Via Steve Sailer, here's an ad for the Democratic candidate in Virginia's gubernatorial race depicting the state's whites as Jim Crow rednecks running down doe-eyed diversi-youth in pickup trucks flying Confederate flags, Gadsden plates and--like a punchline--Ed Gillespie for Governor stickers.
Each representative of the new diversity wakes up from the same nightmare! The nightmare of white supremacy!
The all-a-dream trope is bit of a cop-out: the authors aren't suggesting it's actually happening. They don't go that far. But it's too apt: the threat of violence from whites truly is the stuff of nightmares, not reality, nightmares conjured by the Democratic Party, of which this ad is an example. Sailer:
Thank God the Democrats are importing millions of future Democratic voters to demographically crush those pickup-driving yeehawing white racist Republican genocidal lynch mob maniacs who built this country and thus deserve to have it taken away from them. Haven’t you heard about how these lowbrow morons all belong to U. of Virginia fraternities that have an initiation ritual of gangrape on broken glass? Read a book!
Is this ad what we can expect from now on? Because this isn't the case of someone pulling out all the stops in a close contentious race, but in a close, boring race between two moderates.
Establishment Republican Ed Gillespie has covered a deficit to pull even on the issue of sanctuary cities, opposition to which is a winner for Republican candidates. Virginia has been rapidly diversifying, as part of the broader effort to establish Democratic dominance. It's also where a particularly ugly instance of narrative collapse occurred: a Salvadoran illegal killed a Muslim girl--apparently because he didn't like Muslims. [update: with a baseball bat]
(Things like this are ultimately blamed on white guys--the Democratic ad above sort of does that. In the film After Hours a protagonist stumbles through a series of misunderstandings by which he's blamed for one thing after another. He's hiding from a mob on a rooftop when he witnesses a murder in an apartment across the street. Shocked and unable to do anything about it, he just mutters, "I'll probably be blamed for that." That is the American white guy's plight at present.)
The Democratic Party imports non-whites so they can implement Democratic policies: universal health care, gun control, welfare. But ideology and policy bores them. What doesn't bore them are identity politics. But identity politics run on conflict. It should be enough that the Democrats will expand social programs, the affirmative action regime, the whole ethnic spoils system by which America is being parceled out. But it isn't. The new voters are like the black American voters after which their participation in the Party is modeled (blacks are the true Model Minority): admirably apathetic about details but by that same token not so good about getting to the polls.
In pulling the demagogic ripcord to win this, the Democrats condition their new voters for the future to associate whites, their historic symbols and even, for the love of God, pickup trucks with danger and bigotry. It would be good for them to lose this one and discourage them in the future, but I suspect we're just going to get more and more of this, commensurate with the extent white Americans and allies oppose demographic displacement. The program of ethnic diversification is a fait accompli being foisted on us: at some point resistance to it is political suicide. The cuckservatives long ago determined it's already upon us. But it remains to be seen.
Vivian (Vivian Veritas on Twitter) joins us today. Now we're the four coolest, smartest people you know, and considerably more attractive.
First up: do white lives matter?
2:10: Dennis Prager video on Alt Right (I haven't watched it):
21:50:
Luke's tells of his conversion to Judaism with an impressive, succinct apologetic. He also tells of his red-pilling. He converted before he was red-pilled. I wonder: had he been red-pilled before converting would he have not converted, and would he be out here with us flailing, homeless white nationalists? Having converted before, however, the red-pill reinforces him in his faith. The timing of his red-pilling was good for the Jews, because they won
27:00 Judaism: a light unto the Alt Right, showing the way out of the globalist miasma.
37:00 Vivian arrives, with infant child. Three men and a baby.
54:28 Jesse Lee Peterson interviews Richard Spencer (scheduled to join us on Torah Talk November 26), is adorably clueless:
Here's Spencer talking about his portrayal on a CSI-like television show, The Wisdom of Crowds:
2:31:50 Vivian on Jenna Jameson and her biography. Luke is a friend, sends her an invite to the show.
For more than an hour, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s high-profile chief operating officer, sheepishly pledged to “do better” — over and over — as stern-faced members of the Congressional Black Caucus grilled her on Thursday about Russian ads aimed at exploiting racial divisions during last year’s election.
For black lawmakers, it was a chance to vent — at the outrage they felt toward Russian intelligence and its efforts to foment racial unrest in the country; at the frustration they felt toward three separate congressional investigations into Russian interference that have plodded on and yielded little; and at Facebook itself, which has been long on promises and short on action.
“She was checking the boxes. She said all the right things,” Representative Donald M. Payne Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said of Ms. Sandberg. But he was not satisfied. “I had an uncle who hated when you said ‘gonna’: ‘I’m gonna do this, and I’m gonna do that.’ He used to say, ‘Don’t be a gonna.’ And that’s what I said to her, ‘Don’t be a gonna.’ "
Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, after initially denying that Russians had exploited the company’s system, has reversed course and admitted that groups backed by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia paid Facebook to influence voters last year with ads designed to inflame and exploit racial, political and economic rifts in the United States. Russian-backed Facebook pages promoted anti-immigrant rallies, targeted the Black Lives Matter movement and focused attentions on critical election swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan.
While Facebook has yet to release any of the ads, it has hired three crisis communications firms, bought digital and newspaper ads and sent Ms. Sandberg to Washington last week to charm Congress and the public.
The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate.
Rather, the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights. [emph added]
About one-quarter of these ads were geographically targeted, and of those, more ran in 2015 than 2016.
The behavior displayed by these accounts to amplify divisive messages was consistent with the techniques mentioned in the white paper we released in April about information operations.
In this latest review, we also looked for ads that might have originated in Russia — even those with very weak signals of a connection and not associated with any known organized effort. This was a broad search, in cluding, for instance, ads bought from accounts with US IP addresses but with the language set to Russian — even though they didn’t necessarily violate any policy or law. In this part of our review, we found approximately $50,000 in potentially politically related ad spending on roughly 2,200 ads.
As Trump is viewed by the Establishment as a world-historic catastrophe, Facebook's lack of vigilance in opposing him earns it a punitive lap around the Narrative. And it wouldn't be that if it didn't begin and end with The Blacks.
Fake accounts mimicked real right wing accounts critical of Black Lives Matter and identity politics. From another New York Times article:
The Russian pages — with names like “Being Patriotic,” “Secured Borders” and “Blacktivist” — cribbed complaints about federal agents from one conservative website, and a gauzy article about a veteran who became an entrepreneur from People magazine. They took descriptions and videos of police beatings from genuine YouTube and Facebook accounts and reposted them, sometimes lightly edited for maximum effect.
This, says the Times, is how a Russian propaganda operation was able to "reshape American politics" using "the anger, passion and misinformation that real Americans were broadcasting across social media platforms". Link sharing and light editing.
The company hasn't even made clear that all the ads were implicitly pro-Trump (none were explicitly so). If there wasn't this all-hands-on-deck effort to get Trump the story here would be that Russian hackers' use of Facebook during the election was negligible. Of course we wouldn't be looking in the first place if not for the anti-Trump "resistance". Makes you wonder what the real extent of such propaganda operations are--who says the Chinese aren't a lot better? Even mentioning Hasbara is just the sort of hate speech all this is about eliminating, so it's better left out of it.
Because the effort now is less to get Trump than to get Facebook, and other platforms, to clamp down further and faster on right wing speech (I write this on one of those mornings we woke up to find Twitter had taken out a bunch of accounts).
As an ideological fellow traveler Facebook accepts the chastening--a more assertive company might point out the "penetration" of Russian trolls was so slight as to be meaningless, that is, as good as zero. A success under any other circumstances, but nobody--except some of the dopier members of the Congressional Black Caucus--really believes any of it.
An alternate myth: shitlords from Russia and around the world flocked to the cause like volunteers for the Spanish Civil War, forming an international brigade in the Great Meme War.
Other posts on the Russian pages used stilted language or phrases rarely found in American English. Yet their use of borrowed ideas and arguments from Americans, which were already resonating among conservatives and liberals, demonstrated a deft understanding of the political terrain. The Russians also paid Facebook to promote their posts in the feeds of American Facebook users, helping them test what content would circulate most widely, and among which audiences.
The Establishment can only lament the exploitation of our divisive politics helped Trump, but whose fault is that? If Black Lives Matter is not a just movement but a fraud, then foreign trolls taking advantage of the outrage generated by it are just another of its negative effects.
Black Lives Matter, more than any single entity, cost Hillary, the Democrats and the Establishment the presidency. It takes real nerve for black politicians to leverage that into more spoils for them. Black America and the Establishment are locked in an indulgence spiral that threatens to collapse the whole movement. Get the popcorn.
Congresswoman Frederica Wilson and allies have charged General Kelly's "empty barrel" remark is racist. Everyone laughed: there's no traditional connotation between the two. But I like to think Kelly's opponents get it, just like I do: an "empty barrel" making a lot of noise is a black mediocrity making of herself a spectacle. Weary whites know the type. Weary blacks know the type. You must not show you know the type. Perhaps if it was a little less common.
And that's the problem. Nothing is so evident as that which is so strenuously ignored.
Racial slurs not directed at whites are becoming rarer. But they help maintain the sustained moral panic that is "anti-racism." Sometimes slurs are repurposed as needed.
New slurs are being added all the time--not by racists, but by anti-racists. Honest people going about their business are often waylaid by some new, unexpected restriction. They should know better--it's been decades since "niggardly" became unacceptable for just sounding like a word with which it had no etymological relation.
Lack of racist intent is no excuse. Ignorance of the laws of racism are no excuse. This being racism, there is no reference too obscure, no connection too tenuous. It isn't enough to not be a racist, one is expected to fight racism, report it, to hate it with his very soul. Justice is diligence.
As a result of our hyper-sensitivity to black sensitivity, the target of any offense determines offense, not some objective social standard.
Criticizing a black person's intelligence is almost always construed as a criticism of black intelligence generally, revealing a lack of confidence in black intelligence, mostly. This is getting embarrassing. The brilliant black thinkers of television and cinema still aren't showing up. Hailing Ta Nehisi Coates, Neil de Grasse Tyson and Barack Obama as exemplars of the black intelligentsia is a bit of a back-handed compliment. The condescension is driving aware black intellectuals out of their minds, but the aware are increasingly rare.
But the insistence on the existence of a thriving black intellectualism is making its absence obvious.
People are still paying attention, even in their forced silence. The increasingly absurd charges and demands of anti-racism and attendant injustice erode the perceived legitimacy of the anti-racist movement. It's a crisis that can't be recognized because it reveals the corruption of the entire endeavor.
It's always better if you can find the use of a racial epithet. It's simple, it draws the flag and stops play immediately. A hush falls. There's no explaining what so-and-so is inferring, which is a lot more work and frankly embarrassing when you're working with such material as Congresswoman Cowboy Hat.
But the accusation that "empty barrel" is racist is not entirely baseless, just hipster-level obscure.
"There's this racial epithet, you've probably never heard of it, it's a little obscure..."
The source is out there, if one is willing to slog through the narrative/historic jungle like an explorer looking for the mouth of a river. But yes, empty barrels are empty of justice and full of hate.
Thomas Wictor is a science fiction author with expertise in warfare munitions who produces epic Twitter threads. He's an often vociferous Trump supporter without white nationalist, anti-Semitic or racist tendencies, but he's not humoring the congresswoman. He's been all over the Wilson-Kelly controversy.
Vachel Lindsay was a poet of the early 20th Century who innovated what he called "singing poetry"--his poems were designed to be read at certain tempos, cadences, intonations, etc according to instructions in the margins ("a deep rolling bass"; "shrilly, with heavily accented meter"; "like the wind in a chimney"). The works were designed to be performed. Wictor calls him the first rapper. He's also an early sort of performance artist.
His work was popular, and still familiar enough to make it into a 1964 edition of "A Treasury of the Familiar" anthology I have at home. The poem above, The Congo, is the source of the "empty barrel" epithet says Wictor, and if this was anything but "racism" I would scoff. But I suspect he's right.
The poem is subtitled "A Study of the Negro Race" and is in three parts: "Their Basic Savagery", "Their Irrepressible High Spirits" and "The Hope of their Religion". The first part portrays black Americans as boisterous primitives ill-suited to the industrial world, and is the source of the supposed empty barrel epithet:
Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
THEN I had religion,
THEN I had a vision.
I could not turn from their revel in derision.
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.
The poems were meant to be performed and in accordance with margin notes for tempo, inflection, style "like the wind in a chimney" ; "with a philosophic pause", etc.
The first part portrays blacks in their most threatening light: bloodthirsty savages with a historic grudge:
Boom, steal the pygmies,
Boom, kill the Arabs,
Boom, kill the white men,
Listen to the yell of Leopold's Ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell
Lindsay thought African brutish would be redeemed by Christianity.
In the third part the Apostles and "pioneer angels" cutting through the brush bring the Africans to Jesus, and the sinister "Mumbo-Jumbo" of voodoo is left in the jungle:
Mumbo-Jumbo is dead in the jungle.
Never again will he hoo-doo you.
Never again will he hoo-doo you.
Redeemed were the forests, the beasts and the men,
And only the vulture dared again
By the far, lone mountains of the moon
To cry, in the silence, the Congo tune:--
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo...Jumbo...will...hoo-doo...you."
I suspect Lindsay was too forthright and literal-minded for that last line--the vulture invoking voodoo after its defeat--to mean what I want it to mean: the vulture is foretelling the certain return of Mumbo Jumbo, in due time.
All of this is horribly racist now but Lindsay was sympathetic to the cause of black civil rights and some of his earlier work endeared him to such as W.E.B. Dubois.
The only thing I see him guilty of is naivete and condescension. In that way this bizarre character from another era is very much like your average earnest white liberal.
Those charging that General Flynn's criticism of Congresswoman Frederica Wilson is racist aren't entirely wrong.
I don't take racism as it's defined seriously, and I don't imagine the general is personally "racist" or motivated by racial animus. But in adding to his criticism of her behavior towards Trump the charge of an earlier graceless public act, and calling her a mediocre fraud ("empty barrel"), there is, just as the opposition sees it, an implied criticism of black America from a non-apologetically white perspective.
The congresswoman is a familiar stereotype that Must Not Be Named, the Black Buffoon. Public figures have had to be careful in criticizing such people, to steer clear of implication that they are noticing the type. Naming the Fool outright is out of the question of course for the time being.
Indulging blacks in this fashion has been bad for whites and is a steady, ongoing degradation of our national character. This grows along with black cultural power. Black culture and style is inseparable from the violence and hatred of the ghetto and emanates from the same deep well of true identity. I no longer accept the argument that a "black culture of violence" harms black America.
Black America chooses its more violent culture, despite all the wailing. When attacking the presumed injustice of the legal system and incarceration rates--seeking the release of as many of their own as they can manage by whatever political means--they act as a separate nation demanding autonomy. Arguments invoking civil rights now are all attempts to rationalize black norms as dysfunction imposed from without. Black civil rights are a racial supremacy movement disguised as an appeal to our own values.
Citing the statistics for such as wealth, parental involvement, education, crime, is applying white criteria to black culture. In the absence of whites, as in the ghetto, black norms default to a harsher order. This is autonomy. Black America is asserting itself, asserting its particular culture, liberated ("free at last") from more restrictive white norms and even displacing them in the broader shared culture, with considerable help from without, of course.
This is not to say black American culture is achieving some natural stasis in the absence of control. Black America still exists in a broader white order. Black culture can't help being deformed by white influence and technology. Black Americans assert a black culture deformed by the vastly different and more advanced white Western culture of liberalism and rights. It's kind of a monstrosity.
Damage isn't limited to the degradation of black-white relations, or to standards of behavior generally (a profound effect no one beyond the hard right mentions); it's also become a proven demagogic template for a growing list of grievance identities. The seeds of our destruction were sown in the noble ground of civil rights.
A more prosperous and well-adjusted black America would not have inspired the host of similarly modeled grievance identities (people always tryna be black!).Who knows? Diversity might have had a chance.Proponents of diversity should be the first to discourage our disastrous indulgence of black dysfunction.
All of this bears on this latest cultural skirmish.
When Trump engaged the NFL controversy he engaged the same explicitly racial movement the league has caved to, if only implicitly on the side of whites. This is just not done. Whites are getting uppity.
This asymmetrical (explicit v implicit narratives) civil war began with Trump's candidacy (or his challenging Obama's citizenship). He was an affront and remains intensely that to the constituent groups of the Narrative. He's a special affront to blacks, due to his "birther" roots, but more significantly due to his threat to the present order. Being the primary beneficiary of that order and its highest moral caste tends to quicken the mind when it's suddenly challenged. And despite all the bellyaching, rather because of it, blacks draw the most benefit for effort put in from the present social and political order.
Trump has evinced all the traits of the typically non-racist boomer over a lifetime in the public eye and he tends toward socially liberal. But he has an interlocutor problem: he doesn't know he's not supposed to say certain things. This is taken for obtuseness. There's a cynical aspect obscured by all the conspicuous outrage: the dope doesn't know to keep his mouth shut! What they're really criticizing is a curious lack of guile that must indicate a moron. Yet they keep losing these little fights. This is driving people insane.
But what you see is usually what you've got. And what I see is that Trump just didn't care if attacking Obama looked racist, he, Donald Trump in his considerable self-regard, knew it wasn't. He knows he isn't racist because he doesn't feel it. He reflects his generation in that regard. Where he differs--shockingly, to his stunned peers--is that he wants his due credit. Like a naif, he wants to behave as if race is just a social construct. The fact his fellow boomers view this sensible view with horror reveals a tragedy: an entire generation going to see God clinging to a humiliating and disastrous myth.
The general is a boomer too. They trusted black America, they've been faithful to equality, they've endured bitterness and violence--they've been patient. Now they're being ridiculed. They look to their children, better not to talk about the children, the children are being peeled away from them. White baby boomers were double-crossed. Do they know it? Young rightists hate the boomers for good reason. But if anyone should be mad it's the boomers: they are the great betrayed generation.
I like to think the general has developed some awareness of this vast con. And here comes this typically buffoonish black character. Sure, she's wielding the most powerful narrative weapon of all, the Numinous Negro, but she's inept, she's not even holding it right, and he's got what is maybe the only firepower to match it, Our Troops.
Bumbling into the fight he was cut down, she never had a chance. All she could manage were some potshots fired in retreat.
What is she saying when charging the general with racism? She's invoking the black premium which is added like affirmative action points added to minority college applications.
There's a standard invocation, in this case Lawrence O'Donnell applied it: "General Kelly called a black woman an empty barrel!"
He called her stupid. One might call anyone stupid, of course. But not black people. Black people are not allowed to be stupid. That's exactly what O'Donnell is saying, it's exactly how his ilk thinks, and they behave as if utterly unaware of its implications or contradictions.
Also black people are really not allowed to be ignoble. The congresswoman is tacky and buffoonish, in a characteristically black way.
So when Kelly thought to get in an extra dig, calling out Wilson's showboating at a previous event that too involved the deaths of public servants, and the mortified reactions of the whites (I'm assuming) that day to it, is what struck me. The Narrative normally comes round to collect you if you dare such even oblique notice of black silliness and lack of decorum. It didn't this time.
A documentary about Hollywood's boy problem, An Open Secret, is being shared on Vimeo because it can't get a distributor, and it's not hard to see why. It isn't just that powerful people in Hollywood are threatened. The Narrative itself is threatened.
At the center of the scandal is Mark Collins-Rector, who created something called the Digital Entertainment Network, producing original programming for the Internet directed at teen "subcultures" such as homosexuality. The company was probably ahead of its time (founded in 1996, before high speed internet) but drew in a lot of investors (among them high-profile gays like David Geffen and Michael Huffington) before collapsing just ahead of its IPO when Rector was accused of child molestation. He lives in Europe and is still wanted in the States.
The brief look we get at the network's programming suggests it was some part grooming operation itself. At 35:14 (can't embed it here) in the video we get a taste of one program, Chad's World. Chad's a boy who goes to live with a rich young gay couple. The house is a playground: a pool and hot tub, video games, electronics; a sort of Neverland Ranch of enticements.
I found an episode on YouTube. This one's about a boy coming out to his conservative parents.
The show was ahead of its time culturally and politically as well in its advancement and normalization of homosexuality. Gay adoption was still controversial.
It's difficult not to see the show and network, indeed the whole gay rights movement, as a sort of mass grooming operation.
After General John Kelly called out Frederica Wilson by name he called her out by implication:
I'll end with this: In October -- April, rather, of 2015, I was still on active duty, and I went to the dedication of the new FBI field office in Miami. And it was dedicated to two men who were killed in a firefight in Miami against drug traffickers in 1986 -- a guy by the name of Grogan and Duke. Grogan almost retired, 53 years old; Duke, I think less than a year on the job. Anyways, they got in a gunfight and they were killed. Three other FBI agents were there, were wounded, and now retired. So we go down -- Jim Comey gave an absolutely brilliant memorial speech to those fallen men and to all of the men and women of the FBI who serve our country so well, and law enforcement so well.
There were family members there. Some of the children that were there were three or four years old when their dads were killed on that street in Miami-Dade. Three of the men that survived the fight were there, and gave a rendition of how brave those men were and how they gave their lives.
And a congresswoman stood up, and in the long tradition of empty barrels making the most noise, stood up there and all of that and talked about how she was instrumental in getting the funding for that building, and how she took care of her constituents because she got the money, and she just called up President Obama, and on that phone call he gave the money -- the $20 million -- to build the building. And she sat down, and we were stunned. Stunned that she had done it. Even for someone that is that empty a barrel, we were stunned.
There is a further implication to be drawn, and I have to wonder if it occurred to the general. There is a cruder style in black politics as in black life, a certain obliviousness. You're not supposed to notice three commonplaces in America: black mediocrity, black malice and black buffoonery. There is also an unspoken rule that criticizing any of these in an individual black person is asserting the existence of one or more of these. The general dares to glance upon two of three--and the lady's hat covers the buffoonish angle already. In calling out the congresswoman's ability along with her decency the general enters a moral free-fire zone. But he's armed with his story, and it's powerful. Trump is fighting back in areas where it wouldn't have even occurred to previous Republican or conservative politicians.
Of course he doesn't necessarily see it that way. But it doesn't matter. In framing Trump as essentially racist the left has made every engagement with him a racial controversy--especially a row with such as the congresswoman, whose street cred appears solid. When she sallies forth to engage it has to be seen as an assault by black America on white privilege. Previous Republicans thought there was no winning such engagements. Trump sees there's no losing them.
It's on.
Sorry, black America. It's just not cute any more.
There has been a cost to our condescension. Humoring black America has necessitated the degradation of standards of behavior culturally and politically, and is inseparable from the other strands of the Narrative choking out the last of our common decency. I suspect the general, like a lot of us, is making these connections too:
It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation. Absolutely stuns me. And I thought at least that was sacred. You know, when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor. That's obviously not the case anymore as we see from recent cases. Life -- the dignity of life -- is sacred. That's gone. Religion, that seems to be gone as well.
Women and life don't get a lot of respect in the black community. Respect, for that matter, doesn't get a lot of respect there, where disrespect drives the daily carnage.
The Trump Administration continues to stun the left by fighting back. How fitting and proper that George W Bush would show up today of all days. His real cowardice is revealed in the fact he fought back politically everywhere but in the rigged game of racial resentment--and here he was invoking it.
Posturing as a tough guy by sending American boys to Iraq was nothing--and forgiven, as we see. Says an awful lot about the continuing power of the black privilege narrative.
Feminism's already quickening pace, the reaction to Donald Trump and now the Harvey Weinstein scandal has tipped us, as if overnight, into a new regime of expanded prohibition and harsher sanctions for politically incorrect speech.
Mainstream entertainers are wed to the Narrative. But those entertainers weren't always mainstream and the Narrative appropriates more and more authority. So half these mainstream guys were doing material just a few years ago that wouldn't fly today. Nobody seems to notice, until something like Jimmy Kimmel's recent foray into the political conversation. Having drawn attention from the right over--I think--some Obamacare tweets, his tormentors then seized on his silence regarding Harvey Weinstein to invoke some particularly sexist routines from his occasionally brilliant, often obscene, The Man Show.
Note how much of that show couldn't be done now. The show itself would be hard-pressed to find a home. This is almost entirely due to political correctness. So there's a good question there, for the performer who's arrived at the pinnacle by a route now closed to others--does he approve? Is this progress, and where does it lead?
Because when looking back at film, television and the like I'm struck by just how much of it wouldn't make it past the unofficial censors of the day.
Today's episode of Untethered originally aired on June 7, 2008
Memento, n.; A hint, suggestion, token, or memorial, to awaken memory; that which reminds or recalls to memory; a souvenir.
[1913 Webster]
I thought to capture my history but was surprised to find it won't stay put; I'm not sure I recognize it. Sometimes it's a faint image, like a 3-D hologram, shimmying and wavering. I reach for it and it flickers out as my hand passes through. I don't know if it isn't just a composite of experience real and imagined, some mine, some stolen from others, some culled from the commons of humanity. There are those moments we all have, of sudden temporary displacement, wherein we do not recognize our surroundings, the life that sprung up around us, that is to say moments when we do not recognize ourselves. These leave behind the residue of doubt.
I'm having trouble neatly separating the experience from the flotsam trapped in the recesses and eddies of my mind, from the residue still building up about the edges of the endless stream of electronic illusion passing through even now. The sticky fragments of no particular relevance left behind in no sensible order. I can no longer clearly demarcate the boundary between the real and the representational. I see now I never really could. Did I live this life? Perhaps I saw it all on TV.
Nothing is stranger than to look in one's past and ask: did this happen? Am I that child, connected to the present by a series of heart beats? How in the hell can this all be? How can this world be real? All this time spent no more than a blip; inconsequential, yet everything I know.
The truth is a tear of mercury that resists containment. It cannot be seen head-on or appreciated in full. It will not be drawn in from the periphery. We are all reduced to furtive voyeurs of our own lives in the end. Your history is that light smudge in the corner of your eye, that flits away when you look in its direction.
I haven't done anything here, after all. Skirting the issue always; the story of my life, of all our lives, of humanity. All this supposed revelation just circling the periphery like a basketball "rimming out." Nothing.
The real journey I will not make.
Or maybe not. Maybe we all make that journey within, the only real journey there is, eventually. Maybe that's what death is. Going home. The incoherent babble of death's delirium is the purging, surrendering energy back into the ether, in waves of language by way of dissipating will, a chemical reaction rendering our identities inert and final. Only after it can no longer be known, only after it is lost is it made whole; only then does it lose its contingent nature and become complete.
This, this is all just stalking, lurking about outside the fortress of reality in the forest of illusion.
No: illusion is the fortress, reality the forest. As it should be.
[Camille] Paglia argued that active programs in the [women's studies] field were thrown together out of the urgency to highlight women’s issues in the curriculum of the American academy. “The administrators wanted to solve a public relations problem. They had a situation with very few women faculty nationwide, at the time when the women’s movement had just started up. The spotlight of tension was on them. They needed women faculty fast. They needed the women’s subject on the agenda fast. So they just like, poof! ‘Let there be Women’s Studies.'”
“Now we will just hire some women, usually from English departments, and we’ll just throw them together,” she continued. “‘You invent it, you say what it is.’ That is why women’s studies got frozen at a certain point of ideology of the early 1970s.”
Bowing to students and 1960s Current Year hysteria, American universities quickly ramped up women's and ethnic studies departments that were sort of inorganic--there was no genuine scholarly impulse behind them.
Perhaps some thought these programs would find their way to scientific merit. Like cargo cultists any true believers left wait still for science to arrive, surrounded by the still-proliferating mock-ups of scholarship that are the various theories of race and "gender".
But science or study was never really the point of course. These were political creations of political necessity. The browning and feminizing of the university is a problem for scholarship and an opportunity for the Left. The tragedy is there are only so many resources. Equality is displacing scholarship.
This is just one field in the Scramble for America, the pilfering of US wealth by various factions through Social Justice, with the encouragement of our gormless elite as they burn through the vast ruin remaining in the nation.
Donald Trump should pick a fight with the academic left when he gets a moment.
Luke opens with description of recently concluded Sukkot festivities: "another day with God"
1:45 Special Needs Dennis
2:30 The Pernicious Professor and our Safe American Home
4:35 Masturbation, alas.
8:00 The Joy of Abstinence
20:25 Casey and Mrs. Robinson
22:50 the "Love Map" and other insidious Jewish ideas
28:50 the "power differential" in sexual fantasy
40:00 Porn, degradation and power
43:05 Mike Enoch and the New Yorker
57:45 Singapore and civic nationalism
1:05:15 Where are the Jewish apologists?
Luke asks where are the critiques of the alt right from great Jewish minds. He cites Steve Sailer: there are no incentives for introspection of this sort by Jews.
There's also no will on the non-Jewish side to demand it. As I said to Luke, we on the right would benefit from a coherent, objective critique of our movement by an outsider. Maybe that's another reason.
But mostly white America, as a group without an identity (an anti-group), doesn't demand it.
Considering the legal status of Jews in Europe, Napoleon convened a "Grand Sanhedrin" compelling Europe's rabbis to present themselves and answer a set of 12 questions. Some of their answers on trickier questions were described by one anti-Semitic thinker as fine examples of Talmudic obscurantism:
Is it lawful for Jews to have more than one wife?
Is divorce allowed by the Jewish religion?
Is divorce valid, although pronounced not by courts of justice but by virtue of laws in contradiction to the French code?
May a Jewess marry a Christian, or [May] a Jew [marry] a Christian woman? or does Jewish law order that the Jews should only intermarry among themselves?
In the eyes of Jews are Frenchmen not of the Jewish religion considered as brethren or as strangers?
What conduct does Jewish law prescribe toward Frenchmen not of the Jewish religion?
Do the Jews born in France, and treated by the law as French citizens, acknowledge France as their country?
Are they bound to defend it? Are they bound to obey the laws and follow the directions of the civil code?
Who elects the rabbis?
What kind of police jurisdiction do the rabbis exercise over the Jews? What judicial power do they exercise over them?
Are the police jurisdiction of the rabbis and the forms of the election regulated by Jewish law, or are they only sanctioned by custom?
Are there professions from which the Jews are excluded by their law?
Does Jewish law forbid the Jews to take usury from their brethren?
Does it forbid, or does it allow, usury in dealings with strangers?
Reconvene the Sanhedrin. Let's have a conversation.
1:08:28 Normies don't understand what the Mike Enoch New Yorker article is all about. Casey says Enoch's dad comes off as a jerk. The old man is tragically pozzed, whatever the case:
On Sunday, after he got home from church, he saw that a relative had e-mailed him a YouTube link. He clicked on it: his son and David Duke, standing shoulder to shoulder. “It turned my stomach,” he said. “Until that moment, I had imagined that, whatever had caused him to go down this path, it could somehow be reversed, and he could come home again.”
Enoch's dad is suggesting he's disowned his son, or at least that he doesn't expect to speak to him again. Seems a tad extreme, but that's the last we hear of it.
1:14 Thomas Paine's Age of Reason
Pederasty
Vimeo is airing a documentary about gay Hollywood grooming that can't find a distributor:
Political hate creates its own "climate" or "environment" according to those protesting (and reporting on) the seemingly endless acts of racist terror, many of them not proven hoaxes, occurring on college campuses.
There's irony in how the actual physical environment of the American university, itself a product of that demonic white supremacy (Steve Sailer has pointed out recently the American college campus is an architectural innovation of that whitest of supremacists, Thomas Jefferson), are being progressively turned into the sort of hostile, dangerous environment angry blacks and allies saw in the earlier calm.
I arrived in Portland on a hot Sunday afternoon on the day before classes started. I walked across one of the pedestrian bridges that spans the school’s 28-acre canyon and sat down at a picnic table in the quad. Students sat eating lunch on tables nearby, chatting excitedly about the new school year, a few of them barefoot. A stream of corgis and their owners strolled by on their way to the annual corgi parade. In the old student union, a dozen students were folk dancing to the same scratchy recordings I’d heard decades ago. I began to doubt what I’d heard about Reed. This couldn’t possibly be the nasty place described in the alumni letter.
Reed College has an excellent reputation (for the time being) and a beautiful campus. Northwestern summers are ideal: not too hot, no humidity, lush green and long northern days. Another irony is the weather brings out the protesters, whose outrage would not doubt be dampened the moment their hoodies were, if they took to the streets in grey, mossy winter.
The Evergreen State College in Washington State was overtaken by a black tranny (eventually bestowed with the title of "presidential equity adviser" by the conquered school) at the head of a gang of adoring lesbians like something straight out of a John Waters movie. The weather was perfect, conveniently for the professor holding class in a nearby park on the advice of campus police.
Remarkable how all these enclaves of white supremacy and black terror look so calm, outwardly. It's always been this way. This was thirteen years ago:
...after visiting Claremont Colleges to check out one of those false flag attacks (a liberal feminist professor trashed her car, then told the FBI it was likely committed by her white male students) that are such a commonplace on contemporary campuses:
Another advertised: "Queer Dreams and Nightmares: What is it like to be a student at the Claremont Colleges? Student panel discussion addressing the current climate at the 5-Cs, both academically and socially." This was part of a conference entitled, with that profusion of punctuation that is the secret fraternity handshake of post-modern academics, "[Re]Defining a Queer Space at the Claremont Colleges."
Presumably, when one of these places is convulsed by the latest poc/sjw tantrum, underneath they are placid, calm, Frisbee-friendly places.
As for Evergreen, that small school was founded in 1967 on an economically progressive model--a place where kids with some smarts but no money could get an education--that if administered properly could be providing useful college educations to one genuinely underrepresented group, working class white guys, with a better payoff for society, I suspect, than the countless poc identity-studies majors that are lugged along by their schools like chimeras. I remember thinking that at least, when I first learned of the school through the controversy.
But of course white guys are The Problem and thus pretext for the various humanities programs that exist like prospectors descending on the institutions and professions in multicultural America now in what Steve Sailer calls the "scramble for America". Back at Reed, Spiked reports on the white guy who got in the way:
Hunter Dillman agreed to meet me on campus before we went to lunch in a barbeque joint a few blocks away. He was 6’2”, drove a beat-up black pickup and had pale blue eyes and blond hair parted in the center. He was eager to talk to somebody who wanted to hear his story in detail, somebody who didn’t believe he had simply fucked up his freshman year. He told me his father was a construction worker who owned a farm and raised cows and chickens on the side. Hunter had taken four advanced placement (AP) science courses his senior year, getting all fives, and planned to get a degree in chemistry.
Dillman was run off under the usual race-baiting duress when he spoke out of turn, which is impossible to discern, exactly.
captured in the workaday concept of "underutilization," a term that Vice President Lyndon Johnson and his associates on the PCEEO had rather casually accepted as early as 1961...
This assumption, reliant upon the prior assumption talent is equally distributed, was eventually developed into the rationale for affirmative action and disparate impact
But the distance between the vague notion of underutilization and a conscious theory of proportional representation was politically vast in the fall of 1963.
The concept was necessitated by too many discrimination cases being dismissed for having no merit. The commission was an "ineffectual agent of social change". A dearth of talented blacks showing up individually necessitated what would eventually become known as disparate impact, arising from
...a growing conviction among fair employment activists that the individual complaint model's deliberate due process in determining was irrelevant to the root problem of "institutional racism."
In the newly evolving view of institutionalized racism, individual intent was at best a secondary consideration. Instead, employment discrimination should be defined and attacked statistically as a differential, rather than traditionally as an invidious and injurious act of prejudice. Its measure was simply the gap between the white and minority employment rates.
Lovely environments denounced as hellscapes, mediocrity praised as talent. It goes on and on.
The New Yorker has published an interesting and dangerously close to fair profile of Mike Enoch of The Right Stuff broadcast.
Enoch:
"If you’re a liberal, you’ve never thought twice, you’ve never reconsidered, you’ve absorbed what you were taught in the government schools and by the TV.”
A liberal now is simply someone who has stopped thinking about certain things. For him a set of settled questions form the basis of his quasi-religion. All we know about sex and race we learned by 1973, at which point the collective liberal brain was freeze-dried while taking in an episode of All in the Family.
This is normal. We aren't biologically conditioned to a life of perpetual questioning of social and religious convention. A society made up entirely of conformists would become stagnant and implode; one made up entirely of individual free-thinkers would become chaotic and explode.
The average person and society both need the hard ground of unquestioned and broadly accepted fundamental beliefs concerning the nature of life and Man. It would be madness if every single individual was a moral free agent to his last, a skeptic of all to the end.
An apolitical and conformist population is a virtuous one--if they are given a sane social order in which to conform. If you have what we have now that virtue of the mass is turned against itself, just as that individual liberal, eager if oblivious conformist, is a victim of his own blind, dumb virtue.
The complete contempt gay men had for other gay men in that era was stunning. If you were a self-identified homosexual in the industry, the assumption was you had no qualms about being used and sleeping your way to the top. You wouldn’t get as much blowback as straight women, and there was no risk of getting pregnant. But the downside was, back then, that you had to accept a public identity of a highly paid whore, one of the thousands upon thousands of gay men with low self-esteem wanting to overcome their lack of masculinity by making it big in entertainment. [bold added]
Sodomy's probably been with us the whole time, but "gay" is a very new identity. In our last Torah Talk Casey the Classicist pointed out the unique nature of "gay": the first pathology transferred into a social and political identity. Its nature is unprecedented and absurd. It's also unquestioned.
So nobody really knows where this ends. Homosexual Americans now constitute a nation with the nation, like everyone (except the white core of the Nation). As a group, as a part of their political movement of normalization erasing the age-old restrictions on them, they are expanding their ranks.
Despite the biological determinism that is the central tenet of the movement ("born this way"), evolution would seem to be opposed to homosexuality. I suspect homosexuality has only survived because until very recently it's been practiced by bisexuals--men attracted to men but marrying. If that's true, the creation of a homosexual identity suddenly creates a crisis for homosexuals; the necessity to "closet" oneself is gone, and more and more gay men and lesbians will gravitate away from marriage.
In a state of prohibition recruitment is probably a necessity--"pederasty begets pederasty"--but after emancipation it conceivably becomes a matter of life and death.
Normalization itself steps into the breach. It is now an option: respectable, presented as glamorous, attractive, heroic even. In the chaos of the post sexual revolution, with the cads, lesbianism and general alienation decimating the ranks of available women, the always adaptable male has this bitter option.
He has more and more options in fact, thanks to the "trans rights" movement. Any young man stranded in his masculinity can now, he's told, abandon it.
But these new converts, there to buttress numbers and supply fodder for the Narrative, are a problem. They are overwhelmingly disturbed psychologically, and they've always been disdained, to say the least, by other gays. Likewise the poorer, younger and especially more effeminate gay man: the "twinks" and "marys" exploited and abused in a way curiously similar to the way a straight lech like Harvey Weinstein exploits women. With more political impunity, of course: imagine the power he wielded, clad with political correctness.
Indeed, if the greater levels of promiscuity in homosexual life can be attributed to the fact there are no women in the role of discriminating regulator, but all men on the prowl (as I think undeniable), the greater cruelty (I suspect) with which powerful gay men treat other gay men is likely attributable to the same thing: the lack of women. It's easier for a man to abuse a man: the prohibition against it is less severe, the weakness of a man lacks charm and inspires disgust.
There is no real gay identity; it is a rickety construct.
Evangelical Christianity surged in the wake of the Sixties, providing a home for that decade's first casualties, and others. By 1976 it was mainstream enough that liberal Jimmy Carter could claim it without harm (there was a bit of snickering, I recall, as well as at the new term "Born Again Christianity").
At the time in my old neighborhood if someone turned up in this state he was viewed with horror. The transformation--early on, destined to wear off in most cases--was such that it seemed to leave little of the "old" person behind.
That it was often the more dissolute who found God in this way made the change all the more jarring. Suddenly an overnight spiritual wonder appears, all enthusiasm and warmth as he declares you hell-bound for your degenerate ways--and he knows all about it, having been there last week.
Billie wondered aloud how to tell their friends and family about Mike E. “What do you do?” she said. “Send a letter to your cousins—‘Haven’t spoken to you in twenty years, hope you’re doing well, and, oh, P.S., our son’s a Nazi now’?” She worried that people would wonder what she and Mike, Sr., had done wrong as parents. “Everyone wants it to be simple, to know who to blame,” one of Mike E.’s relatives told me later. “But lots of kids have parents who get divorced when they’re young. Lots of white kids have difficult personalities. They don’t all become Nazis.”
A few people around town had already heard the news, mostly through Facebook, and some of them were talking about Mike E. as if he had been abducted by a cult, or tied down and injected with a serum of pure hatred. Other people assumed that there must be some key biographical fact—a chemical imbalance, a history of abuse—that would neatly unlock the mystery. But Mike E.’s conversion was more quotidian than that, and therefore more unsettling; somehow, over time, he had fallen into a particularly dark rabbit hole, where some of the most disturbing and discredited ideas in modern history were repackaged as the solution to twenty-first-century malaise.
"Racists" are the new child molesters, somebody has written elsewhere (I can't find it). That's the deliberate work of generations. But there's the little problem of the truth. It's easy to hold child molesters in low regard. The Narrative groans under the stress of contradicting reality even as the net dehumanizing "racists" is cast ever wider. Yet still, it holds somehow. Mike E could have robbed a bank and caused his family less embarrassment.
Way back when I endured entreaties from converted friends, and sat through those awful born-again sermons, what I could never shake was my resistance to the story of Christ as Messiah. I could see the value of belief, but I could not believe this. For me at the center of my alienation from my born-again peers was this idea that I found incomprehensible--that Jesus suffered on the cross for my sins.
That sense of alienation--I suspect--was there for most people, for the same reason: the converts believed something crazy. People didn't say this. The average person was nominally religious, even if he didn't practice. He said he believed in God. He appreciated the church. He appreciated and understood the need for moral order and saw the church's role there. But, again I suspect, he secretly saw the convert's obsession with Jesus on the Cross a little, or a lot, crazy.
Conventional, publicly enforced views on race are approaching the mythical, that is to say objectively they could be called crazy.
So the "racist" alienated from his family now is a sort of inversion of the zealot alienated from his family then. The latter was a source of concern because he was seen as believing crazy things. The former is a source of concern because he's seen as not believing crazy things.
And, per one of my pet crackpot peeves, widespread belief in the Resurrection demands no disbelief in the realities of the world we inhabit. I don't mean to belittle it when I say it is harmless. Whereas the widespread belief in Equality demands just that. It has implications in every aspect of life, everywhere, always, that depend on its truth. Its failure is evident in every aspect of life everywhere, always. Jesus is benignly absent, and Christians see their relationship to him as "personal"--that is private. Contrast that with the demands of Equality now, which intrude further into the private sphere.
The Christian's profession of belief is ritualized and set aside from from the worldly. Thus the mythology of Christianity is benignly absent from the practical. Marxism has sought to absorb everything from agriculture to mathematics, of course. Christianity might have felt threatened by scientific discovery, but it never saw the need for such as a Christian agriculture or physics.
The problem with the new civic religion is it's all worldly. If we could perform some ritual sacrifice to Equality and get on with our lives, it would be harmless.
This is why political correctness is far more severe than religion as it's been practiced in the West. Galileo, whose discoveries upended conventional and biblical interpretations of the natural world, had defenders even in the Church. The narrative of equality allows no such equanimity because it can't survive it. It can't survive it because it's a lie.
When Judaism demanded that all sexual activity be channeled into marriage, it changed the world. The Torah's prohibition of non-marital sex quite simply made the creation of Western civilization possible. Societies that did not place boundaries around sexuality were stymied in their development. The subsequent dominance of the Western world can largely be attributed to the sexual revolution initiated by Judaism and later carried forward by Christianity.
This revolution consisted of forcing the sexual genie into the marital bottle. It ensured that sex no longer dominated society, heightened male-female love and sexuality (and thereby almost alone created the possibility of love and eroticism within marriage), and began the arduous task of elevating the status of women.
8:10 Is heterosexual marriage the basis of society?
14:00 Sexual rage and its role in society.
16:05 Dennis' sexual rage. White Sharia Now.
18:20 More Prager.
It is probably impossible for us, who live thousands of years after Judaism began this process, to perceive the extent to which undisciplined sex can dominate man's life and the life of society. Throughout the ancient world, and up to the recent past in many parts of the world, sexuality infused virtually all of society.
Human sexuality, especially male sexuality, is polymorphous, or utterly wild (far more so than animal sexuality). Men have had sex with women and with men; with little girls and young boys; with a single partner and in large groups; with total strangers and immediate family members; and with a variety of domesticated animals. They have achieved orgasm with inanimate objects such as leather, shoes, and other pieces of clothing, through urinating and defecating on each other (interested readers can see a photograph of the former at select art museums exhibiting the works of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe); by dressing in women's garments; by watching other human beings being tortured; by fondling children of either sex; by listening to a woman's disembodied voice (e.g., "phone sex"); and, of course, by looking at pictures of bodies or parts of bodies.
There is little, animate or inanimate, that has not excited some men to orgasm. Of course, not all of these practices have been condoned by societies — parent-child incest and seducing another's man's wife have rarely been countenanced — but many have, and all illustrate what the unchanneled, or in Freudian terms, the "un-sublimated," sex drive can lead to.
Prager is right but in the West chastity and sexual morality arise from the same evolutionary pressures that shaped other behaviors. In the West Christianity developed into a relatively strict sexual morality because of the people adopting it, as of course is true for its other aspects.
20:50 A Surviving Remnant.
36:45 Betrayal as an aspect of American life.
39:00 Shouting Africans.
41:30 The amazing turnabout of the AIDS narrative.
46:20 Bad news in the War on Frapping.
49:55 Our senior masturbation correspondent Casey reports on Harvey Weinstein.
1:26:15 Aunt Mary Wants You. The problem of homosexual recruitment.
Hugh Hefner went with neither a bang nor a whimper, but an exhausted meh. I confess I haven't the heart to read any of the boilerplate fill-in-the-name send-offs that collect like plates of food brought to the mourning family--which is supposed to be us--when one of these "icons" passes.
A boomer's fate is to age out of this world to an unending series of such requiems for "pioneers" who "broke boundaries" and "ignored the rules" (as if this is inherently good).
The long-ago routed objections to sexual liberation aren't even brought up to mock now.
Neither are the original arguments on its behalf ever revisited.
The arguments for sexual liberation are forgotten in the post-coital haze like smooth reassurances of a seduction. They're frankly a little embarrassing now. Sexual mores were born of nothing more than neuroses, sexism and Freudian angst (this was taken to be proven by science) went the line; their removal would return us to a natural, healthy state.
But we now know Freud was a fraud who made no account of biology and evolution.
That is to say, the liberation we celebrate is based on a pack of lies.
The objections to the sexual revolution--that it would destroy the family and create misery--have been borne out. But the Freudian presumptions still hold cultural sway, and the objections are discredited there still.We foisted a fait accompli on future generations.
This is a pattern in progressive movements: witness civil rights' journey from fight for equality to microaggressions, safe spaces and cultural appropriation.
Hefner was a pimp, and when he started out that was an insult. As much as anyone else he contributed to turning that phrase and the practice into a joke, even a boast. We are to congratulate ourselves on having lightened up regarding the trafficking of women, as well as sexual disease, parental abandonment, infidelity, the ever-shrinking world of the perverse.
Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.
Hefner's shtick was outdated from the start, a sophomoric and immature aesthetic of cool, decked-out in all the latest from the previous decade and wading obliviously into the water ahead of the tsunami that was the Sixties. The magazine printed quality authors who wrote quality articles, but had no editorial personality; the liberal consensus of the moment was the magazine's. A glossy, technical marvel with no character and a whiff of obliviousness.
In mainstreaming pornography it led the way culturally; ever since it's followed the trend.
Hef's James Bond vision of an encompassing lifestyle, rich in pleasures, gadgets and consumer goods, failed utterly, of course. He was fashioning a "brand" before the concept was created (I think), and that brand failed even as the magazine rolled on.
So the venereal became venerable. The mansion and Hefner enjoyed a sort of resurgence in later years, owing to the ironic condescension of such as Howard Stern. When the mansion was featured on Entourage it was too perfect, the lineage from obscene parent to mediocre spawn too direct.
Hefner would follow the same failed course he plotted for his generation, as described by Roger Devlin in his Sexual Utopia in Power
A man’s sexual utopia is, accordingly, a world in which no such limit to female demand for him exists. It is not necessary to resort to pornography for examples. Consider only popular movies aimed at a male audience, such as the James Bond series. Women simply cannot resist James Bond. He does not have to propose marriage, or even request dates. He simply walks into the room and they swoon. The entertainment industry turns out endless unrealistic images such as this. Why, the male viewer eventually may ask, cannot life actually be so? To some, it is tempting to put the blame on the institution of marriage. Marriage, after all, seems to restrict sex rather drastically. Certain men figure that if sex were permitted both inside and outside of marriage there would be twice as much of it as formerly. They imagined there existed a large, untapped reservoir of female desire hitherto repressed by monogamy. To release it, they sought, during the early postwar period, to replace the seventh commandment with an endorsement of all sexual activity between “consenting adults.” Every man could have a harem. Sexual behavior in general, and not merely family life, was henceforward to be regarded as a private matter. Traditionalists who disagreed were said to want to “put a policeman in every bedroom.” This was the age of the Kinsey Report and the first appearance of Playboy magazine. Idle male daydreams had become a social movement. This characteristically male sexual utopianism was a forerunner of the sexual revolution but not the revolution itself. Men are incapable of bringing about fundamental changes in heterosexual relations without the cooperation—the famed “consent”—of women. But the original male would-be revolutionaries did not understand the nature of the female sexuality.
In helping set loose the sexual revolution he of course helped strand countless men left out of the bacchanal. The magazine promised to lead them to a sexual utopia of never-ending delights--while they engaged in the lonely, pathetic act of masturbation. It was, fittingly, jacking them off the whole time with this con. Now, all that's left is the masturbation, literal and figurative. The lesson of Playboy isn't that sexual liberation is freedom, but that it is a prison.
To the extent the average American male took him seriously he was ill-served, but Hefner managed to create that utopia for himself. He championed it his whole life. And its yield was a long dotage of drugs, pornography, mental illness, cuckoldry and masturbation.
His life was a testament to the stupidity and destructiveness of the life he celebrated.
11:50 Casey: What is the nature of religious authority?
13:40 Where have the miracles gone?
Here Casey has come upon a problem outlined in Dostoyevsky's The Grand Inquisitor (an anti-Pope short story within The Brothers Karamazov; I parodied it here). A powerful Bishop rejects a returned Christ, because He's been silent too long.
"There are three Powers, three unique Forces upon earth, capable of conquering for ever by charming the conscience of these weak rebels—men—for their own good; and these Forces are: Miracle, Mystery and Authority" the Bishop says. In His long absence Christ has abdicated His authority to the Church. He can't just come back now and wreck the program! The Bishop dares condemn Him for withholding miracles and demanding man come to Him of free will in His absence:
"Thy refusal to come down from the cross when people, mocking and wagging their heads were saying to Thee—'Save Thyself if Thou be the son of God, and we will believe in Thee,' was due to the same determination—not to enslave man through miracle, but to obtain faith in Thee freely and apart from any miraculous influence."
15:30 Dumb movies. Casey mentions a Dumb Comedy out there, written by Jews. How is it intelligent people make such dumb crap? Luke, ever the cruel Jew, points out the dumb stuff is for the goyim. Jews don't partake. Furthermore, I would add (and rue), it's the dumber Jews making dumb culture perverting our dumber goys, while the smart Jews get to keep their hands clean. The Jews are siccing their dummies on us. Witness Seth Rogan, a sort of Jewish on Twitter:
The NFL isn't the only institution that's become a malicious force. Take a knee, Hollywood.
18:30 We are all Masters of our Domain here.
19:00 Luke marvels that the goyim aren't actively masturbating and doing drugs as he speaks to us.
21:10 Thank God we're off the subject and talking about Roger Devlin's remarkable essay, Sexual Utopia in Power
Luke quotes from it:
A man’s sexual utopia is, accordingly, a world in which no such limit to
female demand for him exists. It is not necessary to resort to pornography for
examples. Consider only popular movies aimed at a male audience, such as the James Bond series. Women simply cannot resist James Bond. He does not
have to propose marriage, or even request dates. He simply walks into the
room and they swoon. The entertainment industry turns out endless unrealistic
images such as this. Why, the male viewer eventually may ask, cannot
life actually be so? To some, it is tempting to put the blame on the institution
of marriage.
Marriage, after all, seems to restrict sex rather drastically. Certain men
figure that if sex were permitted both inside and outside of marriage there
would be twice as much of it as formerly. They imagined there existed a large,
untapped reservoir of female desire hitherto repressed by monogamy. To
release it, they sought, during the early postwar period, to replace the seventh
commandment with an endorsement of all sexual activity between “consenting
adults.” Every man could have a harem. Sexual behavior in general, and
not merely family life, was henceforward to be regarded as a private matter.
Traditionalists who disagreed were said to want to “put a policeman in every
bedroom.” This was the age of the Kinsey Report and the first appearance of
Playboy magazine. Idle male daydreams had become a social movement.
This characteristically male sexual utopianism was a forerunner of the sexual
revolution but not the revolution itself. Men are incapable of bringing about
fundamental changes in heterosexual relations without the cooperation—the
famed “consent”—of women. But the original male would-be revolutionaries
did not understand the nature of the female sexuality.
We forgot about Hugh Hefner! He pioneered, represented and literally embodied the failed vision of sexual liberation--the masculine Nakba, We are all Hugh Hefner now, alas.
