Category: culture

Remembrance of chads hanging

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Naomi Wolfe was an Al Gore presidential campaign advisor in 2000. She instructed him (among other things) on not ‘presenting’ as a Beta male. This was impossible, but Al was desperate.

Wolfe has been red pilled. She’s been mugged by the Overton Window, which, true to form, framed a much more sane view in 2000. She has detected the shift. I subscribe to her Substack.

She remembers the 2000 election controversy very well.
“Happy Indictment Day!” – Outspoken with Dr Naomi Wolf

I am experiencing considerable inner turmoil at the spectacle of President Trump’s indictment, as well as at the almost animalistic glee that this spectacle has triggered in the solid bloc of Democrats that currently surrounds me.

I am extraordinarily sad — at the thickheaded ignorance of history that those who are celebrating tonight, reveal; and at what has become of our country.

Don’t people understand — much as they may hate this fellow — that this is exactly what coup leaders in every banana republic, do? Seek to imprison their political opponents?

Especially while the political opponents are on the campaign trail?

Another reason for my discomfort and misery is that I have a guilty conscience, because of what I experienced two decades ago and what I know — things that not that many people have experienced or know, and things that seem to be generally forgotten. These memories bear directly on current events…

I am having relentless flashbacks to where I was and what I was doing in late 2000, when I was a consultant for Vice President Gore’s campaign for the Presidency.

As I’ve written elsewhere — and as I am trying desperately to remind everyone who will now listen, on every podcast that will have me — I was advising from a distance, and looped in, intermittently, to discussions within the campaign that were both public and private, about exactly the same issues that are now apparently criminal offenses even to entertain, let alone to mention in actual words.

So were almost all of the lawyers, campaign consultants, advisors and staffers of Gore 2000. So was the candidate himself, visibly.

RTWT

Common Sense, annotated

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HeterodorxPodcast🍂🧑‍🦳 Tweeted (Exed?) this on X yesterday. It is sane advice which we can expect will be ignored. I supply the link since you may also wish to see any responses.

(The following is my neutral advice, not a list of my preferred policies)

To: Transgender Influencers and Leaders
From: A Trans Elder

You have really screwed the pooch. Let me offer this set of recommendations to fix some of the damage.

1. Immediately concede on the issue of males in women’s sports. Instead, push for male sports from k-12 all the way to college to be more inclusive of gender non-conforming men. Start with one sport (cycling? disc golf?) and build a partnership to show trans athletes being welcomed and accepted in the “open” divison. [sic]

Nice try, but they wouldn’t be happy even with their own separate division. That would not humiliate females.

The motivations of the Males Pretending to be Females (hereafter MPtbF) are not aligned with this idea. Those who deliberately encourage outrage wish to compete against females because they can dominate females, a biologically defined group of humans. They intensely resent females (I think you could say hate), because females are the scientific affront to their claims. That is, they hate the reality females represent. They’d have to give up on “transwomen ARE women.”

Fanatic TRA atheletes cannot fulfill their goal of humiliating women if they still compete against men. This proposal simply asks men who admit they are men to be tolerant of MPtbF in-your-face declaration of their “right to be seen.” Sitting on the bench is not the goal. From the sports establishment’s POV, it would drive fans away from significant sports like football and basketball. I already wondered in Dec/21 why womens college basketball is not under assault by MPtbF: hOOPS! and Dominatricks.

Finally on this one, the K-12 sports spectrum doesn’t actually include any men or women. So without (perhaps impossibly) strict enforcement of point 2 and 5 will only become another flashpoint. We have too many flamboyant TikTok teachers bragging about how they lie and deceive.

2. Align your messaging on “parents rights” on child transition. This means vocally opposing schools and protective services from transitioning children without parent consent. In fact, go further and demand that parents should always be informed about the mental health risks for their children.

Bravo!! That would also represent them as potentially good parents.

And 3. Immediately adopt the message that violent criminals, particularly ones who have committed sex crimes, can never be housed among vulnerable women. Stop accepting violent felons into the activist milieu. Stop demanding access to surgery, hair removal services, access to “gender affirming” accessories like makeup and underwear for any transgender inmate.

Add the military. This is a National Defense issue.
Remove the word “violent.”

4. Begin marginalizing “queer” activists from the highest and most visible activist positions. Most Americans are accepting of transgender people as long as they are seen as being just like anyone else. When you center activists who clearly state they want to destroy “cisheteronormativity” then you make an enemy of the majority. And frankly, most of us just want to get along and go along.

Yes. Jeffery Marsh and Dylan Mulvaney are examples of why this is necessary. It’s asking for the flamboyant bullshit to be confined to people who want to consume it. ALLOW everyone else not to care.

5. Clarify that schools should NOT be pressuring children to declare or define their “gender identities.” Support the removal of all types of SOGI materials from classrooms for children under 12. Acknowledge that identity formation in adolescence is fluid and that pushing children to commit to a trans identity is ultimately harmful to the child’s development.

Bravo!

If you follow my advice, you’ll change the direction of public acceptance. You all have screwed up. I’ve just given you some workable positions. I hope this helps.

It would help, but the fact that 2 examples rate a Bravo… This even had to be said?!

Delusional Devaluation of Women and Children

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The New York Times recently published this essay:
Maternal Instinct Is a Myth That Men Created

It’s gated, but you can probably get to it here.

The headline accurately reflects a straw man definition of “maternal instinct” no reasonable person would take seriously.

“All around her swirled near-rapturous descriptions of the joys of new motherhood. They all celebrated the same thing — the woman who is able to instantly intuit and satisfy her baby’s every need, and to do it all on her own.”

First, it makes intuition into omniscience and omnipotence. Second, it argues most women are idiots. They believe that.

I’m quite sure that anyone who has spent time around a new mother – a new father perhaps – knows it’s bullshit. That’s why wise women seek mates who will stick around after the baby is born. Faithful, protective, providing fathers are prized by mothers because they support and protect mothers and children. Call it pre-maternal instinct.

Like devotion to their children, prudence in reproductive partner selection is not always displayed by all women, even though the negative consequences of failure to do this are numerous and evident from five hundred thousand years of human evolution.

Which raises another problem with the definition: It assumes (“all on her own“) that a father’s contributions of food, shelter, and defense do not satisfy any (“her baby’s every need“) need of a mother or infant. It also asserts no women help. This defies all our experience. But the NYT claim is that women who feel a special, protective bond to their child are victims of their own false consciousness. And it’s not just humans. At very least it’s mammals. Animals whose females are built to suckle their young.

A mammal’s progeny are expensive, and a much larger percentage of the survival budget for pre-literate hunter-gatherers. Nurturing and protecting a child is a huge investment that for much of our evolutionary history paid off only sporadically. Relatively slow development of mammal young means time spent and resources diverted. The opportunity cost of carrying and caring for a human child is highest of all. Every psychologically coherent human values children, AT THE LEAST, because of the investment in creating them and maintaining their lives. More so when food took the fittest of your tribe huge amounts of time and significant risk to secure, shelter was precarious, and death was lurking in the next tree, behind the next bush, or slithering along in the grass.

Five hundred thousand years of this biological imperative have shaped human psychology. NYT denials notwithstanding.

The burden does fall more heavily on those whose investment is highest: Women, and especially mothers. How can this existential necessity, recognized by all human societies, be detrimental to human well being? Recognizing this is a discovery, not an invention.

I posted this on Twitter in response to the NYT headline: “Try telling that to a Grizzly.”

Other animals were mentioned in others’ Tweets. I was surprised that I saw no responses to the effect that Grizzlies, dogs, etc. aren’t human so the NYT story is still correct. I expected a bunch of whataboutism: “Whatabout animals that abandon their young even before ‘birth’?” Well, a frog, or an ant, has a very low investment in the hundreds or thousands of eggs she lays.

I think “hatching” would be the proper term for these examples, not the bonding experience of live birth, but the TRA cadre is as likely to think about that distinction as is a turkey. What’s the gestation period for turkeys?

“Hatching,” IAC, isn’t pejorative in this context. Many birds treat their young as more important than themselves. Avian mothers will chance death to draw predators away. Female birds instinctively act to prevent species extinction, but the NYT tells us human females demonstrating any such tendency are victims of patriarchal conspiracy.

If human maternal instinct is a patriarchal myth, are Grizzly bears, dogs, and chimpanzees (especially that Bonobo ‘matriarchy’ we’re supposed to be instructed by) mammal outliers?

We are considering homo sapiens, however, and I can’t name any mammal that does not nurture its offspring. If maternal neglect _wasn’t_ a psychological aberration in mammals, there would be no mammals. Characterizing human females as duped out of a heightened sensitivity, of caring deference, to their children is a clear attempt to rewrite five hundred thousand years of evolutionary biology and the psychological consequences. That is, it rejects reality.

Consider the denial of biological fact necessary to say “transwomen are women.” Transwomen don’t have any possibility of bonding with a child they have carried. So women can’t be allowed to either.

Consider our plunging birth rates. Is denigrating female regard for children as a patriarchal plot existentially more threatening than climate change? The climate change people will tell you fewer humans is a good thing. Interests converge.

Consider the insistence on normalizing the sexual fetishes of a small minority. Salacious drag queen performances for toddlers and porn in middle school libraries suggests treating children as acceptable sexual targets; disposable toys.

It is a fantasy consistent with, and necessary to, transphilic dogma. The assertion’s base utility today includes denigrating protective mothers who show up at school board meetings with pointed questions, “Yours is not a natural human reaction, it’s a fascist ideological abomination which the DOJ must call out as incipient terrorism at the behest of Randi Weingarten: Human mothers superior devotion to their children is an invention of the patriarchy. Your children belong to us.”

Why publish this tripe? Because it supports the anti-humanist radical transphiles, abortion absolutists, “all sex is rape” feminists, pedophilia apologists, and climate apocalypse fanatics.

The idea that mothers’ special relationship with their children is a human invention, rather than molded from five hundred thousand years of existential success is patent nonsense. That males invented it is not simply ludicrous, it is actively anti-woman and anti-human.

Transactivism is misogyny… wearing ‘womanface’

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Trans Right Activists continue to ramp up their vilification of anyone who objects to the erasure of women. Males-pretending-to-be-females (MPtbF) and anti-TERF feminists encourage the silencing of women by violence. For example, attacks on Posie Parker and Riley Gaines.

There are threats to sue anyone who refuses to use TRA’s Lysenkoist pronouns. For example, from the prancing TikTok doyen (NOT doyenne) Dylan Mulvaney.

There’s even a cadre of the TRAs insisting that heterosexuals are bigots if they refuse to call themselves ‘cis.’

TRA should be BIT, Biologically Ignorant Thugs.

All is proceeding as Jordan Peterson predicted in 2016. I’ve selected a snippet that you can watch for just a minute and a half. People scoffed at it in 2016, but is now accepted wisdom in our blue cities and states, on most university campuses, is promoted by our President, and the default opinion of NBC’s talking head Chuck Todd: “Basically, it’s not correct that there is such a thing as biological sex.”

That 55 minute video has 10 million views, and you may well have seen it. It’s well worth watching if you haven’t, and worth watching again if you have. A refresher on what we were told as the BITs were initiating their assault. TWT:

I plan to snip a few more items in subsequent posts.

Hog Butcher for the World

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Chicago is electing a mayor today. The candidates are not simply corrupt, they are degenerate. The execrable Lori Lightfoot, for example, may be re-elected. While it’s not clear any other candidate is better, some are even worse.

It reminds me of Carl Sandberg’s 1914 poem Chicago. The opening line was cemented in my mind 60 years ago.

Carl Sandberg loved the city. He captures Chicago’s essence: What made it a great city. He sees the dark side, but also a flourishing metropolis: Big, vibrant, strong, industrious, creative.

I’m sure he would shed a tear at what it has become.

Chicago
By Carl Sandburg

“Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.”

Victor Davis Hanson/Jordan Peterson

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Following you will find a couple of snippets from a difficult and foreboding conversation. I haven’t figured out how to set an end time since Google changed that API, so they’ll keep going unless you stop them. I’ve included duration info for the bits I’m highlighting.

The whole thing is highly recommended. An hour and 45 minutes.

The title is inadequate. It’s about far more than the degeneration of Ivy League trust funds masquerading as institutions of higher learning.

Higher education, momentarily led by the Ivy League, does have big problems. Admittance criteria exemplify the political attack on meritocracy, the quality of education is in steep decline, the number of administrators is an obscene waste of resources, the treatment of adjunct professors is abominable greed, and – in collusion with the General Government – student debt makes unwary credentialists into wage slaves.

It is infuriating and ironic that civilizational rot should have started in the Education Departments of universities with mottos such as “Veritas” (Truth) “Dei sub numine viget” (Under God’s Power, She Flourishes), “Lux et Veritas” (Light and Truth), “In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen” (In Thy light shall we see light), and especially “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

VDH and JBP spend a quarter to a third of the conversation on higher ed (and there’s a commercial for Hillsdale College in there). But if it were just the Ivy League, Western Civilzation in general and the United States in particular would not be under assault by solipsistic identitarians.

One example, this clip is Peterson talking about the damage to our military from pronoun training, for example. About 2 minutes 20 seconds.

Second example. Hanson is not speaking of mere Ivy League institutions here, he’s speaking about almost all our institutions – public and private. I would quibble with his use of “the state”, because distrust of state institutions is part of everything they’d talked about. Were he editing it, I think he might substitute “cultural heritage,” or refer back to the responsibility of citizenship they touched on before. About 20 seconds.
“Once you lose confidence in these institutions, and once they’re no longer meritocratic, and once people’s primary allegiance is not any longer to the state everything we’ve talked about this morning … the end result is an implosion – very quickly.”

You should watch the whole thing. Just skip back to the beginning from one of those clips.

Social Just Us

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This long and thoughtful article is highly recommended. There is an interesting introduction – a nicely condensed look at evolutionary psychology – which I think blows up Rousseau’s “state of nature/innocence of man/blank slate” argument in favor of Hobbes’ “nature red in tooth and claw” view. This is deftly applied to the implied question in its title: Social justice as social leverage.

That could have been “Utopian Scheming as a Dominance Strategy.” Utopia depends on the blank slate model of human cognition.

I’ve picked one paragraph in order to relate it to quotes from Raymond Aron, Milton Friedman, and Robert Heinlein:

But social justice as status-and-social-leverage is driven towards blank-slate claims. For the less constrained by underlying structures—such as innate human cognitive traits—the grander the imagined social justice future can be. So the more rhetorically dominant its claims can be. The more motivating its aspirations can be.

The more control must be given to a centralized arbiter of truth.

The key element here is the blank-slate Rousseauian – “humans are innately good and it is civilization that is destructive” assumption, vs the Hobbesian – “humans are innately self-centered, because in raw nature lives are nasty, brutish, and short.” Rousseau is often contrasted as an optimist with Hobbes cast as pessimist. I don’t understand why Rousseau is considered an optimist, since return to “state of nature” would be a mass extinction event for humans. Then again, that implicates mainstream Green thinking.

If Rousseau is right, the future depends entirely on how that blank slate human mind is conditioned. It is not difficult to see how proponents of Critical Race Theory and Transgender Activists insist their ideas be taught in K-12. And it is easy to see why they want this kept secret from parents.

A fundamental transformation of culture requires new language, suppression of speech, and erasure of opponents. A recent example is the attempt by the Ontario College of Psychologists to compel his attendance at a re-education camp. The threat for non-compliance is suspension of his license as a clinical psychologist.

Consequences that flow from the Rousseau/Hobbes debate over human nature underlie the following:

“The [classical] liberal believes in the permanence of humanity’s imperfection, he resigns himself to a regime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the object of a conscious choice. Finally, he subscribes to the pessimism that sees in politics the art of creating the conditions in which the vices of men will contribute to the good of society.”
-Raymond Aron

Hat tip Powerline

Aron, a PhD in the philosophy of history, was a historian, journalist, philosopher, and political scientist. A stellar example of French intellectualism for much of the twentieth century.

You can detect Adam Smith in “in which the good will be the result of numberless actions.”

Which gives us a segue to economist Milton Friedman, who echoed Aron’s sentiment:

“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”

We are not blank slates, or we would by now have only good men to elect in the goodthink utopia in which we would already live.

Granted, the Hobbes/Rousseau debate is not strictly binary. Of course we learn things from our culture and experiences, and we use those things to inform a spectrum of political opinion. Underlying that spectrum though, is a basic binary choice. Robert Heinlein:

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”
-Robert Heinlein

In closing, I’ll give another nod to Heinlein describing the consequences of the hive mind necessary to any Utopia, where freedom of thought cannot be allowed:

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”