Here is a rant about how “current day” ideas injected anachronistically into science fiction spoils things a little.
He is certainly very animated, but he does not quite hit the nail on the head. I replied:
Separate pronouns, body type and voice options are pretty normal in RPGs now. The only problem would be if the world-building and storyline draw too much on “current day” Californian politics, and not enough on interesting [science fiction] ideas.
Here is an example of the sort of thing I am talking about, from On His Majesty’s Secret Service by Charlie Higson.
Beckett was an ex-Tory MP, famous for providing covid/vaccines/mask-wearing/5G conspiracy theories, which had spilled over into the usual anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-BBC, anti-MSM, anti-cultural Marxist, Climate Change Denial pronouncements. It was an anti-trans diatribe that had eventually got him kicked out of the party and he’d soon after set up the ‘New Freedom Party.’
Bond was struck by something. It was a long while since he’d been at any kind of function that was almost entirely full of men. It felt strange. There was not even a pretence at diversity here. AEthelstan hadn’t been the least bit concerned about ensuring that half of the people he’d hired to carry out his coup should be women, or non-white, or disabled.
It is a fourth-wall-breaking shopping list (complete with forward slashes) of things the author does not like. It reveals that the author is only aware of un-nuanced caricatures of his political opponents. It stretches credibility that this is what a competent MI6 agent would be thinking about while infiltrating a meeting, and it makes no logical sense that he should be “struck” by any of this when he already knows all the opinions of the caricature villain.
Now we know we are not reading fiction set in a credible world that makes sense, and that everything that occurs within its world serves only to amuse the author’s preoccupations.
One fear when starting to read a new author is of getting several books into a multi-volume epic before it becomes apparent that the functioning of the fictional world is premised entirely on price controls solving all the problems, or some other impossible notion. At least this is so blatant, as if a teenager was writing it after reading Teen Vogue too much, I know not to start.
Charlie Higson says that Frankfurt School “Cultural” Marxism is a “conspiracy theory” – when the stuff he writes is full of “Critical Theory” “Diversity” Frankfurt School Marxist themes – in short Mr Higson is saying that he-himself is a “Conspiracy Theory” – that he himself does-not-exist.
This is not a culture, this is not a social system, and it certainly is not a “conspiracy theory” – this Frankfurt School stuff is just decay and collapse, and it was intended to be so (it was designed to destroy the West – and it is destroying the West).
It is, therefore, a mistake to try and work out if this Frankfurt School race-and-sex stuff is a better or worse culture and social system that that of Russia, China or the Islamic world- because what dominates much of the West now is not a culture, not a social system, at all. It is just decay and destruction.
As for the other “conspiracy theories” Mr Higson is using the term “conspiracy theory” for the truth – the truth. About immigration (there have been migrants over the last few decades, 600 thousand last year alone, than in thousands of years (thousands-of-years) before the last few decades. About Covid – the “conspiracy theories” about Covid turned out to be the truth. About Climate – with data systematically faked (the “Hockey Stick” lie). About the endless lying propaganda of the BBC (about just about every subject). And about the power crazed European Union, and the rest of the power crazed “international community” of the “rules based international order” with its desire for global totalitarianism, whether one calls it “Agenda 21” or something else.
It is well know that Ian Fleming spent his last years in despair – perhaps (perhaps) because Mr Fleming understood that people of the Mr Higson type were taking over.
The cultural domination of the Mr Higson types can only mean the decline, and eventual destruction, of the Western world – certainly Mr Higson is not very important on his own, but his type are Legion. They are like termites eating away at the Western world.
As for the “rant” – I do not like the shouting and the curse words, but everything the man said is the truth.
I knew that Charlie Higson was the standard North London left wing squish, but I had not anticipated how bad his rehash of the Bond books would be. Apart from being on the intellectual level of Greta Thunberg, the writing is just awful. What a travesty. I imagine the NuBond neither drinks nor smokes, and is in touch with his inner femininity.
If you want to write an enthralling action thriller, then the motivation of the villain is important. In James Bond, there were often political blasts, such as media tycoons who start a war for the sake of popularity or the like.
That’s not a problem for me.
It doesn’t show any special character or literary qualities to make a villain a caricature of what you really don’t like yourself.
If, on the other hand, one claims to deal intellectually with a position within the framework of fiction, then one fails terribly if only a caricature remains.
JohnK – yes and deliberately bad.
The character of James Bond was created by Ian Fleming to be anti Communist – no doubt Mr Higson gets perverted pleasure out of turning James Bond into a Frankfurt School “Diversity” Marxist.
Even Joseph Stalin rejected the Frankfurt interpretation of Marxism – because Classical Marxists, such as “Stalin”, wanted to take over a functioning society – and the Frankfurt School race-and-sex stuff utterly destroys society.
The policies that the Legion of destroyers (of which Mr Higson is a very small part) push are designed to utterly destroy society.
They are not pushing an alternative social system, an alternative culture, their doctrines (on racial, sexual, and other matters) can only lead to destruction and death.
Shame really because I have always loved the Fast Show, which Higson helped create and performed in. But I’d never read any of his novels. I have read all the Fleming Bond novels but stayed away from those written by others.
Kingsley Amis wrote a decent Bond, and the Horowitz ones are pretty readable and avoid this crud, but otherwise I’m totally with you.
The likes of Higson aren’t fit to light one of Fleming’s cigarettes. I’ve read several reviews of his book and they’re unflattering.,
Well, no wonder MI6 is worried about it, then. He has a decent chance of pulling it off.
Science fiction has always been injected with “current day” ideas. That’s why science fiction from 50-100 years ago is often so odd; it’s full of ideas that were “current day” back decades ago when the stories were written.
The problem here comes from writers saying “Fornicate the story!” in favor of loud hammering repeated preaching – and then banging the Aesop some more, just to make sure the reader gets it. But that’s not really new either. Consider Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards (1888)
Hold on, isn’t OHMSS set in the late 1960s? WTH is it going on about 2020s narcissism for?
WTcompleteF? Maybe because half the population ARE NOT non-white, half the population ARE NOT disabled.
There are more train spotters in this country than trannies, why isn’t the media plastered with trainspotters in every story and news report?
Are you sure this isn’t deliberate parody? It sure reads like it to me. Even the name “On His Majesty’s Secret Service” sounds like it is saying “this is a parody of a Bond novel”.
You can’t tell a good story when you start out with the idea that you’re going to be preaching at the masses doing so. They’ll mostly get up and leave, while also rejecting your entire premise.
You want to preach at someone, you have to tell the story first, and let the preaching happen in the background. If your reader is suddenly sitting up in bed, twenty years later, and then recognizing the premise you were expounding and advocating, then you’ve done your job. It’s nearly subliminal; has to be, else the audience won’t accept it.
Most of these idiots are just really, really bad at doing their jobs, which would be entertaining their customers. You can preach and entertain, but you have to be very, very careful when you do it. For pointers, see Robert Heinlein’s middle works, and compare/contrast to the later ones where his brain was going all wonky because he wasn’t getting enough oxygen and he quit caring. Also, because his editors were afraid to, well… Edit. Plenty of “message” in his stuff, like “Stranger in a Strange Land”, but you weren’t really struck right in the face by it. That’s how you do it…
Of course, it may well be that some of his readers were taking lessons from his writing that even he wasn’t fully cognizant of making.
It’s all a bit like viewing Soviet art posters circa 1917. Strong, resolute bodies scanning forward into a bright future . . .
The thing that just makes me do that same thing that the dog in the famous RCA “His Master’s Voice” is doing is this: The incessant focus on sex, sex, sex… And, the more deviant, the better. Transgression seemingly has become the entire point.
I mean, go out and look: How many modern works are shoehorning in the whole LGBTWTFBBQ line, compared to their actual rate of occurrence in the population? Anyone reading books or watching movies from this period in history is going to be convinced that we had a 75-80% rate of sexual deviancy going on, that everyone had rape in their tragic backstory, and… Well, you get the point. The media portrays all of this crap as being a hell of a lot more prevalent than it really is.
Why? What’s the actual agenda?
Stop and ponder that, for a few moments. Why are the “media producers” infested with the Harvey Weinstein types, and how much effect has that had on the issue? Are we being granted a view into the ids of these media producers, and all of this deviancy and perversion is totally normal and unremarkable to them? And, if that is the case, why the hell are we putting up with it, and lining up to watch this crap?
At the rate things are going, should the trends continue, I give it to about the 2050s-60s and we’ll see mainstream media productions incorporating blatant and graphic pedophilia and God alone knows what else. What the hell they’ll be doing by then for their transgressive buzz? I have no idea, and I don’t want to see it. Will the new frontier they fight for, after pedophilia, be snuff movies?
They told me there wasn’t a slippery slope that we were getting on. I think we can ascertain from today’s perspective that that was a blatant self-serving lie.
My own suspicion is that there’s gonna be one hell of a backswing on the “public mores pendulum”. It’ll be fast, ugly, and go waaaaaayy further than any of today’s ohsoverycertainofthemselves “activists” can even begin to imagine. I’d wager that you might see sexual deviancy dealt with by mob action, including bonfires and other such things.
Were I a non-activist, non-“transgression is everything” sort of gay/lesbian? I’d be extremely careful to remain closeted, and leave zero trail behind me. “Lifestyle choice” may well become a death sentence, when critical mass on this stuff is reached; don’t be easily identifiable. Cowardice? Perhaps. Also, common ‘effing sense, given what is going on.
I think you’re going to start to see a bunch of really ugly things happen, as people get fed up with the anarcho-tyranny. Your cars aren’t safe to park? Your home isn’t safe to leave? Well, if the cops won’t do anything, there are people out there who will, and you will not like their ideas of justice. At. All.
Lynchings will look positively civilized, by comparison.
If conversations with my gay and lesbian friends are anything to go by, the ‘normal gays’ will be joining in with the pitchforks and torches.
I give it to about the 2050s-60s and we’ll see mainstream media productions incorporating blatant and graphic pedophilia
“Cuties” was getting too close three years ago. Also pushing this stuff at schoolchildren is succeeding in putting up the apparent rate of transgenderism in teenagers simply by making it seem cool/fashionable. It’s coming at us fast.
As you suggest though it’s unlikely to get that far. Very likely the left are planning to make a grab for hard power – as they are doing in the USA, what with their third-world style arrest of the opposition leader and his supporters – then they may go all Stalinist and hastily drop this stuff. Very likely, though, the ugly backswing will occur first and land us with a whole different set of problems.
We – the “small government” we – may have to work hard to damp the swing, calm people down, get everyone to live & let live instead of demanding their own version of tyranny.
Libertarianism depends, I think, on a rational humanity. I’m wondering if we have that anymore. Works for Galt’s Gultch, but for a polity of people who voluntarily choose, in vast numbers, the kinds of governments we have today, I have to wonder.
I suspect that, if government tells parents that their 12-year-olds are fair game for lusty adults, many will comply, lest they be accused of being evil far-rightists. I do not see libertarianism as being very appealing to such people.
In a more sensible age Mr Higson’s paragraph would have been written by a new Fast Show character – “Middle-aged woke author”.
Yet again – this is not a “new society”, “new social system”, “new culture” or anything like that, the “diversity, equity and inclusion” (or whatever name is used) agenda of Frankfurt School Marxism, pushed by the international community (the “educated” classes), is designed to destroy – it is not about creating anything new, it is about promoting decay and destruction.
If it’s not a deliberate parody this part is just comically bad.
“Beckett was an ex-Tory MP, famous for providing covid/vaccines/mask-wearing/5G conspiracy theories, which had spilled over into the usual anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-BBC, anti-MSM, anti-cultural Marxist, Climate Change Denial pronouncements.”
Miss out the 5G conspiracy and qualify anti immigration with illegal immigration and he sounds like one of the good guys to me.
That does seem to be the case. Indeed, had a thus oriented chum note “We have far more to lose by being lumped together with these pederast predators.”
On a related, but non-cultural war note, my break with most fiction is in RPGs. Nothing breaks my sense of immersion than the lack of a the most common terrain type in the world: fields. I don’t mean prairies, I means fields – plowed, paddocked, fenced, and farmed. It’s like every city in some D&D knockoff exists in a some sort of denial that for most of the worlds history most people worked farms that supported denser settlements. Even in 1920s United States 50% of the populated resided on family owned farms, and that was with early industrial agricultural! Every time I see a city like “Baldur’s Gate” without a hundreds of miles of fields surrounding it, that just bugs me. The occasional “New Forest” a quick from a royal palace I understand, but that is the exception.
Yes, yes, quibbling. But it is still immersion breaking, to me at least.
And on the RPG front only the old Hârn game understand and had maps with the “fields” terrain type.
Perry de Havilland (Wiltshire)
That does seem to be the case. Indeed, had a thus oriented chum note “We have far more to lose by being lumped together with these pederast predators.”
I think a lot of regular gay people resent being bunched in with the whole alphabet soup. I remember Douglas Murray once said that the idea of gay men being in the same group as asexuals was about as ridiculous as it can get. The problem with the alphabet soup of 2SLGBTAQI+ (never heard of the 2S? Yup the Canadians added that for “two spirit” people, whatever that means), that what they REALLY mean is “everyone except straight white people who believe penis/vagina is a reliable marker of gender. So they assume that everyone outside of that category of the mainstream have the same goals. Which is an utterly ridiculous. It is like Americans thinking that all South Americans are the same, or thinking the Green Party and the Libertarian Party have the same goals because they are outside the mainstream of the American political duopoly.
FWIW, it is related to a similar discussion under a different topic where we are talking about how organizations become all focused on the organization rather than the original goals of the organization. Many organizations like GLAAD or the NAACP original goals of equal rights and equal marriage for homosexuals or equal rights for black people having been achieved, they didn’t just say “job well done, let’s go home boys”. Nah, they moved on the keep their cushy jobs and fancy organizations by changing onto other targets that would leave their founders gasping in horror.
Stonyground – no it is not a parody, and it is not “comically” bad. It is bad as in evil.
There is nothing comic about the decay and destruction of the West, people laughed at the Cultural Marxists – but now their “Woke” Frankfurt School Marxist doctrines dominate almost all institutions, public and private, including most publishing houses. So there is nothing funny in this any more.
The use of racial and sexual groups for the purpose of undermining the West, by presenting these groups as “exploited and oppressed” (the standard Marxist tap dance – but applied to racial and sexual groups rather than the “working class”), has proved to be an effective strategy – people who still regard it as funny show themselves to be out-of-touch with what is going on in the Western world.
In a related matter….
Mr Peter Navarro, one of the few honest men in Washington – who, for example, supported Early Treatment for Covid (which saved many lives – and could have saved vast numbers of people, had the sadistic establishment not done everything they could to PREVENT people getting Early Treatment for Covid) and denounced the blatantly rigged 2020 Presidential Election, has been found guilty of “Contempt of Congress”, the corrupt judge would not even allow Mr Navarro to present his defence of Executive Privilege at the “trial” – which was a Show Trial, as so many “trials” under this regime are.
This corrupt regime will fall – its economic basis of creating “money” from nothing and using this “money” to finance the import of goods (some Trillion Dollars worth of goods in 2022 alone) will collapse – and that collapse will take this corrupt regime with it.
Yup, my gay friend, who isn’t afraid to mince his words, ahem, (rightly) considers trans people to be mentally ill and left London to, his words not mine, ‘get away from the muslims and the blacks’. He’s French though so gets a pass.
Paul Marks said:
The thing here that must be pointed out, as I have been doing for years, is that there’s a two-fold issue: A really strong and healthy culture would have resisted this angle of attack much better than ours has. This sort of “culture-jamming” has only been effective because of a particular moment of indecisiveness in our history, and while it may kill its host, it does point out that the host wasn’t at all healthy to begin with.
The other point to be seen here is this: The fools behind all of this think that they’re “winning” something. They aren’t; just like with all the captured institutions that they imagine will give them ultimate control over everything, everywhere, the real fact is that their conquest itself inevitably renders those institutions ultimately irrelevant.
Witness the media. Back in the late 1960s, everything Walter Cronkite said was gospel truth… Nobody doubted his “That’s the way it is…”
Most of the rest of the media was similarly trusted, despite there being no real reason for it. The Gramscian march was heavily enabled by all of this “trustworthiness”.
Now? LOL… Does anyone, anywhere, still believe a thing that the newsreaders say? Anyone with half a brain, that can’t connect two dots and note the discrepancies?
Hell, if anything, people are treating the modern news media the way that the Soviet citizens treated their media: As a source of reverse information, knowing that if they say “A”, then the truth is likely “B”.
You can capture the institutions, but once having done so, you can do nothing to maintain their essential legitimacy. Your capture of them renders that automatically illegitimate, because of what you are doing with them, rendering your efforts ultimately irrelevant. If nobody believes the newsreader, what good does it do to co-opt them?
There’s an underlying ground truth to everything. Taking over an institution and trying to use that takeover to deny the ground truth…? It. Doesn’t. Work. Not for any length of time.
The Soviets managed to conceal the true nature of their regime for several generations. By the time the 1980s hit, the average Soviet citizen no longer believed, having had the reality of the nomenklatura and all the other contradictions in terms of the system waved in their faces for decades. The Soviet Union basically collapsed because the populace ceased to believe, suffering a loss of “willing suspension of disbelief”.
So, too, will go the effects of capturing all these things in the West. They can’t make these things work, because they’re ideologues who understand nothing about the world around them, and are set on a course of attempting to impose their belief systems on the world. Which doesn’t work, because the world ain’t what they have in their pointy little heads…
Jon Eds –
If conversations with my gay and lesbian friends are anything to go by, the ‘normal gays’ will be joining in with the pitchforks and torches.
Yup, my gay friend, who isn’t afraid to mince his words, ahem, (rightly) considers trans people to be mentally ill and left London to, his words not mine, ‘get away from the muslims and the blacks’. He’s French though so gets a pass.
——-
Everybody is mentally ill in some way or another, when seen by people of a different persuasion. Sometimes even by themselves.
I’m trans myself, and mad as a hatter. Fortunately, I live in an era when medicine can help that, and as a result have had an interesting and productive life. This included several years of being an official Mad Scientist in a museum setting. (You had to be there.)
I’ve had an Episcopal priest completely unable to understand why I didn’t vote Democrat. Another stopped talking to me when Minnesota had a referendum on Voter ID. I was for it. He said I was wrong to so deprive citizens of their chance to vote. (?) I usually get along with lesbians, but doctrinaire feminists – oy! But they didn’t think well of me back in my masculine days, either.
I can’t stand fiction with a Message. I don’t read it, I don’t write it. A lot of it, I suspect, is editors and publishers maintaining a certain slant in their publications. Once I even sent a paperback to the publisher and demanded my money back. The cover said the story was a triumph of the Human Spirit. I told them (with examples) that it was Worldsux, and they’d lured me in with false advertising.
I read fanfiction. There’s no editor in the way, and I’ve found a many worthwhile authors. Since I didn’t pay for it, I can toss it away without mourning the price I paid if it turns out dreadful. Sometimes — it makes me think. I’ve occasionally made friends there. And most of the writers don’t know what the Frankfurt School is.
The trans issue is qualitatively different than lesbian, bisexual or gay. The advocates of “gay rights” were seeking the same kind of freedom that all sane people should be seeking: the right for consenting adults to be free to do their consensual activities. It doesn’t matter what those activities are – living as a couple, shopping together, holding hands, having wild passionate sex – provided it is between consenting adults. It should not be illegal for two or more* consenting adults to “live together” with all that implies. I’m all for transexual people having exactly those kind of freedoms too. What I don’t appreciate is the attempt to force me to use the preferred pronoun, or to be denounced as evil for “believing” in the fact of binary biological sex.
* Polyandry, polygamy, polyamory et al are still illegal in most jurisdictions but no-one seems fussed about that.
Ellen said:
Uhmmmm… No. Just… No.
The test here is this: Does it work? Is it a “survival trait” that enhances the odds of the possessor of said trait surviving to pass it on?
Sanity and mental health are absolutely NOT relative things; you may think you’re sane and functional, but if your behavior gets you killed or results in a less-than-optimum impact on your survival and health? You aren’t sane and functional. Ain’t nothing going to “fix” that, either: You are, or you are not. You may pass out of the state of madness, but while you’re there and dysfunctional, you ain’t sane and it ain’t “relative”.
It’s a binary state: Sane+functional in the real world vs. insane+dysfunctional in it. You cannot be both, and the test is your success at dealing with the world around you and surviving in it. It’s like being pregnant: There’s no such thing as a “little bit pregnant”. You are, or you are not.
Reality gets a vote, and only the truly mentally ill refuse to admit that fact.
I’ve not really ever met one truly “normal” person. Everyone has quirks and foibles and idiosyncrasies and blind spots and nightmares, in enough combinations to make it an interesting world.
Until those quirks and nightmares start impinging on others, let them reign.
The only line I draw is the involvement of kids. And there’s really only one issue which currently features kids as the battle line. And so I end up sounding anti-trans – but I’m not.
I can understand the importance to that community of bringing the kids into it. Old attitudes don’t change – they die off and are replaced by the next generation’s attitudes. So, the quickest way to general acceptance probably involves making the issue one of familiarity to kids. Win the next generation over and you’re set.
But there’s a difference between making kids comfortable with the concept, and driving the kids nuts by building up their own insecurities and tragedies by making them constantly question their own sexuality.
So if there’s a trans victory in this, it’s a very selfish one. And I doubt it will work out to a victory – they’ve pushed too hard on the kids, and the backlash is not going to be helpful.
Where? When? With who else? How do you measure success?
Your test works only when everyone lives in the same context, same circumstances, have the same hopes and dreams and aspirations. It only works in the midst of homogeneity. Which, in many cases, is the desired end of such an analysis.
Heck, some recognized forms of mental illness develop as a coping measure for otherwise unbearable life events. They would survive your test, but mess up your conclusion.
Homosexuality used to fail your test, until mankind reached a point where progeny lost their importance. Now, it works. Transgenderism works well for many. It keeps them sane and alive. What better test is there?
“What works” just so often gets reduced to “what makes ME comfortable.” What “works” for me may not work at all for you, but it still works for me.
Take Rand’s “serve what serves life” lesson to heart, and you realize that lifestyle differences don’t usually trigger a “what works” analysis – until that lifestyle difference says that I cannot live MY life as I see fit. That is what doesn’t work.
Alex said:
OK… Your position is what mine was, years and years ago. Live and let live, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
However, huge ‘effin comma, I think that the evidence before us in today’s society is that I (and, sadly, you…) was wrong: This crap is important, in the grand scheme of things. Everybody can’t be off being their own unique and special snowflake, because if a critical mass of said snowflakes turns into a demographic avalanche…? Hey! Presto!!, you’ve got mail coming in from the Gods of the Copybook Headings. Namely, a below-replacement fertility rate, demographic collapse, and a whole host of other issues that nobody signed up for or expected.
News flash for the uninformed: There were once a lot of “free-love” community attempts down the millennia. Few of them survived, and none of them thrived. You can’t have this sort of crap going on across broad sections of your society, or you wind up effectively destroying those things that work.
It’s Chesterton’s Fence writ large. The “reformers”, who were really libertine theorists that didn’t like Mommy and Daddy’s rules, had no idea of what they were tampering with. We can see the results of said tampering, all around us: People are pretty much going off the rails, not just coloring outside the lines.
Looking back on it, every single adult I know who had parents who were, shall we say, “individualistic” with their sexual behaviors and choices? Those adults all have issues, profound ones, of varying sorts. Few of them have managed to form lasting healthy relationships, nor are they contributing to society in a positive way.
Meanwhile, all those boring old normies, who came out of more-or-less successful nuclear families with stable adult relationships to model on? Who weren’t irretrievably damaged by parental licentiousness? They’re not doing too damn badly, oddly enough. It’s almost like all that boring bourgeoisie lifestyle stuff just works…
Upton Sinclair and his ilk sold the world a bill of goods about Babbitt. Those boring old middle-class values and mores were of value; they were how those nasty Babbittses got into the middle class in the first place, after all.
An age of license is inevitably followed by an age of repression and uptight virtue, because once everyone sees what the actual wages of sin are, they realize that those things are sinful precisely because of the price they demand otherwise.
Mark my words: When the social pendulum comes back, it’ll go further, faster, and a lot harder than anyone today would credit. I would not be surprised to see summary streetside executions come to pass for things like shoplifting and petty theft, along with sexual deviancy, with all right-thinking people standing there and observing, shaking their heads knowingly as they watch the malefactors forced to kneel and take the bullet in the back of the skull…
bobby b said:
Used to fail? Dude, what time scale are you using? Do you think that because you haven’t splattered on the pavement just yet, that your leap off the roof a moment ago is going “just fine”?
Look around you: Does the way the world is look to you as though it is working? Do you think that we’ve somehow managed to rewrite the rules of human society and biology such that these things don’t matter, any more?
This is the problem with people of your belief system; you make changes, see that the “predicted negative effect” doesn’t manifest right away, and then you extrapolate to say “Oh, that didn’t matter… It was stupid…”
Meanwhile, the oncoming freight train of demographic collapse and social decay is still on the tracks, and still headed for you. You just aren’t able to make out the light on the engine, just yet.
This crap takes decades to work through the system which is society. The trend lines with social decay and the utter loss of moral stability are there; where they are going? I doubt that they’re going to stop. All y’all were telling me that gay marriage was all that the gays wanted; today, they’re literally trying to normalize pedophilia as “minor-attracted persons”.
You’ll have to forgive me for laughing at the rampant idiocy of your position. Unlike you, I can observe and learn; what I’ve observed is that the pervs aren’t satisfied with any concession; they want it all, to be able to do as they damn well please to whomever they please, whenever they please. Elsewise, this “trans” BS wouldn’t be going on, with doctors of medicine advocating for the maiming of minor children, and them persecuting any dissenters. It’s fairly obvious where they want to take society, and what sort of society they want to build.
You’re up for that, obviously, so… Yeah. Enjoy your Brave New World, because you’re immanentizing right along with them. Hope ya like it…
I rather think that it won’t come to pass, and that the likely counter-reaction is going to be extraordinarily ugly, taking a lot of innocent people with it during the almost-inevitable pogroms that will come along. I really hope that the people helping this happen get to observe it all, from good seats. I doubt that they’ll like it, at all.
Other commenters have put it better than I could. Some men are happier living as women. That’s obviously sub optimal for them personally and every single avenue should be pursued before going down the physical route. If they do go there that doesn’t make them women. We can call them trans. I don’t care. But I do care when they seek to obtain social proof for their condition by spreading the gospel, including to children through social media. In a personal setting I don’t mind using their preferred pronouns but as soon as you do it in public you might as well be waving the accursed rainbow flag around. I’d rather die.
We’re talking Darwin Award here? I’ve lasted into my eighties so far. Pass my traits on into the future? I’ll settle for leaving a legacy – I’m not all that fond of my genetics. Is eugenics evil when I do it to myself? I’d be a lousy parent. The fifth generation will have to make do without me.
I leave it up to the viewer. If they look at me and see a woman, they’ll use female pronouns. If they see a man, they’ll use male pronouns. Mostly I get female. I should go around harassing people about pronouns? That’s no fun.
@Alex
What I don’t appreciate is the attempt to force me to use the preferred pronoun, or to be denounced as evil for “believing” in the fact of binary biological sex.
I think it is perfectly reasonable for somebody to ask you to address them the way they want to be addressed. I think Jordan Peterson is right here: if someone wants to be addressed as “she” or “he” then it seems only polite to do so. Where it is a problem is when the government threatens to punish you if you don’t.
The real problems with the transgender agenda are both the attempts to push it on kids who are not at all able to make good judgements; the propagandizing of it to make it cool to be trans (my god do you see this all over the schools), which seems to me in many respects would be rather belittling to the truly gender dysphoric, and can turn a childhood affectation into a life altering trauma; and finally the collapse of women only spaces, something that women absolutely need.
Just a few years ago the idea that a guy can claim to be a girl and swim in their sports competitions, take their scholarships and perhaps most egregiously go in their locker rooms and flop his big female dick out in front of a bunch of teenage girls would have had him ridden out on a rail. The suddenness and immensity of the change is breathtaking.
Is it unreasonable, for example, to say that only people without penises can go in women’s locker rooms? It seems to me a reasonable compromise, though I’m happy to be shown wrong on this point because I don’t know enough about the medicine of SRS.
Polyandry, polygamy, polyamory et al are still illegal in most jurisdictions but no-one seems fussed about that.
FWIW, that isn’t true. all these arrangements are perfectly legal, what you won’t get is the imprimatur of the government, or the rights associated with marriage. And this is a very relevant point. I think people should live however they want as long as their are not hurting anyone else, but it is a whole different thing to demand the government sanction your choices, or worse, punish those that disagree with your choices. That is the very antithesis of freedom.
It seems clear that “minor attracted persons” are the next thing on the agenda. It is hard to imagine that going mainstream, but five years ago who would have thought the schools would be pushing mastectomies or castrations on teenagers without even bothering to let the parents know?
Ellen said:
I’m not talking individuals, here. I’m speaking of society, as a whole. You as an individual can survive and prosper for your time, but what comes after? What the hell happens when enough of a population says “Yeah, ya know… That having kids thing is a grind, don’ wanna, can’t make me…”?
The fundamental error here is thinking in terms of individual timescales; you don’t see the broader effect that your choices have ringing down the generations. You and I see the choices we make seeming to work, on the scale of our lifetimes. Then, the repercussions come due, and suddenly the village streets are filled with tumbleweeds instead of children playing. You won’t see it; I won’t see it, but they are coming nonetheless.
The real problem here is that people think far too selfishly, in terms of “what’s good for me”. I get that, but when you’re looking at social policies, social values, and social mores that affect all of us across generations? What then? Who is responsible for ensuring that all of those things actually work?
I’m rather fond of the individualistic Judeo-Christian society I grew up in; I’d like to think that such a thing would last. I fear that the shortsighted short-term benefit types are setting conditions that will inevitably kill that society, and they’re doing it in the name of things that any rational person would look at and say “That’s plainly nuts; a man can’t be a woman, can’t produce children…”
The mentality that lies behind all this, which is that you have a choice, an ability to make changes to things that are laid down and fundamental to reality is what is crazy, here. If society doesn’t produce enough children to pay the taxes that support you in your old age, how much right do you, as an individual, have to demand that the children other people birthed and raised pay your benefits and take care of you? Do you get a vote in forcing those kids to pay for you, when you (by choice…) didn’t have the kids to share the load with?
On an individual scale, fine: You do you. I don’t care, when we look at it like that. However, once you pull back the scope and examine things from a broader perspective, the unpleasant fact is that your individual choices matter to the society in which you take part, and which has nurtured and supported you all of your life.
I’m not a big believer in the collective, the Big-C Communist idea, but… I do recognize that I am a player in a much bigger society, one that I entered into of my own free will when I attained adulthood and acquiesced to the written and unwritten rules we live under. You can’t escape that, no matter how much you might wish to.
Kirk:
1. The dearth of kids today is not driven by homosexual marriage. The main driver is that heterosexual couples are choosing not to have kids. Gays are a blip on that particular screen.
2. You do know that the vast majority of pedophiles are hetero, right? Gay pedos occur in almost exactly the same proportion to their total gay population as hetero pedos to their own group population. In short, there’s no observable “gay pedo” association.
3. “Look around you: Does the way the world is look to you as though it is working?” Mostly, yeah, it works well, so long as I stay off the internet. The internet brings every bad thing – every trend, every dead kid – into my living room. If I concentrate on what I see around me, life is pretty good. We all live longer than people used to, we live better lives than possible in the past, we’re better educated, better fed, and we manage to take upper-middle-class attainments and comforts for granted, something that few in human history have achieved. And in the process, we no longer discard and torture 8% of the kids with fag jokes, we no longer use entire races as throw-away possessions – hell, we’re so comfortable that our big fights are over what labels we have to call people by. I’d say things are not that bad at all.
It’s mostly “bad” to folks who hate seeing their comfortable upper-status traditions being replaced. It’s hell not being on top anymore, right? Even when you were on top only by an accident of birth?
bobby b betrays his classist pretensions:
I dunno. I’ve never been “on top”, and neither has any of my family. We’ve always been the productive types, either small business owners or things like teachers, back when that meant something.
The destruction I see going on has not a thing to do with “upper-class traditions”, unless you count people following the usual precepts of the working middle class as being “upper-class”. What I see being destroyed is the underpinnings of the social and economic structure that got most of us where we are (were, in some cases…) before the “brights” decided it was inequitous and that they’d fix everything. That, they did.
You lay claim that things like “gay marriage” has nothing to do with the lower birth rate, but when you couple that with everything else, including the constant drumbeat of “white male bad” that permeates culture, you wonder why young men are opting out? Why they won’t walk into the multi-year commitment entailed in marriage and raising kids? What the hell do you expect, when that’s all they ever hear in popular media and school? When they see that the portrayals of gays and minorities are always positive, and the white male is always the bad guy in their popular culture? Ya think none of that has any impact?
No, your happy-dappy friends decided to denigrate and disenfranchise a whole segment of society, and then guilted them into going along with it. The white man was the slaver; never mind that it was also the white man who was the abolitionist, and that the white man was the first ever to outlaw slavery in Africa and make it stick. White men did more for the women and minorities of the world, and what they got in return was the blame for every evil under sun, whether or not it was ever even perpetrated by said “white man”.
I would love for you to be able to come back in a few generations and see the impact of all your “harmless little changes”. Let’s see what the world looks like, dominated by the same folks that actually did the slaving, like the Nigerians and Arabs. Think that’ll be a nicer, better place?
The real problem is that the social improvement types actually won their arguments; the white man surrendered. Now that they’ve won, they’ve nothing else to do but go around the battlefield and shoot the wounded. And, the ones who never had a damn thing to do with the whole set of “bad things” in the first place.
My ancestors fought for the Union during the Civil War. They were abolitionists. They helped raise the black regiments in Massachusetts. They were on the side of the Republicans during the Reconstruction, and supported the Civil Rights movement. Yet, because I’m white, I’m now the bad guy.
Here’s what I’ve learned: Never try to “do the right thing”. You do that, and as soon as you turn your back, you’ll get a stab in it. That’s the lesson here, my friends: See, the mistake wasn’t in enslaving the blacks, it was in thinking that they’d ever be able to get over it. Once having been done, then the only real solution could be, from the lesson they teach us, to keep the foot on the neck forever.
Were I able to have a conversation with my ancestors that killed themselves and went bankrupt in the name of “freeing the blacks”, I’d tell them it was a mug’s game, and that no good would come of it. Why? Because, my friend, that’s the evidence of today, all around us. Same with the rest of your happy-dappy BS: The pervs don’t want to live in amity and peace, they want to force their deviancy on all of us, to make themselves feel powerful and righteous. That’s why you see the child-porn possessing drag queens being hired as school principals, and all the rest. It’ll never end, until it is ended in blood. They won’t have it any other way, and if you think otherwise, you’re quite mad.
Like I said earlier, you’re that guy who leapt off the roof, being asked how things are going about the time you were passing the second floor. Of course it looks good; you haven’t hit the f*cking pavement, yet.
News flash: Societies with 1-point-something fertility rates ain’t healthy ones. The pathologies simply haven’t caught up with them.
Like arguing with an actual straw man.
You present no real arguments, just feels.
https://www.sciencealert.com/chinas-qing-dynasty-collapsed-for-reasons-that-feel-eerily-familiar
Note the similarities between the Qing and us, then ask yourself if it’s really a good idea to add all these additional social stressors. You have no idea at all why every other successful society in history has chosen to suppress the libertine; yet, you say that unleashing that impulse is a net good.
You can’t refute the numbers. The demographics are in the toilet; the male participation rate in education is dropping, as is family formation. Instead of looking at that and saying “Gee, this might be a problem, I wonder how we could fix that…”, you and your ilk insist on playing “gotcha” games with the long-dead, carrying out a revenge on people who never had anything at all to do with all the “oppression”.
It won’t end well. And, it has nothing at all to do with “comfortable upper-class traditions” and pretensions to same. What it has to do with is what actually works, and that ain’t the libertine impulse to play gangsta and have baby mommas all over with no fathers there to raise the children and set the example.
It’s all of a piece with the same childish rebellion that Upton Sinclair felt against the values of his small home town; he decried “Babbittry”, and had no real working alternative to those staid and boring middle-class values and mores that built those successful small towns. It’s much the same today; nobody has a working alternative for all the hard things, so they just throw them out and wish upon a star for some felicitous solution to manifest, like “social workers” that’ll somehow manage to bring peace to the inner city.
I’ve seen the results of your ilk’s work and mentality. I don’t think it works, and I expect the splatter zone to be huge when the collective social body finally hits the pavement.
You made several points. One was, gays are lowering our birth rates. I refuted that. (And they weren’t having many kids BEFORE gay marriage.)
One was, something something gays pedos. I refuted that.
One was, life sucks and is only getting worse. I argued against that, factually.
One was, you’ve never been “on top.” My assumptions are that you are a white male hetero living in the USA. Four of the biggest lottery winners in Earth history. You’re on top.
Your facts seem to revolve around, gays suck, blacks suck, progs suck (okay, I’ll give you that one), and individual personal liberty sucks.
So I’ll concede to the more factual argument.
Your chosen people, in action:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12470501/Portland-trans-activist-destroyed-defecated-inside-teen-girls-car-transphobia-claims-Car-towed-away-considered-biohazard.html
When there were social guardrails in place, this “individual” would have been confined to a hospital somewhere, humanely. In the name of “individual liberty”, your ilk forced their release, failed to ensure treatment in the community, and unleashed hell on the normal people just trying to live their lives.
What you’ve accomplished with all this? You’ve ensured a state of nature such that these nutters aren’t going to be dealt with humanely; when the worm finally turns, which it inevitably will, they’ll be slaughtered like animals. Which I’m sure you’re going to deplore, and blame the “conservatives” for. Instead of looking in a mirror to recognize what you’ve enabled and unleashed with your “liberal thought”.
I don’t have a particular dog in the fight, ideologically. I just observe what works, what accrues the most benefit to the most people, and I see that this state of affairs, which you applaud, is leading us into hell on earth.
Enjoy it. You made this happen, with all your peers. When you see these people burnt alive in their tent-hovels, by the “brutish normies” who will no longer put up with the bullshit, know that you’re the one who caused all this, in the final analysis.
Hope ya like it, hope you enjoy it. It’s coming to a street near you, soonish-like.
As I said in my original comment, the problem I have is with force. The government doesn’t have a monopoly on force in reality, so my comment was very specifically and precisely worded on that point: my problem is with being forced, whether that be legal compunction or an fear of losing my job from using the wrong pronoun. Anyway, the pronoun issue is a deliberate trap. You can’t win. For hundreds of years pronouns were simple: you said “thou” to strangers, “you” to familiars, “he” about males, “she” about females. You didn’t have to consult someones biography to know the right pronoun to use. Take Eddie Izzard, what pronoun is it using this week? The situation has been deliberately created to trip people up – say the wrong pronoun and-gasp-you’re a transphobe. It’s in-groupism at its worst, and quite deliberately so. In the name of inclusivity and diversity, millions of people have been out-grouped and are being repeatedly propagandized and indoctrinated that to follow normal social conventions and historic norms is unspeakably vile.
It is similar to the ever-shifting negro/coloured/african-american|afro-caribbean/”person of colour” preferred collective noun when talking about the black community in various countries. Say the wrong one and instantly be vilified. In any reasonable society the idea that “silence is violence” and “words are harmful” would be laughable, but our societies are increasingly ones where failure to speak is condemnable, and so is speaking the wrong word even when there was no intention to offend. Similarly that is entirely intended to prevent any kind of reasonable discourse on the subject.
Those things logically follow the loss of free speech. If a teacher will lose their job for resisting the propagandizing then they won’t speak out. If a woman is only a social construct then anyone can be a woman and thus it becomes impossible to have a women only space. Women only spaces being lost was inevitable the first time a men-only club was forced to accept female members. The freedom to associate and disassociate was an early victim to this kind of political correctness.
You’ve written a dozen or more comments on this issue, evidently you do have a dog in the fight. There is a flaw with your logic however. Your position concretized thus in the quote is one of utilitarianism. Change for the better is often disruptive and temporarily sub-optimal. In any case freedom is suboptimal from a utilitarian standpoint. What works, what accrues the most benefit to the most people, depends on your definitions of “works” and “benefit” (a point you yourself made to Bobby B earlier). I’m sure ancient Lakonia was convinced of their moral superiority with the strong state protecting the citizens and helots, and the helots kept in their place where they could fulfil their role and provide menial labour to provide for the needs of the citizenry and soldiery. Most modern people would not consider that a great state of affairs, and rightly so in my opinion.
Liberty versus the interests of the many, it’s always an interesting debate. Slavery used to be justified by paternalistic rhetoric that the slaves being mentally inferior and incapable of providing for themselves. Not just black slavery, slaves throughout various cultures have been unpersoned by various arguments: their capture being proof they were unfit to be free, their race or ethnicity, their religion, their supposed feeble-mindedness. Usually a toxic mixture of various aspects that make someone only fit to be chattel. If we are free only to be of most use to the greater good, then everyone is a slave.
The main error you are making is setting in stone “what works” at a specific period of time I suppose roughly 1950-1990 or so. Strong nuclear families with relatively few queers. Church on Sunday, work Monday-Friday 08:00 – 18:00, mow the lawn on Saturday and buy a new Buick once every 5 years. Happy healthy kids in schools that taught grammar and the constitution, not Common Core and gender studies. Of course that’s as much of a straw man of your beliefs as those you’ve projected onto Bobby. What works for the greater good evolves over time and in different social contexts: Helots and krypteia, citizens and homoios were what worked in ancient Lakonia and the modern historian makes errors if they let their social views cloud the study of why it worked. You can be morally opposed without declaring the whole to be evil. Slaves and cotton juxtaposed with democracy, rule of law and manifest destiny worked well for the U.S. in the 1800s. Today many Americans condemn their own history and fail to observe the good that was done as well, or to understand the context. Does that make the slavery morally right? In my view, no – no more than that of the helotry of ancient Lakonia. It doesn’t make the U.S. today or of 1800 an evil society though. Today in the U.S. and the UK, in Australia and Canada, in the Netherlands and Germany there is much moral evil but there is also vast lakes of moral goodness. If every society is evil if a single moral evil exists within it then there has never been and never will be a good society.
Does promoting “negative rights” for all create more moral decay? Perhaps. No doubt the release from bondage of millions of slaves in 1865 caused a short term moral decay in the formerly enslaved. Do you argue that that the release from bondage was thus wrong? The scale is different but the issue is the same. Placing restrictions that violate negative rights on people with the justification of the greater good is usually a damn slippery slope.
Alex – no promoting “negative rights” (basically “hands off”) does NOT create moral decay.
There are two great errors in the first paragraph of Pope Leo XIII’s once famous encyclical of 1891 – the first is that capitalism (by which is meant such things as large scale private ownership and freedom of contract rather than guild restrictions) has promoted poverty – the claim that poverty was worse in 1891 than it had been in previous centuries was false, indeed the reverse of the truth (there was less, not more, poverty than there had been)
But the other claim made in that first paragraph is also in error – and this is the claim that capitalism had led to moral decline. It just was not true that moral conduct was worse in 1891 than in 1781 or 1691 or 1591 or 1491, if anything the reverse was true – moral conduct was, in general, better than it had been.
But why people are talking about capitalism, negative rights (limited state and limited private criminals) in a modern context, I do not know. After all today is a state dominated society – even the money is just the whims of the powerful (it is not any physical commodity – the last nation whose currency had any link with physical reality was Switzerland, and that link with reality was cut 23 years ago) and taxes and regulations are endless and crushing.
Confusing, for example, the modern United Kingdom with capitalism, writing as if modern Britain was a capitalist society, would be a grotesque error.
People who are, for example, fleeing California are not fleeing a “capitalist society” – because California is no longer a capitalist society (and, soon, I doubt it will be a society at all).
It just will not do for people to ignore the Credit Bubble monetary and financial scam-system, ignore massive government spending (about half the entire society in Britain), ignore crushing taxes, and ignore endless regulations – and still blithely write about capitalist society.
“Capitalism is undermining the family”, “capitalism is undermining traditional morality” and on and on.
To say that capitalism” or liberty is doing these things rather ignores reality. It would be like me claiming that my father was beating me up right now – when he has been dead for 23 years.
How can liberty being doing X,Y,Z bad things FROM THE GRAVE.
Liberty is dying if not dead – liberty has been repeatedly stabbed, and if liberty is not dead then liberty is certainly on its death bed.
“We are still not as bad as ……..”.
Yes indeed we are not as bad as North Korea (or whatever example people present) but that does not mean we are free society.
“We are not as bad as….” is a desperate argument, it does not prove that we are free society.
And the idea that it is freedom, liberty, that is causing our social ills – is utterly false.
Prime Minister Gladstone was right – of this I am certain, it will not be by the state (or private violence) that the moral condition of the people will be improved.
How anyone, anyone at all, can have lived through the last few years and think that too much liberty is the problem, is beyond all rational understanding.
And the “public health emergency” excuse for tyranny is just starting.
For example, the Governor of New Mexico (NOT a small place) has declared that firearms are a “Public Heath Emergency” and so has “suspended gun rights” for 30 days – a trial run for doing this at the Federal level and doing it for ever (the “Emergency” of 1933 allowing the government to steal the gold of ordinary people, and to dishonour all gold clauses in contracts, public and private, has been going on for 90 years, and the “Emergency” of 1971 that allowed Washington to cheat foreign nations, has been going on for 52 years – these “Emergencies” will only end when the regime collapses).
Well Kirk – when the “firearms are a Public Health Emergency” edict is issued by the Federal authorities – will you enforce it?
How about the “Climate Change is a Public Health Emergency” edict? It will come – you know it will.
Here it already has – the “Energy Bill” is being passed in the United Kingdom.
A handful of Members of Parliament voted against the measure – the others clearly believe that even the little liberty we have left, is too much.
Often I try and blame officials and “experts” – and they did write the Bill, but everyone in Parliament knew what they were voting on.
Alex said:
You accuse me of things you do yourself, here. I never said that “what works” was any particular thing, fixed in time and space, immutable. Spartan helotry manifestly did not “work” for most Spartans, who were actually the helots. When it ceased to work, at all, Sparta went away. As do all such tyrannies.
The points you raise about nebulous “change” being beneficial would be fine, if ever the idiots making these changes set out to define what they were supposed to accomplish, what they were meant to do in terms of hard-number reality. They never do… It’s always some vapor-ware idea like “Homeless camps with Wi-Fi…”, and zero quantifiable anything. They should be setting the metrics; we’ve got X number of homeless today, and after five years of your charming programs of decriminalization and anarchy, we’ve got Y, which is exponentially higher than X.
That’s failure, no matter how you measure it. Having failed, it’s time to unwind those brilliant ideas and try another course, instead of layering still more touchy-feely crap on top of it all…
I get the distinct impression from your writing that you think all of this is just peachy-keen, and you’re 100% bought into all the malodourous “changes” that they’ve made. It’s unfortunate that the babies are going to get tossed out with the bathwater when the worm finally turns and the general public ceases to have the slightest sympathy or empathy for the creatures infesting our streets, these days..
Sparta was once known for its culture – for example for its poetry, they were warriors but also a cultured people.
But with the conquest of a neighbouring city and the reduction of its farmers to state owed semi slaves that culture went, the Spartans spent their lives in fear of a Helot revolt, they became obsessed with the warrior life A:ONE.
In a way Sparta was dead long before the Thebans defeated it on the battlefield.
By the way – modern Sparta in Greece is, I am told, a nice town.