From Scott Locklin's "Never Trust Anyone Who Hasn't Been Punched in the Face":
Every great civilization reaches a point of prosperity where it is possible to live your entire life as a pacifist without any serious consequences. Many civilizations have come to the state of devolution represented by modern Berkeley folkways, from wife-swapping to vegetarianism. These ideas don't come from a hardscrabble existence in contact with nature's elemental forces; they are the inevitable consequence of being an effete urban twit removed from meaningful contact with reality.
Related: Bret Easton Ellis' Generation Wuss.
This is the reason that hippie punching is never wrong.
When a gay guy in Vanity Fair is calling you a wuss, you are probably a wuss.
I like anyone who clearly isn't PC.
After reading, I thought for a bit. How many North American men now fit into this category (no violent experience)? I've played football, hockey and rugby, got into a few brief street fights, but all were more than 20 years ago.
Yikes!
I've been saying bullying was a good thing from the word go.
Bullying, i.e. picking on someone smaller or weaker than you, isn't a good thing. Being allowed to fight back against a bully - even if they're bullying someone else - without being arrested or expelled is a good thing.
If you eliminate the first, you eliminate the second, you wuss.
I was bullied by those stronger than me, and I bullied those weaker than me. I fought those who bullied me, and was fought by those I bullied. This is just a normal part of growing up.
There are many great sentences in this article that cut to the core of why our civilization is in decline.
"A man who has experienced violence knows that, at its core, civilization is an agreement between men to behave well. That agreement can be broken at any moment; it’s part of manhood to be ready when it is."
"When good men who will fight are all extinct, there is no more civilization. No lantern-jawed viragos are going to save you from the barbarian hordes. No mincing nancy boys with Harvard diplomas will stand up for the common decencies: They’re a social construct, dontcha know."
There has been much discussion on various threads for years on this blog about the decline, and I must admit that Scott Locklin is right about conservatives blaming the symptoms and missing the real cause being "lack of contact with objective reality". T
The symptoms he mentions and many of us blame for the decline, are really the fruits of the lack of contact with objective reality. We see empty shells of humans all around us and many of them are in positions of leadership.
Most of our current leaders are "lantern-jawed viragos" and "mincing nancy boys".
It's a variation on a theme on which I've sounded off since my twenties -- over-domestication. It was well summed up by a Polish ex-pat colleague of mine as we were killing a bottle of Polish bison-grass vodka. He said to me in his slightly drunken thick Polish accent, "One thing I do not understand about your country -- why do you not want your children to have stress?" He pointed to the bison on the bottle and said, "What is cow? It is bison without stress. And if the two are in the same field, which one gets eaten by the wolves?" I agreed with him completely. We're breeding a (second) generation of cows. And the wolves are acting hungry.
Necessary, but not sufficient.
Plenty of coke dealers spend their entire careers one step (or no steps) away from violence, and I can assure you that retired coke dealers do not all turn immediately into bastions of chivalry.
And then, there's that frequently-repeated tale of that guy who let himself get punched in the face - a lot - and then eventually crucified, without fighting back. He seems to have had at least a small effect on civilization.
And I know a lot of hardscrabble people - heck, I'm one of them now, after family court performed an income-ectomy upon me - for whom adversity has not been ennobling. Most of us just say "screw it" and pop open another beer.
FWIW.
Hippie punching is never wrong, period. You don't need reasons for that.
Yet, it seems to me that you are not some panty-waited little fa&&ot.
It's not meant to ennoble, it's only meant to exist, be embraced, and be acknowledged as real.
Excellent piece, and it will go over the heads of most in here:-)))
Ken, you are bang on!
Or like Dad said, "three generations off the farm common sense disappears"
Dad was right.
When the Yanks and the Canucks hopped on those troop transports,
they were already hardened by life during the Great Depression.
The World War Two generation lived through economic hardships
we can only imagine in our worst nightmares. As bad as it was
for them, they fought to protect their way of life because they
knew it was worth fighting for.
The very next generation devolved into a group of narcissistic
savages, like a page out of William Golding's Lord Of The Flies.
(And because Internet Trolls do not read, there is a movie)
Successive generations have descended into a bunch of brain-
dead morons who cannot even spell. Oh, they can text at the
speed of light and some of them can even cut and paste Wiki-
pedia pages and comment on subjects they do not even comprehend,
but that is the extent of their skills.
We have created two generations of sissies who are so puss-
ified, that their women are tougher than they are. I am not
counting my generation (The Baby Boomers,) because the vast
majority of Americans supported the war in Vietnam (60%
supported the war at it's lowest point.) The raging pussies
mostly headed North. where I hope real Canadians kicked their
asses like schoolyard bullies going after the scared sissies
they were.
In one year there were more than 300 major anti war protests
in in America. The next ZERO! The difference? Nixon
Abolished the draft. There you have the cause of the
"Peace protesters," I am afraid to fight!
While the Tofu eating, Vegan morons are touting solar and
wind power, we are laughing our asses off!
*
drd says... We're breeding a (second) generation of cows. And the wolves are acting hungry."
speaking as someone who HAS been punched in the face, i can tell you that one of the benefits of the experience is the realisation that... as much as that may hurt, it will not kill you.
*
Ken, the point you made about the denial of objective reality
is spot on. I have long maintained that the ancients were
the original objectivists. Starting a few hundred years ago,
there was there was a movement that embraced subjectivism
in philosophy. That led to the complete "Deconstruction"
in politics, art, music, science, etc.
My theory is that all the good ideas had already been "Thunk,"
so in order to counter established philosophy, they had to sell inferior ideas by claiming reality does not even exist. This
gave us Darwinism, which led like night into day to communism,
socialism, fascism, baby boomer radicalism and the false
science of environmentalism, not to mention rap music.
In order to sell an inferior product, you need to destroy
the the better one. We have whole generations who do not know
the difference between right and wrong. So, the next time
you hear someone say "Who's reality, yours or mine?" you are
dealing with a brainwashed zombie.
Immanuel Kant was just another con artist.
Very well said from one who lived through that era.
My brothers and I got into some pretty good fist fights when we were kids, so I have been punched, bitten, kicked, scratched, sat on ... you name it! I figured that was just part of having siblings. We also got involved in a rock fight with the kids who lived across the road from us.
My husband grew up in a very strict family, but even he managed to get into it with his brother. He was grounded for hitting his brother with his lunch box. I can't imagine a childhood without some form of physical altercation. Kids, like puppies and kittens, need to engage like that to learn what it feels like.
Aye, 'nuff said. No reason to go much further, eh?
Leo, when religious dictators started to lose control the pendulum started to swing to the left, and has been doing so ever since. All these "ideas" of which you speak are just religion replacements, again, a symptom, not a cause.
This guy was right about 3 generations too.
Great article and I have the feeling that there's going to be a great die-off when an unprepared population gets hit with a large dose of reality when TSHTF.
Being a lifelong hater of arbitrary authority, I never got any military experience, but martial arts were a very important part of my growing up. Once I was no longer confident in my ability to take on anyone physically, I got into guns. I've been pleasantly surprised that the kickboxing skills come back when I occasionally need them now. What I find mystifying is the increasing number of people that express disgust over the fact that I'm always prepared to engage in violence should it prove to be necessary. The responses seem to be more extreme now when people find that I like to shoot and always carry a couple of knives on me (we really need CCW in Canada). I've been called paranoid because I am always sizing up situations I enter into and can't walk down a street without looking for where possible threats might come from and how I'll deal with them -- I've been doing this for so long that it's become second nature.
In previous posts I've voiced similar opinions that current large cities are environments where people can inhabit reality tunnels which would lead to immediate death if they were placed in a primitive reality. By being shielded from objective reality there is an increasing fraction of the population who haven't a clue how to deal with emergencies or assuming that one can always reason with individuals who inhabit different reality tunnels. There are a very large number of disputes that can only be settled via physical means and anyone who isn't prepared to kill to maintain their way of life deserves to be a slave to individuals who are much more aware of external reality.
One of the reasons I left Vancouver is that I was disgusted in living in an environment where even the notion of an objective reality was derided and moved to a redneck area of BC. I find it refreshing to live in a location where people have to deal with external reality on a daily basis.
One solution to the progressive pussyfication of the younger generation would be to segregate elementary school students by sex and have only male teachers for the boys. Right now the mere act of throwing a snowball is considered to be sufficient to discipline a student whereas my generation was primarily guided by physical discipline by our parents. I remember telling an elementary school teacher how she had no idea how to use a strap and that she could take lessons from my father who knew how to effectively wield a belt.
The process that is taking place is a deliberate creation of a dependant class who won't revolt (actually they wouldn't have a clue how to rise up agaist totalitarianism) and just exist to serve the oligarchs who rule by natural right. Plutocrats are in charge now and "democracy" is a delusion designed to pit people against one another and distract them from the real power brokers in the country. The people the oligarchs are most afraid of are individuals who have engaged in physical violence and believe in an objective reality as well as being able to function independently. This is likely the impetus for considering members of the military returning to the US as potential "terrorists" as they have learned to think for themselves and know how to effectively use violence. Similar rationale applies to those considered "survivalists" as they are not dependent on statist governments.
"a deliberate creation of a dependent class". Something like Eloi?
Nice to see you posting once again. Welcome back.
When I was a kid there was a statute for corporal punishment that allowed a magistrate to have a person in the local jail to be leaned over a pommel horse, pants stripped to ankles and have his a$$ beaten with what looked like a cricket bat.
I was shown this little room in the basement at the age of 13 to reinforce a message that I was getting too big for my own britches around my little home town. I was not the only one who received this warning, not the first and not the last.
For me the message was clear.
For the record the corporal punishment was was quite effective and discouraging bums, habitual criminals, violent drunks, petty thieves, vandals, arsonists and major a$$holes from staying in town. Or at least keeping their obnoxious selves out of sight and quiet.
We also had a healthy membership at the local Veteran's Legion who would help out our miniscule police force. Even kicked about 100 bikers out of town one afternoon. With prejudice and baseball bats.
Lessons learned.
Good summary at 8:10. There are other more complex forces at work that contribute to the disappearing male in western society. The Disappearing Male is about one of the most important, and least publicized, issues facing the human species: the toxic threat to the male reproductive system. The last few decades have seen steady and dramatic increases in the incidence of boys and young men suffering from genital deformities, low sperm count, sperm abnormalities and testicular cancer.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-disappearing-male/
Many of the chemicals ubiquitous in western society mimic estrogen in the human body. They have made men semi-eunuchs, and girls are ending puberty at ever younger years. The sexualization of female children by the marketing industry only amplifies the effect. The urban androgynous metrosexual is an evolutionary dead end for an overpopulated urban planet. Real men can sill be found in the sparsely settled areas like Alaska where a traditional diet of 'game meat and potatoes' prevails.
I am always sizing up situations I enter into and can't walk down a street without looking for where possible threats might come from and how I'll deal with them -- I've been doing this for so long that it's become second nature. -Loki
I was taught that at an early age as a basic tool for survival, along with an ability to project situations into the near future and take evasive action before the SHTF. I can remember many times slowly driving away from a situation as a stream of cop cars passed me on the way in. It's not precognition, but rather a heightened sense of situational awareness. It's generally easier to avoid trouble when possible. If fighting is unavoidable, then I prefer the surgical precision of a 150gr .308 FMJ from 200yards or more, rather than slashing hand-to-hand with a knife.
correction: girls are entering and ending puberty at ever younger years.
since we will not be held to the Geneva Convention why use FMJ?
Excellent! - crystal clarity in an objective critique of post-constitutional American culture - in a natural disaster which would delete their fragile life support system the current generation would perish for lack of rudimentary survival skills - talk about fundamental detachment from objective reality
Never been a huge Bret Easton Ellis fan, but that is a good piece of thinking and writing. Excerpt:
"...late-end Baby Boomers and Generation X parents who were now rebelling against their own rebelliousness because of the love they felt that they never got from their selfish narcissistic Boomer parents and who end up smothering their kids, inducing a kind of inadequate preparation in how to deal with the hardships of life and the real way the world works: people won’t like you, that person may not love you back, kids are really cruel, work sucks, it’s hard to be good at something, life is made up of failure and disappointment, you’re not talented, people suffer, people grow old, people die. And Generation Wuss responds by collapsing into sentimentality and creating victim narratives rather than acknowledging the realities of the world and grappling with them and processing them and then moving on, better prepared to navigate an often hostile or indifferent world that doesn’t care if you exist."
Pretty good analysis. I wasn't expecting that.
BTW I'm just old enough to know that Leonard Jones does have it right about the Vietnam war protestors. As soon as Nixon ended the draft, the campus demonstrations stopped.
"As soon as Nixon ended the draft, the campus demonstrations stopped." Posted by: Exurban
Of course the demonstrations stopped, that was the purpose of the demonstrations, they won. The demonstrations were more about the draft than the war. It was denial of freedom of choice that they rebelled against. Once the wars were being fought by enlistees, people believed they had free choice to participate in a war or not. No president has ever been foolish enough to institute a draft again.