SelfAdoration.com

Writer David McGowan is the author of an enchanting conspiracy theory: Was the Laurel Canyon music scene of the late ’60s and early ’70s a sophisticated intelligence operation devised to defuse the anti-Vietnam-War movement?

As with all conspiracy theories, a willingness to suspend disbelief is the price of entry, but McGowan has this going for his theory: If he’s right, it worked. Before Laurel Canyon – before The Mamas and The Papas, CSN, the Byrds – the kids were radicalized. Afterwards, they were mellow, content to tune in, turn on and drop out.

I don’t subscribe to McGowan’s conjectures, but they’re fascinating, especially the huge number of connections he is able to make to the military intelligence apparatus: If you wanted to make it as a rock star in folk/country-rock L.A., a dad high up in the spy business turned out to be a big career boost.

I’ve been thinking in a McGowanly way about the libertarian agenda since last summer, when I realized that Stefan Molyneux’s anti-family stance was fundamentally at odds with the growth of his internet cult. I think Molyneux is engaged in a frenzied obsession to commit mass-parricide-by-proxy – I think he is killing his own parents over and over again in pantomime – but anti-familialism pervades libertarian philosophy.

That’s a problem. Why? Because philosophical movements grow by families. The initial growth comes from converts, obviously, but the long-term growth, from a fringe group to an established cultural force, comes about when children who were raised in the movement’s doctrine raise their own children in it. Two converts become seven adherents become twenty-five champions in just two generations. Add in on-going evangelism and you’ve got a growth machine that just won’t quit.

Libertarianism doesn’t have that. It is evangelical, if obnoxiously so, but it is all-but-adamantly anti-family, with the anti-family agenda being pushed relentlessly by theorists like Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard and gadflies like Molyneux. This is bad for people who subscribe to their ideas, since the family is the sine qua non building block of human civilization, the last redoubt against the (more…)

Piers Morgan: ‘My highest moral virtue is my ferocious animal savagery.’

With emphasis: Rhapsodizing violence is evil. It is even more self-destructive if, like Morgan, you know your homicidal rage is entirely affected. Batman is insane, but Walter Mitty is self-annihilating.

My take:

The paths to error are infinite, but two landmarks I have learned to rely on, in listening to people trying to justify their evil actions, are the logical fallacies Tu Quoque and Two Wrongs Make A Right. Tu Quoque is Latin. It means, “You do it, too.” When you catch your teenager swiping a beer, the pre-fabricated rationale will surely be, “Well, you drink, why can’t I?!?” And you were probably very young when you first heard some little proto-brute justifying his vengeance by bellowing, “Well, he hit me first!” – ergo, two wrongs make a right. You should probably be on your guard against any statement that starts with a “well” and ends with an exclamation point. That particular verbal construction seems to fit very comfortably in the mouths of liars and thugs. But when you hear those two logical fallacies being deployed in tandem, what you are hearing, almost certainly, is a cunningly-crafted rationalization of an abominable injustice.

I’ve known Don Watkins net.wise for 15 years or so, and I met him in real life last Fall in Tampa. I comped him a copy of Father’s Day – because the last thing the world needs is more divorced parents. I’m not surprised to see he’s blocked me. Blood makes noise, after all, and cognitive dissonance craves nothing more than silence.

Remember The Affectionate Display, Don.

I know why.
I can help.
I repay effort.
I grow regardless.

Ave atque vale, brother. Your integrity is neither dead nor unmourned.

First, how can I have five weblog posts on the itty-bitty little Ayn Rand Institute and its palpably false arguments in favor of abortion – intrauterine infanticide? I don’t. I have more than a dozen – so far.

Second, how is it that the itty-bitty little Ayn Rand Institute, full to bursting with Ayn Rand’s prideful minions, has not managed to write anything at all about the Planned Parenthood videos and their fallout for champions of infanticide?

My guess is that Rand’s radicals-for-perfect-conformity are engaged in a cluster-frolic worthy of James Taggart himself: Fretting, dithering, blaming, steaming – doing everything except standing up to take responsibility like self-responsible adults.

What of their staffers, donors and other insiders?

The first person to deviate from the party line will be purged. And the next. And the next. Et cetera.

I’m kicking their asses in public and they respond to me with transfixed paralysis.

How am I doing it? Like this:

1. Taking on Ayn Rand and Objectivism on abortion: A moral atrocity cannot somehow be a political sacrament.
2. Fisking Ayn Rand on abortion: Why her utilitarianism is necessarily anti-man, anti-mind, anti-life.
3. Why won’t the thick-witted cowards at the Ayn Rand Institute rise up to defend Planned Parenthood?
4. Spanking the Ayn Rand Institute on abortion and Planned Parenthood: None so deserving.
5. Why am I infanticide-shaming the Ayn Rand Institute? Because abortionism kills humanity itself.

PS: Bonus post: Is the Ayn Rand Institute’s indefensible stand on abortion part of a clandestine intelligence op?

And another: Three story angles the Ayn Rand Institute can use to continue to evade the abortion scandals.

And yet another: Doing the job the Ayn Rand Institute is afraid to do: Abortion is incompatible with egoism.

Almost a top 10 posts: Attn. Yaron Brook: Your shameful silence on abortion spotlights the Ayn Rand Institute’s intellectual bankruptcy.

And so to 10: The Victims (more…)

I should have done this years ago. I did, of course, but not as well as I’m doing today. As always, I never think about something until I do, and then I think about it all the way through. How do you like me now?

Insiders: Are your “thought leaders” looking like James Taggart to you? Guess why…

Donors: You’re paying good money for this?

There is more to come…

Intrauterine infanticide – abortion – is morally repugnant – and you don’t need for me to tell you that, do you? The ‘procedure’ itself is ugly, as are its secondary consequences, but being instrumentally involved in abortion makes us ugly – with life-long ugly consequences.

Our culture-wide support for – or at least ambivalence over – intrauterine infanticide makes us callous and cold, most indifferent to those most in need of compassion. Worse, the utilitarian arguments that undergird all claims of “just” homicide consistently move their champions toward ever-greater atrocities, such that – as should be obvious – abortion is just a stepping-stone to genocide.

But it gets worse. For the fanatical cult of abortionism that is the motivating force behind the Ayn Rand Institute robs the human race of its humanity itself.

Ayn Rand’s positions on marriage, career and abortion might seem like good advice to give to a teenager: Have some fun, learn a trade and avoid entangling alliances. Isn’t that just the further extension of carefree youth into young adulthood? Into old adulthood? To the grave?

But exactly. The official-Objectivist plan for life consists of an extended adolescence, a life-long rebellion against the actual nature of humanity. Older official-Objectivists are typically miserable, wheezing along with the ‘what’s-the-use?’ resignation we see in the vagrants in Atlas Shrugged. But they’re miserable not because of a defect in human clay but because they stopped molding that clay at the emotional age of 18 – the age when we expect children to grow into self-responsible adulthood. Being materially involved in an abortion will result in life-long regret, but, much worse, being a champion of abortion will make you a life-long teenager.

A pregnancy, expected or not, makes you take the long view. Choices that once seemed inconsequential – take that job or hike the Andes? – are now throbbing with moment. Adults commit to their spouses in their marriages, to their children in their families, to their neighbors with their homes and to their communities by putting down roots. None of these things happen for the adolescents-of-any-age who choose to – or (more…)

How can you tell The Ayn Rand Institute is run by thick-witted cowards? Blank out.

Ayn Rand lived her whole life waiting to meet a man strong enough to turn her over his knee and show her what she always knew – that a dominant woman is an unsustainable contradiction. I don’t know that I could have been that good influence on her thinking, and we never met in any case. But I am happy to deliver corporal punishment in appropriate measure to her numbskull minions.

Spoiler alert: None so deserving.

To church: How to win everything – by driving everyone else crazy.

If you have given your moral sanction to abortion until now, it’s time to rip off the band-aid. Here’s why:

• Abortion and self-adoration: Do what you want, but don’t claim you can escape the consequences. You can’t.
• Taking on Ayn Rand and Objectivism on abortion: A moral atrocity cannot somehow be a political sacrament.
• Taking on abortion and the so-called “prudent predator” by video — with a shout out to the students of Ayn Rand.
• We all owe our freedom to fatherhood, but you owe your everything to your parents.
• What do you call an anti-family libertarian like Stefan Molyneux? A Marxist.
• Empathy tells all: Why are libertarians so hostile to marriage and family?
• What’s the best tactic in the Ruling Class-led war on humanity? Convincing you not to have a family.
• Illuminating libertarianism’s fatal flaw: Individualism – Egoism = Utilitarianism = Useful-Idiot-Marxism.
• For what other species of the earth would we argue for ‎abortion?
• The goal of abortion-as-politics? Cultivating ‘Good Germans’ to both effect and surrender to genocide.
• If your ‘thought leader’ can’t tell you why abortion is evil – you’re going to the wrong church.
• Fisking Ayn Rand on abortion: Why her utilitarianism is necessarily anti-man, anti-mind, anti-life.
• Spanking the Ayn Rand Institute on abortion and Planned Parenthood: None so deserving.
• Why won’t the thick-witted cowards at the Ayn Rand Institute rise up to defend Planned Parenthood?
• Why am I infanticide-shaming the Ayn Rand Institute? Because abortionism kills humanity itself.
• Is the Ayn Rand Institute’s indefensible stand on abortion part of a clandestine intelligence op?
• Doing the job the Ayn Rand Institute is afraid to do: Abortion is incompatible with egoism.

Objectivists and Libertarians are resolutely hostile to the family, and it is killing their movement. Ayn Rand had ten thousand adopted daughters, a thousand grand-daughters, a hundred great-grand-daughters and zero great-great-grand-daughters.

[T]o the extent they are not resolutely pro-family, libertarians are de facto Marxists – where Marxism is the temporarily-successful mutiny of the Cautious over the Driven. The future belongs to the children of the parents who have them. So long as libertarians number themselves among (more…)

Official-Objectivists never talk to me. They come around by the committee-load, but all they do is lurk. I see them by what they read – simultaneously and in bulk – leaving only their Orange County IP addresses behind as calling cards. We care a lot. I know they’re cowards, and I’m pretty sure I know why they’re cowards.

Since the publication of Man Alive, I’ve tried to go easy on Ayn Rand. She got me to the questions that got me where I am now, and I owe her for that. But still, the woman was great at integrating ideas but lousy at defending them. Her rationalization of the vicious adultery she inflicted upon her husband (allegedly her “top value”) and her slavishly-devoted acolytes takes first prize in the self-serving “arguments” contest, of course, but her callously utilitarian defense of intrauterine infanticide has been unconscionably consequential – especially to her slavishly-devoted acolytes.

Here are some questions that have occurred to me:

1. How did Ayn Rand herself and her many supplicating minions not see how poor the official-Objectivist pro-infanticide arguments are?

2. How did Leonard Peikoff not notice the ‘ominous parallels’ of Rand’s specious pro-abortion arguments to those put forward by Marxists?

3. How did none of them see that, by advocating romantic ‘affairs’ while dismissing storgic familial love, by indoctrinating Rand’s followers to value their careers above their families, and by stridently preaching abortion as a sacrament, official-Objectivism destroyed its philosophical legacy?

4. Most significantly, how could it be that seemingly not one of the millions of people who have read Ayn Rand on abortion noticed that her position is a gross violation of her own putatively-rational-egoist philosophy, representing instead the kind of “I got mine!” self-absorption associated with Friedrich Nietzsche or Max Stirner?

For what it’s worth, I have trouble calling any of those three egoists. Stirner was a champion of everyday amoralism, Nietzsche of exploitative amoralism and Rand, ultimately, of anti-amoralism. The arc of Ayn Rand’s intellectual history consists of the less-than-perfectly-successful recovery from a youthful (more…)

Call me Cassandra. My job, apparently, is to state the stunningly obvious facts no one has any intention of heeding. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it.

So: For what other species of the earth would we argue for abortion?

In what circumstance would we regard adult animals slaughtering their own young not as an awful, inexplicable aberration, and not just as some gruesome fact of nature, but instead as a noble and laudable act?

This is self-loathing as a sort of anti-identitarianism, leading to the kind of auto-extinction that can never happen in the wild.

The ultimate in man-made marvels: The man-made extermination of man.

This is the power of bad ideas…

It turns out people who eviscerate babies for a living are ghouls.

Who knew?

Well, I did, and I expect you’ve known it all along, too, regardless of what you said out loud.

But now the outrageous evil that is intrauterine infanticide is even harder to deny. Which is making things mighty difficult for ‘thought leaders’ – professors and preachers and pundits. They want to murder inconvenient babies. They just don’t want to say so out loud.

Today is Sunday, the day of the week set aside for Deep Thoughts about Important Matters. I’ll be interested to hear how many ‘thought leaders’ dare to take up this renewed awareness of the slaughter of 55 million innocents. Here’s my roar of rebellion to this cacophony of silence:

Like chattel slavery at the birth of the American experiment, abortion is the vicious contradiction upon which libertarianism foundered. I’m redeeming the quest for liberty by correcting this awful error.

Four more unarmed innocents were killed yesterday. U.S. Marines, attestedly the most fearsome soldiers on earth. They were lawfully disarmed in a so-called gun-free zone, and today people are calling for (some) soldiers to be authorized to carry sidearms on military bases.

This is more right, but it is still an error. Disarming soldiers seems oxymoronic, but, of course, the greatest peril to the officers in unjust wars does not come from the putative enemy but from the sacrificial cannon foddder they purport to lead. The ruling class is thoroughly justified in its fear of the ruled, and its only recourse, it seems, is to make the ruled even more homicidally furious.

Bad idea, and the obvious solution to every political problem is to disgovern. Where people are free to pursue their own values, they find ways to get along. When “we’re all in this together!” – the crazy comes out. Want proof? If you lead a normal middle-class life, the places where you will encounter the greatest fear of armed citizens are your county courthouse and your local office of the Social Security Administration.

When incidents like Charleston and Chattanooga come up, some people say, “If only one of them had been armed…” That’s a valid observation, as you can determine by the inevitable counter-shriek of “Bloodbath!” But there is a question both sides of that debate miss:

What if every adult were armed?

If every self-responsible adult was habitually, routinely armed – and armed with redundant, complementary weapons – Charleston would not have happened at all. Chattanooga would not have happened at all. Every sort of street crime, with the exception of crimes borne of insanity, would not happen.

Would. Not. Happen.

From armed robbery to mass murder, crimes of violence are crimes of opportunity, and the dispositive opportunity, the without-which-not, is the gunman’s expectation that his victims will be disarmed. Take away that expectation and you eliminate virtually all crime.

Even better, when a truly crazy person hits that pop-goes-the-weasel crisis, as in (more…)