Tag: Culture Wars

Civilization vs. Barbarians

The King Is Dead

Business, Men & Women, Modernism

One wonders what King Gillette would think of his company’s current manifestation of anti-masculinity:

A new short film released by the shaving brand dedicates itself to tackling toxic masculinity in a video that relies more on berating men for not living up to the standards of feminists than selling razors.

Knowing but a little of what King Gillette was like, and knowing how many years of toil and financial hardship he endured to get his disposable razor blade to the market, I think he’d probably burn the whole fucking thing to the ground, and I’d be handing him the cans of gasoline.

In the grand scheme of things, I’d be one of the men refusing to buy Gillette products in protest at their foolishness.  But the truth of the matter is that I haven’t used a Gillette product in well over a quarter of a century, simply because I refuse to spend about $5 for a blade which lasts me less than a week*.  (Good old safety singles or bargain-priced Trac II blades for me;  and if I run out, I use a straight, or “cutthroat” razor without a qualm.)

As for Gillette’s parent company, Proctor & Gamble:  I have suffered untold toiletry privations at their hands, the miserable Cincinnati MFCS bastards:  brand “extensions” which end up replacing much-loved products, only to see said extensions later withdrawn, meaning that I have to find replacements for products I’ve used sometimes for decades.  Try to find, in supermarkets or drugstores anywhere, Old Spice Original Fresh Stick deodorant with the the light blue label — not the anti-perspirant variant, which smells like cat piss.  I’ve been using Old Spice Fresh sticks for well over fifty years, and now I’m forced to buy them online in packs of 24 because they are nowhere to be found otherwise.  And if that supply dries up, I’ll stop using deodorant altogether, because every other male deodorant on the market nowadays smells like an attractant for homosexual prostitutes during Fleet Week.)

To use Gillette’s line on P&G:  50 years of unswerving loyalty is “the best a man can get”, you incompetent fuckers.  Too bad it means nothing to you.

A pox on all of them.  I can’t wait for “woke” to become “choke”, and may they burn in the fires of toiletry hell.

*En passant:  I once tried one of those 5-blade things — a disposable — just for the hell of it, and it felt like someone was dragging the hair out of my face with sandpaper.

LMAO

Crime, Freaks & Loonies

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh hysterically (as I did) at this report:

Footage released by the hunt saboteurs shows several people standing in front of a van, blocking it from leaving.
A man wearing a baseball cap appears to threaten the occupants with a pool cue, as they shout: ‘Oi, you’re on camera.’
A woman in a red hoodie jabs her finger at the sabs and says: ‘Dirty f****** scum, you’re not going nowhere.’
A man inside the van can be heard desperately calling police for help and tells the operator they are being boxed in by hunt supporters wielding pool cues.

Lemme see: when hunt saboteurs (“sabs” — how cute) break the law, trespass on private property, try to pull hunters from their horses and scatter pepper in the noses of the dogs, it’s all “right to protest” / “save the animals” etc.  But when their violence results in violence against them in retaliation, they’re all “Oh please, P.C. Plod, please please please  come and rescue us!”

The woman in the red hoodie had it right:  they’re dirty fucking scum.

Alternative Path

Advice, Business, Guy Stuff, Men & Women

I have often ruminated that young men need to evaluate their career choices very carefully before picking the one they think will work best for them.

Increasingly, it’s become apparent that going to college is not a worthwhile option for them — unless they want to be hounded, harassed and vilified just for the “crime” of being a man, that is.  (10,000 instances of false accusations, man-hating professors and the courses they teach have been omitted on grounds of brevity.)

Now, we’ve seen in other spheres what men do when they feel that the game rules are loaded against them, or that participation leads not only to inevitable failure, but even to a compromised future.  The dating game is one such activity, where men have either deliberately turned the rules of the game against women and used them to their own benefit — or have simply eschewed all participation in the face of assured failure (going their own way — MGTOW) and simply created a parallel life outside the game.

I’m suggesting an alternative to the career game.

Don’t go to college, at least until the rotten system has collapsed under the weight of its own prejudice and misogyny misandry, and been replaced with a better deal.  Ignore the vested interests of people and institutions who preach the lie that you can only be successful with a college degree.

If you’re super-smart and driven like Michael Dell or Bill Gates, of course, you don’t need to be told this.  But only a very few men, in any  activity, are in that rare 0.00001% of super-achievers.

But for the vast remainder, there is an option:  work in industries where the vast majority of women can’t or won’t participate.  I’m talking about the heavy, dirty and sometimes thankless jobs (Mike Rowe-type Dirty Jobs) which not only don’t require a college degree, but where a college degree might even be a hindrance and not a qualifier.

Just last week I came across a guy who was an oil field worker.  He’d fled from Venezuela right after that thug Hugo Chávez came to power, and in the eighteen years since had worked his way up the ladder, in oilfields all over the world.  Now, at age 45, he’d finally reached the point where he didn’t have to work  the oil rigs, just visit them and see how things were going.  Along the way he’d acquired a wife, two preteen kids, and a $750k house in Plano where I picked him up to take him to the airport.  He’d completely lost his Hispanic accent (when he left Venezuela he couldn’t speak a word of English) and was also fluent in Arabic and (ahem) German.  When I asked him if he had a university degree he just laughed and said, “What for?”

What for, indeed.

Here’s the point.  I know it’s going to be difficult for Millennials and their successors to handle this, but working dirty jobs is hard.  It requires dedication, stubbornness and of course a willingness to get one’s hands dirty, and sadly, because of the education industry’s indoctrination of kids, this choice is often dismissed or demeaned.

It shouldn’t be.  If you weigh the eventual benefits of dirty work — where, by the way, your exposure to militant feminism is going to be minimal to nonexistent — against a useless degree coupled with crippling debt, this should not be a difficult decision.

Is this risky?  Not as much as you’d think.  Just the other day, our local community college broke ground on a campus which apparently is going to be dedicated almost exclusively to the “hard” careers — automotive service and repair, construction, welding, plumbing, electrical work, manufacturing and so on — but I’m not going to suggest you look to such an institution for your education / training;  what’s important is simply to realize that for such an event to have taken place, there must be a crippling shortage of young men willing to get into those fields, and this is the Establishment’s attempt to address it.  (It’s complete bollocks, of course — you’d do better by getting an apprenticeship at a real place of work.)

So, in the paraphrased words of Ayn Rand, go “Galt” and make your own way in the world.  You may not succeed, of course, but remember that failure is equally (or, in these times, more) likely with a freshly-printed college diploma clutched in your hand.

Become a watchmaker, if you’re mechanically inclined.  Work in construction, if you’re strong in body.  Get an apprenticeship in a trade, preferably an ugly, dirty and tough one where just by virtue of being a man you face no competition from women.  I guarantee you, there’s a tough job out there for any man if he’s prepared to go for it.  And if your first one (or several) choices don’t work out, find another one that does.

Let women take over non-jobs like human resources, clerical jobs at the DMV, cubicle management, bank tellers or benefits administration at Global MegaCorp Inc., and laugh as the life force is drained from them.

Here’s the challenge:  be a man.  Not today’s version of “male” figures who argue over craft beers and fashion accessories.  I’m talking about real  men, who do things for themselves, push aside barriers with confidence and, eventually, end up with women (like my friend Raul, above) who appreciate them for their qualities and for the security and families they can provide.

When I asked Raul if his wife worked, he looked at me in puzzlement and said, “What for?”

If this guy taught a class, he’d create a generation of achievers.  He would never do such a thing, of course, although he would (and does) train other men to succeed as he has.

Now get out there and make something of your life that does not include words like “curriculum”, “term paper” and “Diversity Studies”.  You’ll be a world better for it.

Postscript:  there was a time when enlisting in our nation’s Armed Forces would have been a viable career choice for a young man.  Not today, unless you try out for Special Forces, SEALs or similar.

Snowflake Warnings

Culture, Entertainment

One of my most treasured memories is watching the late Frank Zappa tearing into that foul scold Tipper Gore during Congressional hearings.  Gore, you may remember, thought that rock music lyrics were eeeevil and caused kids to become mass murderers or Satanists or something, and Zappa just took her precious little thesis and trashed it with a wonderful mixture of scorn, opprobrium and educated analysis of her silly, nonsensical fears and creeping Puritanism.

I was taken back to those good times when reading this piece of utter bullshit:

Old favorites, outdated attitudes: Can entertainment expire?

They exist throughout society’s pop-culture canon, from movies to TV to music and beyond:  pieces of work that have withstood time’s passage but that contain actions, words and depictions about race, gender and sexual orientation that we now find questionable at best.
Whether it’s blackface minstrel routines from Bing Crosby’s “Holiday Inn,” Apu’s accent in “The Simpsons,” bullying scenes in “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the arguably rapey coercion of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” and “Sixteen Candles” or the simplistically clunky gender interactions of “Mr. Mom,” Americans have amassed a catalog of entertainment across the decades that now raises a series of contentious but never-more-relevant questions:
What, exactly, do we do with this stuff today? Do we simply discard it? Give it a free pass as the product of a less-enlightened age? Or is there some way to both acknowledge its value yet still view it with a more critical eye?

I have a better idea.  Treat it all as entertainment.  And in the manner of Tipper Gore and her ilk, feel free to pepper the covers with all sorts of “parental advisories” or better still, my favorite all-purpose warning that one’s childish sensibilities may be offended by the contents thereof (number to increase with the frightfulness of the content):

  

At least a “10-” warning will announce that I’m about to really enjoy myself.

But for the love of Jupiter’s throbbing headache, leave the classics alone for us grownups to enjoy for the fabulous bits of entertainment they are.   Frankly, there’s absolutely fuck-all about the classics which should frighten anyone, whether it’s Mark Twain using the word “nigger” so freely in Huckleberry Finn  (which novel, lest we forget, did more to change attitudes about race than a dozen Jesse Jacksons) or Gary Cooper taking Claudette Colbert in hand in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938):

At the end of the brilliant movie Thank You For Smoking (2006), there’s a scene where the foul Senator protagonist talks about going back into all the classic movies and digitally removing all traces of smoking, thereby “improving” them.  The man’s unctuous smugness coupled with his utter conviction is so creepy it makes your skin crawl.

And that’s what these pricks are talking about now.  And make no mistake, there’s absolutely no end to it.  If a treasured classic like Baby, It’s Cold Outside can be interpreted to containing “rapey coercion”, then let me assure you all of one thing: nothing is safe.

I have a simple solution to this nonsense:  every time some asshole indulges in some censorship dream like the above, the nearest person should horsewhip them.  Literally.  They get “triggered” by the suggestion of stalking in The Police’s Every Breath You Take ?  Well, I get triggered by their wanting to change the whole fucking world to accommodate their tender sensibilities.

Just remember:  this wonderful, sexy scene in Tom Jones is one day going to disappear forever because some fucking vegan got triggered.

I am getting so sick of people trying to tell me what I should or should not do, or what I may or may not eat, or what entertainment I may or may not enjoy, that there may well come a time when you’ll read about some snowflake getting flogged for trying to bowdlerize the lyrics of Run For Your Life.

And the flogger’s name will be mine.  Which reminds me:  I need to oil the old sjambok, just in case.

We’re All Individuals!

Essays

This line comes from Chris DeGroot, and I nearly made it a QOTD, but I think it actually deserves more discussion.

“Over time, any nation in which personal autonomy is taken for granted as the highest good must become deficient in social cohesion.”

And that’s where the Enlightenment falls apart.  In their rush to overcome the oppressive social environment such as under royalty or an official State church (not to mention religious excesses such as the Inquisition), the Founding Fathers, Enlightened all, created a system with ironclad rights (which they called “natural”) which were guaranteed to the individual and protected by the Constitution.

I have no idea what John Adams or Thomas Jefferson would have thought of a society with many nebulous and self-identified genders about which nobody dare breathe an ugly or even judgmental word (despite that “freedom of speech” thing).  Let’s not even talk about the demonization of White men or the “reverse” racism enshrined in racial-preference laws.  If they’d had that situation back then, Washington may well have called out the militia to enforce a series of mass floggings… ummmm…

Sorry, I went away to warm and wonderful place there for a moment.

The point is that intelligent people (such as, say, the Founding Fathers) have always known that the concept of individual rights stood at the very top of an extremely slippery slope, but I suppose that the aforementioned probably counted on the common sense of the people and their elected officials not to take society to a place where a White woman wearing a caftan on a hot summer’s day could be decried as “cultural appropriation”, and punished  (by censure from university authorities, for example, or by socially-acceptable ostracization).

So much for that idea.

DeGroot’s statement is perfectly true, of course, so at a time when we as a nation are hopelessly divided into a multiplicity of self-interested groups of increasingly-freakish people — not to mention nigh-monolithic groups such as “Blacks”, “progressives” or “LGBTOSTFU” — it seems an impossible task to call for such exotica as “national unity” (what a fucking joke) or make pleas that sound like “Can’t we all just get along?”

No, we can’t, ever;  not when The Other has been institutionally demonized by the Perpetually Aggrieved.

Well-meaning people may think that there must be a way for us to come together and put aside our differences, but that’s never going to happen.  As long as the most trivial differences between us have been magnified into chasms separating us into “Nazis” and “racists” (to name but two), such harmony is absolutely impossible.

I wish there was a workable, lasting solution, but there isn’t.  Even the mass floggings alluded to above aren’t possible, otherwise the Left would have started them already — on us — for being the Nazi / racist / evil / Trumpians / whatever we are (according to their  standards, of course).

The only thing that does cause so splintered a nation to unify is a calamity (e.g. a hurricane’s devastation) or a palpable evil perpetrated by a hostile entity (e.g. 9/11).  Because of the sheer size of the United States, natural calamity is generally localized and is not a “national” event.  And even the actions of a hostile entity have an increasingly-abbreviated shelf life nowadays, so I see no “unity” in our collective future.  Hell, I don’t even see comity appearing anytime soon.

But then, I’m The Enemy.

Opinions (reprinted from August 14, 2007)

Deep Thoughts

One of the many epithets hurled my way is that I’m an opinionated man.

Guilty as charged.

I’ve often thrown around statements like “the best cheese ever made” and “the world’s greatest beer/brandy” (Wadworth’s 6X and Richelieu, respectively), and I would have thought it obvious that these were a.) opinions and b.) made after many years of careful (and in the case of booze, not-so-careful) sampling and experimentation.

What I never say, however, when it comes to these matters, is that people who don’t share my tastes are idiots or fools or whatever.  (Sometimes, I find their opinion inconceivable—e.g. if someone were to prefer the horrible Californian brandy over the wonderful South African stuff—but the expression “there’s no accounting for tastes” works perfectly to describe my mental shrug at so strange a position.)

I also make it plain, very plain, when I prefer one thing over another because of prejudice.  I don’t like Glocks, for example, because I think that black plastic guns are ugly (note:  opinion—yours may differ), Glocks don’t fit my hand very well (note:  physiological difference from your hand), and Gaston Glock supports the horrible idea of “ballistic fingerprinting” (note: my difference of position vs. Glock’s).  I don’t like Glock’s spongy DA trigger pull, but then I don’t like any DA semi-auto pistol (note:  generic dislike not specific to Glock), because I think that if you want to shoot DA, a revolver should suffice.

Thus I can see no reason why I should ever buy a Glock for myself.

BUT:

I have often recommended Glocks to prospective gun buyers, if the gun seems to fit their criteria, and especially if they tell me that the Glock fits their hand well.  I have never said that Glocks are unreliable, or inaccurate—in fact, I’ve often noted the precise opposite.  I have never called Glock owners “idiots” (although I have on occasion teased people about their choice—and, it should be noted, they have teased me right back).

It’s just my opinion.  And yes, some of it is based on freely-admitted prejudice, because I think that John Moses Browning’s design of the 1911 is the absolute zenith of pistolmaking, and why try to improve on perfection?

Most of the time, such statements are made tongue-in-cheek.  Like the last one.

What really pisses me off is when people insult me because of my opinion.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I mention that I dislike runny cheese, and in fact prefer older, firmer, even crumbly cheese.  I don’t like runny cheese because, to be blunt, it reminds me of the consistency of snot.  Nothing wrong, there: it’s a simple preference of taste and texture, backed up with a personal rationale.

What I don’t expect is for some dickhead to say that because I don’t like runny cheese, my taste buds are immature or inoperable, and that therefore I’m not a real cheese-lover.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?  But that’s the kind of bullshit that’s aimed at me almost every time I express a strong opinion:  at some point, someone is going to accuse me of some shortcoming, simply because my strong dislike happens to be his strong preference.

This doesn’t matter whether I’m talking about beer, cheese, cars, cricket or (gawd help me) literature.  Even my musical taste has come under attack when, say, I opine that while Rush are excellent musicians on an individual basis, their music leaves me cold, and Geddy Lee’s voice makes me want to eat the barrel of a Ruger Blackhawk.  Note that I have not, ever, called Rush fans a bunch of immature poseurs—and I’m not doing so now, because that’s just what we writers call an analogy—but others behave very differently towards me.  Using the same example:  because I don’t like Rush, there Must Be Something Wrong With Me, And All That Needs To Happen Is For Me To Experience This Song, And I’ll Change My Opinion—and every time I express a strong dislike of something, the same tiresome nostrum is shoved down my throat whether it’s beer, science fiction, football or any of the other (many) flashpoints of difference on this website where others hold equally-reasoned, and as passionate opinions as mine.

All bets are off when it comes to the Rolling Stones, however:  their music is awful, their playing dreadful, and their fans are, like the Stones themselves, a bunch of middle-class streetfighting wannabes.

And if the previous sentence made your blood boil, welcome to my world.

Note that all the above have to do with personal taste—in other words, it affects society not a whit that someone else may be bored to tears by The Three Musketeers or The Mayor of Casterbridge but is enthralled by When Planets Collide and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

Society is likewise unaffected, nay improved, by the fact that people’s tastes run to beers not Boddington’s Ale, but to lagers, porters, beers with a fruity flavor or those which need a squeeze of lime to make them palatable.

There is one opinion, however, which does not lend itself to a multitude of options, and that’s the political one.

Society is seldom improved by the wholesale introduction of, say, socialism into the polity.  Although some very minor aspects of same may not be too awful, it is simply lunatic to suppose that “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” has the slightest chance of working in the grand scheme of unalterable human nature.  Socialism requires endless self-sacrifice and altruism, and the submission of the self to the whole.  Ditto radical libertarianism, whose fierce adherence to “the primacy of the individual” requires success parameters that all members of society be innately virtuous, resourceful, reasonable and possess an IQ greater than 120.

Both sets of requirements are hopelessly unrealistic.

Little bits of both philosophies are not a bad thing, and each acts as a counterweight to the other.  But no government is just as bad as too much government, because both allow too much leeway for the powerful to screw up the lives of the not-so powerful.  History has proved that the best recipe for the success of the society is a political system which has as little government as possible, with a people as empowered as possible—once again, each acting as a check on the other’s baser instincts and behavior (mob rule, of course, being as bad as a centralized totalitarian system).

And a small government with an empowered populace is: ta-da!  our Constitutional, representative republic.

Now, we may argue about the details of said republic (and O! how do we argue), and of late, our government has become far too big for my liking.  Just remember, however, that the most vile situation to live in is one of constant revolution, with first one extreme philosophy and then the other contrary one holding the higher ground.  Allowing government to grow until too big for its boots, and then beating it back with sticks (okay, voting), seems to me to be preferable to the alternative, even though the prognosis right now is gloomy.

There have been rays of sunshine—the Assault Weapon Ban non-renewal, the immigration amnesty nonsense, and so on—where We The People gave Them The Gummint a bloody nose (not bloody enough for most, including me, but hey).

But the plain fact of the matter is that unlike my opinions on beer, cheese and literature, which are mine and where others may comfortably differ (without resorting to insult), when it comes to the realm of politics, there is no argument, because history, and the millions of people from other political systems who are trying to come here, tell us so.

Argument in that vein is not only pointless, it’s counter-productive.