I contend that it is impossible to live an absolutely honest life. We all live with lies (and by this I mean the simplest definition of a lie: “an inaccurate or false statement,” whether it is intentional or not). This could be the result of any number of things – indoctrination, propaganda, self-defense, who knows. One of the lies I lived with for a long time was related to my indoctrination into the modern liberal mindset, a process I had very little choice in.
Langauge
Communication Loss – Loose Lips Sink Ships
There’s an old saying in the military that “loose lips sink ships.” This is a reference to operational security, in that gossiping to people carelessly about the location of your unit or your deployment plans could start a chain of gossip that eventually falls into enemy hands and compromises missions.
love [luhv] Show IPA noun, verb, loved, lov⋅ing.–noun1. a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.2. a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.3. sexual passion or desire.4. a person toward whom love is felt; beloved person; sweetheart.5. (used in direct address as a term of endearment, affection, or the like): Would you like to see a movie, love?6. a love affair; an intensely amorous incident; amour.7. sexual intercourse; copulation.8. (initial capital letter) a personification of sexual affection, as Eros or Cupid.9. affectionate concern for the well-being of others: the love of one’s neighbor.10. strong predilection, enthusiasm, or liking for anything: her love of books.11. the object or thing so liked: The theater was her great love.12. the benevolent affection of God for His creatures, or the reverent affection due from them to God.13. Chiefly Tennis. a score of zero; nothing.14. a word formerly used in communications to represent the letter L.
Disassociating with Liberalism: The Lies of Moral Relativity and Equality
The problem with my previous post was that I did not, at any point, identify clearly what it was I was going on about. This is partly my fault and partly the fault of the slippery nature of the language under discussion (and often, critique); those that generally call themselves “liberals” today employ a lot of terms in an absolutely false way.
- CONNOTATIVE: I mean the group of people who most commonly identify themselves as liberals. These people tend to be very intolerant of differing viewpoints. These are the types of people who militarize PETA and bomb research centers that use animal testing. These are the type of people who shout “tolerance!” on one hand but condemn pro-lifers on the other. These are the type of people who use political correctness as a shield to insulate themselves from open critique. These are the type of people who rely on “feminism” to sound legitimate, since most people misunderstand what feminism (currently) is. They have an absolutist world-view where their way is the only right way, but shield themselves from criticism by claiming they hold a relativist viewpoint that condemns no one and accepts everyone. They are slippery, confusing, and generally blind to their own inconsistencies and hypocrisies. (I know I was!)
- DENOTATIVE: Dictionary.com actually provides a reasonable definition. “Favoring or permitting freedom of action, esp. with respect to matters of personal belief or expression.” The problem with modern liberals is that it is pro-choice or bust. Animal rights or bust. Their way or the highway. Liberalism has lost the implicit tolerance that would be necessary to permit absolute freedom of action in regards to matters of personal belief or expression.
- CONNOTATIVE: This phrase is mostly doublespeak jargon or a thought-terminating cliché. It is used by liberals (see actual definition above) who, under assault for their absolutist views, trudge this term out to conjure up associations that exist due to the assumed definition below. In this capacity, the term functions as a red-herring, though I don’t know if the younger generation of liberals (having been indoctrinated since birth) can really be accused of intentionally committing logical fallacies, since they mostly regurgitate what they’ve been taught.
- DENOTATIVE: An understanding of moral theory as being particular to either individuals or cultural groups but having no basis in physical reality. This contrasts sharply with absolute moral theories, whereby our moral rules have some kind of absolute basis in reality to give them further weight. For example, strict religious interpretation of the bible tends to lead towards an absolute moral view, whereby the Ten Commandments (and other scriptures) that describe certain moral rules are the literal word of God, and obeying these moral rules will get one into Heaven and disobeying them will land you in Hell. A more relativist mindset recognizes that morals exist only “in the brain,” so to speak, and have no corresponding implications on physical reality (such as heaven or hell); such an understanding of moral systems leads to the conclusion that no one moral system is objectively any better or “more right” than another moral system.
- CONNOTATIVE: A nebulous and vague idea that makes everyone feel better about everyone else but has no basis in reality. This phrase borders also on being doublespeak jargon or a thought-terminating cliché like moral relativism. Examples are when one makes statements like “all men are born equal” or “men and women are equal.” This serves only to ignore unpleasant differences like physical prowess or the different distribution of intelligence quotient among human beings. Ignoring these fundamental problems causes lots of misattribution when it comes to describing social disparity and injustices (it may even cause one to perceive injustice where none exists).
- DENOTATIVE: A mathematical phrase that describes two values of the same quantity. For example, 2 x 2 (two multiplied by two) is equal to 4. Equality is something that can be proved, demonstrated and double-checked. There is no mystery in establishing equality, and only those quantities which are known to be equal are asserted as such. Saying that 3 is equal to 4 is nonsense.
Preliminary Thoughts of Moral Relativity (Unclearly Stated)
This is the first of what I intend to be three posts regarding my rejection of what I term “modern liberal ideals” – which I was basically born into and indoctrinated with from the public education system. To me, modern liberalism is an essentially hollow philosophy, but one which is readily accepted – unquestioningly – by a disturbingly high number of people despite being little more than thinly veiled hedonism and “feel-good” mentalities. I see it comprised of, essentially, three constituent doctrines: feminism, political correctness, and moral relativism. It is my intention to deal fully with each subject in turn, but this post will focus on moral relativism. It is the element of liberalism which I held onto the longest – sometimes without even realizing it – and probably forms the basis for the other two ideas. Being almost a purely abstract idea, however, it requires less research and evidence to refute, and thus why I will be writing on it first.
[I] no longer [have] an active, seething hatred, but something different. A kind of acknowledgment that humanity is flawed, over-arrogant…The kind of attitude that leads to relativism, the idea that my life is worth no more than any other life is worth no more than any other life. That extends to everything – your viewpoint is no less convincing than my viewpoint than any other viewpoint. There is justification for anything in this world. And right and wrong are moral judgments, and morals are a strictly human construct – there is no physical law that correlates to “good” and “evil” in the universe, or to “right” and “wrong.” “Right” is what an organism must do to survive, and “wrong” are actions that doom that organism to death. And with these kinds of attitudes, I can join the military with no qualms. Send me to Iraq, give me a gun, tell me to shoot whoever, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care.
An Analysis of "Sexual Utopia In Power" Part 1
I’ve been reading, among many other things, Sexual Utopia in Power by F. Roger Devlin, Ph.D. and apparent regular contributor to The Occidental Quarterly. I was not previously familiar with either the author or the publication, but on the basis of this stunningly well-written (and, presumably, researched, with thirteen sources listed for approximately 27 pages of writing) article, I will have to become more intimately familiar with both. The entire article is worth commenting on; I had intended to merely pick “the best” parts but found myself copying entire paragraphs or pages in preparation for this analysis. Let me start by suggesting that perhaps the best course of action is to not read anything I am about to write, and to go read the article yourself.
Nature has played a trick on men: production of spermatozoa occurs at a rate several orders of magnitude greater than female ovulation (about 12 million per hour vs. 400 per lifetime). This is a natural, not a moral, fact. Among the lower animals also, the male is grossly oversupplied with something for which the female has only a limited demand. This means that the female has far greater control over mating. The universal law of nature is that males display and females choose. Male peacocks spread their tales, females choose. Male rams butt horns, females choose. Among humans, boys try to impress girls—and the girls choose. Nature dictates that in the mating dance, the male must wait to be chosen.
Marriage, after all, seems to restrict sex rather drastically. Certain men figure that if sex were permitted both inside and outside of marriage there would be twice as much of it as formerly. They imagined there existed a large, untapped reservoir of female desire hitherto repressed by monogamy. To release it, they sought, during the early postwar period, to replace the seventh commandment with an endorsement of all sexual activity between “consenting adults.” Every man could have a harem. Sexual behavior in general, and not merely family life, was henceforward to be regarded as a private matter. Traditionalists who disagreed were said to want to “put a policeman in every bedroom.” This was the age of the Kinsey Report and the first appearance of Playboy magazine. Idle male daydreams had become a social movement.
Hypergamy is not monogamy in the human sense. Although there may be only one “alpha male” at the top of the pack at any given time, which one it is changes over time. In human terms, this means the female is fickle, infatuated with no more than one man at any given time, but not naturally loyal to a husband over the course of a lifetime. In bygone days, it was permitted to point out natural female inconstancy. Consult, for example, Ring Lardner’s humorous story “I Can’t Breathe”—the private journal of an eighteen year old girl who wants to marry a different young man every week. If surveyed on her preferred number of “sex partners,” she would presumably respond one; this does not mean she has any idea who it is.
The sexual revolution in America was an attempt by women to realize their own utopia, not that of men. Female utopians came forward publicly with plans a few years after Kinsey and Playboy. Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl appeared in 1962, and she took over Cosmopolitan magazine three years later. Notoriously hostile to motherhood, she explicitly encouraged women to use men (including married men) for pleasure.
I sympathize with the young woman, in view of a miseducation which might have been consciously designed to leave her unprepared for the situation she got herself into. But as to the question of whether she was raped, the answer must be a clear no.
To anyone who believes that a society of free and responsible persons is preferable to one based on centralized control, the reasoning of the date-rape movement is ominous. The demand that law rather than moral principle and common prudence should protect women in situations such as I have described could only be met by literally “putting a policeman in every bedroom.” However much we may sympathize with the misled young people involved (and I mean the men as well as the women), we must insist that it is no part of our responsibility to create an absolutely safe environment for them, nor to shield them from the consequences of their own behavior, nor to insure that sex will be their path to happiness. Because there are some things of greater importance than the pain they have suffered, and among these are the principle of responsibility upon which the freedom of all of us depends.
It is a cliché of political philosophy that the less self-restraint citizens are able to exercise, the more they must be constrained from without…Human beings cannot do without some social norms to guide them in their personal relations. Young women cannot be expected to work out a personal system of sexual ethics in the manner of Descartes reconstructing the universe in his own mind. If you cease to prepare them for marriage, they will seek guidance wherever they can fi nd it. In the past thirty years they have found it in feminism, simply because the feminists have outshouted everyone else.