SelfAdoration.com

The sophistry of nihilism is nothing new in philosophy – more’s the pity. Now Elon Musk goes that ancient game one better – by insisting we are all living in a video game.

No one actually believes any of these absurd anti-reality, anti-human-efficacy claims. The people who mouth them are simply jacking off in public, trading astounding anti-intellectual pronouncements for evanescent Incandescent rewards. But their claims are not without consequence, and that’s why this matters.

Church this week takes Musk to task, but it also takes to task the people tasked with defending reality, most especially the ever-evasive Ayn Rand Institute:

There is a semi-brutal chapter in Nine empathies called “Empathy for the untouchable.” It’s about the individuals who are cruelly scorned by everyone else in a particular social context and what that says about them – and us.

There is often a corresponding role in that same context: The irreproachable. Where the untouchable is the person no one dares to treat as a human being – and, possibly, the one everyone else feels obliged to mistreat by some more-overt means – the irreproachable is the person that no one in that group dares to reject, criticize or chastise.

Prom King, right? Head Cheerleader. Attractive, talented, prosperous, well-groomed and popular – where popularity literally means the imputed power to reject, criticize or chastise anyone else on the ladder of irreproachability. The untouchable is in the corresponding role: Putatively denied any right to reject, criticize or chastise anyone higher up.

From Chapter 7, “Empathy for the machine.”

But not all social groups are evil – just most of them. People generally kiss up and kick down. They brag over or at least don’t complain about injuries inflicted upon them from above them in the social hierarchy, perhaps because they’re too busy inflicting injuries of their own on those further down. Status amounts to who you can reject peremptorily, expecting them to take it without rebellion, and who is putatively empowered to reject you in just that way. The untouchable is scorned by everyone, of course, but his counterpart – the irreproachable – is prized by all the others precisely because he scorns them – with their own consent.

That’s kinda sick, huh? Pretty ugly. Have you ever seen anything like it before?

I’m (more…)

The Army of Cartmans marches on – to its terminal peril – with new generals, and now with an even more tragic end goal.

This week’s Church of Splendor homily takes up Donald Trump, Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos – and why their persistent deployments of the logical fallacies Two wrongs make a right and Tu quoque promise nothing but tragedy for their mindlessly guffawing followers:

Opposing evil with evil assures the triumph of evil.

Until I saw that photo, I hadn’t known I could be even more disgusted by Milo Yiannopoulos, aka @Nero — which appellation is ever more obviously apposite.

This pathetic little popinjay, Eric Cartman made flashy, is just the symptom, though. #Trump is the disease.

We are bombarded with science “news” thrust upon us by Cautious academics – almost all of it tendentious.

Here’s an example from earlier this month: Science Says the First Born Child Is the Most Intelligent. A first-born child is an only child until the first sibling comes along, and, accordingly, will tend to be more highly rewarded for demonstrating adult behaviors, especially Cautious behaviors. To its credit, the cited “science” notes some of this. What it misses is that it measures only “intelligence” as it is prized by “science,” missing out on the wonderful expressions of human ingenuity more often exhibited by second- and later-born children. First-born children look more like nerds to nerds, and this is all the “study” actually demonstrates.

This week’s Church of Splendor homily takes up the tendentiousness of science “news” with a very simple practical demonstration – teaching children how to make common hand signals:

What can we learn from such a simple example? Simply this: The people telling you that you know nothing and they know everything know quite a bit less than they claim to, and much of what they claim to know is wrong. When they have guts enough to admit their errors, that’s when they can be trusted.

Per my friend David Brodie, yesterday was supposed to be Happy Day, but the passing of Guy Clark made it a very sad day for me. More than Townes van Zandt, more than Leonard Cohen, much more than Bob Dylan, Guy Clark could put over a song and make you believe it, make you feel it from the inside. American music isn’t music, it’s poetry. We lost a great poet yesterday.

Here’s a clip to show the man’s raw power, but you should watch the whole show. This is what pop music – five writers, fourteen players, six dancers and autotune – cannot do:

Homosexuality is an unavoidable, inescapable non-lethal birth defect, and, accordingly, children must be recruited into it by every possible means.

Wait… What…?

The claim that homosexuality is a genetic defect, much like epilepsy, seems hugely dubious to me, with the best evidence for my doubts being the relentless campaigning to induct children into the cult of same-sex attraction. Taking account that many, most or even virtually all self-professed homosexuals claim to have been victims of childhood sexual abuse, a more likely theory would seem to be that the Pied Piper’s Gay Pride Parade seeks to identify, isolate and groom potential new candidates for childhood sexual abuse, in the end recruiting still more lifelong homosexuals.

This week’s news brings us two new onslaughts in the war on human biology and normal family life by the ‘love’ you dare not identify as decadence: The demand that Elsa from Disney’s “Frozen” franchise be rendered a lesbian and President Obama’s order that all public schools make their bathrooms and locker rooms transgender-neutral.

As I noted the other day, the later putsch is a boon for home-schooling, so the net long-term effect could be very positive. But in the short run, these two campaigns, along with the rest of the gay agenda, serve to silence the opposition while making our children that much more vulnerable to a life of barren self-destruction.

What’s the solution? The Clan Testudo, of course. The world is preying on your children, and to protect them, you must isolate them from the worst influences of the world until they are mature enough to make their choices wisely.

That’s the theme of this week’s Church of Splendor homily: The best choice for your kids? No choice.

All purposive human behavior is chosen, and adults are free to make what I might consider to be poor choices – over and over again. I dispute that there is anything either gay or loving about ‘gay love,’ but your mileage may vary and how you choose to execute your life is none of my damn business anyway. But if your obsession extends (more…)

The world’s greatest gun salesman is now also the world’s greatest promoter of home schooling. Accordingly, I will revisit an ideal high school curriculum I devised a while back:

Parents: If your children have mastered geometry and Latin, they can learn anything else they might wish, with a dedicated plan or on any whim, at any depth of rigor they choose, to complete world-class mastery if they so choose – or even to unimagined leaps of mind, once minds are fully free to leap and lope and surf and soar at will. However you handle their education through the tween years, your goals should be aimed toward complete mastery of those two very rigorous disciplines. I want music, I want lots more math, and art, art, art. But people who master those two subjects can think, and in consequence they will be able to learn anything else they might want.

And, heck, that sounds like a publishing business. We’ll give it to Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie, because he’s nicer than me. Hence:

Uncle Willie’s World-Class High School In A Matchbook Cover.

That’s the outside. Once you pay your nickel, you get the full curriculum, printed on the inside cover:

Latin, Geometry,
to full mastery.

Do you watch “Shark Tank” on ABC? We rarely miss it. I like to see eager strivers showing how they’re putting a dent in the universe – and I like to evaluate their presentation skills. But watching the investors is worthwhile, also. A “Shark Tank” pitch is a better mousetrap, and three cheers for innovation. But a “Shark Tank” deal is a business model, where the term ‘business model’ almost always means a plan to exclude potential competitors. Kevin O’Leary and Laurie Grenier are particularly adamant about spiking the competition, but all of the investors seek to know how the wantrepreneurs plan to extract maximum profits from their businesses by making it difficult or impossible for other vendors to compete.

How do they do this? By rent-seeking, of course, especially by deploying the patent system to forbid alternative mousetraps.

The argument for intellectual property law is utilitarian: Forbidding Jerry to profit from what he has learned from Jim’s innovations is bad for Jerry, but it’s good for everyone else, the claim runs, since without the state imposing monopoly protection to Jim’s exclusive benefit, Jim will have no incentive to innovate in the first place. The proposition itself is dubious, and utilitarianism is never more that elaborately-rationalized crime. In an actually-free society, how Jim defends his property is his own problem, not something to be collectivized in pursuit of alleged collective benefits. And whatever argument there might have been for patent laws in 1789, it is by now obvious that the patent system is simply odious rent-seeking.

The same logic applies to every other kind of government “help” for business: It is all Rotarian Socialism – lining Jim’s pockets with wealth extracted by threat of violence from Jerry and everyone else.

The Federalist’s Robert Tracinski gets this, at least with respect to full-time professional rent-seeker Elon Musk. Good on him. I expect he might trip over the larger problem, though: Rotarian Socialism is the only kind of business left in America.

Which brings me to my pet bête noire, Yaron Brook, evader-in-chief (more…)

The Republicans are screwed: They have reduced their options to Benito Mussolini versus Frank Underwood. The worst of it is, the election will be won by President Fallguy, either way. Marxism is collapsing, and Marxism must not be blamed for that failure. And #BrotherYouAskedForIt!

You could argue that I have it easy: I don’t vote – or, rather, I make an elaborate production of voting for no one. Plus which, while people who take me seriously take me very seriously, those folks are few in number – and most of them don’t vote, either. My favorite candidate in this race is a hopeless case – Rand Paul – and I like his father better than him, and I like perennial libertarian favorite #NoneOfTheAbove best of all.

But even though the eventual winner of this election – the ignominious Fallguy – will be remembered as one of history’s great losers, the candidate I want to see lose – and lose in the most humiliating fashion – is Donald Trump.

Why? Because Trump is a monster. People natter all the time about sociopaths – where sociopath is almost always a squishy sobriquet meaning, “He called me on my vices and the truth hurt” – but Trump is the real thing: An actual remorseless bullying thug.

You know that’s true. If you hate him, it’s why you hate him. Much worse, if you like him, it’s why you like him: You think he will be your monster – which is me calling you on your own vices.

Why is Trump a monster? Because his father summarily rejected him at the age of 13 or 14, when he shipped the already-vicious bully he had spawned off to military school:

You will have noted that I tend to focus on fathers. A mother’s job is to nurture her child’s body. A father’s job is to cultivate his intellectual and emotional life. Where children or adults betray enduring, outsized unmet needs, these are failures of cultivation rather than of nurturance. This is not to say (more…)

There are a lot of different ways to think about voting, most of which are just quasi-religious white noise to me. But the issue of voting — do it or don’t, and, if so, how and why? — has gnawed at me all my life. It’s not a major huge deal; the millionth part of anything is nothing. But I have never resolved in my own mind how to approach the idea of voting in elections.

Until now, that is.

As a matter of philosophical principle, voting could only be just in a club, a fully-voluntary organization — and I don’t join clubs. Voting in government elections is necessarily unjust, since I am forbidden by that government to escape from it. In effect, when I vote in a government election, I am trying to dictate the terms on which my neighbors and myself are to be enslaved. I am not just influencing that evil, I am making myself party to it: I am effectively declaring that I have a fractional ownership of everyone else. This is the argument against voting you will hear from many serious libertarians.

Here’s a counter argument, also strongly libertarian: Voting for the most freedom-loving candidate in any race, and for the most liberty-seeking of the ballot questions, is the only way that someone like me has of communicating what it is that I want to temporizing, equivocating, back-side-covering major-party political candidates. I first learned of this strategy in an article in Reason magazine by 1984’s Libertarian Party candidate for president, David Bergland.

A third argument, especially in primary elections and when considering ballot questions, is to pursue self-defense-by-ballot-box, voting against the worst candidates and for the best ballot propositions. To the extent that I have voted in my life, this is what I have done.

But none of this has been satisfying to me. The lesser of two evils is still evil, but forbearing to rape the commons does nothing to eliminate the Tragedy of the Commons.

As above, this is not a major huge deal, so perhaps I’m over-thinking it already. But the lens of self-adoration leads me to rethink everything, (more…)

For church this week, a cautionary tale: We are hectored about the epidemic of suicides among the middle class and the epidemic of deaths by opiate overdoses, but we overlook a more sinister kind of suicide:

The outrageous food addiction of the tragically underfathered.

We are watching the slow suicide of Western Civilization by doing everything we can to look away from its most outrageous expression:

People, drowning in incredible abundance, slowly eating themselves to death.