Why?

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Daddy I'm a Porn Star!

So, I just read an... article... about five porn stars that 'came out' to their families and how it went. I use the term article guardedly. Its a puff piece, really, a section of vignettes with pretty pictures. If you were curious it was in the New York Post, and included Jessica Drake and a couple of girls I've never heard of such as Stoya and something-something Fiore.  I won't bother trying to link it.

The only reason to mention it, to discuss it, is to talk about The Cathedral, and Spin.  It seems weird, of course, to consider a puff piece about porn stars to be relevant when discussing the Cathedral, but there you have it.

See: While Porn is a sort of dirty secret, an unintended byproduct of directed efforts to shape our society, to tear down the old world and build the new, utopian dream, the fact is that anyone connected to the Cathedral can't actually do anything about it. They have to treat porn, and especially porn stars, as legitimate and publicly acceptable members of society.  Not while actually approving of porn or those who watch it... its a sort of catch-22.

I should say, instead: The Porn Industry. After all, since the dawn of time man has drawn titties on the walls and women have exchanged sex for money.  Even in the old world one could find dirty pictures to look at. The Industry, however...  well, Hugh Hefner has never been shy about admitting he set out to change the world to a far more libertine one, that peddling smut was merely an enjoyable means to an end. 

Publicly accessible porn is part of destroying the morality and codes of the Old World, it is part and parcel of The Cathedral. Not that they necessarily like it.  The modern progressives are some of the worst prudes you can imagine.  For all their jazz about not judging people, you try putting a dirty picture up in a modern... lets say mechanic's garage.  They'll screech and shout oppression until they are blue in the face to get you fired. 

But they still need the Porn Industry, the alinsky rule about using the rules against the rulers applies, which is why Larry Flint framed his legal defense as a First Amendment Right, and why the ACLU still views itself as a First Amendment protection organization above all others, despite being entirely a communist organ from its founding.

Of course mission drift works both ways, and the ACLU has found itself siding against the Cathedral any number of times in recent memory. Modern generations of lawyers aren't carefully brainwashed into only supporting First Amendment cases that attack the Ancien Regime... they believe in the mission as blindly as they should.

But lets get back to the puff piece. It was spun so hard that it is nearly impossible to pick any useful information out of it, but... well... nearly. 

Of note we universally hear how mothers, or in Stoya's case Grandmothers, were entirely supportive of the women's career choices. Fiore's case is particularly interesting in that all the Cathedral sentiments you can imagine were cited. She'd gone to college, this was her path, her choice... nothing wrong with it, but be careful.

Jessica Drake provides the only exception, and barely in that her mother mailed pictures of her work to her father, more on that in a moment.

In only three of the five cases are fathers mentioned at all, and they are never as effulgent as the mothers. Often they are merely quiet figures, or baffled. In one case the father says something to the affect of 'I still love you', without ever actually criticizing.  

This is deliberate. This is Cathedral propaganda.  There is no shame in doing porn, mother's opinions are the important ones, and fathers are cowed into submitting, into not creating feel-bads.  

Which leaves us with Jessica Drake. Clearly the message is that there is nothing wrong with doing porn, that it is empowering and so forth. Clearly it is that everything is all right, that a proper father will accept it, won't be upset... that he knows his place. 

So why the story? Clearly, from Jessica Drake's anecdote, the intent was to hurt the father, sending explicit pictures of his daughter.  We might infer that Jessica was also a target, as she apparently was superseded from telling Daddy herself, in her own way, though this implies she actually intended to do so on her own. 

Its an imperfection, and I don't think its a coincidence that it occurs in the largest star in the piece, the headliner of the article.  Everyone makes mistakes, and the stories can't be made up from whole cloth... not yet.  Ms Drake's story is not deemed, one assumes, directly harmful to the message and she is too important, to visible to be shunned.  We can even read a sort of Cathedral Positive message in it, the sort of second hand incest, the empowered woman who is not judged for the incredibly vile action she perpetrated. 

The most damning evidence is this: Not one story involves the actress being condemned, judged or otherwise put upon for her choice. Is it random coincidence that they picked five actresses who just happened to have very tolerant and understanding families? Or did they white wash away any evidence to the contrary.  I think that's obvious.

And once you realize they white washed the hell out of the story... and why they didn't just stick one of those not terribly uncommon california girl actresses who actually involve their families in their careers, I have no idea? Too creepy, maybe? ... then the obvious question to ask is why? What is the message here?

The Message, clearly, is that there are no repercussions to doing porn, that its perfectly acceptable behavior... that being judgmental, even in this, is simply not something right-thinking people do.  It is, in short, a feel good story about being a whore. 

From that we can speculate WHY this message is important, why it is necessary, which is what I just did.  We can look for ways they spread the message, which I also did.   

I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories. I don't believe in the smoke filled (patchouli instead of cigar?) room and the secret network of string pullers making hard choice.  But I do believe in patterns, in loose coalitions of like minded people. I do believe, for example, that Gramsci's long march took place, is taking place around us. It doesn't need an evil mastermind and loyal minions... that is the worst part about it, in fact.  Its just ordinary people who believe in an ideology strongly enough that they are willing to pervert the organs of public life around them into one more of their liking. They are taught it is perfectly acceptable to lie openly about their motives and reasons as they do.  And people are generally bad liars, so they get caught all the time saying exactly what they are doing, and no one cares.

No one cares, because the most important of our public organs, the senses by which we observe the larger society, was the first one corrupted... the media.  It is no coincidence, no mistake, that shortly after the Frankfurt School came to the US, fleeing the Nazi's, that the settled into the Columbia School of Journalism, and no surprise that shortly after the idea of journalism degrees became de rigeur in news rooms around the country. 

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. 

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. 

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.

Just a Shawty

It strikes me that every single element of western civilization that was true a hundred years ago has been torn down and decried as evil.  Yet, a century ago America, at least, was strong and powerful, and growing more so every day.

Since the rise of the Boomer Generation, and the modern incarnations of Feminism and all the other -isms, we have failed to win a war... which is not the same as losing... and squandered our wealth on projects designed to make a handful of wealthy, privileged (and amusingly enough, white) people feel better about themselves that have actually made things much worse for the people they were purporting to help.  We've coasted almost seventy years on the victories of the previous generation, the inheritors of the wealth and power of the great captains of industry.

And yet, despite the clear ruin of both our nation and our personal lives at the hands of these monsters, we still believe in all their lies about the evils of the past.

Despite the evils they perpetrate on even their own children, we believe their lies about what is best for families.

Oh what a piece of work is man.

An Observation

I realized, walking to and from class today, that if you were to pick a random woman on campus and describe her clothes to me, I could tell you with a reasonably high degree of fidelity what she looked like.  

This may seem obvious, but the actual results seem counterintuitive. 

For example: If you said she was wearing a dress that showed off her legs and had her hair done very nicely, I could tell you she was fat.  

If you said she was dressed fashionably, in jeans and boots, with layers up top, I could tell you she was skinny. 

There is more to it, pieces I'm still putting together.  I was noticing that all the pretty women that caught my eyes were largely 'butter-faces'. Then I realized it was the clothes. The skinny girls with nice faces dress more casually, more athletically (though not necessarily implying they are more athletic).  A cute but...ah... shapeless girl shows off more skin, almost perversely calling attention to their defects. 

That last bit might confuse you.  An example then: I saw a girl walking to class wearing four inch wedges (so not a fatty), but wearing hideous printed slacks that were shaped somewhat like pajama pants, a hot pink tube top that bared her midriff, but covered with a light jacket of the sort only women buy, you know the kind: It doesn't do a fucking thing to keep you warm. 

So, using science to predict what she looks like, you have a cute woman with decent tits, not fat but sliding there faster than she'd like to admit. 

Hm... yup.  Sounds right.  Flaunting her worst asset, the shapeless waistline, covering her legs and breasts with colorful shapeless cloth that is somehow fashionable... 

But it actually makes some sense.  The shapely but not pretty girls play up their femenity as much as possible, but don't feel the need to flaunt it, so they go for fashion, competing with the other girls and following the herd. The truly pretty girls go for more comfortable fashions, content that they don't need to try to get attention, while the fat girls who haven't given up maximize their attention by ignoring the fashionable look and flaunting their womanliness and interest... dressing for the boys instead of the girls. The average but cute girls... I dunno, I guess they're splitting the difference?  I mean: If they knew what they were doing they wouldn't be average.  With the big push for fat acceptance (though it is entirely a lie...) they don't mind flaunting, like they are daring you to judge their lack of concern for their looks (while secretly very concerned with their looks). They don't want to flaunt their actual assets for fear of being viewed as sluts?  That's my hypothesis, but I'm not a mind reader. 

Now, don't get me wrong: There are plenty of other looks on the girls on campus.  The plain janes that don't try abound. Mostly they dress in jeans and shoes instead of jeans and boots, with hipster layers up top. There are the dykes and soon-to-be dykes that have given up on me (or never wanted them), and plenty of fat, old, or old and fat women in shapeless swaths of cloth and so forth.  I just don't want to try and do an exhaustive list of what the predominant trends are for every woman I see. Besides: Heels, ugly print slacks and tube top girl sort of threw me for a loop until I realized what exactly was going on (see above).  Like the fat girls unconcerned with showing off their shapeless sausage legs if it means some desperate boys will flatter them, she flaunts her stomach but plays it more coy with her (large) breasts and (from what I could tell) attractive legs.  

No doubt some of this is the visible signs of position jockeying among the young and available women, status signaling for the herd. Other elements are compensating for flaws, which is why the plain or even ugly faced girls with tight bodies dress so nice compared to the more pretty tight-bodied girls. 

Ideally, that means if you want to pick a girl out from across the room, or blindly, go by her outfit. If its fashionable, somewhat tight but sporty/comfortable, chances are she's hot and pretty.  If its really fashionable and somewhat impractical (heels) she's hot but plain faced.  If its fashionable and hideous she's cute but lazy, and if its unabashedly feminine she's a fat girl. 

On Leadership

Yesterday I posted a longish bit where I exhorted the audience to become their own leaders and heroes instead of giving up on the entire institution.   I have a few issues with that post, not because I don't believe in it, but because I am all too familiar with people on the internet who seem to enjoy willfully misunderstanding anything not explained, as if to a child.

Rather than turn a long post into a longer post I thought I'd break off my sidebar discussions on various elements into separate posts spread out over a few days.

So lets talk about leading people.

First of all, what Leadership is not: It is not telling people what to do. Sure, a leader might order people around, but saying that is 'leadership' is rather like saying using high beams is driving.  Its something done under very specific circumstances that can easily be misused.

So when I tell you to be a leader, I'm not telling you to go around bossing people.

Likewise, Leadership is not Management.  This is something deeply and erroneously conflated in the modern corporate culture. Not that management doesn't have its role, its place, but its not leadership. People rarely look back fondly on that time their manager totally managed them at work, but scratch a vet and chances are he'll have a story or two about the time he got his ass chewed, and deserved it.

I suppose a remarkably banal way to express the difference is that a Manager makes sure you've checked the box on form ID-10-T, while a Leader makes you the sort of person who checks the box without being told.

I think that captures the essence in about the worst possible, yet still accurate, way.

Of course, in the military its easy. The military is explicitly a hierarchal system, as many male focused groups tend to be.  The leaders are appointed, usually with seniority, over the followers, and in many cases given specific training on how to lead. This training is reinforced by the use of creeds that summarize the leadership philosophy of their rank and role, such as the NCO creed and the Officer's Creed, which are memorized and recited during training.   Thats not to say every leader in the military is good at it, that wasn't my point. The point is that being a leader is easy if you have a clear code and followers appointed for you.

How does this translate to you, Joe on the Street, looking to make a difference in the world?

Well, start with the code.  What we are missing isn't really 'leaders'. We've got plenty of them, its just that they all suck, right?  Why do they suck? Because they are self appointed, smug assholes who use borrowed power to get their way. They have no moral center, no creed but power itself.  They are selfish, and if you read the other post you know that selfishness is antithetical to civilization.

And yes, I will probably have to do a post regarding selfishness and self-interest on another day.

In your personal life there are probably very few people you can simply boss around without looking like an utter tool, so begin a leader is a bit more challenging. That's ok, though: leaders should be able to rise to challenges.

I don't want to make this a simple listicle, and there are plenty of decent works out there that cover the finer points, so I'll try to keep this portion brief. Like I said at the top, this is a sidebar to explicate my terms.

To be a leader you have to be worth following, to be someone you, and others, can respect.  Emulating great men of history is a decent starting point, being solicitous of others, having a moral code and actually sticking to it... these are all good starts.

Know your people. Not your 'followers', but the people you interact with, up and down your hierarchal chain and outside of it.  Be an active participant in your life, and be reliable and helpful.

While I'm far from satisfied with this post I'm going to call it with a piece of advice that runs contra to the advice we hear so often.  If you are not naturally a leader, then don't be yourself. Be the man you want to be, not the one you are comfortable being.

It really is that simple.

Hierarchy, Leadership and Civilization

Ultimately, Civilization is the opposite of Anarchy, which is a modern and popular euphemism for savagery. Civilization requires a certain fundamental order, it requires rules, it demands  selflessness. 

What does that mean, exactly? 

When we are very young we are all a savages, as bloodthirsty and evil as anyone could imagine.  We think of the very young as innocent because they are helpless and harmless, but this is a comforting delusion.  Your infant doesn't care that you have to go to work in three hours, he is hungry NOW dammit!    

It doesn't really get better as they get older. Just observe how fundamentally sociopathic small children can seem when you remove their cherubic faces from the equation. Sure, that video is pretty funny, but only because you are told at the beginning and end what is going on. Stripped of that context.... well, I don't want to belabor the point. 

Humans don't naturally become civilized. Its a process, formally known as enculturation, but most of us know it simply as 'raising kids'. You teach them to share, to consider other people's feelings, to act appropriately. You civilize them, giving them simple, clear rules to follow.  And when you don't do it right you get Ted Bundy, you get a monster.  

When you have rules you have hierarchy. You have leaders and followers, you make demands based on roles.  Selfish men do not rush into burning buildings to save other men's children, but every civilization has firefighters.  Selfish men do not walk the mean streets at night to pacify them, yet we have police.  

And when Order breaks down, when Selfishness becomes the rule rather than the exception, men in those positions seek safety and comfort, the 'Anything it takes to get home to my family' siege mentality prevalent in our police today. It draws men to the 'blue gang' who want the power and prestige, the social cache and legal immunities, perverting the system from within, which we are starting to see increasingly every day.  

Aurini has an excellent examination of the current state of affairs rewarding Leadership today; regarding, essentially, the fallen state of Civilization.  If it has a major flaw, it is that it offers no real solutions.  We need to rust and respect our leaders, yet our leaders are not worthy of our trust... a true statement yet useless. 

Maybe its because I watched Space Battleship Yamato the other day, but I find that, in what appears to be a hopeless situation, that I find myself increasingly appreciating the value of a single lamp in the dark.  

The solution is obvious, even simple. 

Become the Leader, the man worth trusting and respecting.  If there are no Heroes worth emulating in pop culture, become the Hero worth emulating in your own life. Step up to the demand and ignore what the debased pop-culture says about you. Find your subordinates, the people who will follow your lead, and if you are lucky you may inspire the leaders you need. 

Not that this is an easy solution.  The good things rarely are.  

I found a metaphor for the state of our world that I rather liked the other day, that all civilizations pass through a single swing of a pendulum, at one end their foundation, the other their destruction. The Golden Age of such a civilization is the center, the nadir, beyond which it only gets worse until the end.  

I know we passed that point long ago.  I can think of few struggles more meaningful that putting myself in the path of that inexorable swing, of grabbing hold, digging my heels into the dirt and pushing back as hard as I can, for as long as I can.  When Thor wrestled the old woman in the keep of Utgard-Loki and lost, it doesn't merely show the futility of wrestling Old Age itself, but the value in trying.  The Giants are impressed, even scared of how well the Gods do in their impossible tasks. The struggle itself has meaning, has value. This is especially true when the cause is just. 

Civilization is better than savagery. Selflessness is better than self indulgence. Order is better than Anarchy. 

Good is better than Evil. 

My hope for the future has been that eventually the barbarians that will tear down our Rome will eventually discover civilization and rebuild, better than before, but that is just a hope. Plenty of barbarians never bootstrap themselves up, never learn. They destroy and feed, and look for the next host, forever parasites.  Civilization is Hard, and for the individual it can often seem unrewarding, at least in the short term. No one likes to be told No, after all. 

No. In order for that hope to become true, someone will have to remain who wants civilization more, who has the strength and will to bring it. Someone has to be the Light in the Dark.  Why not me? 

Why not you? 

Charity

The United Way is Evil.

When I was seven or eight, the United Way 'came' to my school and hit us all up for the sweet sweet cash. 

Maybe my teacher did it wrong, or maybe I simply misunderstood, but I didn't exactly bring cash from my parents to pay them off, so the few coins I stuffed in the little manila envelope came from my own very meagre allowance.   So instead of getting generic 'feel goods' from my giving, I instead resented the adults for asking me, a small child, for money.  I was, after all, only a year or two removed from saving up for weeks to buy a three dollar box of legos, and my allowance hadn't changed in the interval.

Now that I reflect back on it, it is clear that the intent of these yearly exercises are to build a habit of reflexive giving, unhampered by thought, and starting with other people's money.  You don't ask seven and eight year olds for their allowance money if you want to create a lifetime giver.  I can't see how this is anything other than extremely gentle extortion. If the parents don't provide the (to them negligible) donation, its the kids who feel the pressure to contribute and the shame of failure. Most parents would happily sacrifice a dollar to two, even way back in the early 80's, to save their kids that sort of trouble... especially in the name of a good cause.

But since it WAS my money that I was giving up I always had to wonder about it.  I mean, when they wanted me to buy books from the book club, I got something for my money, but what happened to the change that I stuffed in those little envelopes?  For all I knew (back then) the teacher kept it for herself. 

Oh, I knew it was supposedly going to Africa to feed starving, underprivileged children (but I ask you? What was I in those days?), but how did I KNOW that?  Year after year things seemed to get worse in Africa, not better. Year after year, more and more charities seemed to spring up, demanding more money, more effort.  My cartoons were interrupted by please for 'For as little as ten cents a day'... or whatever the going rate was back then... and by Sally Struthers, looking like she'd eaten all the food donated before going on the air demanding more, for the children.

I must not have been the only one asking 'how do I know that my donations are actually going to underprivileged kids?', because it wasn't long before they started sponsorship packs, where the one kid you were paying for would send you pictures and letters and shit. 

This was, to my young eyes, a monumental failure of an idea. 

As 'proof' went it seemed entirely inadequate to me, to easy to fake in the short run.  As a charitable idea it was lacking as well. At what point do you stop paying for this 'one child'?  

I had a dozen ill formed ideas about how silly it all was, but I simply shrugged and moved on.  For decades the only charity I have given is to bell ringers at christmas from the Salvation Army, and of my time and labor for local causes. 

Now, courtesy of Ace of Spades comes a story that warms the dark tarry cockles of my shriveled and useless heart. 

For those of you too busy to click a link, let me sum up: This journalist from... Australia?... has been sponsoring a child for ten years and in ten years the quality of the letters and art haven't improved at all, and actually gone down hill. A seventeen year old child is still drawing simple, off-kilter boxes and triangles with crayon to represent a house.

What I like is the never-stated subtext... that it is in fact unstated subtext... that there is some sort of fraud going on here.  The closest the story gets is to ask 'Hmm... that's curious', and a brief reference to another journalist who actually travelled to Africa (country unknown) to find the child she had been sponsoring, only to find said child had only dealt with the Charity* when they'd taken her photograph.

But even in that case, the term 'fraud' is never used, never alluded too. At worst, the Charity* merely used the money to do better good communally than the individual promise they offered.

Umm...

That's a lie. That's fraud. If I had sent several hundred (thousand?) dollars to support some named individual, I would expect THAT INDIVIDUAL to have received the money, or at least the goods and services it bought. Not some generic 'community' that in turn may or may not include said individual. 

By way of analogy: If I wanted to get my cousin Tim** off the streets of Detroit, so I sent him a few hundred bucks, I would be extraordinarily peeved to find that instead of going to Tim, the city of Detroit took that money for 'improvements' for 'all the Tims of the city'. 

I didn't send Detroit the money, did I? I sent it to Tim.  It doesn't matter if Tim is actual family, or just a name and a photograph that tugged at my heart from a book or commercial. I sent the fucking money to fucking TIM, and TIM better be the one who gets it!

But we musn't question the saintly nature of our charitable organizations. 

Bullshit. 

I've got a lot to say on charities, but instead I'll let you ponder this one case, and what no one seems to be saying... at least no one official, and not out loud. 

* by this I mean the organization World Vision, the charity involved in this case, and somewhat facetiously the idea of these groups being actual charities. They are large businesses with excellent PR, and what they sell are remittances. 

** I do not have a cousin named Tim that I am aware of. Likewise, while I have a number of friends from Detroit, I don't actually know anyone that lives there. If I did, the last fucking thing I'd do is send them money. I'd rather drive to Detroit in a truck and help them move out than send them ten bucks for gas. 

The Death of Civilization

I had a thought today.

Our civilization is already dead. Think of it like a tree, standing there all tall and proud, home to squirrels and birds.  Dead as a stump.

Its actually been dead for some time. Decades probably. It, we, have been slowly rotting from the inside ever since.    We keep expecting the end to come quickly, suddenly, and violently.

Have you ever seen a dead tree rotting away? Sometimes they don't fall over. There is no grand moment of violence, just a never ending series of minor collapses, and no recovery.

Now, by itself that is a slightly dark, but not terribly persuasive thought exercise. But of course, I haven't actually explained WHY I had this thought.

You see, once upon a time people valued ability, skill... hard work. They did things with their spare time that required significant practice, learning and were generally useful to a large number of people.

We play video games. Sure, if you play them long enough you eventually develop something resembling a skill...

... but let me back up. We'll touch on our free time in a moment.

Convienence isn't really the explanation for what changed. By the time of our grandfather's generation the industrial revolution had been going for generations, and all manner of mass production, labor saving and so forth had already been invented.

It starts with the Boomers.

No. I think it starts earlier. I can't prove it, not in time for a simple blog post, but I suspect that a large number of the progressive minded elites in this country, the ones who didn't go to war (I or II), were already showing signs of the decay, masked by robust and living body of the ordinary people.

But with the Boomers we see it clearly for the first time.  Ask any Boomer to sum up the zeitgeist of their generation, their era, and you will inevitably hear about Woodstock, about the Civil Rights marches and the Vietnam protests.

Those aren't accomplishments. At best they are participation merit badges, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the vast majority of boomers didn't really do any of those things.

If you ask a little more, you'll probably hear about Fighting the Man, Free Love and 'sex, drugs and rock'n roll'.

That's not to say that great things weren't done, often by skilled and talented people of their generation. We put men on the moon, invented the Internet and the home computer. We put the power of a million minds on your desktop for you to watch elf ass wriggle across your screen before you got bored and switched to porn.

But for the first time in our era, our civilization, we stopped caring about the great creations of the age, the masters of science and industry, the creators and workers and shapers. We began caring more about rejecting the rules, fighting the man. We didn't care about success, we cared about the Revolution for its own sake.

And most of it was a lie.  Woodstock was, by all accounts, a miserable experience created by its own propaganda. Even the music was second rate due to shoddy preparation and planning. Even the best stars struggle under the conditions they were forced to play in.  The Vietnam protest didn't really do much to end the war, which lasted twenty years. Its more probable that the US government finally asked itself what it was doing there, unloved by almost everyone, and just gave up.  Twenty years from now we'll hear how Cindy Sheehan single handedly brought the Iraq War to a close by that logic.

And the Civil Rights movement? Well... lets just say that things haven't exactly gone as planned and leave it at that, for today.

There is a theme here, not just in the lack of accomplishment required to take pride in being a boomer, but in how all the things they prize are effectively anti-establishment. The word "anti-establishment" has become something complimentary, hasn't it?  But think about it for a moment. Do you like having roads to drive on? Establishment built that. You like having relatively crime free neighborhoods? Establishment.

The Establishment, for all its flaws, is something of a defining characteristic of Civilization itself. Civilization is far, far preferable to Barbarism, which is also Anti-Establishment.

The curious thing was that this sort of attitude began manifesting everywhere.  The very tale end of the Boomer Generation holds power now, and yet they'd rather use that power to tear down the very country they rule, to destroy the last vestige of The Establishment, The Man, and remake it in their own image.  What of Art?  Have you seen most modern art? It doesn't require a heck of a lot of talent to create most of it. The irony is that the real artists, the craftsmen with skill and vision, all seem to work in the corporate sector doing 'visual design' pieces or as 'hobby artists' working on the web for bux.  The guy getting the grant is more likely to shit on a plate and garnish it, selling it for forty thousand dollars in the process.  Since skill and accomplishment mean less than marching for the Cause, than Fighting the Man, the shit-plate gets the money and the praise, while the guy painting a mural on the wall of a chain restaurant gets to eat the plate.

The ultimate expression of this is schools. Teachers have the easiest degree of all college degrees, and they have the lowest IQ of any credentialed profession. They give out awards for participation to students, they reject thousands of years of math to teach 'fuzzy math', where just trying really hard make the answer right.  And yet, because it is 'for the children' they are among the highest paid professionals in the country. Not that you'll ever get them to admit it, of course.  They wail and complain about long hours, about being underpaid and under appreciated...  then they call a six year old a rapist for kissing another six year old. They throw a kid out of school for eating a poptart the wrong way (so that it looks vaguely like a gun).... the litany of indignities they inflict upon our young seems endless.

And when they finally go to far, when their utter lack of professionalism, accumen or ability is revealed? They aren't fired, they are made administrators, which is why there are now schools with more administrative staff than teachers.

Participation and believing in the right things is far more important that actually accomplishing anything.

As an indictment of the Boomer Generation, I think that would be far more than enough to see the lot of them tossed out to make their own way, without vampirically bleeding the young dry so they can have a few more years of living it up.

Unfortunately, that isn't the goal of this post.

No.

Its to point out that my generation, by which I mean both the Generation X crowd and the Millennials (hey, the Boomers claim nearly 30 years of people in their generation, why have they divided up the following generations into mere decade lengths?), have been raised by people who are merely squatting in the carcass built by better men in better times.  Far fewer of 'us' are interested in hard work, in craftsmanship, in anything that takes years to master than the Boomers were.  We worship celebrity, even of the most crass and pointless sorts. Make a fool of yourself on the Internet, make a million dollars. Film a dog doing dog stuff, make a million dollars.

I'd like to say the Nadir of this movement is Girls, a show that is a crappy rip-off of an older, marginally smarter show, with less attractive people and far fewer fans, but all the critical praise due a great, moving peice of Art.  Lena Dunham is the new model Sexy for our age, the goddess of beauty our debauched and worthless age deserves, but I'd be reaching.

The Tree is dead, but that just means things aren't going to get better, just slowly worse. Girls is merely a vanguard of the new depths we will sink to.

Idiocracy was Prophecy,  our Cassandra.

All Hail President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho!

The Bechdel Test as Microcosm

In the last year or so there has been increasing fervor for applying the Bechdel Test when discussing movies. For those of you who have never heard of the test, congratulations on being a normal person with an exciting and active lifestyle.

Oh, fine... I'll explain.

The Bechdel Test is a feminist ideal that any given movie should have at least two named women characters who have a conversation in the film that isn't about a man.

If a movie passes the test, it is acceptable for feminist viewers, or something.

Of course, rather amusingly, it can be hard to determine if a movie passes the test, as if it isn't really adequetely feminist then all manner of excuses can be used to force it to violate one of the rules. For example, the Book of Eli passes the test on its face, as the female lead talks to her mother about their captivity (at the hands of men!), and the mother (Claudia... so officially a named character) only has two or three scenes in the film, yet is incredibly plot relevant.

The Book of Eli is almost entirely built around the male characters, yet passes the test, so women have to come up with marginal rulings to exclude it, you see.

There is a good reason for it. The only thing the Bechdel Test actually tests for is, in fact, itself. It literally has no relevance to the quality of the film, its relative merits as entertainment or feminism or pretty much anything.  At best it can tell you that, yes, two women have a conversation on screen in the film.

Compare that to the much simpler 'how much did it make' test.   That test is measuring only one thing, the actual number of tickets sold, yet it can give you a lot of relative information that is actually objectively useful for evaluating a movie. Not perfectly, of course, but still far more accurate than the test.

Let us explain by way of example.

Assume a movie that only includes a single character, a woman. This film is a deep meditation on the human condition, and follows the premise that a feminine perspective is more accurate and relevant than a male perspective.  Deep, meditiative, insightful and undeniably feminist.  Possibly even good and entertaining.

Fails the test on two points at a minimum, and all three on a technicality (with no other characters, we have no reason to expect the sole character's name to be relevant or revealed).

Assume a movie in the vein of Birth of a Nation, only from a manospherian/gorean point of view. THe main character is still a woman, modeled after Sarah Palin. She spends the entire movie chasing down, capturing and brainwashing other women characters to be little more than meek servants and slaves.  For the sake of argument, we'll assume that any number of conversations with the movies antagonist (a free, liberal feminist woman) do not, in fact, even mention men, but instead talk about what it means to BE a woman.

Passes all three elements of the Bechdel Test.  It might be entertaining, but probably not to people who actually tend to evaluate movies with "the Test". It is undoubtedly misogynistic, possibly even exploitative. We still don't need male characters, but we could assume that this is only a significant subplot to a bunch of men capturing and raping women and it would STILL pass the test with flying colors.

Hell, I don't even have to imagine that second film.  Ilsa, She-Wolf of the whatever (There were some three or four of these) passes the Bechdel Test. True, most of those conversations would be about torture and pain and so forth, but again... not about a man.

Not that I expect anyone to actually put that film on the Bechdel Test website any time soon. They may be willing to admit that the test is flawed, but I somehow suspect that such an obvious counter-example would break them.

Because, ultimately, the Bechdel Test is a tool... not for evaluating movies, which it singularly fails at, but for political power.  The strength of the test, in many ways, is that it is utterly unconcerned with what the movie is about.  Lots of movies beloved of women include multiple female characters talking about what so many women already love to talk about... their love lives. And these films fail the test.

Think about it: A genre of films that is made for women, catering to their tastes, and employing far more actresses than any other genre is just as likely to fail the test as a film like Riddick (or for that matter, Alien, which famously passes!), which is more or less a 'guy flick' from the word go.

Not that anyone is seriously attempting to evaluate Rom-coms and other 'chick flicks' with the test. I note that most, if not all, the Harry Potter films fail, despite being written by a woman, and with the female character (hermione) being the most competent and capable character of the trio, to an almost insulting degree, simple because all the scenes involve people talking to, or about, Harry Potter, and not about, say... their hair.

It is also notable that Allison Bechdel, the creator of the test doesn't actually think much of it. She created it as a punch line in a cartoon in 1985, and noted in that very punchline that only Alien passed the test (at that time), and the women are talking about the monster (technical foul: The monster is clearly a man! Penetration, phallocentric, yadda yadda, rape analog beast!)

Which brings me to the post title.

Here we have a test that measures nothing but itself, can be easily subverted to produce the opposite of its purported intent, was a punchline to a comic strip and is essentially disavowed by its original creator, yet is used and protected, as a bludgeon for political purposes.

It is essentially modern progressivism in a nutshell. Not just feminism, which is merely one facet of modern progressivism (and in fact may be described essentially the same as the Bechdel Test, as I just did...).

Modern Progressivism is literally about nothing but itself, though it purports to be about a great many important and good things. Civil Rights? Only useful as a tool for more progressivism. Feminism? Only  useful to shut down debate and quash the opposition... national health care? Only important in that it forces you to come to the Progressives to get life saving medicine, making you dependent upon them.

Progress? Don't make me laugh. The Progressive Elite would much rather rule over a village of dirty, dark age peasants than a vast space empire. The Global Warming Fraud is proof enough of that. So long as they have marginally better stuff than you, they're happy.

In short, we have a political ideology that describes nothing but itself, has been entirely subverted to produce the opposite of what it claims, is a punchline to one grim, dark joke on humanity, and would be eagerly disavowed by most of its original adherents if they saw what had become, and yet it continues to exist as a useful bludgeon for political power.

Thus endeth the lesson.

All out of Fucks and the Empirical Man

Sometime around September of this last year I realized that I had well and truly run out of Fucks to give.  The first and primary consequence of this realization was that I stopped worrying about what my boss thought of me, or the consequences of not being a shit-sucking weasel every day.

Not that I stopped being generally professional. I showed up at work on time, early really, did my job with full conscientiousness, and was generally a model employee... and I felt better about myself and less stressed because I no longer gave a fuck if the boss liked me.

Contrary to what I've heard about Confidence and Boldness, this did nothing to improve my work life. I was fired a few weeks later for a possibly unrelated incident involving the fruits of feminism... saying one of the many, many forbidden words of the modern workplace. Literally. I said one word that got me fired, and that word was "Porn".

I, however, gave no fucks, because the job sucked and I quickly moved into a new job that paid the same money but gave me more hours and had no real annoying office politics. I still gave no fucks, I was, after all, completely out.  Sadly, that job didn't last because I confused two different managers with the same name and the one that was in charge of me decided I had to go.

Again, no fucks were given.

This is neither here nor there.  In twenty years of keeping my opinions to myself and being a good, model, loyal employee, I had somehow sold away a very important and real part of my self identity, my soul. I had given away my fierce and burning urge to be myself.  I am not easily a slave, but habit is a dangerous thing.

In the wake of that... call it a debacle... I decided that I had, at last, run out of patience for the tread mill, for the sacrificing of my own sense of self worth, my own pride in myself for the gratification of increasingly idiotic, but lucky or connected, bosses, for liars and knaves and power drunk sociopaths... I was done.

Because I no longer had the fucks to give.  I had reached the point where the erosion of my pride had meant there was no social condemnation powerful enough to shame me into wanting or needing work to value myself. I had reached a sort of equilibrium, too much pride to go on, not enough to be forced back into it.

I have a very good memory for the defining moments of my life, the things that shaped me into who I am.  Thus I can tell you, objectively, that the promise of the man I was at age 6 was not the man I grew to be at age 18, and despite a general lack of effort since then, I've slowly but surely been finding my way back to that long lost promise.

I went from being an aggressive, determined and confident child to a sort of doormat, relentlessly 'civilized' to the point where I actually slouched consciously to avoid towering rudely over others, where I never stood up for myself, or others, because I had been taught, ruthlessly, that if anyone did anything worth getting into trouble over it, I would catch the worst of it even if, or because, I was in the right.

This is neither here nor there except as a framework for what I say next.  While I occasionally wished I was a different man, a better man, I wasn't terribly unhappy, and even in my halcyon youth I was rather hermit like in nature, solitary... so I can't blame the errors of my parentage for the one thing that pained me most.

However, not giving a fuck has led me to an interesting experiment.  The manosphere, the pick up artists, generally talk about alpha behaviors, even faking it until you make it and other such things. Its always sounded rather interesting, but ultimately academic and somewhat... difficult to verify.

Until now.

Note that I'm not terribly concerned at the moment with seduction and picking up chicks.  My luck there has managed to be tolerable for my circumstances despite my rather deliberate nebbishness, the false neurotic camouflage I have so long adopted to avoid giving offense.

Shedding that requires conscious thought.  Forcing myself to stand upright requires thought and effort. Not tucking my too-long legs under my chair only requires vigilance, as I have always sat 'alpha posture', legs out and spread, when I was given space... but I find I still unconsciously minimize myself in even a modest crowd.

After a week or so I have to say I don't feel any more Alpha, or however you want to phrase it. No more confident, no more self assured. I still have that empty well where my Fucks used to reside.

On the other hand, I do notice that I care less about those many minor offenses, real or potential that used to nag at me.  A rather minor case in point: Today I wore sunglasses inside.

There is no law, and damn few rules about sunglasses indoors, but it is something that is simply not done.

No one said a word to me, which is not unusual in and of itself and I didn't feel particularly rebellious doing it. Its sunglasses, man... its not like I was swinging my dick out and about or anything.

However, having made the conscious decision, with full malice aforethought, to challenge this unspoken rule of etiquette, I realized that I literally had no worries, not even the pale ghosts of the worries I still had after I ran out of Fucks, that used to plague me about every minor action or inaction. So what if someone thought I was rude, or that I was doing something wrong? So what if it wasn't the one thing I had deliberately chosen to do but some other niggling point of etiquette that I just didn't 'get'?

As it was deliberate, as I expected some condemnation, spoken or not, nothing else that might have worried me really applied.

In a sense, my sunglasses had set me free, if only temporarily and from the most minor, if constant, of stresses in my life.

In a sense, I was doing something I had never really done in the last twenty years or so: I was being absolutely true to myself rather than forcing myself to conform, and poorly, to someone else's standards.

Freedom as a pair of sunglasses.

Who knew?




While it is still early in my empirical test of the 'fake it till you make it' school of manospherian alphadom, I can say that I've had an early positive result.  I'm reluctant to read too much into it, after all I am deeply in the grip of a sort of apathy that seems to approach the levels of a psychotic break. It might not be the sunglasses, the rule breaking, per se but the fact that they merely demonstrated that not actually having a fuck to give means not being stressed by the little shit.

But if, in a few weeks, I feel I've made progress on maintaining my "alpha physical frame", and I haven't found a compelling reason to stop, I will progress my crude experiment to the next level. I have been cataloging the moments of my adult life that I have been more happy with myself in one way or another and will work hard on recreating those times as an organized whole.  Some I will start immediately, as they require investments of time to pay off, others will require more... thought.

For now, the glasses are tentatively chalked up to a positive result of... shall we call it the 'do what thou wilt' principle?  I think we shall.

I note that simply being lazy is not the same as doing as thou wilt.  Breaking the social norms of public comportment as a deliberate act is not the same as going grocery shopping in your pyjamas, as seems to be the current fashion.  That is a passive display of generalized apathy and contra to both my intention and my nature. It is a fault to be overcome for its own sake, not a statement of 'being true to oneself'.

But this post has hit the rambling stages, so I bid you adieu.

And I'm still all out of Fucks.

The Lost Girl issue

Some of you may know of a show, one of many, about a supernaturally powerful woman and her coterie of beautiful hanger's on and her bitchy evil frenemies...

Well, that wasn't very specific, was it?

I'm talking specificially about Lost Girl, which has among its various claims to fame that its 'All Canadian' and that it is entirely non-judgemental about sexuality. Well... given that the 'heroine' is a succubus, that only makes some sense.  Not that it really is non-judgemental. I mean: you have hot straight sex and hot lesbian sex, usually on camera, but no real sign of hot gay sex, on or off camera. Not that I'm complaining... or even watching anymore... I just like pointing out how people like to bullshit themselves.

That's all a distraction, however: a reason to watch the show. (Yay for Boobies!)

The issue I take with the show isn't the mythology, which in the main is reasonably well researched for a tv show, and not appallingly adapted for 'drama'. Its not the sex, or the lack of sex or the overwhelming presence of the sex. Its not even trying to sell me another forty year old actress as a hot naked sex-pot by using soft focus lenses, or a woman as a powerhouse because, Magic.

No.

The issue, the umbrage, I have with the show, and many other recent bits of pop culture flotsam shoved at us these days is the moral landscape.

So in Lost Girl, all the supernatural gribblies of the world are all 'Fae', to include our nominally demonic heroine, the Lost Girl herself.  Fair enough.

Like ALL fae, or fairies, or shidhe, they are devided into light and dark camps, good and evil, seelie and unseelie.  Because, well, that's sorta what fae do, right? Also, mythology loves to simplify the world in to clear camps of light and dark, good and evil.  Its sort of a major, and important theme of mythology.

All well and good. Lost Girl meets the Light Fae, who are the group of fae who refuse to kill humans to feed (apparently, all Fae need to feed on humans in the Lost Girl world. Fair enough...), while the Dark Fae are the fairies who basically think of humans as cattle.  Moreever: The dark fae have to real issues with all sorts of evil behavior towards their own, kept in check mostly by fear and personal power of the various players.

Anyway: The two sides formed after a powerful fae (the blood king, I think they call him. Its the midget barkeep (SPOILER! Hah!), cast a spell forcing immutable laws on fae society. Prior to that they were just savage tribes slaughtering each other to feed even more powerful monsters.  The Dark Fae are generally portrayed as more powerful and more organized and motivated... they are kept in check by the laws that prevent them from just declaring war outright... in fact a number of sub plots involve dark fae manipulations of events to bring about war between the two sides. THe light side isn't all peaches and cream, which also doesn't offend me. I mean: They trick and enslave a human doctor into being their personal science-bitch and resident hottie-lesbian (and really: Can you blame them?), they have some pretty strict rules and seriously heavy duty punishments for infractions. On the other hand, they are trying to avoid a war and remain powerful enough to survive it if it comes, and their enemies like eating people and torture as a hobby.

So when our Lost Girl shows up on the scene, meets the various parties and players what does she do?

She sides with the light fae, right? I mean they've got a resident lesbian for her to make out with, in her obligatory love triangle involving the werewolf (like that shocks you people...), right? And she is really happy to learn how to not accidentally eat people when she has sex, which is a very light-fae attitude, right?

Silly readers, of course not. She refuses to join a side and tries to play the middle, despite the fact that almost every bad guy winds up being a dark fae.

That offends me.

Oh, if it was just this one show I'd shrug and go 'hee... tits' or something. No. It seems all these 'awesome' shows, books, and movies... all these 'riot-grrl-power' pop culture dramas always find a way for the heroine to look somehow noble for rejecting the putative good guys.

Look: There is no real third way. Life may have all sorts of shades of grey and interesting colors blurring the lines between good and evil, between light and dark, but that doesn't mean they represent some purer, more noble path that choosing good over evil.

You don't require an objective good for that to be true, either.

Ironically: They rob themselves of a chance for narrative richness, as questions of moral complexity, of moments of true drama, are stripped when the heroine's rejection of good is viewed as morally right. She never has to compromise her beliefs because she is 'right'.

What appalls me is the frequency which this meme, this narrative pattern surfaces. I didn't have to see that recent 'witch coming of age' film to know what the heroine chose at the end, its become cliche. Now: I may have been wrong about the girl-witch finding herself the first and most powerful 'evah' grey caster... in that particular case, but consider that in the trailer, and really in the film itself, no one ever tells her to 'go light'. THe dark witches want her to go dark, and are willing to manipulate her into being dark, but the light casters, and ordinary people, just want her to be 'true to herself'.

Ultimately it winds up being the same sort of thing.  Good is only really good if you aren't all judgmental and preachy about it.

That is utter rot. Nonsense.

Let me repeat Burke's famous quote for you

"All that is necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men do nothing."

Ultimately, essentially this is what we are being told that Good should do. Nothing. Good shouldn't judge, it shouldn't preach, it shouldn't uphold certain values. Good becomes a passive thing, a mere rejection of evil behaviors.  The Lost Girl can't side with the Light Fae because they do things that are, to her, morally objectionable, and she can't side with the Dark Fae because they are actually Evil, with a capital E. By choosing NO SIDE, by being all passive and You-Go-Girl pro-human, she is presenting the idea of a passive Good that is superior to the organized, restrictive Rules based small-G good of the Light Fae.

Likewise, we can only support the Girl-Witch in Beautiful Creatures good to the Light because no one ever tells her the Light is the only legitimate choice, and we fully endorse her rejecting the Dark Casters because, well, they keep telling her to 'Go Dark' all the time.

What a fucked up morality they try to present!

It is utterly divorced from reality, and simply saying it is fantasy isn't good enough. Fantasy works because it is grounded in a real world we can understand. You take a real, believable world and add magic to it. You make conscious choices about what 'real rules' don't apply.

We are born savages, barbarians... sociopaths, really. Every human being is a little monster who only cares for himself, from birth.  It takes years to teach the helpless little monsters to be reasonable, altruistic, civilized human beings.  It takes rules. It takes judgments and punishments.  It takes making black and white, good and evil, real things in a world made up of colors and greys. And even after thousands of years of practice we still sometimes get it wrong.

Worse: Civilization is a precious, fragile thing.  We assume stability, we assume progress is a part of the natural order, that the only thing we can change is the rate of progress.

Nonsense.

Civilizations die, they collapse and it takes lifetimes to start over again, and many, many cultures have never found their way out of savagery. Civilization is not assumed, it is built slowly and carefully on rules, on trust.. and yes, on Judgment.

Telling people to reject Good, because it is only less evil than Evil is corrosive, destructive and damning. Telling people that its only Good if its optional, if its non-judgmental is corrosive, destructive and damning.

We have a real shortage of responsibility in our modern society, and this sort of perverse moralizing is only making things worse.

But what do I care? I get to see two naked chicks making out on my television.

Caio.

Those Damnable Unions

As a general rule, I despise labor unions.

If you happen to be pro-union, by all means do not click away in disgust just yet, I may surprise you. Conversely, if you agree with my opening statement you too may wish to read on, rather than simply nodding in agreement and assuming that everything is jake.

The current wrangling over Boeing's 777x contract is, to my eyes, a particularly galling example of WHY I hate unions.  Boeing is a massive employer in Washington State, and where I live I scarcely go a day without meeting some new person who either works for Boeing, or has a family member who works for Boeing.  Its not just a massive employer, but a rewarding employer.  Just this week someone was telling me about a friend of theirs who got a job with Boeing some thirty or forty years ago, fresh out of the Navy and wound up becoming one of their primary electrical engineers before finally retiring, despite not having a degree when he started.

The Union is not helping the employees of Boeing, or the people of Washington by making ludicrous demands. Boeing can, and will, simply set up shop somewhere else. Pressure them hard enough, and they will move everything out of state.

Oh, maybe not this year, or the next. After all, the current political climate is pro-union to an unprecedented degree, even while the public has been souring on the concept for well over a decade. The entire debacle with the... was it South Carolina?... factory is proof of that.  No jobs were lost, or even threatened in Washington, but the new factory was in a Right to Work state where the Union had no power, can't have that!

So five thousand people wound up not getting jobs, because the government, at the behest of the Union, shut down the move. Boeing simply didn't expand. Who won?

Well... the Union won, after a fashion. A hollow victory, to be sure. They made a statement, earned a little street cred as bad motherfuckers, and that was it.  In the end all they did was delay Boeing's factory, not kill it.

So their current shenanigans are simply more of the same. Obstructionism for the sake of making a point, damn the workers, damn the business, damn the economy.

The hell of it is: in the current economic environment, the duties and purposes of a union are more necessary than they've been for a hundred years.  Not that any of our current unions are actually doing their jobs...

See: We have pushed technology to an interesting point, the point where a tiny handful of people can do the work of dozens, even hundreds.  Every few years a new job is rendered obsolete. Next on the chopping block might just be delivery men, if Amazon has its way.    Companies no longer need to employ thousands of workers, and even service work is disappearing as automation takes its place. Next up: wait staff at restaurants, replaced by the Ipad.  Movie ticket agents have already been cut in half by ticket ATMs, and I could easily see most of the rest going away as they build buildings with turnstile access and new vending machines to replace the concession stands.

Now: This is a very good thing, or rather it could be. Most people are unaware that we actually work longer and harder than our ancestors did to make our way. Our jobs are less physically demanding, perhaps, but we've created a world that seems to require a forty hour work week to just get by.  A stone age hunter spent maybe eight hours a week at his 'job', and a medieval farmer could never work, as a practical matter, longer than the sun was in the sky, where modern man can burn the midnight oil and never think twice.

There is a second aspect, a second boon to this sort of labor-free world: Anyone could, in theory, compete with established businesses. You no longer need to assembly massive infrastructures, factories or people. One guy with a vision can change the world!

Or he could.

See: while the progressive left likes to talk about the gap between rich and poor, they also like to reinforce it. They are, fundamentally, elitists who come from upper class families. They don't want to rub elbows with Joe the Plumber, they want to rule him.  There is a powerful disconnect between what they say, and what they do.

This is not, however, to say that they are entirely deliberate in placing obstacles. They have inherited a legal system that thinks putting 60 new laws on the books each and every year is far too few!

Too few?!?!?! Do me a favor, dear reader: Right now I'd like you to try and name sixty people... any sixty people you like... right now. Name sixty illegal acts, or sixty video games.  Chances are you're going to stumble and stop in the twenties. You might get to sixty, eventually. Great: You just covered...oh... 1979. Now lets try 1980 through 1999 before we move into the new millennium!

Not to belabor the point, but even one year of passing 60 new laws is too-the-fuck many laws. The primary purpose of most of these laws, or the result anyway, is protectionism for the established. They are obstacles and barriers in the path of making your own way in life. You can't start a business these days without a lawyer to guide you through the paperwork, and to protect you from litigations. And the lawyers like it that way.

So we come, at last, back to Unions.

See: You, the guy reading this, probably won't start competing with Amazon any time soon. Jeff Bezos has already paid his dues to ensure you can't afford it. Now he doesn't have to hire you to deliver his packages either, or work in his warehouses. Soon enough he won't need you to drive the trucks that bring product from the factories or boats.

I mean: He does have to hire SOME people. But since there are so very, very many of you, and so very few job openings he can pretty much make any ludicrous demands he wants of you... if you want that job. He can pay you peanuts, make you do absurd things like sing karaoke for his amusement and so forth. And he can fire you for simply not plastering a fake smile on your face every day and pretending to be grateful for the opportunity to be his personal bitch.

A little over a hundred years ago the Rockefellers (democrats and progressives from the beginning, if you like to pay attention) had all the coal mines.  And since they had all the coal mines, they decided they didn't need to pay the miners enough money to live on.

Logic fail, right there. See, in a large enough group of people you'll find some moron who is willing to work for less money than he actually needs, just so he gets SOME money... thus making sure no one can afford dinner.  The miners didn't like this, of course, so they went on strike. Now... those early, pre-union, strikers were actually wrong. Not for going on strike, but for occupying the lands and mines and preventing anyone else from getting hired, but thats a debate for another day. Anyway: Rockefeller hired the Pinkertons, who when in with guns. People died, and the government officially reckognized the rights of people to organize to negotiate against management.  How they managed to then align themselves, politically, with the very people who helped spur their creation is a story for another day.

Without a side trip down the rabbit hole of defining capitalism and the invisible hand... Unions served a useful and noble purpose when all the cards, politically and economically, fell with the moneyed elite, with big business.  It didn't take too long for them to become corrupt, self serving parasites prone to extortionistic behavior, but that is neither here nor there.

We've come full circle: with all the power once again falling into the hands of big business, with a decreasing need for people in jobs, a union is a vital counterweight against exploitive behavior on the side of management. A good union, rather. We DO need organized labor until the economy learns to adapt to this new world we've created.

The unions we got ain't it, but you play the cards you're dealt.

Teh Podcast.mp3

So, our second weekly podcast is up and we delve deeply into what the Internet Culture really is, what it signifies and so forth, using Eve Online as a sort of stand in for all the interwebz.

The Power of Procrastination

A friend of mine has had a leak in her basement for the last three years. For those three years she has been convinced that her house is collapsing because the foundation is cracking, that the house is sliding into the sea.  She has settled into a sort of vague sense of fatalism about the entire ordeal, using a wet-vac to suck up the water several times a day when it rains.

The other day I went out to do some odd jobs: hanging cabinets, cutting down dead trees and moving heavy objects... the sort of tasks she can't do for herself.  She expected this would be an all day affair, because each of these simple tasks were beyond her ability, but I had it all done by noon.

So I removed the offending wall. In less than an hour I had the drywall cut neatly and the insulation bagged.  It turns out the leak wasn't from a crack in her foundation at all, but a shoddy patch around a sewage pipe. A quick drive into town for quick setting concrete patch and the leak was gone.  Replacing the hole in the wall will take another couple of hours; mostly waiting for stuff to dry.

Three years of doom and gloom for a job that could be done in an afternoon for less than she probably spent on the wet-vacc to keep the water under control.  Three years of increasing certainty that she'll have to sell her house, at a loss, and move into a crappy apartment somewhere.  She spent a thousand times as long worrying about it as it took to fix it.

In my own case, Procrastination has cost me measurable amounts of money... at least three thousand dollars in the last year from one source alone. I could be more exact if I wanted. I could detail out the various ways that I've hurt myself financially over the last year, the missteps and mistakes I've made along the way. I've drug my feet between jobs, failed to follow through on timely offers. I've never had a great excuse, either: I just put it off 'just another day'.

I am not a rich man by any stretch, and I have lost thousands of dollars in this last year alone because I have procrastinated, and many countless more in all the years before.  I burned out in my career because I put off taking vacations for myself, I've put off my writing and publishing because I was afraid, denying myself a possible fall back income.

And that is the power of procrastination. It weakens us, makes us weak where we should be strong. It torments us with worries over easily fixable problems and steals money from us when we aren't looking.  It is the drunk uncle who comes by without being asked and breaks your furniture and steals your wallet.