Moral Lepers

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

So, yesterday I had a comment I had to think about before I approved.

I always think about approving new commenters before bed, because this gives them free rein to scat all over the threads before I wake and usually before the Huns are active and neutralizing. So this comment made me hesitate.

First there was the name. The name was Ele. Now that means “he” in Portuguese. It could also arguably be a diminutive of something like Giselle. OTOH it’s also a misspelling of Elle – French for “She” which is the sort of commenter name feminists with glitter in the hoo ha tend to saddle themselves with.

Then there was the comment. Not only were there internal alarm bells in the comment itself (I’ll explain) but the comment itself was living proof that the commenter had either not read or not understood the post AT ALL.

The comment is this:

I’m sure this will get lost – but Hoyt, did you look at the site you linked to? The vast majority of it is misogynistic ramblings, including the idea that all women are bitches unless they find a man attractive (because that’s the only thing that makes a woman behave). He said that.

I’ve always respected you, but look at your sources. While the article itself is not objectionable, linking people to a site that clearly espouses hatred of women is not a good idea. Don’t give him a platform – and don’t give liberals ammunition.

The internal alarm bells are as follows “Hoyt” – no one who reads this site for any amount of time, no matter how silent, calls me “Hoyt” particularly in an appellative sort of way “Hoyt” betrays that they were sent here and have seen no more than the header, not even bothering to look at the books for sale on the side.

So, that “Hoyt” effectively contradicts “I’ve always respected” – because this person doesn’t even know what my first name is.

This is enforced by “respected” – look, “respect” is almost exclusively a liberal word. Usually used in the sense of “respect the office” or “respect me because I have this credential.” When speaking to a blogger or a writer, a conservative/libertarian is more likely to use “I’ve always admired” you.

The only thing that decided me to let the comment to was “And don’t give liberals ammunition” which is typical of young, scared and possibly in the political closet conservatives and libertarians. (Later, they grow a spine and they start being able to walk upright, but that’s something else.) Also, that the comment was all in all fairly innocuous. Not wholly innocuous. It might very well have been planted with the intent of having me defend that site, and therefore having me further tainted by association. Since I hadn’t read the site and didn’t have time to answer in full, that wasn’t a problem.

Well, this morning it’s tilted slightly more towards the “obnoxious SJW (sodden social jejnue justice whiner warrior) infiltration” on this comment, because a) this person judging by her email writes like one (this is not conclusive. People try to pass in various ways) b) there has been no other comment, no plea to me to be careful, nothing.

If that’s the case, she should hold onto her hat. And if she is a young but daft conservative/libertarian in the closet, she should hold on to her hat.

In the first case because “I ain’t afraid anymore” (there is a Portuguese joke, told after the revolution, not incredibly funny to anyone who didn’t live through it, about a guy who orders a brandy and a coffee and refuses to pay because “I ain’t afraid anymore” – that’s sort of what I feel like.) In the second case because, oh, honey, you need to learn reading comprehension.

For those concerned about the link and how the man at the site is a misogynist who “hates women”. I still haven’t read the other posts on that site, but I can see the header. He’s one of the proponents of “Game”. For those of you who aren’t acquainted with this facet of the manosphere “ Game” is what pickup artists call what they employ to… well, pick up women.

While in general I disagree with pick up artists as much as I disagree with feminists and for the same reason (because they make an entire half of the human race into widgets, definable only by what is between their legs) I cut them more slack then I cut feminists. I do this for two reasons:

First – There is a world of difference between reading a blog that tries to counter female oppression in, say, Saudi Arabia, and one that tries to counter female oppression in the US. The first might go a bit far in objectifying men or thinking all men are evil without my thinking the person is a loon. In the second, unless the person is devoted to working against white slavery or works at an abused women shelter – PFUI. So, I cut more slack to men who in the US are effectively second class citizens when they go a little far in their own defense, than I cut women living in what is now an effective matriarchy when they blame all their issues on “patriarchy.” (I’m not saying that some women, in the US, due to situation, character, etc. aren’t oppressed, only that the average SJW truly isn’t and uses it as an excuse. And that I cut no slack.)

Second – They are in touch with reality. Yes, they are in fact wrong in the idea every woman can be manipulated in the exact same way. I fell in love with my husband after what would be considered “friendzoning” and by his doing EVERYTHING wrong according to “the game.” However, if your goal is to attract a certain type of woman for a certain type of affair they are in fact right. And they’re right on the very fundamental fact that men and women are different. (Now if they got that women are also different from each other, they’d be even saner.)

IOW the man on the site, unless it’s a very odd representative of The Game is not advocating killing women, or keeping them in a burqa, or taking away their right to conduct commerce. He’s instructing men on how to seduce them. He might hate women (I doubt it. Why in heck would you devote yourself to pursue them?) but if that’s your definition of “Misogyny” you really don’t know anything about how women are treated the world over.

I sort of figured it wasn’t anything as bad as the white supremacist site that shall not be named, because they have scouts who come and infest a site for months because it’s rational. (The white supremacist site is not. And it’s a pity I can’t link to it, because among other things their interpretation of Portuguese history is a hoot. For instance, based on pictures of Portuguese kings in the NINETEENTH century they think all Portuguese used to look like Germans. In fact, the Portuguese kings were related to Queen Victoria, of course, but that had nothing to do with the population. Henry the Navigator, who was arguably the royal with the most Portuguese blood preserved in painting, looked like… a Portuguese man. [His father was, arguably, of Jewish ascent since his mother was a commoner of converso background. He was an illegitimate son.]) Such sites tend to be very silly, even for just one post.

Okay, that’s now disposed of. Now we can move to the important part:

That comment betrays a total lack of understanding of the post.

The whole point of the post was to show that the right (and my fellow libertarians should forgive me. I know that we are just short of the sans culottes in the French revolution with the same lack of reverence for “our betters” but lacking that fascination with equalite, except before the law, and therefore it hurts to lump us in with socons and with people who, in Europe, defended kings. The thing is in the US we are on the right. Possibly the most right of all, since we cling to the “old form” of our founding documents. So, bear with me) reads and evaluates ideas and artwork in themselves, while the SJWs rely on a version of “unclean.”

To put this another way: I liked that article because, with a minor quibble, I thought it described very well what has been happening in literature and gaming. I didn’t even bother looking at the other posts on the site (or the header) because that POST made perfect sense and described the situation in words I didn’t have to write, which then provided the background to my post about why the left is intellectually sterile.

The left, though, can’t apply logic to its beliefs, because if it did they’d crumble at the touch (no? really? Answer me quickly: which one is more UNJUSTLY oppressed? A black woman raised in the lap of luxury by college-professor parents or a white man in the Appalachia raised by a druggie single mother? Which one deserves your help more? If you said the woman, you just proved you internalized your Marxist training perfectly, but you can’t think. If you said “the man” you just proved you are trying to game me. The actual answer is “It depends on the content of their characters.” That’s the ONLY sane, rational answer for a non-racist human in a free society.)

So instead, they rely on a system of “cleanliness.”

Having defined some thoughts as unclean — those that disapprove of any women for any reason whatsoever, or which fail to believe men and women are exactly alike (we’re not. Vive la difference), those that say the poor might have done something to bring their plight on themselves, those that approve of any republican, ever, those that intimate that the person might vote for anyone but a democrat/socialist/communist, those that disapprove of communism and all its works and all its empty promises – they then go around trying to avoid the contagion of those thoughts.

To that end, their fellow SJWs help, by acting like lepers in the middle ages, tolling their little bell and shouting “unclean, unclean” every time a blog or book betrays one of the germs of these forbidden ideas.

They have to, you see. Like lepers in the middle ages they have no clue how the contagion occurs, they just know that exposed people often become that which the SJWs disapprove of. (I.e. ANY rational thought can crumble their perfect pseudo-religion.)

Under that heading, I am already unclean. I’ve admitted that I will vote against democrats in every possible election if for no other reason because the press refuses to report democrat malfeasance which both covers up and enables corruption of democrats in power.

Their system, because irrational, and because they are so loud, has been intimidating and maiming the right for decades.

You see, no one wants to become a target of their screams and pointing because, well, who the heck wants to be called a nazi because they disapprove of gynocracy in Science Fiction or of giving awards to people because they, in the ultimate analysis, have a vagina and/or an interesting genetic background?

When I was a kid, every Sunday we visited the slum where mom grew up. (Yes, I hated it, why?) On the way to my grandparents’ three room (rented) house, we passed this … magnificent ruin. If I had to guess, it was probably once a manorial house, now many centuries abandoned/in disrepair. (Though it might be older than that. Like its equivalent in the village, it was called “ilha” a direct translation from the Roman Insula.) It had many floors and countless rooms, out of which boiled a multitude of half-dressed, ragged, dirty children, who would swarm around you, hitting and kicking, and trying to steal stuff from your purse.

The SJWs are sort of like that, when they find a target, and no one wants to deal with the swarm of dirty, ragged and intellectually half-dressed children.

Even when you have the courage of your convictions and can defend your ideas rationally, it’s a pain. I mean, my family at the time was probably poorer than most of those kids in the slum (most of them belonged to prestigious beggar leagues. The league is very wealthy and its headmen very powerful) but this didn’t save me from being hit and sometimes having my hair ribbons (mom insisted!) stolen.

In the same way, you might be the nicest man who ever lived and have devoted your entire life to looking after women in shelters, but if you don’t follow the SJW line, they’ll call you a misogynist and a woman hater.

Most people find it not worth the trouble and are afraid of the character association.

This, in the end means that right wing politicians get attacked for reasons that don’t even make any sense. Like, for instance, Romney getting accused of something relating to women and binders, because he asked for the resumes of women who had been held back (he thought, at least) due to their gender and for giving them due advancement. That accusation never even made any sense. Not even out of context. But it was all “Women, binders” and no one, NO ONE in a public position defended the man. So all the woman (and man) on the street retained was “women/binders/war on women.”

Much worse than that, Palin got accused of being stupid and it stuck to her because of jokes by SNL and because the left speciously cut her interviews. This despite the fact she rose to prominence all on her own.

But the right is supposed to be “stupid” and so the left beat that drum. She was on the right and therefore self-obviously stupid, just like the president is supposedly the most brilliant man who ever lived, but we don’t get to see IQ tests or grades. (I’ll show him mine, if he shows me his. No? Yeah. I know.)

This is particularly effective against the right, because most of us came to our positions on our own, and therefore it’s not a unified position. I.e. there are many disagreements even among ourselves. Some of the most heated arguments I’ve ever had were with other libertarian and libertarianish people.

So, when you say “Well, this person believes in x” and it’s against my beliefs, it’s easier to scare me off. Theoretically.

The left, showing its shallowness and lack of morals, chooses to defend people guilty of real, heinous crimes. They make martyrs of people who robbed convenience stores and attacked cops. They enshrine politicians who grow rich at the public expense while talking about the plight of the poor. They embraced racists, and gave them long lives in the democratic party. And they embrace feminists no matter how horrible their blogs or stories are, including those that advocate the elimination of all males or stories (MANY. Do your homework) that imply all men are evil because penis.

This is because they have no principles and no ideas. So the “Democrat” or “communist” or “socialist” label makes someone’s thoughts “safe” even when despicable. (And the fact that communist and socialist are “safe” labels tells you how much they will swallow, because those two regimes always end in blood, faster or slower, overt or covert.)

So by allowing them to Mao Mao the right into splintering and isolating, we’re allowing the truly bad, truly disgusting, truly immiserating ideas to prevail. We’re allowing innocents to think that the SJWs have some sort of moral high ground. We’re allowing the destruction of civilization.

In the name of avoiding the kicking and shoving, the grasping by the filthy hands of the ideologically dirty and morally diseased progeny of Marx.

Except some of us ain’t afraid anymore.

The fact we don’t vote for them is enough to bring the bell and the pointing finger and the shouts of unclean. After a while they form sort of a pleasant buzz as you go about your business. And hey, if they hang around to shout sooner or later they’ll read something that will make them think. Well, it’s possible.

I ain’t afraid anymore.

In the end, we win, they lose.

Be not afraid.

WELCOME INSTAPUNDIT READERS – And as always thank you to Glenn Reynolds for the link!

921 thoughts on “Moral Lepers”

    1. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest mother****er in the valley…

      In this case, I can guarantee that because a) I own the valley and b) I have range cards on all the windows.

      1. Sigh. Now I feel the need to go peruse Skippy’s List, for old time’s sake.

        The 213 things Skippy is no longer allowed to do in the U.S. Army:
        143. I do not need to keep a “range card” by my window.

        http://skippyslist.com/list/

  2. Be Just and Fear Not! (Sorry, it’s Halloween.)

    I have never really understood guilt by association. Just because one might share AN opinion with someone who might otherwise be just repulsive doesn’t make one repulsive. If so, all vegetarians are Hitler.

    1. It makes perfect sense if you can’t think for yourself and use opinions as signaling of social position. Getting ideas from the wrong “shelf” is like wearing last year’s fashions. ZOMG, so awkward!

      1. *looks in closet* That explains so much. (Although, by now, most of my closet is back to “vintage” from “totally out of date OMG you’re still wearing THAT!?!”)

      2. And if the “fashion” changes, they’ll follow it. Look at how the Paris literary leftists of the 1930’s behaved during the German Occupation. They became good little Nazis, and afterward didn’t even apologize for it.

          1. Mind you, I’m not saying that the position of someone trapped in Nazi-occupied Paris was easy — one’s options amounted to attempting a risky escape through neutral countries, attempting an almost-suicidal resistance against the occupiers, or at least surface conformity. But as you point out, these were people who claimed moral superiority, and there were numerous people who chose to flee or fight, rather than conform. And some of the self-proclaimed morally-superior actively collaborated.

            1. Cf. that consummate weasel Sartre, who sucked up to the Germans efficiently enough that his plays were performed in occupied Paris with an official licence from the occupying forces. Of course, none of the bien-pensants ever called him on that after the war, not even when they were hanging poor women from lampposts for having once slept with a German soldier.

        3. Or a book that I have in my collection: Paris in the Third Reich. David Pryce-Jones is the author. It’s on Amazon, but I don’t want to post the link for fear of going into moderation. It was quite a devastating account of how the French intellectual elite basically rolled over and showed their bellies to the Germans during the Occupation.

          (Oh, we’re so special, us intellectual and cultural special snowflakes… we have to sit around and intellectualize about our specialness … we can’t actually do anything but look down our intellectual and cultured noses at those brute Germans with their snazzy uniforms, their dreadful certainty, their uncultured … oh, but mon dieu, that one is handsome, and so urbane … well really, they’re not ALL barbarians… such a pity about that Jewish friend of ours … any one know what happened to him after that last transport from Drancy … is it acceptable to smile at a German, one of the cultured ones? He is SOOOO handsome and erudite …)

          I quite lost any respect I might have had for Sartre and his coterie … indeed, for all but Albert Camus who at least had the balls to be a resistant. Yes, the German occupation was brutal, and yes, being an active Resistant took an insane degree of courage … but WWII was a pivotal event – an intellectual and ethical challenge in so many ways. I can’t really criticize French intellectuals for keeping their heads down during the Occupation, but what has gotten up my nose ever since is how having funked a challenge, they dared to get up on an ethical high horse and lecture the rest of us for decades after.

            1. Camus’ work makes an appearance at The American Spectator today, along with works by G. K. Chesterton and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

              Albert Camus’s 1957 short story “The Renegade” takes the Stockholm Syndrome of Doyle’s Frenchman to an extreme. It is also an exploration of the attractiveness of evil which may be relevant to the spectacle of young men educated in Western liberal democracies joining ISIS.

              It is an interior monologue of a French priest who goes to North Africa as a self-appointed missionary, is captured, and has his tongue cut out. He is converted to the worship of cruelty and evil. He shoots, wounds, and then beats to death the priest sent to replace him. He hopes to start a war that will give his captors a chance to conquer and spread throughout Europe, and comments on how good it feels to strike the face of goodness with his rifle butt (the tribesmen are not said to be Muslims, but they could not be anything else).

              His captors, far from being grateful, or perhaps just to shut him up, mete out a punishment which even after what has gone before is a shock. The interior monologue ceases abruptly and “A fistful of salt stops the mouth of the babbling slave.”

        4. French socialists have almost always been intensely nationalistic, which makes them a natural fit for a National Socialist party. Their real complaint was that the smelly boche were in charge not the magnificnet French. They fixed that with the EU

          1. That last part’s debatable. The Germans might not totally be in charge, but they seem to be somewhat closer to it than the French.

            1. I watched the original broadcast. As with so much else in Yes (Prime) Minister it appears to be absolutely true

      3. It might be more expressive of their attitudes to strike “social position” in favor of caste. Doing so would help focus on the desperation they feel to belong.

          2. Are faggots specifically for burning or do they have other uses? I think the answer is yes but the only reference I ever see just says “bundle of sticks”.

                    1. I will point out that the only one of my friends who uses the word to refer to himself, if he happens to be reading this, is at this point rolling on the floor laughing so hard he’ll do himself an injury. So, maybe we should behave?

                    3. I’m guessing you aren’t old enough to have seen this when it first came out:

                      Still tasty, though.

                1. I thought on smoked fags, not faggots. Of course I’m a bear of very small brain who isn’t up on his slang.

    1. Someone posted that (or something similar) a while back. I said at the time, I now have a new vision of Hell.

      The first comment writer talks about how repressed she was because “I remember as a fairly young girl having to fetch things for my father so he didn’t have to move from his chair in the living room.”

      Well, guess what, my son has to get things for me. It has a lot less to do with male/female than with youth/parents.

        1. Also, the cats *never* come back with what you sent them to get. And they take forever, and complain that whatever it is requires thumbs, yadda yadda.

          1. Yes, for some reason they want to circle around me while I am pulling a motor and complain they haven’t been fed yet. But they will never hand me the 14mm when I ask, even though it would mean they would get fed that much faster.

          2. This is one area where dogs are vastly superior to cats:

            Although it should be acknowledged that dogs are as likely to fetch near-beer and lite-beer as the good stuff — they’ve notoriously undiscriminating palates.

              2. The dogs I know that drink beer seem to have very little taste in beer. They’ll drink any you put out and some you didn’t.

              1. Abominations? Lite beer is the greatest marketing ploy of the twentieth century. How else are you going to get people to pay good money for 3-2?

          3. *sigh* We had a cat when I was a teen, lovely, sweet black cat. I’d never heard a cat so vocal before. Scolding when the door was closed and she couldn’t get in… the window was open but nooo, she wanted in through the door. Because propriety. And the scolding…!

            Then we had a pet chicken that did the same thing. My mother and I found ourselves being scolded in the most prissy tones of clucking by a half-grown chook because we took just a shade too long to open the door to let her in. (She was a house-chook, and ate and slept inside the house, sat in a chair and ate, neatly, from a plate, and her favorite drink was Coca-Cola. I don’t think she thought of herself as a chicken, because she didn’t have the mannerisms of one. If she could have used utensils I think she might have. She didn’t like drinking out of a bowl or a saucer or a puddle. A glass.)

            2. I have two black cats, and I don’t understand why they are the hardest cats for the shelters to get people to adopt, because they are very good cats. Not exactly geniuses, but well-behaved.

              I can’t imagine having chickens in the house. We once got a couple of chickens (don’t ask me where) to put in the company president’s office for a prank (small software company) and after the joke was over, we had to put them in a storeroom until they could be returned that evening. Good god that room stunk afterwards. And this was an office that was full of birds all the time (The aforementioned company president’s hobby was exotic birds. I shared an office with an insane Molluccan cockatoo named “Pink”.) And yes, there was a lot of bird poo to deal with, although the exotics could be trained to go on command over a trash can, they didn’t always restrain themselves.

              Not a big fan of birds after that job.

              1. That particular hen … was an Odd, if you could ever have an Odd for a chook. She would go to the bathroom to … well, go. Not drop it in the toilet (apparently you can train them to do that) but at least somewhere we could easily rinse away. She slept in the bed – next to my brother’s head, in fact. When it came to nesting, she liked my mother’s onion and garlic basket. She’d eat the onions when broody too.

                She wasn’t the only hen who would keep nesting inside the house – we had about six other hens that liked to nest in the house, but only to nest. The rest of the time, they preferred to be outside, but Chickie, or Adobo, as my mom named her, was a strangely fastidious chook.

                For some reason though we never had a problem with bird poop in the house, despite the chickens.

                  1. Yep. The ones named after food (officially) became the Special Pets over time. The first one was Fried – a 45-day broiler that I brought home one day from a school fair. She followed my mother around as she did chores and liked to cuddle up to her during the afternoon siesta. Like Adobo, she would go outside most of the time but come back to keep us company (but she liked to perch on the clothes line to sleep.) Someone stole her and we never saw her again. Adobo was the second chicken to gain a name, and she died in a flood, during a heavy typhoon, a very old hen at 7 years of age. Roast was a rooster, who we actually planned to turn into a capon, but after someone threw a firework on him and crippled the poor lad – he hobbled back home after somehow surviving outside of our yard for three days – we decided his stubborn sense of survival would be rewarded and he was nursed back to health and eventually helped sire the next generation that survived a plague that killed off a lot of the chickens in the neighborhood. Yakuza was a young rooster who lost a claw to a rat (we had to amputate the claw, it was so manged), and Shoes was a bantam rooster with feathers on his feet that was my daughter’s pet, and was the rooster who grumbled nonstop. My son ended up with a bantam we called One Eye, because he lost it in a fight that he won with a much larger fighting cock breed (he killed that larger rooster too!) Fierce as that little guy was, if my then toddler boy picked him up and put him on his back, that rooster would lie there, feet in the air, without moving until his master decided to pick him up again. And since my boy liked to sleep with his pets surrounding him, he got hugged for naps quite often, sometimes sleeping right next to the cat.

        2. What? You let them roam free without supervision?
          Before you know it you’ll come up missing a bunchaton of cod cakes.
          Not to mention the occasional science experiment in the parlor.

      3. Sigh. My brothers and sister and I all had housekeeping chores, in strict rotation – washing dishes and folding laundry, and looking after baby brother all figured highly … but we took turns at it. I’d guess that we were all equally oppressed, but I can see the precious snowflake SJW insisting that my sister and I were ESPECIALLY oppressed…

        2. But did you take turns at chores like mowing the lawn, taking out trash and white washing the fence (I gather it is great good fun!)?

          1. Somehow mowing the lawn was always *my* chore…

            And, coincidentally, within a month of my leaving the house, my parents suddenly decided to replace the old manual mower with a gas powered one.

            /rolleyes

              1. are we related? And where do I go to redeem all these character points I built up? Is there a magazine like they had for the green stamps? I think I have enough to get the gilt-encrusted submarine by now….

                2. I am told the character points are redeemable in some online RPG venues, known variously as The Afterlife and The Rapture. I’ve no direct experience of these, however, so reports remain rumours.

                  1. Rapture is pure vaporware. OnHigh Software – more accurately, their more degenerate fans – keep talking and talking about it, but they’ve been doing that for decades. It’ll never get made. At least not in our lifetimes.

                    1. I dunno, I keep hearing stories of people saying that the closed beta will start for selected people any time now.

                    3. Now now, Duke Nukem DID finally come out….

                      (I do laugh when I see the bumper sticker “Come the Rapture, can I have your car?” in response to the “… this car will be unmanned” sticker, which I think is the height of hubris. Kinda like Bloomberg.)

                    4. Re: “this car will be unmanned” – It is presumptuous from a mainstream theological pov, but the Rapture-believing denominations are mostly also “sola fide” folks who further believe that there are no backsies after you’ve made a statement of faith in Christ, and thus you are automatically going to heaven no matter how you sin afterward or even if you apostatize. It’s comforting for people who are tormented by worry over going to Hell, and adding a Rapture before any kind of persecution happens is comforting to those who worry about Tribulation. (Similarly, the prosperity Gospel caters to people tormented by money worries, etc.)

                  1. Awww. (blushes, kicks dirt) And you’ve been hanging out in Hun Central for HOW long?? That’s a high bar to clear. (Or maybe he means a Chinese character, she ponders…)

            3. Because my mother was ill i wound up doing the housework and cooking. My brother, when he got old enough tagged along with dad to do the chores outside (I had some of those too, farms take a lot of work) when mom got better she took a job outside the home because my parents wanted to own a home, managed to afford it before I graduated high school. They didn’t design the kitchen for a dishwasher because no one needed one. I enlisted upon graduation. Before I came home on leave after AIT they bought a dishwasher

            4. Somehow mowing the lawn was always *my* chore…

              Man, was I annoyed that I wasn’t allowed to mow the lawn– but my brother was. (Chores for allowance. Not actually pay because we were very clear that we were supposed to help around the house because we lived there as well, and if things got tight that $20 was the first to go, but still.)

              Sure, he’s almost a foot taller, and easily a foot bigger across the shoulders, but—!

              1. while we had a riding mower, dad and I would try to get up before the other to do the mowing. It started to smoke and we went back to the push mower, but my sister wanted to mow, so we broke down and let her (it was a real tough decision … we thought about it maybe a nanosecond) … then I got work at the golf course mowing and I was never asked to do it again.

                1. At our one house I hired the neighbor girl to babysit (had two at the time, age 1 and 3). Paid her $5 an hour for maybe three hours at a time. I went over one day and asked her Dad if she would like to mow my lawn (postage stamp) for $20 because they had a lawnmower and I knew teens always needed money. He didn’t say girls don’t do that… he said that his daughter wouldn’t do that.

                  I’m not a feminist but… pay inequality? Cry me a river. Work for 3 hours watching kids or spend approx 20 minutes mowing a lawn. What should I do? I can’t decide.

                  Because I’m a girl and I’m just dumb that way.

                  1. I gotta give to my sis, it was about 3 acres she was mowing. We rarely got an allowance, and this was one of those times we were not. Of course, I was spending 8 hours pushing a “self propelled” mower (the treads were so slick it was not much help), but I was getting minimum wage for the time (1984).

                    1. For some reason I was one of those weird girls who preferred hard, physical labor to the daintier house stuff. Or maybe I preferred the company. I liked tagging along with either of my grandfathers. I never got paid for that stuff, but I could dig a furrow like any man. AND I could put in three days of grape picking and afternoon of grape stomping. The bizarre thing is that in this extremely sex-segregated society no one in the family objected. I guess they didn’t consider me a girl? I mean everyone knew a female stomping grapes would sour the wine…

                    2. The only thing all us kids HAD to do was haul wood for heating the house in winter. We had a furnace in the (hand dug by me and dad) basement and when dad got a permit to cut in an area not on family land, we all went out and the two youngest sisters hauled the little stuff, and brush, my oldest sis and mom did the bigger bits of brush and a bit of the smaller wood, and I and my dad’s best friend’s son (well, and a freind of mine as well … we were using their truck to haul the wood) moved the bigger stuff (some were roll to the truck and maybe even saw in half then team lift). We wished we had a camera when my sis picked up a bit of log that looked like a base drum on her (She is “Almost” 5 foot tall now, as a grandma) and was able to get it into the truck bed. It was “punky” so it was very light.
                      We all only did something like that a few times. Mostly it was either just me and dad, or sometimes with either the friend ( some of the wood was used to heat our garage that was used as a business by his dad and mine) or some of my cousins (who sometimes got help from me in return, though they just had to split a small amount and stack a bunch of wood …. their dad worked at a veneer place and got the cast off logs for free. most were perfectly round and from 8 down to 3 inches in diameter and paint paddle length). My middle sis also sometimes asked if we needed her to help, but we never took her.

            3. Just chased the kids out to the yard to clean away the dead leaves. It’s pleasant and they seem to make a game out of it. Then again, during the aftermath of one of the typhoons back in the Philippines, I put them to work helping haul away branches and debris to burn. Even a little 4 year old can drag a branch behind him, and he had fun doing that, because it was noisy, he got muddy and dirty and splashed around in puddles.

              Afterward they got marshmallows to toast over the fire.

          3. I am an only child so yes. And the one who told me to do those things (except the fence, ours was chain link) was my mother. Father’s area was the garage (as in source of income, his main area was body work and painting but he did everything else too when asked, and when I got older I would sometimes help with the sanding and such preparatory work for the painting), mother took care of the paperwork and house and both father and I obeyed her commands when it came to house and yard maintenance (I whined and made up excuses, like pretending to do my homework, he obeyed much better).

        2. Hah! Where would they get the huts? We’re talking about womyn, the folk who can’t manage their birth control without government mandate.

          Plenty of women would live just fine once they killed off the womyn.

    2. I have read some of this woman’s rantings before. She is so weird that I sometimes wonder if she isn’t trying to be ridiculous to show the idiocy of the feminists.

        1. That was my conclusion.

          Of couse it could be something from the Andy Kaufman school of performance art. If so it is impressive, but still very depressing.

      2. Well, I know she’s been classified by other feminists as bat guano crazy, but I honestly think she’s sincere. She’s been doing it for far, far too long. But, I really hope I’m wrong, because my faith in the human species implodes every time I see her crap.

        Then again, even if she’s an epic troll, I doubt that all of her comments come from sock puppets. Some of those people actually believe that crap, and that is freaking terrifying.

        1. Keep in mind that there are a small percentage of people who are JUST sane enough to hold down a job and pay the bills. Or to hold down a spouse and force them to pay the bills.

    4. “Why don’t these people see that twisting things against nature ends in piles of blood and bodies?”

      Why, they aren’t twisting things against nature. Only men would do that. Instead they are untwisting the nightmares that men have inflicted on them.

      Put in approved oppressor group, and that’s the justification of every mass-murdering tyrant in the twentieth century. Even her pastoralization plans have their echoes in Year Zero. But she’d do ’em right (and nevermind that’s been the claim of every such tyrant since the first ones issued in bloodbaths)>

      2. And if the Utopia doesn’t work out as well as she’d expected, clearly that means that womyn were merely more corrupted by the Patriarchy than she’d originally thought…

        1. It is never beloved leader’s fault.

          It is always a failure on the part of the followers. And/or that the corruption of the past runs too deep. And/or the fact that the whole world has yet to embrace their vision and they are being undercut.

          1. Yes, if the people just tried to be good harder. If they tried hard enough that would fix _everything_. But, alas, they always fail, no matter how sainted a person will rise to lead them.

        2. Yup. After euthanizing all the remaining men, no doubt she would start in on the women, regretfully concluding we are too colonized for her brave new world.

          If we haven’t all starved. I really think when she says that the men she is isolating must not receive service from any woman, that means they have to do their own housework — she really thinks food appears on grocery store shelves.

          1. There must be something very wrong in a life to have gotten to a point where you fear and loath so much of the world around you.

            1. One of the posters thought that, once all the men were gone, most women would only need to worst a couple of hours a week. Apparently, once the men are gone, all physical needs will magically take care of themselves. TOTALLY removed from reality.

              Actually, I say we pool some money and buy an island for this women to live on with no men. Seriously – she can let any women come who want. Let’s see how long that lasts.

              1. That’s because women would have super magical powers if only men didn’t oppress us. From the Utopia piece: “Most women will have rediscovered our healing, divination and extra-sensory communication powers.”

                Really. Like her belief that some women can, even to this day, talk to plants.

                1. All women can talk to plants. All men can, as well.

                  Where it gets tricky is whether the plants talk back…

                  😛

                  1. They rarely seem to pay any attention at all, it seems. And mine seem to have this tendency to commit suicide too. Even when I remember to water them. Maybe I don’t talk nicely enough. Maybe I should try music? Isn’t some classical music supposed to be good for them?

                    1. Well if you would quit destroying their self-esteem they wouldn’t commit suicide so often.

                    4. I will. I had good luck with an aquarium too, both the fish and even the plants stayed alive, although the two lizards I once had both kept climbing out until both met their demise when I didn’t find them fast enough (they dried to death).

                      Before that there were several close calls for them. I lived with roommates at that time, and once one of the lizards had crawled from my room into the kitchen, freaked out one of the girls and she threw it out of the window. I found out in the evening. Well, it was late fall and rather cold outside, but not freezing, and I found the critter underneath the window in the wet grass. It was fine when taken back to water. And then it crawled out again a couple of months later. I tried to keep the hole in the cover blocked, but the damn things were quite skillful as escape artists.

                    4. She’s not a vegan. To be a vegan is to prioritize animals over plants, and after all plants are alive and want to live. . . .

                  4. “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.”

                    Why so can I, or so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?”

                    ― William Shakespeare
                    henry-iv, part-i

                    1. And will they obey if they do come? [Evil Grin]

                      Drak’s addition to Shakespeare.

          3. Yep. But you notice she makes no reference about who will open the jars with stuck lids and who will kill all the spiders.

            (Yeah, I know…I couldn’t resist 🙂 ).

            1. Well, yes — she expects there to be enough men to do everything she deems dirty work. Cleaning up nuclear power plants, for instance.

              I observe that she considers preparing animals to be released to the wild to be “fun.”

              2. *I* would like to observe her performing such fun… preferably with something like a grizzly sow and cubs.

                  1. since she obviously has no animal husbandry background a poland china boar and sow would be enough,

              4. Mentioning releasing animals to the wild reminded me – A few years ago, I was listening to Sean Hannity when he started talking to one of his staff. It seems he had purchased a Lobstergram for her for the Holidays, and she, being against the notion of the cruelty of cooking lobsters alive, had taken the lobsters from the package and released them back into the wild.

                In a lake. A freshwater lake.

              5. Wait, it just struck me that her plan is to have society horribly abuse men while giving them access to hihgly-radioactive materials. I see a flaw in this program.

                    1. Cabbages? What kind of idiot trusts cabbages? Have you ever listened to what they have to say?

                    2. Hmmm…

                      Maybe she had a Cabbage Patch Kid when she was young and no one has ever told her that isn’t actually how babies come into the world.

              1. Yes, she’s firmly of the camp that says that gonads determine gender. Her blog roll includes a blog dedicated to attacking the notion that men can become women.

      4. The trick the anti-tyrants have yet to master is to adequately condemn the tyrants before there is blood. We do just fine when the skull piles are visible from orbit. That’s easy. When people verbally advocate going down the same bloody road as before, it is socially accepted. That’s the key point where we are weak. That’s the key point that needs fixing.

        1. As with many other jobs, the times that we do manage it go unnoticed because they don’t become tyrants.

          And, of course, since we’re being decried as tyrants headed for pulling blood and it never happens, they must keep doing it to keep being effective.

          1. It’s exactly the “keep doing it” part that I would like to shortcut. Marx was not only an economist, he played at being a logician. He was similarly damaging with the concept of polylogism, class based logic. It’s a monstrous concept and allows the marxists their strange weeble like powers of never actually staying down for the count on a permanent basis.

            Fix that and marxism dies the true death and does not come back.

            1. The American Dream™ used to be the cure for Marxism infection. Unfortunately a rabid strain altered the dream now no one really remembers it.
              The ability to live in peace and liberty with an equal chance to achieve any passing goal you put your mind to.

            2. If Marx was an economist and if Marx was a logician then why, when I can see the result of Marx’s theories put in action, should I listen to anyone whose primary argument is their claim to be likewise? Yet another reason to discount argument from authority.

              I have my own simple answer to those who say X number economists tell us … or Y number of logicians conclude … so we therefore must do Z: Do you remember when you were taught to provide reasons to support your arguments in essays? Do you recall what your math teachers used to tell you; always show your work?

              Shame Marx didn’t claim to be a scientist as well.

              1. Well, it was scientific socialism after all, wasn’t it?

                The marxists do show their work. You have to be a proletarian to understand it though. If you are infected by bourgeois notions of logic and ideals, you just won’t get it.

                Pardon me, I’m out of practice doing devils advocate. I think I threw something there.

      1. Be sure to tone it down enough to avoid the shrieks of how you exaggerate and no one’s that evil.

        1. Ooohhh yeah. Not to worry, I’m working in a steampunk setting where the women at least acknowledge that they need male physical strength (at least for now) and men to sire offspring. Although I suspect the Big Bad has visions of . . . especially once it becomes obvious that men as well as women can . . . ‘Scuze me, I’ve got to go write something. *trots off*

    6. Wow. I could not get through the entire … thing … but some things did strike me (oops, that’s a patriarchal term!). (1) This person obviously has no children and has never spent significant time around children. (2) The blogger says on the page regarding comment policies that a comment “that evinces basic comprehension of radical feminism” will not be published. Heh. Just my natural pettiness coming out; well, at least THAT’s feminine. (3) This is a astonishingly, toxically, self-centered person. I read the “On Writing and Creativity” page, which is the substitute for the typical “About” page on this blog … Oh. My. Bob. (oops, Bob is a MAN’s name!). Make that Oh. My. Barb.

      Good grief, I feel the need to de-tox myself by doing some housework. The toilet brush is calling me! My dear hubby is working from home today … I think I’ll fetch a cuppa for him first. Later, I might kick off my shoes and bake some brownies. I’m just sorry I’m too old to be pregnant as well.

    7. Thank you for that link John, & by extension Keith.

      Reading that steaming pile of rotting FemiMarxist pig dung was *by far* the longest and best laugh I’ve had all week. I laughed until I literally had tears streaming down my face. I even laughed loud enough to wake poor Office Cat from his dreams of gooshy food and crunchy treats.

      You know, that really *was* very much like reading some sort of feminist control-fantasy version of a diatribe from Stormfront – with “men” taking the place of all the hated minorities. And yeah, I laughed at those idiots too.

      I guess it’s really not very nice of me to essentially point and laugh at them, but what the hell, sometimes that IS the only correct response.

          1. I don’t think linking to that site attracts them. There’s no ping-back, and as for the blogger:
            When men view our blogs in such large numbers, it’s a threat. They’re not just looking at it, they view it with the intent of harming radical feminists and women in general. They do it to collect information so they know what next to do to prevent women from going there. They batter radfem work in public for all women to see and show the result of their verbal and written battering as an example of what will await women if they do, think or say the same. They write nasty and threatening comments, that in order to trash, I have to read at least a few words of. Even though it doesn’t hurt my feelings, they are still harmful and inevitably affect my thoughts.

            85,000, that’s the maximum number of views I had in one day a couple of weeks ago when the liberals and MRAs circulated my PIV blogpost for punishment. Unlike a normal blogger, attracting 85,000 hits isn’t something I want to celebrate. It’s threatening: you know they’re after you, it only means you’ve hit men’s radar and you have no idea what they plan to do
            http://witchwind.wordpress.com/2014/01/18/in-retrospect-to-the-85000-reformism-and-other-things/

            1. it only means you’ve hit men’s radar and you have no idea what they plan to do

              Oh, that’s simple: laugh. Long and loud:-D.

              2. Yep: laughter. Often the mental-healthiest way to handle the persistently medication-resistant unhinged.

            2. 85,000, that’s the maximum number of views I had in one day a couple of weeks ago when the liberals and MRAs circulated my PIV blogpost for punishment.

              If the liberals are out to get her where does that leave the rest of humanity?

              2. And she probably considers it a “death threat” similar to the ones supposedly delivered in GamerGate.

            4. When men view our blogs in such large numbers, it’s a threat.

              She wants to kill a bunch of men and men notice her ramblings, yet it’s their fault. Hm. 😕

              1. Yup. Just like if she were to dress in revealing clothing and men were to stare at her that would also be the men’s fault. From what I could gather, all that is Evil and Wrong in the world is because of Men and this planet would be paradise if we’d just never existed. (One almost wishes her father had never existed.)

                What happens in someones life to make them hate half the population that much?

                1. So, she could have her little paradise if all men and supposedly-colonized women would just hide and leave her alone for [how long does it take to starve to death, again?]

                  2. Well, that post pretty well clears up what her overall problem is. She was never exposed to what most of us would call, “real life” when she was younger, and her head was filled with fairy tale descriptions of how her life was supposed to be as she grew up. Then, when she got slapped in the face with reality (with what really does appear to have been a total asshole), she took the feminist mantra and internalized it hard, to the point that she is now pretty much unable to have a normal relationship of any kind (sexual or not) with a man.

                    1. Andrea Dworkin had a similar history. Hooked up with an asshole who beat the crap out of her.

                      THIS is why you’re not supposed to hit girls.

                    2. Are you suggesting that men should not hit women because this might break women’s brains, thus leading them to decided to take revenge on all men, rather blaming the one who specifically hit them, or those who failed to teach the hitter not to and the ones who might have protected them, but failed?

                    3. You notice that she downplays the statutory rape element for fear we might blame him and not men in general.

                    4. There’s a couple of reasons for that, I suspect.

                      One, as you mention, is if she allows the focus to be on the legal aspects, she can’t say all men are evil.

                      Another is that since she wants various laws to keep men in check, she knows that her own experience could be used to show just how useless laws can be.

                    5. But in her mind all men are evil. Men didn’t prevent that man from hurting her.

                      And: Women have been twisted by men, because they are aiders and abetters as they are and have failed/are unable to raise their sons so once they became men they would not prevent each other from try to taking advantage of women.

                    6. And she’s a helpless flower who refuses to be an adult and take responsibility for what she’s done and what she’s failed to do. And that makes her entitled to rule all.
                      Yeah. That makes sense. In a madhouse.

                    7. Yup.

                      Poirot argues that the logic of a twisted mind is consistant in itself. This does not excuse the twisted mind.

                    8. I’m not sure she downplayed it so much as she ignored it as irrelevant, considering that he was just a normal male, therefore she wasn’t being treated any differently than any other girl or woman.

                    9. What we used to call a “hothouse flower” (although I have no idea of her looks, and the term hothouse flower was generally only applied to ‘lookers’) a girl who needs lots of attention and special care. Either a) a high maintenance woman or b) someone who spends hours doing their makeup and hair each day in order to look good, or c) both.

                      At best the term is a backhanded complement with barbs, at worst (and more commonly) it is downright derogatory.

                    10. “Women have been twisted by men, because they are aiders and abetters as they are and have failed/are unable to raise their sons so once they became men they would not prevent each other from try to taking advantage of women.”

                      But women are not aiders and abetters. Women are not responsible for anything they do under men’s thrall.

                      “I’ve finally figured something out. That we’re not supposed to be angry against women, as in, our anger against women is purely manufactured by men. And if we are angry, we’re angry against the male colonisation in her, not really her, though what happens is that we confuse it with the woman and hit on her instead.

                      “This ‘embedded maleness’ or ‘incarnate male presence’ as Mary Daly called it, are insidious male ideologies that men have hammered into our psyche, like an anti-personnel landmine fastened inside us which explodes in contact of other women, so that women turn against us, instead of turning against men and feeling sorry or compassion for the pitiable state that men have put us in.”
                      http://witchwind.wordpress.com/2013/12/18/when-were-angry-against-women/

                    11. There isn’t enough good scotch in Los Angeles to get me through reading more of her posts than the one I looked at.

                    12. Well, yes, any fault in women is, in truth, rooted in the subjugation of the whole world under the thumb of men. Still, the women who are still in the thrall of men need to be corrected to be liberated.

                      As you note elsewhere there is something about the blog. Like watching a passenger train wreck … into a full school bus.

                    14. Don’t ask me. I do not suffer from her delusions.

                      The Spouse reminds me, “If you stare long enough into the abyss…”

                      I am sure that there is some kind of logic in her sealed world, but I can only go so far before I say, ‘Oh, h#ll, F**k it!”

              3. Better yet, she wants to kill large numbers of men and we are the threat.

                Um…there aren’t a whole lot of guys talking about euthanizing large numbers of women, are there? I mean, I haven’t read their blog posts (and if they exist, they’re morons too).

                1. The only one I’m aware of recently was the nutjob college student who killed half a dozen people of both genders, and that far too many self-proclaimed feminists was a shining example of all that was wrong with the world.

                  1. Yeah, Mr. Violence Against Women who killed his male roommates at a couple other guys as well?

                    FWIW, I should have clarified by asking about men wanted to try and do something like that through governmental sanction.

              4. To be just, the thing I quoted was just after the all-sex-is-rape post. It was later that she posted both her “Utopia” and her “Oh noes the life on earth will go extinct with in a few decades — you evil men should kill each other so us females get to enjoy some peace before the end” posts.

            5. She fears only men? Does she assume all women would be natural allies?

              Oh boy. Suggest doing what she plans to do to men to any mother of sons, for starters…

              1. We would IF we had not bought into the lies of the patriarchy and opted to side with the enemy. (And snuggle up to, and hold hands with, and do chores with, and go to concerts with, and . . .)

                2. Which is Not Our Fault. We are colonized. Anything we say that she doesn’t approve of is men’s fault.

                  “Knowledge is something that the oppressors reserve for themselves and deprive the oppressed of, to maintain their oppressive system. Men know their domination. They know they’re the dominant class and need to exclude women from it, and know how to treat women and men distinctively to maintain this sexual dominance. It’s very clear to them what constitutes an affront to their masterhood and what doesn’t. While they might not know all the ins and outs of the patriarchal system (and don’t need to), they do know perfectly well where their interests lies — in keeping the subordinates underneath them — and know how to go about doing it. And that’s all they need to know. Access to this knowledge is part of their birth-right, and transmitted to them by other males.

                  “This isn’t so for women. We don’t “share” their ideology and reproduce it in turn, against ourselves, as the intents and workings of patriarchy aren’t clear to us at all: we simply don’t have access to the same information as them. Men prevent us from seeing it by excluding us from their institutions, boards, meetings, parties, peer networks, forums, rituals, clubs where they openly exchange about their dominance, where the important decisions are made, where all the crucial knowledge and skills are transmitted and where they bond over sexual degradation of women in the most overt ways (mostly prostituted women). ”

                  http://witchwind.wordpress.com/2014/10/28/why-doesnt-she-leave-i-told-her-so-she-should-know-better-she-has-access-to-radical-feminism-shes-just-stockholmed-part-one/

                  1. Your dang right we exclude her from our “institutions, boards, meetings, parties, peer networks, forums, rituals, clubs where they openly exchange about their dominance, where the important decisions are made,” but that is because of what is between her ears, not what is between her legs.

                    1. As far as I know she-who-speaks-to-plants has never addressed this so none of could tell you the answer to that. We might try to guess. Such as patriarchy is so imbedded in our society that it no longer requires actual fathers so long the women around the boys are still in its thrall and there are other males within the neighborhood to carry it on.

                      (This would go with her assertion that any males left alive once entering puberty should be kept in isolation.)

                    2. She reminds me of this incident when we were in Portugal last — driving towards Lisbon — we heard reports of a car going the wrong way in the South-North (headed to porto) Highway. After a moment they put someone who called them on the air. It was a man, very angry saying “One car going the wrong way? They’re ALL going the wrong way.” Yep, he was the one.
                      She’s kind of the same. It’s hard to square her fear of people even reading her posts with the sort of magnificent hubris that decides the relations between sexes, dating back to before humanity are ALL WRONG and she’s the only one who gets the truth, everyone else having been “colonized.”

                    3. Ah, you’re assuming social construction. The reality is that men are not only All Evil, they are All Evil in their very Essence. To be male is to be evil.

                      “there is nobody outside men forcing men to be violent. Their patriarchal system is created and enforced by them alone. no invisible force is secretly pulling the strings behind the scenes. Since it comes from men and not from anyone else, this is the definition of inherent. It’s internal to them.”

                      http://witchwind.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/more-science-and-essentialism/

              2. I read the entirety of one of her blogs that dealt with what to do about men, and it addressed that. (I am somewhat amazed I completed it.)

                She believes once women realize that they must ultimately eliminate all males to be able stop the damage brought on by living in a society so twisted by men and their consciousness is raise to the truth of the power of women then they willingly surrender their sons just before they reach the dangerous stage of the onset of puberty. The sons will then be taken to live in isolation and to make themselves useful to society by doing such chores as clean up hazardous waste.

                3. So the not crazy at all combination of unsupervised teenaged males and nuclear material is a part of her utopia? Is this proof positive of her derangement?

            6. So she feels intimidated by the fact that men might be laughing at them? And fears that men will use this “verbal and written battering” to intimidate them into surrender?

              The same women who are supposedly going to be tough enough to force men into a permanent second-class role and “euthanize” many of them? Uh-huh. What will they do if the men they try to oppress laugh at them?

              1. She does admit that she has no clue how to get from our current nightmare to the happy state where women get to murder and isolate men.

                1. If you were to write this as a story: she gets enough followers to create an isolated commune somewhere in the back of beyond, and managed to find somebody who can create a viral epidemic targeted towards individuals with the Y chromosome (would that be possible, by the way?) which kills most men. After they find out they are now being hunted by millions of very pissed off women who have lost their sons, husbands, fathers, brothers, friends and sweethearts they then create an other virus which kills most of the people left – maybe one which kills mostly people past a certain age, like past puberty, so what will be left will be mostly preteen girls – while being safe themselves because they have the vaccine.

                  After that they create their utopia and start collecting the kids who are still alive.

                  And later, maybe a few years, maybe even a decade or two, what is left of their utopia – I’d guess they will have been surviving mostly by scavenging – will be destroyed by the normal people who did survive, hide in different parts of the globe, and some of which did find the vaccines. 🙂

                    2. I doubt they’d get that far as they’d be put down like a rabid dog, as they’d deserve before they could get close to that point. But it is starting to sound like a Ringo series.

        2. Well, that’s the problem with a “He who must not be named” ennit? You can’t tell people who to not name until they’ve named him. Sorta like the way kids learn dirty words by getting whanged for dropping one — it would be kinder to give them a list, but then you’d be telling them those words, wouldn’t you?

          I recall a long ago editorial by a libprog bragging about how enlightened she was, listing all the ethnic slurs she had told her child to never use. I considered myself fairly worldly but I had had no idea there were so many such words; they certainly weren’t in my vocabulary.

          I occasionally imagine Harry Potter’s antagonist as written by Terry Pratchett, being constantly called “Lord Whassname.”

          1. It’s a favorite trick.

            We totally pissed of a really horrible chaplain by refusing to list the slur she was looking for and instead rattling off slurs for every single other racial or national group.

            About the time I offered “Frogs– that’s french– and Boosaunt, that’s a Basque on Basque slur–” and then several of the same-race-as-her techs from our department found some for the English and Spanish, I thought we might’ve induced a heart attack in her.

            Terrible, terrible person, but that was hilarious!

                2. I miss good mangoes. They ship up these sad, flavourless little things from Mexico and charge an arm and a leg for them here. Once in a while I’ll find some the right size, but then they’ve no flavor at all, and once in a great while they have a batch with some flavour, but then they’re terribly small. *sigh* I remember the good ones my Nordestino friends brought down from the Bahia; now I’d settle happily for second-rate Paulistano stuff.

                  On the other hand, the local fruits here in Utah are impressive. Tried a friend’s crop of home-grown grapes a few weeks ago, and they were eyes-rolling-back good. I didn’t know grapes could actually be that good. The apricots are astoundingly good, when spring freezes don’t slaughter all the buds. We have a traditional family recipe for an apricot-based preserve that was dubbed “crack jam” back in California*. Now that the rest of the Oyster Clan has moved here, I can’t wait to see how the jam-making goes next year with some of the local fruit.

                  * Short version: my brother sold his peanut butter sandwiches in high school. For cash.

                  1. Kensington Mangoes here in QLD, to my delight, can be as good as the ones in the Philippines. They aren’t fibrous, tastless things, but juicy, creamy, delights of flavorful tastebud addiction. They’re STILL stupid expensive – 3 dollars per mango right now! – so I keep wishing I had a tree. They have random mango trees here, growing out and about and wild, but I don’t know what variety they are (or if we’re allowed to just pick them from park lands…)

                    There *are* tradeoffs to where one lives in terms of fruit availability. For example, while I can get tropical fruits like mangoes and kalamansi limes here (and strawberries for a good CHUNK of the year), I don’t get golden delicious apples. My ultimate dream is to have an area with land of my own, where I can grow strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, red currants, mandarins, limes, lemons, kalamansi limes, cherries, golden delicious apples, pears, nectarines, grapes and mangoes. I don’t know if that’s actually possible though, given the diverse climes of the abovementioned fruit, but… *wishful thinking…*

                    I’ve never had good experiences with apricots, but I keep hearing they’re yummy. So the story of your jam has me intensely curious.

                    1. Couple of hundred acres in central to eastern Washington and a very large greenhouse for the tropicals.

                    5. Well, if we’re giving examples, you can search for “krohn’s conservatory” images. They have all kinds of different types of trees, in multiple different climates. No sloths, though, but they do have a butterfly show every year that is pretty cool.

                    6. OMG — that place looks beautiful. Maybe someday I can convince The Spouse to go up for a baseball weekend if the Reds are playing a home stretch at the same time as the butterfly show.

                      (Unfortunately Ohio A&G is a bit too early, so no resorting to The Daughter to get there…although she would love the Krohn’s Conservatory.)

                    7. Really?

                      Thank you for the information. If I am ever in Kansas City and have time I will have to check it out.

                    9. That is why they make dwarf and miniature trees… and big greenhouses.

                      Personally I love apricots, peaches, nectarines, etc. There are varieties of all of those that will grow here, and I have trees for all of them, but they are still small and don’t have a lot of fruit yet. It depends on the year however, even though I have the trees planted on hill where it is warmer we do get late frosts some years (only once can I remember one in July where the trees are, but a frost in July down in the creek bottoms isn’t extremely unusual) so production can vary wildly year to year.

                      I tried to grow kiwis though and even though Gurneys says they will grow in my zone I can’t get one to live.

                    11. A quick search indicates that dwarf Mango trees exist. I even saw a link to how to grow one in a container indoors, but I wouldn’t know how to go about finding a source for such where you are.

                    16. Well, now I know that what I haven’t liked all this time is less than stellar mangos. If, someday, I am in a place where they grow properly I will have to try them again.

                    17. Also, I, too, have dreamed of growing an impossible range of fruits. Your list looks pretty good to me, although I might want to add blood oranges to the list, along with apricots, as well as a few others including pomegranates, peaches, quince, currents and gooseberries.

                      When one of my grandfather’s returned from a tour of Germany he had pictures of a line of grapefruit trees growing next to a castle. In the winter they had a glass structure erected over them to keep them from freezing. Probably cost prohibitive for the rest of us.

                    18. *snaps fingers* How could I forget pink grapefruits? I might want to plant the blood oranges because Rhys likes them. Apricots, if I ever, ever found an apricot I liked. Pomegranates are fairly easy; I had one in the Philippines that bore little fruits, but they weren’t sweet (I don’t think the soil was right for it). Weren’t red currants on my list? Black currants are wonderful too (I loooove them, especially as a jelly and as a preserve.) Peaches too. Mmm. Just not fond of the fuzzy outer skin, but a knife can deal with that. I’ve a great fondness for the brownish beurre bosch pears, as well as the typical green and yellow ones, especially when they’re just about to become over-ripe and are so juicy, the juices dribble down your chin. Oh, the childhood memories!

                      I’ve no recollection of having tasted gooseberries. I’ve also looked up quince and I don’t think I’ve ever had any. What do they taste like?

                      I’ve recently tried parsnips and to my dismay I had a slight allergic reaction to them. I’m dismayed because they smelled and tasted quite yummy, roasted.

                    19. I believe that Quince has to be cooked to be eaten. I enjoyed quince jelly on toast. It had a clean crisp taste, not like anything else I can recall. Since I moved to the Southeast I have rarely been able to find it, so it is largely a memory of my youth.

                      Unfortunately quinces requires a reliable period of cold to set fruit, and where I live we do not have it.

                      Looking it up on Wiki I came across this tidbit about quinces: The term “marmalade,” originally meaning a quince jam, derives from “marmelo,” the Portuguese word for this fruit.

                      (While I like parsnip I do not prepare them anymore because of their very high glycemic index.)

                    21. you have more severe limits on imports there as well. I recall complaints about lacking enough bananas because they are not allowed to be imported “to protect from diseases” (and by the by protect the higher cost local sources) but some disaster occurred (cyclone maybe . I forget exactly) and the crop was hurt that year. Here were get lots of thing almost all year long. Chilean grapes, watermelons from Mexico, etc.

                    22. Yeah, that was a couple of decades ago, I think, if I recall Housemate’s stories about bananas. They grow them here in Queensland and bananas are easy to grow, but a flood can and will wreck the trees. Banana trees can be easily blown over in cyclone winds, so that can destroy a crop, but only for the season, and tropical areas have bananas usually growing nearly all year round.

                      I miss the bananas we have back home, in the back yard, We have little sweet bananas, and these big, creamy, sweet banana-pie like things that we’d get massive bunches of, and the ones we couldn’t eat my mother would turn into vinegar.

                    23. this was more recent but I forget exactly when. I read Irregular Web Comic and DMM was complaining about the lack at the time but it is so old it is no longer on his forum or it was from his LJ posts way back when when I looked at LJ. Either way it was after 2007, that being when I started reading his stuff.
                      Very few bananas are grown here so most are imported. Those that are, most are specialty types like your little ones (though I don’t know how those taste)

                    24. The little ones bought at the market, even in the Philippines now, tend to be treated with something that tends to make them chalky tasting. For the real flavor they need to be grown organically. They haven’t figured out how to make them for commercial growth without that something. =(

                    25. most of the little ones I have seen were marked “organic” and I tend to avoid anything so marked (mostly it is just more expensive, and nearly all cases of salmonella are from organic foods of one sort or another) so I never bothered to get any.

                    26. Yeah… by ‘organic’ I mean ‘grown in someone you know’s tree.’ The little bananas that are sold in mass markets in the Philippines have ripeners that speed up ripening and help prevent faster spoilage, but taste chalky; the ones that don’t have that are sold at the same price but brown up really quickly, but taste a lot better and smell better. But they brown up and spoil fast. Being bananas though, I don’t think they have salmonella… o_o

                    27. yeah, with bananas you peel the things but they are also far far more pricey than a regular one. Here I don’t think they treat bananas to ripen them, as most come some distance they do their best to keep the unripe as long as possible.
                      And iirc the last small ones I saw were nearly $2 a pound, where regular bananas run around $0.50.

                    28. JP,

                      Actually you are wrong, most if not all the salmonella case are traced back to contamination at the packing plants. Not at the grower. Organic [ http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/getfile?dDocName=STELDEV3004446 ] denotes how something is grown and is not very indicative of quality.

                      You want a better measure of of your chances of getting sick look to how your food is processed and how many different people handle it before it gets to your table.

                    29. it aint just the handling, it is the methods much of the way through to maintain the “organic” label. Meat and some stuff it is not an issue other than the price. But the last two recalls I recall (sorry for the punning) were for Spinach and something else with spinach in it (a greens salad iirc) and yes, others I recall were processed foods like peanut butter, and that is usually because it was some small place that seemed to fly under the inspection radar for long enough that the company got sloppy in it’s cleaning. But it has gotten to the point now that if you hear of an issue and there are recalls, most every time you can bet it is something labelled “Organic” and you will win.

                    30. Ok, see that. The longer distances and more people handling your food the more you are going to need anti-bacterials/fungus sprayed on your food, but are diminishing returns.

                      Is it on a bell curve. Garden to table is going to have fewer vectors than a long supply distribution net work for introducing contaminants into the system.

                      Is organic the problem or how we get food to table?

                    31. yes.

                      (~_^)
                      seriously it is a combo of both. Organic rules make it more likely to get something from the start. People got sick more way back when in part because they were living “organic” lives. Using manure as fertilizer works, even if “de-bioed” it is still less safe than spreading ammonium nitrate or mag sulfate or what ever your soil needs. Then add the rules for handling after the field and you add to the chances of something bad cropping up. Add the want of Organic Salad in December in Minneapolis you get industrial scales of riskier handling. Buying local doesn’t work well when you are under feet of snow.
                      Ringo did a great job describing the realities in Last Centurion.

                    32. I’ve got to go and finish that. Started reading it and stopped when he described all the different ways the flu kills. After all, when you’re sick as a dog with the flu, you really don’t want to be told all the way the sickness you have can end your life.

                    35. JP,

                      There is some assumption that need to be addressed.

                      1) When talking about the life and death in the past, and…

                      2) About how we grow our food and get it to the table.

                      First, I’m going to link to an article can address the issues of comparing the past to the present than I could in this comment:

                      scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/05/01/falsehood-if-this-was-the-ston/

                      Plus, is what we are doing making us healthier and stronger or weak and sickly? Because, it doesn’t really matter what the past was like. What matters is what is going on right now.

                      [Note: I have not read Ringo’s book, “The Last Centurion.” So this is not a critique of his work.]

                      Second, As to how we grow our food. There is this misconception that the only way to feed ourselves is to rely on the big agro-farms. And…

                      And…

                      cbsnews.com/media/7-elaborate-urban-farms/

                      And…

                      google.com/search?q=aquaponics

                      And that’s just not true.

                      If we are to use tech (a by product of our minds), let’s use it to improve our lives not slave ourselves to it (IMO).

                    36. You want paranoid? I have an ulcer that generates gas in my upper stomach area, causing pain in my chest. I also have an injury to my left arm and shoulder that can cause both chest pains and numbness in my left arm. Why does this cause paranoia? Because I am also a hundred pounds overweight and have high blood pressure.

                    40. I’ve had the tendency for years. My heart would just, from time to time, start racing. It was a rare occurance so I didn’t think much of it until one day, while I was turning off the street into a parking lot, with my family in the car, and I got hit so bad my vision blacked out.

                      Scared doesn’t begin to describe it. I could imagine that happening while driving down the highway and….

                      The next day I went to see my doctor about it. They had me wear a heart monitor for a week and to log physical activity that could normally drive my heartrate up.

                      Turns out that I was having one or two episodes a day that were passing under my radar. I’d recently had a stress test which came back normal, so that was good. The prescribed carvedilol and that brought it under control However when I started the allergy shots, I had to stop the carvedilol (beta blockers and deliberately injecting allergens into my body are a bad combination) so I went to first one, then two alternate medicines to keep the palpitations under control.

                      So far, so good.

                    41. it runs in the family. I’ve an aunt with it (though now she has a pacemaker) and her ticking would get frantic. She also has an artificial heart valve so she ticks like a clock.

                    42. to reply to your other response:
                      Aquaponics/hydroponics will help fill local needs in say NYC, but it certainly isn’t going to feed the place. Also, it has the same problem as regular farming. it will produce more food if it is not organic, and and then both the organic version and the non-organic will be higher in cost.
                      What I been arguing is that “Organic” labelled foods are not worth the extra cost, nor are they a whole lot healthier especially when you add in the extra recalls due to health issues with them caused by the rules to keep them “Organic”.

                      How many acres of hydroponics are needed to feed NYC do you think? How many watermelons or oranges are you going to get that way. Wheat? Corn? Potatoes? You know how many acres are needed to feed a family of four for the year?
                      What is the difference in yields between “Organic” Aqua/Hydroponics and non-organic? Why go through the high price of trying to shorten a garden to table event when much of the time it is of no issue and compared to the labelled “organics” when taking in just how mind boggling larger the non-organic volume is?
                      We might not need the big ag corp farms (many of which are just leased to the big ags, but I shall also refrain from going too far into the fact inheriting a farm is now nearly impossible in a family so they almost all need to be “Joe Farmer Farms Inc.” to not get dissolved when Farmer Joe kicks the bucket) and will point out that even doing the stupid thing of burning food in our cars we still feed a good portion of the world. So it depends on your determination of who “us” is.
                      All this reminded me to go put my Mennonite sourced Wheat Berries into my beef and cabbage.

                    43. JP,

                      Aquaponics is Hydroponics and Aquaculture combined producing a closed nitrogen and carbon system. And It doesn’t have the same problems regular agriculture.

                      “What I been arguing is that “Organic” labelled foods are not worth the extra cost, nor are they a whole lot healthier especially when you add in the extra recalls due to health issues with them caused by the rules to keep them “Organic”.”

                      True and I agree. I think we are talking past each other ( 🙂 ), and that is why I’m not for “Organic.” as defined and regulated by the FDA. I’m for locally grown, seasonal with minimal commercial processing of food. Any off season food storage should be handled in the home. Keeping our food sources as close to the table as possible.

                      My point was contamination is more likely to happen the more you handle process the food. I wasn’t trying to defend “Organic.” Blaming “Organic” isn’t going to keep your food safe.

                      scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2011/07/18/mythbusting-101-organic-farming-conventional-agriculture/

                      I believe this what you were intimating. But rejecting one without correcting or even acknowledging any deficiencies the other, current agricultural practices, isn’t going to make our food any safer.

                      I too won’t get to far into how Big Gov’t and Cronyism killed the family farm, either.

                      charleseisenstein.net/permaculture-and-the-myth-of-scarcity/

                      http://www.whale.to/a/blume.html

                      I do advocate permaculture over mono crop agriculture as it is practiced today.

                      crmpi.org/What_is_Permaculture_files/permarticle.pdf

                      😉 Take care.

                    44. The benefit of “Big Ag” is lowered cost. Locally grown is generally more expensive, because smaller farmers don’t get the benefit of the economy of scale. Likewise, by increasing the total volume of “locally grown” food, it reduces the cost savings of the larger farms, increasing the cost to everyone else.

                      Now, that’s an academic analysis – I have my own garden, in order to reduce my own personal costs.

                    45. A lot of “non-organic” foods are sprayed with a disinfectant to kill salmonella, which no doubt is where JP is coming from. I don’t have any hard numbers on percentages of salmonella in organic or non-organic foods, however.

                  2. Didn’t know how many apple varieties there were and how good many of them tasted until I moved to apple country in New York. Yes, NY produces prodigious quantities of fresh fruit and veggies. But Jersey sweet corn is better then any corn in NY…

                    1. Honey Crisps were on sale last week when I was shopping. I think those are my favorite eating apples.

                      Some time back I chatted with an older Hispanic gentleman who in his higschool aged days would go with his brothers on a work trips, planting various things going north, (onions in Arkanasas was one) then end up either in upstate NY, or his favorite Michigan. They’d get to Michigan, take the ferry to the U.P. (The Mackinac bridge not being there then) and camp for a bit then Pick their way back home to Texas. Peaches Cherries and Apples in Michigan, various other things and then the Onions they had planted and sometimes stuff here in Texas but normally they had to get back for school.

            2. Upon getting a new CD from the Irish band Flogging Molly Daughtorial Unit and I discussed briefly and determined that pretty much any gerund noun combination could be used as a euphemism for “self-abuse.”

              e.g.,
              badgering the witness
              paddling the pink canoe
              bashing the bishop
              buffing the bonnet
              spanking the monkey
              polishing the pearl
              polishing the pole
              checking for squirrels
              shooting wamp rats in beggar’s canyon
              double clicking the mouse
              taking jean-luc picard to warp speed
              flicking the prawn
              roughing up the suspect
              fingering the culprit

            3. The entomology of the use of cracker as a pejorative is convoluted. It was used in Shakespeare to denote a loud braggart, where it is believed to have come from a word in Middle English of the same meaning. Various reasons are given to explain its use as a descriptive of a particular body of whites in southern US who were viewed as having aspirations above their social station. One lies in commercial soda crackers — a cheep treat with lots of noise but not substantial substance.

              Oreo is easier: black on the outside, white in the middle.

              1. Like “apple” (Native American “red” on the outside . . .) and “banana” (Asian on the outside . . .) Because having your culture not match your complexion is bad, or something. *eyeroll*

                1. Dang, I didn’t know those two, I guess you learn something new every day. (and I thought I knew all the racial pejoratives I’m supposed to use, turns out I’ve been neglecting some 🙂 )

                  I’ll have to call the lady at the gas station an apple in the morning, just to see what kind of a confused look she gives me.

                1. Now I was given to understand that cracker referred to the habits of old white men to decide matters of import whilst sitting around the cracker barrel playing checkers at the local general store.

                2. I believe it is a more recent suggestion. I have also heard it explained as deriving from those field bosses who cracked the whip. Might be, but its usage seems to indicate otherwise.

                  But as I have heard it actually used in the southeastern U.S. Cracker is generally used to describe someone who is ill thought of by society in general. Someone who behaves in an uppity manner, usually having risen above their station in life and not properly recognizing their betters.

              1. I have been remiss on my food slurs, I guess I am better at my geometric ones, slant-eyes and slopes (half slant, half round).

                1. Does anybody know anything about cherries? I need a type that typifies the cherry flavor. The one variant that screams “THIS IS A CHERRY!!!”

                  1. well she is about 16 intensely interested in “men” because “she is too mature for boys. and extremely unhealthy to the male of the species. Avoid at all costs

                  3. The first time I ran into a really fat, juicy OH MY GOD DELICIOUS cherry, I was in Guam and it was imported from South America. It was so fat it was half the size of a golf ball, and so juicy that when I bit into it, you heard a crunch and I looked like I’d ripped someone’s throat out with my teeth. Drip drip drip red juices.

                  4. Cherries? How did we go from racist foods to cherries? The only time I’ve seen ‘cherry’ used to refer to humans, it was to label them virgins.

                    1. Did you miss the fruit segue? Cutelildrow graced us with a few flavor descriptions of fruit available to her on the far side of the world which brought this to mind. Cherry is also used to describe any person inexperienced in the situation they are in.

                    2. No, I saw the fruit-as-racial-slur sub-thread, I’ve just never seen “cherry” used as a racial slur, and the comment didn’t seem to flow naturally from the previous discussion. I thought maybe there had been an intervening comment that hadn’t appeared in my feed yet.

                      No big deal though.

                    3. You didn’t miss just a comment, but a whole sorta subthread. Like most things around here though it is organized in a sorta disorganized fashion, and somebody, ahem *looks innocent* crossed threads which caused jselvy to decide here was a good place to berth the cherry comment.

                  5. As there are two basic categories of cherries, the sweet cherry used for fresh eating and the sour cherry used in cooking, I doubt that there could be one cherry that covered all the bases.

                    I suspect that the variety is not the only thing effecting the taste of a fruit. The climate and soil does as well. So does the particular weather of any growing season. So what you need to find is the varietal best suited to its growing location and hope that the weather gods co-operate.

                    1. The family used to drive up to Tamarack in West Virginia a couple of time a year to, among things, enjoy the craft demonstrations and displays. One of the trips would be scheduled in cherry season so I could indulge my love of cherry cobbler. One year we drove up to several times because the weather gods had truly smiled and the cherry cobbler was to die for.

    9. You rang ?? Actually, the “witchwind” blog pops up every now and then, and is an absolutely STERLING example of Teh Burning Stoopid. Last time I saw it pop up, as I recall, was around the time of the “default binary gender” bit and the formation of the Evil League of Evil. . .

      I zapped her on my old blog once or twice, but honestly, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. . . .

    10. Among the more hilarious aspects of her scenario is that — if you read down a bit:

      All relationships of authority, domination and subordination will be abolished between all women of all ages.

      and

      No more military, no more army, no more wars!

      and

      States, borders, nations, laws would be abolished and totally dispensed with….

      Yet, somehow the sort of social rules that would require intense surveillance and forcible imposition to enact (such as no Penis-In-Vagina sex) are going to be enforced. How, given the lack of armies and laws?

      Also, medicine gets abolished, to be replaced with this hope:

      Perfect health would be the normal state of women anyway, as we will learn by experience and observation what we should eat and do to stay healthy at all seasons and times. Most women will have rediscovered our healing, divination and extra-sensory communication powers.

      This is “new socialist (wo)man” with a vengeance!

        1. Part of her lunacy is that she believes women can have children without men. [Frown]

        2. part that she thinks women can have them without men — “Women will be free to experiment parthenogenesis or procreation with two female eggs”– part that she doesn’t think ahead

        3. Silly man, artificial insemination, later women will figure out how to dispense with the need of sperm altogether.

      2. Also obviously written by someone with no chronic health problems, who has never had such problems.

        1. Again, silly man. Chronic health problems are a result of men messing with mother nature. Eliminate men: eliminate chronic health problems.

      3. Lack of irony indeed – the concept of detailing plans to euthanize ‘genocide planners’ among many, many others, and apparently not seeing any conflict there, simply boggles.

      1. I believe that you mean “since she believes it will be male blood from male bodies.”

        I believe she would be wrong in her assumptions.

    12. “Their life expectancy would probably drop to the age of 40, but that’s how things should be. Women’s life expectancy without men would rise to 130 years at least.”

      This woman is simultaneously hilarious and deeply frightening.

        1. Because the evil males wouldn’t be stealing women’s vital fluids with their evil PIV sexing anymore.

          1. Stealing a woman’s vitality through sex was a method of assassination in a manga I read some years ago. A sheltered, virginal nobleman’s daughter was killed… by the female assassin, using lesbian sex. The manga’s Lady Snowblood, from the same guy who wrote Lone Wolf and Cub, Crying Freeman, etc. The interesting thing is Lady Snowblood was drawn by a woman, and so was Crying Freeman.

            1. Of course stealing a man’s vitality through intercourse is the modus operandi of the succubus and that legend goes all the way back.

                1. Actually the incubus and succubus were deemed the same thing. Shape-shifting. Which is why an incubus could impregnate a woman.

                  OTOH, their dominating trait was crushing weight on you. This was so widespread that into the 19th century, the name for sleep paralysis was “incubus.”

                    5. I intensely dislike sleep paralysis- and praise the Lord, haven’t had an episode in years. And my wife has no clue what it is even as it is described to her by me and one of sons who occassionally suffers from it. It’s not uncommon.

                    7. Sleep paralysis is scary. I had at least one episode of it when younger and sleeping in an unfamiliar bedroom. What’s interesting is that in extreme cases of it, there are aspects to it that could have given rise to stories about being kidnapped by the fairy and/or witches. Of course, now we have stories about being kidnapped by aliens.

                    8. It’s also a primary component of what are known as Night Terrors, when you wake up, feel like there’s something horrible in the room with you, often feel as if it’s sitting right on your chest, making it hard to breathe, and you can’t move or call for help. These are deeply disturbing to children, especially.

                      Of course, even after you know what’s going on, they’re still terrifying while they’re going on, but you can at least get over it afterward a lot easier.

                    10. One of Mercy’s good ones. It was one of her books about Diana Tregarde.

                      Oops, that is the book I remember with emotional vampires, I see (when looking up how to spell Tregarde) that If I Pay Thee Not In Gold is a novel wrote in collaboration with Piers Anthony.

                    11. Ah, that’s why the title sounded familiar. It’s not one of the ones I have in my collection. I may rectify that, so it’ll go on my ‘to buy’ list.

                      I found a book on my shelves that is written by Mercedes, Eric Flint and Dave Freer. I’ll have to look up and see if it’s in the middle of a series, which would probably be why I haven’t read it yet.

                    12. I had never heard of it, and had to look it up. But after reading the symptoms, yes, I get this fairly commonly when I take power naps, usually when I am way low on sleep and I pull over and take a 20 minute nap. I just thought it was normal. :/

            2. Whom does she imagine doing the housework? Men were banished from contact with women, remember? Hasn’t it occurred to her that if she lets men come into women’s houses, the women might want some PIV sex? How will she prevent this from happening?

              If neither men nor women do the housework, then who or what will clean the houses?

              1. Women will do their own housework. Without men, it will be trivial easy. Remember this woman intends to stop using plows to raise food.

                1. Ah yes … they’ll use the same magic powers that will permit women to live to 140 without modern medicine, once the evil male doctors and pharmacologists are all in the Happy Smiley Death Camps.

                1. Hey, that’s exactly how Derpy Hooves got her Muffin — letting a unicorn in where she shouldn’t have!

              3. No, women are not do housework for men.

                Each man upon aproaching puberty will have to tend to himself, as he is to be kept in isolation from both the female population and other men.

            1. Given that she hasn’t thought of simple practicalities – like “Who is going to clean up after me” when it seems like she doesn’t think women should be doing housework, sanitary things and comfort are two things I don’t think are high on the list of her insanity.

    13. A few paragraphs after she lovingly describes depriving men of all their rights and saying boys would be utterly subject to the whims of their mothers, she says:

      “Children will be considered as persons in need for autonomy and all form of punishment, authority or educational manipulation over children will equally be abolished.””

      As I often say, a fanatic is someone who doesn’t understand irony.

      1. Once again, silly man, logic is the tool designed by DWEM to suppress everyone else. Once men are eliminated women will be freed from its strangulation to imagine a better world and by doing so they will make it so.

    14. if she really believes all that.. I have a bridge in Brooklyn i will sell her. Cheap, To keep it out of the hands of the patriarchy.

        2. Oughtn’t that be “before entering … The Hunzone”?

          Can’t figure whether the background music ought be ominous Da-da-Dum or Twilight Zone theme.

            1. Mike Oldfield, who actually has a lot of excellent music out there (and some really bad stuff from his contract disputes with Richard Branson)

                  1. No. This proves that you don’t have cameras in our bedroom. there’s nothing discontinuous about– Oh, wait. you mean… er… nevah mind.
                    (BTW AVOIDING looking at early returns, prognostications, etc. Cat on Hot tin roof here.)

                    1. I suspect that it is probably getting toward safe to get off the roof now if you haven’t already.

                    2. Democrats may want to get the Government out of people’s bedrooms (they SAY…) but they want it in every other room of the house.

                      Now if only SoCons would give up on getting the Government INTO the bedroom, they might get somewhere.

  5. . If you said “the man” you just proved you are trying to game me.

    Or, conversely, you’ve had a lifetime of experience with both pampered elites and the sort of kids who come from single moms with drug and/or alcohol problems and you make certain leaps.

      1. Unlike the SJW a rational person knows that they cannot possess infinite resources and so must spend what they have wisely, ie where it will do the most good.
        Has always puzzled me how your typical free range liberal progressive can at one and the same time believe in a fixed pie of wealth that must be “fairly” redistributed, and that our benevolent government has infinite resources at its command to grant our every need.
        Won’t even start on their confusion between the terms need and want.

        1. Because they believe that there is a finite pie, and every problem the government has is because it has been too shy to grab all of that pie, and mean rich people (always mean rich people of the enemy side, there are also rich people who wouldn’t be mean except for the fact that they have to hold on to what they have in order to be able to fight those rich people who are mean, like Gates and co against the Koch brothers, when talking about the American ones) are still holding too much of said pie.

          1. The ones who ask for higher tax rates. (The ones who are already wealthy and can structure their wealth to grow without a high income. the purpose is to pull up the ladder after them by going after those with high enough income that they could accumulate enough to rival them.)

            1. Yes, very much yes. And some of them may even believe that (others are of course only saying it in order to look good and lick all the right boots).

          2. Is that related to their inability to see that people in the real world are going to change their behavior to minimize the impact of boneheaded, ivory tower policies.

            2. They don’t really believe that most people are human. They think we are chess pieces they can move about the board.

            3. I recall that one President argued against a tax cut because people might spend it on the wrong things.

      2. Meaning that the pampered SJW has removed the capacity for self-reflection that the young kid might still have. Kevin Williamson read Lena Dunham’s book, and it is evidently full of behavior that she expects people to celebrate (or at least understand), although it sounds like it might be criminally abusive inmost states.

        1. Imagine the reaction if Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin or any of the FNC anchorettes confessed doing something like that to her kid sister?

          1. Ya know, that’s a nice thing about using [browser], I could see instantly that I did not want to click that link this afternoon.

            1. Unfortunately, I did. Does anybody have some good, strong lye soap? I feel the need to wash my eyes out.

            2. I am glad to see that making the extra effort to embed that link rather than leaving it as exposed as Dunham’s moral depravity.

        2. Didn’t Lena admit molesting her toddler sister? That’s a gruesome twofer! Incest and rape.

          1. Actually its a threesome, you forgot pedophilia. And explains why she’s considered a potential heir to cinema greats like Roman Polanski

                  1. And yet, she’s “reliable” enough that some poor guy is dealing with rape accusations years after the fact.

                    Plus, if his buddies after figure it out, they’re probably giving him a lot of crap for sleeping with Lena Dunham. if that is happening, they need to stop. Having slept with Dunham is punishment enough (and if a judge says that, I will donate to his reelection campaign for the rest of my life!).

                    1. What’s really weird is that she considers what he did rape because she didn’t enjoy the sex, but not what she herself did.

                    3. And, as we well know, she has feelings, whlle men entirely lack them. Well, I doubt that the guy she accused had much feelings for her, but then she did agree to drunken, drugged sex with some guy she just met at a party. What was she expecting?

                    4. Of course men lack them, because men suck.

                      Remember that women are free to engage in promiscuous sex as much as they want, but with so many trying to scream “rape”, will that be possible? I’m guessing not.

                    5. He may not have had much feelings for her then; I’m pretty sure he has strong feelings for her now.

      3. Meaning that statistically the child of pampered elites has mommy/daddy issues (if they do) out of a sense of entitlement, while the kid from the hills is probably still suffering from minimal/poor nutrition, neglect and *likely* abuse.

        The child of the elites has, or has the means to access the sort of resources they need to get help. The child of a poor, single, drug addicted mother might not even know that there *is* help, much less that they can access them.

        There is a recording out there of Bill Cosby (IIRC) talking about a ride along he did with a cop in one of the carolinas. They took this kid “home” to a 1 room shack, and the kid couldn’t go in because “mom” was entertaining. In another case (from the same recording) a kid found his own mother dead of an OD.

        So I won’t go so far as to say the child of the pampered elite isn’t worth wasting my time on, if they really want help and I can give that help I’ll be glad to, I’m just saying that with no other information available and I have to choose, it’s most likely to be the kid from the single mom that is most in need.

  6. Hmm. Oppression is an external system that seldom is predicated on people’s characters. Indeed when people’s characters come into play, we often stop calling it oppression. If John Doe, Richard Roe, and James Poe are all medieval peasants who must pay their lord to allow their marriages or receive their inheritance, must use his mill to get their grain ground and pay inflated prices, and work a day a week on the lord’s land, they’re all oppressed. If Richard Roe makes his lot worse by spending all his free time fuming over his lot and actively refuses to do things that might better it, and James Poe runs off, becomes a bandit, and gets killed in a fight with a desperate peasant he tried to rob, it isn’t their oppression that’s the problem, it’s them.

    So ” Which one deserves your help more?” and “Which one is more oppressed?” can have very different answers.

    Of course, that observation, being plain old ordinary justice, is not social justice.

  7. …tells you how much they will swallow…

    So, you’re saying that SJWs are a good thing to have in your dungeon? Interesting. (RUNS)

  8. “They embraced racists when they changed political affiliation”

    Really? Some prominent racist defected from the camp and became a Republican, and they embraced him? 🙂

    ‘Cause don’t kid yourself…the Democrats have _always_ been the party of racism in America. From the rank-and-file, through relatively lowly positions like the Birmingham AL commissioner of public safety, all the way to the highest-ranking Klansman in the US Senate…lifelong Democrats all.

    1. oh, yeah. I know. BUT they still will take the most vile despicable people, from the site I won’t mention, if those people suddenly declare themselves democrats.

        2. The Democrat party hasn’t changed, not at all. Not if you look at in the way I do. The Democrat party is, and has always been, the party of group rights, then and now. the founding fathers (oops- non-PC there) left group rights out of the Constitution. Rights belong to individuals. Not groups. And rights cannot be denied to an individual becasue of group membership. Works both ways. The Cherokees, having adopted westerm ways, happily settled in and living peacefully, were ejected from their lands by a Democrat president, Martin Van Buren, because they were Cherokee. (The other Indian tribes were also ejected and moved- but they never assimilated quite the same as the Cherokees had.) The Japanese were interned by a Democrat president, and liberal hero, FDR. The U.S. Navy was segregated by Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat president and liberal hero. Now, the Democrat party is still the party of group rights, but it is pro-rights of every group except white males. Democrats, the party and individuals I have known, judge you almost entirely by your group membership. And on that note, if groups have rights- then individuals, like me and you, don’t. Because individuals and individual identity are sacrificed for the greater good of the group. Meaning, of course, the “leaders” of the group. Everyone else can wallow in pigshit and die as long as the leaders are taken care of.

          I have known a few racist conservatives. And you know that old saying, “But I have a best friend who is ( )?” Well, they all do. They may not think much a particular ethnic or racial group in toto, but they judge individuals they know as individuals, and not on their group identity. If they don’t know the indivdual- well, another story. All the people I know in the category of racist conservative work in the prison-industrial complex. Might color their perception somewhat.

          And as far as racism goes, where is the boundary line that describes racist? Is it how you think or how you act? I won’t go to street festivals on any street named Martin Luther King Blvd. Is that simply being wise or is it racist on my part?

          1. The Cherokees, having adopted westerm ways, happily settled in and living peacefully, were ejected from their lands by a Democrat president, Martin Van Buren, because they were Cherokee.
            ————————-

            Don’t forget Andrew Jackson’ role in that mess…

          2. the dem platform over the years:
            Blacks are less than human so enslaving them is perfectly fine.
            (evolves to)
            Blacks are less than human, so we must keep them segregated from the whites.
            (evolved to)
            Blacks are less smart than whites so we need to have lower standards for them than whites.
            I don’t care how they candy coat it, they are racists who feel Blacks (and Hispanics and every other “minority” except Asians ie. Orientals and Indians) are stupid and slow witted, so they are held to a lower standard.
            See, they ignore that “Content of their character, not the color of their skin” portion of MLK’s Speech (A Republican by the by) and still, as they have throughout history, deal with folks by race.

          4. Part of the problem they had with the Cherokee is their pre-existent culture adapted to “White Man’s Ways” quite readily and the Cherokee of the Western Carolinas, Tennessee and Georgia were economically out-performing the ex-convict crackers, a situation intolerable.

              1. Similar to why the Mormons were driven out from several spots. No drinking or gambling, money got put to productive uses, farms thrived…must be witchcraft!

                1. witchcraft was one of the accusations tosses at the father of one of my co-workers. He’s Cambodian and could get better crops sooner, and longer than his neighbours, so when the Rouge took over they sicced them on to him so he and his family fled to the USA. From what I understand it did not end well for the accusers either. not that anything ended well under the Rouge.

                  1. not that anything ended well under the Rouge.

                    You can say that again. It was not good terrible bad bad — at its best.

                2. I have heard that the J. R. Reynolds fortunes really took off the year his wife started to come to town with him when he took his tobacco to market. After the basic store goods were bought she made him put some of the remaining money aside to re-invest in and expand the farm.

  9. Regarding yesterday’s comment referenced in the post: The use of the term, “misogynist” was what set off my alarm bells.

    On the other hand, regarding a PUA hating women? It’s possible. I can’t fully wrap my head around it, but a woman-hating man could see seducing and having sex with a woman as the ultimate degradation he could impose on her, with the side effect of receiving a pleasurable experience while doing so. Probably very rare, as most of the time it’s going to be all about getting his own enjoyment and merely not caring much about hers.

    1. “Hate” is very inclusively defined for these people. I.e., to fail to respect and honor all women as individuals, simply for being female, (which is pretty inevitable when your focus is manipulating them into sex via the Game), is “hating”.
      I get it, although I prefer to reserve extreme descriptors for the extremes of behavior; not everyone does.

  11. Uhh, small picky, picky – it should probably be “mau, mau” not “mao, mao” unless of course you were workin’ at avoiding being all RAAAAACIST!!!11!! and such, heh, heh, heh. On the other hand, reds being red and such…
    And Sarah/Wayne, they are obviously prepared to swallow a lot; consider how much time they seem to spend before their “gods” on their knees with their faces up close and personal waiting to be fed.
    I better stop now before I get all koi and this turns to carp…

    1. Unless it was unintentional, “mao mao” sounds like a play on words. Would have perhaps been more obvious if capitalized (“Mao Mao”) perhaps.

    3. Yeah. Phrase originated or first recorded by that all time favorite conservative in disguise, Tom Wolfe, in “Radical Chic, or Mau Mauing the flak-catchers.”

  12. Good heavens. Next thing, you’re going to be saying that the SPLC shouldn’t call them hate-groups.

      1. Far be it from me to tell the SPLC what to do. I’ll just tell them they’re full of condensed crap.

      1. And they’re going to get somebody killed. Painting constitutionalists as terrorists is as about off target as you can get.

        1. They might have already gotten someone killed. I can’t remember – did anyone die in the attack on that organization that was opposed to same sex marriage? The gunman decided to attack them because he’d seen them listed by the SPLC as an “hate group”.

            2. Sarah, as someone who lived in Montgomery AL for 35 years, ANYTHING you have heard about Morris Dees being a con artist and all around sleaze is both true and not the half of it.

          2. I don’t remember either. I was more specifically think of the fact that federal law enforcement takes the SPLC as gospel. The groups being tarred may not be terrorists but they don’t knuckle under either. This may lead to death and destruction on both sides.

            1. Actually, the FBI has announced they will no longer be using SPLC as a resource. Apparently one lawyer at a desk has less credulity than the two Schenectady greengrocers who started the Hollywood witch-hunts back in the 50’s ( a story in itself).

          3. If you mean the attack on the Family Research Council, I think the guard was shot but not killed.

            1. You’re right. Since the shooter’s intent was mass murder, however, the correct response from SPLC does not change.

      2. No it isn’t. It’s the pot calling the mixing bowl black. SPLC inspired a shooting and goes after people who haven’t.

  13. I confess to being a mite conflicted.
    As an individual visiting troll I think you gave Ms. Ele much more attention than she deserves. But as a representative of the insidious SJW subculture, yeah, I can see the need to occasionally excoriate the idjits.
    But my first thought was you really approved her post just because you thought the Hun needed a bit of fresh meat to munch on. Nom, nom, nom, ptui, nasty!

    2. Well, she was “better” than most “drive by trolls”. She almost sounded reasonable.

          1. I’ve perfected a mechanism for time travel. Unfortunately it only works in one direction and seems to get less efficient as I age. Now I can only do 8 hours max per trip, but when I was a teenager it was good for up to 16 hours at a go.

    2. I have noticed that Our Beloved Blogmistress occasionally misspells a word, but it is never a slang term … she is better with the slang terms and puns than anyone I know in real life … 🙂

        1. The gaps in Sarah’s knowledge should be known as Sarahchasms. Free use is hereby granted/allowed/just take it, will ya!

            1. Dropping them into the Marianas Trench with cement shoes does have a certain appeal, I’ll admit. This also has the side benefit of allowing them to gain the depth they imagine they have, but don’t.

              What? We’re a helpful lot, aren’t we? *innocent smile*

  15. I think this shows you that, no matter how bad/crazy/whatever someone might be, it doesn’t mean they’re wrong about everything. There might be that germ of truth in their crazy. I have had some interesting conversations with my kids on this topic. It really takes a certain amount of largeness of mind to accept.

  16. The Spouse suggests that I should put a warning. Warning: Rant.

    I.e. there are many disagreements even among ourselves.

    Hopkins: ‘Well, I’ll tell ya. In all my years, I’ve never seen, heard nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about. Hell yes, I’m for debating anything!

    From 1776

    I suspect that one of the few things all of us here would agree upon is that we do not hold a unified theory of The Right Way of Being.

    Still, surprising, as we here are the ones so often accused of wanting to make everyone march in lock step. I guess this is used as a means to shut us down. They hope that, like good (read that: well trained) little boys and girls, that if they accuse us of being impolite for rocking their boat and we will “Sit down.” ( 😉 )

    This leads to one of the several reasons we can and do argue among ourselves. We are argumentative by nature. We have had to be. Many here first had to argue within themselves to come to the conclusion that the culture they were raised in is off track. (In some cases way off track.) We have gotten into the habit of arguing.

    For each of us a differing mix of ideas and incidents that caused us to question the popular political and cultural meme. These often become the hot points that set us off. Similarly there are differing influences, people and books that have shaped our present positions. These often form our battle weapons.

    In common we like liberty. Including the liberty to openly examine what others say and defend our own ideas in the arena of thought. And, thanks to our esteemed hostess, we have a forum where we feel like we can do this among ourselves without being kicked out of the family circle.

    (Oooo! Look! Look, look! An idea! Or two, or three! Pounce. Let’s see what happens if we poke, prod, shake, stretch and fold this a bit. How about? Well, I never! You know you did. No? Yes! Maybe… My, my. But…)

    Sadly as in all families, there are those political relatives of ours who think it is legitimate to impose (not suggest, not advocate for, but impose) what they believe is The Right Way of Being. No one really wants them at the party. They sometimes show up. They get hammered.

    1. Wrong! (Or is that just contradiction?)

      I’m pretty sure you could tell anyone on this forum they’re fully of hooey and as long as you 1) did it politely and 2) backed it up no one would fault you for it. A REALLY long thread might ensue but no one would just flat try to shut you down.

          1. As you identify yourself with a male name, therefore, it is obvious to some parties, such as She-who-talks-to-plants, that you are most certainly worse than a jerk.

            1. Well, yes, of course I’m a jerk in GENERAL, I wasn’t trying to be a jerk in particular, just reference a Monty Python sketch I laugh at (thanks for the link).

              When she talks to the plants, I wonder if they talk back and, if so, what do they say?

              (Which makes me think of Clint Eastwood.)

                1. Well, they told me there was a Field Marshal’s baton in my back pack but I told them I didn’t steal nothin’!

      2. In my experience, limited as it is on this site, I think pretty much everyone has been told at least once that they are full of hooey about something and I think only a couple aren’t here any more because of it. (Other than the drive by trollings.)

        It’s the whole ‘knock down drag out fight followed by going out for beer after and planning the rematch’ thing that some people find boggling. 😉

  17. Hoyt, err, Sarah,

    A few modest corrections.

    1. It’s not “The Game;” it’s just “Game.”
    2. Gamers play video games; “pick-up artists” game women.

    Also, would you please tell the Portuguese post-bellum joke?

    1. Um. I shall fix that.
      It won’t make any sense.
      A guy comes into a coffee shop and orders a brandy and a coffee. The proprietor brings it and asks for payment. The guy says “I ain’t paying and I ain’t afraid anymore.” So the proprietor asks his nephew who is huge and working there for the summer to collect. The customer repeats the same thing. The kid looks like “oh, I see.” Sits down. When his uncle comes he tells him “Bring us two brandies and two coffees. We ain’t paying and we ain’t afraid anymore.” (The deep inlaid joke is on social influence, but it doesn’t work in English/now.)

      1. I wonder whether the joke would work in portuguese, or if the Brazilian cultural experience is already too separate from the Portuguese. I suspect the latter is the case (and I am probably a bit out of touch with Brazilian culture these days in any case.)

        Love your blog Dona Sara. The Instapundit keeps sending me your way. Glad he does but I really should just bookmark you.

        Done!

      2. I know that somewhere I read a similar joke about two Irishmen. The joke does work elsewhere. I got it right off.

      3. I dare say it does.

        A black man walks into a bar in Birmingham, Alabama. He orders a bourbon. The white bartender brings him a bourbon, and says, “That’ll be a dollar.” The black man says, “I ain’t afraid of you and I ain’t paying for that bourbon!” The bartender looks over to his son-in-law and says, “José, explain to the gentleman that he owes us a dollar.” José walks over and says, “Sir, you owe my father-in-law a dollar.” The black man replies, “I’m still not afraid of him and I ain’t paying for the bourbon!” So, José grabs the man by the neck, throws him to the floor, stomps on him, then drags his bleeding carcass out of the bar. When he’s done, he walks back to the bar, takes a seat, and says, “Pour me a bourbon!”

        Something like that, right?

        2. Since it’s joke time, that reminds me of a joke I heard way back when in high school. Q: What does a bigoted southern shopkeeper say to a 7 ft Zulu who enters his store carrying a spear? A: May I help you, sir?

          1. Q: Why is it people never laugh at jokes about Southerners? A: The jokes are about bigoted Yankees. Here’s a joke about Southerners.

            A poor ex-convict cracker walks into a gun shop. Two black men are looking at hand guns under glass, while one more stands behind the counter. All are openly carrying handguns. The black man behind the counter asks, “Can I help you, sir.” The cracker replies, “I need a rifle.” The black man at the counter says, “No problem. Here’s a Winchester, and a box of ammo. That’ll be $100.” The cracker, amazed at the price and lack of paperwork, slaps his money on the counter and promptly leaves the store. The black man then looks toward the floor, at the store owner, and says, “That’s how you treat people respectfully. Now, sire, please open your safe.”

  18. Several years ago I saw a clip of a show where a guy was commenting on Palin. An interviewer had asked her what her favorite books were and she said she really enjoyed C. S. Lewis (one of my own favorites, but also a standard safe and orthodox answer, so who knows if she really meant it). This guy–who was British, and an Oxford professor mind you–promptly made fun of her for citing a children’s book as a favorite. Which mostly made *him* look stupid if the watcher knew anything about Lewis, but he was obviously going for scorn points over reality.

    A few weeks ago I took my 14yo to a panel discussion at Berkeley for a program commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. I wanted to see Greg Lukianoff talk, and the topic was free speech issues on college campuses. Even though I am used to Berkeley politics, it was quite the session, with several audience members openly advocating for limits on speech on campus, approving the ‘heckler’s veto,’ and advocating for a hierarchy of who is allowed to speak based on historical victimization status. My poor kid was pretty stunned (I think Lukianoff was too, poor guy). It was very educational for her.

    1. A few weeks ago I took my 14yo to a panel discussion at Berkeley for a program commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.

      Meet the new boss… Free speech for me, not for thee. Because, you know, we have to have make sure it is responsible speech.

      1. Or my solution to David Dukes and Jesse Jackson: lock both of them in a room with spiked clubs… and have snipers posted for whichever one comes out.

        Why, yes, I am a Misanthrope. What was the first clue?

          1. Nah, spiked clubs make *sure*. I’d rather they were just *gone* than suffer a bit but survive.

              1. …so why give them both a fighting chance? Cement shoes, Challenger Deeps, and they’ll have the depth they so desperately want to have! (or keep declaring they do.)

                Actually I’m sure there’s a lot of people who would… benefit… from gaining the depth we think they should have, hey?

    3. Weren’t the Berkley Free Speech Society the ones who wanted to burn Edward Teller’s house down to punish him for refusing to appear at a mock trial to defend statements he’d never made? He was in the house at the time, I think.

  19. “After a while they form sort of a pleasant buzz as you go about your business. ”

    That sentence made me think of the smell of a fish-processing plant. It’s pretty horrible as you walk up, and for a while after you go in, but eventually your nose becomes accustomed to the stench and you can ignore it.

  20. It is hard for me to care right now. “Kill them all and let God sort out the rest.” Kind of a phrase I heard from combat vets for several years. When I am out of the grief phase, I may regret wanting to go Viking. Now??? The left and their policies are NOT helping. The ACA (Obamacare) is hurting the Vets, and others who shouldn’t be hurt by it. If I were healthier, I would be causing a political riot. So in my mind the LEFToids are evil.

    1. *hugs Cyn*

      And I don’t blame you. Grief aside, they’re all pushing us to go Viking, thinking that this will result in a win for them.

      They have NO idea what they’re asking for, trying to make us all snap the leash and chains on our tempers and restraint. After all, they who disdain civilization, but have known nothing but, enoble barbarism and think it’s desirable.

      We know better.

  21. When it comes to the manosphere, there seem to be several very good thinkers in there (I have occasionally at times spend quite a lot of time looking at the blogs and sites). The one thing I have against the movement as a whole is that most of them do seem to rate all women based only on sexual attractiveness – if a woman is close to a 10 in looks, her attractiveness can be considerably raised if she also has values which they find attractive, but if she is beneath a five or so in looks it doesn’t matter much what values she holds or how she thinks, a lot of them seem to think that she can be dismissed completely just because she looks ugly.

    Now you can’t force sexual attraction, true, but personally I’m okay with being friendzoned by men I’d like to have sex with – if you don’t want to, you don’t want to, and as said, you can’t force yourself to feel that if you don’t feel it.

    But I do find it at least somewhat insulting when a man who finds me ugly will dismiss me also as a potential friend or ally just because he doesn’t want to have sex with me. And foolish of them. Fine, you don’t want to have sex with me, then consider me as a honorary sister or aunt or whatever, but if we do share most of our other values we should be working together.

    1. I was never as much about looks as personality. This is one advantage of the net. While you may or may not feel the same I find you attractive and a suitable companion. I have no idea what you look like and don’t care. People seeing my fiance would doubt what I say because in the lottery of life I pulled a winner, her personality won me and then I found out that she was physically beautiful as well

        1. The problem with “Game” is that most people, especially women, don’t understand that it is “A game” I know there are women’s games that are just like that or even about other things. Boys have been standing on street corners talking trash to each other since streets were first laid out, naw, cow paths work too. I like to watch people doing every day things. I’ll bet I have seen more heavy set women pushing baby carts than good looking sexy women without wedding rings. In real life, looks don’t matter except to the women who think it does and limit themselves.

          1. Minor quibble. I was only heavy-set AFTER I had baby prams to push. In my case it was six months in bed with first son and metabolism that never recovered. BUT it’s not unusual.

            1. You would have to kick in a memory. I’m a retired Probation Officer, besides other unmentionables, One day one of my female clients stops sideways in the door and after a minute the shaking parts stop moving as she strikes a pinup pose. I think. She looks over her shoulder into my office. “Guess what, I got my figure back!” At my curious look, she explained that she had just had a baby. I had been her officer for three months and didn’t know she was pregnant. Still couldn’t tell the difference. But, I liked her, she was probably one of the best clients I supervised. Good attitude, followed the rules and never argued. I could see what her husband saw in her.

    2. I agree both that there’s a number of good thinkers in the manosphere, and that there’s a lot of people with a very adolescent view of women. They seem to leave out entirely qualities of character which, in my opinion, are much more important to attraction that that initial flush of animal attraction.

      I confess to actually reading the romance genre, and I have the same complaint about quite a few romances. They elevate physical attraction to the point that it’s higher than any other virtue. It can be pretty repellent. Self-restraint is not admired, it’s denigrated. I like to think about what the fantasies that we see in fiction reveal about the state of the culture. Sometimes it really makes me worry.

      1. One of the reasons why I don’t read much modern romance. The older works often seem to consider outer beauty more as a big plus rather than the whole point, but with most of the newer ones sexual attraction has become the main point for the whole thing, and everything else – well, they usually do have the idea that things like character and values are important, but often they seem to have only very secondary importance compared to the ‘oh damn that person is _attractive_, wants him/her in bed with me!’ -part (or kitchen table or backseat of the car or any other place which happens to be there right then).

            3. Now, if you must marry, take care she is old —
              A troop-sergeant’s widow’s the nicest I’m told,
              For beauty won’t help if your rations is cold,
              Nor love ain’t enough for a soldier.

              The Young British Soldier, Kipling.

        2. I do think that part of it is that one of the underpinnings of the “progressive” worldview is a rejection of any “moral” judgment of anything and everything sexual. That was really attractive to those who wanted to do whatever they felt like without feeling guilt.

      2. The author whose romance works I enjoy the most has the sexual attraction angle as a powerful motivator, but the relationship tends to break, and both people in the relationship miss the other for more than just the steamy sex, but the various virtues and positive personality traits the other person has as well. That usually prompts the get-back-together. As both the guy and girl tend to be attractive – and the variations of what this author goes for as attractive in the women’s descriptions is VERY varied, from tiny woman, to tall, to generous body and curves, it’s quite a refreshing read. One guy especially liked that the girl he was with was enjoying her food as opposed to picking at the meal and constantly making noise about oh god calories, my figure, eek I can’t have that. Another plied his lady with fudge, and another with chocolate cake.

        I read her stuff because they’re WONDERFUL de-stressors and comfort ‘mental food’ as it were. (Lynne Graham, in case you’re curious.)

        A guy friend – yes, a guy, very male, very much married to his wife – recommended Loretta Chase for character interactions, which he has fun reading. He and I both deeply enjoy character driven stories so I did enjoy the books recommended. (Historical accuracy though, I wouldn’t be able to vouch for.)

  22. “…with glitter in the hoo ha…”

    I think Sarah has, once again, hit on the problem. While I am “differently plumbed,” I can only think that glitter applied thusly would be as irritating as an equal application of coarse sand. Perhaps if they washed the glitter out, their perspective and attitude might change.

    (slams the door and runs before the carp police arrive…)

          1. You can pin a star on it, you can pin a diamond on it, you can even pin a ribbon on it, but a private is still a private.

              1. Ah, the $100 song on WRFG (Radio Free Gael/ Georgia) during fundraising week. They’d play it ONLY if you donated $100 or more. Someone always *ahem* rose to the occasion. 🙂

  23. Thomas Sowell, in his book Intellectuals and Society focuses at length on the tendency of intellectuals to do what he calls “making arguments without arguments:”

    … many of their political or ideological views are promoted by verbal virtuosity in evading structured arguments and empirical evidence. Among the many arguments without arguments are claims that opposing views are “simplistic” and opposing individuals unworthy, as well as assertions of “rights” and attributing to adversaries a belief in panaceas or golden ages.
    Op cit., p.80

    The declaration of some people as “unclean” is one example of this procedure. It alleviates the need to address, much less refute, the actual ideas and arguments being put forth by declaring the source of those ideas and arguments morally offensive.

    It is the classic <ad hominem logical fallacy of attacking the source rather than the facts or the argument, dressed up to conceal its invalidity.

  24. “This is enforced by ‘respected’ – look, ‘respect’ is almost exclusively a liberal word. Usually used in the sense of ‘respect the office’ or ‘respect me because I have this credential.'”

    “I have always had a deep respect and I mean that most sincerely. The band is just fantastic, that is really what I think. Oh by the way, which one’s pink?”

        1. That might be interesting. Mixing sometimes does produce something actually in a good way new, provided all involved are working towards a good blend and not trying to just overwhelm the other parts.

        2. Sounds crazy, but it might just work.

          (Seriously, PInk is a decent singer and really a pretty spectacular writer once you listen to the songs that *don’t* get charted.)

              2. Years ago when they declared that the next Hurricane that would hit North Carolina was Floyd I could not help but comment that I did not see how a storm named after such an amiable rather laconic character could do much harm. Of course I had not taken in account that before it arrived Tropical Storm Dennis would menace the coast for some eleven days dropping some numerous inches of rain…

            2. Blasphemy! I’m just glad I got over the “sit in a dark room, listen to Pink Floyd and wallow in despair” phase when I was a teenager. But I still have all their albums.

              1. They only ever produced one song I cared for at all, most of the others were like fingernails on a chalkboard.

            3. Roger Waters is a right on communist prick but the rest are(were) OK. I prefer their early stuff but there a bits I like of the later stuff too.

          2. Although she does occasionally wear glitter in some odd places, one has to admit it takes talent to sing while spinning upside down.

            And I DON’T want to see the lead singer of Pink Floyd in that outfit.

                1. Watch some of her other live videos, like

                  She is a Performer first. I would kind of like to go to one of her concerts because I suspect she would be one of those artists who are much better live.

                  2. I admit Andy Kaufman’s work these last thirty years has not been particularly funny, but there’s still hope of a comeback.

                    Of course, if Kaufman did return, who would believe it was him?

        3. I find a much better ear worm in my desire to find the alternate universe where a banjo playing Steve Martin joined Fleetwood Mac while Stevie Nicks went on to become a stand up comedian and actress.

          Just imagine the drop thumb version of “Rhiannon”.

    3. Actually, conservatives use the world Respect as well, but the key difference is, conservatives use it as a noun, while the liberals use it as a verb.
      C: “You have earned my respect.”
      l: “You have to respect me!”

  25. Anyone know who Beardsley McTurbanhead is? He/she/it posted my comment from here to my blog and said they were uncomfortable reading anything I had to say– ummm. Sounds like I am a moral leper now. I checked the url but it is “fake.”

      2. Bingo. Marshfield MA — it’s Andrew Marston AKA clamps AKA Chlamydia. You have a case of the Clamps, my dear. Block him. Oh, and he also objects that I linked to a Game site.

    2. The internet is big. Mr. McTurbanhead doesn’t have to read anything he doesn’t want to. We won’t be offended if he doesn’t return here again.

        1. Still waiting on mine to arrive. 😦

          And I still need to order my trigger warning one so I’ll have it for the next CCW class I teach.

              1. I didn’t realize there were going to be launches for either of them.

                :/

                Now, I’m wearing a Pink Floyd shirt. If any of the band dies, I’m going to just solid color t-shirts from now on!

                  1. As long as I don’t have to wear it out in public and you’d better throw in a Joe Biden shirt as well (otherwise, we could go from out of the frying pan and into the fire).

                    1. Seconded on the Biden shirt. We really don’t need America’s Favorite Crazy Uncle running the show.

                    2. Obama, biden, hillary, boehner, mccain, kerry,pelosi…I may need to run a fundraiser

    2. Bad. But you will get those, that’s a given. Hopefully they will learn what caused it and fix the problem, but even if they don’t, well, let’s just hope they will get no major problems from the bubble-wrap group and they can continue.

      You just have to accept the failures and the deaths if you want to go forward with this. And the main thing: the people who are willing to accept those have to be allowed to proceed.

        2. The FlightSafety crash is the weirdest in this bunch. To be callous, rockets blow up, but crashing your King Air into a simulator training facility that does extensive safety training for King Airs? That’s just odd.

      2. Apparently “Stand to Your Glasses Steady” is a filk of a poem by a Victorian poet named Bartholomew Dowling.

        CHORUS:
        Stand to your glasses steady
        This world is a world full of lies
        A toast to the ones dead already
        Hurrah for the next man to die

        We stand ‘neath resounding rafters
        The walls around us are bare
        They echo back our laughter
        It seems that the dead are still here

        In flaming Spad and Camel
        With wings of wood and steel
        For mortal stakes we gamble
        With cards that are stacked for the deal

        Denied by the land that bore us
        Betrayed by the ones we hold dear
        The good have all gone before us
        And only the dull are still here

        We loop in the purple twilight
        We spin in the silvery dawn
        With a trail of smoke behind us
        To show where our comrades have gone

        And the darker, more humorous version:

        Take the cylinders out of my kidneys,
        The connecting rod out of my brain,
        From the small of my back take the crankshaft
        And assemble the engine again.

        There are a lot of versions of these, but I can’t find the space one just now.

          1. I always understood that to be the toast of the Lafayette Escadrille. A group of American aviators fighting for the French in WWI

            1. Sorry, I’m not posting coherently. The Victorian version had no Spads. It was written about English guys in India during plague time. The original original poem, “Indian Revelry,” was written by W. F. Thompson, Esq. and published in The Bengal Annual for 1835, a publication by the East India Company. Then it got associated with Dowling somehow as “The Revel.”

              So the Victorians used it, and the WWI UK fighter pilots used it, and the WWII fighter pilots of various nations used it, and there are tons of filks of it all over the world for all purposes. It has an artsong tune, or you can sing it to “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.” It’s that kind of song.

              “Indian Revelry”

              We meet ‘neath the sounding rafter
              And the walls around are bare;
              As they shout to our peals of laughter
              It seems that the dead are there.
              So stand to your glasses! steady!
              We drink in our comrades’ eyes
              A cup to the dead already–
              Hurrah! for the next that dies.

              Not here are the goblets glowing,
              Not here is the vintage sweet;
              ‘Tis cold, as our hearts are growing,
              And dark, as the doom we meet.
              But stand to your glasses! steady!
              And soon shall our pulses rise;
              Here’s a cup to the dead already–
              Hurrah! for the next that dies.

              There’s many a hand that’s shaking,
              And many a cheek that’s sunk;
              But soon, though our hearts are breaking,
              They’ll burn with the wine we’ve drunk.
              So stand to your glasses! steady!
              ‘Tis here the revival lies;
              A cup to the dead already!
              And hurrah! for the next that dies.

              Time was when we frowned at others,
              We thought we were wiser then;
              Ha! ha! let THEM think of their mothers
              Who hope to see them again:
              Ho! stand to your glasses! steady!
              The thoughtless is here the wise;
              Here’s a cup to the dead already–
              Hurrah! for the next that dies.

              Not a sigh for the lot that darkles,
              Not a tear for the friends that sink;
              We’ll fall, mid the wine cup’s sparkles,
              As mute as the wine we drink:
              Come stand to your glasses steady!
              ‘Tis this that the respite buys;
              Quaff a cup to the dead already–
              Hurrah! for the next that dies.

              There’s a mist on the glass congealing–
              ‘Tis the hurricane’s fiery breath;
              And thus does the warmth of feeling
              Turn ice in the grasp of death:
              But stand to your glasses! steady!
              For a moment the vapor flies;
              Here’s a cup to the dead already–
              Hurrah! for the next that dies.

              Who dreads to the dust returning?
              Who shrinks from the sable shore,
              Where the high and haughty yearning
              Of the soul shall sting no more?
              No! stand to your glasses! steady!
              The world is a world of lies:
              A cup to the dead already,
              And hurrah! for the next that dies.

              Cut off from the land that bore us,
              Betrayed by the land we find,
              When the brightest have gone before us,
              And the dullest remain behind,
              Stand! stand! to your glasses, steady!
              ‘Tis all we have left to prize;
              One cup to the dead already–
              Hurrah! for the next that dies!

    3. I’m a little suspicious about “exploded” — one survivor and the debris field is pretty much one chunk. Might have been a gain failure in the hybrid motor that led to blowing out the nozzle.

      1. Total WAG based on what some folks saw from the ground, it sounds like a hard start of the hybrid rocket, with an explosion when it stuttered. The test pilot that got out was likely involuntarily tossed, as getting out of a spinning tumbling broken fuselage is no mean trick (no ejection seats installed).

        And lest it seem I’m treating this too technically and ignoring the tragedy: The people who do test piloting, especially of totally new stuff, are among the bravest people I can possibly imagine, especially the ones that are helping push humanity out of the cradle.

        1. Pilots who test such contraptions push the exceedingly fine line between”Bravest Man I’ve Ever Know” and “Bughouse Nuts.”

              1. The book was way better than the movie, as such things usually are. The book had annoyances due mainly to the undertheme of “explaining this odd flyover hick culture of military test pilots to the NY-LA intelligentsia who really matter,” but it was also clear Wolfe liked the subject and admired the test pilots and astronauts he wrote about.

                (Aside: Anyone have an example of the opposite, where the movie was way better than the book?)

                1. Warning: If anyone seriously suggests that “Starship Troopers” was a better movie than a book, I will find you and beat you to death with your own liver.

                  Just sayin’. 🙂

                4. Well, I think the 1939 version of “Four Feathers” (and in second place the 1976 or 77 version with Jane Seymour” were far better stories than the original novel by A.E.W. Mason. The 2002 version was like the Charlize Theron “Italian Job”, a third-rate story sold under a more distinguished name.

                  1. I am currently “reading” Beau Geste in audiobook form and have to view the 1939 motion picture adaptation (starring Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, Robert Preston and Brian Donlevy, directed by William A. Wellman) as better than the book.
                    http://www.imdb.com/media/rm307138048/tt0031088?ref_=ttmd_md_pv

                    For that matter, I would be hard pressed to claim that the book was superior to the George Stevens 1939 film adaptation — starring Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Victor McLaglen (with Sam Jaffe in the title role) — of Gunga Din.

                    Having read Destry Rides Again and seen the movie, I think I would opt for the movie .. but I admit to being a big fan of Jimmy Stewart, Brian Donlevy, Akim Tamiroff and, of course, the great Dietrich. See what the boys in the back room will have, indeed!

                    I might also entertain arguments that the movie versions of Gone With the Wind, The Thin Man and Ball of Fire were all better than their originating books. I admit to being of mixed opinion about the adaptations of H. G. Wells to the screen — when I originally read those books my literary tastes were mostly in my mouth and I suspect were I to reread War of the Worlds and The Time Machine a conclusion could be sustained that the movies wasted less time.

                    Other nominees should include Field of Dreams, Die Hard, Shrek, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and M*A*S*H.

                    That only covers titles where I am familiar with both the film and the book. Some other possibilities occur, such as The Devil Wears Prada where I would have a hard time being convinced the novel wasn’t worse than the film (and not because the film was particularly good), and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

                    1. I will second The Time Machine being better as a movie. Then again H G wells was never to my taste. Gunga din OTOH, comparing a movie to a poem is a stretch. MASH and Aladin i will disagree with but, that boils down to taste. Who Killed Roger Rabbit was inspiration for the movie, not a script for it. The book is a much darker work in most ways. Since the subject matter was toons I cannot call it, too many variables

                    2. Adding complexity, Who Killed Roger Rabbit was about comic strips; the film adaptation relied heavily on cartoon references and memes in a way the novel almost surely could not have. This was less an adaptation than an “inspired by” translation.

                      Then there are such things as The Sacketts, Conagher, The Quick and the Dead and other L’Amour adaptations. I love the novels, but SAM FREAKIN’ ELLIOTT in some of his best performances. AND Tom Selleck. 😉 A note for the watchful, L’Amour’s The Iron Marshall was adapted as a pilot for a television series (Shaughnessy) and featured Daragh O’Malley (Sgt. Patrick Harper in Sharpe’s Whatever) in a major role (no, not the lead — that would have been too delicious.) (Further trivia: look for O’Malley and Pierce Brosnan as IRA hitmen in the superb gangster film The Long Good Friday.

                    3. I hated the Sacketts the first time I saw it. Too many liberties taken with the books. After that I loved it, one of the few western movies I own. And while Sam Elliot was masterful as Tell, the casting of both Tom Selleck and Glen Ford was inspired for those parts as well.

                    4. Oh, yeah — about Gunga Din. I was just messin’ with ya. Same with Ball of Fire, which began life as Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs before Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks got ahold of it.

        2. The idea that the Virgin Galactic accident was a “hard start” or some other overpressure in the motor sounds even more likely when you hear the V-G spokesman telling us this was the first flight test of a “new fuel mixture” (the “mainstream media” can be good for something) — even despite his accompanying assurance it had been “extensively tested” on the ground first.

          The phrases “hybrid rocket” and “combustion instability” have been used together in a sentence rather too much by now for that to sound benign; if I’m remembering correctly the (liquid) oxidizer is basically pure nitrous oxide, so the (solid) fuel composition would be pretty much all you could tinker with, barring a major redesign. Even getting some new combination to burn steady several times would not mean it’s as dependable as the old one, from the hybrid “lore” I’ve read/heard.

          And if the 1-2 second video that came next is relevant (or even *from this flight* at all), that may be even more suggestive. It shows not a flame, but a turbulent and coarse mixture of what looks like black smoke and white smoke, coming out of the nozzle. If black = fuel burning slowly in oxygen-poor gas and white = nearly pure oxidizer, having that (cool but pressurized = high-density) stuff suddenly mix well and burn hot over much of the chamber sounds like a great recipe for a hard-start, pressure-spike accident. Not a happy thought.
          Although it also makes merely “speculative” sound pretty tame, too. One piece of information and a couple seconds of video = not much to go on.

          The crew must have known all this, hybrids’ spotty history of stable performance and all the rest, and done it anyway.
          Somehow there’s an implication that because this was a private company getting ready to take tourists to space, they weren’t as much representatives of the nation as our “real” government-hired astronauts (who have only Soyuz to fly right now anyway).
          I do not believe history will share that opinion for long.

          (Hoping this will land in at least the right ballpark of the threading…)

          1. Somehow there’s an implication that because this was a private company getting ready to take tourists to space, they weren’t as much representatives of the nation as our “real” government-hired astronauts (who have only Soyuz to fly right now anyway).
            I do not believe history will share that opinion for long.

            A lot of the development in early aviation centered around barnstorming and air races. The barnstormers were mainly entertainers. But they got people interested in flight and flying. How many of those who would go on to become aviators and aviation engineers got bitten by that bug watching somebody in a surplus Jenny doing loops over Old McDonald’s cornfield? How many got infected by “airplane rides, $5 for five minutes”?

            And air races? Entertainment again. And it certainly wasn’t bloodless. Some of those planes (most of them?) were deathtraps. Yet a lot of the technology that made its way into the fighters of world war ii came right out of those air racers.

            In some ways I think it’s a shame that post-war air racing, at least in the so-called “unlimited” class (well, unlimited so long as you’re limited to propellers and piston engines) settled on souped up surplus WWII fighters and not new original designs. And according to an illustrated history of air racing I read many years ago there was at least one post-war race that featured surplus F-86’s. Would have been nice if they had continued that but I suspect the problem was money, oh, and the government not letting later airframes loose into civilian hands in numbers enough to make racing them viable. (There is, or was at least–don’t know if it’s still existent–F-104 in flyable condition in civilian hands. Who could he race?)

            You know, for all Jim Bede’s flaws as an aircraft designer, somebody should have been designing aircraft like the BD-5J and BD-10 (just doing a better job at it). Now if somebody like the Rutan’s had turned their hand to high performance jet aircraft for the civilian, hobbyist, market….

            In any case, pioneering is dangerous, whatever the field. Those who lose sight of that, and lose the willingness to accept the danger, are doomed to stagnation and ennui.

            So keep the dream alive.

            1. a few folks have tried to make a from scratch unlimited racer and found it is damned hard to do, and most either run out of money well before the thing is competitive (or flying in a few cases), or they crashed killing the designer/pilot. And most of the planes running in the Gold races resemble a stock P51 or Bearcat about as much as Smokey Yunick’s 15/16ths Chevelle did to one on the dealer floor.

              1. Yeah, those highly modified mustangs and bearcats are probably very near the pinnacle of what can be done with piston engines and propellers. But it’s that very limit that I’m questioning. Turboprops do exist. And while the BD-10 has severe flaws related to flutter, it shows that jets in the transonic to supersonic regime are achievable.

                Oh, and I decided that my comment up above was worthy of a blog post in its own right:

                http://thewriterinblack.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-loss-of-spaceship-two.html

                1. turboprops though run into the same issues as a piston plane and add a few as well. Prop speed is the problem, and a turboprop has throttling lag that would be an issue.
                  I also would not want to be within hearing range of a field full of MU2/Garrett TPE331 sounding aeroplanes.

                  1. Once upon a time, I had to explain to someone that their supersonic tiltrotor aircraft wouldn’t work and why.

                    2. That and as the prop blades approach their local speed of sound, they stop working, thus providing no thrust… they assumed it was just a matter of applying more power…

                    3. Isn’t applying more power the solution to everything? Certainly it works for centralized government!

                    4. Hah… well, it ended up with them dumping that entire description from their book and got me writing for them.

                    5. yeah, iirc the Bear has props that approch sonic speeds, so they yowl pretty good singly but counter rotating they are even louder, so loud they used to track them solely by sound. I’d hate to think of a tilt rotor getting close to that, but I doubt we could keep reliable blades on it.

                      But just thinking about things like that is giving me more of a headache.

          2. Yes, everytime I hear that phrase “hybrid rocket” two things pop to mind. 1)Hybrid cars, and how they have a lot more problems than most regular cars, because there is twice as much stuff to break 2)10% ethanol fuel. ‘nuf said.

            Neither of those thoughts would instill me with an abundance of confidence if I was the test pilot.

  28. Hoyt, 🙂

    [I’m a first-time commenter who has occasionally landed here from links on Twitter and from Instapundit.]

    I’ll leave it to others to comment on the primary points of this post, because my mind is *blown* by your obviously-true observation about the political associations of the verbs “respect” and “admire”. It’s the sort of nugget that makes one fall in love (platonically) with a writer.

    Thanks for that!

    Best regards,
    –Colin

    1. “Hoyt” again? You’re really trying to get on her bad side, aren’t you?

        1. He could’ve put in a salutation like Miss, Mrs. or Ms. Welcome to Hundom Colin! Sarah is preferred.

              1. She prefers us to “Miss Sarah” when tossing about the carps, and we prefer Sarah Miss when we get out of hand and she brings out the cannon for a whiff of carp shot.

                1. OK, good. I was afraid I might have tripped over a cultural curb there.

                  And Dona Hoyt you certainly rate – Are we, your Peoples, not The Fierce and Fearsome Huns?

                  Besides, Don Hoyt fits your beloved so well…

    2. That was a similar light bulb moment for me, too. But I do want to say to all and sundry that occasionally I will mention to my dear hubby about some conversation or book recommendation here, and when I do, I frame it as “I heard this from someone whose judgment I respect.” So, Sarah, and all Hundom regulars, I really and sincerely do respect you. But I ain’t no lefty.

        1. I am not sure I could ever respect someone who had the dubious judgment to respect me.

          Is one reason I lean toward cats rather than dogs.

          1. I prefer dogs to cats. If i want someone to ignore me til they want something,. Expect me top cater to their every whim. Want affection when they want it and claw me when they don’t, be constantly unable to make decisions til I do and decide the other way? I’ll go find any average American woman

            1. None of the cats I’ve lived with displayed any of those traits. Worst trait any of them had was to figure out exactly where in the newspaper laid out on the floor I was reading and then lie on that spot.

              Never had to take them walkies in driving rain, either.

  29. sheesh ! that’s gotta be the most tortured post (over a simple comment !) that i’ve read anywhere on the internets. give it a rest, hoyt.

    3. More like a simple commenter. But there’s one upside to Lefty idiots (BIRM): Sometimes they expose useful truths whilst stepping upon their dicks.

  30. I laugh about women talk about “Male Privilege” especially when something like today happens (nothing bad).

    I was in one of the downstairs lobby of my apartment building and noticed an older woman sitting there.

    Just gave her a polite nod and then noticed a man trying to bring some boxes into the building.

    Well she asked me to let the man in (calling him her brother) and almost without thinking I went to open the door for him. (Note, the doors to the outside are all locked to people trying to enter.).

    He thanked me for opening the door (IIRC she thanked me for not making her get up, she had a cane so walking was a problem).

    Well, while I would likely have done the same if an older man had been the one to ask me to open the door, it struck me that I was raised to help out women (more than men) if they needed/asked for help.

    So “Male Privilege” includes “Helping out women”. [Very Big Grin]

    2. My favorite male privilege is getting to be the bad guy in *every single* sexual assault/harassment vignette.

  31. In my experience the simplest explanation is almost always the correct one . “Go with your gut” is not an empty phrase.

    “… It had many floors and countless rooms, out of which boiled a multitude of half-dressed, ragged, dirty children, who would swarm around you, hitting and kicking, and trying to steal stuff from your purse.”

    It sounds like my experiences in Italy and Gypsy children…..

  32. “[T]he fact that communist and socialist are ‘safe’ labels tells you how much [democrats] will swallow, because those two regimes always end in blood, faster or slower, overt or covert.” Boy, ain’t that the truth. But it’s worse, far worse. The communist and socialist regimes that so-called Progressives admire are not simply guilty for spilling oceans of blood. ALL regimes eventually spill blood. What makes Leftist regimes so utterly contemptible and irredeemable is that they spill copious amounts of their own people’s blood.

  33. Well, this morning it’s tilted slightly more towards the “obnoxious SJW infiltration” on this comment, because a) this person judging by her email writes like one (this is not conclusive. People try to pass in various ways) b) there has been no other comment, no plea to me to be careful, nothing.

    Sounds like someone who looks for references to that site at random and posts “long time listener, first time caller” type messages to me.

    It’s possible that they’re just familiar with your writing second or third hand, maybe someone sharing it on facebook, but are more familiar with the other site as a “watch the car crash” thing.

    One of the problems of the common tactic of “Hi, I’m on your side, but you need to stay away from THAT guy” is that it makes the folks who are sincere sound false.

    It’s possible that he said “respect” because couldn’t say “admire” or “agree with,” and if it’s part of the manosphere then there’s a really good chance that there have been really obnoxious things no sane person wants to associate with said or done there.

  34. Serious question = If “respect” is a liberal buzzword… what would the non-liberal version/alternative be? Because there *are* times I “respect” a writer but disagree with a particular point, or want to ask a hard question.

    Let me guess at a possible answer. I normally might say something like “I’m a fan of yours, but I want to challenge you a bit on…”

  35. “Hoyt”, huh? I’ve always leaned toward “the divine Sarah”, myself….
    Seriously, I’m old enough that addressing someone who doesn’t really know who I am by just their surname, without an honorific of any kind, seems rather rude and disrespectful. With the exception, I suppose, of certain public figures who want to run my life…

    2. Even the public figures I dislike I would add an honorific to their name when speaking to them, even if I omit one when speaking about them.

      1. I on the other hand have been known to use the last name to reference people frequently. A common attribute of military folks where the name tag was last name only. I do it less now but, it still happens with no disrespect. Simply a convention learned young

        1. um… I don’t think either of the two charmers who just did it are ex-military.
          My publisher can call me by my last name. As can my colleagues at Baen, many of whom are ex-military. From total strangers and in the form of orders “Hoyt!” it brings a spring to my middle fingers.

        2. In my everyday life I have a tendency to talk about myself by only my last name. I answer the phone with it, I introduce myself with just it, then maybe add my first name (at least if asked… yep, I sort of do the ‘Bond. James Bond.’ routine, except my version is usually just ‘Bond. Jane.’) and so on, and when calling on the phone I usually use just it too, even with friends. May have something to do with having spend a lot of time in mostly male company back in university, at that time all the lecturers and almost all the students in the geology and mineralogy department were men, and they mostly used just their last names.

          I never wondered about that, but maybe it is the military style here too. And since we have draft, and usually at least half of the men in almost any group have done their six to nine months, it would make sense that it has become the general male style with names too.

          1. And it seems to be something the men here do only when almost all of the people in the group are men (and not close friends), it tends to get dropped if there are more women.

        3. Something I learned young to. Usually I use it only with people I know, and it is a sign of comraderly respect*. I tend to use an honorific or a first name with people I either don’t know or don’t care for.

          *With the notable exception of politicians, they are so commonly referred to in the media by simply their last name that I suspect the vast majority of people refer to them the same way.

          1. No, that’s perfectly fine.
            Really, other than HOYT! when someone doesn’t know me and I feel like they’re yelling at me (though perfectly acceptable if you’re a regular and/or joking/and/or/a colleague) I don’t care what you call me.

          2. Interestingly, there’s a comment addressing me as Mr. Hoyt and yelling that for someone who doesn’t care about the comment I care about the comment, or something. Given the total lack of getting what the post was about, he was not approved.

  36. Sarah, I had read this post, the post in question and the non-Sarah post before the instalanche, but decided I had to give all-ya’ll my 2 cents worth.
    Disclaimer: I have admired you since I read “Draw One in the Dark” and you have revitalized my interest in Science Fiction as I thought all talent was lost (and later, from you found out that the SJWs had invaded SF too.).
    The rooshv post was very reasonable, the only objectionable language was in some of the SJW screen shots. He did not sound like an axe murderer in any way. It was well written, although I’m sure a word-smith of your caliper could improve on it .

    Now, as you mention in this post, he is a member of the ‘Game’. The Game, must be one of the most despised topics for SJWs on the internet, because it proves one of their foundational points is totally bogus. Now, if men and women were identical, then either the Game would not work to pick up women or women could use the Game to pick up men. Instead, it opens up the discussion of the foibles of the feminine mind (or at least the reptile part of the brain), and then proceeds in the typical logical, ordered point by point presentation that ‘white men’ have employed since the Ancient Greeks.
    In that sense, anything on the site is ‘obnoxious’ to SJWs and you should have provided them a ‘trigger warning’ at the link (just kidding on that).
    I found your site probably when you were subbing for Glenn Reynolds, and your usual gang of commenters seem to be wonderfully free of PC and the name calling game. Unfortunate that the SJWs now have you on their radar, but I suspect the Huns can keep their form of ‘civilization’ at bay.
    Now, if all-y’all will excuse me, I’m off to download “The Big Ship and the Wise Old Owl” to my Kindle, and will be back to lurk (what I usually do here) after I’m done.

      1. Eh. Feel free to pipe up more.
        BTW I think what the SJWs lack is the “female game.” It used to be imparted by mothers and grandmothers and the poor addled daycare raised babies never learned. So instead they envy others and hate the world. Or thing they can get what they want by being bossy. Pfui.

          1. I think I accidentally did this. As in, I got a lot of marriage proposals because I was not interested in sex before marriage and I was not interested in marriage. (Or thought I wasn’t till I found my mathematician.) You see, I had other interests and no time to fool around with relationships. I still had some — notably a very long-lasting long distance one — but they weren’t my primary focus. I think men read this as “playing hard to get” because I got proposals all the time. NOT propositions, proposals. From guys I’d never dated. “You must marry me” “Uh… no.”

            1. Considering what you have said about your relative size in Portugal in those days, perhaps they had Miles Vorkosigan’s fetish and wanted to go mountain climbing

                  1. Re: getting proposed to, this happened to me also. From some guys I’d never dated, although at least I did know them and they were nice guys. But I guarrrrantee they are a lot happier with their current wives and kids, so it’s lucky for them I said no!

            2. Or thought I wasn’t till I found my mathematician.

              “He was only a mathematician, but he really counted!”

    2. Thank you.
      You know women do have a form of game. It’s not the same. men work on different cues. (Yep, men and women are different) but it is game. I’ve seen ugly little fat women chased by fifteen men at a time. The smart ones settle, though, because it doesn’t last.

      1. Spoken like the Wise Old Owl. A good read for the Young Adults, but as an Old Adult, I still enjoyed it. We need cynics that realize the power-seeking of the administrators always corrupts the mission and spread lies to alter the truth. Very non_SJW 🙂

      2. This is because men come with a convenient handle for ease of manipulation. Care must be taken, however, lest that handle become excessively limp and no longer offers leverage.

    3. women could use the Game to pick up men.

      Generally speaking they don’t *need* to.

      If men and women were identical the game wouldn’t be necessary, and every bar would have rent-by-the-minute rooms in back.

  37. I am seriously going to have to give up on reading some of my favorite fanfic sites.

    There is a story where a near-immortal lady is assured (by his wives) that it’s totally okay for her to have a sexual relationship with a guy she midwifed and whom she knew as a child, as long as she has their permission, because it would be a horrible thing to be physically attracted to somebody and not have sex with him, even if it makes you feel creepy to have sex with him.

    In the same story, there is a prolonged beatdown of a dragon elder for summoning a young dragon through teleportation to learn dragon conduct and powers. Although the young dragon complains about him not asking first, the prolonged beatdown by other characters is because another character (a baby) was surprised to find the young dragon gone, and this made her cry. One character even says this is worthy of being cursed for life.

    So let’s summarize. Sex with anybody you’ve ever been attracted to – good.
    One person not being present for less than an hour when baby wants her – horrible no good bad crime against decency.

    2. Um, OK, that first one just creeps me out because of what it says about the rest of that society. The second one makes me want to go knock some sense into characters, but the first one hits my icky-limit.

      1. The whole thing is pretty much an excuse for his Gary Stu to have more notional sex, I’m afraid. (Ironically, this particular author doesn’t even write sex scenes, so I don’t know why it’s so important for him to have virtual harems of friends with benefits and wives and girlfriends for his Gary Stus. But that seems to be where he’s going, whenever he’s not writing action and adventure.)

          1. I guess.

            On a different site, we had a steampunk-variant Marvel Comics fanfic story opine that if a little kid goes barefoot all the time in summer in the midwestern US, his feet will be perpetually cut and bruised and have open sores. Apparently your true special snowflake has never heard of calluses. Also, if a businesswoman has assassins after her in a steampunk universe, it’s not because she’s rich and powerful and has narsty enemies, but because she’s female and the man wants to keep her down. Apparently special snowflakes think Madam Walker must’ve had some kind of ninja protection squad.

              1. There’s a concept called “Sturgeon’s Law”, which is that 90% of everything is fecal matter.
                Fanfiction is where the 90% of literature goes. (Well, most of it. The rest goes into novel series that go into the hundreds, and literary journals.)

            3. I’m going to have to build a padded, yet heavily reinforced, panel just to bang my head on when I read things like this. The damage to the walls, keyboards, and desks is getting unreasonable.

            4. Also, if a businesswoman has assassins after her in a steampunk universe, it’s not because she’s rich and powerful and has narsty enemies, but because she’s female and the man wants to keep her down.

              “She’s kind of cheeky. Kill her.”

              That’s seriously bizarre.

  38. “And don’t give liberals ammunition” which is typical of young, scared and possibly in the political closet conservatives and libertarians.

    It’s also typical of classic concern troll.

    1. Occasionally it’s also a good point. It can be possible to lure some fence sitters who have gotten on that fence out of curiosity to our side of the fence, but most likely they have to be approached with extreme caution. Sound like the stereotype they have been warned about by the more visible parts of current culture and they are likely to either run or develop selective deafness – even if they still stay as friends whenever the conversation goes towards any form of politics they stop hearing you as they assume they already know what you are saying.

      Well, I have to admit I haven’t been really successful with anyone, they are all still leftist, but I seem to have at least managed to ease a few towards more moderate leftism. And maybe planted some doubts in their minds.

  39. One thing you mention in passing is how difficult it is to find a presentable mate. The person you marry may not, at first, be presentable at all. This is not simply because, from a male perspective, most women are insane. That is, they are looking for things in a man which are bizarre.

    Good example of this is on the dating site, E-cupid. The women there, who by being on the site declare themselves as being somewhat desperate, think that 80% of the men on it are below average.

    This could be an example of hypergamy, the desire for women to marry up. That is, looking for a Prince Charming when you are a peasant girl. Any realistic assessment of the past says that a peasant girl is a convenient lay for a noble. Pregnancy, perhaps, follows but no marriage for her.

    So, let’s take it as the truth that good men are hard to find. There are reasons for that. One may be the differences in the curve of IQ between the sexes. They both center at a hundred, but women have a lower standard of deviation than men. This means that more women, than men, fit within the first standard of deviation. Most women are of normal IQ, between 90 and 110.

    The bell curve for Men’s IQ is flatter so we have more idiots and geniuses. There are six times as many men with IQ’s of 140 than women, but we have six times as many morons of IQ’s of 60. Naturally, women would prefer to have children by geniuses, because they are likely to have money. Hence, half the male population is substandard even for a substandard female.

    One of the arts which men must learn is how to attract the attention of women. Money alone is not enough, he must catch her eye in special ways. To be presentable, he must have both physical attractiveness and social status. For that reason men will exercise to get stupid muscles like overdeveloped pecs. He will exaggerate his social standing and attend functions he has no interest in.

    All this is to get him the opportunity to ascertain who a women is, so he can determine if she has the right temperament to live with.

    Men tend to be simple creatures, mostly because our interest are outward looking. If you keep a man well fed and satisfied in bed, he’s unlikely to go wandering.

    Women, on the other hand, are complex and demanding before they have children. A man has to feed her fantasy life. Her imagination, rather than actuality, determines if she is satisfied. There have been studies which say that the more men a woman has bedded the less likely she will be contented in marriage. Marriage and children is NOT a fairy tale; it is hard work.

    This is before we run into the poison of Feminism. The most positive way of thinking about Feminism is that they are all losers; women who’ve decided to cut themselves out of the gene pool.

    This is absolutely necessary, because men do not live as long as women, although slightly more boys are born than girls. By the time they are adults, there are 6-10% more women than men. The numbers get worse from there.

    So, when presentable males are scarce, the chance of finding a man is very difficult. Those women who decide to despise man can be considered a blessing to society, although a nunnery would be less social disruptive. There would be less social strife if they were not so nasty and demanding. They hate normal women as much as they do men. They hate the winners of the game, male and female.

    1. I don’t mention anything about how to find a mate at all. It’s not what the post is about. (Puzzled.)
      I will say however you make some crazy-weird generalizations like “men are simple creatures.” Um.. I dated quite a few who weren’t. And women do insane things like starve themselves to look good and get interested in stuff they don’t care about (sports, for most of them) etc.
      I’d say humans are mostly humans. It’s sad, yeah, but it’s what we’re stuck with.

      1. Well, given what people with odder tastes get up to in private, not all of us are stuck with human.

        What a man and a goat do in their own compound is their own business.

      2. Ok, I’m a grouch. I think the problem with the mating dance is that so few single people have the damn sense to make friends of the opposite sex, and then marry one of them. I did that, but not because I was smart. I plead guilty to sheer dumb luck.

        Most of Humanity, male and female, are out there looking for some superlative Great Romance. I have news for them; romance will come and go (I have “fallen in love” with my Lady several times), but in the interim you’d better be friends or you are going to be A) Divorced or B) found with your hands locked around each-other’s throats. My Lady is my best friend, and I try hard to be hers.

        If you aren’t friends, and don’t live in a society that places serious emphasis on fidelity (which can hold a marriage together until the romance returns, if it ever will), then DON’T FRIGGING MATE! I’m not saying don’t play hide the salami; just don’t conspire to fertilize an egg. Because if you do, and then break up, either there is going to be an abortion (which is by no means as trouble free as Planned Parenthood would have you believe. And I’m pro-choice) OR you are going to have to give up the child (and its odds aren’t all that great in The System) OR the child is going to have a single mother …. and an uphill climb (even if Mom is pulling down seven figures and hires Mary Poppins).

        This is why am am pro Gay marriage, even though the public face of homosexuality strikes me as one of low impulse irresponsibility (my experience of gays on a personal level is that very few of them live down to this front). People who make good life-partners should have society’s sanction …. and people who don’t but hook some poor schmuck into a sham marriage should get it in the neck legally.

        This has really been a disjointed rant. Guess I’m more tired than I knew. I’d delete it, but I’m curious to see what kind of reaction I get.

          1. Hear hear!

            Be careful ladies, mine fed me and I followed her home. It wasn’t until death were we parted.

            1. So you’re saying a trail of pot-roast, fresh bread, and bits of apple crumble topping laid from the county shooting range to my door might work?

              6. *takes off hat* Ma’am, you’d sure get my attention that way! Can’t speak for anyone else, but if I had followed a trail like that to the home of a lady as intelligent and well-spoken as yourself when I was a bachelor, I’m not sure she have ever been rid of me. *big grin*

        4. I think the problem with the mating dance is that so few single people have the damn sense to make friends of the opposite sex, and then marry one of them. I did that, but not because I was smart. I plead guilty to sheer dumb luck.

          Ditto!

          Sure, you still have to look out for predators, but you get rid of a lot of them simply by not being an initial romantic target.

          (Incidentally, for all the talk from guys about “Friend zoning”– they do it, too. Sometimes people are simply not interested in someone except as a friend.)

          1. The only cases of this I can think of, in my own history (pre-marriage, of course) were either already married, or entirely the wrong generation. (And I’m not talking about an age difference on the order of the difference between me and Our Beloved Hostess, either…I’m talking roughly my mother’s age. 10-ish years older? Yeah, even then the thought was there, even if the action-on-it never was.)

            Even the married ones were dismissed only on ethical grounds.

            Just FYI. 🙂

            1. There are individual differences, but I know there are at least three other women here who have listened to male friends complain about how there are “no decent women anywhere” these days, or similar things.

              When hit over the head with it, the usual response is “but you never indicated you were interested!” (Always, always, always a bad thing to say to a woman, unless you want a checklist of times she hinted it at you– better is “I never knew!” You might still get unloaded on a bit, but it’s an easier recovery.)

              I’ve got a couple of guy friends who apparently don’t notice anything unless it’s half naked and trying to pull their shirt off, and they can’t figure out why it doesn’t work out. *headdesk* To make it worse, one is a white knight, so… yeah, you know the kind of issues he has with women.

              1. Sometimes they have specific requirements. Once my sister was listening to a friend complain about the lack of nice Jewish boys, and my sister looked around and, “Matt’s Jewish. Hey, Matt, come and meet Sarah.”

                Which is why at the first Jewish wedding my sister attended, she was the maid of honor.

              2. I wasn’t able to find it (Figures. I’m sure it will show up in my FB feed 10 minutes after I post this comment), so I can’t quote it exactly, but there’s a reason there’s a meme about how to talk to men:

                Don’t make subtle hints.
                Don’t make normal hints
                Don’t make strong hints
                Just come out and say it.

                Of course, this is applicable to some men more than others. Unfortunately, I’m in the “more” category. I don’t read nonverbal communication well at all, and verbal hints take me 15 minutes or more to catch. I would have to go back and do a refresher on the subject and then be consciously paying attention (which means no “Squirrel” moments) to get half of what I should.

                1. Just remember: the guys who pick up on such hints are often NOT guys with whom you want to be involved. I’d wager no woman ever showed a hint of interest to Bill Clinton which he missed.

                2. These days reading hints, for men, is a good way to buy a sexual harassment or rape charge. Of course getting a clear unambiguous YES is a way to buy a rape charge as well. It is unreasonable to blame men for not picking up hints after two generations of “education” by feminism.

                  1. These days reading hints, for men, is a good way to buy a sexual harassment or rape charge. Of course getting a clear unambiguous YES is a way to buy a rape charge as well.

                    I joke sometimes that realistic sex dolls are going to be a real big thing soon. But events like those you allude to here make it not so funny.

                    I believe Dilbert did a strip on that theme, or a related one once. (Too lazy to look it up.)

                    1. Real-life Chobits will make for some interesting social changes. Give ’em uterine replicators and a built-in ovum synthesizer and you’ll have fully-functional Stepford Wives.

                      I suspect quite a few men would welcome such a development. Make a male version for women, and…I’m not sure I want to speculate too far down that path.

                    2. I’m not sure I want to speculate too far down that path.

                      The Dilbert cartoon that I remember was on the theme that once realistic virtual sex becomes a real thing (a much easier task than uterine replicators) the human race will be extinct in a generation.

                    3. I see the humor, but I suspect that humanity wouldn’t be extinct, it’d be Islamic:-(. Or some combination of groups that were *very* ideologically opposed to the Virtual Sex tech, or tech in general.

                      On the upside, hopefully most pedophiles and such would get their jollies in VR and leave real people alone.

                    9. There’s a difference? [Very Big Grin From A Protestant Conservative Christian]

                    10. *sad smile* Pretty soon, there won’t be. The last generation that couldn’t limit their children is dying, and so the unobservant are having very few, who don’t have the same “this is what My Family does” tie to Catholicism. The first-cousin echo worked ok for the first generation with various sterilizations being common, but a lot of their kids aren’t even marrying…..

                      Sorry, been brooding on this. It’s sad. They’re wrong, but they’re my people, so… ouch.

                    12. I don’t know, I’m grinning pretty big looking at how quick to the number of folks who it won’t touch is going up… and the Mormon Allies side is use to working with people that don’t totally agree with them, instead of slaughtering allies over variations of belief!

                    13. Mormons vs. Muslims?

                      No brainer: Mormons are too tight-fisted to waste ammo, they don’t “spray-n-pray,” they aim.

                    14. I am given to understand that a majority of research funding for fully immersive VR is coming from the big money players in adult entertainment. The rest, I think, comes from the DoD.

                    15. Evolution is in overdrive nowadays, selecting hard for willingness and ability to reproduce in modern society.

                    16. @jabrwok – Honestly, if persocoms became a reality, I’d probably have one of each.

                      *slight smile* A fully functional male persocom would at least have the stamina to keep up with / please a woman (A common complaint I run across in family and relationship sites) , and perhaps the sexual skills I keep hearing that men lose as they grow older… or never had at all…

                      Myself, my uses for such would be significantly more mundane. The thought of a persocom or two helping me with household chores, cooking prepwork, work in general… ah… that would be very nice. Mincing onions wouldn’t be such a pain in the ass any more!

                      What? The skills needed to have the delicate touch for sex would be JUST as useful in other things that require attention to detail.

                    17. Robots to do the grunt work in the yard and around the house, leaving it possible for The Spouse and I to do the parts we enjoy? We would still cook and garden, but dang, not to have to pull up the poison ivy or climb up in trees to cut out dead or dying limbs?

                      Nice, very nice.

                    20. Well, yes. Also, persocoms were limited in their learning algorithms. Most of them couldn’t do much more than what they were programmed to do, and the majority of their flexibility came with the personality program they had installed. The persocoms seemed to ‘learn’ new behaviors based on what they ‘thought’ that their owners/masters would like.

                      Kotoko (the little kimono-wearing laptop) was a tsundere because she was programmed that way but ultimately still wanted to carry out the functions that her master had programmed her to do – including expose a lie that was detrimental to her master, because he had explicitly ordered/programmed her to always tell the truth. While technically not bound by ‘the three laws’, they didn’t seem to be capable of lashing out against their creators because of the personality programs they had (which as it’s base is, apparently, supposed to look out for their owner and ensure their well being.)

                  2. Maybe we’ll be returning to VERY old fashioned traditions like formal courting and chaperones. The Quiet Man “No playing patty fingers in the holy water” and all that.

                    1. A man needs a chaperone and a witness just to stave off potential accusations. Not to mention a notarized “Intent to Fornicate Agreement.”

                    2. “Intent to Fornicate Agreement”???

                      You must be an optimist. The way college campi are headed, before you get to that you need an “Intent to Court Agreement,” an “Intent to Spark Agreement,” and an “Intent to Pet Agreement.”

              3. “I’ve got a couple of guy friends who apparently don’t notice anything unless it’s half naked and trying to pull their shirt off,”

                And then dismiss those as sluts they wouldn’t want a long term relationship with. Since those is the only ones they notice, they then complain about no nice girls being interested.

                1. I did everything except a belly dance for Dan, but he “wasn’t sure” enough to even ask me out. I never pulled my shirt — or his — off because shy and had never dated. If we hadn’t started dating over the phone four years later, he might NEVER HAVE GOT IT.
                  The “happy” news is the boys inherited his cluelessness. Any women out there in fan land taking aim at one of my boys: YOU’LL HAVE TO TELL HIM YOU’RE INTERESTED. In little words. Like, two syllables. You’ve been warned. “I wanna date you, you ape” might work.

                  1. I was reading the Frazz collected comics.

                    How Frazz finally got a date with the first-grade teacher may amuse some of you

                    Spoiler

                    Caulfield, one of the students, asked her. Then he told Frazz.

              4. Some of us are either too dumb or don’t believe anyone as nice as “her” (who ever “her” is) would be interested in “me”. (“Take me now!” “Where? I’ve only got a quarter tank of gas?”) When I was in college a girl once pulled up my shirt and put her feet on my stomach. I thought she was just cold. My female friends have since told me “No, she was hitting on you.”

                From what I’ve heard from several of my male geek friends, you really do have to pretty much say “Hey! I’m interested!” before we get it. Sorry.

                1. When I was in the Navy, going to “C” school in Portsmouth, a guy in my class had party for his birthday.

                  At the party was this really cute girl I’d seen around the hospital, but I’d never met. I was introduced to her when a mutual friend approached the group I was standing with.

                  After a few moments, I excused myself from that group and went elsewhere. A few minutes later, this girl shows up in that group. After a bit, I went elsewhere, and she showed there as well. That last somewhere was a couch that no one else was sitting on.

                  I find out later that she was apparently interested.

                  I only left a little bit of blood on that brick wall I bashed my head against when I found that out…AFTER she’d transferred to Spain. :/

                2. “Take me now!” “Where? I’ve only got a quarter tank of gas?”
                  You know my husband, then? And you had cameras on my attempts to get it across to him I liked him, at 18?

                  1. An engineering student walks up to his friend (a fellow engineering student) while pushing a bicycle. The friend asks him where he got the bike. “Well, I was walking to class when this beautiful blond pedaled up to me, jumped off the bike, took off her clothes and said ‘take whatever you want’.” The friend replied “Good choice. I doubt the clothes would have fit.”
                    I am pretty sure it’s a geek guy thing. We’re so used to being ignored by women in general we’re shocked when someone actually shows interest.

                    1. Caution: Aggie joke.
                      An Aggie was deer hunting in east Texas. He crept through the brush until he came to a stream. he heard rustling sounds from the brush and looked out to see a woman standing by the creek, wearing her birthday suit. The Aggie and the woman blinked at each other and after a moment’s hesitation he blurted, ” ‘Scuze me, Ma’am, are you game?”

                      She smiled and turned so he got a better view, exclaiming, “Why yes, yes I am!”

                      So he shot her.

                    2. This is why go betweens and/or matchmakers are vital! They bridge the gap and bring the proto couple together.

                3. There are four women in my life who’ve done that. One was in high school…we were together on-and-off for almost 15 years, and at several points I came perilously close to marrying her. One I dated for about a year until she moved out of town. One I was with for 8 months until she decided to call it quits. And one is my wife.

                  If subtle isn’t working…well, stop being subtle. Especially if geek guys are what you’re looking for…which if you’re female, single, heterosexual, and reading this blog, seems a safe bet. 🙂

                  There were at least 6 others that, in very distant retrospect, I’m now pretty sure were interested. I didn’t pick up on it in any of those cases until at least 10 years after the fact. (And I’m pretty sure _any_ of them would have done my life less harm than the one I was on-and-off with for 15 years and almost married.)

                  1. Suggested phrase for females wishing to indicate openness to a geek guy’s “interest”: “You’re cute.” (Variants permitted.)

                    While a female might well receive such a statement as damnation with faint praise, to a guy it has a very different interpretation.

                    1. I said something as much to Rhys, and that’s how he knew I was interested back. Prior to that, I was giving him dating advice, because he got asked out by a girl, and he wasn’t sure where a ‘safe, neutral’ place was to take a girl out on a date was. I said coffee shop.

                      Of course, I was just as dense, really, but after a while I did figure it out. Fortunately for me, Rhys is a persistent type.

                  2. By the way folks: telling a male geek acquaintance that a friend you both knew in high school would have gone out with the poor dateless yob twenty years after the fact isn’t necessarily a good thing. Yay facebook.

              5. I’ve got a couple of guy friends who apparently don’t notice anything unless it’s half naked and trying to pull their shirt off,

                Then do that.

                Reminds me of Neil Gaiman’s short blog post on “how to seduce a writer”:

                https://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/18932682858/as-requested-by-too-many-people-making-the-last

                “In my experience, writers tend to be really good at the inside of their own heads and imaginary people, and a lot less good at the stuff going on outside, which means that quite often if you flirt with us we will completely fail to notice, leaving everybody involved slightly uncomfortable and more than slightly unlaid.”

                1. Then do that.

                  Yeah, because that rejection coupled with accusations of being a slut is just so great for a woman, and copying the format of the last fifteen failed relationships they had is a delightful start.

                  And that’s before the problem of 1) them just having a “relationship” because they are horny and/or nice, or 2) what happens, rather obviously, in a relationship where only one person is willing to risk anything.

                  I get that some guys don’t “see” the more subtle things. All I’m suggesting is that more of them look before bitching about how women friend-zone guys to people that they’ve friend-zoned.

                  1. I get that some guys don’t “see” the more subtle things. All I’m suggesting is that more of them look before bitching about how women friend-zone guys to people that they’ve friend-zoned.

                    What might not be obvious is that a man “friend-zoning” a woman is frequently not the same as a woman “friend-zoning” a man. For most women, guys they friend-zone are those who are friendly and helpful, but who they don’t see as sexually desirable due to them not appearing masculine enough. The man is seen as one of their girlfriends but with more muscles.

                    The man friend-zoning a woman, however, usually does so because he doesn’t feel that she has any interest in him at all, because of the lack of seeing signals, but he still enjoys her company and will hang out with her because of that. If he somehow gets the hint that she would be interested in dating him, she would come out of the friend-zone before she had any idea what was going on.

                    This happened to me at least once, and it was the only girl I truly had a crush on in High School (Other than that, I was just a horny teenage boy who would have gone for practically any female who showed interest that I could detect). In college, I confessed to her that I had wanted to date her (though not how much i wanted to – that would probably have scared her off), and she said she would have been happy to do so, and even said she thought I would have been a better date for the prom than the boy she had gone with.

                    1. With a decent guy, yes; with a less decent guy….

                      Well, let’s just say that part of the “Game” theory about women shooting for guys in the top ten is projection of a male tendency to consider only the top 30% acceptable. (Random tail pull number, but not mine– it’s from that silly video about hotness to crazy index.)

                      There’s just a lot of folks with unrealistic expectations and a lack of self examination. Obviously, this group isn’t likely to be short on self examination, even if our conclusions aren’t what others might decide. 😀

                    2. You wanna be careful with that self-examination — too many who do it end with their heads up their bums and never find their way out.

              6. Men like me we need a room full of clues…

                The sound is not the best, so here are the lyrics, just in case you need more clues:

                Doug and the Slugs
                Cognac and Bologna
                Just Another Case

                Della took a look at the thimble and she cried,
                “Oh, it’s underweight!”
                I was trying to tell everybody inside
                It’s just another case
                We’re all part of it
                No one’s innocent
                All we do is pick and choose
                Men like me, we need a room full of clues
                (Gimme gimme gimme gimme a clue)

                I was hot on the tail of an arrogant rash
                Of those one-night stands
                Leaping from Lisbon to London
                Lust in those hinterlands
                Social derelicts
                Drunken socialites
                Always singing the blues, and
                Men like me, we need a room full of clues

                Just another case of a crime
                Lovers’ quarrel at three a.m.
                “Just the facts, ma’am, if you can now”
                I need another fixation

                I was trying to send everybody else home
                Deceitfully
                I was starting to act like the host of a game show
                On daytime TV
                Keeping Della there
                Just to sit and stare
                I was thinking in twos
                Men like me, we need a room full of clues

                Hello, Della
                We’re alone now
                Scotch and soda?
                Sounds good

                Della took another look at the thimble and she cried,
                “Oh it feels alright”
                Then she slid inside of my sack and sighed,
                “Won’t you spend the night?”
                There in front of me
                Full of fantasy
                Wearing nothing but shoes
                Men like me, we need a room full of clues!

      3. In the name of accuracy, the “starve themselves to look good” thing is more a matter of female competitiveness. When a guy say “I’d sure like to jump her bones” he isn’t speaking literally — a little well placed padding comes in highly useful.

        When you’re in for the long haul you look for comfort, not speed.

  40. I gather that it’s a men’s rights advocate site, that regularly exposes the abuses of feminists, SJWs and such, from a skim of the topic titles/article titles at the bottom.

    Given that he exposes the tactics and actions and abuse, I don’t think it would matter in the LEAST if he were respectful, polite and dry. The fact that he opposes the abuses of feminism, says that men should have rights too (and not only women’s rights)… yeah. That’s enough to be painted ‘misogynist’ in this day and age. It doesn’t matter that he advocates ‘The Game’ – he could be advocating for any number of perfectly good things, and adopt puppies off the street and the mere fact that he says that men aren’t the slaves that feminists think they should be would be enough to blacken his name.

    Hell, the fact *I* think men and women should be treated equal – EQUAL, not ‘women be given preferential status’ – has been enough for people to claim I’m a rape apologist, a gender traitor, race traitor, whatevertraitor, and flat out evil in the most irrational and stupid of ways.

    It’s also stupid, overall, to demand that humans that these screeching judgmental whiners oppose be perfect and flawless in their every aspect. The SJWs are all flawed human beings demanding that their opponents be BETTER than they are in every way, and any ‘flaw’ is ‘reason to suck and be disbelieved.’

    Our side thinks we’re human and flawed and there are parts that are forgivable and parts that aren’t. The SJW demands perfection but screams that they’re human and shouldn’t be judged.

    Pfui!

    1. As I said earlier, when women are told that on the average men are stronger than woman and respond with “That’s sexists”, comments about “men’s sites” should be taken with a ton of salt.

      1. In a twitter-fest started by Jim Hines (gamer gate related, starting point is irrelevant), one person pointed out that yes, men and women DO have different capabilities – take a look at track times for 100m sprints.

        One of the women mocked him. “What, they run faster because testicles?”

        That’s one person who may not believe reality even if she’s unfortunate enough for it to hit her in the face.

        1. The answer is “Well, Technically, yes.” Testosterone builds stronger and faster bodies. It’s not “Poison” as they seem to think.

          Alternatively. “Testicles, is there nothing they can’t do?”

          1. That’s what I would have told her, except I would have shortened it to:

            “Well, yes, actually, because testicles=>testosterone.”

          2. At sprint distances, the narrower hops also make a difference. Where do those narrower hips come from? I think we all know the answer.

    2. There is a book by First Amendment advocate (and honest liberal) that sums the situation neatly, with minor adaptation for circumstances: Free Speech for Me but Not for Thee.

      Replace “Free Speech” with nearly anything — tolerance, justice, forbearance — and it covers most libprog positions.

      See also: What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is mine.

      1. Replace “Free Speech” with nearly anything — tolerance, justice, forbearance — and it covers most libprog positions.

        See also: What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is mine.

        (Insert suitably pithy swear word of preference here) that, I say.

  41. The word globalist for the word leftist or liberal — even for the word communist or socialist — appeals to me as improving specificity and contemporaneity.

    1. No. Sorry, no. You’re talking about different things. There are globalists or internationalist libertarians. Communist and socialist or “leftist” is an economic approach to society. It’s the empowering of a bureaucracy and an enriching of kommissars. It is a return to aristocracy by means of an intelligentsia. The social effects are incidental.

  44. Huh? This is the first time I’ve read a conservative columnist excoriating ‘SJW’s’. I’m kind of dumbfounded. I’m a single, Jewish, female (I’m assuming that’s what your reference to ‘SJW’ stood for, correct me if I’m wrong) and a staunch constitutional conservative. I also have felt proud in the past, that my fellow conservatives (libertarians, independents) eschewed the kind of pandering/slandering/stereotyping ‘identity-politics’ that the left is so known for – preferring instead to see people (in this case, a wholly unidentified person) as individuals. So what’s going on here?

      1. No, I hadn’t, thanks for that. I saw it mentioned on Instapundit (comments section on Glenn’s link to your post), but because you referenced ‘Jewishness’ a couple of times in your post, I felt the need to make sure. I’m not the only one who hadn’t heard that use of ‘SJW’ before (several Instapundit readers asked the same question in the comments), so it may be worthwhile to spell it out at least once.

        1. Uh…. I referenced Jewishness????
          Oh. Henry the Navigator. Yeah, technically not a Jew, but his father, Don Joao I was arguably technically Jewish.

          Sorry, this late in the game, it never occurred to me someone hadn’t heard the term. I tend not to spell it out because I prefer “Social Justice Whiners”

    2. A Seriously Just Whining, Who usually refer to themselves as Social Justice Warriors, Has nothing to do With Judaism.

  45. Interesting title for the new book.
    Decades – and I do mean decades – ago I read a really well put together tale titled “The Drawing of The Dark”. It involved swords, a brewery and a special beer, and the Older Gods along with an interesting spin on good and evil. I look forward to find a hard copy of your latest in my B & N next year.
    And a long time ago when the US was a different country, my high school French teacher told our class that the reason Parisians DON’T like Americans is because they wish they were STILL speaking German…
    And then he said that the reason the provincial French LIKE Americans is because they remember why they AREN’T still speaking German. He was from Normandie.

    1. It’s not a new title. It was my first book for Baen … 8? years ago. The first edition, which has the peculiarity of being weird vocabulary wise, having been written when I was recovering from concussion (It mixes British, American and probably other dialects) is free on Amazon.

    2. Did the Drawing Of The Dark have to do with an incarnation of Arthur At teh battle where the Mongols were stopped and him sneaking some of the next batch of magical ale a little early?

        1. Tim Powers. Always worth reading. Making a lot of Disney money off Pirates of the Caribbean III, after they finally did the right thing and admitted to themselves how much they owed him for Pirates I.

        2. Thank you, the story had stayed with me but neither the title nor the author…must reread

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  47. IIRC it had to do with a special cask of ale with no bottom that sat on the ground in the monastery/brewery and was never emptied – so the brew in it was essentially ageless. Every so often the monks in charge of the brewery would draw a glass and give it to a “special” wondering traveler – said traveler being a cross between King Arthur and the Archangel Michael – tasked with guarding/protecting humanity from the other guys. Without the occasional draft the Hero would lose his connection to the earth and weaken to the point of losing the battle – and of course the bad guys couldn’t be allowed to drink of the cask.. That’s a really short description of the storyline… Written sometime in the ’60’s I think?? Still have it somewhere in the bunker.

    1. amazon says 2002 but i also remember if from longer ago than that. I won’t be rereading it simply because I am not paying $12 for an old book on kindle, or $50 for a used hardback

  48. You mean, people were paid to do chores? I thought that was an urban legend. I cleaned, cooked, canned, baked, changed diapers (a small part of my chores) from the time I was six. Never saw a penny–

    1. No. I paid the kids. First I set them chores and paid a certain amount. When they were older, I started putting tasks and prices on a board, and whoever completed them got the money. (mostly older son.)

          1. Thank you. I decided to grow it out this year. Plus my doctor weaned me of the prednisone and changed my chemo so I lost about forty pounds.

        1. Ok folks… congratulations all around, threading is broken. these two were replies to completely different threads and are… down here.

  50. BTW, I’m just glad the title of this post is “Moral Lepers”. If it had been “Immoral Lepers” we would have simply descended into the Thomas Covenant discussion again.

  51. Apropos of the Miriam’s comment above, maybe a second page on the website with frequently-used-terms might be useful? SJW, GHH, Vileprog, Hun/Hoyden, and the Rules of Engagement (no theology, no ad hominem attacks, no re-fighting the 1861-1865 war in the US, no paeans to how much better Portugal was when Spain occupied it . . .)

    1. If someone were to volunteer to set up such a page for you I would also steal from the Bar, I mean include form the Bar, a list of common acronyms such as TEORWAWKI and OTOH

    3. …no paeans to how much better Portugal was when Spain occupied it …

      What! Did someone ever have the audacity to seriously try that? Wow! Fireworks. I would be soooo sorry to have missed that if it had happened. 😉

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