The sexual revolution was caused by cowardly men

The sexual revolution is largely a product of the failure, and in particular the cowardice, of men. But this is true in a particular way.

It is easy (and entirely appropriate) to morally condemn the behavior of sexually loose men. It is difficult (and entirely appropriate) to morally condemn the behavior of sexually loose women.  Cowards who condemn sexually loose men while making excuses for sexually loose women are “bravely facing the applause”.

The conflation of rape and fornication is just the kind of rhetorical shield from responsibility that craven cowards need. Cowards and sluts go together as the engines driving the sexual revolution.  The cowardice runs so deep that conservatives who supposedly oppose the sexual revolution will readily (and appropriately) condemn a man for trashy talk while making excuses for women who deliberately murder their own children.

So a more complete picture is that the sexual revolution is a product of the cowardice of men and the sluttiness of women, working together.

If you really want to turn back the sexual revolution, the place to start is with yourself.  Don’t be a coward or a slut.

What game theory says about negotiating with terrorists

Wikipedia describes the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a construct in Game Theory, like this:

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They hope to get both sentenced to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to: betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. The offer is:

• If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves 2 years in prison

• If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve 3 years in prison (and vice versa)

• If A and B both remain silent, both of them will only serve 1 year in prison (on the lesser charge)

The thing to notice about the Prisoner’s Dilemma as a one-off situation is that each prisoner is better off betraying the other, no matter what the other prisoner does.

However real life does not consist of a single one-off choice, and the PD can be re-imagined as an ongoing game with repeated rounds, where years in prison are replaced by points in the game: “less years in prison” equals more points, if you will, and the more points you get the better you are doing in the game.  Each round of the game a player chooses whether to cooperate or defect, and the game is played for an indeterminate number of rounds.  The goal is to maximize how well you are doing “against the House” not against the other player: to minimize total years in prison, if you will.

In this iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, wherein two players engage in the game repeatedly, actual human beings use the game itself to communicate with each other and collaborate.  A very effective strategy in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (played against another human being) is not betrayal but “tit-for-tat“: cooperate with the other player unless he defects; if he defects then ‘punish’ him by defecting on the next round.  In this way a pair of “prisoners” can optimize their score against the house over time, by learning to cooperate.

Iterated “games” are fundamentally different from one-off situations.  This is why intelligent decision makers learn, over time, not to negotiate with terrorists.  Terrorist negotiations may (or may not) change the outcome in a particular case, for better or worse.  (The choice there is ultimately up to the terrorist, not the negotiator, since presumably the negotiator is not proposing to do something evil himself).

But choosing to negotiate with terrorists in general is what gives terrorists power; and in an open-ended iterated “game” this means that in the long run the evil party wins.  Each negotiation increases the power of “team terrorist”. If this goes on long enough morality will invert: “team terrorist” will be seen as victims rather than perpetrators; opposing their wanton slaughter of the innocent will come to be seen as oppressive tyranny; and the mountains of corpses will pile up to the sky.  (I say “will” as if this were a future prediction rather than a retrospective).

At least we’ll all be able to pat ourselves on the back and feel like we are taking a nice pastoral, conservative, live-and-let-live approach, though.

Ex post lacto, or, mother’s milk vs the positive law

If the positive law of some governing body expressly authorized X yesterday, and then that same body criminalizes X tomorrow, it is unjust – with caveats – for that body to punish someone tomorrow for having already done X yesterday. This has to do with the just exercise of authority, not the justice of the action in question: when a particular authority punishes an action which it explicitly authorized this (the punishment) is an unjust act by that authority. If I authorized you to shoot the dog it would be unjust for me to punish you for having already shot the dog, though it is not unjust for me to withdraw authorization.

This principle against ex post facto law has limits. Punishment might not be an unjust act by a different, especially a higher, authority: God punishing people for doing things which are supposedly “authorized¹” by the positive law is not unjust, for example. And in general a different authority may be justified in punishing actions which it did not authorize, even though some other authority attempted to “authorize” it.

This is especially true when people ought to know better.  Importantly, the fact that some authority has not said anything about X does not constitute authorization by that authority to do X.  In this case no ex post facto prohibition applies as a moral constraint on the authority to punish.  And I would not be too quick to dismiss the notion that mothers mostly ought to know better than to kill their own children, no matter what pressures they are under.

Modern people with their politically liberal commitments may find this difficult to swallow, but the fact that nobody in authority has expressly forbidden doing X does not mean that you are authorized (have the authority) to do X.  The fact that there is no positive law prohibiting you from doing X doesn’t grant you a right to do X, for all possible X: “right” is just a different term for authority.

When we do something which we have no right to do, sometimes there are consequences, including punishment of some sort by someone in authority. And the fact that someone – even someone in authority – told you that you were authorized to do something evil does not confer actual authorization: it doesn’t make you not guilty, it just makes the person(s) who attempted to authorize evil also guilty.

The fact that someone in authority egged you on to commit murder may be a mitigating factor in deciding upon a just punishment.  But it can never be entirely exculpatory.  We are responsible for our own choices², and that includes being sure that we have the authority to do the things we choose to do.

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[1] I use scare quotes around “authorize” because in fact nobody has the capacity to authorize or require doing evil.

[2] Here I leave out the mentally ill and otherwise truly incompetent.

Victim status

Rejecting the death penalty for women who murder their own children raises the question of what punishment a properly ordered society ought to have in place for murdering unborn children.

There is an enormous amount of room between the death penalty and, not only no punishment whatsoever, but a general freakout over the very suggestion that this form of murder ought to carry some sort of punishment — any punishment at all.

Voluntary abortion only has “two victims” in the same sense that any kind of voluntary murder has “two victims” – that is, when we cast the perpetrator as a kind of victim. There is some truth to that, but it doesn’t keep us from punishing murderers.

With great power comes great incontinence

The most primal power of men is violence. Therefore the besetting sins of incontinent men tend to be sins of violence primarily, and to involve sex only circumstantially/accidentally.  A violent man will use violence to get sex that he desires, but he will also use violence to get other things that he desires: money, drugs, prestige, etc.  This decreases as individual power decreases: the besetting sins of incontinent men with diminished capacity for violence will tend to be more effeminate or androgynous sins.

The most primal power of women is sex. Therefore the besetting sins of incontinent women tend to be sins of sex primarily, and to involve violence only circumstantially/accidentally.  A slutty woman will use sex to get violence that she desires, but she will also use sex to get other things that she desires: money, drugs, prestige, etc.  This decreases as individual power decreases: the besetting sins of incontinent women with diminished sexual power will tend to be more masculine or androgynous sins.

This is reflected in prison populations, which are mostly men, because our society is willing to punish crimes of violence but is not willing to punish crimes of sex.  In fact when a straightforward crime of violence perpetrated by a woman is perceived to primarily arise from sex, there is across the board resistance to punishing that crime.

How to titrate a Final Solution

First assume that any theory is better than no theory at all; even when the theory in question is manifestly and demonstrably destructive, evil, deceptive, and just plain wrong.  The important thing is that in the hierarchy of answers we accept, admitting ignorance and expressing a willingness to accept reality as it is, is at the bottom of the list.

The magic question of modernity is “what alternative do we have?”  Failure to answer this in a way that the questioner finds satisfactory is disqualifying.

Once we have an answer it is time to fire up war machines, ovens, and murder factories to deal with the discrepancies between theory and reality.

Nazis dancing on the head of a pin

My post The Products of Inception deliberately evokes the modern morally sanitizing euphemism “products of conception,” which refers to the post mortem object of the abortionist’s ministrations: the dismembered remains of her human victim.

There can be all sorts of personal motivations, as with murder more generally speaking, when it comes to murdering (or contracting the murder of) one’s own child.  Liberalism (in its feminist aspect) isn’t always and necessarily what motivates individual choices to abort.  Sometimes it likely isn’t a significant factor at all.

What feminism does is construct a social world in which abortion is considered a right, and is deemed necessary in many cases in order to carry out the imperative of female emancipation.

Nazism, likewise, isn’t always and necessarily what motivates rounding up undesirables into camps and exterminating them.  Nazism merely constructs a social reality which makes doing so necessary.

Liberalism considered purely in itself, as an abstracted idea to which nobody is committed even as a kind of default, doesn’t cause mass murder.  What causes mass murder is the crushing impact of the liberal commitments of governing regimes , ruling classes, and whole populations as these social forces come crashing into reality.

Folks who like to think in terms of academic ideas isolated from reality, clinically examined in the laboratory of the mind, sometimes object that – despite express commitment to freedom and equality of rights among the herrenvolk – nazis and other moderns don’t really fit the “liberal” label.

I’m OK with that.  No, really.  Debate over whether mass-murdering modernist regimes are all forms of “liberalism” strictly speaking, as opposed to the perfectly understandable (and inevitable) results of liberalism crashing into reality, itself represents a radical pullback from the real world and into an abstract mind laboratory.

So feel free to insist that nazism and communism are not forms of liberalism, strictly speaking.  From my point of view this is just counting nazis dancing on the head of a pin.

The butcher’s bill of rights

As we’ve discussed many times before, what modern people call “rights” are instances of discriminating authority.  A property owner has the authority to eject trespassers without everyone insisting that he has to give good reasons for why he is doing so.

A property owner’s discriminating authority is labeled “property rights” as a way of short circuiting any further thought on the matter. By labeling this a “right” we don’t have to acknowledge that the law discriminates between the property owner and everyone else, empowering the property owner to, himself, discriminate and bind people to do or not do certain actions within the domain of his authority.

The magic word “rights” acts as a kind of wrongthought circuit breaker, allowing us to notice the empowerment involved in “rights” while studiously ignoring the multitude of constraints which are concomitant to every right.  “Rights” give us mental cover for thinking of ourselves as empowered while at the same time avoiding the terrible crime of discrimination.  Because rights are empowering, more of them means more freedom to our short-circuited modern minds.  The more expansive our “rights” are interpreted to be by the ruling class, the more of this “freedom” we have.

At least for certain values of “we”.

Trump as the third black president

We must not tolerate illegal immigration. Since 1992, we have increased our Border Patrol by over 35%; deployed underground sensors, infrared night scopes and encrypted radios; built miles of new fences; and installed massive amounts of new lighting. We have moved forcefully to protect American jobs by calling on Congress to enact increased civil and criminal sanctions against employers who hire illegal workers. Since 1993, we have removed 30,000 illegal workers from jobs across the country. – Between Hope and History, by Bill Clinton, p.134 , Jan 1, 1996

Donald Trump in 2016 is objectively very similar to Bill Clinton in 1992.  The main difference is that from an Overton Window standpoint Trump is now an extreme right wing candidate rather than an extreme left wing candidate. Anything resembling social conservatism has simply dropped off of the radar: even the pro life movement these days is pro choice. Donald Trump when elected (assuming he is smart enough to let Grandma Abortion Witch implode) will just be the third black president.

Liberalism is insane and anti-human, but its insanity ironically makes it extremely adaptable.  The Trump phenomenon is not some great new hope for the salvation of Western civilization: some new direction which represents the possibility of a future free from SJW excesses and other leftist insanity.  Rather what we are witnessing is the action, in real time, of liberalism’s own internal mechanisms for protecting itself from the results of its own excesses as it continues to dominate more and more of reality.  We are witnessing how it absorbs and repurposes any possible incipient opposition, turning the energy of that opposition toward liberalism’s own ends: ends which include self preservation.

Liberalism’s greatest enemy has for centuries been the consequences of its own comprehensive triumph. But by keeping all political conflict inside of its inescapable gravity well it ensures its own long term persistence, in spite of itself.

Bringing murderers to the Gospel through a process of accompaniment

Apparently the Polish Episcopal Conference sabotaged the passage of anti-abortion legislation because the legislation treated abortion as if it were a form of murder:

… the Polish Episcopal Conference issued a surprising document, in which it opposed the pro-life reform, because it mandated the punishing of all those persons responsible for conducting an abortion, including women who allow their children to be killed.

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Despite having the means to simply expunge this section of the Bill and continue to work on it without the penal consequences for women who decide to kill their children, they refrained from doing this. This reflected the position of the Polish Bishops who on the same day decided to reject the Bill in its entirety.

Like Donald Trump the authors of the law made the mistake of taking pro lifers seriously in the contention that abortion is a kind of murder, when in fact the mainstream pro life position in the Current Year[tm] is merely a variation of pro choice. The mainstream pro life position is that the provision of abortion should be restricted and heavily regulated, but women who procure abortions should never face any sort of legal penalty for doing so. Abortion victimizes the perpetrator and is the fault of abusive men; it isn’t a choice made by women who are responsible for their own choices.

The assertion that when a pregnant woman procures an abortion her act should never be treated as a crime simply is the pro choice position.  How much and what kind of regulation one thinks there ought to be within the pro choice framework is just variation on the theme: we’ve established what we are and are just haggling over the price.

My own understanding is that abortion is in fact a species of murder and should be legally treated as such.  I call my position ‘anti abortion’ to distinguish it from the various pro choice legal doctrines (including the ‘pro life’ variant of pro choice).

Under just positive law, murderers can receive all the spiritual accompaniment and mercy that they need in their cells.