Blog Mirror: 870: On Reading Sigmund Fraud

This is linked in from the Dumbest Blog Ever, which we have linked in in our General Interest blog categories but, while most of the enteries there are a certain species of satire, this one is not:

870: On Reading Sigmund Fraud

Well worth reading, and spot on.

Trust the Science

On Twitter I saw a photo somebody posted of a sign in Washington D.C., in a hallway, which said "There are two genders, male and female, trust the science", praising it.

And I agree with the statement.

Knowing the underlying politics of the person who posted it, somebody replied: "But we shouldn’t trust science on Covid and vaccines, correct?!"

An excellent point.

The science goes where it goes, it cares not about right and left, and people caring about the science have not the option to ignore that.

Sacrifice. What's Wrong With The World

In the West, we just celebrated Easter.  In the East, where the Old Calendar is sometimes used, it's today.  This might mean, for the observant, that they were in Church the prior Sunday, in which case, for churches using the Catholic liturgical calendar, they heard this.

Then Judas, his betrayer, seeing that Jesus had been condemned,

deeply regretted what he had done.

He returned the thirty pieces of silver

to the chief priests and elders, saying,

"I have sinned in betraying innocent blood."

They said,

"What is that to us?

Look to it yourself."

Flinging the money into the temple,

he departed and went off and hanged himself.

We all know, of course, that Judas was Christ's betrayer.  Not too many stop to think that he was seized with remorse and hung himself.

Why was he so miserable?

Probably for the same reason that Western society, on the whole, is.

He thought of himself and chose his own inner wishes rather than being willing to sacrifice.

It's struck me recently that this is the defining quality of our age. We won't sacrifice and don't believe we should have to.  It explains a lot.

Interestingly, in a matter of synchronicity, after I started writing this I happened to listen to an episode of Catholic Stuff You Should Know on Augustine's City of God and Lewis' The Great Divorce that ties in perfectly.  It's here:

The one that explains exactly where we are.

CAN WE BUILD THE CITY OF GOD?

And I do mean exactly.

Also, a matter of synchronicity, we passed the 111th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic after I started this.  

The wealthy men on board the doomed ship, and a lot of the other men, stayed on the sinking ship so that women and children would be saved.  The men who went were largely the crew, needed to man the lifeboats as part of their tasks.  Otherwise, men didn't complain, they just stepped aside so that as few women and children as possible wouldn't die. A Catholic Priest stayed with them to prepare them for entry into the next life.  All of them were living up to a standard, but the interesting thing to note there is that it was a standard.  They were heroic, but not because they exceeded the standard, but rather because the occasion came to apply it, and they unflinchingly did.

Now we shove women into combat, something that in any prior age would be regarded as an outright societal act of cowardice and a complete failure of male virtue.

We've come a long ways, all right.  And not in a good way.

Sacrifice was almost the defining quality of any prior age, or at least those that preceded the late 1960s, and very much the defining quality of the 18th through mid 20th Centuries.  Men would die before they'd let women and children be injured, and if they didn't, they'd be branded as cowards for the rest of their lives.

Most people married, and marriage was understood to have a sacrificial element to it in numerous ways.  People didn't "write their own vows", the vows were part of the ceremony and they were, well, vows.  Promises you weren't getting out of, in other words.

Latin Rite English wedding vows still reflect this.  The entire series of events reads goes as follows.

First, the Priest asks a series of questions, to which the couple responds "I do", or words that effect:

(Name) and (name), have you come here to enter into Marriage without coercion, freely and wholeheartedly?"                   

"Are you prepared, as you follow the path of Marriage, to love and honor each other for as long as you both shall live?"                       

"Are you prepared to accept children lovingly from God and to bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?"

Only after ascent to that, the Priest reads:

Priest (or deacon): Since it is your intention to enter into the covenant of Holy Matrimony, join your right hands, and declare your consent before God and his Church.

Groom: I, (name), take you, (name), to be my wife. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.

Bride: I, (name), take you, (name), to be my husband. I promise to be faithful to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, to love you and to honor you all the days of my life.

The element of sacrifice is so strong in marriage, that in Croatia, a Catholic country, an added element is present, in which the Priest states:

You have found your cross. And it is a cross to be loved, to be carried, a cross not to be thrown away, but to be cherished.

That's really heavy.  That's not a fuzzy bunny, flowery rose, type of view of marriage at all.  You're signing up for a real burden.

But one to be cherished.

And that's the thing that the West has lost. 

We don't want to sacrifice at all.

If you look at life prior to the late 1960s, sacrifice was darned near universal.  Everyone, nearly, married and divorce was rare.  People sacrificed for their marriages.  Most married couples had children, and having children entailed sacrifice.  Reflecting the common values of the time well, the screenwriter of The Magnificent Seven summed it up in this fashion in a comparison of family men to hired gunfighters:

Village Boy 2 : We're ashamed to live here. Our fathers are cowards.

Bernardo O'Reilly : Don't you ever say that again about your fathers, because they are not cowards. You think I am brave because I carry a gun; well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility, for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground. And there's nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it. This is bravery. That's why I never even started anything like that... that's why I never will.

The line, "And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground." was literally true for many.  Indeed, it's been noted that up until some point after World War Two Finland, which rountinely comes in as the happiest country on Earth, had a very early male death rate, simply because the men there worked hard, and basically worked themselves into the grave for their families.

People were not, of course, perfect, and therefore children naturally arrived on the scene with an unmarried origin.  Depending upon the age of the couple, that often ended up in a marriage before the child was born, adding an added element of sacrifice in which the couple sacrificed, in essence, an element of freedom or even their future for what they'd brought about. When that didn't occur, the child was more often than not given up for adoption, which involves an element of sacrifice, but because it arises in a different context, we'll not get too deeply into that.

Things tended to be focused on that fashion. There were people who didn't follow this path, but they were a minority.

This has been portrayed, since the 1970s, as some sort of horrible oppression.  But the surprising secret of it is that people seem to be hardwired for it, and when it's absent, they descend into, well, a descent.

None of which is to say that sacrifices aren't present in the modern world. They are, although by and large society tries enormously to avoid them.

It's tried the hardest in regard to the natural instincts of all kinds.  People are able to avoid nature, and so they do, least they have to sacrifice. But that's a sacrifice in and of itself, but for what?

The self, is what we were told initially.  But the self in this context turns out to be for the economy.  In a fairly straight line, we're told that you should avoid commitments to anything requiring commitment, so that you can get a good career, make lots of money, and go to Ikea.

Very fulfilling?

Ummm. . . 

No, not at all.  

In The Great Divorce, which I haven't read but which Catholic Things summarized extensively, Lewis placed a self focused Anglican Bishop in the role of the self-centered intellect.  Self Centered is the epitome of the current age.  And that self-centered role placed the figure in Hell.

We're doing a good job of that figuratively for the same reason, and literally as well.

Prior Related Threads:

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 1. A thought on community

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 2. Care, lack of care, and an existential lack of focus.

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 3. Our lost connection with animals.

 

A constitutional right to a clean environment in NM, etc.

18,000

That's the number of cattle killed in the explosion in Texas.  18,000 dairy cattle.

That's obscene.

I own cattle, and beef cattle at that. But this shows what's really gone wrong with the United States and the Western World.  Everything has to be some sort of factory.

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 3. Our lost connection with animals.

ICELANDIC MILKMAID ON HER MORNING ROUND

This is a fine, sturdy pony standing so stockily for his photograph, and he can make light of his burden of buxom beauty with her heavy can of milk. She cares not for saddle or stirrups, for most of these island people are born to horseback, and her everyday costume amply serves the purpose of a riding-habit for this strapping Viking's daughter, with her long tresses shining in the breeze.  

(Original caption, of interest here I wouldn't call this young lady "buxom" or "strapping", but just healthy.  This might say something about how standards have changed over time.)

The other day, I posted this in a footnote on a completely different topic.

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, par...:   

4.  One of the odder examples of this, very widespread, is the change in our relationship with animals.

Our species is one of those which has a symbiotic relationship with other ones.  We like to think that this is unique to us, but it isn't.  Many other examples of exist of birds, mammals and even fish that live in very close relationships with other species.  When this occurred with us, we do not know, but we do know that its ancient.  Dogs and modern wolves both evolved from a preexisting wolf species starting some 25,000 to 40,000 years ago, according to the best evidence we currently have. That likely means it was longer ago than that.

Cats, in contrast, self domesticated some 7,000 or so years ago, according to our best estimates.

Cat eating a shellfish, depiction from an Egyptian tomb.

We have a proclivity for both domesticating animals, and accepting self domestication of animals, the truth being that such events are likely part and parcel of each other. Dogs descend from some opportunistic wolves that started hanging around us as we killed things they liked to eat.  Cats from wildcats that came on as we're dirty.  Both evolved thereafter in ways we like, becoming companions as well as servants.  But not just them, horses, pigs, sheep, cattle. . .the list is long.

As we've moved from the natural to the unnatural, we've forgotten that all domestic animals, no matter how cute and cuddly they are, are animals and were originally our servants. And as real children have become less common in WASP culture, the natural instinct to have an infant to take care of, or even adore, has transferred itself upon these unwilling subjects, making them "fur babies".

It's interesting in this context to watch the difference between people who really work with animals, and those who do not.  Just recently, for example, our four-year-old nephew stayed the night due to the snow, and was baffled why our hunting dog, who is a type of working dog but very much a companion, stayed the night indoors.  The ranch dogs do not. . . ever.  The ranch cats, friendly though they are, don't either.

I started this thread back in February, when the entire news on "transgenderism" really hit the fan, so to speak.  Since that time there's been the filing of the sorority lawsuit in Laramie, a host of transgender mass shooting, and an absolutely freakish campaign by Budweiser in which a guy trying to channel a girl of the 1960s is sponsoring Bud Light.  Anyhow, this thread was to tie into it somehow, but now a lot of time has gone by, and working seven days out of seven, etc., I've really forgotten what my brilliant point here was to be, more or less.

But I'll go on anyhow.

This photograph shows a young woman at work, doing something that counted, and doing it in a way that was very close to nature.

So does this one:

Mid Week At Work: Mail Carrier, 1915, Los Angeles

And also this one:

Rural Nurse, Virginia. 1919.

And this one:

LOC Caption:   Sarah Crutcher, 12-year-old girl herding cattle. Route 4, c/o S.O. Crutcher. She was out of school (#49 Comanche County) only 2 weeks this year and that was to herd 100 head of cattle for her father, a prosperous farmer. She said: "I didn't like it either." She is doing well in school. Is in Grade 8.] Location: [Lawton, Oklahoma]

I think one of the interesting things about this photographs is, contrary to the modern image of what women wore when doing livestock work in the early 20th and late 19th Centuries, she's dressed in completely typical female attire for the time. She's riding wearing a fairly long skirt and a woman's hat that is typical for the period.

The point here?

Well this.  

We've gotten to the point where we don't deal with animals as they really are, daily.  We also are at the point where a large percentage of the original WASP demographic of the nation (more on this shortly) has lost most of the values it originally had, and replaced them with very weak tea instead.  And we've so removed ourselves from a state of nature, that most people don't have a grasp on what nature really is.

It's hard not to know the reality of the world if you live in it.

This past week, the Wyoming Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case in Casper in which the plaintiffs claim they suffered emotional distress as their two pet dogs were caught in snares which they claim were improperly placed on public lands by a trapper.  Apparently, in a companion criminal case, the trapper was exonerated.  The state land is very close to the city, which is a problem, but it's still state land, and still unincorporated.

Losing dogs is a tragedy, but emotional distress?  This has never been allowed in the common law, as the law always held that the law is, basically, for people.  If you can claim emotional distress due to the loss of a pet, why not anything?

Now, that sounds cruel, and I understand grieving over the loss of an animal.  I've done it myself.  That is, in fact, one of the things about owning pets.  Normally, you outlive them, and if you are normal, you'll miss them when they die.

It's a part of life.

But emotional distress has been reserved, in the common law, for the loss of humans, based, in the end, for what we feel with the loss of a loved human being.  Not an animal, no matter how loved.

And of course, up until recently, there was no such concept as a legally recognized animal for "emotional support".  Support they did provide, but the bond was in a naturalistic way, not one for which the law afforded protection.

Have we lost something here?

I think we have, and it's connected with real work and real animals.

We'll explore What's Wrong With The World more in this series of threads, but here's one.  Being connected with animals in a real sense, and not in the sanitary removed from nature sense, helped keep us real.  

We've lost that.

It's hard to be obsessively focused on yourself, including your reproductive self, if you're around animals as animals, particularly great big ones that can hurt you.

And I'll bet the thought "I'm a girl, but I want to be a boy" didn't much cross the minds of Icelandic pony riding milkmaids, Oklahoman girl cowpunchers, or Los Angeles mounted mail carriers.

Related Threads:

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 1. A thought on community

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 2. Care, lack of care, and an existential lack of focus.

Lex Anteinternet: Down the rabbit hole.

Lex Anteinternet: Down the rabbit hole.: Down the Rabbit Hole And so, we find, a contemporary warped Zeitgeist, virtue signaling, cowardice, and bad reporting, have taken the state ...

Well, nothing here is a surprise, we must say.   And therefore, we should not be surprised that the Saga is headed, as it seems it needs to, to Court, while the sorority members themselves, head out the door.

On the latter, only ten of the fifty actual you women who are members are reupping.  The alleged details, and of course they are merely alleged, explain why.

Complaints, we should note, initiate lawsuits, and they are allegations, not proofs. That's important to keep in mind.

Be that as it may, the complaint is illuminating.  Among other things, it described the "transgendered" wanna be woman pestering the real women about sexual topics of a person nature, watching them, and getting an erection while doing so.  He hasn't left on "pajama" night on a timely basis.

Next year, he's moving in.

In short, he's, and he is a he, is sitting around on occasion in the sorority house getting a hard on watching the girls his own age.

The latter is a natural reaction.  What isn't natural is the situation itself.

And what isn't sane is a society that allows a young man to claim he's a girl so that can place him in a girls residence in a manner which sexually excites him, and threatens them.

Which brings me back to this point which was made in our last entry on this story:

Assuming he is intact, and to put it honestly which therefore will come across as indelicate and crass, he's got a dick and balls and male DNA, and he's with a group of young women.  His currently claimed psychological situation may be telling him he's a woman, but his testosterone and biology tells him he's a man, which he is.   And if we know anything about the biology of our species, the mammal with the highest sexual dimorphism and sex drive of any mammal that ever lived, it can override a lot.  Indeed, claimed homosexual men fathering children is not exactly unusual.

So, there's a man, perhaps intact, living in a sorority, simply because he claims to be a woman and has been dressing as one.

I'm not saying that he's going to do something improper.  Chances are he won't.  But I'm saying that, at a bare minimum, it's a bad precedent, as at some point, somebody will.

Let's be blunt.  It very well might not be this guy, and it might very well not be in Laramie, but some young woman is going to get raped in a situation such as this.  I'm not saying might, I'm saying she will.

We already know, of course, that putting young men and young women in close proximity in barracks like situations, or actually in barracks, leads to rape.  The U.S. Army has being dealing with this ever since it started off on its attempt to insert women in what is a traditional male role of combat soldier.  It's been working on it since day one, and it continues to, as the situation carriers on, as it does in the Navy, Air Force and Marines.  

And everywhere it's tried.  Just this past week, the Irish Defense Forces, existing in a land with a nearly homogenous culture with a much stronger religious nature in all levels of society, reported that over 80% of its female members have experienced some sort of sexual harassment, up to and including rape.

We also know, no matter how much some may wish to pretend, that men wishing to be women, and vice versa, is not psychologically normal.  It's also, it should be noted, not really the same thing as homosexuality.  Indeed, homosexuals by and large function in all other aspects of their life according to the mean.  Transgenderism is such a radical departure from reality, however, that it does not.  Something is deeply amiss in a person exhibiting it.

Chances are high that, at a high altitude level, men and women exhibiting are not really exhibiting the same thing.  One thing they are exhibiting, however, is a deep cry for help.  

They aren't getting it, in no small part as liberal sociology is sabotaging it.  Instead, what they are getting if "affirmation". That's not what they're seeking.

I've known, as has everyone, people who are exhibiting really destructive traits.  We've all known drug addicts, alcoholics, and massive over eaters.  All of those things are external traits exhibiting something amiss internally.  The answer to their problems isn't another joint, another drink, and a third serving of short ribs, along with affirmation that it's okay to be a doper, an alcoholic, or massively overweight.  That's going to kill them, and they probably know that.  The kind thing to do is to try to help.

People are going down the transgendered path are asking for help.  They're fleeing from something.  

With women, probably what they think it means to be a woman, which probably isn't what it actually means.

For men, in some cases, they're fleeing from what it means to be a man, or perhaps screaming for attention which they feel they've been denied.

Indeed, no sane many would want to be a woman simply due to the hormonal nightmare and cyclical exsanguination they endure, let alone the second class status they put up with and will continue to for the foreseeable future, not the least of which is that women, far more than men, are judged by their appearance and those crossing over rarely make a good one.

All things insane make it to our courts, at which point the insanity is expelled or ratified.  We may be at the start of a return to reality, or about to abandon it full scale.

Abandoned with it will be the sorority system, we might note, which may have already received a fatal blow.  Be that as it may, those who were too cowardly to arrest this trip before it started ought to pay, at least with shame, for having allowed this to occur.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLV. At War With Nature and the Metaphysical

At war with God. 

We are at war with God.

Joseph Stalin, caught in tape commenting to Molotov.

I don't pay any attention to the Grammy's anymore.  I never much did. Anymore, however, nobody pays much attention to them.  The same has become true of all the other big awards in entertainment that once meant so much.  Now, heavily politicized in a PC fashion, they're really not very interesting and people pretty much ignore them.

Therefore, I ignored the flap over Sam Smith's performance when it came out, even though with Douthat commented on it I started to take a little note.  But then I noticed something else.

It's no secret that a certain segment of Western, liberal, society is at war with our existential nature, which calls into mind, for a believer, Stalin's quote.  And well it should. Communism claimed at first to act in accordance with man's nature, but soon saw it that it couldn't force the nature that it wished for, so it decided to make a new Communist man that was the antithesis to real men in some ways.  It failed.

That's what we have going on now.

Sam Smith is a homosexual.  While Pope Francis is certainly correct that making homosexuality illegal, as it actually is in much of the world, is wrong, celebrating it is nonsensical, just as celebrating hetrosexuality would also be.  It is a deviation from the genetic norm. In spite of that, however, and particularly post Obergefel, now a person can hardly even point that out.

And as people who were well attune to development and trends pointed out, the Obergefel decision was going to inevitably lead to a full scale assault on normality and nature itself, which has busted out in the transgenderism craze.  It was claimed that this would not occur, but with the guardrails down, it pretty much had to.  Not surprisingly, he collaborates with German songwriter Tim Petras, a man who was chemically and probably surgically mutilated as a very early teen, and who goes by the name of Kim Petras and affects a female appearance.

In Smith's performance, he affected a Satanic visage and gave what can only be called an open embrace of what that entails.  Perhaps fully unwitting, Smith has exposed openly what most in his camp have hidden, perhaps for the better.

And by so doing, he joins Stalin in that category. For all his defects, Stalin was a genius and his comment was not only open, I don't believe it to be metaphorical.  At least he had the courage to admit what he was up to.

Of course, like all such efforts, it failed.

It's worth noting that this argument still prevails even for those who claim not to believe or doubt.  Most of the general fundamentals of Christianity in regard to men, women, and what they do and interact, are not only Christian principles, they're principles of every religion, and exhibited in every natural society.  That's why, we'd note, that Communism works no better in North Korea than East Germany.  It's contrary to human nature, as is what these performers are exhibiting.  

You can be at war with nature, but you won't win.

It's interesting to note. . .

Related to the above, that in the commentary in Playboy documentary that aired one of the models flat out stated that she believed Hugh Hefner to be possessed, and that a girl who was a centerfold or "bunny", I can't recall which painted something essentially stating the same thing prior to her committing suicide.

It was really Kinsey, and his bogus report, that started us down this road, although I've blamed Hugh Hefner, justifiably, a lot.

During World War Two, Alfred Kinsey, with colleagues, was busy studying the sexual habits of perverts who were incarcerated, resulting in a text entitled Sexual Behavior In The Human Male, which would have been better entitled Sexual Habits of Incarcerated Perverts Who Couldn't Be Drafted.  It's one of two examples of 1940s "studies" being really results driven.  I.e, a report that isn't a study, but a conclusion being justified subsequently by a report, the other being SLAM Marshall's Men Under Fire.

Both texts have done a lot of damage.

Taken objectively, it turns out that really gross perverts act perversely, which didn't stop Kinsey and his associates from actually arranging some acts that should be regarded as solicitation, or prostitution, or just weird.  Anyhow, their conclusions were erroneous, as is now well known, but so damaging and influential, they're still regarded as persuasive.

In reality, the overwhelming majority of men and women actually had very limited numbers of, as we like to say now, "partners".  Most men and women had no sexual experience at all of the really intimate type until they were married, and it was universally regarded, irrespective of not everyone keeping the standard, that sex outside of marriage was morally wrong.

Enter perversion fan Kinsey and this began to weaken, followed by Hugh Hefner.  Not too surprisingly, we are at where we now are, at war with nature.

99 Luftballons

The entire Chinese balloon flap has been very interesting.  I'm sure that we're not going to know the truth of it for many years.

What we know is only the basics. The Chinese have been flying spy balloons over the United States, and in this case, although barely noted, over Canada as well.  The choice of the two nations together may be simply atmospheric, perhaps that's how you get a balloon over the continental US, or it may be strategic, that flies it over and through NORAD.

It would not appear that the NORAD, American or Canadian response has been stellar. This was apparently, if we're being told the truthy, and we very well might not be, the first time a PRC spy balloon was detected, which if true is a shocking admission of a major NORAD failure.  And the entire story of waiting it so long to shoot it down doesn't pass the smell test at all.  This thing could have been dropped anywhere from the Aleutians to Wyoming harmlessly, but wasn't.  The story about not wanting to damage stuff on the ground simply isn't credible.  They were probably more likely to hit a boater where they took it down than they were to hit a human over much of its course.

Which means somebody is probably fibbing.

We now know that U2s accompanied the balloon nearly its entire route over the US. The high altitude spy plane was spying on the balloon, likely picking up anything it emitted, and perhaps messing with its own emissions.  That alone may be sufficient justification, justification that can't be admitted, for not dropping it until we did.

Chances are good, I'd note, that U2s are flying near the one now in the Southern Hemisphere.

The big question is why are the Chinese doing this?

Well, one reason is that they got away with it so far, and it did a good job of testing NORAD.  We overflew quite a few places with U2s until we simply couldn't, and it was never our intent to test air responses in doing it. We probably also intruded on Soviet waters with submarines for various spying reasons, and the Soviets and Russians probably still do that in some locations.

Nations spy.

But spying in this manner is really interesting.

They may have been able to pick up a lot of electronic data from the ground that a satellite simply couldn't.  And, importantly for a nation that is preparing for war with the United States, and it is, testing NORAD made sense.

A new Cold War?

This question came up on all the weekend shows. Are we in a new Cold War.  Nobody would say yes.

Well, we obviously are.

One analysis, that the level of trade was too high to support that claim, is nonsense. We didn't have a lot of trade with the Eastern Bloc countries, as they had nothing we really wanted to buy at the time.  China has been different, and intentionally so. The real model is the trade level between the Western combatants in World War One, prior to the war.  It was enormous, none of which kept the war from happening.

And this war will go hot.

Are the Chinese going to attack Taiwan?

Probably. 

Well, rather, they will probably try. 

I'd give it about 70% chance of happening by mid-decade.  I.e., we're close.

It'll also be an epic fail.

Crossing the Taiwan Strait will prove beyond them, their casualties will be massive, and their government will fall.

Liars.

Fox news crew with the network.

To nobody's really surprise, unless they chose to be completely self-deluded, Fox News personnel privately acknowledged that they knew Trump hadn't won the 2020 election.  Indeed, privately, some, notably Tucker Carlson, blasted him.

In spite of this, they just keep on keeping on.  If Fox had any honor, all of these people would go, and go right now.

But they won't.  And they'll just keep shoving the crap they're shoveling.

Lying about being Jewish

It's interesting that there is now some political cache, apparently, to being Jewish.

We've long had Jewish politicians in the United States, and even before that.  Francis Salvador, for example, served in the South Carolina provincial legislature at the time of the Revolution and hew as Jewish.  But it can't be doubted, additionally, that being Jewish was once a serious hindrance to obtaining higher office.  While Salvador was undoubtedly an exception, by and large successful 19th Century Jewish politicians in the US, and there were some, came from districts where their constituents at least partially had the some background.

Exceptions started in the 19th Century, however.  Portland, Oregon had back to back Jewish mayors starting in 1869.  Washington Bartlett was the Jewish Governor of California starting in 1887.  And so on.

Be that as it may, Jewish Americans being quiet about their religious identity, in some instances, was pretty common well into the 20th Century.  Indeed, most Jewish actors in American films changed their names, if they had a name that might identify them as being Jewish.

Now that's changed so much that we apparently have two freshman members of Congress claiming Jewish identify when they have none. George Santos is one, and now Anna Paulina Luna is another.  Luna claimed to be raised as a Messianic Jew and that she’s part Ashkenazi Jewish, but has now converted fully to Christianity.

In actuality, she's always been a Christian and one of her grandfathers, a German immigrant, served i the German Army during World War Two.

What's up with this?

Last Prior Edition:

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLIV. Pope Francis writes Fr. James Martin, S.J.

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 2. Care, lack of care, and an existential lack of focus.

 

Basically- Save the tomboys, let little boys paint their nails, don’t be a jerk to your kid because there are bad people/groomers in the world- protect your child and teach them they’re great the way they are and doing those things doesn’t mean they’re a different gender

Luka "Bunny" Hein.

Last Sunday I had a long item on community, and how we're lacking it, and need to restore it.

In that, I also noticed the operation of synchronicity.  And here I find it at work again.

Among the various bills pending in front of the state's legislature are two regarding the horrific abuse of minors in the name of "gender affirming care".  Chemical and surgical attacks on gender and surgery to "reassign", or at least partially remove, a person's gender characteristics is "care" in the same way that the Holocaust was a "solution".  It isn't, it demonstrates extreme moral depravity, and it's an absolutely insane rejection of nature.

Some of this topic, and that one, started off with various items I'd read or heard, which was then followed, by what I just noted here:

Well, I was in the bookstore for three days running, but that's another story.

And just before the trip to the bookstore, I became aware that somebody who I've known their entire life now identifies as transgendered, but there's something else, I suspect, going on there that I'll not deal with here.

I noted in that I'd post another one on this particular topic.

And then the very brave Luka "Bunny" Hein testified in front of the legislature, saying a lot of this stuff more bravely than I could have.

I so thoroughly killed off my younger self to become what I was, what I am, that I truly feel as though trying to find any part of her left in me would just feel like resurrecting someone else’s corpse 

I suppose that metaphor is appropriate with how Frankenstein-like I feel now

Luka Hein.

Hein isn't alone.  She's joined by Chloe Cole, whose name has been given to one of the proposed statutes, "Chloe's Law".  Cole, like Hein, is an activist against this horror, but she's gone further and is crusading generally against what we might call the perversion of youth.  If you want to know why there's so much furor over a certain book that keeps getting mentioned in regard to school libraries, look at her Twitter feed. She put the pages of the book up, complete with the male on male dick sucking images, which are the reason people are complaining about the book.¹

I've known little boys who played with dolls who grew up to be men's men, and I've known plenty of girls who took up what had been formerly regarded as very male activities, or male habits.  Indeed, ironically in our day and age, younger women who have retained highly traditional ideas, or perhaps I should say highly feminine behavior, have been ridiculed and belittled, while women as a whole have been pushed into entire roles that are not only traditionally male, but in some (limited) instances, such as combat soldiers are likely genetically so.  Up until just recently, however, it wasn't the case that the conclusion was made on some societal level that this must mean those boys want to be girls, or those girls want to be boys.  

Now that's being shoved down upon them.² 

What's really going on here?

We discussed some of that just the other day, but there are a number of things going on, the first of which is the complete rejection by the WASP class of the concept of nature and standards, which we touched on in our earlier essay.  That's left them a ship adrift, and subject to the winds of forces which very much have an agenda.

As we've already gone into it in some depth, we won't here. But basically to sum it up, up until after the Second World War the dominant American culture, the WASP culture, was rooted in a Protestant sense of Christianity, which means that it was rooted in a Christian world view.  Even people who were not Protestant Christians picked up large portions of this world view, given us the oddity of Protestantized Catholics and Protestantized Jew, as well as Protestantized Agnostics and even Protestantized Atheists. Humorist Garrison Keiller has a joke in one of his monologues about claimed non believing bachelor farmers going to Lutheran Easter services and noting that "it was a Lutheran God they didn't believe in", but there's something to that.

As part of that, or related to it, American society, and European society wasn't all that far removed from nature in a way up into the early 1960s.  You certainly can find examples of people who lived an urban life for generations by the 60s, but more often than not you'd tend to find some recent rural connection.  People's parents, or grandparents, had been farmers quite often.  And certainly in North America, as Gene Shepherd noted in one of his essays, even urban people retained outdoor activities to some degree if they had no farm connection.³

Why does this matter? Well, for a couple of reasons.  Starting in the 60s, this really started to breakdown.  The Spirit of 1968 essentially rejected all conventions, existential or otherwise, and started society on a path of radical self defined, "if you feel good, do it" type of thinking, inroads into which were already being advanced by the Playboy culture that started attacking the family, in essence, in 1953.  Things were well advanced in this direction by the time Tom Wolfe redefined the Boomers as "The Me Generation" in 1976, by which time the Greed Is Good ethos was also taking root.  By the late 1970s the WASP culture was so diluted it was already about individual self definition, as long as that also included monetary success.  Ties to the land were being lost, in spite of efforts to revive it in an unrealistic idealized sense, so lessons that are plain in nature, were gone.⁴ 

With the guardrails removed, it's no wonder where things ended up, but it didn't happen, of course, overnight.  Indeed, it really took until the Boomers children raised in the larger WASP culture started having their own, and passed on only a very diluted sense of anything whatsoever, with that mostly being "be yourself" and "be successful".  Nobody was a loser, everyone (up until you needed to make money) a winner, and whatever you wanted to do was okay.

Well, nature is nature, sometimes cruel, and that's not the way things work.

And hence we see the fork of a dilemma here, which is impacting the modern age, and the rise of transgenderism in confused, mostly female, adolescents, and confused males in their early 20s.

And that means the root is likely not the same.

The Confused Girls

Luka Hein describes this, having lived through it, about well as anyone can.  By and large, what we see with these girls, and that's what they are, is this.  They're mostly distressed female teenagers with ADHD, some of whom are Tomboys, who are pushed in this direction or find temporary refuge in the identifier.  Totally lacking a community, with parents who are about as firm as milk toast and who have no existential concept of anything, they head that way and then are pushed that way.⁵

In a society grounded in nature, let alone the existential, they'd get real support from their families, which would like be sports, the outdoors, and a community with external standards.  Instead, they get "support" which amounts to pushing them into mutilation.

The big root in this is the lack of a community, combined with an exposure to the perverse early on.  Girls this age don't want to be pushed into sex, let alone pushed into sex, which up until very recently was regarded as extremely weird.  Now they are.  They're pushing back and away. Getting away is the real desire.  Given enough time, and support, to realize that they don't have to yield to whatever weird conduct Reddit is boosting at the moment, or appearing on the cover of "teen" magazines, and they'd be okay.  Moreover, being somebody like Hein, whose Twitter photo is a baby rabbit sitting on a large caliber handgun, doesn't mean you have interest which mean you have to be a closet male.

Polish mountain climber Wanda Rutkiewicz, Tomboy extraordinaire, difficult personality, married woman, and a real woman.  Polish Olympian Maria Magdalena Andrejczyk provides another, very contemporary, example.

The Confused Young Men

Some of what we noted above applies to men as well, but I suspect that we have more often is a cry for attention, or the Laying Flat culture, or both, at work.

While it's not popular in any fashion to say it (although it is being said), it's always been hard to be a man.  This is not to say that it's been easy to be a woman, but frankly the burdens of life have traditionally fallen on men and women quite differently. The historical burden on women is indeed tied to their biology, bearing children is dangerous, or at least was up into the 20th Century, and hard on the body.  And up until the Government stepped in to be the husband of women who cared not to marry the father's of their children, having even one child tied a man to the father if she kept the child permanently as there was no other economic option for the most part.  People have tended to therefore look back and be wistful on the "patrimony".

Truth be known, however, male roles in societies have been blisteringly simple traditionally, if not always easy.  Men were expected to take a societally defense role, with their first obligations being to protect their families first, protect women and children in general secondly, and protect their nation last.  On that last one, you can put in tribe if you are thinking of a more aboriginal society.

Men were also expected to "provide" for their families.  When I was young, it was still the case that people would excuse some other real or imagined failure of a man by stating "he's a good provider".  This had all sorts of meanings in context.  In one hand, a man might have some real moral failings, perhaps he hit the bars a lot, or perhaps he dallied with other women, but if he made a good income and brought it principally home to his family, that was regarded as excusing a lot of other conduct.

Conversely, it was also used in the instances in which a man might otherwise be regarded as boring, plain looking, or not an otherwise romantically attractive person.  "He's a good provider" would be regarded as excusing those failings on one hand, or be used as a basis for suggesting to an unmarried woman why somebody should be regarded as a prospect for marriage.⁶

This goes back to the dawn of the species and reflects the original genetic dimorphism, physically and psychologically, that our species exhibits.  In modern industrial times it reflected itself in a number of interesting ways that directly made, if you will, men's life "hard".

Men working themselves to death wasn't really regarded as abnormal and in certain societies with thin resources, such as Finland, men died much earlier than women did. Men in general still generally die younger than women for that matter.  And dangerous work was a male role, including not only industrial work, but the most dangerous work of all, war.  Indeed, in spite of feminism and a general societal effort to suppress this, this is still largely true.

Much less true, however, is how society reflected this.  

Men were expected to respect women in a much more formal manner than they do now, where this is very much no longer the case.  They were expected to defend them, even in a situation in which they really didn't know them.  They were expected at some point to plan to make a living which "would support a family", or if they didn't feel up to that, and not all did by any means, to drop out of the family raising role for some other societally acceptable one.  They were expected to support families if they had one, including marrying a woman if they got her pregnant and were not married. And they were expected to bare arms if need be.

A good example of this in the early 20th Century is interestingly the Titanic.  A monument in Washington D.C. introduces to us the reason why on its front and back inscriptions:

TO THE BRAVE MEN WHO PERISHED IN THE TITANIC

APRIL 15 1912

THEY GAVE THEIR

LIVES THAT WOMEN

AND CHILDREN

MIGHT BE SAVED

ERECTED BY THE

WOMEN OF AMERICA

Back:

TO THE YOUNG AND THE OLD

THE RICH AND THE POOR

THE IGNORANT AND THE LEARNED

ALL

WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES NOBLY

TO SAVE WOMEN AND CHILDREN

The men on the Titanic, rich and poor, stepped aside so that women and children would live.  This was the traditional expectation, and they fully fulfilled it, stupid modern movies notwithstanding.

The reward, so to speak, for the role was in part simply genetic.  Husky's, the dog, are happy pulling sleds, which coyotes would not be.  Much of this just worked the same way.  Additionally, however, male life tended to result in male societies, formally and informally, going all the way back to tribal society.  Membership in them was part of being male, and amazingly universal.⁷ Indeed, it started off in childhood, with the first "band of brothers" usually being a "band of boys", and later some formal organization, like the Cub Scouts.

Now all of this is shattered.  A society that confused equality of the sexes, which existed much more than imagined prior to feminism, but which has been confused by the failure to understand how technology impacted that, with samism, has created a societal requirement that, save for professional sports, the physical differences between women and men are not to be mentioned.  Men have become shy about defending women the way they once did, least they receive a rebuke. Well-intentioned government subsidies combined with the society wide adoption of the "Playboy Ethic" has blinded society to the physical and psychological impacts of sex so that not only are men not really expected to take care of any children they cause, or the women who bare them, but they're actually expected to put out irrespective of the consequences.  This is so much the case that in a fairly recent notorious event in which somebody was unjustly killed, the press was full of his being a "good father", which in real terms simply meant that he'd fathered a lot of children, and not all by the same woman.  Not that he was acting as a parent.

Added to that, the traditional role of "defense" has seen female intrusion as something that must be accepted, although in reality it hasn't gone that far at the armati homines level.  

Male societies now are completely verboten. You can't do that.  The Boy Scouts must admit girls, and is the Scouts.  Men, basically, have no larger societal refuge from their male lives.

And the point of those lives is now warped. The "get a good job" pressure is still there, but point is missing. Getting a good job is supposed to occur, so you can buy toys.  In the WASP end of things, many of the upper middle class WASPs avoid children entirely.  Ultimately procreation, a reality of earlier years, is just regarded as recreation, and therefore the object of it on the giving and receiving end easily disposed of.

As feminist author Susan Faludi has put it, men have been "Stiffed".

That gets to this.

If young teenage women, on the cusp of becoming young women, have been freighted by the Reddit/Internet portrayal of their expectation that they serve as harem concubines for men in general, and have opted out through transgenderism, young men, a little past their early teen years, and perhaps fully past them but still in their very young 20s, have looked at this in some instances and looked for the door out.

In the past, as noted, there was an outdoor, even before much of this became so perverse.  In rural societies, bachelor farmers, who often weren't terribly good farmers, were a pretty common and accepted thing. Farming, and ranching, was good honorable work, and not getting married as part of that was more common than a person might suppose.

The unmarried industrial worker was also surprisingly common.  A sort of portrayal of this, combined with one man's desire to get married, is shown in the movie Marty.  Enlisted men in the Army, with the exception of senior NCO's, sometimes, tended to be unmarried.  Indeed, junior officers were usually unmarried, and in some militaries, such as the British Army and, while a bad example, the Imperial Russian Army, marriage was highly frowned upon. Moreover, certain male occupations tended to fall towards unmarried men by default, and some, such as the Catholic priesthood, required it.  Just as male society tended to accept the mentally off a bit into it's ranks in the larger group, it accepted unmarried men into it as well.⁹

With the rise of the societal acceptance of homosexuality as ostensibly normal, this dynamic completely changed. While there have always been people with same sex attraction, unmarried men were not assumed to be "gay", they were assumed to be unmarried.  Homosexual men did fall into the categories mentioned, as the wealth in society started to rise mid 20th Century and certain low paying occupations became increasingly societally unacceptable to obviously intelligent men, this increased. But the postwar economic boom, the Playboy culture onset, the Sexual Revolution, and Feminism completely destroyed what had been.

At some point, by the late 1980s, society would no longer let men who wanted to basically drop out of things, for whatever reason, do it.  A couple of decades prior society accepted that a guy could take an industrial job, for instance, and work it his entire life as a single man, with a single dwelling, and not be homosexual. By the late 80s, no longer.  And no longer was such a person really even allowed to peaceably dwell in that condition, but an absolute need for sex of some sort was presumed.  Such people were presumed to be homosexual and if they were younger, relationships they might not really want were forced on them.  The Friends and Big Bang Culture had arrived.

At the same time, the rise of the Me Generation meant that money for individual hedonistic purposes was now the point of being.  You needed a "career" so you could live well, even if living well really meant that everything was for entertainment, including other people.

How do you get out of that?

Well, "transitioning" will work.

Based at least on some observation, young men just getting ignored in their plight, with parents who aren't going to provide any guide rails, is a big factor in this.  They aren't really seeking to change genders, they're trying, ironically enough, to get back to the 1950s.

How does this end?

I'm usually pretty cautions about quoting Rod Dreher.  I like some of his stuff, and not so much others.  Be that as it may, he's spot on here:

There will be no justice until every damn doctor, hospital, and medical association responsible for this atrocity has been sued into the ground, and some of them imprisoned. Forgiveness? Yes, in time (though that's easy for me to say, as I have not suffered what this father has suffered) -- but only after full lustration, only after Nuremberg-like tribunals, only after the trials, only after utter and complete shame shattering all the luminaries and the institutions -- including the Democratic Party, the TV networks, the major newspapers -- which brought this evil onto the lives of American children and their families.

Those who did this to young women like her -- people like Dr. Gallagher above, who revels on social media in her success in slicing the healthy breasts off of women -- God willing, they will pay within the limits of the law for what they have done. As evil as the Tuskegee Experiment was, this is even more damaging, because it has created, and is creating daily, thousands of more victims.

He's exactly right.

Indeed, it's already happening. Chloe Cole has filed suit.  My prediction is that if she doesn't win, somebody soon after her will.  And like the Opioid lawsuits that are now so common, they'll drive this out of the societal field by litigation force and judgements.  In the meantime, the same society that was just lately pushing pills will be "oh my, oh my, how could this terrible of thing have happened.

But that won't solve the larger problem.

Their end is destruction. Their God is their stomach; their glory is in their “shame.” Their minds are occupied with earthly things.

Philippians; 3:19.

This pretty much defines where we are, even though's worshiping their stomachs and glorifying in their shame don't recognize it.   That has to change, and changing that is a tall order.

Because in order to do that, the lens, in society has to be turned back to me, towards the whole, and the existential.

Footnotes:

1.  I really haven't tracked the library debate much and have discounted it, but Cole's posting makes it plain how far things are gone.  The book clearly illustrates the author's descent into homosexual conduct and is frankly pornographic.  It shouldn't be in a school library, and it does amount, intentionally or not, to transgender propaganda.

At no point prior to our current era would there even been a debate on whether a book which graphically depicts sexual acts, let alone homosexual acts, should be available to be checked out of a public school library. The fact that there is such debate now is a sign of how far gone things really are, and additionally how entrenched certain interests are that not only want to defend their contra natural lifestyle, but actually promote it.

2. To state this bluntly, what people feared about the Obergefel decision has not only come to pass, but it's surpassed those fears.

This should not have surprised anyone.  Many years ago the homosexual book After the Ball, according to those who have read it, and I have not, not only argued for the normalization of homosexuality, but apparently for the dismantling of marriage and the traditional and long-established incidents of male/female relationships.  Presently, not only are those campaigning for the normalization of transgenderism, but campaigning for it, which is accompanied by foisting medial "treatments" upon the very young, and the accompanying large-scale transfers of cash that entails.  

This has happened before with other industries.  Think, for example, this:

3.  Shepherd noted in one of his books how the men in the Indiana city in which he grew up all subscribed to Field & Stream, even though they largely were not outdoorsmen.  It was a retained desire.

4.  One of the odder examples of this, very widespread, is the change in our relationship with animals.

Our species is one of those which has a symbiotic relationship with other ones.  We like to think that this is unique to us, but it isn't.  Many other examples of exist of birds, mammals and even fish that live in very close relationships with other species.  When this occurred with us, we do not know, but we do know that its ancient.  Dogs and modern wolves both evolved from a preexisting wolf species starting some 25,000 to 40,000 years ago, according to the best evidence we currently have. That likely means it was longer ago than that.

Cats, in contrast, self domesticated some 7,000 or so years ago, according to our best estimates.

Cat eating a shellfish, depiction from an Egyptian tomb.

We have a proclivity for both domesticating animals, and accepting self domestication of animals, the truth being that such events are likely part and parcel of each other. Dogs descend from some opportunistic wolves that started hanging around us as we killed things they liked to eat.  Cats from wildcats that came on as we're dirty.  Both evolved thereafter in ways we like, becoming companions as well as servants.  But not just them, horses, pigs, sheep, cattle. . .the list is long.

As we've moved from the natural to the unnatural, we've forgotten that all domestic animals, no matter how cute and cuddly they are, are animals and were originally our servants. And as real children have become less common in WASP culture, the natural instinct to have an infant to take care of, or even adore, has transferred itself upon these unwilling subjects, making them "fur babies".

It's interesting in this context to watch the difference between people who really work with animals, and those who do not.  Just recently, for example, our four-year-old nephew stayed the night due to the snow, and was baffled why our hunting dog, who is a type of working dog but very much a companion, stayed the night indoors.  The ranch dogs do not. . . ever.  The ranch cats, friendly though they are, don't either.

5.  Both Hein and Cole have been reluctant to criticize their parents, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be criticized.  These strong daughters honor their parents by providing the backbone that their parents completely lacked.

Having said that, this illustrates the point I noted above.  These young women are roughly in their early 20s, which means they were born either in this century, or the tail end of the last one.  This means that their parents were likely born in the 70s or 80s, to parents who had come up in during the 60s.  So in effect they are the grandchildren of Boomers whose children were often raised with the ethos of the 60s and 70s, which combined would be there are no standards and your goal is to make money.  Additionally, their parents came up during the GOP's gutting of science funding in schools.  So they were born to parents whose grasp of the physical and metaphysical is weak, and whose principal world view is that it's nice to be nice to the nice.

6.  While citing to fiction is always dangerous, an interesting example of this are well depicted in the fiction of Jane Austen.  Not really intended for wide circulation, and limited to the concerns of her class, they nonetheless demonstrate the basic nature of male and female relationships across the ages, which is why they remain incredibly popular, particularly amongst young women who tend to see themselves in the characters.

A feature of this is the "provider" aspect.  Tending to focus on families made up of women, the unmarried women are the concerns of their parents and concerned themselves.  Finding a suitable match, to so speak, dominates the novels, with tension between that and romantic love.  An example in Pride and Prejudice, her best novel, is found in the character of Charlotte Lucas, the protagonist close friend, who opts to marry the Episcopal Churchman, William Collins, who is the epitome of boorish and overbearing, as she's 27 and has no other prospects, and his position is secure.

7.  An example of this given that at some point, it must have been in the 1950s and perhaps early 60s, my father was a member of the Knights of Columbus.

Now, my father was not a joiner by any means, but in the 50s and 60s a man would almost by default be a member of some organizations.  He was the President one year of his profession's statewide professional association, which means that he had been active in it.  And based on some recollections he related to me over the years, he'd been a member of the Knights when the Knights still had a downtown clubhouse.  So had two of my uncles, at least.  Maybe, and probably, all four of them were.

The Knights were a much different organization then, at least locally, than now.  Now I know that they act as a mutual benefit society, as I am sure they did then, and I note them most frequently for having pancake breakfasts at one of the parish churches every Sunday after the early morning Mass.  They may have done that then as well, but the big difference is that their clubhouse, like most men's clubs of the day, had a bar, and it could get a little rowdy.  The long serving Parish Priest of the era stopped in every night at closing time to make sure that they were actually closing, and their St. Patrick's Day parties were legendary.

Be that as it may, it's almost impossible to imagine my father in that setting. Probably after he married, or at least after I was born, he chose not to be, which was in keeping with his character.  Still, it's interesting that you pretty much had to be a member of some social club, probably male only, if you were a man prior to the 1970s.

I've never been a member of anything like that, really, although when I was first practicing law the county bar association was amazingly active and often met one evening, right after work, in a bar, ostensibly to present a CLE.  My enduring memory of one of those meetings was getting there in time, but just in time, and having to squeeze into the back row of table seating, only to have one notoriously rude female lawyer saying something like "so you think you can get around my fat ass?"

She later was subject to a scandal when her husband turned her over to the authorities for molesting him when he was a minor.

9.  This is reflected back to us by the culture of earlier eras in some odd ways.  

For instance, in cartoons, an unmarried male character was really common. Gasoline Alley's central protagonist was, at first, unmarried, with this changing as female readership was low.