A while back, I ran across a paper entitled Women as Proactive Transmitters of Culture. This is a work by an identifiable student, so I won’t be addressing the author or the contents directly. There is really no need to do so, because a whole genre of poorly-conducted, stupid pseudo-research exists, authored by similar feminists, who propose that worthwhile culture is transmitted through mothers to children, fathers being unnecessary.

Is this true?

It’s not true, but, we should begin by acknowledging that we are painting in broad strokes (unlike the feminists who usually posit the contrary position) and exceptions exist. Even so, a general trait specific to human females is a narrow focus on the here and now, with little energy left to worry about cultural transmission across generations.

I believe that human beings were designed this way on purpose. Unlike most other members of the animal kingdom, the human infant spends a prolonged period of time totally helpless, and its brain develops outside the womb. This has a number of specific advantages, but it also requires an intact family to see it through to adulthood. Men and women were designed to pair up and mate (whether they were created by a God to do this, or wired up by natural selection to do it, is really beside the point).

Men and women are designed to survive and raise children in social groups, with a father and mother as the minimal core. This is the optimal way to live and survive in a hostile world, and it’s the best way to transmit one’s genes across time. The differences that men and women exhibit (both physical and behavioral) are meant for expression in this context. As husband and wife bring different skills to the table, they find life easier.

Even so, some of our complex behaviors are not hard-wired in the way that our instinctual drives to mate and couple up are. Culture is defined by complex behavior, and the absence of this core social group, a father and a mother, working together, derails cultural memory and transmission entirely.

Women tend to exhibit no interest in transmitting cultural norms into the future, because that tends to be inborn in men. Women tend to better than men at many things (short-term memory, immediate verbal acuity, etc.) but this is not one of them.

The evidence for this is anecdotal, as no serious institution dares to challenge the feminist “fathers are worthless” rhetoric. Even so, we need only venture into the ghetto housing project or the trailer park to see the sort of “rich culture” and “complex behavior” which is transmitted by single-moms to their children.

In my experiences as a white dude, who has occasionally lived in the midst of a bunch of white single-mothers, the racial differences so important to the manosphere do not compensate for lack of a father. White kids who are raised by single-mothers overwhelmingly turn out to be emotionally stunted, shiftless idiots. They’re much more likely to be into escapism (drugs and alcohol), truancy and petty crime at adolescence. Some of them become “nazi skinheads” in an effort to give their mindless rebellion an abstract meaning, but this is cosmetic. One of the Stormfront kids who used to commit car burglaries in my old neighborhood had a black girlfriend. Hilariously, neither he nor his crew seemed to realize the contradiction.

Black or white, fatherless children tend to resemble other species of apes, more than their civilized human counterparts. They’re violent, unable to delay gratification, incapable of effective communication, and unable to concentrate for more than five minutes.

The feminists who read this will immediately trot out some high-profile counterexample – usually the child of some millionaire celebrity single mom. It is true that in isolated cases, fatherless children can grow up without significant problems, but I’ve found these specimens always came from homes with the income to outsource the father’s job to various surrogates: coaches, scout-leaders, etc. Most single mothers do not have the means to approach this level of output, and most of them aren’t self-aware enough to know that it’s necessary, thanks to the feminists who constantly tell them that they can do it on their own. Moreover, it’s a horribly inefficient way to raise children. All a woman has to do is to marry a good earner, and she saves hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime, for the process of civilizing and enculturating her kids, which comes naturally to such men.

Alienation takes many forms, and one of the most pronounced happens at the level of the family group.

In 1850, before industrial capitalism changed the social and political landscape, most Americans lived on small farms, in large nuclear families. This correlated to living in close proximity to other, closely related, large nuclear families.

If you grew up in 1850, you were likely to have four or five siblings. The families would likely settle on neighboring (or, at least, approximate) farms. When you reached marrying age, around the time of the civil war, you’d have four to six kids yourself, as would your other four or five siblings. Thus your own kids would likely have twenty-five cousins, living at most a day’s ride away.

Cooperative networks were formed between kin. This was an important bit of social insurance that immunized the individual from all manner of risks, even as it constrained him from giving way to his baser instincts (at least in public).

Graphic courtesy of qz dot com.

Today, even as we are infinitely more mobile, the average family has two children, and it is unusual to find a family with five children.

Thanks to our brother Honeycomb, who brings us this inspiring story of an empowered single mother, who brutally tortured her two children to death, before having the decency to save the taxpayer the cost of a trial. From Daily Fail:

A North Carolina woman killed her two young children and then took her own life by leaping from a bridge onto an interstate highway over the weekend.

 

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department says they were called at around 5.40pm on Saturday after the woman landed onto Interstate 485.

 

Christina Elizabeth Treadway, 34, was pronounced dead at the scene after jumping from the Old Gun Branch Road bridge.

Setting aside the obvious question, as to why we have to turn to reporters in the UK for a domestic story, (blackout, anyone?) we will note that, as is the custom among American media, the father of these children is not interviewed in the piece. He’s not even named. Why not?

Police have classified the incident as a double homicide-suicide. The father of the slain siblings has been notified and he is not considered a person of interest.

It seems to be an absolute standard never to acknowledge the surviving victims in these too-common incidents.

The fact that dad has been ruled out as a suspect so quickly can lead us to some interesting conclusions. My guess is that he has been out of the picture for quite a while. Most likely, he was told by a faggot judge at the divorce courts to get lost, after the state had divided his entire estate between itself and his violent skank of a wife. He likely lives hours away, and probably had very little contact with his own kids.

The past week has been framed with long journeys: 16-18h in airplanes and courtesy lounges. Bored as I was, I watched the new Blade Runner movie. This was an easily predictable error in judgment, and nobody else’s fault. I’m about to share its awfulness with you, because I love y’all.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t spoil a film like this, but this movie is so dreadful, it becomes worth analyzing.

I was a teenager when I watched the original Blade Runner film, and it had an aesthetic that I admired. I did not (and do not) really consume sci-fi, but like a couple of other old films (Tarkovskii’s Solaris and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) the original had a compelling story, interesting characters, and worthy acting.

Unlike the typical (gay) sci-fi story, the original Blade Runner universe is neither a dystopian shithole, nor is it an autistic technocratic paradise. It was a world much like the one I knew in my own childhood, only a bit weirder, darker, more multicultural, with flying cars and bases on other planets. The people in the original Blade Runner universe also had far better taste than Americans do today.

By 2049, art deco is out. Most of the art and architecture looks like a cross between your local Federal Building and the strip-mall where your dentist’s office is.

The Tyrell Corporation is also gone. It has been replaced by an organization run by an introverted, eye-glowing, robotic hermit named Wallace (Jared Leto). The troublesome replicants of the past have been replaced by newer, more obedient models. A new replicant hunter, named alternately “K” (to his female boss) or “Joe” (to his hologram girlfriend) is played by Ryan Gosling. His job is to hunt down all the older models and retire (murder) them.

Yes, I’m sure the name was a deliberate allusion to The Trial. Kafka is still grave-rolling.

The first plot-hole appears almost immediately. The world has been destroyed (see: “dystopian shithole,” paragraph 4) and folks are raising worms for food. Joe K hunts down one of these protein farmers, played by Dave Bautista. Bautista’s character first seems compliant. Officer Josef K needs to scan the barcode which has been genetically programmed to appear on the farmer’s eyeball.

One will recall that in the old film, different parts of the replicant body were outsourced, and the corpse was apparently built and animated from parts designed by specialty firms.

Not so in 2049. The Wallace-bot is producing grown humans in an artificial placenta, which looks, to my novice eye, like a giant, suspended plastic bag. So the question arises: How is it that a genetically engineered but otherwise indistinguishable human clone can have a serial number on its eyeball? It stretches the imagination to think that one could genetically engineer such a precise deformity.

In any case, the mediocre Josef K slaughters Bautista’s character (who delivered one of the few noteworthy performances in the film), and cuts his eye out, for delivery to the (female, of course) Los Angeles police commissioner.

Another storyline-disaster occurs immediately. Right outside the protein farmer’s house, stands an old withered tree, with a date that is carved into the root. This carving matches one that little K remembered from childhood, inscribed on a toy horse he remembered. He later goes back to his orphanage and finds the toy horse, somehow, and realizes that his memory isn’t artificial.

How all these amazing synchronous coincidences just seem to happen is never fully explained.

So, we have androids who aren’t really androids any longer. They’re just human beings grown in garbage bags. The replicants minds aren’t designed any longer, they’re just human brains. In short, we have humans of the traditional variety, and human beings who were grown by the Wallace-bot, and there isn’t any meaningful difference between them. One of the main themes of the film is a question about whether a robot can possess an authentic soul, or feel authentic emotions. In this instance, why wouldn’t they? Unless the Wallace-bot is growing brain-damaged people, they would be indistinguishable from the heirloom variety.

The Wallace-bot has a right hand woman (another kickass female assassin… yawn) named “Love” (Sylvia Hoeks). She kills a police officer in the department’s evidence room. Somehow, she gets away clean. I guess the LAPD has grown very lax about video surveillance in 2049. Emboldened by the ineptitude of the cops, “Love” subsequently comes back and murders the (female, of course) police commissioner. Slaughtering L.A.’s top cop goes unpunished also.

In one of the few comedic moments, Wallace-bot’s assassin/assistant can be seen plugging SD cards into the side of Wallace-bot’s head. Truly a funny scene, though it’s embedded in a sequence that is so nauseatingly self-important that the humor was entirely unintentional. So much for self-awareness…

Harrison Ford’s character (the original Officer Deckard) is revealed to be a robot himself, and he shuffles through his lines halfheartedly, looking like a sufferer of the beginning stages of android-Parkinsons. Even as an old geezer, Harrison Ford can deliver on the screen (check out his work in 2015’s Age of Adaline). My guess is that he saw the script, took the money, and like the rest of us, refused to give a shit.

Making Deckard a robot not only sours the contemporary release, it also ruins the original. One will recall that the younger Deckard was on Earth, as a human being, and he was depicted as being a bloodthirsty and cruel murderer-for-hire. His victims, who were derided as being emotionless, were constantly displaying empathy for each other. At the end of the original, the dying replicant (Roy Batty, played by Rutger Hauer) even showed mercy to Deckard (Harrison Ford). This was supposed to illustrate a deeper dichotomy about the definition and limits of humanity. All that thoughtful stuff is gone now, with the introduction of the plot holes scarring this odd, poorly envisioned piece of fan-fiction.

Deckard’s meeting with Wallace-bot, the autistic grower of humans in garbage-bags, clues him in to his true purpose. He was designed to meet Rachel, impregnate her with the first android-baby, and bring the child to term in a natural way. Wallace-bot is jealous of this ability, and needs to find the child for dissection, so that he can make his garbage-bag humans fertile. I guess the Dearborn assembly line isn’t producing enough robot-people. What the world really needs is millions of robot-playaz, constantly impregnating millions of android-skanks, to get that population booming.

So Deckard is designed to fall for Rachel, and vice-versa. Why didn’t the Tyrell Corporation just keep them both on company property to do their little fertility experiment?

The camera angles and synth-music attempted to ape the Vangelis score and Ridley Scott’s direction. They made the film a muddier, more confusing mess. Of course, the competing bombast, alternately delivered by Wallace-bot and Police-wimminz, in ham-fisted, self-important soliloquies, tells us more-or-less what the filmmaker wants us to think. We are supposed to identify the garbage-bag humans as the working class, and the individuals as your parents’ Meso-American gardeners, and we are supposed to feel sorry for them, and contrite for holding them down.

Note to the producers: It doesn’t work.

One surprisingly noteworthy performance was given by Josef K.’s waifu pillow, a hologram girlfriend named Joy (Ana de Armas). She sheds tears as she gives her man a name, and tells him that he’s special to her. This was a very moving scene. She’s also tasked with things other actresses would never do (appearing fully nude on screen, being a nerdy robot incel’s VR porn doll, etc.)

If a director asks his actress to do such stuff, then he has a moral and professional obligation to feature her work in a worthy, watchable film. Denis Villeneuve skipped out on his part of the bargain.

What do I mean by “bulldyke”? It’s not entirely expressed by lesbianism, but the two sets have a huge intersect space.

Over at Artisanal Toad’s haus, our brother Bob posted this gem, with a caption:

When asked, “What reproductive Rights do Men have?”, she immediately start listing Men’s Patriarchal Responsibilities…Then immediately segues into Women having the ‘Right’ to murder the Man’s child at will ( de Jure before birth, de Facto after ), and being willing to kill themselves if not permitted that ‘Right’.

Katherine Spillar is an editor at Mizz Magazine. She’s a graduate of Texas Christian University, and the graduate school of Trinity University. Despite her impressive credentials, she seems to just make shit up on the fly. Did you know that contraceptives are illegal in Brazil? Neither did anyone else, including Brazilians.

Mizz Spillar makes up nonsense, and lies for a point in her argument. lol

Numerous biographies on the web are scrubbed of any mention of husband or children, so I assume she has none.

Many feminists (and most of the spokespeople) are lesbians. Just looking at Mizz Spillar’s butch hairdo made me suspect as much. She has bothered to maintain plausible deniability by removing any mention of family from the biographical sketches which accompany her work, but the tactics described by Bob, verified by the video, settled the matter.

Whenever I see a hateful fanatic with a one-track mind, who consistently employs topic-shift to spew up acid at men, all exorcist style, I suspect a bulldyker. Bulldykers, almost always given to some sort of lesbian sexual expression, are constantly trying to undermine our society. Jack Donovan’s work, Milo’s showmanship, and reading Camille Paglia clued me in to this, and this is what originally brought me to the conclusion that homosexuals are often driven to antisocial behavior by psychotic and irrational emotion. (It’s more than a little ironic that three homosexuals were the only people with the courage to tell the truth about the strategy employed by their fellows.)

Like all bulldykers, Mizz Spillar does her best to seem “fair” and “neutral,” but like the typical bulldyker, she can’t successfully hide her lunatic hatred of men, fathers and families.

As Paglia would remind us (in nicer and more scholarly tones), being a bulldyker isn’t merely about being a woman who has sex with other women. Paglia is a lesbian, but she’s not a bulldyker. Being a bulldyker is about spreading hatred of men, and normalizing discrimination against men. Not surprisingly, the bulldyker will vanish completely in the face of any of the actual social problems she pretends to rail against. When there’s work to be done, there won’t be a single bulldyker found in the labor pool. They’re just interested in stirring up strife, sowing confusion, and spreading their misery around to others.

A man needs to carefully remove himself from the company of bulldykers, as he would remove himself from a potential encounter with a dangerous wild animal, backing away cautiously, not making eye contact, and running like hell once a safe distance is established. Fortunately, they can often be spotted in a very short time. Do not socialize with them. Do not hire them to work for your businesses. Do what you can to rid them from your surroundings.

Day game is inferior to online dating in a quantitative sense. If you are merely looking for a woman to sex up, you will find one more quickly on Plenty of Fish or OK Cupid than you will in meatspace. This is the one and only consistent advantage of online dating.

Nearly every woman that seeks a man online may be described as difficult, in one way or another. The great majority of women who frequent the online dating sites have children. Those who don’t, will tend to want to have children — with your semen, and usually without your prior consent. The vast majority of them have questionable histories. Most of them are ensnared in bad habits: alcohol problems, smoking (marijuana or tobacco – often both), prescription painkillers… Some of them will have HPV, HSV, HIV, Hepatitis, or something similar. None of them will disclose any of this up front.

One of the most obvious problems with meeting women online is the ease with which such women can hide behind dishonest profiles. A sincere man will not realize the extent of any particular woman’s dysfunction before meeting her in person, and many women are able to mask their bad qualities for weeks. By this time, our brother has had sexual intercourse with her a dozen times, and has often met members of her family. Only when he is sufficiently invested will he get a glimpse of the actual woman behind the mask she has so carefully crafted for him. The persona slowly dissolves as the woman feels more and more comfortable in her conquest. She feels like she has you, or at least she has what she wants from you, before you ever really get to know her.

The woman who features herself on a dating site knows, better than you, that she is an inferior specimen. She assumes, due to the fact that you are receptive to her, that you are also inferior. You will play along with her charade, as she pretends to be normal, and as you do so, the conversation dries up, the sex gets progressively less interesting, and she begins to manifest the same sort of disrespect for you that she had for all the men who came before you. This is, at the very least, understandable. If you’re playing the game the correct way, and you’re convincing enough, she likely concludes you’re an idiot. (As she is a useless skank, and useless skanks don’t fool anyone but fools, your status is tautological).

If you’re anything like me, you tire quickly of that sort of nonsense, and you head it off by pulling a fade. This is my own term, but I didn’t invent the tactic. I’ve heard it described by others as a soft ghosting. You quit texting her. When she texts you twice, you text her once. You’re always polite, but equally noncommittal.

And as wimminz are wimminz, they will often reappear in your life when it is most convenient for them. Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day. The specimen below is a good example. I met her online. We had fun for a couple of weeks, and as she got more and more nasty, I was less and less inclined to respond to her. She invited me to spend her birthday with her in early December. I declined. She pouted. I ignored.

Until New Year’s Eve, when (I must assume) she found herself without a date. She sent me a “what’s up” type message in mid-afternoon. Three hours later, when I didn’t respond with an invitation to meet, she needed “closure.”

Wimminz will often reappear to “get closure” — that is, to re-write the narrative. Apparently she wanted me to know that it was she who was breaking up with me, and not the other way around. Never mind the fact that no breakup was possible, given the ontological commitment never existed.

Pulling a fade is, objectively speaking, incredibly rude. Even so, it’s something of an unfortunate necessity with the emotionally stunted and brain-damaged women one is likely to meet through an online matchmaker. In the vindictive #metoo era, it seems generally preferable to let the unstable have the last word.

Before anyone kooks out, I’m not endorsing any particular religious movement (and Dr. Peterson isn’t either), nor am I trying to convert anyone to anything specific.

One of the benefits of religious practice, though, is the integration of what Jung called the shadow.

The shadow roughly corresponds to Freud’s id. It’s the carnal, dark, violent, sexual part of the human psyche. Religion was given to us by our creator, or was developed by men, as a ritual way to harness the energy of its psychic forces.

One of the consequences of growing up is greater self-awareness. I’ve become convinced that secular types, atheists and agnostics (like me) can find a home in the church (mosque, temple, whatever), and use ritual and aesthetic to fuel greater self-knowledge and balance in a chaotic world.

Jung noted, both in Memories, Dreams, Reflections and in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, that psychoanalysis only developed because of a historical imperative, necessitated by social atomization. Prior to this, religious ritual functioned along the same lines, and produced similar results.

There are monsters under the bed. Once you make friends with them, they cease to be frightening. In fact, you can make them work in your interests.

Finally, here’s some good Canadian shadow-oriented music. Start the integration, and I’ll see you at mass…

Speech was never free. Those of us on this side of the divide know this instinctively. It’s why most of us refuse to divulge our real names and home addresses openly. When I opened up comments here, I intended to create a place where we could all practice free speech, in a bubble where you can’t be secretly reported by someone you’ve never met, and subsequently punished by your boss for something you typed out.

Expression has always involved consequences. In a more sensible era, these were generally limited to social sanction in one’s immediate area. If your great-grandfather repeatedly called the mayor a faggot, the mayor’s friends would probably quit talking to him. No one likes to hang out with the dude with the impulsive anger problem. He’s depressing. He probably wouldn’t have been fired or driven from his home, unless he was so uncontrollable that he caused a problem at work. People would just quit taking him seriously, and life would go on.

As the internet has changed, its rules have changed. By this we don’t merely mean that the customs we use on the internet have changed with the times. As time increases, we edge more toward self-censorship. History repudiates Orwell, who dreamt of free people, stifled under the yoke of a brutal legal system. The status-quo invites any group of people, anywhere, to target and annoy users that fall afoul of an ever evolving series of complex speech rules, that are nowhere consistently laid down.

While the internet has changed, society has also devolved. Campus speech codes, workplace anti-harassment policy, organized boycotts and the centralization of mass media conspire to wrest popular control of information from local communities, giving it over to corporate figureheads. The potential of the community to develop strong, shared values — culture itself — has vanished along with aggressive enforcement of “tolerance”. At the same time, the potential for free and open debate has collapsed.

What we are left with is a mass of disaffected, largely powerless atoms, screaming in anonymous space, each wishing that his neighbor would pay him some attention.

Down below, I noted (in the margins, and with a cynical air) that whenever anyone uses the term “real American,” he’s inevitably talking about those people who not only come from his hometown, but more specifically, those who agree with him.

For a white nationalist, a real American is not merely another white dude from the USA, it’s another white nationalist, who agrees with him. To the white multiculturalist, a real American is not the white nationalist, above.

some wild-eyed anarchist (visit the latest at his blog here) wrote…

In my instance, I am (in agreement with H.L. Lovecraft) referring to the descendants of the primarily Anglo-Saxon Protestants who colonized America in the 1600s and composed the ethnic stock during the Revolution. Depending on the person, someone might go further in history up until the major immigration waves in the mid-1800s.

The problem with this definition is that it includes guys like me, namely non-Americans. My people (and not just one, but several) were colonists. Like most ethnic Mormons, I’m descended from WASP types who originally lived in New York, New Jersey and Ohio. Both my mother and father are descended from colonists (surprisingly, for two Mormons, they aren’t descended from the same people.) I’m eligible to join the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, several times over. Isn’t it ironic…

Given that we’re thinking about nationality of late, I thought it would be fun to attempt to prove my own theorem wrong, by trying to construct a workable definition of real American.

In the first place, a real American isn’t a guy like me. There are few things I’m more certain of than that. If you were born someplace else, or even if you were born in the U.S. but raised someplace else, you simply don’t make the cut.

“But Boxer,” I hear you cry, “I spent my whole life an hour away from the border! I speak English and grew up with Sesame Street! ” So did most of the three million residents of Juarez and Tijuana. Sorry, bub. Sucks to be us.

SFC Ton wrote a comment, someplace, that went something like…

It’s a tough call but I will chose my race above all else. In part because your race is your extended family and in part because if Whites become a minority my child and grandchildren will be hunted down by non Whites and we owe our offspring certain things

Sergeant! Good News! There are millions upon millions of white folks, dying to get into the U.S.A.. Here’s a couple:

This is an uncopyrighted photo that was taken in Kabul, Afghanistan. The Afghans consider themselves the original “Aryans.” They’re certainly white (and those that aren’t look like white people with just enough Arab or Berber admixture to be the type of almost-white who would pass easily in New York or Atlanta).

Unfortunately, they’re also prone to blowing shit up, running over pedestrians in their trucks, and various other forms of mayhem.

NAAALT, of course. I work with one such fellow. He seems nice enough, and it’s clear from his features that I share a closer common ancestor with him than with many North Americans. In answering the only pertinent question: is he a real American? Not yet. Maybe when the Muslims take over, but that’s a few years off.

But hey, forget the Afghans and Pakistanis. There are about thirty-five million white folks in Canada. As a guy who escaped that cold and frozen shithole, I suppose I ought to beg SFC Ton not to welcome all these limp-wristed faggots and ugly feminist dykes en masse.

Trust me, you don’t want too many of us here. This country is better without Canadians in it. Please, please, please take my word for it.

Gunner Q wrote one of the more interesting possible responses to this question on his blog.

The way I would restore North America: Disempower women completely. Eliminate the welfare swamp. Free rides to the border, one-way, but if any ethnics want to earn their food, learn English and assimilate into American principles such as rule of law, they can stay. Lastly, put the death penalty on most violent crimes as well as women who get pregnant outside marriage.

Would that restore white America? Probably not; race issues would remain, therefore I would be counted a failure by evolutionary principles. But it would be an orderly society that honors its roots and is a land of justice. The clear trend in the New Testament is that God prefers a just society to a uniform society.

Setting aside the wimminz question, Gunner seems like a Steve Bannon type. A civic nationalist. I like civic nationalists. Some of my best friends and all that. In reality, though, the civic nationalists remind me of no group other than die-hard Marxist-Leninists. Whenever I talk to them, it always goes something like:

You know we’ve tried that shit for a couple hundred years, right?

Wrong, fascist! It has never been tried!

You haven’t heard of the Paris Commune in France? The Spartacist Uprising in Germany? You ever hear of the USSR? Does the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela not ring a bell? These were all socialist movements, and they’ve all failed spectacularly.

Fuck you, bigot! Those were all capitalist movements hijacked by crypto-fascists like you. Our revolution will be pure! We’ll get it right this time! I bet you hate black people, too!

Swap a couple of words for their civic nationalist cognates, and the above conversation is precisely similar to ones I’ve had with neoconservative Americans (including and especially the gratuitous accusations of racism).

The civic nationalists of today, like the goony communist ideologues of yesteryear, imagine they are going to succeed in compressing disparate peoples and nations to critical mass. Nevermind that everyone else has failed. The constitution and magic dirt will make it happen, somehow.

No matter how hard I try to construct a workable definition of real American, I’m unable.  That doesn’t mean that the term can’t be well-defined. It means that I’m unable to complete the job. Can you?

Are there such things as real Americans? What part of America do they come from? Are they racially similar, or not? Are they Yankees or do they sing Dixie? Sound off and let me know…

At some point, an otherwise useless feminist wrote an article entitled “Fuck Trigonometry,” suggesting that we ought to just skip over the subject entirely in school. She concluded this article with complaints about her husband.

Honeycomb responded to her in my comments section:

Students of mathematics, philosophy and physics often get hung up on definitions. It’s annoying, but it’s not for nothing. The first thing a successful student does, in encountering a new area, is to memorize definitions.

Imagine being a newly arrived freshman student at a big university, and being asked to understand this:

It happened to many of us as teenagers. The first week of the first course in the Calculus series requires incipient students to memorize that line. When it happened to me, I first copied it out, over and over and over. Within a few hours, I was able to put it into words, and within a couple of days, I was able to use it constructively. A week after we were all collectively panicking in Dr. G’s Calculus I class, those of us still in attendance were writing proofs with it, treating it as though it were a newly acquired tool, that we found in the bottom of the chest in the back closet.

Some people can’t understand it. It’s not that we’re any smarter than they are. Anyone who shows up to study Calculus is already done with trigonometry, where they were required to memorize all of this:

It’s thus fair to assume that any high-school graduate in America can study Calculus. He’s done this sort of thing before. Raw cognitive ability isn’t lacking in such people. Often they are simply unmotivated. Other opportunities (namely binge drinking and screwing strangers) avail themselves, and study is put on the back burner. The prospective student is thus weeded out. He either leaves university entirely, or he switches his major to something like literature or political science. This has a number of different benefits for everyone. It usually frees up the uninterested to pursue an area with which he is more comfortable, and it keeps the unmotivated from dragging down the rest of the class with insipid questions.

When you’re in high school and you’re taking mathematics, the whole thing seems pointless. Back when I was teaching remedial math it at a community college, I called it “faith-based trigonometry”. At this point, the trigonometry course is just a cumbersome addition to the geometry you learned a year prior. It’s just a proof-writing class, using identities one doesn’t fully understand as axioms. For those people who graduate high school and go on to study Calculus, it’s essential. If you’re in Calculus and you don’t know that cosine of pi over two is negative one half*, then you’re fucked. In fact, the values of all these trigonometric expressions end up becoming second nature, sorta like four times four equals sixteen.

Once you’re done with the last course in the Calculus series, you get to take your first course in what is called higher mathematics. (Marijuana not included.) For me, that course was called Introduction to Linear Algebra. The title itself is misleading. Every little kid learns how to solve systems of linear equations, right? No big deal!

One of my most memorable moments as a schoolboy came in this course, when we were all messing with matrices during practice time. The professor was someplace out of sight. Suddenly, I came across something that tied into a distant, old memory. At precisely this same moment, another student burst out shouting, from the back of the room: “Holy shit! It’s the half-angle formula!” As the realization spread, everyone started laughing and sighing, as though we were all patients in the university’s insane asylum.

What was once a pointless procession of symbols was suddenly illustrated, deeply and beautifully, exactly where none of us expected it to be.

*Caspar wins! (winning)