It’s the men…no, it’s the women…no, it’s the men…

Men must put themselves back under God (through the One True Faith) and then women will put themselves under men.

— Vendée Radio (@VendeeRadio) December 16, 2022

Too simplistic (i.e., Vendee Radio’s tweet) – as in not wise as a bit of political strategy or advice. It may, just may, work on an individual level for a man vis-a-vis a woman. But even at that level any woman you are dealing with is her own moral agent with free choice for right or wrong independent of, regardless of, the virtue of the men she surrounds herself with.

We are in this mess because men collectively and women collectively have worked in tandem with each other to bring about ruin. One could not have done it without the other, and the other could not have done it without the one.

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A few correct opinions on some Christmas music

Though Gustav Holst is the much better known composer, Harold Darke’s setting of “In the Bleak Midwinter” is much the superior one. The first six notes of Holst’s setting says “I’m bored” to me, and the tune doesn’t improve after that.

Overrated (or perhaps just overplayed): Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium”

Underrated: Lauridsen’s “O Nata Lux”

Aphorism Attempt No. III

The great danger with men and authority is not that they will become tyrants and abuse it, but that they will become cowards and abdicate. That there are outliers among men who selfishly grasp and abuse power is a fact. But the world goes to great effort to portray these outliers as normative because it fears above everything, ordinary men exercising their rightful authority in the created order. It means inevitably that the world must become anemic and diminish.

A stroll into the weeds, on human nature

I think commenting on this post at the Orthosphere in such a way as I intend to do would be considered trollery if I did it there. Not that I would never do it (I have, many times), but I would like to refrain as much as possible; that is, as often as I stop myself by recognizing it beforehand. By the way, it seems my lot in internet life to read the posts of others and be stimulated not by the main point, but by some lesser, ancillary detail. It would not surprise me if wise men say it is the sign of a small mind.

So I’ll post my thoughts here, though no one else read them.

In the process of demonstrating how Feminism fails the Gedanken Test Kristor states the following:

Clearly, then, any sane society would repudiate feminism.

Not because it hates women, but because it wants to survive; indeed, because it wants more women (the supply of women is the rate limiting factor of social survival: few women → few children → few women … so, women are precious; men on the other hand are cheap, ergo relatively expendable (in war, the hunt, dangerous work, and so forth)).

Though many have spoken in the same way as Kristor about the cheapness of men vis-a-vis women, I’ve only been able to make sense of it in a materialistic, secular, evo-psych type framework. That is, not in a framework I would expect to find Kristor arguing from.

Of course we share certain natural qualities with brute animals. But we also share certain natural qualities with angelic beings – most importantly the qualities of having a mind – intellect, memory, will. It is false then to speak of humans as if they were mere brutes, or even of a possible time when it would be understandable or excusable for intellectual creatures to behave as such. You can’t reduce the qualities of the human person even in a thought experiment, without doing violence to what makes man essentially different from animals.

The excerpt from Kristor’s post above would be intelligible only in an environment that accepted human behavior that reflected something much less than intellectual or rational. You can perpetuate the human race in a materialistic sense (that is, if its only instinct were “to survive”) with the bare minimum of stud/brood mare behavior. But the human race never had, and never will have, merely a “to survive,” materialistic instinct. The former will always have a desire to perpetuate immaterial, spiritual, and conscious qualities that depend on more than mere animal breeding. If not, we are speaking of something less than human, and therefore in the wrong category.

Omniscience – what’s the problem?

Junior Ganymede notices that Alasdair MacIntyre has come to resemble Bruce Charlton in his rejection of an omniscient Being as a reality.

As far as I can tell, MacIntyre, like Charlton, will not or cannot engage with the simple concept of God not being bound by the constraints of time in matters of contingency. Kristor has explained this many times at the Orthosphere, and the best answer I’ve seen Charlton give is that he’s just got a different “metaphysics.” From my view he (Charlton) simply will not engage with the concept of God being transcendent of time.

It resembles very much my experience with those who would not, or could not, engage with obvious ways that reality challenged the Covid narrative. In fact I’m thinking of declaring the acceptance of God’s omniscience a litmus test.

Voting thoughts

I haven’t been voting in any public elections for probably 10 years or more now, but I have not been able to satisfy myself in all these years about my argument for not voting enough to explain it to the voters in my life, whether to convince them of my position or otherwise (and I’ve been revisiting writing on the subject in the past several days at the Orthosphere, Zippy, Charlton, stuff that I’ve read and re-read and re-read over these same years…I never come away at ease in being able to defend it to others, even though I continue staunchly in my non-voting ways).

But there are a few experiences or observations I have that, while not perhaps logical arguments against voting, nevertheless speak against it in other ways.

One observation is that, for some reason, big bloated monstrosities like Google and other corporations really, really, really want me to get out and vote. They use their resources to encourage me, and everyone, to do so. They want my “voice to be heard” at the voting booth … in spite of the fact that those who pull the strings at such places have made it clear that folks who hold political opinions such as mine should be censored and canceled. This makes no sense – why does Google want me to vote? The very fact that they want me to makes me not want to do it.

Another experience I had recently… I have a mobile number that obviously belonged to someone else on another plan before I obtained the number. Since I got this number I have at different times received calls and texts from different people and organizations trying to reach this one person at a number they still think belongs to her. She was obviously a fairly politically active person, and also favored the Democratic party and other leftist causes, based on the types of calls and texts I receive from those trying to reach her. Yesterday I received the following text (I bolded text for emphasis):

"[Name of previous owner of my current number], remember that who you vote for is secret but whether or not you vote is public.  Stop 2End Thank you for being a voter! Election day is Tues Nov 8.  For info on how to vote visit [weblink] - Climate Action Campaign"

I tried to think of this text in the best terms I was able, and I can’t get away from it being anything less than some kind of chilling warning to non-voters. A threat…again something making me not want to vote.

Aphorism Attempt No. II

A great amount of intellectual destruction takes place by treating the mundane and uninteresting as something unique and aberrant.

Aphorism Attempt No. I

Anyone who argues against feminism by claiming it is misogynistic is just letting the spirit of Jezebel in through the back door instead of the front.

The person and society

Bruce Charlton’s objection to generalizations might be valid if the individual only had to deal with other individuals. That is not the only reality however. Individuals must interact and deal with society as well, which is as real as the individual. Politics is an often ugly, but nonetheless necessary endeavor, and it must deal in many sweeping generalizations to do its necessary work.

I do not know why it cannot be for Charlton, as it was for Zippy (and James Kalb), a both/and distinction rather than either/or:

… What is to be done? The simple and obvious answer is frank acceptance of stereotypes and discrimination. Such things are often oppressive, just as government, private property, social standards, individual self-assertion, and many other things are often oppressive, but in one form or another they are necessary and inevitable. Treating women as different from men, taking ethnic kinship into account, and treating a judge with special consideration should all be acceptable as expressions of legitimate principles of social organization. Abuses can be dealt with piecemeal; to reject stereotype and discrimination in principle, however, is useless, since we will rely on them in any case. The attempt makes serious political thought impossible, and benefits only those with something to conceal. … [Zippy quoting James Kalb]

[Zippy goes on] … One of those limits is that a stereotype loses its usefulness as one gets to know individuals better. I’ve pointed this out before: when talking about hypergamy or the Meyers-Briggs test or any other social model we are basically creating stereotypes. These are useful in understanding what things are happening in aggregate, and, absent more specific information, they are additionally useful in personal encounters with people, places, and institutions you don’t know (or don’t know very well). But that usefulness has limits, and it decays as specific knowledge replaces the stereotype. If I have worked with you for ten years and am still relying on knowing that your Meyers-Brigges evaluation categorized you as an INTJ it is probably a sign of something wrong with my ability to learn. …

It is both good to generalize when dealing with an identifiable and distinct group, because a societas is real and demands our recognition and intelligible interaction with it; and it is good to dispense with these same generalizations when dealing with the individual because the individual is not a society.

Misogyny

There are rare cases of irrational and pathological hatred of women, somewhat akin to a phobia. These cases are properly called misogyny, but are infrequent and freakish, certainly not normative.

But what we commonly call misogyny is an unreal category created in the mind of women who try to experience their lives as men; it also happens from another angle by men who are all too willing to accommodate the former, and who also try to experience their lives as women (i.e., try to see life “through a woman’s eyes”). It doesn’t work either way except to give a slanted or skewered perception of reality that has no meaning in a universal sense.

So what we commonly call misogyny is unreal, fake, made up. That Satan and all creatures with evil will hate women is uninteresting, in the sense that Satan hates all of humanity, men and women both.