Author: VD

Cicero on “scientific” morality

I spent a rather pleasant morning finishing de Legibus today, and was inspired to begin putting together some thoughts that I anticipate sharing at some future date. In the meantime, however, I was more than a little amused by these two passages, the first from Book One and the second from Book Two, particularly in light of having read The Moral Landscape. As a general rule, if your argument has not only been anticipated, but brutally dismissed, some 2,000 years in advance, you should probably consider rethinking it.

“As for those who go in for self-indulgence and are slaves of their own bodies – people who measure everything they should seek and avoid in life by the yardstick of pleasure and pain – even if they are right (and there is no need to take issue with them here) let us tell them to preach in their own little gardens and let us ask them to keep away for a little while from any participation in public life, an area of which they know nothing and have never wished to know anything….

What can be more certain than this, that no one should be so stupid and arrogant as to believe that reason and intelligence are present in him but not in the heavens and the world? Or that those things which are barely understood by the highest intellectual reasoning are kept in motion without any intelligence at all? As for the person who is not impelled to give thanks for the procession of the stars, the alternation of day and night, the regular succession of the seasons, and the fruits which are produced for our enjoyment – how can such a person be counted as human at all?”

I think we can be confident that the great Roman humanist would not only be unimpressed with the proposed science of morality based on the happiness/suffering metric, but like most Americans today, he would be more than a little reluctant to cast a presidential vote for an atheist.

I’m sorry, Dave

I’m afraid I can’t accept that answer:

I’m fairly responsible with finances, but my girlfriend is in a terrible financial situation with a lot of credit card debt, an expensive car payment and a big, fancy apartment. Plus, she just quit her job because she didn’t like it anymore. Now, she’s thinking about filing bankruptcy and thinks us moving in together will help solve her problems. If she can’t handle her finances on her own, what’s going to happen if we get together? Can you help?

At least Dave Ramsey advises the guy not to marry the woman or let her move in. But he doesn’t give him the proper advice, which is to ditch the financial vampire now before she can manage to get her teeth fixed any more firmly upon him. Don’t ever date a woman in debt, and don’t even allow the thought of marrying one to cross your mind for a moment. It’s more expensive and less financially prudent than playing blackjack in Vegas.

Fire them all

The Wisconsin governor is doing a staunch job of standing firm, but it’s time to go on the offensive and fire every teacher who called in sick on Thursday and Friday:

State and Madison teachers union leaders are urging their members to report to the Capitol Friday and Saturday for continued protests against Gov. Scott Walker’s collective bargaining proposal. “We need you to come again (today). We need to hear you on Saturday,” Mary Bell, Wisconsin Education Association Council president, said at a rally Thursday, when teachers from around the state joined Madison teachers whose absences closed schools for a second day.

I’d actually like to see Walker go one step further, decertify the teachers union and fire every public school teacher who belongs to it. That would border on epic and would instantly make him a national hero in the image of Reagan. One of the defining lessons of the Thatcher and Reagan eras is that the people love a politician who crushes unions. Pawlenty should be hoping for the spread of the teacher sickouts to Minnesota thus giving him the chance to improve his national profile by breaking the public employee union there… although this would presumably be difficult as I am reliably informed that he is no longer governor there.

Unions are the evil, stupid, parasitic cousin of government. They possess most of the negative attributes with none of the positive ones.

The day you thought would never come

In which I write in praise of Justin Bieber:

Justin Bieber, pop icon and every teeny bopper’s dreamboat, has given the pro-life lobby a totally unexpected and extraordinary coup: he has told Rolling Stone magazine that he thinks abortion is “like killing a baby”. The 16-year-old, a committed Christian, has actually come out and said that an embryo is a human being. Gasp! Gulp! From Montreal to Manchester, this is the most important person in a teenage girl’s universe.

It is always dangerous to place much credence in anything that any celebrity says or does, especially a young one. Michelle Malkin’s foolishly premature praise of Charlotte Church springs to mind, by way of example. Regardless, it is courageous of Bieber to so openly take a stand against the dogma of Hollywood at such a young age and so early in his career.

On a totally unrelated but apparently more predictable note, Abe produced a timely comment: “DRAT! How could I have forgotten the Merlot, Ritz crackers, and canned cheese spread for Vox?! It’s all he ever eats, anyway!” :-p

The reason SB and I thought this was so funny was that at the very moment I read the comment, I happened to be enjoying a lunch that consisted of a 2001 Gran Riserva, spiced Valaisian sausage, and parmigiano reggiano. Ecco la dolce vita….

Chrissy outdoes herself

Lest you wonder why female “conservatives” and the so-called Mama Bears inspire so little confidence:

Domonique Ramirez, this year’s Miss San Antonio (preliminary to Miss Texas, Miss America) went to a photo shoot. She was supposed to wear her outfit from the San Antonio pageant. Well, it didn’t quite fit anymore, and the pageant let her know it was unacceptable…. Miss Ramirez slapped a temporary restraining order on the organization so they couldn’t take her crown away. A judge will decide whether she is fit for the crown or not. Isn’t that awesome? Seeing this kind of strength in a young woman is so refreshing. She’s fighting back and standing her ground, which I find incredibly brave. She’s becoming a role model, which is exactly what the Miss America Organization brags about.

If this pageant wants to permanently damage the youth of our country, mission accomplished. If they really want to help these girls then they need a better strategy. You don’t tell a teenage girl she’s too fat, unless you want her to have an eating disorder. If they thought she was becoming obese, sure, step in for the sake of her health. Offer her the benefits of working out if you want her to get in shape the healthy way. Tell her it helps reduce stress. They should want her mental health to be calm and collected for the nerve-racking interview. Tell her it will give her stamina to get through the long days. But never make it about her looks. That’s just crazy.

The organization threw her further under the bus by stating she has been late to appearances and has been defiant. I call that BS! It’s ludicrous to think adults would lie about a teenager just because they never could make it as Miss America themselves. They’re delusional….

Some know-nothings have argued that Domonique signed a contract. She promised to abide by these rules. Get over yourself. She’s a teenage girl, and to make any woman sign a contract like this is outrageous and unrealistic. This rule is ridiculous and shouldn’t even exist.

So apparently this is the position of the so-called conservative media these days: don’t tell fat girls they’re fat, run to a judge anytime you fail, and don’t expect women to abide by a signed contract. Now, if women can’t be held any more accountable than children by virtue of their sex, how can anyone possibly justify their right to vote?

I do wish Fox News would hurry up and hire Chatterfield already.

Dumbing down and dreaming on

I feel quite confident in stating that the scenario suggested in the cartoon has NEVER EVER happened in the entire history of Man.  Barely any men understand quantum physics; the number of women who not only understand them but are prone to discussing them on a girls night out can probably be counted on a woodworker’s hand.  As for Plato, I have yet to meet a single woman who has actually read the entire Republic outside of the one hopelessly nerdy girl in my senior year Classics class who once read a poem in public that was, we were reliably informed, written “from the point of view of me and a lizard”.  In the various debates over Euthyphro over the last two years, I’m not sure if a single woman has even commented on the matter of the pious and the gods, much less whether Socrates was justified in his artful redefinition of the terms in mid-dialogue.  Women’s book clubs don’t discuss Thucydides and Dante, much less Bohr and Alcibiades, most are devoted to novels from the Oprah list as evidenced by the helpful discussion guidelines provided at the back of those books.

There are three reasons that women play dumb on occasion.  The first is because they are insufficiently attractive to attract men that they can look up to intellectually.  Note that the author, who is an aged 3 at best, admits that the dim boyfriend to whom she refers was only the second man who had agreed to go out with her when she was in her 30s.  It wasn’t her brains that were the problem there.  The second reason is because women understand on some level that most men prefer less intelligent women.  This is not because men are intimidated by smart women, (think about that claim for a second, are they intimidated by male nerds and geeks?),  but because intelligent women tend to be a quotidian posterior pain.  Intelligent, educated, middle-class women are extraordinarily annoying because they seem to feel the need to constantly reaffirm either their intelligence or their education by pointlessly challenging those close to them over the most trivial minutiae.  The fact that a more intelligent man can effortlessly slap down those challenges doesn’t mean that he wants to waste his time doing so, especially when it interrupts his train of thought.

(To be fair, most intelligent people of both sexes are difficult compared to the norm, the significant difference is that women find the difficulty to be attractive due to their hypergamous nature.  Men just find it difficult and don’t want to deal with it.)

I found her cited example of a mispronounced word as an indication of a lack of intelligence to be more than a little amusing.  In fact, those who mispronounce words on a regular basis are probably more intelligent than the norm because it indicates that they are learning words from reading them rather than hearing them.  The writer has confused ignorance with intelligence; to the extent that a mispronunciation indicts anyone, it indicts the social circle around the mispronouncing individual who have never used the word around him.  The assumption that “Arkansas” would be pronounced in the same manner as “Kansas” is a perfectly reasonable one, especially for an Englishman who is no more likely to know the difference between the two than the average American if it is Leicester or Worcester that is found in the East Midlands.

And the third reason is that women play dumb as an excuse to get out of things they don’t want to do.  Figuring out how to program a remote or change a tire isn’t difficult, but why bother when you can simply get someone else to do it for you?

So close

I have to admit, I enjoy it every time I happen to see who keeps RGD in #2 on Kindle, as was the case again today.

Celebrating Egyptian democracy

Apparently we’re all supposed to be horrified to discover that dangling a chicken over a swamp full of alligators may end in the devouring of the chicken. In Mala Fide is visibly unmoved over the reported “sexual assault” of Lara Logan:

You send a chick into a situation like the one in Egypt, you might as well hang a sign around her neck that says “FREE FUCKTOY”. I don’t care how many disaster areas she’s reported from, how many awards she’s won, it was going to happen eventually. Christ, even Anderson Cooper, that twinkle-toed pansy, couldn’t handle the heat on the streets of Cairo. What the fuck did Logan think was going to happen? Did she really think that the teeming, America-hating, angry, sex-starved crowds of men she was surrounded by wouldn’t view her as a tasty treat? Is she THAT clueless about the non-Western world? Or did she truly think that her crew of yes-men could protect her every time she touched down in Surprise Sex Country?

Obviously what Miss Logan needed was a phalanx of armed American amazons to protect her. On second thought….

“In 2003, a survey of female veterans found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military. A 2004 study of veterans who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving. And a 1995 study of female veterans of the Gulf and earlier wars, found that 90 percent had been sexually harassed. The Defense Department shows much lower numbers, but that is because it only counts reported rapes—and, as the DoD admits itself in this year’s annual Pentagon report on military sexual assault, some 90 percent of rapes in the military are ever reported at all. Nonetheless, that same report showed that in 2008, reports of assault increased by 8 percent military-wide, and by 26 percent in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.”

Rather than pursue the obvious solution and keep women out of the military, the social engineers who have succeeded in getting so many women raped by men who are specifically trained to overcome their societal and moral taboos about not killing other people is to attempt to remove those who refuse to abide by societal taboos from the military. So, it should be interesting to see what their proposed solution for Egyptians rape-mobs is.

But the most interesting thing about the Logan incident is the way it is a metaphorical lesson on the choice facing Western women between three different futures: a) a return to traditional Christian culture, b) rape and the brothel, or c) submission and the burqah.

The decline of fantasy

I found this back-and-forth on the decline of modern fantasy into nihilism to be quite interesting. I’ll probably weigh in with my own thoughts on the matter when my turn comes around again on Sunday, so check out the discussion between Leo Grin, Joe Abercrombie and others at the Black Gate:

The other side thinks that their stuff is, at long last, turning the genre into something more original, thoughtful, and ultimately palatable to intelligent, mature audiences. They and their fans are welcome to that opinion. For my part — and I think Tolkien and Howard would have heartily agreed — I think they’ve done little more than become cheap purveyors of civilizational graffiti.

Soiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths is no different than other artists taking a crucifix and dipping it in urine, covering it in ants, or smearing it with feces. In the end, it’s just another small, pathetic chapter in the decades-long slide of Western civilization into suicidal self-loathing. It’s a well-worn road: bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field. They co-opt the language, the plots, the characters, the cliches, the marketing, and proceed to deconstruct it all like a mad doctor performing an autopsy. Then, using cynicism, profanity, scatology, dark humor, and nihilism, they put it back together into a Frankenstein’s monster designed to shock, outrage, offend, and dishearten.

Longtime Ilk may recall that I touched on a few of these themes in an essay entitled CS Lewis and the problem of religion in science fiction and fantasy, which was published in the 2005 anthology Revisiting Narnia by BenBella Books.

Alpha to Omega

DW has created a quiz on the male socio-sexual hierarchy. So go ahead and take it, all you precious male snowflakes, and report back on how astonishingly alphasexy you are!

I do note that lambda was somehow omitted, but I suspect most lambdas can readily figure out where they rank. For example, if your answer with regards to question four would have been You were in the mall a week ago with a bunch of friends. Are you: “The one giving/getting a hummer in the men’s room”, then it really doesn’t matter what your answers to the other questions happen to be.

I’ve been intending to put together a quiz of my own at some point in time and I’ll eventually get around to it, but this is certainly entertaining for starters.