Many of my favorite blogs, over the years, have both hard-hitting articles and a lively comment section. iSteve is the prime example, though Dalrock and Heartiste both qualify too.
A day or two ago, over on one of these other places, I cited Jack Donovan’s book The Way of Men as a decent primer on masculinity. The first comments were more or less legitimate, if deliberately uninformed.
The author of the book is an openly gay dude, and many Christians refuse to read the work of someone in that camp. No problem. Even so, It wasn’t long until the resident headcases appeared to try and derail any discussion about the book.
While I have seen Jack Donovan and his work excoriated on feminist sites like Jezebel, at least the feminists tend to critique it’s content. Frank K appears to be making a false rape accusation against the author, which is something that I don’t even see from the likes of Jessica Valenti.
Not to be outdone, SirHamster agrees and amplifies:
There are a couple of interesting possibilities here. The most obvious is that these people have some sort of repressed fantasy life which includes inappropriate thoughts about young boys. Because SirHamster is mentally ill, he projects these disgusting fantasies outward, upon random strangers he disagrees with on the internet, and upon authors of books he doesn’t like.
When confronted about these weird fantasies, SirHamster doubles down, naturally, and starts desperately spreading the meme that y’r boy Boxer is a homosexual pedophile. With no evidence, of course, but whatever…
It might also be the case that the feminist movement is sending malcontents to manosphere blogs in an effort to make antifeminist men look like unhinged nutcases. This is actually a well-known phenomenon, which was described in Tayacan’s Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, Taber’s War of The Flea, and Che Guevara’s classic Guerrilla Warfare. The tactic is usually known as “black propaganda.”
Is that what motivates people like SirHamster? Hard to say. If I had to guess, I’d go with psychological problems and social isolation as a likely cause. Even so: While patriarchalists shouldn’t give way to conspiracy theories, they should be aware that their enemies are committed, determined and unscrupulous. Feminists have gained the upper hand almost completely through propaganda, rather than direct action. Deception is easier than fighting, and historically it has been their M.O..
Update: In a funny turn of events, SirHamster (with the help of his fake Christian friend Cane Caldo) is now denying that he ever wrote this nonsense. I cover this humorous reversal here.
In order to demonstrate that he is honest, he’s making up stories about you being gay.
I like that guy. He’s funny.
The poaster who was really good at this was named “Hipster Racist.” He got mad at me for laughing at his conspiracy theories last year, and spun an elaborate yarn that I was secretly Jewish.
This is a left-field answer to the problem you’re highlighting, but I think it’s a higher-order issue because your examples are so particular, but generalizable on a scale that makes it a drop in the ocean even if you turned one of the examples to sense.
So to higher-order:
I wonder if it’s a case where one tribe in our culture more or less needs a king.
Take tribes like Catholics and Mormons. Both tribes have a strong culture, history, written-lit/canon backing the culture, as well as a moderately domineering hierarchy – these serve to overcome the lack of a common ethnicity while also raising Catholics and Mormons to a higher state of cultural cultivation than would be possible by ethnicity alone.
Or – take “ethnic” or “racial” tribes – they have ethnicity and race as a skin-deep / clan-deep unifier. The unifier is extremely potent, but also inherently self-limiting.
So – let’s look at the characteristics of the problem tribe.
– it lacks adequate culture, history, written-lit/canon that either would bond it or cultivate it
– or: actually – it may have such a written-lit, everything from Huck Finn to Blackstone and Smith – but somewhere along the way it got this anti-intellectual poison pill so that it won’t read it’s own lit – in fact, the act of reading it’s own lit typically results in one’s self-deportation from the tribe
– it lacks a hierarchy – really any hierarchy at all
– but it always seems to be looking for one – it is the most readily susceptible demographic to “strong man” quasi-fascist and fascist politics – this is manifest, in other words: everyone, in the tribe and outside it, for it and against it, now and ever in the past, everyone – recognizes this quality about this tribe
– that last quality is probably caused by vacuum of culture, history, written-lit/canon and hierarchy, as well as common national origin
– it chest-thumps a lot – but here’s something to it’s credit : it ** can ** be angered, but it is ** slow ** to anger – so we have seen cases of it rising up in anger, and sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, but thankfully it’s rare when it does so – … in this respect it’s something like European honey bees as opposed to Africanized honey bees – where the quality of the latter being so easily roused is actually anti-adaptive among high-tech niche-sharers like humans because it makes the latter more likely to be exterminated
– anyway – the chest thumping, together with the irrationality of the chest thumping – has a lot to do with all the previous attributes – there’s a human, hind-brain danger indicator going off the in tribe member, but he is unable to correctly identify it, lacking either a hierarchy or culture, history, etc., which would better inform him
In the past I’ve thought that the long-term solution for this tribe is education, a moderate degree of separation (i.e.: differ by time, age, place and range-of-effect), and through both: enculturation.
Short run though: long-run solutions may not come fast enough, and in the short-run a “good king” would help.
I’m doubting big T is the good king we need though.
I guess a thing to add:
For awhile strong labor unions were adequate for this tribe. They provided a sound means getting its legitimate political needs represented and gave the tribe the strength-through-unity that is necessary in lieu of history/culture/literature, hierarchy and common ethnicity.
But we killed the unions.
More accurately: we gave the unions a knife and begged and pleaded and threatened for them to self-emaciate, and they did.
Arguably: this was possible due to aforementioned anti-intellectual poison pill and the strange belief that everyone is going to agree that what’s good for you but not for me is going to go on forever, … where better education might have prevented that.
That, or unions were just corrupt. Could be both.
But bottom line is this tribe needs to unify, and if it wants to unify and thrive, instead of unify and be promptly destroyed, it needs to unify on the basis of something with humanistic value. Right now it seems prone to unifying on race and, see “promptly destroyed”.
The tribe can’t recognize things right. Like: it should recognize you Boxer. What should be happening over there is you should be getting followers. But it won’t do that. The tribe won’t recognize its friends, won’t recognize it’s leaders, won’t recognize it’s betters. It would rather argue, and argue about stupid bullshit.
Or: you can volunteer a leader. Volunteer Dalrock. Tell him that if he leads, you’ll follow, as long as he makes culture and humanity center, and eschews race, but that you’ll follow.
Anyone who self-identifies as a leader puts on a target. We have to give up our own desire to lead as a token to the privilege of having a leader.
I could be way off, it’s a blog comment, that’s all, but that’s what I’m sensing. We need a leader, and that will happen when people choose someone to follow. If you volunteered to follow Dalrock, he shouldn’t agree to lead. There should be 20, maybe a hundred more volunteers. Qua Plato, we need a reluctant king.
Hey Stroller:
Great comment. It’s become a post in its own right. I hope that’s OK. Let me know if you’d like me to direct traffic to your blog with a link, by the way. A couple of minor things…
1. Mormons are an ethnic group. All the Mormons originated in Northern Europe. We all identify with the covered wagon migration and the guerrilla wars in Missouri/Illinois, and we all had a state of our own for a decade or so. Note that not all Mormons ascribe to the Mormon folk religion (the largest denomination of which is the LDS church).
2. I think this is a worthy critique of the thesis of Donovan’s Way of Men, which (at least in the subtext) talks about the problems of scale, and the inability to form coherent groups larger than prehistoric bands.
In any event, I hope you’ll write more on this and other topics. You clearly think a lot about meaningful stuff, which is unusal these days, but welcome.
Boxer