SelfAdoration.com

What to do about your lying, cheating, abusive wife.

We’re taking up the idea of masculine frame, with a much deserved hat tip to Socrates at ManningUpSmart.com.

The good news: You don’t have to settle for less than you bargained for.

“Do your worst. I will not kneel.”

By way of Twitter, Steyn reminded me that today is #EverybodyDrawMohammed day. I built the sidebar you see in the image to the right on Monday, this because I have so much on the subject to link to, and because I don’t wish to imply that I am acquiescent in the deafening silence that greets every ugly display of the infinitely ugly Islamofascist temperament. I didn’t know I was celebrating a very important holiday, and yet here I am.

If you pursue the links in the actual sidebar, not the image, you can read and hear what I’ve had to say over the years, going all the way back to 9/11. There are two Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie stories in there, for comic relief, but for all of me, the best of the bunch is the video I did just after the Charlie Hebdo Massacre: Why you must never silence yourself.

And that’s a Steyn-like message, I hope. None of this matters. Allah is a petulant, impotent crybaby. Mohammed was a mentally-defective child-molester. The best of his followers are sweet but deluded, like most religionists of all creeds. And the worst of them are mooks and mutts and mongrels whose only hope of having a life is to deliver themselves unto death in the most pathetic and ignominious of possible ways – and may they writhe thereafter in bacon grease until the universe collapses on itself. But to fail to speak when speech (more…)

Edward Druce, master of mentorship.

My evaluation: A most impressive young man, a man to watch as he rises in the world. He’s an INTx high-C, in my quick ’n’ dirty estimation, working very hard to become a high-D. That’s a killer combination, a planner mastering the demanding art of doing.

As evidence of doing, Druce has gone the world one better by turning his ideas on mentorship into a book: This Is Where to Start: Find Superstar Mentors, Master All They Know, and Get Ahead in Your Career.

Why does it matter? Because genius undiscovered and untapped is genius wasted. Druce will show you the remarkable ways he has come up with for making the acquaintance of business giants – and he’ll teach you what to do to make the most of those relationships once you’ve forged them.

As a disclosure, I am thanked in the afterword, but I assure I did nothing to deserve this expression of gratitude. I’m flattered, but this work is all Edward’s, and I am eager to see where it takes him.

You can always count on me for big-picture advice, but when you get to the “Now what?” question, this book is a very good place to begin.

Nothing says ‘libertarian’ quite like the faithful capitulation to Marxist tyranny.Photo by: Ross Angus

I took note of them early last year, when a friend pointed out that at least one bigfoot libertarian, Stephan Kinsella, had jumped onto the gay-marriage bandwagon. This is not an anomaly. Putative friends of human liberty are forever waking up next to smelly Marxists, this going back to the times when Marxists still bathed once in a while. I didn’t care too much – the state’s sanction of marriage is plainly criminal rent-seeking, and, hence, the only appropriate libertarian response to that sanction is to eradicate it entirely. I realize now I might have cared more.

Nota bene: Sex outside of marriage is bound to be self-destructive. By marriage I do not mean an elaborate ceremony, with or without the state’s seal of approval, but rather the mutual commitment of the married couple to their enduring, exclusive storgic and romantic love. Without that, it does not matter with whom or what you frolic, since your ‘love-making’ is simply meat-mannequin masturbation – except that ordinary self-pleasuring doesn’t inflict you with lifelong painful memories. Even so, that much is your business. The only way most people learn to avoid self-destruction is by living through it too many times.

Likewise, the claim that homosexuality is genetic in origin seems dubious to me. That which resembles all other obsessive sexual fetishes seems much more likely, to me, to be nothing more than yet another obsessive sexual fetish – the irrational sexualization of inappropriate objects beginning with a sexual trauma occurring at (no surprise) the age of (more…)

Watch me surf my own elation.

Photo by: Spirit-Fire

I wrote the book Nine empathies on Saturday, August 30th, last year. A serious book of philosophy, completely revolutionizing the idea of empathy, written in a single day? I don’t think the way everyone else does, and, accordingly, I don’t work their way, either.

The Grand Unifying Theory of Human Motivation – as taught to me by a turtle, and by an eternally-outraged human reptile.

To read more about empathy, see me, feel me, touch me, heal me at Amazon.com.

I thought I had lost access to that video, but I was able to recover it yesterday, to my immense delight. It’s embedded below. If you watch it, you’ll learn more about empathy than anyone on earth knew last year on August 29th. But even better, you’ll learn all about what exuberant indomitability feels like from the inside out.

I owe my brother men nothing, and I detest the idea of indiscriminate charity, but the gift each one of us confers upon all the others, as an unsought consequence of being alive, is the gift of his example – one may hope a good example. This video is me setting a good example, showing you why my way of thinking is better for you in every thriving cell of your body:

Reposted from September 24, 2012. Cum taces, clamas.

Daniel Pipes (by way of Kathy Shaidle):

In brief, any Westerner can buy a Koran for a dollar and burn it, while any Muslim with a platform can transform that act into a fighting offense. As passions rise on both sides of the democratized Western / Muslim divide, Western provocateurs and Islamist hotheads have found each other and confrontations occur with increasing frequency.

Which prompts this question: What would happen if publishers and managers of major media reached a consensus, “Enough of this intimidation, we will publish the most famous Danish Muhammad cartoon every day until the Islamists tire out and no longer riot”? What would happen if instances of Koran burning happened recurrently?

Would repetition inspire institutionalization, generate ever-more outraged responses, and offer a vehicle for Islamists to ride to greater power? Or would it lead to routinization, to a wearing out of Islamists, and a realization that violence is counter-productive to their cause?

I predict the latter, that a Muhammad cartoon published each day, or Koranic desecrations on a quasi-regular basis, will make it harder for Islamists to mobilize Muslim mobs. Were that the case, Westerners could once again treat Islam as they do other religions – freely, to criticize without fear. That would demonstrate to Islamists that Westerners will not capitulate, that they reject Islamic law, that they are ready to stand up for their values.

So, this is my plea to all Western editors and producers: display the Muhammad cartoon daily until the Islamists get used to the fact that we turn sacred cows into hamburger.

I think this is great idea, but it makes more sense to me cut out the middleman. This is war, and there are two ways to fight it. Either sane Muslims can wake up to the reality of human indomitability, or craven opportunists like Barack and Bibi can use the intransigence of the insane Muslims as a pretext for nuking Tehran.

So here is my recipe to help sane Muslims keep their religion inside their own skulls, which is the only place it can ever exist:

1. Take one Koran (why not (more…)

Instead of repeatedly and resentfully failing to change things with the same old failed tactics, the much-reviled Koch Brothers are pursuing a true strategy with our new undocumented friends, who may soon be newly-anointed voters. In this week’s Church of Splendor homily, I talk about other strategies for redeeming Western Civilization, including a simple legislative change that would all but eliminate divorce:

I am consistently amazed at how committed people are to making the same mistakes again and again. If you want the world to change, DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT! You can start by contributing to The Church of Splendor, the only place you’ll hear ideas like these.

I’ve been pondering deliberate thoughtlessness — and so far my brain has not imploded.

I came up with that turn of phrase — deliberate thoughtlessness — as a way of describing the amazing ineptitude of the ruling class. As you can see from the photo, the coinage itself is not unique to me. But the words got stuck in my head like a popcorn hull between molars, and I’ve been thinking about them ever since.

I wrote this in passing in a Facebook comment:

Deliberate thoughtlessness is ubiquitous where, logically, it should not be possible at all.

Why, in logic, should deliberate thoughtlessness be an impossible state of mind to attain? To deliberate is to think. To think thoughtlessly should not be possible, but the miracle of waste creation that is Marxism makes it achievable even so. (Note that ‘waste creation’ is another seemingly logically-impossible notion, and yet Marxism makes it real.)

What is it that I’m talking about?

If you think about the way an old-school logic teacher might guide you, again and again, back to the way of rigor and merit in your arguments, leading you away (leadership is what puts the duc in education) from demonstrably fallacious claims — turn that all ass-backwards and think of an anti-logic professor instead.

What would an anti-logic teacher teach? Fallacies, obviously, along with every style of demagoguery, question-begging, subject-changing, specious conflation — all the rank nonsense you see and hear everywhere.

But here’s the real trick, the magical mystical Marxist miracle: The point of the entire dysenterprise is to give incompetents the cargo-cultish ‘benefits’ of mastery — without going to all the work and bother of, you know, mastery — so the better way to teach anti-logic is simply to teach nothing, but to tell students that they are even better educated than those stuffy old rigor-mongers.

Anti-logic is simply the puerile logic of children, so wasting twelve or sixteen or twenty years in pre-school results in — ta da! — the American electorate. They cogitate, they ruminate, they definitely fulminate, but they have never been taught how to ratiocinate. And that term — ratiocination — is an extremely useful (more…)

Welfare clients and other people who adopt their values are being judged just as Martin Luther King asked fifty years ago today: Not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.paulbence / Foter / CC BY-NC

What makes the black underclass in America an underclass is not a manifestation of skin color or vestigial racism but of the welfare state. We can see this easily enough by looking at long-term welfare clients who are white- or brown-skinned, people who, alike unto the black underclass, reject Western middle-class values.

To the extent that the members of this welfare underclass are treated scornfully by people of all colors who are higher on the social ladder, that scorn is a rejection of this perverse, welfare-inculcated values hierarchy. Welfare clients and other people who adopt their values are being judged just as Martin Luther King asked fifty years ago today: Not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

That’s important for three reasons that I can think of:

First, we don’t need to have a conversation about race, contrary to the solemn admonition we hear from everyone who has no interest whatever in having a conversation about race. Instead, we need to have a conversation about character and values and how these manifest themselves in a civilization.

Second, we very much need to have a deep and earnest conversation about the welfare state, since it is the source and the sink of the moral philosophy that results in the welfare underclass. We need to have this particular conversation right now, not just because the welfare state struggles ceaselessly to undermine Western middle-class values, but also because the advent of welfarized health insurance in the form of Obamacare is an attempt to induct everyone into the welfare system. If we do not rid ourselves of this pestilence at once, in two generations there will no longer be any representatives of Western middle-class values in America. The middle class will have been eviscerated and we will all be one vast ignorant, helpless underclass, living at the mercy of and on (more…)

Outliers are not worth thinking about. What’s worth thinking about is what is normal.

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