The past couple of weeks have been fairly bad for us here at the Fortress of Crankitude. Rufus was diagnosed with lymphoma. Beth’s minivan refused to pass an emissions-control inspection. The paving company my general contractor hired to extend my driveway messed it up badly and refuses to fix it. I had to jettison one of my vinyl storage sheds. We’ve just endured a torrential rainstorm that knocked out power and ruined all our potted plants. And I think I have aliens living in my barn. (What does it matter if they come from another planet? They should still go through passport control and Customs, right?) But as the philosophers said to the emperor (from a safe distance, of course), “And this, too, shall pass away.” So let’s have a little marginalia this fine Tuesday morning.
1. Fiction Promotion.
I detest “social media,” in part because they’re dominated by idiots, trivia, and idiots spouting trivia, but also because I’m about as asocial as anyone alive today. However, after being bludgeoned about it for many moons, I’ve created a pair of Facebook groups, specifically to promote my two novel-series:
Maybe they’ll help my flagging sales. (I know, releasing a fresh book or two would help too, but all things in due course.)
2. Klavan On The Left’s Not-So-Secret Weapon.
The following Andrew Klavan video came to my attention only yesterday:
It’s worth viewing for several reasons, most emphatic of which is that Klavan, an insider, can give personal, first-hand testimony about the media establishment’s absolute hostility toward the Right. Moreover, as he’s been a screenwriter for almost as long as he’s been a novelist, Klavan can confirm that the Left has used its media dominance to deny the Right a place in the entertainment industry for more than just the last few years.
Books, the Internet, and talk radio have helped us, of course, but the bastions of the entertainment and journalistic media have remained closed to us – and as Klavan notes, those are the conduits through which the Left establishes its enduring historical vision and cultural hegemony. Yet the Right continues to advance...and it’s making the barons of those satrapies very nervous.
The fundamental insight here, which Klavan only implies, is that the Left has become desperate. The Right is winning arguments and converts even though it has very few media outlets and the Left has demonized it at every opportunity. The one way the Left can prevent the Right from advancing is to deny the Right access to any platform – and when you see AntiFa / Black Bloc thugs trying to shut down a conservative movie, to silence a conservative speaker, or to disrupt a conservative or patriotic event, they're acting on that premise.
3. Control Of The Terminology.
It’s well known among students of rhetoric that control of the terminology in which a discussion is held is tantamount to assured victory. That alone suffices to explain the Left’s attempts to dictate the words we may use and the contexts in which we may use them. It also suffices to establish my own, oft-repeated point about such things.
A recent article at Return of Kings extends the logic of this process to five “up and coming phobias:”
As every person on the right knows, the left loves to control language. Whether it is through so-called “hate speech” legislation or political correctness, the left strives to dictate what words can and cannot be used in society-at-large. And the left seeks to do this because they know that to control a person’s language is, quite literally, a way to manipulate and steer that person’s thoughts. It is a means of creating self-censoring thinkers.Thus, language-control is a way of gaining power over people. Furthermore, it is a power that makes people fight the left using the left’s own chosen terms, which means fighting the left on its own rhetorical terrain. And, as any strategist knows, you never want to fight an enemy on ground that he has selected. This is why refusing to use the left’s 1984- language is so crucial, as is positively fighting back against that language control.
Now, in recent years, when it comes to the battle for language, everyone and their dog has experienced the explosion of the left’s ‘-phobia’ and ‘-ism’ propaganda war. You have homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, and so on. At the same time, you have racism, sexism, ableism, etc. All these terms are designed to elicit a positive emotional reaction from the left’s true believers while simultaneously seeking to shame the individuals or groups at which those terms are aimed. And, for a surprising number of years, these terms have been quite effective at shifting the cultural landscape in the left’s favor.
What follows in that article might strike my Gentle Readers as fanciful...but I’m old enough to remember a time before “homophobia,” when open homosexuality was regarded by nearly everyone as a danger to young Americans. I’d take it seriously for that reason alone.
As a highly relevant bonus, have a quick snippet from Florence King’s Lump It Or Leave It:
Being guilty of “bad judgment” is now a sin in and of itself. It is morality’s scene stealer, standing alone in all its short-circuited glory, with no before and no after, no cause and no effect, no wheat and no chaff. Suggest that bad judgment leads to a decision that leads to an action, and that it is the action that constitutes the moral lapse, and you will find your name at the top of the –ist list.
Did your Congressman fuck a Doberman on the steps of the Capitol. He’s guilty of bad judgment, not dog-fucking. Who said anything about dog-fucking? Where in the world did you get that idea? Dog-fucking has nothing to do with dog-fucking. It’s a question of bad judgment, and if you don’t agree, you’re not only an –ist, you’re a phobe.
The late Miss King surely had as keen an eye as was her way with words.
4. The War Against Sexual Mutuality.
You may remember this odious story from a few months ago, about which I ranted in my usual fashion. The notion that her orgasm pleases him offends some women – that is, it offends women who despise men, including the men to whom they open their legs. As bad a problem as that is, there are “men” who are offended by the notion that she might have desires of her own, and that he should take them into account:
As readers of the red pill manosphere know all too well, you cannot negotiate desire. By its very nature, desire is the opposite of negotiation. And yet here we have this self-proclaimed expert plowing ahead as she gamely positions herself to help men everywhere who are in the awful predicament of not being able to get their leg over with their own wives.On and on she goes as she explains in torturous detail how she convinced couples to keep diaries so as to track how they negotiate their sex lives. The word comes up again and again. Arndt relies on the word almost as much as commuters rely on their smart phones.
The situations and examples that she describes in this video are nothing short of pathetic. Men groveling for sex, a wife informing her husband that he is allowed to have 50 thrusts as long as he does not jiggle the book that she is reading, husbands crying when faced with someone explaining their daily sexual misery....
As long as men listen to women then their problems will only compound and get worse. These long suffering men made their first mistakes when they listened to their wives. And yet here they are once again listening to a woman on the same subject.
The linked essay pinned my “petty malice” meter. While I disagree with parts of Miss Arndt’s presentation, it’s hard to believe that anyone could shower that sort of bile on well-meant relationship advice – especially as the advice mainly consists of being willing to listen to and acknowledge one’s spouse’s desires (and lack thereof).
Persuasion expert Michael Emerling once said that defining your desires as right and everyone else’s desires as wrong is the key to abject failure at persuasion. It’s also the key to a life of sexual deprivation. But that’s a point that makes itself, wouldn’t you say?
That’s all for the moment, Gentle Reader. I’m behind on my current novel and must make some headway before I lose the thread completely. Until tomorrow, be well.
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