#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
The Right Wing News puts a list of the year’s best political tweets together and one of them turns out to be mine:
I think this is what is described as “losing your base”. Bill Ayers: “Try Obama for War Crimes”.
— Vox Day (@voxday) June 18, 2013
I also liked Joe Rogan’s:
This country has a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem and a tyranny problem disguised as a security problem.
— Joe Rogan (@joerogan) January 27, 2013
La Paglia has little confidence in feminist civilization. Assuming, of course, that one can reasonably even call it that.
A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.
Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young women, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women….
After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed
again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist
gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most
women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water
and to defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable
right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the
infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible.
TL;DR: viva la difference!
If anyone is looking for an excuse for another Middle Eastern war, it appears their casus belli is buried in a presidentially censored 2002 report.
President Bush inexplicably censored 28 full pages of the 800-page report. Text isn’t just blacked-out here and there in this critical-yet-missing middle section. The pages are completely blank, except for dotted lines where an estimated 7,200 words once stood (this story by comparison is about 1,000 words).
A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are “absolutely shocked” at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks.
Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) can’t reveal the nation identified by it without violating federal law. So they’ve proposed Congress pass a resolution asking President Obama to declassify the entire 2002 report, “Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.”
Some information already has leaked from the classified section, which is based on both CIA and FBI documents, and it points back to Saudi Arabia, a presumed ally.
The Saudis deny any role in 9/11, but the CIA in one memo reportedly found “incontrovertible evidence” that Saudi government officials — not just wealthy Saudi hardliners, but high-level diplomats and intelligence officers employed by the kingdom — helped the hijackers both financially and logistically. The intelligence files cited in the report directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks, making 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war.
Of course, there could be other reasons to hide known Saudi involvement in the events of 9/11 besides a desire to invade Iraq. Once it is admitted that the Saudis were involved, this can’t help but raise the question of who else might have been involved as well.
I simply can’t find it in my heart to feel any sympathy for the larval lawyers who are belatedly discovering that they, and not the common people upon whom they thought to feed parasitically, are the prey:
Law schools will lie to you. Do not believe a word that comes from law schools, law deans, or law professors. They are salesmen and they want you to hand them $200,000 in non-dischargeable law school loans. That’s all they are interested in. They will tell you about a glorious career that awaits you. They will tell you lawyers are in demand and new technology will open the gates for prosperous new practice areas (3d printing, drones, etc.).
It’s all a bunch of hogwash. They will tell you that society needs lawyers and tell you stories about saving the poor and doing public interest work. This is also hogwash. Because public interest jobs are eligible for a 10-year government repayment plan, the jobs have become intensely competitive – as have JAG jobs [jobs in the Army]. You will compete against students from top 5 schools for these jobs and unless you go to a top 5 school, it’s going to be difficult to land these jobs. The main point to take away is to appreciate the reality that law schools are trying to sell you a product (the law degree). Law degrees are not in demand in the market so they’re trying new tricks to lure in more consumers….
I think most people are hapless fools to attend law school today, except in extremely narrow circumstances…. If you go to law school, it’s not a remote possibility that you’ll end up
back with your parents, in huge debt, desperately searching for work,
and angry at yourself for wearing horse blinders and ignoring this
information.
Then again, this is merely a window into the much larger college education scam, as Karl Denninger notes a recent report from the St. Louis Fed:
If you elect to go to college there is only a one in four chance that (1) you will finish and (2) you will work in a job that actually renumerates you for having done so. In other words there is a three in four chance that you’d be better off not having gone to college at all, because (1) your earnings power is not enhanced by having attended and (2) you wouldn’t have the debt — or spent the funds — to go.
What this paper actually appears to argue is that a huge percentage — three in four — of people who go to college shouldn’t, because they don’t get economic benefit from doing so. That the outcome for someone who doesn’t have a college degree is on-balance worse than for someone who does isn’t the question. We know that to be true and it’s always been true. The question is what are the money odds of going to school in improvement of your life. That’s all that matters; potential outcome is immaterial if you don’t achieve it just as is the fact that you can win the lottery does not mean that, on a money odds basis, you should buy a ticket!
As such if you’re contemplating as a young person whether or not to go to college the decision point isn’t whether you will earn more money with a degree than not. You will; that is a known factor.
Instead you need to make an honest personal assessment of both the odds you will complete the course of study you undertake and the odds of finding employment that uses that course of study and degree to enhance your earnings power.
Everyone thinks that they can beat the odds. Because Most People Are Idiots. The other problem is that even for the winners, college can come at a tremendous opportunity cost. Suppose Bill Gates had finished his degree at Harvard instead of starting Microsoft? That’s essentially the mistake I made; I went back to school for three semesters instead of selling my working stereo 16-channel 44Khz sound board at a time when Ad Lib was the dominant technology. By the time I finished, the engineer was gone and the VP of engineering wouldn’t give me any of the layout engineer’s time required to put it into production. But hey, they managed to crank out one trivial modification to their existing graphics cards after another instead! So I started a band….
Now, there are no guarantees. Maybe my sound board would have flopped. And even if it hadn’t, the sound board company that exploded onto the scene two years later with a board inferior to the one I’d had built managed to collapse entirely by 1995. On the other hand, it’s hard to argue that my expensive degrees were worth it. After all, my BS in Economics and BA in East Asian Studies don’t even permit me to win Internet arguments because bachelor’s degree in Philosophy of Language.
Dave Truesdale reviews Apex Magazine and is absolutely appalled by the sight of a feminist authoress releasing her rancid, overstuffed bowels all over a classic fairytale:
Rachel Swirsky’s “All That Fairy Tale Crap” gives us another female author who is, let’s say…severely disgruntled at stuff she cannot change in the real world. Her focus here is the “ideal” female as portrayed in fairy tales who make it impossible for the contemporary woman to live up to such high standards—the fairy tale of Cinderella being the chosen target here and which seems to be the one getting the author’s panties in a twist.
Rather than acknowledging that such models of purity and innocence as Cinderella might be something toward which to aspire, or look up to as an ideal, the author has decided to destroy that which she cannot attain in real life. Envy? Jealousy? A desperate, angry attempt to knock from her pedestal a fairy tale princess realizing such is not to be in her own life? Just another writing assignment for an anthology to make a buck or two and let’s take a contrary viewpoint and run with it? Anyone’s guess. But the lashing out at the seeming unattainable, to make mockery of the ideal, to bring down to one’s own level rather than striving to raise one’s own station is something the immature adolescent is prone to do, not the mature adult….
Sadly, there are those who lash out and can think only low thoughts of mockery or destruction, the cutting down to size those who profess or portray what we might be, or become, because they have, in one way or another, given up on themselves and wish to destroy that which gives others inspiration or hope. Tis a pity their glass of Life is always half empty and at every opportunity they feel an unrepentant urge to share their from-the-heart (“There! Take that!”), disappointment-with-life vision with those who strive to set their sights higher.
“All That Fairy Tale Crap” is a fine example of this view and is more likely to find its target audience among an uncritical, morally ambivalent adolescent crowd (if not adolescent by age, then by psychological maturity). In this respect I give it a Well done. Stories like this, in the final analysis, reveal to the careful reader more about the author than anything worthwhile to be revealed or added to the canon of the fairy tale itself.
This is a perfect illustration of everything that is wrong and evil and degraded about SF/F today. Then realize that the authoress is the Scalziette who was elected to the SFWA Board by the pinkshirts earlier this year. Rachel Swirsky happens to be the vice-president of the SFWA.
Perhaps Swirsky believes she is “subverting” Cinderella. If so, that would only serve to demonstrate the lack of talent in modern SF/F. This is how you subvert Cinderella if you have genuine literary talent. Swirsky has less story-telling ability than the average porn director shooting four films in an LA mini-mansion rented for the day.
There is no getting around it. The SFWA is run by a group of fat and freakish losers who write mediocre fiction about soldiers swapping blow jobs and Cinderella going down on her stepsisters. If you didn’t believe me before when I said I didn’t mind being kicked out of the organization after my failed attempt to salvage it, perhaps you will now.
UPDATE: I am informed that when she’s not writing poisonous crap, Swirskyella enjoys sock-puppeting her own Wikipedia page. As my emailer noted, these people are charlatans down to the bone.
65 Fromunda Cheezheads (11-3)
55 Mounds View Meerkats (6-8)
105 Bradford Gamma Rays (6-8)
81 Greenfield Grizzlies (9-5)
80 RR Redbeards (9-5)
53 Bailout Banksters (6-8)
74 Bane Sidhe (9-5)
59 Mercury Marauders (4-10)
59 Suburban Churchians (6-8)
50 Boot Hill Hangmen (4-10)
Another regular season comes to a close. I’m disappointed to miss the playoffs, but hardly surprised due to the copious injuries my keepers suffered this year. Nate put in what was arguably the best management performance of his career, bringing the Redbeards back with a strong run to make the playoffs, while the Grizzlies started strong and faded. Fromundah took the regular season title with the weakest 2-game lead we’ve yet seen; four teams scored more points, including two teams who finished five games behind them.
As always, luck plays its part. The first round:
Greenfield hosts the defending champion Sidhe and Fromundah is home to the Redbeards.
To say nothing of more than two millennia of theology, philosophy, and modern science. And you wonder why I’m dubious about the survival prospects of equalitarian society, or indeed, any society where feminism has grown roots:
What is a feminist logic is a question I’ve spent the past six months
thinking about and researching. There are not a lot of women in
philosophy, and there are definitely not a lot of feminist philosophers,
so I don’t have a good answer for this question. There is great
scholarship talking about weather a feminist logic can build off of
formal logic or if it has to reject the laws of identity and create
something entirely new. There are solid arguments for both camps,
personally I’m swayed by the constructive theories that would build onto
formal logic through a feminist lens. There exist logics that handle
contradiction as part of the system, namely paraconsistent logic. I
think this type of logic represents the feminist idea that something can
be and not be without being a contradiction, that is a system where the
following statement is not explosive: (p && ¬p) == 1.
It should be readily apparent that once you’ve decided that X = !X, you have essentially doomed yourself by denying reality. It is only a matter of time before you make the fatal determination that the hungry bear wants you to play with it, the November ice is thick enough to drive on, or you can leap off the cliff and fly.
This holds as true for societies as it does for individuals. Consider the paraconsistencies that Examerican society has adopted as truths.
The Seal Queen is a free download on Amazon today.
“The Seal Queen tells the story of Briah, an escaped slave, who finds
sanctuary for herself and her unborn child on an enchanted beach. There
her life is filled with contented solitude, the joys of motherhood, and
even the possibility of love with a merman whose song haunts her dreams.
But Briah’s magical world is shaken when she discovers that
her son is the long-awaited savior and future king of the roane (the
gentler cousins of the selkies).”
Can you say… WERESEAL FICTION!
It appears the gun manufacturers are finally beginning to understand their true growth market. If they want to comprehensively rout the gun grabbers, they need to win over a majority of white women. Although if they really want to sell more guns and properly scare them into thinking straight, they should be using a more statistically realistic bad guy.
Question: The redhead in the commercial is hot. But how much hotter does the Glock make her. I would say a half-point of SMV and two whole points of MMV.
MP is a little bit excited about the new court ruling that declared polygamy bans to be unconstitutional:
Having severed marriage from any cultural traditions and values over the last fifty years, I thought it would be at least five more years before the Feds took marriage to the next step: polygamy. Marry whoever and whatever you like. Marry as many as you want.
As of now it is not “cheating” to fuck other women when you are already married. You are merely looking for your next wife. The courts will have to work out some of the kinks, such as not needing the permission of your existing wife to get married again.
After all, I can contract to buy a car from one car dealer and contract to buy another car from another car dealer without asking permission of the first car dealer, right?
And since marriage is nothing more than a voluntary contract between two people, the wife should have no say-so in preventing me from getting Wife #2 … or #3, … or even #4!
What business is it of my old wife to oppress me and prevent me from marrying the (new) one you love? After all, she has the right to control her body and abort my child, why should I not have the right to marry who I want?
And don’t you Evil Religious Freaks start quoting the Bible or the Koran. We got rid of the old oppressive Christian monogamous “’til death do us part” junk many, many years ago.
At this rate we will have pure marriage-by-contract within 10 years: “Marriage” will be divorced from those Evil Religious Freaks and we will be able to construct our marriage contracts however we see fit!
What a Brave New World we are entering!
Do you know, I can remember when all those homogamy advocates were assuring everyone that the only reason anyone opposed altering the equation Marriage = One Man + One Woman was bigotry and that there was no possible way that changing Woman to Man could lead to changing One to One or More.
“In a game-changer for the legal fight over same-sex marriage that gives credence to opponents’ “slippery slope” arguments, a federal judge has now ruled that the legal reasoning for same-sex marriage means that laws against polygamy are likewise unconstitutional.”
American society is rapidly slip-sliding away, to the extent that it can even be said to exist at all anymore. One may not be able to legislate morality, but it is becoming eminently clear that one can legislate civilization. And barbarism, for that matter. But we may be past the point where civilization can be legislated; it may have to be imposed.