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What is the ‘defoo’ advocated by Stefan Molyneux – the practice that has at last won him recognition as a cult leader?

And what can you do when it happens to you?

All my Molyneux news.

“Daddy! Daddy wasn’t there!”

I’ve written a lot about this film, huge surprise. The introduction below was written in November of 1997. The little boy you meet there would have just turned six years old. The review comes from February of 1997, at the time of Hamlet’s theatrical release.

 
Hamlet past his bedtime

I rented Branagh’s Hamlet last night. I had seen it this spring at a big-screen theater in Phoenix, an unforgettable experience. Sadly, the videotape is not letterboxed, so much of the wide screen impact is lost. Nevertheless it is quite fine and very worth renting – or buying.

My six-year-old son Cameron came out of his bedroom and tried to pretend that he just had to see the film, a staying-up-late ploy that never works and that he never stops trying. Surprise of all surprises, last night I let him stay up, and he surprised me by becoming engrossed. I had to synopsize for him now and then (though Hamlet in synopsis is very brief), but he figured out from the synopsis that Hamlet and The Lion King are the same story. Not even Cameron can stay up as late as Kenneth Branagh, but he made it to the slaying of Polonius, nearly two hours.

Branagh’s Shakespeare is vigorous, to say the absolute least, but this can’t be a vice when we are so used to thinking of these plays as dry and dull, the fitting penance of a schoolhardy youth. In the theater I thought the ghost was too much, but it was just enough on the television screen, and it was the ghost who hooked (more…)

Did he just say matron-fracker? In church?

This week: Loki the Trickster illuminates the emotional factors in play in every transaction – in every mutually-voluntary human social interaction. That would be boring in any other church, but we punch things up with loud guitar plunking and elaborate swear-words.

You have never been to a church like this. Settle in and let me talk, and I’ll show you the world as you’ve never seen it:

I’m staring at you – and you know it.

Here’s the link to the video stream. And: New praxis, new mistakes, I promise, so don’t be dismayed by miscellaneous shake-out-ery. No errors, no art. No garage, no garage-band discourse. It’s not philosophy to my satisfaction until it’s philosophy without a net – until you’ve bet your life on it.

Is all of this a mystery to you? I’m talking about The Church of Splendor, my atheist egoist garage-band televangelical mission.

An atheist egoist church? How does that work? More big ideas, fewer big hats, same damn offering plate. The Church of Splendor is moral philosophy for people who know why they need one, practical ontology from the gritty to the grandiose. That is to say: You ain’t never been to a church like this.

This week I plan to talk about the Carney’s high art of persuasion: How to read people and influence decisions. Until you understand the transaction from the buyer’s motivations, you don’t know what you’re selling. We’re going to talk about a simple sizing-up exercise that will tell you what to sell to get what you want.

Who am I preaching to? That would be you. I love my part of The Church of Splendor because I get to talk right at your mind, and you are stripped both of your defenses and of your need to be defended. That’s my kind of fun.

The Church of Splendor. This Sunday and every Sunday at 10 am MST, streaming thereafter.

Come play with me?

His name? Ineradicable Regret.Photo by: David Shankbone

Men are seed-sprayers.

Women are egg-layers.

Men and women are functionally equivalent, in the sense that, away from our sex differences, we can all do pretty much the same stuff. We are intellectually equivalent, even if the vestigial effects of poverty, religion and tradition have cost humanity the full benefits of female mental prowess over the centuries. We are politically equivalent, obviously. There are biological differences that result from our sex differences — men tend to have better upper-body strength, women have better blood circulation at the core but poorer circulation in the extremities — but apart from those sex differences, we are an awful lot alike.

That much is not surprising. We are the same species after all, and the XY model is just the one-off variation on the XX prototype. Even men’s sex hardware, of which they can be very proud, is just women’s junk turned inside out. This is true of male mammals in general — except for the pride part.

But because males — male mammals, not just male Homo sapiens — are seed-sprayers, their reproduction strategy will be different from that of the egg-laying females.

Human beings are thoughtful creatures. We have had the gift of mind cultivated within us, the graduation from an animal’s style of cognition and communication to the fully-human state, thinking and communicating in notation systems — in Fathertongue. For now I am am talking about thoughtless biological reproduction strategies, but in no way am I excusing human beings for behaving like thoughtless animals. Too much the contrary!

But the thoughtless reproductive objective of a seed-sprayer is to spray those seeds everywhere. This is what a Maple tree is doing with those cascades of whirling “helicopters,” and it it what an Agave plant is doing with its seed pod, one of the most inspiring phallic symbols to be found in nature. For seed-sprayers, reproduction is a numbers game. His supply of seeds is effectively infinite, and, plausibly, his best chance of reproducing himself is to spray (more…)

Yesterday’s Church of Splendor homily: We start with a discussion of the essential role of self-responsible fatherhood in the creation of Western Civilization. Then we relate that back to the anti-family praxis of ‘defoo’-ing – disassociating from your family-of-origin – advocated by talk-radio/social media impresario Stefan Molyneux.

I’m less interested in him than in his victims, but I could not possibly be more concerned about allegedly pro-liberty, pro-humanity doctrines that advocate the wholesale destruction of the family – the only respite in the storm, the only redoubt from the wars, the only fortress stout enough to stand against the void.

Pawns, meet the pawns.

I have three stories in my head today.

One is an inverse romantic comedy, call it a reconciliation-com. All I have so far are the establishing shots, him moving his too-much-stuff into a too-small apartment, her trying to spread her too-little-remaining-stuff around in the now-too-big space he has just left. The story is obvious, but it’s the details that make a rom-com fun, and getting back together is a fun story we should tell more often.

That’s a piece from yesterday’s homily at The Church of Splendor, inverting a cautionary tale, like The Breakup, as a comedy:

Story number two is another glimpse of the same idea, this time expressed as historical fiction about the early Hoplites, the freeholders who were all the order there was in the Hellas for hundreds of years. I don’t even like historical fiction, but I like this story – how fathers make the world safe for their wives and children, and thus for everyone. It tells us everything about who we are as people to this very day.

But the story that is straining my brain and drowning out the other two is this one:

A pandemic is the perfect death panel, if you care more about political power than human lives. Make time for your grandparents while the weather is still warm. You are a mute witness to mass murder, maybe yet its victim. And, brother, you asked for it.

I wrote that as a caption to the photo you see above, adding this a Facebook comment:

Respiratory illnesses take out weak and compromised immune systems, disproportionately. If you want to loot the elderly and trim the downstream debt of the entitlement state, one good flu will do the job.

Pawns, meet the pawns. You’ll be sharing mass graves together.

Marxists, meet the mirror. You are everything you’ve ever aspired to be: Cheerleaders to genocide.

This is speculation, nothing more. If one were to surmise that looters looking for an end-game strategy might hope for a flu epidemic, then the mass importation – and instant, essentially random dispersion – of potential carriers of all manner of infectious (more…)