Patriarchy hates homosexuality and punishes it severely. But have you ever wondered why it hates it so much? Why it feels that homosexuality must be given the biggest disincentives possible? What are they so afraid of? What fuels their persistent and clearly unsupported belief that homosexuality is spreading and that any exposure to it will lead people down the wrong path?

Why are they so afraid that something they say is the most disgusting and awful thing ever will start catching on?

Because patriarchy breeds homosexuality. And deep down, it knows this. In fact, in a sense, patriarchy itself is very gay, and I think that male homosexuality has played a part in the history of patriarchy.

The most obvious way that patriarchy breeds homosexuality is via sexual segregation. Anyone who has heard about what goes on in prisons knows that sexual segregation leads to opportunistic homosexuality.

Now imagine that, but pervasive throughout the lives of young males. From birth till college, they are kept apart from women by the established patriarchs who don’t want better-looking youthful men full of hormones poaching “their” women.

So all that is around when they are going through puberty, and more importantly sexual imprinting, is other males. Young, old, equal, superior, fulfilling every role in a functioning society (including “women’s work”), nothing but XY chromosomes as far as the eye can see.

In this world, females are alien, exotic creatures, rarely see up close and clad in unassailable virtue and protected (and enslaved) by a system that treats them as priceless possessions. In such a system, women seem not just unattainable but mysterious and thus powerful. The patriarchal system proclaims the rightness of hetrosexuality, but removes the opportunity.

In such a system, a high percentage of males are not just going to have sex with one another (that’s virtually guaranteed), they are going to sexually imprint on one another, and hence homosexuality is inculcated.

This happens because one of the most important components of our sexual imperative is the seeking of the most stimulating available target for one’s sexual attraction. Emphasis on availability. That’s why your dog humps your leg, and why you hear of the occasional bull moose “wooing” some farmer’s cow. It might not be the ideal sexual target, but it is the best of what is available, and lust can always overcome reluctance if it is left to build for long enough.

And when the most stimulating object around is another male….

In addition, patriarchal culture constantly reinforces the value of men and the unimportance of women, and treats manly virtues paramount and female virtues to be strictly for girls. It should then come as no surprise, then, that when it comes time to choose a partner, some of these males (especially the ones of low status) seek a partner with those same male virtues.

Once patriarchy goes past a certain point of no return, when the sexual segregation is nearly total and women are forbidden to show any female characteristics in public at all (again, because of the jealousy of old established patriarchs), the homosexuality of the culture becomes literal and things will inevitably slide towards male homosexuality.

That is what they are so afraid of and why they have to make a show of punishing homosexuality as harshly as they can in order to show to others and themselves that no matter how tempting it might be, homosexuality is not worth it.

Otherwise, why bother punishing it? We don’t dole out harsh punishments for doing things nobody actually wants to do. Nobody ever got burned at the stake or stoned to death for pounding a nail into their eyeball or setting their hair on fire. To harshly condemn and punish something, and talk about how easily it could spread, you have to believe that this thing is something everyone wants to do really badly and only the threat of the severest punishment and a culture where every man must continually assert and defend their heterosexuality can keep everybody from doing it.

Another way in which patriarchal culture breeds homosexuality is by encouraging men to stay at a prepubescent level of sexual development. The idea that all that women are good for is cooking, cleaning, and babies matches completely with how a little boy sees the opposite sex. A little boy literally cannot imagine what else women are for. And neither can patriarchy.

This sexual infantilization turns all women into “mommies”, and under that paradigm women can only be good mommies or bad mommies. Good mommies treat their men like spoiled babies, giving them whatever they want whenever they want, including sex. Bad mommies fail this very narrow and powerless role.

This is how the Greek version of patriarchy, which progressed to the point of women not even being allowed to leave the house, quickly became the era of “women for babies, men for fun”. Heterosexuality was nonexistent and you only had sex with women because you wanted to have lots of children (that she had to raise, of course) in order to impress other men.

Also, because patriarchy separates the sexes so thoroughly, it breeds gynephobia. What is mysterious is often frightening, and so men in a patriarchal society often fear women. And how do they express that fear?

Why, by punishing them and controlling them, of course. Misogyny is always an expression of the fear of women. Only someone who sees women as dangerous as an enraged bear will think that women have to be kept in chains.

And who is going to lead this fight against the power of women? The ones who fear women the most, the ones who don’t just see them as a threat but as competition for the attention of other males. Ones who understand that, from their point of view, women ruin everything because most men are primarily heterosexual and therefore no man can be a superior sexual target to any women as the women will always be more stimulating.

I am talking, of course, about gay men.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just gonna dash off a few thoughts while I try to get this extremely irritatingly timed allergy attack under control.

Damn you, generic Claritin, you’ve failed me again.

Let’s see… it’s a very smart, stylish, and dextrous movie, and I did enjoy watching it, but I can’t recommend it because it all seems very forced, contrived, and way too pleased with itself.

And I mean, the whole thing of having the main character being the screenwriter of the movie you are watching and ending it with him finishing the script is so verydone

I mean, Disney’s done it, for fuck’s sake.

And the way they throw around the word psychopath annoyed me. It was too much of a catchphrase, plus I think the screenwriter thought “psychopath” meant “crazy violent person who kills people”, and it’s far more than that.

But it has its good parts. Tom Waits has a small but memorable role and turns in a solid performance, which pleases me. Some of his performances in movies were… not so good. Which is fine… he’s a musician, not an actor.

But I am happier when not faced with the cognitive dissonance that inevitable ends with me feeling cringe-inducingly ashamed on his sake. Like I am watching a friend butcher a song on American Idol.

Fun fact : he was also good in Wristcutters : A Love Story.

And Christopher Walken is, of course, awesome in it.

Well, time to go, pills are kicking in. (That never stops being fun to say. )

I’ll talk to you nice people later today.

Another night, another review written in the wee hours of the morning. This could become a thing.

Nah. I hate things.

So, yup, just now finished watching the Goonies for the first time in my life. It feels good to finally tick off that box. It’s a seminal movie of the 80’s, it came out when I was just the right age for it, and went to movies a lot, and yet somehow I never saw it.

Maybe it never came to sleepy little Summerside. I must admit, it’s a tad spicy for a kid’s movie. The kids swear and like five minutes into the movie the kids are dealing with a stone penis. I was shocked but not in a bad way.

I actually found it refreshing, because, if we are being honest with ourselves, that’s how kids actually talk when there are no adults around to hear it.

And speaking of hearing, one of my favorite things about the move (spoiler : I loved it) is how rambunctiously enthusiastic the whole thing is. Sure, it’s noisy, and if simultaneous dialogue is a Bad Thing For Your To Be Around (BTFYTBA), steer clear of this movie because there’s tons of it.

It’s part of the movie’s charm for me. They clearly let the kids improvise their reactions to various things. Everything is done at a gloriously high level of energy that perfectly suits the kind of movie Spielberg was trying to make.

Basically, one that was exciting and fun all the way through, packed with all kinds of things kids love like pirates, treasure, really nasty bad guys (who also got to improv some), skeletons, secret doors, puzzle-based booby traps like in Indiana Jones, scares, thrills, and a super feel good ending.

Man, I loved that Super Happy Ending. All the kids and parents seemed genuinely overjoyed to see one another after all the kids had been through. I teared up, it was so beautiful! Made me want to hug my Mom.

Some day, I will come home again, Mom!

The whole movie is one long crazy ride, beginning to end. The only other thing I can think of with that kind of breathless non-stop pacing is A Stitch In Time by Madeline l’Engle. It’s awesome. I wish more stuff was like that!

What can I say, I was raised by television, I need a dense stimulation stream.

This is the kind of movie that I think of when people are annoying me by using “Spielbergian” as a pejorative. In his prime, Spielberg was magic. He made extraordinary entertainment that went way beyond the call of duty and that left a deep and powerful impression not only in the memory but in the imagination.

And in the culture, come to think of it. When everything that comes after your work uses things you invented in your work, you can call yourself a true auteur.

You didn’t change to fit the industry. You made the industry change to fit you instead.

I get all tingly in my creative parts just thinking about it.

Well, I have avoided it so far, but I guess this is as good a time as any to talk about Chunk.

Chunk is the fat kid. He’s obsessed with food (all comedy fat people are, more’s the pity), he’s quite high strung, and he is very clumsy and tends to break things.

All of this was true of me when this movie came out. If I had seen it in the theatre, my response to it might have been… complicated. And troubling.

Now, Chunk doesn’t get an entirely raw deal. He gets to save the day by showing up with Sloth near the end. And the fact that he gets to befriend Sloth in the first place is a win from my point of view, because I am all about befriending the friendless and looking past people’s issues to see the real person inside.

They never did explain why he’s such a mutant, though. I was not surprised, just a little disappointed. The movie made it clear that he’s the third Fratelli brother, and the other two aren’t lopsided Quasimodo looking motherfuckers.

What the hell was Ma Fratelli doing when she was pregnant with him? Work with fumes?

Oh, and Chunk gets to keep Sloth at the end, so to speak. That might not seem like a big win, but do you seriously think anyone is going to mess with the high strung little fat kid with Sloth around?

Not often, and never twice.

There’s little things that don’t quite make sense. But who cares? That would be a ridiculous thing to worry about in a movie like this. It’s nothing really major and the movie’s energy leaves little time for nitpicking anyhow.

This is the point where I should be able to give examples. But I can’t think of any. So they can’t have been that big a deal.

Honestly, I wonder if I was better off not seeing it until now. If I had seen it when it was in the theatres and I was a timid little kid, I might not have been able to appreciate it because it was too loud and chaotic for me.

Then again, I loved the hell out of Indian Jones, and that wasn’t exactly a naptime lullaby. So I dunno. Maybe I would have loved it twice as much then as I do now, and I love it a lot.

So yeah, you could say I recommend it. In fact, do it now. I’ll wait.

Very good! You have a lovely voice.

As long as you go into it expecting nothing more than a fun kid-sized ride, you will enjoy it as much as I did. Let you inner kid out to watch this and I guarantee he or she will have the time of their life.

Oh. And this is Spielberg World. Park your cynicism at the door. You won’t need it here.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Yes, I am going this at a weird time. I just finished watching the thing so I figured, might as well. Oh, and SPOILERS. Duh. )

That movie was way better than it had to be.

I’m serious. Hollywood could have totally gotten away with crapping out another fat culture turd with absolutely no soul, no spirit, and an eye-watering amount of contempt for the audience, but instead, they made something significantly better.

I guess it’s good to be Guillermo Del Toro. He has a lot of clout in The Biz these days, and this movie seems like a labour of love to me. Someone wanted to not just make this movie but to do it right.

And I have a lot of love and respect for people like that.

Now I am not saying this is the next Casablanca. It’s nobody’s idea of high cinema and nobody is going to be studying this movie in snooty movie courses. But only an idiot would expect it to be.

It’s your typical American corny action movie. You have your all American hero of the salt-of-the-earth New Yorker variety. You have the traumatic event early in the movie (monster kills his brother while they were psychically linked…. harsh!) that puts him into a funk for a long time (five years). This is where the hardassed boss of the anti-monster program finds him when the world needs his monster killing abilities again. There’s a female love interest/co-pilot, a hotheaded brash rival whose respect he eventually gains, characters you meet once and then again when it’s time for them to get killed, and of course, lots of cool giant robot versus monster fights.

I am serious. They are kickass.

But the older I get, the less I give a shit about originality, and I never gave many shits about it in the first place. I suppose that’s for the best. The older I get, the more things I have seen, and hence the harder it is for anything to strike me as entirely original. I try not to be jaded about it, but it’s not easy.

Anyhow, I did not go into this movie thinking it would be a beacon of originality.

Hell, I liked Avatar, and it was constructed entirely out of tvtropes.org entries.

One thing that bothered me was that, for a while, it was looking like the movie was going to be super goddamned sexist. It looked like there was exactly one female pilot (Ms. Love Interest) and the first time she tries to pilot a mech, she fails spectacularly because she can’t control her emotions.

Fut the WUCK? I was getting pretty pissed off. But apparently they anticipated that, because shortly after, there is a (very brief) scene that reveals another female pilot, and then later in the movie, our hero says the first time is always harsh.

And I am nearly positive he was talking about mech piloting.

So I canceled the male feminist red alert and calmed the fuck down. This was almost a very different kind of review. That shit pisses me off severely.

Instead, it was a highly fun movie with way better acting and production values than necessary. Like I said above, there is a real feeling of something very corny being made with love, care, and attention, and that is a rare thing indeed.

One little nitpick : quite annoyingly, all the mech versus monster battles take place underwater, in the rain, or in the fog. I am positive that this is a way to conceal the crappiness of your graphics (plus it gives you an excuse to skip the background on closeups). It’s the CGI equivalent of concealing Elizabeth Taylor’s weight gain by putting gauze over the lens.

It’s better than having desperately inadequate graphics, but it’s frustrating to always be straining to see what is going on. Makes me resent the movie for making me work so hard.

That aside, the fight scenes are awesome. Tightly paced but expertly staged and edited so it doesn’t become a nonsensical series of rapid cuts seemingly made just to have rapid cuts.

The human eye can only resolve the image it sees so fast, people. After that, it’s a visual seizure.

I love how the main character fights. There’s elements of American style boxing, professional wrestling, and good old fashioned brawling in the mix, but the main thing is that it is just fucking brutal.

And after being shown that these monsters have killed millions via attacking cities, that’s what I want to see. This isn’t the martial arts, honorable combat, or war. There’s no humanitarian concerns and no Geneva Convention.

This is monster killing, and there’s only one rule : kill the fucking thing.

I mean, at one point, he rips a monster’s acid-spitting tongue out. And I was like FUCK YEAH. The movie sets up the monsters as essentially pure fucking evil, and that clears the way for total carnage.

But my fave thing about the fights is the main mech’s weapons, and I am not talking about the lame shit like missiles or plasma beams. I don’t give a shit about those, they are boring. I want to see hand to hand combat, not special effects shots.

No, the one I am talking about are two things I absolutely love : rocket punch, where there’s a rocket in the elbow of the mech and you can fire it to punch REALLY HARD, and my favorite (fictional, I assume) weapon of all time : the CHAINSWORD.

It’s the weapon Female George Washington is using in this clip :

It’s a whip. It’s a sword. It’s an entanglement weapon. And it is so freaking boss.

And when a corny action movie delivers on the fight scenes, making even someone like me who has been watching the damned things since the 80’s want to stand up and shout, someone has done something very, very tight.

So I recommend this movie. It’s tons of fun and better than you’d think, and while you will recognize most of the elements in it, they are better made than usual, and workmanship counts.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Minutes ago, I finished watching the anime series Moribito : Guardian of the Spirit, and so I thought I would capture my impressions of the series while they are fresh in my mind and have not been occluded by the passage of time and oh so many thoughts.

Wait, what was I talking about? Oh right… the show.

The basic thought is that the young prince of an Edo style kingdom has been chosen to bear the egg of a mighty water spirit within his soul. The boy’s mother, the queen, hires bodyguard Balsa (yes, just like the wood) to spirit the boy away from the royal palace so that he will be safe from his father (the Mikado), whom it is feared will be forced to kill his own sun in order to prevent the water spirit from being in line for the throne.

Seeing as, at the beginning of the series, the spirit is thought to be a demon, this is not entirely unreasonable.

So off they go, the ten year old prince and his tough as nails female bodyguard, Balsa, mistress of the spear. Off to flee the Mikado’s assassins.

At this point, I thought the show would be like Lone Wolf and Cub, a warrior and an innocent child versus hordes of bloodthirsty enemies, and the first five episodes bore this out. But then, out of the blue, they find a city and settle down, and it becomes an entirely different kind of show. One with very little violence, and a lot more character development, especially concerning the young prince.

This took me by surprise, and it took me a few episodes to get my bearings and realize that this was it, they were not going to start fighting again. This was now a show about Balsa raising the little prince incognito and teaching him how to survive in the real world.

That made me suspect something that I later found out to be true : the author is female. Had to be. Not because of the female lead, but because the style and pacing were so unlike the typical impatient male aggression based drama.

The show is hardly pacifist. There are some killer action scene wherenbsp; Balsa wields her spear in totally badass ways. She is definitely She With Whom Thou Shalt Not Fuck. But they are few and far between.

Once I made the adjustment to the unusual pacing and style, I quite enjoyed the show. The story is fascinsting and rich, it has good characters, the animation is quite good, and I really cared about Balsa and Prince Chagum and what befell them.

As I implied above, the spirit turned out not to be a demon after all, but a very important water spirit who was responsuble for all the rain in the kingdom. That raises a lot of questions, but this is fantasy, so we’ll just roll with it. This water spirit must die and be reborn every hundred years, and obviously if it failed to be reborn, it would cause a terrible drought, and millions would die.

So the secong half of the show’s 26 episodes are dedicated to learning about this, and how to make sure the young prince survives it.

One thing I liked was that the fearsome warrior Balsa has taken a vow to never use her skills to kill. She will not take a life. This is another thing that you will likely only get from a female writer. We men are far too easily caught up in our testosterone madness that demands our literary avatars dominate their adversaries in the fullest way possible by killing them.

But why kill when it can be avoided?

Another thing I really liked was the character Shuga. He is a palace scholar who discovers that the spirit is not a demon and that killing it would be Very Bad, and he ends up rebelling against the other scholars to get the truth out. He is gentle, intelligent, passionate, and very pretty, and I totally had a crush on him for the whole show.

He was also the show’s silver/white haired dude. Those seem to be mandatory in the shows I watch. There is always a silver haired dude with delucate bishonen features, a somewhat effeminate voice, and the manner of a gay elf.

Doesn’t matter the setting, and they might as easily be a villain as a good guy. But they are always there.

I can only assume they are there as fan service to the females and fags in the audience. If so, thanks!

What else… I enjoyed the overall gentle tone of the show. Gentle, but not wimpy or saccharine. Balsa does not baby Prince Chagum. Instead, she nurtures the strength within him, and stimulates his development of character. That doesn’t mean she is cruel or unnecessarily harsh.

It just means that she is always encouraging him to take that next step up the staircase of life. That, to me, is the right way to parent. Not only because it results in a tougher and braver child, but because it teaches the skills necessary for self-actualization. It teaches the child to always be prepared to do the next thing.

And that’s the secret of life, really. Doing the next thing.

There was some tiny things about the series I didn’t like. Plot elements were introduced as important then, in a later episode, dismissed with some offhand dialogue. There were a bunch of small logical inconsistencies, but that’s par for the course, as is the fact that the ending was not very satisfying.

I am really picky about my endings. Comes from having such an overdeveloped sense of narrative, I suppose.

But all in all, it’s a great show as long as you are not expecting it to be filled with battles and violence and really clear villains. It is instead a story of childhood, nurturing, survival, magic, romance, and it is all written with a great deal fo wisdom, compassion, and heart.

I recommend it.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I won’t lie to ya… I ain’t doin so well right now.

For one thing, my computer has decided it just plain can’t run my browser any more. If I try, the screen goes black, and I have no choice but to reboot. I can do anything else, it seems… But not the one thing upon which all rests these days,nbsp; namely web browsing.

So as you may have deduced, I am typing this blog entry into the WordPress app on my tablet. Thus is a lot slower and a lot more work than typing on my full sized keyboard on my full sized computer, and I might go get my Bluetooth mini keyboard to help bridge the gap.

It’s almost as good as typing on a real keyboard, but you need someplace to put it, preferably someplace table-like.

And we don’t have those here, as such.

So I am stressing out about whether or not my precious computer is dying. My one saving grace is that it has displayed these symptoms before, always in the summer, and they have gone away and stayed away for long periods of time.

To have my computer die on me is unthinkable. It is both where I work and where I socialize,and I sure as hell can’t afford a new one.

The other stressor making me miserable today is trivial in the grand scheme of things, but sure as hell didn’t help : I spilt my root beer.nbsp; I had a njce tall glass of diet AW root beer that I was really looking forward to drinking, and as I was making lunch, I knocked it over and spilled it all over the kifchen counter.

So notvonly did I waste all that root beer and thus deprive myself of the pleasure of drinking it, I got to spend the next 10 minutes cleaning it up, ice cubes and all. All that ice cold root beer mocking me as it chilled nothing but my fingers.

Sometimes it is the little things which hurt the most.

Oh well. All this will pass. I still feel kinda grumpy and mad at the world, but I will get over it. And life will go on.

Really, today’s twin tragedies just brought my current mood to a head. I have been feeling cranky and depressed lately and I don’t know why. Just part of the long long healing process that is recovery, I suppose.

I suppose my student loan business is a stressor too. I logged into the student loan website yesterday to check on thd progress of my application, only to find that there hadn’t been any because it turns out that I have to print out this stupid form, sign it, and send it to Victoria before the process can really begin.

Ink on paper, in this day and age. Billions of dollars of business is done entirely electronically every day, but these prople need ink on paper.

What’s worse, in order to access disability money, I have to fill out this simply massive form to prove that I am disabled. Apparently, the fact that I am receiving full disability benefits from the exact same government which will receive said form is not good enough. They need me to prove it again.

The left hand doesn’t even know the right hand exists.

I don’t have a printer, so I have asked dear Felicity to do the form printing for me. Her mother has a home office, and she can print them out there if she gets her mother’s permission.

So that is, I suppose, another thing pulling my mood down somewhat. I am sure it will work out, but discovering that I had missed a vital detail when I filled out my student loan application the first time (actually, there were a few other small things, but whatever) was a shock and filled me with that all too familiar feeling of stupidity at having missed something important.

Being somewhat scatterbrained and absentminded, as well as extremely inward-looking and outward-oblivious, there is always a very real possibility that I have missed something very important. Some detail that is super important but my tendency to do things with more energy than precision failed to grasp.

And I know that sometimes, irrational exuberance gangs up with desire to escape (or be “done”) in causing these errors to occur. In such a state, going back to see if you missed anything seems absurdly unnecessary.

But thw worst part of it is that there doesn’t seem to be a possibility of change. It’s not like I set out thinking “I am going to do a really half-assed job of this!”. I try as hard as I can to do a really thorough and diligent job, and a lot of the time that is fine, but now and then, it isn’t, and I feel like a helpless, hapless fool.

(—)

Aaaand I am back from my appointment at the sleep center, and let me tell you, my bad brain day just keeps rolling along.

I got there a couple minutes late, only to realize that I had forgotten to bring the memory chip from my CPAP device, the reading and analyzing of which was the entire point of my going there.

I thought of just slinking home right then and emailing Marielle to reschedule. But that would be shameful and cowardly of me, and I am striving against the tendency, so I went in to face the music.

Only to find out that my appointment was not for today, it was for Thursday. Or at least, that’s what the spinny receptionist said. I have reason to doubt her perspicacity. She thought I normally come on Fridays (nope), and that my previous appointment had been on a Wednesday (nope nope, they have all been on Tuesdays. Wednesdays they would conflict with therapy. )

So at least this time, I was stupid in two ways that canceled each other out. I thought I was going to have to sheepishly admit that I had forgotten the chip. But it turns out, nope!

I really hope I am better brained when I wake up tomorrow.;

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, I’m going to talk about something that lies at the root of much of the evils of the world : one-upmanship, otherwise known as social competition.

The most familiar form of this is “keeping up with the Joneses”. The Joneses get air conditioning, and suddenly everyone wants to hang out at their place. This burns you up, so you get a bigger, better air conditioner. They respond by getting a pool. And so forth and so on.

In that form, while it might lead to people living beyond their means and wracking up a lot of needless debt, it is still relatively benign. But change the variables a bit, and the sinister possibilities become clear.

Say you’re an imam in a Taliban-dominated area. Your biggest rival, the imam that really pisses you off with all his fancy talk and putting on airs, announces that the latest suicide bomber to take out a group of foreign infidels in their smug UN uniforms was one of his disciples. Clearly, this means everyone thinks it’s HIS disciples who are the most devout, and of course, that means that HE, the person you despise the most in the world, is the best imam.

Obviously, this cannot be allowed to stand, and you immediately go back to your mosque and deliver an impassioned speech about the vile and filthy infidels besmirching the lands of Allah and how the only path to true virtue is to wipe them off the face of the Earth, no matter what the cost.

You’ll show that smug prick who’s the better imam. You’ll recruit TWO suicide bombers.

Or take the Cold War. Say you’re high up in the military of the United States during the Cold War. You have just told the President that, due to your patriotic diligence and selfless self-sacrifices, the United States has enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the entire world. And it makes you feel happy, proud, and erect to imagine all that destructive power at your… er, that is, the United States disposal. Finally, you will be able to show those dirty rotten Red bastards who is really the strongest nation, especially that smug Commie prick that is your opposite number. You can’t wait to see the look on his face when he find out just how royally screwed he is.

Then some peckerhead from Intelligence comes in and tells you that the Soviets now have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire world twice.

That socialist son of a bitch has one-upped you! Time to get on the phone to the President and explain to him how very, very inadequate the nation’s defenses still are, and how important it is to push for further expansion of the nation’s nuclear capacities, lest the Soviets gain a strategic advantage.

I could go on and on. Much evil has been done in the name of spite and jealousy and the desire to push a rival’s face into the dirt, and then sold as patriotism, being tough on crime, or truly dedicated to the highest ideals.

This social competition is an inevitable part of human society. It is bred into us. Social competition is how hierarchies are created. A wolf fights other wolves, starting low in the pecking order and moving their way up, until they lose. Then, that becomes their place in the hierarchy – one step below the wolf that beat him, but above all the ones he beat.

The one who beats everyone gets to be alpha.

But acknowledging something as inevitable and letting it run rampant are two entirely different things.

The most deadly expression of social competition is extremism. Extremism is more than a set of beliefs. It is a process by which people adopt more and more extreme positions in order to one-up one another in their fight for social dominance.

It always starts the same way : one person makes a play for social dominance by, in one way or another, claiming to be more “dedicated” (or devout, or committed, or whatever) because their positions are more ideologically pure than the current social leader’s. If the people of the social group, be it a student run animal rights organization or Congress, reject this ploy, then the cause of reason, restraint, and sanity lives another day.

But if they accept it and begin paying more attention to what the extremist has to say, the social group has contracted extremism and the prognosis is not good. Reason dies, and the sensible people might as well pack up and go home.

Because now it’s going to be about who can adopt an even more extreme position which is even more “pure”, and it won’t take long that, purely because two or more people are vying for social dominance, the positions adopted by the group are patently insane.

Because the thing is, extremism is easier to understand and more emotionally compelling than moderation. People believe X to be good and Y to be bad. The easiest thing in the world is to gravitate towards the person whose positions are the most X and the least Y. Whether or not any of it is a good idea takes self-restraint and second thought and all those other boring things that are no fun at all.

Nowhere is this more evident than the radical senescence of conservatism in the world’s democracies, especially the one south of the border. The “more conservative” candidate wins the primary (or what have you) and so all the competitors must try to out-do one another in unadulterated lunacy and any proponent of moderation, cooperation, or sanity is ruthlessly crushed as being “not conservative enough” or worse, “not a real conservative”.

The only solution, as I see it, is to educate people to recognize extremism as it forms, and give them the tools to defuse it. Teach people that there is no good thing that can’t be turned bad by taking it too far, and give them social permission to stand up and say “No, that’s not better, it’s just crazy”.

Or better yet, get them saying “No thanks, we’re sticking with sanity. ”

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Usual disclaimer : these are fresh thoughts, so they might not be fully formed yet.

Here’s my thesis : in essence, all bigotry boils down to a simple definition : denying individuality via labels. Sexism, racism, homophobia, religious intolerance, ageism, sizeism, and every other form of bigotry in the world shares that singular characteristic of reducing enormous groups of people to a simple label.

That is why, somewhere in the anatomy of all large bodies of prejudice, you find these words : “They’re all the same!”

This is, of course, blatantly untrue. Human beings are far too complex and variegated to be reduced to any sort of label. You can create labels that describe certain aspects that groups of humans have in common, like diabetes, Catholicism, or Archer fandom, and you might even be able to make a few generalizations about other characteristics these people maybe have in common. But to say “they are all the same” is patently absurd.

Hence the denial of individuality. To treat a group of any size as though they are a single individual is anathema to the very concept of individuality.

That’s why it’s the individualist societies of the world who have made to most progress against all forms of prejudice. Every member of an individualistic society values their own individuality, and fears/resists the loss of it. They can therefore identify with the loss of individuality of another.

The basic truth of individualism, that we are all unique, works against all forms of prejudice, over time. Individuality is the sea wearing away at the foundation of prejudice with every wave.

There is one particular label that is the most deadly form of de-individualization, whether it is applied consciously or not. That label underwrites all more specific forms of prejudice, and without it, no prejudice would even be possible.

And that label is : The Enemy.

There is no hate without fear. And The Enemy cannot exist without hate. There has to be some sense that the target group is a threat to oneself or one’s group before the deadly machinery of conflict can be activated in the service of hate.

That’s when the prejudice really gets started. Once the oppositional binary is activated – us versus them, or worse, it’s us OR them – then the target group is not only no longer a set of individuals, but an enemy tribe, and all enemies must die.

And once that point is reached, prejudice’s main appeal can kick in, which is scapegoating.

All it takes is a little taste of the appeal of having a target for all the anger and frustrations of life and people get hooked. The more you can blame on the target group, the bigger the cathartic high.

This is why the prejudices which incorporate some grand conspiracy theory are so appealing. They give you so much justification for your hate, and the greater the justification, the more hate you can pour on the target without feeling like a bad person.

After all, you’re just defending yourself.

And all it takes is denying the individuality of people who confuse and scare you already. All you have to do is believe whatever you have to believe in order to justify how you already feel about them.

And then there’s the other “gift” of prejudice : simplification.

By reducing entire groups of people to a cartoonish caricature, you vastly simplify your world. This is highly appealing to people who feel like the world is more complicated than they can understand. That’s why you rarely find someone with just a single form of bigotry. Once they have accepted one simplification, the others come far more easily, and instead of a vast complicated world full of individuals, you have The Good People (people just like the bigot, who therefore do no scare or confuse them) and The Bad People (everyone else).

It’s the perfect system for your active moron.

One of the basic fears in all humans is fear of strangers^[1]. You can see that very clearly with toddlers. Even the very social and extroverted ones will instinctively hide when they see a stranger. And in a more primitive state, before the modern megapolis, this worked quite well.

After all, during those days, you spent all day with your family except for the times when you went into town and dealt with the exact same people you have dealt with for your entire life. Strangers were a rare event and stood out sharply from the social sameness you had known all your life. And that stranger might pose a threat, if not physically, then a threat to the social order as currently established.

But then the world began to urbanize. And that meant constant exposure to strangers. There are far, far too many people in a big city (or even a small town like the one I grew up in) to know everybody personally, or even at all, and so a simple walk down the street means passing dozens of total strangers, all of whom could potentially mean you harm.

As civilized humans, we have invented (then overcome) things like conformity and group identity in order to overcome the feeling of fear from being amongst strangers. Sure, you might not know the person passing you on the street, but they look enough like you to reassure your inherent xenophobia that this person is of your tribe and thus “safe”.

And this works well enough as a temporary measure. Like I said before, individualism pushes inevitably towards tolerance, and so conformity can’t last.

But this march of civilization leaves in its wake a deep undercurrent of unexpressed xenophobia looking for an excuse. It is this undercurrent that finds its expression in bigotry, prejudice, scapegoating, and hate.

Just as in the old days it was convenient to blame the current drought on a passing stranger (or if there were none around, whoever is at the bottom of the social pecking order) and then punish them for it, today’s subcivilized cretins blame whoever it is that frightens their xenophobic little hearts anyhow, and assume that target group must be responsible for all their problems.

I leave you with a clip from Canadian comedy duo Bowser and Blue that illustrates that kind of thinking.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.