"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Aug 27, 2011

Some Kind of Maxim

Rotting at the moral heart of a future Mussolini is a frustrated anarchist* who measures freedom by a golden age mythology and whose complaint, in the end, can be understood as bitter failure to understand the strength of women. He will call his resentments, "insight," and his contempt for the weak, the "soft" and the feminine, "liberty."

* - he might call himself, also, a "libertarian"...

7 comments:

Susan of Texas said...

And brains. The bullies always assume women/liberals are incapable of reason. (And all liberals are "honorary" women in their eyes.)

Women's experiences are less educational and enlightening than men's.

Their anger is strength. Your anger is weakness and instability.

Their mistakes are natural occurances due to their importance and busyness. Yours are due to your incompetence.

Your creativity is proof that you have your head in the clouds and can't operate in the concrete world. Their creativity is a spark of divinity.

Pleasure in your own accomplishments is a sign of vanity. Pleasure in their own accomplishments is a due reward for success.

Their momentary desires are important. Your momentary desires are a sign of self-indulgence.

This is their world, and you just live in it. If you have anything they feel deprived. If you have attention they feel slighted. If you accomplish anything they feel oppressed.

Libertarianism is a perfect excuse to be an unpleasant adolescent forever.

Jack Crow said...

There's not much to add to that, Susan.*

* - well, almost nothing: I'm sure a particular head will loll on its tongue of a neck, wrought with self-absorption over the failure of men to resist feminization...

David K Wayne said...

If this post is what/whom I think it's about, Susan's 2nd to last column reflects perfectly what I felt after my own petty conflict with what/whom you're I think you're referring to.

A lot of men have found themselves stuck in that mentality, but thankfully it was only temporary for some of us. Unfortunately, too many create lucrative careers - or much worse - feeding on it.

Jack Crow said...

Wayne,

It's not a direct reply to any one person or position.

Elsewhere, I'd suggested that a statement about the "softness" of modern people was a fascist sentiment, arguing later that I see in complaints about "softness" a lament directed at women as corrupters of men.

Historically, it should be of some note that anarchist and syndicalist failure to produce revolutionary societies led men like D'Annunzio, Mussolini and the Spanish falangists to mutate their horizontal collectivism into vertical one, and that they were as likely to lament "feminization" or its cognates as anything else, seeing "womanishness" in the weakness of socialism.

I draw certain conclusions about men who believe that modern men are "feminized" or "soft."

Not all men who believe so are fascists, obviously, but in the context of our real societies, and combined with a almost predictable defense of white petite bourgeoisie, the urge to gloss over any references to race as a marker of class, the contempt for "unmanly" or "dependent" men who can't go it alone as lone wolves, the reification of the State into a monolithic adversary as a replacement for observation of the actual state as a varied and historical instrument of the ruling class, the celebration of a survivalist or bootstrapper ethos, the elevation of nature to a sacred (virginal) feminine which must be protected from technological defilement and the restoration of that virginal state through cleansing belief and personal ritual, I think it reasonable to see the ground for reactionary sentiment.

Senescent said...

Yup yup. So what's your counteroffer?

Senescent said...

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/trotsky/1900/12/nietzsche.htm

Jack Crow said...

I don't have a counteroffer, Senescent. I had an eye, for a transient moment, on the furious resentment which masquerades itself as antipathy to power.