This is, I'll confess, a full blown rant.
Which means, perhaps, that I shouldn't publish it at all. If I do, it means I've overcome my reluctance to do so and my better sense
Which means, perhaps, that I shouldn't publish it at all. If I do, it means I've overcome my reluctance to do so and my better sense
From the edifice of NCHS in Casper Wyoming: Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government
and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall
forever be encouraged. The utmost good faith shall always be observed
towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from
them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty,
they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful
wars authorized by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity,
shall from time to time be made for preventing wrongs being done to
them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them. They'd probably take their clothes off in Denver for the distress comments in that first sentence. My goodness.
Which doesn't mean, that, every now and then, a rant my be in order.
Emily Davidson, dead. She was killed when she stepped into the path of a horse owned by King George V at the Epsom Derby. While her act was ill advised, she didn't loose her life so brainless twits could parade around topless in Denver. Get a clue.
M'eh.
I should note here that it should be fairly obvious from the get go, if anyone reads my prior comments regarding Denver that I don't like the city. That should probably be taken into account, and its really rather obvious. I think its a big, overgrown, city and that common sense seems to be largely suspended there, particularly recently. So, I guess, perhaps my comments should be taken with a grain of salt.
Denver, before it was a complete loss.
And this from a person, I'd note, who has strong connection with Denver. My grandmother on my father's side spent much of her formative years there, and met my grandfather there. My father was born there, as were at least one of my aunts. One of my cousins lives there having returned, in a way, to our ancestral metropolis. My great grandparents on my father's side moved down into the Hideous Blight after leaving Leadville, where my grandmother was born and where they'd spent much of their married life.
Yes, my connections to Colorado are much deeper than most Coloradans. So I come by my disappointment with the city honestly.
And I like some things about it. I like the Colorado Rockies.
And I like the A Train.
Well, not maybe, but a lot of what's wrong with things recently is powerfully symbolized by how pathetic Denver is.
Now, to start off with, regarding my comments, I'd also note that when I've commented in this same general are in the past, I've usually tended (but not always) to write in such a style as to somewhat camouflage the conversation. I've done that as I don't really want the blog to become bizarrely graphic or vulgar. So, when I've written about that creep, Hugh Hefner, I've generally referred to him as the "ossified freak", and likewise I've only once called the rag he publishes by name. When Kate Upton and her fellows have suspended sensible thought and sent photographs of themselves with out a lick of clothing on, only to have them show up on the Internet, I haven't mentioned her or her fellows by name, up until now. Well, given this topic, I'm suspending that practice and just being blunt. This is, quite frankly, as people are becoming increasingly stupid.
On to the topic, or rather, topics.
Go Topless Day ostensibly promotes gender equality. It doesn't. What it does do is provide an opportunity for men to ogle women without having to be secretive about it or turning on their computers in their apartments. Get real.
As a person with a daughter, I'm frankly angry that dimwits are hurting the image of women this way. They're dolts, and they need a dope slap.
The feminist twits who back this sort of thing apparently have absolutely no clue whatsoever how men work. Want men to treat women equally and put personal appearance into the equation? Don't undress them for goodness sake, that does the polar opposite. How freaking stupid are you people, really, if you believe that? And I don't know that many of you really do. Indeed, I think some are just out for a libertine exercise in exhibitionism, and this is the sorry pathetic excuse used to do it. Others, I think are engaged in a radical hatred of our very natures and go to such extremes in an attempt to deny them. And yet others I think are so mired in the dead propaganda of a bygone era that, like old Communist on May Day, they drag out the old, old issues as if they are relevant. Let's burn the bras again. Huzzah.
Whatever.
But more than that, really, there's some sort of pagan naturalistic element to this, and I think people who engage in it very well know that. Young women who do this may say one thing, but on another level, they're crying out to men "look at my boobs and want me". They wont' admit that, but they are. And that's reducing them to an animalistic level that we routinely declare we wish to avoid.
That society tolerates it rather than shames people for such exhibitionism is shameful in and of itself. Shame on us all.
Whatever.
But more than that, really, there's some sort of pagan naturalistic element to this, and I think people who engage in it very well know that. Young women who do this may say one thing, but on another level, they're crying out to men "look at my boobs and want me". They wont' admit that, but they are. And that's reducing them to an animalistic level that we routinely declare we wish to avoid.
That society tolerates it rather than shames people for such exhibitionism is shameful in and of itself. Shame on us all.
No matter what feminist may think, undressing women, particularly young women, totally sexualizes them. Totally. Men showing up at these things, unless they are as gay as a millennia is long, are going to experience lust. Yes, they are. Frankly, probably at least 70% of the reason that any man shows up is so that he can look at the boobs. And that doesn't even take into account the impact of the Internet, which has become a vast sea of pornography with only islands of real content here and there. In a world in which a person can't look at YouTube video on anything without, sooner or later, some suggestion coming up that you should see a boob related video of some sort, individuals, or rather women, who think that showing their boobs in public isn't rank exhibitionism and titillation are out to lunch, in a major way. So far out to lunch, they may have retired to lunch forever. Their images won't, however, as whatever they thought they were doing, those images will now be memorialized on the net and in computer downloads everywhere, with those downloads not going into the hard drives of ardent feminists. No, not at all.
This is due to a natural attracting, and the natural way men work. This has always been, the case.
What hasn't always been the case, at least for the last 1,600 years or so, is that women were reduced to objects in this fashion for men's enjoyment, and then to be discarded so freely.
"You've come a long way baby!" declared the Virginia Slims cigarette ad, marked to women, in the 1970s. You sure have. All the way back to year 400. Equalization. . . emancipation, and right back to objectification.
Thomas Wolfe said "you can't go home again and stay there". Hmm.
What hasn't always been the case, at least for the last 1,600 years or so, is that women were reduced to objects in this fashion for men's enjoyment, and then to be discarded so freely.
"You've come a long way baby!" declared the Virginia Slims cigarette ad, marked to women, in the 1970s. You sure have. All the way back to year 400. Equalization. . . emancipation, and right back to objectification.
Thomas Wolfe said "you can't go home again and stay there". Hmm.
Men like boobs as it causes a sexual response in them, and this is the case in absolutely every culture there is. Even cultures where the temperature is blistering hot and therefore women have traditionally suspended the wearing of tops (none of which, I"d note, is particularly marked by gender equality) will find that the men are checking out the boobs. Yes, they are. Women have apparently become so dense to this that they don't believe it, but back in the men's hut, the conversation is "wow, have you seen the rack on that one?"
Nature sparks the interest because nature's interest is that it put some of those men and women together and they create little people. Nature doesn't give a whit about concepts of shirtless equality. Nature does want the young men taking interest in the young women, and not solely in an intellectual way. Nature doesn't maintain that you're reading the topless crowd for the articles. Nature demands that men look at the tits and pursue them. Human intellect is supposed to temper that, morality is supposed to inform it, but neither stops it.
Nature sparks the interest because nature's interest is that it put some of those men and women together and they create little people. Nature doesn't give a whit about concepts of shirtless equality. Nature does want the young men taking interest in the young women, and not solely in an intellectual way. Nature doesn't maintain that you're reading the topless crowd for the articles. Nature demands that men look at the tits and pursue them. Human intellect is supposed to temper that, morality is supposed to inform it, but neither stops it.
Evidence of this might in part be provided by the fact that in the 18th and early 19th Centuries European men, who came from a culture that at that time was very heavily endowed with a concept of racial and religious superiority, and which abhorred the genetic mixing of the races, did not sustain those barriers in the presence of topless women. The lure proved too great. While little discussed, it's well known that Protestant British missionaries, who believed that the Anglo Saxon Race was the absolute pinnacle of human creation, ended up marrying African women pretty darned frequently. Sent to Christianize and civilize them, and charged with a world view in which the British Race was the world civilizer and equal to none, they found themselves defeated by female appearances at a high rate.
Likewise, the sailors of the HMS Bounty are frequently noted as having rebelled against the cruel oppression of Captain Bligh, but in reality the lure of Polynesian women proved a huge element of it, and not just for the ranker, but even for the officers in at least once case. Lead by an officer in mutiny, they turned right back to grab their topless Polynesian girlfriends and took off for a remote island.
Did they say, at any point, "you know, now endowed with a full realization that men and women are equal in ever sense and wishing to live in an egalitarian society we're going to cast off the chains of servitude and go into freedom"? Not hardly. They basically said, to some degree, let's go back to the babes and take off.
Not nearly as noble as people might wish to believe, but let's be real.
Indeed, a lot of history is just that basic and juvenile. The entire Helen of Troy thing makes prefect sense if none of the principal actors is out of their teens. . . which a lot of them probably were not.
Not nearly as noble as people might wish to believe, but let's be real.
It's a complicated matter, but genetics and the related sciences have long established that men respond to visual ques and this forms an attraction for them with women, and more than an attraction as well. Hips, Breasts, and obvious female forms, do not exist for no reason. Indeed, there isn't anything in a human anatomy that is or was there by accident. We may live in an era of decreasing testosterone (we do) but all of this remains the case.
Which has always been a challenge for women. And which provides the notable historical fact that women have only received real equality where the Christian influence was very heavy. Christianity, right from the onset, was the only real force in the world that treated women equally with men. Ironically, the Christian law and Christian influenced laws that feminist have sought to toss off were the very ones that protected them. No fault divorce? Don't forget that it was only the Christian prohibition on divorce (retained now, really, only in the Catholic church) that protected women from simply being dumped. No fault has returned the dumping era in full force, and women, and children, are the worse off for it. Laws that required couples "cohabitating" to marry protected women and children, not men. But that's been forgotten. Social views that looked down on premarital sex, in the end, protected women from being left when pregnant and inconvenient, but this has been forgotten, leaving women the worse off for it, in spades.
In smarter eras in the Western World, the desire to put women on an equal footing with men therefore didn't involve stripping them down so that the men could look at them. It involved the opposite. The Suffragette era, and the 1920s that immediately followed, are remarkable in that serious women affected clothing that was female, but which tended to replicate the appearance of male business clothing. That is, just as the gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s sought to look respectable by dressing respectably, women of that same era did the same thing. And they were successful at doing it. Modern feminist might look to the women of the 60s and 70s as the ones who they admire, but they ought to really be looking at the women of the 10s, 20s, and 30s who plowed a lot more ground and came a lot further. They didn't do it nearly nude either.
Suffragette, age 19. A true feminist.
Which is why women are really loosing ground today. And no pants suit wearing President is going to change that simply by getting elected, as she almost certainly will be. This isn't a comment on Hillary Clinton, no not by any means. No, it's a comment about the women parading topless, and women like Kate Upton.
I've written about it earlier, in the context of the Kate Upton's of the world who have made a living flashing their nearly bare chests in men's faces, but as long as there's one woman making a living prostituting her image, women will never be equal. Encouraging all of them to run around looking like their wares are free for the imaginary taking puts a huge dent in a quest for equality. It sure doesn't help it.
Which oddly gets to me to another aspect of this topic.
I go to Denver a lot. I'd rather not, as I do not like Denver (obviously), but I do. Just a few weeks ago I was down in Denver for depositions. I've been to Denver a great deal this year.
While I was there, I had some down time that allowed me to grab a bagel sandwich in some shop on 16th Street whose name I've forgotten, but which is near where I was working. Denver has a lot of local oddball newspapers for some reason, beyond the serious Denver Post, and as you'd probably expect, some were there for reading. It always has. Being alone in the shop at the time, I grabbed one and sat down.
Now, on this occasion, the news story entailed what is a sad story (and I mean that) about a local Denver girl who had just been photographed sans stop in Wax Tracks, the funky downtown records store. I have no idea why they allowed that, but people were complaining about it. And I agree that their complaints were legitimate.
The odd thing about the complaints, however, is how Neanderthal it is for the store to allow this to occur, and I agree it is. The story is downright funky, but this is just flat out wrong. It's all the more wrong as at least based on the (clothed) photo of the girl in question, she facially looks younger than the 21 years she was claimed to be. Or, perhaps, I may be so far past 21 years old that 21 year olds look pretty young to me. But I don't know, I think I might be right, in which case the perpetrator of this moral crime has compounded it by appearing to really creepy instincts.
Isn't enough of this enough?
Is the world not debased enough?
Isn't anyone worried for her?
Rather than allowing this sort of really Neanderthal conduct to continue, and indeed actually bolstering it so that there's no societal restriction on this sort of moral sewer at all, shouldn't we be going the other way?
To add a bit to that, and to admittedly change the topic a bit, but maybe not as much of it as it at first seems, and admitting that part of it is likely may age, I can't help but worry about a kid who shows up in photos of that type in the environment of Denver. Flooded with weed, and prostituting her image, where does that go? I can't think it goes very badly for everyone involved, her in particularly, the photographer that perpetuates this moral crime, and the viewers who leer over her wherever that stuff shows up. It's awful, and very bad. I suppose she may use whatever little money she was paid for this for her college tuition, but I doubt it. It in town awash with drugs, and in a culture that no longer has any restraints, my fear is that she gets used in a very bad way. Where are her parents, and what are they doing? Can they do anything. I guess a person can say a prayer for her and those like her. The whole thing is truly pathetic.
Sojourner Truth. Radical. Brave. And not acting like a brainless tramp.
And in an environment that's awash with dope, making it all the worse.
Now as every one surely knows, unless they've been living in a cavern within a cave, and hiding in a corner of that, Colorado has legalized marijuana. There's been a lot of commentary everywhere about this. And a lot of the commentary really misses the point.
There's a common thread in these stories about how marijuana has been "good" for Colorado. Well, maybe, but it hasn't been good for Coloradans, or the drifters who floated in there, at least by my observation. Indeed, while I tended to be of the view that the law shouldn't worry about marijuana before, even though I don't approve of its use (and I think most of the "medicinal" excuses people give for using it are a crock), seeing it first hand has really and strongly changed my mind.
Some of the ill effects of the drug I was aware of before, mostly by having been exposed to people who had become addicted to it. To some degree, they may have been cognizant of the problems it caused, them, and to others, not. The degree to which they became listless and lazy in some instances was notable. The addictive nature of it was obvious, and probably most notable to me when a former soldier of mine from the Guard stopped me on the street, after he'd gotten out, and asked me for help to get him off it. Now, at 22 or so years old and a college student, there wasn't much that I could do. That an older fellow, in his 30s by that time, would ask for help, because I guess I'd been his sergeant, made an impression.
Well, Denver has really made an impression.
And not a good one.
Since weed became quasi legal, and then fully legal in Denver, a giant social experiment has been conducted on its streets and the results are pretty easy to see. They're overrun, downtown, with listless dirty addicts begging, often quite openly, for money for marijuana. No job, no prospects, no motivation, just a craving for the stuff. Not pleasant.
The first time I really ran across it was just after or just before, I can't quite recall which, it was legalized fully and there was some sort of dopers gathering in Denver. Now, admittedly, a convention of dope fans may present a skewed image of the stuff, or not. But present an image, it certainly did.
I could describe it, but I think the best way to describe what I saw on that occasions, and subsequent ones, it to describe singular people.
On that occasion, the person who made the biggest impression was a girl sitting on the corner, back to traffic. She was probably about 20, and had once been fairly pretty. Now she was dirty in that funky way that only the really ills, or the really stoned, get. Not that honest sort of dirty that oilfield workers, for example, have. No, dirty in a diseased way, probably something we note because in an earlier era our natures told us to watch out when we encountered it.
She was glassy eyed and had a sign begging for money. On her lap was a Husky puppy. The puppy was cute.
I almost gave her money, but would have extracted a deal that I got the puppy. That isn't very Christian of me, and I didn't do it, but money for drugs wasn't going to help her any, maybe somebody could have helped the dog. But then, in her condition, I suspect, the dog was truly her only real friend.
Since that time situations like this have been really common. I've heard panhandlers yell for money. I've seen seen other glassy eyed dressed in bizarre mixes of discarded clothes rambling in begging appeals. They're addicts. Marijuana is all they want.
"Radar plot depicting the data presented in Nutt, David, Leslie A King,
William Saulsbury, Colin Blakemore. "Development of a rational scale to
assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse" The Lancet 2007;
369:1047-1053. PMID:17382831. For more information, see image.
It contains not only the physical harm and dependence data like the
aforementioned image, but also the mean social harm of each drug. This
image was produced with the python plotting library matplotlib"
Now, I know, I'll hear the argument that "well, those are the exceptions to the rule" and "it's no more addictive than booze". Well, those are hardly good arguments.
First of all, at least based on my exposure to it, its far from the exception.
Now, I'm sure there are occasional users of marijuana that suffer no ill affects, maybe. But then this is the case with any drug of any type, so its not much of an argument. The real question is whether it has a demonstrative ill impact on a significant percentage of the users. It clearly does.
Now, right away, the argument will be made that "well it isn't as bad as alcohol". That's a pathetic argument.
First of all, according to some studies, it is in fact "worse than alcohol" is some real ways. The study printed above, in chart form, for example, would have it as causing less physical harm, a little less social harm, and causing a little more dependence. That's hardly a sterling endorsement. And that assumes that this is correct. It probably has caused less social harm and less noted psychical harm, so far, as its' been widely illegal. As it becomes increasingly legal we will likely be surprised to find, oh my, it causes harm.
Indeed, we're already learning that a bit. A recent study shows that relatively little use amongst minors, including teenagers, causes permanent alteration in the brain. Not good. And I suspect that the impacts from smoking it will likely duplicate much of the non cancerous impacts of smoking tobacco, none of which are very good. Indeed, people tend to associate smoking tobacco's risks only with cancer, but in reality, there's a lot of other cardio vascular and respiratory damage that it causes. I can't see a good reason why this would be different for marijuana.
Additionally, in regards to the oft made comparison to alcohol, it's worth remembering that the best evidence suggests that human beings have been consuming alcohol for so long that they have a genetic adaptation to it, varying by human population. This has been addressed here before, but the human tolerance for the poison that is alcohol is likely related to the fact that it was once safer to consume it than water. But that doesn't make it safe. The point is that we've been consuming alcohol now for thousands of years, probably tens of thousands of years, and we still can't really handle all of its ill and evil impacts.
If we can't really handle something that's been widely legal for maybe 200,000 years, what makes us think we're going to be any better at this?
I don't think so.
And what is going on, on a large level, that we seem to need to be numbed so much?
Alcohol, as noted, has been with us forever. Marijuana has not doubt been around for some time, but not as long as an intoxicant, and certainly not in such a widespread manner. But it isn't just these. We have made real progress in tamping down some really dangerous drugs that were getting widespread circulation, but at the same time we seem to be in a full scale effort to numb ourselves as much as possible. We still have booze (but not anywhere near at the consumption rate it was once at, in spite of what some may think). But we are also numbing ourselves in all sorts of other ways.
Indeed, the pharmaceutical level of mind alternation is at an all time high. Thousands of people have to take medication just to make it through their day, mentally. And news came this past week of a new psychological ailment based on an addiction to computerized technology. That is, people so deeply into the fantasy world provided by the Internet that they cannot escape it.
Part of that quite frankly circles back to what we started with above. Amongst the hugely addicted, we are told, are thousands, more men than women, who are addicted to Internet pornography. They can't control it and sit around consuming it in mass quantities. Now that the barrier of shame that existed if you had to purchase it, something harkening back to our natural instincts that this is wrong, is removed, they can't control themselves. This is similar, fwiw, to the impacts that result when the barriers have been removed on other areas of related conduct that have long been prescribed by tradition, law and religion.
So severe is this latter new problem, we're told, that there are now an appreciable number of young men who have so destroyed their natural responses that even in their 20s they have to resort to Viagra when acting in the real world.
And we are also given the news, not a surprise really, by the tremendously brave Elizabeth Smart that her abductor acted in part due to pornography, acting out on her what he was viewing there. Smart, as people will recall, was the Salt Lake teenager (at the time) who was abducted and repeatedly assaulted by a delusional insane man. That individual's insanity certainly cannot be discounted, but when the element of pornography is added into the story it gives us all the more reason to be alarmed.
Alarmed for girls like the Denver "model" mentioned above.
And alarmed at a society in which a gathering of women essentially offers the same live and in person in a public area, and no doubt memorialized in thousands of digital images.
Which leads me to the war.
Eh?
Well, stay with me.
We're in a war, whether we like it or not, with a variant of Islam that retains a very, very primitive view of the world and men and women's role in it. Hardly any of us would agree with the social aspects of our opponents movement, but in opposing it, we actually have to have a point.
We don't have much of one.
Which is why I will say, form time to time, that we could lose the war.
We could, truly, simply because we're fighting for. . . well what is it? The right to wear pants that are too tight? The right for men to self identify as gerbils? What was it?
Okay, I know what our core values are, and so do you, but how often does anyone actually think on those core values and where they come from? Not very often. But our opponents do.
Indeed, endowed with a strong sense of right, wrong, and the order of the world, even if we don't agree with it, our opponents have been remarkably successful in recruiting simply by using our libertine example as a recruiting too. And, part of that it might be noted, has been a distressing success rate with Europeans, including European women.
When we think of Islamic extremist groups in Europe, or the US, we tend to think that they're all radicalized Syrians, basically. But that's very far from true. Some of them are, but others are radicalized first generation Muslims in Europe, and more than a few have been Europeans with no Middle Eastern heritage. What's going on here?
Well, agree with it or not, Islam stands for something. That's much less true of the modern West.
Now, I'm sure people will react that we stand for democracy, and liberty. But do we?
I think we do, but in such an unthinking way that our examples are pretty hollow, as we've forgotten what democracy and liberty, in the modern context, were supposed to mean. They are not the same as social rationalization and libertine.
Indeed, democratic thought is deeply embedded on a concept of the natural rights of man. And the natural rights of man is a principal that stems from the concept of a natural law. Natural law holds that there are certain fundamentals, observable as "self evident", that all people have. People, although not poorly educated modern lawyers, like that idea as it is self evident and it seems so very fair.
But what is seemingly forgotten in our modern world is that a natural law that recognizes natural rights will care not a wit about an individual's sense of what rights would be, were he creating them. That's something else entirely. Indeed, that's so debased that its' basically sick.
Natural law credits nature, and if we're to understand what our entire concept of the world, government, liberty and the like is based on, we have to do the same. We have free will, but we are not free to will what we will. We cannot, that is, create 6 billion individual realities, there is only one. Everyone's window on that reality will be different, at least somewhat, but that doesn't mean that there's more than one reality, it means that we're too small to grasp the whole.
Anyhow, properly viewed, we believe in individual liberty as we believe that people are endowed with free will. But that means that people are at liberty to act in accordance with the nature and the natural law, but they can't change it. Nature, and its law, is bigger than we are, and unchanging.
That may seem not to fit in here (and this post is stunningly rambling, I'll admit) but it very much does. We have looked out at the rest of the world since 1776 and maintained that we are the champions of liberty and justice, as that's part of the natural law. We've sometimes done it badly, but we've done it well enough that we've been a major factor in bringing about a "liberal" sense of the world globally. We've certainly had the assistance of the the political and philosophical cultures of other European powers in that, even though not all of us have quite the same sense of these things as a national culture. I'd maintain, however, that down on the street level the overall concepts are not far removed from each other. That is, the ethos of 1798 may have been the spark of 1917, but at the same time, the average Frenchman, up until mid 20th Century, held views more akin to an Irish tenant farmer than a member of the Parisian mob.
Since 1917, however, that being the retuning and focusing of 1798, we've struggled with an opposing view that detests the concept of anything but an animalistic view of our species and which has been largely at war with nature. In more recent years even though its political expressions have failed, it philosophical ones have not, and since the turmoil of the late 1960s most western political thought, both at home and abroad, has been devoid of any deep meaning. Long habituated to our political culture, we have not noticed much until recently as it slipped its moorings and became fully devoid of a deep meaning, although many now do sense that, but others have noticed.
In the Islamic world some certainly have, and in a Europe that took in a lot of Muslim immigrants post World War Two, post Colonial retreat, and post Algerian defeat, many residing there, where assimilation is poor, undoubtedly have. In the years following 1968 a Europe that had grasped that its political and cultural outlook was fully Christian in origin now doesn't know what it even is. It's for "fairness" and "human rights", but it doesn't know what those concepts are grounded in. We aren't doing all that much better, although we are doing better, which is frankly why our enemies view us somewhat differently.
For a people who retain a sense of a deep purpose, a larger culture that is grounded on nothing more than "if it feels good, do it", comes across as abhorrent, because it truly is abhorrent. That it is abhorrent provides the basis for young Europeans, particularly European women, crossing over into the minority culture. It's notable that more than a few of these women have been Scandinavian or British, as these areas are where the fall is amongst the most expressed.
This doesn't mean, of course, that they're right, and we're wrong, overall. I'm not urging that we all become radical Muslims and salute the black flag. Not hardly. Rather, I'm urging that we take a deep look at the deep things.
And that would mean recognizing that "if we feel good, do it", not only is a moronic philosophy, it's contrary to nature, its contrary to nature's law, and its extremely destructive. We need, apparently, to get back to where we started from and do some serious thinking.
I don't think so.
And what is going on, on a large level, that we seem to need to be numbed so much?
Alcohol, as noted, has been with us forever. Marijuana has not doubt been around for some time, but not as long as an intoxicant, and certainly not in such a widespread manner. But it isn't just these. We have made real progress in tamping down some really dangerous drugs that were getting widespread circulation, but at the same time we seem to be in a full scale effort to numb ourselves as much as possible. We still have booze (but not anywhere near at the consumption rate it was once at, in spite of what some may think). But we are also numbing ourselves in all sorts of other ways.
Indeed, the pharmaceutical level of mind alternation is at an all time high. Thousands of people have to take medication just to make it through their day, mentally. And news came this past week of a new psychological ailment based on an addiction to computerized technology. That is, people so deeply into the fantasy world provided by the Internet that they cannot escape it.
Part of that quite frankly circles back to what we started with above. Amongst the hugely addicted, we are told, are thousands, more men than women, who are addicted to Internet pornography. They can't control it and sit around consuming it in mass quantities. Now that the barrier of shame that existed if you had to purchase it, something harkening back to our natural instincts that this is wrong, is removed, they can't control themselves. This is similar, fwiw, to the impacts that result when the barriers have been removed on other areas of related conduct that have long been prescribed by tradition, law and religion.
So severe is this latter new problem, we're told, that there are now an appreciable number of young men who have so destroyed their natural responses that even in their 20s they have to resort to Viagra when acting in the real world.
And we are also given the news, not a surprise really, by the tremendously brave Elizabeth Smart that her abductor acted in part due to pornography, acting out on her what he was viewing there. Smart, as people will recall, was the Salt Lake teenager (at the time) who was abducted and repeatedly assaulted by a delusional insane man. That individual's insanity certainly cannot be discounted, but when the element of pornography is added into the story it gives us all the more reason to be alarmed.
Alarmed for girls like the Denver "model" mentioned above.
And alarmed at a society in which a gathering of women essentially offers the same live and in person in a public area, and no doubt memorialized in thousands of digital images.
Which leads me to the war.
Eh?
Well, stay with me.
We're in a war, whether we like it or not, with a variant of Islam that retains a very, very primitive view of the world and men and women's role in it. Hardly any of us would agree with the social aspects of our opponents movement, but in opposing it, we actually have to have a point.
We don't have much of one.
Which is why I will say, form time to time, that we could lose the war.
We could, truly, simply because we're fighting for. . . well what is it? The right to wear pants that are too tight? The right for men to self identify as gerbils? What was it?
Okay, I know what our core values are, and so do you, but how often does anyone actually think on those core values and where they come from? Not very often. But our opponents do.
Indeed, endowed with a strong sense of right, wrong, and the order of the world, even if we don't agree with it, our opponents have been remarkably successful in recruiting simply by using our libertine example as a recruiting too. And, part of that it might be noted, has been a distressing success rate with Europeans, including European women.
When we think of Islamic extremist groups in Europe, or the US, we tend to think that they're all radicalized Syrians, basically. But that's very far from true. Some of them are, but others are radicalized first generation Muslims in Europe, and more than a few have been Europeans with no Middle Eastern heritage. What's going on here?
Well, agree with it or not, Islam stands for something. That's much less true of the modern West.
Now, I'm sure people will react that we stand for democracy, and liberty. But do we?
I think we do, but in such an unthinking way that our examples are pretty hollow, as we've forgotten what democracy and liberty, in the modern context, were supposed to mean. They are not the same as social rationalization and libertine.
Indeed, democratic thought is deeply embedded on a concept of the natural rights of man. And the natural rights of man is a principal that stems from the concept of a natural law. Natural law holds that there are certain fundamentals, observable as "self evident", that all people have. People, although not poorly educated modern lawyers, like that idea as it is self evident and it seems so very fair.
But what is seemingly forgotten in our modern world is that a natural law that recognizes natural rights will care not a wit about an individual's sense of what rights would be, were he creating them. That's something else entirely. Indeed, that's so debased that its' basically sick.
Natural law credits nature, and if we're to understand what our entire concept of the world, government, liberty and the like is based on, we have to do the same. We have free will, but we are not free to will what we will. We cannot, that is, create 6 billion individual realities, there is only one. Everyone's window on that reality will be different, at least somewhat, but that doesn't mean that there's more than one reality, it means that we're too small to grasp the whole.
Anyhow, properly viewed, we believe in individual liberty as we believe that people are endowed with free will. But that means that people are at liberty to act in accordance with the nature and the natural law, but they can't change it. Nature, and its law, is bigger than we are, and unchanging.
That may seem not to fit in here (and this post is stunningly rambling, I'll admit) but it very much does. We have looked out at the rest of the world since 1776 and maintained that we are the champions of liberty and justice, as that's part of the natural law. We've sometimes done it badly, but we've done it well enough that we've been a major factor in bringing about a "liberal" sense of the world globally. We've certainly had the assistance of the the political and philosophical cultures of other European powers in that, even though not all of us have quite the same sense of these things as a national culture. I'd maintain, however, that down on the street level the overall concepts are not far removed from each other. That is, the ethos of 1798 may have been the spark of 1917, but at the same time, the average Frenchman, up until mid 20th Century, held views more akin to an Irish tenant farmer than a member of the Parisian mob.
Since 1917, however, that being the retuning and focusing of 1798, we've struggled with an opposing view that detests the concept of anything but an animalistic view of our species and which has been largely at war with nature. In more recent years even though its political expressions have failed, it philosophical ones have not, and since the turmoil of the late 1960s most western political thought, both at home and abroad, has been devoid of any deep meaning. Long habituated to our political culture, we have not noticed much until recently as it slipped its moorings and became fully devoid of a deep meaning, although many now do sense that, but others have noticed.
In the Islamic world some certainly have, and in a Europe that took in a lot of Muslim immigrants post World War Two, post Colonial retreat, and post Algerian defeat, many residing there, where assimilation is poor, undoubtedly have. In the years following 1968 a Europe that had grasped that its political and cultural outlook was fully Christian in origin now doesn't know what it even is. It's for "fairness" and "human rights", but it doesn't know what those concepts are grounded in. We aren't doing all that much better, although we are doing better, which is frankly why our enemies view us somewhat differently.
For a people who retain a sense of a deep purpose, a larger culture that is grounded on nothing more than "if it feels good, do it", comes across as abhorrent, because it truly is abhorrent. That it is abhorrent provides the basis for young Europeans, particularly European women, crossing over into the minority culture. It's notable that more than a few of these women have been Scandinavian or British, as these areas are where the fall is amongst the most expressed.
This doesn't mean, of course, that they're right, and we're wrong, overall. I'm not urging that we all become radical Muslims and salute the black flag. Not hardly. Rather, I'm urging that we take a deep look at the deep things.
And that would mean recognizing that "if we feel good, do it", not only is a moronic philosophy, it's contrary to nature, its contrary to nature's law, and its extremely destructive. We need, apparently, to get back to where we started from and do some serious thinking.
Okay, so now I've made this long, rambling cri de coeur. So what is my point, really?
Well, here it is.
We've really gone off the rails recently. We've probably been going off of them for some time, but we're off them now.
As a society we've forgotten there are two genders. And we even have forgotten why the dimorphism in the genders exists. The most deluded of us now thinks that we can change genders, or ignore them all together.
And we now dislike the world that we live in so much that changing genders or getting stoned out of our minds seems like a better idea that facing reality.
Well, we probably better look back, to nature.
That doesn't mean becoming a Cro Magnon, but it does mean becoming a rational, thinking, human.
And rational thinking humans don't parade their daughters, sisters, and wives around to be gawked at. And they don't tolerate the photographic prostitution of them either. And they don't ignore it when others do that.
Nor do they bet numbed out of their skulls, or encourage others to do the same.
Here endth the rant.
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