if they went on adventures with Spot and found a toad in the bushes, that was nothing compared to Tan Hadron of Hastor using his sword to defend the woman he loved from the insane cannibals of U-Gor!

Years later, when I started reading fairy tales, I was surprised to find the ones that aren't bowdlerized (which are the ones most people are familiar with) are blood-thirsty horror stories. In the unexpurgated "Cinderella," for example, her sisters cut off parts of their feet to try to make them fit into the slipper (which points out what greedy people will do for money and power and fame). You'll never see that in a Walt Disney film -- and Walt admitted he knew he was altering the original tales. Cinderella was, of all things, a very feisty girl, one who would never give up.

I was puzzled about these old children's stories. These are what adults in the past read to kids? And I got Dick and Jane and their boring white-bread lives in the suburbs, with their parents dressed like Ward and June Cleaver in a suit and tie, and pearls? But weren't kids supposed to be kept innocent as long as possible? Weren't they supposed to not know about awful things like violence and battles and swords and guns and death and destruction and romance and even - yuck - kissing? Wouldn't these terrible stories give them nightmares and permanently damage their tender six-year-old psyches?

Well, it seems to me that Dick and Jane and all the rest of those innocent boring stories are what damaged me. Those blood-thirsty stories with the swordfights and all the killings not only didn't damage me, they introduced me to a world of wonder I didn't know existed, one so amazing I actually felt grateful about my luck. And if there is one (actually three) thing(s) I am absolutely convinced is an inherent component of happiness, it's gratitude and appreciation, and the humility that comes from those two qualities.

What's worse -- being bored all the time as a kid in school, or having an occasional nightmare, if that nightmare is the price of being introduced to wonder and amazement and awe? Personally, I'll take the nightmare. I'm an adult, and I still have nightmares. Only now, the only regular one I have is about being stuck in high school on the last day and not being allowed to graduate. They're so bad they wake me up. I've never woken up from the Mad Scientist Phor Tak chasing me with a disintegrator pistol, or a huge spider gnashing its fangs and running after me down a valley. Not yet, at least.

If stories for kids are boring, kids certainly aren't going to want to read. And if they don't read, then they can't take much advantage of all the knowledge available in literature. That's saying bye-bye to all the accumulated wisdom of the human race. So, in order for children's stories to be interesting and exciting, they have to contain all that "awful" stuff. On top of that, kids like the stuff.

As an experiment, read some dumbed-down stories to young children, and then read some of the real fairy tales, and watch how they react. I've done this many times. They quickly get bored with the first, but always remain fascinated by the second. And they want more, even if they don't fully understand everything.

I remember the first time I read "The Little Match Girl" to some kids who were less than five. I've never seen such looks on their faces before. They learned about pity and mercy and horror from that story, about how lucky they were to have parents and a home and warmth and enough to eat, unlike the Little Match Girl. And such things are why those stories are so important, because kids learn to deal with all sides of life in the safety of their imaginations.

Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, claimed fairy tales and similar stories were necessary for children because they allowed them to work through various feelings they all had. I won't go so far as to agree with his Freudian interpretation, but I understand his point. I am reminded of that modern-day mythic movie, A Christmas Story, in which Raphie has to deal with bullies, boring school, a nutcase for a little brother, a harried mother, a goodhearted but somewhat dense father, and the various problems all kids have to deal with.

Eric Rabkin agrees with Bettelheim, commenting upon the importance of the storytelling function in his book, The Fantastic in Literature. He explains that the cruelty in fairy tales indeed can be beneficial to children because "they can see danger handled safely and symbolically and thus, their own fears can be mastered."

We are never going to see truly interesting and educating stories for kids in the schools. If kids came home and told their parents about about those great stories they were being told - the old fairy tales - some of them would throw fits and call the schools right then. To which I say: bah. You have no idea what you're doing.

I see no solution to any of these problems except to get rid of the government schools. Unfortunately, private schools aren't going to be any better if they imitate the government schools. But at least they'll stand a chance, something that's never going to happen in do-gooder-feel-good bureacracy-crushed schools run by the gooberment.

It has now become a truism that every time the government gets involved in something, it doesn't make it better; it makes things worse. These days, nearly everyone complains about the schools, and what all these schools have in common is that they are "public" - read "government run" - schools. Most of these schools seem to have become masters at making kids hate them. Most kids see their time in them as a prison sentence to be served. I sure did, which is why about the only thing I learned in high school was how to make a bong out of a coffee pot. What kids learn is to dislike school, and, quite often, reading and learning.

As for me, if I could go back and do it over again, I'd take the wonder and awe and fear and cruelty instead of Dick and Jane and Spot chasing that stupid toad. I think most kids would, too.

The Wonderful and Amazing Intellectual/Moral Explosion of the Scottish Enlightment!

The reason I write intellectual/moral as I do is because you cannot separate them.

I have for years been puzzled by the Scottish Enlightenment. Here was a small country that exploded onto the world a group of men whose influence continues today. How did this happen?

Here is a list of the men of the Scottish Enlightenment:

Robert Adam (1728–1792) architect.

James Anderson (1739–1808) agronomist, lawyer, amateur scientist.

Joseph Black (1728–1799) physicist and chemist, first to isolate carbon dioxide.

Hugh Blair (1718–1800) minister, author.

James Boswell (1740–1795) lawyer, author of Life of Johnson.

Thomas Brown (1778–1820), Scottish moral philosopher and philosopher of mind; jointly held the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University with Dugald Stewart.

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714–1799) philosopher, judge, founder of modern comparative historical linguistics.

Robert Burns[52] (1759–1796) poet.

Alexander Campbell (1788–1866) early leader in the Restoration Movement.

George Campbell (1719–1796) philosopher of language, theology, and rhetoric.

Sir John Clerk of Eldin (1728–1812) prolific artist, author of An Essay on Naval Tactics; great-uncle of James Clerk Maxwell.

William Cullen (1710–1790) physician, chemist, early medical researcher.

Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) considered the founder of sociology.

Robert Fergusson (1750–1774), poet.

Andrew Fletcher (1653–1716) a forerunner of the Scottish Enlightenment, writer, patriot, commissioner of Parliament of Scotland.

Sir James Hall, 4th Baronet (1761–1832) geologist, geophysicist.

Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) philosopher, judge, historian.

David Hume (1711–1776) philosopher, historian, essayist.

Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) philosopher of metaphysics, logic, and ethics.

James Hutton (1726–1797) founder of modern geology.

Sir John Leslie (1766–1832) mathematician, physicist, investigator of heat (thermodynamics).

James Mill (1773–1836) late in the period - Father of John Stuart Mill.

John Millar (1735–1801) philosopher, historian, historiographer.

Thomas Muir of Huntershill, (1765–1799), political reformer, leader of the Scottish "Friends of the People Society."

John Playfair (1748–1819) mathematician, author of Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth.

Allan Ramsay (1686–1758) poet.

Henry Raeburn (1756–1823) portrait painter.

Thomas Reid (1710–1796) philosopher, founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense.

William Robertson (1721–1793) one of the founders of modern historical research.

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) lawyer, novelist, poet.

John Sinclair (1754–1835) politician, writer, the first person to use the word statistics in the English language.

William Smellie (1740–1795) editor of the first edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.

Adam Smith (1723–1790) whose The Wealth of Nations was one of the first modern treatises on economics.

Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) moral philosopher.

George Turnbull (1698–1748), theologian, philosopher and writer on education.

John Walker (naturalist) (1730–1803) professor of natural history.

James Watt (1736–1819) student of Joseph Black; engineer, inventor of the Watt steam engine.

Many of these men ended up in Edinburgh, which at that time had about 25,000 people.

Here are some of the main characteristics these men shared.

For one, they got together in clubs in which they could discuss anything. You can't do that today because of PC, and if you form a club your meetings will be attacked by fascists/leftists, who believe in Thoughtcrime. George Orwell predicted this with uncanny accuracy.

What these men were doing is playing (which is a serious thing) and as Stuart Brown and other scholars have proved over and over, play is essential. They also had to engage in what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called Flow: the "mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity."

Said Brown about play: "...an adult who has 'lost' what was a playful youth and doesn’t play will demonstrate social, emotional and cognitive narrowing, be less able to handle stress, and often experience a smoldering depression."

The intellectual life of that time revolved around these clubs, which had names such as the Political Economy Club, the Select Society and The Poker Club.

All of these men were the recipients of a liberal education in the original definition, not the modern perverted left-wing one.

What created these men and their accomplishments is freedom. They had the freedom to read any book, to think any thought, to discuss any idea.

If you want to create another Enlightenment the first step is to get rid of the public schools. Children should not be in school for 12 years. There is no reason for it, except for babysitting while their parents slave their lives away. Public school dulls their minds and destroys their creativity and curiosity. They can't follow their own natural interests because sometimes they don't even know what they are. They can't be imaginative (daydreaming) because teachers (education majors have the lowest IQs of all majors) don't understand what is happening.

There is little play and little Flow in the public schools. For all practical purposes, none.

Another eight or more years to get a Ph.D.doesn't help either. These people are schooled but not necessarily educated. All these degrees are filters to get rid of those who aren't drones and grinds.

And, of course, getting together in clubs is essential. It's also essential that these clubs not be attacked in any way.

Since public schools are a large part of the problem, home-schooling is also essential. I'd live in a hobbit-hole in the country that I built myself before I'd send my kids to public schools.

I know enough about myself to know that I am a creative, imaginative, high-IQ introvert. I suspect most of these men, if not all, were the same. Adam Smith, for example, used to go for long walks in the cool of the evening to think and imagine (he once fell into a ditch, as I have).

The only time I enjoyed school was the summer I was in the gifted program, right before I turned 12. Two classes, each about half-an-hour, with a hour break in-between, which I spend in the library. The rest of my school career was a boring semi-prison that I daydreamed away.

The sad fact is, our entire society is set up to prevent another Enlightenment.

The Madonna and the Whore

"Knowing that a woman does not belong on a pedestal is not synonymous with believing that she dwells in a sewer." - Athol Kay

I have pointed out before there are a lot of inaccurate, indeed dangerous, concepts in the Manosphere.

Some of them are the concepts of Alpha/Beta. An Alpha supposedly see the truth about women, that they are hypergamous gold-digging sluts who want "Alpha fux and Beta bux" and who are run by their rationalization hamsters. That they'll always dump their husbands if they can trade up, that they are always attracted to Bad Boys, that they have no self-awareness whatsoever of any of these things.

Betas are supposed to put women on a pedestal and Alphas see them as whores. Even though the "theoreticians" in the Mansphere can't seem to figure it out, these are just the old ideas of the Madonna and the Whore.

The split didn't come from Christianity but was identified by it. I'm sure it was identified before Christianity, since this split is created by our inborn narcissism, i.e., our ability to split people into all good and all bad. Good Madonnas and bad whores.

Our narcissism is what influences us to see ourselves as good and others as bad. What of the worst things about it is that inherent in it is scapegoating, or projection. "Since I am good and you are bad, you are the cause of all my problems, so I will degrade you, humiliate you and often try to kill you."

For women it is supposed to be idealizing Alphas and despising any man who's not. However, that's what men think they are.

The Manosphere hasn't yet figured out how to heal this split because they don't realize it was healed in the past - to the extent it can be healed.

For on thing, there are two "Alphas," not one. The one who sees women as Whores is the Cad, and my experience has been Cads don't even like women. The one who is the Patriarch/Protector is the true Alpha, not the Cad. The term Alpha only confuses. It does not clarify.

One thing figured out by Christianity - and the Hebrews before it - is the meaning of the story of the Garden of Eden. The serpent is a symbol of envy and hate and like all the envious wants to bring the envied down, even if the envier destroys himself.

Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent. It what I mentioned before: it's scapegoating or projection. The denial of self-responsibility and the casting of problems onto innocent people.

The story is telling us that putting someone down is almost always based on envy. Feminism is based on the envy of men, which is why feminism will destroy men even if it destroys itself - which is what it is in the process of doing.

The Cad sees women as whores, which mean they degrade women out of envy of them, and Cads will destroy women even if they destroy themselves - which is what they do.

To the extent the Manosphere puts down women as hypergamous gold-digging Alpha-cock-riding whores, it based on the envy of women and so will destroy them even if it destroys itself. It turns women into whores, and any man who sees women as whores is courting a boatload of psychological problems.

Any man who sees them as Madonnas is also seeking that same boatload.

There is a lot of wisdom in the past. If only people pay attention to it.

Cowardice Is Its Own Punishment

"A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit" - Thomas Jefferson

I didn't learn everything I need to know in kindergarten, but middle-school was pretty close. The one thing I remember more vividly than most everything is that cowardice is is own punishment.

There were three things that happened, and of course I don't remember the sequence. But I think I was 12 when all three occurred.

The first is that I read a story by Gordon R. Dixon called "Call Him Lord." It was about a boy, about 20 I suppose, who was to inherit the mantle of Emperor of the Galaxy. He was sent to be tested by a man who belonged to the family that had tested all the potential emperors for a few hundred years.

The boy turned out to be a bully who attacked the weak but ran from the strong, and in the end the man who tested him had to kill him. When the boy's teacher asked where the boy had failed, the answer was, "Lord, he was a coward."

The boy was a bully, and like all bullies he was a coward. And his cowardice was its own punishment.

The second concerns a boy named Greg. Greg was a genetic catastrophe. He walked with his head sticking forward, sort of hunchbacked I'd say, had grey skin, mousy brown hair, had a mouth than hung open all the time, and had these thick glasses that magnified his eyes and make them fuzzy. Even without all that he would still would not have been good-looking.

I was in the bathroom when a boy I did not know walked in with a big cocky grin on his face. He was followed by Greg and a few other boys.

Apparently the boy with the cocky grin had been picking on Greg and thought he was be easy pickings because of the way he looked.

He wasn't.

The fight seemed to last about five seconds. Greg tried to rip his kid's face off. He made some sort of claw with his hand, got the guy in a headlock - and tried to rip his face off.

The kid collapsed and started begging Greg to leave him alone.

I was impressed.

The third thing that happened concerned a bully named Don. Don made the mistake of picking a fight with a wrestler named Phil, who only weighed maybe 115 pounds.

Phil got Don in the corner and just pounded him. And Don collapsed and started begging, "You kicked my ass! Leave me alone!"

I was impressed.

Since that time, every time I've seen someone stand up to a bully the bully has collapsed. If someone shows spirit the bully will back down. If not, they'll spend years being picked on.

It's doesn't surprise me that one of the Four Cardinal Virtues is Bravery. The other three are Prudence, Justice and Self-Control. If you don't have one of them you don't have any of them.

Bullies lack bravery and so lack the other three. A bully who picks on someone because he thinks they are weak, and finds out they aren't, certainly isn't prudent. Or just. Or has any self-control.

I am, as always, reminded of the scene in The Maltese Falcon when Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) needles Wilmer the Gunsel (a tiny man carrying two large .45s) with the comment, "The cheaper the hood the gaudier the patter."

The bigger the blowhard, the bigger the coward.

"This Boat is my Home"

"The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies...." ~ Henry David Thoreau

When "Firefy" first appeared on TV in 2002 I missed it completely. I had to buy the series on DVD. Some of the themes in it really struck me.

What impressed me most can be summed up in what Mal Reynolds said about his ship (significantly named "Serenity"): "This boat is my home."

Many of the episodes can be summed up in that comment, because the main themes in the series are about freedom, home, and community. Which is something everyone wants, except the natural-slave types.

The crew members are a family, and they eat communal dinners together. Just as a family is supposed to do. When Jayne Cobb tries to betray the family Mal tosses him in an airlock, intent on dumping him in space, but when Jayne begs, "Don't tell them what I did" (meaning he's concerned, even on the point of death, what the family thinks of him) Mal relents and lets him live.

The cultures on the planets (some cultures, at least) are portrayed as true communities. In one episode River Tamm encounters some people doing an Irish jig and delightedly joins in (why is it every time I see the most fun dancing in a movie they are always doing an Irish jig? - see Soldier and Titanic).

It is significant that River is crazy, because the State fucked up her brain to make her a bioweapon, and at the end of the series she becomes whole, in large part because the members of the ship accepted her into their family.

River is the most intelligent, sensitive and intuitive person on the ship - and she is the one the Alliance went out of its way to destroy.

Joss Whedon said the series was based on Michael Shaara's novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, which was the turning point in the War Between the States (if only Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had realized he was on the wrong, Union side).

For that matter, the bounty hunter in "Firefly" is named Jubal Early.

The Alliance is supposed to represent the North and the Browncoats, the South.

Here's where things get interesting concerning a theme I see all the time: the Machine State versus the Natural State.

The Alliance represents the Machine State and the Browncoats the Natural State. The Alliance is mostly military and everyone dresses the same, since they are cogs in a machine. They aren't free, no more than the stormtroopers in Star Wars are free.

There is little portrayal of any home, family or community in the Alliance, just fear of the meddling State. Mal, a smuggler who bought his ship to escape from the Alliance, kills its agents without a second thought.

Mal is actually a patriarch/protector, and his crew is his family. He is brave, resourceful, and confident.

You can see the same Machine State/Natural State theme in Star Wars, in which Darth Vader, who is half-man/half machine (Joseph Campbell called him "a bureaucrat") represents the Machine State (as does the entire Empire) while the Ewoks represent the Natural State. You can also see it in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine in which the Morlocks represent the Machine State and the Eloi the Natural State.

What the series is telling us is that the purpose of the State is to turn you into a machine and take away your freedom, your home, your community - in fact, to turn you into a replaceable cog in a machine. It means to take away the meaning and importance in your life and replace with allegiance to the State (which the deluded call "patriotism").

Your meaning and purpose becomes what the State says it is - mostly die in wars (see the aforementioned Soldier, with Kurt Russell).

You can apply the Machine State/Natural State theme to everything. Public schools? Cosmodemonic Transnational Megacorporations? Do I really have to explain?

What I will explain is that the State is about fear and slavery, and as Roy Batty told Rick Deckard in Blade Runner, "Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it means to be a slave."

"The family is fundamental; religious affiliation, ethic solidarity and other associations provide emotional support, meaning and interaction/relationship building based on shared experiences and values." - DayKoons

Seeing Yourself as Worthless in the Eyes of Others

"There are the Outsiders, and then are those who are even more Outside than they are."

In college I lived in a studio apartment attached to a house of 12 girls. Once I was in one's room when she started telling me, right out of the blue, how she was ostracized in seventh grade because he was chubby and wore clunky glasses. She showed me a picture.

She had been gawky but not unattractive, but certainly didn't look like that at 21. Now she verged on being beautiful and had a great body. But at 12 she was ostracized.

She said over the summer she blossomed from an ugly ducking into a swan, and when she came back to school for the eighth grade all the kids who had ostracized her were all over her wanting to be her friend. She told me she ignored them, especially the boys, who had gone from "ew!" to "ah!"

Since that traumatic time she said had been only attracted to usual-looking men, especially men who looked like Peter Noone, who was the lead singer for "Herman and the Hermits." That surprised me a little, since she was about four when he was popular.

She even married a guy who looked like Peter Noone.

Her story always stayed with me. For one thing, it's about revenge. The desire for revenge is created when a person is humiliated - ostracized, insulted, treated with contempt and scorn. It's an attempt to replace humiliation with pride.

Originally the word Hubris meant to humiliate someone in public, and the Greeks considered it so obscene they banned it from the theater. Hubris is followed by Nemesis, which means "revenge." Humiliating someone in public leads to revenge - replacing humiliation with pride.

In order to understand the Hubris/Nemesis dynamic it helps to understand that people are mirrors. That is, you see yourself in the ways people look at you and treat you. They reflect it back to you.

To use myself as an example, my large extended family thought I was just about the funniest thing they had ever seen. I always have remembered the ones for whom I was their favorite, mostly because they thought I was funny.

The woman in college, who I'll call Kathy, saw herself as low-value, perhaps even no value, in the treatment she received from others. Low value means poor self-image (which means anxiety, depression and anger), and she replaced her feelings of humiliation with pride by revenge on the kids who ignored her - by ignoring them. "Since they ostracized me I will give them a taste of their own medicine."

I try to keep those concepts in mind, since they apply to everyone. When someone feels humiliated by seeing themselves reflected back as a low-value/no-value person, they, in one way or another, will try to raise their self-image by some sort of revenge.

Sometimes, like Kathy, it will be "what goes around comes around," sometimes it will be "living well is the best revenge," and sometimes it will be murder.

I've said this before, but I consider the Manosphere to be mostly about revenge. Feminism was never about equality, since a lot of it was founded by man-hating lesbians, and a lot of its evil has percolated down to the average woman, who has only the vaguest idea what happened to screw up her life.

Feminism was always about humiliating men - seeing them as worthless. It appears to be getting even worse, with every man a rapist or sexual harasser. The Manosphere is not only about justice, but in large part about revenge, which is why a lot of it is about humiliating women. Men try to raised their self-image by creating inaccurate concepts such as Alpha and Sigma, try to humiliate men who disagree with their mistakes by calling them everything but an Alpha and Sigma, and very few have a clue as to what they are doing.

Humiliation has been implicated in the pathogenesis of (take a deep breath) low self-esteem, school-related difficulties, pernicious child-rearing practices, delinquency, poverty, social phobia, anxiety, depression, paranoia, marital discord, domestic violence, sexual aggression, rape, other forms of violence, serial murder, and suicide.

I'd go so far as to say any man who truly believes in Alphas/Sigma/negging to show you're high value/"alpha fux, beta bucks"/etc, is a man who has been humiliated by women, doesn't know how to talk to them, and in fact doesn't have much of an idea of what a man is supposed to be.

That kind of man is the end result of feminism, and it is a perfect example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

There is a lot of good in the Manosphere, since it is a needed corrective to the evils of feminism, but the wheat will have to be separated from the chaff. As always.

How to Have Sex with 100 Women

"The 'alpha, beta' thing is nerd shit" - Jacob Vidrine

I know guys who've had sex with over 100 women. Here's now they did it.

First, they were cowards. One writer said the male version of a female slut was a coward. He was correct in his assertion, but the correct word for a male slut is not a coward (although he is a coward) but a cad. For that matter, sluts are also cowards.

Second, target overweight, unattractive women, since they are the easiest to lay.

Third, have no concern whatsoever for women's feelings. (That's why it helps to target the unattractive - what should you care since you aren't taking them seriously anyway?) The more deluded in the Manosphere think women are attracted to Bad Boys (the more immature are) but the other side of that coin is to be a Bad Boy you have to be a narcissist or psychopath and are therefore incapable of love. (There is, by the way, a lot of very bad advice in the Manosphere.)

I remember one guy in college who wanted one of the women he was banging (he saw two or three at the same time, but led each to think they were the only one) to leave, but didn't have the courage to tell her he wanted her to go. So instead he called a friend of his (who happens to be my best friend) and asked him to come over.

This guy (who I will call Pat) asked my friend (who I will call Greg) to say he wanted Pat to go do something, allowing Pat to get rid of this girl. So Pat told her he was going to leave. He needed backup to screw up the courage to tell this woman goodbye.

Sound complicated? It gets worse. The woman in question, who I will repeat thought Pat was her boyfriend, wrote Pat a note saying she believed Greg was trying to come in-between her and Pat. Which he was.

The reason I know about the note is because Pat showed it to Greg – and Pat laughed about it. This is the kind of backstabbing, lack of loyalty and cowardice that are the hallmarks of the cad.

By the way, the more ignorant in the Mansophere call someone like Pat an Alpha. I snicker at the definition. Alphas don't exist.

No man is an "Alpha." If you want to use those terms, all men without exception are simultaneously Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, Sigmas and Omegas. The terms do not clarify but confuse.

Remember I said Pat was a coward? Once he and a girlfriend were walking down the street and passed two guys. One said to Pat: "Your chick's ugly" and the other laughed. Pat said nothing and kept walking. I have never been talked to like that and if I had been the guy would have gotten it right in the shin - which I have done before and prevents any fight from starting. And if you take out the Big Mouth the others back right off.

This kind of cowardice was one of the main characteristics of Pat.

The reason they said "Your chick is ugly" is because Pat would target unattractive women. He told me he "didn't care" if they dumped him because they were overweight and unattractive. Probably 90% of the women he laid were in that category.

In fact, all the seducers I've met always targeted the less-attractive women. It is an impossibility to a man to have sex with 100 beautiful women.

Remember I said he was seeing two and three women at the same time? He told me he lied to and manipulated women. He told them what he described as "what they wanted to hear." That he wanted to get married, make a lot of money, have kids, have a big house and nice car, support the women in her career, etc.

Every bit of it was a lie. He knew they were lies, didn't care, and thought it was funny.

So he was a coward, a liar and a manipulator. He just happened to be charming.

I have thought for years the seducers never particularly liked women. They got along better with men. They were even more trustworthy with men, which is ironic since they're not trustworthy with women at all.

Even with men Pat is what the British call "unclubabble," because men saw through him in a instant. I got red flags on him within hours of knowing him. Even some women saw through him, as in the case of a 20-year-old girl who said he had a permanent sneer on his face.

The more deluded in the Manosphere refer to Pat and his kind as an Alpha who showed Dark Triad characteristics. They don't know what they are talking about.

The Dark Triad are supposed to be Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy. That combination is nonsense.

Machiavelli was a political thinker and is to political science was Newton was to mathematics. His thought has nothing to do with narcissism and psychopathy.

For that matter, narcissism and psychopathy are redundant. They're the same thing, except that psychopathy is just the extreme version of a narcissist. Let's just say to be a successful seducer of women you have to be cowardly, uncaring and cruel - and being all of them is easy.

There is nothing admirable whatsoever about a psychopath. A psychopath has no conscience and no guilt. They are not capable of love. Neither are narcissists. The only thing they are interested in is power, domination and control. And isn't that what the terminally silly think an Alpha is?

The worst of psychopaths are the serial killers. Some of them eat people and have sex with corpses. They often torture them to death, dismember them – and then eat them or have sex with their body parts (Jeffrey Dahmer said doing this was "pleasurable").

An Alpha with Dark Triad traits would be Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. They were handsome and charming and popular. And people wonder why I laugh at so much of the Manosphere.

Psychopaths and narcissists are weak people. They are covering up unbearable feelings of humiliation with a grandiose false self. This is why there exists the observation that all bullies are cowards. And it's why Pat was a coward. Inside he was one of the most insecure men I have ever met – which is why he tried to get his self-esteem from going to woman to woman. It's called "narcissistic supply" and it doesn't matter who the woman is.

Pat was having an affair with his secretary, who made a bad mistake with Medicare, leading to Pat having to pay back $50,000. It destroyed him. Most men would pick themselves up and keep going. Not Pat. He was, and is, a weakling.

A good illustration of this bully on top/coward underneath is the movie, The Maltese Falcon. Bogart is continually needling Wilmer the Gunsel, going so far as to tell him, "The cheaper the hood, the gaudier the patter."

Gunsel doesn't mean Gunman. It means passive homosexual. The word got past the censors, who apparently thought it meant "gunman."

What Bogart was telling Wilmer, in modern terms, is "The cheaper the punk/pussy, the bigger the mouth." Bully on top, insecure, humiliated coward underneath.

This observation applies to a lot of the Manosphere. "I delude myself I'm an Apha with Dark Triad traits because in reality I never learned to be a man and have been humiliated over and over by women." Insecurity hidden by grandiosity.

If you want an easy way to understand what is generally wrong with a society, look at the monsters. John Douglas, the retired FBI profiler of serial killers, and the author of several best-selling books, stated that every serial murderer he encountered was an “inadequate” type (i.e., he felt humiliated) who covered it up with grandiosity (i.e., an immense Satanic pride) and sought revenge on anyone who reminded him of those who believed caused his problems in the first place. What, then, is generally wrong with American society is a mostly-unconscious acceptance of humiliating people.

All of the Manosphere is a reaction to the evils of feminism – and feminism, since it is leftist, is about 99% evil. But it goes too far.

You know what happened to Pat? He became a drug addict and lost his teeth. He ended up without home or wife or children. He told me, "I finally got a taste of my own medicine." He said if he had to do it over he would have been a high-school coach.

I found some of these guys were viciously envious of me, because I got the best girls, the ones who saw through them, rejected them, and ended up with me. They have no problem with rejecting women but can't tolerate it when they are rejected. That is because of their poor self-image. (I have found I have been the target of a lot of envy from men about women, and it got to the point I considered these guys to be weak, sickly, dysgenic males who are eaten up by envy of everybody and everything.)

You might also want to investigate the life of the late porn star John Holmes, an "Alpha with Dark Triad" traits, who had sex with a few thousand women, who died in his early 40's from AIDS, who was a drug addict, who beat women and was involved in a murder. He also continued to perform when he had AIDS.

Those who knew him said he was a psychopath. He showed every trait.

I'm going to repeat again all this "Alpha with Dark Triad" traits is nonsense. Dangerous nonsense. History has shown it is dangerous nonsense. Both the Greeks, the Romans and the Hebrews – and our society was strongly influenced by all of them – noticed that those who devote their lives to physical pleasure become degraded. Like Pat, like John Holmes.

Why do so many men in the Manosphere fall for this nonsense? Because, as John D. MacDonald noticed in his novel, The Green Ripper, people are "herd animals, social and imitative." That is, for the ones who can't think for themselves, which is why I've had the deluded quote the exact words of "alpha fux, beta bux," "negging" to prove you're high-value to women, and other silliness they picked up from someone on the Internet, including nihilistic frauds like Roissy who just happens to be a funny writer although he is almost completely lacking in any wisdom.

As for Roosh, he recently blogged: "...no matter how much alcohol or caffeine I pump into my body, no matter what artificial flag goal I make, no matter how much I abstain from masturbating, and no matter how I try to jack up my testosterone levels through diet or weight lifting", he no longer could find women as desirable, displayed sexual dysfunction, and admitted his current state was that "like an addict coming off a drug."

I predicted this, not because I have any special predictive powers, but because the entire history of the human race predicts it. As a reviewer at Amazon put it about Roosh's book, Bang, "should be a warning shot to anyone who aspires to a life of reckless promiscuity, sexual compulsivity, and a life seemingly committed to nothing more elevated than bedding a woman for self gratification and bragging rights."

When anyone points out how foolish some in the Manosphere are, they react as religious fanatics do - attack whom they consider blasphemers and heretics snickering at their religion. These attacks will consist of calling the critics everything but an Alpha or a Sigma. I will repeat: these are the tactics of those who cannot think for themselves and so imitate and memorize the ideas of others.

The word "Alpha" comes from canines and refers to the parent wolves. If you transfer that to humans what you come up with is a patriarch/protector. That is the true Alpha, not some guy who imitates and memorizes every silly idea in the Manosphere and then deludes himself he's really an Alpha/Sigma who'll get the chicks if he gets applies some Game.

All of this discussion about what a man is supposed to be was covered thousands of years ago, and they did a better job than those discussing it today. If I had to describe what a man is supposed to be in two words, it would be confident and competent and brave - to the extent he can be.

What they came up with is the original Code of Chivalry (not the modern perversion) and the Four Cardinal Virtues (you can look at the Aryan Code of Honor for the more pagan among you).

I'm curious as to where all this will lead. There is a lot of good in the Manosphere. There is also a lot of bad. The challenge, as it has always been, is to tell Good from Evil.