Monday, February 17, 2025

Manliness

It shouldn’t be confusing. After all, manliness is straightforward and direct. Femininity, on the other side of the great sexual divide, is notably mysterious and inscrutable. 

Amd yet, our current converaation is riddled with confusion . Decades worth of feminist ranting about male chauvinist pigs and toxic masculinity has confused the issue..If a man proposes to protect women and children, to provide for his family, he will, in some quarters, be denounced for trying to diminish and weaken women. If he wants to protect and provide he is imply that women cannot do it themselves. 


On the one hand, American men have not not been winning too many wars lately. The generation that emerged victorious in World War II is no longer with us. The Vietnam Generation was not a martial success.


Some have suggested that America has even lost the habit of winning wars.


Moreover, women today insist that they do not want some man taking care of them. They tell us that they want, above all else, to have their own careers, to pay their own way.


It seems like a good idea. Yet, in practice, it has produced an epidemic of broken homes. If she does not want you to be the man of the family, why stay with the family? If you do not have an honorable role within the family, why not decamp for warmer climes?


Men become men by competing in the arena, in the marketplace or the battlefield. Since they are doing it for others, for women and children, they do not see it as a form of self-actualization or self-expression. 


Women, on the contrary, have traditionally defined themselves by their work in the home. They are the queens of inner space and value emotion and feeling, over the ability to play games,and to follow rules.


What matters in the arena is that you follow the rules, that you play the game according to the rules. Sportsmanship prevails in that world outside of the home. 


Traditional manliness was defined in terms of gentility, of the gentleman. This was the case in Confucian thinking and in Victorian practice. 


Again, the role involved following codes of good conduct. It did not just matter that you won, but that you played the game correctly, following the roles. Cheaters were not real men.


But then, when men fail at their primary tasks they often resort to what is called machismo. They cannot command respect for their achievements, so they insist on imposing their will on those who are weaker. 


Machismo is theatrical display. And yet, it produces obnoxious behaviors, even what is called the will to power. If a macho man cannot receive respect he will often force others to respect him, by using jos physicality.


So, we have strong empowered women struggling against more powerful men. Perhaps they will find a way to balance the powers, but that is easier said than done,


Sunday, February 16, 2025

Sundaze

With a warm welcome to new subscribers. 

Being as today is Sunday, we take the day off from opining in order to request donations. They are the fuel that keeps this work going. 


Not to be overly obvious, but it takes time and effort to put up a new post daily. Not very many others manage to do so. Thus, it’s a job, one that is worthy of compensation. 


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Saturday, February 15, 2025

Saturday Miscellany

First, you will recall-- it was not that long ago-- that the world heaped derision on the Trump Baza plan. It was, we were assured, a non-starter.

By now, however, we ought to remain skeptical about such reactions. Initial reactions are often for show. They are not about substance.


So, if you have been following my reflections on the Trump Gaza plan, you will not be surprised to ;earn that a senior official from the United Arab Emirates had a few good words to say about it.


The Emirates signed on to the Abraham Accords and they have maintained their alliance with Israel in the midst of the propaganda war against the Jewish state. And, keep in mind, the Emirates are closely allied with Saudi Arabia. At the very least, if the Saudis had not wanted the Emirates to affirm their hesitant support for the Trump plan, it would not have happened.


Zero Hedge blog reports:


In an extraordinarily surprising development, the United Arab Emirates (UAE has signaled the possibility of removing all Palestinians from Gaza, in accordance with Trump's controversial Gaza plan.


UAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al Otaiba in a fresh interview called the plan "difficult but inevitable" and said he's sees "no alternative" but Trump's plan to expel Gaza's population and undertake massive economic redevelopment of the Strip. He had been asked by a reporter whether the UAE is working on a separate plan, to which he responded no, there's no other plan.


Second, our new vice president-- JD Vance-- had a few choice words for the leftists who are running Europe. In particular, he had the harshest words for the British Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer.


The Daily Mail reports:


Vice President J.D. Vance took his culture war to Europe on Friday, warning that its greatest threat came not from China or Russia but from within as he delivered a blistering attack on what he said was the continent's retreat from its traditional values.


Vance said free speech and democratic institutions were being eroded in an address to the Munich Security Conference.


He accused European politicians of forcing people to shut down social media accounts and urged leaders to do more to stem illegal immigration. 


Vance reserved particular scorn for America's closest ally, and the case of a British man arrested after praying near an abortion clinic.


'Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making,' he said.


'If you're running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.'


Third, some six decades ago a housewife named Betty Friedan launched an opening salvo against the patriarchy with her book, The Feminine Mystique. She posited that suburban housewives, in particular, were suffering from a maladie that had no name, a neurotic condition that was produced by the realities of being a housewife.


As a result, young women ever since have renounced the role of housewife. They have put career first and have refused to cook dinner.


The result, reported by The Daily Mail, is an outbreak of misery among young liberal women throughout America. I do not think it’s a stretch to say that these women are invariably feminists:


Liberal women are more likely to report feeling lonely than their conservative counterparts, according to a survey. 


New evidence in the 2024 American Family Survey, found that 37 percent of conservative women from the ages of 18-40 reported being satisfied with their life. 


Only 12 percent of liberal women in the same group said they felt the same way, while 28 percent of moderate said they were satisfied.


The findings also say that liberal women are nearly three times more likely than conservatives to say they experienced loneliness at least a few times a week. 


It also broke down the relationship status of those surveyed, saying that 40 percent of liberal women reported being single, while 31 percent were married. 


For conservative women, 33 percent reported being single, while 51 percent were married.


Women have come a long way. Their problem now has a name-- feminism.


Fourth, so much for amateur psychology. Walter Kern points out that those who declared Trump to be something of an egomaniac have been shown to be wrong.


Wish I had a dollar for all the pros last year who told me Trump can't share the limelight and would never bring on Kennedy and the others


Guy has shared more limelight than most politicians ever.





Friday, February 14, 2025

Pater Familias

Today’s Democrat Party did not merely lose. It is lost. It has no focus. It has no center. It has no policy proposals or recommendations. It does not have an agenda. As I pointed out yesterday, it has been reduced to yelling and screaming, ranting and raving, howling in the wind and in the political wilderness.

As James Carville noted, the Democrats chose as the starting quarterback for the Super Bowl-- their seventh string player. They believed that they could trick the nation into thinking that Kamala Harris was competent, even when all the evidence pointed toward an embarrassing level of stupidity.  The joke was on them.


And they went all-in on the notion that the Republican opposition was Hitlerian, fascistic, Nazi-- consummate evil. They could not find a good reason for people to vote for them. So they tried to scare people into voting against Republicans.


Democrats were hoist on their own petard. That would be, on the petard of identity politics. They seem to have calculated that a coalition of the aggrieved and oppressed groups would produce an electoral majority. 


They decided to attack white supremacy, white Christians and toxic males. It turned out that their war against manliness drove large numbers of Americans, of every race and ethnicity, into the arms of Donald Trump.


When professional football players started doing the Trump dance in the endzone,you knew that the Democrats had alienated the nation’s men, and discredited themselves. 


The Democratic Party, for having gotten in bed with feminism once too often, ended up being the party of what James Carville called-- preachy females. One recalls, with some chagrin, the Senate hearings for Trump’s cabinet appointees. And one recalls the female Democratic senators shrieking a torrent of mindless ad hominem arguments.


This left it to Donald Trump to present himself as America’s pater familias.Surely, Hunter Biden’s father could not present himself as father of the decade. Trump had a notably sane and normal family. No one seems to have mentioned this simple fact, but the Trump family was a clear refutation of years worth of feminist railing against the patriarchy.


One remarks, in the world of manliness, that Trump also surrounded himself with tech bros. Not merely the richest men in the country, but Elon Musk’s tech wizards who are currently working to undo the administrative state and to save the nation's fiscal viability.


It is perhaps too obvious to have to say it, but the dozens of tech bros who are working for DOGE are nearly all suffering from toxic masculinity.


Similarly, the Trumpian emphasis on manufacturing and on making things in America appeals to a masculine sensibility. One idiot Congresswomen yesterday opined that there is a man in the word manufacturing. She might also have pointed out that the patriarchy has made it that words like menstruation and menopause also contain men.


So, Trump is working to undo the damage wrought by decades worth of non-stop feminist propaganda. This is the hidden message behind the Trump revolution.


It’s not just about strength. Strength without courage is trigger happy,


And, consider this. Whereas President Trump takes considerable time to answer any and all questions offered by journalists, his predecessor was hiding from the press. That is, he was showing a cowardly face, a fear of direct questions, and a failure to perform.



 


Thursday, February 13, 2025

Impotent Rage on the Left

When you encounter someone who is making a fool of himself, your normal human instinct is to cover him up. Just because he has no self-respect, nothing obliges you to follow his bad example.

When you find someone with his pants down you are not going to stand there staring, even laughing. You are going to try to cover him up. If that cannot be done you will most likely turn away.


Say what you want about President Trump, but he seems to have succeeded in rendering Democrats into complete fools. Their recent antics are not going to convince anyone of the righteousness of their cause. 


How persuasive is it politically for a group of Congressional Democrats to stand before a microphone screaming like hysterical school children.


Democrats are protesting, because that is all they know how to do. They do not know how to govern. They do not know how to legislate. They are reduced to screeching like hysterical fools, and expecting that people will respect their emotional intensity.


When a member of Congress calls Elan Musk a Nazi nepo baby, you become aware of the fact that this member is simply an idiot. 


Perhaps it does not need saying, but in a deliberative democracy there is no place for yelling at people. Those who are indulging in such histrionics to have nothing to say.


And then we witness the spectacle of members of Congress, doubled by talking heads, declaring that we are living through a
“constitutional crisis.” When everyone is reciting the same lines, focus group tested as they obviously were, the value diminishes. They cannot even think for themselves.


Given how badly lawfare did the last time, one is surprised to see the usual suspects trot it out again. You would think that once it was tried and failed, they would offer up a new solution to the nation’s debt problems,, but, alas.


Consumed by righteous zeal, they can do no better than to trot out the same tired, discredited nostrums. They did not succeed the first time. What makes anyone think that they will succeed the second time around.


Of course, Elon Musk is the problem. Because Musk is not an ideological zealot. He is not a preacher or a philosopher. He is not even a lawyer or a journalist. The truth remains, for his many accomplishments Musk is universally respected. For creating an electric automobile company, for sending rockets into space, for setting up communications satellites, Musk is not so easily dismissed as a fanatic.


And you cannot imagine that Musk is in it for the money. The notion that Trump is an incipient fascist cannot survive the association with El0n Musk.


While President Trump is hard at work bring peace to the world, ending wars and making deals, the raging Democratic left is calling for violence in the streets. Perhaps we should call them Demonocratic.


Fair enough, they are enraged. And yet, theirs is an impotent rage, a histrionic display of emotion that serves no useful purpose.


Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Wednesday Potourri

First, remember this name: Laurie Pohutsky. She is a radical leftist state representative from Michigan, a place where reproductive rights are enshrined in state law.

It was not good enough for young Laurie. She was so horrified at the chance of having a child in Trump’s America that she had herself sterilized. One wonders what she will do four years from now when she is no longer living in Trump’s America.


Obviously, in certain precincts of the radical left, rational thought no longer exists. The story comes to us from Steve Watson:


“I refuse to let my body be treated as currency by an administration that only sees value in my ability to procreate,” she added while speaking to hundreds of extreme left-wing protesters on the lawn of the Michigan Capitol.


“If you know people who are questioning how serious this is, I’m going to repeat myself: A sitting government official opted for voluntary sterilization because she was uncertain she would be able to access contraception in the future,” she further claimed.


And, dare we also mention, there are other forms of foolproof contraception. I trust you do not need me to explain that to  you.


Second, by now everyone knows that Joe Biden was cerebrally impaired during his presidency. Now, we also learn, via the estimable Lindy Li, that on important occasions he was drugged. Or, as they say, juiced. Matt Margolis reports:


We’ve all suspected that Joe Biden was getting doped up before public events. But, according to Li, it was definitely happening.


“I do know that he likely took something before the State of the Union,” she said. “I was wondering because I was there for that, and he seemed sharp at the beginning, and then kind of went downhill towards the end.”


We all noticed that.


“Oh, there are plenty of rumors, but I'm here to give you the facts,” she said. “Like, everything I've said to you so far has been proven, or I've seen it with my own two eyes. I've never seen him get doped up, but there were plenty of rumors that he would get doped up before every major event.”


Li continued, “For example, after the debate, he went to North Carolina. It was basically a life-or-death moment for his campaign. He had to prove that he was still ready to continue his race. The rumor was that he took something. The night after the debate, he basically self-destructed before the eyes of the whole world. So the next day, he had to prove that he could still keep going, and that’s what we were told—that he got some sort of injection or whatever before he went on stage in North Carolina. But I wasn’t there to see that, and I can’t say for sure.”


Third, by now everyone knows that the American pre-college education system is a calamity. Most especially, students do not learn the subjects they need to master if they are to function within the high tech world. This begins with calculus. We are not just producing social justice warriors. We are producing innumerate social justice warriors.


From Molly Slag at The American Thinker:


While Democrats focus on the liberal arts, which train students to be leftist activists beginning in grade school, it is the STEM studies that keep America functioning. As students ascend that ladder of mathematical logic, calculus becomes central to their ability to maintain our systems and invent new ones. Sadly, though, our schools are failing students, not just in teaching calculus but in teaching everything preceding calculus.


It is widely recognized among today’s undergraduates that the STEM field is at once among the most rewarding and the most challenging, promising well-compensated employment in the future while also demanding devotion and consistent concentration in the present.


A principal source of the demanding nature of the STEM curriculum is its solid mathematical core, the centerpiece of which is calculus, a cause of both delight and frustration for generations of college students.


Fourth, explaining what he discovered on the Social Security rolls. Elon Musk remarked that he had found people receiving Social Security payments at age 150:

,

"I think they're probably dead, is my guess, or they should be very famous, one of the two."


Fifth, yesterday Trump managed to persuade Vladimir Putin to release American hostage, Marc Fogel.


In just 3 weeks, Trump secured the release of Americans being held hostage in Gaza, Venezuela, and Russia.


Biden abandoned them. Trump brought them home.


Sixth, the Walt Disney Company is tired of losing money. Thus, it is scrapping its DEI program. Newsmax has the story:


Walt Disney is changing its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs to focus more closely on business outcomes, while fostering an environment in which all employees can thrive, according to a memo seen by Reuters.


The media giant joins several of the largest businesses in the U.S. in scaling back diversity initiatives.


Disney's 2024 annual report, published in September, removed mentions of its "Reimagine Tomorrow" program, an online space for "amplifying underrepresented voices" that featured some of Disney's diversity, equality and inclusion commitments and actions.


Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Whither Gaza?

No sooner had the words passed his lips than Donald Trump was excoriated for offering a new plan to fix the situation in Gaza.

Foreign policy mavens, both left and right, denounced the new Trump plan as unrealistic, incoherent and doomed to failure.


One might wonder about the motives of a group of experts who had seen their most earnest efforts to solve the problems in the Middle East trumped by the impresario of Celebrity Apprentice. How did it happen that he and not they had come up with the Abraham Accords.The humiliation must have been unbearable.


Now, Lee Smith writes on Tablet that Trump’s new plan spelled the end of the fantasy called Palestine. 


Succinctly, Smith wrote:


Gazans, not just the enlisted members of the Hamas brigades, waged an exterminationist campaign against Israel, and they lost. At virtually any other time in history, save the last 75 years, they would be lucky to lose only territory and not have their legend and language permanently deleted from the book of the living.


You might say that it was a choice. Rather than build a functioning country within their borders, the Palestinian Gazans decided to put all of their efforts behind an effort to destroy what Israel had built. Dae we notice, they were continuing the European War against Jews.


As Smith notes, they lost. Whether they are capable of accepting the consequences remains to be seen.


As for the mystique that has been applied to a specific piece of land, Smith explains that it is just that-- a mystique.It provides a convenient excuse for the nations that surround Israel and that have largely been outcompeted in industrial and military endeavours.


And Smith does not believe that the Trump proposal is as crazy as others do. After all, he points out, many Gazans are basically Egyptian. And, as for Jordan accepting refugees, they just accepted some half a million Syrian refugees. 


And this before we remark how much foreign aid we send to Egypt and Jordan.


Considering the misery that they have brought on themselves, Gazans ought to be grateful to President Trump for offering them something better. One suspects that the Saudis and the Emirati, peoples who despise the Mualim Brotherhood and Hamas, would be more than happy to lend a hand.


Smith sums it up. Trump has offered to save the Palestinians from themselves. They should be grateful.


Trump, in his innovative mercy, has offered to save the Palestinian people from their own history, and give them a new idea to live by. They should thank their maker for the chance to start anew—and give thanks as well to the American president, who realistically promises them a better future, backed by U.S. global power. Given the repeated failure of the multi-decade-long dream of eliminating and replacing the Jews of Israel, it seems unlikely that the Palestinians will receive a better offer.


Monday, February 10, 2025

What Are Virtucrats?

In the most recent issue of Commentary Joseph Epstein recalls a coinage that dates to four decades ago. In 1995 he defined people who he called “virtucrats,” a special breed of political fanatics who believed that their great ideas and impeccable moral behavior  transcended  right and usefulness, residing in the realm of higher truths.

Virtucrats are idealists on steroids. Most especially, the viruecrat does not believe that he can be wrong, but that he is always in the right. He eschews all references to reality; it does not care whether policies work or fail. Virtucrats will always find someone else to blame. 


They believe that they are always right, regardless of the practical consequences that pertain when their policies are enacted. Virtucrats are another form of tyranny, a  totalitarian imposition of certain beliefs on the polity. 


Virtucrats rejectreality checks. They will never allow facts or experience to throw doubt on their cherished beliefs. They might believe in love or equality or justice. The fact that they fail to govern effectively does not discredit their ideas. It discredits the rest of the population. They consider that the value of their beliefs is the depth of their conviction.


Epstein described it this way:


In 1985 in an article in the New York Times Magazine, I coined the word “virtucrat.” Elsewhere I’ve defined a virtucrat as “any man or woman who is certain that his or her political views are not merely correct but deeply righteous in the bargain.” A virtucrat apprehends the world’s injustice and feels obliged to set things right. He is confident that he sees through the lies and cons of the rich and powerful, which he feels must be exposed. His life becomes a mission, his view of himself that of a sensitive, serious, above all highly virtuous person.


Obviously, the virtucrat is a missionary. His goal is more religious than practical. He wants to produce a kingdom of right opinion, of orthodoxy, and does not care about how well the system functions. 


In today’s public life, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez & Co. are obvious examples of the virtucrat at work. Their every public utterance shimmers with righteousness. Why the rest of us do not perceive their home truths is an unending source of wonder, and of sadness if not horror, to them. They view themselves as a force for good, with those who think otherwise ignorant and insensitive, unimaginative, and finally immoral. 


Needless to say, the virtucrat appeals mostly to the young and naive. Those who do not have enough experience to judge good from bad policy console themselves with the notion that they are on the side of the angels. The rest are on the side of the devils.


Do not ask what good or bad any government program does. Know in the deputy of your soul that the program feeds starving children-- even when it wastes enormous amounts of money on tasks that have nothing to do with feeding starving children.


Virtucrats have nothing to do with pragmatic considerations, about what does and does not work. 


Sunday, February 9, 2025

Sundaze

With a warm welcome to new subscribers. 

Being as today is Sunday, we take the day off from opining in order to request donations. They are the fuel that keeps this work going. 


If you would like to donate please make use of the Paypal button on this page. If you prefer, you can mail a check to 310 East 46th St. 24H. New York, NY 10017.


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Saturday, February 8, 2025

Saturday Miscellany

First, just for the humor of it all, the inevitably wise James Carville offered this comment on the past election:

“We ran a presidential election. If we were playing the Super Bowl, we started our seventh-string quarterback. . . . You can’t address a problem unless you’re honest about a problem.”


Nellie Bowles continues in her TGIF column:


Carville said people would be shocked to know that there are Dem candidates that “can actually complete a sentence, that actually know how to frame a message, that actually have a sense of accomplishment, of doing something.” Where are they hiding?


Second, at the risk of being repetitious, we remark that 4 percent of black fourth graders in Detroit are proficient in reading. And that 2% of black eighth graders in Milwaukee are proficient in math.


Seeing these results, teachers’ union president Randy Weingarten failed to take responsibility for the failure. She declared that they could solve the problem by giving teachers more money.


Why not tie pay to student performance? They would get their attention.


Third,watching DEI die, via the Financial Times:


Accen­ture has scrapped its global diversity and inclu­sion goals after an “eval­u­ation” of the US polit­ical land­scape, becom­ing the latest big com­pany to ditch its tar­gets since the elec­tion of Don­ald Trump.


A memo to staff from chief exec­ut­ive Julie Sweet said the New York-lis­ted con­sult­ing group would begin “sun­set­ting” its diversity goals, as well as career devel­op­ment pro­grammes for “people of spe­cific demo­graphic groups”.


Sweet said the change fol­lowed an “eval­u­ation of our internal policies and prac­tices and the evolving land­scape in the US, includ­ing recent exec­ut­ive orders with which we must com­ply”.


Fourth, when all else fails, slander. Those who are up in the houghest dudgeon over Elon Musk’s DROGE warriors found out that one of the young people manning the computers once said something that was apparently racist.


Naturally, they wanted him to be canceled. Musk was having none of it. And not jut Musk. President Trump and Vice President Vance echoed the new policy.


The New York Post reports:


 Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffer who resigned after being linked to racist social media posts will be brought back after President Trump and Vice President JD Vance both co-signed the idea, Elon Musk said Friday.


“He will be brought back,” Musk, the head of Trump’s cost-slashMusk, 53, announced his decision to rehire 25-year-old engineer Marko Elez after the vice president expressed strong support for giving the ex-DOGE staffer a second chance.


“Here’s my view: I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Vance tweeted in response to Musk’s X poll asking users if the DOGE worker should be brought back.


“To err is human, to forgive divine,” the tech billionaire added.


“We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever,” the vice president added. “So I say bring him back.”

“If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”


Trump, 78, later told reporters that while he wasn’t clued in to the situation, he backed Vance’s call.


“If the vice president said that – did you say that? I’m with the vice president,” the president said.


Depriving the radical left of one of its most potent tools might be an incentive-- to learn how to govern.