Serpent in the Garden II

In a previous post, I mentioned useful idiots tearing down modern society. I'd love to expand on that, so I will.

We here in the west live comfortable lives.  Those without an appreciation for history, or experience with hardships, have damn little idea how very comfortable those lives are.

That comfort comes at a cost. For the sake of brevity, let us call that cost 'Modern Civilization'.

Consider the delivery of an iPad to your door for a moment. There is an entire clockwork of cogs and gears churning, for weeks or months, to get that aluminum and glass slab of status to your door, that geegaw of geekery, that status symbol of the middle class into your hot little hands.  Most of those gears are very well hidden from you, leaving only the closest indicators of their existence, the delivery driver say, revealed.

Let me repeat that. A vast and complex clockwork of gears and cogs.

Now, clockmaking has gone out of fashion, and most people prefer digital time pieces, such as smart phones, to old style watches, so maybe the youth of today has forgotten how easy it is to wreck a clockwork device. A single gear, misaligned, can halt the entire process, a cracked cog causes things to slip, time to be lost, and the missing cog may itself jam other parts.  We still do use the phrase 'sand in the gears', do we not?

Have we forgotten what that means? I rather suspect we have, but then I suppose I am old and crotchety rather than young and hip. Alas.

Now consider the environmental movement.

Some might say that they mean well.

I'm not one of them, it goes without saying, but SOME might.

Almost universally, those concerned with the Environment have a fundamental lack of grasp on the concept of SCALE.   They, for example, worry endlessly about 'millions of trees' being cut down to make your toilet paper.

Millions of trees to make toilet paper for billions of humans. Billions. That is, at the least, an order of magnitude bigger. In purely mathematical terms, it is several orders of magnitudes bigger.

To be blunt: The world is a very fucking big place, and you, my poor deluded green friend, are a very, very small person.

That merely makes the average Green a simple idiot.  Let us discuss how they become Useful Idiots, very quickly.  Let's start with the Keystone Pipeline.

Now, if ever there was a pointless environmental fight, the pipeline fight is It.  This is not a fight over the production of oil, the refinement of oil, or even the use of oil. Its merely about the means of transportation of said oil. Somehow, forcing Canadians to ship their oil in large, fuel burning trucks, instead of simply pumping it through sealed pipes will save the planet from ecological disaster.

Because, make no mistake, Canada isn't going to NOT produce the oil just because the pipeline stalled. Once produced it will be refined, then it will be sold, and since it will be sold, it must be shipped, somehow, somewhere.  The only way to prevent this is to either stop Canada from exploiting their tar-sands or convince people to not buy Canadian Oil.

So, on the very face of it we have very stupid people protesting a very stupid and pointless part of the supply chain. Again, they are merely simple idiots at this point. Idiots who have no grasp of how the world works. No, I don't mean they fail to grasp some sort of secret knowledge of the levers of power, or some sort of conspiracy theory. They literally have no idea how things in the world actually work, and so they can be easily convinced to protest the one part of the process that simply cannot be stopped, and thus make matters worse on the simple premise that if they can stop any one thing related to 'oil' they have somehow made  difference.

For their next trick I fully expect them to start blowing up tankers carrying oil, either on the roads or at sea. Because, reasons.  If you can't see how stupid that would be, google Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizons or something.

Surely someone, somewhere, can see how pointless all this is? Protesting a pipe?

Sure. Those people have vested interests, shares in trucking companies for example. They WANT the pipe stopped because it makes them money. They know that the pipe has no impact on the environment, they don't care.

That is how simple idiots become useful idiots.

But this post is titled serpents in the garden, not 'useful idiots'.  Now, I could make it about dudes like Algore, the Manbearpig who lives in a lavish mansion, flies all over the world constantly and has made the GDP of a mid-sized European nation off of selling 'carbon-credits' to gullible companies with PR problems.  But Algore isn't really the problem.  He is, at worst, a symptom.

The average Green lives in some place like New York City, Boston, Seattle, Portland. Generally urban enclaves, and shockingly, often in cooler climates. Something about an excuse to wear all those natural fibers and generally skip personal hygiene, I suspect.  You don't find too many die-hard environmentalists in Miami, and fewer than expected in LA... places where going green might not actually kill you.

Odd.

Anyway: the modern Green has almost no experience in the broader world of 'flyover country', which is still pretty civilized, much less the facts on the ground of, say, Kyrgyzstan.   He or she (and many, many are girls. I suspect most male Greens are in it for the (hairy) pussy...), probably has an iPad, a laptop and a host of other conveniences that they consider necessities. A tiny handful do attempt to live off the grid (like, in California... which is why you find ANY in LA at all, I suspect), generally in communes around existing farm buildings, and they generally survive to any great extent by selling shitty handcrafts to people driving down nearby roads so they can buy food to supplement their generally pathetic gardening attempts.

Naturally, to these vast and morally smug urbanites, civilization is a plague upon the land, and their credo seems to be Agent Smith's rant from the Matrix.  Well, I suppose if I lived in New York City I too would find humanity to be just a little too... human. Time to thin the herd, bitches! That's what you get for cramming twenty seven million people onto a couple of small islands, forcing them to live piled on top of one another like rats, day in and day out.

What they fail to grasp is that were they to succeed in even one of their modest environmental goals (say... 10:10 cutting the electricity use of modern civilization by a mere ten percent... Which they never, ever point out is merely a 'tiny' first step!), their rather comfortable, white-guilt ridden lives would come screeching to a halt.

Remember what I said about clockworks and gears?  Now I make it relevant.

See: If you merely FROZE energy output at current levels, the world would adapt. It would be ugly and painful, and eventually prices would skyrocket as the wealthiest paid premium prices to increase their allotments, leaving the rest of us in the cold, but that would take a little time to set in.  Some emergency power output would undoubtedly remain to keep basic infrastructure running.  It would also force society to shrink, mostly through die-offs, until they were no longer draining as much power.

This, by the way, is an interesting metric for tracking the health of any large group of people: As healthy groups expand and grow... even if merely in complexity... they use greater amounts of resources, such as electricity. When demand for such resources begins to shrink naturally, you may wisely presume that the community is likewise shrinking, and therefore unhealthy.  I have no doubt that modern Detroit uses less electricity than it did twenty years ago, despite the rise of big screen TVs, gaming platforms and other frivolities of the urban poor, the modern version of the Roman Circuses.

When you abruptly CUT production of electricity, shit gets real, and fast.  Remember how I said all those video games and TVs were the modern equivalent to Roman Circuses? yeah, the poor will find their opiates cut off overnight, and they will take that about as well as you expect.  Businesses will fold simply because they aren't powerful enough to demand sufficient electricity to function.

Now, I know some asshole is about to point out that 10:10, despite the creepy child-murdering, was only about 'voluntary' cuts, like using less lights and so forth.  Well, yes, that was stated often enough, but the actual goal was to cut electrical consumption nation wide, which means also cutting PRODUCTION, as one does not produce in excess of demand. And once consumption levels were reduced, they would be fixed by law, regardless of how society grew or developed.   Notice how 'voluntary' the cuts were, in the video.  Even being insufficiently pro-cuts, as Gillian Anderson was as the end, was grounds for summary execution.  She was actually in favor of the movement, and they "killed" her anyways for not being quite as active as they'd like.

In short, all those hip, wonderful, white-guilt Greens in their hip, wonderful urban enclaves, and all their wonderful modern conveniences, will be among the first people to feel the pain of success. Most of these people have very few skills, the ones they have are all tied up in decadent, civilized make-work. You know, protesting, writing 'journalism' and bad poetry, art of some form or another. Hey, I like art as much as the next dudebro, but you can't eat it. Or, most of it.

Without energy, the trucks won't deliver the latest iPad to the store, then the factories that make the iPads close down. Without energy, you can't have air conditioning to offset the heat produced by twenty million rats, and you can't run heat to escape those bitterly cold New England winters.  Good thing you have armpit hair, right?

But its actually worse than that. Modern Farming is largely predicated on turning stored energy (Petroleum) into 'food energy', meaning one man driving a tractor can feed a hundred men from the produce of one acre of land, instead of having ten men on that acre feeding twelve.  That food is generally grown... not in New York, which means shipping, by land or sea. Since we have a real shortage of draft horses and galleons, that means gas and diesel, both of which are being protested as 'evil' by the average Green.

In other words, we have a massive number of people who foolishly are attempting to knock out the pins holding society together, despite the fact that they, themselves, have no real means of surviving the barbarism that comes if they succeeded. People who are utterly welded to the toys that said society makes possible, unreflective and deeply stupid, foolish people.

I'll skip the nakedly Evil environmentalists who wish to exterminate the human race. They always claim they only want it to happen painlessly, but extinction is extinction.  These people are nihilists, who dress up their bleak philosophy in positive, hopeful messages about unspoilt nature and shit, but they are evil... and for the most part they are also deluded fools, since the prophets of their creed simply want to reduce the population drastically out of some selfish notion of having more land (plantations?) for themselves, or getting rid of the undesirables (Margret Sanger, anyone?).  I mean, at least the nihilists have a certain consistency to their plans that the average idiot green lacks.

The worst Irony is that the greens are their own worst enemies.  By impeding progress, by restricting energy in every way they can, they force us to rely on old, proven technologies that are cheap, reliable and, yes, dirty.

Roughly two hours drive from my house are two large concrete structures that almost anyone would recognize as the stacks of a nuclear power plant.  It was never completed, though the builders passed every regulatory hurdle and examination.  It wasn't completed because the Green movement engaged in a deeply evil process of law fare to drive the price of construction up, to create unnecessary and expensive delays, to drive the company out of business and stop the plant by any means necessary. They, of course, succeeded in this mission. As a result, instead of clean steam pouring from those stacks, and cheap, clean power lighting out homes, we still burn coal and oil to run our power plants.

In other places they fight the constructions of dams, preventing clean hydrodynamic power from replacing coal and oil in those areas.

So we keep burning our petrochemicals. We keep polluting, and they keep protesting. Progress stalls, halts, dies, and we remain in a perpetual twilight of our own thwarted progress.

All so a bunch of smug children with too much time and too little sense can alleviate their vague sense of worthlessness and entitlement.  All so they can dream of a Rousseau-ean Noble Savage existence for  themselves (complete with some sort of Flintstones version of the iPad, I imagine...), where they will be venerated for their holy leadership in their great crusade.

They are the serpents, despising the very garden that has provided them shelter and succor, leeching their poisonous words into it, hoping to spoil it, to tear it down.

At least the barbarians want to pillage before they burn. 

Looking for Facts in all the wrong places

Not terribly long ago, I was reminded of something... a goal I once had as a very young man in fact. There are places in the country, in the world, where there are more women than men, and those places are, as expected, gold mines for dating.

I forgot this, decades ago, as my lifestyle put me, more or less automatically, into sausage land, with the commensurate difficulties it placed on my dating prospects.  I have ever been a glutton for punishment, I suppose.

As a newly single man, I realized I had no idea what my local scene was truly like.

I found out two sad facts.

The first is that my worst adult dry spell was when I lived less than an hour from one of the top ten cities in the nation for single women (oops!!! This demographic data might have been good to know when I... wasn't going there to get laid!!!!), and that the town I have called home, on and off, for the last ten years is among the ten worst. 

Sigh.

Actually, I think its in the top five. 

This may explain why I seem to lack suitable targets for my attentions so much of the time. 

On the other hand, I suppose it should make me feel rather proud of the quickness with which I scored when I first moved here, and the subsequent...ah... party lifestyle I managed to live before the relationship turned to shit. 

In short, the evidence suggests that my previous experiences in Sausage Land have well prepared me for the arduous task of scoring in a town where there are six men to every five women.  Luckily, it seems this is also among the gayest of cities... possibly caused by a shortage of bankable girls. I note here that the Northwest seems to be a mecca for fat pasty girls with bad peircings and tattoos, possibly because the lack of sunshine means they don't need as many excuses to layer themselves in tents year round...

However: I have been contemplating a move to warmer, sunnier climes anyway, as my notoriously foul moods and general reclusiveness are only aggravated by constantly shitty weather.  So, if I cannot pull myself out of the permanent nose dive of my life, once the ground has well and truly smacked me around a few times to prove that gravity is a Boss, I will undoubtedly bid fare-thee-well to this god forsaken place, and seek me a land of lonely, and bikini clad beauties, desperate for a manly man to sooth their... shit, what's the female version of sausage fest?... well, you get my drift.

There are upsides to being destroyed. 

Of course, my foray into research also turned up a fact I and been deliberately ignoring.  I've chosen to indulge in my general hobo-nature and let my hair grow rather wild, along with cultivating a manly beard, or at least part of a manly beard, letting manly scruff take the rest.  I was imagining that my utter lack of metrosexuality was working in my favor, perhaps offsetting my indisputable laziness regarding my gym habits.

In short: I was, of course, lying to myself. The beard and scruff, if maintained properly, seems to be working just fine. Its the useless, shapeless mass of unruly hair (blessed be the gods of genetics, who saw fit to pass over me when they visited the scourge of Male Pattern Baldness upon the heads of the unworthy.  Let it be said that I know well, and powerfully, that I have not the skull to support a sexy bald head, looking rather more like an unhealthy cross between a vulture and a cancer patient in his last earthly days, no matter how much muscle the neck beneath boasts...), that is proving...well... unruly.

There is, to be blunt, a fine point between dashing, devil may care, rugged manliness and slovenliness, and I have well and truly crossed the line into the latter, at least with regards to my hair. 

Given that I have at least some appreciation for classic stylings, this will simply not do.  I am not quite ready to do the whole dress-suit, spit-shine shoes routine, though I suppose it would behoove me to attempt it, but looking like a bum is starting to turn me into a fucking bum, and that ain't sexy unless you're looking the Rock Candy Mountains... 

So, in turn, that means upon the morrow I shall attend to my glorious locks.  I may return to my slovenly, manly hobo ways once I have restored the temple of my body, so that I resemble more the savage beast-man, the viking of olde, rather than some chump to cheap to shell out for hair care. So too shall I ditch the rumpled t-shirts, no matter how comfortable and, well, EASY they are. 

I would say too that upon the morrow I will attend me to the gym, but facing the fact, in this I will undoubtedly fail, beset as I am by the devils of procrastination and general laziness. 

And while my maudlin tale of self loathing may seem pointlessly indulgent, I suggest instead that you point to those nonexistent readers, whose lack allows me such frivolities without shame.  Who among you exists that can cast a stone in judgement or derision? None, say I, and riding my ass backwards through the marketplace, I point and laugh without shame or dignity*

*I have no idea what the fuck I just said there. None.  

Love

I am, have always been, at heart a man of concrete and definite notions.  I hate little so much as an ill defined word.  I suppose I should be grateful, as the inability to pin down definitions kept me from ever truly buying the progressive lies fed to me from an early age.

But it was somewhat troublesome as I approached adolescence all because of one little four letter word. 

Love.

Its right up there in the title of the post, folks, so that should be no real surprise. 

How do we define love? Its a feeling, right? 

Christ, what a clusterfuck trying to define love turned out to be.  I struggled manfully and mightily with this concept. I knew lust, had felt lust, and lacking a good concrete definition of love, I supposed my lust was love, as so many of the young are wont to do. 

Like most young men in my late teens and twenties I drifted from one 'love' to another, guided by my pecker.  It was a miserable existence, as modern women have no use for love, and especially the lovelorn.  

In modern parlance, I was a victim of my own 'oneitis', often rejecting women who were interested in me for women who weren't.  

Sometime around 25 or so I gave up.  I'd been dry-gulched into the friend zone one too many times. I am not at heart a 'beta orbiter', I suppose. My tolerance for being kept around without relationship progress is limited, and the more times it happened to me, the more limited it got.  I can recall clearly the very last straw, though I didn't recognize it for what it was at the time.  

Contra to the various game sites, walking away in disgust, closing my door in a girl's face and other expressions of disqualifying did not lead to moist panties being thrown my way, but this was the nineties, and Game was only just starting to form in some dark corner of a frustrated beta's mind, I suppose. 

It is tempting to proudly claim I was some sort of reformed, former Beta, or a natural alpha who was misguided by societal lies.  The truth is, I don't know and don't really care. My circumstances were different than those of the guys who created, who needed, game.  All the game in the world won't help you if you aren't where the women are, so to speak.  A dude serving ten life sentences of hard time has no use for 'Game'*... though my circumstances were hardly so bad as that, the allegorical similarity is enough for my purpose.

Regardless; after my last straw, I crossed a personal rubicon. I stopped caring about love, about building connections and wether or not I liked the girl in question. I stopped looking for girlfriends and started looking for fuck buddies.  My circumstances hadn't much changed, but my sex life did.  

I still knew nothing of this 'Game' phenomenon, and to be honest, discovering it made little impact on me, personally. 

There is a somewhat hollow mockery of life that acquiring sex without meaning meant little.  It was survival at the barest of margins.  

Not that life permits much else.  My chances for meaningful relationships died before I left high school. Women I wanted to live with wanted casual sex, and the women I was getting casual sex from were inherently unstable, unlikable sluts.  They weren't sluts because they would sleep with me. I was sleeping with them because they were sluts, and thus easy.  

But sex isn't really optional. Its lack is less obviously destructive than a lack of food or water, but it is destructive. We are wired by biology to breed, to procreate.  Women, in large margin, appear to have reverted to feral mating patterns, but they deny men the right to do the same. This disequilibrium cannot hold for long. 

I mentioned before that I had a LTR. It started with a casual fuck, a pickup of some girl I had little interest in other than her apparent easiness.  I was, in game terms, alpha as fuck, and she wouldn't go away, so eventually I got lazy and let her stick around.  For a while I thought I would never 'love' her, that women had cured me of that affliction, in fact.  

I suppose they have, I was just wrong about when it happened.  As years turned I kept faithful out of a sense of duty and honor, and eventually settled into a comfortable loving friendship with my bedmate. 

So she stuck the knife in, robbing me blind and abandoning me when I was at my lowest point, emotionally and then physically, but sticking around to squeeze a few more drops of blood from my stone until I'd had enough. 

When I fell in love as a young man I was rebuffed. When I sought only sex I was successful.  As an older, wiser man, I allowed myself to feel tender, to feel love for the woman I was having sex with, and was again rebuffed.

What is the lesson I should take away from this? 

The obvious one is that love is, has always been, a lie. 

How cruel that I, a pessimist, even now hold out hope that I am wrong?  

See: since I am now back in the singles game, I am forced to confront simple facts.  I can either look for love, long term stable love that will fulfill me emotionally and give me purpose, knowing that I am likely to be betrayed and rebuffed.

Or I can nakedly look only for sex. I can lie, cheat and manipulate with all the force I can muster. I have no doubt of my ability to get my dick wet, though I know there will be more stumbles along the way as I shake off the rust of a decade of complacency.   The price for this however, is that I will remain cold, aloof and alone to the bitter end. I will be unhappy, without the purpose and companionship I so desperately crave. 

It is a bitter fruit, rotten on one side and poisoned on the other. 

Yet, I am famished and I must bite. 

The Serpent in the Garden

Over on Aurini's blog I happened to read a bit of Genesis, specifically where man is cast from the Garden of Eden. 

I mention this because it goes back to one of my recent posts regarding the tendency of some Men's Rights Activists to seek to repeat the Feminist Folly of denying inherent biological facts, or rather it reminded me of that post. 

See, while I certainly don't think the bible is the inerrant word of God, and in fact I view that particular branch of faith to be particularly unhinged, it is still a great old book containing a lot of distilled wisdom from the ancient past.  I think it is perfectly possible to reinterpret various injunctions in more modern language and still find wisdom in them. Take, for example, the injunction against witches. 

How can one find wisdom in a book of superstitious nonsense warning you not to truck with other superstitious nonsense, you may ask? 

You mean: aside from the fact that dealing with Wiccans is generally an exercise in futility and mental anguish as the sheer density of their stupidity gives even biblical literalists a run for their money?  

I mean, since Wiccans DO seem to believe the bible was referring to their faith, even as they talk out both sides of their mouths on the subject of witchcraft in Wicca. 

Right: the bible was definitely not talking about Wiccans, though I can imagine some ancient semite pondering their ilk from the distant path and deciding to pen a particularly insulting injunction from god regarding them... had he only known.

In fact, the bible talks about soothsayers, card readers, telephone psychics and spiritualists of all sorts.  

You know: Con Artists. 

Now, God can't out and say: Don't give these people your hard earned shekels, they're all liars and thieves... no, God has to say they do the work of EVIL, because... you know... God and stuff. 

Pretty much like the dietary injunctions that look pretty silly nowadays but back in the bad old days of dirt and yurt were probably pretty fucking lifesaving.  Would you want to eat shellfish in ancient Egypt?  Man, I wouldn't eat shellfish in Egypt TODAY!!!  Reminds me of a funny story actually... 

Anyway, where was I? 

Oh, yeah: Genesis. 

See, God curses the serpent, Eve and then Adam.  We can pretty much dismiss the Serpent's curse as pure poetical description of snakes in general, and Eve's curse is pretty much 'have a bunch of kids, obey your husband'... not terribly earth shaking. I'm guessing some Feminist has already dismissed it as typical patriarchy in action, and were into that who christian game scene, I guess I'd be pointing out that a good christian woman is submissive to her husband or something... 

None of that is particularly relevant.

Well, maybe a little. See, God doesn't really tell Eve her life is gonna suck. I mean he SAYS something about multiplying her Sorrow, but then he explains that means she's gonna have kids and lust after her husband.  

But when it comes to Adam, boy howdy does shit get real.  See, Adam's life is gonna be all 'Thorns and Thistles', the very ground is his enemy, he eats his own sweat until he is buried.

Get it? God is saying that 'Adam, you are a man now, and that means life is gonna suck for you from here on out. You're gonna fucking ENVY Eve her child birthing by the time you die. See, you gonna have to work until you are fucking DEAD. Every day, in and out, getting cuts and scratches and all sorts of shit, like the world itself has it fucking in for you, man.  Because, reasons.' 

Now, like I said earlier, I don't buy one moment that this is the word of 'God', but of a bunch of men who claimed to be speaking for God, wether or not they actually bought into the whole 'god' thing or were just some seriously smooth operators.  They weren't explaining so much that men had it hard because they were cursed by god, but that this is what it means to be a man.  Women have the babies, men do all the shit work and that's the fucking way it is. 

Six thousand or so years ago, people got it.  They dressed it up in holy talk, but they got it, and their spiritual decedents built this glorious modern world that so many useful idiots seem to want to destroy.  Now, following traditions for its own sake is only fine up to a limited point, but then so too is throwing out old and hoary traditions just because they are old and hoary.   

So back from religion to biology: 

One day Science!!! may find a way to create little human beings without women... and ergo, without men.  On that day we might truly look for a new paradigm for gender relations.... or we me learn to our dismay that without biological attraction, producing new humans is a little too much like work. I'm betting on the latter.  Until that day comes, however, trying to ignore something that has been true from the dawn of time is pretty fucking silly.  At best its putting the cart before the horse. 

Women can't be men. They can't toil the fields and suffer the pricks of the thorns and thistles and work until they die to put food on the table in the face of a cruel and savage world.  They can try, but they will do a miserable fucking job of it, and they'll put of having kids until too late. 

Men can't be women. They can't ignore the fact that their lot is to suffer the thorns and thistles and to do the hard, shit work that puts food on the table.  They can try, but civilization crumbles, walls fall, and you wind up eating rotten vegetables and hoping to make it through the winter without starving. 

Winter is coming, you better fucking believe it. 

Just dream a little dream

I can excoriate feminism's positions quite easily. With a rudimentary knowledge of biology and a little bit of logic, its not hard.  Getting people to listen is hard.  Women have a distinct knack for avoiding direct confrontations, and they've taught that skill to their male supplicants, so getting a feminist to even agree to a debate is nearly impossible. 

Of course, even if you tore down each and every lie of feminism proper, they'd merely deflect. That is less a feminine technique than a socialist one, this idea that you are somehow not responsible for the various positions, and the consequences of those positions, held by your side unless you, personally, can be quoted as promoting them in some exacting language... which of course, socialists are trained not to do.  Redefine terms, use broad language, and deny, deny, deny. 

I'm rather more familiar with that technique than I would like, having discussed rather non-political positions with self professed socialists and communists, and discovered first hand that they refuse to be held to even the simplest of terms. 

I have, on occasion, found myself pondering the roots of socialist thought in the ancient debates between rational and teleological thought, which was officially won by the Rational philosophers.  Alas, teleology seems to be deeply ingrained in the human psyche, while rationality must be learned, and thus it ever returns.  I myself have been guilty of it in the past, but when I was a child I may be excused for having thought as a child. 

As a geek, I have a rather curious perspective on the matter in the form of gaming products from White Wolf.  It is undeniable that White Wolf's writers and designers were quintessential college liberals, men and women with liberal arts degrees, degrees in the humanities and so forth... not one scientist or rationalist among them.  Their rules systems were simple and reasonably robust within the limits of their early goals, but were not grounded in mathematical or statistical models... and when their grasp exceeded their reach in 'higher level' gaming... that is to say the demigods of Exalted, the actual Gods of Scion, and the mortal gods of Aberrant, the limitations of the system were vastly exceeded, and the rules began to fray and fail, though one may track the efforts to address these flaws, these inherent limitations, through the evolution of the rules across those game lines, and so of the three Scion, the last designed and released, works the best. Of course, the irony is that it works the best because while the player characters are actual Gods, creatures of Divinity, traversing the heavens and the realms of the dead with impunity, they have the most modest power sets of the three game lines mentioned.

But we were talking about teleology versus rationality in their games, which cannot be found in the actual rules nearly so much as the settings.  The most obvious example is Mage: The Awakening, where all of reality is nothing more than a consensual illusion, and if enough people believe something hard enough, all of reality changes.  This is a world where a meme-war is enough to erase your enemy from existence.  Wishing something hard enough makes it true. 

And that is fundamentally the heart of teleological thought. 

And not coincidentally the heart of all socialist thought, not merely the more formal schools of socialism we recognize as actual philosophies, political or otherwise.  This is the heart of modern leftist, progressive thought, that if your intentions are good enough, if you believe hard enough, then things will work out. All oppositional ideas must be rejected outright, regardless of how sensible they are, since they are tainted by lack of devotional purity. It doesn't matter that lowering taxes will improve the economy, its an idea supported by those dreaded, evil, vile Tea Partiers, and therefore cannot work... because reasons.  

Prove that the Tea Party is not rife with racists? Well, that doesn't matter, they are still secret racists because they lack the purity of liberal belief, and thus must be corrupt. 

Government has never, in the thousands of years of human civilization, created jobs or improved peoples lives? Well, the right people, with the right beliefs, simply haven't had enough power yet. 

Now: At some level a number of bad actors do exist, people who don't actually believe, who don't actually think this way, who have merely ridden the coat tails of leftist, progressive indoctrination of school children for the power, but that can't explain everyone else.   It can't even explain Obama and his administration.

If Obama were one of these bad actors, only after Power, if he was not in fact a true believer, we would be better off.  This 'evil Obama' would, after all, move to ensure America remained powerful on the world stage, to better grow his own power. This Evil Obama would reinforce the Pax Americana, would bolster the navy and the army. He might start a few needless wars, cause countless deaths for nakedly political reasons... but the real, True Believer Obama has plenty of blood on his hands as well. Libya, Syria, Egypt... the doubling of the death toll in Afghanistan since his election, the drone wars and kill lists. 

But at least we, at home, under the oppressive boot would be more safe, in the long run, from our enemies abroad.  And make no mistake, we have enemies abroad. Every successful nation has, throughout history.  

At least the violence of the police would not be capricious, could be avoided. 

Its a terrible thing to recognize that a malicious, deliberately evil man would serve us better than the ideologue currently at the helm.  The Ambitious Man would want the economy to grow, and might take even a few steps to see it happen, the Ideologue wants us reduced to hapless savages for the good of the world, in abstract. 

I don't fault Progressives for being wrong. Everyone is wrong some of the time. I fault them for being willfully, deliberately wrong, for blinding themselves to the obvious. I fault them for being impervious to the lessons laid out before them.  Only a fool doubles down on every failure, and only a madman repeats his failures exactly, while sure that this time will be different.  Thus we know the Left is full of fools and madmen, and I weep for the voters who simply cannot be bothered to open their eyes and see for themselves.

I don't want to persuade. I don't want to educate. I want you to look for yourself, for once, and see for yourselves what is true.

I want you to realize that you have been lied to, are lied to, every day.  That these lies are not casual, are not accidental, that they are coordinated, deliberate, and planned. 

Gramsci's Long March began with the Journalists and moved rapidly into the schools. From there, every other institution falls quickly into line, because we can see only what we have been taught to see. 

Disposable Heroes

I have, when bored, read mens rights sites like The Spearhead and A Voice for Men.  In general I find myself agreeing with somewhat more than half of what they have to say.  At times it is higher.  This is not a ringing endorsement nor a condemnation, but merely setting the stage, as I always encourage people to make up their own damn minds. 

Western Civilization, particularly here in the States, is not merely tragically flawed, but horribly broken.  We've been in a cascade failure, as a culture, for at least a decade, but the seeds were sown far earlier. As a cascade failure, each failure piles on top of the last, accelerating as it picks up steam. Were a little smarter, perhaps I could put this in the form of a Logistics Function and determine where exactly we are in the 'market saturation of total cultural breakdown'... but rest assured, dear reader, that we are still picking up steam.  Me? I've predicted, independently of Mark Steyn, that we'll see true signs of collapse in the 2020 decade, aiming earlier rather than later.  Maybe I'll do a post later explaining some of my reasons, but not today.

Let me return to purely manospherian discussion: The phenomenon of MGTOW, or Men Going Their Own Way, is merely a reflexive defensive motion, the drawing away from a sharp pointy stick.  As a movement it is tragic and doomed because it offers no solutions, only a withdrawal, a defensive crouch.  That's not to denigrate the MGTOW dudes.  They profess to be happier, and I can see why... they've escaped the sharp pointy stick, for now.  That is one of two flaws with the movement, the lesser flaw in fact: most of the evils directed at men by society are coercive, are forced.  Too many men 'flee' an increasingly toxic society and society itself.... men and women... will take action to force their compliance.  The second flaw is far greater. It is an animal response, instinctive and unreasoning. They cannot repair, they cannot build or create. In fact due to the toxicity of modern society they advocate owning as little as possible, a not unwise piece of advice. 

But men who can not, will not, build or create, who can not or will not participate provide nothing of value to anyone.  Unthinking pursuit of personal happiness, personal satisfaction, has created this feminist monster. It is the great sin of our age, our culture that we have enshrined our own personal values above all others, our own personal happiness above all others.  

I spoke of the true sin of the coward just a few days ago, and yes, the MGTOW is essentially a movement of cowards, unwilling to fight, to make things right.  They will have the blood of other men on their hands, the men who stayed behind, like all cowards.  

I shouldn't blame them, of course. We haven't raised a generation of Men in fifty years, maybe seventy.  

You see, this is the single greatest problem I have with A Voice for Men, and to a lesser extent The Spearhead. No, not their support of the MGTOW movements... 

Girlwriteswhat, Karen Straughn, is a woman I admire, and she expresses the very problem, almost ideological, that lies at the core of my disagreement with Paul Elam and the other VfM writers.  I am talking about 'Male Disposability'. 

You see, at the end of the day, AVfM really wants to see a societal shift, where Feminism is cast down like the venomous serpent it is, and men are no longer held to be the proper targets for violence...

Which sounds nice and all until you realize exactly what they are saying.  No, not that women deserve to become our proper targets of violence, but that men shouldn't be.... perhaps men and women should be equal targets of violence? 

Or perhaps they expect like so many western man-children they expect that this new and wondrous society will be peaceful.

Utopia. 

Pfegh. 

I have a term I use, generally for Feminist and Progressive utopian ideas... transgenderism, female equivalence to men and so forth called The Tyranny of Biology. 

See: tyrannies are bad things that need to be fought, right? So if biology has given us an inexorable, tyrannical, state of affairs... well, its only right we fight it? 

Thus you have men claiming they were born women, women claiming they were born men, that heteronormativism is a bad thing (hint: They are saying that being normal, and preferring procreative sex, is bad...), you have women trying to start families in their forties, demands for female soldiers on the front lines and so on.

See, the funny thing about 'reality' is that it doesn't give a good god damn about fairness or justice or decency. If women are assertively selected for mating based entirely on beauty and never for brains, they might wind up, a few million years from now, angelic eloi incapable of stringing more than two coherent words together with voices that would make you weep just for the hearing of it.  That they would be little more than ambulatory wombs is unimportant to biology.  Would it be grossly unfair to women? Would it be horrific to realize that not one woman in that senario would be capable of making informed consent, and may in fact be utterly dependent on men for even the simple act of eating? 

Yes, yes it would. 

But biology doesn't care. Reality doesn't care.  Our intelligence means nothing to the Universe At Large, but only to us as individuals. 

Fighting against Biology, fighting against the Tyranny of Biology is ultimately doomed to failure, and on a grand scale. Its one of those fights you lose by winning.  If the gay lobby succeeds at turning vast percentages of straight children into gay adults, to bolster their numbers, they will have won the battle, but when the inevitable demographic cratering follows, they will have lost the war.  

Which brings me back to the current fight against Male Disposability. 

A woman is smaller, weaker and more fragile than any man. Its not terribly PC to say it, but our laws do reflect that, often unfairly.  Far more importantly, a woman can do what a Man cannot, that is bear children. Yet, for most of the nine months she does this, she is helpless, incapacitated. She cannot run from threats, meaningfully, and cannot fight. She can barely forage for food, though technology helps here. Even after she gives birth she will be bed ridden for days after, and depending on her age weak for week. She could even die, making the act of giving birth a singular one.

A man can conceive a child in five minutes, though he'll be mocked for his lack of stamina. He can impregnate dozens of women in the nine months it takes the first to be born. 

No society that puts women into harms way can survive long, this is a matter of historical record. The vast majority of species, nearly all mammalian life certainly, follow this pattern on one scale or another. In the insect world males are so disposable that they are often consumed post-coitus by their mates to ensure there is enough energy to lay healthy eggs, just in case. 

So while Karen Straughn's concern for my gender's aches and bruises, the slings and arrows of our genetic karma, is heartfelt and touching, she and the others at AVfM are committing the same error as Feminists. They are fighting against the Tyranny of Biology. 

The solution is not to create a society where men are not disposable, but to return to a society... to create a society where it is respected, honored and appreciated rather than punished. 

We cannot create, cannot wish into being, a peaceful, safe world.  No amount of labors will change the fact that some people will take by force what others have. They will do so out of cruelty and greed, and they will do so because they need those resources to survive. They will do so because Justice or Honor or Duty demands it of them. 

But it will happen, time and time and time again, until the very Sun grows cold and humanity becomes a faded echo of past glories. 

And even if we conquer human nature, even if we eradicate sin, we will still have to deal with nature, red of tooth and claw. The beasts may be tamed, but new threats arise. Once it was lions and tigers and bears, now it is cars and building fires and crab fishing.  

Biology, that bloodthirsty tyrant, has rendered women unfit for these hazards, has dangled the threat of extinction itself to make its will known. 

Thus Men will ever have to step into the breach, and face the hazards of the day, known and unknown in their place.  It will be hard. It will be demanding. It will be painful and bloody. Many will not return, as it has ever been. 

I have thrown myself into that breech my entire adult life. I would not desire to sacrifice my body, my life, for modern American women. I would not seek for myself the pain and suffering, however mild, I have endured for others. I am never so selfless as that, yet I would not hesitate, even now, to do so again.  

But I cannot be compelled, by any means, to do so. 

But only for the right causes, the right people. 

I cannot fight the Tyrant, and I pity anyone who tries. 

I can chose how I obey. 

Maidan

When things happen, I suppose they happen quickly.  

One might pray, if so inclined, that the world hangs like a pendulum's weight, and when it swings, the world swings with it. 

Chavez is dead and his successors have inherited a mess they cannot hope to contain, and socialism once again fails.

Yanukovich has fled Kiev and the protestors have taken his home, the government has released the leader of the opposition party from jail. 

The might of Russia, a modern powerful nation, has been shown in no small part to be nothing more than a myth, a paper tiger that cannot even provide working toilets for the Olympics, shaming themselves on the world's stage...

The pendulum swings, tyrants fall and false idols are cast down. 

And yet...

And yet, the world does not hang like a pendulum's weight. The future is not yet written, and too many people still believe in the dream, that the man selling you a life of ease and prosperity, if only you give him more power, can actually provide it. 

The Future is unwritten, as it always has been.  Today the Tyrants are on the ropes, but others remain. 

Tomorrow there may be blood and fire. Tomorrow the Iron Boot may come down.  

For the people of Kiev I have only hope.  For the people of Venezuela I know that there is more blood to come, their fight is not over.  For Russia, they have merely suffered the indignity of their incompetence, their dreams of power and control have not yet died. 

And for us? 

We still believe the man in the pulpit, the liar who sells us our dreams as if they were mere baubles that had been kept from us by greedy children. 

I know in my soul I want the blood. I want the fire.  Justice demands it. The suffering their lies cause cries out for vengeance, it cries out for blood.  I would make such an object lesson of them that the world would tremble, that all would be tyrants, great and small, would know what waits for them.

But I am just a man. 

No. 

I am not even that. I am a shadow, an electronic ghost, invisible. 

Today, I am content.  Today it does not matter. 

Today there is still hope. 

Ye olde Dungeons and Dragons

In which I talk about a bunch of games that are not, in fact, Dungeons and Dragons, but are only grouped with Dungeons and Dragons for the Rubes. 

So I've been running for my friends (you can hear them on the Podcasts) a bunch of Rogue Trader games over the last year, about once a week.  This is Warhammer 40k, of course, the idea that the players are the officers of a napoleonic space ship cruising, well, space for fun and profit. 

It has been an unholy mess.  Don't get me wrong, I've loved the setting since it was just a crude sci fi expansion of Warhammer Fantasy, though I find my interest in it has waned over the last decade, peaking sometime around 1999-2000 or so, and slowly dropping ever since.  No small part of the issue is simply how BAD the intellectual property has been managed.

Now, if Citadel/Games Workshop were some small 'fly by night' company operating out of some dudes garage, I could forgive them for many of their many problems. You know: Releasing a new edition when only half the army books have been released. Not releasing new versions of core army books (codex for the rubes...) until three or four new editions, going to cheaper plastic models and doubling the price over the old lead (white metal, a lead free version of pewter, actually) models, or more and other general fuckwittedness are just some of the problems.  

Look: you employ a small army of writers and designers, you are mostly recycling (or were) models that were designed and molded over a decade ago. You have NO excuse not to put out codices (the plural of codex, natch) fast enough to get them all out the same year as a new edition. Doubly so, since at least HALF of any given codex is recycled fluff text from the last release!! 

And don't give me that bullshit about 'game balance'. Not only is 40k among the worst ever tabletop games for balance (Lessee::: Broken unkillable/ghosting Necrons, Stompy bug armies... four editions of Tyranids that were nigh well unbeatable by any normal army.... then the Demon-bomb army, and greater demons that can win most battles single handedly (taking out six to eight times their point value if they do!)... yeah, you guys are really worried about balance, mate), but if you haven't 'balanced' the core armies before you've released the new edition, well maybe you aren't ready to actually release the new edition, are you? 

Now, Privateer Press, at least when it comes to the RPG version of Iron Kingdoms is damn near as bad, releasing a single fucking book about once a year. Ironically, since their war-game gets damn near a whole new edition in the same time frame, this means by the time IKRPG gets its third book, the first two books may well be rendered obsolete from a setting standpoint.  Yet, why? I could easily produce a single book of the IKRPG, to their standard of page count and quality in a single year... working alone and subcontracting art.  Privateer Press lists some sixty people in the credits of their own books, meaning any given person is either a fucking leech on the corporate teat, or is responsible for approximately five pages of content. 

And its not like they are making up huge mounds of shit, either. Most of the books are drawing extremely heavily on existing content, and the 'careers' are damn near boilerplated. 

But back to Rogue Trader and why it was a fucking nightmare to run. 

Well, from a basic setting standpoint the game sort of contradicts the setting. See, Warhammer 40k operates under a sort of 'great man of history' setting assumption.  Titans stride forth on mighty battlefields, accomplishing all sorts of shit, and attracting followers in vast numbers by sheer dint of their badassness.  I mean, if you are inherently bad-ass enough, eventually an army will form around you, as if by magic, and wage war on your behalf.  

This is hard coded into every bit of game fiction.  Assassins have to be selected by destructive weeding out of thousands of potential applicant/children, then trained their entire lives, given nearly entire body makeovers using superhuman and nearly lost technologies in genetic modifications and cyberware, and unique equipment held as almost holy relics from the lost golden age... just to be able to do their jobs, that's how bad ass every person of interest is in the setting. Some random, dissipated noble lord, with a thousand years of inbreeding and inheritance decides to cede from the Imperium?  As pathetic a specimen as he sounds, you can damn well bet he can eat entire regiments of infantry and shit the bones like artillery shells.  Anything less than a demigod level killing machine is doomed to failure if you send them to do the job. 

Except, in Rogue Trader, the captain of the ship is insanely fragile and nearly useless when not at the helm of the ship... which makes running the game an exercise in frustration or reduces everything to ship to ship combat. In fact, the more disposable anonymous you are the more bad ass you are, apparently, allowed to be. 

That's a minor beef, however.  I could simply chose to make the ship captain a Non-player character who never leaves the ship (Picard, calling Picard!), and let everyone play 'cool characters'... sure. 

But then we're dealing with the system. See, RT is the second in a series, and its pretty obvious that Fantasy Flight (The publisher of the RPG) and the Black Library (the arm of Game's Workshop responsible for non war-game IP), are still working out kinks in the system, so much so that by Only War the games start looking seriously non-compatible. 

Only, they aren't really tinkering at all with the fundamental game play. No, at best they tinker on the margins of that, preferring to spend all their energy on character progression.  Sigh.  Progression is mostly fine, if you accept the premise of 'class' based leveling (or if you don't, as of Only War). 

No, the real problem is that roughly three quarters of the combat rules are in the Talents chapter of character building.  You can't evaluate a bad guy until you've memorized three hundred fucking Talents so you know exactly what he can and can't do in a fight!  For players it is nearly as bad. 

Then there is the oddity of combat itself. I mean, reduced to its simplest elements it is fairly fine, though it really does favor specialized characters.  However, some weapons can prove nearly useless in combat (lasguns, which we found almost never wounded even the comparatively fragile space elves!), while others are so lethal that if you use them against even heavily armored player characters you are pretty much asking to reset the campaign (oh... rocket launchers, plasma guns... that sort of thing...). 

Let just say it was turgid but still managed to be like playing catch with a live grenade and leave it at that, the worst of all worlds. 

But it was, ironically enough, starships that killed the game. Oh... not too much the ships (though I could rant on them long enough...), but warp travel.  The core book is reasonably fine, in that it more or less glosses over everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING... except ship to ship combat (which... ugh... though STILL better than watching your players struggle to kill one nameless, unimportant space elf because...reasons.)  No, my mistake was using the Navis Primer rules for warp travel. Things were fine when the trips were short-ish, though the lack of a player character navigator meant the ship was nearly constantly lost in space due to really pathetic crew rating rules.  It was the first reasonably long trip that killed it for us. Something like twenty or thirty dice rolls later, and an hour into the evening they were roughly half done with the trip, several areas of the ship were uninhabitable due to 'space gribbly infestations', a warp beast was stalking the halls, and the entire crew was suffering delusions of mutation... sigh.  This was, for the record, with the benefits of a warps bane hull (making them much less likely to suffer awkward results), and a 'fast' ship engine, reducing the total number of rolls per trip to about sixty percent. 

Even just waving my hands and saying they arrived with 20 percent of the crew lost wasn't enough to recapture the 'magic' of game. We'd had enough.   

I might say the issue is tables.  The game is full of tables, but they are all small, and frequently refer to other small tables. Some people swear by random tables. I'm not really one of them, but if you're gonna do random tables, you have to put a substantial amount of work into them. Splitting everything into smaller tables just makes for shitty results and tons more time spent rolling and flipping pages. Better one big table, really. 

So we're gonna try traveller for a bit.  I've been given fair warning that my players don't want to get bogged down in ship logistics, which kinda makes me sad, because, well.... Traveller, but there you have it.   Still, for all the books I have, I know this much: There is no bog in Traveller nearly so boggy as ANYTHING in Rogue Trader. 

Recognition

So.

Several times in the last year or so people have linked to an image of Zooey Deschanel at some awards show with her trademark bangs swept aside (for once), almost universally as this amazingly trick question quiz of 'do you recognize her?'

Maybe you've seen it, maybe you haven't.  

Personally? 

I think its a shit photograph. Even after you reveal that its ms. Deschanel, you really can't see it... because its a shit photograph.  On the other hand it does say something about our culture that we really can't seem to recognize people once they strip off their 'uniform'.  I mean, are we really so incapable of basic recognition that we need fucking name tapes to know who's who?

Not me, man. 

See, I discovered rather late in life that I was more than a little nearsighted. Legally I can't drive without glasses on, which is hugely amusing to me since I didn't start actually wearing glasses until I was in my twenties, long after I had gotten my driver's license.  Anyway, as a result of my "Near Blindness" I learned to recognize people from a distance by the way they walk, so much so that I could tell you the gender of the person wearing a school mascot suit after only seconds of observation, and if I actually KNEW the person I would probably be able to tell you who it was despite almost any normally identifiable characteristics. 

Well, a decade and a half since I started wearing glasses I've gotten a little less keen on subtle hints of posture and walk (though I can still spot a tranny from a mile away, literally), but I've gotten really keen on smaller, subtle indicators of 'who'.  

See: i've really only seen Zooey Deschanel in two things: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and that crappy/interesting Wizard of Oz movie on Scify (where I liked the wicked witch a lot more...).  Now, these days we are inundated by her image thanks to that New Girl show (which, from what I know of it, was meant as a vehicle for Her Specificially, and has since morphed into a true ensemble show, possibly driving a nail in the coffin of the idea that Ms. Deschanel is particularly engaging as an actress, instead of merely being very pretty...), but a few years back, before the New Girl thing, I happened to catch an episode of Bones, mostly because I have a totally heterosexual man-love for David Boreneaz, or however you spell his name.   The show failed to properly capture my viewership in the long run, proving my man love was for Joss Whedon instead, which just shows how little taste I have in men. 

The point isn't my latent homosexuality, or lack thereof, but that within ten minutes of watching the show I realized that the female lead was, in fact, Zooey Deschanel's sister.   This, despite having no real interest in Zooey at all.  The only reason it took that long is that I had to verify my early suspicion against Hollywood's remarkably tendency to find a half dozen nearly identical actresses to shove in our face all at once in any given celebrity cycle.   I could reference here that as Thandie Newton got more and more attention, Zoe Saldana showed up to compete for the 'not quite white, skinny girl' crown... but I don't want to make a post about it, so you'll just have to pretend I did. 

Now, Emily Deschanel doesn't, to my knowledge, wear her sister's trademark bangs, and to be honest the closest resemblance I saw was in the eyes, not so much in the shape of their face or their relative acting chops, which sort of refutes the idea that I need Zooey's bangs to recognize her.

For you, however? Well, you tell me, imaginary reader.

However, to spare you the embarrassment, should you fail the photo 'test', I think it indicates far more how a crap, overexposed photograph can reduce anyone... no matter how famous... into a vaguely human manikin than it does for Ms Deschanel's bangs. 

Kiev

Yesterday I suborned my regularly scheduled posts with a heartfelt, if somewhat narcissistic, post on the Ukraine.  Today I continue the trend, because I care about you, my imaginary readers. 

Obviously I am not on a plain to eastern Europe right now, though perhaps less obviously, I am not in an airport waiting for the flight either.  I feel I should be, but perhaps my lack of belief in God means I just can't abandon the wreckage of my daily life to go based on impulse and feeling... 

Since you only exist in my mind, dear readers, I chose to imagine you listened to the podcasts we originally started with, and thus have heard Burke speak, the one podcaster who is deeply religious and deeply involved with his church (Methodists, which is funny if you recall Blazing Saddles like I do...). So, while we disagree about the existence of God, he is a fine friend to call on when you are troubled by matters that extend beyond mere intellect. Call them spiritual, for that is as accurate a word as any. 

So I called upon Burke, not to talk me out of going, or into going, but because I needed, perhaps still need, spiritual advice. Like all men I needed, in that moment, someone to talk to. 

So here we are. I am still not convinced that staying here, following the roller coaster news reports, is the right choice, but I am at least convinced now that going is not necessarily the right choice either, which I suppose is progress of a sort. 

You see: It isn't so much that I care about the outcome of the protests, per se. It isn't that I have objective knowledge that one side is right or wrong... though unlike Vox Day, I find myself singularly untroubled by the fact that the protesters are armed and have reputedly taken 'hostages' from among the riot cops. 

My reason, perhaps my sole reason, of interest is that the people of Kiev, the protestors, are doing what Americans are content not to do.  As I explained yesterday, we are far more likely to see mass protests over the price of an iPad than the continuing failures of our self-appointed Philosopher-Kings in DC.  People protest out of envy and spite, not because the police are shooting random people in the streets.  

Mind you: I find this worse than what is going on in Kiev. The riot police there are shooting protestors, they are fighting according to sides. One can avoid the violence quite easily by simply choosing to, well, avoid it.  Here in the states, however, you are far more likely to be shot by accident by the cops simply because some asshole read an address wrong, out of malice and personal animosity, or simple incompetence. 

How the fuck do you avoid that?  The police have become lightning strikes, impersonal and deadly and almost entirely unpredictable, and just as unstoppable.

But they are just men, and unlike lightning they can, and should be held accountable for their actions. We simply chose to turn a blind eye and ignore it, however.

So that is why I care about the Ukraine all of a sudden. 

I care because THEY care, and you do not.   I am tired of waiting for Americans to wake up, tired of hoping that we will one day realize that while there is no boot physically grinding your face in the dirt, the boot is there and it is making you miserable in a thousand tiny ways.  Can't get a good job? Thank the government regulations that keeps employment low. Can't afford a doctor? Thank government regulations that mandate your insurance cover things you have no interest in, like gender assignment surgery.  Lost your mother to icy roads in New Jersey (surely an act of God!, not government!), thank the rules that have held up 40 thousand tons of road salt in Maine, a mere few hours drive away.  

It isn't my point that government is always bad (well.. it is always bad, hence the term 'necessary evil'...), but that you simply don't care to trace by the source of whatever your woes are to continuing government malfeasance and corruption, and I am tired of waiting for you. I am tired of raging against the dying of the light, but I do it anyway. 

I don't want to rage, I want to fight. 

I want to stand with people who care rather than stand uselessly alone because no one else does. 

Ukraine

It seems odd to me, in the midst of all the other shit going on in the world, that I somehow desperately wish I could do something, anything really, to help the protestors in the Ukraine.

I mean: Really, the only reason I would normally post on here about the Ukraine would be to talk about how smokingly hot and, well, feminine,  Ukrainian women tend to be, compared to the obnoxious and unattractive wandering shoggoths that seem to dominate the American landscape.

But no. I'm talking local politics. I'm talking real protestors, protesting real issues (unlike our homegrown morons in the Occupy movement, say...), and taking real beatdowns for their pains... again, unlike our Occupy movement, which basically was like some sort of urban jamboree. 

Why? Why would I go to a place that is currently miserably cold where I'm likely to catch a bullet in the chest for my troubles, for a country that almost literally only means 'porn' to me? 

I think in some small part it is because they are doing what we are not. They are standing up for freedom, for rights being denied. They are fighting for a better tomorrow instead of cheaper iPads and  the absolution from willfully gained debts.  Because even if their struggle is currently futile, even if this protest is doomed, I have hope for them that I don't really feel for America most days. 

Of course, it could be something else. The cynic in me tells me that I only wish to go because I stand amidst ruin at home. There is nothing here for me, no real life, no real future. I can, in the immortal words of Captain Capitalism 'enjoy the decline' and not much else.  I should be preparing my forty-five calibre retirement plan, to steal another turn of phrase from him.  Its easy then to throw myself into someone else's doomed cause, to throw away my failures rather than fight to overcome them and claim it is good work, rather than simply giving up. 

It could be a martyr complex, to put myself into danger once more with cameras running, so that maybe I'll at last have a chance to make my eternal suffering (life, for the slow kids) mean something. The easy immortality, requiring no work but only the willingness to suffer dramatically.  I can do that. Anyone can do that, really.  It requires no great talent to suffer. 

What I do know is this: Twenty years ago I would have happily thrown away everything to go, to stand there, but twenty years ago I wouldn't have cared enough to notice.  Am I not impulsive enough anymore?  Am I afraid?  Is it wisdom or cowardice to stay here, safe if not particularly comfortable? Is it courage or vanity to go? 

Call it the curse of living the life of the mind. I cannot let my instincts go unexamined, cannot let my desires go unchecked for right or wrong.  

Right now my heart screams at me to go, chanting with all the dedication of an overwrought fan seeing their favorite band live for the first time, and yet here I am... typing away instead. 

I am here, not there.  

I am wise and foolish, brave and cowardly, I am static.

And so I do nothing but stroke my own ego, making their plight my own by proxy.  

And if I go, do I not suggest that my mere presence may turn aside the tide of history? That being an American in Kiev would somehow... matter? 

Probity Redux

In the Law they express two concepts, though in Latin to keep the rubes like me out, that can be summed up in 'The Guilty Act' and 'The Guilty Mind'.  In traditional formulations, both have to be present for a criminal act to have been committed.

Example: You shove your friend and he stumbles into traffic, is hit by a car, and dies horribly. 

The Guilty Act is that you killed your friend. There is no real debate, in this case, that you did so.

The Guilty Mind is your intent. If you wanted your friend to die horribly, it is murder. If you were just playing around and accidentally killed him it is not.  Of course, since we like putting people in jail, we came up with Negligent Homicide, and everyone except you and your dead friend, is happy. 

Make sense so far? 

When you are forced to denounce yourself for some trivial sin you are admitting to guilt, the Guilty Mind, you did not possess.  Let us review it in the sense of our story from the last post:

The young man's Act was to post a joke .Gif of President Obama kicking a door. His Mind was 'Midterm's suck, even the president agrees'.  Not really a thought crime, yes?  Surely, President Obama, a former professor (who taught no classes?) would not actually agree with that sentiment, but that is neither here nor there. 

However, despite any racial animus to his act, he was forced to apologize for committing a racist act, taking on the mantle of a Guilty Mind, making his .Gif, post facto (another legal concept, in Latin), a Crime of Racism. 

Why harp on this? 

Well, first to assuage my own mind that, in his shoes I would never have allowed myself to be tarred with the crime I hadn't actually committed.  My history shows quite the opposite: I'm quite skilled at evading guilt for crimes I DID commit, sadly, so I can't see pleading to a greater charge as an option I'd take. 

I've got too many skeletons to go around getting in trouble for shit I didn't actually do, in other words. 

Second I want you, any of you, to have that thought in your minds if you even find yourself in his shoes... without my own 'armor of sin' protecting you.  He may have bought himself a few moments of peace, even the ability to remain in school, officially... but he is now forever more 'That Racist Bastard' to all the people who believe in thought crimes.  I doubt he has honestly preserved his academic career in any meaningful sense.  Pleading guilty to "Lesser" charges may seem the right choice, but it means you'll never be free of the guilt in the public eye.  It is a devil's bargain, and we all know how those turn out. 

In this I disagree with many in the Men's Rights movement, from Price at the Spearhead to the guys at a Voice for Men. They sympathize with men who chose not to sacrifice years of their life for honor and dignity, who plead to lesser charges in return for clemency.  I have no sympathy for cowards and spineless men.  Pity, certainly, but not sympathy.  

And let me explain why: Every man who takes the cowards path makes it harder for the rest of us.  I used to jump out of planes, static line jumps. It was never your mistake that would hurt you, would kill you, but the mistake of the man in front of you.  His weak exit, his moment of fear at the open door and the empty sky, meant his static line was low on the door and would catch you by the arm (if you were lucky) or the neck (if you were not).  His failure was your pain, and your failure was the pain of the man behind you. 

It is the same here. Every single man who pleads to sexual assault to avoid a rape conviction instead of fighting a false accusation merely makes it that much easier for the next man to be charged. Every man who admits to racism in thought and deed when there was none, makes it harder for the next man to stand on his dignity. Every.Single.Man who refuses to fight domestic violence charges when it was his wife throwing the punches, as loudly and aggressively as possible, just so the legal problems will go away makes the next man so charged his fault. 

There is a reason more vigorous societies hated cowards.  The coward always buys his life at the cost of the men around him. Always.  He has blood on his hands. The blood of better men, worthier men, and the blood of women who pay the price for his failures.

We have forgotten that, in our race towards eternal childhood.  We have forgotten that as we try to turn men into women. Bravery is not a feminine virtue, though we laud those women who possess it, so we reject it as too macho.  We fear if we celebrate bravery we encourage men to prove theirs through violence. 

And since we have forgotten the price of Cowardice, it is not enough to merely mention it, to mock it... I must explain. 

Defend your honor as if it were your life.

No.

Defend your honor as if it were more important to you than life, for it is. 

Probity, Lies and Politics

When I mentioned probity in my last post I didn't expect to find a reason to follow up a mere hour or so after I mentioned it.  Courtesy Ace of Spades.

What is Probity?  The word means nothing more than having strong principles, but the concept is somewhat deeper than that. Probity implies a strong sense of self, of empowerment. Someone who has 'probity' is in control of themselves, is a moral, principled actor.

So what does this have to do with the post I put up, and my reference in the earlier post?

Well, several years ago I stumbled across a description of how communist meetings tended to go. People were accused of 'Thought Crimes' and had to stand up and denounce themselves, then others were invited to stand up and denounce their own thought crimes to the group. Failure to denounce oneself, even to the point of having to lie and make up things to denounce, was cause for the entire group to turn on the offending party (who, ironically, was the only person NOT claiming to have offended...), putting huge amounts of peer pressure on them to force the offender to conform.

The actual description was tying this behavior to various progressive groups, including Feminism and so forth, which in and of itself was fascinating and insightful. So much so that I regret that I didn't bother to keep the link to share with you all.

However, the real insight for me wasn't the way modern progressive groups were acting almost exactly like their communist fore bearers did, but WHY communists and progressives did this.

And the word they used was Probity.

See: When you are forced to lie about yourself, even in small ways, you lose your sense of Probity, your sense of being a principled actor. By forcing you to lie, constantly, you lose your sense of morality. You conform to the group ideals, loosing your own in the process. It is, essentially, a form of brainwashing.

Now look at that story again.  The young man's sin, such as it was, is not that he was a racist asshole but that he was insensitive to his own potential racism.

Which is, of course, a lie.

His true sin was that he...

No. He didn't sin. He made a joke about midterms. We can even argue that his own act was sort of the opposite of racist. He didn't even THINK about the color of a man's skin, just the content of his character and the actions that demonstrated the same.  Martin Luther King should be proud of this young man, and what he says about the youth of today.

For this he was forced to denounce himself. The actual 'sin' he committed is irrelevant, even to those who persecuted him. He is an object lesson, he is Winston.  His own sense of Probity has been irreparably damaged by his forced confession, and everyone who witnessed his public shaming has likewise seen the consequences of being a white man in today's society, of insufficient piety for the platitudes of the era and the dignity of the powerful.

Think on that. By simply showing an image of a very public act he is accused of shaming the actor, he is accused of promoting a false idea of black males (young black males at that, despite the fact that Obama is, what, fifty?).

It is a fact, a matter of public record, that Obama kicked a door.  Any harm to Obama's reputation, any shame to 'young' black males as a result is Obama's fault. HE acted.*

But merely repeating that image, in a humorous context that had nothing to do with shaming or mocking Obama is still viewed as an act of disrespect that must be punished.

And since this young man was in their power, a student at a school, pursuing a degree, they have the power to punish him, to shame him, to make an example of him.

Now that puts me in an awkward position. I am, in fact, going to school. I am, purportedly, in their power as well.  Do I duck my head and pretend to conform? Do I harm my own Probity by avoiding actions that might lead me to being made an example of?

Well, I suppose I do.  On the other hand, I have made it this far in life without a degree, and god only knows I could use a little publicity at this point, so I can say that were I in his shoes I would defend myself rigorously, no matter the cost.

What, exactly, have I to lose?

But I am old and tired and sick of it all. Its not my future I concern myself with, but the failures of my past.  Were I a young man I might have done as he did, and never regretted the denouncement, but the original, harmless, innocent act.











*Obama did not kick the door.

The Last Boyscout

"The Sky is blue, water is wet, women lie."

So says Bruce Willis's character in our title movie.  He repeats this several times, as a leitmotif, in fact dampening down the last portion at the end of the movie to reveal he is just a little less bitter, in a not quite subtle form of character development.

Of course, he can get away with that, since it was the early nineties, it was Bruce Fucking Willis, and it was just one sad-sack loser of a character who has his eyes opened to the 'truth' by the end of the film.

Because we, as a people, can no longer tell truths if they go against the grain. Telling unwelcome truths is never easy, and not always wise, but I fear we've gone way too far.   There is a long post brewing about progressives, socialism and the deliberate destruction of probity, forcing us to lie about ourselves in a thousand little ways simply to get by... but that is a topic for another day. 

I am going to risk the wrath of a million easily offended women by focusing on the fact that, yes, women lie. 

I don't mean they lie like men lie, for simple gains or to avoid unpleasant consequences. Of course they do that. We can say there are 'human lies' and 'women's lies', two specific categories of lies that exist side by side. No 'men's lies', though of course there are some lies in the 'human' category that men tell 'yeah baby, you the only one for me' seems like a man specific lie, doesn't it?   Well, actually: women tell those lies too, when appropriate. 

Women lie in a way that is alien to men, in a way we often cannot fathom, and with a frequency that would be astounding if anyone ever called them on it. 

This is where our eponymous boy scout get it wrong.  The lies that Bruce Willis's character is thinking about goes back to his wife cheating on him. 

That is hardly specific to women... though science has shown us women do in fact cheat far more readily and often than men do, despite a decade plus of concentrated, deliberate effort to convince society that men were the dogs.  Men will lie about cheating, they are just less effective at it... something to do with the fact that women will happily convince their girlfriends to help them cover for an affair, while men's friend just sort of haphazardly wing it... unless they think they can score with the wronged woman!

This, despite the fact that women are notoriously bitchy and backstabbing towards one another. 

So what sort of lies am I talking about? 

Mostly, for this post, I'm talking about Identity Lies.  Women lie about who they are constantly, on a fundamental level. They lie to themselves on a scale that boggles the mind.  While almost any man who has had experience with women can tell you that women give the worst dating advice, it has been shown by experts that most official dating advice isn't just wrong, it is literally the polar opposite of the truth! If a woman tells you to bring flowers, skip them. If she tells you don't call her a bitch, do so!

I exaggerate slightly, to save words. 

Women tell men they want nice guys, en masse they say this, and everyone who has ever tried to be the 'nice guy' has learned that women don't want nice guys... they want jerks and assholes... bad boys who will cheat on them, won't call them, and might not even remember their names. 

Remember: Empirical man.  If you doubt me, and you've been a lonely nice guy for a while, just go try it. Go find some women you don't know (or heck, even some you do!), and just be an asshole. Call them bitches, ignore them, treat them like a completely disposable, interchangeable fuck-hole you could care less about. If I'm right you'll make more progress than candies and flowers and praise ever got you. If I'm wrong, you can go back to being the chump in the friend zone.   

And its not like I'm not talking from experience. I was in long term relationship because I ordered a girl I barely knew into my car so we could go to my house and fuck.  She claimed later that she had no idea what my intention was, but she stuck around for a decade, gave me threesomes and let me sleep with other women simply because I demanded what I wanted from her.  

So I know it works. 

But that's just one facet, not even a big one.  So women don't know how to give dating advice, even though they claim to be experts on emotional connections, empathy, and...well... women? So what? 

Well, they also lie to themselves about their ability to fight like a man, their ability to live in a man's world, to work and fuck like a man... but that might not be their fault. Feminism has lied to them for fifty years about these things, and western civilization has coddled and protected them from the consequences of these lies for far longer.  Men have created a civilization where women are mostly safe at night, where... at one time... criminals avoided robbing women in favor of the riskier attacks on men.  Oh, sure, there were still rapists, who weren't about to go for a big, hairy man in favor of a soft, pretty woman, but rapists were the lowest of the low for a long time. But that's changing, all of it is changing, and as Feminism at last sees all of its goals achieved on a scale its founders might have never imagined (even, perhaps, been disgusted by. For all her faults Betty Friedian opposed NOW's agenda and was kicked off the board...), and the result is that men are losing their respect for women. Criminals are finding them easier, often richer, targets than men and rapists have been dethroned by pedophiles in the pantheon of evil, and that is Feminisms fault. After all, dirty uncles have always been with us. 

But Feminism used 'The Children' as a weapon for decades, and society agreed that children were more precious than women. The enshrining in Feminist Canon for the institution of false rape accusations, and the increasingly abusive use of police to charge any man with domestic violence if he dared not bow to his wife or girlfriend under 'domestic abuse' law has caused many men to think twice about charges of rape, about rapists.  Abuse of their rhetorical weapons has begun to backfire.

But wait, there's more!

Anna Paquin is happily married to her male costar from True Blood, and to my knowledge has NEVER been seen out with a woman in public in any reasonably romantic way, even by innuendo and rumor, despite having been in the public eye since she was a mere girl. Yet, she proclaims proudly her bisexuality. 

Amber Heard was an out and proud 'pretty lesbian starlet' up until Johnny Depp needed new arm-candy. 

That's two famous cases, but I know many, many others. Women proclaim proudly their bisexuality, their gayness, constantly, but hook up exclusively with men, or at best carry girlfriends until the next suitable man comes along.  My LTR, for our entire relationship, talked about how she was bi. But, you see, I had sex with her and other women, and I know better.  She would barely touch another woman during sex, she was all about the dick, as were her 'bi girlfriends' whom we shared our bed. 

We could talk about female fluid sexuality, of course, and I won't deny that there are lesbians out there, real ones, not the straight girls doing girl-girl porn because its is somehow less sleazy than taking a cock on camera, and I won't even mention (hah!!!) college girls grinding on their girlfriends in the club. 

Women lie about their own identities. Bisexuality is 'in'. Gays are getting lots of attention and women want a part of that.  They believe their lies. I have to believe that they do, the alternative is that half the human population is sociopathic. 

Bisexuality is merely the current trend, the big one that seems to come from the lips of every single woman who doesn't have a pressing reason to avoid it (christians, say!), but I've seen women lie about being vegetarians. Lie, you see, because for all they proclaim it they will guiltily admit to 'cheating'.

Look, if you avoid meat for ten years and suddenly have some bacon out of long suppressed longing, that's fine. That's a lapse, a breakdown of will. I have to wonder about someone who has to fight the urges to eat meat for ten years, but that's another story.

But if you are buying bacon at the grocery store, keeping it in your fridge...thats not a lapse. You're a damn liar, a carnivore proclaiming your 'pure and innocent' vegetarianism for societal praise. 

And I just don't see men doing this. 

Not anywhere near the industrial scale that women do.  In fact, when a man lies about himself for praise, we call him on it, call him a fraud and a con artist and any number of invective phrases. Depending on his lies, we may even arrest him.

Not that I'm saying we arrest Anna Paquin for lying about her bisexuality... or potentially lying. I mean, I haven't had sexual relations with her recently, so maybe good old vampire Bill enjoyed his wife and her maid of honor on their honeymoon.

Notice, in my list of bi-lies, I left off X-tina. Why? Because X-tina actually IS sleeping with girls and boys. 

So: Not a liar.  In fact, she got served with divorce papers by her husband (the FOOL!!!!) because X-tina loves the pink a little too much. 

I also left of Lady Gaga because I can't be assed to research her, and I've never heard of her dating ANYONE... ever.  I will note, in passing, that pretty much all of her videos have her dancing around with dudes. Gay dudes, mostly, but still. 

Katy Perry? She just claimed she kissed a girl, and liked it.  Not the same as claiming she regularly visits the isle of sappho.  Hey, who hasn't kissed a girl and liked it?  Girls are eminently kissable, I think we can all agree. 

Of course, I think we'll be seeing more men lying about being gay (or queer, which I increasingly realize means 'womanly'... as all women seem to be queer or pro-queer when you listen to them) as we increasingly set gay's up as some sort of super-minority.  As my previous posts on this remain mere drafts, I'll reference once again the 'gay-only' scandal of Eddie Izzard and the case of the mysteriously missing dress.   

Hey, going 'gay for pay' netted him millions of dollars, and he even went out of his way to stress his love of girls over boys!  Now that he is rich and famous, being not-gay means not scaring the mom and pop folks, thus more money!  

So: Is he really queer (Tranvestite) who dropped the dresses once it started hurting his prospects in Kansas? Or was he never really queer at all, but merely wore dresses and makeup to stand out from every other stand-up comic out there? 

Whatever the truth is, Eddie Izzard is merely a taste of what is to come for the gay community.  Bring on the quotas, I'll happily mark 'gay' on my next job application if it means hiring preferences. Prove I'm not!



Edit::: I can't believe I forgot the old (two decades at least) practice of men pretending to be gay to get laid.  Well, just imagine I wrote something witty and long winded about it and you'll be fine.

Real Edit: For some reason I had Pink listed instead of Christina Aguilera. I even knew I'd made the mistake, but forgot to correct it until now, months later. I denounce myself.