Lately I’ve been trying to come to terms with the fact that I my resilience has sharply decreased. Which is not surprising; both in emotional terms of too many trips around the same block and physical terms of the changing neurochemistry of someone in early middle age, it would be very strange if I were still as resilient as I was ten years ago.

But I have to avoid mentioning this to my friends, because most of them are positive thinkers who want to insist that humans can recover from anything and be rompingly happy and so on, and if they don’t it’s only because they believe that they can’t, etc. It’s actually pretty appalling how thoroughly the self-help philosophy has infiltrated the zeitgeist. I’m not sufficiently free of it that I wasn’t hard on myself when I started to realize that some things in my head are just not going to get better in this lifetime, not at this point. It’s like something I’ve said before: whatever does not kill you does not necessarily make you stronger, more likely it will just soften you up so that whatever comes along next does kill you.

So we’ve got this whole culture that is in denial about the reality of psychological damage (except when we’re suing each other over it). I’ve discussed before and will doubtless discuss again the way modern society has done away with most of the safeguards that used to protect us from such damage. For instance, the path to marriage was clearly delineated. Of course it wasn’t always happy, but it also wasn’t nearly as brutal as today’s system of locking horny teenagers up together all day every day and expecting them to remain chaste, then casting them adrift on the world to try to forge a connection with no social or legal support for doing so successfully. We have set up a system which guarantees that everyone will have their heart broken at least once. Why the hell did we do that?

There are other examples, but I have to wrap this up so I can get to the grocery store. (Ah, the glamourous world of the blogger.) So, we have used all that positive thinking babble to convince ourselves that there is no such thing as actual damage to the psyche, just a refusal to get over things. Never mind that we know know about the genuine physical changes to the brain that occur with traumatic events or the loss (for whatever reason) of a loved one, we’ll just ignore all that science stuff when it doesn’t suit our received wisdom. What’s important is, there is no reason for families or societies to protect their members from trauma because the traumatized can just shake it off with a little effort and if they don’t, it’s because they don’t want to. (This is the philosophical descendant of the Puritan belief that if your life isn’t going well, that’s a sign that God hasn’t predestined you for salvation.)

But at the same time, damaging programs such as affirmative action and sex discrimination lawsuits are based on the premise that people are so incredibly weak that having people doubt them, however subtly, is so permanently damaging that generations of special privileges are necessary to recover. (For a rebuttal of this, see: Jews.)

So, if you spent your formative years being battered and your “education” consisted of borderline retarded pedophiles reveling in the raw unbridled domination involved in saying nasty things to children, and then spent years devoting your heart and your life to one person after another in the hope of finding one who hadn’t accepted the indoctrination that hopping from one partner to another is normal, you have no business not grinning ear to ear in ecstatic joy all the time and definitely no right to be even slightly un-optimistic about future efforts.

However, if society in general did not constantly tell you that your future excellence was an assured thing, then clearly you are far too damaged to be expected to even refrain from committing violent crimes without tons of help.

As usual, the modern world has it completely backwards.

The blogger was probably right. I always dismissed the “psychohistory” as a sort of narrative convenience, like FTL space travel, used to make the story move along, not as something remotely likely to work in real life. Now I realize that this was probably my assumption, based on my certain knowledge that the behavior of civilizations is just not that predictable. Oh, some things are – that socialism will lead to disaster, or that democracy will eventually corrupt itself when politicians create new pools of voters for their own use – but there are many different paths that declines and rises can take, and many factors in what determines which one will happen in a particular case. So I took it for granted that of course what Hari Seldon was doing wasn’t possible in real life, and didn’t really realize that some people might think that it was, despite reading of examples.

So, Chaos theory, according to Wikipedia, states that “[s]mall differences in initial conditions…) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.”

While it is true that the modern incarnation of the theory started in the 60′s and became widely known in the 90′s, the above is of course a basic premise of conservative philosophy, going back at least as far as Edmund Burke, probably further. So, science guys, nice to see that you’ve finally caught up to us fuddy-duddies smoking cigars and sipping brandy in our gentlemen’s clubs, writing indignant letters to the Times.

So I’ll just say how thoughty it is of the brights to work so hard at thwarting the reproduction of their own kind, not to mention toppling one of their own heathen idols for us. We’ll reclaim the world in a generation at this rate.

The absurdity of the item linked above is so complete that there is really no way to answer it. Are we supposed to listen seriously to people who imagine that violent people are going to listen to this kind of thing? That it is not more effective to advise prospective victims on how to safeguard themselves? Potential rapists have no interest in restraining themselves. Potential victims have a great deal.

In the interest of suggesting something more constructive than either set of advice above, I have wearily compiled a short list which, if followed, will cut rapes down to less than ten percent of what they are now. I absolutely guarantee it.

Feminists and liberals will oppose every measure below with all their might, because they do not care at all if women get raped.

1. Restore fatherhood. Virtually all violent crimes are committed by people who grew up in fatherless homes. So if we want to lower crime – which feminists do not – we will abolish no-fault divorce and default mother custody. Also we must deny unwed mothers welfare unless they surrender their children for adoption by a married couple.

2. Abolish co-education. Locking girls up with boys who have not yet been socialized guarantees that many of them will be sexually assaulted before they have even begun puberty. If feminists wanted girls to be safe from violence, they would have rioted until co-education was outlawed decades ago.

3. Have boys taught by men. Female teachers have demonstrated that they cannot stand up to a six-year-old with a penis. Really, this is as unfair to boys as it is to girls. When a boy spends his childhood and adolescence physically and sexually assaulting girls and getting not so much as an admonition from the authority figures in his life, small wonder that he imagines he can continue committing assault when he comes of age. When he finally chooses a victim who is not his classmate and not on a campus, he will probably be completely astonished to find himself arrested this time.

4. Abolish Third World immigration. Especially Muslim. Return most such immigrants who are already here back to wherever they came from. Liberals become enraged when this well documented fact is pointed out to them, but such immigrants commit crimes wildly out of proportion to their numbers. If Muslims in Europe were sent home, the rape rate over there would virtually vanish.

5. Restore cultural respect for chastity. Help women avoid foolishly putting themselves in danger to win the approval of irresponsible feminists by giving them societal support in taking care of themselves. Help spiritually weak men – the ones who commit nearly all crimes, and thus have always needed society’s help to control themselves – by not constantly provoking their animal side.

I wrote this out of frustration that friends of mine – intelligent women, who should have better sense – have been so indoctrinated that they think the nonsense I linked above deserves applause. But mostly, I feel incredibly weary that this is what is taking up people’s attention. The economy dissolving, crime and terrorism ever more rampant, and various social pathologies are destroying our civilization, and people are making a fuss about how terrible it is to give women advice that would make them a little bit safer from the hell progressives have created. The words “Rome” and “fiddle” come to mind.

EDIT: And just after I finished this, my dear Hypatia complained about coming across some idiot declaring that saying that someone has “a big fat mouth” is “fat-phobic”, and a commercial came on tv asserting that using the word “retarded” to disparage someone who does stupid things, like complain about women being advised not to put themselves in vulnerable positions, is just as bad as using nasty ethnic slurs. Fiddling indeed.

I believe that last was the correct question to ask. There have always been two types of bad girls: courtesans and sluts. Let us leave aside whether the women in question receive money for their favors, because that really isn’t relevant to the difference.

A courtesan, or her unpaid equivalent, has more to offer than her body. They have charm and wit. They are amusing conversationalists, diverting hostesses. At times it was fashionable for them to host salons for intellectual discussion. Kings followed the advice of such women. History tells us that many of them were not even beautiful, but as with Scarlett O’Hara, men seldom realized it when caught by their charms.

Sluts, whether they do it for fun or for money, have nothing to offer except their bodies. Men have no interest in their company outside of the bedroom. Men certainly do not respect them.

I think that feminists believed that, freed from chastity, they would be treated as courtesans. They had a vague fantasy that men would be honored by their favors as were the lovers of Ninon de Lenclos, and outside the boudoir would gather around them by the dozen, hanging on to their every word of wisdom. Their anger at things like pick-up artistry are a consequence of their disappointment at the reality.

The sad fact is, not every woman has it in her to be a courtesan. There are plenty of beautiful women who aren’t very interesting aside from their beauty. There are plenty of smart women who nonetheless are shy or too-serious in conversation. (That last should not be understood to refer to the authoress at all.) That kind of charm requires not only cleverness but also light-heartedness, practice, and people skills of the sort that, well, that PUAs strive to develop.

And of course, there are plenty of women who would make decent mid-level employees, and decent wives, but just don’t have the charm and wit of Lola Montes. If they obey the feminist commandment to let a series of men use their bodies, they will not receive much esteem from these men. They do not deserve what they are likely to get instead.

That is to say, many, many women who have a great deal to offer are not going to pull off being Madame de Pompadour. It is a highly specific skill set.

So women who give themselves to men who have made no commitment to them and who lack that kind of charm are going to find themselves in the “slut” category if the man in question doesn’t just happen to appreciate whatever else she has to offer. If she is lucky, they will share interests or political views or something. But then, I once read that a certain actress as famous for her political activism as for her acting could not get her long-time lover, also a movie star, to listen to her ranting. “One word and I’m out the door,” he told a reporter.

If even movie stars can’t get their lovers to respect them for their minds, other loose women are unlikely to achieve it.

In the tedious arguments about how many billions the government is going to steal from Americans and what they’re going to squander them on, Senator Kyl, a Republican, said that 90% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortions. The actual percentage is much smaller. The MSM is currently wetting itself in glee; there’s headlines all over the place with dramatic titles like “Jon Kyl: The Facts Don’t Matter To Me” or “Kyl Lies About Planned Parenthood”. Some muckraker named Lawrence O’Donnell got all weepy while defending PP. I keep coming across links to this article: What Planned Parenthood Actually Does.

I’ve been avoiding the news a lot since the last disastrous presidential election, as I already grind my teeth and have insomnia and ulcers. But this flap first came to my attention because I saw a link to that last article and clicked on it, assuming that it was going to be a litany of horrors about Planned Parenthood covering up child molestation and trafficking. Instead, it turns out to be a sunny piece about all the nice pap smears and stuff.

There are two things wrong with this. The first is the glaringly obvious one: When a man who has shot a bank teller or two in the course of a robbery is tried for murder, no lawyer would defend him by saying that only 3% of his activities have been murder. There’s an old analogy: whether you put a single drop of sewage into a barrel of wine, or a single drop of wine into a barrel of sewage, the result in both cases is sewage. Murder is kinda like that. Whether it’s a little bit of murder or a whole lot of murder, it’s still, you know, murder. We don’t remember the Nazis primarily for their snappy uniforms, even though they spent more time wearing snappy uniforms than they did committing mass murder.

Second, there’s the PP activities which don’t show up on any chart, but have led some commenters to nickname is “Pedophile Protection”. Take the infamous tape of a PP employee coaching a supposed pimp on how to evade the law when he brings his 14-year-old illegal immigrant sex slaves in for venereal disease treatment or abortions. I deliberately chose that link to give an example of how the MSM is falling over itself making excuses for PP.

The same week that PP’s aid to traffickers in teenage girls came to light, everybody got into a righteous froth over Chick-fil-A because the manager of one of its many outlets donated a few sandwiches to an organization that opposes gay marriage. Articles and blogs leapt from these boring facts to declarations that Chick-fil-A “hated” homosexuals.

In the first place, not wanting ancient institutions radically altered for someone is several million light years away from “hating” them.

In the second place, let’s take a look at the MSM’s priorities. An organization that has one employee who gives a tiny gesture of support to an organization opposing gay marriage, which frankly at this point is an incredibly trivial issue, is demonized. An organization that helps a supposed criminal cover up his systematic forced prostitution of young teenage girls must have every allowance and excuse made for it, only the individual employee caught in the act must be held responsible, and excuses must be found even for her – the woman who suggested that 14-year-old sex slaves who have recently had abortions could still earn their keep by performing oral sex, according to ABC, “appears to act professionally and appropriately.”

Oh, also, a lot of people were mad that the pretend pimp was “entrapping” PP employees eager to help forced prostitution of minors. I have never heard these people complain about the many minority members who are paid by the taxpayer to go to banks and realtors and so on fraudulently pretending to be customers in hopes of catching someone showing a hint of possible racism.

This incident was the most glaring example of PP’s long history of systematic concealment of the rape of minors. Just a few links:

‘Pedophile protection racket’ still going strong

Abortion Clinic Covers-Up Incest; Planned Parenthood looked the other way, Mason rape victim says

The Real Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood Threatens UCLA Pro-Life Advocate on Abortion Coverup

Planned Parenthood may face charges

Despite the only too clear catastrophes caused by contraception, I have always been reluctant to outright condemn it. First, there will always be some irresponsible promiscuous people and being their offspring has always been a horrible fate – but by now, we have seen that making contraception available does not protect children from this fate. Second, I myself was an unwanted, unplanned child, and it is not a fate I would wish on anyone. But then, my parents had birth control, and usually used it. They were just careless one night. The availability did not save me.

When the organized protection of child molesters and rapists of teenagers is not only escaping consequences, but is also government funded, perhaps it is time to admit that birth control is a bad thing.

Before I explain why I actually feel some uncharacteristic optimism about young men, let me answer the common objection that today’s youth is too spoiled, effete, brainwashed, etc. to deal with the horrific problems which are inevitably coming. Every time I hear that, I remember what Grandma Fontaine told Scarlett O’Hara about her grandson:

”Before the war, Alex was the most worthless dandy in the world and he never had a thought beyond a new cravat and getting drunk and shooting somebody and chasing girls who were no better than they should be. But look at him now! He learned farming because he had to learn. He’d have starved and so would all of us. Now he raises the best cotton in the County and he knows what to do with hogs and chickens.”

Many pampered, miseducated generations in the past have surprised the world. This one may do it too.

For decades, in their inexorable march towards dictatorship, Western governments have striven to seize all the rewards of society and shower them upon people who they deemed likely to go along with an increasingly totalitarian agenda in return for bread and circuses. Women, Third World immigrants, and the generally incompetent are lavished with status, money, prestigious jobs, and lots of attention. News outlets and universities have destroyed everything that used to keep society functioning. Colleges and even high schools used to be for, you know, smart people. Now college has been dumbed down so that anybody can go there, and the smart people now have nowhere to go, because society no longer gives a damn about them and is just fine with them committing suicide out of boredom at 16 rather than sticking around wrecking the grade curve. Marriage has been destroyed so that most men have no hope of female companionship; without external forces imposing monogamy, all the women gravitate to a handful of high-status men, resulting in de facto harems. Degrees and jobs go to protected groups whether they’ve earned them or not, leaving the people who have created and maintained everything we have for centuries – white men – with no reason to work hard.

It looks pretty hopeless, given how many of us have been duped and how futile our efforts at self-defense have been.

But when they created a political system designed to distribute spoils to their accomplices and suppress the most normal and healthy human impulses, they overlooked one pesky detail: young Western men.

Young men are notoriously difficult to domesticate. It’s possible that our overlords imagined that they could train the testosterone out of them. Throughout history, society has saddled young men with wives, children and jobs at the earliest opportunity to keep them out of trouble. Nowadays, society deprives them of all of these things, choosing instead to give them to women and foreigners. When I explored the MRA blogosphere a few years ago, I was struck by how many men stated that they would never join the police or the armed forces, because they saw no reason to risk their necks upholding governments which have betrayed them. How does a society suicidal enough to let its men feel that they have no stake in defending it expect to survive?

Despite massive efforts to brainwash men into mutating into the Progressive ideal, young men still want the same things young men have wanted since Cain killed Abel: status, competition, adventure, toys, and sex. More importantly, while the more risk-averse – women and older people – are, well, easier to control, young men are the very embodiment of difficult to control. Piles of statistics show that men in their teens and twenties are more likely than any other group to die or be seriously injured in accidents, and everyone who has ever met a young man knows that this is because young men enjoy taking risks. Even the intelligent ones who have a clear understanding of what they are risking by bungee jumping or picking fights in bars or whatever high-risk behavior appeals to them still do it. It’s nature’s way of giving them a chance to seize a kingdom for themselves. And however much women complain about this, we like that about them, which is why professional athletes who may well end up permanently crippled tomorrow have no shortage of female companionship.

I suppose Progressive social architects imagined that if they made it impossible for young white men to seize or build their own kingdoms, then older white men would not hold the power said social architects coveted so ardently.

Unfortunately for Progressive powermongers, young Western men are problem-solving creatures. If doors are barred to them, they will find hidden entrances if they don’t just break them down. Young men aren’t good at resignation. Challenges? Back ways? System building? Those, they’re good at. Example: The moment society told women that they didn’t need marriage and did need sex, the pick-up artist movement became completely inevitable. As a religious person I should disapprove, but on a practical level it gives me hope for my species.

The main thing about pick-up artistry is that it relies on politically incorrect premises. A great deal of the mockery directed against PUAs consists of reinforcing the party line, sarcastically asserting that women aren’t superficial enough to respond to status in men and similar myths. (Another common tactic is to insist that women could not possibly respond favorably to the flamboyant clothing a few PUAs affect. I assume that those who make this argument are under the impression that the Beatles – and every other rock star since – sadly lacked female companionship.) After spending their entire lives being indoctrinated in Progressive fantasies about human nature, young men are surprised at first when they hear PUA gurus telling them that everything they’ve been taught is wrong. But young men have the urge to, as Freud put it, kill their fathers – a metaphor for the willingness to defy their elders if obedience won’t get them what they want. A few experiments with PUA principles proves that they are correct and the myths of egalitarianism and the blank slate are demolished by the desire of young men to have sex.

Having discovered that what they’ve been told all their lives about women is a lie, why should young men believe anything else they’ve been told? More and more of them do not. Neil Strauss is probably the single most famous pick-up artist thanks to his books, and aside from acknowledging that women respond to different attraction triggers than men, he’s quite politically correct. Not all PUAs are. Explore their blogs and you find young men who are willing to question everything they have ever been taught. And a surprisingly large number of them are showing an understanding of how civilizations actually work, that they require real marriage, families, religion, and rewards to those who do most of the work – men. The notorious Roissy is a hedonist who is content to benefit from feminist folly, but he fully understands the vast destruction it and other progressive folly are wreaking.

Other young male urges are finding similarly unapproved outlets. There is a reason that computer hackers are mostly young men. And anyone who imagines that PUAs are applying what they’re learning only to getting laid is living in a dream world.

It would be wrong to say that young men “have the courage” to face up to authority figures and demolish their misinformation. That would imply that this was a difficult and scary thing for them to do, which they would rather not have to. Well, I, a middle-aged woman, would much prefer to have trustworthy authority figures who gave me good advice and looked out for me, and standing up to them is a frightening duty that I wish I didn’t have.

Young men love doing this. Their fantasy lives chiefly revolve around telling all those tired old men that they’re full of it and they should get out of the way because there’s a new sheriff in town. If you doubt this, watch any adventure movie ever made. How long can Progressive lies continue against people biologically programmed to question them? They only got a handhold because for a few years, young men thought that Progressive programs would get them sex and drugs.

The present regime, like every regime, is utterly dependent upon young men continuing to submit to it. Only, young men have no reason whatever to submit to it, and a great many reasons not to. As immovable as it now seems, it is on a collision course with an irresistible force.

(Reuters) – Parents whose hectic schedules mean they can’t be at home when their children go to bed can now buy an app which enables them to read their youngsters a goodnight story or sing them a lullaby from afar.

I think I shall choose to find this amusing.

But another reason which I had overlooked until now is that Progressive propaganda appeals to people’s optimism. We conservatives are always raining on the parade by pointing out reality, and reality, a lot of the time, is a downer. Reality is full of consequences, failure, mean people, human fallibility, germs, falling rocks, etc.

Just how powerful a force foolish optimism is wasn’t clear to me until I was in a bookstore a few days ago. I took a look at the works of a certain authoress who’s been recommended to me, one of those who writes basically romance novels only longer and with more plot. I read a few random pages and realized that there was no way I could possibly read an entire book of this. I don’t read romances, not out of intellectual snobbery but because the fictional universes in such works require a fundamental optimism I can’t believe in. The fiction I read tends to involve wars, lots of people dying, and star-crossed lovers. Indeed, a few years ago I went through a phase where I could only watch westerns and classic war movies, in which a happy ending generally meant the hero dying bravely, because I couldn’t endure facile assurances that things – any things – would turn out all right in the end.

I was amazed recently when some people I know, who I had thought were sensible, started recommending The Secret. I knew someone was buying that vile book (and the celebrities who are promoting it are all known liberals), it just never occurred to me that I would ever actually come into contact with such a person. But the number of copies that have sold is a demonstration of how badly people want to be sold fairy tales -and it’s an insult to call that pack of lies a fairy tale, because real fairy tales forced their protagonists to suffer and show great merit before giving them a pot of gold and a beautiful spouse.

Most self-help books are the same tripe, that one is just a distillation of the genre. There are a few self-help books that take the tough-love approach, but the fact that I’m having trouble thinking of examples just shows how much less successful these are.

Back in the days when I was exploring New Age folderol, I belonged to a sort of club of Tarot card readers. I must say that, while we were searching in the wrong places, the members of that club were sincerely seeking understanding and spirituality. One of the members decided that since she enjoyed reading cards so much, working for one of those 1-900 numbers would be a good deal for her. What she didn’t realize, though perhaps it should have been obvious, was that the people who call those numbers were not like the serious seekers in our club. Her callers wanted to be told that fortune and romance were just around the corner, regardless of what idiot mistakes they were making. One of them was on parole and asked her if he was going to stay out of prison – as if this were a matter of Fate over which he had no control. She tried to read the cards honestly. She was fired in a week.

During Dubya’s administration, one evening I listened to a speech he gave about terorrism. Everything he said about it was self-evidently true and I really couldn’t see – ah, for those naïve days – how liberals could possibly take exception to any of it.

The next day yielded a pile of editorials and blog posts whining about how Dubya was “playing on our fears”, “promoting fear”, and other trite phrases for fear-mongering. I saw then, though I didn’t pay enough attention to the revelation at the time, that what liberals want is a government which will tell them comforting lies, like the kind parents tell frightened toddlers so they can get to sleep. When a politician – or anyone – mentions facts to them, it makes them very angry. No wonder they can’t handle having it pointed out to them that their economic policies are going to lead to (more) disaster; they can’t even endure hearing that terrorism exists no matter how manifest its existence is.

Small wonder Progressivism steadily gains ground. Progressives tells everyone who obeys them that they are wonderful people and that as long as those mean old right-wingers don’t spoil it for everyone, Hussein Obama is going to lead us to a paradise of bunnies, bread and circuses. How the hell can facts and logic compete with that?