The Class-Filled Classless Utopia

To the left...

Whites = white skin regardless of ethnic background
African-Americans = black skin regardless of ethnic background
Asian-Americans = slanted eyes regardless of ethnic background
Latinos = Spanish speaking regardless of ethnic background

and now it just hit me that...

LGBT = anyone who isn't straight regardless of sexual orientation

It's all about broad class, isn't it? I thought gay was men, lesbians women, etc, but apparently if you're anything but straight you're part of the LGBT class. Politically, it works wonders to get people organized. Individual rights-wise... it destroys people's individuality through mass peer pressure. That's why if you tell a lefty that you're gay and conservative, they look shocked. Same goes for black and GOP or any other combination that doesn't equal minority and Democrat. Like ethnicity, the left fail to realize there are lines between gays, lesbians, bis and transgenders. Human nature is to be tribal and these tribal lines appear in all things.

That's why I read GayPatriot. You get a non-party directed view of gay conservatives and their issues with both sides. Read it. You'll love it if you love freedom.

Lester Burnham: American Hero

One of the greatest dramas I've ever seen is American Beauty. Lauded by tons of critics, winner of a dozen awards, on the lists of countless “Best of...”; its already been turned upside down in interpretation. It's a satire, a drama, a love story, an attack on middle America. It's everything to everyone. I haven't read all reviews and essays on it, but I haven't come across anything that has taken a more face-value interpretation of the movie. Specifically, that Lester Burnham, the hero of the movie because he rejects the materialism and hollowness of suburbia, is in fact a new icon of traditional marriage and alpha male behavior.

Let's summarize: 40-year-old Lester has hit his mid-life crisis with the speed of the space shuttle. Caught between his monotone job at a media magazine, insecure daughter Jane and cold wife Carolyn, Lester has felt hollow and “dead” for years. But, as he tells the audience in the first act, “its never too late to get it back”. Lester does this by becoming infatuated with Jane's flirty best friend Angela, buying pot from his new neighbors' son, quitting his job and blackmailing the company and pretty much doing whatever he wants. The movie also has several sub-plots including affairs, courtships, homosexuality, death, beauty, etc, but our focus is the lovable “Les”.

When we first see Lester, he wakes up like many of us do: completely unenthusiastic with what is to come in the next 10-14 hours. Dressed in a two-piece pajama outfit, which has vertical stripes akin to prison bars, he gets into the shower for a daily dose of his happy time. He calls it “the high point of my day”. Through a window, he watches his wife out in their garden, already in her work clothes, trimming roses. She chats idly with their very friendly neighbor Jim, and his lover... Jim. Lester's morning ends with his briefcase opening up on him after being nagged by Carolyn about being late. The look she gives him is as cold as liquid oxygen. Suffice to say, Lester could die in his sleep and he wouldn't be the only one happy with the death.

Between this sequence and the Angela catalyst, we are shown how much Carolyn is defined by status and work. When Lester tells her that his employer is making everyone write out a job description to find out who's worth keeping, she immediately tells him to write it. We don't hear the entire conversation, but it can be assumed he mentioned that a manager at the magazine lost $50 000 of company money on a hooker. During dinner, Carolyn plays old jazz and big band tunes much to the chagrin of her husband and daughter. She steamrolls their objections with a “I cooked dinner” defense. The next day, Carolyn, a realtor, shows a house to several people, but none bit at the juicy apple. She reacts to this failure badly, crying hysterically and slapping herself in an empty room of the house. But as fast as she began she stops, silently walking out of the room.

In the movie, Carolyn is made out to be the bad guy, and she is on so many levels. Her careerism, her materialism, her coldness towards her husband are all bad things, but she isn't entirely to blame. Lester is the man, the husband, the protector and provider. As a husband, its Lester's job to take control and direct the family. But he didn't. Somewhere, he let his responsibilities go and let Carolyn take hold. I noticed that Lester's actions are mostly defined by his relationship with Carolyn. Would Lester need to have a infatuation with a teenage cheerleader if his wife was more loving? Probably not. Though I'm not excluding that a major driving force of his change is to sleep with Angela; Lester was, before and after seeing Angela, controlled directly and indirectly by the actions of his wife. His relationship with Jane is not outside this, either. His long ignoring of his daughter is paralleled by his wife's, except she isn't remorseful about it. In fact, she celebrates not being the hated parent when Jane rips Lester for his lax affection, but later smacks Jane for questioning her love.

While the movie does skewer suburbia like so many other movies do, Lester doesn't really rebel so much as he takes his rightful place in the household. Yes, he starts smoking pot, quits his corporate job (dunno how “corporate” in the IBM sense a media magazine is, but whatever), plays 60s music and insults his wife by calling her a “money-grubbing freak”, but he also gets $60 000 from his job through blackmail, buys himself his dream car and chases after a young woman. Not exactly the icon of anti-corporate America. But what he is though is the icon of born-again masculinity and traditional gender roles. After “finding himself” through lust, pot and a giant set of balls, he begins to dominate his wife. Before, her screeching voice yelling “LESTER” would literally make him slump, but later in the movie he is taking her on and surpassing her control of the relationship. He becomes attractive in her eyes once again because he's standing up for himself and emitting alpha behavior, not because he's got a new car or dresses differnetly. Eventually, they almost rekindle their love life until Carolyn freaks at a couch almost getting stained. In one of the many loved scenes from American Beauty, Lester slams a pillow over and over and yells “Its! Just! A! Couch!” and “its just stuff”. Yet, just a minute previous, he congratulated himself for buying a perfect 1970 Pontiac Firebird that no doubt chewed up a good portion of his $60 000. While this materialist hypocrisy is never pointed out by the script, it does make me smile that only Carolyn, the materialistic wife, is hated for her materialism, while Lester, the “rebel” husband that buys classic cars, gets a pass. I don't think writer Alan Ball, a gay, new agey, leftie sort of guy, meant it to be that way, but that's how it came out. And because of that, Lester loses a big edge of his written anti-establishment persona and becomes a more realistic, more American, more alpha male hero. A rare find in Hollywood.

From my perspective, Lester goes from shlub to stud in every sense. He loses the accountant-style clothes that were no doubt suggested by his wife and takes up more blue collar outfits. He stands straighter, losing his “Walter Matthieu” walk. He works out and takes care of himself. His behavior goes from soft-spoken mumbler to stern voiced, though it doesn't always work out the way he wants. He quits taking orders and starts giving them in the family, with his wife and, most importantly, with himself. These are all things that staple the traditional gender role of a man. Of course, the provider role goes out the window when he quit his job, but in today's world, the provider role is considered shlub unless backed up by the more masculine behavior that was Lester's persona change. Otherwise, he'd just be a piggy bank with a penis.

And that isn't exactly a rare cage the modern American male lives in, is it?

Leftist Mythology and Real Faith

A story:

'Before beginning my talk I want to tell you a story about Moses. When
he struck the rock and it brought forth water, he thought, 'What a good
opportunity to have a bath!'

He removed his clothes, put them aside on the rock and entered the
water. When he got out and wanted to dress, his clothes had vanished.
An Israeli had stolen them.'

The Israeli representative jumped up furiously and shouted, 'What are
you talking about? There were no Israelis there then!'

The Palestinian representative smiled and said:
'And now that we have made that quite clear, I will begin my speech.'

Sounds great, huh? The Israeli just got owned by history. A liberal responded to it with:

“How about we don't care what an old book of myths says about who owns or should own the land?

That being said, I wish [the] story was true.”

Ah, the great answer to the debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Why not ignore the religious claims and just blindly support the Palestinian's great historical ownage. This has pretty much been the left's view on the conflict since Israeli's creation 60 years ago. Ignore legitimate Jewish claims to their ancient homeland. Ignore the ethnic history. Ignore the political claims. The Palestinians are the underdogs, so they're the ones to support.

Aside from over 5000 years of Jewish history in the region (that's 3700 years before Islam), the ethnic similarities between the two warring parties and the decades of Jewish political organization under secular Zionism before the birth of Israel, yeah, that answer pretty much has the entire thing down.

To dismiss faith has been part of the left's agenda since the mid-1900s. Before that, the Progressives were quite religious. Woodrow Wilson based his proto-fascism on, among many things, Christian supremacy. It was the infection of hardcore Marxism that turned formerly pious eugenicists into atheistic fire-starters. Since that time, faith is decadent and evil (see: Dawkins vs. the Catholic Church), and science has become not just a method of investigation, but an ideology (see: Dawkins and Darwin, any atheist). If you think a pompous priest is annoying, wait until you meet a atheist leftist from community college. Gah!

Anyway, liberals, socialist, communists, and pretty much any other left-wing ideology, have this century and a half-long mythology running their political religion. Marx was a genius, not a anti-Semitic Jew who failed in pretty much all his predictions. Wilson was a visionary, not a theocratic tyrant who re-segregated the government and had a true imperialistic vision for America. FDR was a God, not a racist who imprisoned Asian citizens based solely on their race, or a horrible economist who prolonged the Depression and created a culture of dependency and currency inflation. Kennedy was a leftist, not the anti-Communist, pro-free market, “pro-war” president he actually way. LBJ's Great Society sunk minorities into poverty and dependency. Carter's peace overtures killed more people than saved. Clinton's deficit was actually the Republican Congress'. If I had the time and the attention span, a whole book could be written on the myths of the left.

The left believes in these things because, sadly, they have no real faith. They don't cross that line between reason and beyond reason, they straddle it. People of faith believe in things beyond human beings. They believe in the redeeming power of Jesus, or the mercy of G-d, or the righteousness of Allah, or the enlightenment of Buddha. They believe beyond people into the realm of revelation and the soul. They believe, and this is key, in something that TRANSCENDES human nature and act upon that belief. Altruism, as close as one can get to it, is never based on reason, even for those claiming strict atheism. Transcendence beyond our nature is a religious idea. Those atheistic leftists who support indulgence of base instincts like promiscuity, early sexual experimentation, primitivism and the like are much closer to true atheism than those who claim to not believe, but also call on our higher faculties (ie. Against our selfish nature) to give up wealth and economic freedom for others.

Unlike the left's myth of religion, faith and reason are NOT opposites. Of course, you'll encounter those who deny reason because of faith: creationists, Islamists, global warming fanatics; but those people aren't exactly the mainstream of human thought. Science grew within countless religious cultures. A Muslim created algebra. A Catholic created astronomy. An Orthodox Christian founded an alphabet now used by hundreds of millions. A Christian founded modern physics. Science, much to the chagrin of the left, has flourished due to, not in spite of, religious faith. That's not to say that religious INSTITUTIONS haven't interfered with scientific endeavors, but simply believing in God does not discount someone from being a scientist.

Leftist atheists love to shove it in your face that everyone else is stupid. Studies about creationists are their favorite. It's creationists this and God that. If you have faith, you're on the wrong side of history. And amusingly, if you ask a leftist about global warming, they tell you the “science is settled”, which spits in the face of the very idea of science. Or ask about John Kennedy, as I described above. Ask any number of historical or philosophical ideas, and you'll get a pre-engineered response about it from most. Say Hitler, you get right-winger. Say USSR, you'll hear not real communism. Like the religious fanatics in Islam and Protestantism, they're knee jerks will knock you out of your reason chair. But don't tell them they aren't reasonable... because they are... because they say so. And to dispute it is being closed minded.

Sheesh.

Word Police: That's So Gay

I know I'm very late to this, but hey, I'm here. And GP will probably get a buttload of hits for some of the words I'm going to use in this post. Hmm....

***

For a long time, “gay” meant happy, elated and so forth. Shakespeare used it. Now its the identifier of homosexuals, specifically male homosexuals. Lo and behold, the thought police come out in force to make you feel guilty for co-opting a word they recently co-opted.

Meet thinkb4youspeak.com.

*shudder*

The simple truth is that THEY'RE JUST KIDS. KIDS WILL SAY OFFENSIVE, STUPID THINGS.

When I grew up it was “Jew”. You were “jewish” if you were cheap. You acted like a “jew” if you acted (GASP!) “gay”. Kids pick up on words and mutate them to their end... kind of like the Left (something I'm working on for a future, giant post). For God's sake, male white kids still go around calling each other “nigger” because the biggest market for black gangsta rap is young, middle class white kids. Even more disgusting is that the biggest market for stripper-inspired club music is pre-pubescent girls.

Anyway, jumping on them for using “gay” is stupid, totalitarian and, frankly, makes you a douche. But that's my opinion, you totalitarian douche!

Honestly, give “gay” 30-50 years and it'll mutate again.. It'll probably end up being a word for frivolous:

“Your honor, this lawsuit brought against my client is beyond gay. The plaintiffs have no grounds.”


“John Edwards was a lawyer that took many gay cases.”


“It is the finding of this court that the ACLU bring supremely gay issues to these chambers.”


“The President's new supreme court pick has a history of taking gay cases and making them gayer.”

And just because I can:

God bless America. May it be gay!

We Can Change Things

I'm prone to believe worst-case scenarios. I was brought up by my pragmatic parents to hope for the best and plan for the worst. Advice that's come in handy on several occasions. With geo-politics, economics and social history, there is so much that can happen that predictions of doom aren't exactly unwarranted, but they're just one of several paths history can take.

There are plenty of people who have full belief that we are doomed. John Derbyshire wrote an entire book on the subject of pessimism while blogger Vox Day makes his economic and demographic predictions of apocalypse from his hideaway in Italy. Both men are smart and talented writers. Yet, even when I'm in full belief the next 5 years will be the most transforming years since the end of World War I (Iran's rise to regional hegemon, a long recession if not depression, social strife due to the first two), I am not of the mind that it's all doom, gloom and the end of America.

People like to believe in determinism even if they're anarchists, libertarians, hippies, yuppies or whatever. In Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom pointed out that people have become more attached to determinism and prophecy than before. Today's politics is laced with those who see the end and want us steered towards or away from it. No political party in America is living in the now, the current, the real; we're all stuck staring at the horizon or at ourselves, like the scientists in Gulliver's Travels. By not watching what's in front of us, we are not adapting to the world, we are adapting to our predictions of the world. We're adapting to fantasy re-creations of how the world works. For example, the Left has blamed capitalism for the housing crash and the financial crash, but all the evidence points to bad regulations, not lack of regulations; government interference in the market, not lack of government interference; easy credit, not lack of people (specifically poor minorites) getting credit; and myopic oversight, not lack of oversight. Yet, the agenda of the Democratic-led Congress isn't opening markets, closing the easy credit faucet, strengthening regulations already in place or making sure they actually have oversight of the GSEs. It's the exact opposite.

Americans, both left and right, especially left, need to wake up and live in the now. The right-wing too has its dreamers, many of the tea party leaders see a world beyond the welfare state, they see America right after the Constitution, they see the end of progressivism. These things are nice, but they aren't realistic. The most important thing right now, above all things, above illegal immigration, Fannie and Freddie, and yes, even above the ending of Iran's nuclear ambitions, is the financial well-being of America. That is the ONLY problem we should be focusing on right now.

But we aren't, are we? Arizona, for better or for worse, brought illegal immigration to the top. The President is pushing the nationalization of 401(k)s, increasing corporatism in the economy, bringing out the worst in our social tensions. Even Republicans, the self-labeled party of the free market, the balanced budget and of the Revolutionary tradition, crumble quickly when given the chance to sign on to short-term gains. They don't have the balls to do what's necessary. They too have the one eye staring outward, one eye staring inward. They can't see the flames or smell the smoke.

Like I said, the doom saying isn't unwarranted. In fact, its more legitimate than any flowery talk coming from the President or anyone else. Things look bad, are bad and will probably get worse. But, guess what? Actions speak louder than words. Doing things end up changing things. Taking stands create barriers to the predicted end. If the Republicans and Blue Dogs actually believed what they talked about, then they would be drawing a line in the House and Senate chambers and telling their fellow “leaders” of America that things need to change now, not later, not tomorrow, not after lunch. Now.

For 60 years and change, we've been happy to be moderates, to work together and play nicey nice with other people money. We've spent ourselves into a corner. We've become addicted to government created consumer addiction, easy credit and easy lives. To fix the mess we're in, we need to have radical change. We need to quit credit, quit bubbles and quit the quick buck. That won't work anymore. It never really worked to begin with. As the IMF politely put it, the party is over. Everyone needs to go home, sober up and report for work in the morning. To save ourselves from becoming Greece, to make sure the worst we feel is the best the rest of the world will ever feel during these times, is to make the radical choice to CHOOSE the harder path. We can change things, we just have to choose to do so.

I hope we do. And I guess that's what makes me different from Vox or John or the others, I've got hope, even if its naïve hope. And sometimes, well... rarely ever, hope pushes us to do what is right. Let it be this generation, this nation, right now, that does it.

Or so I hope.

Avatar, the Authenticity Fetish and Illegal Immigration

Avatar is a good movie. The action is crisp, the acting par, the visuals stunning and most of the science fiction believable. What bothered me about it, other than the sledgehammer style of message deliverance, was the Na'vi, the pure and innocent native race on moon Pandora. While Dances with Wolves and other Indian-perspective movies portray human tribes with varying degrees of accuracy, they're still human beings. In Avatar, the Na'vi had a real psychic connection to nature, not the religiously implied connection that various real indigenous cultures have. While I can imagine giant space ships, floating minerals and even the Avatar-mind transferring program, what I could not digest was that the Na'vi had their own Avatar program through their psychic connection with their moon. This demolishes the very message that Cameron thinks he's giving to the world. Humanity doesn't have the collective mind. It doesn't have psychic powers. There is no coincidental organic equivalent to the electrical technology we have. I bring this up because Avatar's director, James Cameron, had a very narrow and very ideological reason for creating Avatar, to push the message of radical environmentalism and its promiscuous mother called authenticity.

Base environmentalism isn't a bad thing. I'm an environmentalist in that I love being out in nature, I think we should keep our national parks and we should do our best to not pollute the air, sea and land. I think global warming is mostly a natural cycle (our last mini-ice age was only 500 years ago), I don't think the impact of our industrial world has been zero. We've done some carbon “damage”, but nowhere near the amount to create giant floods that'll kill only the poor and brown, as Matthew Ygelisis likes to bray.

The thing is about radical environmentalism, the environmentalism of the far left, of Al Gore, of the eco-terrorists, and of James Cameron, is that it isn't a science based or even a Romanticism based ideology. Today's radical environmentalism is based on the fetish of authenticity, an idea that's born Marxist schools of ethnic, religious and psychological idiocy. One can't simply create better technology for fuel or heating, or TVs that use less energy than they did 5 years ago; the entire nation must change to a more “authentic” (aka, a more indigenous) style civilization. While energy corporations and university scientists work making coal cleaner, drilling safer and hydrogen the next gasoline, the radicals want cars off the road, trucks in garages and bikes mandatory. While most of the country and Western civilization wants greener products and cleaner air within the capitalist system, people like James Cameron (who can afford to make his giant house entirely green) are pushing for a environmental revolution that excises capitalism, individualism and technology from civilization. Instead of a movie where human civilization is saved by new technology, innovation and hard work, Cameron made a movie that doomed humanity (Western civilization) to its (perceived) self-induced misery. Instead of saving our race (civilization), Cameron wants us to abandon it for a more authentically environmental one. Yet, the one he gives us in Avatar, is physically impossible to have. Such is the far-left ideology in all things: impossible.

This relates to immigration in that the authenticity drive that makes sane middle-class people buy inauthentic and expensive yuppie-weaved dreamcatchers is the same authenticity that convinces them that every illegal immigrant that crosses the border is the authentic salt of the earth, unlike the pudgy American. Ask an open borders advocate and you'll get a bookshelf of explanations of how America and capitalism pushes these people to come to America for work, but we shouldn't ask them to assimilate to American culture, values or even language. That would de-autheniticize them and then they'd lose their roots (aka, ideological and psychological usefulness to the Left) to the soulless system. America doesn't have a culture, just consumerism, that's why its inauthentic! Really, how can you slap a guilt trip on the country when the people you say you're fighting for are happier buying McDonalds and sipping a Pasbt than participating in a round table on the Latino-American situation in the Southwest spoken entirely in Aztec?

There's nothing wrong with having a multitude of cultures in America, as long as those cultures assimilate to the few things all Americans assimilate to: individual rights and English. It's not that hard. First, you must respect, not believe in, but respect that in a free country people will not agree with you. That means agreeing to disagree, not shouting down, pieing or any other kind of violence against your political rivals. College students seem to have a hard time learning something many of their “protected” understand. Second, you must be able to communicate. Millions of ex-pats in dozens of countries have learned this. You don't have to be Muslim when living in the UAE, but it sure as hell helps to learn Arabic and not break the social taboos. In many nations, that's the norm, but not in the West. In England you can call for the death of Jews, but don't put up the Union Jack, it may offend someone. In America, at least in some places, being for a border wall is racism (who cares if it stops human trafficing, drug smuggling and tens of thousands of deaths a year), but promoting a racial purge of whites (which includes a few dozen or more ethnicities) in the Southwest is authentic tribal pride.

American culture may not be as glamorous as the Sioux (don't tell that to the Pawnee) or the Na'vi. We may not have religious connections to the soil (well, none that don't involve that evil faith of Christianity) or dances we can show off to other cultures (well, we did, but body grinding, head banging and jazzercise kind of drowned them out), but we do have a real culture. We have a mindset (individualism), a rich history (all the way back to England and the Netherlands, and that's just the WASPs) and customs (WAZZZZZUP! Fo' shizzle! Hello!). Our culture is just as authentic as any other, but supporting the dominant culture, no matter how little it asks you to give to join with it, doesn't fit with the underdog obsession of the Left. There must be an opposite to us, if only to shove in the face of the ignorant fools (whites, males, Southerners, white male Southerners... their wives too!) that someone thinks differently. There's a reason straight parades or white pride parades (as in cultural past, not racial/biological hate) are looked down upon, but gay pride parades (both the simple and the sexually explicit) and anti-American, far-left Aztlan parades are encouraged by almost every level of government to show their "understanding" of the "authenticity" of whatever Marxist claptrap they've been teaching at UCLA.

Authenticity is a psychological fantasy. Authenticity is rebellious dominant culture children, like James Cameron, playing make believe to sate some hole in their psyche that could be plugged by the Bible or Kant or some other, less superficial philosophy. Most of all, authenticity isn't reality. In reality, the Sioux conquered the Pawnee, the Na'vi apparently hate gays and humans (you find neither in Avatar at the end) and the MS-13 members dragging along their drug mules (aka, people) aren't exactly the best example of Mexican culture. That would be the legal immigrants. In reality, the safest way to import people into the country isn't by the death trap called the Mexican border, but through legal channels, which absolutely need to be fixed. The best way of stopping illegal immigration, drug trafficking and cross-border gang violence isn't "understanding", but building the damn border wall. We will save more lives, help more Latinos and promote a "better world" if we do everything we can to stop the lucrative criminal enterprises that exploit our unattended border.

When you watch a movie about natives or think that how much more fun it would be to be in another culture, read a bit. You'll realize that the Last Samurai was about a deranged soldier supporting the last gasp of a violent caste system, or that the bad guys in Roots are not only the white slave trader, but the native and Arab ones that sold to the Europeans. In my own case, the Spartans, a culture I have affinity for, murdered their babies if they were sick or deformed, and were one of the most xenophobic of Greek peoples. I know it may not fit one's daydreaming, but that's how the world is and we have to recognize it.

Reality bites. Sorry, James.

The Fabulous Art of Victimhood

Sexism. Racism. Ageism. Homophobia. Islamophobia. Islamohomophobia. Homoageophobia. Homoislamobamaphobiaism. If one can be accused of it, the left-wing has created a name for it and have accused conservatives, libertarians and non-unionized librarians of it. There is no end to the amount of victims that they could muster or the amount of lawsuits brought in the defense of these hapless innocents of a cruel world.

We all know that there are real victims of real crimes in our country. There are rapes, murders, frauds, beatings, kidnappings; all horrible acts done by mostly horrible people. Out of all the laws in the land, very few places have laws against hurting someone's feelings or making someone feel ostracized or saying words others think may be offensive. That's the risk you take for being a human being. People will not like you for your skin color, your accent, your beliefs, your sexual preferences; its just how humans are. We're tribal, we like our own kind, whatever kind that may be.

During the rise of the modern liberal/progressive/socialist, there were actual victims of real racism, sexism and violent attacks on homosexuals. There was a real reason to take up the cause of minorities, women and human rights. Unfortunately, for the Left, that day passed decades ago. Institutional racism, sexism, homophobia and all that jazz isn't much of a problem anymore. Of course, you'll hear that the gay marriage debate is akin to the civil rights era, that healthcare for all is part of MLK's dream, and all these connections to past events, but you never hear the Left make any attempt to put these issues in modern contexts with modern reasons for these leviathan solutions. They'll always throw back to the days when they had a reason.

This is the reason why the Left now pushes countless number of different categories for victims of society. Aside from the basic categories, there are things as heterosexism, pregnancy discrimination, Nancy Pelosi's “being a women is a pre-existing condition”, discrimination against trans-gendered children, discrimination against sex criminals and discrimination against women who wait years before bringing suit against their dead boss. As you can see, there's no bigger industry in left-wing politics than the production of victims.

Yet, the Left is happy to be as discriminatory as it wants to those it deems unworthy of protection. Mormons were blasted as intolerant, physically attacked and ceaselessly mocked after the passing of Prop 8 in California. Despite there being so little voting age Mormons in California to sway the vote, they were the target of blacklists, protests, hate mail and bomb threats in California and in Utah. This in spite the fact that a majority of blacks, Hispanics and Asians voted for Prop 8. Along with this, the term “breeder” became the new label of those straights who would not support gay marriage. “Breeder” is a derogatory term for heterosexual. Like other derogatory terms, its bad unless a protected class is saying it, then its cultural pride. No longer is the crack dealing black man a criminal, but the victim of white privilege, the CIA and the LAPD. The illegal Hispanic isn't breaking the law by crossing the border, but he's simply finding work for his oppressed family. There are back doors for every potential recruit to the left-wing ideology, except for the one minority culture everyone rags on: Southerners. It's alright to call them names, make fun of their accents, say they inbreed and say they're inferior. It's totally okay because they're white. It's okay because they're the only culture in all of America that must pay for the sin of slavery. Not the Democratic Party that defended it, not the big government ideology that promoted it, not the state Democratic Parties that prevented blacks from voting; no, it's every white southerner that believes in free markets, faith and the American way that must pay. Pay no attention to the blacks, the Hispanics and the other racial minorities who live, work and embrace Southern culture. They're just Uncle Toms like Justice Thomas. They're just traitors to their race, to the La Raza.

This victimhood industry is bad for politics and bad for culture. It breeds the idea that people aren't responsible for their mistakes, their flaws and misfortunes. It breeds the same generalized race classes that brought about slavery, government discrimination and government oppression. Promoting the victimhood of those who aren't and promoting government solutions for problems that don't exist put us in our current place of heightened political and social tension. Tension that exists not because of any actual widespread discrimination, but because politicians, parties and even entire government agencies have a vested interest in keeping alive the programs to remedy these non-existent plagues of our society.

The inability of our society to hold individuals, not cultures, accountable for the actions of individuals goes against every dream our Founders had for a free and just society. It prevents us from truly trying to end the wrongs that are there. Worst of all, it makes us stupid and blind. Do you really want your kids and grandkids growing up in a world where whatever their skin color, religious belief, cultural background, they are being judged as worthy or unworthy based upon it? Is that not the world we fought over decades to eradicate?

Fairness is a Disease

So, a school wants to create a Male Studies program to look into the welfare and psyche of the modern human male. Not a bad idea, eh? Males have changed a lot in the past one hundred years. Suffrage, the women's rights movement, contraception and consumer trends have all created a male completely alien to the Victorian male that brought in the 20th century. Today, there are concerns of the loss of masculinity to an ever increasing feminization of Western culture. Shows like Everybody Likes Raymond, where the husband is always wrong, bumbling and submissive, promote the idea that the Western male is not longer the head of the household, but the laughing stock of it. Of course, this is just one of many theories about the modern male and these theories should be researched and reviewed and published, as is the right of any researcher.

That's if Male Studies get off the ground. When I passed this news along to political acquaintances on the left, the response was a resounding “why?”. Might as well have “white studies” too, one said, since men and whites have dominated the world since time immemorial. We can't be studying the male since the male has had his place of privilege for so long! It's the female's turn! That's the atmosphere I got from them.

When did education go from finding the truth to promoting fairness and alleviating the guilt of left-wing white males? When Plato thought and wrote, it wasn't to make sure the trans-gendered anarchist had a voice. It was to find the truth about humanity and its soul. When Voltaire thought and wrote, it was to explain the world and the mind, not find a new niche market for a women's studies book about anti-antidisestablishmentarianism in the male dominated Greek world.

The idea that we can't study the male, especially the white male, out of some anti-intellectual ideal of fairness spits in the face of every honest educator in the world. Not only that, it spits in the face of real equality between the races and sexes. Babying a broad, monolithic class, in this case “women”, because another broad, monolithic class, “men”, has had their day in the sun is beyond idiotic. It's an idea based on racism, sexism and class warfare. It's an idea that goes against the root ideals of this country and of its history of higher education, going all the way back to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. It's as if the creator of this anti-intellectual ideology couldn't actually come up with an original idea and just flipped the worst views of the worst people of the Civil Rights Era and said, “Ta da! Open mindedness! And if you don't like it, you're a racist!”

SIRIUS/XM radio host Andrew Wilkow has a very apt analogy to explain this view. Imagine two people walking down a street. A white guy with a shirt that says, “White Power” and a black man that has shirt that says “Black Power”. For the last half century, we've been told (trained, in some cases) to look at the white man's shirt and deride him for his ethnic hatred. Yet, when we turn to the black man, we are told (trained) to congratulate him on his progressive ethnic pride in his culture (“black culture”, another broad, monolithic idea). How is THAT not racism? Hate whites for being proud of their race while encouraging blacks to be proud of theirs? That isn't equality, that's overcompensation. That's anti-intellectualism. That's anti-American. Period.

And I haven't even gotten to the best part. History. The leftist opposition to all things white and male are based on the idea of white male domination for God knows how long. But how long as white males actually ruled the planet? Not that long, actually. The domination of the “world” by whites was consolidated around 200 years ago when the British Empire spanned the length of the planet, “the empire on which the sun never sets”, as it was called. I'm including all European powers in this, by the way. But it wasn't actually the world, not even close. The Ottoman Empire spanned well into Africa and the Middle East. Russia's domination wasn't entirely a white man's crusade since much of Russia's ethnic make-up descends from the Mongol invaders four centuries earlier. The South American powers had both white and mixed leaders, as it does now. The only continent that there was near total domination of other races by whites was Africa, but like I said the Ottomans were in there too and I don't believe Turks are considered white.

That's only 200 years ago. But doesn't the Left say white dominated history pre-1800s is part of our guilt? So how far back to we go? Hopefully, for these “intelligent” folk, we don't go back to Renaissance Italy where women had the ability to speak and rule? Or how about certain African tribes where women played bigger roles? Oh wait, they aren't white. I don't think there's black male guilt, is there? Anyway, how about Sparta, where the women under the militaristic regime had the right to speak, to refuse marriage, property rights and were trained in combat to near equal levels as males were? But that's only if you consider ancient Greeks white, and they're only white in Hollywood, not in reality.

This obsession with extra-legal fairness in all things, especially education, is a disease. You cannot change history by buying off your guilt. You cannot change minds by denying education sectors for the crime of going against politically correct dogma. It strikes at liberty, intellectual discourse and our nation's self-esteem. A nation cannot remain free if its taking from one class and giving to another over events that happened pre-independence (or pre-history, for that matter). A nation cannot have honest intellectual debate if charges of racism, sexism and all other words of total insignificance now (thanks, Leftists) are used to put down legitimate criticisms of a anti-intellectual ideology. A nation especially cannot remain powerful and unified when its too busy making sure every nook and cranny of leftist created trans-class, cross-gendered, bottom-up race injustice is being sated by economy destroying programs promoted by people who aren't touched by them, but who somehow feel the tinge of racism from a crowd not saying a word.

John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

And the facts are, dear leftist friends and contacts, that your objections to Male Studies tells a lot about you and your inability to think critically, let alone dictate what others should think. You cannot stop racism with money, sexism with government or bigotry with indoctrination. The best we can do, the best any free nation can do, is make sure that under the law no one is discriminated against. After that, its up to the individual to find the truth themselves, not by government fiat or ivory tower poo-poohing. The past 60 years have shown your idea of fairness has created one of the most anti-intellectual and bigoted mainstream ideologies in America. And that has led to a world where leaders call citizens racists, “teabaggers” and fascists for simply opposing policy the leaders themselves have tainted with the stain of racism, sexism and anti-religious bigotry.

Give yourself a hand.

Oh, wait, you already do.

καταδίκη

This is a follow up to Egotastic Me. If you want to know the thought process behind this post, please read Egotastic Me.

---
καταδίκη is the Greek word for conviction. Conviction is “an unshakable belief in something without need for proof or evidence”[1].

The Greeks were a very special people in the history of the world. While many civilizations have risen and fallen in our history, the Greek civilization remain the core of the West. Their republics, democracies and even their tyrannies have influenced all major powers. The Greek myths draw us in with their drama, violence, heroism and villainy. Greek tragedies show us how fate and human nature pit us against ourselves, and so few times do we ever end up on the right side of the world.

I've been interested in the Greeks for many years, mostly on a very superficial level. It was not until the movie 300 was announced did I begin to read deeper into the Greek story than just the thin picture books I got from the library. I read everything I could on the Spartans, the warrior-citizens that could create unstoppable fear by simply marching towards their enemy. I read about their culture, their unique monarchical-oligarchical-democratic government and, of course, their military victories. It was from there I began a slow read of the Greek culture as a whole, not just the differences between Sparta and Athens or Argos and Thebes. The Greeks had a very human nature based view of their existence. Human flaws and human vices were the center of their works and plays. Even the Gods were subject to their emotions, vices and desires. And above it all was fate. You could not fight your destiny, no matter what.

In a land of plenty, we tend of make up plenty of things to fight against. Wars against cancer, smoking and obesity. Battles against poverty, mental health disorders and racism. The poor population of one of our cities has more wealth than all of Somalia or Bhutan. Our middle class spends more time resting than working, more time having fun than having to break one's back. Our technology is bounds ahead of our nearest adversary. Our kids are more tech savvy than any other generation in history. Children can navigate the chaos of the Internet better than their parents and grandparents. Our material utopia has brought us so much, but it has left one thing behind. The war each one of us has inside.

The terrain is the mind and victory is harmony. Our physical wars have been either fast, long or not fought to win. Not since 1941 has the United States went into a war balls out. We've spent the last half of the 20th century protecting the material gain we had from the deviation of World War II. What was the tragic luck of having most of the world in ruins has become the addiction of an entire civilization.

We have an easy life, but we aren't happy. We want more. More protection. More hugs. More happiness. We worry how the world sees us, even to the point of putting the lives of our own in danger. We worry more about the fictional “Other” and how it feels compared to us. How many times are we told its going to be okay? That the government will take care of you? That the pills will make it all better? That all you need to do is talk to a doctor to stop the cancer, the blues or anything else that may be bothering you? We are told we are always going to be okay... except how many times does that platitude collapse like a house of cards?

Almost every single time.

The world will never be as easy as it was and we must come to terms with that. The party that's happened for the last 65 plus years is ending, or at least it should end. We've prolonged it for so long after many false deaths. But today, with debt, with basic moral degradation, with a national cynicism so prevalent that nobody trusts the government anymore, not even those who endorse government programs. The fluff of prosperity is blowing away, revealing an ugly and cracked monster underneath. We have problems and we're going to have to bite more than one bullet to save our way of life.

For years, I've struggled with confidence in almost everything in my life. Socially, mentally, politically, religiously; a snake pit of emotions. This isn't a unique thing. It's become a right of passage of the modern man. In the face of a world with everything, a material utopia, the last thing we think about is our souls. We forget that our psyche is real. It requires comfort, but it also requires discipline. Our spiritual selves need to be able to stand up to the world around us.

Slowly, over the past few years, I've learned that one must be confident not only in self, but in one's beliefs as well. You can think you can do things well, that you can get the girl, ace the test and down a stein like a pro, but doubt doesn't come only from your abilities, but from your ideals as well. I never held on to an anarchist belief I had for long because I couldn't never be certain in my convictions that a particular anarchist ideology was right. I kept switching until I abandoned the entire school of thought. You must be able to truly believe in what you preach, or it will collapse on you.

Conviction isn't just a word that explains a fanatic, it is a state of mind that we must attain if we are to be able to function above the ugly world we inhabit. Conviction, for my worthy political opponents or for myself, allows for doubt to vanish when it appears. Conviction is worthy of respect, most of all in this time when even the most stone headed of politicians ends up turning on his people for his own personal gain. If you believe in God, Marx or Dawkins, it doesn't matter, take the time and the effort to make sure that is what you truly believe. Don't half-ass it. It'll only be your downfall.

Faith is the key. Even the most science-based beliefs have a bit of faith backing them. One doesn't dedicate one's life to evolutionary biology because the evidence is conclusive and no more must be done. One doesn't research the climate because the time for debate is over. We do it because we believe. We are belief driven people. We want to show what we believe is true. It is one of the best aspects of human nature. The drive of belief.

The confidence of myself, and in general, of the nation, is based on the confidence of our beliefs. For me, my beliefs have become stronger due to the doubts that I've had and the mistakes I've made. But, unlike our nation, I have done my best to change my mistakes instead of covering them up with more spectacular and materially driven mistakes. I've come to my conclusions and I believe them from head to heart. The nation, well, that's still up in the air. We shall see if the nation will heed the convictions given to it by the Founders, or fall to the weakness of doubt and material addiction.

1. http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=conviction

Egotastic Me

I've always enjoyed the irony of today's world. The human species is six point six billion strong spread across every landmass and sea. If it exists, there'll be signs that humans have been there, usually in the form of our trash. We are everywhere. The other side of that coin is our modern individualist society. The West is the most powerful and most comfortable of civilizations. In control of pretty much half the planet, Western-based nations influence everything. If not with our ideals, then with our inventions and products. We are everywhere. And yet, as individuals, if we are metaphysically separated from our civilization, we are nothing. We are simply human. We are specks in the sea of billions. And that puts the fear of Almighty God into so, so many. Including me.

The World Around Me

I have been, and probably still am, very self-centered. I know many others are like this, but I won't assume you, dear reader, are one of them, so I'll take the time to expand for the sake of argument. What I mean about self-centered is that much of what I do and think involves advancing my own interests (material, mental, emotional) over that of others. May it be simply walking faster so I can get around a slow walker at the supermarket or complexly maneuvering at work so I can get on the boss's good side. My politics had and still have a lot to do with my personal ambitions. From socialist revolution to anarchist nihilism to conservative free-market dogma, connected to my wants. My patience with people, especially those truck drivers at work who have the inability to understand directions, are mostly based on the mood I have when I walked in. If something went wrong that morning, I'd probably treat them with them a little contempt. I justify such behavior by blaming it on them and their actions. It's not my fault they can't see the stop sign or understand the other signs around the lot, so it's not my fault if I'm an asshole to them.

My daydreams are in the same realm. I've had the running theme of heroism and historical significance since I was little. The politics may have spun them to the left or the right, but overall, I'm the center of the story and I'm the awesome guy with the kung fu and the accurate shooting. I've written countless short stories and attempted first chapters of novels that usually involve my views with heroes that have my personality (or the one I wish I could have). Hell, I play video games and watch movies with the express intent of sating a fantasy land where its not the actor, but me kicking the ass of terrorists, Persians or backward CIA employees trying to knock me off. Whatever I thought or imagined, it was all about me. It's all for me. It's all fun, but it's also all fake and slightly unnerving.

I've talked a lot of talk about my future over the years to many people. I was going to be a war reporter, an author, a game designer, a movie director, and that was all in high school. In college, I was going to be an music video director, a action movie director, a TV producer, then I stopped wanting to do TV. I kept at the college courses though and moved to LA to work in the industry. There, I was going to be a Marine, but marriage and family cut that down quickly. I then decided on pursing a police career and after moving to Utah, I took a police standards test... and failed. A year later, and a year at my rent-a-cop job, I tried again. That time I passed. I was going finally be the hero.

Except that heroes aren't being hired right now. The current economy is killing every level of government in Utah. The cities and the state aren't hiring any officers. The world isn't playing my game. It's not playing fair.

The World That Is

Reality is a bitch. I'm no hero. I'm not even close. I've never been one. Probably closer to the opposite.

For as long as I can remember, I've been pretty introverted. Girls and friends were few, if any at the several schools I went to. Within the introverted personality was a selfish ass. A prime example was in grade 8. A little kid, probably a first grader, was wandering in the bus area one day. A group of girls from my class saw her, got worried about her safety among the cars and asked me if that was my sister. I shook my head and just walked on as they took her within the safety fence and started to look for her teacher. My only thought during that time was “Not my sister, not my problem.” I didn't want to get in the middle of anything. I wanted the world to stay away.

As newly minted teenagers, we were all selfish. We were all confused and emotionally immature. It's a right of passage to deal with that. But the key is to get passed that and mature to where you can deal with hiccups like a bad economy, a failed test or old dreams dying due to circumstances you yourself created. For the longest time, I couldn't. As recently as last week, I was brooding on the idea of being at my rent-a-cop job for any longer. It was supposed to be a hold over job until I could become a police officer. I've been at it for a year and a half now. It's mind numbing and, at times, so dead that a paraplegic could take my place without any dip in productivity. It put me in a mood that was less than friendly, giving me thoughts that were less than rational. My fantasy land of heroism and shit were directly conflicting with the real world where I was going to be stuck at a dead-end well past my 25th birthday. How could I be a SWAT member or an agile young super cop after 25?

The Speck and the Fear

Then, one recent night, unable to sleep even though I was dead tired, it came to me. I'm not special. Not in the slightest. No matter how many dreams I have, no matter the stories I write, the movies I watch or the games I play, I am not the character that I see. I am not the assassin, the scholar, the agent or the famous fighter. I am one of six billion people trying to carve out a section of this world for myself as best I can. And I have six billion people all wanting to do the same thing as well. In the Salt Lake Valley alone, there are over one point five million people, all jamming to have some sort of space. That's still a lot of people in an area shedding jobs.

I've never been a man with confidence in myself. It took over twenty years for me to break past the embarrassment of working out alone in public. I spent more time talking to girls on the internet than I did in real life. I faked confidence, even to to the point of making myself believe I had it. A house of cards. A cover for the insecurities I developed between birth and now. We all have insecurities, of course. Some deal with it better than me, some don't. One will never fully overcome them. They'll crop up sometime, even if for just a moment. It's the way we deal with them that shows us our real confidence and our real maturity.

I handled the realization that my dreams of grandeur would not come true quite badly. I basically whined and kicked and made a fuss that I couldn't reach heights I probably had no good reason to expect I could reach. My house of cards fell and I spent a week trying to justify it without blaming myself in anyway. The economy was the fault of bankers and government. The lack of hiring money in the Valley was because of entitlements. They're all corrupt. It's not my fault.

And in some way, it's not. I don't control the economy, but neither does Salt Lake City or the Great State of Utah. The economy of the United States is based on everyone. The economy is the collective result of millions of actions being preformed every day by Americans and others around the world. Our lives today were build by the world of yesterday, the world that consisted of billions of individual actions crashing and colluding with each other. The beautiful chaos.

For most of the past 100 years, we've based our economic lives, and our lives in general, on the fear of everything coming crashing down and stopping us from finding our dreams. Every recession is met with outlandish claims and overreactions. Every dip in employment is considered the end all of capitalism and markets. When things go bad, our confidence sinks and we panic. We fear the dream will die.

Like my house of cards, based on the fantasy of heroism, greatness and historical significance, our past century has been based on that as well. Militarily, for good or bad, ending in victory or defeat, America has done much based on high hopes and ideals. While there have been true moments of greatness, there have been plenty of disasters. Economics has been a different story. Since the Great Depression, we've been living on the idea we can stop disaster like we thought we could stop war. The Great Depression was the Great War, so we created the League of Nations called the welfare state. The post-WWII boom was the World War. Things were hell everywhere but where we were, so we prospered. The 80s and its crash was Vietnam, a dream turn to rot. And today, our decade or two of vast prosperity has been, for better or worse of an example, Iraq. We went in thinking we had it all. We had the perfect reason. We had the best idea. We had the moral high ground. And in the face of it all, after all we said and did, the confidence is collapsing. It's civil war. It's the real world vs. the fake one. It's 2006 and the country is at a crossroads.

Back to the Beginning

What does the current economic crisis have to do with my personal story of a shitty personality, egotastic fantasies and horrible self-confidence?

It's the rubble.

When the house fell all was left was the foundation.

What was the foundation?

Me. Just me. Who I really am. The man that was hiding beneath layers of neurosis, emotional cloaks and mental walls. All that I learned, all that I saw and experienced became the reason, the lessons and the rational. It may have been an accident or an act of God, but its there now.

My adult foundation.

America needs to find its foundation. It needs to find its true confidence, not build up another house of cards upon the collapsing deck that came before it. This has happened for nearly 100 years and it cannot continue.

As I could not rely on the displacement of blame onto others for my misfortunes and for just plain ol' bad luck, the world as it is today cannot just levy punishment on the crooks and liars that put us here, because it wasn't just them. It was us as well. Our fantasy dreams of easy wealth and no-risk happiness brought us to the point where we have to choose the world we made up or the world as it is.

The world we made up says we can keep trying to make everyone happy, rich, beautiful and comfortable. We can waste ourselves for utopia. We can spend the world and gain only an illusion of progress.

The world that is says we have to go back to basics. We have to start trusting ourselves to improve ourselves. We have to use our own two hands to brings ourselves beyond the primordial ooze. We have to make our dreams come true the hard way: years, probably decades, of unrelenting hard work without even the glimpse of finish line.

What I feel now and what I know now doesn't mean I won't become the immature kid again. Just because I've become grounded now doesn't mean I won't stick my head up my ass again. It's up to me, not you, not the state, not the feds and not God, to make sure I'm on the right path. It's up to me to make sure I'm not going to revert back to that new teen, watching a little kid put herself in danger and ignore it because its not my problem. Pretending it wasn't only added to the fantasy that I was going to be someone amazing. It was my problem then, it's my problem now.

Our lives are our choices. What we are is what we choose to be. The responsibility rests with no one else.

It's a hard lesson, but its a necessary one. Because basing a life on egotistical fantasies doesn't do shit for you or anyone else. You can't get out of bed purely on the will of you dreams.

What gets you out of bed is moving your body to the edge, swinging your legs to the floor and standing up.

All by yourself.

The Magic Lamp Syndrome

Is it me or do the people of America watch too much TV?

In the past few years we've seen two superstars from both ideological sides ride into Washington on waves of adoration and political comeuppance. They stroll into the Capitol with their heads cocked up, their eyes burning with change and their backs being patted by citizen and a party alike. And then, wouldn't you know it? They betray the masses in a single stroke or a single vote.

POOF! The magic is gone. What is an American to do?

Stop believing in political superstars. Obama has already alienated almost everyone with the health care bill except the puppets over at the Center for American Progress and DailyKos. Brown just cut off his cajones despite his voting base for a jobs bill that doesn't create jobs.. Palin has taken it upon herself to lecture us on the sensitivity of the mentally handicapped while trying to court the anti-PC crowd. Reacting to one-line e jokes in TV cartoons, no matter how legit the complaint, is just dumb.

The woman who thought Obama would pay her way to happiness is now probably one of the 10% of homeowners in foreclosure. The Tea Party got its ass handed to them by Scott Brown's reverse Romney, voting for statism AFTER being in the limelight. These Ds and Rs are not genies that'll fix the country once you vote them in. They are people who make the choice to take up political office, usually with the foreknowledge that to get there it takes no small amount of lying and breaking promises.

The less Americans laud the preening pansies of Washington, the more readily they'll notice the crap they get in return.

Double Standard

This article talks about controversial billboards by an Atlanta pro-life group, but it was this passage that caught my eye:

The idea that abortion clinics are specifically "targeting" pregnant black women is not new. A 2001 paper from the New York University History Department titled "Birth Control or Race Control? Sanger and the Negro Project," describes efforts by the Birth Control Federation of America (which later became Planned Parenthood) to provide contraceptives to the black community as "constructed in terms and with perceptions that today smack of racism."

Loretta Ross, the executive director of Atlanta's SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective offers another theory. "The reason we have so many Planned Parenthoods in the black community is because leaders in the black community in the '20s and '30s went to Margaret Sanger and asked for them," Ross told the Times. "Controlling our fertility was part of our uplift out of poverty strategy, and it still works."

Am I reading this right? Is Loretta Ross of the flowerly named leftist group actually advocating population control for blacks for economic reasons? Is that supposed to make us feel better about the procedure? How would a woman feel if she was torn about an abortion and she goes see Mrs/Ms/Mizz Ross and she says, "You should get one. It'll keep the poverty percentage down!"

How is that argument any less horrifying than when it was proposed by the Progressives and their fascist cousins? Double standard much?

Way to win hearts and minds on the issue, there.

I Wouldn't Want To Be Single Today

The Weekly Standard has an amazing article on the modern dating scene, if you can actually call it dating. The author takes the feminists and the sexual revolution to task for the axing of old school courtship and marriage, saying that the removal of these things has lead to a world where both men and women are more worried about getting laid as many times as possible before "life" (aka, maurity, masculinity, good social norms) catches up to them. This, in turn, has robbed beta males and females of good stock, as well as psychologically damaged the views they have of traditional society and marriage. The most damaging thing of all, in my eyes, is that preening, metrosexual, American Psycho-style looks obsessiveness is considered alpha male content.

Really, how the hell did this guy become more manly than this guy?

She concludes with this:

The whole point of the sexual and feminist revolutions was to obliterate the sexual double standard that supposedly stood in the way of ultimate female freedom. The twin revolutions obliterated much more, but the double standard has reemerged in a harsher, crueler form: wreaking havoc on beta men and on beta women, too, who, as the declining marriage rate indicates, have trouble finding and securing long-term mates in a supply-saturated short-term sexual marketplace. Gorgeous alpha women fare fine—for a few years until the younger competition comes of age. But no woman, alpha or beta, seems able to escape the atavistic preference of men both alpha and beta for ladylike and virginal wives (the Darwinist explanation is that those traits are predictors of marital fidelity, assuring men that the offspring that their spouses bear are theirs, too). And every aspect of New Paleolithic mating culture discourages the sexual restraint once imposed on both sexes that constituted a firm foundation for both family life and civilization.

Who Dat!

Saints win by 14. Congrats!

But I wouldn't want to be any kind of law enforcement in New Orleans or Jefferson Parish...

Big Hollywood Approves of 24 - Season 8

They say it much better than I did.

As in previous seasons, the villains feel no compunction whatsoever in killing people, taking hostages, and committing a diversity of explosive mayhem in pursuit of their goals. The forces of good and order, by contrast, are constrained by their adherence to certain moral standards, although the protection of innocents justifies the performance of otherwise prohibited actions, and Jack’s actions and conversations about his choices (and Renee’s) typically reflect this tension.

Just when the danger to innocents is sufficient to override these ethical concerns without becoming an “end justifies the means” excuse is an eternal moral question, and it’s what has always been at the center of 24. It’s what makes the show serious and important while adding to its entertainment value.

Oh Crap. It's In All Caps.

I spread around Vox Day's version of male hierarchy to some friends and one of my left-wing friends returned with the following:

Jordan, you actually read Vox Day?

For those who aren't aware - Vox Day is the pen-name of Theodore Beale. He is a misogynist , a racist, and a anti-Semite.

While no evidence was ever given for the racism or antisemitism charges, the misogyny charge was followed by:

He wrote that according to the traditional Judeo-Christian ethic a woman who is not entertaining the possibility of sex with a man can only be considered a innocent victim should she be raped by that man, and that rape is no better or worse than extramarital sex from a moral perspective because "Christianity knows no hierarchy of sins."

The man is an unapologetic NAZI.

[emphasis mine]

Wow. That's just wrong.

You know, the leveling of the charge of Nazism on a Christian libertarian, not the moral opinion of a Christian man, who made sure to you knew he wasn't arguing anything but his own view on Christian morality, with a blog and no power or will to actually enforce his moral code on others.

I've written on here about how Nazis were neither Christians nor were they libertarians. I have no idea how a far-left, centralized, socialistic, neo-pagan ideology could get mixed up with a strict Christian libertarian who's against the War on Terror. Well, other than the normal historical ignorance of the Left.

And the kicker of all this for me: Nazi being in all caps. As if putting the word in ALL CAPS makes it irrefutable. *

My friend isn't the only one who does this, which is both sad and satisfying. Sad that so many people are ignorant to the ideological reality of Nazism and neo-Nazism. Satisfying that its so damn easy to refute.

Unless one can find me irrefutable evidence, not ALL CAPS mudslinging, against Vox, I'll stick to reading his blog for economic insight... and now, apparently, for the pure joy of annoying my far-left friends.

*Apologies to Jonah Goldberg for stealing his line

Alphas, Betas and Deltas

Vox Day at Vox Popoli posted this a while ago about the male social hierarchy:

Alphas - the male elite, the leaders of men for whom women naturally lust. Their mere presence sets women a-tingle regardless of whether she is taken or not. Once you've seen beautiful married women ignoring tall, handsome, wealthy, and even famous men because that ugly old troll Henry Kissinger walked in the room, you simply can't deny the reality of Alphadom. Example: Captain Kirk, Big from Sex in the City. Suggestion: Do you see a scoreboard? Right, so relax already!

Betas - the lieutenants, the petty aristocracy. They're popular, they do well with women, they're pretty successful in life, and they may even be exceptionally good-looking. But they lack the Alpha's natural self-confidence and strength of character. They're not leaders and they're not the men to whom women are helplessly drawn. Most men who like to think they're Alphas because of their success are actually Betas. Most Betas won't change their game because they don't really have any need or reason to do so. This is probably the easiest social slot in which to find yourself, since the Beta enjoys many of the benefits of Alphadom without being trapped in the Alpha's endless cycle of competition. Example: Brad Pitt Suggestion: Have some compassion for the less naturally fortunate. Try to include them once in awhile.

Deltas - the great majority of men. These are Roissy's Betas. Almost all of you reading this are Deltas despite the natural desire to believe that you are a brave and bold Alpha snowflake notwithstanding. Deal with it. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being a Delta, it's just a simple statistical and observable reality. The sooner you accept the truth about yourself, the sooner you will be able to control your unconscious inclinations and modify your behavior in a manner that will help you achieve your goals. I've gone out of alphabetical order here because delta symbolizes change, which most Deltas are capable to some extent. Hence the synthetic alpha instruction set known as Game. Example: Probably you. Suggestion: Never forget that there are plenty of girls on the girl tree.

Gammas - the obsequious ones, the posterior puckerers, the nice guys who attempt to score through white-knighting, faux-chivalry, flattery, and omnipresence. All men except true Alphas will occasionally fall into Gamma behavior from time to time, this is the behavior and attitude that Roissy is attempting to teach men to recognize and avoid. The dividing line between a Gamma and a Delta is that the Gamma genuinely believes in the Gamma reality to the very core of his soul whereas the Delta is never truly comfortable with himself when he behaves in this manner despite being thoroughly indoctrinated in it by his culture. Example: Probably you if you've found yourself complaining about your lack of female companionship over the last two years. Suggestion: Remember that the statement "all are fallen" applies to women too. She isn't any more naturally pure or holy or ethereal than you are.

Lambdas - the gays. They have their own social hierarchy. They can fill any role from Alpha to Omega, but they tend to play the part rather than actually be it because the heterosexual social construct only encompasses the public part of their lives. Example: Neil Patrick Harris. Suggestion: Straights will be more tolerant if you keep the bathhouse behavior behind closed doors.

Sigmas - the lone wolves. Occasionally mistaken for Alphas, particularly by women and Alphas, they are not leaders and will actively resist the attempt of others to draft them. Alphas instinctively view them as challenges and either dislike or warily respect them. Some Deltas and most Omegas fancy themselves Sigmas, but the true Sigma's withdrawal from the pack is not a reaction to the way he is treated, it is pure instinct. Example: Clint Eastwood's movie persona. Suggestion: Entertain the possibility that other people are not always Hell. The banal idiocy is incidental, it's not intentional torture.

Omegas - the losers. Even the Gamma males despise them. That which doesn't kill them can make them stronger, but most never surmount the desperate need to belong caused by their social rejection. Omegas can be the most dangerous of men because the pain of their constant rejection renders the suffering of others completely meaningless in their eyes. Omegas tend to cluster in defensive groups; the dividing line between the Omega and the Sigma is twofold and can be easily recognized by a) the behavior of male Betas and Deltas and b) the behavior of women. Women tend to find outliers attractive in general, but while they respond to Sigmas almost as strongly as they do to Alphas, they correctly find Omega males creepier and much scarier than Gamma males. Example: Eric Harris Suggestion: Your rejection isn't entirely personal. Observe the difference in your own behavior and the way the Betas act. And try not to start off conversations with women by sharing "interesting facts" with them.

Me? Right now I'm Delta. I'm not too ambitious, but I'm pursuing a career that requires the ability to get out of Delta and in to at least a Beta. Like Vox says, "[t]he sooner you accept the truth about yourself, the sooner you will be able to control your unconscious inclinations and modify your behavior in a manner that will help you achieve your goals."

The Great Society's Great Idea Is Greatly...

...losing money, like the Right has said for decades.

UPDATE: Michelle also did a great post on this exact subject a few months ago.

National Aeronotical and Space Adminstration Told To Ignore Space

*sadface*

I may be about small government, balanced budgets and not wasting money, but space exploration is something very unique that America has done well.

The shift to climate science is pretty disheartening in light of the massive scandals surrounding the esoteric nature, not to mention the fudging of numbers, of climate science. That's not to say NASA can't work with agencies like NOAA on climate science, but NASA's main goal has always been expanding the understanding and pushing the frontier of space exploration by camera and by human beings. To axe its human exploration programs means we're too busy staring at our navels (a Baby Boomer aspect I did not miss) instead of going out into the unknown and finding awesome new stuff to do.

Our civilization is never too old or too mature to not get excited at the idea of exploring.

201st Post: On 24 - Day 8

Happy 201st post for GP! Yay!

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SPOLIER ALERT! DO NOT READ IF ONE IS CATCHING UP ON DAY 8 of 24!

This is probably blasphemy to some, but I think this season of 24 is actually pretty good.

In the last few seasons the world has been on edge from all sorts of super complicated terrorist attacks like EMP bombs, backyard ICBMs, chemical weapons hidden at Ontario Airport, more nukes, a remote control for every nuclear plant in America... you get the idea. There's been a ton of out-of-this-world plots by all sorts of terrorist groups and international cabals. Not to mention the constant stream of traitors in CTU. The last few seasons, in fact, have had an arching storyline for those who can stomach some of the worst parts of the 24 series.

But here comes Day 8 and what do we have so far after 6 hours? A Rafki Harri attempted assassination on the moderate leader of the "Islamic Republic". The realization there is weapons-grade uranium in the US in the hands of criminals. A CTU member whose criminal ex-boyfriend is manipulating her battered person syndrome. And the most interesting plotline, Renee Walker's decent into darkness.

No insane plots. No twisted family connections. No lame love torn apart by terrorists. Day 8, aside from Day 1 and Day 3, seems to most realistic and most entertaining season yet.

Hopefully it stays that way.