I was going to save these links and comments for a Miscellany post but they’re kinda long for that.
A couple of days ago I got a hit from extradeadjcb.substack.com and by sheer luck I stumbled upon the link in the comments here; a commenter had linked to The Role of Ideology in Leftist Violence. (Thanks for the shout-out. By the way, why does WordPress only tell me the basic site the link came from, and not the specific page within that site? And why didn’t it tell me when the link was originally created (in October 2022), but only couple of days ago when (I guess) someone clicked on it? WTF?)
Anyway, as I was hunting around on that site I found a bunch of good stuff. I’ve found a lot of good stuff ‘pon teh Interwebz lately. Coincidence or something else? Maybe Clown World is getting so obviously, performatively insane that its insanity has hit some kind of critical mass and everyone is like, “Aww, fizzuck this shizzisnit.” One may hope.
As I was martingaling my way through this substack site I came across e.g. this post where he casually tosses off this FUCKING GEM on feminism:
We no longer have any cultural vocabulary for a hierarchical relationship that is not tyrannical.
Damn. What an apt observation. Just saying it and forcing everyone to spend three seconds thinking about it would revolutionize our entire political culture.
Unfortunately he doesn’t totally get it (pardon me, dude, if you’re reading this, but this is important). Here’s the whole paragraph:
Second, they’re [women] afraid of being tyrannized. Nobody actually wants to be humiliated or hurt or exploited. Women enjoy feeling “owned”, but we no longer have any cultural vocabulary for a hierarchical relationship that is not tyrannical, so the idea of being owned & the idea of being abused are deeply connected. There’s a fear that if that desire is ever defined as anything other than “kink” – if it is ever permitted to escape the bedroom – that it would mean literal, actual, unsexy slavery.
The phrase “literal, actual, unsexy slavery” is a man thinking, reacting, and speaking as a man. And this is well and good, because a man should think, react, and speak as a man. But women are not men. In many ways, women are profoundly alien beings from the Circinus Galaxy. Slavery is not the horrifying catastrophe for women that it is for men, because while a male slave’s average reproductive success drops, a female slave’s average reproductive success rises. Evolutionarily, men had to be horrified by the idea of being enslaved, and fight it to their last erg of energy, or they were out-selected. Women who were enslaved… oh, well, whatever. Read porn, I mean romance, written by women themselves. You will not find one example – not a single one – of “unsexy slavery.” You will find more examples than you can count of sexy slavery.
The author of this site is a Mormon, and I don’t know the Mormon teaching on How We Got Here – maybe evolutionary psychology is verboten or something. But verboten or not, it’s the truth, and you can’t understand important topics, such as human sexuality, without it.
There’s another gem in this post, where (among other things) he gives a good kick in the teeth to the idiotic notion that “communication is the solution to most of our problems.” Actually, as he says, it’s arguably the opposite when it comes to people on the political left and right. The Internet enabled each side to really see what the other side thinks and wants. The left realized we are never, ever going to believe that they are the best and the brightest, and willingly submit to a totalitarian government with them in charge. This was quite a shock to them, because their personal narrative is that they’re just the tits. And the right realized that the left wants to enslave us all (their moderate faction) or to kill us all (the leftist faction where all the energy and drive is). It’s good that we know this about them, but communication definitely didn’t cause us to all hold hands and start singing This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land ’round the campfire.
Neurotoxin 