Rape Culture

Yet more heads roll! Amusingly, the string of sexual crimes by Leftists now includes Harvey Weinstein's brother, Amazon's Roy Price, New Republic Editor Leon Wieseltier, director David O. Russel, director James Toback (now accused by 238 women), the proprietor of a prog videogame forum and bourgeois commie LARPer and Jacobin contributor Sam Kriss. We've come a long way from Harvey. I'd pause to say something about how I'm still not tired of winning, but I have more pressing questions.

First, why? The scale of the accusations since Weinstein was outed is almost mind boggling. Almost. It's no secret that male feminists have ulterior motives when they sign up for the equality struggle session. Every once in a while a low to mid tier male feminist with name recognition would be outed for some sort of sexual impropriety against the, erm, fairer sex. Anyone who somehow avoids the news, but attended college with millennials would harbor similar suspicions. Most men I met in college had very little sympathy for feminism, but all men who sympathized with feminism were lackluster examples of masculinity. There is a certain, delicious irony in hearing individuals who only barely resemble a man bitch about "toxic" masculinity. Chiefest among those accused of the crime of toxic masculinity were fraternities. If you ever have the opportunity to listen to some soymen bitch about Greek Life, hold off on interjecting and just listen. You will very quickly realize that the animosity SJWs hold towards the Greek system is not just based in resentment, but also ressentiment. I touched on this in my very first post:

Didn't get a bid from a fraternity or sorority? Resent that you don't get invited to their bangin ragers? No problemo famalam, just call them racist and the school will be right there, just like your stupid fucking helicopter parents, to put those above you on their knees in supplication, begging for mercy. That is power, but cheap and easy and wholly devoid of obligation, responsibility or the burden of care and foresight.

As I see it, the ressentiment soymen hold for fraternities is inseparable from their sexual frustration. At the end of my teens and into my earliest twenties, I was a frat boy. I jokingly told my non-Greek friends that a fraternity is more or less a glorified drinking club. Sure, to a large extent that is true. But fraternities also serve as easy access to women. Joining a fraternity is a status booster. I'm not as erudite as Roissy when it comes to explaining how the sexual market works, so bear with me. Women, being hypergamous, are particularly aware of where men rank on the social hierarchy - or at least how men present their rank, as there appears to be little difference in the female mind. This explains the efficacy of 'game'. Membership in a fraternity checks off a bunch of qualifiers that boost relative status: Trial by fire vis-a-vis pledging, popularity through the easy friendship of membership, access to resources through alcohol and parties, exclusivity through invitations to closed parties, etc. There are other benefits (primarily post-graduation networking), but that is relatively unimportant when you're trying to rail some thots. I certainly never boasted about how great a job I was going to have when I was flirting. And none of this is to say that all of my frat buddies slayed pussy non-stop. A fraternity will certainly get you through the door, and give you a higher initial status, but its up to you to close the deal. There were guys who brought home some strange every night, and there were a handful of guys who didn't even touch a woman. But that doesn't matter, because to an outsider all that is visible is the long line of women one-night-standed by a bunch of Chads. Hence, ressentiment. Amusingly, despite the incessant bitching from prog women about the Greek system, I have yet to meet a feminist who wasn't deeply flattered by the prospect of getting railed by a frat boy. The incongruity between what a woman says and what a woman does is a dead horse I don't need to beat.

Being shut out from the (perceived) access to pussy vis-a-vis fraternal organizations, men who still have a sex drive turn elsewhere. There are a whole bunch of strategies to getting laid in college, some good and some bad, but for some reason there is a very obvious, very loud and outspoken, and very wretched group of men who decided being a yes man white knight to a woman's worst impulses was the best. Really, for them, it was the path of least resistance. I normally would scoff, but evidently the thirsty are quenched every now and again. Sorta. Do yourself a solid - if you aren't the sort of person that reflexively flinches at cringe - and compare the woman's account of her unwanted encounter with Sam Kriss (below), and the secret recording of Harvey Weinstein attempting to seduce that model.

Fucking cringe.

I don't even need to lead you where I want to take you, the cringe is so very real. I could tell you a few stories about buddies (fraternal or otherwise) who failed spectacularly in seducing women while in my vicinity, but without a face or a name, the anecdote is more or less meaningless and hogging up space. Suffice it to say I've seen some godawful pickup attempts, but the rub is that I have never in my life seen anything in person that makes me cringe as hard as listening to Weinstein's pathetic pleading and demanding, or reading Sam Kriss's increasingly desperate attempts to get the girl in the above picture to come home with him. There is a certain sense of entitlement that you might see in the way both men attempt to ingratiate their sexual urges, and this sense, I think, is key to understanding the why here, and much more broadly, the why of why our ruling class is failing and consuming itself.

There are a lot of ways to distill the problem of the modern world and the crisis of Western Civilization. Brett Stevens refers to our pathology as both hubris and solipsism. I would add to that, because I generally agree with Stevens, by saying that most people want something for nothing, and as the eventual consequence of racking up physical, metaphysical and spiritual debt has yet to arrive, most people willfully delude themselves into thinking that the debtor will never actually collect his due. People like Harvey Weinstein, his brother, Sam Kriss, the idiot burning his Lefty vidya games forum to the ground, and male feminists generally are cut and dry examples of something for nothing. Pledging allegiance to the degrading nonsense of postmodernism requires no effort, and costs nothing (save for what Theodore Dalrymple said about the purpose of communist propaganda). Whatever effort steeled the Leftists of yore, the Anarchist terrorists, the Communist infiltrators and the Marxists of the Frankfurt School is worthless now, because their sons paid no price for their father's efforts. It is actually not surprising that the bourgeois fucktards who were handed the cultural controls of the greatest technomagic civilization of all time have gone and fucked up everything by trying to fuck everything. And it's even less a surprise that they had no grace doing so! They were untested! They paid no price, burned no calories. For Christ's sake, Sam Kriss is the scion of rich bourgeois urbanites, and contrary to his socialist creds he tried to puff himself up to his would be cumdumpster based on the astonishing wealth of his progenitors.

A long time ago Roissy (I believe, I actually don't want to dig through the CH archives to find this particular post) shed some light on the old "grass is always greener" adage. If I remember the chain correctly, George Clooney's manager envies the way that extremely attractive women will simply slip Clooney their numbers. This manager, no schlub himself, has a name that carries weight (being the manager of an A list celebrity tends to do this), and himself attracts many women, though not as many as Clooney. The managers friend who... maybe was in a band or something, envies the manager, but himself reels in a lot of women vis-a-vis being a musician, and the bartender envies the friend, who is in turn envied by so on and so forth, all the way down the line with men who do slightly worse, sexually, envying their betters. The story eventually ends with some guy who goes home to his Japanese love pillow envying his friend who has a female coworker he talks to regularly. I forget what the moral exactly was, but why I am bringing it up is that a man who harvests desirable anything without effort is a man untested.

We are all born virgins. In the seemingly ancillary story I hamfistedly related to you above, we all start at Japanese love pillow, and we all know the peak is George Clooney. Or maybe some other actor with better taste. Just roll with it, it's a lame metaphor anyways. I don't actually advocate hedonism or the PUA lifestyle, despite the sex metaphor you're about to be shoved into.

Leftists look at George Clooney and say my life would be so much better if I were him, and they either inherit the building blocks of staggering sexual prowess (fame, power, wealth, access) and fuck it up royally by never putting in the work, or they hover as male feminist allies/lesser betas, watching in anguish as their oneitis slowly morphs into a cumdumpster courtesy of a long line of Chads. Hence, ressentiment. Much to their surpise, the Left's shortcut to power only enfeebles them more (to borrow from PA again).

You never, ever, ever want to just look at the goal, because it isn't the goal that makes you better, it's the lessons and character and muscle you accrue along the way. We all want to be Emperor, but without the conquest... the top of the mountain is just a pretty view if you didn't climb up it yourself. 

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There is fairly good reason to believe that the defenestration of Harvey Weinstein was simply the crack necessary to burst the dam. Given that the sexual impropriety among modern Leftists (and, according to Thermidore, the Leftists of yore) is fairly common, we should expect that there is a significant population of young women who have experienced anything ranging from mild discomfort to straight horror, who are more than willing to spill the beans given that being a sexual victim itself is a profitable way to harvest attention - the only currency that really matters to women.

Some have pointed to Bannon being the source, although I am fairly unconvinced. I am extremely unconvinced that there is anyone "directing" the outflow of victims from the shadows of our Leftist overlords, much as I would otherwise like to believe.

What is important is that this is tearing the Left apart. Complete madness.

Caste, Then Now and Forever

Declasse though it may be to mention, it is impossible to ignore that America has a caste system. Caste, of course, more or less just means categories on a hierarchy, although the American caste system is less a pyramid and more a pyramid-ish tree, with branches sprouting in three dimensions. Where do millionaires stand relative to celebrities? What about celebrity millionaires? People with pretensions of intellectual grandeur call that sort of questioning intersectionality. You can tell that the sort of people who tell you about such a term are very thoughtful.

Caste in America is also fluid, as people are able to move up and down categories depending on their circumstances. This is peculiar relative to the more rigid and overt caste systems of yore. Jennifer Lawrence and Justin Bieber are to examples of famous individuals moving up in caste, and Harvey Weinstein is an example of the opposite.

Thinking of the drive to "equalize", I can't help but suspect that no one has really thought that much about how total social equality would work. Would we all be celebrities, recognized by everyone that we pass on the streets? Or would we all be friendless nobodies? Given the atomizing trends of urbanization, and the sort of people who fall prey to the glow of city life (ignoring the filth readily apparent upon close inspection), the latter seems far more likely than the former. Needless to say, there is a social discrepancy between the famous and the mundane, such that privileges are conferred in one direction and clearly this sort of thing is an anathema to our drive to totally obliterate distinctions and uniqueness.

A handful of sentences in and I've already thought about this way more than your average liberal arts student. Or professor. Anyways, I can't help but suspect that fashionable equality is a sort of inbred abomination of a fever dream and a child's tantrum. A half baked cry of Pay attention to me!

Channeling Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

From the Hill:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) blasted “half-baked, spurious nationalism” in the United States in an emotional speech Monday night after receiving the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal.

“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain 'the last best hope of earth' for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history,” McCain said in the speech.

The Arizona senator said “we live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil” and said Americans “are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad.”

“We have done great good in the world. That leadership has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy as we did,” McCain said.

“We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we don’t. We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent.”

There are several curious remarks in the above passage, but the one most worth commenting on is people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems. Although these words were doubtlessly written by an aide, it none the less serves as a tell, a passable reconstruction of what John McCain sees when he looks in the mirror.

I solve problems.

In another era John McCain would have been an unimpressive middle manager. Alas, today, he is an unimpressive Senator. It's funny, not ha ha funny but gallows humor funny, that this man and his peers regard themselves as problem solvers.

The post-World War II order saw to it that the citizens of the West be rewarded with an expanding set of entitlement programs. The first-level flaw with our model of entitlements is that there must be a larger pool of payers-in to recipients, such that social security, to quote Rick Perry, is a ponzi scheme. So long as the ratio of payers to receivers is maintained, everyone is happy. Unfortunately the birthrate of the West declined and the ratio of payers to receivers skewed wildly, and the whole house of cards began to groan under the weight of the Baby Boomers.

Enter Mr. McCain, et. al. Instead of looking at the conundrum and asking the basest of questions - why did the ratio of payers to receivers change? - our democratic overlords simply said "We'll just add new people" and rewarded themselves with raises and accolades and fancy parties. A whole new categories of problems emerged from the importation of new tribes, and to smooth over the turbulence an ex post rationale called a proposition nation crept into the education of young Westerners. Now only those who actively seek the truth discover how heinous the lies they were taught are, and worse still those actively resisting lies almost always face some sort of social sanction from ostensible members of their own tribe. What an incredible mess, though you who read this are doubtlessly well aware of the scale of this whole catastrophe.

So why point it out?

Because the hubris of John McCain is a worthy example of how not to lead and how not to solve problems. It's easy to look up to a Caesar, a Napoleon, an Alexander. The greatest men that ever lived get their due recognition, but even when the bad and the failed become a cultural byword for treachery or loss, like Benedict Arnold or Pyrrhus of Epirus, we seldom stop to pause and wonder where exactly they went so wrong. In the case of McCain, whatever his personal failings are (and I have no desire to recount all that I have heard about Mr. McCain), there is an argument to be made that it is not McCain's failures per se that we should focus on, but rather that there exists a system that allows men like McCain to take power beyond their measure.

In a sane era, John McCain would have been an unimpressive middle manager.

Signs of the Kali Yuga I

Nazis watch out!

"Communism doesn't work" is a conservative banality. "Communism has never been tried" is a progressive banality. "Communism doesn't work but Marx was spot on in his criticism of Capitalism" is a substantially less banal observation. Despite being less banal than the others, this requires a little bit of unpacking along the same lines as my post about the proto-Indo-Europeans and Urheimat.

It isn't exactly that Marx was particularly prescient about Capitalism. Marx's prescience comes from his observation about the bourgeoisie.

I would encourage you to take an hour or so to re-read Marx's Communist Manifesto. I was never a Communist. I had a brief period - literally 10 weeks, or one semester at my first college - where I subscribed to what you might call "Socialism Lite". I reasoned that if everyone had their basic needs provided for them by the state, then the time they would have otherwise spent acquiring the necessities of existence could be reallocated towards higher level productivity. Imagine how much art we could create if no one had to work to eat. I worked out the flaw in that sort of thinking through the course of one class (much to the chagrin of my professor, whom I still regard as a vapid douche), and moved on. Ever since, academic or social encounters with anything influenced by Marx caused me much eye-rolling.

This wasn't exactly fair on my part, but it wasn't unprecedented. The number of self-described Communists that I met during my undergraduate who recognized Bakunin and Gramsci was exactly zero. With a handful of exceptions among well read and thoughtful friends who reside on the Left end of the political spectrum, I found college commies to be boring, unoriginal, and slightly more annoying than the handful of College Republicans I met.

On a whim, I bought Marx's Communist Manifesto for one dollar, and, reveling in the irony, spent one evening rereading it and taking notes. I gave Marx something better than the old college try by reading him as a reactionary, and had I not already rejected his solution as impossible, I may very well have been swept away from my longing for hierarchy and order and converted into a sort of Orwell-ish communist. By which I mean I would have looked upon the sum total of Leftism and despaired. The connections I made are disturbing, but not unprecedented. There is a particularly humorous exchange between Richard Spencer and some fat idiot where Spencer makes fun of the man's taste for being, as he called it, bourgeois.

The implementation (or attempt at implementation) of Communism is widely regarded as a failure. For those who do not see the raw kill count as evidence of Communism's impossibility, that Communism (or the attempt thereof) was always a revolution of intellectuals as opposed to the proletariat surely tips the scales towards Marx's designs as failed. The unfortunate history of Communism being relatively well known, there is little else to say in that regard. Where Marx curries some serious favor from people who otherwise regard Marx with the same enthusiasm you might hold for finding dog crap smashed in the treads of your boots is his thoughts on the bourgeoisie. You often hear this rephrased as "Communism doesn't work but Marx was correct in his criticism of Capitalism." If they've done their homework and aren't just repeating something they once heard, Capitalism refers to the behavior of the bourgeoisie. Most people leave out that seemingly small but extremely important detail.

Allow me to quote The Communist Manifesto liberally before we substantiate Marx's... correctness:

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

If you look at that the right way, from the right angle, you just might be able to stuff an SJW into Marx's list of crimes committed by the bourgeoisie. This is, of course, something of a stretch, but it certainly coincides with the now almost banal conservative observation that Marxists typically have nothing to do with the working class, and are almost always academics, aspirants of the academic-industrial complex, or white collar workers who have passed through the ivory tower. Still, isn't it the slightest bit peculiar that the Marxism, a colossal failure in implementation, is now championed by people who we could charitably accuse of being bourgeois? What a strange fate.

Hell Hath No Fury II

Wayward White woman caught in signalling spiral evidently vaporized by drone strike.

I raise half a glass to the vaguely amusing thought of this weeping widow meeting her end the same way as her husband went: Scattered across the barren landscape of Outremer, mourned only by desert tribalists with room temperature IQs.

Her son died with her. Once upon a time I was younger and libertarian and horrified that Barrack Obama killed 16 year old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki in a drone strike intended to take out his Jihadi father. Today, not so much. Perhaps the passage of years have embittered me. Good riddance.

The Curious Fall of Harvey Weinstein

Your humble wordsmith attempted to find a flattering photograph of Mr. Weinstein. Regrettably, none could be found. Perhaps the old college try wasn't thorough enough. Perhaps Mr. Weinstein is just comically ugly.

If you haven't heard the recording of Harvey pathetically attempting to seduce a model who I've never heard of, brace yourself: The cringe is very real. All that money, the power, the access to even more powerful people, the fame and accolades and all the other perks associated with America's deranged celebrity caste, and the man still has terrible game.

As the accusations grow in number and a potential criminal case begins to build, its worth asking a couple questions:

Why now?

How far does the rabbit hole go?

Pretty far, evidently.

A Miscellaneous Note About Progressive Christianity and Progressive Islam

Not far from where I live is a Methodist church. There are lots of churches where I live, but I notice this one more than the others because the building is decidedly low-church protestant and there's an electric sign in the lawn that has read "hate has no home here" since the election of Donald Trump. Coincidentally, the parking lot is always devoid of life.

"Hate has no home here" is a popular lawn sign among the handful of signally dickheads who somehow manage to stomach the astounding ignorance of a vastly White, vastly conservative town enough to live among the lowly, regressive residents of the wrong side of history. There's also a few "love trumps hate" and "we're glad you're our neighbor" signs for those select few who want to display an extra level of fart-sniffing superiority.

And so their lines ended, with the hushed sound of an insufflated fart. 

The yard signs aren't particularly interesting, and for my purposes serve more as a ready-made, obvious warning that the residents of a particular property are prepared to lecture you about their moral superiority at the drop of a hat.

What is interesting is the church sign. The empty Methodist church is not the first church I've seen with a dildo-tier message on their signboard, but it is the most persistent.

Christians who take their religion seriously, or as seriously as the Kali Yuga can possibly allow, have a sort of odd sense that the aggregate body of Christ is rather... ill. Generally they don't have a good way of expressing this, and I suspect that the wild deformities of low church Protestantism, i.e. Biblical Literalism and Young Earth Creationism, are a socio-evolutionary strategy to escape the nigh-infinite gravity well of Christianities inbred offspring, Ultracalvinism. I also generally suspect that the astoundingly vicious turn that Islam has taken in the past decade or two has as much to do with America's wayward adventures in nation building as the it does with the sinister influence that Ultra Calvinism allegedly has inculcated among the Western university educated leaders of the various militant factions of Islam.

By socio-evolutionary strategy I don't mean that there is some earnest but otherwise inept board of low church Protestants who decided that the best way to combat the incursions of Ultracalvinism on their faith-territory is to slowly become weirder until the last surviving churches with any sort of congregation to speak of are indistinguishable from Common Filth's fans (although the end result is basically going to be the same). Rather, the incursions of Ultracalvinism infect a particular institution and ultimately drive out those who cannot be converted, much as colleges and universities have already done to conservative or right-leaning professors. The survivors are left to search for a new place of worship (or study) and as Ultracalvinism attacks by moving rightward on the classic political line, the institutions that remain unconverged tend to be... weirder.

This is a hypothesis, but mostly a narrative that I hope someone else might find useful. Needless to say it's going to require quite a bit more refining.

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In any event, here's a further thought I wrote at an earlier date about the nature of Progressivism relative to Christianity and Islam. It has been gently abused to fit my above thoughts:

Christianity, rightly understood, is progressive according to Progressives. It comes as no surprise then that Progressives also believe Islam, rightly understood, to be a progressive religion. Anything that Islam does that isn't progressive therefore cannot be Islam. The vacuity of "Islam is a religion of peace" trope is a hill perfectly constructed for a conservative to die on: He gets lost in the details of Arab violence and forgets to see the narrative. X isn't X if it doesn't perfectly mirror Progressive Idealism. You may have your X, Y, and Z, but they are always and forever subservient to Progressive Idealism. Like the Roman practice of incorporating local Gods into the Imperial Cult, they will herd all things under the banner of "progress". There is a sick, suicidal trick to the whole affair in that  the mental gymnastics they force themselves through to accept such nonsense really only applies to themselves and the ruralite Whites they both loath and love to keep subjugated vis-a-vis the bourgeois narrative of Cultural Marxism. A small mound grows daily over Marx's tomb as he ceaselessly spins in the grave knowing that his theories were ultimately captured and repurposed as a "market" for the victorious bourgeoisie. His prescience, such that it did exist, could not save his work, and so corrupted they sink into a particular ironic failure, reduced to a petty social signalling device and a tool for capturing new markets - if we consider churches, religions and schools of philosophy as the 4th generation warfare equivalent to the material markets Marx was speaking of when he excoriated the bourgeoisie for their insatiable hunger for 'profits'.

Also worth considering is how the lie of egalitarianism fails in contention with third world devotees of the religion of the Prophet. There is no material reason to believe that the Pashtun tribalists we conquered in Afghanistan have a whole new appreciation for teaching their children to put condoms on bananas. Our attempts to do so, under the auspicious guidance of the "anointed" academics (as Thomas Sowell calls them), have probably done as much to enrage them as the occasional obliteration of weddings by Hellfire missiles. The shockwave echoes here and in Europe, and ultimately Progressive Idealism falls on its own sword. Christianity, for the most part, has succumbed to Progressive Idealism, but there is little reason to believe that Islam will submit as well. Their violence says as much, not that it seems to bother the sort of people who think you can simply deconstruct things into the category that makes the world look as you think it should, as opposed to how the world is.

And so we circle the drain.