SelfAdoration.com

You can choose the light or the darkness, or you can run from one to the other, wasting your life in a lather of dithering. But you cannot be alive as a human being and yet, somehow, choose not to choose. You cannot choose what you are. Your only choice is who you’ll be.♥serendipity / Foter.com / CC BY-ND

This is a dumb thing to say, but at the same time, I think it’s the essence of everything, the one thing that most needs to be said:

I love life. I love living. I love being alive as a human being — a genetic homo sapiens within whom has been cultivated a self — and I love, love, love being that self with a deep and abiding adoration. I don’t want to be anyone but me, but I want to be me to the utmost, to the evermost — without shame, without hiding or disguising myself in any way and without one word of apology to anyone, ever.

This is fact, obvious and dumb to say but utterly necessary to understand: We are each of us all alone inside the mind, and the self of atoms, actions and events that others see is the physical expression of the self of the imagination that each one of us sees only of his own self and only alone, within that perfect solitude of the mind.

Just that much is breathtakingly beautiful, if you take the time to think about it: A reflexively recollecting mental process, by iteratively expressing itself — in the observable world, of course, but first and most and almost continuously in purely introspective activity — essentially becomes itself and then, over time, progressively recreates itself — learning, changing, growing — over and over again. The self is its own self-abstracted abstraction, and your relationship with your own unique self is by far the most important relationship in your life.

The self is the song of itself, and each one of us is his own song, his own soul, unique and incomparable and fundamentally inexpressible to others. Without human upbringing, we are bad imitations of animals, (more…)

When the free press is outlawed — it’s time to get a gun.

As my own small act of defiance, I am mirroring a zip file of the Liberator 3D printed handgun plans. I’m hoping this is hugely redundant — thousands of mirrors all over the world — but, either way, come and get me coppers. I am an American, and no one tells me what I can and can’t say.

Meanwhile, some thoughts from Fred Eaglesmith:

My friend, Richard Nikoley, showing you what a Randian hero looks like in real life:

I listened to the state collector’s heartfelt, condescending admonishments, including how much he’d so have preferred to work it out, had I just called him back and et cetera, et cetera. I got quiet, nicer.

“Well, I think that tells me everything I need, and I know what I need to do.

“Oh, good.”

“Yea, I’m going to rectify this whole situation immediately, as soon as I hang up. But before I do, I want to thank you for the help. I’ve been neglecting things for too long and I’m going to change that right now. I know it’s only Thursday, but you have a good weekend.

“You too.”

I hung up, and immediately deleted the email server. Then I shut off all the phones and the fax. My next email (I’m operating on private email by this point) was to the bank that holds client funds, telling them I’m done, to delete the $30,000 in already earned fees that trickle in to us as client funds trickle in to them, to delete all drafts and refund all money to clients. Soon as that was confirmed, I sent all paper files to the shredder/recycler, and had the company that hosts our servers shut them down and send them to the electronic recycler (they’re old, no commercial value).

[Update: It’s probably prudent to stipulate that the reason for all of this deletion and shredding was for the purpose of protecting sensitive client information like SSNs, financial records, etc. Since I was closing down and have no means of protecting or storing things in an adequate secure facility (i.e., not my garage), it needed to be professionally disposed of.]

I closed, locked the door, and walked away…having accomplished an irrevocable burning down in hours of what it took 20 years to establish. That night, sleep was less than optimal but Friday morning was euphoric. I learned an instant lesson: make your big moves in life irrevocable. You can’t go back, even if you wanted to.

Or, think of it this way: how many times did you get fired or get a (more…)

Happy Birthday, Man Alive!bernat… / Birthday Photos / CC BY-NC-ND

At Easter, I traded email with my father about the poetry of song-writing. I write about that stuff, of course — less than I might, but publicly. I write everything very publicly, but my father has seen almost none of that. This public life of mine means nothing at all to my family.

My mother died at Christmas. She was one of my favorite people in the world, the one person besides my wife that I would call just for fun, just to tease and torment her with the thrust and parry of talking for the sheer joy of talking. And yet my mother died without knowing anything fundamental about me. And poetry or not, that seems likely to be the case for my father, too.

That’s not an expression of dismay, it’s just funny. I have my Cathleen, the incomparable love of my life, because of my writing. I hear from brilliant strangers all over the world, some of whom are very careful students of the things I’ve written. And yet I’m sure my mother knew nothing about that part of my life, and I have no idea at all what my father knows or doesn’t know.

Surely I am my own worst enemy, in this and every other regard. I have never trusted the reader, and that includes my own parents. When I write, I know I will be happy with the work I do. My happiness is why I do it. But I also know that I will get no reward, or next to none, from the people who read my work, and it’s good odds that one or more trolls will try to punish me for having dared to speak up.

I don’t mind any of this. It’s just so much weather, as full of moment as any gust of wind. This work starts and ends with me. You just happen to be here, that’s all. But I have always wanted to trust the reader, to put him beside me in the car, as my guest, instead of always keeping him at (more…)

No masters, no slaves.
A compelling argument memorably made.

Earlier today, members of Ukrainian feminist group Femen staged protests across Europe as they called for a “topless jihad.” The demonstrations were in support of a young Tunisian activist named Amina Tyler. Last month, Tyler posted naked images of herself online, with the words “I own my body; it’s not the source of anyone’s honor” written on her bare chest. The head of Tunisia’s “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” reportedly called for Tyler to be stoned to death for her putatively obscene actions, lest they lead to an epidemic. Tyler has since gone quiet, leading some to fear for her safety.

The accompanying 31 photos show the Ukrainian women doing two things American feminists cannot do:

1. Stand up for the oppressed and not the oppressors.

2. Look good without clothes.

I expect things will get worse before they get better for the women of Islam, but it’s nice to have contemporary visual evidence that the feminine waist is not extinct.

Do not be deceived. Apparently, homosexuals are the only Americans left who want to get married.Makena G / Love Photos / CC BY-NC-ND

It’s funny, in a way, that we are wasting so much psychic energy debating gay marriage.

For a first thing, marriage is falling apart. The welfare state has made unmarried child-rearing financially attractive to women at the same time that feminism (the other red meat) has made marriage and fatherhood completely unattractive to marriage-age men. Apparently, homosexuals are the only Americans left who want to get married.

And for a second thing, gay marriage is not the problem, not at all. As I said last December and echoed yesterday, the immediate push for gay marriage is simply rent-seeking, while the long-run objective — as with Big Red Feminism — is to undermine the family as a redoubt against the über-state. The true problem with marriage is that the long-run is here: The family has been all but completely destroyed.

Here’s some good news: This won’t last. The family as a private social structure is universal to human civilizations.

Here’s some bad news: The most likely impetus to the formation of new family structures will be the collapse of the welfare state.

Here’s the best news: Absolutely none of this can be regulated by thugs in black robes.

The welfare state will fail in due course. When it does, there are a great many full-time dependents now living on the kleptocracy’s largesse who will be left high and dry. Many of those people will starve to death — expressing in their deaths the inestimable mercy of Marxism — and the survivors will form social structures — voluntarily, privately, spontaneously — to serve as survival machines.

And this is what the family is, at its essence. Man and woman? Okay. Love and sex? Yes, please. Kids? Without ’em, a traditional marriage is more like a long date. But what matters is the survival machine — the shared investment in the family, taking shared risks in the pursuit of shared rewards. This is why it’s still a family when both parents are the same sex, when the only adult (more…)