Chesterton, in arguing against women's suffrage, pointed out that while men are used to negotiating power relationships and being forced to respect the space of peers due to the threat of mutual violence, women in the sphere of home life traditionally exercised an unlimited authority upon dependent inferiors. He predicted that if women were enfranchised, their ingrained autocratic tendencies would result in a massively expanded and intrusive state that sought to control every aspect of life in the name of health, safety, and security. As P.J. O'Rourke put it: "It takes a village to raise a child. The government is the village. You're the child."
Obviously Chesterton's predictions were completely off-base and nothing of the sort came to pass, but just imagine a society in which women not only run institutions like nurseries, but co-opt and weaponize the male urge to protect to inflict actual harm on those who oppose them. Something for a sci-fi horror movie! I'm glad feminism was a great success and we all still enjoy the freedoms of our ancestors with the benefits of great women leaders like Angela Merkel and Rachel Levine.
But in this corner called England, at this end of the century, there has happened a strange and startling thing. Openly and to all appearance, this ancestral conflict has silently and abruptly ended; one of the two sexes has suddenly surrendered to the other. By the beginning of the twentieth century, within the last few years, the woman has in public surrendered to the man. She has seriously and officially owned that the man has been right all along; that the public house (or Parliament) is really more important than the private house; that politics are not (as woman had always maintained) an excuse for pots of beer, but are a sacred solemnity to which new female worshipers may kneel; that the talkative patriots in the tavern are not only admirable but enviable; that talk is not a waste of time, and therefore (as a consequence, surely) that taverns are not a waste of money. All we men had grown used to our wives and mothers, and grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink and party politics. And now comes Miss Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were wrong and all the men were right; humbly imploring to be admitted into so much as an outer court, from which she may catch a glimpse of those masculine merits which her erring sisters had so thoughtlessly scorned.
It’s true that freedom for women is bad for men. This is a brutal truth and the reason why most societies try to restrict women’s liberty. When women have choices, they needn’t settle for mediocre men nor stay in bad marriages.
What keeps society going will always trample on somebody’s rights. This problem can’t be solved. So life goes through cycles of constriction and liberality. There’s no other way.
When Christendom was the primary political force in Europe and monarchs had to go crown in hand to be authorized as legitimate rulers by the Pope, the Church was an as authoritarian force as could be found in the West, controlling every aspect of life. We’ve got an America because of all those dissident sects that fled the regions where the church—Catholic or Protestant—was trying to stamp out every little purported heresy. As soon as they got here, they began murdering their own heretics.
Men negotiate right up to the point where they break out into open warfare.
But of course women aren’t any more peaceful, and the failure of all these smart philosophers to recognize that the struggle for power and resources is equally a male and female fight is head-shakingly strange.
Really—what did you expect? That lionesses will fight to the death for their children but human females will not? There’s a gazillion ways of savaging the threat.
Wait . . . WHAT! I wouldn’t have thought in a hundred years that demure, feminine creature was a man that looked like Bull Halsey played by Mrs. Doubtfire played by Rick Moranis. Please tell me Merkel is a chick at least; I mean, leave me with something.
Yes, Angela Merkel is a typical Soviet era east German woman. lol. I know she doesn't look like one, but she is....I think. Sometimes her humanity is in doubt.
I grew up in West Virginia, almost heaven still but then free of experts except mining engineers, liquor distillers, Medicaid fraudsters, and "honey dippers" (don't ask.) Soon after entering college, when I returned home for a weekend visit, a neighbor asked what was I studying in college. I replied that I was "majoring in political science." The neighbor became curious as to what was this new kind of science and who were its experts and what they did to make money. He asked, "What does that science teach you to do to earn a living?"
I had no idea how to answer, but I did get my first glimpse into the conundrum of expertise, the spending of money and time learning something which can't easily be explained as economically productive and directly contributing to one's financial well-being. Maybe I was doing something dumb with my parents' money and my time.
I told my neighbor that political science was expertise in how to be President of the United States and that I intended to become an expert in four years, then become President one day.
One of the worst features of neoliberalism is the notion that if something cannot be commodified it has no value. I prefer to think that I didn't go to school to make money; I made money so I could go to school. If I had the money of a man of leisure, I would buy a house near a large, beach-adjacent school and spend the rest of my life in study, supplemented with my independent pursuits. I can see where most people would see that as a waste of time. I just happen to believe they're missing out.
I believe that educating oneself should be a lifelong pursuit. These days it's probably a waste of money doing so in an institution. The best things in life are free.
500,000 new jobs and $half a trillion "investment."
US Army Corps of Engineers for the world's biggest, greenest fesces project: 200 hundred solar-powered, wind mill-driven honey dippers, 6 shit dams, 20 dikes, overflow flood gates and 1 miiion gallons/day tertiary sewage treatment at 1600 Pennsylvania, with sludge disposal via pipeline, truck and train (through East Palestine) in West Virginia and other nearby areas of white privilege, like Fairfax County VA.
Get Joe Manchin on board with promise of three years of good jobs for coal miners learning code and other fossil fuel throw away whites.
If there's ever a day when you're in a local political position and you help to lower that guy's municipal taxes or keep drag queens out of his kid's school district I hope he apologizes haha.
Jul 7, 2023·edited Jul 7, 2023Liked by William M Briggs
I think there is something deeper and more nefarious than "safety first-ism" going on here.
As you wrote, universities accepting federal money mandated the useless, harmful vaccine, indicating that they were coerced into coercing their students to roll up their sleeves. The "President" and the Speaker of the House were filmed after vaccine rollout stating that vaccination would not be mandated...but they quickly changed their minds. Whoever is really running the show really, really wanted everyone to get vaccinated. Why?
The University of Notre Dame dropped its booster requirement, but, very suspiciously, demands that all students get the first two shots for a strain that has long since come and gone. There is something about the first two injections that is critical to whatever's going on. And something is definitely going on, imo.
Yes, stupidity and effeminacy are insufficient explanations for what we've experienced. Add to that a couple of fortified elections, the worldwide rollout of CBDCs/digital IDs, and a sudden craze to limit speech in formerly free western nations and...hand me my tinfoil hat.
Sure doesn't look nuthin like a random (haha) perfect storm, however strong those unaccountable self-reinforcing feedback loops might be in modern uber-complex societies 😏
Ten yrs ago I needed to find an attorney in NY for family business and two dear friends of mine of 20 yrs., son was not only a NY attorney but a 'Harvard graduate'! I mistakenly, thought how lucky I was! WRONG! Couldn't have been more wrong as I quickly found out. When I hear the words 'Harvard graduate' now I run the other way.
A no-brainer answer to the titular question could be screening/selecting for obedience/compliance. Vaxx & mask serve as a convenient proxy for the required trait 🤷
In contrast to the rest of English, academia is a special case in which, for practical reasons, the default pronoun to be used in the case of indeterminate sex is feminine.
I am, in fact, an autodidact. No college. No gaps. No silliness. Multi-lingual, not fluent but conversational. I was always a good student but good teachers are difficult, now almost impossible, to find. I'm also my own Dr. for the most part.
“It’s also no surprise that a great many of colleges on this list are Christian. This is a group of people, in this country, in which you can still find both men and women of courage. Rare, rare.” <- This is a truth so powerful that many dare not speak it. Thank you for doing so!
There are so many things in this serious, yet still jaunty essay, that I can’t speak to all of them. One part I laughed at and agreed with is when you referred, at one point, to the Expert as a “she,” saying something along the lines of, “Of course it’s a she.” I nearly spit my drink out in glee!
Maybe in US. here in Europe Christian communities were cowards regarding covid... I go rarely but I found ridiculous when on xmas '21 I had to wear mask in the church. Theoretically we face paradise after death and we are quivering in fear. Still in 2023 handshake is discouraged and communion is still given to hands instead directly into the mouth...
Yeah, but how does the White House staff snort coke with a mask on? SO, that means the coke-bringer MUST be vaccinated (because the unvaxxed have to wear masks).
Jul 7, 2023·edited Jul 7, 2023Liked by William M Briggs
🗨 Female aggression has higher levels of efficient self-deception. Intellectuals generally operate in milieus with high levels of efficient self-deception due to weak reality tests. Feminism is an intellectual product of women. Its levels of self-deception can be stratospheric.
🗨 what do you need the special ideologies for? Motivating, justifying and coordinating social aggression. Especially the bullshit claim that “the problem” is Western civilisation.
🗨 politics is turned from a transactional mechanism for managing societies into something toxic. It becomes a vehicle for meaning; that is, a religion substitute.
Chesterton, in arguing against women's suffrage, pointed out that while men are used to negotiating power relationships and being forced to respect the space of peers due to the threat of mutual violence, women in the sphere of home life traditionally exercised an unlimited authority upon dependent inferiors. He predicted that if women were enfranchised, their ingrained autocratic tendencies would result in a massively expanded and intrusive state that sought to control every aspect of life in the name of health, safety, and security. As P.J. O'Rourke put it: "It takes a village to raise a child. The government is the village. You're the child."
Obviously Chesterton's predictions were completely off-base and nothing of the sort came to pass, but just imagine a society in which women not only run institutions like nurseries, but co-opt and weaponize the male urge to protect to inflict actual harm on those who oppose them. Something for a sci-fi horror movie! I'm glad feminism was a great success and we all still enjoy the freedoms of our ancestors with the benefits of great women leaders like Angela Merkel and Rachel Levine.
This is it.
GK Chesterton was truly a prophet. He was decades ahead of his peers with his read on the direction Western culture was heading.
One of my greatest influences.
But in this corner called England, at this end of the century, there has happened a strange and startling thing. Openly and to all appearance, this ancestral conflict has silently and abruptly ended; one of the two sexes has suddenly surrendered to the other. By the beginning of the twentieth century, within the last few years, the woman has in public surrendered to the man. She has seriously and officially owned that the man has been right all along; that the public house (or Parliament) is really more important than the private house; that politics are not (as woman had always maintained) an excuse for pots of beer, but are a sacred solemnity to which new female worshipers may kneel; that the talkative patriots in the tavern are not only admirable but enviable; that talk is not a waste of time, and therefore (as a consequence, surely) that taverns are not a waste of money. All we men had grown used to our wives and mothers, and grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink and party politics. And now comes Miss Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were wrong and all the men were right; humbly imploring to be admitted into so much as an outer court, from which she may catch a glimpse of those masculine merits which her erring sisters had so thoughtlessly scorned.
GK Chesterton
An additional observation:
It’s true that freedom for women is bad for men. This is a brutal truth and the reason why most societies try to restrict women’s liberty. When women have choices, they needn’t settle for mediocre men nor stay in bad marriages.
What keeps society going will always trample on somebody’s rights. This problem can’t be solved. So life goes through cycles of constriction and liberality. There’s no other way.
You should pardon me but this is nonsense.
When Christendom was the primary political force in Europe and monarchs had to go crown in hand to be authorized as legitimate rulers by the Pope, the Church was an as authoritarian force as could be found in the West, controlling every aspect of life. We’ve got an America because of all those dissident sects that fled the regions where the church—Catholic or Protestant—was trying to stamp out every little purported heresy. As soon as they got here, they began murdering their own heretics.
Men negotiate right up to the point where they break out into open warfare.
But of course women aren’t any more peaceful, and the failure of all these smart philosophers to recognize that the struggle for power and resources is equally a male and female fight is head-shakingly strange.
Really—what did you expect? That lionesses will fight to the death for their children but human females will not? There’s a gazillion ways of savaging the threat.
Errr. Lavene is not a woman, he’s a fruit in a skirt.
Wait . . . WHAT! I wouldn’t have thought in a hundred years that demure, feminine creature was a man that looked like Bull Halsey played by Mrs. Doubtfire played by Rick Moranis. Please tell me Merkel is a chick at least; I mean, leave me with something.
Yes, Angela Merkel is a typical Soviet era east German woman. lol. I know she doesn't look like one, but she is....I think. Sometimes her humanity is in doubt.
I grew up in West Virginia, almost heaven still but then free of experts except mining engineers, liquor distillers, Medicaid fraudsters, and "honey dippers" (don't ask.) Soon after entering college, when I returned home for a weekend visit, a neighbor asked what was I studying in college. I replied that I was "majoring in political science." The neighbor became curious as to what was this new kind of science and who were its experts and what they did to make money. He asked, "What does that science teach you to do to earn a living?"
I had no idea how to answer, but I did get my first glimpse into the conundrum of expertise, the spending of money and time learning something which can't easily be explained as economically productive and directly contributing to one's financial well-being. Maybe I was doing something dumb with my parents' money and my time.
I told my neighbor that political science was expertise in how to be President of the United States and that I intended to become an expert in four years, then become President one day.
One of the worst features of neoliberalism is the notion that if something cannot be commodified it has no value. I prefer to think that I didn't go to school to make money; I made money so I could go to school. If I had the money of a man of leisure, I would buy a house near a large, beach-adjacent school and spend the rest of my life in study, supplemented with my independent pursuits. I can see where most people would see that as a waste of time. I just happen to believe they're missing out.
I believe that educating oneself should be a lifelong pursuit. These days it's probably a waste of money doing so in an institution. The best things in life are free.
Ah, for missing the point irony, nothing beats following a good story with a bad lecture.
please do tell what a "honey dipper" is!
More than one honey dipper is needed.
Massive swamp project.
"Make DC Great Again for the First Time."
"Remove the stench of Decaying DemocRats!"
National infrastructure project--- Katrina size.
500,000 new jobs and $half a trillion "investment."
US Army Corps of Engineers for the world's biggest, greenest fesces project: 200 hundred solar-powered, wind mill-driven honey dippers, 6 shit dams, 20 dikes, overflow flood gates and 1 miiion gallons/day tertiary sewage treatment at 1600 Pennsylvania, with sludge disposal via pipeline, truck and train (through East Palestine) in West Virginia and other nearby areas of white privilege, like Fairfax County VA.
Get Joe Manchin on board with promise of three years of good jobs for coal miners learning code and other fossil fuel throw away whites.
Sucks the shit out of over-flowing outhouses.
White House needs a honey dipper.
If there's ever a day when you're in a local political position and you help to lower that guy's municipal taxes or keep drag queens out of his kid's school district I hope he apologizes haha.
I think there is something deeper and more nefarious than "safety first-ism" going on here.
As you wrote, universities accepting federal money mandated the useless, harmful vaccine, indicating that they were coerced into coercing their students to roll up their sleeves. The "President" and the Speaker of the House were filmed after vaccine rollout stating that vaccination would not be mandated...but they quickly changed their minds. Whoever is really running the show really, really wanted everyone to get vaccinated. Why?
The University of Notre Dame dropped its booster requirement, but, very suspiciously, demands that all students get the first two shots for a strain that has long since come and gone. There is something about the first two injections that is critical to whatever's going on. And something is definitely going on, imo.
Suspiciously much too much unconscionable bunkum for stupidity alone to cause 🤔
Yes, stupidity and effeminacy are insufficient explanations for what we've experienced. Add to that a couple of fortified elections, the worldwide rollout of CBDCs/digital IDs, and a sudden craze to limit speech in formerly free western nations and...hand me my tinfoil hat.
Sure doesn't look nuthin like a random (haha) perfect storm, however strong those unaccountable self-reinforcing feedback loops might be in modern uber-complex societies 😏
Ten yrs ago I needed to find an attorney in NY for family business and two dear friends of mine of 20 yrs., son was not only a NY attorney but a 'Harvard graduate'! I mistakenly, thought how lucky I was! WRONG! Couldn't have been more wrong as I quickly found out. When I hear the words 'Harvard graduate' now I run the other way.
A no-brainer answer to the titular question could be screening/selecting for obedience/compliance. Vaxx & mask serve as a convenient proxy for the required trait 🤷
If things cannot continue as they are, then they wont.
Selecting for the cowardly or deranged will lead to their collapse. Cannot happen soon enough for me.
🗨 The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
😇
Propagandistic Phantasms would be a good band name.
I pencil in Hersterical Shriek & Mandated Fear (for free!) 🤸
In contrast to the rest of English, academia is a special case in which, for practical reasons, the default pronoun to be used in the case of indeterminate sex is feminine.
I am, in fact, an autodidact. No college. No gaps. No silliness. Multi-lingual, not fluent but conversational. I was always a good student but good teachers are difficult, now almost impossible, to find. I'm also my own Dr. for the most part.
AUTODIDACTS FOREVER!
"be afraid, be very afraid"
Veronica Quaife, 1986
“It’s also no surprise that a great many of colleges on this list are Christian. This is a group of people, in this country, in which you can still find both men and women of courage. Rare, rare.” <- This is a truth so powerful that many dare not speak it. Thank you for doing so!
There are so many things in this serious, yet still jaunty essay, that I can’t speak to all of them. One part I laughed at and agreed with is when you referred, at one point, to the Expert as a “she,” saying something along the lines of, “Of course it’s a she.” I nearly spit my drink out in glee!
Maybe in US. here in Europe Christian communities were cowards regarding covid... I go rarely but I found ridiculous when on xmas '21 I had to wear mask in the church. Theoretically we face paradise after death and we are quivering in fear. Still in 2023 handshake is discouraged and communion is still given to hands instead directly into the mouth...
Insanity.
the broncos in kalamazoo never had one either ! go wmu
Yeah, but how does the White House staff snort coke with a mask on? SO, that means the coke-bringer MUST be vaccinated (because the unvaxxed have to wear masks).
These colleges are still educating, but not in the way that they think. I’ve never felt smarter.
🗨 Female aggression has higher levels of efficient self-deception. Intellectuals generally operate in milieus with high levels of efficient self-deception due to weak reality tests. Feminism is an intellectual product of women. Its levels of self-deception can be stratospheric.
(h/t Lorenzo Warby --> helendale.substack.com/p/a-common-humanity-or-bust <-- intense piece 👌 tightly packed with piercing thought)
🗨 what do you need the special ideologies for? Motivating, justifying and coordinating social aggression. Especially the bullshit claim that “the problem” is Western civilisation.
🗨 politics is turned from a transactional mechanism for managing societies into something toxic. It becomes a vehicle for meaning; that is, a religion substitute.
I said this always during the scamdemic: experts don't question experts because this is a reciprocal silent acceptance of each other's expertise...