Vox Day: "Feminism is a Satanic, anti-Christian, anti-reason, anti-science ideology that destroys literally everything it touches and everyone who embraces it."

what is it with me and tag fails lately – this hasn’t been the only blog. And thanks kittehserf for the link.

acrannymint, the html monsters are feeling frisky, I’d say!

Pretty much, acrannymint! I learned a lot in a hurry from LBT’s site, too.

I’m sorry they left, but politics will do that. May not be irreconcilable differences forever, but right now, yeah, it is.

Oh, crumbs, not at all! I was referring to something quite different re: the politics – it wasn’t about multiplicity or bipolar disorder (is disorder the term?) or anything like that, it was about gender politics.

Thanks, PoM.

No kittesherf – it was nothing you posted, it was me being worried about offending someone by (in my mind) implying that a person who was a multiple or bi-polar was damaged in someway. To me they are just states of being for people. I am probably really going to fuck this up. Policy of Madness is correct that bi-polar can be fatal to some people if untreated. But that doesn’t necessarily apply to multiples or even all bi-polars. I am going to (try) and stop now

acrannymint, I would be willing to bet that people with X condition are going to have very different views on it – one might call it a disorder, another not, whatever.

Would an internet hug be welcome? With bonus kitty furs?

PoM, I was diagnosed for years with depression which helped to a certain extent but not completely. Original screening questions -“have you ever had feelings of invisibility” uh no. It wasn’t until I walked into the doc doing medication management talking a mile a minute that a bell went off. It probably didn’t help that the original social screening social worker told me I should read Dianetics. My medication management doc was appalled when I told her that.

I literally cannot remember any of the screenings I took. I was treated for depression for something like 10 years. None of the medications really worked on me. I mean, they did stuff, but not the stuff they were supposed to do. The most effective was Zoloft, which completely amputated my emotions. I’m sure you can guess how that worked out.

Eventually I got tired of the one doctor who put me on Zoloft and all but refused to give me something different, and found a new one. The new one also treated me for depression, but was willing to mix it up and try different cocktails if one wasn’t working (which none of them really did, although Ritalin helped for a while). One day he said, “Let’s do this other thing, it’s really more of a bipolar treatment but maybe it will help you.” MIRACLES it actually did. And that’s how Christmas was saved.

I’d always known that I had ups and downs, but the cycles are soooooo long, like a year long in their natural state, that the connection between the ups and the downs was not at all apparent. It literally took an off-the-wall drug combination to diagnose me.

Feminist Hypocrisy, a topic so vast and terrifying in its scope, that I’m going to have to pivot a bit and look at it from another angle.

You see, I could spend the entirety of this video listing bullet point after bullet point of specific examples of how modern Third Wave Feminism, informed by the triple threat of Postmodern bullshit, Identity Politics bafflegab and selective Fashion Victim rationalizations is all about claiming to do one thing and consistently doing another.

In fact, why don’t I list a few of my favorites to start things off.

First, the idea that Feminism represents a movement of equality for women that also, in some magical betterment through vilification, benefits men. Which is like saying the benefits of Kristallnacht was that Jews no longer had to do windows.

The name itself. If one is for equity and egalitarianism, then why the name “Feminism”? Odd that a movement that seeks to render everything gender neutral, when and if convenient and where men are involved, ddoesn’textend the same neutering to its own name. Also, although they may fight to change the term “fireman” to “fire fighter”, the term “gunman” is pretty safe from revision.

Although Feminists strive for parity in sought after careers and in communities that they did not build or sacrifice for, they are notoriously uninterested in achieving parity in dirty, dangerous occupations, general shit-work or, for example, in making women’s federal student loans dependent on signing up for Selective Service cannon fodder at the age of 18 just like everyone with a penis had to do.

It’s an odd and completely self-serving parity whereby if Feminists are unrepresented in communities that they had no hand in creating, parity must be established. What others build must be handed over to Feminists and Social Justice Warriors once they stick their foot in the door. And that parity comes at no price because Feminists feel no obligation, on arrival, to do any real work except for taking a managerial position, telling everyone else what to do, and deriding those who do real work as shitlords. The Feminist ideal seems to be that women just are, and are valued for converting oxygen into carbon dioxide and generally taking up space. It’s not like they actually have to do anything. Except call you a misogynist should you get the least bit uppity.

It’s not for nothing that the much cited “game developer” Zoe Quinn of #gamergate fame didn’t develop anything like what is usually recognized as a video game requiring talent, technical skill and the outlay of time and effort and instead takes her place as a “developer” based on a boring, puerile text-based “choose your own adventure” boilerplate. That, and having, well-traveled as it may be, a vagina.

Of course, parity need not be maintained in areas where women are over-represented and increasing unequal representation of women in college enrollment, for instance, doesn’t mean that anything should be done to help men, rather, that inequity is equality and more should be done for women.

To Feminists, the sexuality of women is to be celebrated, regardless of how tawdry and careless it may be, ever on the lookout for the merest hint of “slut shaming” while engaging in the dissection and micromanaging of every sexual thought, word or deed a man might potentially have.

Feminists decry “fat shaming” and feel it is their right to determine what men, in general, may or may not find attractive. Men who do not find overweight women attractive are denied the excluded middle of actually preferring fit and healthy women and it’s claimed they want boyish, anorexic girls. At the same time, men who do find overweight women attractive are derided as fetishistic “chubby chasers” seeking women with low self-esteem despite previous bullshit claims that Healthy at Any Size women love themselves.

And on and on it goes. Untangling the constant “giving it with one hand and taking it away with another” that Feminists engage in can be a full time job. As is having to issue the walking-on-eggshells disclaimers at every step.

You know, like that by criticizing Feminism, which is a political and social ideology, not a gender, one is not criticizing women as a whole. Mostly that confusion is cultivated by Feminists every chance they get in the same way that some right-wing Fox News nutjobs in the United States will answer every critique of their self-serving programs with the question “Why do you hate freedom?”.

This “woman as victim” feminism promotes an idea of women as people forever acted upon, not acting on things and so, to be against this view of women is not to be anti-woman, but rather, promoting the idea of women as fully formed adult human beings able to take the knocks, setbacks, and yes, injustices that are part of the human experience.

Feminism – this view promoting the outrage and foot stamping of the perpetually dissatisfied woman-child– benefits only a small subset of mostly white, middle-class educated, white collar women and is otherwise perfectly happy to have “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” T-shirts made by underpaid and exploited women in the Third World. A prominent feminist women can advocate for women in the workforce, while mistreating her own help and paying them pennies.

Feminism is, in the narrowest political sense, simply pork. Which doesn’t make it unique, it just makes it one more obsessive special interest group looking for the best way to AstroTurf its demands.

This hypocrisy is bad enough when it’s limited to some cranks on the internet but the real potential for harm comes when the hypocrisy is made manifest and legislated. Take, for example, the “Violence Against Women Act” which codifies the idea that, in domestic violence, men are the perpetrators and women are the victims when it’s been known since the 1970s, based on numerous studies, that there is, in fact, parity in domestic violence. Women are just as much perpetrators of domestic violence as men, initiate it more often, and not in self-defense and where a weapon is used it is more often women wielding it.

From almost the moment that Feminists claimed the existence of a “wage gap” it’s been proven time and again that once you allow from the different choices men and woman make, including investment of time and effort, no such wage gap actually exists. That Feminists persist in repeating a canard that has been rigorously disproven shows that they are all for the equality of women getting paid more for doing less on the job. And the proposed “equal pay” acts are attempts to ensure, despite all the variables, that forced outcome.

Or demanding the full protection for women under the law, and even adding to the protection with “rape shield laws” while at the same time supporting the complete evisceration of due process rights for college men accused of rape until the mere accusation is enough. The rights delineated in the American Bill of Rights are considered to be innate and inalienable and the Bill of Rights exists not to bestow them but simply to prohibit government from infringing on them. And so there is not greater hypocrisy than doing an end-run in academia and treating those innate and inalienable due process rights as inconvenient and optional.

Blah-blah-fucking-blah. I can literally go on doing this forever.

The question is not where Feminist and Feminism are exercises in hypocrisy, but the why and how of the hypocrisy. That is, like being evil, no one consciously thinks of themselves as a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is made possible by a world view coupled with some particular mental gymnastics.

Let me explain by means of what might seem to be a digression.

Feminism, as it is practiced now, coming out of academia and online discourse, all too used to browbeating people into compliance, is a totalizing, dogmatic system.

Like Marxism, Freudianism and Randian Objectivism, feminism is not only an ideology, but represents an all encompassing way of looking at the world that is insular and dogmatic as any religious doctrine. The simplest way to think of a totalizing system is to think of it as a construct that not only serves to explain everything, and there is literally nothing that does not come under the rubric of its ready-made explanation but, more importantly it comes equipped with a series of ad hoc rationalizations. These rationalizations guarantee that it explains everything and where it seemingly doesn’t, well, that’s just more evidence that it explains everything.

The most overt example of this kind of thinking comes from Freudian Psychoanalysis where it relates to the psycho-sexual development of children, Freud, being a deranged, coke-fueled nutjob, figured that young boys are sexually attracted to their mothers, which causes much conflict and confusion. Freud referred to this as the Oedipal Complex. Carl Jung named the same phenomena occurring between young girls and their fathers The Elektra complex, but that was mainly to piss Freud off.

Now, fun fact about the Oepidal Complex, at least the way Freud constructed it: There’s no escape. You see, if a guy marries someone who looks like or in some other way has characteristics of his mother, that’s a clear manifestation of unresolved Oedipal Complex. Of course, if the same guy marries someone who in no way resembles his mother, that’s “reaction formation” and like a two headed coin with Freud’s cigar fellating face on both sides, that’s still a manifestation of the Oedipal Complex. That’s also what’s called an ad hoc rationalization.

And that’s the neat thing about totalizing systems with their ad hoc rationalization neatly lined up in case of emergency: They explain so much everything that in practice, they explain absolutely nothing. And that phenomena was what Carl Popper called “nonfalsifiability”, which is in no way a compliment or something that anything but sheer bullshit should aspire to.

Thing about totalizing systems is they are kind of like a virus. They don’t care about killing the host, or generally making no sense whatsoever, provided they propagate themselves. The purpose of ad hoc rationalizations is not to really explain anything about the world, but to protect the a priori assumptions of the totalizing system and save it from refutation. The conclusions of these systems are not dependent on the premises, in fact premises can come and go, or be flipped on their heads, but the conclusion, at all costs, must be maintained.

Think of how utterly immune from refutation concepts such as the wage gap, or rape culture, or that disagreement constitutes harassment are to those who have chugged the victim narrative Kool-Aid. Think how easily Feminist dodge and weave with “Not All Feminists Are Like That” Not only can’t you refute any claim of feminism — as far as the Feminist is concerned — but when push comes to shove, they will deny that they make those claims at all, or rather, those claims are made by some other feminists, which is like, to paraphrase Karen Staughan, foil fencing flatulence.

Then, there’s the big one. The thing that explains everything: The Patriarchy. Otherwise known as The Man, the All Male Hegemony of Control and Oppression, the birthright to awesome cosmic power that Feminists attribute to all men. Which isn’t at all inexplicable considering the Feminist selectivity in that if you are not a man with power, that is, one they can get something out of, you are practically invisible. The one thing Feminists really hate to talk about, even think about, is class. Mostly because the middle and lower portions of it are just filled with men for whom they have no use.

The Patriarchy is the big guns of a non-falsifiable, observation-laden construct preserved by ad hoc rationalizations. Something hurts Feminists? That’s the Patriarchy. Feminists hurt other women? That’s the Patriarchy too. Men get hurt by Feminism? That’s also the Patriarchy. There is, quite literally, nothing The Patriarchy can’t do. Or, at least, get blamed for.

The Patriarchy is the high-octane fuel for the engine of the perpetual victim narrative.

Now, the conclusion of Feminism of the Third Wave, fashionable kind is the preservation of a victim narrative. The victim narrative serves several purposes, first, it explains away the personal failures of the individual Feminist by externalizing them, it allows an emotional appeal to quash the sort of criticism that would be leveled were not the individual feminist a tender and bruised raw nerve libel to fly off the handle and go totally stabby at the first sign of resistance,

Basically, it requires you to treat the Feminist as a strong and resilient intellectual Amazon warrior princess while, in practice, obligating you to coddle them like a teary-eyed six year old.

Take, for an example of Feminists utter tone deafness when it comes to class. , the “Ten Hours of Walking” video, just one of several videos trying to create outrage for fun and profit by having a woman videotaped walking the streets for hours, generally in lower socio-economic class black and latino neighborhoods in order to document “street harassment”. After hours of trolling for harassment, what is actually demonstrated is not “harassment”, that is violent or threatening behavior, but ethnic guys having the audacity to say hello or otherwise seek acknowledgement from the young woman baiting them. The videos are supposed to prove something about how men and woman interact in public, but what it proves is that some women will completely overstate the case for harassment by treating any interaction as harassment. What’s more, although the videos claim just as much harassment comes from white men, the target audience for shaming, they could just as easily be used by racists to make the case of the perils faced by pretty white women at the hands of lustful black men and other minorities. However, unlike the “strange fruit” of days gone by, the goal of these sort of damsels in distress masquerading as strong women who can hold their own, is more ambitious. Rather than calling for the lynching of black men, men in general will do just fine.

The real hypocrisy of these sorts of efforts is that they pretend to be about progress, about moving forward and redefining gender norms, while actually digging deep to mine the chivalrous psychology of a selective traditionalism and, perhaps, traditional racism.That is, traditionalism that women benefit from must be preserved, even if rebranded as something else, and that by not only demanding males behave in traditional ways, but also by plastering that over with additional and often contradictory demands. That men perform traditional roles as buffers and protectors – because the call is for men to take on men over supposed “street harassment” – while not expecting women to fulfill traditional roles, least of all respecting men for on the one hand saving the damsel in distress, while simultaneously extolling her virtues as a strong, independent woman capable of taking care of themselves.

And that bit of hypocrisy bears repeating. Modern Third Wave Feminism is not a progressive movement, rather it is a selective rebranding of traditionalism for women, with no reciprocal rethinking of those traditional male roles that are of benefit to them.

Now, let’s talk about how this all actually plays out.

I’ve read somewhere that Tibetan Buddhists, and this may be coming from the Dalai Lama rather than a doctrine of Buddhism per se, that should Buddhist claims conflict with empirical fact, then the claims would be tossed out.

Now, I don’t know whether or not that is true. At least, I haven’t seen a single instance of that being put into practice and, given the nature of dogmas, you can always count on just enough revisionist wiggle room that the jettisoning of established dogma wouldn’t actually happen.

This is not unique to Buddhism either. I’ve heard the same claims made about Judaism and even Christians try to get in on the act that their dogma is taking part in the free flow of discourse and, therefore, open to refutation. The Catholic Church attempts to do this by claiming there’s no contradiction between Evolution and the Truth in the Bible more by opting out, claiming different magesteria rather than humbling themselves before fact.

Now, why would otherwise dogmatic and insular religious doctrines make these sorts of claims, especially if, like me, you are cynical enough to think when such a thing was about to happen, they would find a way to weasel out of making good on the claim?

I mean, very best thing that doomsday cults do isn’t calculating the end of the world. It’s recalculating the end of the world.

You see, everyone wants to act like they are taking part in discourse, that they are fair salesmen in the marketplace of ideas. You want to make yourself out to be reasonable rather than, revealing that you are a bunch of close-minded, insular lunatics whose only interest in getting into the market of ideas is so you can shout people down and unload a canned speech on them.

The problem is, that many of the sellers in the market place of ideas are exactly that. Snake oil merchants who have lied their way in to the market itself under false pretenses.

And that is the greatest, most glaring hypocrisy of modern Feminism, and the same tendencies is on steroids for the online version: Feminists enter into spaces, intrude on them, claiming that they are there to right injustice, or raise consciousness. They are just there to talk. And what follows are blocking and shaming tactics, having people’s social media accounts suspended, people fired from their jobs, if possible, claims of abuse and harassment all direct towards one aim and only one aim: To have a monologue, to engage in the marketplace of ideas by shutting everyone else up, through harassment and proxy violence if necessary so they can run a re-education camp for a captive audience.

That, to me, is the greatest hypocrisy of modern Feminism: It enters into spaces paying lip service to the idea of having a discussion, of having a dialogue, or being able to be persuaded by facts and common sense when, in fact, it’s just another totalizing system, another big bag of predetermined ideological nonsense, as much as any other crackpot theory or religious dogma, that can only operate in the a complete vacuum of dissenting voices and is more than willing to suck the air out of any room to accomplish this.

And really, when it comes to that, it’s all just marketing. I wouldn’t claim that we live in an age or a culture where people are no longer coerced by violence. However, I would say that when violence is used, it can’t be used in broad daylight. Which explains why we live in a surveillance state where there are cameras literally everywhere, but cops will still crack your head for filming them.

Because of this, we live in an age and culture of lies and fallacy and emotional appeal where the art of massive bullshit was perfected over a century of selling people shit they don’t need through marketing. And it’s no accident that Edward Bernays, the patron saint of 20th century public relations and propaganda used his Uncle Sigmund’s theories of Psychoanalysis to craft more and more refined ways to lie to people in large groups. The ad hoc hypocrisy of totalizing systems and marketing go hand in hand to the extant that, quite literally, the truth is regarded as whatever you can make people believe.

Modern Feminism, which most of the time acts as a series of witch hunts and moral panics, hypocritically acts as if it is a fair seller in the marketplace of ideas when, in fact, it is simply marketing. Not surprisingly, some of the more successful online feminists have degrees in marketing, communication, and are selling the product of endless outrage that can only be cured by giving them your dollars. You can refute their claims on a Monday and they will be back repeating them by Wednesday. That’s because their claims, the victim narrative, isn’t something open for debate or beta testing. It’s a product that they simply intend to sell as is.

And that is the most cynical, the most hypocritical thing of all. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

@kitteh

I don’t think a year is typical. Nor is my usual, unmedicated high-point state, which is 2-3 weeks of absolutely insane irritability. I can become ragefully angry sitting alone doing nothing, and just hearing a person’s voice drives me out of my mind. I am unfit for human company or even my own company, and I destroyed multiple relationships before I decided that any relationship is unfair to the other person, and it cost me a job once.

On medication, the high becomes more typical for bipolar.

Or, rather, it becomes more typical for what is usually classified as bipolar. I am convinced that I am actually not as atypical as is claimed, and that a lot of people could benefit from bipolar meds who don’t believe they have this particular issue. I was very hard to diagnose, after all. There may be many, many people out there who know there is something wrong but can’t get a diagnosis or treatment because it doesn’t fit the stereotype of bipolar.

Yeah, I rather thought from what you said that a year would be very atypical – that alone would make it even harder to diagnose.

That extreme irritability sounds frightening, I mean for you to live with. I’m very glad your meds are helping.

Diagnosis is such a sticking-point for so many people, isn’t it? Just about everything I’ve had (and I’m only talking relatively minor physical stuff) doesn’t fit the fairly narrow descriptions, so there’s been a certain amount of guesswork or figuring it out myself before running it past the doc involved.

wordsp1nner, holy hell, five years at a time? D:

There was a documentary on here recently about a mental hospital in Sydney; it followed several people’s treatment. One man was so deeply depressed that they used ECT on him, and it helped. They also showed it – with his permission – on the program, probably to demonstrate that it is not, these days at least, what Ken Kesey described.