In Which a Grumpy Lesbian Offers Her Feminist Understanding of Men

Posted on | February 3, 2015 | 49 Comments

You know, just once, it would be nice if we heard a married grandmother’s analysis of male psychology, sharing insights from her happy life with her husband, raising sons and daughters, observing their experience of dating and marriage and so forth.

Grant that men are always irritated by female criticism — it injures our pride and puts us on the defensive — but we might be willing to heed such criticism if it came from a woman who was successful in her own relationships with men. Instead we get lectured by emotionally unstable graduate students and various professional ax-grinders who have made careers of proclaiming their oppressed victimhood.

“The personal is the political,” and so feminist analysis nearly always emerges from the experiences of maladjusted misfits.

But why bring up Laurie Penny again?

No, let’s consult the amateur feminists of Tumblr.com. Here is Lost Princess of the Lizard People (“40 .. . gay, female . . . geek”) attempting to analyze Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs):

One of the funny things about MRAs is, many of their ideals seem self-contradictory — for example — not wanting to compete with women in the workforce, but at the same time, angry about female freeloading (I’ve even heard arguments that resent women for having sex work as an alternative to homelessness — totally ignoring the existence of men who do sex work — and that argue that women even take traditionally female dominated jobs away from men), They also tend to scream pretty loudly about their resentment of the traditional male role. They call women prudes on the one hand but sluts on the other.
It would seem this doesn’t make any sense. This is not what your chauvinist grandpa from Texas would’ve ever said; this is not the sexism we’re familiar with. It seems so ridiculous. Is anyone really this stupid??
Most seem like they’re espousing some kind of progressivism out of one side of their mouth and traditional chauvinism out of the other, and it seems so self contradictory …
What I am realizing is that no, these guys aren’t actually stupid. Many MRA attitudes are part of a larger, self-consistent world view. Let’s look at the things so many are into: a particularly radicalized form of atheism (rejection of traditional religions). Your chauvinist grandpa was all for organized religion. Objectivism, though strangely, from the other side of their mouth, they sound like they want a weird form of communism wherein they are just given accolades and raises and bonuses and kudos without ever earning them. Your chauvinist grandpa was too proud for that and even had a sense of fulfillment in hard work. And then there’s all the Libertarianism and anti-statism. Your chauvinist grandpa was an old school patriotic man, all for the military-industrial complex.
Instead of looking at MRAs only in terms of their misogyny facet, why not examine the entire picture?
They want to be aristocrats. They’re under the impression that this is the birthright of all white men. They don’t SAY this, but … it’s the only way their worldview makes sense, because from that point of view, the views that seemed contradictory, actually make sense. The “alpha/beta” (heirarchies), “Return of Kings” (an MRA site) brand aristocratic or even royal branding (this language pops up a lot) … it’s the only thing that makes this whole thing make sense.
This is a reason why arguments against them fail, because most people can’t figure out what their stand actually is, and get caught up in the vacillation. They listen hard to what’s being said but miss what was actually NOT said.
This is the only way that their superficially contradictory views make any sense. . If they were — they wouldn’t be competing with women, let alone other men, except very high status men. Any women they partnered with would come with their own wealth and *born* status (but low-status women of course would be sexually used and disposed of). They wouldn’t personally have to deal with the labor involved in running a household and they would be awarded kudos and pay without having to work overly hard for it.
Taken this way, their views about women become logically consistent, and fall into a consistent and logical frame work that accommodates their other views.

Thanks for your analysis, Lizard Princess.

As I’ve said before, I’m ambivalent toward the “Men’s Rights” movement. On the plus side, A Voice for Men consistently and directly opposes feminism, per se. This is very important.

For too long, the established Right has offered a neoconservative opposition to feminism that tries to win the argument by ceding the premise (i.e., that “sexual equality” is either desirable or possible) and offering women an ersatz “me too” Republican feminism. This is not the original (and successful) anti-feminism of conservative women led by Phyllis Schlafly. Nor is it even the anti-feminism of Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a real neoconservative who rejected the feminist movement because of its hostility to marriage and motherhood. While I appreciate the valuable work of Christina Hoff Sommers, her attempt to rescue the “feminist” label from the feminist movement was doomed from the start. The title of Dr. Sommers’ most famous book poses a question: Who Stole Feminism? And the answer is, “Nobody.” Marxist radicals, abortion lobbyists and lesbian man-haters did not “steal” feminism; they were in control of the Women’s Liberation Movement from its very inception in the 1960s. Trying to re-define “feminism” for conservative purposes is futile and perhaps even dishonest. Our proper goal is to oppose feminism, and MRAs are willing to do so without apology.

On the negative side, however, the phrase “Men’s Rights” implies that males and females are necessarily antagonistic in their interests, an idea I reject. The problem, as I see it, is that feminists have wrongly intruded the political language of “rights” into a private sphere. Remember that the title of Kate Millett’s 1970 book (the first book produced by the Women’s Liberation Movement) was Sexual Politics — which is the problem of feminism summarized in two words.

FEMINISM IS ABOUT SEX!

POLITICS CAN’T SOLVE YOUR SEX PROBLEMS!

Excuse me for shouting in ALL CAPS there, but after more than four decades of failing to solve the basic problem they set out to solve, I think people need to wake up to the truth. Human nature is not infinitely malleable. Attempting to re-arrange society to accommodate the permanent discontent of professional ax-grinders has not solved their problem, because their problem is an inability to adjust successfully to normal adulthood. Instead, feminism has only created new problems for women, problems that did not exist before the Women’s Liberation Movement began its futile attempt to bring about an egalitarian androgynous utopia.

Is anyone surprised to learn that our Lizard Princess (“40 . . . gay, female . . . geek”) failed in heterosexual relationships — she speaks about an ex-husband, a marriage that apparently lasted less than two years — and has since experienced failure in her lesbian relationships? Valentine’s Day was always unhappy with her most recent partner:

This is the kind of sh*t my ex pulled about nearly all “special days”.
me: “So what do you want to do?”
ex: “Anything you come up with will be great” (note that it was always up to me to do the romancing; I was basically cast into the traditional male role in a lot of ways)
The day rolls around.
me: “How do you like it?”
ex, starry eyed and smiling: “Oh it was wonderful! I love it when you do that.”
Six months later:
Ex picks fight seemingly out of nowhere.
ex: “I knew you’d forget about ___ (insert random thing), you didn’t even remember what I liked for [Valentine’s Day].”
me: “Wait, I asked you what you wanted to do.”
ex: “there you go, you never remember our conversations, because you weren’t paying attention. I TOLD you.”
-or-
ex: “You did, but if you’d actually paid attention to what I like, you would’ve known. But you didn’t, and never do.”
me: “Well, I can’t read your mind.”
ex: “You didn’t have to read my mind, you just didn’t know me.”

Lizard Princess elsewhere complains:

Basically, my associations with relationships and [Valentine’s Day] are memories of painful awkwardness. It only tended to highlight how bad the relationship actually was, it was something we had to grin and bear until we broke up a week later. Seriously, most of my relationships have broken up a week or two after [Valentine’s Day] . . .
So yes. I F–KING HATE VALENTINE’S DAY AS A COUPLE HOLIDAY.
Every single [Valentine’s Day] I have is a day I count my blessings that I am not in a f–ked up situation and it feels like *fresh air*. And dammit, I do want to be healed and whole enough to love someone again, but I have really bad associations around [Valentine’s Day].

This is the woman, you see, who presumes to provide objective analysis of the “self-contradictory” ideals of Men’s Rights activists. She couldn’t succeed in heterosexual marriage, but she can’t sustain a lesbian relationship, either. It’s almost as if . . .

UNHAPPY PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY

There’s your real bottom line. Do I claim to know why all of Lizard Princess’s relationships have been such hopeless bummers? No. As I said of Jillian Dunham, maybe it’s just bad luck or maybe it’s bad judgment.

Finding a good relationship requires either (a) an ability to recognize good character, or (b) an ability to cope with the particular character flaws of the imperfect partner you have chosen. Maybe also (c) a bit of both, because very few people are of such excellent character that their partner never has any cause for complaint. What you must avoid is situation (d) — being a flawed person who attracts other flawed people and yet is unable either to admit your own shortcomings or to accept your partner’s shortcomings.

The Lizard Princess’s complaints about her partners are not necessarily wrong, nor do I doubt that she might have identified something important about the mentality of many MRAs, in their ideal of an atheist libertarian aristocracy of Alpha males. The problem, as with most feminist analysis, is that we have unhappy misfits telling us what’s wrong with “society,” rather than having successful people telling us how to succeed and be happy in society as it exists.

Alas, the unhappy misfits are so full of envy and self-righteousness that none of them would listen to good advice if it were offered, nor can we expect them to ask happy successful people to share the secrets of our success and happiness. (Hint: People used to tell me I acted like I was God’s gift to women. I seldom bothered to explain that it’s not acting.)

And what’s with this site calling itself “A Return of Kings”? When were we ever deposed and overthrown? Our reign has been continuous, no matter what that chattering rabble may say.

Speaking of A Voice for Men, Pierce Harlan reports that a New Jersey grand jury has declined to indict five students at William Paterson University who were accused of gang rape.

The accusation was false? But . . . I thought women never lie about rape.

"Romance is rape embellished with meaningful looks." — Andrea Dworkin, 1979 pic.twitter.com/I1x50oclJi

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) January 30, 2015

Category: Feminism, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox, 02.03.15

Posted on | February 3, 2015 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Fire Darrell Bevell
First Street Journal: The American Left – Do As I Say, Not As I Do!
Twitchy: Protesters Kicked Out After Disrupting American Sniper Screening
Terry Teachout: WASP Without A Sting

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Fox’s Shepard Smith Slams Anti-Vaxxers – “You’re Science-Deniers!”
American Thinker: How To Make Young People Conservative
Conservatives4Palin: NO CONSERVATIVES ALLOWED – LGBT Needs New Leadership, New Blood, New Ideas
Don Surber: Liberal Lies Never Die. EVIL.
Jammie Wearing Fools: ISIS Monsters Throw Gay Man Off Building, Then Stone Him After He Survives
Joe For America: Four Countries That Are On the Right Economic Track
JustOneMinute: Monday Morning QB
Pamela Geller: Most Americans Remain Unaware Of This Gruesome Milestone
Protein Wisdom: A Wonkish Non-Wonk’s Thumbnail Analysis Of The Obama Budget Proposal
Shot In the Dark: Women And Guns, Take II
STUMP: 80 Percent Pension Funding Hall Of Shame – It Would Be Ideal To Pay The Pensions
The Gateway Pundit: Obama Admin – Transgender Illegal Aliens Have Right To Hormone Therapy
The Jawa Report: Lebanese Reporter Pwns Da Jooos
The Lonely Conservative: Scott Walker Way Ahead In Drudge Poll (SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!)
This Ain’t Hell: ISIS Relabels And Distributes UN Aid
Weasel Zippers: Obama Threatens To Halt Paychecks For 143,000 Homeland Security Employees If GOP Doesn’t Give Up Amnesty Fight
Megan McArdle: The Goldilocks Approach To Unemployment
Mark Steyn: Shoulder To Shoulder, But Not Head To Head

Thanks to everyone who contributed to my GoFundMe!
We reached the $1500 goal yesterday!
Special thanks to Bob Danger, wherever you are.

Shop Amazon Fashion – 30% Off Jewelry

Category: Linkagery

Or Maybe It’s You

Posted on | February 2, 2015 | 87 Comments

Jillian Dunham was 37 when she made a desperate choice:

When David Keefe made egg freezing a part of his clinical practice a decade ago, he imagined that single women looking to delay childbearing would be a small percentage of his patients. Before then, few women froze their eggs, and those in his clinic who did so were usually about to undergo cancer treatment. But when I met him in 2012, the year the American Society of Reproductive Medicine declared the procedure no longer experimental, he told me that close to half of his freeze patients were single women like me. Today, 80 percent of his patients are women electing to delay childbearing. . . .
I cringed every time I saw a reference to single women in their 30s and 40s “searching for Mr. Right,” which means that I cringed a lot. Dating was cast as “a desperate series of co-parent interviews.” . . .
Before he was a fertility specialist, Dr. Keefe was a psychiatrist. He speaks in scientific details but also in parables. He told me the story of a woman who did one freeze cycle and later had a child, and another who did multiple cycles but was unable to conceive. He told me the story of a woman who broke up with a man who had strung her along for years, only to learn that she had almost no eggs left. . . .
“I wasted a lot of time in my last relationship,” I admitted. “I want to make sure that I take care of myself.”
He leaned forward and paused. “There’s something wrong with the men in your generation,” he said. I was stunned. Here was a doctor who had just been talking about the importance of considering statistical significance, and now he was chalking my dating problems up to the broadest of generalizations. But he was articulating two forms of truth: the mathematical and the personal.
“It isn’t you,” he said. “All day long, I see patients like you. You’re smart, beautiful, accomplished, nice. It makes no sense. I go home to my wife and I say, ‘There’s something wrong with the men in this generation. They won’t grow up.’” . . .

You can read the whole thing, and I don’t want to argue directly against Dr. Keefe’s analysis. However, there is countervailing evidence: Women no less smart, beautiful, accomplished and nice than Jillian Dunham do get married and do have babies long before they turn 37.

Nevertheless, when I worked in D.C. every day for a decade, I routinely encountered women who were in her situation or, if younger than her, were clearly at risk of someday being in her situation. They kept wasting time in “relationships” with men who refused to close the deal. These romantic involvements would last anywhere from a few months to several years, and it was always — always — the guy’s aversion to a permanent commitment that prevented these relationships from becoming marriages. The real problem, it seems to me, is not merely the widespread phenomenon of “Peter Pan Syndrome,” but that (a) young women unwittingly enable such male immaturity because (b) they miscalculate the economics of love, and therefore (c) they waste one of a woman’s most valuable resources, her youth.

The smart, beautiful, nice girl is popular in high school. She has no trouble getting a boyfriend in college. As a 20-something in the singles scene, she gets plenty of attention. To such a young woman, the idea of being in a hurry to find a husband may seem absurd. Yet in the immortal words of Teen Talk Barbie, “Math is hard.”

If you graduate college at 22, you have eight years before you turn 30. Those are very valuable years. However smart, beautiful and nice she may be, a woman is more attractive to the average male when she’s 22 than when she’s 30. You can complain that this double standard that places a premium on female youthfulness is unfair, but you can’t avoid the fact that it is nevertheless real. A woman who is very attractive may think she can defy the odds and that it will be no problem for her to find Mister Right when she’s 30, but what if she’s wrong? She fritters away her 20s in a series of pointless relationships — six months with this guy, two years with that guy, etc. — and before she even notices the pattern, the clock is ticking down: She’s 27, 28, 29 . . .

Bad habits are hard to break. The girl whose first “serious relationship” ends in heartbreak after a few months may not recognize that she has developed bad romantic habits. After the second or third breakup, she’s like a poker player on a losing streak and tells herself she’s a victim of bad luck. An attractive woman in her mid-20s still has a large stack of poker chips in front her, so to speak, and she can keep playing with the same bad strategy a while before the odds shift decisively against her. She’s 30, 31, 32 . . .

Jillian Dunham, predictably, turns her failure into a feminist lesson:

Freezing my eggs did not change my dating life. What it did do was expose me, again and directly, to the ways we treat women when there is a decision to be made about their bodies: We judge, pressure, and publicly debate a woman’s ability to direct her own life. We fret about women’s susceptibility to “false hope,” about their being manipulated by the egg-freezing industrial complex, rather than believing women to be capable of assessing information and understanding risk. We judge women who pay thousands of dollars to freeze their eggs, rather than spending that energy advocating for those who can’t. We criticize women for not being able to control variables that are necessarily out of their control, something that is insulting to everyone involved.

You may notice that rationalizing failure seems to be the point of many feminist narratives. The whole point of feminism is convincing women they are never responsible for their own failures. Feminists will call you a misogynist if you ask a woman to consider the possibility that maybe men are not to blame for all her problems.

Still, not all women have the same problem, do they? Maybe it’s bad luck or maybe it’s bad judgment, but maybe your problem is you.

Category: Feminism

In The Mailbox: 02.02.15

Posted on | February 2, 2015 | 5 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Michelle Malkin: Obama’s Taliban Tools And Treachery
Twitchy: American Sniper Sets Super Bowl Weekend Box Office Record
John C. Wright: Sad Puppies 3 Announces Its 2015 Hugo Sample Slate

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe Vows Revenge For Beheadings
American Thinker: Obama Is Openly Colluding With The Enemy
Conservatives4Palin: Ferguson – The Line To Apologize Forms On The Left
Don Surber: Why Isn’t This National News? EVIL.
Jammie Wearing Fools: RAAAAACIST Sixty Minutes Host Steve Kroft Told His Black Mistress “Don’t Dress Like Beyonce”
Joe For America: Triple-Amputee Vet’s “F*CK YOU” Letter To Obama Goes Viral
JustOneMinute: Out With The Old, In With The Older
Pamela Geller: Islamic State Burning All Books Except Islamic Texts
Protein Wisdom: I Blame The Administration And Its Niggardly Funding Of The Army
Shot In the Dark: Women And Guns
STUMP: Obamacare Tax Watch – Obama Notices
The Gateway Pundit: Anti-Netanyahu Talking Point That Israel “Blindsided Obama” Was A Lie
The Jawa Report: Netanyahu The Bibi-Sitter
The Lonely Conservative: Creepy Democrats Escorted Reporters To Bathroom At Philadelphia Retreat
This Ain’t Hell: Asians Outraged By Army Headline That Had Nothing To Do With Them
Weasel Zippers: UK Muslim Leader Accuses London Mayor Boris Johnson Of Terrorism For Calling Jihadis “Wankers”
Megan McArdle: Hillary Clinton’s Late Start Won’t Stop The Punches
Mark Steyn: No-Go Contendere

The GoFundMe campaign is at $1220 after Super Bowl Sunday.
Thanks to everyone who contributed! I am not worthy!

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Category: Linkagery

Rule 5 Sunday: Wax Ecstatic

Posted on | February 1, 2015 | 8 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

For those of you taking a break from the Super Bowl (or just not watching it to start with) welcome to this week’s Rule 5 Sunday, our celebration of pretty women attractively dressed or otherwise. This week we lead off with a cover pic from Wax Ecstatic Magazine, an online Christian magazine presenting an alternative to more mainstream magazines that are more interested in “…how much they are able to shock you instead of how much they are able to inform you.” One can only assume the founders were unaware of the Sponge song by the same name.

Not Angelina.

Readers are reminded that some of the following links are to pictures generally considered NSFW, and if you get canned for watching these at work, well, you had it coming. Exercise discretion in the clicking; we aren’t responsible for your bad judgement and poor choices.

Goodstuff leads off this week with what can only be called the Chemical Warfare Issue, followed by The Bionic Woman. We gladly note the return of Randy’s Roundtable with Johanna Lundback, Average Bubba’s Rule 5 Friday: Blonde Bombshell Edition, and Ninety Miles from Tyranny’s trifecta: Hot Pick of the Late Night, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. Animal Magnetism checks in with Rule Five Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, Loose Endz celebrates Bond Girl Honor Blackman, and also exposes Wonder Woman as a man-hating feminist! First Street Journal looks at women in Basic Combat Training.

EBL’s thundering herd this week includes much ado about balls*, Miss Universe, Jeffrey Epstein & Bill Clinton’s Fantasy Island, Gisele Bundchen, Ashley Moss, more stuff about balls, Katy Perry, and Super Bowl cheerleaders.

At A View from the Beach, it’s Willa Ford Wanna Be Bad, More Blue Catfish Than People, A Bad Accident and a Great Recovery, Well, It’s Worth a Try, A Wee Bit o’ the Irish, Wombat’s Wednesday News, Surf’s Up!, Les origines de la beauté, How Many Countries Can You Name?, Stormy Monday Wombat News Review, “Don’t Know Why”, and “Burn”.

Soylent Siberia kicks off with your morning coffee creamer, followed by Overnighty Unbridled Bazoom, Monday Motivationer MILF Mania, Evening Awesome: Brazilian Balcony Bodacious, Tuesday Tit-illation With Fishnet Finery, Overnighty Linky Love Contender, Humpday Hawtness Jessica, Evening Awesome Country Fine, Fursdayski Hotski, Happy Birthday Soylent!, Fursday Evening El Fuego, Corset Friday Fillup, Soylent Blogasm: The “New” New Comment Widget, T-Gif Friday: The Future Mrs. Soylent In Training, Happy Hour Hawtness, Weekender In Motion, and Bath Night Bonus – That’s The Plural

Postaldog returns with Tiffany Amber Thiessen, Miley Cyrus, Kate Hudson, and Stacey Dash.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Eugenie Bouchard, his Vintage Babe is Lina Romay, and Sex In Advertising is covered by All Natural Burgers. Also, Deflategate cheerleaders! 😉 At Dustbury, it’s Liu Wen and Daniela Bianchi.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for next weekend’s Rule 5 Sunday is midnight on Saturday, February 7.

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Category: Rule 5

The Errors of ‘Democracy’

Posted on | February 1, 2015 | 93 Comments

We are heirs of a tradition. Each of us is born into circumstances that were created by our parents, by our grandparents, by our ancestors, and by the civilization in which they lived. Human life existed before we were born and will continue after our deaths. As children we inherit the past. As parents we create the future. Wisdom requires us to understand ourselves as a single link in an infinite chain of human existence, rather than to imagine ourselves as free-floating atoms unconnected to others.

Popular ideas of “democracy” — the modernistic idolatry that speaks the language of “rights,” “choice” and “equality” — obscure the truth of human existence, trapping us in the present tense, isolating us as rootless individuals removed from the authentic traditions of our inheritance. Children are taught that the past is not merely useless, but actually harmful, because human history is nothing but a catalog of oppression, atrocities and victimhood. Thus, the modern child cannot be allowed to believe that his grandparents were wise or virtuous, that the great achievements of our civilization are worthy of respect.

The great idol of modernity is Progress. Everything that happened prior to today is “old-fashioned” and obsolete, and nothing is more obsolete than yesterday’s ideas. Whatever your parents or grandparents believed in 1980 or 1950 or 1920 is presumed to be wrong. Your ancestors were all racist sexist homophobes enslaved by patriarchal religious bigotry. Never mind that their beliefs enabled your ancestors to survive hardship that would be unimaginable for most Americans in the 21st century. In a remarkable span of six decades, America survived the Great Depression, triumphed in World War II and destroyed the Evil Empire of Soviet tyranny. Yet the American child today is taught to despise the values of the people who accomplished all that. The child cannot cherish his own inherited tradition or respect his own ancestors, and is instead commanded to bow down at the altar of Progress.

“To live for the moment is the prevailing passion — to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future. . . .
“Narcissism emerges as the typical form of character structure in a society that has lost interest in the future.”
— Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979)

What has resulted from this modernistic idolatry of democratic Progress — the utopian fantasy of an imagined future where we all live in absolute equality, free of “old-fashioned” beliefs — is a sort of social epidemic of bipolar hysteria, in which minds unmoored from cultural tradition constantly shift between utter confusion and radical certainty. Anyone who paid close attention to the “Occupy” protests of 2011 saw evidence of what kind of disordered personalities this progressive epidemic has produced. Young people who were clearly incompetent to manage their own lives nevertheless felt themselves entitled to dictate to the rest of us how “society” must be changed so as to “empower” these mobs of emotional unstable misfits. Refusing to take responsibility for their own failures, the Occupiers believed they were supremely qualified to pass judgment on the “system” that served as an all-purpose scapegoat onto which they could externalize blame for their misfortunes.

Duke: The lights are growing dim Otto. I know a life of crime has led me to this sorry fate, and yet, I blame society. Society made me what I am.
Otto: That’s bullshit. You’re a white suburban punk just like me.
Duke: Yeah, but it still hurts.

Great art speaks great truths and the death of Duke in Repo Man is an under-appreciated highlight of 20th-century cinematic art. Whatever the authorial purpose behind Alex Cox’s 1984 cult classic, that scene speaks eternal truth. Duke and his girlfriend Debbie try to rob a liquor store, and Duke laughs in psychopathic glee as he points his pistol at one of the clerk: “I’m going to kill him! I’m going to kill him! I’m going to kill everybody!” Unfortunately for Duke, there is a thing called karma in the world, and when Duke is momentarily distracted, the store clerk gets his shotgun and fatally wounds Duke. Debbie responds by shooting the clerk dead and it is then that Duke’s death scene plays out. Breathing his last gasps and spitting up blood, Duke speaks his own epitaph, expressing the worldview of every worthless punk who ever lived: “I blame society.”

Irresponsible people always need a scapegoat to blame for their faults and failures. They can never be satisfied to let their own shortcomings or disappointments be blamed on bad luck. Other people may be unlucky — indeed, many millions are far more unfortunate in their circumstances than the punk — but bad luck won’t do for him. No, the punk must always have someone to blame. His own failures and the problems that he has caused for himself? Not his fault. Blame society.

A punk’s entire life is basically one long quest for revenge, an attempt to even the score with “society,” to get back at the people he blames for whatever it is that has made him unhappy or unsuccessful.

The Cult of Progress has spawned a Punk Generation of people with no system of values except intellectual abstractions — “democracy,” “rights,” “equality” and so forth. They have learned nothing of sturdy virtue, nothing of classic Stoicism, nothing of the Calvinist ethos of enduring life’s hardships with a spirit of reverent gratitude.

We are told that democracy is synonymous with freedom, but we see how a false belief in “equality” between the wise and foolish, between the evil and the good, must ultimately enslave us all.

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”
— Romans 1:22 (KJV)

Category: Culture, Intellectuals

In The Mailbox: Late Weekend Edition

Posted on | January 31, 2015 | 28 Comments

— by Wombat-socho

Apologies for the lack of linkagery yesterday; I spent the morning with my lawyer before heading into the tax mines for my Friday shift, and by the time I was done with that it was almost 9 PM and I didn’t have the energy left to do anything by the time I got home. /whining
Part of what’s been sapping my energy is impending bankruptcy…ah, you can read about that here, and if you can help at all, it would be very much appreciated. Every little bit helps, and who knows – maybe the incentives will tickle your fancy. In the meantime, on with the items of interest from various and sundry blogs…

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Andrew Sullivan Is Retiring From Blogging
Proof Positive: The Polaroid President
Louder With Crowder: Kevin Costner Uses The N Word
First Street Journal: Obviously A Joke, But Can You Imagine The Reaction From The Feminists?
Michelle Malkin: Choose To Refuse
Twitchy: Nationwide #runwarrenrun House Parties Rival Sandra Fluke Rallies In Numbers, Diversity

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Former Oregon State Student Kendra Sunderland Arrested After Making Porn Video In Campus Library
American Thinker: Pedophilia And The American Future
BLACKFIVE: Free Fire Zone – Bring It Bibi
Conservatives4Palin: Sarah Palin Is Right – Go On Offense, Tout Conservatism
Don Surber: Communists Lure Democrats. GOOD.
Jammie Wearing Fools: HuffPo Author Barack Obama Tells Democrats “Get Informed, Not By Reading The Huffington Post”
Joe For America: Here’s A DREAMER For You
JustOneMinute: Not Enough One-Percenters
Pamela Geller: Ted Cruz Calls For Investigation Into Taxpayer-Funded State Department Group Trying To Oust Netanyahu
Protein Wisdom: Liberal Writer Discovers Resurgent PC Movement Is Essentially Illiberal In Ideology
Shot In The Dark: There’s A Reason They Called Bobby Heenan “The Brain”
STUMP: What I’ve Read – The Bounty Of Zelazny
The Gateway Pundit: Jordan Threatens ISIS – Kill Our Pilot And We’ll Execute ALL Our Prisoners
The Jawa Report: War Porn – Freshly Dead ISIS Courtesy Of Iraq MOD
The Lonely Conservative: Six Million Households May Be Fined For Failure To Buy Health Insurance
This Ain’t Hell: What My Military Pension Means To Me
Weasel Zippers: Texas Governor Greg Abbott Declares February 2 “Chris Kyle Day” In Texas
Megan McArdle: A Tall Order For McDonald’s
Mark Steyn: Mood Indigo