Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Category: Gender

  • #Mewtwo

    First time I can remember being assaulted and forced into a Poké Ball I was only in my first evolutionary form. I told no one and lived with the shame and guilt, thinking all along that I, a Psychic-type, was somehow responsible for the actions of a 10-year old boy from Pallet Town. I had to see this “trainer” on a daily basis for years to come. He would shout my name and expel me from the pocket dimension I was trapped in, and I would be forced outside, my blood running cold, my guts carrying the burden of what only he and I knew — that he expected me to shut my mouth and fight other “monsters” in grudge matches until one of us was beaten into unconsciousness. When I was not fighting, I was forced to breed with the other “monsters” in his stable and our offspring would eventually be taken from us to be traded with other “trainers”.

    #Mewtwo

  • Intersectionality

    My friend told me about a new used car dealership that opened up in town over by the railroad tracks. The owner decided he’d revolutionize the used car industry by offering cars at their true  market value plus a 5% bump for overhead and salary. He’d make up for the lower margins with volume.

    Possibly the woman who was the inspiration for this story.

    I strolled into his lot and started kicking tires. A 2009 Honda Fit caught my eye. 17K miles and the body looked perfect. “Why don’t you take it for a spin?” the owner asked as he flipped me the keys. It had responsive steering, supple brakes and decent power for such a small engine. “We’ve checked around and this model with this mileage and condition goes for $7,200, so we’re offering it for $7,530.”

    I stood there thinking about it for a long while. I had only $7,100 to spend. Of course, I needed the car for work and my job was essential to put food on the table, so I knocked $200 off his price in my head. Being a woman, it was obvious that I could be raped walking around at night, so I sliced another $300 of the price. Really, how much would it cost society to deal with another rape? And, isn’t this owner part of the raping gender? Also, I’m nearing fifty years old, so I’ll need money for retirement. If I don’t have enough for my old age, I’ll be a burden on society. I knocked another $500 off his price. Raised by a single mother: $600. Genetically prone to obesity: $450. Lesbian experience in college: $150. Bad teeth, left handed, bad at math, more than five vowels in my last name. The numbers were flashing through my head like John Nash working on differential geometry.

    Finally, I had my answer. “I’ll take the car. According to my calculations, you owe me the car and $2,600.” As I listed my deductions, the left side of the dealer’s face started twitching. When I reeled off the last deduction, he reached out his shaking arm and handed me the title.

    . . .

    She pulled out of the dealership in the purple Honda Fit and turned up the song that came on the radio. She had loved Alanis Morissette ever since she had heard it playing in the background while eating out her college roommate. She looked in the rear view mirror and saw the dealer waving good bye, some pinkish liquid running down his forearm. She thrust her arm out the window and flipped him off. “Fuck your white patriarchy!” she yelled and stomped on the gas.

    . . .

    BAAAAAAAM! “Hey, Boss. What was that?” the young mechanic shouted from the Fiat he was under. “No problem, kid. Just means the train was on time.” He started wiping off the brake fluid on his arm, proud of himself for not mansplaining to the lady that brake lines were bad.

  • 81) #Metoo

    By Just a thought not a sermon

    Because this is exactly what it’s like, amiright?

    81) The thing about this #metoo crap is that it implicitly seems to accept that sexual harassment or discrimination is something primarily experienced by women. My own life contradicts this. I have experienced sexual harassment and discrimination multiple times, and so far as I can tell, my incidents occurred with no less frequency than for the average woman. The difference is, I’ve never tried to make myself out to be a victim.

    When I was in high school, a girl I wasn’t interested in pinched my ass in the hallways several times. #metoo? No, I got tired of it and told her to knock it off, so she did.

    Another time in high school, a substitute teacher in my drama class sat on my lap and put her arm around me. I was NOT interested and found the whole thing embarrassing. #metoo? No, a little embarrassment didn’t hurt me, and I just rolled my eyes about it later.

    When I was in college and graduate school, there were several occasions when girls I wasn’t interested in would come on to me, a couple times accompanied by unwelcome touching, at least one persisted even after I politely tried to turn her down. #metoo? No, not here, either. Somehow I managed to escape these situations without permanent psychic damage. That sometimes someone is attracted to another person and expresses that in an awkward way seemed sufficient explanation to me.

    Before moving on, I’d just like to point out that I’m a reasonably good-looking guy who stays in shape, but I’m no Adonis. I don’t have a flirtatious or outgoing personality. There’s no special reason I should receive more romantic attention than other guys, and I don’t believe I do. I think nearly every man could tell similar stories to the above.

    On a more serious level, I had an internship at an academic non-profit in downtown D.C. when I was in graduate school. Their financial officer was a loud feminist, and also a recent divorcee who never hesitated to put in a bad word about her ex—or men in general. Every once in a while, we used to have sessions where everybody would go to the conference room and we’d stuff hundreds of envelopes with invitations for upcoming events. These were usually good times when everybody got a chance to chat, unless the finance lady was there, as she would dominate the conversation with her bad-mouthing of men.

    One day a staffer asked me to make copies of resumes for academics applying to be fellows at this institute—there were thirty or forty applications, and each required dozens of copies, which had to assembled into packages. It was an all-afternoon job of busywork. Ms. Man-Hater came in to the copy room, took a long look at what I was doing, mumbled something under her breath, and left. Later that week, I found a reprimand in my mailbox from the intern director for using institute resources for my personal use.

    I had no idea what the reprimand was referring to, but eventually I put two and two together and had the staffer who’d given me the job explain to the intern director that I’d been doing something work-related. But why had the finance lady not just asked me directly if I was doing something work-related? The obvious explanation is that I was a man so she automatically assumed I must be up to no good.

    Later, I learned one of the other interns I worked with (a woman) received an offer for a staff job there. Why not me? I’d done everything she had done, and was a good employee by any measure.

    #metoo? I wonder. Had I chosen to pursue it, I think I would have had a very good case for sexual discrimination against this non-profit—hostile atmosphere, passed over for promotions, false accusations of wrong-doing likely based on my gender.

    But no, not #metoo here, either. I was free to leave anytime I wanted, and in fact did leave after this incident, as soon as I had another job lined up. And why shouldn’t a company be able to hire whomever it wants, even if its main criterion is not being an icky man? It’s not like this place had any monopoly on jobs. (Actually, I should send Ms. Man-Hater a thank you note for keeping me off the low-paying non-profit path.)

    Humans are sexual and carry around sexually-related desires and pains that don’t stop when they enter the school or workplace. Our interactions are full of impure motives, biases, and logic errors, and trying to police them in an impossible battle to end harassment and discrimination is foolish. This is true of both men and women. If anything, teaching women they are victims makes them feel helpless to address problems that could easily be solved simply be speaking up and making it clear if they feel they’re being harassed.

    As far as discrimination in the workplace, the best way to address that is not to pile up regulations or increase legal jeopardy for sexual discrimination—that only makes businesses less likely to hire women in the first place. The best solution (for men and women) is a vibrant jobs market that allows unhappy employees to easily find another job. Don’t like the atmosphere where you work—sexually discriminatory, racist, or you just plain hate the other people? If it’s easy to find another job, this is hardly a problem.

  • Wednesday Afternoon Links

    Hey kiddos, I’m here to provide you with your daily dose of afternoon links! Won’t this be fun?

    • Speaking of kiddos, the Paddock family is really working hard at notoriety. The Vegas shooter’s brother is in the OMWC way currently having been arrested during an investigation of consumers of adult content featuring child actors.
    • The .in.mb family seat in rural NY now has a spectacularly named gun club for homos and trans-folk “Trigger Warning Queer and Trans Gun Club.” I’d rather see the membership and clout of the Pink Pistols grow, but I’ll take what I can get.
    • Fun fact: Playa Manhattan is masturbating furiously right. this. minute.
    • Philipines continues to snuggle up to people we don’t really like.

    And since I was drunk at Oktoberfest this weekend, here’s a scruffy blond fellow in (faux) leather lederhosen playing the sax.

    Thanks, Alpine Village Oktoberfest!

  • Sex? Gender? Bit of both? Neither?

    [GLIBS STAFF NOTE: Whirling vortex of angry moved to moderation – including this note.]

    There is a lot of talk about sex (there’s a song in there somewhere) and gender in the news recently. People are using them as basically the same, as completely different, or as “it’s complicated.” My point of view is that it is purposefully and needlessly made more complicated than it needs to be, that there is way too much talk of it, it is not that relevant in the grand scheme of things (it really really, really isn’t, no part of the so called culture war is), and, occasionally, I go the route of “oh my god let’s just drop it already.”

    Now this post may be a bit controversial, but hell what is the point of just agreeing with everything? So, of course, here come the disclaimers. This is not a scholarly work and it will not have any reference to studies or other articles. None of my stuff does. I just do op-ed.

    I am not a biologist or a neurologist. I am not, thank your deity/empty meaningless void of choice, a social scientist. I am an engineer and, stereotypically, I hold most (not all) social science in disdain. I don’t see them as reliable enough to be fit for purpose, and most of it of little use, besides pushing political agendas. So this is not going to be in any way based on professional experience.

    Trigger warning: I am about to state my view of things and I do not care whether people agree with me or find me offensive. It may be long, rambling and incoherent. And I will try to include jokes as I go along, most likely bad ones. You have been warned. Also the spell check keeps trying to get an “u” out of behaviour, but I am keeping that “u” in, so there!

    Another thing that I am is an individualist. I believe that the individual is the basic unit of humanity. In my view, only individuals can act and be responsible for their actions, only individuals can have rights and, in the end, individuals suffer when the shit hits the fan. Groups cannot act; they can, at most, try to coordinate their action. I do not believe the group is higher than the individual and I believe a group needs to be seen as simply an aggregation of individuals.

    I understand that human brains create categories and, as you cannot know every single person in the world, everyone will resort to generalisation. But one should try to minimise it and drop it when one actually does know the person. Also, stop worrying so much about people you don’t know, and you will not need to categorise them. I really do not care a jot about the average wage of a man, a woman, and the difference thereof. I care mostly about my wage – to low if you ask me, and maybe those of people I know. That’s about it. While one can draw general average statistics over large populations, I find them meaningless, outside pushing politics.The general destroys the particular, as someone else said once. The average shoe won’t fit many. But this is a topic that can go for many pages, keepin’ it brief!

    Now after ample disclaimers and such, let’s get to it, dive in the deep end, as it were.

    What the ever-loving fuck is all this sex and gender stuff? And why should we care? (spoiler alert: in a better world, we shouldn’t. Unless we plan on having sex. Which sounds gross.)

    We have a bunch of words. Some of them are man and woman, “male” and “female.” Back in the day, words used to mean something. That was their point. An accurate description of these words I got from someone else was “bimodal population pattern based on anisogamy and the traits correlated with it.” Humans, like all other mammals (you and me baby are nothing but .. gah sorry about that), have a reproductive anatomy based on this bimodal pattern, with associated gamete, hormones, chromosomes, a degree physical dimorphism and some degree of behavioural dimorphism. This is good and all, and should be uncontroversial. Ah, should…

    Of course there are small numbers of people who do not fit clearly as male or female, this is quite true, but the number is small enough to not be that relevant for the vast majority of cases. Bimodal in not necessarily binary, and there are outliers.

    Now the complicated part kicks in. Gender, baby. Gender is more of a linguistic designation, which was used to describe some elements of identity and behavioural bimodality somewhat separated from the physical. This was, throughout a majority of human history and a majority of cultures, strongly correlated with sex. It still mostly is. In Romania, not being so far down the road of social science, most people still see the terms as almost interchangeable, although young urban progressives are working hard to change this.

    In the modern mind of the social justice crowd, gender has been completely separated from sex, which makes it much more flexible, not being bound by any biological limit. I would say good luck to em, use it whatever way you want. But keep in mind that being so flexible and undefined, in time there will be little to separate gender from a personality type, a mood, a fashion statement.

    This brings me to my main question: What is the goddamn point of even having it? Sex is a clear biological designation. It is needed as human sexuality is strongly linked to it. There can be medical reasons – different treatments, ailments, etc. based. Males will not get ovarian cancer.

    But what is the goddamn point of gender? They say gender, as different than sex, is a valid concept, but I just don’t see it, especially unless quite clearly defined and delimited. Unless it is to utterly confuse everything. If it has no biological boundaries, no conceptual boundaries, no nothing, then yes, you can identify with any of the 33,498,227,345,456 genders. But what is the use of it, at this point? If there were 2 or 3 or 7 genders with specific designations, I would see it. But if it is a vast, continuous spectrum, there’s no point to it. Each has his own personality. Leave it at that.

    Well, what about gender roles? What about them? Fuck gender roles as well. Do whatever the hell you want, just leave me be while doing it (unless you are an attractive female and what you want to do is me, in that case you can bother me about it).

    Sex is a biological descriptive category, which is now turned by progressive in an oppressive prescriptive category. Which leads them to the conclusion blank slaters get about everything: it is a social construct. One example is having gender supersede sex, as far as sexual desire and behaviour. Sexual attraction and behaviour is based on biological sex and anatomical features, whatever those may be. Now I am a bit of a shitlord. I believe in biological difference between men and women. I also believe sucking a penis is gay, even if it identifies as vagina. And I also strongly believe there is nothing wrong with that, if that sort of thing is your bag.

    That being said I am the epitome of live and let live. I don’t care. My only problem is that fewer and fewer people seem to take this approach. I let them live, but they won’t let me. This is annoying, especially since besides activist profiting for this, all this drama is not helping anyone.

    I have no problem with people switching sex, gender, what-goddamn-ever. Out of politeness, I am willing to treat them with respect. But there are more and more attempts to codify this into law, and with that I have a problem. I would not, were I a business owner, refuse to employ someone because they are transgender. But I do believe it is the right of some other business owner to do so, for whatever reason they may have.

    Now, although I have no problem with it, I do think that sex is a biological reality and you cannot truly change it. I think there is a mental problem with someone who thinks they are of a different sex. This is not, of course, any reason to disrespect or bully someone, just like you would not bully someone with autism.  I think it is awful issue to have. I cannot imagine how it feels, but it must be very bad to feel like you are in the wrong body. But that cannot change my view that reality is reality.

    There are brain morphology issues that may actually justify this belief, beyond a vague notion of mental illness. But I cannot see how mutilating one’s body in a significant and irreversible fashion is not the result of having a serious problem. Although I accept that this process may actually help the person, it may be a drastic treatment, but treatment nonetheless. Chemotherapy can also be debilitating. That being said, I am highly circumspect about it being applied to prepubescent children, who may be confused as much as anything else.

    But I do think bodily mutilations can be ehm… problematic in general. Speaking of mutilation, I also think most piercings in general are terribly unattractive. Tattoos I am split on, I have seen some sexy tattoos, but overall most are not. Also, if male, you should not get a tattoo unless you can deadlift twice your bodyweight, at least; nothing worse than tattoos on guys with no muscle. And those people who want to look like lizards and such are crazier than most. But this is all beside the point.

    So, in conclusion, you do you, have sex with whomever you want (as long as they want to, as well, obviously) and ignore all this gender crap, would be my advice. Also no piercings.

    Now… feel free to school me on what I got wrong in the comments. Give it to me, so to speak.

  • Separation of college and sex

    I’ve just finished The Campus Rape Frenzy, by K. C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr. The subtitle – The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities – should dash any false hopes that this book is a STEVE SMITH adventure. It’s about how the federal government forced – or probably the right word is egged on – colleges to provide inadequate hearings for male students accused of sexual misconduct.

    The usual scenario is that Bob

    Can you think of a dirty joke I should have put here?

    and Betty

    According to Google Translate, "coed" is Welsh for "trees"
    Drive safely, indeed

    two hypothetical students at Hypothetical U, both drink a lot of booze, then get together and have sex.

    She's a moonshiner's daughter but I love her still
    Here’s a picture of the booze

    Later, sometimes much later, Betty decides that she was raped and, after failing to persuade the real-world judicial system of the reality of the crime (or neglecting to report the alleged crime to the real-world judicial system at all), takes the case to the campus “justice” system.

    In the name of being Tough on Rapists, the federal government – invoking the anti-sex-discrimination statute, Title IX – has encouraged the campus SJWs who were already pressing for making campus “courts” accuser-friendly. The campus “judges” are students, administrators and faculty who have been trained to view accusers sympathetically and to be on the lookout for those predatory rapists responsible for 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 coeds getting sexually assaulted. These “judges” are warned that the idea of large numbers of false accusations is a myth, and “only” 2%-8% of accused men are actually innocent. These statistics are phony, as the authors show.

    Never mind, though – combined with the “judges’” training is their ability to ignore many traditional due-process restraints on their power, restraints which might allow the accused man to throw a wrench or two in the accusation. The “courts” can put the defendant on trial on really short notice, they can limit his right to cross-examine the accuser, invoke the assistance of a lawyer, or present evidence in his own favor (there’s a lot of cases where the texts the “victim” sent at the time of the “rape” are not consistent with the behavior of the victim of such a crime, but the “judges” aren’t always interested in seeing these texts).

    Sometimes the trial is conducted by one person hired by the college to conduct and investigation and reach a verdict, without holding a full-dress hearing in front of both parties as in traditional Anglo-American trials. The judge/investigator just interviews the witnesses, gives the accused a (perhaps incomplete) summary of what the witnesses said, and then reaches a verdict.

    It almost gets to be like the old joke of the judge who didn’t want to hear the other side because hearing both sides tended to confuse him.

    The judge tends to jump to conclusions
    All rise for His Honor

    The bottom line is Bob is branded a rapist and suspended or expelled. It’s kind of hard for him to get another college to accept him, and many employers, seeing that the guy was branded a rapist, will be like “don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

    So if Bob or his family has enough money he can sue, and maybe win or maybe lose. But any victory, while it benefits Bob, doesn’t necessarily benefit the next guy who comes along accused of rape in the Kampus Kangaroo Kourt.

    And if there actually was a rape? In that case only the real-world justice system can impose the prison sentence needed to keep the rapist away from the public for term of years. Throwing an actual rapist out of college and out onto the streets seems a tad lenient, and not entirely safe.

    It looks like the inmates in this cell block only got a C in not-raping.
    You want to teach rapists not to rape? Send them to one of these educational institutions.

    Johnson and Taylor have all sorts of perfectly sensible ideas for reform, but I want to focus on one idea they reject.

    Johnson and Taylor indicate that it might be desirable to discourage students from getting drunk and screwing. This might annoy Jimmy Buffett (NSFW), as well as the “don’t blame the victim – teach rapists not to rape” crowd. But such discouragement is a good idea as far as it goes. Rape accusations flourish, as a practical matter, in vaguely-remembered encounters which may be regretted once sober, adding to which is how easy it is (according to university regulations) for alcohol to make consent to sex irrelevant. And current dogma means that if both Bob and Betty are drunk when they have sex, Bob is raping Betty but not vice versa. How colleges reconcile this doctrine with Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination is unclear, but that’s how the system operates.

    But Johnson and Taylor don’t go all the way (so to speak). They frown on drunken sex, but they scoff at the idea of discouraging student sex in general. They acknowledge that, given the kind of cases which lead to these “he said/she said” controversies, a good survival strategy might be “celibacy,” but the authors dismiss this as a “nonstarter[]” which “few will find appealing.” College students in the past – often from necessity – often managed not to rut like bunnies while pursuing their studies, but I suppose the idea is that we’re a more sophisticated, liberated, non-taboo-having, healthier people today.

    "Or-gy! Or-gy! Or-gy!"
    “I hate going to these orgies – so many thank-you notes to write afterwards.” /old joke

    What if colleges simply stopped encouraging student sex? That could make moot the question of how to handle drunken hookups by their students.

    Don’t mistake my meaning – I am speaking of the separation of college and sex, not the abolition of sex itself, although of course as you know abolishing sex is the ultimate objective of the Catholic conspiracy.

    Colleges can only do so much, and training the horniness out of its students is something which is beyond their capacity. But that doesn’t mean a college should provide boinking facilities for its students. No using dorms as sleepover facilities, fraternity would-be orgies, etc.

    When I worked as a student dormitory assistant, checking students into and out of their rooms, I felt like the clerk at a sleazy hotel. My job wasn’t to keep the guys out of the girls’ rooms or vice versa, but to make sure they left their student IDs at my office before going upstairs for their…whatever it was they did (probably not canasta).

    Just doing my job
    I was also the piano player

    Did colleges put up with this sort of thing in the past? No – although students weren’t any less horny than today. College education wasn’t as near-universal as now, you needed some money or enough talent to get a scholarship, but if you had one of these qualifications there were plenty of institutions to choose from. But generally, the colleges at least made an effort to keep the students on the straight and narrow.

    Mandatory chapel. Curfews. If the college admitted women (not a given), then there was separation between the sexes, and social events needed chaperones.

    Actually, I don't know if nuns actually chaperoned college dances, this is poetic license, people.
    “Don’t mind me, you kids just have fun.”

    Most students wouldn’t put up with that today. But that’s all right, most students don’t need to be at a modern residential college.

    We’re in a situation where colleges and universities ought to downsize anyway. A four-year sojourn at a residential college (often involving indebtedness and fairly sketchy post-college plans for promptly paying off that indebtedness) is not an essential part of every young person’s life, if it ever was.

    There are some career paths which may require studying at a residential college, some career paths which may call for online education (dropping by the local public library for proctored exams), and some career paths which may call for a good high school education (where it can be found) and/or an apprenticeship.

    And there are some people who may still go in for a liberal arts education as defined by Cardinal Newman – learning for its own sake, including the things associated with being a learned person, including theology, the “queen of the sciences.”

    Upholding the Cardinal virtues
    Blessed John Henry Newman

    In each of these situations, the college can separate itself from enabling its students’ sex lives.

    If a student is working on his or her online degree while holding down a job, then their college life and social life will run on separate tracks, for the most part, or if they get together with other students it will be off campus and they’ll have signed all sorts of forms that the college won’t be liable for broken hearts, broken bones, disease, death, etc., resulting from independently developing relationships with other students.

    Or if students are taking one of those intensive courses of study which requires a residential program, they should be warned to do their foolishness (if any) while they’re off campus.

    And at least in theory, nontraditional-age students supplementing their education, often online or through occasional visits to campus for class purposes, will have homes of their own and any kinkiness they do will be in those homes (and they should ask their spouses first, if any).

    And for those few liberal-arts residential colleges which survive the coming shakeup of higher education – those colleges should be unashamedly elitist, recruiting students who are actually committed to a course of study, with socializing with the other sex limited to chaperoned activities like in earlier times.

    (If a young man and woman meet at a residential college (or before going) and decide to get married, then of course after their marriage the college should put them in married-student housing.)

    I guess the one downside to my scheme would be that it would force the SJW “student life” bureaucrats to get other work.

    "As long as you're looking, can you find [insert name of unpopular sports player]'s talent?"
    Look carefully, and you might be able to see the violin on which I am playing “My Heart Bleeds for You”

  • Focus on the Family – A Cultural Rumination

    I’ve gone back and forth on how to format this article. It’s hard to stay on one single topic when talking about the cultural erosion of the importance of family. As such, I’ve written and deleted this article a couple times, simply because it turns into a rant against elements of our culture. It wouldn’t be a good read. This is my final attempt, and I’m keeping it short and focused.

    TW: I’m probably gonna piss a lot of people off. SLDs apply here as they do anywhere else. I support your right to raise your children as you wish, no matter the cumulative cultural damage I think may result.

    The most disheartening and soon-to-be-fatal flaw of modern Western culture is the disdain for the family. (I’m completely ignoring homosexual and other “alternative” families for this analysis; they’re statistical noise when it comes to culture as a whole). This “disdain” can be seen in many contexts, including: 1) Replacing traditional family roles with outside intervention, 2) Subsidizing family failures, 3) Transforming old stigmas into laudatory praise, and 4) Portraying family negatively. I’ll quickly expose my biases and then treat each of these quickly. Any more than a quick treatment starts to turn into a rant.

    My biases are simple. I’m a complementarian, meaning that I believe women are generally better at/more inclined to certain things and men are generally better at/more inclined to certain other things. This generalization is, by no means, a straitjacket but more of a descriptive observation of people as a whole. I’m also a believer in the ideal family being a supportive, lasting, tightknit family, one that passes morals, traditions, and beliefs from generation to generation. Much of the “disdain” I see is in opposition to the generational information transfer in this ideal family.

    Replacing Traditional Family Roles

    This primarily falls into two categories: government as Santa, and “it takes a village.”  To see the biggest indicator of how much government and other outsiders have taken over traditional family roles, simply do a time audit of a child in a typical American household. Out of the 15 or so hours little Johnny is awake, how many do his parents actually have any sort of influence? Maybe an hour? He spends 7 or 8 in school, 1 or 2 in extracurriculars and on the bus, 1 or 2 doing homework, and 2 or 3 watching TV/playing video games. Besides the odd homework check or multiplayer CoD game (ha! who am I kidding??), Mommy and Daddy hardly even talk to Johnny. Then Mommy and Daddy wonder why Johnny doesn’t carry on their morals, traditions, and values when he becomes an adult. Johnny’s primary influences are leftist-feminist teachers, Lord of the Flies peer influence, and the Internet. Two income households put kids into this cycle at a few months old, and there’s never a break.

    Subsidizing failure

    This could be an article in-and-of itself. Suffice it to say that economic incentives matter, and, according to Thomas Sowell, the average black family was better off 100 years after slavery than after 30 years of welfare. Paying people because their family is broken incentivizes other struggling families to break as well. You get more of what you incentivize, and you get less of what you penalize. We’ve spent 50 years subsidizing broken families out of some naive sense of compassion. Of course, government shouldn’t pile on when families come apart at the seams, but the safety net should be a net (SLDs apply), not a pillowtop mattress.

    Stigma to “Strong”

    The cultural mantra that “different is good” completely ignores the thousands of years of trial and error that has built the traditions that the postmodern left is now tearing down. Again, this isn’t a straitjacket, but there’s a difference between approaching single parent households as parents making the best of a bad situation versus approaching them as no worse than two parent households. There’s a difference between a first marriage, a second marriage, and a fifth marriage. In attempting to build up people (primarily women) in bad situations, culture has made the traditional family passe. Being a single mom is “strong” and “brave.” Being a housewife is “backward” and “sad.”

    Portraying the Family Negatively

    This goes hand-in-hand with the “strong,” “brave,” broken family trope. Feminists have undercut the family as an oppressive structure since the 30s. Culture has followed along, making men into uninterested, idiotic fathers. Mothers (and children) have supernatural wisdom, but fathers are morons. Not surprisingly, people follow the cultural model, resulting in disinterested fathers having children only because their wife begged for it to “save the marriage.” The end result has been the MGTOW movement, which, despite the nugget of truth regarding the gender-based cultural unbalance, exacerbates the problem by tossing the entire family out with the feminist bathwater.

    I’m a little bit proud that I’ve finally gotten this article finished. This is a difficult article to write up in spare time because it could be a 10 part, 50 page monstrosity. However, I think I conveyed the pamphlet version of the argument. I agree with the Distributists in that family is the core unit of society, and I think it makes this cultural erosion of the traditional family hugely self defeating. When culture erodes its own foundation, it doesn’t last.

  • Go Ask Alice

    The Query

    I’m a single guy who’s finding the search for a girlfriend frustrating, because one of my absolute requirements for any woman I date that she be at least libertarian-leaning. I have friends of different political persuasions, of course, because politics aren’t the crux of our friendship, so we do [shared interest activity] then part ways. But I don’t think I could stand coming home to someone who supposed to be a source of solace and moral support yet I think is at best naïve and at worst stupid or immoral or both. How could I connect with someone who doesn’t even understand my frustrations with the world outside the walls of our home? How could I respect as an equal someone who thinks such a world is moral or just?

    So, for those of you who are dating/married to non-libertarians, how do you make peace with that? Am I doing myself a disservice by maintaining such a strict requirement?

    — Where The Libertarian Women At?

    The Answer(s)

    Riven:

    I don’t think there’s anything wrong with waiting until you find the right person. Previously, I was married to someone who might have considered himself a libertarian, but he definitely fell into a standard Republican square, in my estimation. Things didn’t work out–for plenty of reasons, not just because we couldn’t see eye-to-eye ideologically. One thing I’ve found about libertarians and libertarianism is that it isn’t just a political philosophy; for me, it’s more of a life philosophy. I would not be able to push my ideals aside for my romantic partner and I have a whole failed relationship to prove it. As you said above, how could I come home to someone who has an entirely different approach/reaction to the world than I do? I couldn’t. Mr. Riven and I met on OKCupid, where it was easy to see on each other’s profiles if there was going to be any compatibility or not. Luckily we were both painfully honest, and meeting in person only reinforced that compatibility further. The rest, they say, is history. Hold out for that unicorn.

    Banjos:

    A thrice divorced hopelessly romantic former coworker of mine once told me a story. He was almost about to give up on finding “the one” when a friend of his point blank asked him a question.  “What do all the women you have been married to/dated over your life have in common?”  He thought about it for a second and then said “I met them all in bars.”  His friend then said “If you want to catch a different kind of fish, you need to start fishing in different ponds.”  My coworker took his friend’s advice to heart, found a different pond, and has been happily married ever since.  Shortly after being told that story, I started fishing on Reason and caught myself a sloopy. I know of another couple who are soon to be married who found each other through Reason’s comment section, as well. So my simple advice is this: If you want a libertarian fish, fish in libertarian ponds.

    BrettL:

    First of all, we know there are no libertarian women out there, Banjos and Riven are taken. But beating our heads against the wall of impossible is obviously attractive to the libertarian leaning. What worked well for me was to find one who didn’t care at all about politics and really didn’t think much about how society should be ordered. And then show her the outrageous things that happen every day that this site and certain others are good at highlighting. Mrs. L still doesn’t care about politics, per se, but she sure does say a lot of things that sound like they came off this message board in response to the petty statism we encounter day-to-day. However, Mrs. L is awesome, sane, and puts up with me, so good luck finding your own unicorn.

     

    If you’ve got questions and no answers, feel free to drop us a line at advice@glibertarians.com, and we will do our best to help you.

  • Transmogrification and Projection

    What was once a humorous but true observation has become a blatant tactic with the Left: everything they do is about projection.

    The 24-minute news cycle is currently obsessed with transsexual and transgender rights because the President rescinded an awful “Dear Colleague” letter that was fraught with more danger than just who uses what bathroom.  Naturally, of course, the Right, being stupid, latched immediately onto talking about who uses what bathroom, but I digress.

    The Left fell in love with the term and promptly used it obsessively, wrongly, and beat its usefulness into the turf.  The Left accuses anyone who dares questions the rationality or wisdom of a “victim’s” feelings of “gaslighting” that person. Gaslighting, however, is not about refuting or mocking the fee-fees of a humorless 19-year-old twat (gender neutral) on Twitter.   Gaslighting is actually a systematic form of abuse which causes the victim to question his own memory, his own recollection of facts, his own judgment and perception.  When I think of a campaign to systematically undermine known facts, rational thought processes, and good judgment, one political and cultural group stands out to me.

    Naturally, the Left is whinging about gaslighting (without using the term correctly) while actually gaslighting the American public about gender and sexuality.  If you are one of those crazy regressives who thinks there are two biological sexes, and those two sexes (male and female) happen to correspond neatly to “socialized” gender roles (men and women) that have evolved over thousands of years and generally hold true across cultures and civilizations, boy are you in for it.  The Left is willing to Madred you until you squeal, “There are 1,000 genders!” We have actually come to the point where it is considered bigoted and awful to repeat biological, historical, psychological, and sociological facts.

    I am sure, to no one’s surprise, my feelings on transgenderism and transsexuality will make me first against the wall when the First Internationale – United States Edition convenes its Comintern. I am a semi-educated layman on psychological disorders, and Gender Identity Disorder — I mean, Gender Dysphoria — fits fairly neatly into the class of problems called psychotic disorders.  I am not the only one to think so, and the evidence is pretty compelling.  For example, a study conducted in the Netherlands, a country notably “progressive” on this issue, found that GID/GD was the primary diagnosis in only 39% of psychologists’ patients.  For the other 61%, it turned out,  “cross-gender identification was comorbid with other psychiatric disorders.”  Another paper in The Journal of Psychiatric Research found that 71% of GID sufferers had or currently have an Axis I psychological disorder, and wrote, “Lifetime psychiatric comorbidity in GID patients is high, and this should be taken into account in the assessment and treatment planning of GID patients.” The paper rightly points out this may be a chicken-egg problem:  are GD sufferers’ additional psychiatric symptoms caused by the high stress of having GD, or does the comorbidity of Mood and Dissoaciative Disorders with GD prove GD is a kind of psychosis that “travels along” with mentally ill patients?  Given the aforementioned Dutch study, where only 39% of GD sufferers had it as a primary diagnosis, I know which side I’m taking.

    Science!

    It’s important to note GD remarkably mirrors Body Integrity Identity Disorder.  If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would say it is rather convenient the DSM-V renamed Gender Identity Disorder at around the same time Body Integrity Identity Disorder was named as such, but fortunately for you, I’m off Alex Jones duty this week.

    All kidding aside, the parallels between GID/GD and BIID are obvious.  You suffer from a delusion, despite biological and social evidence, that your body is “wrong” somehow, and the only way to fix it is to radically alter it.

  • Texas “Boy” Wins Texas Girls Wrestling Tournament – Largest Media Sports Outlet Reports On Story With Comments Turned Off

    Mack Beggs, a female transitioning to be a male by using massive amounts of steroids completed an undefeated season Saturday by winning a controversial Texas state girls wrestling title in an event clouded by criticism from those who believe the testosterone he’s taking as he transitions from female to male created an unfair advantage.

    Beggs, who reached the state tournament after two opponents forfeited, was dogged throughout the tournament by questions about whether his testosterone treatments made him too strong to wrestle fairly against girls.

    The University Interscholastic League, which oversees athletics in Texas public schools, enacted the birth certificate policy Aug. 1, 2016. And while Beggs’ family has said he wanted to compete against boys, UIL deputy director Jamey Harrison, who refused to address Beggs directly, said the UIL had not received a request to change divisions from any athlete at this competition.

    "I must break you." -Mack Beggs
    Girls Wrestling Champion

    In a twist of irony, The above story was reported on the ESPN W outlet rather than the main site.  ESPN W, which ostensibly caters to women, does not have commenting in its articles.  ESPN’s main site permits it. To my recollection, it’s the first article about an athlete referred to as male throughout to appear on the “W” site.  I’m sure its a coincidence

    Meanwhile, the Washington Post article had commenting on and the responses largely derided Beggs being able to compete against athletes who are banned from taking the same performance-enhancing drugs Beggs is mega-dosing on in order to deliberately change body structure.

    USAToday had the comments turned off for their story, which said there were “a smattering of boos”  amid mostly cheers.  Which is a departure from the WaPo pice which hilariously led with the words “booed and bloody”.  Now perhaps Kent Babb had some insight into Beggs’s monthlies (if he’s still having them while taking mega-dowses of male hormones, I don’t know) that gives him license to use “bloody” in a description of someone that looks like they barely broke a sweat while competing against a series of opponents that are physically inferior to him in every way. Perhaps his editor added it in for color. And perhaps Babb is just full of it.  Either way, no blood was visible and there were more cheers than boos.

    But WaPo and other outlets have gotta fight for Team Trans rather than report honestly.  After all, if just the fact were reported here: “a person taking doses of steroids that nobody else in a competition designed for females is able to take under the rules, wins the competition without breaking much of a sweat”, I’d imagine the reactions would be quite consistent.

    Of course, the self-proclaimed “worldwide leader in sports” doesn’t want your reaction to be heard anyway.

    BONUS CONTENT: These people say their seven year old is trans and would change Trump’s mind on access to trans bathrooms.  Seven.  Their kid is seven. And this fostering of a delusion so they can get street cred with their idiot progressive friends is child abuse.