Collapse: The Blog

Lefticography and Spiritual Autism

I swear I could devote an entire spin-off blog devoted to analyzing how leftists write. I mean, some days I catch myself trolling the most intolerable left-wing sites just looking for stuff to scrutinize. This is entirely different than the weird leftist proclivity for getting themselves offended; it's a deep and abiding intellectual fascination with the language used by leftist minds.

I've always had the sense that there was a vast and unbridgeable chasm between the left and right, probably going back to the days when I first read Fred Kerlinger's Liberalism and Conservatism in college. There's much to hate about that book, including Kerlinger's questionable statistical methods and reductive treatment of conservatism as merely modern Burkean pseudo-libertarianism, but his criterial referents theory (according to which political attitudes can be measured according to the criteriality attached to certain ideological referents, e.g., "gun control," "abortion," "divorce," etc. -- which was a relatively novel idea at the time) was nevertheless an interesting one because it exposed the inadequacy of the traditional polar conception of politics. Instead, he found that liberals and conservatives didn't just stake out opposite positions on the same referents: they were fundamentally different in terms of the referents they valued. The liberalism and conservatism subscales of his social attitudes scale correlated at a mere -.30 or so, meaning that variance in liberalism subscores could explain, at best, around 9% of the variance in conservatism subscores. That's not nothing, but it's certainly not a lot, and considerably less than the 100% suggested by the typical formulation according to which L = -C.

Ever since then, the realization dawned on me that the left-right split isn't merely just a difference in values (autonomy/equality for the left, tradition/authortiy/duty for the right). The world looks fundamentally different to leftists than it does to rightists. I can't conceive how they see it -- any more than I can, say, conceive of how a person with synesthesia experiences the world -- but I know the difference is there, and I feel like the way that leftists write offers some glimpse into their worldview.

It seems to me that liberalism is characterized in part by (and may well spring largely from) what I like to call spiritual autism. Autism spectrum disorders tend to be characterized by a few neurodevelopmental deficiencies, particularly in the areas of communication, social interaction, and sometimes impulse control. The ordinary liberal's spiritual deficiencies mirror these.

First, I've documented before the extent to which the rise of liberalism in the West has coincided with the corruption of language. Leftists just don't grasp the language with which spiritual matters might be discussed. Consider, for instance, the pathetic delusion that Christian love is nothing more than drippy affection and brainless tolerance, rather than an act of will. In this vein, I've noticed a tendency among liberals to write in a manner that is painfully literal, bereft of even the slightest concession to metaphorical ornamentation. I used to think that when liberals describe, for instance, God as a genocidal tyrant-in-the-sky, they were merely being superficial, blasphemous assholes. Now, though, I think they describe Him that way because they genuinely think religious people see Him that way -- because they cannot grasp that it is proper for God to ordain the deaths of men (even the deaths of whole races of men, such as the child-sacrificing, demon-worshipping Canaanites) and proper for man to obey the will of God, Who creates and sustains him.

I think this communicative deficiency produces profound frustration in those liberals who make an effort to engage religion (and the vast majority don't). This is why liberals and atheists alway seem so damn angry, not to mention deliberately impious. Since liberals cannot grasp religion on its own terms, those who can't reduce it to mere universalized liberalism (God as tolerance) reduce it instead to a collection of superstitions which people need to be shocked out of by means of grossly socially inappropriate displays of desecration. Impiety and sacrilege are to the liberal as aggressiveness and destructive tantrums are to the autist: both spring from an inability to mentally acquire and adhere to proper spiritual or social roles.

If this is true, liberals are in quite a sorry state. The world to them must seem irrational and intimidating; it can hardly seem otherwise. They ought to remain in our prayers, even as we continue to fight them and the false and evil creed their deficiencies lead them to defend.

Bastards!

Not content to have merely ruined the institution of the family, the left has seen fit to destroy even the word, by associating it with their greedy, atheistic utilitarianism:

Don’t think of it as the federal government but as your “federal family.”

In a Category 4 torrent of official communications during the approach and aftermath of Hurricane Irene, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has repeatedly used the phrase “federal family” when describing the Obama administration’s response to the storm.

The Obama administration didn’t invent the phrase but has taken it to new heights.

“Under the direction of President Obama and Secretary Janet Napolitano, the entire federal family is leaning forward to support our state, tribal and territorial partners along the East Coast,” a FEMA news release declared Friday as Irene churned toward landfall.

The G-word — “government” — has been nearly banished, with FEMA instead referring to federal, state and local “partners” as well as “offices” and “personnel.”

“'Government’ is such a dirty word right now,” says Florida State University communication professor Davis Houck. “Part of what the federal government does and any elected official does is change the terms of the language game into terms that are favorable to them.”

“Family” can evoke favorable thoughts of motherhood and security. But it can also conjure images of Big Brother and organized crime.

Bastards. Ruining our words and stuff.

The Lexicography of Leftism

I don't know why, but the way leftists write fascinates me. I've explored left-wing lexicography before, and I recall penning one post I can't seem to find now (perhaps I never actually published it) pondering if there's some kind of book that people are given upon their induction into the leftist... illuminati or whatever.

I don't mean merely the themes they tend to talk about, but the actual styles in which they write. There is just such a style, and it's qualitatively different from the way right-wingers write. I think it says a lot about the idea that attitudes are formed by personality traits, or rather that certain personality traits predispose people to be attracted to particular sets of attitudes. Accordingly, I was hardly surprised about Charles Johnson's remorseless shift to the left the last few years; he'd always written like a leftist, with the characteristic snark and sarcasm, the pained efforts to sound clever, the insufferable moral supremacy -- he was really just going home.

So I was naturally interested in the wrathful outpouring over at Jezebel in response to Roosh's creating a new meme blasting the vapidity and general nastiness (body, mind, and soul) of American women -- a meme that the ladies at Jezebel have, perhaps unwittingly, only reinforced. Emotionality strips people of their intellectual pretensions, I think; it boils them down to who they really are, how they really think. Their rage speaks to me.

First, their woeful misreading of the average IMF reader is pretty noteworthy. Ms. Ryan evidently thinks they're a crew of sexually frustrated self-styled "nice guys" who, in their bitterness, resort to rationalizations about the undesirability of American women. I'm sure that's true of at least some IMF readers, but they hardly seem to be a majority. Many, certainly, were "nice guys" once, a long time ago. Life experience changed that, as it often does -- not only the life experience of being rejected romantically for being a nerdy suck-up but also the experience of sexual success due to repudiating that suck-uppery. I certainly don't think most any of them would call themselves "nice guys" anymore, much less are they bepimpled virginal basement-dwellers. I think of them more as the guys from Swingers (who hang out, eat pizza, and play SNES games for fun) than the guys from... you know, The Big Bang Theory or something, who have scheduled weekly Halo tournaments and actually attach in-group status to the outcome of those games. So although they may  be bitter, few of their other descriptors actually stick to the IMF readership; for the most part, they're simply bizarrely inaccurate and wholly oblivious to this fact.

I suppose I can't fault Ms. Ryan for not grasping the nuances of IMF readers' personality traits. She's clearly not a regular reader. People tend to fall back on reliable memes when they are unsure how to proceed; but it's important that this is the meme she chose. Assuming that everyone who doesn't like you must not like you because you're better than them is very telling, indeed. I'll leave it up to you to decide what, exactly, it says about them.

There is, of course, the obligatory reference to somebody's "pointless existence." People have been using that phrase so long now it kind of grates on my cornea just to see it in text. Pointless existence, sometimes rendered meaningless existence, and usually welded into a sentence containing some variant of the word justify. Ugh. For people generally so enthralled to the fashions of the day, you think they'd grab a thesaurus rather than trot out cliched crap. Why not glitz it up and write, I dunno, rationalize your purposeless state of being or something?

I count the appearance of some variant of "racist" five times and "misogynist" three times, both in the main post and in the comments section. I'm frankly surprised they didn't appear more frequently. Of course, nothing about the meme is racist. "American," after all, is a nationality, not a race -- at any rate the argument is that the culture of American femininity is defective (which belies the claim of misogyny, too). Nor is it racist or misogynist to claim that women of some other race (or nationality; the commenters refer to women of eastern European descent, but again, eastern European is not a race) are preferable to American women, as, again, the argument is that Asians and eastern Europeans exhibit more desirable cultural traits, not that they're some kind of racially pure übermenschen. At any rate, our friend Inigo said it best.

And finally, the sarcasm. It abounds. It's right there in the title and appears four or five times in the body of the (rather short) post itself. I often think there's a peculiar psychology to sarcasm. As a means of humor, it's wholly ineffective (I once used the term sarcasmosis to describe the act of sucking all the humor out of a situation by means of excessive sarcasm). It literally consists of nothing but saying back to someone what they just said in a slightly more nasally voice. Any babboon capable of mashing a keyboard with his balled-up fists could, given sufficient time, emulate sarcasm with a startling degree of accuracy. But Ferdinand Bardamu has already pointed out how unfunny and blindingly literal their memes are, and I don't think they're stupid enough not to realize it, which means their sarcasm serves some other purpose. I've often felt, although I have no evidence that this is the case, that sarcasm is a response to feelings of oppression and hopelessness. The sarcastic person feels ground down by the weight of the world, and resorts to petty verbal sniping at those who complain about woes that, in their mind, pale in comparison to their own. I suppose being in thrall to an ideology that harps endlessly about unjust power dynamics, the oppressive of social structures, the futility of nonrevolutionary movements, etc., would turn me into a bitter, black-hearted harridan, too.

Before anyone asks, no, I have no plans to examine the lexicography of the right. For one thing, being a right-winger myself, I can't get the perspective on it necessary to write a good one. (To paraphrase Machiavelli, you see the mountain best from the bottom of the valley; you see the valley best from the top of the mountain). And second, I don't really read mainstream right-wing blogs. Frankly, they bore the hell out of me.

On the Vileness of Modern Pseudoconservatives

I spend a lot of time beating up on liberals, I know. Let's take a moment to remember that the modern "right" aren't our friends, either.

Remember Jonah Goldberg having the temerity to draw a connection between de Maistre and the Nazis? Or his and Norman Podhoretz's celebrations of sodomy? Or his and Ross Douthat's celebration of feminism?

Don't forget the endorsement of the abolition of marriage from Fox News, for Heaven's sake! Or their silence concerning (or even mild support of) the forced homosexualizaiton of the Armed Forces.

Let's also not forget the warmongering chickenhawkery, or the emotive revolutionary bluster we hear from "conservatives" any time some policy is enacted that they dislike (forgetting, always, the Biblical admonition to submit to authority). Their revolutionary impulse easily matches that of the left, which I suppose stands to reason; but the left is at least honest about its revolutionary ambitions, as history has amply demonstrated.

These are the people who, in the interests of fighting the really important battles of making sure we get payroll tax cuts that offer people like me a whopping $8 a biweekly paycheck, have agreed to shut up about our ongoing abortion holocaust, or at least agree to do nothing really serious to put an end to it. And who cheer, in the interests of supporting the troops, the taxpayer-subsidized glorification of sodomy.

To Hell with them.

It's Election Time

I absolutely detest American elections and everything about them, not least of all the hysteria. Each successive election is said to be even more important than the last -- the stakes are higher this time! the future of the republic hinges on this pivotal moment! -- yet this is the exact opposite of the truth: each successive election (regardless of who wins) further cements the leftist consensus and witnesses the further organizational, intellectual, spiritual, and moral collapse of the right.

So vilely leftist has modern political discourse become that the chief criticism of Ron Paul circulating among ostensibly right-wing "thinkers" is that he isn't sufficiently left-wing. Check out Jonah Goldberg's criticisms of Paul not being antiracist enough. (Goldberg... how I detest the man. Henceforth, his name shall ne'er be written again on this blog: he shall be known only as Dagon -- in the Lovecraftian, not the Amoritic, sense).

Look, there's plenty not to like about Paul's politics, but this isn't it. Why in the world should the right be enforcing the left's strictures, especially when we all know and complain about their obvious bogosity? I'm no fan of white nationalim (which I regard as dangerously misguided, especially given that the majority of reactionaries' enemies are white -- and almost certainly a majority of whites are reactionaries' enemies), but surely we can acknowledge that particularist loyalty, properly constrained, is generally a good? Must we indulge the left's inquisitorial impulse? Must we adopt their irrational value system? Must we embrace their puritanical spirit?

Break out your barf bags; this election's going to be especially nauseating.

On the Desecration of Flags

I remember briefly obsessing about flag-burning once during my college years; I seem to recall a flag-burning Constitutional amendment came within a vote or two in the Senate of being sent to the states. I also remember vacillating wildly about the issue. I haven't given it much thought since then, mainly because no one else has, but now I see it's back in the news. What are we reactionaries to make of it? (Note that by flag desecration I mean any act directed toward a flag which is aimed at sullying it, such as burning it in protest, cutting or tearing it, trampling it, or smearing it with foul substances; the burning of a flag in accordance with protocols for its proper retirement are not of interest here).

First, let's orient the discussion toward its proper object. There is no sense complaining that such a ban would run afoul of anyone's rights. There is no natural right to do it that I can discern, and whether or not there ought to be a civil right to that effect is precisely what's at issue here. At best, one could make a case that banning flag desecration would run afoul of other people's natural rights. But that only gets us so far: justice itself entails the restriction of rights when the crime is of sufficient gravity to justify it. Thus the murderer loses his freedom of movement when he is imprisoned, while lesser crimes are punished with proportional restrictions or impositions; in other words, it doesn't go beyond "the means must be suited to the ends"; it says nothing about the character of the end. So the proper question ought to be, "Is the desecration of the flag a grave enough matter to justify legal enforcement of its prohibition?"

Probably so, although there's certainly room for debate about the extent or form of the prohibition. A flag is an existential representation of a group of people, an expression of their self-consciousness as a people and not merely a mass of alienated persons. In a sense, then, to desecrate the flag is to consciously attack the deliberate self-expression of a united people. Insofar as social unity is a good thing, and thus a thing to which people have a right, they also have a right to demand that the symbols through which this unity is expressed be protected, and thus a right to forbid the desecration of those symbols. There is a reason, after all, that it's called flag desecration -- that is, de-sacralization, or the removal of a thing's sacred character -- and not merely flag destruction.

To the modern, people's objection to the desecration of the national flag is incomprehensible: it's just a variegated bit of fabric, after all. But in registering this objection, he betrays nothing but the autistic insensibility of his soul to the importance of representations in organizing man's social life; he also exposes himself as a materialist (and, consequently, exposes the vacuity of the idea of "values" in a materialist ontology, despite his objection that it need not lead to nihilism). He may acknowledge the fact that flag-burners themselves don't feel as if they're just burning a colorful strip of cloth, but in doing so he will probably say that the flag is nothing more than a receptacle for the projections of collective consciousness. But in saying this, he has given the game away. The flag is an expression of the people's self-consciousness, and this is what endows it with value; that it would still serve this purpose even if the flag had a different shape, color, or content changes nothing. It's true that any given flag is an arbitrary design; but it's true only in the sense that any given man has made an arbitrary choice of wife -- it is not then follow that his wife doesn't matter or that he has no duties toward her. Haecceity matters.

Conversely, another commonly-heard objection is that the flag is, indeed, a symbol -- but a symbol of freedom. Thus, the logic goes, prohibiting the kind of freedom of expression that allows a flag to be burned would be an insult to the flag, not a protection of it. (This is the logic hinted at in Michael Douglas' final speech in The American President). But this is very little more than propositional nationalism, that is, the idea of America not as a nation but as some sort of nebulous ideal; we might also call it universalized nationalism. As such, it is runs afoul of the same absurdities as propositional nationalism does: it means that "American" corresponds not to national citizenship but to adherence to some ideal. We know this is false, though, or at least that no one takes it seriously, because there are plenty of Americans who don't believe in that ideal and plenty of non-Americans who do. Clearly, "American" is not an ideology but a nationality: it relates to identity, concrete, particular, and historical. To be American is not (necessarily or exclusively) to be a democrat or a libertarian or a capitalist but to be a citizen of the United States, subject to the authority of its government and sharing in a common culture, heritage, and network of traditions as those who also share this identity. A second response to this conflation of the flag-as-freedom is that it's obviously self-contradicting: if the flag is a symbol of freedom, why do protestors burn it and not some other symbol? Because they hate freedom? Why, then, do they insist on the freedom to burn the flag? Protestors themselves never think they're burning the flag as an expression of hatred for freedom but as an expression of hatred for the political expression of the people, that is, of this or that government (usually because of this or that action they disapprove of). In short, the modern can oppose a prohibition on flag desecration only by emptying both the flag and the act of burning it of symbolic content -- in other words, stripping both the object and the protest of meaning. (I suppose that is basically modernity in a nutshell: the intentional destruction of meaning for the sake of enthroning a subsequently meaningless freedom).

A final objection is that prohibiting flag desecration is unnecessary, either because it won't stop people from desecrating them or because it rarely ever happens. The latter is probably the best possible objection: that there are simply more pressing issues at hand. This may be true, but note that it is an argument related to the circumstances of the present time. It says nothing about whether or not such a law would be good in principle. As for the former objection, it is not necessary at all that the law actually suceed in stopping anyone from burning the flag: it is enough for it to serve as an expression of the common will, that this particular symbol has meaning and value and will be protected.

So the flag is a concrete symbol of a concrete people, an expression of themselves as a common people; and insofar as communal self-expression is a good, it follows that destruction of communal self-expression is an evil, and thus that the people are within their rights to demand that it not be permitted.

What form, then, should the prohibition take? Should flag desecration be a misdemeanor or a felony? Should it be punished with a fine (if so, how much?), imprisonment (if so, for how long?), or both? Should police seek to actively prevent, even with physical violence if necessary, the desecration of the flag, or should it only be punished after the fact? These are valid questions and require a good deal of reflection (especially on ethical first principles); they are certainly beyond the scope of this post, which is only intended to establish the validity in principle of the right of a people to insist that their national symbols be protected. I will say that the importance of protecting those symbols increases as national unity weakens, so that in times of crisis, it may well be more important to protect the flag in times of peace.

Bear in mind I say this as someone who has only a very generalized affection for his country -- there are a few nations in the world today quite as deserving of punishment and reprimand as this one.

The Secular Case Against Gay "Marriage"

Let us grant, for a moment, the left's prejudices regarding separation of church and state, and say that natural law is no basis for civil law. Can we still fashion a useful argument against gay "marriage"? The left, generally, says no: that there's no reason to oppose it outside of religious fundamentalism.

To the contrary, given even a modest appreciation for the purpose of law, even when you discard all religious context, there's still no good reason to endorse gay "marriage." Here's the five-step argument:

1. Laws are promulgated to serve the public interest.

2. The care and disposition of children is a matter of public interest.

3. Heterosexual unions have an innate tendency to produce children.

4. Therefore, society has an interest in heterosexual unions, and is within its rights to attach its impetus to them by way of marriage.

5. Homosexual unions have no innate tendency to produce children and therefore are not in the public interest. QED.

To this, the leftist may object, "But not all married couples have children." So? What is endorsed is the capacity for producing children. Not all people who get engineering degrees go on to practice engineering, either; no one imagines we ought to retroactively revoke engineering degrees financed in part with government student aid for that reason.

Or the leftist (betraying his nominalist prejudices) might argue, "But not all heterosexual couples are even fertile." Sure, but how is the state going to figure this out without running afoul of privacy protections (e.g., inquiring about the state of your uterus) or else making an arbitrary judgment (e.g., couples who are 33% fertile may marry but those who are 32% fertile may not). Hands off my body, dude!

Think of it this way. Why do we have a drinking age? To keep alcohol from falling into the hands of those who are not sufficiently mature to accept the responsibility of alcohol consumption. But how is the state going to assess maturity? Are they going to make you show up for a class, take a battery of psychological tests to assess your affective and cognitive maturity levels, make you wait 6-8 weeks while a group of grad students in psychometrics score them, report the results to the state, and then issue an endorsement to your driver's license to let you purchase alcohol? That'd be insane. We use age as a proxy, as there's a decent correlation between age and maturity. Likewise, there's a pretty decent relation of sex to fertility: in fact, sexual complementarity is a necessary (if insufficient) condition for procreation.

Ultimately, this comes down to: what is the reason for gay "marriage"? If there's no valid social reason for heterosexual marriage, the proper response is not to redefine marriage but to abolish it altogether. Promoting happiness or endorsing love or whatever is no compelling public interest: the state has no business legislating on anything as insubstantial as the whims of the human heart. Even if it were the case, as leftists say, that there were no good reason to oppose gay "marriage," there absence of a reason to oppose something is not itself a reason to support it.

Of course, there is no reason to support gay "marriage." The push for it is just the typical leftist scrabbling for limited resources by wedge minorities in the sunset of Western civilization.

The Case Against Gay Marriage (and Why Everyone Should Care)

The degenerates' lobby continues its remorseless march through the institutions of American society -- and if you believe certain alt-right bloggers, apparently we're all supposed to not care.

Such is the story from Ferdinand Bardamu, Advocatus Diaboli, Alte, and others. From Ferd:

No really, I don’t care, and neither should you. If you’re expending any serious amount of energy opposing gay marriage, there’s something seriously wrong with your head. Defending the integrity of marriage in America at this point is like defending the chastity of a crack whore. No-fault divorce and feminist family courts, among other things, have so debased marriage that letting gays join the club isn’t going to so much as leave a ripple in the pond. Marriage has been long dead, and all the people in the gay marriage debate are doing is playing tug-of-war with the corpse.

And from AD (a deeply unimpressive and unoriginal thinker whose close connection to Ferd and the alt-right hub that is IMF makes him a useful barometer of whatever horrible thing the alt-right is about to adopt or succumb to):

I have a question-

Why do some people oppose gay marriage?

Given the absolutely pathetic state of heterosexual marriage in developed countries, especially the USA, is it even possible to debase the “institution” of marriage any further? What part of this pathetic institution can you still desecrate?

Have you ever seen shows like Bridezilla? If you think that they are fiction, you have probably never overheard a group of women talking about their upcoming wedding. Here is the unpleasant truth-

‘Empowered’ women have debased heterosexual marriage beyond repair.

Two guys marrying each other might actually raise the state of marriage. In any case, the married life of two guys is likely to be less fucked up than its heterosexual equivalent.

Some commenters at IMF argue that we should focus our efforts on combatting financial fraud rather than wasting it on gay marriage.

First, I agree completely that financial fraud is a very important issue and should be first and foremost in the attentions of our political class, especially because it's a side-effect of our unsustainable and catastrophe-bound monetary system. But that's a condemnation of the left, for distracting us from the issue by harping on about peripheral ones, not a condemnation of the right for resisting them.

Financial fraud stems from the collapse of public morality of which "gay marriage" is part and parcel. Homosexual behavior, to the extent it is self-evidently contrary to natural law, is also part of that collapse. And all morality stands and falls together. There is no sense arguing that one has an obligation to respect justice while arguing that the foundation for that justice -- that is, morality, from which sexual morality also derives -- doesn't exist or is irrelevant, as many alt-right bloggers and readers do.

But they cannot do otherwise, because to do so would be to expose the rank disorder of their own lifestyles. Most of the "game" practitioners at IMF do to unsuspecting women what bankers do to unsuspecting borrowers: they take advantage of their ignorance and simple-mindedness to screw them (literally in the former sense, figuratively in the latter). Thus, their complaints about financial fraud and the injustice propagated by our feminism-mired legal system amount to so much utilitarian argument from self-interest: they have no sound moral basis from which to criticize either, after all, since it would entail criticism of themselves, as well.

To quickly get back on topic, it's worth asking ourselves what the purpose of marriage is. The left says that justice demands that gays be allowed to marry, but obviously that is only the case if it is unjust -- that is, contrary to the purpose of marriage -- that they are denied from marrying in the first place. If "same-sex marriage" is obviously contrary to the essential purpose of marriage, then permitting it is unjust; and if it is not contrary, then forbidding it is unjust. Either way, justice demands some positive position on same-sex marriage: "I don't care" is simply not acceptable, and is in fact a position borne of thoughtless cowardice.

Marriage as both a social and a legal institution historically was understood to arise from natural law: that is, an understanding of the general normative behavior of things which derives not from convention but from nature itself. It's a simple observation to note that men and women's physical sexual configurations exist and are different from one another because some aspect of human nature (specifically, the need to propagate the species by procreation) demands it. Thus the simple reality of physical sex (that is, the male/female dichotomy) points toward some end: procreation.

Because procreation can naturally occur only in the context of the reality of the sexual dichotomy and because male/female conjugal relations are therefore the basis for the continuity of society and the species, a number of rights and obligations follow. First, because it is good for parents to care for their children (in the sense that nature demands that they do so), parents have both an obligation to care for their children and a right to do so against the claims of society; likewise, children have a right to be cared for, and by their own parents. Marriage law is simply a legal framework within which these rights and obligations are subject to society's impetus -- society, after all, has a vested interest in the care and disposition of children, since raising children is not only a matter of individual good but of the health of the community and the state, as well.

Clearly, then, "love" is not the purpose of marriage. We might say that it is a necessary condition for marriage to operate but not a sufficient one, else it would imply a right to incest that virtually no society has ever recognized. Moreover, there is no compelling reason why the state ought to legislate based on the whims of the human heart; if it were, in fact, the case that marriage law was simply about recognizing love and commitment, that would be a case for abolishing it entirely, not extending it to include others. Obviously, "commitment" is not the purpose of marriage, either, since commitment is not an intrinsically good end in itself. Parents, after all, are generally speaking committed to their children, and children likewise to their parents, but no one would term this relationship a "marriage" (even though it, too, clearly involves love). I'd argue, too, that to say that commitment is the purpose of marriage is rather a non sequitur, since commitment is, by nature, rather causally prior to marriage.

Nor is "consent" a foundation of marriage, except in the sense that it is necessary but not sufficient for it. For one thing, to say that "the purpose of marriage is to consent to be married" is profoundly retarded circular reasoning. For another, to say that consent is a sufficient basis for marriage would mean (a) that there is no compelling reason for the state to limit marriage to two people (which would imply a right to polygamy that no advanced society has, to my knowledge, ever endorsed); (b) that there is likewise no reason to limit marriage to human beings (which would imply a right to bestiality* that, again, no advanced society has, to my knowledge, ever endorsed); and (c) that there is no reason to forbid people from, say, marrying inanimate objects for which they have fetishes (like the neurotic child-abuse victim who recently "married" the Eiffel Tower and apparently masturbates with a bit of fence post for which she's developed an attraction).

Rather, the purpose of marriage is intrinsically bound up with man's conjugal nature. It is impossible to separate it. Marriage is heterosexual sex (although not all heterosexual sex is marriage). Thus, "same-sex marriage" is an ontological non sequitur.

The usual objections to traditional marriage are easily dispatched by an understanding of natural law. Because natural law is concerned with the norms that arise from nature, marriage, too, is normative: that is, because the essence of man and woman is fertile, the essence of marriage is simply the union of a man and woman, even if individual couples may, by happenstance, be unable to have children. A  marriage in which, say, the woman has had a histerectomy and therefore cannot have children may not as perfectly instantiate the essence of marriage as a fertile couple,  but it is nevertheless still a marriage. By contrast, "same-sex marriage" does no such thing because a same-sex union is intrinsically infertile.

Of course, a gay  man can still (hypothetically) have children with a woman. But under the law, he is free to marry that woman if he chooses. The typical leftist response, that people said the same thing about laws against interracial marriage (i.e., "blacks can still marry other blacks") and that opposition to gay marriage is thereby analagous to irrational racial bigotry is, again, a non sequitur: race is irrelevant to the end of marriage; sex is not.

This is what conservatives mean when they say that gay marriage is an affront to the nature of marriage: by treating marriage as any ordinary contract, it reduces it from the status of an organic institution arising from human nature to the level of a manufacturer's warranty on an old air-conditioning unit.

What's most maddening about all this is that gays in no meaningful way had their rights restricted under a traditional marriage regime. As Reason points out (in a pro-gay marriage puff piece that proves decisively that mainstream libertarianism is really just left-wing libertinism), gays were already free to go to churches and exchange rings and vows and even go around for the rest of their lives saying they're "married" and absolutely no one could do anything to stop them. And, of course, if they truly wished to enjoy marriage in a manner consistent with their nature, they could foreswear their homosexuality and  marry someone of the opposite sex. Yet this, apparently, wasn't enough: they demanded not just the freedom to practice their degeneracy but the whole of society's endorsement of it, an endorsement to which they were in no way entitled by natural law or the common good. And by way of their bullying and the sinister judicial warfare of their leftist co-conspirators, they have finally succeeded in getting that endorsement at the expense of all reason, justice, and order.

Alte, a Catholic, comes closest to making sense here:

Yeah, I don’t care either. Notice I have not been reporting on it. It’s all irrelevant. Legal marriage is totally and permanently dead. Over. Done for. The RCC needs to stop defending it, and start boycotting it.

Take a stand on something, Mother Church.

If the church hadn't already completely surrendered in the cultural war, it'd have arrested this trend years ago -- for instance, by excommunicating all the pro-gay "marriage" Catholic politicians for scandalizing the public, and perhaps even absolving married Catholics of their moral obligation to obey the legal terms of their marital contract, which has been absurdly renegotiated without any respect to their own conditions. The wages of Vatican II is moral confusion and impotence.

If the right (even the alt-right) follows suit and lays down its arms because gay marriage is "irrelevant," they will forfeit preemptively every battle to come. If morality -- including the justice that the bankers' gross criminal behavior demands -- is all a matter of personal subjectivity and irrational value judgments (a concession automatically made by declaring one's uninterest in the sanctity of the marital institution), then there is no such thing as justice, and therefore no reason to care about its violation. Seriously, can you even think of any reason to care that is not somehow related to natural law? By giving up on this, you surrender all rights in perpetuity to complain that modern society is not organized to your liking. Not that most of the alt-right would ever do anything but complain, anyway.

What happens next? These few inches being grudgingly conceded, the relativist left will proceed to demand the next several miles. Within a decade, there will be a concerted movement to compel state recognition of polygamous relationships, probably spearheaded by some celebrity degenerate, most likely in the form of expanding "civil union laws" to allow multiple-person contracts. (Ultimately, people united under such laws will be folded into marriage law by Supreme Court fiat). To the extent legalized polygamy is opposed by the left at all, it will only be because of its continuing association with the Mormons, although that may not prove to be too strong a consideration since it would demand just as equally censure of some Muslims. Prohibitions against bestiality and certain forms of incest will probably be eased (don't believe me? At least one leftist paragon is already on board). No doubt the future will be one in which people are permitted to sign contracts in life to sell their corpses after death to necrophiliacs, or allowed to donate their bodies for that purpose in a manner similar to how they're currently permitted to donate their organs.

And why not? If you divorce "marriage" (indeed, the sexual act itself) from its procreative context, all manners of absurdities follow. There is nothing except personal distaste stopping one from rationalizing those absurdities as "good." And personal taste, as the devolution of attitudes toward homosexual behavior just these last ten years suggest, is subject to revision.

*Of course, the libertarian (who sees consent as the basis for all social interactions and cannot even conceive of a nonconensual arrangement) will respond that we forbid bestiality because the animal doesn't consent. But we do not get animals consent before we kill, cook, and eat them, or sheer their excess wool to make clothes, or test hygiene products on them. Animals are by nature subordinate to man, and thus in his interactions with them it is his consent alone that ought to matter. Even this, I think, would be outrageous: to claim that consent can legitimate just any interaction with an animal. Man has a duty to cultivate the capacities that are essential to his nature, and one of these capacities is compassion, which obviously requires that animals be treated, if not necessarily with the "respect" that would accrue to a human person, certainly with no more violence or cruelty than would be justified.

**The liberal will argue that this is a "slippery slope fallacy," betraying in the process his total ignorance of rhetorical principles. The slippery slope argument is not a fallacy in and of itself; it is fallacious only when it rises (or falls, rather), to the level of a non sequitur because no clear logical relationship is demonstrated between the present act and the forewarned future ones. I have clearly so demonstrated a relationship: if sex does not exist for the purpose of procreation, and if marriage does not exist to attach society's impetus to the intrinsically fertile heterosexual relationship, then there is literally no compelling reason whatsoever to impose any further limitations on what sexual behaviors may be tolerated.

The Great Depression: Then and Now

The tipping point for economic collapse is coming up quickly, perhaps as early as next year. We've been through this sort of mess once before, but the America of 2012 is a vastly different nation than was the America of 1929. Let's take a few moments to examine these differences.

First, while we're heading for depression, the coming one will be markedly more severe. GDP contracted a total of 30% in four years; the necessary correction to bring GDP in line with our present levels of economic output will be more on the order of 50%.

This time, public distrust, suspicion, and contempt of the American government is at an all-time high.

This time, our ethnic minorities are considerably more numerous, more radicalized, and more violent, to the point that they are constantly shooting people over sneakers, getting arrested for losing their minds in fast-food restaurants, and stabbing their coworkers with screwdrivers.

This time, virtually no one is a farmer or even knows how to farm (back then, virtually everyone was capable of at least subsistence farming).

This time, society is in thrall to an ideology that regards pain and suffering as the worst possible evil and suicide as a perfectly valid means of avoiding such.

This time, dependence on the government is already at a record high and there will be no money left to help out the poor.

This time, there are clear villains -- the financial-political complex.

This time, the American identity as such is considerably weakened after decades of propositional-nation nonsense, mass immigration, and political correctness.

This time, we share our porous southern border with a violent narco-state (in fairness, this isn't much worse than the violent atheistic despotism we shared it with back in the 20's).

All of this is reason to suspect, to quote Newsweek's Mark Thomas, that this time, "there will be violence."

Why Our Debt Crisis Could Become a Constitutional Crisis

The federal government is Constitutionally forbidden from repudiating its debt under the 14th Amendment, said the Supreme Court about 75 years ago:

The government's contention thus raises a question of far greater importance than the particular claim of the plaintiff. On that reasoning, if the terms of the government's bond as to the standard of payment can be repudiated, it inevitably follows that the obligation as to the amount to be paid may also be repudiated. The contention necessarily imports that the Congress can disregard the obligations of the government at its discretion, and that, when the government borrows money, the credit of the United States is an illusory pledge.

We do not so read the Constitution. There is a clear distinction between the power of the Congress to control or interdict the contracts of private parties when they interfere with the exercise of its constitutional authority and the power of the Congress to alter or repudiate the substance of its own engagements when it has borrowed money under the authority which the Constitution confers. In authorizing the Congress to borrow money, the Constitution empowers the Congress to fix the amount to be borrowed and the terms of payment. By virtue of the power to borrow money 'on the credit of the United States,' the Congress is authorized to pledge that credit as an assurance of payment as stipulated, as the highest assurance the government can give, its plighted faith. To say that the Congress may withdraw or ignore that pledge is to assume that the Constitution contemplates a vain promise; a pledge having no other sanction than the pleasure and convenience of the pledgor. This Court has given no sanction to such a conception of the obligations of our government.

First, let's take a look again at what the 14th Amendment actually says:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

As I argued yesterday, there is nothing in the plain text of the amendment that requires Congress to actually repay its debt -- only to acknowledge its validity. Properly understood, the amendment merely asserts that the debt issued in accordance with an act of Congress is the federal government's debt, while debt issued by illegitimate authorities is not. There is nothing in it that forbids Congress from repudiating, in another act of law, the debt it previously accrued, or to restructure its debt, renegotiate the payment schedule, or otherwise modify its obligations.

Nothing in the main text of the Constitution, either, forbids repudiation:  Article I, section 8 merely grants Congress the power "To borrow money on the credit of the United States." However, given the Court's decision in Perry v. United States, it is now the case that there is a Constitutional obligation to repay debt. In other words, the requirement to pay debt is now a Constitutional requirement, and to repudiate debt is a necessarily illegitimate and unconstitutional act.

This is a profound problem.

In 1935, the Court essentially acted to shackle the republic to its finances -- forever. Our debt situation is, at the moment, bearable, but painful: if we act to balance the budget now, we will only need to run a primary surplus of $400 billion or so annually to amortize our debt. But we're not going to balance our budget now. Most likely, we're going to settle for relatively minor cuts and tax hikes paired with a debt ceiling increase that will result in an immediate credit downgrade by the major ratings agencies, followed by an increase in borrowing costs. That increase will widen the deficit (probably erasing the savings made by the cuts Congress previously agreed to) and make our debt situation worse. Very likely, we will enter a credit-downgrade spiral that will be progressively harder and harder for us to climb out of.

No matter how unreasonable or even mathematically impossible it becomes to finance our debt, we will never be able to repudiate it.

The only way to escape the impossible situation we wil find ourselves in, therefore, will be to repudiate the Constitution itself.