Showing posts with label Evolutionary Biology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Evolutionary Biology. Show all posts

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Wednesday, March 7, 1274. Death of St. Thomas Aquinas.

 


Thomas Aquinus died on this day in 1274.  He was a proponent of the major Catholic school of thought, natural theology, and the father of a school of thought known as Thomism after him.

Monday, March 4, 2024

The Agrarian's Lament: A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 1. How the barbarians took over the city.

The Agrarian's Lament: A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with t...:   

A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 1. How the barbarians took over the city.

 As a bishop, it is my duty to warn the West! The barbarians are already inside the city.

Robert Cardinal Sarah

Alaric entering Athens, 395.

On August 6, 1979, Newsweek came out with a surprising cover depicting Theodore Roosevelt leading the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry up Kettle Hill.  The caption was "Where Have All The Heroes Gone".  I can remember laying on the couch in the living room looking at the issue.  I would have been about fifteen.

That was right about the time the nation was getting ready to see Carter square off against Reagan, and if the author of that article thought the choices were uninspiring, I have to wonder what he'd think now.

Anyhow, in reading about the contest between Reagan and Carter I was compelled to ask my father, "What's the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats?", trying to figure out what it was, and what I was, in that context.  I'm actually surprised, in looking back, that I was asking this question at that age, as in my mind, this was earlier.  And in fact I may very well be remembering this inaccurate, as to when I asked this question and what brought it about.

I do recall his answer.  He informed me that "the Republicans are more conservative than the Democrats".

It was an interesting answer.  He didn't say that the Republicans were conservative or that the Democrats were not.  He said the Republicans were more conservative than the Democrats, implying that they were sort of in the middle.

I decided at the ripe old age of 12, or so, that I was more conservative, and therefore I was a Republican.

When I registered to vote six years later, I in fact registered as a Republican, which is what I thought I likely was.  It didn't last a real long time, however, as by age 20, I was registering as a Democrat.

Conservation was the reason why.  Even by my late teens I as clearly a conservationist, and I teetered on the edge of, and crossed into, environmentalism.  While I didn't see myself being on the political left, those around me did. I recall one friend of mine in junior college, who had known me since high school, remarking in a conversation about the Vietnam War protests that if I'd been college age at that time, I'd be in the protesters, a comment that really surprised me as I was in the National Guard at the time, and I was a defense hawk, part of the reason I'd originally registered as a Republican.  The now late mother of a friend of mine loaned me The Monkey Wrench Gang on the basis that I'd like it, and while I was surprised by that when I read the cover about a group of fictional who were basically environmental terrorists, I in fact did like the 1975 Edward Abby novel.  It probably didn't hurt that I had a crush on the daughter of that lender, the sister of one of my friends, and that entire family were obviously environmentally centered, eccentric, Democrats.

It wasn't a facade, however.  I wasn't a DINO, if there is such a thing.  Going through my undergraduate years and through law school, and into at least my first decade of practicing law, I remained a Democrat.  It was rural issues that did it.  The Democrats were for preserving the wilderness, at a time that the Reagan Republicans never saw a tree they didn't want to cut down.  The Democrats were for keeping Wyoming's wildlife a public resource when a Republican legislature wanted to give it to landowners in a bill, I'd note, that our current Congressman's father promoted.  The Republicans always saw wild lands as something to be exploited, the Democrats normally saw them as something to be preserved.

Ultimately I left the Democratic Party for the Republicans as I couldn't stomach being in a party that embraced death so closely.  I wasn't alone.  Really significant Wyoming Democrats, like Ray Hunkins, who had campaigned as Democrats, left the party and became Republican politicians.  The overall impact was a good one, however, for the state's GOP.  It took a party that was already highly independent and frankly middle of the road on most things, and made it more so.  It was a Wyoming Party.

Those days are dead and gone.

It's hard to describe where we are politically in this country today, and that's in no small part because it's hard to explain where we are culturally.  The absolute insanity of social movements in the Western World, unleashed since the annus horbillus of 1968, but with roots dating back at least to the 1790s, has created as sort of cultural hellscape which now, very late in the day, average people are reacting to, but reacting in way that expresses their ignorance of their own culture and existential nature.  It's been a long time in the making.

Some thirty years ago I was at a not very well done bachelor's party, no not one of that type, that I hosted for a friend getting married. At the party was a young man who had just been admitted to a university in New York.  He was pretty impressed with getting into it, and had already taken up calling New York City, "the city", even though he knew just about as little about NYC as I did.

At the party he raised the question of whether the United States was existentially a liberal, or conservative, nation.  In thinking about it there in my late 20s, when I was somewhat more liberal than I am now, I thought the country basically existentially liberal.

I'm not certain that I think that now.  But then, back then, in the late 1980s, being liberal didn't mean I had to pretend that biological truths weren't just that, truths.

Educated people, including educated conservatives like me, as that's basically what I am, are to a large extent baffled by the phenomenon of Donald Trump.  How, we wonder, could anyone vote for a person like him, particularly after he attempted a coup to overthrow the 2020 election?

The Judicial Coup of 2015 has everything to do with that, as we warned that it would, in 2015.

Why Americans, irrespective of position, ought to cringe over Obergefell


Yes, we warned what was in store:
And we warned about it more than once.

We educated people, including we social conservatives, had acclimated ourselves to accepting that an unelected body of jurist could decree social liberality on the society, and everyone had to accept it.  To a large extent, frankly, we grew comfortable with being conservatives of varying stripes, but not getting much of what we wanted.

Obergefell was clearly a bridge too far, and it was right from the beginning.  And what liberals promised, that "this would never mean", very rapidly turned out to be a whopping lie.

The Supreme Court tries a bit to mop up a dog's breakfast. Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.


An argument on what you can and cannot think about stuff that people don't understand with implications you just don't expect but maybe ought to.. Fallout from Obergefell


The contempt that's come for evolutionary biology and basic nature out of the American left, and indeed, the European left, since 2015 has been epic.  But it didn't start in 2015.  It started well before, with major events marking the path.  May 9, 1960, the entire year of 1968, 1969, 1973.  What marked it all, during the very period in which the left embraced everything in nature outside of ourselves, was the rejection of our natures.  We didn't see ourselves as men in nature any longer, but like gods, outside of it.

What the left apparently they didn't grasp is that no matter what the educated conservative "establishment elite" was willing to accept, the rank and file, instinctively conservative middle, wasn't, and isn't, once things went too far.

For we brought nothing into the world, just as we shall not be able to take anything out of it.

If we have food and clothing, we shall be content with that.

Those who want to be rich are falling into temptation and into a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge them into ruin and destruction.

For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.

1 Timothy, Chapter 6.

At the same time, however, a combination of two of the oldest malevolent forces in the world had already united to make any reaction abhorrent.  Ignorance had combined with greed.

People like to spout a lot of babble about the settlement of North America, and the United States, that is just that.  People imagine that hardworking benighted immigrants came in and built a new land out of the sweat of their brows.  Yes, there's an element of truth in that, but the larger truth is that they were massively assisted by their governments, which removed the native population by force at public expense, and then sold or gave the land to the settlers for no value or grossly undervalue.  It's impossible to look at what occured and not regard it as deeply immoral, and claims to the opposite as deeply hypocritical. When Wyoming politicians today proudly declare that they're fourth generation Wyoming rancher who built their enterprises from nothing but their own hard work, they're deluding themselves.  Their ancestors were, as a rule, dirt poor people who benefitted from what was effectively a government hand out, in part, and in part from a program that made that possible by what today would be regarded as ethnic genocide.

There's really no two ways about it.

Nonetheless, in being honest about it, we can also be honest about the fact that the beneficiaries of those programs did not have in mind killing people.  

They also largely didn't have in mind getting rich.

The goal was to have a family, and provide for it.

We recently spent a lot of time on our companion blog looking at the laws and social conditions prior to the fateful legislature of 1977.  Those laws were geared towards that end.  And, prior to the 1970s, the laws in the country largely were.  Laws  on "domestic" topics were geared towards the preservation of the family and the protection of children.

And before Ronald Reagan, the tax structure and the structure of the Federal Government was aimed at regulating excessive accumulation of wealth and reigning in big business. It was widely held, and correctly, that people needed protection against large business and that vast accumulation of wealth could result in the wealthy paying their own way.  The wealthy were not worshiped, and big business was not seen as the little man's friend.  

A figure like Donald Trump was not regarded as admirable.

Reagan came in and changed that, selling the public the lie that as the wealthy got wealthier everyone else did as well.  It made some sense, until you thought it out.  And to a certain degree its true, as the wealthier a society becomes, the wealthier everyone in it is.  But it only goes so far, and it didn't go nearly as far as its backers claimed.  Moreover, the advance of technology, accelerated by World War Two and the Cold War, marched on irrespective of tinkering with the tax rates, and that is likely what made the reason difference.

Something that didn't withstand the tinkering was the assault on education.  The Great Depression, followed by World War Two, followed by the Cold War, had emphasized the need for science and engineering like nothing else.  World War Two, in turn, flooded universities with servicemen after the war, making college educations common.  But with Reagan came a reduction in support for science and engineering.  University remained important, but degrees suffered value erosion.  Degrees like law, which could be societally beneficial, or destructive, evolved towards the latter, as a Reagan era emphasis on greed set in.

Just as societal structures started to break down due to the battering rams of the left, therefore, they were replaced by a lack of education and an emphasis that everything was about money.  It was not a combined intentional attack.  The left would not have made everything about money, and the right would not have broken down societal structures, but the combined assault of both had that effect.  This left an American, and Western, culture with no existential values and nothing to measure individual self-worth other than economic success.  Like the concurrent assault of Germanic, Slavic, and Eastern tribes in the Middle Ages, the damage on the American metaphorical Rome was too much to bear.

Rome, of course, had the Church. And as Rome fell, the Church stepped in, preserving what was worthwhile of the existing culture, and educating the Barbarians.  The United States is not, however, Imperial Rome.  When Rome fell, which was over time, the Roman culture could look towards the Church and realize that it held existential truths Roman civilization did not.  As the American culture falls today, it has instead the adulterated American Civil Religion, a light and reduced content variant of original strict Protestant sects that reflected the product of the Reformation.  And people retain their native instincts, although not in a restrained or educated fashion.

This has left the reeling street level populist reacting against things they know are wrong, but mixing them with ignorance and confusion.  That it's absurd that some claim there are more than two genders is self-evident, and wrong, and that steps like Chloe's law must be taken to combat it is apparent.  What is not is that this depraved state of affairs stems from one that divorced sex from marriage, or the concept that marriage is natural, and not a set of highly advanced sexual dates which allow for discarded partners.  Hence, you have some railing against sexual mutilation, who practice chemical sterilization, or who are serial polygamists themselves.

And the substitution of money as the supreme value over family remains in the same class, with some seriously believing, as some have asserted since the 1980s, that God basically endorses their occupations as surely he must.  It can't be the case, they think, that their occupations could do harm. Therefore, you have those who, like James Watt, can't grasp the thought that natural resources must be conserved, and that this is conservative, let alone that there are things that are being economically exploited which may very well destroy the ability for us to exist.  In their heart of hearts there are those on the populist right who believe that the use of fossil fuels is Divinely sanctioned, just as there are those on the left who believe that altering our psychological and physical natures is some sort of existential, if not Devine, right.

This sort of thing has put us in the untenable position we now find ourselves it.

It ought to be possible, in other words, for a thoughtful conservative to oppose infanticide, genocide, and ecocide.  That is, it ought to be perfectly possible to oppose abortion, gender mutilation, Russian aggression in Ukraine while supporting conservation and indeed be concerned about the environment. That would, in fact, be thoughtful conservatism.

There's no need, and indeed no sense whatsoever, in feeling that because you are worried about gender disorder, that you need to support Putin in Ukraine, or hail a serial polygamist as somebody who presents as a modern Cyrus the Great.

But where to go from here, especially for a thoughtful conservative.

It's clear at this point that neither the modern Republican Party or Democratic Party are going to do anything to solve this. They are both too far corrupted in an existential sense. The Democratic Party is virtually at war with Human Nature and the Devine, while the GOP is at war with intelligence, Science and thought.  Between the two parties, the Democrats have revived a belief in democracy they lost in 1973, however, whereas the Republicans view everyone who doesn't agree with their Caudillo as a class enemy.

The populists know that something is deeply amiss with the assault on human nature. The progressives know that there's something deeply wrong with the assault on science and nature.  Progressives sense that a worship of money is wrong, whereas the Republicans are outright worshiping it.  Populists sense that a worship of yourself as a demigod is perverse, but only embrace that up to the point that it's not personally inconvenient.

National Conservatives and their fellow travelers claim they're the answer.  C. C. Peckhold, a university professor who seems to be in this camp, gives about as good of a justification of this as can be given in an episode of Catholic Answers live that's well worth listing to, but also  a little disturbing in some ways as well.  Like Patrick Dineen, he's big on "order".

What he seems to be missing, in so far as that interview goes, is that corporate capitalism has imposed its own order.  He regards "liberalism", as in the classic meaning of this word, to be the problem, and seeks a "post liberal order", and is one of the contributors to the Post Liberal Podcast whose blog we've linked in our companion site as its interesting.  What they miss, however, is that what they are seeking is effete, which to a large degree is what took down "post liberalism", by which them mean the pre liberal ancient regime, and that it was also corrupt, as concentration of order encourages corruptness.  Indeed, that's what we have now, to a degree, concentrated in capitalism.

Only in a Distributist Agrarianism, by whatever name, is the solution to this found.

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Some recent bios and what they tell us about the realatively recent past.



In the last week or so, we've posted a series of threads that dealt with various personalities.  In setting them out, it occured to me how some of them actually reach back to the supposed purpose of this blog, which is:

Lex Anteinternet?





Well, in reality, that broadened out pretty rapidly to taking into account looking at everything in this era in trying to get a grasp on it.  Since then, it's certainly broadened out enormously, probably much too much.

Anyhow, some recent items help illuminate some of the things of this era, and the one immediately after it.  Indeed, as we'll discuss, one of them helps actually define, maybe, how to property define certain eras.

The items we looked at which brings this to mind are the story of Maj. Gale "Buck" Cleven, that of Dick Proenekke, and also Lee Marvin, and the work of the Southern Agrarians, and that of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

Quite a varied set, I'll admit.

Let's start with Dr. Gale Cleven, which is how most people who knew him, knew him as, the latter part of his life.


I'd never heard of Dr. Cleven until I started Watching Masters of the Air.  The show references him as being from Casper Wyoming, and that caused me to research him further.  As noted on the entry on him, he was born in Lemmon, South Dakota, but came with his family to the oil town of Lusk when he was just a very small boy.  From there he moved to Casper, at some point.

What I could find on him notes that he worked as a roughneck as a young man, while going to college to study geology.  I did both of those things also, and also simultaneously, giving me an odd occupational connection with him, although one that's not all that uncommon around here.  I did find that a little startling, however.

What all that does, however, is to show the very long-lasting economic feature of Wyoming as being an oil and gas province, something that is still the case, but waning.  It remains a strong aspect of the state's economy, however.  This has been the case since, as we explored earlier, at least 1917, although things were headed that way earlier.  It's interesting, looking back, to realize how many of us in The Cowboy State, have worked in oil and gas in some fashion.  Given the economic reach of the industry, darned near everyone at one time.

Something else that really had the reach was the newspaper, in the form of The Society Page.  I was able to track Gale Cleven, as he would then have been known, joining a fraternity and going to UW dances.  I could even track who he was casually dating.

That's odd.

Society columns in newspapers were common at least into the 1950s, and even beyond that. They reported all sorts of snoopy stuff.  I've found, for example, my grandfather mentioned in The Denver Post because his sister was visiting, this in the 1930s.  Another sister of his visited somebody in Denver in the 1920s.  Whose business was that?

They also reported on when people went on vacations, even extended vacations, which is a horrible thought.

I guess it shows, to an extent, the concept of privacy, which the Internet has eroded, is a modern thing.  In the newspapers of the 20s divorces made front page news, births were mentioned, as they are now, scandals were reported, and where you were going, with whom, was as well.

People were keeping track of things and didn't need an iPhone to do it.  No wonder people all subscribed to the paper.

This item also pointed out what a small world Wyoming was and is.  Cleven, whom I had not heard of previously, took a relative by marriage to a dance.  She was from a ranch family that owned a ranch that I later owned a piece of.  She married a rancher who left his name on a prominent local feature.  One of her brothers-in-law was the best friend of one of my old, now long gone, partners.  That fellow was killed in World War Two.  My partner was a crewman on a B-24.

In the small world item also is the thought that I, my father, my wife, and my children all walked the same high school halls, and have driven on the same streets as this fellow.  

And that fame, to the extent fame is involved here, if fleeting.  I'd never heard of him in spite of his remarkable wartime service.  Nothing is named for him here.

Another thing, and one that cuts a bit against something I've noted here in the past.

As I've noted, for at least some Americans, going to university was really a post World War Two thing. That's widely known.  Less well known is that Catholics didn't go to university for the most part until after the war (and I don't know what religion Cleven was).  

Cleven's story shows that this was already changing before the war, however.  Cleven didn't come from a wealthy family, and his parents clearly weren't college educated.  But there he was, at UW, before the war.  

University education was reaching down to the Middle Class, even though we were still in an era when less than 50% of American males graduated from high school

Indeed, while its jumping ahead, the story of Richard Proenneke demonstrated that.  He dropped out of high school as it didn't interest him but went on to, at first, as successful blue collar career.  He seems to have actually retired in his 50s.

Back to Cleven, he had what looks to be the start of a pretty conventional, Wyoming, advanced education before the war, and then went on to an extraordinary one due to the war in no small part.  That demonstrates the manner in which World War Two altered all of society massively.

We'll get back to that.

Finally, in regard to Cleven, his story also demonstrates the ongoing impact of disease in that era.  His young wife was killed by polio.

The polio vaccine didn't come out until 1955, two years after her death.  Somewhat associated with children now, polio in fact struck adults as well.  It was highly contagious and it often killed rapidly.  People went form well in the morning to dead by the end of the day.   And the deaths weren't pleasant. That appears to be basically what happened to her.

Polio, like Small Pox, and Measles are all preventable by vaccines.  So is Covid.  Not until recently, in the post Reagan post Scientific era, have Americans lost their faith in these lifesavers.  

And that is, quite frankly, stupid.

Let's look at Proenekke.


I really think Proennekke's story has been misconstrued, now that I've looked at it.  He tends to be viewed as somebody who turned his back on the modern world and moved to the Alaskan outback.  In reality, however, he's a guy who lived his whole life as a single man and retired young, then moved, in retirement, to the outback.

It's a bit different.

Proennekke's life brings to mind two items of social change, both of which are increasing rare and difficult for "moderns", or "post moderns", if you prefer to understand.  One is the existence of lifelong bachelors with nothing else being assumed about that status, and the other is the true jack of all trades.

We'll take the bachelorhood story, which we've dealt with before in another context, first.

Supposedly today 30.4% of men never marry, more or less (that's a 2010 figure) and 23% of women.  In 1900 that figure was 38.8% and 29.7% respectively, but that doesn't mean the same thing at all.  We've already seen that prior to the mid 20th Century, in many places "living together" was a crime, and in others that would have resulted in a common law marriage.  So those figures really reflect people who lived lives alone

The percentages dropped for every decade of the 20th Century, until the 80s, when they started hovering right around 30% consistently, never going back up to the 1900 38.8% for men.  For what it is worth, for women they dropped to an all-time low for the 1960s, of 17.3%, and the went up to about 23% where they've remained.  Realistically, however, the current 30% and 23% are probably significantly lower, if we take into account situations where couples exist but without the formal benefit of marriage.

And that's significant in multiple ways.

Currently, nearly any male in the "never married" category without some sort of female "significant other" will flat out be assumed to be homosexual once they get much past 30 years of age.  Many people will even assume that Catholic clerics must be homosexual, as they are required to be celibates.  The pressure is so high on unmarried males to declare, in some fashion or another, at the present time, that its actually proven to be a problem for recruiting Catholic Priests as some who have expressed a latent desire to do so have already married due to pressure, or have gone down the secularly pressured road of girlfriend and actions that used to wait until marriage to the extent that they really cannot get back from it.  For that matter, single men past a certain age are not only assumed to be homosexual, but are often societally pressured, in some areas, to be one in order to explain their status.  The thought that somebody could function, more or less alone, but with normal inclinations, just doesn't exist anymore.  The thought that anyone, and indeed anyone who isn't a cleric, could function in a single celibate way is almost regarded as making that person a raving deviant.

It was quite common, however, at one time.  Indeed, there are at least four movies that touch on the topic, all of which might be a little hard for people to grasp now, but which showed that this was a normal frame of reference for viewing audiences at one time, with those files being Marty (1955), The Apartment (1960) Only The Lonely (1991) and Brooklyn (2015).  The evolution of the films shows how this evolved, with the protagonist in Marty being a single male who is assumed by everyone, including his family, will remain one.  Indeed, they wish him to.  In The Apartment it is not assumed that the young executive will marry, even as he develops a deep affection for the female protagonist.  In Only The Lonely the situation is much the same as Marty, but with the mandatory introduction, by that time, of sex into the film.  In Brooklyn the assumption of marriage is much stronger, and indeed becomes a problem during the film.

Truth be known, however, up until at least the 1980s this was a relatively common thing to encounter, and there was no assumption that a single male was attracted to other men by any means.  Usually the single status was regarded as sort of a tragedy, but not one that was a deviation from the norm to much of a degree.  Indeed, I can easily recall several examples of this in adults when I was growing up.

One such individual was a plumber who was well liked and who lived next to my grandmother.  He was a veteran of World War Two and had served almost the entire war in a Japanese POW camp. For that reason, he never turned the lights off in his small house, as they had not done that in the camp.  HE never married.

Also, a tradesman, another person in my father's circle of friends was a fellow who was a plumber and who didn't marry until the 1980s, at which time that was regarded as nearly foolish as he would have been in his very late 50s or perhaps 60s at the time.  His long bachelorhood was not regarded as strange in any fashion, and for much of that time he lived with his mother, inheriting her house after she passed away.

Another example was a friend of my father's who was a mail carrier.  He'd started off before World War Two to become a Protestant minister in his home state of Nebraska, but like so many others, the war interrupted his planned career, and he was an artillery spotter during the war.  When he came back, he did not resume his studies, although he remained devoutly religious.  He dated after the war, at least until the late 1950s, but never found anyone and never married, passing way after my father and after having lived a very long life.  He was one of two postmen who shared a lifelong bachelorhood status, the other one living in a tiny house in North Casper, who when he passed away was a millionaire.

About the only example of this that ever struck me as odd, when I was a boy, were a brother and sister who lived down the block from us. They were both school teachers and never married, and lived into their old ages in a house they jointly owned.  I recall they called my father by a diminutive, the only people who ever did that, which he hated.

They had a Golden Labrador.

Finally, the owner of a men's clothing store here in town was single his whole life.  He was a fanatic UW football fan.

Could any of these people have been closeted homosexuals? Sure, but it certainly wasn't assumed so.  Indeed, it was just regarded as the fate they'd fallen into and a bit sad.  Most of them had something that was a bit quirky about their characters, and the majority of them were tradesmen or blue collar workers, although not all were. That might tell us something there.

Prior to the Second World War, there were entire occupations that tended to be dominated by single men.  Most of those occupations involved hard labor in some fashion.  By the 1920s ranch hands, for example, were single men, and they often spent their entire careers in relatively low paying jobs that precluded them from ever marrying.  The few places that actually have hired cowhands today, if you find a career one, replicate this.  Enlisted men in the Army had always been single in US history unless they advanced to more senior Non Commissioned Officer status.  Well after World War Two, enlisted men frequently required permission to marry from their commanding officers, and before World War Two they routinely did. Wartime was the exception, as married men were brought into the service during war.  Even junior officers were not usually married.

This somewhat reflects, therefore, the harder working conditions and lower incomes in society overall.  Being married took enough of a male's income to make it work, as women often were not employed and typically were not employed once they started having children.  Hired hand status on farms and ranches, and enlisted status in the service, precluded marriage as a result.  The long working hours in some instances, and griminess of manual labor, also worked against marriage for a certain percentage of men as hypergyny didn't favor it, if other options were available.

Indeed, this also helps explain the occupations that the actually closeted went into, as has been discussed before.  Generally occupations that paid better, or steadily, and perhaps which weren't grimy in comparison to others, also favored marriage.  Occupations that were essentially white collar in a way, that didn't favor marriage were very few and far between.

The other thing Proennekke's story brings up is the successful jack of all trades.  His father was one, and he seems to have been as well.  Men with really good mechanical skills who could go from one setting to another were pretty common, and indeed they were at least up until the 1990s.  "He's good with his hands" was a compliment that was often paid to somebody who could act as a universal skilled laborer.  

I'm sure that these guys still exist, but not nearly in the numbers they once did.  I really can't recall meeting one recently, except for older ranchers who are that way by default.  Indeed, everyone I knew of a certain age who had grown up on a farm or ranch was like this.  I was actually surprised as an adult to meet younger ranchers who didn't have those skills, although plenty of them still do.



Finally, there's the modern aspect of strongly pigeonholing, indeed even limiting, people by their perceived disabilities, many of them mild.

The item on Lee Marvin notes that he was afflicted with ADHD, which may in part account for his somewhat wild nature, his early failings at school, and his strong affinity for alcohol.  Or maybe not.  At any rate, he was enormously successful at his trade, acting, and he would never have known he was ADHD, if he was.

This is true of all sorts of things like this. Dyslexia, which I have in a mild form, also afflicted such people as George S. Patton.  Not knowing what it was, you didn't really worry about it, and carried on.  

It's not that these things should be ignored, but I worry that our appreciation of them may not be really well-founded in biology, and certainly evolutionary biology.  Dyslexia, some now claim, is not a neurological disorder or an impairment, but a concession for cognitive strengths in exploration, big-picture thinking, creativity, and problem-solving, so its a byproduct of generally positive aspects.  ADHD, which occurs strongly in some human populations, is now suspected to be an evolutionary trait favored evolutionary people, which makes lots of sense, and which frankly is something that we earlier realized when we called people polymaths and autodidacts.  In contrast, the large occurrence of anxiety in our modern populations reflects an evolutionary need to be careful and alert, made problematic as our modern cubicle lifestyle sucks.

Monday, February 5, 2024

What if the Western World is the "special case"?

Pastoral scene, pre Soviet Ukrainian village.  Not a lot of homsexuality, transgenderism, etc. going on there.

Those who protest vehemently belong to small ideological groups," Francis told Italian newspaper La Stampa. "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it".

"But in general, I trust that gradually everyone will be reassured by the spirit of the 'Fiducia Supplicans' declaration by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith: it aims to include, not divide," the pope said.

We all see things through thick lenses of our cultures, and the history of our cultures.  This was true even of the authors of the Gospels, which sometimes come through on certain items in their writings. 

I think Fiducia Supplicans demonstrates this.

For that matter, to use a bad secular example, I think Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges did as well, which is not to say that the documents are analagous. They are not.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy seems to have generally believed that the Obergefell decision overturning tens of thousands of years of understanding on the nature of marriage would be met with rapid universal acceptance, rather than turning out to be the metaphorical shot heard around the world that gave us Donald Trump in short order.1

The Supreme Court, in Obergefells, and the Papacy, in Fiducia Supplicans, are reacting to the same development seem to have made the assumption of thinking that what happens in European cultures is what happens, or what even really is of major concern, all over the world.  That just isn't the case in this instance.

A pretty good case can be made that "homosexuality", as Western Society regards it, doesn't even exist, although certainly same sex attraction and sexual conduct does. They are not the same thing.  Therefore, when the Pope says "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it" it might in fact be the case that the opposite is true.  That is, the "special case" is Western Europeans, for whom homosexuality exists, and is not a "something 'bad'", or at least a significant number of Western Europeans, of which North and South Americans are (once again) part, have now been schooled or accepted that it isn't bad.

In most, of the world, homosexuality is regarded as a European thing.  Again, the conduct occurs, but not the gender characterization.  And in no society, does it occur with the frequency it does in Western Society, which is also the society which as become the most libertine, albeit only in the last seventy years, particularly in regard to sex and manifestations of sex, including outward manifestations of sex.

We've dealt with that before, but now that It's come back up in this fashion, it's worth looking at again.  Pretty much everywhere this conduct occurs, it's strongly associated with a variety of factors, one of which, in its broad manifestation we now see, is a wealthy society that has lots of idle time.  Put another way, it's a factor of resources and availability to them.

This is true of a lot of human disorders that are closely related to elemental needs and what we tend to universally see is that when we have a society that is heavily deprived of an elemental needs, a disordered desire for it, combined with disorder conduct, pops up in a minority (never a majority) of the population.

Food is a good example.


Scarcity of food will result in a massively strong desire to eat.  In some people, that leads to desperate acts under desperate situations.  Cannibalism, for example, comes to mind in regard to the Donner Party, or the residents of Leningrad.  People took measures they normally wouldn't.

Not everyone did, however.

At least in the Soviet examples, which repeated in various fashions from 1917 through early 1944, most people didn't.  People would starve instead.

Conversely, in food situations where there's a surplus of food, the entire population will tend to gain weight, but not everyone tends to become excessively overweight.  Modern dieticians will yell in horror at this, but overweight, and truly grossly obese are not the same things.  Grossly obese happens for a number of reasons, including people having a makeup which is extremely efficient in order to avoid famine, but it's only in an unnatural situation of surplus calories that it manifest itself.  

As a scene in Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee presents it:

Sergeant Chillum:  Don't look to me like them gut-eaters has been feeding them very good.

Wiley: Did you ever see a fat Apache?

Sergeant Chillum: I ain't yet.

This scene depicts the pick up cavalry formation taking the kidnapped children and feeding them, but the point raised, accidentally, is a good one.  Native Americans lived in a state of nature, and in that state, they were in good shape and not packing around extra weight.  No culture in a state of nature does.

When things become disordered, such as in famine, some people will do something that can be argued to be disordered, eat other people.  When there's too much food and no real need to work too hard, physically, to obtain calories, everyone puts on weight, but some will very much to their detriment.

So what's this have to do with homosexuality, let alone Fiducia Supplicans? Well, quite a lot, really.

Just as, in a balanced state of nature, or close to one, people don't get fat, and don't turn to cannibalism, in a balanced state of nature, they don't turn to the range of sexual deviations that they do in an unbalanced one.

Edgar Paxon's Custer's Last Stand.  While it might seem odd to see this posted here, the Cheyenne and Sioux warriors who won this battle, and one just days before it at Rosebud, were never more than a day's ride from their families.  Women were of course present in the Native camp at Little Big Horn, as the battle was brought on by the 7th Cavalry's attack on the village, but at least one native woman had been present at Rosebud as well.  Native raiding parties might separate from their families for a period of days, but not months.

In a state of nature, people live in pretty small communities and there's pretty much a 1 to 1 sex ratio.  Men would only be separated from women for very brief periods of time.  A war party, for example, might separate for several days, but not months. The Great Raid of 1840, for example, which is regarded as the largest Native American raid every conducted, just lasted two days.  Add in travel, and the warrior bands were gone longer, but it probably wasn't much more than a week, if that long.

Hunting parties are also often cited for periods of separation, but in a healthy native state, the separation was often just a matter of hours.  Women were usually close enough to a really large hunting party that they could partake in the processing of the game.  There were undoubtedly exceptions, but by and large, this was the rule.

Taking the war example again, consider this from Ethiopia's mobilization order of 1935 when Italy invaded:

Everyone will now be mobilized, and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and cook. Those without wives will take any woman without a husband. Anyone found at home after the receipt of this order will be hanged.

Emperor Haile Selassie

Married men, take your wives.  Not married?  Find a woman who isn't married and taker her.

It's only once you begin to mess with the basic human living patters that the opposite is true.  Industrialization, which we'll get to in a moment, really brought in a major disruption from the normal living patter, but there are preindustrial examples that are notable.  War provides a pretty good example again.

Major military campaigns in antiquity relied on theft of food, which is not ordered, and which is well known.  If the fighters were separated from women, they also rapidly descended to disorder.  Early military campaigns (and some recent ones) are famously associated with "rape and pillage", and by men who would not ordinarily do that.  

Another example of adjusting to desperate times might be taken in Muhammed authoring his troops, who were ready to go home as they were tired of being without their wives, to have sex with their female saves taken in war.  This is widely denied by Muslim scholars today, but it seems to be fairly well established and in fact the practice has been resumed by Islamic fundamentalist armed bands and its the origin of Muslim sex slave trading, which is an historical fact. That this is basically an example of licensed rape can't really be denied.

Conversely, in Christian societies the "marital debt" was taken very seriously up until recently, and it was taken so seriously in the Middle Ages that a wife of a man who wished to go on crusade could veto it simply by citing the marital debt.  That's fairly extraordinary, but telling, in that she could simply declare that if her husband departed her needs in this category might cause her to fall into sin, and therefore, he couldn't go.  Moderns like to look down on such things today, but in reality that was a very natural and realistic view of human sexuality.

Same gender attractions play in here too, but within bands of men kept away from women for long periods of time.  The most famous example of that may be the Spartans, who were fierce warriors trained from young adulthood, in the case of men, to be soldiers.  However, the warehousing of men, and boys, away from women brought about widespread homosexual conduct as the living conditions were, rather obviously, completely abnormal.

So too are much of our current living patters.

Industrialization separated men from women and parent from child in a major way, recreating the abnormality of living conditions noted above on a society wide level.

And that's deeply unnatural.

It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that men left their homes every day, working long hours, and were separated from their wives and children for what amounts to well over half of their adult waking hours.  And this was not only true of industrial laborers, but also of their white collar bosses.  In many industrial societies, moreover, this was amplified by the fact that men further segregated themselves, or were segregated by society, even on off hours.

It was essayist Henry Fairlie who noted:

Work still gives meaning to rural life, the family and churches.  But in the city today, work and home, family and church, are seperated.  What the office workers do for a living is not part of thier home life.  AT the same time they maintain the pointless frenzy of hteir work hours on thier off hours.  They rush form the office to jog, to the gym or the YMCA pool to work at their play with the same joylessness.

Fairlie wrote this in 1986, well after the most aggressors conditions of the Industrial Revolution had slackened, but he did note in The Idiocy of Urban Life what that had been like.  Men left early in the morning and walked, on average, seven miles to work. They worked their all day, and then returned home after twelve hours of labor.  Well over half their day had been spent away from their family.

By the 20th Century that had, in many heavily industrial regions, created a new pattern of living he didn't address, and one which lasted well into the 1970s.  Men left for work in blue collar jobs, worked all day with other men, and at quitting time, they hit the bars.  Men in the American Rust Belt, for instance, commonly hit a bar every night on the way home, spending a couple of hours drinking beer in an all male company, save for the barmaids whose tips went up as the beer flowed.  Rough and tumble places, these were not the equivalent of charming English or Irish pubs of the same period.  The maleness, if you will, of their work was all the more amplified by the nearly universal membership of men in organizations that excluded women.

Not surprisingly, this all encouraged conventional sexual vice.  Some men, a minority but nonetheless an appreciable nature, took the jousting with bar maid and waitresses further, with some of the women reciprocating.  When Hank Thompson and Kitty Wells sang about the "wild side of life" it's easy to wonder why they were hanging out in bars, not really appreciating that a lot of men in particular simply did.  Indeed, the term "family man", conversely, had real meaning.

Not to dump this exclusively on blue collar workers by any means, philandering conduct was common in the white collar world as well, to such an extent that it became instantly recognizable to people who went to see 1960's The Apartment, the entire theme of which plays out through the vehicle of cheating married executives using their younger colleagues' apartment.


Indeed, when I was young, I can recall my parents openly talking about professionals in town who had affairs and mistresses.  This certainly didn't include anyone in my family, which was 100% Catholic and meant it.  That conduct was clearly not approved of, but my point is that it occured.  While never discussed in this fashion, in the context of what we're discussing here, the mistresses were sometimes targets of opportunity, so to speak.  Secretaries and assistants.  Indeed, I heard a lawyer of the generation prior to mine, once relate of the generation of lawyers two generations older than hers, that quite a few of the paralegals of that old, now largely dead or very old, were effectively mistresses.  One such assistant had mysteriously had a child out of wedlock when that was pretty rare, and it was widely known who teh employer father was.

There's a lot more that could be explored here, but the point is that the contra natural working conditions give rise to departures from morality and nature.  Even now, or particularly now, you'll hear a close female colleague of a male be referred to as his "work wife".  I've even heard a person refer to herself that way.  Work wives have no marital debt, but hidden by the statement is the vague suggestion or fear that they might be providing such a service, illicit thought it would be.

Homosexuality, in large part, comes about, I strongly suspect, due to something similar.

In an earlier thread, we noted that there are in fact cultures that not only have low incidents of homosexual conduct, but none.  As we earlier posted:

Somewhat related to this, interestingly enough, I also came upon an article by accident on the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa, who are branches of the Bushmen, or what some people still call "pygmies".  They've been remarkably resilient in staying close to nature.

A hunter-gatherer people, they naturally fascinate Western urbanites, and have been studied for many years by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, a husband and wife anthropologist team.  Starting off with something else, after a period of time the Washington State University pair "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women, and they verified the men's assertions."

The study revealed some interesting things, besides that, which included that they regarded such interaction as a species of work, designed for procreation.  Perhaps more surprising to our genital focused society, they had no concept of homosexuality at all, no practice of that at all, and additional had no practice or concept of, um. . . well . . .self gratification.  You'll have to read between the lines on that one.

Perhaps the Synod on Synodality ought to take note of the reality of the monotheist Aka's and Ngandu's as that's exactly what the Catholic faith has always taught.1 And so it turns out in a society that's actually focused that way, what Catholics theology traditionally has termed disordered, just doesn't occur.  It's also worth noting that the rise of homosexuality really comes about after men were dragged out of the household's on a daily basis by social and economic causes, and the rise of . . . um., well, anyhow, recently is heavily tied to the pornificaiton of the culture that was launched circa 1953.

In other words, those like Fr. James Martin who seek a broader acceptane of of sexual disorder, might actually be urging the acceptance of a byproduct of our overall economic and social disorder, which itself should be fixed.

But what would be the conditions that bring it about in our culture?

We're not even supposed to ask that now, but for most people who have same sex attraction, it's a pretty heavy cross to bear.  We should be looking at how it comes about.

Well, what we know is that if we separate men from women, particularly in their formative years, we'll get it at a higher rate than when that doesn't occur.

Going back to war, that fountain of all problematic things, we can look back as far as the Spartans to find this.  Spartans, faced with a constant threat of war, took up separating men from women large-scale and raising boys in barracks.  It also had a notable degree of homosexual conduct.

Hmmm. . . separate young men and keep them separates just as things begin, for lack of a better way to put it, turn on, and . . . .

The Spartans were a notable early example of this, which in turn tends to be exaggerated.  It's not likely that every single Spartan male was a homosexual.  It's also not the case, as is sometimes suggested, that Ancient Greece was wildly homosexual.  Indeed, Plato abhorred it and regarded it as contrary to nature and proposed the Athenian assembly ban homosexual acts, masturbation, and illegitimate sex in general.

Going forward in time, when we really start to see references to the acts (but not a claimed "homosexual" status) comes with the first semi modern navies.  It was a constant concern, for instance, of the Royal Navy, which perhaps might be regarded as the first modern navy.  A great navy, it was not necessarily recruited in the most charming way and many sailors were simply press-ganged, a type of conscription, into it against their will.  As press gangs favored hitting bars in ports, many of the men conscripted into the Royal Navy already lacked a strong attachment to home and family, and ports were notoriously associated with prostitution.  Anyhow, a lot of men away from sea for months, or years, at a time, and a lot of them being fairly young. . . well the problem rose again.

It replicated itself in large modern armies as well, interestingly often among the officer class.  In European armies where the officer class was made up of minor nobility as a rule, the men in it had entered as the only other real employment option, if they were not set to inherit the estate, was the clergy.  In some European armies officers were strongly discouraged from marrying, which in part reflected the fact that their pay was very bad, as their countries knew that they could rely on family money. While it didn't occur universally in every such army, in some, such as the pre World War One German Army, there was a strong streak of hidden homosexuality.

English private schools, which were widely used by the upper class, were notorious for homosexuality for the same reason.  Homosexual conduct became so common in them that homosexuality used to be referred to elsewhere as "the English Disease".  Private schools were segregated effectively by class, and very much by gender.  Unlike the charming portrayal in the Harry Potter series of works, boys went to boys schools and girls to girls school.  Quite often, over time, parents enrolled their children in the same schools they'd gone to.  Overtime, a closeted institutional homosexuality, or at least its common occurrence, crept in.

It could be legitimately asked how on earth any of this relates to our current era, but it does in more ways than we might imagine.

In most Western societies today, we make no effort, for the most part, to separate men and women in anything, formally.  But as we've already detailed, we do send men, and now women, out of their families and into an unnatural environment on a daily basis.  People often meet their future spouses in periods of time when young people are constantly together, such as in school or university, but as soon as they are established, we pull them apart.

Starting during World War Two, moreover, a false academia combined with the corruption and destruction of the war, gave rise to the Sexual Revolution.  We commonly think of that as arriving in the 60s, but in reality it probably really started in the 1940s with the publication of Kinsey's false academic narratives. That was the first shot, so to speak, and the publication of Playboy the second one.  While Playboy was opposed in some localities into the 1980s, by the 1950s it was so well established, in spite of completely rejecting conventional morality, and in spite, moreover, of publishing photos of women younger than 18, that the ground had been massively lost.  The pill followed in the early 60s, work patterns changed due to the introduction of domestic machinery, and sexual morality took a beating.  Once its natural purpose was obscured, and then lost, which really basically took all the way into the 1990s, the widespread acceptance of homosexual sex was inevitable.

None of which means that a large number of people will take it up.

But what does mean, that some people, in some circumstances, will. And the unnatural conditions that we live in, amplified by societal moorings having been cut by the Sexual Revolution, help bring that about.  And as society has chosen to simply embrace everything that deviates from the norm, and natural, as it applies to ourselves, those afflicted have almost no place to go, but deeper in, no matter how destructive that may be.

All of which is a good reason that people in this circumstance need blessings, if blessing are properly understood.

And which would, therefore, support Fiducia Supplicans.

But none of which suggests that the Church's view on sex is what is causing a decline in attendance in  Europe, and that a wider acceptance of homosexuality as normal, as some would urge, would actually do anything.  This all is a problem in the West, to be sure, but the underlying evolution of thought that some have, that this is all natural, is not supported by the evidence.

The evidence supports the contrary.

Which gets us back to our original point.  African and Asia, for all of their problems, have lived closer to nature, longer, than we have.  But that is rapidly changing, and in much of Asia in particular it already has. People who like to imagine that there is such a thing as broad progress, for which there is no good evidence, would argue that this is all progress, so that everything we have noted as a byproduct of the evolution of industry in the West will necessarily happen everywhere else. But that's not necessarily the case at all.

And indeed, in the West itself there seem to be an awakening of tradition, and a desire to return to a more rooted lifestyle.  Ironically, evolutions in technology may bring that about.  We know that populations are declining everywhere in the Western Northern Hemisphere, which is seen as a disaster but which in fact may emphasize this sort of return to the village.

Footnotes:

1.  Obergefell is an incredibly weak decision which, if it were to reappear in front of the United States Supreme Court today, would be reversed.  My prediction is that it will be within the next decade as it devoid of solid legal reasoning.

When it was handed down, it was my prediction here that it would cause massive social disruption and resistance, which in fact it has.  Pollsters like to point out that the views on same gender unions have moved greatly since it was handed down, which is true, but what they seem to miss is that it was basically the last straw on the part of traditional social conservatives, as well as (Southern type) populists on forced social change.  The latter group had long ago accommodated itself to divorce, to people shacking up, and begrudgingly to homosexual conduct but it wasn't about to be told that homosexual unions equated with marriage.  In very real terms, Anthony Kennedy, whether he realizes it or not, has always been Donald Trump's running mate.

Related Threads:

The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past Century, Definitions, Society, Law, Culture and Their Odd Trends and Impacts.

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The swift and the not so swift edition.


  • Twitter has banned searches for Taylor Swift.

This tells us something about the danger of AI, as what they were searching for is AI generated faux nudes of the singer.

It also tells us something about entertainers we already knew.  Yes, their art counts, but part of their popularity, quite often, is that they're a form of art themselves. Which leads us to the next thing.

Everything about this is wrong on an existential level.  AI, frankly, is wrong.  

And once again, presented with the time, talent, and money to be sufficiently idle to do great things, we turn to the basest. 

  • There's a creepy fascination going on with Tyler Swift
I don't know anything about Tyler Swift, other than that she's tall, and from the photos I've seen of her, on stage she wears, like many female singers, tight clothing.  She appears to be very tall, and is sort of a classic beauty.

I suppose that's the root of it.

Apparently, right wing media and MAGA people are just freaking out about Tyler Swift.  This has been headline fodder for some time, but I only got around to looking it up now, as I don't follow entertainment at all and don't care that much.

Swift is dating some football player.  I don't follow football either, so that doesn't interest me.  Beautiful female entertainers dating sports figures, or marrying them, isn't news, and it isn't even interesting.  Consider Kate Upton and Marilyn Monroe.  Indeed, under the evolutionary biological precept of hypergyny, most rich women in entertainment would naturally gravitate in this direction, as much as we like to pretend that our DNA does not push us in one direction or another (lesser female entertainers, such as Rachel Ray and Kathy Ireland, tend to marry lawyers).  Billy Joel may have sung about the opposite in Uptown Girl, but that truly is a fantasy.  There's really very little direction from them to otherwise take, whether they are cognizant of it or not.

And so now we have this total weirdness:

Right wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec: 
People who don’t understand why I have been commenting on Taylor Swift and Barbie are completely missing the point and NGMI These are mascots for the establishment. High level ops used as info warfare tools of statecraft for the regime.

Newsmax host Greg Kelly:

They’re elevating her to an idol.

Idolatry. This is a little bit of what idolatry, I think, looks like. And you’re not supposed to do that. In fact, if you look it up in the Bible, it’s a sin!

Far right activist Laura Loomer:
The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open … It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign.
Donald Trump fanboy and poster child for political train derailment, Vivek Ramaswamy:
I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall …

And if all of that isn't weird enough for you, a host on the right wing  OAN claims the Swift football dating is a deep state psy op, because sports brainwash kids when they should be focused on religion. 

This is insane.

Liz Cheney warned us that idiocy had crept into the nation's politics.  What more evidence of this is required than this?
  • Celebrity endorsements.
Some of this stems from a fear that Swift might endorse President Biden.  I read something that claimed she had in 2020.

I don't know if she did or not, and I don't particularly care.

There are a host of celebrities who have endorsed Trump.  Nobody seems to get up in arms about that, or even notice it.  So why the concern.

Probably because Swift is seen as the voice of her generation, and that sure ain't the generation that MAGA is made up of.  I.e, she's young and an independent female.  

Look at it this way, would you rather have her endorsement, or Lauren Boebert's?

I frankly don't get celebrity endorsements anyhow.  I don't know why we care what any actor or singer thinks about anything.  Freaking out about it is just silly.
  • Jay Leno is seeking to be the guardian and conservator for his wife, Mavis, who is 77, and has dementia.
This is a tragedy.

It's also a tragedy in the nation's eye. Most of the time really notable figures endure something like this, it's out of the public eyesight.  We didn't watch Ronald Reagan decline on the news.  Of course, we're unlikely to see Ms. Leno endure this either.

But this serves as a warning.  Old age, we often hear, isn't for wimps.  And one of the things about it is that those who remain mentally fit have to take care of those who do not.  Most families find this out.

But what about when they're running for office?
  • The National Park Service reports a 63-year-old man died on a trail in Zion National Park.  Heart attack.

This headline tells us something, too. 63, we're often told, isn't old. But then we're not too surprised when a 63-year-old dies hiking, are we?

  • A concluding thought.  We're getting scary stupid.
Freaking out about Tyler Swift, letting two octogenarians run to carry the nuclear football, engaging in endless weird conspiracy theories. . . we've really let the dogs of insanity out big time.

Frankly, a lot of the time the "elite", by which we mean the educated elite, the cultural elite, etc., kept a lid on this.  It wasn't as if the opinions of "the people" didn't matter, but they were tempered.

That's not happening in the country now at all.  Swift is part of a left wing conspiracy, efforts to prevent gender mutilation are due to right wing meanness.  This is out of hand.

Last Prior Edition:

The Lost Cause and the Arlington Confederate Monument. Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 53d Edition.

Sunday, January 21, 2024

On being blisteringly dense and contra-natural

I'll have to start this again with a quote I had here the other day from Cardinal Sarah

The dying West.

I'm afraid that the West will die. There are plenty of signs. No more childbearing. You are invaded, still, by other cultures, other peoples, who will progressively dominate you by their numbers and completely change your culture, your convictions, your morality.

Cardinal Sarah

I guess because I'm a big reader, I'll get advertisements for books and also book reviews in email form.  One that I get is the New York Times book reviews, which I've come to barely notice.  A big part of that is because as the Times itself has declined, and it very much has, its book reviews are focused on whiney self-indulgent narcissist who write whiney self-indulgent narcissist memoirs that nobody reads and which are soon forgotten.  Stuff like the struggles of a middle class homosexual 1st generation Pakistani American in the big city whose extended Islamic family doesn't get him. M'eh, get over yourself, dude.

Anyhow, I got more than one email on Molly Roden Winter's new memoir, More on her sexual immorality.  The first time I disregarded it as it was a New York Times review (of course), but the second time I did take brief note of it.

Basically, she and her husband, who do have children, like to f*** other people than their spouses and for some reason their licentiousness is to be shared with others, making them both not only sexually reprehensible, but exhibitionist as well.  They'd define this as being "polyamorous", but that description does violence not only to nature, as we'll see, but to "amour".  Polylicentiousness would be a better description, but licentious would simply do, although they apparently (I haven't read it) keep their affairs down to one person at a time.  Indeed, one item I found she wrote in an op ed was about her sneaking out to her "boyfriend" during COVID and lying about it to her mid teen son, whom she must think is really dense, so she can screw her paramour in his household while his wife, whom he is trying to get pregnant, is out.  

Like all books in this area, this will be read only by people, probably mostly women, who want either 1) a peak into somebody's Fifty Shades of Grey lifestyle or 2) are thinking of cheating on their spouses and want to learn what that's like while being encouraged to do so.  I'm not going to bother with that, but instead make an evolutionary biological and medical observation.

Setting aside morality, this sort of conduct can only occur if you've carpet bombed your system into sterilization and have a platoon of antibiotics ready to come to your rescue.

In other words, while the promoters of this sort of thing like to claim it as sort of natural, it's the opposite.

We've dealt with it elsewhere, but the bargain of our species was that the male in a couple got the female. . .you know. . . that way, for his life, and she got food and protection, which she couldn't provide once she had a child or children.  Slice it anyway you want, but that's the evolutionary basis of monogamy and that's why our species exhibits it.

People will talk about affairs etc. and the degree to which they've been historically common in our species, but they really miss the history of it.  By and large, while they do occur, amongst the masses, which were most people, who lived close to the economic bottom line, or who were aboriginal, or pastoral, or nomadic, the Old Law provided that such offenses were punishable by death, by and large.

People like to claim, "oh that was just for the women", but that's simply not true.  Yes, women adulterers were killed, as we all are well aware.  The underlying logic of it, as brutal as that was, is that a man shouldn't be forced to raise the offspring of some other man, and death put an end to the chance of that occurring, and perhaps to the offspring as well as the offending woman. 

Grim.

But death was the common punishment for men as well, and it was typically directly meted out.  The man discovering the offense very often simply killed the other guy, and that was regarded as okay.

Indeed, as late as 1973, the Texas Penal Code provided:

Homicide is justifiable when committed by the husband upon one taken in the act of adultery with the wife, provided that the killing takes place before the parties to the act have separated. Such circumstance cannot justify a homicide where it appears that there has been, on the part of the husband, any connivance or assent to the adulterous connection.

In other words, if husband came home and found Jim Bob Diddler in bed with his wife, he could kill him.

And we should note that yes, that's completely contrary to Christian morality.  You can't run around killing people, even those in bed with your wife.

But the old, pre-Christian, law allowed for this.

Black Buffalo Woman.

Indeed, a famous example of this is given by the example of Crazy Horse, whose early affections had been towards Black Buffalo Woman.  In spite of his known feelings for her, she married No Water while Crazy Horse was on a raid.  In 1870, he carried her off while No Water was out on a hunting party.  The next day, No Water caught up with him, shot him in the face with a revolver (hitting his nose) and breaking his jaw, his shot being misdirected due to a third party attempting to intervene.  Crazy Horse was laid up due to his injuries for months, but had escaped death.  The blood feud was ended by No Water giving Crazy Horse a horse in compensation for his injures, which must have been galling to No Water knowing that Black Buffalo Woman and Crazy Horse had spent one night together, but which was deemed justified in light of there being questions about Black Buffalo Woman's long term marital intent.  Crazy Horse was stripped, in turn, of his position as a Shirt Wearer.

No Water in later years.

I've known, FWIW, of one killing here which was pretty much under those circumstances and I personally know a fellow, who was an FBI agent, who came home to find a coworker of his in bed with his wife.  In the latter case, he gave the guy one hour to clear out with the stated intent that when he came back in an hour, if they were still there, he was killing him.

His instructions to his spouse were to clear out as well.

They did.

Anyhow, Ms. Winter's behavior is only possible, as noted, due to chemistry. We've used chemistry to defeat our biological functions, but not our psychological and psycho-biological ones, and at least for the time being, we're not close to doing so.  Indeed, if we do, it'll be the end of the species.

Let's go back to Black Buffalo Woman.

Several months after Crazy Horse's attempt at taking her, she gave birth to a light skinned child.  That must have been all the more galling to No Water, as Crazy Horse was light skinned as well.  Indeed, while people aren't supposed to speculate on such things, his light feature and aquiline nose have lead to some speculation that he descended from a French trapper a generation or two prior to his birth, and I'll just go out on a limb and say it's likely so.1   Anyhow, this gives a biological example of why this is so deep in our DNA.  No Water wanted his wife and knew what the relationship between men and women meant.  He already had three children by her.  Her departure with Crazy Horse was a massive act of betrayal as well as resource disaster.  Some nine or ten months later, he likely ended up burdened with the child of another man, but sucked it up and carried on.

And here's a second reason.

Disease.

Whatever the multiple partner of this type has been common in any form, venereal disease has been absolutely rampant.  There's really no exception.  Indeed, that's probably all the more we need to say on that.

Now, on this, a person might wonder for a second about polygamy.  I'm not a defender of polygamy, but polygamy and polygamous behavior aren't the same at all.  The wives of a husband in a polygamous society are his, not for sharing.  Pretty obviously, if they were shared in any fashion, with our without his knowledge, the disease spreading opportunity is really enhanced.

This shows, once again, how prophetic Humanae Vitae really was.

Consequences of Artificial Methods

17. Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection. 
Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

What was warned of here has now happened on a large-scale, with not only men regarding women as mere instruments of satisfaction, and vice versa, but a modern Western society obsession with our lower regions, even basing entire "lifestyles" on it.

None of which is capable without a complete chemical sterilization of our natural systems in a manner that we'd not tolerate on any other topic.  It's unnatural on an epic level.

Footnotes

1.  One of Crazy Horse's two wives, Helena "Nellie" Larrabee (Larvie), was half French.  


History has strangely not treated Larrabee well, seemingly because she influenced him to basically settle down.  That's really unfair, quite frankly.

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