Month: September 2019

I had a dream where I was shown a Democrats volunteer for something, and a Republican volunteer.  They looked identical.

We are our best selves when out in the world, doing concrete good things for actual people.  Helping with cross country meets, church picnics, community clean up, whatever.  Americans are helpers by nature.  We are volunteers.

It’s really hard to hate someone who is right in front of you.  It takes practice and determination for otherwise psychologically normal people.

It would not be right to say Republicans are innocent in all this hyperpartisanship.  It always takes two to tango.  But we are not the ones going into clinical hyperarousal every time someone disagrees with us.  We are not the ones who throw ridiculous and completely unwarranted names at people.  This is a fact.

Still, the two groups spending time together, mixed, focused on a shared objective: all good.

What use anyone can make of this observation, I don’t know.  But here it is.

I watched Sticks and Stones.  Given all his jokes about pedophilia–which came really, really close to condoning it–it’s amazing the fuss was about his car with a G driver, an L passenger, and a B and a T in the back.

I can’t really think too many gay men seriously disagreed with his comedy.  Transgenders are a bit of a problem for them, apparently, and apparently quite militant about it.  And they probably ARE driving the car because they DO know the road.

Shit, it’s literally conceivable this whole thing could drive gay men and some large number of lesbians into the Trump camp.  I think he’s smart enough to fete them and treat them right.  Even they have got to be getting sick of the crazy.

I think most Republicans are fine with “if it’s not affecting me personally, fuck it.”  This is certainly a development, but not a bad one, I don’t think.  I won’t say there have been no benefits at all, socially, to left wing agitation.  It is simply manic, obsessive, and denuded of any core goal other than shaking the shit out of every structure of society which works.

When nothing works because nobody wants to do their job, because they are fucking entitled morons, THEN people will get where all this was heading.

Gays and Lesbians will be hurt as much as anyone else.  General decline is general decline. I think more and more are seeing this.

I had forgotten this controversy.  That study I linked created a wave of hate.  The author followed up with this post, which also quotes the former Dean of Harvard Medical School, which did the study: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-mind-and-brain/201811/teen-transgender-identity-response-critics

What I see is that the less fulfilling gender transition is, the more potent the following political rage.  Most of these people do not seem to want to live their lives quietly, and simply be left alone, which I absolutely support, and which is the American way, but rather to bully everyone who wonders out loud why 14 year old girls are deciding overnight to become their best approximation of men.

Nowhere in here is there wisdom.  Nowhere in here is anyone expressing any higher purpose to life than doing whatever the fuck you want, whenever you want, in any way you want, and fuck everyone who disagrees.

This sort of thing makes me fantasize about becoming a hermit up in the hills somewhere, and just letting the whole fucking building burn down.

I nearly didn’t post that.  I decided to.  Fuck it. 

Here is my thing: I won’t judge someone for wanting to change their sex (to the extent physically possible, which is not very much), but I WILL judge them, categorically, and all day long every day, for lying to me, or to themselves.  I fucking hate lies, and liars.  Even if it is self deception, I WILL call it out.

The truth on this issue, though, is that this buzzsaw is already cutting through our culture.  The damage will not be easily undone.

When I was in Sales, I used to compare sales proposals to trees.  Trees, once they start to fall, tend to keep falling in whatever direction they initially started.  It is very, very, very hard to sell to someone who is already sold on something else.  Trying to do so is what gives salespeople bad names.  Don’t do it.  If you start right, by placing the notches on the base of the tree yourself, it will fall your way.  My favorite sales book is titled “Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play.”  Great book.  Summary: qualify, qualify, qualify, then know what the fuck you are talking about, and how to get the good things you promise done correctly, on cost, and on time.

Be all that as it may, the tree is falling on universally shared notions of family, patriotism, church, etc.  It would not be hard to argue it has fallen.

But things will get much worse before they get better.  The falling is still going on.  People are still pushing that tree over.  Nothing I or anyone else like me says or does will change that process.

We all need to adapt.  We need to plan for when these people realize their ideas are a catastrophic failure.  When and how that may happen, I can’t say.  It may very well take national collapse.  I can’t say.  I don’t know.

But I do know that I can only preach to people already largely in agreement with me.  I can’t preach to anyone else.  No one is listening.  The rift widens daily, seemingly.

I was looking at my cashier tonight, and I’m pretty sure he used to be a she, probably not that long ago.  I’ve long had the feeling these women really get excited when their voice changes, and they start getting facial hair.  Who knows: maybe they throw parties.


But I couldn’t help but look at this and see next generation consumerism.  When you can have anything you want, what do you want?  To be someone else.


Now, some people really are born that way.  I have zero argument with this claim.  My kids knew a girl who, when she was 5, was saying “when I get breasts I am going to cut them off”.  Camille Paglia dressed up as a male character of some sort every chance she got when she was a child.  Even now, she identifies as transgender, even if she seems to oppose actual surgery for most people.


I got to thinking, though, that there are huge potential social gains from deciding to become transgender.  This article actually summarizes from a position of data the conclusions I formed independently.  This article is worth reading in its entirety.


https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-mind-and-brain/201811/why-is-transgender-identity-the-rise-among-teens

Littman hypothesizes that ROGD [Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria] can be cast as a maladaptive coping mechanism for other underlying mental health issues such as trauma or social maladjustment, but also for other exceptional traits like high IQ and giftedness. The peer support, prestige, and identity leveraged by the youth who proudly come out as trans certainly appears to be protective in their circles. 

And:

The notion reported by parents that the ROGD appears to be “scripted” is also telling. Medical anthropologists describe the process of outsourcing negative feelings to cultural narratives and systems of beliefs as “idioms of distress.” These beliefs can be partially grounded in science and biology (as is the case with current brain-based mental health culture), or not at all (as is the case in cultures that explain mental illness through the idiom of spirit possession). When extreme forms of distress and coping arise through novel social pressures and spread through implicit imitation, strange epidemics of “mass psychogenic illnesses” have been documented. These have extended to dancing plagues, possession epidemics on factory floors,fugue states, or epidemics of face-twitching. These conditions are described as “psychogenic” (originating in the mind) when no underlying physical cause can be determined. But the term “sociogenic,” which highlights the social context in which these conditions occur,  is a better description. 

Now, they do note that there are negative factors as well:

As Littman’s study shows, this social signaling strategy also comes with strong disadvantages, particularly as it increases conflict between trans youth and the “cis” majority of the population, which, tellingly, includes a majority of the LGBT community. 

I had not really grasped the extent of this conflict, until I read about trans activists nailing rats on the doors of a rape clinic: https://www.theblaze.com/news/trans-power-womens-rape-shelter-faces-death-threat-and-vandalism-for-rejecting-transgender-women


My own reasoning was thus: when you “come out” and decide to “transition” you can expect to be praised as brave.  Anyone questioning you about ANYTHING can be termed transphobic.  You get a LOT of attention.  Everyone wants to know how you are doing.  It is virtually MADE for social media.  You get to post regular updates, get to vent about real or imagined incidents of bigotry.


And the whole thing might take several years.  During this period, you are a star.  And you get to focus all your attention on this one problem, and not the problems of life, not the problems of earning an income or educating yourself, not the problem of becoming a mature, socially responsible adult.  To all criticisms of anything you do or say, you can accuse them of transphobia.


So there is a huge secondary gain in this.  But the whole thing feels to me like getting a tattoo.  You might think, nobody is that stupid, that short sighted, that shallow, that naive.  Honestly, I disagree.  I see stupidity around me I can’t begin to fathom.  Every misanthropic impulse I have in me is strengthened, the more I deal with today’s youth.  As I’ve said many times, I can’t see how good comes from any of this.


And the whole thing wears off eventually.  You transition.  You get the hormones–which you have to take for life, as far as I know, and the health effects of which I don’t think are really known–and you do the surgery, and after all the hoopla, and attention, and novelty, there you are: the same person you always were, without the attention, without the gratification of being able always to defend against all criticism with a non sequitur.


You are in the world, different, but the same.  All the problems of life–paying the rent, finding true or at least stable love, deciding what life means for you, picking a vocation–are not diminished in any way.  Perhaps they ARE amplified by your decision.  Perhaps some residual prejudice remains.


And I just can’t help seeing, in my minds eye, people saying “what the fuck was that all for?”


As he says in the article, there is a very robust connection with social media involvement and this decision.  To put it mildly, social media is fickle.  Today’s star is tomorrows goat.


I can’t help but seeing many of these kids feeling suicidal depression 10-15-20 years down the road.  They didn’t do it for the right reason.  They made a foolish decision when they were young, that is very, very hard to undo.  Hell, even for people who made this decision when it WAS hard, or harder, say 30 years ago, their suicide rates skyrocket several decades after surgery.  I think the statistic I saw was a rate 400% higher than the population as a whole.  That’s not success, by any standard.


How is it that wisdom, and patience, and thinking things through has become passe?  How have we become so deluded that those with life experience think we need to automatically trust the judgment of brainwashed youth?  Do we not owe them more, if we love them?  Should we not want them to be happy, to thrive, by learning how to live as adults in a sometimes difficult and nearly always confusing world?  Do adults really not owe their children more than abject and astonishingly craven subservience? 

Commuting is a lot like a mass daily migration, isn’t it?

What is the Middle Way, Madhyamarga, in this world? 2019? In industrialized, comfortable, decadent nations?

When you concentrate power, sooner or later you will have concentrated evil.

Corollary: all utopias, if they are to be other than abusive fantasies perpetrated by skilled liars, must begin with plans for INDIVIDUAL moral betterment.

It would not be an exaggeration, I dont think, to say my whole scope of work is largely based on this latter precept.

Marx has little to say about how one given person might better himself. Why? He was a shithead. An amoral, frustrated angry resentful caricature of a decent human being. And he hated decent human beings. This is more or less directly what is connoted with the insult “bourgeois”.

This is what is epitomized with the Leftist embrace of Sade, Satan, and the transfiguration of morals based on no more intelligent criterion than destroying what is, with no plan to replace it.

Self evidently (so it seems to me), Socialism and it’s most virulent strain, political correctness, consists in what I will infelicitously, but vaguely comically call “Exclusionary Tuesday Red Sockedness”. They want to see RED fucking SOCKS on fucking TUESDAY.  Woe to the person who isn’t on board.

I hope my point is clear, but expect that it is not. It’s that fish in the water thing.

Let me put it this way: Socialists, obviously, are not appealing to tradition. This would be a conservative argument, and one which I hope I have shown to actually be a good one, because if everything is arbitrary anyway, the long known and agreed upon is best.

No, Socialists are making the much harder claim that their views (which are mutable on a dime, other than the core claim that you have to agree with them no matter what) are OBVIOUS,, and that it is right and proper to bully and cajole, and where needed expel and inflict (for now) social violence on anyone who disagrees.

The whole system is built on essentially arbitrary ideas, concocted by emotionally damaged and highly limited people, which the rest of us are expected to adhere to out of courtesy and a threat of violence.

In a world of cowards, they would have already won. But America, particularly, whatever our other defects, has never lacked men and women with balls.

For most people, the way they are used to.

I will offer an example. I can imagine a cultural order where it is vitally important to wear red socks every Tuesday.

This practice affirms for members their belonging in a group. It symbolizes and expresses a solidarity with others.

This is useful. It counters the natural tendency in woke animals towards confusion and anomie.

But it can also easily devolve under pressure into exclusion. Inclusion is happy, exclusion is angry. Perhaps you beat those who forget or refuse. Perhaps you make war on those who insist Wednesday is the best day, the only appropriate day.

(I will note, many religious wars, with thousands of gallons of actual blood literally filling the gutters of actual streets and other battlefields, were fought over issues not all that different than my nearly, but not in my view quite, satirical example).

People may evolve who point out of arbitrariness of Red Sock Tuesday. These deep thinkers, perhaps the David Hume’s of their age, might say the socks can be any color. They might say they can be worn on any day. And they might be sweaters or scarves, or vests, or underwear. They might create a crisis of faith.

Bit none of this truly undermines the usefulness of the belief that one should wear red socks on Tuesday. We need things like that, and they will evolve over and over and over.

Look at sports fans, fanatics for short. They have clothes, rituals, beliefs. They spend money (tithing), time and much energy in their devotions. They make their affiliation an important part of their lives.

Examples could be mulitiplied.

Ponder all this.