November 7, 2014

Ohio court to queer couples: Drop dead (from viral loads)

In a landmark decision that will hopefully drive most of Ohio's gay-enabling Millennial generation out of the state, a federal appeals court in Cincinnati has allowed four states (Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Michigan) to treat gay marriages as illegitimate, following the sentiment of the people.

This may force a decision with the Supreme Court, and they may rule in favor of gay marriage. But even if that happens, conservatives in the region should not grasp defeat from the jaws of victory. A ruling against condoning gay deviance all the way up at the appellate level is already sending shockwaves throughout the region (see all the whiny Twitter reactions in the Dispatch article).

Now it is official: no matter what the Supreme Court ultimately decides, Ohio and its Appalachian neighbors have chosen to stand on the wrong side of history. Anybody who wants to stand on the right side can defect and join the liberal transplant hive in a more fag-friendly state.

If you think that gays and their apologists are going to forget this decision when/if the Supreme Court reverses it, think again. Look at how well people still remember the resistance in the Deep South to desegregation in the 1950s. That example is instructive: although local resistance was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, blacks still figured it wasn't worth the hassle of living there anymore, and continued migrating toward more liberal Midwestern areas.

Letting a group know that they aren't welcome, or at least that they can't push their agenda over the majority, goes a long way toward not having to live with their problems anymore. On the flipside, letting a group know that they are welcomed unconditionally, and that the majority will take all the narrow-interests abuse that can be dished out by the guests, makes it certain that the hosts will have to put up with the newcomers' problems for a very long time.

Chicago only shed large numbers of blacks when they told them that even better welfare policies awaited them up in Minnesota and Wisconsin. There were also enough micks and wops in Chicago to give the blacks a little boost out of the state, whereas Minneapolis and Milwaukee have only Nordic pansies standing guard.

Ohio, though, is proving to be less and less Midwestern over time. We see that now from a regional high court more or less giving the finger to the number one trendoid human rights cause du jour. There is a fault-line running through the state from southwest to northeast, with the southern and eastern strip being hillbillies, the southwest being more akin to Louisville, Kentucky, the center area drawing a variety of folks, and the northern and western area being part of the freezing industrial Midwest, now the Rust Belt.

Over the past two to three generations, the hillbillies have been leaving the rural areas and settling down more in the center near Columbus, or further south toward Cincinnati and Louisville. Cleveland in the northeast and Toledo in the northwest keep losing population, mostly out of state to transplant havens in Arizona, North Carolina, etc. Slowly but surely the Appalachian influence is on the rise, and the Midwestern on the decline.

It can be hard for folks not acquainted with flyover country to picture where the rough boundaries of Appalachia are, so here is a map of its counties according to the Appalachian Regional Council. Most people know that the country is flat along the East Coast, flat in the Midwest, and is hilly or mountainous somewhere in between, but think only of West Virginia.

Notice how much of Ohio is hillbilly territory. You don't see that out in the Platonic ideal Midwestern states like Iowa or Minnesota. (Also notice how much of Pennsylvania is hilly once you get away from Philadelphia on the East Coast.)

As the me-first impulse carries individuals away from their home town and to wherever they identify and affiliate with, the initial disparities will widen within fault-line states like Ohio. People who want to be on the right side of migration history will high-tail it out of the state toward Colorado, Arizona, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, etc. And they'll take their "right side of history" politics with them.

The remainder who pay no mind to how trendy their place of residence and origin is, will neither care about how trendy their policies are.

96 comments:

  1. I think you're totally right about your Ohio observations. Of course you have plenty of experience with it, as do I. My brother and I were just talking about this yesterday. I asked what southeast Ohio is like and he said "West Virginia."

    And I can attest to the larger number of blacks in southern Wisconsin. It's pretty noticeable compared to 20 years ago. Especially seeing their white baby mamas.

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  2. Some of southeastern Ohio is right in the Columbus metro area, like Hocking County, site of the cliffs, gorges, and trails of Hocking Hills. We used to make day trips and camp overnight there at least a few times a year. It's only about one hour from suburban Columbus.

    Fun fact: most of the stone bridges and stairways that blend seamlessly into the Hocking Hills parks were built during the Depression by the WPA. We associate that with modern, industrial-age architecture, but they must have had a Romantic-Gothic program as well for the forested areas.

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  3. I should put up a full post on the topic, but another unseen yet powerful difference among the eastern parts of the Midwest is whether the Germans are Lutheran or Catholic. This roughly maps onto where in the German-speaking lands their ancestors hailed from -- Catholic in highlands and mountains, Protestant in the plains.

    We all know about the Scotch-Irish hillbillies of Appalachia, but there's a good deal of overlap in ways-of-life with Alpine Germans. More toward the "culture of honor" side of the legalism-honor spectrum, relative to other Europeans. It's convergent evolution among transhumance pastoralists of the highlands.

    The Protestant Germans headed farther west, along with their Nordic brethren. The Catholics were more at home in places near hill country. A lot of German Village in Columbus is not generically "German" but specifically Bavarian.

    Not to mention the concentration of highlander High German speakers along the eastern OH / western PA border, the Amish.

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  4. Back in 1992 I drove from Cincinnati to DC via Rt. 32, which runs along southern Ohio. It was rolling hills, entirely rural. I stopped at a Pizza Hut in Athens, OH for dinner. One thing I remember is how pretty the crew of waitresses there was.

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  5. What was playing on the radio -- this?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrpXArn3hII

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  6. "Ohio court to queer couples: Drop dead (from viral loads)"

    I appreciate your contribution but at the end of the day, a headline like this confirms you possess no ethical consciousness whatsoever.

    You're an intellect bereft of moral sense.

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  7. So, wait. Now you DO see homotyranny as being comparable to segregation and inter-racial marriage? That’s playing into their frame. Sodomy is clearly comparable to abortion, rather than segregation, which coincidentally is the only field where feckless conservatives have gained any meaningful ground. I think you`re trying to find a silver lining. None of this counters that liberals are moving beyond sodomy, and into trans, pedophilia, incest (the Lena Dunham spat was clearly a test run) and eventually bestiality.

    Who cares if four states managed to uphold the law? Homotyranny and their awful liberal enablers continue spreading across previously decent states like the one you mentioned above. The people in North Carolina and Virginia also tried to stop sodomy. Why should they be punished by some unelected judge, on a whim? Legalization affirms their “lifestyle,” which is exactly what they want.

    Unless you truly believe that once we move out of this "cocooning" age that there will be an utter rejection of sodomy, like after the Victorian age, all this means is that states like Colorado and Virginia will continue falling into this degenerate swamp. Once decent people will become completely desensitized and apathetic (“who cares… it’s their choice to die of AIDS and bowel diseases. Who am I to judge?”) to this perversion. Living in a world where sodomy is calmly and passively accepted would be even worse than what we have right now. That’s when people go dead inside. You and I both agree that sodomy is wrong, but as long as they are able to control the frame and claim to be on “the right side of history,” without meaningful push-back, they ARE on the right side of history. Maybe because I’m a millennial, and I don’t remember a time when sodomites WEREN’T on the ascent, I’m overly pessimistic. If so, please tell me why I'm wrong.

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  8. "an intellect bereft of moral sense."

    You're a dork bereft of a dick.

    Intellect above morals belongs to the homo enablers. "I don't see any reason why" the mentally ill shouldn't be able to spread their viral loads to whoever they want -- as long as there's consent.

    Approving consensual degradation and epidemic putrification -- not exactly the most moral course of action.

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  9. I didn't say that segregationist and anti-homo practices were morally equivalent. Rather, that they share the highly polarized right side vs. wrong side of history dividing line. And that it doesn't matter if an even higher court declares that the wrong side of history practices must come to an end.

    As long as the target group feels unwelcome, they won't stay. And sympathizers won't come in.

    True, this may not lower the overall national level of support for gay marriage, and may only geographically shuffle around where the supporters and push-backers live. So be it. Reversing the condoning of gay deviance is going to take a long time, and this is an important step along the way.

    My advice to younger people, who have no historical perspective, is to look back at history. The debauched climate of saloons and red light districts of the Gilded Age took decades to undo -- not until about 1910. Cleaning up the drunkenness took about 10 years longer. Striking workers in the Gilded Age were simply mowed down with guns by private armies of Pinkerton guards. Not until the '30s was organized labor able to bargain with management without the fear of gatling guns.

    That ought to temper your pessimism too. The 1950s don't extend back through the 1850s -- quite the opposite. The Gilded Age and Fin-de-siecle periods were ridden with vice. They are the seedy places that George Bailey is horrified to see continuing into the present in the nightmare version of his hometown in It's a Wonderful Life.

    If people back then managed to clean up the saloons, red light districts, gambling, drunkenness, robber barons, and flagrant corruption, people today can do the same. But don't expect instant gratification -- that puts you instead into the addictive, vice-prone mindset that we're trying to unplug society from.

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  10. Think of it like cutting back the sickening overgrowth of vines and thorns along what used to be a pedestrian-friendly trail through the woods. It won't be cleared out overnight with napalm, and you may not even live to see the project completed. But don't let that get in the way of you pitching in to chop away at those vines and thorns today.

    Especially do not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. If you manage to stop a nest of noxious weeds from invading one part of the forest, don't immediately whine about how they'll find a way to get in there somehow or other, it's only a matter of time before corruption returns, etc. Be grateful that there's now a temporary sanctuary amidst so much aggressive infestation.

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  11. You are a lot more optimistic than others in the reactionary/alt-right/dark enlightenment blogosphere, such as Heartiste or Vox Day, who pretty much argue we’re on a one-way collapse of civilization. Your advice is good, certainly a different attitude than anything I've heard from secular or religious blogs. Attitudes about whining and perspective will be duly noted.

    I will admit though, I am still somewhat baffled by what your "thesis" is, so to speak. I understand the pieces, about cocooning, status striving, crime-rates, ect, but I'm not quite seeing the whole. How did you come across this "theory?" How did you notice it? Also, good on you for noting how robotic Asians act. I’m in the Pacific Northwest, and the majority of the "diverse" population we have here are Asians, so I admit a certain amount of exasperation when I see people in "flyover country" talking about how great Asians are. Maybe it's a matter of "familiarity breeds contempt." How will the end of "cocooning" effect how North Americans view Asians?

    On a tangential note, what do you make of the trend of white male, (white) Latina female coupling? For example, I know a boomer from southwestern Pennsylvania, and her son in Texas just got married to a (white) Mexican girl. Combined with reports that Latinos/Hispanics/Mexicans/ect increasingly identify as "white," what will be the implications of this, compared with the doom and gloom expressed by Heartiste, when crime begins to rise again and immigration grinds to a halt, ala 1924? Leftists, particularly Asian leftists, are already getting upset by this development since it may endanger their dream of a multicult utopia. For what it's worth, I've found my experiences with Mexicans to be much more fruitful in terms of making personal connections than with Asians. However, this may be another case of familiarity breeding contempt, compared to people in the southwest.

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  12. I'm from Toledo, and I have fond memories of hiking at Hocking Hills. That area is so different from the pancake-flat and completely farmed-over glacial plains of NW Ohio that it's hard to believe you're in the same state, just a day trip away.

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  13. With regard to pessimism and whining, I think conservatives (especially the old cynical ones) often lament way too much that things are just horrible and never getting better. Great way too alienate younger and more inspired people who, as Agnostic just said, could be doing a lot more to impede the progress of brain dead PROGRESS! liberalism.

    Whatever liberalism's faults (there are many), at least it offers a message of hope and improvement.

    Historical ignorance does distort both liberal and conservative thinking. Liberals naively assume that the past was a hellish nightmare that we mustn't ever return to. Conservatives tend to make the inane assumption that everything has gone to hell so we must return to some august past.

    Which point in the past, exactly? The typical conservative is quite inarticulate about what traits we should be emulating from which period. The stock response is the 50's, but even those who lived in that decade forget that people were aloof & neurotic albeit not status striving. Eventually, people found 50's culture so suffocating that they revolted in the 60's . Liberals cheer those changes without appreciating the fact that the modest equality of the 50's was worth saving. Conservatives hated those changes without realizing how dull life is when people are taciturn and averse to spontaneity and excitement. They also don't notice how awful 50's art is.

    In fact, one of the main weaknesses of conservatives is their indifference to the importance of good art, probably arising out of how liberal artists tend to be. During a period of terrible art (which is a product of cocooning) people seem to even more ignorant about how inspiring and exciting art can be.

    Maybe if some strong effort was made to teach people about historical cycles of behavior (at least in college, maybe even in high school) there would be a lot less ignorance about the past and the future.

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  14. "I understand the pieces, about cocooning, status striving, crime-rates, ect, but I'm not quite seeing the whole."

    There are two separate cycles, one that links cocooning and crime rates, and another that links status-striving and inequality. The cocooning and crime cycle is my discovery, the status-striving and inequality cycle is Peter Turchin's (I'm just fleshing out more details, in more domains of life -- like male facial hair rising and falling along with status-striving).

    The approach to both cycles is the same, though: there are two forces that influence each other to produce a cycle. Kind of like how predators and prey influence each other's numbers to produce rising and falling population sizes. (Formally, the model is a system of differential equations.)

    Here's the gist:

    Cocooning and crime. Start with low crime rates that are bottoming out. They've been falling for long enough that people feel safe to be more outgoing, in public spaces, with total strangers. (Fear of crime or getting taken advantage of is the main deterrent to the outgoing social orientation.)

    With rising numbers of socially trusting people appearing out in public, potential criminals see an easier and easier chance to rob, rape, and kill. Apart from that, more people crowding public places means they'll step on each other's toes more, and there will be more bar fights, more girlfriend stealing, and so on.

    When outgoing-ness rises, crime rates rise soon after.

    As crime becomes more and more common, in more and more places that you had believed to be safe -- your own neighborhood, your own social circle, your own family -- people start to re-evaluate how outgoing and socially open they're willing to be. Trusting people are more vulnerable to being preyed on.

    Eventually this reaches a turning point, and people begin to cocoon. They're less public-oriented, and when they go out, they're more guarded and suspicious.

    With fewer targets out in the open, and with those who are out being so closed-off, criminals have a more and more difficult time preying on them. Also, people aren't stepping on each other's toes as much -- if people are hanging out around the home rather than a public place, there won't be as many bar fights, girlfriend stealing, and so on.

    Cocooning causes crime rates to fall.

    When they've fallen low enough, people feel safe again, become more outgoing, and the cycle repeats itself.

    Most of the cycle, the two variables are heading in the same direction -- rising openness and rising crime (the 1960s through the '80s) or falling openness and falling crime (the mid-'90s through today).

    But they're not perfectly in sync, because social orientation is the leading variable, and crime rates track its movements by a delay. So there are small periods where they're out of whack -- rising openness and falling crime (the mid-to-late 1950s) and falling openness and rising crime (the early 1990s).

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  15. I may have misunderstood your crime rates / cocooning theory. I understood it NOT as you say here, that rising crime opportunistically tracks openness with a bit of a lag, but that they are inverse and apparently counterintuitive cycles:

    As crime rises, people become more open and sociable because they are compelled to seek out companionship and keep a vigilant eye out on their neighborhood. As crime rates drop, people become complacent and lazy and retreat to their cocoons.

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  16. Status-striving and inequality. Start with inequality low and bottoming out. People see collective harmony and accommodation being so widespread and seemingly natural, that they take it for granted. They ask, "C'mon, what's the harm of pushing a little more for what *I* want?" They being striving for higher status.

    More and more competition for desirable spots on the economic pyramid means that the battles are fiercer. Winner win bigger, losers fall harder. Winners will also fight to hold their spot more viciously, applying whatever pressure they can on those below. This goes all the way down the pyramid -- level 1 at the top tries to handicap level 2 beneath them, level 2 handicaps level 3, level n-1 handicaps level n.

    Rising status-striving causes rising competitiveness, and from there, rising inequality.

    Modern winner-take-all industries make the problems worse, but are not necessary to widen inequality -- these dynamics can be seen in the Roman Empire.

    Eventually, competitiveness becomes so chaotic -- often reaching the levels of a civil war -- that people re-evaluate the value of always trying to get ahead. They start to dial down their impulse for higher status, and begin to shame and hinder or regulate those who want to keep the great big status war a-churning.

    With a more self-regulating and other-regulating orientation, people are not as indiscriminately competitive. Now the stakes are lower, and winners and losers are not so polarized in the aftermath of a battle.

    Self-effacing and self-regulating leads to falling competition and inequality.

    Then harmony becomes so common that it's taken for granted, and the cycle repeats.

    As with cocooning and crime, one variable leads and the other trails. Status-striving increases first, and then competitiveness / inequality. Mostly they are aligned, but they're slightly out of sync, so there are periods where they are at odds.

    Rising status-striving, rising inequality -- the 1980s through today, and the Gilded Age and early 20th C before.

    Falling status-striving, falling inequality -- the 1920s and '30s through the '60s.

    Rising status-striving, falling inequality -- the early-to-mid '70s.

    Falling status-striving, rising inequality -- the 1910s.

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  17. "As crime rises, people become more open and sociable because they are compelled to seek out companionship and keep a vigilant eye out on their neighborhood. As crime rates drop, people become complacent and lazy and retreat to their cocoons."

    These dynamics are at play too, but they only reinforce the main dynamics. Openness leads to rising crime, and rising crime leads people in the short-term to band together. But over the medium term, rising crime erodes trust, and a turning point is reached.

    Cocooning leads to falling crime, and falling crime leads people in the short term to see less reason to band together. But over the medium term, falling crime replenishes trust, and a turning point is reached.

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  18. "Start with low crime rates that are bottoming out. They've been falling for long enough that people feel safe to be more outgoing, in public spaces, "

    That does explain some of it, but I also wonder if there's a sense of frustration, of missing out; 'we've been cooped up way too long and this is getting old. Time to venture out.' This is probably more pronounced among the young because kids are more likely to stir things up. Also the generation(s) whose childhood occured mostly or entirely in a period of low outgoingness may finally begin to be curious about the outside world and its inhabitants. To a dangerously naive degree as we saw with aging Silents/younger Boomers being embarrassingly easy to exploit and delude in the 60's-70's.

    Some poster who's name escapes me pointed out a little while ago that Gen X-ers may have inadvertently halted the freewheeling 60'-80's era by being much less sociable and adventurous than Boomers.

    When the culture turns to outgoingness I think that it will be a naive, high spirited neo Boomer generation that will be most responsible for the change. Who will be most affected, for good or for ill, by the changing vibes? Probably these neo Boomers but also, to a lesser degree, a generation close to them similar to how the Silents ended up overlapping the Boomers in many but not all respects.

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  19. "You are a lot more optimistic than others in the reactionary/alt-right/dark enlightenment blogosphere"

    Thankfully, I didn't appear in that info-graphic that displayed the links among the many blogs of alt-right network. I wouldn't put myself there either.

    I did contribute to Gene Expression (gnxp.com) in the mid-to-late 2000s, but that was mostly to help overturn silly notions about human beings as blank slates. I've been trying to find environmental causes of human differences since the beginning -- whether they're short-term causes (infections, divorced parents, zeitgeist) or the drivers of long-term genetic and cultural adaptation (subsistence modes, geography).

    Most of the "dark enlightenment" is simply divorced from reality -- taking an idea with a kernel of truth or insight, but exaggerating it into a prophecy of doom. It feeds a mindset of helplessness, hopelessness, and passivity, where only escapism and rage can alleviate stress. It's basically the heavy metal scene for nerds.

    Hopeless angry people will also yearn for a strong leader to save them and smite their bullies, so the dark enlightenment has an elitist streak that goes against the populist view I've held since I had any half-formed ideology to speak of, back in college. If we import enough high-IQ Asians, or promote high fertility among native-born Jews, Western civilization will be saved. We need to lose our fear of dictators. Let rich people keep all their ill-gotten wealth, regardless of how much they employ it to destroy community and society. If we only had no blacks, most of our problems would be solved. Etc.

    The two problems I see are cocooning and status-striving, but how many conservatives will say these are corrosive forces? Most of them these days *prefer* holing up in their home, and only interacting with the outside world via the internet (blogs, Amazon, whatever). And they condone the drive to always be getting ahead -- they just don't like a particular set of winners in the great big status war.

    My basic values, that we need more of: being more connected to the people and places around you, reining in your self-advancing impulses, and taking an attitude of stewardship rather than "let it burn" and "let them eat cake."

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  20. At root, the misguided views and failed efforts of the dark enlightenment (in broad terms) stems from the attempt to apply Silent Gen and Boomer ways to the problems facing Gen X and Millennials (and whoever comes after them).

    For Boomers, it's always the 1960s and '70s. Big government is the greatest evil, social safety nets are weakening our moral fiber, women are inveterate sluts (get some if you approve, blow hot air if you disapprove), blacks are the greatest ethnic threat, and so on. That was a naive set of ideas even back then, but by now we can judge the results and move in a different direction.

    Somehow that way of thinking and acting made things worse. Blacks were replaced by Mexicans and Asians, who multiply way more easily and are less co-adapted to white American culture. Distrust between the sexes has grown. Concentrated wealth has hammered the middle and working classes even harder, and bought off more of the government (making the government weaker has made it more vulnerable to manipulation by the powerful). And when ordinary people fall on hard times, there's hardly anything to soften the blows, which will come more frequently with fewer protections of the weak.

    There was an attempt to wed political-economic libertarianism with conservationist or traditionalist values for the family and community, but it failed pathetically. The human mind doesn't like being pulled in opposite directions -- laissez-faire norms in the political-economic sphere have fed and been fed by laissez-faire norms in family and community affairs. In practice, libertarianism goes along with libertinism.

    Re-discovering this connection, the futility of trying to work within the laissez-faire norms, and the need for greater regulation -- both politically / economically as well as morally -- is the project for the post-Boomer generations. It will result in a twin movement of Progressives in the economic sphere and Temperance activists in the community sphere -- just like the last time around, in the early 20th C.

    Among Gen X and Millennials, conservatives must learn the value of economic regulation, and progressives must learn the value of moral regulation. With that common ground being found, progressives will support an end to immigration like they did in the good old days, and conservatives will try to conserve society rather than let it get torn to shreds by a war of all against all.

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  21. A prevailing element in alt-Right anger is the belief a deliberate anti-white agenda. I myself believe that this agenda exists, and is being imemented, though it's still unclear to me how strong or implacable this genocidal program is.

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  22. Interesting post. I hope you are right about Ohio.

    A couple of points though:

    1) Strange comment about blacks in the South -- they are still there in large numbers: http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-06.pdf

    2) Are you religious? When you talk about the "value of moral regulation" are you talking about religious values?

    3) As an old-fashioned American, constitutional conservative, I think you have the Progressives all wrong. The last thing we want is a bigger, more powerful government which is just used by business and bureaucrats to get what they want at the expense of the common man. Read your public choice economics. Or read your U.S. Constitution -- the 20th Century is one long sad story of expanding the federal government's size and power into areas it doesn't belong.

    4) We agree about one very important thing -- ending the flow of immigrants and hopefully forcing a large percentage of the illegal population back to their real homes in Central America.

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  23. Blacks are way less common in the South than they used to be. Look at historical data. Many Southern states were well over majority black before the Great Migration.

    Moral regulation usually finds a religious expression, because that gives a taboo quality to a secular argument. But you could frame self-regulation in therapeutic and communal terms, without being explicitly religious. Other people depend on you being healthy and not drowning in vice. And if everyone strives for maximum status, they will overgraze the pastures.

    "The last thing we want is a bigger, more powerful government which is just used by business and bureaucrats to get what they want at the expense of the common man."

    Inequality fell for more than half a century thanks to policies that stem from the Progressive Era fight against robber barons, monopolies, and the Senate being the millionaire's club (who weren't directly elected back then).

    It extended more broadly to biological health, not just material well-being. The disease burden fell off a cliff during the same period, not necessarily due to vaccines but simpler things like the FDA making it safe to eat food that you didn't produce yourself and can't vouch for personally.

    What does public choice theory have to say about that reality?

    "Or read your U.S. Constitution -- the 20th Century is one long sad story of expanding the federal government's size and power into areas it doesn't belong."

    Yeah, if only we could return to the halcyon days of How the Other Half Lives, The Jungle, robber barons shielded by armies of Pinkerton guards, trusts, and the Spanish Flu -- just as Thomas Jefferson dreamed of, but which was sadly to be derailed by gubmint intervention.

    The real reason the state grew so big and powerful is because businesses, corporations, and monopolies had grown big and powerful first during the Gilded Age and early 20th C. No normal person found that new level of corporate tyranny desirable, let alone traditional or conservative. So they acted to rein it in, lest the escalating war between workers and owners reach Soviet Revolutionary levels.

    Starting in the later half of the '70s, the deregulation movement kicked off and unraveled much of the state protection of the majority from the financial elites. Now we're in a neo-Gilded Age, and we need to chop off the tentacles of today's octopuses.

    Like I said, the Silent / Boomer story about bureaucracy being a problem only or mainly of the government could not sound more dated and tone-deaf to anyone who's experienced the office environment of the past 20 to 30 years. It would be hard for folks under 50 to imagine a more demeaning, power-tripping, wasteful, and conformist hive than the modern corporation.

    Office drone is not a social role that goes back into time immemorial, and there could be nothing less conservative than wanting to preserve such a radical new experiment in social and economic relations.

    I'm sure the Chinese sages have something from 2000 years ago praising office drones, but show me where laissez-faire norms are condoned, let alone praised, by Jesus, Seneca, or Shakespeare.

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  24. Libertarians have their own tired, shameful version of "B-b-but, *true* communism was never implemented!" and "B-b-but, the Soviet Union just didn't have enough time for Communism to flourish, not to mention being sabotaged by the capitalist West!"

    It goes something like, *true* deregulation was never implemented, *100%* laissez-faire economics has never been tried, so don't judge it based on a degraded and corrupted derivative that we saw in the Gilded Age and today. The retards at GMU like to trot this out on their libertarian econ blogs.

    Like, if only the Dickensian era could have been allowed to be even more Dickensian, it would have been libertarian Nirvana!

    Clueless, as well as callous.

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  25. Agnostic,

    I'm not a libertarian, so I have no dog in your fight with them -- I often think the gang at GMU is silly and misguided, particularly on ethical/moral questions and of course, on the most important issue: immigration. That said, I'm an old-fashioned American conservative who believes -- knows -- the 20th Century welfare state has been a disaster and no amount of spin from you or the liberal/progressives can save it. You can hang out with Piketty and the gang and promote the politics of envy -- I don't recommend it as it is poison for your soul, but hey, whatever floats your boat. I think inequality is just fine and expected in a growing dynamic economy -- that's the real issue -- how do we manage to keep the American economy growing and dynamic.

    Meanwhile, I couldn't help but laugh when you mentioned Sinclair's propaganda -- oh no, who will inspect the food if we get rid of the FDA:

    https://www.libertariannews.org/2012/11/15/meat-packing-lies-exposing-the-fiction-of-upton-sinclairs-the-jungle/

    and

    http://reason.com/blog/2013/07/22/q-if-government-isnt-checking-your-food

    Meanwhile, I notice you ignored my apparently quaint comments about the Constitution -- what's the rule of law between friends when you are trying to re-make the world!

    P.S. I don't think you'll get a moral society without religion -- that's why I'd invite you to learn about the sacrifice Jesus made for you and get to a church one of these days soon to thank Him for the cross!

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  26. "I think inequality is just fine and expected in a growing dynamic economy -- that's the real issue -- how do we manage to keep the American economy growing and dynamic."

    Yikes, I hope were not getting into invisible hand territory. The very rich elites have been getting progressively richer since the late 70's but at what cost?

    Instead of debating various data that isn't always reliable and is easy to distort and cherry pick, let's look at some basic, important common sense measures of well being.

    Agnostic, among others, has repeatedly pointed out that various measures of decadence and corruption like pornography, gambling, indifference towards substance abuse, cheating, bribery, poor sportmanship, decaying infrastructure, inferior quality goods & food, etc. are heavily correlated with periods of high inequality and high status striving.

    In an atmosphere in which climbing to the top is placed above everything else

    "You can hang out with Piketty and the gang and promote the politics of envy"

    If you've got anything resembling a sense of shame and decency, you ought to be sickened by the every man for himself attitude that has corroded so many over the last 20-30 years. When society collectively fails to shame and punish people for selfish, treacherous, and rootless behavior the message that anything goes and nothing matters is sent. So that's how we've descended to the mess we are in.

    There's more to inequality concerns than resentment of those at the top, by the way. People like me also empathize with the legions of wannabe strivers whose efforts to 'compete' and not fall behind others takes a massive toll on their bodies, minds, hearts, and bank accounts. We also should realize how dehumanizing and autistic things have become. Instead of treating others with humanity and good will, people become obstacles to be cleared, marks to be exploited, backs to be broken etc.

    I know it's hard for todays cynical minds to grasp, but there have been times in the past in which there was actually mutual respect between politicians and citizens, bosses and workers, CEO's and consumers, husbands and wives and so on.

    Like I said, let's not reduce this to statistical analytics. Just read Agnostics many prior posts/comments to get an accurate picture of how today's ills are similar to certain periods of history and how the source of those ills is the same today as it was in the past.

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  27. "Agnostic, among others, has repeatedly pointed out that various measures of decadence and corruption like pornography, gambling, indifference towards substance abuse, cheating, bribery, poor sportmanship, decaying infrastructure, inferior quality goods & food, etc. are heavily correlated with periods of high inequality and high status striving."

    Yes and for the most part his analysis is nonsense. Take pornography for starters. We have such corrupt attitudes towards the evils of pornography thanks to the collapse of Christian morality and the retreat of sensible Constitutional court decisions, coupled with the proliferation of technology making it easy to obtain. I still think we could crack down on pornography if we had the will -- but try reversing 30+ years of the sexual revolution and Americans who increasingly have given up on traditional views of sexual morality.

    I also couldn't disagree more with the claim that today we have "inferior quality goods & food" -- the amount of high-quality restaurants in any decent sized city (e.g. Louisville!) is quite frankly amazing. And there is something to be said for cheap fast food -- sometimes you want a quick meal and it is nice to be able to feed the family at Chipolte or Panda Express or Five Guys for around $25.00. And speaking as someone who just bought cheap put-it-together furniture for my daughter's room from Wal-Mart and Target, I can say definitively that while the quality is NOT the same as it was as if it was produced from some 1915 craftsman workshop, it also didn't cost me a fortune and will serve its purpose for the next seven years until she goes off to college. I thought you guys were populists -- what about helping the working man afford good-looking furniture for his home that doesn't cost a fortune?

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  28. "You can hang out with Piketty and the gang and promote the politics of envy -- I don't recommend it as it is poison for your soul, but hey, whatever floats your boat."

    You degrade yourself by talking like a simpering airhead. The affected insouciance of some conservatives makes them sound like such faggots. "It's like totes poison for your soul, but hey whatevs..."

    Bringing up material inequality is not the politics of envy. Most people discussing it are not dirt poor. But the below-median folks do feel how lop-sided society is getting, they have been getting angry for awhile now (since roughly the '80s), and if there's no mediation, it'll erupt into another Civil War or WWI-era chaos -- the Battle of Blair Mountain, anarchists lobbing bombs on Wall Street, and so on.

    You may not be interested in the politics of envy, but the politics of envy is interested in you.

    You're also totally ignorant of the history of inequality from the Gilded Age through the Midcentury, through today. Violent labor strikes and propaganda of the dead is poison for your society, but if that's what you'd prefer by turning a blind insouciant eye, hey whatevs.

    "I'm an old-fashioned American conservative who believes -- knows -- the 20th Century welfare state has been a disaster and no amount of spin from you or the liberal/progressives can save it."

    No, you're a clueless Boomer (or a Gen X-er doing a shameful imitation of one), who knows nothing about what American society was like before the reforms of the early-to-mid 20th C. You inhaled the buzz about Big Gubmint being the ultimate evil way back in the 1970s, and are still coasting on that high.

    Would you rather have the AFL-CIO negotiating with GM, GE, etc., with a federal bureaucracy overseeing the relations, or would it be better to have armed strikers facing off against an army of Pinkerton guards and the state militia?

    And how did we get from How the Other Half Lives to the Ozzie and Harriet world of the 1950s? Callous conservatives are going to get backed into a corner on inequality -- just try preaching the virtues of the Dickensian world over the New Deal / I Like Ike world. It's a pathetic, losing argument to defend the Gilded Age, but then insouciant conservatives don't mind losing -- politics is more for entertainment, and symbolic affiliation than about the health and survival of their country.

    "oh no, who will inspect the food if we get rid of the FDA"

    Get real: multinational agribusiness would love to sell you contaminated Chinese shit if there were no oversight. Consumers can't revolt with their dollars since they won't know which ingredient made them sick -- or even know that it was a food source rather than bathroom germs. Ordinary people can't tell, and won't be able to punish corner-cutting by agribusiness.

    Once more you don't know the basic historical facts -- we got taller and enjoyed a far lower disease burden during the Midcentury compared to the Gilded Age. Those gains have stalled out and even reversed over the past 20-30 years. I wrote a post on how epidemic diseases have been making a comeback after a Midcentury lull, itself after an early 20th C high.

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  29. "Meanwhile, I notice you ignored my apparently quaint comments about the Constitution -- what's the rule of law between friends when you are trying to re-make the world!"

    Earth to old-timey conservatives: the Constitution was the product of a pre-industrial, pre-managerial, barely Modern world. Jefferson couldn't foresee robber barons, media monopolies, agribusiness, Big Pharma, and all the rest of the developments of the past 200 years.

    The reforms of the Great Compression were not attempts to remake society but to contain the threat of disorder caused by the *earlier* radical changes to the economic sphere, largely the result of letting industrial magnates do whatever the hell they wanted to.

    We needed a federal program to declare certain lands off limits, since otherwise the logging industry would have clearcut the whole damn thing. Do conservatives not care about overgrazing the commons? Or do they write the notion off as a theoretical problem only?

    "that's why I'd invite you to learn about the sacrifice Jesus made for you and get to a church one of these days soon to thank Him for the cross!"

    Such a debased mega-church mind, that sees the only point of religion in "what can it do for me? -- can it save my soul?"

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  30. "but try reversing 30+ years of the sexual revolution and Americans who increasingly have given up on traditional views of sexual morality."

    That sounds awfully close to the timing of the period of rising inequality... if you knew anything about the Gilded Age, you'd see the connection. Brothels, saloons, red light districts, so many steetwalkers spreading "social diseases" that England gave up trying to prohibit prostitution and sought instead to regulate it and monitor them to protect public health.

    Weimar Germany, Fin-de-siecle France -- yup, good ol' traditional sexual morality all around. You really are a clueless airhead, for whom conservatism is a cosplay pursuit, or like leveling up a video game character.

    "the amount of high-quality restaurants in any decent sized city (e.g. Louisville!) is quite frankly amazing."

    Great, we get to indulge in trendy exotic food, but meanwhile none of the stuff that matters is built to last, indeed is planned to be obsolete in a few years. Consumers don't mind because quality is not the main thing to them -- novelty and design-y appearance are.

    "And there is something to be said for cheap fast food -- sometimes you want a quick meal and it is nice to be able to feed the family at Chipolte or Panda Express or Five Guys for around $25.00."

    Two status-striving parents overworking themselves (especially the mother), unable to make dinner for their own children. Cheap Mexican / Chinese food to the rescue! I don't remember June Cleaver calling home every other night from work to ask Wally and the Beave what kind of take-out food they want her to pick up on the way home.

    "I thought you guys were populists -- what about helping the working man afford good-looking furniture for his home that doesn't cost a fortune?"

    Cheap shit that will flake and splinter in a couple months. But it's no biggie since her room is being treated as a temporary dorm room until she occupies a different dorm room. I don't recall Father Knows Best showing how the dad has given up on trying to provide good stuff for his kids, and rationalizes it away since they'll be off status-striving at a degree factory in a few years anyways.

    You also don't remember how common it used to be to get second-hand furniture -- that was built to last and would serve the family far longer than cheap junk. You used to get it from other family members (but you're cut off from them due to trying to maximize status in a more promising city, not wherever you came from). Or from church sales, yard sales, and so on.

    You used to buy furniture once every couple of decades. Now it's faster than a single decade, so don't mind if it's crap -- we'll be replacing it in about seven years anyways.

    Truly the utopia that Thomas Jefferson dreamed of.

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  31. Also bullshit about feeding a family at Five Guys for $25 -- more like $50+. Real cheap.

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  32. Agnostic, I'll admit you have an internally consistent worldview, but your blog is just like the other helpless, hopeless, rage-porn Dark Enlightenment stuff if you don't propose any solutions. Surely you can do better and be specific.

    It may well be the case that there aren't solutions (but then what's the point in complaining so much? ). For example, if you get your low striving outcome, wouldn't it be pretty tempting to strive just a bit more than the next guy, and then the whole thing unravels? You have said it yourself -- the cycles repeat -- so how can they be stopped?

    You seem incredibly defensive any time one of your views is challenged and you resort to ad hominem attacks. Those gays really must have bullied you back in grade school, eh?

    Do you have any friends in real life? I would think that someone so concerned with social trends would do the most basic, direct thing to apply his principles -- make some friends and put your values into practice.

    I also get the impression that you'd be ranting about the social climate no matter what era you lived in.

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  33. "Those gays really must have bullied you back in grade school, eh? "

    Uh, the non-stop defense and promotion of homos (including many making a pitiful effort to pass as straight) by modern western culture is the ultimate expression of how warped and autistic said culture is.

    When 'homophobia' (read sound mental health and moral values) comes back into style and the freaks go back to the shadows where they belong, they won't warrant as much attention as they do now.

    "Consumers don't mind because quality is not the main thing to them -- novelty and design-y appearance are."

    It's unfortunately not that shocking how glib, superficial, crude and tasteless people often are in a very libertine, profane period.

    Our flabby, hormonally out of whack, maldeveloped, over caffeineated, over sugared, disease ridden bodies wearing made in China clothes are in indictment of how sick we've become.

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  34. Agnostic, you used to be a game afficionado. You would talk about high school girls and barely legal girls. You wanted to pay for prostitutes once you got too old to attract women.

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  35. "helpless, hopeless, rage-porn Dark Enlightenment stuff if you don't propose any solutions. Surely you can do better and be specific."

    Hopeless? Hardly. It's been repeated plenty of times on this blog by various people Agnostic included that everything is cyclical so it's only a matter of time before we transition to another phase. As for how that will happen, its not like any one person or group can somehow force these changes decades ahead of schedule. They will happen gradually at first with a fair sized group leading the way and then quickly intensify as everyone else joins in a bit later.

    We're in a cocooning (since the early 90's) and high inequality phase (since the later 70's) at the moment so we've actually got a lot to look forward to. Since cocooning/outgoing cycles are relatively brief, I don't think it's absurd to suggest that we'll break from cocooning by 2030 at the latest. Maybe even quite a bit earlier in the 2020's.

    Breaking the high inequality cycle will be a tougher nut to crack since equality cycles seem to have a longer shelf life and also because the transition into or out of
    these cycles is more gradual. Cocooning is easier to pick up on and happens quite abruptly; an alien who visited Earth in 1987 and then visited again in 1994 would immediately sense a huge change in terms of people being much more agreeable and unpretentious in '87 compared to the self conscious, aloof mindset that people had affected by the mid 90's.

    What can we do to spur some positive change? For starters if As happens to be guy, he can wear less trash baggy clothes (if you wear such clothes) and he also should be clean shaven everyday (if he isn't already).

    Lose the sunglasses and ear buds too. If people really are eager to cut through the cocoon, they need to stop covering their faces and bodies and they need to give more attention to the people and activity around them. If someone senses that you're willing to open yourself up, maybe they'll be more interested in connecting with you rather than pretending that they've got better things to do.

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  36. If the poster As happens to be a guy I meant. If you skim through my post too quick, it probably looks like 'if As happens to be gay, LOL.

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  37. Feryl: Some poster who's name escapes me pointed out a little while ago that Gen X-ers may have inadvertently halted the freewheeling 60'-80's era by being much less sociable and adventurous than Boomers.

    My thinking is that Gen X are still pretty adventurous, just really pessimistic.

    For me, rather than trust, the factor encouraging outgoingness is risk vs reward.

    When risk is high compared to reward, people avoid people they don't know.

    Now risk can be perceived as high because it is perceived to be common, as in the pessimistic, but otherwise brave, worldly, risk tolerant and failure tolerant Gen X.

    Or because risk is perceived to be uncommon, but severe, as in the optimistic, but sensitive, meltdown prone and fragile Millennials.

    Gen X don't socialise as strongly as Boomers because they take a more harsh and cautious view of other people, while perfectionistic and naive Millennials think others are OK, but really can't cope well with social failure.

    Optimism comes from living through safe times, where people are not in danger and not often exploited or hurt, while risk tolerance (from strength of character and ability to seek social support) comes from living through testing times.

    At some point into the "Millennial" cycle, the levels of optimism become high enough that they totally outweigh the lack of risk tolerance, and you get an ultra naive and optimistic Boomer style generation, who aren't necessarily that capable of dealing with the consequences of risks and failure exactly, but are so optimistic that almost nothing really phases them (even if it should).

    This is what Bret Easton Ellis talks about when he describes the optimistic, kinder, gentler, informal, presumptuous Millennials who nonetheless cannot take negative feedback at all and can be really pretty unscrupulous to avoid negative evaluations (he basically calls them pussies but you get the idea).

    And you can see the characteristics of being secure and risk tolerant but nonetheless really antagonistic and taking a really, really dim view of anyone they don't personally know in Generation X. With their Jackass where they hit one another in face with bats and their overwrought extreme sports, their Beavis and Butthead bickering and tearing one another down and their continued high levels of drug abuse.

    In contrast to the "kinder, gentler, but flips out" Millennials whose high level of risk aversion is associated with the major turnarounds on illegal drug use

    (http://tinyurl.com/bwbvv74 - Howe - “They have this risk aversion that we’ve seen with millennials since they were teenagers,” Howe said. “It’s declining alcohol use, declining drug use. I mean, declining sex.”.

    These trends maybe affect everyone a bit, but most strongly the generation that forms within them. So Gen X are always going to be a bit tougher and more pessimistic than Millennials, even with changes through time. Boomers will always be more ridiculously optimistic, even in a pessimistic era like the late 90s.

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  38. Feryl: Conservatives tend to make the inane assumption that everything has gone to hell so we must return to some august past.

    In fact, one of the main weaknesses of conservatives is their indifference to the importance of good art, probably arising out of how liberal artists tend to be. During a period of terrible art (which is a product of cocooning) people seem to even more ignorant about how inspiring and exciting art can be.

    I think there's a couple of things here:

    1) Psychologically, Conservatives are a lot more loyal and rooted to the past, so they can't throw their 50s forebears and their youth in that time (if they had it) under the bus the way a glib Liberal who got obsessed with 80s and 20s culture could, and who felt he could then be a traitor to his other ancestors. They'd continue to pay some reverence to the 50s as a part of their cultural story to which they owe loyalty, even if they emphasise it less than the truly exciting periods.

    Same with art - unless it specifically attacks their concepts of integrity (purity, loyalty, order, tradition), I'd guess they'd be unwilling to throw it aside or reassess it the way a Liberal who'll disloyally disregard their traditions for some ancient Halycon age will. That's one of the differences between the Neoreactionary Cosplayers and genuine Conservatives. One is being loyal to the integrity of their tradition, the other is casting it aside for some distant ideal (the fact that the ideal is in the past and not the future is an incidental detail).

    2) Conservatives live in a world where their friends and family and actions are real and important. On average I'm not sure they can get quite as much out of or spend as much time on some abstract fictional play or music or painting compared to Liberals. Some of them are and produce art which is quite visceral, but generally art and refined aesthetic appreciation for its own sake is not going to matter as much to these less abstract people, who get on with living their lives.

    agnostic Somehow that way of thinking and acting made things worse. Blacks were replaced by Mexicans and Asians, who multiply way more easily and are less co-adapted to white American culture.

    Although Africans and South Asians would've been worse though, as in Europe. Still unresponsive though.

    agnostic: Boomers think Big government is the greatest evil

    Back in the 60s and 70s, Liberals used to talk a lot about the military-industrial complex and imperialism, which you've commented on before. Boomers still seem to talk about this, Gen X and Millennials not so much.

    Big government vs small government is a bit of a derail - government probably could stand to be smaller, the real problem is elite overproduction of course, which really does seem to make big government big, and dysfunctional.

    It's easier to deal with Boomers by going "Big government is bad, and big government is big because everyone wants a high paying government job with lots of staff, and every corporation wants corporate welfare, and corporates are happy to give kickbacks that keep government big if it means they get bailed out" than plowing ahead with the wrong idea that we need a bigger government to fight the corporate sector. Government needs to rein it in, just it's not going to make much of a difference if government is all that gets reined in.

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  39. Re: gays, on the GSS (variables SEXSEX18, SEXFREQ, PARTNERS, AGE), albeit with small sample sizes, it seems like gays tend to have slightly lower sex frequency than straights, not as much sex. Don't seem like the hyper libidinous creatures many think of them as being. Don't know if that generally matches the literature on this (I haven't ever looked).

    Compare them with straight men and women and straights seem to have a bit more sex, but in monogamous relationship. And this is true even if you control by selecting only those gays who choose monogamy.

    What distinguishes the gays seems that in their 20s (but it seems less thereafter) they tend to have an extremely high number of partners. Promiscuous, but not hyper sexual. Slightly less sex per week / month, with more people. Thus the AIDS and the STDs and so on - a result of their unstructured sexual networks more than a lot of sex going on.

    This is all true of lesbos, but to a much lesser extent. Still low frequency of sex, still more partners than straight men and women, but not nearly as many partners as the gays.

    Probably the lack of monogamy is because they have issues forming romantic intimacy, mutual tolerance, etc. Might be delayed maturation - takes them until their 30s until they're at the point where they can start sustaining a proper monogamy, and even then they are less monogamous.

    Gays not really being hyper libidinous might fit in some ways with them being neotenised or paedomorphic I guess. A lot more of an attempt to use sexuality in a shocking and immature way, but not any more drive and appetite.

    I would still tend to think of gays as being emotional, sensual, nonviolent and complaint like normal women and sensation seeking like normal men though. Their patterns of jobs in degrees and jobs in nursing, linguistics, fashion / beauty, public administration, the arts don't seem to fit a kid boy pattern at all - kid boys like shooting, cars, buildings, etc.

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  40. "1) Psychologically, Conservatives are a lot more loyal and rooted to the past, so they can't throw their 50s forebears and their youth in that time (if they had it) under the bus the way a glib Liberal who got obsessed with 80s and 20s culture could, and who felt he could then be a traitor to his other ancestors."

    It's one thing to have a sense of honor to your ancestors, it's another to overlook (usually unconsciously) the less flattering aspects of a prior period/prior generation. Conservatives who blindly worship the past because of reflexive myopia and "my country was taken from me" (substitute my guns, my money, my property whatever) victimology need to wise up to the fact that every period has its sins. The term reactionary became in insult directed at conservatives precisely because of the conservative tendency to attack things new and different because, well, just because.

    There are ideas and traits from the past worth emulating, but any halfway objective reading of human history reveals that there are also many terrible things that we ought to avoid.

    Mind you, the liberal tendency to fawn over new things, because, well, they're new is just as pointless. Indeed, Agnostic has mentioned before that the modern West has been plagued by excessive liberalism which causes an infatuation with alien, exotic people and ideas.

    As for the whole throw a generation under the bus thing, well, some generations have more blood on their hands than others. If my ancestor(s) did terrible things I don't think I'd want to honor that. I'm sure many are tempted to rationalize a given sin as, "hey that was the culture back then" but that kind of goes against the conservative concept of personal responsibility.

    By the way, the conservative tendency to despise the 70's is no more witty or sensible than liberals snarking on the 50's. The only type of period that is almost devoid of admirable traits is a high inequality, high cocooning period. The 70's and the 50's would be more pleasant, equitable places to live in than the contemp. West, albeit for different reasons.

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  41. "Their patterns of jobs in degrees and jobs in nursing, linguistics, fashion / beauty, public administration, the arts don't seem to fit a kid boy pattern at all - kid boys like shooting, cars, buildings, etc."

    Gay males stick out like a sore thumb in highly masculine professions. Hell, they stick out in tougher time periods and places in general.

    Early experiences with taunting from athletic boys and more low key shunning by taciturn nerds quickly sends these budding drama queens to the girls (who are much less skilled at discerning male deviancy ) as well as to the few gay boys/arty effeminate straight boys around who won't immediately feel the urge to punch them.

    Obviously they grow up (physically if not mentally) to pursue occupations which are less likely to expose them to dominant heteros glaring at them. In the military they are very disproportionally stick to medical and clerical work. They know that straight troops won't even tolerate the sound and sight of a fag, much less trust said fag to perform with honor and dignity in a battle zone.

    In the pre gay rights era, gays were frequently but rather modestly drummed out of the military (or at least the grittier parts of the services) most likely because the authorities sensibly understood that fags cause far more problems than they solve.

    So how do gays drift to things that on the surface require people skills and compassion? As Agnostic has often and plausibly stated, gays are simply not more nurturing and sensitive to the suffering of others. A psychiatrist I linked to a bit ago said that in his experience dealing with gay guys, they tended to have an extremely selfish, vindictive, callous attitude towards society, even in comparison to mentally ill straight men.

    So gays avoid situations and jobs dominated by no nonsense straight guys who won't tolerate the drama that gays create. Thus, why they end up working in nursing homes, hospitals, theaters, art galleries, restaurants and so on rather than warehouses, factories, police stations, construction sites, etc. Environments that value highly masculine values like selfless resilience, bravery, stoicism and so on are a terrible fit for spazzed out gays.

    Straight men have good reason to be harshly homophobic.

    I;m not sure about Gay men being disinterested in architecture which is after all a partly aesthetic discipline. Aren't there quite a few gay architects?

    I'm certainly more skeptical of gay heroes, explorers, conquerors, though. Fags tend to be weak, needy, cowardly and passive aggressive. If I'm gonna storm a machine gun nest, I'm not gonna trust a fag to act with decisive bravery.

    Don't bother with the well, some gays are heroic and some herteros are evil. Yeah I know that. Still, the average gay is far more dysfunctional and unreliable than the average hetero.

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  42. In the military they are very disproportionally stick to medical and clerical work.

    I forgot to add intelligence/diplomacy as well. Is it surprising that gays would excel at tasks require glibness and duplicity?

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  43. Gays being disinterested in cars? Well, I'm sure they love cars with a campy aesthetic. But the power and implied maturity of some forms of transportation (esp. cars) is a turn off to them because gays are so weak and immature. Straight guys like well designed machinery (esp. fast vehicles) that makes living an adult life more pleasant. Meanwhile, gays fantasize about things that feed their immaturity, narcissism and tragic victim complex.

    Agnostic has noted before that in occasionally lucid moments, gays acknowledge that they have nothing in common with James Bond, Bruce Wayne, or Indiana Jones. These cool, charismatic men are often show driving, riding, or flying from place to place. Go figure that the lamest men of all, fags, show almost no interest in transportation.

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  44. I should add that some sectors of the gay world do fetishize motorcycles. But that's because the biker scene's outlaw, edgy image. Gays being the ultimate outsiders to begin with will be sympathetic to a scene of disrepute.

    We don't associate motorcycles with a more mature, confident dignity. Thus the mid life crisis jab that's thrown at older men who buy a Harley.

    Gays not only only fail to fetishize, say, army tanks, trains, or red sports cars, they seemingly have no larger interest in transportation beyond a basic "I need a car to survive" or "I've gotta make the train so I'm not late" level.

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  45. Agnostic,

    What can I say -- you keep digging the hole, deeper and deeper. I still think you come up with some interesting insights, but you are clearly confused about history, economics, religion, etc. I'd try to bring some clarity to your thinking but your mind is warped and you don't want to listen to reason or facts that somehow conflict with your worldview. God forbid that I link to actual evidence showing you how industry colludes with government, how regulations designed to help the public often result in more harm than good, and how the specific example you brought up of Upton Sinclair is based on lies because like most left-wing commies he was a liar.

    A couple of more points:

    1) You don't know anything about me so don't talk crap about my family (feel free to talk crap about my ideas, but not my family);

    2) My wife quit her job so she could raise our daughters here in the northwest side of Chicago (the demographics are good over here for the public schools);

    3) My wife is a vegetarian, so she doesn't eat at Five Guys but a kids hamburger for my two daughters ($4.39 each) plus two regular fries ($3.79 each) plus a cheeseburger for me ($6.89) is $23.25 total or just over $25.00 with tax. That's for take-out so we aren't buying drinks. Obviously though, your point is a good one if I was buying another burger for my wife and maybe another fry and drinks, we would be closer to $50.00.

    4) "Cheap shit that will flake and splinter in a couple months." or "Now it's faster than a single decade, so don't mind if it's crap -- we'll be replacing it in about seven years anyways." Which one is it -- a couple months or seven years? Since I put the stuff together I can confidently say it will last seven years if not more. My mother, who did indeed buy quality furniture back in the day and passed on some of that furniture to me (i.e. she is a snob like you) was impressed with how good the stuff looked and couldn't believe it came from Wal-Mart when she came over to check it out.

    Meanwhile, when we wanted a new couch for the family room, we spent a little extra money and bought a nice one (and love seat) from an outlet store for $1,300 (which was still a good deal -- that's the Jew in me!)

    5) I'll close with this question for you -- do you know what the out-of-wedlock birth rate was back during the Gilded Age you like to disparage so much? How about the divorce rate? Yeah, that's what I thought -- not a peep from you about the destructive power of the sexual revolution or the welfare state but you blather on and on about the vices of the Gilded Age.

    And nothing will get better for anyone until people start worrying about their immortal souls. Get a clue.

    6) Last point and then I'll leave you alone. I also blog at www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net You should spend some time over there and you might learn a thing or two.


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  46. "It may well be the case that there aren't solutions (but then what's the point in complaining so much? ). For example, if you get your low striving outcome, wouldn't it be pretty tempting to strive just a bit more than the next guy, and then the whole thing unravels? You have said it yourself -- the cycles repeat -- so how can they be stopped?"

    I'm not entirely convinced that cocooning is part of a natural cycle, thought it could be. it seems like some kind of a disease

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  47. OT, but I read an article on “strivers” in education -

    http://college.usatoday.com/2014/11/12/getting-by-girls-prioritize-social-lives-over-school-study-shows/

    “getting-by girls” —white teenage girls putting in just enough effort to get by academically, who prioritize their social lives over academic achievement.”

    “They under-perform because their white, lower middle-class culture values sociability, and doing enough to have enough. In a high school context, this culture clashes with an upper-middle class culture that prizes striving and individual advancement.”

    Fascinating that “Doing enough to have enough” and sociability is posed here as some kind of problematic “under performance” compared to striving and individualistic accumulation.

    I mean, how on earth could you be happy to get by, work hard, enjoy life with your family, show genuine (not careerist) intellectual interest and have enough humility to leave achievement to really bright minds?

    Far better to compete with the brightest minds, get them in a mindset of hostile competition, occasionally overcome them with some superficial glib and spurious argument that degrades the discourse to everyone's loss and when you get thrown on the slag heap (as will eventually happen), stew in bitter regrets that you haven't spent more time interacting with others on a cooperative level.

    Of course, something would probably twig even for their clueless striver student audience of their website. o of course they have to get some random prep schooled talking head to try and spin it around as being a question of academic “passion”

    Gabriella Borter, a freshman at Yale University, believes that being part of such a culture of academic achievement is a key factor in a student’s success.

    “I would say that a genuine love of learning combined with —and sometimes exaggerated by —a feeling of intense pressure to get into a top college kept all students at my high school very committed to their schoolwork,” said Borter, who graduated from a top New York City prep school. “There is an unspoken expectation that all students must pursue their passion and excel at both their academics and extracurriculars. Everyone buys into that same standard of success.”


    A genuine love of learning. Right.

    “The getting-by girls’ emphasis on fun and cultivating social ties is appealing, as is their resistance to the cut-throat competitiveness and pursuit of self-interest they see among their ‘overachiever’ peers,” stated Rossi. “However, in an increasingly polarized job market, where educational attainment —particularly in STEM fields —is the key to ‘good’ jobs, it is not clear there is a place for them.”

    It's remarkable to me that the first place I've seen talk about striving as a socially destructive and a wealth destructive phenomenon is this blog. Everyone else seems to think of it as “Oh well, we'll be richer but less sociable. Well it's sad, but we have to win the global race.”, but agnostic actually has the guts to point out it could be destructive for our physical well being and scientific and technical progress as well.

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  48. “However, in an increasingly polarized job market, where educational attainment —particularly in STEM fields —is the key to ‘good’ jobs, it is not clear there is a place for them.”

    This rhetoric would be disturbing and shrill enough if if was being applied solely to young men. The fact that it is conveyed with even the slightest degree of seriousness to girls (who ought to be nurturing family and keeping home as nature intended) is definitive proof of how much faster and ubiquitous the career treadmill has been getting since the 70's.

    Odd how none of this culture of ultra education/ competitiveness/materialism ever admits that there is a infinitesimally small number of elite positions ("good jobs" is a typical euphemism). So if we glorify those positions too much, a ton of people will fight tooth and nail for them. Such fighting invariably takes a heavy toll on the losers (poverty, debt, vulnerability to health and safety threats, insecure relationships, possible imprisonment) while the fortunate few who outlasted the rest get to ride high and hold the banner of elite success aloft.

    To accept these facts would lead one to the conclusion that the majority of people are done more harm than good in such a culture, if for no other reason than the realization of "No shit, the piece of the pie is only so big so a lucky/very talented/well connected few get a huge slice while the majority get almost nothing for their trouble.

    Unfortunately, instead of waking up and encouraging a modest, got to know your limitations attitude, we just continue to double down on winner take all striving.

    You gotta love the arrogance of these "experts". God forbid you let people find their way, follow their muse. No, these charlatans think they know what's best for everyone at all times.

    Note also the journalistic sin of not bothering to disclose the fact that people in the education/elite industrial complex have an obvious conflict of interest when giving advice in a education/career article.

    Lastly, there's the expected autistic ignorance of talent/potential, as signaled by the demeaning of lower performing students as latent ubermensch who are dragged down by a modest upbringing that didn't glorify high status enough.

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  49. "This rhetoric would be disturbing and shrill enough if if was being applied solely to young men. The fact that it is conveyed with even the slightest degree of seriousness to girls (who ought to be nurturing family and keeping home as nature intended) is definitive proof of how much faster and ubiquitous the career treadmill has been getting since the 70's."

    Then how is an "outgoing phase" going to help anything, if the inequality peak is still 30-60 years away? Also, how is it going to solve anything by my fellow millennials blindly becoming debt slaves, while inequality continues to rise? Won't this just make things worse, regardless of cocooning? Still not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, here.

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  50. "Then how is an "outgoing phase" going to help anything,"

    The 1980's were the decade when the current period of inequality began in earnest. Still, trust levels in America peaked in 1987 (per Agnostic) because the 1980's were the peak of the last period of outgoingness.

    Basically, people are more conscientious and less autistic. There's greater interest in and greater concern for other people. Regardless of inequality, life would be a lot more pleasant if people would lose the earbuds/sunglasses, get their lazy asses outside, and get their damn eyes off the smartphone and away from the TV screen.

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  51. "Then how is an "outgoing phase" going to help anything, if the inequality peak is still 30-60 years away?"

    Inequality is peaking right now. The inequality cycle started in 1970, and lasts 50 years or so, so the society will begin becoming more equal in 2020 or so.

    Cocooning makes things hard for people, everyone is confused, and experiences constant anxiety. When things become more outgoing, life is much more bearable. Look at popular media from the 60s-80s - despite a crime wave, it was much more positive and happy than the pessimistic movies and TV shows we've seen over the last 20 years.

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  52. After all that discussion, to bring things back to the original post, agnostic (or others): is there something inherently wrong with a male/male sex act that transcends all of the associated stigma?

    Example: Frank goes to high school, marries his high school sweetheart, and they have three sons together. Frank goes through ROTC, gets his commission and assignment, and moves his family to Ramstein. His wife lives at home and devotes herself to the children and to building strong relationships with the other officers' wives. A few years later, Frank is promoted and transferred to Colorado. A couple years later, he leaves the service, starts a technical publishing house, and lavishes attention on his wife and children when he is not working. When his sons get a little older, they all volunteer together at the local homeless shelter, and for Christmas, the family donates ten grand to the same shelter, forgoing all but small gifts for members of the household.

    In his early thirties, Frank's wife introduces him to Eugene, and Frank feels a strange stirring of physical attraction to Eugene which he has never felt before, nor wanted to feel. His wife thinks Eugene is great for some reason, so she keeps having Eugene over for supper. She has been reading gay fanfic erotica online, and confesses to Frank that she thinks it would be really hawt if he and Eugene got together. Her fantasizing about it creates a weird improvement in their sex life, which had been diminishing of late as they aged and grew even more familiar with each other. During one such encounter, she confesses that she once tongue-kissed her girlfriend in high school, but had never wanted to again.

    One night, after landing a major account and helping his older son with his calculus homework, Frank has a drink with Eugene, and they begin considering having sex. Frank, who always thought he was religious, conservative, and straight, realizes that he is going to go through with his urge. He realizes his wife set it up, from the way she winked at him before leaving brandy on the counter and rushing to bed. However, he isn't willing to risk illness, so he and Eugene shower separately with antibacterial soap, Eugene using an enema beforehand, and then Frank puts on three condoms, and they have an anal quickie.

    Frank and Eugene embrace, talk about how great Frank's wife is, and part ways. When Frank goes up to bed, his wife is awake and perky, and so turned on by the playing-out of her fantasies that she fingers herself until 1 in the morning. They fall asleep arm in arm.

    A week later, Eugene is hit by a drunk driver on the way to work. Frank and his wife attend the funeral, give each other pained looks, then agree not to mention Eugene ever again. They raise their sons, enjoy their grandchildren, and die happily in their 80s.

    Why was what Frank and Eugene did wrong? You have an easy answer if you're a certain kind of biblical literalist, but if not, what do you have?

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  53. It's wrong because gay sex is disgusting.If it needs to be explained why such behavior is grossly wrong, then you're wrong meter is broken.

    Just for the record, neither I nor Agnostic condemn homosexuality on a entirely or even partly religious basis though we are sympathetic to religious conservatives who oppose such perversion.

    The homophobia I have encountered personally tends to arise from a visceral sense of "fags are gross/annoying drama queens", rather than on some abstract religious principle.

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  54. The modern, post-1980s forms of progressivism and mainline 'conservatism' manage to both fill the needs on the one hand for satisfying people's moral urges along with letting them have their status striving without the pesky "let's restrain competition" bits we saw from various ideologies or religions as late as the 1980s.

    Under these circumstances, adopting a life goal of getting both HIV and Ebola makes more sense than attempting to bring moralists back into politics.

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  55. Feryl, so you're making the statement, "Disgusting things are wrong," but that gives rise to, "Who decides what's disgusting"?

    (1) Is it acceptable within a Christian marriage for the husband to perform cunnilingus on the wife?

    (2) When the husband gets old, and can't control his rectal muscles anymore, is it acceptable for the wife to change his diapers and wipe crusted feces off of his buttocks? (Or, should she leave him lying in them?)

    (3) If an old man is left alone with two young girls to whom he is closely related by blood, should he have sex with them to produce offspring? (Lot)

    (4) Should things that you find personally repulsive be prohibited to everyone else? What separates the set [Things Feryl doesn't like] from the set [Things which are objectively disgusting for everyone]?

    (5) Should people be able to stalk and shoot elk, cut them apart, and eat bloody rare elk steaks? Similarly, should people be able to eat sausage?

    (6) Should people be able to own cats that live indoors and defecate several times a day into a pile of chemically-scented shoddy which is cleaned out every week or so?

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  56. High Arka, you're ill conceived laundry list of activities makes no distinctions between things which are selfless and socially/physically necessary (hence, not taboo) and things which are selfish/hedonistic/perverted (hence taboo & gross).

    Behaviors which have a profoundly destructive effect on the body and mind thus tearing through the very social fabric of society (including but not limited to gambling, homosexuality, prostitution, infidelity, divorce, drug addiction and so on) lead to warped minds, diseased bodies, rampant corruption, treachery and mistrust.

    That is why decent, pro social people should be disgusted by them. A society of high character and integrity does everything possible to encourage modesty, sobriety, restraint and delayed gratification. Productive and honest work, respect (but not naive non judgmentalism) towards others, loyalty to and concern for one's family, friends and community and so on ought to be valued. The vices that conflict with these things should provoke disgust and be punished.

    Gee, what I would I (or any other sane, big hearted person) have a problem with gamblers destroying their finances, gays and whores spreading diseases, moms or dads letting greed and lust break up families, CEOs grinding ill-paid workers to a bloody pulp, drunks and junkies obliterating themselves. Get the picture?

    For the good of all, both individually and collectively, we ought to wisely monitior and discourage abberant, selfish behavior. I'm not suggesting we liquidate transgressors and dump them in mass graves; As Nietzsche once said, those who fight monsters should not become monsters.

    For more information on what grosses people out and and why they feel that way, please read the following:

    http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2012/10/disgust-based-morality-by-politics-and.html
    http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2012/11/in-east-asians-blunted-sense-of-disgust.html

    Agnostic has noted that cultures which lack a strong disgust reflex (like East Asians) are more likely to accept practices that give caucasians a viscerally strong sense of disgust, like homosexuality (or eating slimy raw food, or horror movies and porn with various and sundry perversions presented without moral judgement etc.).

    If these perversions of Asians don't bother you, I frankly pity and fear you for you are devoid of the qualities that elevate mankind to a greater dignity and grace.

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  57. "High Arka, you're ill conceived laundry list of activities makes no distinctions between things which are selfless and socially/physically necessary (hence, not taboo) and things which are selfish/hedonistic/perverted (hence taboo & gross)."

    If you were able to answer questions 1-6 from the High Arka 4:13 PM post, it would help me understand better. Would you be so kind as to answer them?

    "Behaviors which have a profoundly destructive effect on the body and mind thus tearing through the very social fabric of society..."

    In the High Arka 7:34 AM post, this one discussed the example of Frank and Eugene, and asked, "Why is what Frank did wrong?" You replied that it was "disgusting." You said nothing then about it being profoundly destructive on the body and mind.

    Did you mean to say that it was profoundly destructive on the body and mind? How did it hurt Frank, how did it hurt Eugene, and how did it hurt society?

    "Gee, what I would I (or any other sane, big hearted person) have a problem with...gays and whores spreading diseases..."

    In the Frank/Eugene example, we clearly outlined the use of enema, antibacterial soap, and multiple condoms. There were no infections spread, and the contact that occurred involved no fluid transfer. It was cleaner than accepting your car keys back from the guy who just changed your oil.

    Does that mean that auto mechanics' shops are disgusting? No, you wouldn't say that. Your opinion about Frank and Eugene's sex has nothing to do with uncleanliness or the spread of disease, which is why you're loathe to answer the question. Hospital waiting rooms, airplane passenger compartments, private school playgrounds, and the checkout line at Target are all more diseased and disgusting than what Frank and Eugene did.

    Here are some of the possible arguments you could use to more coherently address the issue (not saying these are correct, but that they at least don't beg the question):

    1) A supernatural force of creation exists, and it tells us that penis should not enter butt, therefore it's not actually about bacteria, but gross for supernatural reasons which we cannot fathom.

    2) Even if Frank and Eugene did it cleanly just that once, the act is a gateway to further acts, and will result in an overpowering drive for them to commit, in the future, antibacterial acts which destroy society. Therefore, even though that particular act was not itself unclean, it was inextricably a part of a lengthy process which destroys society, and is disgusting by association.

    3) The example is impossible. It is impossible for two men to engage in intercourse cleanly even once. There have never been two men anywhere in the world who had a single antibacterial sexual encounter, because any man who would couple with another man would necessarily lose his mind and gobble feces at some point during the act.

    "For the good of all, both individually and collectively, we ought to wisely monitior and discourage abberant, selfish behavior."

    So, after you come home from work on Friday, plop down on the couch, and watch a couple episodes of your favorite show, the government should come in and tell you to get up, because you're being selfish?

    No, you probably don't feel that way. So maybe you want to remove "selfish" from your sentence, and stick with "aberrant."

    Of course, it's aberrant to be a devout Protestant evangelical some parts of San Francisco. In San Francisco, should the Mayor be responsible for monitoring the aberrant individuals who read Bibles and take them seriously?

    No, you probably don't agree with that, either. So to what extent should Eric Holder be monitoring all of us for aberrant or selfish behavior?

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  58. "No, you probably don't agree with that, either. So to what extent should Eric Holder be monitoring all of us for aberrant or selfish behavior? "

    C'mon, you really construed my viewpoint as supporting an Omniscient Big Brother? Really?

    What I meant by "We" was We the People. On a daily basis we ought to be looking out for each other on a friend to friend, father to son, husband to wife, cop/soldier to civilian, kind stranger to kind stranger level. While we need to keep ourselves in line (be patient, honest, sober etc.) there's nothing wrong with working up the courage to respectfully but firmly remind others of the error of their ways should they succumb to greed, sloth, treachery, cruelty or whatever.

    On the other hand, in a time of relative honesty and fairness, a powerful force/authority can be trusted with some power.
    In the 1930's-early 1960's, local police forces would frequently raid bars/clubs that were too seedy/rough (too many whores, gays, gamblers etc.) Granted, some corrupt cops were paid off to look the other way but overall this kind of monitoring/control worked well at containing deviancy.

    Alas, as the culture has grown progressively more coarse and selfish, a given person is more likely to abuse whatever power he may have for his own personal gain which further corrodes society.

    So I'm not on Obama's team; due to the corrupt cycle we've been in since the 70's that's only gotten worse in the decades since, the goverment's claim to legitimate power has worn thinner and thinner.

    Also, I have no idea why you keep interjecting religion into this. As I hinted at above, the act of sex between men does not serve any biologically necessary purpose and can be damaging; as such it is quite natural for people of strong values to feel instinctive revulsion.

    The fact that men who end up having sex with men are often annoying, and psychologically stunted and unstable also explains why those who have viscerally strong moral values are prone to extreme disgust when dealing with gays.

    It is a necessity that people eat; it's a necessity that they eliminate wastes; it's a necessity that a man and woman make love. If you can't get what I'm saying I give up.

    I also am beginning to believe that you must really have a dog in this fight, if you catch my drift. If you want me, or anyone else on this blog to validate your dangerous behavior you need to get lost.

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  59. "Inequality is peaking right now. The inequality cycle started in 1970, and lasts 50 years or so, so the society will begin becoming more equal in 2020 or so."

    I was under the impression that inequality followed 100 year cycles. My mistake.

    Back to the subject of sodomy, they continue their advance into Mississippi and West Virginia...

    http://www.bpnews.net/43744/hrc-a-formidable-force-for-lgbt-cause
    https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/west-virginia-to-remove-words-husband-and-wife-from-all-state-tax-forms

    It's moments like this that lead me to ask, how are we supposed to create something that is equivalent to the temperance movement or the progressive movement (I'm willing to give Agnostic's argument that progressives in 1900 were not simply communists the benefit of a doubt)? I'm not a Southern Baptist, but look at the way they react to this naked aggression. They are not even mounting the most basic defense against this. How do we possibly get these conservatives to go on the offense, if we cannot even get them working on basic defense? They aren't even watching the perimeter!

    In this sense, I totally agree with Agnostic's criticism of conservatives, in the sense that they would rather simply hide in a hole somewhere, and hope all of this will simply go away.

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  60. Agnostic, If you're out there I wouldn't mind a little back up if degenerates like this are gonna troll this blog with homo fantasies.

    This blog and Castefootball.us are part of a small number of places that aren't pro homo so I'm not thrilled about this place getting polluted by this nonsense. As always, I'm grateful for your work and this blog.

    I'm done responding to High Arka; you can go intellectualize deviancy wherever it's tolerated but I hope you lay off it around here.

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  61. (So basically you're saying you should hide away from me in a cocoon? My my.)

    What we've all just seen here is an example of the intellectual cowardice that characterizes much of modern culture. Like homosexual marriage activists, your viewpoint is so obvious to you that you see no need for it to be rationally explainable. When questioned, you can't justify yourself, so instead you throw a hissy fit about how wrong other people are, and look for your friends to bail you out. So you censure, hide, and exchange views only with those who already agree with you.

    (On a separate note, what makes me "pro homo"? I just asked you to clarify why the Frank/Eugene interaction was wrong, and you said it "just was," so I asked for more clarification. Does that have to mean I'm "pro homo"? For all you know, I'm anti-homo, but just want to learn how to develop my arguments beyond the point of one-liners.)

    Does anyone else have the stones to type a good explanation of the Frank/Eugene wrongness?

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  62. Bio Cultural, why should American "conservatives" care? More weddings means more divorces, more wedding photographers, more cake orders, more DJs, more folding chairs, higher stock dividends...

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  63. "Why was what Frank and Eugene did wrong? You have an easy answer if you're a certain kind of biblical literalist, but if not, what do you have?"

    I'm just curious at which point during your story you violently jizzed all over your lap.

    The inane scenario you described contains several examples of behavior that correlates very strongly with mental illness. First, the porn-reading wife wants to watch as her husband commits adultery. Second, there's a very obvious sexual rift between them in which either or both engage in voyeuristic or onanistic behavior--this is very typically an indication that the relationship is dying. Third, all parties engage in boundary-crossing behavior without regard to its effect on the others.

    Mostly though the example demonstrates your advanced Aspergers. Probably no one here can get across to you how weird it is to imagine this scenario or how extremely dissociated your own thoughts on sex are. In normal, healthy relationships, sex is integrated into a strong emotional bond, it is not something people engage in like a game of Parcheesi.

    Homosexuality, like other paraphilias, is always a marker of severe sexual pathology, and is generally accompanied by other symptoms of mental unwellness, such as excessive risk-taking, drug use, narcissism, and interest in dominance/submission (these are all well-represented in homosexual subculture).

    None of this is covered in your collection of Ayn Rand novels, however.

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  64. Thank you, Udolpho. You've chosen a variation of this one's third example from above, to whit:

    "3) The example is impossible. It is impossible for two men to engage in intercourse cleanly even once. There have never been two men anywhere in the world who had a single antibacterial sexual encounter, because any man who would couple with another man would necessarily lose his mind and gobble feces at some point during the act."

    So, to you, the example is impossible. It's like saying, "If there were a five-sided square..." or "If red were blue, then..."

    There are problems built into your choice of that tack, however:

    1) If even one encounter like that has ever happened anywhere in all of creation, your example falls apart--it is possible. It may still be un-Christian, or un-Judaic, or un-Muslim, but it's possible.

    Now, for hypothetical purposes only, suppose that I know someone like Frank. Guy who was in the Army, late thirties, 6'2" and pretty built, but one time on a long deployment he had an encounter with a subordinate in the shower. No one ever found out, they had condoms somehow, he got tested like three times when he got back, and he confessed (Catholic) and his wife didn't seem to mind, and it was all okay. Couple of years later, it's old news, marriage is strong amidst a sea of other divorces (yes, a lot of Catholic friends' ones), and no one could care less.

    So, it did happen. And that's just one anecdotal evidence from one person. Don't you suppose that anywhere else in the wide world many others haven't had homosexual encounters that didn't lead to some path to the BSDM store (where most of the customers are aging wealthy white straight men who keep it a secret from their wives and pastors, by the way)?

    2) The other problem that tack faces is the solely hypothetical one. If you make the argument, "The homosexual act is wrong because it is a gateway," then it is the gateway that is intrinsically bad, and homosexuality that is only bad by association. Ergo, the homosexual sex act is not bad in and of itself; it's malum prohibitum vs malum in se.

    If your only argument against male homosexual sex is that "it leads to other things," then you're saying that the sex itself is A-OK. If someone ever did manage to have the sex without it leading to the real problems you've identified, you'd be bound by your own words to accept the sex.

    Agnostic is correct that a lot of American liberals these days are clueless about what many gays are actually like--they have this TV view of stylish, well-balanced, happy, attractive people living wholesome lives. Your view of gays, though, is the same kind of crappy TV view, just a couple decades earlier. Not every single person who has ever experienced or acted upon a homosexual desire is the embodiment of every single bad trait in other homosexuals, or even a majority of them. Saying that is like being one of those idiot feminists who calls all men rapists.

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  65. You're completely missing the point. The disgust is a fairly obvious, a priori sensation, the same way that talking to a spaz is deeply unpleasant.

    To argue that there's no rational basis for the disgust is to argue that there's no rational basis for preferring one feeling over another. Disgust just is, and anyone demanding a rational basis for being disgusted by anal sex is being deeply dishonest - and to demand that others not be disgusted by it is, basically, retarded.

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  66. (Cont'd from above)

    After about a month, Frank decides that he can no longer stay married to his wife. He has to be "true to himself," which means moving to an apartment in the gay district of the city and having lots of anal sex with strange men. Frank knows that this is devastating to his wife, but he blames the pain that he himself has caused to his loved ones on "society." If only "society" weren't so homophobic, Frank reasons, he would not have been "forced" to marry his wife, have children with her, and build a family together for 15 years. He could have spent the last 15 years indulging his hunger for oral sex and blow jobs instead! He also salves his conscience by telling everyone (and himself) that his wife is a wonderful person, and that he "still loves her," even though he's divorcing her and hurting her terribly. And most importantly, Frank is absolutely determined to be a "good father" to his kids, even though he's destroying their family and throwing their lives into chaos and confusion.

    Because of Frank's decision to get a divorce and move to the gay district of the nearest city, his wife can no longer afford to pay the mortgage on the family home. She has to move to a smaller, crappier, noisier place. It's not in the ghetto, let's be realistic, but it's in a lower middle class neighborhood where people don't keep up their houses so well. The kids have to share bedrooms, which adds to their stress and confusion.Neither mom nor the kids know any of the new neighbors.

    The basketball hoop does not make the move with them to the new place because Frank's wife is not good with tools and besides, it weighs like 200 pounds. On the day of the move, Frank is busy smoking pot and fucking a young Chilean man that he met the night before, so he is unable to assist with this problem. Frank's kids used to spend hours and hours playing basketball in the driveway, but now they can't. Their mom promises to get them a new one soon, but she can't afford it right now and is dealing with the hurt from her divorce and the pressures of single motherhood, so it never happens, and before you know it a couple of years have gone by. Sure, the kids can find a park or something, but it's just not the same.

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  67. Sorry the last comment was out of order. Here it is from the beginning:

    I'll take a crack at this, although it is not in response to your "challenge."

    First, the hypothetical scenario you pose in which a wife urges her own husband to be unfaithful under her own roof, and "fingers herself" after this happens, is ludicrous. I don't mean to be disrespectful by calling it ludicrous, but it is so bizarre and contrary to how wives and mothers actually think (and what they actually feel) that I don't know what else to call it.

    I've seen plenty of marriages touched by infidelity, I can't think of a single one in which the wife experienced an erotic thrill and "fingered herself" upon discovering that her husband was cheating on her. Instead, their reactions have been along the lines of shock, horror, betrayal, anger, and profound sadness. They are terribly hurt by the infidelity.

    I appreciate you and share your interest in these issues. But dude, the example you have given is creepy as hell. If you cannot see that, I respectfully urge you to look closely at what you are thinking and the paths you have permitted yourself to explore. We've all had some sick fantasies, but at some point you've got to pull yourself back from the brink. I do see some narcissistic projection here.

    Here's how I think something like this would actually work in the real world. Frank hooks up with his coworker one night. He does it in secret because he knows that his wife will be devastated if she finds out. Eventually, the lure of quick and anonymous sex that the gay lifestyle offers becomes so great, and the emotional turmoil that Frank himself experiences as a result of cheating on his wife with dues becomes so great, that Frank decides that his next step is to "come out" to his wife one night after the kids have gone to bed. She start chatting with Frank about her day, and begins telling him a story about the thrift sale that the PTA is organizing, when he interrupts her and says that there is some important he needs to tell her. He says that he is gay, and furthermore has always been gay, notwithstanding his 15 year marriage to a woman.

    Frank's wife is completely taken by surprise and is shocked and horrified. She asks whether he has ever acted on his fantasies since they have been married (which is an oblique way of asking whether he has ever cheated on her), and he says yes. She is devastated and experiences a soul-wrenching pain she has never felt before. She goes to bed and instead of "fingering herself," cries herself to sleep. She asks Frank to sleep in the guest room. She wakes up at 3 AM. For a moment she turns to Frank and reaches for him, but then remembers what happened last night's and feels horrified and alone again. She can't go back to sleep and is forced to take stock of her situation.

    Her first thought is not an erotic one. Instead, she thinks of her children. She is desperate to protect them from hurt and turmoil. She goes down to the guest room, wakes Frank up, and says that she loves him and "accepts him for who he is." This is a lie of course, but it is what popular culture tells her to do in these situations, so that's what she does, even though she doesn't mean it. She says that she wants to "work through this" together, and asks him to please refrain from telling the kids while they "work it out."

    (Cont'd below)

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  68. (Cont'd from above)

    After about a month, Frank decides that he can no longer stay married to his wife. He has to be "true to himself," which means moving to an apartment in the gay district of the city and having lots of anal sex with strange men. Frank knows that this is devastating to his wife, but he blames the pain that he himself has caused to his loved ones on "society." If only "society" weren't so homophobic, Frank reasons, he would not have been "forced" to marry his wife, have children with her, and build a family together for 15 years. He could have spent the last 15 years indulging his hunger for oral sex and blow jobs instead! He also salves his conscience by telling everyone (and himself) that his wife is a wonderful person, and that he "still loves her," even though he's divorcing her and hurting her terribly. And most importantly, Frank is absolutely determined to be a "good father" to his kids, even though he's destroying their family and throwing their lives into chaos and confusion.

    Because of Frank's decision to get a divorce and move to the gay district of the nearest city, his wife can no longer afford to pay the mortgage on the family home. She has to move to a smaller, crappier, noisier place. It's not in the ghetto, let's be realistic, but it's in a lower middle class neighborhood where people don't keep up their houses so well. The kids have to share bedrooms, which adds to their stress and confusion.Neither mom nor the kids know any of the new neighbors.

    The basketball hoop does not make the move with them to the new place because Frank's wife is not good with tools and besides, it weighs like 200 pounds. On the day of the move, Frank is busy smoking pot and fucking a young Chilean man that he met the night before, so he is unable to assist with this problem. Frank's kids used to spend hours and hours playing basketball in the driveway, but now they can't. Their mom promises to get them a new one soon, but she can't afford it right now and is dealing with the hurt from her divorce and the pressures of single motherhood, so it never happens, and before you know it a couple of years have gone by. Sure, the kids can find a park or something, but it's just not the same.

    Frank's wife is utterly, utterly devastated by the divorce. First, she is hurt. She loved Frank and was completely taken by surprise at his decision to come out and divorce her. She had always done her best to be a good wife and mother. And she WAS a good wife and mother. She wasn't perfect - no one is perfect - but overall she did an excellent job.

    Most importantly, Frank's wife was happy. She enjoyed the simple domestic tasks of making dinner for the kids, taking them to violin lessons, and volunteering at church and school. She had a simple, happy life. And she supported Frank and didn't make undue demands on him. She didn't push him to buy a McMansion in the fancy neighborhood and lease her a BMW when those things were beyond Frank's means.

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  69. (Cont'd from above)

    Now she feels betrayed and shocked. The divorce was a year ago, but she still can't believe that it happened. It's as if the earth opened up one day and swallowed her. What is going on? Why is this happening? She keeps asking herself these questions. Intellectually she knows the answers but emotionally she'll never understand.

    In addition, she feels stigmatized and ashamed. All of her friends support her. No one has said an unkind word about Frank's decision to leave her. They know that he's a selfish bastard and feel nothing but sympathy.

    The worst part is that she can't wear her wedding ring any more. When people see her with the kids at the park and at the grocery store, they see her as one of those trashy single mothers, or as a woman who was difficult and could not keep her marriage together. The shame is horrible.

    Each school function is a horror, because she thinks that the other parents blame her for what happened. Mostly, she feels incomplete. These events are for intact families, and she wants to be part of an intact family. Instead she's a single mom.

    Frank's wife had no interest in dating other man before Frank left her. Now that he's gone, she still has no interest. But she's lonely so she makes a half-hearted attempt at dating. It's awkward as hell, and the guys are mostly divorced losers or dudes who are looking to score quick, no-strings sex from a divorced middle-aged woman. So she gives up.

    Now she's alone. She could've spent her twilight years growing old together with Frank. Instead, she's lonely. When the kids move out, her house is empty. She's all alone. It's a cold and awful feeling, but she learns to live with it. What choice does she have? But the house that used to be filled with love and companionship is silent and empty now. She's all alone.

    Of course Frank's wife has it easy compared to his kids. The pain of divorce is so great that it is almost indescribable. But let's briefly examine what happens to them, although I don't want to dwell on it too much because it is so hurtful and such an unpleasant subject.

    First, Frank's decision to move to the gay district of the city means that he's not around. The kids are used to seeing dad there at dinner and in the evenings, and now he's gone. He's not spending time with them, he's indulging his craving for gay sex instead. Of course he is not having sex all the time; he's also decorating his new place, sculpting his new gay physique at the gym, and eating at trendy restaurants. Those things are certainly more appealing to Frank than spending time with his kids and helping them with their homework. Frank's kids understand this intuitively when they are young, and explicitly as they grow older.

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  70. (Cont'd from above)

    In a way though, it would almost be better if Frank were to make a clean break with his kids and never see them again. Instead, he has them spend weekends with him at his new apartment in the gay district. Needless to say, this is an alien environment that is not geared toward children. Occasionally one of Frank's hookups will show up and make an awkward attempt to chat with the kids, but neither the anal sex buddy nor the kids really want to know one another, so these situations always end quickly and awkwardly.

    And it's horribly difficult for Frank's kids to see him such a radical...change...in their father. He used to be just...Dad...steady and reliable, someone who loved them and was always there. Then one day he suddenly abandoned his family - just like that! His kids were never warned about this or asked whether they wanted it. Dad just decided to leave them, and they had to pick up the pieces on their own. Now suddenly, Dad is a completely different person, a gay man in the big city. He even looks different; he starts getting spray tans and a couple of tattoos on his newly muscular physique, even though he's in his mid-40's and should be beyond stuff like that.

    Where there used to be a nuclear family with mom, dad, and kids, now there is mom, dad, and all sorts of strange men. Even though no one does anything inappropriate (a couple of Frank's hookups look at his 8 year-old son in a disturbing, predatory way, but they just look), the kids have a hard time processing who these men are. Before they had a family - a mom and a dad. Now the family is broken, mom is by herself, and there are all of these..strange men...coming in and out of dad's apartment. They never seem to stick around. The kids don't understand where they fit into all this, what their role is, or how they are supposed to relate to these strange men in their father's life. The truth is that the kids have no role; they are not part of the other mens' lives; and Frank's anal sex buddies do not want to establish any relationship with them. But the kids don't know this, they are just confused.

    Since Frank lives in the city, he doesn't coach Little League anymore. He doesn't really know who his children's friends are or what is happening at their school. He's...detached from their lives. He still loves them, but he's not really fulfilling the role of a father anymore. He's sort of a "part-time father."

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  71. Frank pretends that everything is great, and that his kids "enjoy" visiting him in the city and sharing his new life, which means having brunch at the latest trendy restaurant in the gay district. But the truth is that the weekends with Frank are horrible. His kids love him, but they would give ANYTHING to go back to the old days when their family was intact and their dad lived with them.

    Of course the kids have terrible emotional problems due to the divorce. they become angry and start acting out emotionally. Their grades fall and their behavioral problems increase dramatically. These emotional problems only intensify as they get older. Frank's oldest son is 12 when the divorce happens, and the turmoil it causes prevents him from dating or forming relationships. Frank's daughter develops a thing for older guys when she gets older. But I don't want to talk about this too much because it is so disturbing.

    In my view, this is what really happens when a middle-aged husband and father decides that he's gay. It's a much more accurate scenario than the one you posed, in which the wife "fingered herself." And it's terribly, terribly harmful. If Frank cheats on his wife with another man, the fact that both Frank and his fuck buddy are STD-free and use antibacterial soap aren't important. The disgusting part is what happens to Frank's wife and kids.

    If you knew a guy whose marriage survived the fact that he cheated on his wife with a another man, that's wonderful. I'm glad to hear that a marriage is still intact. This is not as uncommon as you might think for a marriage to survive infidelity, it is obviously not something that people talk about, but it happens. The thing is, I guarantee that the wife was terribly hurt and devastated by her husband's infidelity, and is probably still deeply hurt by it. She's also frightened and insecure now - what if he does it again? What if he gives her AIDS or herpes? The whole dynamic of their relationship has changed, and not for better, she suspects him now and has to watch him closely. I guarantee that she she thinks of her husband's infidelity with another man she does so with deep sadness and disgust, she does not "finger herself."

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  72. We've dignified this High Arka with way too much attention and effort. As Udolpho said, you either get it or don't. To demand in explanation for basic moral values is itself proof of how ignorant and naive someone must be.

    A society's health and security is predicated on stable families which require loving, monogamous relations between the husband and wife.

    That some people nowadays are so willing to rationalize terrible behavior is another symptom of the current cycle of decadent narcissism, in which anything goes and nothing matters.

    I don't run this blog and I can't control what people do on it, but I would appreciate not encouraging this thorn in our side who's trolling is obvious and not worth our time. We've provided every conceivable basis for our viewpoints but he keeps screaming in our face to do more for him.

    Let's stop taking the bait, shall we?

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  73. So, to you, the example is impossible. It's like saying, "If there were a five-sided square..." or "If red were blue, then..."

    You have severe reading comprehension problems. Nowhere do I say the scenario you depict is impossible. What I argue is that the behavior is clearly indicative of mental illness--inability to form healthy emotional bonds, unconcern for the effect of one's actions on others, strongly self-destructive behavior. How do we know this is unhealthy (the same behavior would be unhealthy in heterosexuals as well)? Because it disturbs or thwarts mechanisms required for a human being to maintain stable psychological development. It's that simple.

    Speaking of which, talk to your doctor about autistic spectrum disorder treatment options.

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  74. Udolpho, there's no sense in reasoning with this diva. Either he's sincerely delusional or a meddling troll. That's the last thing I've got to say in this thread that's mutated into a drama queen browbeating everyone into accepting perversion.

    I bet he's trying to lure people onto his blog, which I've avoided looking at and never will look at.
    Joe Bob says don't check out H Arka's blog.

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  75. High Arka,

    I'll take up your challenge in a minute, I just want to note that I took a peek at your blog and you are clearly a deranged, left-wing, communist mad-man bent on the destruction of all that is good and true.

    Having said that, while I think Udolpho makes good points in response to you; I don't think his latest comment deal directly with your ridiculous scenario only because you stipulate from the outset that after the one same-sex encounter Frank goes on to lead a 'normal', fulfilling life.

    Unlike Udolpho (or perhaps this is what he did mean to say) I would go ahead and make the stronger claim that your story is silly and there are no real-world examples of such a nature, despite what you claim. Furthermore, as agnostic and others have shown, the exact opposite is clearly true -- same-sex behavior is indeed associated with all sorts of pathologies (which makes sense given that such behavior is probably driven by a virus in the first place) and not good for social health.

    But back to your challenge -- the simple answer for why Frank and Eugene should not give in to their same-sex urges is that their bodies were not designed for such sex and they should be guided by the telos of their sexuality -- we are creatures with a purpose in life and our sex and sexuality fits into that purpose.

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  76. Joe Schmoe
    Poignant and we'll said. In life, painting a picture as you just did is how I've gotten through to a few people who don't have those rich emotions. Liberals being more clueless, a touch autistic relatively, is one of the most profound, yet stunningly simple insights Agnostic came up with.
    Our interloper may not be reachable now, but others are and I encourage the others to take the tact you just did.

    Udolpho is the funniest man on the Internet.

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  77. I understand that you guys are a very cohesive group, and that you have very strong beliefs. What I was hoping is that someone could give me a non-tautological explanation of the reasons for your beliefs.

    If it's wrong because it's wrong, and everyone knows that because it's the case, and it's the case because it's wrong, and it's wrong because it's wrong, then are those who aren't born with the predisposition to understand its wrongness unable to ever understand it?

    Do you have any reasons for your conclusions other than your apparent genetic superiority in being able to feel instinctual revulsion?

    Keep in mind:

    1) I acknowledge that you outnumber me in this forum;

    2) I acknowledge that you all have special superior knowledge which I do not possess;

    3) I acknowledge that you belong to a subculture that considers the questioning of its mores to be an idiotic and/or humorous act;

    4) I acknowledge that your culture is so transcendent that it need not explain itself because it is evident to everyone special enough to understand it.

    So that stuff's all covered. I completely understand that part. But is there any way at all that you can translate your feelings into rational arguments?

    Why don't you take a few posts, first, and devote them entirely to attacking me. Conclude that I'm a gay, stupid, diseased, inferior being, inherently incapable of logic, and tell funny stories about all the bad things I do. And then, once you've gotten it out of your systems, try to squeeze out just a few lines where you address the topic itself. Even if I'm not smart enough to understand it, wouldn't it help you to be able to logically express your viewpoints by means other than an appeal to supernatural authority?

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  78. Agnostic, please banish this troll who's wasting our time. In case anyone doesn't realize it, I'll point out again that this busybody is not contributing anything of value thus making him a troll. Please stop giving him the attention he craves.

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  79. "Do you have any reasons for your conclusions other than your apparent genetic superiority in being able to feel instinctual revulsion? "

    See my answer to your question at 10:13 AM this morning. I tried to keep it short and sweet -- of course there are whole philosophical books about the natural moral law and why you should take it seriously, so I doubt I'll convince you in a combox.

    However, in case you do want to learn a thing or two, I would recommend starting this this book:

    http://www.undergroundthomist.org/book/on-the-meaning-of-sex

    Enjoy!

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  80. Thank you, Fake Herzog. Okay, so you've supplied two answers: one is, "The example is impossible," which doesn't address what would be moral if the example did actually occur, and the other is an actual example: "their bodies were not designed for" male/male sex.

    So that's the only non-tautological addressing of the topic that we have. It's an appropriate counter to the point you all feel that I implied by asking an open-ended question. It gives an actual reason for why such an encounter would be wrong--because the encounter "violates design."

    The logical premise is:

    Premise: Acts which violate a thing's design are wrong.

    Premise: Humans were not designed for male/male sex.

    Conclusion: Therefore, male/male sex is wrong.

    The rest of you take note--that's an example of a coherent logical response.

    Now, Herzog, that line of reasoning raises a lot of interesting issues:

    1) Are all things which violate design wrong? If not, then why is male/male sex one of the small subset of things which is wrong because it violates design? What distinguishes this design violation from others?

    For example, are humans designed to travel into space? No. Then are all astronauts disgusting?

    Are humans designed to travel at Mach 1? No. Then are all jet-fighter pilots disgusting?

    Are humans designed to live in Arctic environments? No. Then are all Inuit disgusting?

    Are humans designed to eat animals whose God-given genetic sequences have been perverted by usurers splicing pieces of one kind in with pieces of another? No. Then is Monsanto evil?

    As you may know, there were people who thought that railroads were an evil invention, because humans were not designed to travel that fast. Were those people right, or wrong?

    2) How do we know that humans were not designed for male/male sex? Agnostic makes the case that homosexuality may be caused by a pathogen, which pathogen apparently affects a lot of people.

    Was that pathogen designed? Who designed it? If the pathogen was designed by the same entity that designed humanity, and the pathogen was designed to infect humanity and cause homosexuality as a result, then aren't some humans designed for male/male sex?

    Some animals engage in homosexual behavior. Were they designed for it?

    Homosexual behavior does not produce offspring. Neither does men and women coupling at the wrong time of the month, or post-menopausal/barren/sterile men or women coupling ever again. If they do it anyway, or if a married couple wears a condoms or times their encounters to avoid pregnancy, are these acts similarly unnatural and disgusting?

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  81. High Arka was caught pretending to be a woman:

    He had to change his profile to say he was a woman because he had lied over at IBTP, saying he was a Latina woman. The weird part was when he then got offended when someone else used the term Latina. Then the even weirder part was when a few radfem commenters actually started sticking up for him and his racism and misogyny. I hate to pinch myself to make sure I was awake and not stuck in a nightmare by the time that rolled around.
    http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/2012/06/04/the-difference-between-me-and-twisty-faster/#comment-55090

    He's a complete kook as is evident by his blog which reads like something you'd see in a schizophrenic's case history.

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  82. TBH, Joe Schmo's view (although incredibly long winded, and replying to a tendentious best case scenario with a tendentious worst case scenario so I read little of it) is closer to my own than starting from disgust, having a freak out and then failing to justify yourself.

    Disgust isn't really a justification in itself, but it orients us to think about the disease risks associated with gay sex, and the fact that gay relationships don't lead to family life.

    If we found ourselves in some sci-fi world where disease risks weren't present and gay guys could somehow have a family life (exo wombs or something), it wouldn't be important (lol at natural law that exists independent of physics, chemistry). That would be a better world than the one we have, just as a world where Blacks scored the same on the IQ test as Whites. But we don't live there.

    Disgust is a pointer towards real moral concerns for integrity (people living well) and harm (people not suffering), not really a justification in itself. Note in Haidt's schema the disgust reflex is an evolved basis for and pointer to purity / sanctity concerns, not equated with it. The idea that "Oh, Haidt or whoever told us that disgust is a sufficient moral base on its own" is just dumb. You can't just stop at disgust, like an animal or a child, and then cease to think and feel more deeply.

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  83. Disgust is a relevant factor because you have to explain why the disgust exists. It's not random. It's most often an adaptation that keeps us safe, and as Haidt notes can have a protective social property. It's also culturally bound--we find eating dogs disgusting, whereas Koreans do not (they're filthy gooks).

    Keep in mind Western society is undergoing rapid demographic change (less European ancestry), therefore what is disgusting is often in a state of flux and a subject of contention between groups.

    Homosexuality, like other paraphilias, has much more obvious problems than that many people find the acts personally revolting. I've noted several of these but there is a lot else documented here: http://mpcdot.com/forums/topic/6651-the-institute-for-advanced-homophobia. The takeaway is that paraphilia does not exist in isolation, it is nearly always associated with psychological problems that inhibit healthy emotional attachments. Gay subculture and its propagation of deviance could supply an entire blog's worth of material by itself. People who think of homosexuality as "just an orientation" either don't know about a lot of homosexual behavior or they can't parse it due to stunted emotional growth.

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  84. High Arka,

    I can't say whether or not you are schizophrenic, but regardless, you seem to be having an episode of relative sanity so I thought I would go ahead and respond to your additional questions:

    1) "Are all things which violate design wrong?" -- Man is the only rational animal, so we are the only one concerned with morality. When it comes to our natural functions, I would generally say yes, although one can imagine extreme scenarios in which it might be necessary to sacrifice a limb, for example. to save another person's life.

    The specific examples you list are all non-sequiturs -- they are examples of men using their intelligence in a way that is perfectly consistent with the brain's design. In other words, we are a creature that creates and uses tools so of course we might go exploring the world and universe using those tools we build, etc.

    2) "How do we know that humans were not designed for male/male sex?" Our sex organs serve a specific purpose -- to create new life. As for why certain people have a desire to use them for perverted purposes -- think of it this way. Some people are born with only one arm or are missing fingers. Does that mean that we should say it is "natural" for the human body to have both one arm or two? No, it means that sometimes there are defects in the body -- defects we can detect by referring back to the proper form (a body with two arms). So in one sense, you are correct that it is 'natural' for people to have defects (born with missing limbs, born with retardation, born with other genetic diseases, etc.) -- but we can also figure out, again using right reason, what is the correct use and form of the human body versus the defect.

    More on this subject here:

    http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/10/whose-nature-which-law.html

    M,

    Anyone who thinks the world is just made up of chemistry and physics does deserve a lulz!!!!!!!!!!!!

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  85. Fake Herzog,

    It seems as though you're arguing from a perspective of popular evolutionary biology, rather than from one of intelligent design. Is that correct?

    It would be ironic, given the ways that neoliberal evolutionary biology has been used to justify most of the things you guys seem to dislike on this blog--polarization of wealth; commodification of human lives; different classes financially isolating themselves with a "devil may care" attitude for the choices of others in society--but your arguments against homosexual behavior seem to be rooted around the idea that sex is "for reproduction," and that homosexuality is therefore disgusting because it is somehow "anti reproduction."

    Do I have that right? Or are you a believer in intelligent design, and I just missed something somewhere?

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  86. Udolpho,

    (1) I presume you're aware that in the Soviet Union, a disbelief in communism was defined as a deviance, and a mental illness, and treated as such? You would also probably be more comfortable in Russia than in America, now, as Russia has an official attitude toward homosexuality more in line with your own views.

    As the Silent Generation would call it, you're sounding a little Pink. As the Boomers would say, "Go back to Russia!"

    (2) In a hundred years, when gay robots take over the world, and you're the deviant one, will you be comfortable being shunned and reeducated because of your non-adaptive failure to learn that gay sex and industrial baby factories is a more efficient method of reproduction than fluid-exchange humping away at a snatch that spends twenty percent of its time bleeding dead, infectious chunks of placenta?

    The Walmart Baby Center™ has only a 0.00001% error rate in reproducing children based on their parents' genetic profiles, whereas "human women" regularly miscarry, killing the baby and/or themselves. So now you're the deviant one, and as a member of a 5% minority that the medical community considers freakish for its refusal to adapt to modern science, how comfortable are you moving in with a male partner and refusing to ever endanger the human race again by actually coupling with a woman?

    My guess is, you're not that comfortable with it. You'd probably prefer that other people mind their own fucking business, go to their disgusting artificial "baby factory," and let you and your wife do whatever you feel like doing on your own.

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  87. I imagine you spend a lot of time thinking about robots and wishing you were one.

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  88. Feryl - You were right, he is a troll.

    High Akra - I don't want to respond to your hypothetical questions any more either, because they are getting increasingly creepy. It's not that I am afraid to face the "uncomfortable truths" that you are raising, but because your examples are just creepy.

    For example, if a technology were developed which permits birth outside the uterus, why does homosexuality logically follow from that? Why can't men continue to have sex with, women, while leaving procreation to the robots?

    Lastly, one piece of unsolicited advice - I'm no psychologist, but there is obviously a lot of projection going on here. You talk about antibacterial soap and the like because you are revolted by the act of male homosexual sex, even as you find it enticing. This obviously causes you a lot of psychic conflict. I think this is normal - most people are revolted by gay sex. If you find something revolting, and the are experiencing increasing levels of psychic turmoil as a result, the solution is to stop doing whatever causes that revulsion.

    You (and most gay men) know that sex with women is an option. You're capable of it. You'd enjoy it. It might require a level of emotional intimacy that makes you uncomfortable right now. But it'll be much more satisfying in the end. I hope that someday you find a nice woman, marry her, and grow old with her. That's a much better option than the gay lifestyle, or a phony gay "marriage" that is a twisted imitation of the real thing. The disgust will vanish and you'll be much happier.

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  89. "It seems as though you're arguing from a perspective of popular evolutionary biology, rather than from one of intelligent design. Is that correct? "

    No, I'm just arguing from the perspective of right reason. How and why we came to have the sex organs we do is not my concern at this particular point -- I'm simply arguing that it is obvious to all that based on the design of the sex organs they are for procreation. Therefore, if you believe (as I do) that one should not use one's body in ways in which it was not designed to be used (whoever designed it or however it came to be designed that way) then one should not engage in any form of homosexuality.

    Of course, this also means no masturbation -- but that is a topic for another day.

    Again, if you want to learn more about the natural moral law, I gave you good references.

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  90. Mr. Herzog,

    Masturbation is an interesting issue for you to raise, because regular ejaculation is healthy for men. If a man can't find a suitable sex partner for marriage and/or reproduction, should he forgo masturbation for moral reasons, even though this may lead to him becoming less-potent a few years earlier in life, and unable to impregnate the wife he finally meets at a later age?

    Similarly, is it wrong for people who know they are sterile to have sex? Should a woman born barren never know physical love? Is she a leprous pariah who cannot be touched, because to do so would be "disgusting"?

    What about a woman whose uterus was damaged in a car accident when she was 10? Now that she's grown up, a man having sex with her is as unnatural and disgusting as having sex with another man, because there's an equal chance--0.0%--of that use of sex organs for procreation.

    Post-menopausal women who still make love to their husbands and the fathers of their children, or Catholic couples with six children deliberately using the rhythm method to avoid another pregnancy--similarly disgusting, right? A pregnant young bride making love to her husband so that she feels attractive despite being pregnant? Zero chance of procreation.

    Your standards make all those things disgusting, too. They may be "less disgusting" than homosexual sex (if you permit yourself the authority to assign "degrees of disgust" to disgusting, unnatural acts), but they're still in violation of the principle of procreation that you have established as a standard.

    Is your standard correct? Or did you mean to make it more clear using right reason, so that thirty-nine-year-old women who still love their husbands and the fathers of their children can make love to them without being disgusting?

    You say that your conclusions are "obvious to all," but they're clearly not, right? After all, there are people like [the person everyone here thinks I am because I dared to ask questions], to whom it's not obvious.

    You might well be in the minority, now in 2014, when humanity has at its command more science and power than it has ever had. Certainly after another generation is raised by pro-gay public schools, you'll be in the minority, in a country full of adults who thinks that being anti-gay is "disgusting and perverse," while gay sex is "natural and healthy."

    So, I suggest that you come up with a better way to explain your feelings than by citing to an intangible moral authority. Your only way to win over the thinkers of the future will be by using well-reasoned, logical arguments, instead of tautologies that rely on the genetic superiority of those "born with a proper sense of disgust." Like Calvinism, your perspective may go all but extinct, if you're not able and willing to properly explain it.

    Think of me less as all of the disgusting things other commenters have said of me, and imagine that, maybe, I'm actually on your side, trying to help you make your claims more effectively. If you rely only on bandwagons, and "everybody knows" arguments, you're left powerless to argue against vast social majorities.

    If you were the last person left in an insane world, and no one felt as you did, you should still be able to explain, with reason alone, why your ideas were proper.

    I can explain things like that, using reason alone. You should be able to, too. See Rhino Love: MTR Transspecies Operations and Cyclical Social Rebellions.

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  91. High Arka,

    You are a piece of work. First of all, I have never appealed to disgust like some of the other commenters. True, I agree with them, but my arguments don't rest or fall on issues related to disgust -- so for you to bring up the issue -- it is a red herring.

    Second, I never cited an "intangible moral authority" -- I tried (perhaps I failed, but I tried) to use "well-reasoned, logical arguments" with you. Of necessity, they will be limited in comboxes -- these are not the places for detailed and extensive give and take, attempting to understand each nuance of an argument and all of its implications.

    Which leads me to my final response -- dealing with the classic objections to the natural law understanding and teaching around the issue of not being able to use one's sexual powers to their final end (i.e. reproduction) for whatever natural reason. Please note, the key is natural -- as long as you are not purposely denying those powers, you are not perverting the natural ends of your sexual nature. Here is philosopher Ed Feser with some more detail:

    "A rational agent who chooses to pursue the ends that his essence determines are good for him is to that extent morally good, while a rational agent who chooses to pursue that which is contrary to these ends is to that extent morally bad...Now, the way this gets worked out so as to provide us with moral guidance on specific issues is complicated, and much depends on various concrete details of human nature and the physical, cultural, and historical circumstances in which human beings find themselves. (I discuss the implications for private property and related issues in the article linked to, and the implications for sexual morality in chapter 4 of The Last Superstition.) But “perverted faculty” arguments for certain moral conclusions fall out as a natural consequence of the general principles already described. The basic idea is that when some faculty F is natural to a rational agent A and by nature exists for the sake of some end E (and exists in A precisely so that A might pursue E), then it is metaphysically impossible for it to be good for A to use F in a manner contrary to E. For the good of a thing is determined by the end which it has by nature. F exists for the sake of E, and agents like A naturally possess F precisely so that they might pursue E. Hence (given the underlying metaphysics) it cannot possibly be good to use F for the sake of preventing the realization of E, or for the sake of an end which has an inherent tendency to frustrate the realization of E. Hence (to cite the best-known applications of this reasoning) it cannot possibly be good to use our sexual faculties in a way that positively frustrates their procreative end."

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  92. It's sad that you're not interested in attempting to understand the nuances and implications of this discussion. Don't you think that would result in you missing out on a lot of things?

    You didn't answer the question about post-menopausal women, so I suppose an older married couple with children is disgusting for still making love to each other in their old age. (I disagree with you, but at least you're being logically consistent.)

    So, since people shouldn't act in ways not in accordance with their purpose of procreation, what other "unnatural" behaviors should they shun? Cooking food? Are you one of the "paleo-diet" people, who thinks it is unnatural, unhealthy, or disgusting to eat food that isn't "raw"?

    I ask you this, then--chimpanzees will eat bugs raw. They'll kill and eat monkeys, raw. Sure, it's natural, but if humans developed the ability to cook meat, it allowed them to fall ill less often from infected meat. Wouldn't you say that helped us procreate more, rather than hindered us? Even though it's "unnatural" and "not part of the ends of our essence" as far as being biological animals on planet Earth?

    I know that charring the meat of dead animals using fire, then consuming it, is not a naturally-occurring process, but isn't it okay for some of us to eat cooked meat?

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  93. "It's sad that you're not interested in attempting to understand the nuances and implications of this discussion. Don't you think that would result in you missing out on a lot of things?

    You didn't answer the question about post-menopausal women, so I suppose an older married couple with children is disgusting for still making love to each other in their old age. (I disagree with you, but at least you're being logically consistent.) "

    O.K., I tried, I really tried. Everyone else had your number but I thought there might be some utility in discussing these issues with you. Now I understand that Udolopho was right -- you are just not right in the head.

    If you do have a lucid moment, please go back and read my previous comments and you'll see that I've answered all your questions already -- older married couples having sex (even after the woman has experience menopause) is perfectly consistent with the natural law because those couples aren't doing anything to violate the natural end of their sexual organs.

    Likewise, because man is a rational animal it is perfectly consistent for him to build and use tools to aid him in his natural functions.

    Again, I said this already and if you were paying attention you would be asking me better questions.

    Good luck to you -- our conversation is over.

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  94. I come back to this place after a week and a half, and there's 96 comments... no way I'm reading this. I did pick up from skimming that the High Arka commenter is a homo troll, and will delete further comments.

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