What is so bad about "transgenders"?… This is not about a tiny, unimportant minority of mentally ill people who plead for acceptance. It is about a complete breakdown in social relations that produces, not members of families, ethnic groups, races–essential social networks–but atomized, narcissistic, hedonistic individuals. A libertarian who came here once asked, what's so bad about hedonism? The problem with hedonism is that it is a social solvent. If all that binds you to someone else is the pleasure you extract from them, then there is no morality, no cooperation, no sacrifice, and eventually no species.
 

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YouTube's TheSkepticalHeretic… What's great about YouTube is that it puts a face and voice to the awkward, stilted rhetoric of nerds. Their unsmiling retorts, which sound furiously snotty in a blog or forum post, turn into comedy classics when combined with their effete mannerisms and nasally speech.
 
Here is the motherlode of goony atheist obnoxiousness, TheSkepticalHeretic.
 

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A weakness of conservatives… A recent Amspec article by Jeffrey Lord uses familiar rhetorical tactics to defend conservative interventionism in foreign policy.  But what exactly is in it for conservatives?  It seems that they have been programmed by rhetoric to pursue an unconservative goal.

This sets up a pessimistic conclusion: that conservatives have a congenital vulnerability to being programmed in this way. Why? The answer may lie in a feature of the conservative temperament, its caution and wariness for threats. This very useful feature helps create stable social organizations, in which experience trumps intellectualism, but if hijacked it can be put to mischievous use.

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Pathology a-go-go… Aging woman has trouble getting pregnant, spends a small fortune on fertility treatments, has twins and decides to abort one because there isn't Room For One More (sorry Grant, Drake).

Let's look at all the intersecting trends here:

• women who are masculinized by their careers
• SWPL euphemisms for their morally ugly behavior
• consumerist lifestyle valued over human decency
• rigid adherence to life goals even when pursuing them is unwise at the moment
• couples waiting too long to have children, resorting to fertility drugs that create unwanted (and sometimes macabre) results
• using the artificiality of something to rationalize selfish behavior
• feelings taking precedence over humane alternatives that involve minor amounts of sacrifice
• using statistics to justify individual actions that are indefensible on their own terms
• SWPL worried about being "second class parent", decides to become "mentally ill monster" instead

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Do Paranoids Dream of Electric Jews?… In Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? we have something very unusual, not just for science fiction but for popular fiction as a whole:  a religion modeled after Christianity that is relentlessly, derisively attacked by the popular entertainment culture.  Moreover we find that the group which single-mindedly hates this religion does so because it is jealous of its influence, and because it lacks the ability (empathy) to take part in its communal experience.

Then there is the fact that the Hollywood version of this story, Blade Runner, jettisoned all these parts from the story (which makes up the main thematic conflict), renamed the Rosen Association to the Tyrell Corporation, and didn't want to reprint Dick's original novel for the movie tie-in (instead it wanted Dick to write a novelization of the movie suitable to be read, in his words, by 12-year-olds).

All of this seems to add up to something, as I explore in more detail at My Posting Career.   

A brief history of Republican stupidity, by way of tax policy… Republican legislators generally are not very bright?even by the standards of politicians. They are usually stupid, venal, prone to crying, transparently corrupt, easy to upstage even for our less than dazzling affirmative action president. Eric Cantor for example looks like a sleazy congressman sent over by central casting to trample a bed of daisies and slap children. He sounds like someone who routinely loses arguments.
 

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Dear Richard… L'Affaire Dawkins escalates as hundreds of cowlike fatties rush to their keyboards to blog about his infamous mildly sarcastic reply to a complaining attention whore.  My Posting Career has more!   

My elevator, my choice… In case you ever wondered what kinds of conventions atheists have, apparently the kind where nerds make awkward gestures in elevators, and indifferent-looking feminist "skeptics" then claim that their ears were raped and beaten by this gentlenerd assault.  More at My Posting Career.  (Bonus: POZ Myers!)   

The rise and fall of classical music… In response to the question, "How exactly did classical composing wither away?" MPC poster Balkan Bonehead writes:

As the mercantile class emerged as a cultural force in its own right, the focus shifted from opera to other spectacular forms - the piano recital, the concerto, and the symphony. This shouldn't be taken to mean that the middle class loved opera, qq.v. the scene at the opening of Galsworthy's The Man of Property, the vicious competition among opera theaters in 19th-c Paris, Verdi's celebrity status in Italy, the huge volume of Italian opera in general, etc. The public just loved classical music, and no wonder - it was exciting stuff. The stiff concert atmosphere of today didn't apply at the time. People used to eat in the theater, talk, play cards, etc., after all, it was a show. 

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Servants and wives… The news story about Arnold's love child drifted into a somewhat more interesting discussion about the role of servants and some philosophizing about the nature of women.  I wrote,

You go back to first principles. What does the nature of woman suit her for? What are her qualities, biological, psychological, etc. Of course there are exceptions (happy or not). What exactly does a woman do with her life when she has servants raise her children? What kind of mother is she to her children then? What does modern education, required for a modern career, do to her way of thinking? Simple questions. I don't think you can critique the modern family without addressing them.

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Fighting vs. Paying… It's sometimes helpful to look at the world as being divided between two types, those who will fight vs. those who will pay. This approach is used by criminals, a quick means of assessing who their most profitable victims are. To be willing to pay means a desire to seek passive solutions that involve either shared or individually borne expenses, a form of social amortization. Generally speaking, those who pay end up paying those who fight. People who fight are by nature driven to resolution through conflict.

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The nerd and his umbilicus… In a recent Sailer post, Steve relays a reader's anecdote about discovering a conclave of Wikipedia editors in a food court.  A commenter remarks:

These are the heroes of our age. I wouldn't want to hang out with them, and definitely wouldn't want to catch some of their social stigma, but they definitely offer a lot of good to the world. We could do worse than killing everyone alive except for wikipedia editors to create an improved human race. [emphasis added]

Obviously I'm not going to take that sort of thing lying down.  More at My Posting Career.   

Coming soon to a theater near you: Fag Christ… You might want to wait until Easter is over before reading this one.  Tis the season to fuck with Christians!  (Tis always the season.)  More at My Posting Career.   

A reality based look at...sluts… When a study shows a strong relationship between number of non-marital sexual partners and stable marriage, what do "reality-based" people do?  Mostly they seem to argue that reality must be stupid.

What is most interesting is to observe the intersection between deeply implanted myths and a starkly countervailing reality. One example of these myths is that sophisticated, smart people do not get hung up on sex, and it's always sensible to do a "trial live-in" so that you know what to expect. When such myths are implanted deeply enough, it takes decades to destroy them, and that is assuming the subject is at all willing to take a second or third look at what he believes. (Presumably people who score highly on "openness" would be willing to do this, however…)

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Wop says don't worry about nonwhite America… Michael Barone asks a stupid question--will the Republican Party survive with a white minority?--and gives a stupid answer:  sure, Mexicans are just like you and me!

Barone whistles in the dark about the true question, what does a white minority America mean for conservative or even pseudo-conservative interests. You are going to get looted, you dumb fool, in fact the looting is already underway, and has been for years in the form of affirmative action, "civil rights" lawsuits against police exams, official racism in government contracting, etc. Only a complete fucking idiot--one with little awareness of the outside world--would argue that we have nothing to worry about America with a white (i.e. productive) minority.

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Presidential IQ… What is most telling about IQ obsessives, and this comes through in the comments to Sailer's recent pieces on Obama's possible IQ, is how inconceivable it is to them that certain people are only of modestly above average intelligence. IQ has become a kind of totem, the key to the managerial elite's right of rule. Because we are smart, we are the best people to organize national affairs--and vice versa. This leads to the assumption that someone could not possibly do well in college or in politics by dint of hard work.  More at My Posting Career.   

Politics as addiction… South Dakota passed a law requiring a three day waiting period for abortions.  Rather than comment on the relevance of such a law, I would like to point out that this type of stunt legislation is similar in effect to an endorphin release–it temporarily relieves the pervasive anxiety state of a dysfunctional and stress-inducing society.  The more stressful modern life becomes, the more people are addicted to these partisan endorphin releases.

But the real thing to be wary of here is that it causes the disaffected to maintain a weak partisan identity and prevents them from committing to real change (assuming positive change is possible in an overscaled society). In this case it is a tactic used by the Republican Party to ensure its own survival, which is to say the survival of the managerial class' backup team.

I think this is the key to understanding modern politics–it really is specifically designed to trigger a compensating pleasure state, and you are left dependent on partisan rhetoric and partisan policy gimmicks to feel that next surge of endorphins. Politics as addiction!

More at My Posting Career.