A Simple Truth of Libertarianism

If a nation has a strong, moral culture and a strong, moral people the state is unnecessary, the culture of the people is enough, but the state can destroy the culture, civil society, and the people that makes the nation great.

If a nation has a weak, immoral culture and a weak immoral people, the state will inevitably be corrupt, and will destroy those few strong, moral people left.

The state is at best unnecessary, at worst, a corrupt, mass-murdering destroyer of culture, morality, civil society, and people.

Accomodation to Sensitivity-Driven Discourse

Over the last few months, Vox has been writing a fair amount about rabbit people and the various forms of discourse. I personlly am very much within the heterotopic or modern discource camp, often to a fault. This, combined with my natural introversion, emotional detachment, and my poor ability to read social cues, leads to me being naturally insensitive to others or their feelings.

It is one thing to be purely heterotopic on the internet. Savaging some random idiot you’ve never met and will never meet or having sport with a silly rabbit is one thing. The internet and internet discourse is naturally impersonal and oriented towards modern discourse, so I feel free to let loose without worrying about offending people or being insensitive. If you get offended by some random jackass (ie. me) on the internet, you have much bigger problems than that random jackass; you should probably work on those.

I generally surround myself with male friends more given to the heterotopic side of things, although, not quite as extreme as me. So when with my male friends in RL I can usually engage in discourse with only a minimum level of attention to being sensitive.

On the other hand, I do have some female friends and many of my male friends are married, so often our activities are mixed-company, and females are more prone to sensitivity-driven discourse. While in discourse with said female friends, I try to generally be more sensitive, but my “more sensitive” is still far more analytical than the norm.

At one such mixed activity, after a negative off-hand remark to one of my male friends about Naomi Wolf, I found myself in discourse with four females (most of my male friends left for the other room, unnoticed by me until I was already well-enmeshed in the conversation; the others stayed quiet) about such sensitive topics as feminism, rape, submission in marriage, etc.

While I tried to keep myself from being intentionally inflammatory, it ended up with one of them blowing-up at me emotionally (I hit an personal emotional button or two without intending to). It came to light that it was the consensus among my female friends that I can be a pompous, insensitive ass at times and that this can cause them hurt.

I recognize that I can at times (usually?) be an insensitive ass, and I admitted as such as we spent some amount of time discussing it. Once that conversation ended, I ended up meeting each woman individually and apologizing any times I may have hurt them by being insensitive. I also said I would try to be less insensitive in the future, for they are my friends and I have/had no intention of causing them distress.

I did not apologize for either my positions or for expressing them, although, they did make me reconsider my position on the Biblical view of women in the workplace. (As EW recently argued, “Women were meant to labor so as to help their men support a household and multiply the species. A clear-eyed read of the Bible makes this clear.”)

So, now I’m going to try to be more sensitive in my discourse with the females around me.

But at the same time, I do not want to become a man beheld to the whims of others’ emotions. I do not want to become a rabbit given to prostration and capitulation at the whiff of negative emotions.

So, how do I do this? How do I become less insensitive?

Additionally, as I do so, how do I avoid letting my rhetoric become overly feminized?

Essentially, how do I draw the line between working towards being a rational Sigma/Alpha (or at least a strong upper beta) and not being, as Francis so delicately put it, an “Aspergery fucktard”.

Or should I just avoid discussing “controversial” topics with women?

Anyway, based on the recommendation of Joseph of Jackson, I pre-ordered the 2nd Edition of Verbal Judo from Amazon. I’ll review here when completed. I’m hoping reading this might give me more information to work within sensitivity-driven discourse, without giving myself over to it.

Lightning Round – 2013/02/20

You don’t find your place in life, you make it and take it.
Related: The 4-way test.

Humanism: the worship of a mechanical god, and the death of the human soul.

Game should be simple: It’s not about running a game. It’s about being who you are.
Related: As a tall, handsome guy this gives me hope. I just need to learn not to screw up.

“In their revolt against the natural order, feminists have turned women into slabs of meat.”
Related: You have a right not to get hit by a car when walking into a highway drunk.

A reality check for females from Judgy Bitch.

A discussion of beauty.

Pursuit of the ideal man.
Related: Work on the underlying form; don’t cheat yourself.

Conversation tip: Share details.

Science and game.

The rise of patriarchy.

Dalrock writes on chivalry.
Related: Vox expands.

The feminist is nothing without the power of men behind her.

Why MGTOW makes more sense than MRA.

Some pop culture site did a manliness symposium. Not as bad as it could have been, and occasionally good.

Read this. “Then they came for the gun owners, and you liberal shitbags threw me under the bus, even though I’d done nothing wrong.  So when they come to put you on the train, you can fucking choke and die.”
Related: This is the left having a conversation about guns.
Related: Fighting back.
Related: She’d be better off dead than defending herself; ask a liberal.

The divorce rate doesn’t matter.

Did I ever laugh.

An introduction to nutrition for men.
Related: An introduction to lean gains.

Boosting testosterone.

Humour: Trick yourself into eating healthier.

It’s prescription only in Canada, otherwise I might get some.

The 10 laws of money. A response.

10 signs we live in a false economy.

Science: Revealed sex preferences.

Remember: It’s men’s fault.
Related: Personality is not enough.
Related: 10 reasons you might still be single.

Economics and feminism.

Single ladies… woman up.
Related: What passes for an “adult” woman today.

Men and woman are equal as an apple is equal to a banana.

Quote of the week: “If you’re under 40, NARAL’s efforts make it much likelier that your mother didn’t even have children. There’s something both poignant and funny about a group devoted to abortion puzzling over its difficulty in finding young people to support it.”

The 3 types of leftists.

The left’s reluctant racists.

The US should pull out of Chicago.

Privacy tools.

No More Hesitation Targets ™. For when the police really need to get used to shooting pregnant women.
Retraction: DHS is not buying 1 billion rounds of ammo (at least for now).

Steyn: Every man a criminal.

5 best countries to be a criminal. We’re #3! Yeah!

It seems what’s good for the gander is not good for the geese.

“Income inequality increased more under Obama than under Bush.” How’s that hope & change working out for you?

Head start doesn’t work.
Related: Universal pre-school is a bad idea.

Did all the Vikings die off, leaving only the weak?

The whiskey business.

The truth about AIDS.

Ygglesias and the confidence game. He’s almost as bad as Krugman.

(H/T: BoingBoing, Blazing Cat Fur, The Captain, SDA, Smallest Minority, Instapundit, Conservative Sociologist)

Acquiring Passion

The question is simple, how do you develop motivation?

There is so much I want to do, so many projects I want to accomplish.

I have a small business idea I’ve been slowly working on, but whenever I start working on it, I just stare at the page, until I start soemthing else.

I’ve got a genre-fiction novel I’ve started (and a few other ideas I’d like to write about), and I enjoy the writing when I’m writing, but can enver find the motivation to being.

I’d like to get in shape, work out, but whenever I start a work-out routine, it fizzles after a couple weeks.

Victor Pride answered this a month back:

It is only when you have fire for a project that you cannot quit, there is no option to quit. Rather than trying to force motivation you should only work on projects that fire you up. You’ll save yourself a ton of time and heartache. If you’ve got to force motivation then you should just go ahead and say “no”. It’s only when you can’t stop working on something that you are going to get the benefit from it.

When you’re fired up about something, take it to the extreme.

There is no need to “find motivation”. The motivation is already there. Your motivation just may be different to someone else’s motivation. I see a lot of people who are motivated to watch television and eat potato chips all day. Fine for them. Is it fine for you?

An honest, true, but somewhat depressing answer. There is nothing in life that really fires me up like this, but  being motivated to watch television all day is not fine for me.

I am generally apathetic individual. I don’t really have passion for life or much of anything in it. I occasionally get a really brief flurry of passion for this or that hobby, computer game, or such, but never one that lasts longer than a couple weeks and never one for anything important.

But, that’s a problem. I shouldn’t be this apathetic; I desire to have a passion for something.

So, that leads to a new question, how does one develop passion?

How does one truly begin to care about and pursue what one knows one should?

How do I find the passion to become the man who has the kind of life I desire?

Juicing Experiment – A Good Recipe

I’ve been juicing again and added some changes based on some recommendations from the last thread. I ended up shopping unplanned on the spur of the moment so I didn’t remember all the recommendations given and Costco didn’t stock all the stuff I was looking for (Kale, celery, and beets), but the recipe I made this time tastes ok, almost good, and and was simple to make. So, I wanted to record it:

  • 2 large bags (about 500g, 1 lb each) of spinach
  • 1 large bag of broccoli (about 1.5 kg, 48 oz)
  • 4 lemons (forgot to get limes) with skins
  • 1 Pineapple

Post-juicing I added:

  • 1 container (500 g, 2 cups) of liquid egg whites
  • a splash of extra virgin olive oil
  • some sea salt

The recipe made about 2.5 litres (10 cups) of juice, enough for a about 1.5 cups each day for the rest of the week. It took less than half an hour to make. The cost was about $20-25. I like it.

Next time, I plan to replace one of the bag of spinach with celery, the other with kale, if I can find some. I’m going to add some whole ginger into the juicer, and some beets. I’ll replace to lemons with limes. Hopefully I’ll remember, when it comes to shopping next week.

We’ll see how that goes, but I liked this recipe.

Things I found:

  • Doing the leafy stuff first, and leaving the pineapple to the end, saved a lot of time. The juicer never clogged or shut off other than during the pineapple. The pineapple clogged it a lot, but by then the juice was almost done and it was fairly easy to unclog.
  • The first bag of spinach I juiced by just adding small amounts then slowly pushing the pusher down. The second I added large clumps that got stuck in the in spout and jammed the pusher down. The second method made far more juice and was far more efficient.
  • I the first two lemons without the skin, the second two with the skin. The second method made a bit more juice with a slightly different coloring and was faster. As Keoni advised, throw them in peel and all.

Anyway, not much to this post other than recording a recipe I liked so I can use it again later.

Be the Kind of Man that Would Have the Kind of Life You Want

I had a sort of mini-revelation a few weeks ago. I was gonna write about it then, but didn’t get around to it, so I have no idea what inspired it. If someone else had this idea and I’m ripping you off without acknowledgment, I apologize.

But anyway, the mini-epiphany is a fairly simple concept, but it’s not something I ever put together. Here it is:

To get what you want in life you have to be the kind of man who has what you want.

It’s simple, no? Yet, it’s an elusive thought.

You can run through the approved life script, you can work hard, you can develop yourself, you can learn game, you can lift weights, you can expand your intellect, but in the end, it will all be for naught if it is not helping you progress towards your goal.

The first part of this is determing your goal. What do you want out of life? You need to decide where you want to be before you can get there. I’m still working on this myself, but I’m inching closer.

But once you’ve decided where you want to be, how do you determine what you should work on to get where you want?

Know the type of man who will have what you want, then become him.

Is there a career or job you want to have? Become the kind of employee an employer in that field would hire.

Do you want a promotion? Become the type of man your boss would promote.

Do you want your own business or to become rich? Become the type of man who would run a successful business.

Do you want to master a skill? Become the type of person who has mastered that skill.

Do you want to attract a certain type of girl? Become the type of man that type of girl couldn’t help but swoon over.

Do you want to live the life of an international player? Become the type of man who would quit his job, travel everywhere, and attract attractive women.

Whatever you want to have in life, find out what type of man who has it, then become that man.

****

To do this, find out who has the type of life you want. Find as many of them as you can. You have the internet, it shouldn’t be hard; there’s probably a part of the blogosphere devoted to it.

Study what they all have in common; what virtues do they share? What defines them as a group? What have they all done the same? What experiences do they share?

Once you understand what makes that type of man that type of man, become that type of man. Develop those virtues. Do those things. Have those experiences.

****

There is a corallary to this.

When you consider doing something (or not doing something), ask yourself the question:

Would the man who has the life I want do this?

Would a successful, rich business owner spend his evening watching TV? Or would a successful rich business owner spend his evening working on his business? What would Bill Gates do?

Would the martial arts master lie sleep-in, then laze about the house for the morning? Or would the martial arts master get up early, exercise hard, then practice his forms? What would Musashi do?

Would the successful novelist spend an hour on Facebook? Or would the successful novelist spend that hour on the next page of his novel? What would Orson Scott Card do?

Would the type of man who attracts a pretty, traditional young girl looking to be a mother spend his day masturbating to pornography? Or would he be reading his Bible and spending time developing himself as a man? What would the elder at your church with a loving wife and 6 children do?

Would the international player stay home surfing the internet? Or would the international player go to the club grinding approaches? What would Roosh do?

When you do something, you must ask yourself whether the type of man you want to be would be doing that something.

If the answer is no, maybe it is time to change your behaviour.

****

I admit I make it sound easy. It isn’t. I struggle hard with this. Even St. Paul had this problem.

“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

But finding out and acknowledging what you should be doing is the first step you have to take before you can accomplish your goals. Actually carrying out what you should, will require harnessing your willpower and ability.

In conclusion, become the type of man who has the type of life you want.

Lightning Round – 2013/02/13

Becoming a better misogynist.

Why male self-improvement and game will always be creepy.

Praise for the average man.

The campaign.

Valentine’s Day advice, both good and bad.

Nihilism.

A reasonable solution to the paternity test debate.
Related: Paternity testing ban upheld in France.

M3 on NiceGirls.

Women have no value apart from what you give them.

The female hatred of men doing things that don’t benefit them.

Coochie-couponing (what a great word) is unbiblical.

The conflicting message given unto women.
Related: Young women: Learn from those who tried it before you.
Related: The Captain analyzes the lives of feminists dispensing dating advice.
Related: Ian with advice for women on rolling their own alpha.

Prettier women are less slutty.
Related: The joys of deception.

Throwing feminists under the bus.

Leftoid egoism.

Women, guilt, and pit bulls.

A world filled with empathy is a world filled with lies.

Compliance and IKEA.

Knock ‘em dead kid. Vox responds.
Related: Bill thinks it’s a false flag.
Related: Looks like it’s over.
Related: Even the police state is crumbling in the decline.
Related: Drones being used against an American citizen in the US.
Related: How to kill a UAV.
Related: Of courage and cowardice.
Related: Map of botched paramilitary police raids.
Related: Raid of the Day.

Hate kills.

When rabbits rule.

Science: Men who marry higher income women suffer more ED.

A house is not an investment.

Why is the DHS buying billions of rounds of ammo?

Gun control is a test of your will.
Related: Oak Harbour shows the freedom haters what for.
Related: How gun confiscation will occur.
Related: Why the left fell out of love with guns.

The West’s entire problem can be summed up in two words: chronic kinglessness.
Related: 8 of the top 10 countries for press freedom are monarchies.

Our future.
Related: All is well.
Related: Betraying the young.
Related: Just 6 in 10 millennials have jobs; half are part-time. (IP)
Related: The debt is crushing the US economy? Surprising.

Does Obama fear the Praetorian Guard?

Voter fraud? What voter fraud?

Death panels? What death panels?
Related: Obamacare taxes.

The vulgar atheists.

Fox News is both the most trusted and least trusted news source in the US.

Comment of the week: “It is really, really difficult to offend God and Ozzy at the same time, but they managed it. Wow.”

The days of the year Americans watch porn the least.

(H/T: SDA, Foseti, the Captain, Maggie’s Farm, Instapundit, GLP)

Metal Moment: Blind Guardian

I previously posted my favourite Christian metal band, so now here’s my favourite band, period:

Blind Guardian plays the most epic of power metal.

Here’s the most epic song I’ve yet heard, And Then There was Silence. It’s probably my favourite song of all time. It’s album, A Night at the Opera, is my favourite album of all time. The pomp and bombast is amazing.

Here’s another excellent song, Imaginations from the Other Side, from their 1995 CD of the same name:

Their middle-earth epic CD, Nightfall in Middle-earth,  based on the Silmarillion was also amazing.

Of course, Blind Guardian also had some slower songs. Here’s a concert staple, the Bard’s Song:

Holy Crap: Amanda Marcotte the Libertarian

I never thought I’d see this, but Amanda Marcotte, card-carrying feminist working for Slate XX, has just advocated ending the welfare state.

Amanda “examines” (ie. mocks with snark devoid of intellectual substance, as is typical of these kinds of publications) the idea that not having enough people of working age to support those who don’t work is a problem.

But near the end of her post, she veers way the hell off the reservation:

What really galls me about Last’s piece (and most like it) is the underlying assumption that human beings exist to serve society and not the other way around. Oh, sure, Last mentions a few conservative-friendly policy ideas to help people afford kids—such as reducing the number of kids who go to college, attacking Social Security, and pushing people to move to the suburbs—but if reducing day care costs doesn’t do it, there’s no reason to think these tweaks will either. The reader is left with the feeling that the only solution to save capitalism is to clip the wings of half of the population so they can spend more time laying eggs.

I’d argue instead that if the system is set up so that it fails if women don’t start popping out more kids, then it’s a broken system and should be reworked to account for the reality of America today. If women don’t want to have more children, then instead of abandoning women’s equality as a goal, we should rework our economic system so it doesn’t rely on a steadily growing population to function. After all, the point of society is to serve the people in it, not to reduce us to cogs in a machine that serves no one at all.

This reads like libertarian propaganda. You could put this up at Reason to hearty cheers of comradery and brotherhood (all voluntary of course).

First, she argues that human beings do no exist to serve society, rather the opposite. The individualism expressed here would do Rand proud.

I can’t wait until she gets specific and starts decrying forcing individual to pay taxes to feed the machine.

Then she argues that if the current system requires pumping out children to sustain itself, we should reform the system. She is arguing for the end of both SS and Medicare.

If this is the new direction of feminism I approve.

****

Now, I honestly think it’s unlikely that Amanda Marcotte is going to be voting for Gary Johnson next election. I highly doubt she has carefully examined her views and decided that individual freedom was the goal of politics. Rather this is probably just a case Amanda replaces thought with wish.

She probably just saw someone pointing out one of the logical outcomes of one of her life choices and reflexively through out whatever she came to her so she could avoid having to acknowledge that actions (or nonactions in this particular case) have consequences.

It probably never even occurred to her that SS and Medicare depend on an ever-growing population to remain sustainable. It probably never even occurred to her that her desire for “free” stuff (like child care and contraception) from the government forces other people to serve society.

It is almost sad that non-thought like this can be published by a somewhat “respectable” operation.

****

It seems Judgy Bitch found this article as well and posted on it before me. Check it out, it’s a gooder.

Obliviousness, Incivility, and the Destruction of the Old Order

I came across this article from some feminist who, according to the little blurb at the bottom, has written for “Jezebel, The Frisky, The Huffington Post and The Good Men Project.” In it she complains of the incivility of men in public:

It’s a drizzly Friday in Chicago and I’m leaving a bar with my roommate sometime after midnight. We’re on a quest for tacos and we’re discussing the finer points—Should we get pork or beef? From where? How many?—when you decide to make our conversation your business. You’ve been loitering outside the bar with your friends, but you hear the word “taco” and soon you’re in lock step with us, asking us about our “tacos,” laughing, hooting back to your friends. We push past—literally shoving you—and continue on our way.

Here are some things you should know about my week: I’m on the phone with my mom on my way to yoga when a guy leans out of a doorway, drags on his cigarette and gestures with his pelvis how much he is enjoying my yoga pants. I’m walking home from the grocery store and a middle-aged guy, maybe high, maybe drunk, yells at me, “Get back here, girl!” I’m waiting for the bus when a carful of bros whips by; one leans out the passenger window, points at the girls waiting at the bus stop and yells, “Yes, Yes, No…Yes!” After work, I’m walking from the train to my apartment and four teenagers are trailing me, discussing my body, guessing measurements; they know I can hear them.

This behaviour causes her to feel unsafe. This is understandable as she is a young woman and these men are quite obviously under-civilized brutes; rape or violence would not seem to be an impossibility in some of these situations and given the inherent physical inequalities between the sexes there is little she could do to defend herself (excepting carrying a gun, which someone who writes for Jezebel is unlikely to do).

This is not my issue with what she has written. The incivility of modern times sometimes irks me as well, although, as a tall, broad-shouldered man with confident bearing, I rarely worry for my physical safety.

Rather, my issue is that, as feminists are wont to do, she blames “the patriarchy” for the incivility of ruffians.

She, of course, being an miseducated feminist is oblivious to the twin facts that:

1) Men being uncivil is not “the patriarchy”, it is the breakdown of the patriarchy. It is men being freed from the constraints which the patriarchy put upon them.

2) The left-wing feminist politics she advocates are the primary cause of this breakdown.

Because of this her analysis, such that it is, is flawed.

****

Men’s sexuality, absent civilizational constraint, is naturally aggressive and promiscuous. These men laughing at a woman’s “taco”, grabbing ass, and doing pelvic-thrusts, are acting out their natural sexuality.

At one point in our society, this would have been unacceptable behaviour. Under the old order, lovingly referred to as the patriarchy, but probably more accurately referred to as civilization, civility towards woman was standard; it was called chivalry.

Men raised under this order would have been loath to issue even a mild oath in the presence of a woman, let alone crassly harass a woman over her “tacos”. Had a man been uncivilized enough to harass a woman in such a way, he would have suffered immediate consequences in the form of violence from other honourable men, and more permanent consequences from a loss of social status.

As an example of the sort of man the old order raised, we can use one Samuel Proctor, who tipped his hat towards a woman. When said woman asked what that meant he replied:

Madame, by tipping my hat I was telling you several things. That I would not harm you in any way. That if someone came into this elevator and threatened you, I would defend you. That if you fell ill, I would tend to you and if necessary carry you to safety. I was telling you that even though I am a man and physically stronger than you, I will treat you with both respect and solicitude. But frankly, Madame, it would have taken too much time to tell you all of that; so, instead, I just tipped my hat.”

A man raised in the old order as Mr. Proctor was, would never have even considered joking about a woman’s “tacos”.

Civilization was used to control men’s natural sexual aggressiveness to create men like Mr. Proctor, who acted civilized and would control their aggressive sexuality for the betterment of society and the safety of women.

Some decades ago, a cabal of dissatisfied women under the label of feminism and a small, but vocal minority under the banner of affiliated progressive ideologies decided they did not care for civilization and its constraints. They rebelled against it and fought a long, hard ideological war to destroy it.

They won.

This cabal destroyed the old order and with it the control it had over men’s sexuality.

Men are now free to be uncivil brutes. Civilization no longer holds full sway over them.

Hence, “tacos.”

****

So, in finale:

Dear Feminist,

This is the world you desired.

You and your ideological kin spent decades ruthlessly destroying the old order which kept men civilized. You smashed the patriarchy which kept men’s naturally externalized sexuality healthly internalized and productively directed.

You denigrated the institutions which controlled men, smashed the civilization which ordered men, and have created a generation of brutes and half-men.

You asked for sexual license. Men are now free to express their sexuality without consequence.

You asked for freedom to pursue hedonism. Men are now pursuing hedonism.

You asked to be freed from the rules of civilized conduct. Men are now freed from these rules as well.

You rejected your role as a lady. Men are rejecting their role as gentlemen.

These rules were made to protect you, dear woman. The patriarchy was made for your benefit. The old order existed to serve you.

You desired, nay demanded, them destroyed, and destroyed they have been.

When you destroy civilization, incivility will be the order of the day.

You have got what you asked for, enjoy it.

Regards,

A Traditionalist