One of the awards most respected by soldiers to be issued by the U.S. Army, the Combat Infantry Badge, was authorized.
Limited to infantrymen alone who have seen actual ground combat, the creation of the award acknowledged the particular horrors experienced by infantrymen in combat. The World War Two awards were upgraded, which they likely should not have been as it cheapened the original awards, to Bronze Stars in the 1980s, reflecting the particular horrors of World War Two in which soldiers were not rotated home but served until severely injured, killed, or the end of the war.
It followed the authorization of the Expert Infantry Badge, which had been authorized on November 11, 1943.
Both awards remain enormously respected in the U.S. Army.
"Nomadic" Gypsies in the Soviet Union were reclassified by Germany to be in the same racial category as Jews and therefore subject to the death camps, whereas "sedentary" Romani were classified as citizens of the country they were in.
The order would ultimately extend beyond the occupied regions of the USSR and was another example of how, as Nazi Germany's fate became sealed, it became more homicidal.
Offensive actions by the U.S. Fifth Army were halted by Gen. Alexander.
Today In Wyoming's History: November 15: 1943 1943 Harmonica player Larry Adler played at the University of Wyoming. Adler was a well known harmonica player.
Manuel L. Quezon was inaugurated as President of the Philippines, in exile. It was his third term. In the Philippines a collaborationist government, not as disdained by the post-war Philippines as might be supposed, was in control, with the sanction of the Japanese.
The Cross Mountain, Colorado post office was closed, putting an end to the Moffat County town.
Incoming University of Wyoming College of Law class (Class of 2026).
Wow, look at all those suits and ties.
These students are a nice looking bunch. A colleague of mine, who works in another firm, has a kid in it.
I didn't meet my law school classmates until the first day of law school. This group was apparently brought in early, and told to dress up. The first time I wore a tie in law school was actually after it, at my bar exam interview, back when Wyoming had a real bar exam rather than the Universal Locally Un-iformed Bar Exam.
I'm impressed. This is what a law school entering class should look like, and I hope it bodes well for the future.
The not very attractive Joseph C. O'Mahoney Federal Courthouse in Cheyenne.
This suit's result has hit the news, and because it involves an evolving societal topic regarding fiction and how far we're willing to entertain it in the name of individualism, we're going to make a couple of comments.
Page 1 of the 41 page decision:
1. As soon as this came out, some commentator on Twitter immediately suggested it must have been decided by a "Casper judge".
Eh?
It's not as if Casper is stocked with liberal judges or something. This is a Federal Court case, moreover, and we only have three Federal judges, two in Cheyenne and one in Casper. This was decided by Judge Johnson in Cheyenne. He's been on the bench since 1985 and was appointed by that flaming liberal, Ronald Reagan.
Having said that, not all of Regan's "conservative" appointments were impressively conservative. Take Anthony Kennedy, for example.
Be that as it may, Judge Johnson is universally recognized as a solid judge. The weird suggestion that it must have been some flaming liberal, and that the flaming liberal must be in Casper, as where else would they be, is weird.
2. This was decided "without prejudice", which means on technical and procedural grounds. The suit hasn't decided the issues. It can be brought again.
Whether it will be or not, nobody knows. But this doesn't decide any legal issues.
Often lawyers don't regard dismissals with prejudice as that big of deal, quite frankly, as it gives them the chance to go back and refine their suit.
This gets at one of the big problems in perception of courts today, however. A large number of people believe that judges are supposed to rule on existential issues. They are not. This perception, moreover, is made worse by pundits like Robert Reich who continually suggest that activists' courts are deciding these issues on a left/right basis, something made worse by decades of prior conservative yapping that "activist judges" were deciding things for the left, the latter of which was somewhat true. Most of the time judges are just deciding things on the law, or even procedure, that have nothing to do with the existential issues. The continual "America is losing faith with its justice system" mantra that the press is chanting right now is because large elements of the press don't grasp that deciding social issues isn't what courts are supposed to do.
3. I learned in the opinion that the sorority calls itself a fraternity.
How odd. Deficit of understanding of Latin root words?
4. Judge Johnson did condescend to call Mr. Langford a "sorority sister". The guy has male DNA and, well, you know. He's not a girl, and this ongoing societal delusion is really absurd.
That's what really gets to people. It's a contest between individualist fantasy, and the degree to which everyone else must tolerate the fantasy, and reality. We're in an age when dangerous self-delusion must be accepted, a certain segment of society maintains.
I went to the Black Tooth Brewery in Casper's beer reveal, for their new UW themed beer. I wasn't really interested in going but my wife was, so my wife, daughter and her boyfriend all went.
Secretary of State Chuck Gray was there.
The can has an old style state license plate theme, and therefore it would need cooperation from UW anyway, which owns the trademark for the symbol and jealously guards it. That requires the cooperation of the Secretary of State's office. This is being done as a "partnership" with UW, so there's no doubt that it would have come. One of the employees of the SoS's office was thanked by UW, and to his credit, Secretary Gray thanked the woman as well.
But Gray, who has spent a lot of time touring the state and showing up at political events, just couldn't help but go negative and throw in some nasty line about how we aren't "woke" in Wyoming and referencing Budweiser.
The reaction of the crowd was muted at best. This was a Wyoming beer crowd, not a populist far right gathering, and chances are a lot of the people in the audience were either apolitical or old style Wyoming conservatives. Gray seemed to get the message right away and finished his talk, or whatever it was.
I'm really sick of this behavior. Gray boosted lies as a candidate, and now he runs around trying to pour gasoline on politics and ignite fires when he doesn't need to. Wyoming's politicians never used to do this, and they certainly didn't do it while in office.
What must it be like to have to be angry all the time?
For that matter, what must it be like to wear brand-new Wranglers, a style of jeans designed for people with cowboy bodies, and brand-new thick soled cowboy boots, the type that cowboys don't wear.
Why did people vote for Gray? It's really a mystery. That he's campaigning for the Governor's office right now should be evident to everyone. Wyomingites would really have to be suckers to vote for Gray for that office, but then, they were suckers when they put him in his current office.
But beyond that, what kind of personality do you have to have in order to show up at everything with some right wing screed? Can't anyone just enjoy their day without having to be fed a spoonful of BS?
And at what point does putting on a wrathful show convert your personality to fully wrathful? I know one lawyer who puts on such an act all the time that I think he's truly lost his real personality. At some point, that would occur.
Gray referred to the famous rodeo horse in his speech, Steamboat. That's frustrating but inevitable, particularly as his speech, which short, was rambling, much like a speech by a high schooler whose concluded that he's too smart to prepare a speech. Gray rambled on, something about Steamboat and World War One.
Steamboat was never used by the Wyoming Army National Guard in reality, or as a symbol. That's Red Wing.
This is never going to get straightened out, but frankly I have a hard time imagining Gray caring, just like I don't think he's going to be flanking any calves while wearing those boots and jeans at branding.
On politics, here's an episode of Jimmy Akin's mysterious world really worth listening to.
It's fascinating history, but beyond that, if you can't see the parallels between today's far right populists and the Knights, you just aren't trying.
The only weekend show that's downloaded for me so far has been Meet The Press, and I didn't listen to it. The theme was the Supreme Court.
"The Supreme Court is corrupt!" is to the American political left what "Trump won the election" is to the populist far right, and they're both based on the exact same thing, a contempt for democracy. The far right wants the election to have been stolen, as that would mean it's not a permanent political minority, and we're never going back to wherever they think we were. The left wants the Court to be corrupt as it might get to boot a couple members off and the country would return to the good old days when the Court decided things rather than state legislatures.
In the case of the Court, the entire claim is based on something that's true, but just is. Positions of power and wealth attract each other. You might not like it, but that's the way the world actually works. That doesn't make it illegal, and it doesn't mean that terrible things are going on behind closed doors.
The guest, early on, makes a comment about the beginning of the 20th Century, end of the 19th, and mentions "archeology was new". I thought I'd misheard that, but he mentioned it again, and added sociology.
He explained it, but it really hit me.
Archeology, and sociology, in fact, were new. Many academic disciplines were.
Indeed, that's something we haven't looked at here before. People talk all the time about the decline of the classic liberal education (at a time that very few people attended university), but when did modern disciplines really appear?
Indeed, that's part of what make a century ago, +, more like now, than prior to now. Educational disciplines, based on the scientific method in part, really began to expand.
So, we can take, for example, and find the University of Wyoming recognizable at the time of its founding in 1886.
But would Princeton, as it is now, be recognizable in 1786?
And interesting also how this effected everything, in this case, the Church's look at its liturgy.
But also, everything, really, about everything, for good and ill.
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.
Sister Maria Restituta, age 48, was beheaded under orders of Martin Bormann. An absolute vocal critic of Hitler and Nazism, she refused to be quiet about her opinions, no matter the cost.
Sister Restituta.
Sister Restituta had been born in Austria, and was of Czech desecent. Her full name, after becoming a nun, was Maria Restituta Kafka. She had been born Helene Kafka and had joined the order in her 20s, having first been a nurse. She was a member of the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity.
She was beatified in 1998.
One of the most iconic photographs of George S. Patton to be taken, was taken on this day in Tunisia.
This photo is justifiably famous, but it's sometimes a bit misinterpreted. It really doesn't show anything that unusual for a senior officer of the period.
Patton is wearing a B-3 flight jacket, the heavy sheepskin jacket that was issued to aviators who flew at altitude until synthetics and electrically heated flight suits started to replace it mid-war. It would not be fully replaced during the war. Both the heavy B-3 and the light A-2 saw widespread use beyond airmen, however.
A-2s were issued as a semi dress item to airborne officers (and perhaps enlisted men, although I'm not completely certain on that), signifying that 1) they were an airborne service and 2) there were a lot of them. A-2s made their way into the Navy in some roles as well. They were also widely worn by officers.
B-3s were issued not only to air crewmen, but to ground crews as well, as there were a lot of them. They were a private purchase item with officers, and senior officers sometimes favored them as they were warm.
Patton's B-3 here has had some alterations made to it, including at least one front pocket. You can see his reading glasses held in the visible pocket. You'll frequently see it claimed on websites that Patton had epaulets added to this coat, but that's completely incorrect, at least at the time this photograph was taken. His general's stars are visible, but they are neither pinned nor sewed on epaulets. Indeed, the seam that's visible is simply a coat seam. Other, sometimes later, photos do show Patton wearing a B-3 with epaulets, but that probably actually depicts a different coat, or that this one was subsequently altered as he was promoted.
Patton, perhaps with same B-3 as it has reinforced upper sleeves, but now featuring also epaulets, with the coat featuring the 1st Armored Corps patch. The other figure is Major General Geoffrey Keyes, whose coat features II Corps insignia. This photograph was taken in January, 1944.
The odd things about those photographs are that they show that Patton had that coat at the time that he was the commander of the 1st Armored Corps, which he had relinquished prior to March 1943 when he took over II Corps. Patton was a bit of a stickler about uniforms being correct, but at least in that case his having had the 1st Armored Corps patch put on an expensive coat probably proved to be a mistake, as it couldn't be removed, so he therefore kept wearing it.
The stars on this one, or this coat at this time, are probably painted on.
This coat does have a reinforced upper arm, which is also an alteration, but not one that's as uncommon as might be supposed. I've seen at least one photograph of a conventional aviator with the same alteration. Alterations, often done at the local level, were very common. The location of the unit patch on the reinforcement probably explains why the patch was never replaced. Subsequent promotion probably explains why epaulets were later added.
Sailors in 1950.
Today In Wyoming's History: March 30: 1943 Led by legendary UW basketball player Kenny Sailors, UW beat Georgetown 46 to 34 in Madison Square Gardens. Sailors would enter the Marine Corps as an officer at the conclusion of that year. UW would suspend basketball due to the war after that year. Sailors eventually became a hunting guide in Alaska, but returned to Wyoming in his old age, where he still lives, following the death of his wife.
Note: that item was originally penned, Sailors was in fact alive. However, he subsequently passed on January 30, 2016, in Laramie, Wyoming. Sailors remains a Wyoming basketball legend.
The 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment made a 2,000 trooper jump, the first such mass jump in US history.
The 505th had been formed in July 1942 and was originally under the command of James Gavin. It had been assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division only a month prior to its first mass jump.
The USS Salt Lake City damaged due to Japanese fire.
The Battle of Komandorski, a battle with a deceptively Russian name, took place between the U.S. Navy and Japan. The Navy intercepted a convoy of Japanese ships attempting to reach Kiska and engaged in a pitched surface action. No ships were sunk during the battle, but the Japanese ultimately withdrew.
Kim Barker, a journalist who is best known for her book on Afghanistan, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, is coming out with a podcast on a 1985 unsolved murder in Laramie. Moreover, Barker was apparently a high school student at the time.
And she doesn't like the city of her alma mater at all. Of it, in the promotions for this podcast, she's stated:
"I've always remembered it as a mean town. Uncommonly mean. A place of jagged edges and cold people. Where the wind blew so hard it actually whipped pebbles at you."
Wow.
And there's more:
I don't like crime books, but oddly I do like some crime/mystery podcasts. I'm not sure why the difference, and as I'm a Wyomingite and a former resident of Laramie, I'll listen to the podcast.
But frankly, I’m already jaded, and it's due to statements like this:
It was an emblem of her time in Laramie, a town that stood out as the meanest place she’d ever lived in.
Really, you've been to Afghanistan, and Laramie is the meanest place you've lived in?
Hmmm. . . . This is, shall we say, uncommonly crappy. And frankly, this discredits this writer.
I've lived in Laramie twice.
All together, I guess, I've lived in Casper, Laramie, and Lawton (Ft. Sill) Oklahoma. I've been to nearly every town and city in Wyoming, and I've ranged as far as Port Arthur, Texas to Central Alaska, Seoul, South Korea to Montreal.
The author may recall it that way, but if she does, it says more about her life at the time than Laramie.
And indeed, I suspect that's it.
If you listen to the trailer, you hear a string. . . dare I say it, of teenage girl complaints, preserved for decades, probably because she exited the state soon after high school, like so many Wyomingites do. I can't verify that, as her biography is hard to find. Her biography on her website starts with her being a reporter, as if she was born into the South East Asian news bureau she first worked for. A little digging brings up a source from Central Asia, which her reporting is associated with, and it notes that its very difficult to find information on her. It does say, however, that she grew up in Billings, Montana and grew up with her father. Nothing seems to be known about her mother. She's a graduate of Norwestern University, which supports that she probably graduated from high school in Laramie and then took off, never to look back. How long did she live there is an open question, and what brought her father there is another. Having said all of that, teenage girls being relocated isn't something they're generally keen on, and Billings is a bigger city than Laramie. I have yet to meet anyone who didn't like Billings.
Now, I didn't go to high school in Laramie, but I was in Laramie at the time that Barker was, and these events occurred. 1985 is apparently the critical date, and I was at UW at the time. I very vaguely recall this event occurring, and didn't at first. I vaguely recall one of the things about Laramie that Barker mentions in her introduction, which was the male athlete branding. What I recall is that there was a local scandal regarding that, and it certainly wasn't approved by anyone.
A lot of her miscellaneous complaints, however, are really petty and any high school anywhere in the United States, save perhaps for private ones, might be able to have similar stories said about it. Boys being sent out to fight if they engaged in fighting within the school wasn't that uncommon in the 80s. I don't recall it happening at my high school, outside of the C Club Fights, but I do recall it from junior high, in the 1970s, and experienced it myself. I don't regard it as an act of barbarism, although I woudln't approve of it. As noted, I recall this branding story, which was a scandal and not approved of, but today an equally appalling thing goes on all over the United States with the tattooing of children for various reasons, including minors, in spite of its illegality. Certainly college sports teams feature this frequently, and I'd wager many high school athletes experience a similar example of tribalism.
What's really upsetting, however, is the assertion that Laramie was, and is, "mean".
When I went to Laramie in 1983 for the first time, I didn't look forward to it. I found the town alien at first and strange. I probably would have found any place I went to under those circumstances to be like that. I was from Central Wyoming and had lived there my entire life, save for a short stint at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. But by the time I graduated in 1986, I had acclimated to it and there were parts of living in Albany County I really liked. I was back down there a year later, this time not dreading it, and as a graduate student I was pretty comfortable in the town.
I also wasn't a teenager being dislocated from the place I grew up in.
In my last couple of years of undergraduate studies, and in all of my graduate years, I was pretty comfortable with the city. I knew the places and things there, and had friends there. In the summers, and I spent a couple there, it was a really nice place in particular to live.
And let's be honest. Just as the land of high school angst might seem awful, the land you are in when you are young usually isn't.
If I had any complaints, at that time, it was about housing and prices. Housing was always a crisis for a student, and a lot of the places I lived were not very nice. Some were pretty bad. And prices locally were really high, it seemed to us. Local merchants complained about students shopping in Ft. Collins, but we did that as it was cheaper than shopping in Laramie.
The weather in Laramie is another thing. It's 7,000 feet high, in the Rockies, and therefore it can be cold and snowy. The highway closes a lot. In the early 1980s, it was really cold and snowy, with temperatures down below 0 quite regular. Interestingly, by the late 1980s this was less the case. And it does have wind, but ten everyplace from El Paso to the Arctic Circle is pretty windy. Wyoming weather can be a trial for some people, particularly those who are not from here.
Which gets, I guess, to this. A Colorado colleague notes that you have to be tougher just to live in the state. You do. Being from here makes you that way. As the line in the film Wind River puts it, in an exchange between the characters:
Jane Banner: Shouldn't we wait for back up?
Ben: This isn't the land of waiting for back up. This is the land of you're on your own.
And that can be true. If you aren't at least somewhat self-reliant, this may not be the place for you.
The further you get away from Laramie, the more this can be true. Laramie is the most "liberal" city in regular Wyoming, surpassed in that regard only by Jackson. Albany County nearly always sends at least one Democrat to the legislature. If there's left wing social legislation pending, there's a good chance it comes out of Albany County. Albany County is the only county in the state, outside of Teton, where all the things that drive the social right nuts are openly exhibited, due to the University of Wyoming. In real terms, about 1/3d of the city's population are students at any one time, and a lot of those who are not students are employed by the University of Wyoming.
When I graduated from law school, I noted that a lot of students who passed through the College of Law stayed there if they could. That says something about the town. Several good friends of mine over the years who are lawyers stayed there, including ones that had come there from other Wyoming locations. Even a few of my non law school friends worked and lived there for a time, although none of them do any longer.
And in the years since I lived there the influence of Ft. Collins has come in, with downtown establishments mimicking those that are fifty miles to the south. I've known people who retired and left the town, but I also have known people who retired to it.
It's not mean.
But the whole world is mean to some teenagers, with their limited experience and exaggerated sensibilities. Some people keep that perception for the rest of their lives.
That's the temperatures as I write this at 6:06 a.m.
And yes, that's cold. Dangerously cold, in fact.
But it's not "once in a generation", as the spastic news broadcast on this topic would have it. I've seen it colder than this, nearly doubly so, right here where I live. And I've seen -25F lots of times.
This, frankly, is a normal winter temperature.
No, we don't get down to -25F every winter, but we always get below 0F and at one time we'd get down below -10F every year. What's not normal is that we don't see high Arctic temperatures every winter.
People's reactions to cold are interesting.
In recent decades, a lot of men have taken up wearing toddler's knee pants all year long. You know, those trousers designed for little boys called "shorts". Wearing them in the summer, if you don't have a job that requires protection from horse, thorns or the sun is allowable, if you are a guy, and definitely allowable if you are a gal, the latter being part of the patriarchal conspiracy, so men can see your legs, is okay. But the "I’m a really tough toddler, look at me in my knee pants" look that has broken out in recent years is a bit much.
One nice thing about weather this cold is that those people actually put some trousers on.
Interestingly, women did weeks ago.
Another interesting thing about it is that people behave abnormally, particularly if it's accompanied by snow.
On that, by the way, as these things are so well predicted in advance anymore, if a big cold snap is coming in, you are going to hear somebody say "there won't be any snow as it'll be too cold to snow".
It's never too cold to snow.
I was pleased that this storm was accompanied by a blizzard. It was -15 and white-out conditions due to the snow.
I hope everyone who, two days ago, said "it'll be too cold to snow" had their friends and relatives call up and say LOOK LUIGI! IT'S SNOWING!
Harumph.
Anyhow, when it snows around here, a certain number of people forget everything they ever knew about driving. Yesterday I was provided with a minor example when a Subaru hatch back, a good 4x4 car, decided that all four lanes of a four lane two-way road were now his travel lane. It finally came to a head when I pulled up to a stop light in which he was crowing all the lanes, and got in the only left-hand forward lane room he had left. That clearly surprised him, and he had to speed up to reclaim all the lanes.
Some people, I've noticed, won't slow down for conditions at all. Some, on the other hand, assume that the conditions merit driving at 2 mph.
In recent years, I've also noted that snow days have expanded to offices. It's bizarre.
When I first worked in an office, if there was a titanic late day blizzard such that mastodons were travelling the streets and polar bears were threatening to eat the runner, we'd let people go home about 4:00 p.m. The only time we ever let people go home early due to cold was one year when the temperature got down to -40F and the boiler went out. You really can't work in a building when it's -40F and there's no heat.
Now, however, if we start getting a decent snow, people start asking if we're going to dismiss the employees from work.
Eh?
Yesterday, by early afternoon, I was getting that question due to the cold. "Are we going to let people go home early?"
No, we're not. It's cold outside, and we're inside.
The Bureau of Land Management, I noticed, did go home.
What the heck?
Impertial Perogative
While I have no personal beef with him at all, the hiring by Secretary of State elect Chuck Gray of Harriet Hageman's nephew as his government funded SoS attorney bugs me.
I really don't know why the Secretary of State has an in-house lawyer at all, other than that in spite of what the Republicans like to spout about limiting the expansion of government, the Republican administration of the state, like every other state, has expanded the staffing of governmental offices enormously.
I don't know for sure, but my guess would be that as late as the 1960s, the Secretary of State's office, which does the same job that it currently does, was probably staffed by the SoS, a full time assistant, who probably did the actual work, and about four women clerks who did the heavy lifting. Yes, the job involves a lot of things that involve the law, but they probably made it go that way. The SoS, if he had a legal question, probably walked down the hall and asked somebody at the Attorney General's office what the answer was.
Now, however, the SoS has a full time dedicated lawyer, and I think the Governor may too. If this keeps up, the janitorial staff at the Capitol Building will have one also. Why not?
Now, that Chuck Gray might need a lawyer to advise him, I don't doubt. That office deals with a lot of legal filings. But there's utterly no reason that the AG's office can't dedicate a lawyer to the office, amongst that lawyer's other duties. Chuck can go down the hall, read the latest issue of Bureocratic Quarterly in the lobby, and ask some AG his question, something probably like "how can I call out the National Guard to make Kari Lake the Gauleiter of Arizona?"
But, no, he's going to have his own full time lawyer in an office, we might note, where almost everyone at the executive level is new, most likely as they didn't care to serve under him.
And that lawyer has one year of experience.
It's a rule of thumb in the law that a lawyer isn't really fully functional on his own until he or she has been working for a decade. They call it practice for a reason. Like everything else, this is just a rough rule. Some people don't take that long, some take a bit longer.
Nobody is capable of really efficient practice after a year of work.
If the new hire's tasks are limited to strictly research projects, something that's a huge waste of money for the State of Wyoming, this might be okay. But if it's anything else, it's problematic.
Harriet Hageman was apparently just down in Phoenix talking at something called "Turning Point". The organization that sponsors this is a Trumpite one and likely thought of the name meaning a turning point in the nation's history, rather than the recent off-ramp into the political dumpster that Trump is causing to conservatives. She gave a short speech that included the "deep state".
Whatever she said about this, something older than the deep state is the "it's not what you know, it's who you know state".
Hmmmm.
There's only three real reason for Hageman Nephew to go to work as the Consigliere to the Capo de Regime at the SoS, either to be a reliable yes man, an insider to the Deeply Trump State, or as a favor. Or perhaps a combination of all three.
"You aren't a wartime Consigliere, Tom".
Well, I'm sure that the state's GOP will rise up in righteous indignation and tell Chuck he doesn't need his own special legal council and that the lad can just go back into benighted private practice. Shoot, maybe Constitutional Lawyer Hageman know of a firm where there's going to be one less lawyer.
Stammtisch
We've had some posts regarding Rev. Todd Schmidt and his table in the University of Wyoming Student Union recently.
A lawyer I know asked me a question I hadn't thought of. Why are outsiders allowed to have reserved tables in the Union at all?
I have no good answer for that.
Rev. Schmidt's table was reserved, which is something I hadn't followed. That would mean, amongst other things, that Rev. Schmidt must have had a lot of free time on his hands so that he could dedicate that time to hanging around in the Student Union.
As noted in an earlier post on this topic, when I went to UW, the Union didn't really have a place to put up a table. It was mostly a hall. There was a small lobby that was part of it that had a television, but people rarely hung out in it. Organizations of any type didn't put up tables.
Now, after reconstruction, it has a lot of room, including room for tables, but what didn't occur to me is that its really odd that those tables can be reserved by outsiders.
I don't think they have to be.
I have no problem at all with any legitimate student organization having a table, staffed by students, in the lobby. Most of these would be of a predictable type, but some would probably be organizations that I'd find personally irritating. So be it, if they're student organizations or university related.
I.e, I don't have a problem with the rugby club being in there, or sororities recruiting for membership, ROTC recruiting for recruits, or the Students Against The ROTC recruiting for recruits. But I think it should be limited to student organizations, or the university itself.
What I don't grasp is how we got to the point that a minister from an off campus church can have a full time table in the Union. It invites any group that is off campus that wishes to proselytize to do the same. Would the same people that are okay with Rev. Schmidt be okay with an Imam setting up a table next to him? Or would the university be okay with really radical groups, of any type, doing the same?
UW got itself into this pickle by allowing outside groups to hang around in the lobby of a land grant college that's really supposed to be dedicated to education and education only. This wasn't necessary.
And so, we find, a contemporary warped Zeitgeist, virtue signaling, cowardice, and bad reporting, have taken the state down the rabbit hole.
CHAPTER I.
Down the Rabbit-Hole
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversations?”
So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.
In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.
The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labelled “ORANGE MARMALADE”, but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody underneath, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.
“Well!” thought Alice to herself, “after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!” (Which was very likely true.)
Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? “I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?” she said aloud. “I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think—” (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a very good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over) “—yes, that’s about the right distance—but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I’ve got to?” (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.)
Presently she began again. “I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward! The Antipathies, I think—” (she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn’t sound at all the right word) “—but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma’am, is this New Zealand or Australia?” (and she tried to curtsey as she spoke—fancy curtseying as you’re falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?) “And what an ignorant little girl she’ll think me for asking! No, it’ll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.”
Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. “Dinah’ll miss me very much to-night, I should think!” (Dinah was the cat.) “I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I’m afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that’s very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?” And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, “Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?” and sometimes, “Do bats eat cats?” for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, “Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?” when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.
Alice was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a moment: she looked up, but it was all dark overhead; before her was another long passage, and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying down it. There was not a moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind, and was just in time to hear it say, as it turned a corner, “Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it’s getting!” She was close behind it when she turned the corner, but the Rabbit was no longer to be seen: she found herself in a long, low hall, which was lit up by a row of lamps hanging from the roof.
There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.
Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice’s first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted!
Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway; “and even if my head would go through,” thought poor Alice, “it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.” For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.
There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little bottle on it, (“which certainly was not here before,” said Alice,) and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words “DRINK ME,” beautifully printed on it in large letters.
It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked ‘poison’ or not”; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked “poison,” it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.
However, this bottle was not marked “poison,” so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.
“What a curious feeling!” said Alice; “I must be shutting up like a telescope.”
And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little door into that lovely garden. First, however, she waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about this; “for it might end, you know,” said Alice to herself, “in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?” And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.
After a while, finding that nothing more happened, she decided on going into the garden at once; but, alas for poor Alice! when she got to the door, she found she had forgotten the little golden key, and when she went back to the table for it, she found she could not possibly reach it: she could see it quite plainly through the glass, and she tried her best to climb up one of the legs of the table, but it was too slippery; and when she had tired herself out with trying, the poor little thing sat down and cried.
“Come, there’s no use in crying like that!” said Alice to herself, rather sharply; “I advise you to leave off this minute!” She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. “But it’s no use now,” thought poor Alice, “to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!”
Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words “EAT ME” were beautifully marked in currants. “Well, I’ll eat it,” said Alice, “and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I’ll get into the garden, and I don’t care which happens!”
She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, “Which way? Which way?”, holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.
Chapter 1, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Indeed, we've fallen down a very deep well.
Let's recap how we got here.
Our genetic makeup, and all that goes with it, is something that has a 250,000,000-year-old, at least, history. We aren't "assigned gender", like we're given class assignments. Our gender is part of our DNA and in every single cell in our body.
And there's no confusion on that part inside of us, in our natural state or a more natural state. We're so ordered towards our natural gender orientations that recent studies have shown that not only boy meet girl where cultural boundaries exist, they even will where speciation boundaries exist, as long as they're not massive.
I.e., Cro Magnon boy meets Neanderthal girl? No problem.
And yet, now in contemporary, rich (historically speaking) white, European society, which we are part of, there's a segment of society which is claiming that their DNA, in essence, got it wrong.
That's not possible. Your DNA is your DNA, and your gender is not a "birth defect". Indeed, ironically, in an era in which genetic traits that previously were regarded as defective are now to be treated as normal, here's one that is in fact normal, your gender, being treated as defective.
Western psychology and sociology, which is Western, has taken up treating individual inclinations and biological mandates, or perhaps our psyches as divorced in some ways from our bodies, such that any whim and desire, save for a very few, is to be celebrated. In the area of sex, as disturbing as it may be, and it is highly disturbing, the only inclination which is not to be questioned, and not to be celebrated, is the one barring adults (mostly men) preying on children.1
Everything else is okay and not to be questioned, including behaviors that were only recently regarded as species of mental illnesses, among which is people believing that they should be a member of the gender which they are not.
There's no scientific basis for this. Indeed, in real terms, its current suddenly accepted status is a rebellion against science by narcissistic forces. It is, in essence, they argue, "all about me!". We are the centers of our own narcisstic universe, around which everything revolves, and everyone must acknowledge it.
Only a really rich society can engage in such delusions. And because the delusions are destructive, they will only do so temporarily.
Somebody suffering from such a delusion, a man, decided he was a woman, and entered a sorority at the University of Wyoming.
This was reported by the Cowboy State Daily back in October, in an article in which they stated:
Artemis Langford2, of Lander, became the first open-transgender student to be accepted into the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority in September, according to the Branding Iron, UW’s student newspaper.
Born male, Langford identifies as a woman and attended high school in Lander.
So The Branding Iron reported on the story. That likely wasn't hard, as Langford reports for The Branding Iron. He didn't write the article, however.
Nowhere is it clear how far down the transformation process, if at all, Mr. Langford has actually gone. Photos of him show him dressed as a woman and affecting a female appearance, and indeed perhaps to a degree more successfully than is typically the case in this arena. But is he, as they say about horses in another context, "intact". The articles don't say.
At least one article elsewhere suggest that he is in fact intact, and that some members of the sorority, while it voted to admit him, were uncomfortable with it. One supportive news story just flat out said he was a male that had been admitted to a sorority. The National Review reported that members were uncomfortable about it, with an article about that stating:
A sorority at the University of Wyoming has opened the door to allow a transgender student into the group that has been historically known to only allow females.
Kappa Kappa Gamma (KKG) voted on whether or not the transgender student who is a biological male should be allowed to join the sorority. In a majority vote, Artemis Langford has been accepted to join the group. In an interview with the UW's student newspaper the Branding Iron, Langford says, "I feel so glad to be in a place that I think not only shares my values, but to be in a sisterhood of awesome women that want to make history."
But, not everyone in the sorority joins Langford's excitement. Before Langford was officially accepted, KKG gathered together to discuss the future of the sisterhood. One sorority member told National Review the president and membership chair dismissed the concerns of members who felt "deeply uncomfortable with a male being accepted into their sisterhood."
NR reports the leadership pressured the women into accepting their ideology. The anonymous member references comments made by senior leadership about the girls being "homophobic" if they voted no. Another leader allegedly said, "If you have something to say about this that isn't kind or respectful, keep it to yourself."
Moreover, while appearances on such things aren't everything, it's pretty easy to tell which "sister" Langford is in a group:
Like it or not, in our contemporary society, there's something more than a little ironic about a "taco 'bout mental health" sign in this context.
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.
And of couse we're saying more than that, as this article is focused on, at least in regard to this, biology.
KKG allowed this to occur because it either must affect to be woke, in the zeitgeist of our times, or it doesn't want to appear to be offensive. It should be noted the sorority was recently in the news with bad press elsewhere as its members on one campus were reported to be hostile to their only black member. Based on its material linked in the article above, it's sincerely sipping the Kool-Aid.
UW when it learned of it, which it learned through the Branding Iron, chose to turn a blind eye, taking the position that it's often the best just to do nothing rather than risking offending somebody.
Baptist minister Todd Schmidt, however, did choose to do something, that being to note that Mr. Langford is in fact a man.
Rev. Schmidt was maintaining a booth in the Union which espouses his worldview, which is basically that the entire globe is around 5,000 years old (it's much older) and that evolution is a fib (it isn't, it's the scientific truth). Taking offense at Mr. Langford's decision that he was a "Miss" for sincerely held religious reasons, he was, quite frankly, probably the worst person imaginable to introduce scientific reality into the discussion, but he did. Given the situation, and his Weltanschauung, that was likely inevitable, if unfortunate.
Now UW had trouble. It should have known the trouble was coming.
It reacted to the trouble by booting him off campus for naming Langford by name. But Langford had already outed himself. The widely spread news story, the version we initially discussed here, was that Rev. Schmidt had outed Langford and was being tossed out for that reason. But in reality, that wasn't what had occurred.
Enter constitutional experts like Eugene Volokh, who have said that Rev. Schmidt's free speech rights are being suppressed. Given the full story, Volokh and his fellow travelers are frankly correct. UW had acted to suppress free speech.
Next enter the Freedom Caucus.
What and who the Freedom Caucus is in Wyoming is something that's flown beneath the wire, but as the recent ship jumping of Krysten Sinema had taught, when you are a member of a political party in a legislative body, you "caucus" with them. Basically, the caucus is a political organization within a legislature, nearly a proto political party or even more than that. In this case, the Freedom Caucus has come to be a de facto political party within the GOP, and the extreme right wing/populist one at that.
In that role, it takes Trumpite views, or the ones that work toward him, as part of their Führerprinzip. They also espouse Illiberal Democratic views, taking the outlook of Patrick Deneen to a full conclusion. In that sense, they are open in the sense that not only do they view social trends in the US as disturbing, which they are, and delusional in some areas, which they also are, and espouse the view that ground needs to be taken back essentially by force.
This issue was tailor-made for them as it presents a rare instance in which their Weltanschauung is supported by a concrete issue, and therefore, lead by Illinoisan Jeanette Ward, they've emailed the University, stating:
Well, they're right.
And therefore, what we predicted post Obergefell, has come to pass.
Justice's Kennedy's departing gift.
At the time of the Obergefell decision, which was obviously not supported by the law, we predicted that it would be used to advance an anti nature and anti-traditional liberal world view, even though the delusional octogenarian author didn't see that coming, and those advancing the view of Obergefell, which was to force the issue via a judicial coup, claimed that they'd stop there. The didn't, and haven't. And now a certain section of the American left are busy tearing down all standards.
In no small way, Obergefell lead to Donald Trump, and Donald Trump lead to the radical right antidemocratic Illiberal Democrats.
And stuff like this advances them enormously.
None of which gets to some other issue at work in this trend.
Let's pretend.
Something is massively amiss in a society in which a small but celebrated section of it is so distressed by their natural roles as men and women that they choose to radically opt out of it. Most of those so choosing do not really seek to take up the full roles of the other gender, but seemingly to escape that of the one that they are in.
What has brought that about?
The other day, I rode down the elevator with a woman dressed as a tiger.
She was not, of course, a tiger.
I don't mean that she was in a tiger costume, like for Halloween or a really advance New Year's costume ball. I mean that she was dressed as a tiger, with tiger stripped clothing, and a tiger cape (it was cold), and wearing cat ears.
She also absolutely stank.
I didn't ride all the way down, but halfway down. Boarding the elevator on the top floor of the building, she got on halfway down. You could tell she was surprised that the elevator was nearly full, but she got on, which means that she was in close approximation to all of us.
The weather outside was Arctic. There was a car waiting for her, which was good, as if not, she would have frozen within a block.
But she was dressed as a tiger.
A few years ago, I used to pass, fairly frequently, a girl on here way to high school who was dressed as a cat, completely with a tail.
At that time, I mentioned it to a friend who also had high school aged kids, and he informed me they were "furries", and there were a small community of them in the high school, not surprisingly all female, although not all furries are female. Over time, I'd see a couple more of them as I drove to work who walked the same route.
Furries are still around, and they've come to take themselves fairly seriously. They're people who heavily identify with an animal fantasy. Not just adorning costumes in some instance, but in some really taking it seriously, which has to be a debilitating lifestyle.
Why do I mention this?
Well, again, what brought this about?
People who want to be part of the other gender? Humans who want to be animals?
Hmmmm. . .
Much ado about emasculation.
Some years ago, there were widely circulating cultural trends that were the flip side of each other. One was a conservative concern over a perceived social trend of emasculating men, and the other was a liberal concern over "toxic masculinity". Indeed, at that time I started to post something on the topic, and never finished it. As that one was still in the hopper, and I think it's related to this, I'm going to fold it in here.
The question being posed at that time was twofold, what could we do about "toxic masculinity", and the flip side of it was there a war on men. I started off looking at that with a quote from, well, Sean Penn.
I don’t think that being a brute or having insensitivity or disrespect for women is anything to do with masculinity, or ever did. But I don’t think that to be fair to women, we should become them.
Sean Penn.
The short answer, I thought, was, no. I'm not so sure now.
But, I did think there is a war on biology.
I think that men have, in my view, become quite feminized. I have these very strong women in my life who do not take masculinity as a sign of oppression toward them. There are a lot of, I think, cowardly genes that lead to people surrendering their jeans and putting on a skirt.
Sean Penn.
I've started versions of that thread at least three times under different titles and never completed any of them. Going through my drafts, I saw that I had a semi satyric one called "Girly Men", one called "A Crisis In Masculinity" and one called "A Male Crisis". For no particularly reason, this is the one that I once decided to complete, although this was the "A Male Crisis" one and is now titled as per above, which was the title of a different draft (both of the then surviving drafts were called "The Masculinity Crisis").
This one got about this far before I left it in draft:
The New York Times recently ran an article claiming there is a male crisis in the country.
They have a point.
True, but not a very helpful beginning to this entry.
Let's see if we get this one done.
Well, there is something to this. Maybe not what the various pundits think, but I think there's something to it. And, in my typical evolutionary biology way, I suspect that it has a lot to do with our divorce from nature, which I'll post more about below overall. It has something to do with something noted by Strauss and Howe in their generational theory, and it has something to do with politics.
Okay, let's start with an observation.
While observations of this type are easy to casually dismiss, for anyone age 50 and up, its pretty obvious that there are a lot more effeminate men in 2017 than there were, let's say, in 1987, or 1977, etc.
And transgendered men? Well you rarely ran into this topic except as a really distinct subculture.
At the same time, what also ought to be really obvious, is that in urban areas, there's been a resumption of male affectations as well. There's more young men wandering around with heavy beards and dressed like 1910s lumberjacks now in urban areas than at any time since, well, for a really darned long time.
This isn't the best time in the world to be a male.
Maybe, anyhow.
At least quite a few people seem to think that, and frankly, I think there's something to that. We're going to be taking a little bit of a look at it.
While it may be mere perception, the idea that "it's a man's world" has really declined in the West to the point where some now debate if men have any place left in the world. That's clearly an overreaction, but there is something going on.
And that there's something going on is at least partially evidenced by the fact that there's a lot of press, both of the net type and of the conventional type, on this topic.
Indeed, perhaps the kickoff on this occurred some years ago when a feminist writer (I've forgotten when one) wrote a book called Screwed, lamenting how societal developments had taken away so many traditional male roles. We'll look at that a bit later (hopefully this series actually gets written and doesn't take five years, like some here do). But that book, with an ironworker from the 40s on the cover, was notable.
Since then there's been a plethora of similar treatments in a way. One fellow avoided a career in the law by converting an interest in this topic to a social media business platform, that eclectic treatment being The Art of Manliness, which exists as a website, a Facebook page, and podcast. He's taken some heat, however, from people who claim that his treatment of the topic isn't manly enough.
An example of raw manliness, and a good fun read as a rule as well, is Jim Cornelius's website Frontier Partisans. Frontier Partisans' is male in the raw. The men there are men, to be sure. The women are also women, and if they show up at all, they're likely "hot", as the vernacular would have it, and outdoorsy, and packing heat.
Taking another, more cerebral, approach there are also a collection of Christian sites that have the same focus (not so raw, and omitting, usually, the hot gun toting women). The Catholic Gentleman is one such example. Those Catholic Men is another. And there are more. Quite a few are Catholic in theme (that I know about, but then I'm a Catholic man), but some are protestant. Radically on the other end of things there is the excessively panicky alarmist writings of James Kunslter, who is worried about everything, but who derided millennial men some years ago for dressing like "toddlers in knee pants", perhaps his single greatest moment in print.
He wasn't completely incorrect.
It'd be easy to dismiss all of this, but frankly there's something to it. If you've lived long enough to observe. The question is what's going on, is it societal (what else could it be), or something else?
Well, in terms of it being societal, there's pretty good evidence of that. And according to the Strauss How Generational theory folks, this has happened before. I think there's pretty good evidence of that.
We've dealt with Strauss and Howe's theory before, but basically they hold that human cycles of history repeat with strict regularity.3 They also hold that human characters are fairly predictable in those cycles. And one of the things they hold, although I haven't dealt much with it here before, is that men become the men that women want them to be.
I think there's something to that to a degree. Indeed, here on this site, one of the laws of human behavior notes that young men tend to go through a period of fake character development for a time before reverting to their early characters. That goes against the Strauss Howe theory really, but to credit them, a careful observation of young men over time shows that they often do, depending upon the environment, form themselves in their teens and twenties based on what women appear to want out of them. It has a societal impact. I suspect it has a greater impact the more they are removed from their immediate homes and local cultures, FWIW.
So, if we look at an era like World War One or World War Two, or the early Cold War, manly virtues associated with war were really emphasized. Men became combatants, and they formed themselves to some degree in that role pretty distinctly. It'd be debatable, but it's notable that in that period, eventually, men tended to even groom themselves in their civilian occupations in the fashion that the military adopted. Crew cuts were big in the 1950s and lingered on, for us boys growing up in the 60s, through that era.
Long haired inductee getting a "mighty fine" in basic training, 1967. This was right at the beginning of the Hair epidemic, but the crew cut was still keeping on keeping on, even then.
In contrast, we can see other eras in which men with other qualities were seemingly desired by women. In Jane Austen's treatment of 18th Century England, the desirable males were all genteel in the extreme. Mr. Darcy, for example, was manly, but he wasn't on the Frontier wrestling bears.
But it's more than that.
Just as it's the case that men often go through a false personality period, cultures frankly do, too. Indeed, that's one really weird thing about culture in general, and it's particularly the case the more a culture is removed from nature.
One of my good friends, who has a son the same age as mine, is adamant in his view that there's a societal war on men, and in particular young men, and it's done them damages. At least a decade older than me, and with a very large family, he's raised sons and daughters now through more than one era, and frankly is really pessimistic about things going forward, as somebody with long experience can tend to be. And this relates to that.
The short term view, by which I mean the era extending from the end of World War Two until the present era, has seen a lot of social changes and quite frankly, starting in the 1970s, but looking back to the 1920s, and carried forwards, there truly is a "progressive" attack in some quarters on the basic nature of our human nature. And that has everything to do with this. That is realized in some quarters now, as it's impossible not to. At the point at which a person closes their eyes to biology and science and declares gender just a construct, things have gone more than a little off the rails. That's scientifically completely derailed.
In other words, it's impossible not to notice unless you blind yourself to it.
But it's interesting how this is now working out, which I wouldn't have anticipated when I first started this thread.
When I first started it, I would have noted the assaults on what it means to be male, which were at an epic level. "Toxic Masculinity" was the battle cry of those who wished to force a sort of Toxic Femininity on men and women. And during the last 20 years real intrusions of a destructive nature have been made in this area, including suppressing basic programmed in aspects of what it means to be male, the acceptance of surgical intervention, which is really surgical mutilation, to "reassign genders", to the even such things as pretending that women will do as well as men in combat. It's been surreal.
But during the last few years things have been bouncing back to a degree, which is most notable in the young, and which has become more notable during the Pandemic.
Back awhile ago, I posted a Twitter post from a young woman who was in agony over having to leave her children and work. More recently I've seen posts from a young female engineer who is in agony over being young, well-educated, and single, and finding that her young male cohorts only expect her to put out. She wants children and marriage. A young female doctor posts about her horror over being suppressed by older physicians for opposing abortion, and it is clear that she wants much the same as the engineer.
And this gets back to the industrial construct that we've noted before.
Men left the house and went to the factory and the office, not because they wanted to. They had to. Women followed them with domestic machinery entered the home and made their domestic labor surplus. Everyone has and should have a right to work wherever their talents and desire allow, but society has gone further and determined that they'll be compelled to work. Right now the country is in the midst of the Great Resignation, in which people have determined they'll avoid the work they do not wish to do. The only thing Progressives can think of is to fund the warehousing of children sot that women cannot use taking care of children as an excuse, although its unlikely to have the impact that they imagine.
That's because our view, including the Progressive view, of work is completely industrialized. We exist to serve the machine. . . to consume what it produces, and to work to produce. The benefit is "profit" and fulfillment comes through the service.
Except it doesn't.
But it's clear that this doesn't explain it alone.
Revolutions.
Patrick Deneen, whom we already mentioned, feels that liberal societies evolve towards self-destruction, and frankly all of this presents good evidence that they do. But if that's the case, we have to wonder why the pace of this seems to be a post 1945, and more particularly a post 1965, or even a post 1968, event. Wild social movements and trends have existed before, and not all of them lead to the downfall of standards and ultimately society. Conversely, in some culture, they did so rapidly, and in others, they started to and then were arrested before they did.
In an era like our current one, it's easy to state, as I have here, that the first principal of democratic societies is democracy itself, and that's true. But it can be argued that I've missed something, which is something that tends to be an anathema to Americans, but which is also true. Democracy doesn't really work unless there's a shared set of external values. Indeed, societally, there's really good evidence that "happy" cultures, like that of the Finns for example (often regarded as the happiest in the world), or the Danes, tend to have the singular feature of having very little diversity at all. Hugely diverse societies, in contrast, often devolve into strife and war. Take the example of what was once the British Palestinian mandate, or Rwanda, for example.
The US, of course, has famously fought a Civil War, but not all civil wars have this origin. Indeed, the American Civil War came about at a time when the population of the US was much less diverse than it is now, but the singular topic, an enslaved people who had been Americanized but who were held in bondage, brought it about. Contrary to the occasional criticism of the US on this topic, we've come a very long way since then, even though we still have failed to fully incorporate that population, to our shame.
But of note, in our early history, and lingering well into the 20th, we did have an overarching sort of national culture, albeit one in which what diversity we had was dealt with. What we had was a broadly Christian culture of Protestant origin. It was broad enough that it came to tolerate Catholics, although now without a lot of strife, and it came to incorporate Judaism as well, under the fiction that the culture was "Judeo-Christian", which it was not. It was, frankly, English Protestant. Catholics were tolerated as a minority Christian people as long as they weren't in danger of breaking out into the wider culture, and Judaism was tolerated as they were a minority who didn't threaten to ever become a majority. This gave rise to the overall American culture, which was commonly thought to stretch back, with some good reason, to the Puritans.
The Puritans themselves were, however, part of a rebellion, although they likely didn't see things that way. They were Calvinist dissenters against the Church of England, which they conceived of being too Catholic. The Church of England itself was the official Protestant church of England which had been brought about during the Reformation and which had evolved from King Henry VIII schismatic rebellion against the Church due to his concern about finding reproductive booty, and which had evolved under the cynical administration of Queen Elizabeth I resulting in the Elizabethan Religious Settlement.
The UK, of course, in this regard was following the lead set by Martin Luther. None of these people would have conceived of themselves as supporting men identifying as women, or vice versa, but what's important here is that they stood for an individualistic revolt against a well established order. That is, they stood for the individual over anything else, even if they did not realize it. Luther, in essence, felt that he knew the Christianity so well that he could revise it, even questioning the Canon of the Bible. That amounted to an individual revolt against the experts and expertise, ultimately leading to the anti-scientific revolt that has been going on in the West for some time. Indeed, it helps, to an enormous degree, to explain it. That did not, of course, lead immediately to the present situation by any means, and indeed, while revolutionaries, men like Luther, at least, were also deeply conservative for the most part.
The return of democracy and the liberal society came up through the Age of Enlightenment, which interestingly has been under attack, or perhaps counterrevolutionary attack, by hardcore right wing conservatives in recent years. This isn't a history lesson on a complicated era with complicated ideas, but generally the concept of people governing themselves rather than having a government imposed upon them started to make headway in the 1600s and 1700s.
The first real expression of this came in the British American Colonies of North America, which were under the Crown but self-governing. In fairness, self-governance had been evolving in the United Kingdom itself for a long time. So long, in fact, that it's difficult to say when it really originated. The English monarchy, contrary to the popular idea, had never been fully independent of the vote, but rather dependent upon an ever widening vote which at first was restricted to the nobility but which, by the English Civil War, when parliament went to war with the Crown, had become much wider. Indeed, this is so much the case that it's tempting to discount the influence of the Age of Enlightenment in the case of the English, but this really ought not to be done.
The English Civil War aside, the first real Age of Enlightenment revolution was the American Revolution. This is interesting and important to this story, however, as it was a deeply conservative revolution. While the American rebels sought to establish home and self rule on a democratic basis in North America, they had a broad cultural understanding that was largely the same as that of the body which they were fighting. The same body which would provide that the states were not to establish an official church, like England and Scotland had done, was itself overwhelmingly Protestant, with the majority of the population being in the Anglican Communion, followed next by the Presbyterian Church, and after that, churches like the Quakers. Catholics were present, but in small numbers for the most part.
This meant that the revolution was able to establish something radical, a broad democratic government, while also maintaining a deeply conservative population and, moreover, one that for the most part was fairly homogenous in its Weltanschauung. The revolution was, accordingly, a success.
The next revolution didn't fit this model, and it was not a success.
The French Revolution is often regarded as the mother of all modern revolutions, and in some very significant ways, it really is. Fueled by poverty, and stoked by radicals of the Age of Enlightenment, it was a revolution against everything. It took, therefore, the concepts first advanced by Luther, that of individualism and individual determination, and applied them very broadly. In doing so, they attacked not only the French monarchy, but French society and culture at every level.
Not too surprisingly, the French Revolution, having attacked every standard, descended into anarchy, with order being restored by a caudillo, Napoleon Bonaparte. Claiming to stand for the ideals of the revolution, equality, liberty and fraternity, he imposed a personal monarchy on the French and lead the nation into perpetual war. He was a revolutionary of sorts, but one that mixed liberalism with populism and conservatism, and who further centered France on himself. He succeeded in reestablishing order in France, for a time, but at huge human costs.
The French Revolution was the model for the Communist revolutions that followed World War One, but with the introduction of Marxism in between. The evolution was a natural one, based principally on a misreading of history and economics by Marx and an evolved "them vs. us" point of view. But missed in it is that Marx attacked the social orders once again. Included in Marx's Communist Manifesto was the rejection of the biological order, in the form of the complete rejection of marriage. Women, in the Manifesto, were to be the property of men, who would hold them in common.
Early Communists took that view seriously, and even into the 1920s American Communists continued to. Indeed, Whitaker Chambers, while still a Communist, defied the Communist ideal twice, once by marrying and a second time by having children. And Chambers is relevant to this story for another reason that we'll get to.
Even the Communists, however, where they obtained power, quickly found that destruction of the cultural order and attacking the human biological norm lead to disaster. Given this, every Communist regime everywhere very rapidly became very socially conservative in regard to men and women. They all found that they couldn't hold societies together unless they did.
In the West, however, the introduction of increasingly left leaning thought in "liberal" parties metastasized, in some ways, due to lack of exposure to the political sun. While hardcore radical right wing ideas, such as attacking the teaching of evolution in schools, tended to get exposed and fail, radical left wing ideas did not. Be that as it may, as the culture remained largely if loosely homogenous in its cultural views, no radical individualist attacks really came about until the disintegration of the late 1960s began to set in. By the early 1970s, however, it really was.
It started earlier to some degree. John F. Kennedy introduced the view that a member of a minority religion could be faithful to the country and his religion by observing it only on Sunday, something that had a huge impact on American Catholicism but which effectively introduced the concept that the Establishment Clause's prohibition on state endorsement of a faith meant faith wasn't to be referenced by politicians or governments at all. As Christianity had been the principal foundation upon which all successful post Roman Empire democracies had been built, that essentially rejected the core tenant of democracy, the unwritten rule that people of a common culture could decide political and policy matters.
That erosion meant that by the early 1970s widely held tenants based upon responsibility were eroding. California introduced no fault divorce and the United States Supreme Court forced abortion upon the entire country without a basis to do so. The same trends were advancing, post 1968, all over Europe as well.
With the dam breaking in 1968, it was only a matter of time before we ended up here. A large portion of the political makeup of the country has been attacking rationality and science for decades, and is now shocked that there's a counter reaction.
That counteraction started almost as early as the really big advances in a self-centered American ethos took hold. It first really gained ground politically in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it continued to gain traction since then.
Then the Supreme Court entered again.
I've long held that there would have been no Donald Trump presidency without Obergefell. Up until that point the really radical woke cultural trends of our current era were only creeping along. I noted at the time that Obergefell was handed down that it threatened democracy, and it very much has.
Justice Kennedy in Obergefell grabbed an evolving social issue and claimed it for the Supreme Court, issuing a mushy opinion based on mushy left wing thinking and then hurling it back at the nation. Much of the populace of the country was shocked, even though, by the time of its issuance, they'd already accommodated themselves to lives deeply contrary to the natural order already. It was the attack on the core principle of biology that shook people. The bland acceptance of Obergefell by the right caused the slumbering populist to really wake up. Trump was there to grab their attention, even though he himself lived a life that was deeply contrary to the natural order.
A caudillo not living by the standards he proclaims is hardly unusual. Napoleon may have stood for liberty, equality and fraternity, but he had himself crowned Emperor. Hitler might have advocated for the German Übermensch, but he was a gassy, vegetarian hypochondriac himself. Indeed, caudillo's have a habit of driving their movements right over a cliff.
So, where are we now?
Well, just where we don't want to be.
As a liberal democracy, we're at a point that Patrick Deneen worried about. Since the early 1970s we've attacked the glue that held us together, sometimes politically but sometimes through the courts, to the point where we're at the delusional state that states governed by radical ideas often are. We won't credit or trust science at all, and we've enshrined individual discernment of reality as reality itself. Men declaring themselves to be women must be treated as women. Women declaring themselves to be men must be treated as men. Children, mostly girls, making such declarations must be provided with pharmaceuticals and surgery to make it so, even though at the same age you can't contract to do anything else destructive.4
And women dressed as tigers? Well, they are tigers.
Okay, but how does that explain. . .
Hypercapitalism.
Anyone still reading, and that's probably nobody at all, is probably asking themselves by this point, well, okay, how does this actually explain a story like that we started off with. Are we saying stripping away the barriers that culture had put up just inevitably leads to girls wanting to be men, and things of this nature?
No, that'd absurd.
And in fact, probably next to none actually do.
And that's not all going on.
At the same time, in the post World War Two era, that liberals in legislatuve office and occupying judicial benches began to hammer away at the guardrails, capitalism went into overdrive and ceased to be the means by which we made a living, to the point in living.
Capitalism has been such a huge economic success that even left wing figures now pretty much completely endorse it. Even such a leftwing figure as Paul David Hewson, aka "Bono" is now on record as saying, in regard to the economic development of Africa:
Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse.
And;
Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.
He's right.
Truth be known, capitalism is so efficient at generation of wealth that its buried Socialism. Even college reds who like to pretend they're socialist are capitalist. Left wing economist like Robert Reich who like to run around presenting to be really far thinking on this, spend their actual time arguing about slight adjustments to things like taxes and public funding of this or that. Current economic debates, in the real world, have all the content and meaning of two basketball fans arguing over which teams in NBA are good vs. really really good.
Missed in all of that, the system became so efficient that it went from being a tool, to the only purpose in living. Modern employees are like the galley slaves in Ben Hur, they live to serve the ship, and are told, in all seriousness, the same things the POWS are told in The Bridge On The River Kwai, "be happy in your work".
But people aren't.
And that's part of this.
This is a liberal, American, white, phenomenon for that reason.
The children of white liberal Americans are pretty much told that individually, they're really, really special, and that each of their individual needs, no matter what they are, have very special, if not cosmic, importance. They're also at this point basically unchurched, so they're not given any sense of how cosmic the cosmos is. They're special role in the universe is to consume. In order to best consume, they need to get good paying jobs, which their status in the upper middle class nearly guaranties, and then serve their individual wants, as consumers.
In short, they know nothing more important than themselves.
With so little grasp of themselves and with no guardrails, the world is a really scary place. The basic human drives towards community, reproduction and all still exist, but everything is disordered. People's activities are not natural. People don't burn off calories in pursuit of the things they were evolved to do, but at the gym. People secure their food from sources that are so remote and distant that their basic nature is a mystery. Pop fads scare people into eating unnatural diets, to the extent that an urban food production industry isn't doing that anyway. A pronogrified culture demands that they have sex, and has gone from that to demanding that they observe, accept, appreciate, and engage in sexual acts that are deeply unnatural.
It's not too surprising that a lot of people want to drop out.
And they're dropping out in every way imaginable. Out of the workforce. Out of being productive employees. And out of their natural roles.
The other thing that capitalism helped very much do, by putting a focus on nothing other than the bottom line, is to commence a war on nature. It's so engrained in our society that most people don't even know it.
Perhaps no one but a hunter can understand how intense an affection a boy can feel for a piece of marsh…. I came home one Christmas to find that land promoters, with the help of the Corps of Engineers had dyked and drained my boyhood hunting grounds on the Mississippi river bottoms…. My hometown thought the community enriched by this change. I thought it impoverished.”
Draft foreword, A Sand County Almanac, in Companion to a Sand County Almanac.
At heart, we remain what we always were. Hunters and gatherers on a wild landscape, that are part of it, subject to it, and a lesser in a greater whole. Capitalism has told us that we're to be mindless consumers who are the centers of our own personal universe.
Indeed, it's good for business. The more individual and alone you are, the more consumptive you will be. Looping back to transgenderism, for those who take the route down to radical intervention, they made themselves the subject of a branch of medicine that isn't about care at all, but merely about appearances. It isn't cheap, however. And those who consume that will become prisoners of pharmaceuticals for life.
Again, we're so used to this that we just don't see it. Even radical leftist, or those who think they are, serve the machine. Left-wingers rail against the Dobbs decision, as a societal elimination or reduction of abortion would mean that fewer women would exist to serve industry. The same individuals campaign for Federally funded daycares as that would "free" women to work, which really means it would compel them to do so. Everything must serve that ultimate goal.
You live to serve this ship. . . Consumer.
The male role in this goes back to the Industrial Revolution. The female role was impacted by the removal of men from the households to go to the mines, but putting women in the mines themselves is newer (we experimented with putting children in them, of course, but gave that up as too cruel). People who were not willing to cooperate voluntarily were compelled to do so in some fashion or another.
Following the Second World War, fueled by developments that occurred during it and during the Great Depression, the really radical shit to a consumer economy began. It was aided by new "industrial" developments and cultural trends that assisted it. The Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s, combined with pharmaceutical birth control followed in the wake of the Playboy assault on marriage, all of which basically served to remove men from real women and thereby liberate their wallets and time for more consumption. First Wave Feminism followed along and made the same push for women.
In this new world, what do young people have to look forward to? Careers, mostly. Lives in sterile boxes, broken up by occasional vacation and wide variety television, and the Internet.
It's no wonder we're at the Mad Hatter's tea party.
So how can this be addressed?
Opposed to the industrial society is the agrarian, which does not stand in particular need of definition. An agrarian society is hardly one that has no use at all for industries, for professional vocations, for scholars and artists, and for the life of cities. Technically, perhaps, an agrarian society is one in which agriculture is the leading vocation, whether for wealth, for pleasure, or for prestige-a form of labor that is pursued with intelligence and leisure, and that becomes the model to which the other forms approach as well as they may. But an agrarian regime will be secured readily enough where the superfluous industries are not allowed to rise against it. The theory of agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers.
I'll Take My Stand.
In actuality, this likely will be addressed all on its own, if not addressed, by sheer force of nature. Nature can't be conquered. It can be harnessed, directed, but not ignored.
Indeed, it gets even with those who attempt that.
Nature, quite truly, is a real bitch.
This provides the basis for some Conservatives of various types to argue that the culture is dying. It isn't really dying, but the culture of the Reformation is. Combined with it, the culture of the Industrial Revolution is being rejected.
Left wing hip, cool, and highly white, heirs to the WASP culture, but probably not observant in anything, like to wear shirts that say "the future is female". Well, in reality, the future is probably not WASP'ish but Latin, or Romantic in the original meaning of the word, in all sorts of ways, including culturally. What the founders of the Republic worried about up in Quebec in 1776 is probably likely to return with a vengeance, broadly speaking.
But not before the last gasp of the WASPish world damages a lot of things in its death throes, if this continues unabated.
There's no reason that things have to go the way they currently are, with so much destruction that it's bringing, at the present time. In other words, it isn't really the case that post Reformation Western culture has to let the madness snuff it out, it can adjust to arrest the suffering itself, and correct course.
If it doesn't however, it'll be addressed for it.
That's already starting to occur, to the great distress of some.
The overall question is, in our vast wealth, why can't we change course now? Two political parties, both products of the industrial capitalist age, provide a big part of the reason why. Bifurcation of every single issue on earth isn't possible. Some legislatures have begun to see that, which is why some have now gone to a ranked choice system, like Alaska. Wyoming looked to potentially attempt to head that way, but timing ostensibly prevented that move. Fear of what it would mean for the GOP's grip on the state likely had more to do with it.
In the political parties the knowledge that something has gone wrong is appearing, and we see all over the globe the rise of Illiberal Democracy, which seeks to reestablish the cultural standard by fiat. The throes of Liberal Society, are fueling it, as they make final efforts to force radical anti-scientific liberalism on society as a whole. Again, the bifurcation of things aids in the destruction of everything.
But at a lower societal level, there's some reason for hope. People seem to be waking up, but only very slowly, and mostly in younger generations that will have to live with whatever a Boomer controlled society leaves for them to deal with. Quiet Quitting and Laying Flat are really just votes on the Consumer Society, and big no votes at that.
Going home
We once observed here;
Yeoman's First Law of Behavior. You are going home again.
Thomas Wolfe is famously quoted as having written "You can't go home again.". I believe that the more accurate quote is "You can't go home again, and stay there." I'll be frank that I've never read Wolfe's work that this quote comes from, or much of Wolfe at all, so I can't really say how the quote should be taken in context. The bad thing about pithy quotes is that it's very easy to do that, and loose the meaning that the author intended for it.
Be that as it may, the quote that people like to cite to here, in the context that the quoter makes of it, is completely in error. Not only can you go home again, you are going to. At least you're going home again in terms of your basic personality.
From long observation, I'm pretty convinced that everyone's basic personality is set by the time they're about five years old. Likes, dislikes, intense interests, the whole smash, in some way, is there. Kids who are outdoorsy at five will be outdoorsy as old men. If a kid is fascinated with fishing at that age, he'll be fishing when he's 80. A dedicated reader at five will be at fifty. Nerdy at 5, nerdy at 95. And so on.
This is a fact, I think, that's hardly appreciated, but it's there. I've watched kids who loved one thing or another grow up and continue to love it. I've also seen those same people suppress something that they loved early on, and suffer for it.
This doesn't mean that people can't learn or develop new interests. They certainly can. But something of that spark of interests is in there very early as a rule, even if it's only really intensely brought out later.
What's also important about this, however, is that a person's real personality can be suppressed, but very often with bad results. Some people suppress it, to their misery, their entire lives. Everyone has seen people who are unhappy in a career or occupation, and wondered why. Well, perhaps that accountant saw himself as a kid as a commercial fisherman, and still does. Perhaps that cubicle dweller wanted to be a forester, and it hasn't left him. Perhaps that math teacher really loves baseball, and that's all that he thinks about each day. These things can't be fully repressed.
They can come roaring back, however, and I've seen that from time to time. Every adult knows one or more instances in which somebody in a seemingly solid career up and bolted for something surprising. I've known, for example of several instances in which successful lawyers suddenly quit and entered the seminary, or in one instance, Rabbinical school. I doubt that was a simply newly discovered interest, it'd likely been there all along in some fashion. I've known other instances in which which lawyers became teachers, teachers became lawyers, or successful business people took jobs as poor farm hands. I've seen a lot of instances in which a person left a rural area for career in business where they accumulated a fair amount of wealth pretty much with the exclusive desire to go back to their original hometown and live the lifestyle of their youth, often when they're too infirm to do so, which they could have done had they never left. And, most strikingly at all, I've seen people who lived face paced modern lives, focused on careers and wealth where they had abandoned a simpler rural lifestyle and the religion of their youth, struggle with it in middle age, and return to what they had originally been. That really was who they always were.
That doesn't mean that things don't wax and wane, in terms of interest. That's another oddity all to itself. Some people have genuine intense loves that they slowly loose. But they can come back. Absent some other sort of degeneration, people who were intensely interested in one thing, to seemingly loose their touch, can suddenly regain it and do.
This also doesn't mean that if a person was a snotty brat at 5 their doomed to a life of snotty bratness, although that can also happen. Indeed, for some, a personality trait can become a cross to bear that's lifelong, but still one that can be handled.. Being a brat is more of a personality defect, at least normally. Just as a person with abominable speech can learn to speak like a gentleman, a snot can learn correct behavior. No, what we're speaking of here is core personality traits. Those are pretty fixed by about age five.
What's true of individuals is true of cultures as well. This will not last indefinitely.
Nor should it. And people don't want it to. It's that last thing that makes this all so amazing. Fear of speaking their views, and of living a more authentic life, are everywhere.5
Apache woman.
At one time, it had become a cultural practice of the Apache to actually sacrifice a virgin, as so often fabled about various people. One year, however, a young man simply rode and grabbed the girl so chosen and rode off with her.
It never happened again.
Sometimes, that's what it takes. An individual action. Perhaps many of them, but in contravention to what is expected.
1. There is, however, a movement that seeks to change even this, although this is so extreme that it would seem unlikely to ever succeed. Having said that, much of what we're talking about was once regarded as nearly equally extreme.
2. A real oddity of this is that Langford has retained his name, although "Artemis" can apparently be a male or female name. To Americans, the name sounds male. The name descends from the Greek word for "butcher".
Also, while various press reports have omitted his name, it's become clear its very widely circulated, including by Langford himself, who apparently had no hesitation about doing so.
3. Since this text was written, we've referred to it much more often to the point where its definately a reoccuring theme here.
4. Indeed, while I support the bill, it's ironic that in the same age in which legislatures are making it illegal to contract marriages below 17 years of age, they're forcing society to allow girls to undergo treatment to permanently damage their bodies below that age on a gender assignment theory. If girls at age 15 are too mentally immature to marry, surely they are too immature to attempt to change their genders.
5. Groupthink and the press have really added to this.
While I generally like NPR, an example of this is provided by a recent NPR Politics podcast discussing what is going on at the state legislative level. All the panelist were simply amazed by the state level legislation regarding medical intervention in gender and freely used the term "gender affirming care".
Gender affirming care would affirm your gender, not surgically and pharmaceutically impose a new one on your nature. But the fact that they all acted like this was so obviously not the case demonstrates that the Press really is largely left-wing as a rule, and serves to shut people up who might otherwise be likely to join the debate on a non-extreme level.
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