Since we all could use a little humor in our lives….

Is it wrong for me to admit I kinda missed having a Democrat in the White House? I mean, yeah, it’s the final sunset for Western Civ — and that’s bad — but if you’re amused by human folly, watching moron socialists try to govern is like crack… delicious, delicious crack.

So… what’s your favorite part of Democrat administrations? I know there’s a lot to choose from. “All the racial healing” is always a good one. I also enjoy the thrill of getting a new dictionary — remember, #Resistance is now BAD. But when it’s all said and done, I have to go with “The Media continuously auto-beclowning themselves with euphemisms.”

Like this one. It’s not that Zhou Bai-Den lied when he said he wouldn’t ban fracking. No no, he simply created confusion by misstating his position. Which is as heartbreakingly pure a description of the intent and outcome of “a lie” as you’ll find in even the very best dictionary, but let it pass, my brothers… let it pass. Savor the moment. That’s the absolute goddamn best they could do, and it’s only Day Three.

At this rate, I’m going to laugh myself into a hernia by early next week.

Open thread.

PS all bets are off when, as is inevitable, the Left finally admits to Biden’s obvious dementia. The trial balloons are already going up. At that point, I predict they will wait all of about 0.32 seconds before they start crowing about how Orange Man was such a bad president, he lost an election to a guy who was obviously suffering from Alzheimer’s on the campaign trail. And that, my friends, will be the highlight of the Zhou Bai-Den administration. I don’t think that could ever be topped.

And yes, you know good and goddamned well they ARE that shameless….

Said Lenin, or maybe it was Bakunin, but y’all get the point. We need more of this (Ace of Spades link):

In a Monday op-ed, the Washington Post called on heavyweight telecommunications corporations to shut down conservative cable news outlets including Fox News, One America News, and Newsmax TV, comparing the need to do so with that of shutting down foreign terrorist influencers.

…

“There is a whole infrastructure of incitement that will remain intact even after Trump leaves office,” Boot writes. “Just as we do with foreign terrorist groups, so with domestic terrorists: We need to shut down the influencers who radicalize people and set them on the path toward violence and sedition.”

The essay then heaps praise on the recent purging of conservative voices on social media platforms by tech giants, hoping that broadcast media will follow suit.

Max Boot is a fake-“conservative” NeverTrump SSDS — that’s “sociopathic, sexually deviant shitweasel,” please update your lexicons accordingly — who not coincidentally looks like this:

And, yes, (((of course))), please spare me.

There’s a short game and a long game being played here, kameraden. We can ignore the short game, as it’s just virtue-signaling. I’m not saying there won’t be purges — rest assured, there will be, and have you signed up for the backup newsletter yet? — but not just yet. Zhou Bai-Den and his cronies have bigger things to worry about, as that stupid little sorority girl recycled from the Obama administration said about Zhou breaking his own idiotic mask rule within hours of signing it.* They’ve got industries to wreck and wars to start; Fox is great for rallying the bomb-everyone crowd (their few remaining viewers are, of course, Toby Keith-style flag-sucking diehards).

What this is, in other words, is the SSDS crew finally waking up to the fact that massive, open, gleefully in-your-face electoral fraud means they don’t need your stupid ass any more, Max. The jig’s up. This is the “March Violets” phase of the Gleichschaltung, in which so many of our former countrymen realize they were really SJWs all along. In those conditions, grifters like Boot have to amp it up to 11; I wouldn’t be surprised to see these clowns calling for literal firing squads before too long.

The long game is where it gets interesting, and I for one couldn’t be happier. A total purge of Fox News would perhaps be the only thing that could slap some sense into Normie. It would be far, far better from the SSDS perspective to let that stupid station continue as it is — SJW lite, with a few flag-waving montages. You’ve got to boil the frog slowly, boys. Alas for them, they’re feeling their oats, and since they’re so incredibly stupid, they’re going all the way right away.

We need to encourage this, comrades. Urge them to be as ridiculous and over-the-top as possible. Maybe we can even get Max Boot up there to lead one of the Einsatztruppen. The very sight of that goof in a tank helmet, Mike Dukakis-style, would be worth 10 divisions to our side.

*Great to see her back. I’m serious. I love those types — the ones who were the chunky cheerleader in their little tiny high schools, and got into politics to compensate. Jen Psaki, Marie Harf… (oh, those problem glasses!) I spent my entire college career chasing exactly this type of girl. It’s a real tweak in the nuts.

UPDATE: Since we’ll all be required to learn Chinese anyway pretty soon, let’s start with this: Baizuo. It means “White Leftist” and it is NOT a compliment.

As noted in the comments, this is the high tide of freakery in the Country Formerly Known as America. Zhou Bai-Den’s administration is their Summer of Love, their Woodstock; they will never have it better than this. Why? Baizuo, baby!

Since the Left live completely in fantasyland, they remain invincibly ignorant of what every Dirt Person knows — the Pox hate that crap. Sexist? Homophobic? Sheeeeeit, nigga, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. And while our Chinese overlords are happy to use “intersectional” nonsense to help us destroy ourselves, they have zero tolerance for it where they’re in charge…

Consider the obvious fact that Zhou Bai-Den himself is not long for this earth. That’s not a threat, FBI goons, that’s just medical reality — folks with advanced dementia, which Resident Salute-the-Marines very obviously has, don’t live too long. And even if he doesn’t croak in the immediate future, the Cabal will soon find babysitting him more trouble than it’s worth, so all hail President Kamala. Whaddaya think her cabinet is going to look like?

Rashida Tlaib at State. Ilhan Omar as SecDef. AOC at Justice. You think those fine upstanding ladies are going to tolerate a White guy in a dress flouncing around the Imperial Capital giving orders? It’s going to be nonstop Freaknik there behind the razor wire in a year, year and a half tops. Trannies, furries, all that ComicCon shit… those are things which Homie most definitely does not play.

Which is why we need to encourage it for all it’s worth, kameraden. That tranny from Pennsy is just the #2 organism at Health and Human Services. Why not #1? Transphobia, obviously. And Zhou’s administration is woefully light on Furries. They need to get somebody dressed as Tigger into a top post, stat. Necrophilia, bestiality… you can’t tell me there aren’t Washingtonians who are into that. Let your freak flag fly, guys!!

As everyone who has seen The Prestige knows, the first part of a magic trick is called “the pledge.” Then “the turn,” and finally “the prestige,” the big payoff.

In a totalitarian society, the “news” often contains little more than “pledges.” Half the fun of reading Pravda back in the days was trying to spot the pledge. Since every story the State’s Propaganda Ministry puts out is overtly political, you know they’re going to do something with that seemingly mundane item about the new fishing trawler in Krasnoyarsk. Will the salted herring quota of the Five Year Plan be overfulfilled by 300%? Or is this a setup for something about the triumph of national minorities under the leadership of Comrade So-and-So, who’s now a comer in the nomenklatura?

I have to admit, my brothers, I’m getting one of those old Cold War chubbies right about now. For, you see, on the very same day Biden is installed, the WHO issues new COVID guidelines that will significantly reduce the number of new cases. As Internet people used to say, WATFO?

What Are the Fucking Odds. I mean, who ever could’ve guessed?

Nobody else gives a crap, but recall that The Media is deeply invested in “the first hundred days.” They have a bunch of those stories ready to go for every new administration. Recall also that Biden mumbled something about challenging everyone to wear masks for his first hundred days. Gosh, do you think The Media is trying to spot him a few points’ lead?

Just like that, somehow, someway… poof! A gazillion-percent reduction in new cases “in the first hundred days.” That ol’ Democrat magic rides to the rescue again. The only question now is, will they have the chutzpah to call it an Easter miracle?

I love clown world, I truly do.

It was the murder of the Emperor Severus Alexander by his mutinous troops that kicked off the Crisis of the Third Century. Subsequent rulers — commoners with army commands who briefly seized the purple — were known as “barracks emperors.”

The fact that a mental patient was just installed at bayonet point in the imperial capital has nothing whatsoever to do with reminding me of that obscure bit of Roman history, I’m sure.

The Media gush that the lights on the Lincoln Memorial are like Joe Biden’s arms embracing America.

Meanwhile, the Festinger set is banning everyone who points out that their prophecy has, in fact, failed.

And the irredeemable CivNats at Ace of Spades are vowing to VOTE. EVEN. HARDERRRRR!!!!! next time.

Same as it ever was.

Extra special bonus: The return of Thunberg!

Predictable as sunrise, the lot of it. I love clown world, I truly fucking love it.

If I had the skill to write a funeral oration, it’d be much more Brutus than Marc Antony.

Rule by a clique of smug gangsters is the natural endpoint of universal prosperity, which is lethal to… I was going to write “the human mind,” but it’s more basic than that. It’s lethal to character. It’s lethal to seriousness.

We are a deeply, profoundly, terminally frivolous people. The people entrusted with enough armed power to reduce the entire planet to a cinder tear up their opponent’s speeches on camera. They kneel in the Capitol rotunda in honor of a drug-addicted criminal. Their supporters charge the Supreme Court chambers wearing knitted vagina stocking caps on their heads. All of them insist that working people should be denied their livelihoods if they, the working people, can’t keep up with the bespoke pronoun choices of the obviously mentally ill. They make a crazy man in a dress who insists on calling himself “Rachel” a public health official.

All of that really happened. All of that really happens. You couldn’t remake Idiocracy now; we’re so frivolous, we’re beyond parody. Elagabalus weeps at our inanity.

Thus the just-purged military installing an obvious dementia patient behind thousands of yards of razor wire after an obviously stolen election is not just apt, but perfect, for the kind of species we’ve devolved into. All hail President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.

As for me, kameraden, I’m off for a while. I took some time off, cashed in some investments. I plan to go someplace new for a while, see some new places, meet some new people. I’ve needed a big change for a long time, so why not now? I’ll still post, but if they’re more sporadic than normal, have weird timestamps, etc., now you know why.

I intend to live as well as I can, for as long as I can. Note please that I don’t mean “live luxuriously;” I mean live well. With dignity. Like a human being, the heir — for all that’s worth — to 2500 years of civilization, the best civilization that was or ever could be. That’s my advice to you, comrades: Live well. Read good books. Listen to good music. Enjoy the beauty of nature. Be proud of what you are, what we had, what our children’s children’s children could one day have again.

Above all, be happy. Our overlords are broken. They have gaping holes in their souls, that no amount of “social justice” can ever fill. They’re incapable of feeling anything but the sour satisfactions of spite. Being a kind, decent, happy, whole human being is the second best revenge you can take on the freaks who now rule us, So do it. Live well, brothers, and be happy. The lamps are going out; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetimes. Let yours shine as brightly as you can, for as long as you can.

The Calm Before the Storm, Episode LVIII: For newer readers (great timing, gang; be sure to sign up for the newsletter), or if you just need a refresher, Festinger’s book When Prophecy Fails was a study of a UFO cult which predicted the end of the world on a very specific date… in 1953. Festinger was on hand to see what happened to the cult when the world didn’t end, and he discovered a very important psychological principle. He called it “cognitive dissonance,” but since that term has taken on a life of its own, we’ll swipe one from Internet and call it a “retcon.”

For those with even a moderate level of commitment to the cult (and I’ll leave it to you to speculate what moderate commitment to a cult might be; Festinger’s work is not without its critics), disconfirmation of the cult’s central belief led, astoundingly, to an even greater commitment to the cult. “The world will end on X date” was immediately retconned into “the world didn’t end on X date because of our righteousness.”

You know you’re really onto something when it seems head-slappingly obvious in retrospect. Yeah, of course they did that. Everybody does that to a degree. You expect something isn’t going to work out, then it does work out — it must be because you’re special, right? It’s another way of assigning yourself agency in a world where you’re basically powerless over the big stuff. Humans are wired to believe they have agency, that things happen for a reason. It sounds like I’m giving Festinger at best a backhanded compliment, but I’m very seriously singing his praises — “everybody knows” this stuff, but no one had isolated and described it before. That’s a major achievement — if I could have the equivalent of “discovered cognitive dissonance” on my tombstone, I’d die an ecstatically happy man.

Nor can Festinger be blamed for not taking the seemingly-obvious step and applying his insight to politics. I know nothing of the man, personally, but given that his professional discipline was Soash I assume he was a hardcore Leftist, since you’ve got a better chance of seeing a yeti than a conservative in the “soft sciences.” Fish don’t notice water, so something like Gramsci’s theory of “hegemony” — which, to an outsider, appears to be nothing but a massive UFO cult-style retcon — just seemed right to him.  But we’re not Festinger, so we can take the leap. We’ve had a spectacular example just recently, and we’re about to have another.

The just-passed one involved the CivNats, and for the sake of everyone’s slim remaining dignity, let’s pass it by quickly: Their reaction to the obvious theft of the 2020 election was, of course, a vow to vote even harder next time. The just-upcoming one involves, for the umpteenth time, the “Storm.”

The Q and Vox Day crowds have stated explicitly that shit’s going down today. Tomorrow at latest. All those National Guard troops in DC to install the Great Pretender, this theory goes, are really Trump’s coup forces. So when that doesn’t happen, you’ll be able to watch a giant Festinger-style retcon happening in real time. It’ll be a hoot, but more importantly, it’ll confirm for you, like nothing else can, that there are people too far in to ever get out. If you’ve ever wondered why folks got willingly into the boxcars, or went to the Lubyanka’s back room shouting “Wait until Comrade Stalin hears of this!”, here’s your chance to see it firsthand. It’ll all boil down to Teh Jooooos!!!, of course, or it’s really just another “op” for the really really really long game the “God Emperor” is playing, or both.

Without You, There Is No Us. Reader Frip, on Leftists:

Liberals are rapists. They’re not ok with just jerking off to their bizarre fantasies. They’ve got to seek you out and stick it in. YOU are everything.

I don’t think there’s anyone to the Right of Mao who hasn’t thought, at some point, that secession is the answer. Leftists claim they’re the science people, the “reality-based community” (remember that one?), that “the facts have a Liberal bias” (another hoary old favorite), and so forth. Well, ok then, why don’t you just GO? Go live your lives in your perfect, factual, scientific utopia, and leave all us benighted deplorables here to rot. Obviously we can’t be saved, since if we were smart enough to understand the “facts” we’d be Liberals…

…but we can’t understand them, and yet here you are, arguing with us anyway. I call it the Fundamental Paradox of Internet Liberalism, and it’s a key to Leftist psychology. It’s not enough for them, to actually BE smart. It’s not the factuality of the facts that is important to them, it’s the “Liberal bias” part — that is, they have to make sure that WE know the “facts” support them. When Leftists claim that everything is a social construction, they really mean it. For the Leftist, if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound, because “hearing” requires ears and only people have those.

The psychology of this is above my pay grade, but Frip’s phrasing reminded me of a great illustration of the principle — a book called Without You, There Is No Us, by Suki Kim. It’s one of the most meta things I’ve ever read; the irony nearly made my toes rust. Her title is supposedly taken from a song North Korean children are required to sing to Dear Leader, but Mx. Kim is so solipsistic that it’s really all about HER. It was published in 2015, and if you really want to get inside the head of the Basic College Girl, I can think of no better reading. One small example: she’s a teacher at a school for the sons of the Nork elite. She knows — she writes, several times — that their names appearing in her book might well get those kids and their parents killed. Which is sad, of course, but the important thing is how very very very sexy they all found Mx. Suki Kim.

Jeez, now I have to go put that on the suggested reading list over at the other site. Please don’t pay for it, but please DO go read it. That’s what we’re dealing with, y’all. That’s the mental world of our Rulers.

I know some of y’all prefer these shorter posts, so if you don’t feel like reading the previous two-part doorstoppers, here’s one.

Some folks on our side think that the next logical step for the American Right is the formation of an explicitly White party. Demographics is destiny, these people argue, and with a majority-minority country (what an oxymoron!) in the near future, politics in The Nation Formerly Known as America will soon devolve into what “politics” is wherever there’s a plurality of Others — tribal warfare by other means. Such is life in a multi-ethnic Empire held together solely by inertia and armed force — see e.g. the Austria-Hungary.

The problem with that assumption, though, is that it still relies on a relatively regular, rule-governed political process. Um…. yeah. How’d that work out two months ago?

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that such a Party would even be allowed to form. (It wouldn’t, of course, given that the Bidenreich’s inevitable Hate Crimes legislation will make anything less than literal fellatio of Leftists a federal offense, but let’s stipulate). There have been several such parties in Europe recently, like the AfD in Germany. How’s that working out?

You all know as well as I do what happens: Even if they win, they lose. Look, y’all, the theft of the 2020 presidential election wasn’t directed from the top. It wasn’t some big, centrally-organized conspiracy. It was a bunch of low-level actors spontaneously deciding to do whatever they had to, to rid the country of the Orange Scourge. The only “planning” the Dems did was to make it clear to all and sundry that anything, anything at all, that would advance The Cause was acceptable, and would be forgiven once they achieved power.

The exact same thing would happen to our theoretical White Party, even if such were allowed to form. Which it won’t be.

Then, too, look at what happens to such a Party in a parliamentary system. The Serb minority inside Austria-Hungary didn’t lack for representation in the Imperial system. They just felt they didn’t have enough representation, and hey, whaddaya know, their brothers across the border were willing to help, and there’s World War I for you.

There’s no White nation ready to “help” their co-ethnics, of course, but the Nation Formerly Known as America might well find itself as a battleground between serious countries that have their shit together, i.e. Russia and China. Some real Russian collusion this time, but with “help” being in the form of the Soviet Union’s only worthwhile export commodity. What fun!

Finally, look at a country in which a sizeable White minority was systematically persecuted and denied participation in the political process. The BBC has already urged Biden to “return to his roots.” He just might, comrades… he just might.

Let me be clear: Any of this would be very, very bad. But history doesn’t care about your feelings, and history suggests that very bad things are on the way. There has never, in all of recorded history, been a case of the Rulers giving the Ruled the Finger working out peacefully. There’s a first time for everything, I guess, but if I were a betting man….

First read part 1. Then, apply the 2nd Law of SJW:

SJWs always project.

The reason SJWs are so hung up on “capitalism” is, as we’ve seen, they regard it as something very like an addiction. Specifically, like sex addiction — we “capitalists” are compelled to accumulate new, different, better, more-for-more’s-sake, though the acquisition is harmful to both ourselves and society. Ever known a Leftist with a collection? Coins, stamps, baseball cards, anything? It’s 100 to 1 that you don’t, because Leftists aren’t wired like that.

Leftists put their entire lives on display at all times. They might have some knickknacks or mementoes (though it’s shocking how few of them have even that), but they’re all for show — if a Leftist ever had a baseball card, it would be framed and displayed in the center xzhyr apartment’s living room, and would have something to do with the player’s politics (the only openly gay player on the Yankees or something*). The collector’s joys are unknown to them, because the collector collects for personal reasons. Collectors often can’t wait to show you their collections, of course, and they can be godawful tedious about it, but — pace the Left — they aren’t showing you to brag about it; they’re showing you because you’re their friend, and they assume you’re interested in what interests them.

(I don’t insure my own baseball card collection, because although I’d be devastated if I lost it in a fire, its book-value is pretty much nothing. A truly fetishized commodity, a Marxist would say, because, like the Wagner card not “really” being worth the paper it’s printed on, so my collection isn’t worth the cumulative insurance premium. It’s the work of a lifetime, but it’s “worthless;” thieves wouldn’t bother to steal it if they knew what they were looking at).

SJWs always project, right? They know better than anyone that money can’t buy you happiness, because SJW-ism is strictly an upper-middle-class pursuit. They have all the stuff in the world, and they’re miserable. Look at the ivory tower. I hate to keep beating this dead horse, but it’s really the best example I can think of. Those people are “the 1%” by any measure that makes sense. They have everything. They work 24/7 — that’s “24 hours a week, 7 months a year” — and get comped, on average, nearly $100K for it. You can always tell which one is the faculty parking lot — no make cheaper than Volvo; no model year earlier than 2017. The houses in the faculty ghetto tend to be physically small, it’s true, but that’s because they’re all restored Victorians — go ahead and cost out what it takes to fully restore one of those puppies, and contemplate a lifetime of pauperism.

Commodity fetishism? In spades, kameraden, and we haven’t even gotten to the “lifestyle” stuff yet. Organic food — tiny little bananas from Trader Joe’s that wouldn’t feed a pygmy marmoset, but cost $4 per pound. Hot yoga lessons — $100 per hour. Eat-pray-loving your way across Indonesia — I can’t even begin to calculate it. SJWs live niiiice; way too nice for us deplorables to afford, filthy “capitalists” that we are.

And since SJWs always project, let’s talk about their addiction. Let me reiterate item III from the first part:

Brandon knows he can get any kind of sex any time he wants, so it always fails.  Not sometimes.  Always.  Watch the movie.  But he keeps trying, in the same ways, over and over.   He also tries to simulate the perfect sexual experience, copy what looks like [it] works. He walks by a couple having sex in a hotel window, so he then rents a room in that same hotel and has sex with a prostitute in the window in the exact same manner.  Does it take?  Of course not– it was too easy.  When you sign a contract with narcissism there’s a clause you should pay attention to: if it’s easy, it doesn’t count.

To really live like an SJW is sphincter-stretchingly expensive. To act like an SJW, though, is literally the easiest thing in the world, since all you have to do is talk. And talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. Just like the sex addict’s “explanation” for their pathology, q.v. part V:

The novelty is in fact trivial: yes, different partners, but the same kinds of sex, with the same kinds of people, in the same places, in the same ways, bolstered by the same kinds of porn.   Repetition compulsion masquerading as novelty seeking.  “You don’t understand,” says the analogous alcoholic, “I’m always looking for new drinks.”

There’s always something “new” for the #Woke to be outraged about, but it’s the same outrage, expressed the same way, every time (the “porn” in this case being “whatever Orange Man is up to today,” and it’s going to be dry times ahead for our virtue junkies). Just as it never occurs to Brandon to wonder just how “having sex with a prostitute in front of a hotel window” would finally be the thing that really gets him off, so no SJW could look at this and wonder if it isn’t head-slappingly stupid, not to mention “racist as fuck,” as those types like to say. Nope, they’ll just roll with it — “multiracial Whiteness,” sure, why not.

They live, in short, exactly as Brandon does in part IV:

If you are a product of your behavior, start wearing a watch again to discover who you actually are.  If the sex addict gets a watch, hell, gets a calendar, what he will discover is that he has practiced no other skill more diligently than pursuing empty sex that he knows is unsatisfying to him.  That’s what he’s spent the most time on, that’s what he knows how to do the best. Better than driving, better than speaking, better than Xbox– he has that mindset down to a reflex.  So why would you expect he’d use any other technique for any other life problems that come up?

So: Can SJWs be fixed? Can virtue junkies break their addiction?

TLP says that narcissists don’t feel guilt, only shame. In Shame, the movie, the only thing that helps Brandon get his life together — if, in fact, he does — is by translating his shame (at his sex addict behavior) into guilt (for his sister’s suicide attempt).

The only thing I’ve ever found that works, in the absence of a God who can forgive you, is to understand your guilt [for not “preventing” a loved one’s suicide] as not coming from the failing but generated by you as self-punishment, so that you can go on with the rest of your life.  Have you suffered enough today?  Then go have a Reuben, they’re tasty. You’ve earned it.

The guilt always stays with you.  Always.  It never goes away. Never.  I’m of course not saying you deserve it, but I know it is your inevitable tormentor.  So either you reach some kind of stalemate with it or it beats you down.  That stalemate is sublimation.

In Brandon’s case it is that guilt which motivates him to try and change his life, so when he sees the married woman from Act I again on the subway he doesn’t get up to flirt with her.  He lets her go, he has decided to be the kind of person who sublimates his sex drive to devote more attention to his whacky sister. To being a better person.

It’s not looking good for our virtue junkies, comrades. Why should they change? Because they’re unhappy? How would they know?

I’m seriously asking. SJWs have lived their entire lives that way. It’s like asking someone with an identical twin “What is it like to be a twin?” How would they know? They’ve never been anything else!!

A running theme of The Last Psychiatrist’s work is that in order to meaningfully change, you have to change your behavior… and the only way to do that is to become a different person. Brandon can stop having sex for a time, but he’ll always go back to it, because he’s still that kind of person. Making rules for himself won’t cut it:

The solution to your problem… is not to refrain— you can’t resist your desires forever. You must practice a new skill, you must become the kind of person who wouldn’t turn to porn when they are: lonely; horny; boredy.  If you practice a new skill enough times, it will become second first nature, and you will be a different person. Please note that it is that last part, not the giving up of porn, that makes the change difficult.  Giving up porn is easy squeezy.  Becoming the kind of person who doesn’t need to use porn on Thursdays at 11:30p because that’s when you have a few hours free is hard.

You’ve really got to want it, and to do that, you need to suffer… and not just suffer, but suffer in a way that makes you compelled to go through more suffering — the serious suffering that comes from a long, hard, honest look inside.

If they were unwilling to do that when they were under Orange Man’s heel, why on earth would they do it now, when they’re winning?

Instead they will do what the sex addict does, what they think “capitalists” do — new, better, different, more, more-for-more’s-sake.

*Note that I am manfully resisting the urge to make a petty remark about “gay” and “Yankees” naturally going together, even though all good people hate the Yankees.

What’s my drug of choice?
Well, what have you got?
I don’t go broke
And I do it a lot

-Alice in Chains, “Junkhead”

As usual when I link something, I’ll try to summarize within the post, but what follows will be better understood if you read this two part series from The Last Psychiatrist first. It’s from 2012, discussing a movie that was a blip on the cultural radar at the time: Shame, starring Michael Fassbender. It’s about “sex addiction.” It doesn’t matter if you haven’t seen the movie; I haven’t.  Part 1, part 2.

It’s a wide-ranging post, with lots of good stuff to chew on, but I’d like to focus on this bit. It’s a long excerpt, apologies for that, but it’s all important. (I’ve numbered the sections for quick reference).

I.

Brandon [Fassbender’s character] has a very specific problem, and it is not sex: freedom.

In order to get sexual satisfaction from anything, that thing has to be unattainable, or at the very least it must come with rules.  You can get release and pleasure from the attainable, but not satisfaction.  There has to be a limit, a line, which defines a transgression which then allows you to bump up against it– and be satisfied.

Which explains why divorce rates in the West soared just as social stigma against “cohabitation,” to put it no more bluntly, cratered — part of the deal with monogamy is knowing that the other stuff is now forbidden, which keeps the marital bed at least somewhat spicy. In theory. But that’s not the important part. If we grant that it’s not winning the game, but playing by the rules, that brings satisfaction — if we grant, in other words, that instead of the ends justifying the means, the ends are only made worth it via the means — then the unique frustrations of “capitalism” (as Leftists use the word, note that, we’ll come back to it) start to make sense.

II.

In America, almost anything you can imagine is sexually permitted even as limits to “appropriate sexuality” are everywhere.  The awareness of the ubiquity [TLP emph.] of Photoshop on models serves this same frustrating purpose: this super hot woman that I take for granted that I get to see almost naked for no good reason isn’t actually her– the real her is hidden beneath Photoshop. She is still a mystery.  So the Photoshop enhancement only temporarily heightens the sexual interest– which is why it is paired with products to buy now;  the real satisfaction has to be attained elsewhere– the Photoshopped model triggers a desire to look for satisfaction elsewhere– e.g. the products[my emph.]

It’s a neat trick. I’m not sure whether the proper psychoanalytic term for this is “transference” or “displacement,” but you know what I mean: The ambiguity creates frustration, which the ad gives you a ready means to discharge — you can’t have the model, the real one, but you can buy the toothpaste.* Which creates its own feedback loop, a constant pattern of frustration / discharge. You know, like porn, which everyone these days agrees is addictive.

III.

Brandon knows he can get any kind of sex any time he wants, so it always fails.  Not sometimes.  Always.  Watch the movie.  But he keeps trying, in the same ways, over and over.   He also tries to simulate the perfect sexual experience, copy what looks like [it] works. He walks by a couple having sex in a hotel window, so he then rents a room in that same hotel and has sex with a prostitute in the window in the exact same manner.  Does it take?  Of course not– it was too easy.  When you sign a contract with narcissism there’s a clause you should pay attention to: if it’s easy, it doesn’t count. 

My emphasis. Please just note it for now, we’ll return to it.

IV.

If you are a product of your behavior, start wearing a watch again to discover who you actually are.  If the sex addict gets a watch, hell, gets a calendar, what he will discover is that he has practiced no other skill more diligently than pursuing empty sex that he knows is unsatisfying to him.  That’s what he’s spent the most time on, that’s what he knows how to do the best. Better than driving, better than speaking, better than Xbox– he has that mindset down to a reflex.  So why would you expect he’d use any other technique for any other life problems that come up?

To summarize, what we’ve got here is a case of what old school psychoanalysts call repetition compulsion, in which “the individual unconsciously arranges for variations of an original theme which he has not learned either to overcome or to live with,” according to Erik Erikson (according to wiki). TLP makes the same point himself earlier in the article, as part of the standard explanation sex addicts give for their own behavior:

V.

One common explanation sex addicts offer is that it is the novelty that they crave, and when enough people with pathology agree on something you can pretty much guarantee that that agreement is part of the pathology, i.e. an unconscious defense.  Sorry artists, broken people aren’t given greater insight as a consolation prize.  The novelty is in fact trivial: yes, different partners, but the same kinds of sex, with the same kinds of people, in the same places, in the same ways, bolstered by the same kinds of porn.   Repetition compulsion masquerading as novelty seeking.  “You don’t understand,” says the analogous alcoholic, “I’m always looking for new drinks.”

So what the Sam Hill does all that have to do with (the Leftist misunderstanding of) “capitalism”? (remember that? from up top? see section I). And why do we care what those morons erroneously think anyway?

Well, since we’re talking about fetishized behavior — and what else is any non-chemical addiction, really? — a quick brush-up on the concept of “commodity fetishism.” Nobody actually reads Marx anymore, including yours truly, but Marxism is so engrained in our thought patterns now that barely anybody, even self-proclaimed “Marxists,” can recognize basic Marxist concepts when they’re staring at them. Such is commodity fetishism. This is the process, Marx says, by which the “socially necessary” part of labor gets swapped out for a price. He didn’t know about baseball cards back then, but that’s a good example of the phenomenon. What’s that mint condition Honus Wagner card really worth? From the utilitarian perspective, nothing. In fact, less than nothing, since you couldn’t even sell it for scrap — the cost of recycling the paper would be greater than the amount of paper in the card.

If you want to say that, in the Wagner card’s case at least, “commodity fetishism” is just clunky polysyllabic jargon for the very basic classical-economic concept of “demand,” well, go ahead, I won’t stop you, but you’re missing an important nuance if you do that. Marxism, you’ll recall, is supposed to be rigorously logical, the only truly scientific worldview. I know, I know, but please stop laughing for a second and hear me out. When SJWs talk about “capitalism,” what they really mean is “commodity fetishism,” and though they’ve never heard the phrase “commodity fetishism,” they grok the basic concept just fine — it’s illogical. Says Marx:

The savages of Cuba regarded gold as a fetish of the Spaniards. They celebrated a feast in its honour, sang in a circle around it, and then threw it into the sea.

That’s what matters to the Leftist, and once again, I want you to please stop laughing and let me explain: since they consider themselves Science’s BFFs, things have to be “logical” for them. “Demand,” the classical-economic concept, IS irrational; that’s the point. There’s this whole multi-gazillion dollar industry called “marketing” which is designed to manipulate it, and since Leftism is a Manichaean worldview, “marketing” is therefore evil. But, Leftists think, the rest of us are too dumb to see this — they’re the only smart, logical ones, remember?

In short: They think we are to “stuff” what Brandon is to sex. We’re addicts — we’ve always got to have different, new, better, more-for-more’s-sake. THAT’s “capitalism,” comrades, inside the tiny pea brains of the Left.

Part II soon.

Which I suspect is one of the main reasons rock stars, who really can have the super hot model, always end up cheating on her — because it’s not really her. In their minds, they became rock stars specifically to get that kind of girl… but that’s the thing: That kind of girl doesn’t exist. She’s a 2D image, heavily photoshopped. Oh, I’m sure Supermodel X really IS hot in real life, but she’s also just a person, which means she farts and snores and wakes up with bed head and all that. Plus, rock stars really do live with the equivalent of their own personal Photoshop, in the form a small army of flunkies who make all of life’s routine frustrations go away. So it must be even more maddening to find out that the Cover Girl really does have myriad small blemishes, because, you know, she’s a real person, and not the fantasy you signed up for when you signed that big record deal.