One of my favourite webcomics, posted this today. An encapsulation of what the manosphere has been saying about education in comics form. The comics there are usually entertaining and often thought-provoking. Check it out.
Firearms are Freedom
I have recently purchased a number of guns. This was a pain-in-the-ass process due to Canada’s over-bearing gun laws, especially concerning handguns.
There are a number of reasons I put myself through this process, including the usual, such as I want to take up shooting, hunting, self-defence.
Although, not so much for self-defence. I don’t think I would use a gun to defend my home, I would try to use a different method if possible. I own and train with numerous bladed and blunt weapons that I would probably use before the gun. Not because I have any moral problems with shooting an intruder, but simply for legal reasons.
The Canadian legal system is often stupid when it comes to self-defence, such as this recent case where a man defended his home from being firebombed. For his troubles he was arrested, had is guns confiscated, faces jail time, and is still through going through the courts months alter (while the person firebombing his house was not arrested).
I would avoid using my firearms simply to avoid the legal hassles that come with using firearms, especially given that I take martial arts and have numerous other weapons lying around my house. This is not perfect, as the state jealously guards its so-called monopoly over “legitimate” force and will try to punish any who may try to use legitimate force themselves, but firearms just add an extra layer the tyrannical will be able to use against you.
Self-defence aside, these reasons are all good reasons for owning a firearm, but they are not the most important reason, which is freedom.
A man cannot call himself free in any meaningful sense of the word unless he owns a firearm. If you do not own a firearm, you are, as Elusive Wapiti would say, a sheeple.
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All power essentially comes down to force.
Political scientists and sociologists will talk about the different types of power, whether power comes from authority, from legitimacy, from material resources, etc., but essentially it all comes down to who holds the guns.
The elected official may have the authority of legitimacy, but if not supported by the arms of the police and military, his authority means little. The wealthy man may have the power of resources, but if not protected by the arms of police and his own bodyguards, it could be taken from him by armed men at any time. The demagogue may have the power of persuasion, but if his followers do not have arms, they are prey for those who do.
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. – Chairman Mao
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Freedom comes from power.
Hippies, pacifists, and other such morally bankrupt idealists may talk about peace and freedom while decrying violence, suggesting that somehow you can have either of the former without being capable of the latter, but are only able to do so because heavily-armed police and military protect their ability to say stupid things from people who aren’t so disconnected from reality.
The simple fact is, if you want to be free to act, you must have the power of taking action. If you want to be free, you must have the power to defend and protect your freedom.
Today, power means guns.
Owning a gun is essentially saying, I am free, and I have the power to protect my freedom.
Anybody who wants to take your guns away from you or prevent you from having guns, hates you and hates your freedom. They want to disempower you and take away your ability to protect yourself, your loved ones, and your freedom.
You cannot call yourself free in any real sense of the word unless you possess a firearm.
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Guns are not the only material prerequisite for freedom.
To truly be free, you must be able:
- Have the ability to learn, develop, and transmit ideas, for ideas shape the world. Up until about 10 years ago books, free speech, and a free press were the primary instruments of this freedom. Today, the internet is.
- Have power to act on those ideas. Power comes from force and for the last few centuries, force comes from guns.
- Be mobile to be able to move to where those ideas require. For the last century mobility has come from cars.
- Have a place of your own where others are not able to tread without your permission. This has always come from private property ownership.
If you do not have the internet, firearms, a vehicle, and your own property (or have the ability to acquire them which you have temporarily forgone), you are not fully free.
Anybody who tries to limit your ability to acquire or access these hates your freedom and, by extension, hates you.
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Owning a firearm is an assertion of your freedom and your power.
There is no single action you can take that shows the elites they don’t fully control you better than to arm yourself.
That is why I bought a firearm collection.
Liberal Economic Stupidity
Today, I am going to comment on two pieces of economic stupidity from liberals.
The first piece is from a Democracy Now! interview with Matt Taibbi (h/t: Clarissa), in which he writes:
Well, Mitt Romney is really the representative of an entire movement that’s taken over the American business world in the last couple of decades. You know, America used to be-especially the American economy was built upon this brick-and-mortar industrial economy, where we had factories, we built stuff, and we sold it here in America, and we exported it all over the world. That manufacturing economy was the foundation for our wealth and power for a couple of centuries. And then, in the ’80s, we started to transform ourselves from a manufacturing economy to a financial economy. And that process, which, you know, on Wall Street we call financialization, was really led that-sort of this revolution, where instead of making products, we made transactions, we made financial products, like credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. We created money through financial transactions rather than building products and selling them around the world. And that revolution was really led by people like Mitt Romney. And the advantage of financialization, from the point of view of the very rich and the people who run the American economy, is that it was extremely efficient at extracting wealth and kicking it upward, whereas the old manufacturing economy had the sort of negative effect of spreading around to the entire population. In the financialization revolution, you can take all of the money, and you don’t have to spread it around with anybody. And Mitt Romney was kind of a symbol of that fundamental shift in our economy.
Now, this kind of argument is made all the time by liberals: that evil businesses and bankers are destroying the manufacturing sector and traditional blue-collar jobs.
The problem is its wrong. Now, don’t get me wrong, the traditional blue-collar model is dying in North America, but the left has the culprit wrong. If they want to see why it is dying, they only need to look in the mirror.
The manufacturing economy is dying because of government overregulation, pushed by liberals. Between an increasingly harsh regulatory environment, brutal taxation levels, the manipulation of local zoning regulations, corrupt unions, political interference, etc., etc. the left has made it all but impossible for blue-collar industry to thrive.
As the Captain has written: capital flight is a built-in feature of socialism.
If you make it impossible for industrialists to create industry in North America, do not be surprised when no industry is created in North America.
As just one example of the war leftists are engaging on blue collar industry, we can look to the Keystone XL Pipeline. The US recently had a perfect opportunity to create thousands of traditional blue-collar jobs. Canada was practically begging the US to allow this pipeline to be built through the US and TransCanada had plans drawn up and was ready to build. XL would have created 20,000 jobs and huge revenues for both Canada and the US. It never happened. Why?
Because a bunch of idiot leftists protested it and the government killed it.
This is not an isolated event.
I lied earlier; I’m going to provide more than one example, to show it’s not just oil pipelines. Let’s look at a few examples of random blue-collar industries:
- Look at what the unions did to the US automotive industry.
- Look at what the feds are doing to the heating industry.
- Look what the government is doing to the fishing industry.
- Look at what the EPA is doing to the coal industry.
- Look at what the FDA is doing to the cigar industry.
- Look at what the USDA is doing to the family farm and agricultural industry.
I could go on forever, but why bother. The simple fact is, at every step, across every industrial sector, leftist ideologues are trying their damnedest to destroy any industry here in North America.
These ideologues have created a government of over-regulation and over-taxation that is destroying blue-collar industry. The programs these people have put in place costs the economy $1.75 trillion a year.
After the huge swath of destruction they have wreaked across the North American industrial landscape, I can hardly believe they have the gall to turn around and complain about disappearing blue collar jobs.
Are leftists so stupid that they can not see the very visible side effects of their ideology or are they just plain evil?
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As an almost completely irrelevant aside, there is at least one major company (the second-largest private company in the US) I can name of the top of my head that manufactures most of its products in the US. It’s called Koch Industries. Unsurprisingly, it is the target of constant attacks and smears by the left.
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The second piece of idiocy I’m going to comment on is from Slate. Michael Moran writes:
Are we getting back to normal? Well, of course not: times were not normal to start. To get back to that normal would be national suicide – an asset bubble fueled normal more unsustainable than anything either of our political parties is flirting with today.
…
Do we really pine for the bubble years? Remember, folks, the “prosperity” now implied by those who as about “four years ago” were fuelled by a runaway financial system that treated peoples’ homes, jobs and lives like so many chips in a casino.
Would we be “better off” if the bubble loomed over us again? No, we’d be walking toward an even deeper cliff.
I agree with this, an economy based upon a bubble is stupid, and not something we want to return to.
In the same article he also writes:
First, the view that President Obama wants to emerge from Charlotte: Four years ago the country was sliding over the edge of an economic cliff. Today, we’ve got one leg back on top, and even with the Republican congressional caucus holding onto the other leg and screaming “I’d rather fall to my death than climb back onto that debt-strewn precipice” – we’re clawing our way to safety.
…
Ironically, his economic policies are not the real problem. Again, this was always going to take a long time to solve. We can argue whether there should have been more stimulus (I think so). But on the finer economic points, the general direction has been correct.
…
Recessions, as Europe demonstrates every single day, are no time to cut government spending: the result is a vicious circle in which austerity kills growth and deficits become nearly insurmountable (especially in countries that have to fund them on the open market). So even if deficits rise during a recession, the idea is to hasten the return of growth that, in the end, is the only real solution to such gaps.
It is very clear he is in favour of Keynesian stimulus and against reigning in government spending.
Somehow, he doesn’t see the contradiction between these two positions. One can not be against a bubble economy and be for economic stimulus, as economic stimulus is the creation of a bubble economy.
Government spending inherently creates economic bubbles.
An economic bubble occurs when the nominal value of something is inflated far beyond its intrinsic worth.
Government spending, particularly stimulus spending, is spending on goods or services individuals are not willing to spend on and invest in on an individual level.
In other words, stimulus is spending on goods and services more than its inherent market value.
Anybody advocating Keynesian stimulus is advocating the government creates a bubble by investing where the free market is unwilling to invest.
(There is one difference though, bubbles on the private market will generally pop at some point in the short-medium term when someone realizes its idiotic. On the other hand, government supported bubbles can be propped-up almost indefinitely through tax-payer funding, at least until the state runs out of money).
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Anyhow, that completes today’s round of liberal stupidity.
Die When You’re Done
Roosh posted Denying Death, arguing that’s it’s better to live for now than suffer now to live a few more miserable years. Danger & Play responded, arguing that being healthy is not for living longer, but for living younger while you live. Captain Capitalism has riffed on the same topic before, arguing not to save for now, but rather to prepare the Smith & Wesson retirement plan.
You should also definitely read this piece on how doctors choose to die.
Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will be cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the intensive care unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly: “Promise me that if you find me like this you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.
Now, as for me, family history wise, I should be long-lived and healthy. Both of my grandfathers are in their 80s, mobile, healthy for their age, and more or less independent, despite the fact that one of them smoked most of his life, but even so, eventually I will reach the point where my body will break down.
I find the thought of living hooked to a machine or living as a adult toddler horrifying. When I come to die, I plan to do so in my bed, surrounded by family, or possibly, go alone into the woods to feed the wolves. I do not plan to fight it, bu to embrace it.
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Now, the arguments of both Roosh and D&P both centered around health. Do you suffer now by denying yourself foods you enjoy, undergoing painful workouts, and starving yourself? Or do you live in the moment, and die when you die.
For this we will go to my favourite book of the Bible for wisdom:
In this meaningless life of mine I have seen both of these:
the righteous perishing in their righteousness, and the wicked living long in their wickedness.
Do not be overrighteous, neither be overwise—why destroy yourself?
Do not be overwicked, and do not be a fool—why die before your time?
It is good to grasp the one and not let go of the other.
Whoever fears God will avoid all extremes.
(Ecclesiastes 7:15-18)
Regardless of whether you are a Christian or not, the advice here applies to everything, avoid all extremes.
“Moderation in all things, including moderation.” – Petronius
Be moderate: take care of your health, but only insofar as you need to. Worshiping your health is no better than living a life of gluttony and sloth.
The point is not to deny yourself, not to suffer. Suffering is extreme and unnecessary. The point is not gluttony, that’s just leads to future suffering. Both of those are unnecessary, counter-productive extremes.
The point is to structure your life so you can eat healthy, while not suffering.
That’s why I eat a modified primal diet: the Paleo Fuck You diet, as it were.
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What?
My base diet is healthy. I generally either don’t eat breakfast, or have a couple eggs. For lunch, a bacon/chicken salad and for supper, some meat. Some fruits for energy when engaged in physical activity and some almonds, berries, and dark chocolate for snacking. I drink water. That’s describes the majority of what I eat.
But, if I’m with friends, I’m going to enjoy myself: pass me another slice and top up my coke. If I really crave a milkshake, I’ll stop by DQ. If I’m in a rush, I’ll pick up something off the value menu. I’m eating ice cream as I’m typing this: I haven’t had ice cream for months, but really craved it on the way home, so I bought some.
I never feel deprived, because I never deprive myself. If I really want something, fuck-it, I’ll eat it.
Yet, I still maintain my diet. I’ve lost 30 lbs (about 15% of my pre-primal weight) since April, while adding some muscle mass. I have more energy and endurance than I’ve had since I was a child. I’m healthier than I’ve ever been.
How?
Read the book Willpower (I mean it, best book I’ve read this year [well, technically tied for best with the Way of Man, read that too]).
Willpower does not matter for dieting. You can not willpower your way to good health or good diet; it doesn’t work. In fact, “dieting” leads directly to weight gain. There are powerful bio-evolutionary forces at work in you that will stop you from “starving” yourself, and there is no way to overcome them.
So what matters?
Habit and environment.
Start good habits and structure your environment to eat right.
I let my natural laziness do the work for me. I shop each week and I only buy enough fresh meat for the next week or two, some eggs, fruit, salad supplies, and a few condiments/spices as needed. I make a giant salad for the week, to split into portions each day for lunch. I do not buy unhealthy food, my fridge is mostly bare except the previous. So the choice is, either eat what’s there, or get to my car, drive to the market/fast-food joint, purchase stuff, and drive home. My laziness wins, so I eat my pork chops happily (with some Bull’s-Eye, because hey, it makes it that much better).
I have some stuff in the cupboard from my pre-primal days and some Coke and what not in my alcohol fridge for when I have friends over. But it takes more time and effort to cook something in my cupboard than to fry up some sausages. I have coke, but if I want one I have to go downstairs to my alcohol fridge and get it, while water is right there: I almost never drink Coke on my own simply because the 20 seconds it takes to go downstairs makes it too much of a hassle. If I want ice cream, I have to go to Safeway or DQ and buy it.
I never feel deprived because I never deprive myself, but I’ve structured life so my natural laziness limits how much unhealthy food I’m eating and the good habits I’m developing naturally take over.
So be moderate. Don’t deprive yourself, but structure your life so that you aren’t tempted. You’ll eat healthy, but never feel deprived.
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Back to dying. When should you die?
Should you live fast and die young, or should you eke out every tiny bit of life you can?
Neither, either, both. The question is flawed.
The better question is why do you live? What do you live for? What is your purpose, your mission?
You should die when you are done.
You should live until you have accomplished your mission or when your continued existence can no longer serve your mission. You should not allow yourself to die before then and you should not try to prolong your life beyond this point.
You do not deny death, you do not affirm life. You affirm your mission and realize death is simply when you cease to struggle in this mortal world.
Live to struggle for your mission, struggle to live for as long as you are able to advance your mission. Then allow yourself to die. Don’t drag it out, don’t fight it; go to the grave knowing you gave your all for what mattered to you.
That is when you should die, when you can rest peacefully knowing you have done everything you could and there is nothing more to do.
Die when you are done.
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Roosh, the Captain, and D&P seem to come at this from a hedonistic perspective. They want to enjoy being young; their mission is pleasure. So, it would make sense for them to live fast and young as long as possible, then fellate a gun when they are too decrepit to enjoy themselves.
If you live hedonistically, the Smith & Wesson plan or the early heart attack is the perfect death.
But, hedonism is not something that works for all; it’s just not enough for many.
Most people need a mission; something greater than their own self-pleasure to live their life for.
The S&W plan might not work for them. Living fast would not work for them, but neither would eking ever last painful second out of life work.
What will work for them is dying when they have nothing left to accomplish.
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Some personal reflection:
These last years, I’ve been looking for a mission. So far unsuccessfully. Because of this, I’ve cared little about whether I remained on this mortal coil or not. The lack of success has lead me to slowly become more nihilistic over time, and hedonism is looking increasingly attractive.
But it doesn’t seem enough.
I want to fight for something, to have a mission. I want to go to breath my last breath knowing that I fought for something greater than me.
Hopefully I can find it, before the S&W plan starts to make more sense than it already does.
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To conclude, avoid the extremes of health-nuttery or gluttony. Eat moderately.
It’s not about suffering to live as long as possible or dying young. It’s about fighting for as long as you can and dying when there’s no fight left in you.
Die when you are done.
Lightning Round – 2012/09/05
Roosh discusses living in the moment: why it’s better to die early. He makes a good case for the Smith & Wesson retirement plan.
Danger & Play does not fully agree. I’ll give my take tomorrow.
Oneitis is for Your Wife’s Pussy. Cane knocks it out of the park.
Related: Get married.
Related: The truth about saving sex for marriage. ( 2 & 3).
Danny argues the manosphere should put aside our differences to fight the real enemy. This blog endorses that sentiment.
Related: The manosphere explained.
The social contract is being destroyed.
Related: Western civilization is over.
Related: A mother notices.
Why do people deny the old ways are best?
Dating is not war. At least, it shouldn’t be.
Don’t complain about sheep when looking for a wolf.
Self-deception in graph form.
Own your house and car anonymously.
Liberal racial hypocrisy.
Legal vs. illegal immigrants. The US immigration system is screwed.
Frost returns, renamed Elihu. Argues that we have no fate but what we make.
Science finds the rationalization hamster.
The Last Psychiatrist questions why 125 Harvard students felt compelled to cheat. Rips higher ed apart.
There terrifying new normal. Ever notice how mainstream thinkers are always a few months behind the manosphere/alt-right blogosphere.
Related: We are doomed.
Bill is free. Makes me want to quit my job.
A beginners guide to being alpha. I’ve completed four out of the six and am working on the last two. Nice.
Hehe. Some good satire.
Academia: the World’s Leading Social Problem.
Related: The product of academia.
Related: More entitlement.
We’ve reached $16-trillion in debt. Yay?
Wow. If true, this should be the financial scandal of the decade. The fed is in deep. Although, according to the comments it was “only” $1-trillion.
Draw your own conclusions.
Liberal media bias acknowledged.
Related: The media is the enemy.
Related: Some satire on fact-checkers.
Amanda Marcotte criticizes the concept that the people control the government. The tyrannical mind of the feminist laid plain.
I’m having the same experience as this guy. I didn’t really care for him, but the more I learn, the more I like the Romney.
Related: “That’s freedom, and I’ll take it any day over the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners.”
Zero tolerance idiocy.
(H/T: SAG, the Captain, Hidden Leaves, Maggie’s Farm, Instapundit, RWC&G)
Hanna Rosin: Feminists and the Hook-up Culture
Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, commented on Ann Romney’s speech at Slate. Her article ends with this:
But it’s not her particular marriage that gets in the way of reaching certain women, it’s her entire worldview. In Ann Romney’s world, high-school sweethearts are to be trusted, and women should give in and trust them. They do not fail women and they do not let women down, as she said of Mitt. It’s a little bit like Paul Ryan’s imaginary world where men trek off to the tire plant every day and come home and fix the screen door.
But this is not a world that Obama negated with his economic policies; it’s a world that has been slowly disappearing for decades. Most children born to women under 30 now are born to single mothers and in their world, the men are not really to be trusted and they do let people down.
Compare that to her recent article Boys on the Side, which extolled the hook-up culture as liberating for women.
There is no retreating from the hookup culture to an earlier age, when a young man showed up at the front door with a box of chocolates for his sweetheart, and her father eyed him warily. Even the women most frustrated by the hookup culture don’t really want that. The hookup culture is too bound up with everything that’s fabulous about being a young woman in 2012—the freedom, the confidence, the knowledge that you can always depend on yourself. The only option is what Hannah’s friends always tell her—stop doing what feels awful, and figure out what doesn’t.
Young men and women have discovered a sexual freedom unbridled by the conventions of marriage, or any conventions. But that’s not how the story ends. They will need time, as one young woman at Yale told me, to figure out what they want and how to ask for it. Ultimately, the desire for a deeper human connection always wins out, for both men and women. Even for those business-school women, their hookup years are likely to end up as a series of photographs, buried somewhere on their Facebook page, that they do or don’t share with their husband—a memory that they recall fondly or sourly, but that hardly defines them.
How she can not see the contradiction between these two modes of thinking is beyond me, especially given how these two articles were published only about a week apart.
How can the hook-up culture be both something that is liberating to females and supported by females, yet at the same time be something in which women are let down by men?
It can’t.
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As one commenter at Slate named TheDude commented:
“Most children born to women under 30 now are born to single mothers and in their world, the men are not really to be trusted and they do let people down.”
I don’t sweat this. Double X has taught me that single motherhood is a fine lifestyle to choose, many women choose to do it voluntarily, and that women don’t need men anymore. Who exactly are these guys letting down?
I’ve also learned from Double X that it is in fact men who need women, so the question should be, why are these women letting down the men who need them?
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The hook-up culture is bad for women (and for men for that matter) but it is a necessary implication of the feminism. Women do not really want the hook-up culture. In fact, except for a minority of high testosterone women, most women do not want most of what feminism is selling.
But the hook-up culture is the natural end-game of feminism. Once traditional marriage, an “oppressive patriarchal” family system, declines, men, no longer constrained by patriarchy, revert to their more primitive instincts. One of the of these instincts is consequence-free sex, the hook-up culture.
The hook-up culture leaves women unable to commit and leaves men unwilling to commit. Given that most women want commitment, at some point, this hurts women.
So, feminists like Rosen know the hook-up culture is the necessary consequence of feminism and is necessary to feminism, but they also know it hurts women. So what do they do, they try to pretend that women like the hook-up culture. Some do, ie. high testosterone feminists, but the rest have to be convinced. So, you speak out of both sides of your mouth: you poison gender relations by blaming men for being unreliable while supporting the very system that makes men unreliable, then tell women that they actually like the system that’s destroying their ability to gain what they actually desire: love, a husband, motherhood, and family.
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So you get this:
But then, sometime during sophomore year, her feelings changed. She got tired of relationships that just faded away, “no end, no beginning.” Like many of the other college women I talked with, Tali and her friends seemed much more sexually experienced and knowing than my friends at college. They were as blasé about blow jobs and anal sex as the one girl I remember from my junior year whom we all considered destined for a tragic early marriage or an asylum. But they were also more innocent. When I asked Tali what she really wanted, she didn’t say anything about commitment or marriage or a return to a more chivalrous age. “Some guy to ask me out on a date to the frozen-yogurt place,” she said. That’s it. A $3 date.
But the soda-fountain nostalgia of this answer quickly dissipated when I asked Tali and her peers a related question: Did they want the hookup culture to go away—might they prefer the mores of an earlier age, with formal dating and slightly more obvious rules? This question, each time, prompted a look of horror. Reform the culture, maybe, teach women to “advocate for themselves”—a phrase I heard many times—but end it? Never. Even one of the women who had initiated the Title IX complaint, Alexandra Brodsky, felt this way. “I would never come down on the hookup culture,” she said. “Plenty of women enjoy having casual sex.”
Women whose emotional being has been so warped that she wants more emotionally but can’t conceive of an emotional connection beyond going for yogurt. These emotionally scarred women then turn around and defend the system that withered their emotional being because “plenty of women” enjoy it. Note, not because she personally enjoyed it, but because “plenty of women” enjoyed it. Most of these “plenty of women” didn’t really enjoy it themselves, but acted as if they did, because who wants to be the weird person out who don’t enjoy it.
Now some women probably do like the hook-up lifestyle, and some more women probably enjoy it in the moment, but most do not, simply defending it because it is expected of them because others enjoyed it. In the long-term most women suffer the female version of the player’s curse.
Then, instead of blaming the feminism-created system that has left women alone, divorced, and emotionally-scarred, feminists blame men for being unreliable, poisoning gender relations further.
****
The old family system is dying, purposefully killed by minority ideologies of progressivism and feminism. The right knows what is missing and rages at what it is losing, while not being able to free itself from the symptoms of the sickness. The left can not acknowledge that it is sick, because doing so would shatter their ideological myths.
But the left see some who have not been inflicted, and they rage against them, seething at what what they are missing and rage at having it shoved in their face by those like Ann Romney and Sarah Palin, who have and are everything they can not acknowledge they desire.
Meanwhile, the average women laments how she can’t find a good man, while the average man laments how he can’t find a good women. Both emotionally scarred, with their ability to have a loving marriage crippled by the system they support (because its the politically correct thing to support) but don’t understand. They wonder why they just can’t find the love they so desperately want, not being able to see the system that is taking it away for what it is.
They exchange love for pleasure, but in their deepest being they know the pleasure always leaves them feeling hollow. They yearn for love, but are unable to find it because the continual quest for the pleasure necessary to stave of the void in their heart destroys their very ability to experience that love.
The “gender war” continues, pushed by the hurting and the ideologues who need someone to blame for their loneliness and emptiness, but either can not see or can not acknowledge the system that is doing this to them.
Is it any wonder why women’s happiness has been steadily declining?
Government’s Lack of Mission
Continuing on in the Why Government Fails series, we will start with the main reason government doesn’t work: mission.
To accomplish anything an organization needs a mission to accomplish. You can’t plan unless you know what you are planning for and you can’t act rationally unless you know the reason for acting. For an organization or individual to succeed and prosper it needs a mission to work towards.
The problem with government is it doesn’t have a mission and it rarely can have clear goals. Unlike private companies, which have a clear underlying goal: make as much profit as possible within the law.
The government on the other hand does not and can not have such a clear, underlying mission because the government does not have a specific purpose, value, or interest it represents.
The government represents the diverse, mass interests of millions of different individuals, each with their own values and goals. These mass values and goals are often schizophrenic and mutually contradictory between groups, within groups, and even within individuals.
There is no way for a government to possibly please all these groups and interests, it is impossible.
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Let’s illustrate with an issue like poverty.
What is the government’s underlying mission?
Is it to maximize economic freedom whatever poverty may result?
Is it to maximize economic productivity to reduce prices so the poor can better afford goods?
Is it to keep employment high so that the poor can pull themselves up from poverty through hard work?
Is it to keep wages high so workers have a good standard of living keeping them out of poverty?
Is it to provide every individual has a basic standard of living to reduce absolute poverty?
Is it to promote economic equality so there is no relative poverty?
Is it to promote consumption to reduce immediate poverty?
Is it to promote long-term growth to reduce poverty in the future?
All of these goals are contradictory. A goal of freedom is inconsistent with having any other goals. Consumption and long-term growth come at the expense of each other. Economic equality reduces economic productivity. Providing a basic standard of living reduces productivity and the incentive to work. Keeping employment high often means subsidizing unproductive activity. High wages reduces jobs? Etc.
When it comes to poverty issues, whose interests should the government look out for. The poverty industry? Industry and business? Taxpayers? The poor? Unions? The blue collar working-man? And how should they look out for it?
Each of us probably has an answer, but even then for many it would be fairly garbled. For a government official there is no clear answer. There are simply hundreds of competing, contradictory interests and ideologies, each vying for the government to benefit them and do things according to their ideology.
****
Because the government has no mission, the government can not measure progress. For organizations measurement is a necessity for success. A business can know it’s succeeding if its profits are higher than the year before.
The government has no such way to measure success. Using the poverty example above, how would a government measure and define success. The Gini coefficient, GDP, GNP, the unemployment rate, the employment rate, the participation rate, median income, mean income, poverty thresholds?
Each measure of success carries certain ideological implications. GDP per capita and GNP measure productivity. Gini measures equality. Mean and median income both measure differently, the latter more towards equality of income. And so on.
There is no real way for government to measure success that would be acceptable across society.
****
Because each group and individual desires something different from the government the government can not help but fail. If the government implements gun control half the population believes the government is failing, if it does not the other half of the population believes it is.
The government can not succeed because it is impossible for the government to please everyone. It can only choose which groups to fail.
****
Because the government has a mess of contradictory interests rather than clear, consistent goals, its action usually comes out as an irrational muddle somewhere in the middle of people’s interests, rather than anything resembling a consistent plan.
Each successive government has its own agenda, which it only somewhat implements due to politically reality. Each of these agendas is pasted over-top of the previous system and previous agendas. Each interest group influences the agenda to skew it their way.
This leads to government being a confused, unfocused mess with no real goal to strive towards.
****
Reason #1 the government fails is a lack of a mission.
Lightning Round – 2012/08/29
Patheos discovers the fruits of feminism and they don’t like it.
Related: Feminists should not lie to young women.
Related: HUS also responds to the Rosin piece that started all this.
Related: The hollow fruits of feminism.
Religion makes you beta. Not overly surprising, given the state of modern churchianity.
The Red Pill for the manosphere: Each man must decide which is more important, love or sex.
If you marry, marry someone with a low partner count.
So, your parent’s divorcing decreases your life span by 5 years.
Related: “Parental divorce during childhood was the single strongest social predictor of early death.”
Related: The causes of divorce.
O’Rourke on the baby boomers. Excellent like most of O’Rourke’s stuff.
The real war is on children, not on women.
UMan provides a lessons on what girls like.
Cane with a some great satire on his previous Christian game debate.
Related: More on last week’s Christian game debate.
Related: SCA enters the Christian game debate with an excellent post.
Related: Vox advices has a Christian convert to game.
Why don’t men just get it?
Eye contact is important.
How not to be a racist: hehe.
Let’s have more teen pregnancy.
Why boys don’t read.
As a conservative who also listens to Rage Against the Machine, I found this to be very interesting.
Once you sell your soul once, it’s easy to sell it again.
Atheists demonstrate their open-mindedness.
And yet the socialists still want to have the government control the US’ and Canada’s resource industry. How stupid can they be?
Related: Socialized medicine in action.
I can’t believe that it took 7 years to find that standing in front of a bulldozer like an idiot makes you responsible for your own death. Stupid crusaders.
The former editor of the NYT admits to the NYT’s bias. Will wonders never cease?
Related: Jonathan Chait also admits to media bias.
Related: The leftist media enforces their bias.
Surprisingly, the NYT writes critically of single-motherhood. Unsurprisingly, the lack of “marriageable men” is blamed.
Related: A personal response by someone raised by a single mother.
This is the mainstream article of the week. Read it; it’s awesome satire and highly enjoyable. It’s got all the feminists, and other assorted idiots against it.
Related: Romney sounds like a decent fellow. Between this and the previous piece (read it) I think I might be coming to actually like Romney.
Related: The people who will be deciding the election. Oh my…
Related: The GOP does something right. Oh, yeah.
Student loans are a cancer.
To liberals, the real conservatives are the centrists.
The war on dihydrogen monoxide.
Paul Krugman is wrong? I think it would be more newsworthy if he was actually right.
(H/T: GL Piggy, Troglopundit, Maggie’s Farm, Althouse, Instapundit)
What is to be done?
I am a Patriot. During my life I hope to actually see the True North Strong and Free – not just sing it in the National Anthem. To find a wife and raise a family, with hope for a future. Gaming girls in foreign countries is better than marital theft, certainly – and it’s probably a fair bit better than Heroin – but it doesn’t leave much of a Legacy.
Running away will protect us for a time, but the Enemies of Life are implacable; this is a global ideology more infectious than proselytizing Christianity could ever hope to be. It’ll reach Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia sooner than you think – only by the time it gets there it won’t be called Feminism any more. Like the common cold, this virus mutates fast.
The MRM fell because it was premised upon weakness. Any true hope for the future will have to be premised upon Strength.
But that leaves the questions of what is to be done. How can we destroy the system that is destroying us?
How can we avoid the Bonobo Masturbation Society?
****
The options we have:
1) The Blue Pill: Play along with the system.
2) MRM: Fight the current legal system for equal rights from within the system.
3) Game/MGTOW: These options are essentially the same: retreat. You withdraw from the system.
4) Patriarchy: This is outwardly similar to the blue pill, with all the attendant risks, but is done intentionally with red pill frame and knowledge, rather than leaped into blindly.
5) Violence: Overthrow the current system with violent revolution.
****
The blue pill may work. For you, for now. But you could always wind up on the wrong end of the divorce or economic statistics with one bad week, and it leaves the system intact. This is no fight at all.
MRM may make the legal system more fair, but that’s all it will do. It will make divorce sting less, it will remove affirmative action to allow fair employment competitions, and it may do some other good things, but it is still based on progressive ideas of equality, fairness, human rights, social justice, and all that jazz and is still corrupt. In the long run it merely preserves the corrupt system, but blunts its edges, reducing consciousness, fixing the system further in place.
Game/MGTOW may work. For you, for now. But it is retreat; it is conceding that the system wins and hoping that if you either avoid or succeed at playing by the new rules of the system it might not eat you. You might avoid family court, unemployment, or unhappy marriage, but you are still a Bonobo happily masturbating away, enjoying yourself to avoid thinking if there isn’t something more fulfilling out there.
Violence won’t work. Right now the system is not corrupt enough to get enough people fired up for violence. In addition, the anti-progressive movement is small and is like herding bulls. There would be no way to win. Starting violence would turn the decline into a collapse and most revolutions end up eating their own children. Small scale violence accomplishes nothing except making the violent person’s ideology look bad. Violence should be avoided.
That leave patriarchy as the only hope.
****
So how does patriarchy help us win?
We must realize that any fight against the current progressivist system will take time, possibly generations. The war against progressivism is a war of ideology and ideas; changing the dominant paradigm is (usually) a slow process. It took progressivism and feminism over a century to bring our country to this point. It will take just as long to bring it back.
So, that leaves us with two things we must do: push our ideas and develop our ideology and breed the next generation.
First, we need to develop our ideas and put them out there; we must push the overton window. We have to put red pill knowledge out there, make it acceptable, and bring people to the cause. This is already being done; you can occasionally see red pill knowledge creep into the MSM. The manosphere is great for this.
More importantly to pushing our ideas, we have to live lives that are enviable. Ideas are great, but unless people see what’s in it for them, ideas alone will not suffice. We have to demonstrate what we are arguing for.
Live a red pill life that others are envious off and want to emulate. Praxis.
Second, breeding. The future of our society is determined by the next generation, so we need to create the next generation. On one hand, we have an advantage because progressivists are breeding themselves out of existence. On the other hand, if we all go MTGOW or PUA, then we aren’t breeding either.
So, marry a good women, have lots of kids, and raise them traditionally. Your life will be better, your life will be full and meaningful, and you’ll have a legacy you can be proud of.
Make sure to avoid a few pitfalls. Refuse to marry those who aren’t worthy of bearing your children (no rings for sluts). Be wary of the public school system; make sure to raise your kids right. Live as an example you want your kids to emulate.
Creating the next generation and developing our ideas is how an ideological war is won. So, do it.
****
That’s not to say game and MGTOW don’t help some. Both spread red pill ideas. In addition, PUA’s make promiscuity rougher and less fair, thus making promiscuity, already unattractive, less attractive for females. Both reduce the amount of marriageable men who will “man up”, leaving women asking “where did all the men go”, showing the corruption of the “sacred path for marriage”.
While they’re still acting the part of bonobos, they do have some positive impact in the ideological war.
The Gods of the Copybook Heading
Kipling is by far my favourite poet. Richard Anderson recently posted this poem on bureaucracy, so I’m taking the opportunity to do so as well.
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I Make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place.
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Heading said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four —
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
* * * * *
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began —
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire —
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!