Do caterpillars fear the cocoon?

I know all atheists are not in denial concerning their mortality.  But it is informative to see how people tend to become more open-minded towards religious matters as they approach life’s finish line.  I tend to suspect the relative irreligion of the young is more indicative of an erroneous belief in their own immortality than any sort of genuine disbelief.

 My father has lived in a state of blissful denial his entire life. He
used to smoke five packs of cigarettes a day, and until he was seventy
he drank a quart of scotch a day. His diet consists of steak, salami,
potatoes, bread, cheese, mayonnaise, ice cream, and pie.

By this afternoon, my father’s pain was alleviated substantially, and
he began bitching about how he was going to get off the oxycontin after
he recovered. He told me recently that until he was eighty, he honestly
thought he’d live forever. I didn’t say, “Really? You thought you’d
live in your house here in Los Angeles for trillions and trillions and
trillions of years, making your wooden toys, watching Bill O’Reilly, and
eating salami sandwiches with an inch of cheddar cheese, for all
eternity?”

I didn’t say that because my father’s fear of death is irrational. It
would be cruel to subject him to that sort of conversation…. When my father was eighty-three, he had an operation on his hand.
Since he takes blood thinners, any surgery is risky. They had to prepare
to do an emergency transfusion. In discussing his fears with him, I
mentioned that I couldn’t donate blood because I lived in Britain for
two years during the eighties. Due to the risk that I may have ingested
the prion that causes Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, I’m permanently barred
from donating blood. This made my father terrified that he might get
Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease if he got a transfusion.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It has a forty-year incubation period.”

His face fell. “Are you saying I’m not going to be here in forty
years?” He was horrified and his feelings were hurt. I thought he’d
laugh, but I’d scared him. He went to bed chilled to the bone at the
thought that he might not live to be 123.

We are all going to die eventually.  After a long life of joy, happiness, love, and good works, one hopes, but regardless, sooner or later, the final day will come.  This is why it is vital for us to make the most of our lives, to balance the urgent need to make a living and support our families with truly important matters such as serving God, spreading the Good News, and making some sort of positive mark to permit future generations to realize that we were here.

We can spend our days seeking mindless pleasure, but hedonism burns out fast and leaves little more than a burned-out shell behind.  We can live in fear and denial, or we can live in nihilistic stoicism, attempting to manufacture our own meaning and desperately trying to convince others of what we do not truly believe ourselves.  Or we can live by faith, trusting God, accepting that we are merely caterpillars and death is nothing more than a cocoon we must endure before we can take flight.

And what is true of men is true of nations.  America is entering its cocoon.  Who is to say with any certainty that what will eventually result will not be better than what came before.

Even fools, horses, and liberals

Keep this in mind when the unilateral involuntary disarmament crowd tried to portray the no-compromise position as extreme:

An interesting little factoid has emerged from a new Fox News poll of U.S. voters: Personal sentiments are strong and defiant among many U.S. gun owners.

“If the government passed a law to take your guns, would you give up your guns or defy the law and keep your guns?”

The response: 65 percent reported they would “defy the law.” That incudes 70 percent of Republicans, 68 percent of conservatives, 52 percent of Democrats and 59 percent of liberals.

I find it fascinating that even most liberals and Democrats who own guns aren’t dumb enough to buy into the idea that a forcible government monopoly on violence is a good idea.

Blowing away the backstop

Iceland wins a legal victory with serious international ramifications:

Iceland won a sweeping victory in a court fight over its
responsibilities to foreign depositors in Icelandic bank Landsbanki,
which failed in 2008. The court of the European Free Trade
Association on Monday said Iceland didn’t breach European Economic Area
directives on deposit guarantees by not compensating U.K. and Dutch
depositors in Landsbanki’s online savings accounts, known as Icesave
accounts.

Iceland has blown a large hole in the entire bankocracy.  First, it has shown that a country materially much better off to blow off the bankers, refuse to bail them out, and let them go under than accede to their demands.  Notice that Iceland is not having any trouble borrowing money despite the dire predictions of those running interference for the banks.

Second, it shows that the dubious legal claims about “debts” that are somehow assumed to be magically passed on to parties who were not involved in the debt contracts are false.  And third, it proves that the foreign “deposit guarantees” are absolutely nothing of the sort.

This is serious, because, as Karl Denninger observes: “There are other nations where demands have been made for citizens to cover other, non-citizen losses.  I can think of a few… like, for instance…. Greece…. What this decision does is provide a solid backstop to the opinion that such a guarantee program does not reach beyond the fund and into the general finances of the nation involved, nor can that nation be forced to do so retroactively.”

What you going to do

White boy, white girl, when they come for you?

A Latino gang is intimidating blacks into leaving the city that was once an African American enclave. It’s part of a violent trend seen in other parts of the L.A. area….

Compton Councilwoman Yvonne Arceneaux said she was deeply troubled by the incident. “I’m floored,” she said. “That’s blatant to tell a family you can’t
live in this area because you are black. That’s just shocking.”

Two decades ago, when Arceneaux joined the Compton City Council, she
said that older blacks occupied the well-maintained, small homes in the
neighborhood. But as they died or moved away, Latinos moved in. Although she noted cultural differences between blacks and Latinos, she said she thought they were minor.

So, the blacks have fled Compton.  Liberal whites are beginning to flee CaliMexifornia.  And with the incipient amnesty being pushed by Barack Soebarkah and the Republican Party’s Great Hispanic Hope, Marco Rubio, the 52-million strong Aztec invasion is going to get a new head of steam.  California and New Mexico are already lost.  Texas is next, and I suspect it is the most likely flashpoint in the coming clash between Aztec and Anglo cultures, just as it was 177 years ago.

Like the naive councilwoman, most Americans foolishly believe that the rest of the world gives a damn about their pretense to not see differences of color, race, and culture.  The Union is already done for due to debt, and what we’re seeing now is a preemptive race to be in a position to pick up the pieces prior to its shattering.  The killing and the ethnic cleansing is micro-scale and well below the radar of the macro-focused, see-no-evil mainstream media, but it has already begun.

This shouldn’t come as any surprise.  I recognized the historical pattern developing more than 15 years ago.  It is one of the reasons I left.  These mass migrations – and this is a large one by historical standards – have reliably led to the replacement of the previous culture and people by the invading one.  It is why the Italian province of Lombardia still bears that name today, more than 1,400 years after the Lombard invasion of northern Italy.

“The Lombard king Audoin defeated the Gepid leader Thurisind in 551 or 552; his successor Alboin eventually destroyed the Gepids at the Battle of Asfeld in 567.  Following this victory, Alboin decided to lead his people to Italy, which had become severely depopulated after the long Gothic War (535–554) between the Byzantine Empire and the Ostrogothic Kingdom there. The Lombards were joined by numerous Saxons, Heruls, Gepids, Bulgars, Thuringians, and Ostrogoths, and their invasion of Italy was almost unopposed. By late 569 they had conquered all the principal cities north of the Po River except Pavia, which fell in 572. At the same time, they occupied areas in central and southern Italy. They established a Lombard Kingdom in Italy, later named Regnum Italicum (“Kingdom of Italy”), which reached its zenith under the 8th-century ruler Liutprand.


In 774, the Kingdom was conquered by the Frankish King Charlemagne and integrated into his Empire. However, Lombard nobles continued to rule parts of the Italian peninsula well into the 11th century when they were conquered by the Normans and added to their County of Sicily. Their legacy is apparent in the regional appellation, Lombardy.”

Historians will not view the Aztec conquest of the American Southwest as “immigration”, but as “an invasion that was unopposed”.  History suggests that the invaders will likely accept the current political status quo so long as they continue to receive tribute in the form of free government services and “transfer payments”, but demonstrates very clearly that as soon as the tribute falters, the swords will come out and the invaders will forcefully alter the political system to suit themselves.

Apparently education is not the answer

Paging Dr. Reynolds, Dr. Reynolds, cleanup on aisle 3

Nearly half of working Americans with college degrees are in jobs for
which they’re overqualified, a new study out Monday suggests.  The
study, released by the non-profit Center for College Affordability and
Productivity, says the trend is likely to continue for newly minted
college graduates over the next decade.

Fortunately, these overqualified degree holders can be patient and don’t need to make a lot of money right away, because being so intelligent and educated, they would have known better than to go into debt to pay for a useless degree… wait a minute….

If you’re still on the mindless college track because you think education is priceless, you might want to stop and do the math first.  And ask yourself why, if it is priceless, it has a price tag attached.

This should also put some perspective on the value of the opinion of those who seriously believed – in some cases, still believe – that education is the answer to anything.

The Dark is rising again

There is something vastly amusing about murderous sword attacks taking place on posh London streets, even as the multicultural Left continues to whisper soft and soothing words to try to calm the perfectly reasonable fears of those who castigated Enoch Powell and opened England to another invasion by the Dark:

A 16-year-old boy was heard screaming for his life before he was fatally stabbed by a gang armed with knives and swords, residents of a well-heeled area of London said today.  The teenager, named locally as Hani Abou El-Kheir, was attacked in Pimlico, central London, shortly before 7pm yesterday evening and taken to a nearby hospital, but he died from his injuries two hours later.

Where are the Old Ones?  How long will it be before men with similar names are wielding swords on those very streets and screaming “Allahu Akhbar”?  I have no sympathy for the frightened people of Britain.  This is the vibrancy they advocated.  This is the progress they demanded.  This is the world they wanted.

A failure to defend a nation’s borders does not make an invasion any less an invasion or mitigate its long-term consequences.

A MAGIC BROKEN free on Amazon

I also posted this notice on Helen’s Page, which is rapidly turning out to be a rather useful online bulletin board for the liberty-minded.

The novella A MAGIC BROKEN is free for Amazon Kindle users today and tomorrow.

It has 78 reviews, including this 5-star one:

“This is a short book, and I understand it is intended to introduce
some characters and setting for Vox Day’s upcoming book “A Throne of
Bones.” I thoroughly enjoyed it. Once it gets going, it is hard to put
down. I highly recommend it, especially if you are weary of the typical
book in the fantasy genre that goes on and on and on and never comes to a
conclusion. You won’t be disappointed in your purchase, and you will be
excited to read the next book.”

Women ruin everything

Even, ironically enough, TITLE IX.  I’m skeptical that even the most confirmed cynic could have seen this one coming.  This isn’t fourth- or fifth-wave feminism, we have clearly progressed all the way into the fantastic realm of metafeminism.

In fall 2011, faced with the prospect of another season watching
their daughter, Rose, play field hockey against boys, the Grenens had
finally had enough. They wrote to the PIAA, which invited them to come
to its offices in Mechanicsburg and give a PowerPoint presentation. At
the meeting, in January 2012, Mrs. Grenen figured that she would have to
persuade the PIAA to be on her side. But in the middle of the meeting,
someone interrupted her.

“You’re preaching to the choir,” a man said.

The
PIAA had been discussing the issue for years, but it felt that its
hands were tied because of a Commonwealth Court order that was nearly
four decades old.  In 1973, the PIAA had a bylaw which stated,
“Girls shall not compete or practice against boys in any athletic
contest.” The attorney general asserted that this provision violated the
new Pennsylvania Equal Rights Amendment, which stated, “Equality of
rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged in the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania because of the sex of the individual.”

In 1975,
Commonwealth Court entered an order that declared the PIAA bylaw
unconstitutional, saying, “The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic
Association is hereby ordered to permit girls to practice and compete
with boys in interscholastic athletics … .”

At the time of the
order, few girls-only sports were offered. The order was meant to give
girls who wanted to play sports offered only for boys the opportunity to
do so. As the years passed, and more girls teams were created, the
order began to be interpreted so that boys could also play on girls
teams if the sport was offered only for girls — which had the opposite
effect of the order’s original intent.  The only way for the PIAA
to change the interpretation of the order was to have the case reopened
— a task that would take legal man-hours and resources that the PIAA
didn’t feel it had. Basically, the PIAA needed people like the Grenens
to fight the battle, and the organization would be glad to offer its
support.

“It could be a large expense, and we still don’t know the
outcome,” said Bob Lombardi, the PIAA executive director. “The Grenens
have provided a great opportunity because they are attorneys to work on
this.”

Key to the Grenens’ hope for reopening the case was a 1985
interpretation of the Pennsylvania ERA that said the ERA “does not
prohibit differential treatment among the sexes when that treatment is
reasonable and genuinely based on physical characteristics unique to one
sex.”

In fall 2012, the Grenens filed a petition with
Commonwealth Court to reopen the 1975 case. The court granted the
request — a huge victory and likely the only hope to change the status
quo.

On Feb. 26, the Grenens, the PIAA and representatives from
the attorney general’s office will meet in Harrisburg for a status
conference. The Grenens and the PIAA’s hope is that they will agree on a
common-sense bylaw that will outlaw boys playing on girls’ teams while
staying in accordance with the ERA.

In other words, we are expected to believe that legal equality means girls being able to play on boys teams, whether there are girls teams or not, but boys cannot play on girls teams, even if there are no boys teams upon which they can play.

Even if you think, well, what does it matter, it’s just sports, keep this in mind: Title IX is now being applied to science.  Orwell put it beautifully.  All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.  And the Sports Guy put it even better: women ruin everything.

Do you really think it was an accident that women were never permitted any voice in the governance of the Roman Republic or the great historical democracies such as Athens, Thebes, Imperial Britain, and Revolutionary America?  Do you really believe it to be a mere coincidence that many modern democracies, including Germany, Italy, and the member states of the European Union, were not able to survive even 100 years of female suffrage?

Winning is not the point

Keoni Galt points out the obvious: winning is not the objective of the various wars being waged around the world:

Not only is War Big Business, it is THE BIGGEST Big Business in the world.

We are not stationed and fighting all over the globe to “WIN” any war, let alone a War on an Adjective.

We are not fighting to win. We are fighting to keep the gravy train rolling…and it’s one hell of a giant gravy train. To WIN brings this lucrative gravy train to a halt.

That is the last thing those giving the orders to the guy in the conductor’s booth of the Gravy Train want.

This is why so many things are done to stifle, hamper and hinder the supposedly stated mission of our “global force for good!” While Dalrock is certainly correct in his assessment of feminist and elite motives for emasculating the military to socially engineer the culture and society at large, most people fail to ask the right questions as they rage at the supposed madness and insanity of a war machine hampering itself with such social engineering lunacy.

That is because most are still operating under the mistaken assumption that the military is fighting to win the war and “defend the nation.”

The good news, to the extent that there is any to be found of late, is that the recent move to make combat troops out of women tends to indicate that either a) the government has no intention of making war on the people, or, b) the government is, ala Stalin, totally uninterested in the professional opinion of its military leadership.

I think Keoni is actually understating things here, however.  I suspect they’re not so much trying to keep the giant gravy train going, I think they’re desperately trying to keep the entire system from collapsing upon itself.

Mailvox: the metaphysical straddle

This discussion with Asher concerning the utility and legitimacy of utilizing both practical and metaphysical arguments was too long for Blogger’s comment system, so I’m giving it its own post.

I’m not sure what you mean by “that”. Are you saying you never do the metaphysical/practical straddle or that the way you do it isn’t a problem? IF you are offering both metaphysical and practical arguments THEN you are doing the straddle, and the straddle is the problem, in itself.

Earlier you noted that you effortlessly switched back and forth between metaphysical and practical considerations, which looks, to me, like an admission of a straddle. If so, then that is a problem and, if not, could you clarify that statement.

High IQ does not mean one is able to avoid the straddle problem by being smart, as the straddle IS the problem. Either one makes metaphysical arguments or one does not, and if one does than the entire argument is metaphysical.

No.  Your core assumption is wrong.  A metaphysical argument does not magically subsume a practical one.  They are two different arguments that happen to concern the same subject.  You are conflating “straddle” and “switch”; you’ve used the term “straddle” in two different ways.  What I do not do is what you correctly claimed many libertarians (and many others) do, switching back and forth between the practical and the metaphysical in order to avoid having their weakest arguments exposed and defeated.  I do not “switch” between the two for that reason.  I utilize both, following my opponent where he goes.

Where you are correct is that once one RETREATS to the metaphysical, one cannot legitimately return to the defeated practical argument.  But following another’s retreat to the metaphysical in no way invalidates what has already been shown to be a successful practical argument.

The average ability of the ilk is considerably better than that of the average Joe, but most of the ilk do not capable of following you, at least in the way you lead the conversation. It’s not that your reasoning is bad but that it’s too demanding for most of your blog readers, both those that agree and those that disagree.  The ilk are considerably more advanced than the average guy but less advanced than they fancy themselves.

On average?  Of course.  That’s precisely why I repeat myself over and over again.  That’s why I provide illustrative examples.  Those who can, learn, and eventually demonstrate that they can utilize the tactics themselves, often in long debates here in which I don’t involve myself.  Those who can’t follow are at least usually able to appreciate the tactical aspects in both the aesthetic and entertainment senses.  And given that I have repeatedly stepped in and informed people when they were using various tactics improperly, why would you think you are informing me of anything I don’t already know in this regard?

It’s not difficult to see when someone is attempting to utilize a dialectical device in a rhetorical manner or asserting a nonexistent logical fallacy.  Sometimes people have to experiment and try things out before they get the hang of it.  Sometimes, it is eminently clear they will never be able to do more than bluster and posture.  So be it.  I don’t always get things right myself, as readers like you are always, to your credit, pleased to point out.  However, the other day, I said this blog is not The Following, but it could be reasonably considered to be like that show in that I have helped develop a widespread collection of lethal serial killers in the intellectual sense.  When a member of the Dread Ilk eviscerates the arguments of a friend, or family member, or co-worker using the tactics he has learned here, I am with him in spirit.

I can use this metaphor. A trap is like a claymore mine. You are a parent and the ilk are your young children. You leave the mine lying around your house in the event of a home invasion and, instead, one of the ilk sets it off and it ruins his day. From where I’m sitting that is what we’d call an “own goal”.

It’s not an applicable metaphor.  The traps are, in almost all situations, triggered by the interlocutor.  It’s more like planting a minefield on a battlefield and I am the only soldier on the one side, outnumbered though not outgunned.  The civilians are safe.  The other side, well, one of them will probably step on a mine.  And even if a civilian decides to come onto the field and inadvertently sets one off, well, hopefully it will be a learning experience for him and everyone who witnessed it.  The traps are only set to catch those who are determined to be blindly critical at all costs.

The only way that setting traps is always a good thing is when there is no audience or where you know the audience is on your level of intellect. Most of the ilk are likely to misuse most of your traps most of the time.

Totally disagree and would go so far to assert that your perspective is solely tactical and fails to even begin to take the strategic aspects into account.  The traps are set, in part, for the benefit of the audience, who tend to find them more than a little entertaining in operation.  For example, I suspect Allyn was at least mildly amused when she commented: Vox claims “For my next trick I will make the rabbits appear and then dance and hop on one foot”.  On
command the rabbits appear, raging at Vox for being a Nazi, homophobic,
poopy head that is not smarter than them. What they seem to miss is
they are doing this while dancing and hopping on one foot.”

Now I agree that most people, including the many of the Dread Ilk, don’t have the ability to effectively lay traps for critics.  The capacity for constructing them requires a psychological inclination as well as the ability to utilize a dialectical device with rhetorical ramifications.  That’s all right, it is only one of many techniques and is primarily useful for someone like me, who has hundreds, if not thousands, of critics eager to attack him at every sign of weakness or error.  By displaying false signs, I can take out most of them and demonstrate that their criticism is both superficial and baseless with very little effort.  Your average person who is not a critical target has considerably less need of any such device.  As Allyn observes, I can come right out and announce that I am doing this, just as I am doing here, and it won’t even slow down the speed with which the average rabbit will plunge his head into the shining wire.

Some may consider this to be sadistic, but my view is that if you are aware someone harbors a negative attitude towards you and is inclined to attack you at the earliest opportunity, they entirely merit whatever consequences result from their predictable behavior.

If they are harmonious then you only need to use one and the other is redundant. If anyone uses two the odds of them being harmonious is, to put it charitably, very thin. The entire reason that people do the straddle is that they use one set of arguments to cover for weaknesses in the other set and vice versa.

You’re incorrect; you’re again conflating straddle and switch.  I utilize both levels in order to expose that both levels of the critic’s arguments are wrong and thereby render the switch useless.  You’re completely failing to understand how the game is actually played in favor of some imaginary, metaphysical version of it.

Another metaphor I can use. If day after day an army takes the field, gets defeated and then retreats to higher ground then there is something wrong with the field officers. The obvious strategy would be to stick to where one can win and not continue sallying forth onto ground where one keeps being defeated.

Another bad metaphor.  First I defeat them on the lower ground.  They retreat.  Then I defeat them on the higher ground.  At which point they usually abandon the battlefield altogether.  You know perfectly well that is the usual pattern observed here.  With, of course, the exception of the anklebiters of the world, who sally forth to defeat again, and again, and again, much to the amusement of many.  I don’t mind them most of the time.  It take absolutely no effort to keep swatting down their arguments.

That just doesn’t make any sense. If one has already won on the field of battle then one doesn’t *need* to retreat.

You’re missing the point.  I’m not retreating.  I’m following up the successful defense with a counterattack.  Here is how it almost always works.  I post something.  My statements are attacked on factual grounds.  I defeat the factual argument.  The interlocutor retreats and attempts to justify his now-defeated practical argument with a metaphysical one.  I then launch an attack on his metaphysical argument.  That defeated, he runs away.  We’ve seen this process again, and again, and again, have we not?

I’m not switching anything.  I haven’t given up one iota of my practical argument or the ground I am defending.  I’m simply moving onto the other side’s ground and taking that away from him too.

If you find yourself doing the straddle that indicates that you are faced with an intractable foe, and many in the audience are also likely to be intractable foes.

Of course.  This is hardly news.  I’ve been getting death threats, having book contracts paid off, and seeing my job, my music, and my books attacked for 12 years now.  And yet, my audience keeps growing, the Dread Ilk continue to become more capable, and my abilities continue to develop.

There are two ways to take this observation. Either you already convinced a bunch of Bush Republicans to join Team Vox or you just admitted to an own goal. Chasing people away is likely to decrease the chances of their joining your team.

If you’ve been around here for as long as you said, you already know the answer to this question.  The people who are chased away tend to be the apparently intractable ones, and even some of them don’t stay chased away.  Will they ever join the team of truth, reason, and freedom?  I have known a few who have.  But it is not for me to say if my actions have changed anyone’s minds.  And it’s not Team Vox, it is Team Truth.  I don’t dictate anything, I simply follow the truth, and The Truth, as best I understand it and as well as my limitations will permit.