Bill Murray Hits the #MeToo Hurricane

I have a bit of a soft spot for actor Bill Murray, because of his standout role in Groundhog Day. But I also understand that he can also be pretty unpleasant around other humans.

Well, now production has been suspended on the movie "'Being Mortal' after a complaint was made blasting the actor and 'Saturday Night Live' alumn Bill Murray, 71, of displaying 'inappropriate behavior' toward females on set."

Murray “was very hands-on touchy, not in any personal areas, but put an arm around a woman, touched her hair, pulled her ponytail — but always in a comedic way.

And "some women felt uncomfortable and he crossed a line."

This is why, back in the old days, men and women were kept apart. Because the whole point of being a man is that you have the courage to cross lines.

And I understand how the "women felt uncomfortable." Women expect to be complimented and asked out on dates. But women don't like to be complimented by men they don't want to ask them out on dates.

If women were men, they would activate the male Culture of Insult in such cases and tell the offender to take his creepy remarks and hands and put 'em where the sun don't shine.

But women don't have a Culture of Insult. They usually don't confront men -- or women -- directly. Instead they complain to to friend -- in the expectation of being soothed, according Greatest Author of All Time, George Eliot. Women have a Culture of Complaint.

So, actually, I feel for the women on the set of "Being Mortal." What do you do when a national icon like Bill Murray hugs you and pulls your hair? Even apart from being a woman, are you going to risk your job by publicly talking back to Bill Murray and embarrassing him in public? You think he won't retaliate? 

So the #MeToo movement is an all-girl Culture of Complaint and you can see this in the Bill Murray bust-up. A "complaint" was made. And "women felt uncomfortable" on set. In other words, nobody confronted anyone. Woman A complained to Woman B and a consensus was built up among the women on set and then someone complained to the director or producer or whoever is the guy you complain to.

I think this situation is the basic problem with the modern Public Square. In my view, the public square was created by men for men, as Georg Simmel wrote over a century ago.  And I say that the public square is a Culture of Insult, and it is a domesticated version of the duel. In which My Man Alexander Hamilton died at the hands of the despicable Martin Van Buren.

I first started addressing this issue with respect women in the public square back in 2014.

And by the way, if "I am woman hear me roar" then it must mean that women have to develop the courage to confront male bullies in the public square.

Because if women want to replace the public square with the #MeToo culture -- which assumes woman as a helpless victim of male oppression -- then there is no public square. Cue "Tiptoe Through the Tulips."

Prediction: I expect that men will create a new public square separate from the current woke-dominated public square, because men want to be men and duke it out with other men for dominance in the eternal male dominance hierarchy.

And that's another thing. Men sort themselves into a dominance hierarchy. Lobsters. You could look it up. But females all think they are as good as any other woman. Oh sure, they have Mean Girls and Cruel Stepmothers and all the wicked witches of folk tales and myths. But at heart, every women thinks she is just as good as the next woman. Guess why there are so many princesses in fairy tales.

Personally, I believe that the "just as good as any other woman" culture cannot work in the public square. The point about hierarchy is that it saves time and it saves lives because it reduces conflict. In a group without hierarchy you have to renegotiate the hierarchy every day. And that takes a lot of time.

As for Bill Murray, I expect he behaves like a louse because he has always got away with it. They say that in Groundhog Day he was absolutely impossible. No doubt. But the movie turned out to be a classic. 

So What if College Women are D+38

I expect you've seen the poll that shows College+ women as D+38. They are the most Democratic among men and women, educated and uneducated. Scott McKay has a long article about it at The American Spectator. He goes into the travails of the educated woman, particularly the single educated woman.

Why are educated women so strongly Democrat? It seems weird. But not if you believe my maxim that "women expect to be protected."

If a woman is protected, she is happy. If she is not protected then she's going to find a new protector today.

The reason that educated women -- and especially single educated women -- working on their careers and living in urban condos are all Democrat is that women expect to be protected. If there isn't a husband to protect her then she expects the state to protect her.

Only, of course, the state doesn't protect you. The state will shovel loot at you, in return for your vote, but it won't protect you. The subhead for the American Spectator piece is:

Why are they surprised that they’re living alone with no prospects when they still think it was a good idea to vote for Biden?

Well, because women do what they are told, and expect to be protected in return. For getting on for a century, the feminist movement has taught women not to rely on men for protection but to get an education and a career. When they find they are not protected, and find they are not happy, they get angry, and they start to complain. Did I mention my idea that women have a Culture of Complaint?

It slots in with my maxim that "women expect to be protected." What does a woman do when she finds she is not protected? She complains to her friend. She votes Democrat. Eventually, she finds a new protector.

And that is what is going to happen in the next year or two as women are terrorized by the Biden inflation. They will find themselves utterly unprotected. They will complain to each other. They will complain to their Democratic politicians. Then they will abandon the Democratic Party and go find a new protector.

As the sainted Rush Limbaugh used to say: "Don't doubt me on this." 

Who Will Vote Out the Dems? The Moms

Here's an interesting take on our currently "interesting times:" From Rep. Jerry Karl (R-AL):

“This is the factor that they’re missing, and that is the female vote,” he declared. “And this is Jerry’s opinion — the moms. This is what turned out in Virginia. That’s the reason we keep pointing at Virginia. This is going to happen again."

Because now the moms are going to the grocery store to buy food and running into the buzz-saw of 10 percent inflation. And they are going to the gas station to fill up the SUV and gas prices are up by a couple dollars a gallon. 

"Make it stop, Mr. President!"

I know. What did you expect, ladies, when you voted for the Democrats?

But we men really don't understand women, and what makes them tick.

But that's OK. I have been doing the studying for you.

And above all what makes women tick is the need for safety. Thus, women were on-board with the COVID lockdowns and mask mandates in a New York minute.

And that is why women are all in favor of most of the things that the welfare state delivers. It's not because women are greedy, but that women feel the need for all the support they can get. Just in case.

In the old days, all the support she could get was whatever support her husband could deliver. But in the new era all the support she can get is whatever stuff she can get from government, from education to health care to child support.

Unfortunately, of course, unlimited government help for women leads to inflation and disaster. And then women can't get the support they need.

Which is where we are right now, after two years of stupid government pedal-to-the-metal in the COVID response, compounded by the Ukraine idiocy.

Now, I listen to women; I really do. And women are really upset about the horrors in Ukraine. They are not thinking about whether it was a good idea ten years ago to muck about in Ukrainian politics, or whether it is a good idea to muck around with Vladimir Putin. They are not thinking: "Gee, I wonder what Hunter Biden and Burisma and the 'big guy' has to do with this." Or whether the US has any business mucking around in Europe. Or whether we should have troops in Germany seventy-five years after the end of World War II. They only think about the suffering of the women in Ukraine. They do worry a bit about nuclear war, of course.

Enough of inflation. How to understand women and CRT and transgenders in the schools?

My view is that, when you tell women that transgenders are horribly oppressed they will agree. Because kindness.

But when you demand that mothers have no rights in the matter of the transitioning of their children, or in the matter of non-binary sex education in schools, then you have crossed a line. Because safety.

Do you see the point? Women instinctively know they are supposed to be kind. But women instinctively want to keep their kids safe. Kids' safety comes first -- their kids'safety.

I realize that I need to update my maxims on politics and men and women. Up to now:

There is no politics without an enemy.

Women expect to be protected; men know they are expendable.

All very true. Let's add something like this:

For men, politics is defeating the enemy. For women, politics is protecting them from the enemy.

Am I right, or am I right?

Either way, I suspect, we are going to see a big shift in the women's vote this Fall.

Because women expect to be protected, and when the current protector can't or won't protect them, that's when they go get another protector.

But not, of course, among liberal educated women. They still believe everything in the #WeBelieve signs. But that is another story.

Women's Tears and the Public Square

As you know I believe with sociologist George Simmel that the public square was invented by men for men, and that, with women coming into the public square they are changing it to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

Now comes Richard Hanania with a piece "Women's Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas." He is saying that when men argue in the public square they can stand there are argue away forever -- although argument tends to end up as fisticuffs.

But if a man is arguing with a woman and she dissolves in tears, then she wins.

A man can’t just yell in another man’s face for 5 or 10 minutes about how he’s hurting his feelings. If a man does behave this way, bystanders are more likely to feel disgusted than join in or play the role of white knight. The man at the receiving end of the abuse is at some point going to have to escalate towards violence, or back down and say something about how this is beneath him. Depending on the situation, observers may assume violence is a distinct possibility, and get between the two sides.

None of these options are available when getting yelled at by a woman. You certainly can’t make an implicit threat of violence. Raising your voice will turn everyone against you, and even walking away can look heartless.

Hanania proposes three available rules for male vs. female argument:

1. Expect everyone who participates in the marketplace of ideas to abide by male standards, meaning you accept some level of abrasiveness and hurt feelings as the price of entry.
   
   
2. Expect everyone to abide by female standards, meaning we care less about truth and prioritize the emotional and mental well-being of participants in debates.
   
   
3. We accept gender double standards, and tolerate more aggression towards men than we do towards women. We also tolerate more hyper-emotionalism from women than men.

But, of course, this means that women have the upper hand, because they can always switch to hyper-emotionalism when they are losing an argument.

Actually, I think that any capitulation to female rules is unworkable: you cannot have an effective public square on that basis.

Moreover, I don't know if you've noticed, but the option to be "exhausted" or to use hyper-emotionalism is only OK for lefty women. If you are a regime-approved activist, go ahead. But don't try that if you are a conservative, or a female supporter of a Canadian trucker. I don't think that Sarah Palin was ever allowed to be "exhausted." And I doubt if Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) gets to be all emotional with Chuck Schumer.

Actually women's rules cannot work in the public square, and the reason is obvious from my notion that men have a Culture of Insult -- which is the male one-on-one confrontation minus the actual resort to violence -- and women have a Culture of Complaint.

I have said that the way the women's Culture of Complaint works is for two women to be have coffee together and complaining about a third person.

But I realize that is incomplete. There is another instantiation of the women's Culture of Complaint. A woman may directly complain to her husband or to a man. And she does this because she knows that the man cannot win in that situation. If she gets angry, he cannot resort to violence, as he might with another man. If she gets emotional, he cannot resort to disdain.

The reason that the Culture of Complaint works for woman on woman is that the woman has the option that "she will never talk to that woman again." Whether it's the neighbor across the street or another officer on the US Navy ship. Remember the case of the US Navy destroyer colliding with a container ship back in 2017? The "officer of the deck" (OOD) and the "Tactical Action Officer" in charge of "monitoring the combat radar" were both women.

The OOD was named Sarah, and the Tactical Action Officer was named Natalie, and they weren’t speaking to each other!!!

Obviously a Navy cannot function when the women aren't talking to each other. But a neighborhood can.

The way that public institutions work -- have to work -- is that every day the people working there have to suck it in and work with the other people. Even if the other people suck. Especially if they suck.

For men, they have to stop short of violence. For women they have to stop short of "exhaustion" and "never talking to that person again."

Otherwise you don't have a public institution. You have a barroom brawl and you have Navy destroyers crashing into container ships. And that is not good.

 

The Science Catches Up with Me on the Sexes

For a year or two, based on a lifetime of reading and especially since reading German sociologist George Simmel on women and the public square, I have maintained that men and women have profoundly different cultures.

Of course, being a man I like to make it jokey and insulting, and say that men have a Culture of Insult and women have a Culture of Complaint. Now comes Steve Sailer commenting on a piece in The New York Times and an email from Steven Pinker.

Men can cooperate while ribbing each other pretty hard. I finally watched the fine neo-Western movie Hell or High Water (script by Taylor Sheridan, creator of the hit TV show Yellowstone), in which the outlaws and the law both consist of pairs of guys constantly insulting each other while getting a lot done.

Women, in contrast, tend to compete with each other via snide remarks. So women tend to assume more that of course the authorities should silence anybody who is saying anything not nice.

This was in the context of "studies" that show that men support freedom of speech more than women.

So tell me: Am I right or am I right?

But I have a higher, nobler perspective on all this, which is my analysis of Simmel on women in the public square. He writes that the public square was created by men for men, but that the entry of women into the public square would transform the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility." 

But actually, after long and harrowing thought, I decided that Simmel was wrong, and it looks like "the science" agrees with me. 

It is not that women will transform the public square, it is that women do not get the public square as constructed by men. The idea of guys sitting around insulting each other just does not compute for women. Wherever and whenever women get together they construct a culture based on the women's Culture of Complaint where women "compete with each other via snide remarks."

Now it is my belief that the women's version of the public square, of competition by snide remarks, is completely different and incompatible with the men's Culture of Insult. I expect that in the future we will see two cultures side by side, separate but equal. In areas where men predominate, there will be a Culture of Insult. In areas where women are more than 30 percent of the participants there will be a Culture of Complaint. 

And ne'er the twain shall meet.

Also, of course, there is the intersection of another Battle of the Sexes, that Women Expect to be Protected: as women public-school teachers who don't want to get into the trenches of COVID at school. While Men Know They Are Expendable: as men figure that, well, someone has to keep the grocery supply chain going, and if not me, then who?

But what happens in the future? I think that we will see a segregation of the public square into male and female sectors. Men will gravitate to areas where open competition is needed, such as in the culture of the Road Warrior, and women will gravitate to areas where competition is hidden, as with Burke, where "All the decent drapery of life is [NOT] to be rudely torn off."

I tend to be naughty about all this. But I really think that the feminists are wrong about "you go girl" and girl superheroes. As in clueless. That is just not how women interact with the world, and, more important, how women get their way in the world.

I think that this is an important thing to understand. Women don't get what they want and need by fighting or insulting. They get it by "manipulation," with their interpersonal skills with which they get what they want and need short of insult and actual violence.

As my daughter says: "my job is to keep my kids alive." This sounds rather trite. It is not, especially when you remember that back in the day human babies had a 50 percent chance of getting to age one. Really, there is no more important job in the world than keeping kids alive until it is time for them to leave the nest.

The point is, I think, that in the modern era the job of keeping kids alive has got a lot easier. And that gives women the opportunity to do other things than just keeping the kids alive.

But what? That is the question. And, given that all living things advance with two steps forward and one step back -- if they are lucky -- women aren't going to find a new role for themselves without lots of mistakes and heartache.

It's Not Just a Political Malaise

Yes, everyone knows that politics in the US is broken. And the other guys are to blame.

But I believe in Downstreamism, from the famous Breitbart dictum that politics is downstream from culture.

I believe more than that. I believe that politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

I go further than that. I agree with Kant that we cannot know "things-in-themselves," but only appearances. We spend our lives trying to figure out what the "things-in-themselves" are. Today the question is: are they atoms, aub-atomic particles, waves, probabilities, multiverses?

The fact is that all our fabuloso math and science and philosophy and religion don't tell us. So we make it up.

Thus every theory about the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" -- the "things-in-themselves" -- is really a hot mess. It gets some things right and a bunch of other things wrong.

And every institutionalization of some theory of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" is also a hot mess. As in churches, sects, political parties, ruling classes, corporations, families, marriages.

The eternal problem is this: when something is going wrong, how do you fix it?

When your marriage is going wrong, when your kid is going wrong, when your career is going wrong, when your business is going wrong, what do you do about it?

And when you get to governments, political parties, religions, the problem is even bigger because big-time institutions are designed to resist change. In fact, change to governments, political parties and religions usually involves war and the associated butcher's bill.

I would say that the current political crisis in the US -- and elsewhere in the western world -- is about the fact that the political ideology of the last 200  years has reached its sell-by date. I would say that problem is that there is a profound disconnect with the faith of the educated ruling class, that its knowledge and wisdom and power are the right combination to rule modern human society, and the reality that all government is a war against some enemy and the distribution of spoils among the supporters. And that war and spoils is always a net negative.

I would say that the current social crisis in the United States -- that involves among other things the white working class "dying of despair" and heightened deaths by drug overdose -- is a consequence of the culture of our ruling class. Charles Murray in his Coming Apart shows how, for white America, things are pretty good for the intellectual elite, but not so good for the middle middle. And at the bottom the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. Ron Unz has a sprawling article about all this at his web site, starting with the fact that the death rate for US whites age 45-54 has gone up in the last 20 years while the death rate for US Hispanics aged 45-54 has gone down. Maybe the sharply increased death rate from "poisonings" has something to do with this.

The fact is that our educated ruling class has imposed its religion and culture on the rest of America and it is Making Things Worse. I think that the welfare state is a reason for this; the size of government and government regulation as well; the culture of women's liberation -- women entering careers and politics and sexual license just like men -- that assumes that women want to live in the public square is a wrong turn; the attack on middle-class religion is a brutal Reign of Terror.

And I believe that the ruling class's religious quest to transform the energy economy and the fight "systemic racism" are galloping disasters that will rapidly Make Things Worse.

I also believe that the educated ruling class believes in a false religion, that educated people are called by history to bend the arc of history towards justice, and everybody else should do what they are told. Problem is, I believe, that when you use government to bend the arc of history towards justice what you get is injustice. Always and everywhere, don't you think Stalin and Mao?

Yes, but what do we do about it?

Well, it starts with a new understanding of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" for our educated gentry, the present ruling class.

The idea is quite simple. The educated gentry must stop thinking of themselves as cultural and political metropolitans called to rule and correct the world for its sins. Instead they must think of themselves as humble sacrificial heroes, that sacrifice their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on the border between Order and Chaos. Do you see the difference? It means that the magnificent Names that strut across the political and cultural stage will be thought of as second-rate poseurs. The true heroes will be people that struggle all their lives trying the make the world around them a bit better, knowing that most of the time their efforts may well be mistaken, probably won't make any difference, and nobody will ever know about them.

We can't have mega governments creating a loot and plunder operation out of 30 to 40 percent of the economy. We can't have lifer unionized women teachers teaching our children. We can't have health care cramped into government-directed corporate-driven systems like the present. We can't have government welfare administrators doling out loot to the poor and smashing the family to smithereens.

But it starts with the devaluing of politics down to a dull roar. Because there is no politics without an enemy; and there is no peace unless politics and its war on enemies is downgraded into a low-status activity that no well-born person would dream of descending to. And that no well-born person would truckle to any politician.

Somehow, we have to turn politics into a form of sports. But I don't know how to do it, because I'm not a genius.

Women Complain Because They Want to be "Soothed"

Now there's one thing in the world that I trust absolutely.

And that's My Girl Mary-Ann Evans. That's George Eliot to you. She was the daughter of a carpenter that rose to be an estate manager, managing the estates of rich rural magnates in the old rural England. Her chef d'oeuvre is probably Middlemarch.

So, we can say of George Eliot that, like Susan Sowerby, mother of ten in The Secret Garden, "she knows."

Now, in order to celebrate Christmas I have been re-reading Eliot's first full-length novel Adam Bede. Adam is a carpenter and rises to become the estate manager for Arthur Donnithorne. Adam is tall, strong, worthy, and courageous.

But Adam's mother is an eternal complainer, as in my earth-shattering notion that women have a Culture of Complaint.

But now comes Mary-Ann Evans, and "she knows." So here is a fragment about Adam's mother, Lisbeth Bede.

Like all complaining women, she complained in the expectation of being soothed, and when Adam said nothing, she was only prompted to complain more bitterly.

Did you get that, guys?

Women complain in the expectation of being soothed.

Does that align with my notion of "women expect to be protected" or not?

By the way, guess who is George Eliot's Soother-in-chief?

Right first time. It's Dinah Morris, the sainted Methodist lay-preacher and heroine in Adam Bede. and one of the people she soothes is Adam's mother Lisbeth.

(She also soothes the antagonist Hetty Sorrel before Hetty needs soothing. But she will need soothing, of course, and the sainted Dinah already knows it.)

Now, if a woman is complaining it is probably because she is anxious. And why is she anxious? Because she is concerned that she may not be protected.

And so, what is the point of soothing the anxious woman? To assure her that, don't worry darling, you are going to be protected.

By the way, this all aligns with our current safetyism, the notion of women all complaining about "stress." Not to mention workplace harassment. This all aligns with my talk about Women in the Public Square, that they are in the process, per Georg Simmel, of adapting the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

Women expect to be protected; they need to be safe. When they are uncertain about that protection they complain. When they complain they don't want to be told to shut up and stop complaining -- such a guy thing! They want to be soothed, and they want to be told that everything will be all right.

Hmm. I remember, back in the olden time, how my sainted mother used to chuckle about my Dad. How he would tell her "it'll be all right."

See? Mary-Ann Evans is right. And my mother at least had the wisdom to laugh about my Dad's efforts to soothe her when she was complaining about something.

After Trump, DeSantis?

 We all know -- or at least know that we have been firmly told -- that women just don't like Donald Trump's alpha-male behavior. The mean tweets, an ordinary manifestation of the male Culture of Insult, is just too exhausting.

But, of course, women expect to be protected. So if they determine, two by two in their Kaffee Klatsch meetings of the women's global conspiracy, that President Biden doesn't protect them, then I fearlessly predict that they will have nothing to say about a mean-tweeting Trump in 2024.

But whatabout Ron DeSantis? My liberal neighbors already hate him, so there's that. So the only question is whether they and their liberal friends are going to be hating him as much as they hated Donald Trump. I guess we need to keep track of this by polling the nation's mental-health professionals for an upsurge in CNN/MSNBC-watcher pre-traumatic stress syndrome in the months and years ahead.

(By the way, whatabout the mental health of disappointed Trump supporters? Does nobody in the mental health community care about them? Or are Trumpists merely sub-human deplorables that don't come to the notice of fully-qualified mental health professionals?)

But I have this weird feeling that, with regard to Trump, we are been-there-done-that. As I look back to the early presidential debates of 2016, when I was a Cruz supporter, there is no doubt that Donald Trump, by rolling over all the rules about being a "nice Republican," really gave me a buzz. He showed us all what could be done in the public square. The US political world will never be the same.

Now I think that Ron DeSantis is shaping up as Donald Trump without the mean tweets. Yesterday he was featured mentioning the "Brandon administration.¨ It was clearly fully planned and worked out, and he talked several minutes about the Let's Go Brandon phenomenon, explaining its origin for anyone that didn't know. And boy, did his audience absolutely loooove it.

See, I think that Let's Go Brandon is absolute political gold. First of all, it avoids straight up vulgarity, so the women of the world don't need to be offended. In fact, I suspect that the phrase rather neatly appeals to women, because it is indirect. It makes the point, but it stays "nice."

And I'd say that, overall, Ron DeSantis passes on the "likability" front.

Let's put it another way. Donald Trump was the guy that helped us storm the barricades of the Deep State back in the day; he was the leader of the Forlorn Hope, crashing through a breach in the walls of the ruling class.

But now, I suspect, we don't need a rough tough leader that stakes everything on "once more unto the breach." We need a nice affable guy with a will of iron that will outthink and outflank and outstrategize our dear liberal friends.

Is Ron DeSantis that man? Who knows? That's why we have campaigns.

But I tell you this. When I experience Ron DeSantis I experience a guy trying to look around the corner and think where he needs to be tomorrow or next month. I think that his COVID strategy is pure gold, and the Democratic Party strategy of lockdowns and masks and vax mandates will eventually crash and burn. I think that any sensible politician with a strategic mind is thinking about where we end up in a year or so. Whereas I think that the Dems are merely reacting and pandering to the women that expect to be protected.

Earth to Democrats. When women expect to be protected they have no idea how. They just want to be told by a Maaan that everything is under control.

Here's the problem with the Dem lack-of-strategy. If and when it turns out that the reactive lockdown-mask-vax policy was a stupid mistake, the women of America are not going to say, well, at least his heart was in the right place. They are just going to feel that the Democrats did not protect them and look for another protector.

Men, Women, Politics, and the Public Square

According to one of the exit polls last night, the voters that moved most towards the Republicans from Democrats was white women.

Which means, I suppose, that while women don't like mean tweets, they really don't like men in the women's bathroom.

I suppose that this is the reason why, they say, the most important thing in a political candidate is "likability." Kennedy was likable, Nixon was not.

Guess what kind of voter thinks that likability is important.

Or let's get back to my pal Nazi Carl Schmitt who says that politics about the friend / enemy distinction. But I prefer Curtis Yarvin who makes it real simple and says: "There is no politics without an enemy."

See, in my belief system women don't have "enemies;" they only have women that they don't talk to, of whom they have said "I can't believe she said that."

Put it another way: in the Carl Schmitt friend / enemy distinction the point about the enemy is the possibility of "conflict," or violence, or killing. In the "conflicts" that women have the most extreme result is really no more than "never talking to her again." Obviously, in the male case, fisticuffs, or worse, is always a possibility. Anyway, in the US, male murder offenders outnumbered female offenders by about 7 to 1.  And if you factor in that blacks are 55 percent of murder offenders, then how many white women murderers does that leave you?

What I mean is that, if politics is about the enemy, and for white women the enemy is almost certainly no more than that woman down the street that she is not talking to, then politics is really a guy thing. Because the enemy is almost certainly male, and only the guys are going to put it to a fight.

That's why women hate the mean tweets.

Mean tweets are a part of the male Culture of Insult, which we may consider a polite form of dueling, or a civilized form of conflict. We modern men trade insults instead of fists. It's a guy thing. But for women mean tweets don't make sense: "I can't believe he would tweet that."

When women don't like something they complain; when men don't like something they trade insults: thus the women's Culture of Complaint and the men's Culture of Insult.

But when prices are spiraling into the stratosphere and grocery-store shelves are empty, and little Susie is getting attacked in the school bathroom, that's different, because all of a sudden the protected world in which a woman can go about her vital day-to-day business is no longer protected.

I say that "women expect to be protected" and when they discover that the current protector isn't protecting them, then they go get another protector. So if the gubmint isn't providing a safe neighborhood and a functioning economy, and safe schools for little Susie, then women start talking to the neighbor women and pretty soon they all come to the conclusion that they are all going to vote for the other guy.

But it's worse than that.

I say there is no need for politics, because there really isn't an "enemy" any more, some Viking band that will sail up the river and kill all the men and take all the grain -- and the silver from the church -- and sell the women into slavery at the main European slave market in Dublin. If you, the Russkies, loot the factories in eastern Germany and take all the machines back to Russia what good does it do you? The Soviet Union still collapses 45 years later.

What? No enemies? No need for politics? Tell me it ain't so!

That's why our liberal friends, who believe in politics like a religion, have to conjure up fake enemies, like the "armed insurrectionists" of January 6, and the violent extremists that are upsetting education bureaucrats at school-board meetings, and the white oppressors that are systematically oppressing oppressed peoples despite the best efforts of the allies. And that is to say nothing of "climate deniers," the foul enemy that is preventing noble ecological heroes from tackling climate change.

But here's the problem. We men, we few, we band of brothers, are programmed to be ready at a moment's notice to jump up and fight the foe. But if there isn't any foe, then what do we do?

The answer is simple. We have to fake it. If you are a liberal you conjure up fake political enemies and mount on your charger and set your wokey lance and charge the enemy oppressor. For everybody else you become a road warrior and battle the other road warriors for market share. Road warriors are guys that create products and services; liberal social justice warriors just divide everyone into battling tribes.

For women? They go to college and decide they want to get into "activism." So they get a job in HR and start forcing CRT on the employees and the kiddies.

This is not that hard.

The Four Stages of Women in Modernity

So. Whither women now? Mary Harrington at UnHerd proposes a four-chapter story of women in the last couple of centuries, because now "The sexual revolution has killed feminism."

Chapter One is women on the farm at the beginning of the 19th century.

The typical American matron was a disciplined, skilled, devout individual who worked alongside her husband in a productive household... The patriarchal legal system of ‘coverture’, which subsumed her legal personhood and property into that of her husband, rendered her technically a subordinate class of citizen. It also served to shield her from market pressures.

Chapter Two is women in the industrial city. 

In the new private household, the bourgeois woman was more economically dependent than her agrarian grandmother. Her main activities were the education of children, the management of servants and the consumption of goods produced elsewhere. She may have been more materially comfortable. But this woman had in many respects less agency than her foremothers.

But was this new situation a shelter from the competitive frenzy in the industrial city or a monstrous and patriarchal injustice? Enter the first stage of feminism demanding equal property rights and right to vote.

Chapter Three is post World War II.

Labour-saving devices and booming consumerism have shifted society once again... And for bourgeois twentieth-century housewives, labour-saving devices combined with an increasingly atomised, individualistic social world to trigger a renewed search for agency, this time within the workplace.

Chapter Four is the Sexual Revolution, that imposed "a liberal male-centric understanding of what a person is: a radically separate individual... [and imposed] the right of atomised individuals to exert absolute mastery over their bodies."

For women to be human on this model, we must have total ownership over all these aspects of our bodies that differ from those of males. Even a conflict between total autonomy and an unborn human life must be resolved for autonomy.

But, she says, "It’s a worldview that believes human freedom necessitates radical unmooring from the givens of our bodies."

So now what? Back to the Future.

What we need to face this challenge is not more freedom. It’s more and better obligations...

To respond, first and foremost we must stop treating the question of family as a women’s issue. It’s a human one. And we need to accept that men and women are equal in dignity and personhood but different in physiology. 

Well, yes. And also different in psychology. In that men are fighters and women are nurturers; that men must go out and provide while women are dealing with the disability of childbearing and the dependent years of children. And the need for children to grow up with a mother and a father, their mother and their father.

And so on.

Which means that all the conceits and the fantasies of the last century or so are heading for the wood-chipper. Item One would be that there is no such thing as "The Independent Woman" of Simone de Beauvoir. Or, for that matter the free-ranging male taking his pleasures where he may.

Because underneath all the sound and fury of patriarchs and freedom from unwanted pregnancy and oppressive sexual mores there is the simple fact of human existence. Like all living things, the only really important thing is to have children and grow them to maturity.

Everything else is just fantasy.

And, by the way, there are also the tens of millions of women who are not in the educated gentry class and whose lives have been wrecked by the fashions and the fads of gentry women and gentry men.

But that is another story.

"Nothing is Working. Or Is It?"

In a piece on the disaster we call the Biden administration, Will Alexander wonders it it's really the disaster it seems.

For instance, in the Del Rio bridge disaster with 12,000 Haitians under the border bridge, the result was that the Biden administration shipped nearly all of them into the US. So, from the left's point of view, it's working. Another 12,000 potential Democrat voters migrated into the US.

And the GOP governors sent a message to the president asking for a "open and constructive dialogue regarding border enforcement". Like that's going to work. As Alexander writes:

We’re now dealing with anti-American, Trump-hating, political psychopaths who want to use race, COVID, climate change, and chaos to outlaw political differences using arbitrary policies that look to fundamentally destroy America as we know it.

OK. So which is it? A total disaster of the incompetents? Or a cunning plot by "political psychopaths"?

I'd say both. 

First, the big government welfare state doesn't work. It Makes Things Worse. There's a good piece by Orthodox rabbi Dov Fischer about how the Democrats have wrecked blacks. All in the name of helping them. 

Second, when your glorious plan of paradise isn't working out, and instead is littered with disaster, you don't give up. Not the French Jacobins, not the Russkie Bolsheviks, not the Maoist cultural revolutionaries. That's what the whole notion of a Reign of Terror and Virtue is about. It cannot be that our glorious vision was a fantasy! The problems must be the work of "saboteurs and wreckers." We must double down and fight through to the final victory

That is a way to understand the US history of the last 50 years. It cannot be that the Great Society programs were a disaster visited on the poor. It cannot be that Keynesian economics caused the inflation of the 1970s. It cannot be that "supply-side" economics caused the revival of the 1980s. It cannot be that ordinary Americans revolted against HillaryCare. It cannot be that the Tea Party was an organic revolt against Obama's big government orgy. It cannot be that Trump represents an ordinary middle-class revolt against the conceits and the failures of educated-class big government. No: there is "systemic racism" every way you look.

What is needed is to double-down on more government, with pitiless ideological domination and elimination of "hate" speech. That should do it!

The lesson, of course, is that all Reigns of Terror and Great Purges eventually end, and normal life resumes, sort of. But the butcher's bill!

By the way, both Putin and Xi have been selling the glories of Russian civilization and Chinese civilization lately. What's that all about? Are they, like Trump, extolling the virtues of the Russian nation and the Chinese nation? Any mean tweets from the Kremlin or the Gate of Heavenly Peace lately?

Or are they just realists, understanding that any people wants a history, a narrative that extols its past, and experiences itself as the culmination of its story, its narrative of How We Got Here. You know, like when Trump did a speech right in front of the US presidents engraved into the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Actually, I think the decisive moment will occur when women give up on the Democratic message. See, the whole point of the welfare state is that it "protects" us. And "women expect to be protected."

But what happens when things fall apart and women discover that the folk that promised to protect them have, in fact, abandoned them to the wolves?

The answer, spelled out in A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous, is that they find new protectors. So the German women in May 1945 sought out Soviet officers to be their protectors. And many other German women became GI war brides. Of course they did.

When the women of America make this switch, there won't be trumpets and banners and glorious speeches. Things will suddenly change and nobody will really know why.

A trial run on this is the whole COVID vaccine thing. Right now American women all think that vaccination protects them and their loved ones. However, some women -- nurses -- close to the firing line seem to be telling us that vaccination is not what it is cracked up to be. I predict that some time in the next 12 months, American women will decide that the whole COVID response has not protected them. And so they will seek out new protectors.

Let's put it this way. President Trump campaigned in a manner that really appealed to men. Starting with his mental pugilistic antics at the 2016 Republican debates, he showed that he would "fight for you." But women hated his "mean tweets." They want to be told how our national leaders will protect us. There's a reason why Democrats tend to use memes like "our community" and "our democracy" that appeals to the woman's need for protection. But a lot of Americans hate their use of the racist-sexist-pejoratives. Did you know that "pejorative" comes from the Latin pejorare meaning "making things worse?"

One fine day, a Republican presidential candidate will discover how to appeal to the woman's need for protection.

Then, look out, Wokies.

Monoculture's Effect on Women

Over at National Review Carrie Gress writes about "Why Don’t We Tell Women What’s Making Them Miserable?" It's time to take a look at the mess of women's lives after feminism's "long march through American culture"as in:

Item: Women's mental health: "women are struggling: suicides, depression, substance abuse, and sexually transmitted infections have all increased dramatically over the last five decades."

Item: women at crisis-pregnancy centers live a life where they are "being trafficked, pimped, addicted, incarcerated, abused, and on and on."

Item: "Rarely is the suggestion made that women have been sold a poisonous lifestyle and the behaviors implied in that lifestyle are what actually need to be changed." For college freshmen "Heavy doses of gender exploration and safe-sex practices, and heaps of contraceptives, are all part of the welcome at most U.S. college campuses."

Hey, writes Gress, whatabout the basics:

Don’t sleep around, don’t do drugs, don’t have abortions, stop blaming the patriarchy, find a purpose outside of yourself, cover up some of that skin, don’t overspend, and figure out what is truly good, not just what celebrities say. 

But, of course, you are not allowed to say that. Thanks to feminism, "a carefully constructed closed system has been created so that anything outside its boundaries is almost unthinkable. "

But more-satisfying ways to live do exist, ways where dignity is honored, health is truly valued, body parts aren’t ignored or rendered useless, and relationships — which are at the true heart of most women — aren’t fleeting or shallow, useful or convenient, but deep, abiding, and life-giving. If only we could find a way to tell this to every woman.

Yes, well. But this amounts to a few flabby suggestions. How about something a little stronger.

Where do we start?

First, I think we need to recognize that feminism is an unjust system imposed on all women -- and men -- by ruling-class women. Feminism is a fantasy of life imagined by ruling-class Gentry women who have no right to impose their religion and culture on lower-class women, both ordinary Commoner women and lower-class Client women. See my disquisition on Three Layers, etc.

Let me amplify this: the feminist culture that has been forced on all women is one of the great crimes of the age. Personally, I don't think feminism works for ruling-class Gentry women, but if ruling-class women want to screw up their lives: hey, that's their business. But when they impose their culture on lower-class women, that is unjust; it is domination and hegemony, and it is wrong.

But, I think that even feminists get miserable when they practice feminism. Case in point is Ms. Feminist herself, Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex, in which she advertised the notion of the "independent woman." Never had kids with her beau Jean-Paul Sartre. But she hated that he cycled through each of his mistresses every week. And when they died, both the childless Sartre and childless Beauvoir had sorta "adopted" younger people to be their heirs. So, maybe they shoulda had kids together, instead of strutting around as liberated twerps.

And there is no such thing as the "independent woman." Why is that?

I capture this truth is my notion that starts with Sigmund Freud's question "What do women want?"

No Siggie, I say. It's not what women want, it's what they expect, and what women expect is:

Women expect to be protected.

The proof of this is that whores need pimps to protect them. Even though whores are "trafficked, pimped, addicted, incarcerated, abused, and on and on" by their pimps it is still better to have a pimp to keep all that stuff down to a dull roar.

Feminists to do not need pimps to protect them because they are upper-class Gentry and nobody would dare lay a hand on a Gentry woman. In other words, Gentry women expect to be protected and they are protected. Because privilege.

The next step in understanding the problem is my disquisition on Women in the Public Square. I say that women do not relate to the public square which is a male thing where you engage in verbal fisticuffs with the other guys, and which women Do Not Like, Not At All. Women do not do public verbal fisticuffs; they have a one-on-one chat with a woman friend and say: "I can't believe she said that." And determine never to talk to the third woman again. But you can't do that in the public square.

So Gentry women are trying to destroy the public square, with "safetyism" and the war on "microaggressions." What they are really saying is that they don't want nuttin' to do with the public square.

So, even for Gentry women, the public square doesn't work.

Never mind about Gentry women. Whatabout Commoner women? Guess how Commoner women get to be protected? Oh yeah: by marriage!

I would say that Commoner women are not interested in strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage of a public life like Gentry women. They just want marriage and family and children. That means that they would like a safe world where sex and marriage is bound by fairly strict rules, so that they can be courted by potential husbands instead of being subjected to "relationships." And they are naturally "chaste." Apart from anything else, there is a practical reason why honor for women is "chastity." You get too many sex partners and you are likely to get your reproductive system wrecked by STDs. But Commoner women don't get that protection in the world run by feminists.

I say that the feminist domination and hegemony of Commoner women is a crime. And upper-class Gentry women have No Idea about this.

Whatabout lower-class women, the Subordinates, the Clients? Let us start by reciting the words of Charles Murray in his Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. He writes that in the lower class of whites the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. I think it is fair to say that this is true for BIPOCs, only more so.

Do you see what is glaring out of the "the men don't work much and the women don't marry much?" It is telling us that unless you yoke lower-class men to the children they sire, by marriage, then they aren't going to work to support the wife and the children. Not much. And, of course, if the woman ain't gonna get a man to marry the mother of his children well, there's always welfare. George Gilder wrote Visible Man about this back in 1995.

I don't think that feminists are the sole guilty party here. The whole welfare state is to blame, liberals. It's another crime of the age, that lower-class women can't expect the fathers of their children to marry them.

Do you see what is precipitating out of this, so that women can get their mental health back together?

For upper-class Gentry women they need a male protector to keep them safe from mental distress in the public square.

For middle-class Commoner women they need rules to govern courting and marriage. So that they are protected.

For lower-class Client women they need a real simple societal rule. Men have to marry the mother of their children.

And then everyone would live happily ever after.

Because I am a kindly sort of chap, I say that we wouldn't jail the feminists that have wrecked the life of women. But we would take them down a peg or two.

Nancy Pelosi's Darkest Hour

I've been wondering about our Democratic friends for a while, really going back to the 2000 election when Al Gore didn't concede a normal change election. By that I mean that it's normal for the voters to think it is Time for a Change after one party has had two consecutive terms of the presidency.

The exceptions merely prove the rule, where Michael Dukakis, he of the tank photo, lost to George Bush I.

My point is: what is their problem? Of course the other guys are going to win elections, the bums, especially after we've been in office for a couple of terms. But wait until next time. We'll show 'em, the bums.

Obviously, in 2000, and again in 2016, our Democratic friends didn't approach losing a normal change election in this quintessential male way.

My feeling is that this is explained by a deep and existential understanding in our Democratic friends that something has gone wrong in the political universe. The stars are no longer moving in their accustomed courses.

I think they are getting more and more desperate to hang onto power. Because they feel it slipping away. They don't know why. They just know that Republicans and white oppressors are evil and that Gaia wants them dead.

So now we come to Our Nance: Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Speaker of the House of Representatives.

What's it all about Alfie Nancee? 

What's the deal with endless committee investigations of Donald Trump and two abortive impeachment efforts? What in the world do you think you are doing with these nukings of the political system, Madam Speaker?

Well, I have a few ideas, based partly on my eevil sexism, and my understanding of the difference between honor in men and women, after Honor: a History by James Bowman.

According to Bowman, honor among men is the reputation for courage, and I think it issues from the necessity for men to stick together in battle and not run for the exits.

But honor among women is the reputation for chastity, he says. You can see why. There are enormous advantages for a woman in not spreading her favors around, for any number of reasons. But I think this culture of chastity in women goes way beyond sex, and especially applies to the reluctance of women to admit when they are wrong.

Yeah, I know. Men hate to admit when they are wrong. But women are worse, in my opinion.

When women lose an argument, or are exposed as less than pure in heart, they tend to lie about it, and they tend to be vindictive towards their opponents.

Oh, sure, men do that too, but with men vindictiveness is considered "bad sportsmanship."

I have extended this into a whole philosophy, that women do not like, do not relate, and cannot thrive in the "public square." Because women do not communicate in a kind of public "open outcry" of a public meeting. They communicate one-on-one over coffee, and judge the world through "I can't believe she said/did that" of "Much as I hate to say it..."

Also, I think that women are very bad at revising their world view when it starts collapsing about them. This is because I believe that very few women have "strategic minds." They are good at the tactics of manipulating the family and the community of women in the neighborhood on a day-to-day basis. But, with some remarkable exceptions, women just don't get strategy.

So, to me, all this explains Our Nance to a tee. Nancy grew up in a Democratic world, scion of an Italian political family in Baltimore, Maryland. It just does not compute that America is now 50-50 and Democrats can't just take the white working class for granted like in the Good Old Days.

It explains all her shenanigans, especially now in the Trump era, when the white middle class (and increasingly the East Asian middle class) is rebelling against half a century of vindictive ruling-class anti-white racism. At a strategic level, I just don't think Nancy understands what to do. So she does what comes naturally to a woman, which is to say nasty things about the other women in the neighborhood and "stop talking" to the women that offend her.

Miranda Devine has some nice takes in the NYPost on this.

If anyone is to blame for the hyper-partisanship in Washington these days, it’s the spiteful House speaker.

Everyone in Congress — and, by extension, the nation — has been sullied by the spite and vitriol she has injected into the political sphere. There is no grace or Christian charity, just the barren wasteland of the zero-sum game, power for power’s sake. 

Of course, the January 6 committee is at the center of this, and the unassailable fact is that Nancy Pelosi is the boss of Congress, and she "commands" the Capitol Hill police. So, if there weren't enough police on hand to defend the Capitol, Nancy is to blame. Period, end of story, no need for a commission.

Guess what: the one person that should not be running the January 6 investigation is Nancy Pelosi!

Now, the point is that the most difficult thing for a politician to do is to admit blame and, I would say, particularly so for a woman politician for the reasons articulated above in respect of honor in women.

There is a strategic reason why it is a good thing to admit when you are wrong. It clears the decks. It lets you get on with life. It lets you say: wow, we screwed that up, so let's make sure we don't do it again.

But if you don't admit when you are wrong you are trapped using all your energy to twist the facts around to absolve yourself of guilt and blame other people when you should be figuring out how to avoid the same mistake in the future.

So really, for me as a racist-sexist-homophobe, it is a Good Thing that Nancy Pelosi is tying herself in knots with her spitefulness and vindictiveness. It means that she will lead the Democrats into the wilderness, and let the rest of us figure out how to avoid the stupid Nancy Pelosi mistakes in the future.

One thing I, as a profound racist, wonder about is what happens when the current White-as-Snow Democratic leaders retire and are replaced by the quota People of Color and Gender. Just between you and me, I don't think the next generation of Democrats are up to snuff. Can you spell K-A-M-A-L-A?

Cosby Out of Jail

OK, so Bill Cosby finally got his get-out-of-jail-card. On a technicality. And now he is a free man again. And yes, if you want a non-feminist take on all this, Ilana Mercer is your gal.

I must say that the Cosby-Weinstein thing has been educational for me. It illustrates the problem of a high-status male that had never occurred to me, as a not-particularly high-status male. 

Obviously, when you are a high-status male, women are always "presenting" themselves to you, because hypergamy. But you really don't have time to wine and dine and court them and even have an "affair," as they called it in Swing Era songs. So what do you do?

If you are Harvey Weinstein to take 'em out for champagne and caviar and then take them up to the office where you expose yourself and jerk off. Before returning to the restaurant with the girl rather the worse for wear.

If you are Bill Cosby and the university bureaucrat you -- time after time -- make sexual advances and she puts up with it. Because? Because she likes that he's interested in her? That he might help her in her career? That he might one day actually love her? Actually marry her? Or that she is just instinctively practicing hypergamy and really doesn't have a clue?

And if you are one of these high-status males, why not? Only, you don't want all the bother of treating her like a love object rather than a sex object. Because there are only 24 hours in a day.

A while back, I said it made me understand the rules in a Trollope novel.

[W]omen were protected from male aggression back then by simple rules about when a woman might be alone with a man that is not her father, her husband, or her fiancé. The rule was: never!

Why? Because the natural instinct in women is to "present" themselves to eligible men in pretty clothes and alluring make-up and nicely turned curves. I don't think that women really understand that all these things are automatically picked up by male "target acquisition radar" and turn on the "pursuit" instinct. They do it because it is programmed into their unconscious. I assume that goes also for the millions of women today that walk around in "leggings" that mold and present their butts and their thighs to the male gaze. Some of them wear pink leggings!

And, I think, the natural instinct in women is to submit to sexual aggression. I mean, whaddya do after the Vikings storm your village and kill all the men and herd the women together so the warriors can look them over and take their pick in strict warrior hierarchy order?

So I say that, sooner or later, we will have to return to the Trollope rule, where a young woman is never alone with a man unless he is her father, her husband, or her fiancé.

Mind you, I don't defend Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein. You play with fire, pal, and you gonna get burned.

Because women never forget.

The Gender Gap in Free Speech

A piece in Psychology Today has recently reported that men are more pro-free-speech than women (from Steve Sailer).

In a 2019 study, 59% of women said protecting free speech was less important than promoting an inclusive society, while 71% of men felt opposite.

But young men have the same attitude as adult women. And a study of online speech found that "women are more censorious than men."

Which all fits in with my "women in the public square" notion that women do not like the open-outcry culture of the public square, because open outcry is a guy thing. The culture of the community of women is one that creates an organic, subconscious pressure towards outward conformity and being outwardly "nice." It is appropriate for domestic society and neighborhoods, where the needs are for people to get on with each other, help each other, and keep the kids alive.

There is, in my view, a need in domestic society to avoid innovation and conflict, because the whole point is to have babies and keep the kids alive.

Or, to argue from the opposite position, in the marketplace the majority of innovations and creative endeavors end in failure. Which is fine in the marketplace as we have seen over the past 200 years of the Great Enrichment.

But, of course, innovation in making babies and raising children is personal. It is no good for me to make innovative changes in raising my children or growing my food, knowing that in the aggregate the innovations will result in a better, more prosperous society. Because if innovation hurts my kid, then that is final.

So that explains why women are more risk-averse than men, why women are more likely to be censorious cancelers in corporate world, why women are less likely to be involved in corporate startups.

It explains why women are more pro-mask in the current COVID dispensation, and more likely to follow the advice of experts. Women are coded for these things.

Whereas men are coded to take stupid risks, because "men are expendable."

My prediction is still that women are going to retreat from the public square and occupy positions and occupations with less risk and that reward conformity. That probably means that they will occupy most of the positions in government and corporate bureaucracy, because those positions are coded for following the established procedure and not deviating from approved norms.

But young men have a problem. If, as the "experts agree," young men are low on free speech approval, it means that they are ill-equipped for male adult life. For one thing, women are better coded for "go along to get along" lives and occupations, so if men choose low-risk occupations they are likely to find themselves outperformed and out-judged by the women around them.

It is interesting to note from another piece, that East Germany was perhaps the most censorious society in history.

If someone looked like he might challenge the Communist Party’s legitimacy or control, the Stasi systematically destroyed his life. They used blackmail, social shame, threats, and torture. Careers, reputations, relationships, and lives were exploded to destabilize and delegitimize a critic. 

The trouble is that this sort of top-down ideological control, while benefiting the ruling class in the short term, does enormous damage to the body politic -- including the ruling class -- in the long term. 

If there is one thing we should have learned from the history of the West in the last several hundred years it is that today's rebel is tomorrow's CEO, and that a healthy society permits a vigorous circulation among the elite -- the political elite, the cultural elite, the economic elite.

But that is exactly what women have seldom done, and the current political and cultural elite are trying to prevent. Because they are the good guys, the virtuous guys, and people that don't agree with them are evil and ought to be suppressed.

There is no doubt it will all end in tears, because life, the universe, and everything is a constant renewal that is achieved by the death of the old. The truth of the women's culture of conformity is that you need to keep things on hold to get the kids out of the nest. The truth of the men's culture of competition is that you need to innovate so the next generation will have a world to live in.

How do you balance the two? I have no idea, except to honor women's need for a quiet place and men's need to shake things up.

The Question of Men, Women, Stress, Hierarchy, Complaint and Conformity

Responding to my piece on "Yes, Young Liberal Women Have Mental Health Issues, But..." regular reader Sara reminds my that my notion of the women's Culture of Complaint was corrected a while back by a woman red.hibiscus who wrote:

I don’t agree that woman have a Culture of Complaint. That is what men perceive, not what women experience... The actual culture is a Culture of Conformity. Negative tools are shame, guilt, threat of expulsion. The civilized version is rule of community ties and on-the-ground social ties, eg family.

Perfectly correct. Actually I would say that, in a perfect world, men have a Culture of Courage. After a couple of drinks it descends into a Culture of Insult. In a perfect world, women have a Culture of Conformity. After a couple of disagreements, it descends into a Culture of Complaint. Ying and Yang, and all that.

The piece on Liberal Women got into the question of "stress" which I think is a Girl Thing. I also think that "mental health issues" has a lot to do with women experiencing conflict in the man-designed public square. Conflict is part of the game for men, but intolerable for women.

In view of all this, Sara writes, we need to remember

1) The idea that open confrontation (instead of gossip) is anti-female culture 

2) The idea that stress AKA conflict is intolerable to women and they won't stand for it. 

Men live in a dominance hierarchy, Sara writes, and "see their survival in the world around them as a fight to be on top of the pyramid." But

Women however, because of the nature of their female bodies, necessarily see their own survival in the world around them as a fight to be left alone and survive in an EXISTING CONTEXT set by men.

Actually, I would refine this to say that most men most of the time know their place in the dominance hierarchy, and only occasionally attempt to change it in a fight, a point made by Jordan B. Peterson in his lobster hierarchy argument.

I suppose the same applies to women, wanting to be left alone to run their households and raise children in the context created by marriage, and only occasionally being challenged by the gossip of the women's Culture of Complaint -- which is, no doubt, concerned about the woman in question appearing to violate the Culture of Conformity.

To get all Hegelian we would say that the male Culture of Courage has its negation in the Culture of Insult, while the female Culture of Conformity has its negation in the Culture of Complaint.

I would say that, despite the male hierarchy, there is among men a curious counter-current of equality. When men greet each other with an insult they are expressing that notion: "hey, pal, you are no better than I am." And, for instance, when I had my interview with billionaire Steve Ballmer I was careful to treat him as an equal, and behave as though I expected to be treated as an equal.

And I think that in the women's Culture of Conformity that asserts an equality among women there is a hidden hierarchy that every woman knows but nobody talks about. The Culture of Complaint is all about adjusting that hidden hierarchy.

Also, another woman corrected me on the Culture of Complaint saying that the ideal among women is Kindness. (This explains the last line on the virtue-signaling #WeBelieve yard sign that insists "Kindness is Everything").

I suspect that the Culture of Conformity and the Culture of Kindness are different aspects of the same thing.

Don't ask me how all this aligns with the left's insistence that everything is a social construction, except when it isn't.

"I Will Make You Safe"

Here's how to get elected president in 2024. Tell the women of America: "I will make you safe."

Because by 2024, what with the gathering chaos of Biden-world, women won't be so worried about Trump's rudeness. No indeedy. They will be wanting a Strong Man that will stop the madness and Make Them Safe.

Normally, as I say, Women Expect to be Protected. In normal times, when it really seems that they are being protected, it is natural for women to look askance upon aggressive men that like to duke it out in the public square. It seems like the rude men are making them unsafe.

I disagree with that, but I get it. What Women Want is to get on with their womanly tasks of keeping the kids alive and protecting their reputation as chaste women in the community of women. Aggressive men don't fit into that world.

They are wrong of course. What they should be doing, in normal times, is encouraging men in their manly sports, to keep them up to the mark. Most manly pursuits, from hunting to sports to politics, are relatively harmless. Indeed, they are genius, by deflecting men's natural propensity to quarrel into safe channels.

But when chaos looms, then women stop expecting men to cool their jets; then they start expecting men to sacrifice themselves and protect them, the women.

Now, my guess is that the current Democrat policy circus, from chaos at the border to chaos in the cities, to loot and plunder for the educated Snobs and the helpless victim Scum, is going to make women really afraid, perhaps even including the virtue-signalling women of the #WeBelieve brigade and the "Hate Has No Home Hare" huffers. 

Because what our Democratic friends are forgetting, as they go pedal-to-the-metal on every lefty activist notion imaginable, is that all their activism makes ordinary middle-class Schmucks less safe and less secure and less prosperous.

As I read the Strauss and Howe Fourth Turning I realize that the Big Thing that sparks their "Crisis" is the accumulated injustice of the current ruling-class regime. This is not to damn our liberal ruling-class friends in particular. It is just in the nature of the beast that every ruling class favors and feeds its own supporters and neglects the rest of the community.

Let me just boil it down to one chart from usgovernmentspending.com:

Do you see how, over the last century, government spending steadily increased as a percent of GDP up until about 1980. When, shall we say, it had gone about as far as it could go? And by the way, when ordinary American workers stopped participating in the increase in wealth and income?

Think of all that government spending as loot and plunder that the ruling class takes out of the hide of ordinary people and puts in the hands of its supporters. And I mean everyone from Social Security recipients like me to unionized teachers in the public schools to college professors to grant-wielding scientists to all kinds of people getting government contracts and subsidies, etc.

The more money that government takes out of the hide of ordinary people making their ordinary living, the more that it creates victims of injustice, people who cannot make a decent life for themselves because of the rip tides in the economy created by the government playing favorites.

Now Strauss and Howe gin up a cutesy Jungian theory of the circulation of archetypes, Prophets, Nomads, Heroes, Artists to explain the political cycle. I think it is a cutesy way of covering the nakedness of the truth with a decent drapery, to drag in Edmund Burke. Because, after all, Strauss and Howe are educated class Snobs, and they know that the educated class can only take a little twinch of truth at a time. We get to their "Crisis" when the current ruling class is running out of ways to hide the naked injustice of their rule -- and pretty well all ruling classes are unjust, because "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice."

Hey, we are all human, and we all like a bit of free stuff. But it leads in the end to a situation where a ruling class is trying to cut corners -- like ours right now -- because the sums don't add up. So the ruling class launches its BLMs and Antifas into the streets, and demonizes the opposition as an "armed insurrection" and pretty soon women start looking for a Savior to Make Them Safe.

To Be Continued. As they say.

Yes, Young Liberal Women Have Mental Health Issues. But...

All of us racist sexist homophobes are having a grand old time with the latest news -- reported by Instapundit -- that "Over 50% Of Liberal, White Women Under 30 Have A Mental Health Issue." Akshully the article's text puts it slightly differently, and in the interests of truth, justice, and the American Way, the result comes from people answering a poll, whose question was:

"Has a doctor or other health care provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?"

So, 56.3% of liberal white women aged 18-29 answered "yes" and 33.6% of liberal white men answered "yes." For white conservatives the numbers are 27.3% and 16.3%. The numbers go down as whites get older.

But do you see a rather important point? It is not "woman have mental health issues" but women reporting that a doctor told them they had a problem.

I think that we should take all this with a grain of salt. First of all, mental health treatment is what we might call a "cure of the soul," a job that was performed in the old days by priests and ministers. You would expect that secular people like liberals would seek "cure of the soul" from a mental health professional rather than a minister. Second is that no doctor or other heath professional would tell someone that they have a mental health problem unless their patient "signaled" to them that they would accept such a recommendation. I find, on the rare cases that I interact with the health care system, that the medical practitioner in question is keenly interested in knowing what you want to hear.

The other thing is the "women in the public square" issue that I keep an eye on. It comes from German sociologist Georg Simmel who wrote, over a century ago, that women were coming into the public square, due to various trends, and that we could expect that they would change the public square "to suit a more feminine sensibility."

I say that women do not like the male-created public square, which is a domesticated version of male fisticuffs. Women don't confront each other; they just don't.

Women also, you may have noticed, find "stress" to be a problem. For men, the whole point of "stress" is whether you are man enough to deal with it.

So I would say that educated women today have embarked on a life that is not well adapted to "a feminine sensibility." And I mean everything from consecutive "sexual relationships" to living together before marriage to abortion to combining career and family to divorce to managing finances. In my view, all of these aspects of a modern woman's life are experienced as "stressful" and an unjust imposition.

As I say, "women expect to be protected." What does that mean? It means that no woman can successfully run a household and raise kids and keep everyone healthy -- in other words create the next generation -- unless she is protected from the physical vicissitudes of life. And I say this not in a patronizing way, but as a definition of reality.

And when Simmel talks about adapting the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility" I interpret that as everything that women are trying to do in the public square from "safetyism" to "microaggressions" to sanctioning students in college that raise controversial questions.

This, in my view, goes right back to hunter-gatherers. If a male hunter-gatherer gets into a row with his band-mates, do you know what he does? He quits the band and joins another.

What! And you thought that tribes were tribes and ne'er the twain shall meet! Wrong! Tribes were invented later.

But here is what I read into that. If you are a woman in a hunter-gatherer band and you don't get on with the other women, then you will literally descend into hell. The other women will shun you and name and shame you and your life will be a perfect hell. And leaving the band for another was not an option, I suspect.

The whole culture of women not confronting each other, but complaining about each other behind their backs in conversations about "I can't believe she said that" is  all about the situation of women since time immemorial: that they have to make their life within the community that they were born into or were married into. It means that women have to get along with the other women.

To expect women to suddenly adapt to a more male culture of open outcry and verbal fisticuffs is essentially demanding that they drop the culture that human females have practiced since time immemorial.

And most women will find the "stress" of that to be intolerable. And blame the patriarchy. And encourage their doctor to recommend that they seek care from a mental health professional.

Oh You Brits: How Could You!

In this Cancel Culture age it is rare to see a good old-fashioned insult piece. But UnHerd.com is up to the challenge with "Why we French love to hate the English" by Frenchie Anne-Elisabeth Moutet. 

Now, for the first time in my life, I understand why the French talk about "perfidious Albion." Read this catalog of English crimes:

It starts with use of unregulated longbows at Agincourt.

I agree! There oughta be a law! Then there is

burning Joan of Arc at the stake.

OK, so that was nasty. We moderns would never do that to Greta Thunberg. But here is something I didn't know:

Pitt’s flooding fake assignats to devalue French paper money during the Revolution (typical of the perfidiousness of Albion in all things financial[).]

I had thought all the French financial messes down the ages were all home grown. And this:

“Les Anglais conspired to break the Peace of Amiens in 1803, led the entire continent into war, and managed to pin it all on Napoleon!” one friend raged.

Wow! I had no idea!

Had enough?

And on to St. Helena, to Kitchener’s stand-off against Marchand at Fashoda in the Sudan in 1898, and of course to the sinking of a good chunk of the French Navy at Mers-el-Kébir on 3 July 1940 by the Royal Navy, rather than risking it fighting on for Vichy.

Well. Now I understand the French. They gotta right to be outraged.

And that is nothing compared to the insult to Queen Isabella, daughter of the king of France, wife of England's Edward II. Insulted by Edward's gay relationships she was forced to go home to Daddy in Paris, shack up with Roger Mortimer, and return to Britland at the head of an army and depose her husband.

Hey, you Rosbifs, don't even think about shaming our fine French princesses!

Only now, of course, the French don't have any princesses any more. What a shame!

Seriously though, I think that the good old male tradition of the insult, best practiced after a few at the local pub or tavern, is a vital part of human evolution. To be able to give and take a good honest insult is part of what it takes to be a man.

It is gratifying to see a rough, tough Frenchwoman showing that she can give it out like the best. My view is that if women really want to participate in the Public Square they need to understand and master the art of the insult -- instead of being perpetually insulted in the popular refrain of "I can't believe she said that."

And don't get me started on "safetyism."

The Intersection of Innocence, Victims, Chastity, and Complaint

Yesterday I had a brainwave while categorizing a bunch of blog posts into my Culture of Innocence category.

I said to myself: but aren't helpless victims and innocent virgins and Little Darlings and women resisting the public square with their "safetyism" all the same?

They are all humans in the pre-responsibility culture. They are Adam and Eve before that nasty serpent in the Garden of Eden tempted the innocent Eve into tasting the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.

So let's rehearse all this:

Three Peoples: The People of the Subordinate Self are people that attach themselves to a lord -- a feudal lord or a political boss -- and they are saying, thanks very much but responsibility is not for me. Of course, the Subordinate has no problem complaining if his loving lord goofs up and fails to protect him.

Little Darlings: If you are a Little Darling of the ruling class, given loot and plunder in return for your vote, you are like the rich man's mistress. One fine day, when your prettiness is not quite what it was, your Sugar Daddy will dump you for a newer model. In politics this is the fate of the white working class. I say that it will also be the fate of the feminists as the ruling class favors transgenders over whiny women. And blacks too as the ruling class pivots to illegal immigrants.

Women in the Public Square: I maintain that women don't want to be responsible people in the public square. That is what #MeToo and "safetyism" is about. Women expect to be protected, and rightly so. But that means that women are never going to accept the proposition of the public square, that you take the good with the bad, the ups with the downs. The very difference between the male Culture of Courage and the female Culture of Chastity that issues from the different conceptions of honor experienced by each sex mandates this. Women are not into courage. Their job is to stay alive and keep the kids alive. That does not include dying in a Forlorn Hope after King Henry V bellows "once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more."

Culture of Innocence: I maintain that it is the natural and physical imperative for small minorities to develop a culture of innocence. Small minorities always feel embattled and vulnerable. They never know when they will need to join together as one to defend themselves from the cold cruel world outside. To maintain the necessary unity the small minority has to develop a culture of innocence, that all the world is against us and the only way we can survive is if we all hang together. And when did we do anything to deserve this? Obviously in our own time this Culture of Innocence is most obvious in Jews and Blacks. But I believe that all ethnic immigrants to the United States have gone through this stage. We will probably see it grab hold of the white commoners in the next few years as the implacable acts of the educated elite make life more precarious for them.

 Notice that this Culture of Innocence is mandatory for anyone fighting a war. The leader must unite the country to fight the war if he is to have a hope of winning and he always does this by representing the enemy as a guilty monster and we the people as innocents. If the leader fails to unite his people in this declaration of innocence then he will fail to mobilize the necessary will to win. In fact, if you are the anti-war party you will always try to insist that, hey, we aren't so great. Whatabout such and such... Our liberal friends did a bang-up job on this front during the Vietnam War and also in the the Iraq War after a decent interval to mourn the dead of the 9/11 attacks.

I say that the beginning of wisdom is to get beyond the Culture of Innocence. And that is the meaning of the Garden of Eden story. Once Eve had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge she was no longer an innocent, and Adam and Eve had to leave the pre-conscious Paradise and "eat the herb of the field" and "eat bread." Sounds like the Dawn of Agriculture.

Then there is the human guilt from putting Christ on the Cross. Admitting guilt and getting beyond the Culture of Innocence is the beginning of responsibility, admitting that you are not perfect, and that, here and there, you may have done things of which you are ashamed, and for which you are sorry.

Notice that our liberal friends have a peculiar version of this with their BLM signs and their #WeBelieve yardsigns and their "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative. They are saying "we are the good guys" because we help oppressed peoples and the other guys are the haters. There is not a whisper of doubt, that we think that, on the margin, we are doing the right thing, but you never know. No. We activists are the good guys, and don't you forget it.

To live successfully in the city you have to get rid of all this innocence. You have to accept personal responsibility for your life and surrender to the will of the market. If something goes wrong you pick yourself up and get back in the game. There is a big upside to this: you get to be a happy camper. You ditch the Culture of Complaint for the Culture of Courage and Responsibility. Even if it's not always your fault.