Quote of the Day

With both political parties over the last few decades, there has developed a more ‘team sport’ mentality of voters within their respective parties supporting the candidate of their side regardless of how the economy is treating them and their families.

Alex Beene
A financial literacy instructor for the University of Tennessee at Martin
October 22, 2024

It has been decades since I went to a public sporting event. The rate of my watching professional ball games on T.V. is probably right at one every 10 years. I can feel the emotional pull, but I find the level of emotional involvement by the audiences frightening. This is what people are like when their mask drops just a little bit. Given just a little different circumstances and these same people would cheer on “their” gladiator team as they fought another team to the death. Or lined up all the capitalists next to a ditch to be shot.

That type of emotion served a useful purpose over the millennia. But like fire it is a troublesome servant and a fearful master*. Our political parties have leveraged it to great effect, and I think it has essentially taken over. Look at the political rallies with thousands of yelling people. Look at both sides totally convinced the other side is evil. Both sides may be more right than wrong in their description of the other.

I look at the political landscape and see overwhelming evidence supporting my need for an underground bunker in remote Idaho.

* George Washington didn’t really say anything like this. See:

• Government Is Like Fire, a Dangerous Servant and a Fearful Master – Quote Investigator®
• FACT CHECK: Did George Washington Call Government ‘A Dangerous Servant And A Fearful Master’? | Check Your Fact

Quote of the Day

The left isn’t stupid.

…

They do actually learn from their mistakes, which is why you see so many pitches for Harris sprout up everywhere on social media, get pushed for a day or a week, then vanish at they utterly fail to get the slightest traction.

What you’re seeing here is a combination of low information, and a severely constrained set of moves.

The modern left actually has no idea what a high-testosterone, low-time-preference, heterosexual white man thinks, acts, and talks like, because they don’t have any in their camp to talk to.

And even if they did have a correct mental picture of such a man, they would be unable to craft an appeal to him without mortally offending their base, because their entire appeal to that base revolves around hatred of such men, envy of such men, and the desire to use the state to rob them.

That is why this ad appears to be, and probably is, the result of a bunch of thirtysomething white women, and effeminate gay black men, sitting in a room asking each other “what do white dudes like?”, then shrugging their shoulders and searching “man stuff” on google.

Then plugging it in into the mouths of professional actors, who appear very accustomed indeed to having other people’s stuff plugged into their mouths.

All in a lead-up to the same tired appeals to guilt, honor, and shame that didn’t work for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

They’ve painted themselves into a corner, and are making the only moves they can make. They don’t understand what masculinity is, they only know that they hate it, their voters hate it, and they want to change the definition of it to make it go away.

And this is the situation from which they are forced to try to craft an appeal to that very masculinity.

Is it any wonder that republicans, conservatives, libertarians, etc, are reposting this video endlessly to point and laugh at?

So why, exactly, does this ad fail so badly?

After all, men do work on cars, deadlift things, like steak, etc. Why, then, does this whole screed come off as so fake and unmasculine?

It is cargo-cult masculinity.

Like south Pacific islanders ignorantly making dirt runways and control towers out of lashed-together sticks, hoping to bring the cargo planes back, leftists try to invoke masculinity by imitation of its trappings, with no understanding of its core.

So what is the core of masculinity?

I’ll explain.

And don’t worry, I won’t be helping the leftists. Even if they didn’t hate me too much to listen, and even if they were capable of understanding, they would be unable to use this knowledge to their purposes, any more than vampires could take shelter from the sunlight in a church.

Masculinity is the two essential functions of a man.

Men build.

And men fight.

All the other traits and aspects of masculinity… strength, courage, leadership, wisdom, judgement, initiative… are secondary. They are for a purpose. We have them so that we can build better, and fight better.

A man builds things, first to ensure his own survival and that of his tribe, and then, later, to improve their quality of life.

The accumulation of the things he has built, and the knowledge of how to build them, is what we call “civilization”, not because it really has anything to do with cities in the long run, but because cities were one of the first really big important things that men built, and for a long time, cities were where most of the building got done.

When a man builds, or is trying to build, civilization, he stores up value. This means that sooner or later someone who did not build those things will try to take them for himself.

Then a man must fight.

That is why men exist. That is what means to be a man.

(Women have their own set of essential functions.)

However, the modern left is unable to leverage this knowledge, because the modern left is rooted in resentment of the fact that high-testosterone, low-time-preference men own everything, because they built everything, and can defend it.

Therefore their entire platform is based on taking away stuff from those men, and giving it to people who didn’t build it or fight to preserve it.

They cannot praise those men, because that would imply that building and fighting deserved rewards, not robbery.

They cannot empower those men, because then they would build more stuff, which they would then own.

They cannot appeal to those men, because what those men want is opportunities to build things, and the right to keep what they earn.

The left is, at its core, a collective effort to loot civilization, so its builders and defenders will always be the enemy. And they can try to trick the enemy into voting for them, but they can never promise and deliver anything substantial to them, because that would undermine their cause.

Ultimately non-producers cannot be given an equal voice in the management of civilization, because as the store of value builds, the temptation to use that power to do the easy work of looting, rather than the hard work of building, becomes overwhelming.

This is why the modern left, unlike the old left, will never be masculine.

Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_
Posted on X, October 12, 2024

I had not heard the claim, “Men build things and fight”, before. As an engineer, it is hard for me to see past my own biases and refute this claim.

Thoughts?