The word literally translates from Spanish as “child-buyers” as defined by Wikipedia in one of their less politically unstained entries: “a concept coined by Victor Hugo in his novel The Man Who Laughs. It refers to various groups in folklore who were said to change the physical appearance of human beings by manipulating growing children, in a similar way to the horticultural method of bonsai that is, deliberate mutilation … stunting children’s growth by physical restraint, muzzling their faces to deform them, slitting their eyes, dislocating their joints, and malforming their bones.” The mutilated or stunted children were then provided as dwarves to amuse a noble court, or as performers in traveling circus sideshows. A historical truth, folklore repeated to frighten children into good behavior, or just a melodramatic literary creation? Who knows for certain?
However, it is a truth universally acknowledged among those of us with a socially and politically conservative bent, that there exist modern-day comprachicos ravening among us. How else are we to consider the cases of children and young teens encouraged to mutilate themselves by chemical and surgical intervention? They are urged and aided in this by activists, teachers and parents who insist that it is possible, even laudable to change their gender to the opposite … and is this any different from what Victor Hugo described? What are we to think of small, active, wiggly little boys over-prescribed drugs to ensure that they behave in school on the grounds that they are ADHD … which is likely that a small minority are … but what if they are just restless and bored? Is chemically altering their behavior the solution?
It’s bad enough to know that a normal child’s body is being altered by surgical design or drugs. Even more insidious is seeing their minds and intellect deformed by public schools (and some private and parochial schools, too) by teachers, administrators and school boards pushing Critical Race Theory, or whatever harmless-sounding pseudonym this pernicious, malicious nonsense flies under. Sure, say the teacher’s union leadership, we approve of telling the white kids they should feel guilty for something they didn’t have a part in and derive no advantage from anyway, while the kids of color are condescendingly told that they can never amount to much because whites will see to it that they fail. These modern-day educational comprachicos are hard at work, stunting student minds and are flummoxed and viciously resentful of outraged parents parents who rightfully see it for the damage it does to their children.
The educational comprachicos are also at work, when it comes to wildly age-inappropriate and unsuitable sex education, which might also be fairly construed as sexual grooming especially when teachers try and keep parents from knowing about it. Yet another means of warping young and vulnerable minds. Finally, there is the ongoing OMG! Climate Change! Ten Years to Save the Earth! Panic! A panic which has been going on continuously since I was a middle school student myself. Only the actual causing agent varies every decade or so: nuclear winter, global cooling, global warming, et cetera. Now being of an age eligible for Social Security and somewhat well-educated in history, pre-history, and geography, I am reasonably cynical about the whole disgraceful effort, but kids are not, and the educational comprachicos are scaring them out of their unformed minds with this climate change nonsense, along with all the other deliberate warping of young minds. We ought not allow our children to be warped, damaged, and frightened to death by the modern comprachicos. Comment and discuss as you wish.
“We ought not allow our children to be warped, damaged, and frightened to death by the modern comprachicos.”
Indeed, we ought not. But we do. Why?
At the risk of seeming anti-feminist, what we are seeing in education is a consequence of denigrating motherhood for women compared to careers (or even just jobs) for women.
Of course, the woman who wants to have a job or a career is welcome to pursue her dreams — no problem. But the woman who chooses to stay at home and bring up her children tends to be looked down upon as a “breeder” by feminists instead of being universally honored. And the woman who tries to ‘Have It All’ too often ends up making a poor job of both career and family.
If more women had been looking after their young children instead of dropping off babies and youngsters in institutions, the situation would not have got as bad as it has. At its essence, unless the average woman has 2.1 children (which only a woman can do), society is on a glide path to extinction.
The best solution would be for strong societal pressure on women to have their babies while still relatively young; be an ever-present involved mother until those children are at least 7 or 8; and then have mechanisms for bringing women in their 30s into the workforce if that is what particular women want to do. We need feminists to stand up for women in the essential role of mothers, not women as mere substitutes for men.
The increasing demand that people who want to have a serious career need to have not just a college degree, but an *advanced degree* of some sort, hits right at the intersection of the female fertility window and the career-launch window.
You’ve also got the fact that the left doesn’t bother to actually have their own kids, in general terms. They mostly rely on recruitment, just like the cuckoo–Which is why it was such a mistake to let them take over the education system.
I’m ambivalent about the whole “feminism” thing being a direct cause for all of this, TBH. Feminism is mostly a phenomenon of the left, and has been a tool used to tear down the structure of society, as a deliberate act with malice aforethought. The actual reality of life as it is lived out here in the real world is that there ain’t no “patriarchy”, it’s just people doing people things, male and female alike.
The essential thing I had for an insight years ago is that there is no such thing as a “gender role”. There are roles, but they’re not necessarily gender-based; they’re functional. If you take a male and stick his ass into doing the “raise small children” role, guess what? You’re gonna get someone who is going to act and respond in a very maternal way–Because, that’s what that role calls for. He may cast a male shadow on it, but the role he’s acting in is going to require him to behave and conduct himself in some traditionally maternal/feminine ways.
Likewise, you dump a young lady into the Army as an NCO…? Yeah; like it or not, the role she’s in is going to be more influential on her behavior and conduct than her “gender identity” whateverthehell that might be.
Most of this crap boils down to overthinking simplistic stuff by people with way too much time on their hands, too much money, and no real need to focus on survival necessities. I guarantee you that the women who got stuck acting in “male gender roles” back during the Middle Ages would have had no truck with nine-tenths of the BS today’s theorists spew forth about their societal roles; all they were concerned with was keeping the family financially afloat and managing the day-to-day. Just as it is today–Most women and men out here in the real world don’t start the day off considering whether they’re acting in a male or female gender role; they’re just worried about getting the kids off to school, making enough money to keep the family going, and very little else. The majority of academic theorizing is coming out of people with limited to no contact with reality, and a set of delusional and totally preconceived notions that Joe and Jane Average out here wouldn’t recognize in the least.
Feminism is an artifact of too much time, money, and too little real purpose that a lot of these creatures have in their lives. They don’t feel “fulfilled” because they’re bone-idle and know it. The BS they come up with to justify that mostly stems from shame and deep feelings of inadequacy when they look at other women’s lives from the outside, and project all their fantasies and misgivings about their own lives onto what they think they’re observing.
Honest to God, I’m pretty sure that were you to go back a hundred-plus years ago and interview some of these supposedly “oppressed” women that today’s feminists go onandonandon about, you’d likely find yourself getting the ever-loving slapped out of you for insinuating that they were somehow victims. They’d also probably laugh their asses off at you suggesting that they were somehow “oppressed” by the men in their lives, because most of them knew exactly how to make use of their status and privileges as women to get what they and their families needed, notwithstanding that there were inequities in the overall system.
I’d love to hand off some of these modern whiners to my great-grandmother for some corrective training. I’m pretty sure that that formidable woman would likely tear most of these women to bits, intellectually, physically, and experientially. She did things after the death of her husband that today’s women would likely be entirely unable to manage, successfully navigating the “patriarchy” and its various “oppressions” to successfully raise and launch a half-dozen children into the upper-middle class, from near-poverty and with no breadwinner or insurance payments. There was no “social safety net” in those days, and she’d have likely laughed in your face were you to suggest she make use of such a thing.
I’ve never understood the entire idea of the “patriarchy”. The majority of the women in my family would have nodded along with some male spouting that line of BS, and then quietly offed his stupid ass the minute he made the mistake of falling asleep in the same house with them. I suspect it would have been “In the bedroom, with a cast-iron frying pan…”, and it would have looked like a complete accident.
Of course, there is the fact that absolutely none of them would have ever considered getting involved with such a male in the first place. I’ve no problem with imagining the matriarchy; the idea that any of the women I’ve got in the family tree would have put up with any such stupidity as “the patriarchy” is where I have a breakdown in imagination. Lip service might have been paid, but… Yeah. Nope. Every single male in my mother’s family lived in total ‘effing terror of the women in their lives, and did whatever it took to keep them happy.
Of course, an awful lot of those men died young. Might have been intentional on their parts…
Kirk, your last comment there is very wide of the mark. Of course there are such things as gender roles, and they are derived from biology. The fact that these aren’t the only determinants of the behavior doesn’t mean that they are insignificant.
“Of course there are such things as gender roles, and they are derived from biology.”
Sex is derived from biology; gender is the value we assign to it. Biology can twist itself into circles, and the sexes swap places. Look at hyenas for an example. The females exhibit what we consider stereotypical male behaviors because that’s the role they’re pressed into by the environment. It’s not necessarily innate, other than the fact that the environment calls out for specific behavioral responses, and it really doesn’t care if the individual responding to those cues has an innie or an outie.
Biology isn’t predestination in an awful lot of circumstances; it’s more predisposition than anything else. I’m pretty sure that if we ever go to the step of creating artificial wombs for implantation in biological males, you’re going to see a lot of the same behavioral patterns reiterated that you’d normally associate with females.
It’s the role; not the sex that calls these things out. The genius activists have this exactly backwards, as they do with so many other things. Consider the fatuous argument that “women would run the world so much better, so peacefully and cooperatively”, and then contrast that with the actual female heads of state that we’ve had, like Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great, who really didn’t do a damn thing different from any of the men. The environment calls these behaviors out, and it really doesn’t care who or what is responding–If you have to be the one out on the watchtower, for whatever reason, pretty soon you’re going to be exhibiting the stereotypical behaviors of the guardian watchmen, regardless of what you’ve got hanging or not hanging in between your legs.
Where biology does still have a say with these things stems mostly from the raw physical realities of a species with strong sexual dimorphism, but I’d wager that if you were to leave us to adapt to a situation where that dimorphism is no longer an efficient response, you’d start to see it go away.
It’s an interlocking network of nested influences, but in the end? It’s the environment. Put a man into a woman’s world, and he’s going to fill the traditional womanly role; same-same with the woman in a man’s world. And, it’s going to happen because the role is a reflection of the required efficient response to the environment, not because of the innate sexual nature of the individual. You get what the environment rewards, period. Mistaking “typical male behavior” for anything other than a response to the environment those males find themselves in, and the roles they have to fill? It’s a delusional mistake. You flip the genders, put women into that environment, those roles…? You’re gonna see them demonstrate those behaviors, because that’s what the environment calls forth and rewards with survival. There will be some differences, but they’ll only be in the details. King John is pretty much going to do the same things Queen Joan is going to do, because they’re both the heads of state, and the requirements presented by their environments are much the same.
It’s like convergence in evolution; behaviors are shaped and influenced by what works in the environment, and when you present the same environment to two slightly different organisms, they’re going to do what the environment directs. And, since we’ve developed this division of labor in society based on the very real biological differences between the sexes, we fool ourselves into assigning virtues or sins to the various behaviors. The reality is, each of the two sexes are working within the environmental constraints presented by the divisions of labor–There’s nothing behaviorally innate there making these things happen. Change the circumstances, change the roles, and the new roles will shape the “stereotypical behavior”.
Doesn’t matter what the hell they’ve got for dangly bits, they’re going to have to do what they have to do–And, if that means raising kids, they’ll be doing the maternal role; if it means protecting kids and the one raising the kids, that’ll mean they’re going to have to take on the one we traditionally associate with the paternal aspect.
There isn’t some innate “male approach” or “female approach” to the environment; there’s simply a different experience called out by the traditional division of labor we’ve had, and if you swap the male with the female in that division, guess what? You’re gonna get boys that act like girls, and girls that act like boys–Because the role drives the behavior a lot more than the sex of the person filling that role.
Which is not to say that there aren’t differences between men and women, either–Sexual dimorphism means that there are inarguable ones, right down to biochemistry. What I’m getting at is that those differences are not the crucial reason we see these differences in social roles taken up by the sexes; the majority of those differences are not innate to male or female, they’re more innate to the roles filled by both in society. Put a woman into the role of small unit leader, and while she’s going to throw her own interpretation on it, she’s also going to have to do things in much the same way as a male would, regardless–You can’t “mommy-nurture” your way through a firefight; she’s going to have to act a lot like SGT Rock stereotypically would, because that’s what works in those circumstances.
Which is why it’s a mistake to assume that the “inequities” between the genders are there because of some evil patriarchy. Put women into those roles, for whatever reason, and they’ll evince the same behaviors, recapitulating all the “evils” of the patriarchy, but with a feminine cast. Heads of state gotta do what heads of state do; business owners gotta do what business owners do, and pre-school teachers gotta do what pre-school teachers do. Doesn’t matter what they’re equipped with, in terms of sexual armament; the choices are going to be the same, the environment is going to provide the same cues, and most if not all of the things they do in response are going to wind up being the same as anyone else in those roles.
Hmm … I started this with noting that children are deliberately, purposefully and perhaps permanently being damaged by certain recent pseudo-intellectual fads … and that parents of children are rightfully furious that their children can be treated this way. Aside from home schooling, moving to a small town, and restricting their access to social media, how can we best put a stop to activists tormenting our children for their own purposes and amusement?
I think that about all you can do is separate child from activist-idiots until that child has reached a point of maturity wherein they can make their own minds up about the issues in question.
A lot of the trouble we’re in as a civilization is due to the fact that too many of us have off-loaded responsibility and oversight over raising our kids and passing on our values, all too often onto people who’re actively inimical to our value system in the first place. Witness the various teaching organizations who’re fighting the light of day reaching their environs…
A thought has struck me about one thing that’s going on here: There are two competing strategies of reproduction going on here: One, the traditional one, has people having and raising their own kids, inculcating their values and norms, in order to “colonize the future”, so to speak. The other strategy, employed by leftist scum, is to co-opt the work and effort put into their opponent’s child rearing efforts, and brainwash those kids into the left’s preferred modes of behavior/conduct.
Since most leftist scum are hedonistic POS that don’t like to work, they’ve got a terribly attractive program to offer. Way too many fall prey to the mindless infatuation with their thought-processes, which are effectively those of parasites. Do witness that their primary source-points for their thoughts were all parasites; Rosseau famously consigned his own offspring to a foundling hospital, eschewing the effort of raising them. Same thing with Marx–Show me some enterprise or institution that he set up, based on his principles, that still exists today. Oh, right–He didn’t, relying on Engel’s robber-baron factory enterprises to support his worthless ass.
All of the left reproduces through parasitism. They don’t raise their own kids, by-and-large, and rely on recruitment of the unwary and unsophisticated to keep their numbers up and increasing.
Sadly, it’s a very successful strategy. An example of an extra-biological process, really, competing with a biologic one. If you sit down and analyze what is going on, the things that they use to make themselves attractive to the weak-minded or oblivious, it’s a terrifying thing, akin to the whole Pod People metaphor from horror movies. It might actually be the case that Heinlein was writing an allegory for Communism with his “The Puppet Masters”, but I’m not sure that he ever actually came out and said so…
Any parent sending off their as-yet unformed teenager to college, only to receive back a thoroughly-indoctrinated reflexive leftist in return can probably make the parallels.
“Aside from home schooling, moving to a small town, and restricting their access to social media, how can we best put a stop to activists tormenting our children for their own purposes and amusement?”
I dunno, how could a parent in Rome in the 2nd century do it, or in Russia in the 1910s do it, or any number of times in between? Civilization-scale forces are arrayed against you and you can’t fight them except finding a small hole to hide in…
“Civilization-scale” does not equate to “inescapable”. Yeah, the avalanche is coming down the mountain, but there’s no actual requirement that you be in the path of it all.
“Vast, impersonal forces” implies a certain amount of obliviousness to the participants; when all about you are running in circles, screaming and shouting, creating confusion and chaos…? Perhaps, it is time to be edging for the exit, and seeking to get your ass off of the “X”. Standing there in the midst of it all is not a viable survival strategy, if you wish to avoid sharing the fates of the idiots surrounding you.
In other words, instead of faithfully queueing up for the inadequate lifeboats aboard the metaphoric Titanic of our collective times, perhaps, just perhaps… You ought to be looking around for other floaty-things, and creating your own life-raft for you and yours. There’s plenty of ornate and opulent furniture to cannibalize and turn into something that would keep you and yours afloat, so why not work to get off that “X”, and make use of it?
There’s no compelling reason to participate in the stupidity. August Landmesser (or, Gustav Wegert, who might actually be the guy in that photo which made Landmesser famous…) should be our model, when the collective mob around us goes mad. Nothing says you have to participate in the “fall of civilization”, or contribute to it.
Although, it’s pretty damn hard to deal with, when that avalanche is coming down on your house. Which might be a clue that one shouldn’t build in the potential avalanche zones of civilization, and if you have…? Get off the “X”.
Sgt. Mom: “Aside from home schooling, moving to a small town, and restricting their access to social media, how can we best put a stop to activists tormenting our children for their own purposes and amusement?”
You have got it covered there. Only thing to add would be strictly limiting their access to TV. (I know, I know — old fashioned).
Doing that pretty much requires a fully-engaged parent, traditionally a mother. And there’s the rub, as Shakespeare was wont to say.
Never been much of a “believer” in anything; I come from a very skeptical place in life. Conspiracy theories leave me cold, picking apart the inconsistencies and fallacies they’re generally full of.
However… When you look at all the little disconnected things that have gone on over the last several generations, and start wondering what the connections are between the data-points? It’s pretty hard not to conclude that there are either an awful lot of statistically-improbable “coincidences”, or there’s some kind of conspiracy to a lot of these things that are contributing to the spectacle of our civilization collapsing around our ears.
They told us women would be happier and more fulfilled if they were able to do a man’s job, putting them into the workforce. That left children either unsupervised or at the mercy of hired childcare workers, many of whom were ideologically compromised and who acted against the belief structures of the parents.
They told us that the mentally ill were really not at all dangerous, and should be out in public, leading to the shutdown of mental health facilities and the “mainstreaming” of mental illness.
They told us that the justice system wasn’t actually just, and in dire need of reform–Which led to decriminalization, leading to more crime and a general lowering of the quality of life for most people. They told us the death penalty was too harsh, and applied unfairly, leading to murderers getting free to commit more murders.
They told us that all of this was just an unfortunate effect of modern life, and that it wasn’t due to any set of choices made with regards to public policies–We can’t do anything about it, any more than we can do something about gravity.
I still dunno about conspiracy theories, but there’s a common thread through all of this folly, and I think there are actual names to be named for all the idiocies of daily life we’re forced to put up with. None of these policies “just happened”: Men and women came up with them, popularized them, and put them into effect.
The root problem with all of this is that the vast majority of the public are oblivious to what has been going on, and have allowed all this to happen in a decades-long fit of absent-mindedness. The results are coming to be exquisitely clear, and the body politic had better wake the hell up to what is being done to them by these agencies before the whole thing caves in on them.
All of this was a choice; precisely none of it absolutely had to happen. Bad choices can be reversed, but you have to first discover the fact that they were bad choices in the first place. We’re all in the process of doing that.
Nice analogy to the Titanic, Kirk. There were resources on that ship, but leadership was fatally unavailable (or incapable) of using them intelligently in the several hours between the realization that the ship was fatally holed, and the time that it went under. There were things that could have, might have been done, but weren’t because everyone was running around in a panic, or doing mechanically what always had been done before.
And for the record, I don’t think this current situation can be blamed entirely on feminism of the lower-case f sort – all but very wealthy, upper class women have always had to work, sometimes outside the home, and combine those obligations with family life and the care of children. OTO, I do think that doctrinaire capital-F feminism has a lot of sh*t bad ideas to answer for, one of them being cultivated hate of males and male qualities.
So – what kind of lifeboats can we build for ourselves, and what deck do we launch them from?
Yeah, I have to agree with you with regards to the whole small-f vs. capital-F issue. I’ve never felt like the women that I knew growing up in my family necessarily needed that whole line of BS, and that it was entirely tangential to the things they accomplished. I don’t recognize any of them in the “feminist reading” that I’ve done, over the years–The stuff they blame on “the patriarchy” in that literature was more due to the existing physical realities of the world our forebears lived in, than anything else. Women on the frontier would have laughed their asses off at the idea of “male privilege”–That fat bastard better get his ass behind the plow and do his job, and heaven help him if he didn’t. Same-same with the women on their left and right.
I think they’ve very deliberately created and cultivated a narrative of compulsion and abuse, with malice aforethought. The cold realities of the times were that the social constraints we operated under were what they were due to the conditions obtaining at the time, and there wasn’t some cabal of cigar-smoking degenerate males somewhere in a dark room making things the way they were–Which is pretty much the takeaway you get reading a lot of that stuff. You look back on it, and any fair reading of the social conditions would have to note that while there were a lot of differences between the sexes in what they did for roles in society, they all pretty much had to deal with generally shitty conditions for everyone, just differently. One thing that I feel gets ignored is the prevalent “White Feather” set of values and mores there at the turn of the century, when it was perfectly fine for young women to go gallivanting about shaming any male they saw as “shirking duty” with regards to going off to the slaughterhouse of the Western Front in WWI. Morally, I find that entire situation as entirely repugnant–You’re not liable for service, yet you’re perfectly fine with coercing other people to their deaths, and even feel morally superior doing it? WTF? That whole thing just reeks of hypocrisy, and renders any and all arguments that “women are natural peacemakers” pretty much as ridiculous as they are in other areas. If you’ve ever watched young women at play, egging their males into fights in bars or other venues, you’ll see the same things play out. And, the fact that such things are more-or-less as acceptable as they are, even today…?
I think we’re in a state of crux, right now, with regards to how all this is arranged between men and women. What obtained for conditions in the past has changed, perhaps irrevocably, and the bargain needs to be renegotiated without question. But, it needs to be done honestly, and without blaming one side for all the supposed “wrongs” that were implemented and enforced by both sides for what were then very good reasons.
As to the other question you pose, the only thing I can suggest is just doing what we sons and daughters of Martha have always done in the face of general societal idiocy: Keep on keeping on, and minding our own plows. Raise your kids to be decent civilized folk, and remember that civilization imposed from without is a terribly fragile thing, while that which wells up from within can never be taken away from you.
I think one of the things we’re all about to have highlighted for us is the fact that our concept of “civilization” is terribly inadequate; we think it resides in the institutions, but as we’ve seen, it’s more that the institutions are expressions of that which is within. If you have decent, upright types running the institutions, you have a strong civilization going for you. If not, you’re on the road to collapse, and we’ve simply not kept our eyes on the prize, in terms of who is coming to power inside the machinery. You put essentially corrupt and venal barbarians in charge of things, don’t be really surprised when everything goes to shit around you.
About all we can do, really, is to do what we can within our own narrow purview. Raise the kids right, defend what is yours, and just try to stay out of the machinery as it falls to pieces around you. Finding like-minded sorts wouldn’t be a bad idea, if you can, and then enclave up. Bare is back without brother or sister to guard it.
National socialism proclaimed its goals early on. Its errors were apparent from its early days, long before the National Socialist government, and yet tens of millions had to die to convince almost everyone that national socialism is a bad idea.
Intellectuals of international socialism announced their goals decades before the first international socialist government. Its catastrophes easily predictable. And yet a hundred million people had to die before a vocal minority of people condemned international socialism, which retains its popularity among the educated and among politicians.
Millions of children will have to be mutilated before a majority (i hope) condemns gender socialism.
Why aren’t people convinced by words of the evils of socialism? I dunno. Why are they convinced by words that socialism is good? Deeds, not talk, will decide the future.
Kirk,
“there are actual names to be named for all the idiocies of daily life we’re forced to put up with”
And you’ve already started doing so, with Marx and Rosseau. Everybody on the right loves to beat on Marx, and rightly so, but I think that Rosseau is fairly under-vilified. Most of the blankislateism in the modern world can be traced back to his stupid “noble savage” idea.
… blank-slate-ism…
One of the “tells” I’ve noted with regards to the various leftist theorists is what utterly depraved human beings they are, in person. Ain’t a one of them that I’ve ever researched whose personal life wasn’t filled with parasitism, exploitation of weaker people, sexual depravity, and on and on and on.
Seriously: Name one of them, if you can, who wasn’t a monster in their personal lives.
And, yet… Their acolytes and worshippers all universally describe them as saintly do-gooders whose ideas are to be implemented post-haste, with an imperative for humanity’s future.
My take on it is this: If the person you’re going to for life advice and a pattern for how to conduct yourself is someone you’d never leave your kids with, and whose personal morals are below that of a rutting tomcat? You might want to rethink the advisability of listening to their “wisdom”.
Seriously… If anyone can think of any one of the bright lights of the left that could be termed, even remotely, as a “decent human being”, please enlighten me. I sat here in a quandary for about ten minutes, trying to think of one; am I just prejudiced, or are they really all that bad?
Kirk, that’s the theme of Paul Johnson’s book Intellectuals. Highly recommended.
ErisGuy
December 2, 2021 at 8:34 pm
National socialism proclaimed its goals early on. Its errors were apparent from its early days, long before the National Socialist government, and yet tens of millions had to die to convince almost everyone that national socialism is a bad idea.
In 1932-33, the alternatives to National Socialism were either failing catastrophically (30% unemployment) or looked even worse (Communism). So the Nazis got into power. And for the next eight years or so, they were successful. They stabilized the German economy, they regained Germany’s position as a respected power, they won great military victories.
Lesson: only those who are successful can be catastrophically wrong.
Millions of children will have to be mutilated before a majority (i hope) condemns gender socialism.
Trandsgenderism has nothing to do with socialism. Asan ideology, it derives from the itch of some intellectuals to épater les bourgeois. There’s a grain of truth in it (see my comment below), which allows to feel all righteous and justified and trendy.
Gender Identity Disorder is not an illusion. It’s a real neurological defect. There’s fairly conclusive evidence that gender identity exists in the brain independently of the rest of the body. It can develop wrong, so that the individual “knows” his or her body is “wrong”.
We don’t know how to fix the brain. In many cases, the gender dysphoria just goes away. In other cases, it is intractable. So for those people, altering the body and presenting a different gender is the alternative to extreme discomfort.
But only for those people, who are very rare. At this time, GID has become highly fashionable diagnosis. Since GID offends traditionalists, many of whom respond to a GID case with hostility or even violence, the transgender ideologues can posture as fighting “bigotry”. And the more they overdiagnose GID, the more anger they provoke, and the more justified they feel.
And more children will be pointlessly mutilated.
@(The Other) Kirk,
Thank you for that reference. I’ve never heard of it, or read anything referring to it–My expressed opinion was arrived at independently, and I’m fascinated to see that someone else out there agrees with my premise. Thankfully, Kindle has a version…
@ErisGuy &Rick Rostrum,
I think I have to disagree with both of you, in regards to the Nazis. Adam Tooze lays the economics out pretty bluntly; they didn’t “stabilize” Germany in the least–If anything, the sleight-of-hand BS they pulled made war almost inevitable, because once they ran out of internal “enemies” to loot, they had to go outside their borders. WWII was more an extended ram-raid looting spree of the rest of Europe than it was anything else. And, solely to benefit the Nazi constituencies in Germany and Austria. As well, the sad fact is, the majority of that block of people within Germany were fully on board with it all, right up until the end.
I don’t think that the “bad idea” aspects of it all really bothered anyone, so long as it was working. And, it was, for a lot of Germans who were living pretty high on the hog for a wartime economy, far better than they’d managed in WWI. Hitler and his acolytes were consummate con artists, highly effective at wooing public affection for all the wrong reasons. Many Germans knew what was going on was immoral, but they felt like they’d be fools for not taking advantage of it all…
The transgender issues inherent with gender dysphoria are things I suspect are going to be seen as very much consonant with other such occasions of mass public hysteria, hyped up by the parties involved for similar psychological reasons. I note a disturbing similarity between the Salem witch hunts and modern “cancel culture”, in that it’s all a self-supporting publicly acclaimed mass psychosis that really has limited to no contact points with reality. Most of this crap is simply self-indulgent made-up BS that has its origins in the fact that too many people have too much time on their hands, not enough worthwhile work to be doing, and that many of them are just plain stupid and outright evil. The obsessive self-involvement demonstrated by many of these nutjobs is significant; were they in a different environment where they actually had survival-related concerns, many of them would be doing far different things, or they’d be dead as doornails.
To the extent that gender dysphoria or whatever actually exists, it was, heretofore, a very rare thing.
I can clearly remember at around four or five clumping around the house in one of my mother’s dresses and high heels. I think I remember my year younger brother as well. We were fortunate that there wasn’t some “doctor” standing by with a prescription pad and knife. I can’t ask my parents what they thought of it, or even if my mother told my father. As far as I remember, my mother ignored it beyond making sure we didn’t harm her nice things. I doubt we did it much more than a couple of times.
At the time, my mother was the adult I was around 24/7. My father had a job that kept him away overnight during the week and sometimes over the weekends. At that point, a dress and high heels was what adults wore except what I wore normally. For what it’s worth, I can remember dressing up in my father’s suit coat as well. Without children of my own, I theorize that a good parent needs to select what he reacts to with care. Everything that I have seen tells me that if any of the three of us was destined to end up anywhere outside of solidly on “main line”, there wasn’t much they could have done to change things.
But where’s the money in terms of grants and six figure salaries in that?
I’ll close by noting that National Socialism seemed to have more than its fair share of homosexuals in its upper leadership, not necessarily excluding the very top. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
re: the Nazis in the 30s, it brings up the common question of what it was like on a daily basis, for those who didn’t know then what we know now. Similar to my point above, about what to do when civilization is collapsing around you. We know from our perspective how things ended up, but they didn’t.
Can anyone make suggestions for books that capture this–I guess it would have to be like a diary from the times, written as they were happening, not retrospectively. Whether in Germany under the Nazis, Cuba under Castro before he went full commie, etc. Because I’m really quite curious, and it’s really quite relevant.
And someone needs to put together a collection of political and news stories of the past two years, because it’s a daily occurrence that the media says “We’ve always known that…” about things that in fact just a few months ago they were saying exactly the opposite. It’s incredible that the average person doesn’t recoil in horror–do people really not remember what they “knew” just a short time ago?
William L. Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” and his “Berlin Diary” by an American that was there. I’m sure there must be dozens by Germans that will come to other minds.
I think the concept of the boiled frog covers most Germans as far as the ’30’s are concerned. Something to keep in mind every time someone makes a claim be imposing just this slight “temporary” inconvenience in the name of “safety”, “abundance of caution”, “SCIENCE!”, “for the children”, etc.
“I think the concept of the boiled frog covers most Germans as far as the ’30’s are concerned.”
Honestly, I would have agreed with you even a year ago, but I’m not so sure anymore. I think the boiled frog analogy is a rationalization for something much scarier.
Imagine showing this to anyone two years ago–even one year ago:
https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1466651206244257792
How could you have explained it to them and had it make any sense at all? Your listener wouldn’t have had their brains melted by nearly two years of constant terror propaganda, so they wouldn’t comprehend the point of this. And it didn’t happen all that gradually–it’s been pretty darn shockingly swift, I’d say. Now maybe you can argue that things happen faster nowadays than they did in the 30s, but I’m skeptical.
It’s clearly all down to tribalism and who/whom at this point, I think. I honestly think a lot of people everywhere in the world have been so massively traumatized to the point that they would be fine with doing literally anything to “the unvaccinated” today. I shudder to think what’s going to happen over the next few years. I don’t see how it doesn’t end with massive bloodshed and society being ripped to pieces. Given where we’ve come in the past 22 months, how is it possible to unravel things and get back to “normal”? How can you get someone to think that “the unvaccinated” need to be banished from society, locked in their houses, forcibly removed, kept away from the rest of people, to then just blow an “all clear” whistle and say we’re all members of one society together now? I don’t think there’s any chance.
Brian…I strongly recommend Sebastian Haffner’s memoir, which I reviewed here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/42473.html
He came of age between the wars, experienced the whole Weimar era, the Nazi takeover, and the regime’s early days.
Also recommended: Hans Fallada’s famous novel of the late-Weimar era, Little Man, What Now?
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/29873.html
and the American movie which was made from it:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/29967.html
Brian, Victor Klemperer’s “I Shall Bear Witness” is an extremely detailed personal diary by a Jew who managed to survive both the Nazis and destruction of Dresden. It is fascinating and grim, and knowing what happened makes it very hard to read sometimes. The processes by which individuals and institutions assimilated themselves to the new regime look very familiar nowadays.
I haven’t followed all the strands here, but Kirk is absolutely correct that the Turd Reich was on the whole nothing more than a grand chevauchee’ with tanks and bombers. Looting and expropriation were not cruel necessities of war, they were why the war was started.
David–I remembered that review and others like it, couldn’t recall the exact details, though. Thanks, I’ll pick it up. Like I said, I’m most interested in something that captures what it was like at the time. Retrospective accounts, where you know how horrifically things turned out, are going to be colored by that.
The interesting thing about the gay Nazis is the observation that they were initially welcomed into the Party, and attained fairly high rank. Then, when it was no longer convenient for the rest of the Party, and they needed to “make nice” with the normies, they were sloughed off like a reptile shedding its skin, and either killed off or sent to the camps. Ask Ernst Rohm how all that went, Night of Long Knives and all.
As with all such things, the gays were tolerated so long as the Nazis were equally “transgressive” in society, to be made common cause with. Once the Nazis attained mainstream status, well… The gays were inconvenient, and were immediately discarded. The Nazis then became moralistic.
Very similar to the arc of Communism in Russia. The Communists came in on a wave of “free love”, espousing all sorts of revolutionary sexual freedoms, and then… A near-perfect code switch.
Once the hedonists serve their purpose, they’re dangerous and inimical to the new regime, and so they get “dealt with”. Usually with measures exponentially more repressive than the old regime used, ‘cos the old regime had the confidence to tolerate such things–Which is one reason it became the “old regime” in the first place.
This is a set of facts that you’d think the idiots would observe and learn from, but we’re talking about people who’re mostly more concerned with their genitalia and satisfying the drives accompanying such tackle than anything else. They focus on “their sexuality” and the attendant issues far more than the prosaic and dreary details of daily life. It’s what they do, because they’re genitalia-obsessed.
It’s my contention that most people just look in their pants sometime before or during puberty, go “Oh, I’ve an innie/outie… I must be a girl/boy…” and they then leave it at that, never really considering the case that there might be options available. The sex-obsessed, on the other hand…? Yeah; they’re the ones going “Oh, my God… I really liked the ass on that tall, long-haired blonde person… And, it’s a BOY!!! I must have something wrong with me… I’m gay…”. Or, they simply adopt their sexual choices to piss everyone off around them, particularly Mom or Dad. There are some who are “genuinely gay”, but the distribution is difficult to make out. I know persons that I think fell into all three categories, but aside from a few of the “genuinely gay”, the vast majority of them had one thing in common: Sex obsession. Most of us don’t allow our genitalia to drive our lives; there’s a subset of all sexual persuasions that do, however, and they’re mostly completely beyond understanding for most of us. I mean, seriously… I’ve watched heterosexual men blow up perfectly good marriages and relationships simply out of sexual boredom, and with women that I’d look at from the outside and go “WTF? I could never do that well, and you’re screwing around on her? Are you insane?”. Women do the same stupid shit just as often as the men do, and it’s down to the same reason: They let their genitalia make their decisions, like some semi-sentient rutting wild animal, allowing purest instinct to run their lives. It’s bizarre to observe, from the outside–You want to take them, shake them, and scream “Are you an intelligent being, or a slave to your biology!!!???!!!”.
Most of that subset of humanity really aren’t much better than slaves on the sexual plantation, unable to control themselves, letting their biology control them. My paternal grandmother was one such, and I don’t think she really calmed down and really qualified as a fully in-control and rational person until she hit menopause. Which was also about the time she “got religion”, strangely enough.
I’d submit that there are an awful lot of people out there who’re akin to alcohol or drug addicts, in that they can’t control their own behavior well enough to avoid making irrational decisions on the daily. The sad thing is, while we can deplore the things they do, this group of people are also generally some of the most creative in our civilization. The nutjobs add a lot to it all, but the sad fact is, you can’t let them run things, either. I think we’d be a lot poorer, culturally speaking, were the gays and all the rest of the edge cases for sanity eliminated, and left all the normies behind. Rapture or eliminate the nutters, and you’re looking at some boring times, folks. Granted, we’d have to do without things like Weimar Germany or San Francisco during their “Pride” festivals, but… I sometimes think I could make the sacrifice. Usually after listening to one of the “creatives” go onandonandonandon about their latest pet peeve, and hearing what a dull, boring person I am for not following them down the primrose path of madness…
For those of us wondering at the incipient madness of the times, consider the congruencies between today and the various other periods of human history where there has been mass public insanity–The Salem Witch Trials come to mind, just like the Dutch tulip craze, or the South Seas Bubble.
Those of us with a bit of wit, the ability to think critically, and who are not prone to following the crowds are just going to have to put up with the insanity and observe from a position of safety. The nutters will all run off the cliffs before long, and we’ll be stuck here, cleaning up the mess. Yet again.
they were also largely part of the esser wing of the party, that was for nationalization of industry, the harzberg conference put an end to that, the confab of industrialists, the nazis were a symptom of the societal breakdown post war, the armed wing of the thule society headed by sebendorf (sic) whose deputy was drexler
Brian: “Like I said, I’m most interested in something that captures what it was like at the time.”
Sorry, I have not ever seen anything like that — accounts get edited & printed long after the events. Not really responsive to your request, but a couple of books that might give some feeling for living through major events in the 20th Century:
The World of Yesterday: memoirs of a European” by Stefan Sweig. An Austrian, covers the period from the end of Vienna’s great days through WWI and up to the rise of Hitler. Lots of name dropping, more of an upper class view.
“When Money Dies” by Adam Ferguson. Concentrates on the Weimar period, which tells about the circumstances in which Nazism grew.
The analog to today I am really interested in is what it was like for ordinary people living through the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thinking about it, that is much more similar to what we are likely to be facing than 1930s Germany. We have the same kind of Trade Balance problem that sunk the USSR, and we even have the same kind of gerontocracy. But I have never found a good account in English. Any suggestions would be welcome!
One inside view of life in the Soviet Union…although long before the collapse…is offered by Robert Robinson, an American skilled worker (toolmaker) who took a job there in 1930 and wound up staying (not entirely willingly) until 1986. I reviewed his book here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/17703.html
The Wikipedia article is also good:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Robinson_%28engineer%29
Well, in the early 90s the USSR went from quite poor to still very poor, and from pretty repressive to relatively free. We seem to be on the verge of going from extremely rich to not so rich, and quite free to either relatively or extremely repressive, depending on how you want to extrapolate current trends. Doesn’t seem analogous to me.
Brian…one more book re Germany, this one a novel (by a German) from the time of the great Weimar inflation: Wolf Among Wolves.
Review:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/30572.html
It might be more useful to look at what happened in Venezuela; there’s a book out there somewhere that I read and glanced at years ago, thought to myself “I’ll never need this, and it’s a depressing read… No need to buy it…”.
You could say that I’m re-assessing that line of thought. I’ll see what I can do to recover the title–It was full of good advice about things that we Americans haven’t experienced, ever.
There was a similar work about Yugoslavia’s demise, but again… I did not acquire the book, nor did I retain the rest of its sourcing, because… Again, didn’t think it would ever happen here, and found it extremely depressing.
Brian: “We seem to be on the verge of going from extremely rich to not so rich, and quite free to either relatively or extremely repressive, depending on how you want to extrapolate current trends.”
That is a fair point about the USSR not being a great analog. Then again, Germany under the Nazis developed a highly militarized booming economy with strong internal unity, including unity on beating down the Jewish segment of the population. (Of course, things changed later when the war started to go wrong). That does not sound like a great analog either.
The issue that is interesting with the breakdown of the USSR was that — initially — there were all kinds of “autonomous regions” set up by local honchos, as central authority faded. (When Putin got himself established, those autonomous regions were whipped back into line). That kind of breakup sounds like a real possibility for the US when Resident Biden finds he can no longer send out Social Security checks and China decides to stop trading Real Goods for Bidenbucks. But it is only one of many possibilities — and it is far from the worst.
Yeah, there are no perfect analogies. What’s the saying about history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme, or something like that.
I gotta say, though, that concentration, I mean quarantine, camps in Australia, and health passes, I mean vaccine passports, and signs saying “Unvaccinated Unwanted!” (though they’re so Nazi that surely they are a satirical protest, and not serious, right?), do make the mind wander to 1932 or so…
Venezuela would be a good one to try to read about, since there are so many people who were in fact screaming about what was happening, yet it still happened anyway.
Like I said above, Cuba as well, since it’s often forgotten about that Castro had to pretend not to be a commie in order to take and consolidate power, such is always the way with commies, they never can be open their plans until they have a strong enough grip on power.
It’s just very disorienting, seeing mainstream, respectable people push for things that just a year ago would have been absolutely beyond consideration. I am having a hard time extrapolating to what can possibly come next–i.e., what that no one is willing to suggest now will be considered necessary and appropriate a year from now?
I worked with a younger woman that had emigrated from Kyrgyzstan; she would have been roughly ten at the time the U.S.S.R. collapsed. She said her father went to flea markets and bought up sliver plate being sold by the formerly more affluent. He would then use nitric acid to dissolve the silver and recover the silver in the form of granules. Might be time to start inventorying our fillings and dental work, the Russians tended to use stainless steel.
As I keep saying, the CLIMATE has been changing ever since our planet has had an atmosphere, but sloooooooooooooooowly, sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowly.