Kicking. Squealing.
The Last Psychiatrist has an interesting piece on the nanny state and attempts to limit soda consumption and Buckyballs (metallic balls used by people with Asperger’s which apparently small children sometimes swallow and choke on). He writes:
Have you ever seen a bus and had the fantasy that if you got hit, you could sue the city for $5M? While it’s probably means you’re a follower not a leader (e.g. “I hate frivolous lawsuits, but if everyone else gets to do it…”) I want you to focus carefully on the implication of this fantasy: in the secret studio of your mind, even a bus accident is safe.
…
On the one hand, we live in a society that values free choice and personal responsibility, but we are told that it is safe to value those things only because people expect a certain amount of absence of choice and freedom from responsibility. You assume you would not be allowed to make a truly dangerous choice.
…
The reason you think “personal responsibility” is the answer to the Buckyballs problem is that Buckyballs already exist, and if they already exist they must be safe– or “some other omnipotent entity” would not have permitted them to come to existence. That is the problem of the West, and you cannot change it. All of the metaphors of the West imply this omnipotent entity, from “free market” to “inalienable rights” to “peace in our time.”
Throughout the piece, which is worth a full read, I was thinking about something tangential to this post. The example of the bus made me think of it . Remember the video of the black guy doing the Dougie into oncoming traffic and getting hit by an ice cream truck? It’s a pretty good example of a person believing that nothing bad can happen to them because everyone else will be doing the right thing. That people driving on the road will always watch for people Dougieing backwards into their street lane. The guy even seems to look right at the ice cream truck before it hits him. Even up to the last second before impact he expected the truck to swerve. I suppose this guy thought that no government entity would pave a road and allow him to dance onto it and be hit by a moving vehicle.
Saw the guy on tosh.0. He sued.
TLP has gone off the rails a bit. I sometimes think he’s being a narcissist in his posts as a joke.
The major problem is that you can’t find a unifying thesis in any of his posts. Try this one. What’s the thesis? What are the thesis’s of his last half dozen posts?
OT, Here’s a 1970 piece by Rothbard on Feminism. Interesting.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard4.html
Why did you even post that? His style of rhetoric is torture to the rational mind.
The accepted standard of 7:11 (rise over run) in stair treads are long known as the perfect average for a human stride and so we have adapted convention to Nature, rather than force people to accept a random standard as their nature. The mind has an ability to convey it’s message to the body so that we can literally run up or down stairs without having to think about it and miss the tread nosing with a tolerance so slight as to be almost imperceptible. This didn’t come about because an omnipotent nanny state demanded it and we conformed, it happened because it was natural. Allowing your children to swallow spherical magnets is unnatural because good parents care whether or not their progeny actually live long enough to mature into adults. Nature has been ignored by a State that enforces policies designed to create poor parenting (and thus expand Government to take its place) because the State has its own survival imperative. The poorly constructed step was the result of those policies creating ineffective/doltish/incompetent proles to do the jobs for them.
Nature always works itself out whether we want it to or not.
I’m addicted to TLP’s site. Probably b/c I’m fucked up.
Echoing other commenters, every time I read TLP’s site I get a headache. As asdf points out, he seems to lack unifying thought structure. I also tend to think that there’s either a lot of logic he leaves out of his writing, or there’s a lot of assumptions being made in his posts, which leaves the reader wondering how we got to C from A. Still read him from time to time, but I approach him with even more skepticism than I do Mencius Moldbug.
“I approach him with even more skepticism than I do Mencius Moldbug.”
Moldbug’s made a genuine contribution. No exaggeration- anyone who has read and understood him is ahead smart people whose job it is to understand macropolitics.
That said, a good mind will question Moldbug’s model. Not necessarily its overall thesis, but a lot of its parts. A number of solid bloggers are comfortable being complacent with what they absorbed from him.
Both of these guys are dynamic. They have a large variance in the amount of truth contained in their posts but they make you think about stale topics in different ways. When everyone has an opinion, this is valuable.
When you understand that radical autonomy requires one to act and think indiscriminately (read: highest value is nondiscrimination) and then tolerate the pain and suffering that will predictably follow then what you have is a person totally “liberated”. He essentially acts without consequence. When this is elevated to the collective level, you get BRA, Islam, homosexual rights, feminism, etc.
Agreed, thought provoking and challenging guys. Wish both would write more.
“If our analysis is correct, and we are already living in a matriarchy, then the true significance of the new feminism is not, as they would so stridently have it, the “liberation” of women from their oppression. May we not say that, not content with kept idleness and subtle domination, these women are reaching eagerly for total power? Not content with being supported and secure, they are now attempting to force their passive and long-suffering husbands to do most of the housework and childrearing as well.
I know personally several couples where the wife is a militant liberationist and the husband has been brainwashed by his spouse to be an Uncle Tom and a traitor to his gender. In all these cases, after a long hard day at the office or at teaching to support the family, the husband sits at home tending the kids while the wife is out at Women’s Lib meetings, there to plot their accession to total power and to denounce their husbands as sexist oppressors. Not content with the traditional mah-jongg set, the New Woman is reaching for the final castrating blow-to be accepted, I suppose, with meek gratitude by their male-liberal spouses.”
it’s as if you are reading anatomy of female power.
http://novaseeker1.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/anatomy-of-female-power/
From the Rothbard piece linked above,
“OT, Here’s a 1970 piece by Rothbard on Feminism. Interesting.”
and especially so for being written during the times when this lunacy started.
“Even up to the last second before impact he expected the truck to swerve. I suppose this guy thought that no government entity would pave a road and allow him to dance onto it and be hit by a moving vehicle.”
That’s just it. He comes from an upbringing of low future orientation, one which is fully dependent on government assistance to survive. When the familial structure and investment in children decline, people expect the government or some other deus ex machina to take care of the kids, to stop buses from moving down streets, to solve all their woes, whether rational or not. What do you expect? In a blank slatist worldview, people are not actually responsible for their actions. Any difference in outcomes comes down to poverty, or institutional racism, or whatever mechanism you wish to invent to explain the failure of subhuman societies in a western world. Keep doing the dougie into traffic; if anyone hits you, hope to god they are white because guaranteed you can sucker them into a lawsuit.
namae nanka:
“In all these cases, after a long hard day at the office or at teaching to support the family, the husband sits at home tending the kids while the wife is out at Women’s Lib meetings, there to plot their accession to total power and to denounce their husbands as sexist oppressors.”
That’s what she tells her husband. Really, during those Women’s Lib meetings, she is out jamming the drug addicted janitor or the narcissistic asshole principal.
Women, ladies and the feminine female doesn’t battle for power with her man. The devout dyke on the other hand seeks to become “Butch,” the man imposter. The anti-man. In the wake of this radical autonomy unleashed collectively is real destruction of man and woman.
Anyone that would suggest that “female” supremacy is the cherished “right” to fornicate, abort and divorce at will is obviously of liberal persuasion.
We toil in the effect while the devout dyke creates the toxic brew under the guise of “feminism” because this promotes female “supremacy.”
No liberal. This promotes females degeneracy. Devout dykism. Female self-annihilation.
List of most primitive radical liberals from oldest to youngest:
1. Homosexual
2. Dyke
3. Biblical Jews
4. Jihadist
5. Atheist
6. Anarchist
7. Marxist
This list is tentative and not exhaustive.