Blackface Bad, Dragface Good

The  President of [West] Texas A&M has just manfully stepped up to declare in public that drag shows “degrade women and are ‘derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.’” This has prompted the predictable storm of manufactured gayfake outrage from the Commies, which he must have known would be sure to follow his remarks.

Now, while his courageous act is extraordinarily unusual these days in any figure of prominence, the most remarkable aspect of this turn of events is I think that *it had never before occurred to anyone that, in effect, drag shows treat women the way that the old blackface vaudeville productions treated blacks: with contempt.* This had not even occurred to me, and I wager that I am fairly unusual in my extreme sensitivity to and morose cynical enjoyment of the manifest and absurd contradictions espoused by the Left (whatever the character of its current skin suit).

For white men to make themselves up as black in public performances is bad, horrible, a sin that cannot be forgiven. But for men to make themselves up as women in public performances is totally cool.

So funny.

The Vipers Are Now in Charge

But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

Matthew 3:7

O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? For, out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

Matthew 12:34

The Pharisees whom both John and his cousin Jesus called a brood of vipers were in first century Palestine the counterparts of what today we would call the Woke Enforcers of Political Correctness. Not of Justice, properly so called. Just of Political Correctness.

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.

The Lethal Economic Lacuna of the Left

In an article that details the economic disaster the West has visited upon itself by the sanctions it has in its war upon Christian orthodoxy imposed upon Russia – to the gist of which (to my amazement: strange bedfellows and trenchmates, that’s history for you, am I right?) I mostly concur – longtime Leftist Cassandra Medea Benjamin and a fellow traveler of hers whose name I don’t recognize, or care to learn about (Nicholas JS Davies) utter an economic absurdity:

Western sanctions on Russia reduced the global supply of oil and natural gas, but also pushed up prices.

This is like writing:

Democrat defund the police policies reduced the supply of policing services nationwide, but also increased crime.

It is also like writing:

War reduced the population, but also killed a lot of people.

They immediately continue:

So Russia profited from the higher prices, even as its export volume decreased.

Well, duh. Honestly, did these guys learn nothing in Econ 101? Did they even take it? Do they even understand Newton’s Third Law (generalized in Emerson’s Law of Compensation, aka Karma)? Do they know how to count change?

Wait, dumb questions: of course they didn’t, and don’t. Manifestly, they cannot put two and two together, even in an article that cleaves pretty close to sagacity. I suppose they approach geopolitical sagacity the way that the broken clock approaches temporal accuracy twice each day.

This is why the Left must never be allowed to take power. Their hearts are ostensibly in the right place, I suppose. Some of them, anyway. But, they are economic idiots. This is as much as to say that they are idiots about reality, period full stop. They talk nonsense. This is sufficient indication that they think nonsense – that, i.e., they do not think. They must never be allowed access to levers of economic or political power.

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?

Today is Weimar; Today is the Reign of Elagabalus; This is Belshazzar’s Feast

I remember back in the 70’s reading about Weimar and Elagabalus and Nero, and thinking, “How could anyone have been so nuts as to believe any of that obviously perverse and stupid stuff, let alone act on it?” Yet we seem to fall into such fantasies pretty regularly, especially in times of general prosperity and calm. Any number of other such wild and absurd episodes could be adduced: the French and Soviet Revolutions, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, ancient Persian Mazdakism, the Marquis de Sade and his circle (he must have had a pretty extensive circle, who bought his stuff, or we could never have heard of him, no?), Bloomsbury, the Frankfurt School, transhumanism, on and on.

Also, less violently but more radically and pervasively, Freemasonry and the occult – theosophy, New Age, and so forth.

I.e., Gnostic Pelagian utopianism, in all its instantiations.

And, now, right now, today, abortion, porneia, divorce, wokeism, globohomo, transsexuality, and – especially, and at their root, and at their most energetic and fulsome – anti-Christianity; which is to say, when abstract doctrinal push comes down at bottom to pragmatic bloody shove, infanticide and the genital mutilation of children.

That’s where it always ends, no? These Gnostic transvaluations of value always terminate upon the mutilation and death, or just the prevention, of children; i.e., of humanity.