House of Eratosthenes

It’s been quite a week. I can’t spare a sufficient block of time to get it all captured, but it has not been lost on me that all of the significant events have to do with a socially accepted set of observations going in one direction, while the truth lies in the opposite direction. We as human beings can do this. We possess an ability, unique within the animal kingdom, to lie to ourselves. I did manage to make a list. It isn’t short. It makes me wonder if we’re becoming so estranged from truth and so anesthetized to even the most blatant attempts to deceive us, we may be losing the whole distinction between truth and falsehood.

1. Mitt Romney was embarrassed by the exposure of his nom de plume, “Pierre Delecto.”

2. ABC News got busted for airing phony war footage.

3. Greta Thunberg, as myself and others have observed before, is not in any position to be commended for giving a wonderful speech, or even to give the wonderful speech in the first place. She’s a child with learning disabilities, and people who recognize her as some source of wisdom or good decision do a disservice to their own reputations. If she’s to be given extra laudatory praise for her Autism-spectrum diagnosis, then she can be criticized for that as well. That’s why it’s a betrayal of trust to be exposing her to this level of discourse. Furthermore, singling out predominantly-white societies and nations for “how dare you” climate-criticism while turning a blind eye to India and China, is racist.

4. Elijah Cummings was subject to a bunch of high-profile hagiography as some kind of big swaggering hero who did all sorts of things to help the less fortunate…and a whole bunch of suddenly-indignant people in all sorts of places, were unable to name those things. Cummings, you’ll recall, was lately the subject of a spat with President Trump over the ramshackle state of his own home district, and seemed to be just fine with large numbers of his own constituents being forced to live with rats.

5. Elizabeth Warren has been working extra hard to get herself established as some kind of a victim, which has led to a pattern involving her getting busted for falsehoods over and over again — since the truth is she’s been quite privileged. And I notice she never backs down after she gets busted. Once it’s definitively established the facts are not on her side, she plays the “I’m still going to win the argument” game.

6. Speaking of democrats running for President. All of these promises they’re making, which they aren’t going to be able to keep anyway, would cost big money. I’m talking play-weird-games-just-to-understand-the-magnitude money. “If I spent such-and-such dollars every minute since the assassination of Julius Caesar” type money. We’re supposed to consider them over Republicans because the Republicans aren’t minding the store on the public debt issue…which has some truth to it. The case is that their tax cuts “cost” money, which is at best a strange way of looking at it, and at worst an out-and-out falsehood. But let’s accept it as truth for sake of argument. If democrats are the answer, what’s up with this “Christmas all 365 days” thing? You have to do so much pretending and so much self-contradiction to consider supporting them. And yet here they are. A major political party.

7. PG&E is pulling the plug on nearly a million ratepayers this weekend…which must translate to millions of people with heartbeats, or more, struggling to figure out how to cope without power. That’s because there’s a lot of dry brush, we just finished up with a hot summer, and there’s wind. There is an established cause-and-effect between PG&E’s equipment and some deadly wildfires we’ve been having, so that’s all on the up-and-up…but…what about all the unasked questions? We have a wind event, then ten days or so without power. What’s to be said of other places with dry hot summers, lots of dead brush, and when there’s a “wind event” — nothing. The power keeps flowing. There are no wildfires. People don’t have to throw out freezers full of meat, kids can keep going to school. We don’t have PG&E, we have SMUD. So, there’s high wind for us, too, this weekend…we get to have power. One doesn’t automatically flow into the other. I mean, if I were a PG&E ratepayer I’d be getting ticked that the most obvious questions don’t seem to be getting much inspection.

8. Politicians and their mansions. A lot of the ink spilled on this is pure-jealousy-stuff, not having much to do with logic and common sense apart from wondering pointedly how our representatives can effectively represent the rest of the nation. The real cause for wonder that doesn’t receive much wondering, though, is the congressperson whose real-livelihood is under a big fat question mark. We don’t actually pay these people mansion-money. So people may get irked over Darrel Issa’s entrepreneurial success, or Jay Rockefeller’s inheritance, but at least we have a rough idea of what’s going on there. With someone like Maxine Waters, we don’t. We only know something’s amiss. We don’t know what.

9. The hate crime hoaxes are pretty much out of control. The Jussie Smollett case was only the most famous example, although that’s a good one, because on hearing it for the very first time anyone with some common sense could see things weren’t fitting into place there. Nevertheless, we were obliged to “believe” it. And all the others. The running-tally of true-ones versus false-ones, in hindsight, seems to be kinda…lopsided. The ones that are blasted all over the place before anyone knows what they are, and thus cannot be cherry-picked by anyone with an agenda, almost always turn out to be hoaxes.

10. Fake families at the border. This one is particularly sultry and seductive. We have a great many fellow citizens among us who, it would appear, simply cannot process the thought that the content of a package may be different from its labeling. MigrantsAndTheirChildren!! It flows out of their mouth like one word. Well…how do you know they’re their children?

My list doesn’t stop there. California’s gas tax for fixing the roads…the bullet train…our wildfires being caused by “global” warming…Trump investigating Joe Biden as a “political rival“…the so-called “impeachment inquiry.” Hillary Clinton calling everybody she doesn’t like a “Russian asset.” The nonsense about “betraying our allies” in Syria, the risibility of the Transgender movement, the leakers being called “whistleblowers,” Caitlyn Jenner being a woman, Kavanaugh’s accusers…

What they all have in common is that they’re lies. But that’s not overly concerning to me, because people have been lying for a long time. What causes distress is the brazenness, the “How’d they ever think they’d get away with it.” And then I realize they’re getting away with it because the people being deceived, are aiding in their own deception. It’s on par with the little boy with his hand caught in the cookie jar, insisting that he was actually putting it back into the jar. Except…it’s more like, while he’s offering up this excuse, he continues to take the cookie, remove it from the jar, chew off a piece of it and continue bullshitting you with his ramshackle excuse around the mouthful.

Something is happening. Uh no don’t go there, this pre-dates Trump. But it doesn’t pre-date…let’s say…the first George Bush? Sometime in the last twenty years or so. The lies have deteriorated in quality, to the point where they wouldn’t work if the person being fooled didn’t want to be fooled. And yet they keep working.

As willing as I may be to indulge in political incorrectness — perhaps even with a sense of glee over ticking off the right people, that’s not entirely in good taste — I wouldn’t stoop to blaming girls for it. I don’t like doing that, and that’s in no small part because of the consideration that boys are acting a lot more like girls lately, and vice versa. Sexual stereotypes have moved from being merely needlessly alienating, to being poorly advised, because even if people belonged in their pigeonholes they’re not staying there.

But look what someone else managed to do. Okay, that’s certainly a provocative headline…but I’m keeping an open mind…

“Big Mother”: the Decline of Men and…Truth-telling
Guillaume Durocher • October 27, 2019

The speed of social change in the modern era, and in particular in the contemporary West, is so rapid that we all are liable to feel a bit lost.

A recent example of this was provided by none other than Hillary Clinton, that most “progressive” representative of global oligarchy. You see, the 71-year-old Clinton, whose presidential campaign was premised on making history as the first female presidency, still believes in biological sex:

In an interview with The Sunday Times, journalist Decca Aitkenhead asked the Clintons if someone with a beard and a penis can ever be a woman, to which Chelsea replied emphatically, ‘Yes.’

However, as Aitkenhead describes it, Hillary looked ‘uneasy’, and blamed generational gaps for being less accepting.

‘Errr. I’m just learning about this,’ Hillary responded. ‘It’s a very big generational discussion, because this is not something I grew up with or ever saw. It’s going to take a lot more time and effort to understand what it means to be defining yourself differently.’

…There’s something truly surreal about these kinds of developments. One wonders where to start.

The article then runs through the factual foundation, familiar to many of us already, supporting the trend of shrinking maleness. We’ve made it very cool and socially-uplifting to identify areas of life where women don’t yet have a fair shot at things, and we’ve made it cool to offer them increased, even unfair, opportunities. Once they catch up to men, or even pass them, it’s still cool to notice it’s happened. It’s decidedly not cool to conclude from that, that it’s time for the unfair advantages to go away. The skewed worldview seems to have had a direct effect on our physiology. Testosterone levels are on the decline.

But how is this to blame for our weakening attachment to reality? It’s true the two trends have taken place at roughly the same time, but that’s the very definition of a post hoc fallacy. We need something better.

Well…

The predominance of women is not without consequence for liberty and excellence. A 2015 Pew poll found that women were almost 50% more likely to support government censorship of “statements that are offensive to minority groups” than were men. Women, particularly left-wing women, are more politically intolerant: one survey found that 30% of Democratic women had blocked, unfriended or stopped following someone online for their politics, as against only 8% of Republican men. The London Times reported in May 2016 that female students overwhelmingly supported censorship of university publications if these were “considered offensive to certain groups.”

Naturally, any number of truthful statements may be painful or “considered offensive to certain groups.” Most pointedly, any suggestion that men and women have meaningful biological and psychological differences, and therefore to some degree should have different social roles, will be considered “offensive.”

This highlights the self-reinforcing nature of the Western societies’ feminization.

Among the people I know, the ones who are most likely to remain open to initially-unwelcome ideas, and in so doing are likely to expand their horizons and learn something new, are slightly more likely to be female so this doesn’t jive with my personal experience. But I know the sample pool is tainted because there are some small-minded bitches out there and I don’t want to have anything to do with them. I happen to live in California, and it’s pretty easy to spot them from a good distance away. And I know from my past experiences, from back before I learned how to stay away from small-minded women, how much damage they can do. The “I refuse to listen” men are just as dangerous. But I haven’t been marrying or dating those, so again, I know my perspective is skewed.

On the other hand, though…

While men have historically controlled the priesthoods and the media, it is women who nag their menfolk to live up to the society’s established social norms and be respectable…

As we have become comfortable, so our societies and culture have become feminized and infantilized. Today, it seems that women project their mothering instincts upon all the approved “victim groups” of the world: homosexuals, migrants, and minorities all are their symbolic substitute children. [emphasis mine]

There certainly is an impulse, outside of the women I personally know, to reach out with a suffocating variant of “motherhood.” And to cause some damage. Certainly it’s a valid argument to be considered that men do it too, but that’s not the issue here because there is no concerted, energized agenda to pack high influential offices and committees with men. But we do want to pack them with women. And, what kind of women? The ones i know? Or the ones I seek to avoid?

The answer is the same as it is for any other movement. You make a point of placing a woman in an office of influence, she’ll end up being the screechy, unpleasant, destructive, child-thinking kind. If you make a point of just placing the best and most competent person…it just might end up being a woman. A much better one, who creates, and defends and preserves, and thinks like a grown-up. As you move up into the occupations that involve greater power and trust, and are more widely visible, it seems the effect intensifies. Had Hillary Clinton won the election of 2016, she would have stood as the most extreme example.

With the argument now made, I can see the link between that, and this new strain of “shut up and take my money” fraud that requires sanction of the defrauded. The fraud that requires a sanction of “Okay, you’re lying, I know you’re lying, you know I know, now…aw fuck it let’s just get this thing done.”

Who-to-blame, of course, is always less important than how-fix-it. When a popular notion is an obvious lie, and there are loud angry people surrounding you and prevailing upon you to accept the lie, ready to heckle you mercilessly if you reject it as a lie…it really doesn’t matter if they’re men or women. The fix, I think, is to re-evaluate this unstated but successfully-proliferated idea that some lies are good lies if they hurt & help the right people. It’s easier to do that if we keep in mind that a lot of lies that appear at first blush to hurt no one at all, if you take the time to inspect more closely, you’ll find there are indeed some people being hurt and quite badly.

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“Big Mother”Sunday, October 27th, 2019

“Big Mother”
Sunday, October 27th, 2019