Thoughts on riding the bus
Dear Son,
I'm not saying every person who rides the bus is a villain, but at least 80% of all villains ride the bus. Live or work by a bus station anywhere near the city of Seattle and you'll see that this hub of devilry is responsible for delivering the vagabond, the hooker, the lunatic and the junkie to a single location; and anywhere you see the green and yellow Trojan Horses gathering you'll probably see a corollary gathering of the police. The police are there because something horrible has happened, and is about to happen, and is going to continue to happen.
By J at December 21, 2017 No comments:
Salvaging democracy
Democracy is just like anything else that's good in life, and that means it has to be moderated. To this a lot of Americans respond that we don't live in a democracy, we live in a democratic-republic, and I think saying anything this obvious and unhelpful should disqualify them for the vote.
By J at December 17, 2017 1 comment:
How to lose the fight for your existence
Breitbart news is absolutely infallible about one thing, and that thing is delivering the opinion of Breitbart news. About the actual facts they're sometimes dubious; but the overarching meaning behind the presentation of those facts, and the gist of what they're trying to get at, are so transparent that even a twelve-year-old could spot them.
Those of us who are having a good time and want to continue having a good time all have a common enemy, and that is the person who wants us to have a bad time. These people won't say it outright, of course, but to them the idea of you having a good time goes against everything they believe to be humane. Not in a world where people go hungry, or where people get shot by psychopaths at a concert, or where little boys who think they're girls are called boys; or where the citizens of Flint ruined their water supply and nobody has bothered to fix it; or where Michael Eric Dyson was called the N-word as a baby; or where women as a whole don't earn the same as men as a whole, or where some coworkers grab other coworkers' backsides, or where some people make it on to magazine covers and all the fat women are jealous.
By J at November 26, 2017 1 comment:
Introducing Carl Lentz
Carl Lentz is the latest punching-bag pastor offered to the American public by our leftist media, not because he's a game changer, but because he doesn't outrightly condemn abortion, Justin Bieber follows him, and most importantly he dresses like an idiot. What are his teachings on sanctification, or in other words how a real Christian behaves? Does he believe the Second Coming is around the corner and we should be ready for it? Does he think that the Holy Spirit is speaking through him, or are his sermons just rehashes of two-thousand-year-old letters? And beyond this what do the people of Hillsong Church believe? We'll never know, because nobody has bothered to find out. Liberals asked the obligatory question on gay marriage* and made fun of his rapist glasses and gave the guy the psychological equivalent of a wedgie. The American public is none the more informed because they read the paper to be entertained -- to occupy their two-minute attention spans laughing at a man who is not only probably better than them, but doing what none of them are attempting for anybody else: actively trying to save them from damnation.
By J at November 21, 2017 3 comments:
Colin Kaepernick's election as Gentleman Quarterly's Citizen of the Year brings up a number of questions. What exactly it is that makes a good citizen is first and foremost among these, because Kaepernick has spent a good amount of his time saying the average American citizen is the worst. It leads us to wonder what exactly a good citizen champions if it's not the citizens themselves; and if it's the reformation of the citizens, then maybe so be it, and if it's only a small and extremely fractious minority of the citizens, then wouldn't this make him a traitor?
By J at November 18, 2017 No comments:
Watching the enemy within
We've heard absolute power corrupts absolutely so many times that we're sick of hearing it; and like all the other truths we've heard so much that we ignore them, Republicans are terrible at applying it. They believe that somewhere or some time on this planet a man held absolute power and because he was all-powerful he was all-rotten; and that when we find a man who has absolute power again we'll find another one like him -- a ruthless emperor, or maybe a Machiavellian pope. In fact we don't need to look so hard, and what we find is that if absolute power corrupts absolutely, moderate degrees of power are capable of corrupting moderately. The fact that we're now uncovering a massive conspiracy of perverts and rapists in Hollywood is proof that unlike what Republicans believed, social and economic power are nearly as dangerous to women as any sultanate.
How to hire like a psychopath
Whatever can be said for Adam Smith he was only a man, and because he was a man he was wrong about some things. The first of them was that labor is the main thing that makes things valuable (which it doesn't). The second was that businessmen act like homo economicus (which they don't).
A short review of Plantinga's "Knowledge and Christian Belief"
When all is said and done the job of the intellectual is to challenge our perception of reality. Alvin Plantinga has done this in his new book Knowledge and Christian Belief, not by challenging non-believers to consider the act of believing, but by challenging you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. What exactly is on the cover of this revolutionary book? An orange square inside an orange square. How exactly does it read? Like you are looking at pictures of orange squares. The title is bland and unsexy as a convent. The arguments are precise and sterile as a surgeon's knife.
By J at October 24, 2017 2 comments:
Harvey Weinstein, martyr pig
The mountains of sexual harassment allegations piling against Harvey Weinstein have led me to be skeptical -- about the concept of piggish behavior. There are men who women enjoy fondling them and men women don't and the behavior of these opposite kinds of men, ninety percent of the time, is almost exactly the same.
By J at October 12, 2017 1 comment:
A note on Canada's Holocaust memorial
The most remarkable thing about the controversy over Canada's Holocaust memorial is that a Holocaust memorial is being built in Canada. It's almost as remarkable as if Germany had begun building memorials to America's extermination of the Indians, or the Italians had begun building memorials to the Japanese enslaving of Koreans. There is of course a controversy over the fact that the memorial failed to mention the Jews, but this (I think) is missing the point. Canada didn't make the Jews wear little badges and then throw them into death camps. Canada didn't gas Jews after blaming them for Communism or make their skin into lampshades. The Jewish Virtual Library states that out of the 31+ million people living in Canada the Jews represent little more than a percent. Yet the country that didn't kill the Jews and isn't comprised of Jews is building multi-million dollar monuments to Jews who then complain about the monuments.
RIP Ken Ham
Ken Ham isn't dead at the moment I'm writing this, but he can't last for too much longer, and for all practical purposes of his ministry he's been dead for nearly a decade. Mr. Ham may be rightly said to be the center figure of the movement, found in Baptist churches and other bastions of quackery all across the United States, insisting that the book of Genesis is literally true, and that the entirety of Christianity may be staked upon the entirety of this most indefensible book. His non-profit, Answers In Genesis, currently hosts a mega-million dollar Creation Museum in Kentucky, and may be said to be gaining momentum at a time when the culture wars may safely be said to have been lost by him and everyone else who believes strongly in Noah's Ark, that sharing Bible verses on Facebook is an effective method of evangelism, and that gay people are responsible for America's natural disasters. Their facilities are growing but the country to them is lost.
By J at September 22, 2017 2 comments:
I'm no expert on the meaning of life, but if I had to venture a guess, I would start with finding a woman you like and repeatedly impregnating her.
God's new Black Lives Matter book
Michael Eric Dyson's Tears We Cannot Stop, the latest manifesto of black American activists, has been approved by the Holy Spirit and thus it remains suspect. Two thousand years have passed since the last books were approved by The Almighty, and since then we've had a lot of pretenders. This latest addition to the Bible comes to us from St. Martin's Press (God's personal copyist), has conveniently bypassed all our ecumenical councils, and is spiritually confirmed in the preface by none other than Dyson himself, a gay-affirming Black-Lives-Mattering NWA-listening Baptist minister. He writes,
God stood in my way when I tried to write anything, and everything, except what I offer you now. This is written to you, my friends, because I feel led by the Spirit to preach to you.
You can't really argue against this kind of authority*. Except...
By J at September 10, 2017 No comments:
Selling us out: America's problem with businessmen
The history of the body positivity movement can be boiled down to this: there weren't many fat people and then there were lots of them, and when the people with lots of money realized the people with lots of fat could make them even more money they hired Meghan Trainor to sing about the greatness of fatness. She hit the jackpot and other people wanted to hit the jackpot, and now every clothing company is putting landmonsters into magazines*.
Someone writing for The New York Times loves being a mother and that's why their readers hate her. In what's got to be the most robust, earthy, energetic essay they've recently published, titled Motherhood Isn't Sacrifice, It's Selfishness, Karen Rinaldi, a fertile, competent, joyful woman explains how having children isn't the worst thing to ever happen to a lady, which caused a host of inferior women to go bananas.
Someone threw buckets of red paint all over a statue of Columbus and made me question the value of great-great-great grandchildren. The truth of the matter is that we love our children and their children; but when it comes to great-grandchildren we'll probably be too tired to fawn over them, and by the great-great we'll probably be dead. If we're alive, at best they'll look at us as toothless, shaking horrors; and if we're dead, the likelihood of anyone talking about us is going to be small unless we've made the family rich or killed an army of the Hun single-handed. To be a great great-great grandpa you have to be George Washington. Anything less and you'll end up like his kids or his parents: sucked into the void of non-history and almost completely forgotten.
In defense of objectification
It's needless to say that women are a surprise, and that beyond this horny women are the most enjoyable surprise of all. A quick glance through the erotic literature section in your handy internet bookstore will yield the fact -- not a theory, but a fact -- that you, as a man, had no idea what they were dreaming about when you were dreaming about them. This can be proved not only by the extensiveness of the "shapeshifter romance" genre, about men who turn into animals and animals turn into men, but by the advertisement for Bearly in Control, an erotic novel by the inimitable Milly Taiden. It runs as follows:
For vet and animal whisperer Charli Avers, talking to bears is all in a day's work. But when she finds a man—a very sexy, very alpha man—where a bear ought to be, the wild comes close to home. Charli is drawn to this mysterious stranger. She wants to help him piece together the past he can't remember—even if that means shedding her human misgivings and embracing her more carnal desires.
After shifting from bear to man, Barry believes he's finally found his mate. Now he just needs to find himself. He doesn't know much about the animal within him, but his human heart aches for Charli. She ignites his instincts to protect her from all danger—including their electric attraction.
Portrait of a Trump abandoner
The Republican primaries are the last hope of American civilization and the exact opposite of American Idol. Every season of American Idol we started out with a lot of weirdos and we ended up with a winner. In the Republican primaries we start out with a lot of winners and we wind up with a weirdo. As such I voted for Trump because my wife made me do it*. It isn't a glorious reason but it's true, and now that I've done it I'm glad that I did it. Both of us were against him and then when he wasn't Hillary we were for him. I'm still for him, except now I actually like him. This is the joy of having low expectations.
Sniffing out the sluts
The existence of noses has plagued thinkers for centuries. This troublesome appendage, supposedly fixed on the front of our faces, is so slippery in its features and so varying in its powers that Plato himself couldn't be found in any of his writings to have admitted its existence. Is it hooked or is it straight? Is it pointy or is it flat? Is it brown or pink or freckled or black? Is it hairy when you're old or hairless when you're young? The Realm of Forms was ransacked and "noses" remained elusive.
Rebels and pretenders
The hippies are nearly always good for a laugh unless you have to deal with one. Then they're downright insufferable. Most people who call themselves hippies are actually just for natural living and easy vibes; but in reality a hippie is a person who rebels against modernity; and beyond this it's a person who rebels against civilization. They're against factories because they believe we came out of the grime and against soap because grime comes out of us. I have no idea how this makes them natural but it's what they believe, and with this in mind it's a miracle any of them wipe themselves.
In defense of cultural appropriation
The first thing you've got to remember about "cultural appropriation" is that aside from a slew of top-notch performers and basketball stars, black people have contributed almost nil to American greatness because they weren't allowed to -- and they are painfully aware of it. They've given us some good soldiers and fathers and occasionally a great writer or an actor; but when it comes to the kinds of men we really give praise to, the generals and heroes and scientists and tycoons and theorists and spiritual leaders and directors and metaphysicians and literati and champion presidents; the things we really take pride in and associate ourselves with when we want to feel good about ourselves as a nation, the truth is that black men have contributed far less to us than we have to them; and when they really have contributed, their contributions have done more to advance black people than Americans in general.
By J at July 23, 2017 No comments:
Italy under siege? An exercise in skepticism
"All good things must come to an end."
When you first hear this as a child you think it means your ice cream is going to be finished and the sun's going to go down and you'll have to stop playing with your friend. They never tell you that what it really means is the first woman you fall desperately in love with is going to stop being in love with you and leave before you know what's going on, or that one day you're going to stop having energy and it's never going to come back, or that the place you grew up is going to become a hell-hole and a wasteland.
On being your own "yes" man
When I was young I was terrified that people could read my mind. Nobody had ever taken the time to tell me that 70% of all communication is non-verbal, and when people started reacting to how I was feeling I began to get panicked. This was because I knew in my mind what they felt with their senses. Only I knew with total surety what was hinted by my little behaviors; that the sea of feelings and desires and judgments and realizations bubbling and boiling and sometimes spilling beyond my consciousness were being made known by my hands and my eyes and the way I would hold my head; but they could guess it -- it was their business to guess it -- it was their interest to guess it; and this idea that the secret side of me could be made public without my consent led me to wonder if I was a psychic. I believe this is what they refer to as "anxiety."
God still speaking through asses: a NYT breaking report
The New York Times ran an article the other day called Does God want you to spend $300,000 on college? But God couldn't be reached for comment, so the New York Times went to Notre Dame's Father John L Jenkins, and when Father Jenkins' response was unsatisfactory to the reporter the reporter went to himself. It seems a better question would have been does God want us to pay reporters to look for God when we could just ask The New York Times reporters? to which the answer would invariably be that He did, because The New York Times paid one.
Sympathy for the pharisee
I have a theory (and it happens to be the theory of the Catholic church) that Christendom would be different if people would just ask questions about the the Bible. For centuries this had been the rationale for keeping the public from reading it. The clergy took one look at the average man and then considered that nobody knew Latin or Hebrew or Greek and then hid the Bible in plain sight and that was the end of it. The argument about the unintelligibility of the words was second to the argument about the imbecility of man. And the imbecility of man it turns out was less threatening to the church than his genius. That's why the Catholics have a catechism.
Thoughts on a comment of Nietzsche's
The first thing I thought when I began reading masterpieces like Mere Christianity and The Federalist was I've got to tell this to everyone else. It was the same reaction I've had every time in my life that I've ever learned anything great. I wanted to be the first one to tell others.
By J at June 30, 2017 2 comments:
Labels: personal, youth
For a little while now I've considered our opioid epidemic God's punishment on Americans for being boring. It's the drug habit fit best for a people who love ABC Family and eat Macdonalds. It lacks the festivity of ecstasy and acid's feeling that you're being enlightened. It has no cultural crusade because it's the byproduct and not the stimulant of a culture.
It has none of the party but all of the hangover. It has the all the hallmarks of inevitable age and decline. You can't drive and you can't poop and you can't get an erection. You get it because you're in pain and then the thing that was supposed to make you numb is eventually the thing that hurts.
By J at June 28, 2017 1 comment:
Labels: America, ethics, political correctness, practical advice, social justice warriors
Equality as a social construct
One of the most brilliant things I've ever seen was a picture of a hawk chasing a smaller bird, and a caption that stated the following: Equality is a social construct. In nature nothing is equal.
Labels: America, ethics, feminism, hypocrisy, Objectivism, political correctness, race, religion, sexuality, social justice warriors
High school in the American consciousness
Americans like to believe that people grow up right after high school and to me this is proof that they're childish. There's no reason to believe that a diploma means a change in behavior or that high school, a process involving almost zero dedication or danger beyond football and breakups, will force you to make any serious decisions. The hormones you began it with are there when you leave. A senior is really no smarter than a sophomore. To expect adults by the end is an exercise in fantasy. We expect high school to be over only because the high schoolers have left the building.
By J at June 19, 2017 No comments:
The whole point of cuteness (and a defense of Planned Parenthood)
The really strange thing about cuteness is that it goes away. Unless you have a disease like Gary Coleman's you're going to lose it. One minute you're adorable as a kitten and then poof -- no more cuteness; no more inspiring that feeling that you've got to be hugged and squeezed and cuddled even though you're spitting up all over us and crying when we're supposed to be sleeping.
Civil wrongs
What Americans seem to miss in our approach to homosexuality is that being attracted to men isn't acting like a pussy. The two things are completely different and we've taken them for the same thing. The ancient Greeks were warlike and gay and never batted an eye over it; and when Horatio Nelson said "kiss me Hardy" it was because he had just been shot in a battle. Nowadays you kiss a man and everyone thinks you must be effeminate; and the "inevitable result" of someone declaring his love for a man is that he must also be in love with Liberace.
Missing the old NAACP
Sometimes when you tell an old joke the joke is on you. There are some jokes that are so relevant that they have to be told until the end of all time. Such are jokes about easy moms* and mothers-in-law, and when you tell a good one you can join the ranks of Cicero. But there's no such thing as a joke about a great grandmother-in-law. You don't go back in time. You either target the mother-in-law or you leave it alone. You can say you just shot a bear in your underpants and then question how the bear got there in the first place. What you can't do is tell that joke to an old person. You have to start with kids or the whole thing is lost.
By J at May 31, 2017 No comments:
Before I knew anything about Augustine I read City of God. I'd heard that it was written by someone called a father in a religion where we were commanded by the Founder to not call anyone a father except our Father in Heaven; and although I hadn't any knowledge about Augustine as a person, I was told that it was written because Rome had fallen to the barbarians. I picked it up and read all thousand pages.
By J at May 29, 2017 1 comment:
On wudu
The concept of breaking wudu is a singular development of the Muslim religion. It may be defined as follows.
Wudu, or ablution, is both a traditional ritual and a practical means by which Muslims seek to maintain good physical and spiritual hygiene. Traditionally, Wudu refers to the mental preparation and physical cleanliness of Muslims for the Salat (prayer), one of the Five Pillars of Islam
An objection to the hatred of socialists
An old college friend of mine (and it must be confessed a Russian) has objected to a statement in my last essay that every good man ought to hate a socialist.
By J at April 28, 2017 No comments:
First they came for the Nazis
It's remarkable that the poem First They Came begins "first they came for the socialists" because the socialists came first, and they came for everyone else. They didn't even come for the Jews first. In fact, an unGodly number of the socialists in Russia at the time of the Revolution were Jews, and the socialists in Russia came for whoever they wanted.
The question of saving Syrian children
I think any American at this point who has seen the videos of Syrian children getting gassed by Assad -- any of us who have any tendency towards reflection -- has been led to ask what exactly his feelings are for. We know that every feeling has a purpose; and that, like faith, they were given to us for action. As such, we look inside ourselves and thank God we're morally alive and feel something for the children; but this leads us to another more uncomfortable question. It leads us to wonder whether it's colder to feel something and do nothing than to simply feel nothing.
By J at April 14, 2017 1 comment:
Tomi Lahren vs Moses: a contest in barbarity
Wisdom is a judicious balancing of pros and cons, and the controversy over abortion isn't an exception to the rule. My reasoning against abortions is that I've seen too many pictures of aborted babies. My reasoning for it is I've met too many unaborted adults.
By J at April 13, 2017 4 comments:
Pop music versus the hipsters
Our honest prayer was that we'd return to the days when our artists were ugly, and God and the record labels saw fit to give us Lil' Yachty. This was not at all what we meant.
How to be a terrible Mexican
Now that the Archdiocese of Mexico City has told us that any Mexican helping build the wall is a traitor, we're left wondering exactly what they mean. It has yet to be shown how many filthy Godless wasted Americans waltz through the doors of the current one every year to terrorize Tijuana; and it seems that if anyone could benefit from better border controls it would be the Mexicans. We get many of their workers. They get many of our frat boys. You can easily conceive who's getting the worse end of this deal.
The Ethiopians are a very peculiar people. Hidden away on the eastern half of Africa, they don't have a history of slavery in the Americas, and of all the different kinds of black Africans appear the least foreign to us. Their features are in many cases sharp as the European's, and provide a stark contrast to the Africans of The Ivory Coast and the Congo. Here you'll see no flattened noses or giant lips; and their skin appears almost bright compared with the midnight blackness of the people of Sudan. My opinion is that their women are the prettiest in all Africa; and what they surpass in all their neighbors with the beauty of the face, they double -- nay, triple, with a thickness in the rear*. Their only rivals on the continent are white colonists and the Arabs of North Africa. The same compliment can't be paid to their men.
By J at March 28, 2017 No comments:
Dreaming of right-wing women
I don't believe (whatever Paul and Schopenhauer said) that women in general are stupid, but I don't believe the rumor's existence is entirely the fault of our men. The women seem to have brought it on themselves. If all our men were to start calling our women ugly nobody would believe it, mostly because women are one of the only things we stare at so desperately that some of us end up driving into ditches. But even if men tried spreading the lie, the truth of an assertion lies in its probability. Too many women are beautiful for us to call them ugly. We might even say the concept of beauty revolves around women*. But are too many women intelligent for us to say they aren't stupid?
By J at March 12, 2017 1 comment:
I've never had sex with a man, and I mean this in every sense of the act. But I have gotten lots of attention from men, and the most of it came when I was around the age of 17.
The case for racist English classes
There's a very easy way to make sure your going to judge me, and I have already done it. It all lies in the "your." The difference between "your" and "you're" is simple, but the fact that I've mistaken it isn't. It hints at all kinds of things; at whether I'm sloppy or hurried or stupid or ignorant; it makes you wonder if I ever passed the fourth grade and whether I learned anything after it. Who is the writer? you ask, and rightly. If Jesus said not to judge (whatever that means) He also said that those who can be trusted with much must first be trusted with little; and I've intentionally shown you what happens when someone can't be trusted. Simply put, he gets judged -- without mercy.
By J at February 26, 2017 No comments:
The perils of parenthood
Nothing can really prepare you for the feeling that you've ruined your child. You simply have to feel it. No amount of warning or observation will do. You won't understand years of watching your parents apologize over the tiniest and most trivial most forgotten mistakes they made when you were four until you've made mistakes with your four-year-old that you just can't forget. They'll just hit you one day like a bucket of bricks, and there will be nothing you can do to get over them.
By J at February 25, 2017 2 comments:
On bums
Protestants (and especially Calvinists) enjoy telling us that we're all bums to God. They have no other way of making us understand how far below Him we are morally, so they have to find a way to make us think of someone who's morally far below us.
The really remarkable thing about the Superbowl is that it's the most lucrative football game in the US and the one that Americans are the least interested in. 30 teams have already played and lost; and all the irrational localist jingoism that pervades the average football game has already been spent on the other teams. The most that most of us can say about the Superbowl is that we pick a team that we "hate" the least, and the team we hate the least is hated least because they probably never had a rivalry with the team we love the most. The whole thing is an exercise in wankery, the last dregs of a season Americans began in hope and excitement, eventually petering out in a whirlwind of disappointment, and carried on simply because there weren't any other games left to watch.
Daylight saving time and its detractors
Because daylight saving time is around the corner we can expect to hear that tired old joke from that useless old Indian:
'Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket.'
We're pregnant
Yesterday I met a man celebrating a pregnancy, and when I asked him if the baby was his he pointed at a man and said "we're pregnant." I laughed and then congratulated him.
By J at January 22, 2017 1 comment:
What was Aleppo?
To my knowledge nobody I know knows of the meaning of Aleppo. We know that it's in Syria. We know that Assad has been bombing it. We know that it's what the women are referring to as "a humanitarian crisis," and what the men are referring to as "a point of strategic importance." Nobody has told me why the Syrians are more important than the thousands of women and children being butchered by drug lords in Mexico; or why Assad is more threatening to us than said drug lords in Mexico; or why the people are being bombed in Aleppo in the first place; or why Assad is a bad guy and the rebels are good.
By J at January 19, 2017 No comments:
Westworld: a review
HBO's first season of Westworld is so good that we're worried it will continue; and in doing so joins a series of series that would have been better if they'd left them unfinished. The first series I remember starting this well was The Matrix, followed by two sequels that gave us more of the story but none of the magic; followed by things like The Hunger Games, which eventually gave us a solution when what we actually wanted was more of the problem.
By J at January 05, 2017 3 comments:
Carrie Fisher, world class beauty
People who say Carrie Fisher should be remembered for her brains all have one thing in common: none of them will be remembered for their brains. She was beautiful and that's beyond dispute; and she'll be remembered as long as Star Wars is still selling and Slave Leia is warping our sexuality. What she won't be remembered for is her activism or her attitude. We could have hired any woman to scold Harrison Ford for a decade -- that's the thing we call marriage. But the glory of doing it and still having us want her belongs to her face. And secondly it belongs to that metal bikini.
A short review of Plantinga's "Knowledge and Chris...
Selling us out: America's problem with businessmen...
God still speaking through asses: a NYT breaking r...
The whole point of cuteness (and a defense of Plan...