Goodness, Truth & Beauty are Classist, Racist & Sexist

Woke seppuku reached something of an apotheosis – I shall not say, a maximum – in the recent announcement by a Loyola professor of marketing (marketing, forsooth – that quintessential organ of oppressive capitalism) that clean, tidy, well stocked pantries are “classist, racist and sexist.”

I kid thee not. Pantries. What’s next: butt wiping?

One wonders immediately whether professors of marketing are per se classist, racist and sexist. How not?

Keep working your way down this rabbit hole with me. For “clean, tidy, well stocked pantries,” substitute any other denotation of something that has been from ancient days – or even in the last day or two – thought unremarkably good. To wit:

FFS Are You Kidding Me is the Gedanken Policy Test Writ Small

Every human is from birth imbued with the filter of the Gedanken Policy Test. After all, the Test is that of Reality; so, no real can but apply it, so as to discern which way it should go. Thus no organism subject to selection pressure – i.e., to the Test – can long do without an intimate acquaintance, and indeed agreement, with its dictates.

It is a harsh and implacable Test. It is the Test of conscience. Nobody gets out of it. Nobody is in the end ignorant of this fact; or as well, of his own failures in respect to the Test.

The failure of a policy under the Test is registered in the normal and healthy human by a reaction of disgust thereat. If a policy fails the Test, it almost always is viscerally disgusting to most people. At least, a bit. What right mind, after all, can abide a policy that manifestly fails the Test? Only a mind wholly corrupt, and lost to corruption.

Now, in the natural course of a life these days, the reaction of disgust to this or that perversion – this or that failure of the Test – is likely to have been somewhat attenuated, by considerations of political correctness (which is to say, of expedience), or of confusion, or of divided loyalties (i.e., “I don’t want to valorize x, but if I don’t, I shan’t so readily be able to excuse my own y”).

No matter. The Test is inexorable.

FFS Are You Kidding Me is then where the rubber of social life meets the road of the Test.

Attend to your feelings of disgust. They propose something real.

All Slopes Are Slippery

All slopes are slippery. Not so much for geckos and flies, to be sure. But for men, all slopes are more or less slippery, and dangerous.

I was a professional outdoorsman for 8 years. I had before, and have since, spent many months in all sorts of wilderness. And I can tell you from bitter personal experience that all slopes whatever, regardless of their grade, their height or their constituents, are in the limit mortally dangerous, inasmuch as they all offer to the clumsy, incautious, unskilled, foolish, and inattentive or imprudent – aye, and to the canny fit and experienced man who is the opposite of all these things – a chance to fall all the way to their bottoms. A single misstep can spell fatal disaster.

And every man, no matter how virtuous and skilled in the arts of the wilderness, is prone to a misstep now and then. Missed steps come along with walking, even on smooth and level urban pavements. When you traverse the uneven ground of the wilderness, you are bound to take a misstep at least once or twice in every hour, even when you are not yet bushed (to be bushed is to have grown tired from traversing the bush).

On a level plain, this is generally no big deal (although even on the flats, a fall under a heavy pack is no small thing).

On any sort of slope, however, missteps have a horrible and almost inevitable way of compounding. One misstep leads to another insufficiently planned and careful step, which generates a yet worse; and this continues, to worse and worse effects. Time slows as by such procedures it passes – as our powers of attention dilate and intensify under conditions of emergency – and it becomes possible to observe a compounding disaster carefully as it unfolds, and even to predict what the next of its component missteps will be, and the one after that; so that the fall as a whole takes on an inexorable internal logic like that of a Greek tragedy.

On the Slippery Slope of Classical Liberalism

This post about slippery slope arguments subsequends three priors: JM Smith’s post, Bill Vallicella’s critique thereof, and JM Smith’s response thereto. Readers might want to run through them, before essaying what here follows.

The slippery slope argument is to be sure, and strictly speaking, a logical fallacy, as Vallicella notices. But then, it is not intended first as a logical argument; so that it is mistaken to take it first as such. It is rather intended as an empirical and pragmatic argument – or even, rather, a simple observation, from which we might begin to adduce logical arguments.

Kill Them All, & Let God Sort Them Out

This is how social deliquescence appears concretely. One faction or another – or, all factions – throw up their hands, give up negotiations, and resort to civil war. As soon as the percentage of those in the nation ready to take such a step surpasses about 3%, war is on, no matter what, sooner or later, and despite the wishes of all the other nationals. On such occasions, a Fort Sumter event is inbound. It shall soon or late happen. Then, all bets are off.

This is where we now find ourselves. Far more than 3% of Americans – perhaps it is as much as 5%, or even 7% – have decided that all Americans who are remotely such as we of the Orthosphere ought to be, and so are to be, deleted. So, the war is on.

The shooting has not yet begun, but the imprisonments have. The American gulag has already begun.

What is more, the plan is already out in the open. The elite have by the offices of the FBI declared war upon Traditional Catholics, such as I. Good heavens, and forsooth: I sang the Hassler Missa Secunda at Mass this last Sunday, in Latin; probably that makes me an enemy of the state.

Dying, Jesus Suffered & Bore the Pain of All Sins; So, He Healed Them, All

On the Cross, Jesus in his omniscience knew, and so suffered, felt, endured, all the agony of all creaturely defections, and of all their vicious consequences.

Omniscience eternally and always knows all of that, of course. But in time, and in Jesus, he knows it particularly, and so, acutely, on the Cross. As a man, God knows all the pain of all his creatures, just as we know each our own pain. A staggering thought.

Indeed it is by the suffering of Jesus that omniscience knows the suffering of his creatures; that, i.e., the suffering of his creatures just is the suffering of Jesus. Matthew 25:40.

Happy New Year: On to Ochlocracy!

It becomes more and more clear that the robber barons of the Deep State – few of whom work for the US Government, of course (it goes mostly the other way round) – have for the most part, and despite the burgeoning daring work of the 3% who resist (thanks, Tucker!), taken over. They’ve rigged the game, throughout – all the games – for their benefit.

This right now is the transition from Democracy to Ochlocracy, which has been predicted, and many times seen, for more than 2,000 years.

Feminism versus the Gedanken Policy Test

Few proposals of social reform fail the Gedanken Policy Test as completely and ignominiously as feminism. Clearly, then, any sane society would repudiate feminism.

Not because it hates women, but because it wants to survive; indeed, because it wants more women (the supply of women is the rate limiting factor of social survival: few women → few children → few women … so, women are precious; men on the other hand are cheap, ergo relatively expendable (in war, the hunt, dangerous work, and so forth)).

To recapitulate the Test:

Here’s the experimental set up. Take two experimental subjects. They are two nations, or two peoples, that are exactly similar in every way – same population, same genetic inheritance, same natural resources, same climate, same customs and traditions, same system of political economy, same religion, same technical and industrial capacities, same wealth, same everything. Assume no natural disasters or benisons that afflict or benefit either group differently. Both are faced with exactly the same set of environmental factors.

Having taken this step, you have controlled for all the factors of social success and failure, other than the policy you are interested to test. So, now, you are ready to test your proposed policy. Apply it to one group, but not to the other. Which is more likely to prosper: the group that adopts the proposed policy, or the group that does not?

Notice that we are not asking which group will be nicer or more fair or more just. Justice, fairness and niceness are optional only for societies that have managed to prevail and survive in the competition with their neighbours. We are only asking which group will be wealthier, more powerful, larger and more capable; and which group will have greater morale, commitment, ingenuity, all the moral, emotional and intellectual factors of demographic success. So, it’s purely a question of natural selection; like asking which is likely to do better, as between a pig and a pig with opposable thumbs.

The nifty thing about the Gedanken Policy Test is that it excises from our consideration all questions about how society should be ordered according to some scheme or other, or according to what we think society ought to be. Ideology ain’t in it; nor are any of our preferences or biases. So, the Test can be conducted without rancor, and with no grinding of axes. About its findings, there is no reason to feel either upset or angry, on the one hand, or triumphantly vindicated, on the other: they are what they are.

OK then: how does latter day feminism fare under the Test?

Bend the Knee to an Unjust King

A guest post from our dedicated commenter Scoot and his colleague and interlocutor Hambone:

The virtue everyone loves to hate is obedience. Obedience is easy when it is easy, but there’s a common misconception that having a bad authority exempts us from the duty of obedience. As the late great Zippy Catholic used to say, it is a fallacy of modernity to confuse the question of which authority is just with the question of whether authority in general is just. There’s a fundamental truth hiding behind this misconception that we as fallen humans are often afraid of: That all authority comes from God. Not just good authority – all authority.

If democracy has every man as a king, then the collapse of spiritual authority that snowballed out of the Reformation has every man a Pope. This endlessly fractures the Body of Christ and allows wounds and heresies to fester and spread. “Bad” Popes, Bishops and Priests have been accounted for since the beginning, like their predecessors in the Temple of Jerusalem who did not live up to their offices. How many more such rotten priests might we expect, when every man is a priest untrammelled? The same goes then for political authority: the usurpation of the royal office by the demos is just as unjust as the usurpation of the demotic or familiar offices by the tyrant.

There are three reasons we ought to humble ourselves and bend the knee to unjust men.

The Quintessence of the Reasoned Response of the Left to Dobbs

The egregor of the Left is in full control of this gal. I tell you, she’ll go down in history. This photo could be right up there with the shot of the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi. Look at it closely, blow it up if you dare. You will never be able to unsee it; the quivering glossy ululating uvula of existential protest!

Man, I tell you, this is who we are, as Americans. It is the core of our democratic society.