Category Archives: Society

Digging Deeper on Power

We come to a third edition of the topic of women and power. Both Donal and Chad have responded with criticisms, so I’ll respond.

Donal’s response is, as he admits, somewhat unordered and incoherent, but essentially he denies that men act as a class and states that modern weaponry has lowered the power differentials between men and women.

Chad’s response is wrapped in parable. I’ve never been too good with allegory and as of my writing this I don’t think he’s done yet, but from my understanding he’s likening men to land and women to water. The land shapes the environment and guides and controls the water, but the water flows where it flows within the framework the land has shaped and has the power to either destroy the land or make it bountiful.

From these, I don’t think we disagree as much as my critics think we do.

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First, on the nature of power:

The female, and indirect method, is to make the world desire to change and help it do so.

I think many of my critics are missing or misunderstanding a critical piece:

any power [women] may display is simply proxy power given them by men.

They can not, as a class, have power in the public sphere that is not given them by men.

So maybe I should restate a little: women as a class do not have any inherent public/political power.

Women do have political/public power but only that given them or supported by men. Indirect power, the power the make the world desire to change and to help change is only effective when men give them men’s power to effect that change.

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Second, we will go more into the nature of the public and private realms:

Oh, and another thing: the personal is the political, at least in the sense that political power is heavily influence by personal and private spheres of power. As anyone who has worked in the political field knows, politics is largely about managing personal connections and networks of like-minded people.

Donal seems to be misunderstanding what I meant, which is understandable as I didn’t explicitly state or link to some background assumptions:

In the public realm, where personal relationships are superseded by hierarchical and organizational ones, physical violence is power and power is physical violence,

The Way of Men has more on this, but men exist in a world of function-based, hierarchical organizations, ie. public organizations, while women exist in a world of one-on-one personal relationships. The former does not eliminate personal connections or friendships, but rather changes the nature of them: the personal relationships and networks exist in a framework where function, shared virtue, and ability towards a shared goal are the measures of judgment rather than emotional closeness, non-judgmentalism, and acceptance.

To explain what I mean, think of the playground. Boys generally self-organize into large group activities, such as soccer, where most other boys are allowed to join as they will (except maybe the occasional incompetent or nerd). Girls generally break up into pairs. This doesn’t mean the boys playing soccer don’t have personal relationships, but that the relationships exist in a public, hierarchical, function-based environment, the soccer team, and are superseded by a higher value, winning the game. Politics is playground soccer on a grand scale. The management of personal relationships and networks in such a public system is different than that in a private system, such as the family.

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Finally, on women and men as a class.

Speaking of unified displays of male strength, I think that it should be noted that men rarely act together as a “class.” It isn’t how we are wired. There isn’t really a Team Man counterpart to Team Woman. So any argument founded on a notion that men can overcome women “as a class” fails as a foundational matter.

This misses the entire point of my argument. There is no ‘overcoming women’. There is no war between men and women, to think there is a class war based on sex is to fully adopt the neo-marxist foundations of feminism. To think there is a power conflict between men and women is to lose the ideological war entirely before it even begins. If we accept a sexual class struggle exists, we might as well give up now and enjoy the decline because we’ve already accepted the enemy’s frame and joined him.

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Here we get to the main point I’m trying to make:

Men and women are not enemies and are not in competition, they are naturally made to complement each other. Women are naturally creatures of the private sphere, men are naturally creatures of the public sphere and the social arrangement of men and women, often referred to as patriarchy, of each tending to own their sphere works fantastically well for both men and women. Women have no inherent public political power because their inherent power rests in the private sphere, the sphere in which they are comfortable.

We do not have a competition between male power and female power, because the nature of their power is different. Rather we have a competition between one group of civilization-hating men and other groups of men, particularly white conservative males, in which women are but one group being used as weapons. Women are involved because the former group, using their control of cultural institutions, have managed to take the concerns of a small group of hurting, betrayed, broken, self-destructive, and/or high-testosterone women and elevate them to a class struggle in which most of the class does not share the small groups concerns and does not want to fight and most of those that do want to are primarily doing so because they have been lied to and the struggle is just the accepted environment in which they live.

The war is against that group of civilization-hating men. Feminists are the symptom of entropy not the disease. If we want to start winning we have to avoid mistaking the leaves for the roots.

Private and Public Spheres

Some have disagreed with my previous post, both in the comments and on their blogs. The jist of common objections are:

Women have the power of supplying willing, enthusiastic sex.

Only a Godly woman, submitted to a man with Godly masculinity, will be able to resist. His masculinity will appeal to her flesh, he will be put in authority by God, and hr will derive his direct power from God in the same way she will derive her indirect power from the same source. She will magnify everything in that household to be more as her husband and more as God, and the same in the community.

It overlooks the realm of indirect/private/influence power.

Now these are not wrong, a woman does have power in her private sphere: she has power to influence her husband, power to inculcate values in her children, and power to otherwise influence her local community and personal relationships.* I even briefly mentioned this in my original post: “Women do have a specific power: women are wonderful.” But this power is irrelevant to the discussion as women’s power lies in the realm of individual private relationships.

On the other hand, men’s power lies in the realm of hierarchical public organizations, although, they can bring their power to bear in the private sphere as well.

That is why I specified that women as a class are powerless. A class can only exist in the public realm and women’s power does not transfer into the public realm unless men allow it to and support it. (This does not mean that women’s power if meaningless or non-existent, only that it does not exist in the public realm).

In the private realm, emotions and personal relationships rule. Where harmonious relationships are paramount power can come in many forms as emotional and spiritual violence, the kinds of violence women excel at, are just as effective against individuals as physical violence and the use of physical violence is often destructive to harmonious personal relationships.

In the public realm, where personal relationships are superseded by hierarchical and organizational ones, physical violence is power and power is physical violence, however well-hidden the violence may be. Spiritual and emotional violence are useless as as they can only truly work against isolated individuals or family units, not tribes or thedes. In the public realm, even when public power may come from authority, legitimacy, expertise, tradition, at heart it still flows from physical violence or the implication thereof. Democracy is bloodless war, public policy is coercive confiscation, redistribution, and regulation, authority derives from implied violence, and legitimacy derives from being a part of a hierarchy backed by violence. In our modern society, violence is mostly implied and hidden behind many layers of bureaucracy, but the system still rests on it.**

And women, as a class, are not capable of violence. They can not, as a class, have power in the public sphere that is not given them by men.

In the public realm there is know balance of power between the patriarchy and the matriarchy, there is only a power balance between civilized men and uncivilized men, and the women belonging to either group.

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Why do you think feminists try to make the personal political?

If feminists could succeed at extending the personal realm into the public realm, to have it annex the public realm, women would be able to exert far more power over the public realm through their power in the private realm.

Of course, the personal can not be made political, you can not have individual private relationships with more than about 150 people, let alone millions. It is impossible for the private realm to conquer the public realm, but the public realm can conquer the private realm, so when trying to mix the two the public realm always comes out on top. This is why feminism always ends in bureaucracy. This is why leftism, however pro-anarchy it may be, always ends in bureaucracy.

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This separation of public and private power makes a case for extreme subsidiarity. If most political decision making is devolved to the Dunbar level, the private realm could conquer the public realm, and we could have a political structure that does not fundamentally rest on violence. This is called tribalism.

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As for sex explicitly, there is nothing women could do if men decided to take it forcefully. Thankfully, due to the Christian civilization feminists are intent on destroying, most men have been inculcated with values that are in opposition to rape. While women’s love might be a strong private force, I’m fairly sure that if civilized Christian values stopped being indoctrinated into children from a young age, most men would not be as adverse to rape as a few of the commenters think they are.

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As for female serial killers: as I said, “There is a .01% of women capable of physically matching the average man. This is not significant.” Some women are outside the norm, that doesn’t mean anything to women as a class.

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* I should mention that even here, those powers exist only because the stronger men in her life allow them to women. Men could easily take them away, making those powers dependent on men.

** This is not necessarily a moral judgment; morally legitimate violence is necessary for any polity. Also, for those wanting to get metaphysical on my use of morality here, God is good because God is powerful.

Women Have No Power

“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” – Chairman Mao

Donal wrote a post on patriarchy where he mentioned my previous post. He included graphs on the healthy balance of power between the sexes.

The graph is nonsense though, as it is based on a mistaken presupposition. Donal, and almost everybody, get the same thing wrong:

Women have no power. None.

Women as a class have are powerless. Any ‘power’ they have is simply proxy power given them by a group of men. This is nature, this is reality.

All power is, at base, violence. The iron fist may be wrapped in any number of velvet gloves, but at base the iron fist rules. Violence is power, power is violence.

Men, as a class, are the apex predator, the greatest enactors of violence our planet has ever seen. Women, as a class, are incapable of effective violence,* as women simply do not have the strength capabilities to enact effective violence, and therefore are at the mercy of men. This is reality; any system that doesn’t take into account women’s powerlessness is a denial of such.

Because women are incapable of effective violence, they have no power in their own right**, any power they may display is simply proxy power given them by men.

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This is important to know, because feminists are not the real enemy. Feminists are not the disease, they’re a symptom that would not have changed society at all if men did not change it for them.

It’s not the female judge or female bureaucrat booting you from your home and kidnapping your children, it’s the male cop (as for female cops, would a 5’4″ really be able to remove you from your home if she didn’t have men to call on?). It wasn’t women who decided Roe vs. Wade or gave women the vote. It wasn’t women who passed the Title IX, the Equal Pay Act, or the VAWA. It’s not feminists who own Jezebel, Gawker, Slate, or Salon. These things only happen because men do them.

We can and should fight against feminists, but feminism is only one aspect of the modern leftist project and subservient to them. (See how readily they are being pushed aside for transexual activists). Feminists are pawns that have been given power by men to serve the long march and destroy the traditional family.

Women only have the power that is given to them by one class of men who are using modern, feminist women as weapons against the rest of society. If they were not being used as tools, feminists would be powerless. If it were not for the men trying to destroy our society by female ’empowerment’, the modern women would be powerless.

There is no power balance between men and women. There is only a power balance between men who desire civilization and men who hate civilization (or at least love the pleasures of the flesh and harems more), the women follow the lead of whichever group of men they choose to follow. Sadly, the men who hate civilization offer temporarily pleasing but ultimately self-destructive gibmedats, while civilization can only offer a life of duty and future for civilization.

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* If you don’t believe me, try a test: if you are a man, the next time you shake a woman’s hand don’t hold back, if you are a woman, ask a man you know to shake your hand as he would shake a man’s hand (this won’t work with a limp-wristed mangina). There is a .01% of women capable of physically matching the average man. This is not significant.

** Women do have a specific power: women are wonderful. Men like women and will got to great lengths to protect, provide for, and please women they see as being in their care.

Cyclical History

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever…
All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun…
There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be among those who come after.
(Ecclesiastes 1 ESV, Selected)

History is cyclical. There is nothing new under the sun.

Civilization is in constant war with chaos. Chaos eventually, inevitably, triumphs. The civilizational cycle of growth and death never ends.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Everything man creates turns to ashes, there is no relief from the curse of Adam.

Man endures until he can’t; death his only relief. His children then endure until they can’t.

Moth and rust destroy; thieves break in and steal. All go to the grave.

Everything man builds collapses; every institution man creates falls.

Every institution but one:

The Catholic Church has yet to fall. It has been corrupted, it has been split, it has been broken, but it has always endured.

This is the light in the darkness man constantly wars against.

There is no hope, there is no relief, there is no victory, but one.

The cycle was broken once: a bloody body upon an instrument of torture, an empty pit of death.

A fire descended, a burning illumination among the horrifying darkness.

The cycle of death and entropy never ceases, but that small fire promises hope that it will.

There is a final escape from the entropic cycle for those who have the eyes to see.

For those that keep their eyes closed, the chaos will follow them beyond the grave.

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And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
…
But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.
(Revelation 21:3-4,8 ESV)

Patriarchy = Civilization

I’ve implied this before, but now I will make it explicit:

Patriarchy is civilization. Civilization is patriarchy.

The two concepts are indistinguishable, differing only in emphasis.

Any time someone says patriarchy, they are, whether consciously or not, referring to civilization.

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Civilization is built when men produce more than they need to satiate their desires; civilization is the surplus value males create for the future, particularly their children.

Men will only produce surplus value if it will increase their returns in the marriage market (h/t:RPR). It is not that marriage itself is of value to men, rather marriage provides a means by which man can ensure paternity of his children. With the paternity of his children assured, man can invest invest in his children. Assured paternity binds father to children.

This binding of father to son and daughter is civilization, it may even be humanity itself.*

Patriarchy is a word encompassing all the mechanisms society has created so that man can be assured of the paternity of his children and will bind himself to them. It includes monogamy, pre-marital chastity, prohibitions on adultery, slut-shaming, the criminalization of prostitution, cad-shaming, father as the household head, proscriptions on divorce, patrilineality, and fatherhood itself.

These mechanisms are what create civilization.

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From the wiki for JD Unwin who completed a marriage study on civilization and marriage in the 1930s.

Unwin’s conclusions, which are based upon an enormous wealth of carefully sifted evidence, may be summed up as follows. All human societies are in one or another of four cultural conditions: zoistic, manistic, deistic, rationalistic. Of these societies the zoistic displays the least amount of mental and social energy, the rationalistic the most. Investigation shows that the societies exhibiting the least amount of energy are those where pre-nuptial continence is not imposed and where the opportunities for sexual indulgence after marriage are greatest. The cultural condition of a society rises in exact proportion as it imposes pre-nuptial and post-nuptial restraints upon sexual opportunity.
…
The whole of human history does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilized unless it has been absolutely monogamous, nor is there any example of a group retaining its culture after it has adopted less rigorous customs.

Decadence leads to barbarism.

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The problem is free-riding. For both men and women, it is in an individual’s self-interest to get around the mechanisms of patriarchy. A man can have more darwinian success if he impregnates a woman and another man raises the child or if he impregnates many women. A woman can have more darwinian success if she has is impregnated by a fitter man than she can marry then has an attainable man raise the child. When free-riding becomes too common, the assurance of patriarchy weakens, then disappears.

What we experienced in the 20th century was the triumph of the free riders over civilization. The culture that was indispensable for suppressing the free riders was hijacked and turned on its head. Not only does culture now fail in its primary pro-civilizational mission, it actively discourages women from cooperation and makes it as easy as possible for them cheat their responsibilities… The cost of this failure is civilization itself and there can be no greater price to pay than Eden.

The bond between father and child is destroyed. Men lose their will to create a surplus and build for the future.

Civilization dies.

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Patriarchy is civilization.

Anybody opposing patriarchy is opposing civilization. The destruction of patriarchy is the destruction of civilization.

Whatever feminists and liberals may think of patriarchy, the violence and rapine of barbarism is far worse.

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* The binding of father to children has many benefits on an individual level as well.

Assertiveness, Leadership, and Bitchiness

Dalrock posted avideo. I had seen it earlier and was going to comment on it, but never got around to it, so I’ll comment on it now. Watch it:

Cane also had a good post on it, but I’m going to take this a bit of a different direction.

You’ve all heard feminists whine about how women are called bitchy where a man would be called assertive or women are called bossy, while men are called leaders. It’s one of those memes that seem to continually float around. (Any young women who may read my blog should take note of this post).

The reason women are called bitchy or bossy is because in general feminists, and many non-feminist women, do not seem to understand that there is a middle ground of assertiveness between being a pushover and being bitchy. Leadership exists in the space between passiveness and bossiness. This commercial illustrates that ignorance perfectly.

There are five mini-stories in the commercial, where there’s a before, where the woman is sorry and an after where the woman is “confident” (although, bitchy would be a better term in most cases).

In the first, the woman interrupts someone, probably her boss, in who’s making a public presentation. In that case, ‘sorry’ is only the minimal politeness. Now, they should have focused on her calling her own question ‘stupid’, that was the real problem with that example, and shows a basic lack of confidence. But in the second, instead of just having her show more confidence in her own ideas, they jump her straight to bitchy. She just flat out interrupts the guy making the presentation in mid-sentence. That’s not assertive, that’s just plain rude. The assertive way to pull this off, would have been ‘Excuse me, why don’t…?” When you are publicly interrupting someone in the middle of a presentation, ‘sorry’ is just plain common courtesy.

In the second one, the women barges into someone else’s office. For this one, there’s nothing particularly wrong in either example, both ‘sorry’ or a polite ‘do you got a minute?’ are basic courtesy when interrupting someone. There’s the small problem that the commercial paints the basic politeness of ‘sorry’ for interrupting someone busy, as being somehow weak when it is not.

The third one, illustrates a girl apologizing when she shouldn’t. The commercial is right here, if someone sits don’t beside you, apologizing is silly. But instead of simply having her simply not apologize and ignoring him, which would be the confident thing to do, she smirks at him like she’s purposely being an ass and winning some sort of non-existent competition. That is being passive-aggressively bitchy; between men, that kind of attitude at the wrong time could result in a fight.

The fourth and the fifth ones are the worst though. In the before skits, one woman passes a child to the husband and says sorry and the other takes part of a blanket her husband is hogging and says sorry. In either case, saying ‘sorry’ is rather silly. Nothing wrong is being done in the former and the husband is in the wrong in the latter; no apologies needed. In the former, just saying ‘take him’ or, in the latter, just taking the blanket without a word is perfectly fine. But again, instead of showing a confident woman doing what needs to be done, they jump straight to bitchy. Going out of your way to say ‘sorry, not sorry’ is not assertive, it is passive-aggressive bitchiness, as is taking the whole blanket on purpose.

This is why “assertive” women are called bossy or bitchy. It is not because of some sort of double-standard, it is because many of them don’t know the basic rules of assertiveness game.

Assertive men do what they need to do, but, as the situation calls for it, they either don’t mention it (such as in 3, 4, or 5) or show basic politeness when they do it (such as in 1 or 2). Only aggressive assholes, the male equivalent of bossy bitches, violate someone else’s space or speaking time or go out of there way to rub their “assertiveness” in someone else’s face.

Among men, that kind of behaviour is what starts fights, but men can’t/don’t generally verbally or physically attack women, so those kinds of women get away with the rather minor penalty of being labelleda bitch.

So, women, if you don’t want to be called bitchy or bossy, learn the rules of decorum game, because the kind of passive-aggressive jackassery shown in this commercial is not “assertive”, it’s just being a jerk.

Traditional Family

In my earlier post, lolz commented:

In my humble opinion, the tradcon exchange between husband and wife that you advocate is not really all that equitable – and certainly not what one sees in ancient societies.

He also posted a link (read it all, it’s pretty good, except the conclusion which is too egalitarian and hedonistic for my taste):

In other words, people we call “tradcons” are frequently hewing to a “tradition” that is mostly a recent invention. Throughout virtually all of history, up to and including much of the world still today, “the family” or even “the nuclear family” meant something very different: what it usually was was father+mother+the kids as part of an extended family, with grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles and/or cousins frequently living under one roof, or in very close proximity to each other, in a mutually supportive environment. “The family” was all these people, usually dedicated to helping each other, often forming alliances with other families to their mutual benefit. Even in societies where it was the norm for the youngsters to move away, they usually moved in mutually supportive groups together only a day or two away from the rest of the extended family, whom they would often get back together with in times of trouble. Even in societies when young men struck out on their own, they usually did so in mutually supportive groups, not alone against the world.

The ancient idea of “the family” was not “we get together and have dinner at holidays and provide each other some emotional support.” It was much more a matter of, “we work together during the day, we make our meals together, we live in one house or adjacent houses, we fight off enemies together, when one of us is sick we all get together to help. Two of our young’uns are getting hitched? We may need to build them a house because we can’t fit them in here right now so let’s give ‘em a new place over on that hill up yonder.”

First, I’ll answer the ‘equitable’ thing. lolz is right, it’s not equitable. Having to work 40-60 hours a week away from your home and family is definitely the shorter end of the stick to raising your own family, as I’ve written before, women definitely benefited from the ‘traditional’ nuclear family. The problem is, unless you’re willing to abandon your kids as latchkey children to daycare and the public schools or you have family that’s willing to take care of them most of the week, you need someone to take care of the kids, and given biological differences between the sexes, the man staying home will result in marital problems and divorce. It makes sense to have the woman stay home.

Which brings us to the next point: both lolz and Esmay are right.

The nuclear family is not ‘traditional’ or the way things were, it was an adaptation to modern industrial society. What the article above failed to mention, is that ‘work’ as we know it today, is a recent invention. Until the industrial revolution, most people’s ‘work’ was either the family farm or or the family home business (or in tribal societies, men hunted, women gathered). There was no real separation between work and home life, they were the same. Sadly, we do not exist in that society. To not starve, most people have to work outside the home. The nuclear family is the best adaptation to that economic reality we have.

Ideally, we’d be able to get back to that tribal, extended family structure. One of my hopes, if that someday I will be able to be able to create a tribal structure among my family, and maybe with my friends as well. We’ll live on a mostly self-sustaining farm subsidized by some small income from a couple projects I’m working on. That will take a lot of work, and will be a lifelong project, but hopefully I’ll get there.

But for now, the realities of modern society constrain me, constrain us. We can try to build a traditional, tribal structure, but that is not going to happen right away. Before that, I have to get a wife, then keep my children from having their souls devoured by the progressive school system, that means the nuclear, breadwinning family is a necessity for now.

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As an aside, I would actually not mind being a stay-at home dad. A commenter at Vox’s site has described his adventures as such:

Hey man… we don’t JUST play video games all day. I mean sometimes its almost 8am before they finish with their school work for the day. And sometimes we go down to the lake and shoot turtles with the 10/22s… or fish… or have great glorious nerf wars in the tree forts. and there is a swimming pool out there for the really nice days… about 300 of them a year.

Ok well… its mostly video games…

He’s also described the risk of it:

Look the truth is if I wasn’t such a stupendous badass my wife would’ve lost interest years ago. Happens all the time. The stay at home dad thing is basically betting your family’s future on your ability to maintain your badass man credibility with practically the whole deck stacked against you. The risks are huge. Of course.. if you pull it off you get to spend all day with your kids shooting turtles, fishing, playing Black Ops II, and watching Sportcenter. so I mean… its not entirely irrational.

Honestly, that sounds like a lot of fun, and would be much better life than going to the office every day.

Even the risk of the family being destroyed, while much higher, is not as brutally punishing, as you won’t be the one paying child support and alimony, and you’ll probably have a decent chance of getting custody.

The question is, could you find a girl okay with the arrangement and could you stay badass. I figure, if you ran a little hobby farm in the country, fished, and hunted, your odds wouldn’t be too bad. You’d still get the provider rep if the meat on the table was something you slaughtered or hunted yourself.

It would take a lot of work to set up, but I’d be okay with the arrangement of staying home on the acreage with the kids while the wife worked.

The Simpsons and Cultural Decline

I’ve been watching the first two seasons of the Simpsons the last couple weeks. It’s been years since I’ve watched the show, but I still remember the first ten seasons or so as some of the best TV yet produced.

The first season came out in 1989-90, just 25 years ago, and I remember the show being controversial when it came out; I wasn’t allowed to watch it until some time in high school, about a decade after it first started showing. It was controversial enough that Bush actually used the Simpsons as a negative example of a family. Yet, re-watching now, it’s amazing how tame and traditional it is compared to media offerings today.

Obviously the ‘offensive’ humour in the Simpsons is nothing compared to stuff like Family Guy or South Park, but that’s not the whole of it or even the most important part. It’s not the stated messages, but the basic assumptions in the show.

The Simpsons family is intact and stable, if slightly dysfunctional, and hold to functional, almost traditional, family values. They all love each other, however much they might bicker. Homer is a flawed man, often selfish or stupid, but still loving and caring towards his family. Marge is shown to love and respect Homer, despite her occasional anger at his flaws. Bart disrespects Homer occasionally, but it is shown as a clear deviancy for laughs; it also clearly shown that he does look up to and admire Homer. The kids fight, but at heart care for each other.

Compare those family values that to the three highest-rated sitcoms of 2013: Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, and Modern Family. The first is about a bunch of (fornicating) nerds and their slut friend who spend the entire show snarking at each other. The second is about a cad, his divorced brother, and his nephew who regularly snark at each other; the cad is shown as cool, while the ‘family man’ is shown as a loser. According to Wiki, the third is about a blended family, a somewhat normal family, and a gay couple; the ‘modern family’ is so screwed up wiki needs a chart to keep family relations in order.

The Simpsons has a subtext of Homer as patriarch. A few times in the first couple of seasons Homer makes a family decision, whether it is selling the TV to attend counseling, buying a new TV, or choosing a camping spot, to name a few examples. The rest of the family complains or looks unhappy, yet it is not even questioned that, however flawed he or his decision may be, it is Homer’s place to decide these things. The show just assumes the father makes the major family decisions. Other than Duck Dynasty, would any modern show simply assume the father’s position as head of the home?

The episode Homer’s Night Out, centres around a picture of Homer dancing with a belly dancer at a bachelor party. The (non-nude) picture creates a town-wide scandal, brands Homer as a ‘swinger’, and is seen as something fundamentally deviant and abnormal. In any modern show would bachelor party antics, especially such comparatively tame ones, be shown as being so shockingly deviant?

The show assumes that normal people go to church on Sundays and say grace at mealtime. Prayer is a casually accepted part of the show, as is religion. Does any major show today, other than Duck Dynasty, so casually accept religion as a normal, unremarkable, everyday part of life?

Other, less remarkable, moral lessons are also included. The pro-family/loyalty message of Life on the Fast Lane. How Marge’s sisters constant denigration of Homer is shown as negative, destructive behaviour. In one episode, Marge is casually referred to as Mrs. Homer Simpson.

All this is not to say the Simpsons is a font of traditional values, it is a liberal show, it does have some fem-centrism, and is rather subversive, but it is a good example of just how fast our culture is collapsing. Just a couple decades ago, the Simpsons was a controversial show that was held up by the president as an example of family dysfunction. Yet compared to today’s cultural wasteland, where broken families are common, disrespect and degeneracy are the norm, and the husband as the head of the family is, at best, a joke, it is very tame, almost traditional.

25 years is all it took. In 20 years, will Two and a Half Men and Modern Family be relatively tame and traditional?

Profaning the Cathedral’s Gods

Something interesting pointed out by Nydwracu on Twitter that I think deserves a bit more of a mention than a retweet.

Buzzfeed (webcache) has a listicle (ie: an intellectually absent presentation of stolen images) of facts about swearing on Twitter. The second and third charts have a list of offensive words. Such words as fuck, pussy, shit, ass, retard, and bitch are simply stated in the graph, but nigga and cunt are spelt n***a and c**t.

To make it more interesting, if you look at the original report both nigga and cunt are spelt out normally, which means that Buzzfeed specifically and purposefully went out of its way to censor those specific words.

You can tell what our society holds profane and holy by what words are unspeakable.

I am interested in how cunt gained so much greater exosemantic negativity than pussy or bitch. I would guess it’s because cunt is generally used against women exhibiting negative masculine behaviours, while pussy is generally used against men exhibiting negative feminine behaviours and bitch is generally used for either the same purposes as pussy or against women exhibiting negative feminine behaviours.

I guess its acceptable to call out effiminate men and misbehaving women, but not masculine women.

****

On a completely unrelated note, here’s something too big for tomorrow’s Lightning Round or Twitter, but not worth its own post. I ended up at the race realism page on something grossly mistitled RationalWiki (thanks, HBD Chick) and found this far too amusing not to point out

Adaptation to environments, including social environments, through natural and sexual selection is the linchpin of evolution. Remembering this means knowing why scientific racism is ridiculous. To argue that races or ethnic groups differ innately in intelligence, however defined, is exactly equal to an assertion that intelligence has proven less adaptive for some people than for others. This at minimum requires an explanation, a specifically evolutionary explanation, beyond mere statistical assertion; without that it can be assumed to be cultural bias or noise. Since most human intelligence is in fact social intelligence — the main thing the human mind is built for is networking in human societies — this would require this social evolutionary arms race to have somehow stopped.

It isn’t often someone so thoroughly destroys their own argument within three sentences. Thank you RationalWiki, you amused me for a minute.

For those who don’t see it, intelligence (measured through IQ) /= social intelligence.

Breeding and Dysgenics

Gromar is wondering how to get intelligent women to breed to avoid dysgenics.

My question: why do we need intelligent women to breed?

Most intelligent women have options (exciting careers, schooling, etc) apart from family. Because they have these options they are going to base their breeding habits on the societally-approved feminist script.

Changing the entire script will be almost impossible, as will making significant numbers of women go against the herd.

Wouldn’t it be much easier to convince intelligent men to breed many children with women of average intelligence?

Mating doesn’t have to be assort itself by intelligence. Most men would naturally prefer a pretty face and sweet disposition to intelligence anyways. Convincing them to do what they want to do naturally should be simpler.

As a side effect, if smart men start marrying and breeding with dimwits, while smart women end up aged, lonely, and barren, future smart women may clue in.