They came to believe that if the US did not impose its values on the whole world then either the commies or the Nazis would take over America.

Had it not been for the U. S., the commies or the Nazis would have taken over the world.

You’ve misunderstood my point a little (or more likely I didn’t express myself very well). What I meant was that American liberals in the 1950s still saw Nazis as a threat. They still see Nazis as a threat today. Seeing Nazis as a threat in the early 1940s was perfectly rational. Seeing them as a threat after 1945 was and is deluded.

The commie threat was overblown. The US was never in the slightest danger.

My real point was that, whether you believe their fears were justified or not, the fact is that American liberals decided to launch the first global culture war. They decided that their war against communism would be to a large extent a cultural war. That was something that hadn’t really happened since the Thirty Years War. And a culture war is not quite the same thing as a religious war, although it’s similar.

Whose values would you have us impose? Is it even possible to try and impose values other than one’s own?

Normal healthy countries don’t try to impose their values on others. Wanting to impose one’s values on others is a sign of madness, in both countries and individuals.

On reflection though I’m not sure it’s completely warranted or entirely the fault of democracy per-se. All governments are an imperfect compromise in one way or another, and all subject to their own distortions from their ideal form. On balance, I’m not sure that democratic systems are inherently worse than any of the other alternatives out there.

To continue with my car analogy. My car is old and beat-up but if I had the money and the willingness to spend that money it could be turned into a reasonably reliable and satisfactory means of transportation. I can’t turn it into a Porsche and it will never be a luxury prestige car but it could be made to run a whole lot better.

Democracy is like that. It will never be a great system, it will never be anywhere near perfect, it will never live up to the insanely high hopes people once had of it, but it could be made to work a whole lot better. And it’s what we’ve got. If we ditch it we might regret it.

Do you have an ideal government that you would prefer in some magic world where we are given the choice?

I’m sceptical of perfect governments and perfect worlds.

For myself I’ve always thought that small tribal systems (essentially pre-government) have substantial appeal. They are relatively responsive to the actual needs of the group and an incompetent chief is relatively easy to depose. Barring that, smaller scale democracies where direct democracy is actually possible for a select citizenry seem quite reasonable. You’ll notice I tend toward smaller systems as a personal preference.

Direct democracy would have its dangers. Most people are not that interested in government. Direct democracy could end up being dominated by small highly motivated cliques. And direct decision-making by the citizenry has upsides and downsides. The citizens can too easily be manipulated by emotion.

Somehow, it is hard to find the making of globohomo in the words of these men from the zenith of American Protestant Liberal Exceptionalism. In fact, they are entirely the opposite.

Which is why I made it quite clear that globohomo is a modern development. It’s maybe half a century old at most. But it has its roots in the past. Every new ideological variant has its roots in the past. In the case of the US there were distinctive cultural traditions that didn’t exist anywhere else in quite the same form. Those cultural traditions, over the course of centuries, evolved in ways that eventually brought globohomo to birth. That wasn’t George Washington’s fault.

I understand that as an American you love America and you find it very disturbing to accept the idea that America has become an incredibly destructive force for evil.

But I have never claimed that the US was always a destructive force for evil. That’s a tragic modern development.

And I don’t think the tragic change would have happened without WW2 and the Cold War. Those events changed American liberalism. American liberalism became obsessed with global moral crusades and American liberals became obsessed with the idea that the mere existence of alternative forms of government or alternative ideological beliefs or cultural values was an existential threat to American liberalism. They came to believe that if the US did not impose its values on the whole world then either the commies or the Nazis would take over America. American liberals became both paranoid and hyper-aggressive and they developed that missionary zeal that we now know all too well.

I don’t know why you imagine I think George Washington was to blame.

Things could change and opportunities could arise.

Then we take that night train in from Germany. 🙂

Look in Wiki and see if there is an entry called Huxlian.

Now we’re talking about influence. Orwell has certainly been much more influential.

I read a volume of Orwell’s essays recently and was amazed at the shallowness and wrong-headedness of his ideas. There are occasional flashes of brilliant insight but mostly they’re complete nonsense. Orwell’s own political views were stunningly naïve. The man believed in democracy. What can you do with such a person?

but I also question: does it make sense to call a single decade “decadent”? I’m not so sure, or at least it doesn’t carry quite the same meaning as the terminal decadence we’re caught in now.

I use “decadence” to mean civilizational exhaustion and anomie.

Good point. Most people associate decadence with hedonism in genera and sexual licentiousness in particular but your definition is probably more correct and more useful.

Most periods of “decadence” were nothing more than periodic swings in the moral pendulum. In England you had the extreme moral repression of the Commonwealth in the 1650s followed by a dramatic swing towards licentiousness in the Restoration period. The 19th century began with the free-wheeling hedonism of the Regency period (gambling, drinking and whoring) then there was a dramatic moral backlash in the mid-Victorian period. The Decadence of the 1890s was a natural reaction against the moral repressiveness of the previous few decades.

Weimar/The Roaring 20s was a pretty natural reaction to the horrors of the First Word War. Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll (or in this case jazz rather than rock’n’roll) understandably had a lot of appeal. By the 40s and 50s we were back to being straitlaced again. The Sexual Revolution was (I would argue) a fairly normal swing of the pendulum back the other way.

But then a curious thing happened. The pendulum just kept on swinging towards licentiousness and hedonism. The expected moral backlash against the Sexual Revolution and the Drug Culture didn’t really happen.

Or perhaps it did. But instead of the normal moral backlash we got Political Correctness and Wokeism. Both of which are very moralistic in their own perverted ways. And both of which are essentially weird mutated forms of Puritanism.

The difference between then and now is a feeling that there is nothing left to explore. Technology has stagnated, and we still have basically all the problems that existed in the 1960s and no new solutions for them on either side. This is the difference from the 1920s — back then, there were new problems and new solutions.

Yes.

Any cultural importation from Islam or Europe is negligible, compared to the flood coming from the U.S.

Yep. American cultural power is overwhelming and simply crushes everything in its path.

There’s also the fact that the producers of pop culture outside the US have had to to conform to American cultural values in order to access the vast American market. If you’re making a movie in France or Britain or Australia and you want to to get released in the US you have no choice other than to conform to globohomo.

As far as Europe goes it also appears to me that they are brought down by a lack of will to exist after they were broken by the World Wars, combined by drowning their sorrows in acceptance of American style consumerism.

Yes, I agree. WW2 discredited the idea of European civilisation in European eyes. The Europeans adopted America as their model.

Consumer culture is the root of the rot, in my mind. We are called to create and build, not consume like pigs at a trough.

Yes. I think that the massive increase in material standards of living over the past century was a good thing but the problem was that consumption became an end in itself. It’s nice to have consumer goods but you don’t need to replace them anywhere near as often as most people do. And a lot of consumer goods are things people don’t need at all. They’re just an excuse for spending money. They’re just retail therapy.

Thanks, I guess, for the upbeat and encouraging words.

Hey, by my standards that was pretty upbeat!

You’ll note that I said that these things are not politically do-able at the moment. Things could change. There’s a lot of disillusionment out there. The problem is that it’s unfocused. That could change as well. Political upheavals can take a long long time to build and then suddenly everything moves incredibly fast. And non-political crises (like COVID) can destabilise what appeared to be a stable system.

Things could change and opportunities could arise.

BNW was interesting, but basically an often told story of the transformation of replacement elites.

Brave New World offered two very profound insights. Firstly, you can exercise totalitarianism through material prosperity, drugs and sex and if you do that you don’t need terror. Sure the Romans used Bread and Circuses but their objective was not totalitarian and they were also happy to use terror.

Secondly, you can make people genuinely love totalitarianism. Not pretend to love it, as in 1984, but genuinely love it.

But certainly Orwell came up with some great insights as well. Maybe Orwell understood power more clearly, while Huxley had a better understanding of human nature. I think we’re more likely to end up with BNW.

Globohomo is just the latest iteration of something that has happened many times before. Weimar and the Roaring ’20s were globohomo. Revolutionary France was globohomo. Savonarola’s bonfire was a reaction to Florentine globohomo.

There are many good points in the current back and forth which I’m too busy to address right now, though I’m enjoying the progression.
I agree with your sentiment above to a point, though I would make a bit more of a distinction placing “globohomo” as a more recent, and to doom’s point, a more American export.

All of the examples are of degenerate decadence, a thing which all societies seem to experience eventually. They were however, comparatively isolated to the society in question. The spirit of the French Revolution or Wiemar Germany certainly traveled to an extent, but did not permeate into the mass of the common populace the way globohomo targets even the lowliest prole for ideological submission.

“Globohomo” is much more global in scope because of the cancerous ubiquity of America’s cultural exports and hegemonic global influence. Current communication technologies also make it’s spread much quicker and widespread than would have been possible at any other time.

Globohomo is just the latest iteration of something that has happened many times before. Weimar and the Roaring ’20s were globohomo.

No they weren’t. They were just decadent. The globo part was missing. The missionary zeal was missing. It’s the missionary zeal that is the defining characteristic of globohomo.

Decadence has happened many times. And ideologies driven by missionary zeal have happened before. It’s the combination of the two that is unique, and I’d argue that that is a distinctively American mixture. Decadence has never before been turned into a world-conquering religious faith.

Doom, you are obviously down on democracy. What alternative do you envision?

I regard democracy the way I regard my car. My car is old and beaten up. There are a few worrying knocking noises. A lot of things no longer work (such as the air con). The bodywork has quite a few dings and the paintwork is in terrible condition. But it’s the only car I’ve got and it’s the only car I’m going to have in the foreseeable future. Obviously a new car would be the ideal solution but since that’s not gonna happen the priority is to keep the car I’ve got running. It will never be pretty and it will always leak oil and make funny noises and the damned air con never will work again. But it runs, after a fashion. It will get me from Point A to Point B.

Democracy is an insane system but we’re stuck with it. It will never work well but it could work a lot better. The first priority is to tackle the institutionalised legal corruption – campaign donations are in fact bribes and when retired politicians get cosy sinecures in the corporate sector or ludicrously inflated speaking fees, all for services rendered, those are bribes too. That kind of corruption needs to be cleaned up but it’s not politically do-able at the moment.

Obviously the power of traditional media oligarchs and social media oligarchs needs to be broken. That’s not politically do-able at the moment either.

Some tinkering could be done to electoral systems but that’s also not politically do-able at the moment.

the comment Marty had made reporting that dfordoom’s blog was blocked by FedEx.

This might be an opportune moment for me to insert a rant about censorship.

There are two ways that censorship can be enforced. I can be done directly by the government. Or there’s the American system under which private corporations act as the censors. It is absolutely critical to understand that both these systems are systems of censorship, and that censorship by private corporations make just as much of a mockery of the First Amendment as government censorship. Either way you end up not having freedom of speech.

In many ways censorship by private corporations is worse than government censorship, because it means that the person who is being censored has no right of appeal and doesn’t have to be told why he’s being censored. He doesn’t even have to be told that he is being censored.

In Australia books and movies are and always were subject to government censorship. Many books and many movies were banned. But the government had to do it openly, through government instrumentalities which were subject to public scrutiny. Avenues of appeal existed (and were often successful). Government censorship boards had to give reasons for their decisions. There is also the possibility of compromise and negotiation. This happened when Ken Russell’s film The Devils was released uncut in Australia with an R-rating (equivalent to an American X-rating) on the condition that all advertising for the film had to carry a special warning.

When the Australian Government censored Andrew Bolt on political grounds they had to do it openly and he had avenues of appeal.

Governments can be subjected to pressure when they behave oppressively. It is possible to fight back.

I’m not drawing any distinction here between censorship of sexual material and political censorship because in practice both work the same way.

It’s also worth pointing out that distinctions between censorship of sexual material and political censorship are often not clear-cut. The Australian censors subjected The Devils to special attention not because of sexual content (which they could easily have dealt with by making a few very brief cuts) but because of concerns that some people might find the ideas in the film upsetting.

This is mistaken. Where in Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Emerson, Theroux, Melville or Hawthorne is globohomo? And if you do think it stems from those Exceptional Protestant American Liberals, why did it not manifest until the late 20th Century, after the US ceased being so exceptional, Protestant and (classically) liberal?

Globohomo evolved in the US, beginning in the 1960s.

Ideologies evolve. Look at modern liberals. They’re not your grandfather’s liberals. American liberalism was becoming something quite different from classical liberalism by the late 60s. Up until that time American liberalism was quite benign and even in some ways admirable (if often misguided).

The distinctive American brand of Protestantism permeates American culture. Liberals absorbed a lot of aspects of American Protestantism without being conscious of it. They absorbed an obsession with sin, an obsession with sex, a messianic fervour. When combined with the new strand of American liberalism the result was a potent and dangerous brew.

An obsession with sin is a very nasty thing when it becomes separated from other Christian concepts such as forgiveness and redemption. Secularised Puritanism is infinitely worse than religious Puritanism.

And American Exceptionalism is something that has just grown and grown. It’s stronger today than ever before. WW2 and the Cold War kicked American Exceptionalism into overdrive where it’s been ever since. When you add that to the mix you get an even more dangerous brew.

The current brand of Exceptionalist, Protestant-influenced liberalism is relatively new. Even 1950s American liberals would be horrified by it.

I want to emphasise that up until the 1990s America really was a nation to be envied and admired. What remains of the old America is still worthy of admiration. But globohomo could not have evolved anywhere else but America because the necessary ingredients were not to be found anywhere else.

Australia has Protestantism, Liberalism and Exceptionalism. Why doesn’t Australia grow globohomo if those are the ingredients?

Australian Protestantism has nothing in common with American Protestantism. It has different roots. There has never been such a thing as Australian Exceptionalism. It has never occurred to any Australian at any time that Australian cultural values should be imposed on anyone else. And we had a different kind of liberalism as well. Much less right-wing than the American variant. Much less of a love affair with capitalism and free markets. And it had a paternalistic streak. And Australian liberalism has never had any trace of messianic fervour.

Barbarella — Utopia or Dystopia?

You make the call.

Any world which contains a young Jane Fonda (before she had her sense of fun surgically removed) wearing sexy skimpy outfits and doing strip-teases sure looks like Utopia to me.

My guess is that that’s the best way to convince Ron that it would be worth his while to appoint a moderator.

Maybe, but I don’t believe he cares about stuff like that. He just wanted to get us off the generic open thread in order to reduce moderation time.

Unfortunately I think that’s the case. I don’t think he’d be interested in appointing a successor to AE unless that person was prepared to run the AE blog as a regular Unz Review blog with lengthy articles and all the work that that would entail.

It is understandable that it appears to be a “US line” that everyone must slavishly toe, since the US is the largest power subject to globohomo, but in reality the US is (mostly) slavishly toeing the same globohomo line as everyone else.

But “globohomo” is entirely an American thing. It’s an American invention. It wasn’t imposed on America from outside. Globohomo is as American as baseball or Mom’s apple pie. Only American culture could have produced globohomo. It’s the kind of thing you can only get when you combine American Protestantism, American Exceptionalism and American liberalism.

Ordinary Americans have no interest nor desire to force policy on the antipodes, Syria, Venezuela or anywhere else. But ordinary Americans don’t get to choose.

I kinda agree with that, up to a point. But I do think that many (and I’m saying many rather than all) ordinary Americans genuinely do believe that the US has both a right and a duty to impose American cultural values on the rest of the planet. You can’t just blame the US Government or American elites.

Along these same lines, a comment section limited to AE’s approved commenters will die a slow death.

Yes. Setting up the AE Community Open Thread was a good and sensible short-term solution. We still need a long-term solution but this has bought us some valuable time.

Obviously Ron Unz doesn’t have the time to handle running and moderating this blog along with all the other things he has to do. The best long-term solution is clearly to find someone who is willing to take over the job of moderating this blog and just as clearly that will have to be someone acceptable to the people here and acceptable to Ron. But at least we now have time to work towards that goal.

In the short term the best thing we can do is to make the AE Community Open Thread a raging success. My guess is that that’s the best way to convince Ron that it would be worth his while to appoint a moderator.

We are 116 years down that road, and over 190 countries, up from about 50 when Norway broke away.

Yes, on the face of it, history seems to be on the side of decentralization and self-determination. But simultaneously, globalism advances through non-sovereign power: economics, technology (especially communications technology), and the force of the burgeoning world population. More people, more countries, and yet a global surveillancist super-consciousness has never been closer at hand.

You have to remember that most of these supposedly sovereign nations are not sovereign in reality. Their capability to defend their sovereignty in the face of pressure from great powers (especially the US) is close to zero.

Australia for example is not in any sense a sovereign nation. Back in the 1970s there was an Australian Government that tried to behave as if Australia was a sovereign independent nation. That government was overthrown in a bloodless coup. Since then no Australia Government has ever even contemplated not slavishly toeing the US line.

If countries cannot pursue policies in their own interests without facing the certainty of being bombed or invaded or having theirs governments overthrown then the idea that these are independent countries is pure fantasy.

I imagine if the way this happens, if it does happen, is the megacorps (and not the law) will take the lead, agreeing almost at once to stop serving meat.

Yes.

But I continue to maintain my view that there’s not really going to be a new World War in the model of Wars G and T. Those, plus racism, are enough to maintain a cultural Forever War.

I agree. I know that many people on the Right are convinced that there’s going to be big push to normalise incest or paedophilia or polygamy but I don’t see it happening. I think it’s very unlikely.

What’s interesting is that World Wars G and T have not really been about sex at all. Homosexuals have had the freedom to do what they like sexually for half a century. These wars are not about sex, they’re about identity. They’re about replacing normal organic identities with artificial identities.

The left can never be satisfied.

The Right has been firmly in charge for at least forty years. Identity politics is and always has been a weapon to destroy the Left.

You’re blocked by FedEx.

That’s weird. Of all the political dissident blogs I’ve ever encountered mine is just about the most moderate. I guess even moderate dissent is now forbidden.

I think the main problem is that men are getting paranoid thinking that if they wait until they’re 35, the 20-year-old women will consider them too old, and in this they may be right. Now this really is a problem, but it’s a problem with the conditioning of modern females, not with men per se.

There’s a real hysteria about age differences in our bizarre modern world.

But then our modern civilisation is increasingly hysterical about almost everything. Hysteria is the hallmark of our civilisation.

We’ve had World War G and World War T and people are wondering that’s coming next. My guess is that the next war will be World War V. World War Vegan.

It’s already started in Australia. Suddenly within a few months supermarket shelves are packed with vegan food and non-vegan food is disappearing from those same shelves. The current push behind veganism is extraordinary.

My prediction is that over the next few years we will see a very strong push to de-normalise meat-eating. Not just to de-normalise it, but to demonise meat-eating.

Within ten years people will be getting cancelled when it’s discovered that at some point in the past they were meat-eaters.

Regarding literary dystopias, I’m partial to ones that are not full-blown overhauls of society in a distant future, but instead seem like they could be just over the horizon for us, if a few circumstances were to go the wrong way. Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange comes to mind

Good point. It really does take very little to flip a sane sensible society into a dystopia. And a dystopia can sneak up on you without your being aware that it’s happening.

And A Clockwork Orange is one of the most chillingly plausible of all literary dystopias.

On the subject of obscure and forgotten dystopian fiction there were a couple of interesting 1970s British TV series dealing with the subject – The Guardians and 1990. 1990 is particularly interesting as an anticipation of Cancel Culture.

Italian, German, American, British, etc. politicians don’t think in those terms anymore. To the core they are mostly opportunists, blank slaters and effective altruists and as always handmaids to capitalists, in this case globalists

It’s the nature of democracy. Politicians will always be opportunists because democracy is essentially political prostitution. They’re handmaids to capitalists for the same reason that prostitutes hope to find a john with a well-filled wallet.

Politicians are just like whores except that some whores probably really do have hearts of gold. And most whores are in their own way honest. If they offer you a particular sexual service for a particular sum of money they’ll probably give you what you paid for. Politicians are like the dishonest prostitutes who promise you a good time and then don’t deliver, and then steal your wallet.

In the case of prostitutes it’s the dishonest 5% who give the rest a bad name. In the case of politicians it’s the dishonest 99% who give the rest a bad name.

Expecting anything but lies and cynical opportunism from a politician is hopelessly unrealistic. And always has been.

But yes, sometime in the past decade, I went from feeling this was my country, my government, to “I just live here.”

It’s a more realistic attitude. No country is special. Every country even at the best of times is a mixture of good and bad. And no democratically elected government (in any country) has ever merited more than grudging obedience.

No country is special because no group of people is special. Whether the group of people is a race or an ethnicity or a nationality or whether it comprises the adherents of a particular religion or ideology or whether it’s a social class or whatever, any group of people will be more or less less the same. It will be a mixture of the virtuous and the vicious, the intelligent and the stupid, the generous and the greedy.

That doesn’t mean you have to be ashamed of belonging to such a group but it does mean that you have to significantly lower your expectations. Which may be a psychologically healthy thing to do.

I went from feeling those are our troops, our boys in uniform, to feeling they are USG’s troops

Personally I have never had idealistic notions about Australian troops because during the whole of my lifetime Australian troops have fought in numerous wars, and in not a single case was their involvement justified. I feel some sympathy for the poor bastards who were drafted to fight in Vietnam. Since then we’ve had a volunteer army and volunteer armies are in my view essentially mercenaries. They’re paid to kill people and that’s what they do. They’re not essentially any different from Mob hitmen.

Some delude themselves into thinking they’re serving their country but not once in my lifetime have Australian soldiers actually fought to defend Australia.

Losing delusions is painful but necessary. It’s healthy to lose delusions.

The real problem then isn’t Atwood’s novel, it’s the makers of the TV show and its latter-day followers who don’t really have anything they can even point to, aside from their own paranoia, that illustrates that religious conservatives are increasing in power. In that sense it’s no more sophisticated than asking, “Hey, what if the BOGEYMAN were in charge of society?”

Yes, I agree.

So the TV show at least is bad sci-fi, but good propaganda and a model for future leftist propaganda. It conveys the idea that the way everyone except cishet white males lived, up until 15 minutes ago, was a dystopian hellscape, and any attempt to roll back the revolution even slightly will immediately restore that hellscape, so we must be eternally vigilant.

Yep. It is worrying that the type of people who make such TV shows really do believe that. Partly it’s their truly terrifying lack of any historical knowledge or perspective. It’s not that they believe that in the 1950s women were kept barefoot and pregnant and chained to the kitchen stove, which would be ludicrous enough. They believe that was happening in the 1980s.

We’re dealing with people who genuinely cannot distinguish between things that were happening a few decades ago and things that were happening centuries ago.

Propaganda is particularly dangerous when it’s produced by people who sincerely believe their own propaganda line.

Thank you, Mr. Unz, for creating the new open thread for those of us privileged to be “existing members of the AE community”.

As can clearly be seen, there have already been a number of different, distinct topics already discussed in this thread, and it can only be expected that the number of topics that will be covered going forward will expand. In consideration of this and how unwieldy such a large thread covering so many completely different, often unrelated topics can be, I would like to suggest the following, assuming it could be done without placing undue burden on you.

Create several different topic/category-specific threads, plus one miscellaneous thread as a catch-all for anything that does not fit under any of the specific ones. The topics would presumably be those that have been the most frequent at AE’s blog. The following is a suggestion for some fairly broad categories:
– Electoral and Other Domestic Politics, Policy and Concerns
– Immigration and Foreign Policy
– Economy and Trade
– Minority Populations (for all discussion concerning various racial, ethnic, national or religious minorities and their relation to the majority population)
– Sexuality, Fertility, Family Formation, and Child-Rearing
– Culture and Religion

Some of the above could perhaps be merged, while others could perhaps be further split. I have no idea of what the relative costs to you are of creating and maintaining more threads vs. fewer. Nor do I have any idea how difficult or complicated implementing such an idea at all might be for you. If at all formidable, then, let me reiterate, I would not expect you to take any such burden upon yourself. If, however, creating at least a few separate threads would not be too difficult, then doing so would be much appreciated, not only by myself but, I am sure, others as well.

I’ve cross-posted this reply to a comment by on AE’s blog because I think it’s an interesting question to pursue.

It’s likely above my paygrade to pull it all together, but I am convinced that bureaucracy is working to destroy us.

I agree. I think that’s just in the nature of bureaucracy. As bureaucracies get bigger they get more oppressive and more intrusive. Even if the bureaucracies comprise people who are honest and sincerely believe they’re working in the best interests of society they will still become more oppressive and more intrusive and will end by turning society into a totalitarian nightmare.

Of course if those bureaucracies also include a significant number of people who are actively malevolent then you have a much bigger problem. But even a benign bureaucracy will be destructive.

And the bigger the nation state the bigger the bureaucracy and the bigger the bureaucracy gets the more impossible it is to control.

It’s likely above my paygrade to pull it all together, but I am convinced that bureaucracy is working to destroy us.

I agree. I think that’s just in the nature of bureaucracy. As bureaucracies get bigger they get more oppressive and more intrusive. Even if the bureaucracies comprise people who are honest and sincerely believe they’re working in the best interests of society they will still become more oppressive and more intrusive and will end by turning society into a totalitarian nightmare.

Of course if those bureaucracies also include a significant number of people who are actively malevolent then you have a much bigger problem. But even a benign bureaucracy will be destructive.

And the bigger the nation state the bigger the bureaucracy and the bigger the bureaucracy gets the more impossible it is to control.

I question whether we can have organized entities without elite control. Maybe the best that we can hope for is an enlighten, competent and benevolent elite, not the anti-thesis of those qualities that we have now.

Political fragmentation might be a way of achieving that. It’s possible that it’s the sheer size of nations (and economies) today that produces such appalling elites, because it produces elites with almost unimaginable wealth and power. It encourages elite megalomania.

It’s also possible that the ancien regime collapsed in France because at the time France was, in terms of economics and population, the closest thing in Europe to a superpower. Which might have caused the French elites to be like our elites today – they just had too much power and wealth which made them just too arrogant and decadent.

Unfortunately political fragmentation seems very unlikely at the moment.

One of my critical principles on the modern world is based on size and scale. I’m convinced that as institutions increase in size they become less humane and less responsive to real human needs. It seems to me that there is perhaps an ideal organic scale for human societies which has been short circuited by technology, especially the greatly increased mobility of the 20th century.

I agree. And that’s why I’m not as worried as some people about declining birth rates. It’s arguable that when you have nation states with populations numbered in the tens of millions (or in some cases hundreds of millions) it is inevitable that you end up with alienated atomised populations and regimes that are oppressive because they just can’t function any other way.

In the long term it’s possible that much smaller populations might result in a more civilised healthy society. And this doesn’t have to be achieved by high mortality. Lower birth rates can achieve the same results much more humanely.

Obviously smaller political units are also desirable but I have no idea how that can be achieved. But it’s the reason I quite like the idea of seeing countries like the UK breaking up.

If you’re interested we could continue this discussion on the Open Thread.

So if somebody set up a blog on blogger, then this community could at least temporarily move there.

At the moment I’m trying to transfer some of the recent very interesting discussions here to the Open Thread. I see this as a temporary thing. If we can keep this community of commenters going for a while on the Open Thread maybe we can buy ourselves a little time to think of a long term option. So if you go to the Open Thread you’ll find several comments that I’ve left there that relate to our recent discussions.

I know that the Open Thread is probably not a long-term solution but I’d encourage people to use it as a short-term refuge.

So if you’re interested the relevant One Thread posts are Numbers 285, 294 and 295. And @Iffen’s comment, Number 287.

Recently on AE’s blog wrote on the subject of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Britain didn’t actually turn into Airstrip One, but Orwell was not crazy to look at various forces in British society, how the USSR had turned, and extrapolate out.

I’m not a fan of HMT, but I still don’t think it was an insane book to write. The women who convince themselves that the US is just like it now, they are mad, but they are also very few.

I think you have to remember that Atwood was writing in the mid-80s at a time when the Religious Right in the US appeared to be immensely powerful. That was to a considerable extent an illusion but at the time Atwood’s speculations seemed to be somewhat plausible.

Since then things have changed dramatically and Atwood’s speculations now seem to have turned out to be wildly implausible. But at the time her fears did not seem entirely groundless. You also have to remember that she was writing before Political Correctness became all-powerful, before Third Wave feminism appeared on the scene, before the Great Awokening, before the LGBTwhatever lobby became so immensely powerful. She was writing at a time when the political landscape was very very different.

Atwood seems to have turned out to be wrong (and I’m not a fan of HMT either), but at the time she didn’t appear to be crazy.

I just wanted to see if I got swarmed by nutters!

I did my part.

In a recent thread on AE’s blog said

It seems the mid 20th Century was an exception to the rule. Monogamy was socially enforced and marriage and children fell into place for most men. After the sexual revolution we returned to the haves and have nots.

I replied
“I think that’s true. It was a unique time in which most men could get decent well-paid secure jobs. Secure being the really important factor. For the only time in human history most men were very attractive marriage propositions for women.

“While the Sexual Revolution did play a part in ending that golden age the most important factors were the disappearance of those decent well-paid jobs and the ending of job security.”

To which I’d add that women have to be hardheaded when it comes to marriage. If a man does not have at least a reasonably decent wage and more crucially if he does not have a secure job it is simply reckless for a woman to regard him as husband material. You can’t blame women for that. If a woman wants to have children she needs financial security.

So this is an example not of technology or ideology but changes to the economic system driving social change.

So if somebody set up a blog on blogger, then this community could at least temporarily move there.

I already have a political blog on Blogger and it would be inconvenient and confusing for me to try to run two political blogs.

Anyone who wants to follow my blog or leave comments is of course very welcome to do so. Comments are moderated (which in my opinion is absolutely essential) and my moderation policies are slightly stricter than AE’s schoolmarm.

If anyone wants to write a guest post they’re welcome to do so. At the moment the blog is set up with myself as the only authorised poster and I don’t want to fiddle with those settings at the moment (although I’d certainly consider it in the future) but if you email a guest post to me I’ll publish it (under the pseudonym of your choice of course) as long as it passes muster with my schoolmarm.

The blog mainly focuses on social issue stuff (the family, political correctness, censorship, marriage, sex, education, history, Wokeness in popular culture, the politicisation of science, etc). It has a modest following and a few decent regular commenters. I check it every day so the longest you’d ever have to wait for a comment to be approved would be 24 hours (I have to do things like sleep).

Anyway that’s what I personally can offer at the moment. If you missed the link to my blog last time here it is again –

https://anotherpoliticallyincorrectblog.blogspot.com/

Certain critics abide by a ridiculous bifurcation of literature into two categories:

“literary” fiction and “genre” fiction.

I do not abide by these categories. They are offensive to me, and a dirty trick.

I agree.

There is no “literary” fiction. All fiction is literature. There is no “genre” fiction. There are sub-genres of fiction, but examplars of these are not non-literary. They too are literature.

I agree. But if all fiction is literature then erotic fiction is literature.

This division was invented in my conspiratorial opinion to free stories from a responsibility to execute successfully the things popular fiction tends to manage successfully. Things like plot.

To a certain extent, yes. The division is also intended to make the people who read “literary” fiction feel superior to people who read other genres.

As for whether fiction other than erotic fiction or romance fiction should include graphic sex, that’s a tricky question. There are occasions when it really is important to convey to the reader that the relationship between two characters has changed from just good friends into passionate love and on those occasions it can be desirable to give a sex scene a genuine erotic charge.

Personally it’s not the sex in modern literature (or modern movies) that bothers me. It’s the unnecessary crudity and vulgarity, and the unnecessarily graphic violence.

Meaning regular people are cognizant of the difference between thrills used to advance a story and thrills used for the sake of thrills. And they reject the latter.

But we were talking about romance fiction. It’s fiction about love and sex. If it’s a story about love and sex then the moment that the protagonists have sex sure as hell does advance the story. How graphic you like the description of the sex to be is a matter of personal taste. Clearly many of the women who read romance fiction want it to be fairly graphic. If that’s what they like then good luck to them.

Romance fiction is basically pornography for women, the difference being that men are mostly aroused by visual images of a sexual nature while women are aroused by reading about situations of both a sexual and emotional nature.

Saying that the sex scenes in romance novels are gratuitous and unnecessary is like saying that the pictures of naked women in a girlie magazine are gratuitous and unnecessary.

What are literary purposes? Not giving the reader sexual pleasure up to and including orgasm. That is extra-literary, I must say.

If it’s romance fiction then its purpose is to arouse the reader emotionally and sexually. And yes, some women will read romance fiction and then masturbate. If that’s what they want to do then that’s fine. If it’s add a little bit of joy to their lives I don’t have a problem with that.

CJ Hopkins is a good writer who was kicking the truth about Corona. Why should he be dropped?

As I understand it he left voluntarily because it was no longer safe for him to be associated with Unz Review. In the country in which he lives being associated with Unz Review could potentially earn you a long prison sentence.

That’s the real problem. That’s the reason the sane sensible contributors and the sane sensible commenters are leaving one by one.

And that’s the reason why we should think about trying to set up a new blog/community elsewhere.

We need to realise that Unz Review is increasingly seen as an extremist site that sane sensible people can no longer afford to be associated with. Because increasingly it really has become an incredibly extremist site. And as the sane sensible contributors leave they’re being replaced by new contributors who are full-on extremist nutters.

It seems the mid 20th Century was an exception to the rule. Monogamy was socially enforced and marriage and children fell into place for most men. After the sexual revolution we returned to the haves and have nots.

I think that’s true. It was a unique time in which most men could get decent well-paid secure jobs. Secure being the really important factor. For the only time in human history most men were very attractive marriage propositions for women.

While the Sexual Revolution did play a part in ending that golden age the most important factors were the disappearance of those decent well-paid and the ending of job security.

It’s also crucial to remember that the ending of job security affected not just the working class but the lower middle class.

I think that we should look at dystopias and utopias in terms of for whom. Dystopia for some is utopia for others.

Has there ever been a time in history when it was better to be in the top 1-2% than now? It’s cosmic utopia for them.

That’s quite true.

Although I’d say that it’s a utopia for more than just the top 1-2%. For the top 10% life is pretty sweet. And arguably for the top 25% things are pretty darned good.

That’s the big problem. If a society is only a utopia for the top 1-2% it will be unstable and will eventually collapse (just as the ancien regime collapsed). But if it’s a utopia for a very significant proportion of the population, say a quarter of the population, it might be stable for a very long time even if life is pretty terrible (or even really terrible) for a majority.

The film Equilibrium may not a high brow masterpiece, but it presents a dystopia where emotion, suffering and, essentially, humanity are removed from life experience. Some people would see this as safe and rational, but it is actually the triumph of nothingness over being.

The most interesting dystopias are always utopias gone wrong. That’s why Brave New World is in the final analysis a much more interesting and profound work than 1984. It’s rather odd that Orwell, an idealistic socialist, gave us a dystopia created by people who were more or less straightforward villains. Huxley’s dystopia was created by people who thought that what they were doing was necessary and for society’s benefit.

And the most interesting dystopias always still have a utopian element. The society of Brave New World really is a utopia for most of its citizens – they really are happy with material prosperity, drugs and unlimited sex. They don’t realise they’re living in a dystopia. They don’t realise that they’re missing out on anything.

I think that Huxley’s understanding of human nature was a lot more complex than Orwell’s.

It’s starting to look like the open thread may be the only option we’re going to be left with if we want to continue at UR. I’ve just left a comment there (it’s comment 285 on Open Thread 5). It’s not an exciting comment. I just wanted to see if I got swarmed by nutters!

There’s been a heated debate over on Audacious Epigone’s blog on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The novel is clearly dystopian fiction. When you mention dystopian fiction most people think of 1984 and Brave New World but in fact dystopian fiction is quite a large genre.

An interesting early example is Will N. Harben’s The Land of the Changing Sun, published in 1894. There have been many science fiction dystopias. Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants is a provocative 1953 example. The City of the Living Dead, a short story by Laurence Manning and Fletcher Pratt published in 1930, is another. These are technological dystopias but that is in fact quite likely where we’re headed – to a technological dystopia.

Some dystopias are communistic, some are capitalistic, some are theocratic and some are technocratic. You have a choice of nightmares.

Anyone want to make any comment on literary dystopias? Or movie dystopia as well for that matter?

That’s what I was saying. Sex scenes do not serve a literary purpose.

What is a “literary purpose” exactly? You could argue that the jokes should be eliminated from comic novels because they serve no literary purpose. You could ague that the thrills should be eliminated from thrillers because they serve no literary purpose.

What is literature anyway? Is genre fiction literature? Is “literary fiction” just another genre?

Most of the novels ever written are genre fiction. Are novels and literature the same thing?

Fiction genres have their own conventions. Murder mysteries have a crime to be solved. Science fiction has to contain some element of science or technology or it has to involve speculation about the future of society. Romance fiction has to have romance. It’s hard to separate romance and sex. Romantic relationships are almost always sexual relationships. A romantic relationship might be a brief fling or a marriage but it’s going to involve sex.

Whether you like your thrillers to contain explicit depictions of violence or very low-key violence is a matter of taste but there has to be at least implied violence or the threat of violence. And whether you like your romance fiction to contain explicit depictions of sex or very low-key treatment of the subject is a matter of taste but there has to be at least implied sex or the possibility of sex.

I think you are right when you center it more on Protestantism. I would place modern sexual dysfunction in the Anglosphere mostly upon the prudishness of the Victorians.

That would also explain why it’s more of an issue in the Anglosphere and not across other parts of Christendom like France or Spain which seem to preserve more of that Catholic lustiness.

I think that a lot of people in the Anglosphere are not really aware of the extent to which they are still influenced by those Victorian sexual attitudes. You can see that in some of the comments on this thread – the idea that there’s something immoral about a woman who wants sexual pleasure simply for the sake of sexual pleasure.

The Victorians seemed intent upon making anything surrounding sex a regrettable and unmentionable, if necessary, chore.

Victorian attitudes towards sex are really really fascinating. There were doctors at that time who didn’t believe women were capable of having orgasms and there were other doct0rs who believed that regular orgasms were essential for women’s mental health (which is why Victorian doctors invented the vibrator). Victorian ideas on sex were all over the place.

I talk about some of this stuff (love, sex, marriage) quite frequently on my blog, most recently in my review of Michael Mason’s The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes.

Since AE’s blog is shutting down I’ll take the liberty of linking to my blog (for anyone who might be interested) –

https://anotherpoliticallyincorrectblog.blogspot.com/

And here’s the direct link to my review of Mason’s book –

https://tinyurl.com/4myxfvby

it might be possible to carve out a space which is relatively nutter free.

LOL

I thought that we wanted a space for the AE commentariat.

Just as there has always been porn, I’ve seen it argued by some that today’s porn is not different and it’s no big deal. I would disagree, because the sheer volume, easy of access, and relative filthiness of today’s internet porn make it an entirely different phenomena from finding your Dad’s Playboys back in the 80’s.

Yes, I agree. And again the change was driven almost entirely by technology – firstly by home video (videocassettes opened up a vast new market), then the internet. And those new technologies made it almost impossible to exercise ant control over the nature of the content.

If you ever see photos from girlie magazines up to the 1970s they’re not just remarkably innocuous, they’re oddly wholesome. Pretty girls lounging by swimming pools and then taking their clothes off and smiling shyly at the camera. It’s kinda sweet. It can even be seen as a healthy celebration of the beauty of the female body. Not really a whole lot different from the very long tradition of nude painting in the West. Velázquez’s mid-17th century Rokeby Venus could be a painted version of a girlie magazine centrefold from the mid-1960s.

The content has certainly changed, but it was the technology that drove the change.

quite a few women find it difficult to reach orgasm through intercourse.

I hear this kind of thing occasionally. My impression from—ahem—various sources is that this is more of a problem in the Angloshpere than elsewhere

In the West, and perhaps especially in the Protestant-dominated Anglosphere, there’s the problem of sexual guilt and that has a lot to do with Christianity.

My guess is that some women find it difficult to be sufficiently relaxed to really enjoy intercourse. They may feel shame if they seem to be enjoying it too much – what if he thinks I’m a slut? They may just feel embarrassed.

They can have orgasms with a vibrator because there’s no-one else there to make them feel embarrassed or ashamed. They also don’t have to feel embarrassed about expressing their pleasure vocally.

From what I’ve read on the subject failure to achieve orgasm through intercourse is a very widespread problem among women.

I don’t know why “we” couldn’t at least give it a try. Numerous regular AE commenters have expressed an interest in maintaining contact. It is an open thread so we can shake the guilt feeling for going off topic.

Well I’d be prepared to give it a go. What the heck.

The only problem that I foresee is that the number that can be placed on the CTI list is limited.

Yeah, that’s the problem I foresee. I’d be putting a lot of regular commenters on that open thread on Ignore. A lot. But I guess that’s doable.

The trick is disciplining oneself not to respond to the crazies.

Maybe someone could post open threads for the commentaritat?

There is another very simple solution. Just persuade one of the regular commenters here to set up a blog elsewhere, with possibly several people being given posting privileges. Then just have that person (or persons) post a topic for discussion once a week (or twice a week or whatever).

But please, for the love of God, not a WordPress blog. Their commenting system does not work. It does not work at all. It’s horrendous.

Blogger is the easiest option. Setting up a Blogger blog is fairly simple and their commenting system is very very reliable. And moderating comments is very very simple. Maybe there are other simple blogging platforms.

The big advantage of this option is that only the regular commenters here will know about the blog, so the drooling crazies who infest so much of the rest of Unz Review won’t know about it.

Blogger also allows you to use a pseudonymous handle when commenting.

You’d need some moderation, but probably nothing more onerous than AE’s schoolmarm and none of us here seem to have any serious issues with that.

To be honest I don’t think such a blog would ever gain a high enough profile for anyone to want to shut it down. And I don’t really think any of us here are important enough for anyone to be interested in hunting us down.

There is an open forum that exists on UR. It’s lightly moderated so far as I can tell, but the regular crew should be able to move over there.

I’ve just had a look at the latest open thread there. Almost every comment is about Jews. And the place is full of serious hardcore crazies. Yikes. Include me out.

Talking to fans of erotic literature about the literary value of sex scenes is like falling into a pit of vipers. They can never accept that such scenes serve almost no literary purpose.

For me, outside of actual pornography sex scenes are superfluous.

The erotic literature that women read is pornography. A great deal of romance fiction is pornography. Women prefer not to call it porn but that’s what it is.

Taking the sex scenes out of these kinds of books would be like taking the murders out of murder mysteries, or taking the espionage out of spy fiction.

Men like visual pornography. Women like literary pornography. Men like to see sex acts and naked women. Women like fantasies about sexually charged situations.

I don’t have a problem with it. If women like reading porn let them do so.

It’s not really vibrator usage particularly, but that it represents just another piece in the continued disassociation of sexual behavior from not only reproduction, but even human interaction. I find widespread porn usage, sexbots, etc. to be just as disturbing.

I kind of agree, and disagree. Masturbation is nothing new. In a perfect world everybody has a happy fulfilling marriage which fully satisfies them sexually. But we’ve never lived in a perfect world. There have always been people who have, for whatever reasons, missed out on marriage. Human loneliness is nothing new. There have always been people who have found that marriage does not bring sexual fulfilment. Masturbation has always been one of the ways that people deal with this. Since it’s nothing new I tend not to worry about it.

Vibrators are not exactly new technology. They were invented in 1869. And even before they were invented women displayed extraordinary ingenuity and imagination in finding simple household implements to give themselves sexual pleasure. Women in ancient Greece were using dildos. Modern vibrators just do the job more efficiently, and probably a great deal more safely.

It’s going to be a disaster, primarily for men, once mass market VR helmets coincide with the porn industry (which is already in the works).

It really just another aspect of the continued atomization of all human relationships.

I agree. The biggest threat we face is not ideological but technological. It’s technology that is doing more than anything else to produce an alienated atomised society. Television, personal computers, the internet, cell phones, social media, smartphones, dating apps – these have all been purely technological changes that have all reduced the amount of genuine social interaction.

We need to rethink out attitude towards technology. We need to ask ourselves which of the many new technological gizmos invented in recent decades we really need, and which of those technologies are simply too harmful to be permitted. We need to do this, but we won’t.

A lot of negative social change has in fact been driven purely by technology.

The dehumanization of sex almost makes one nostalgic for the good old days of promiscuity as a social issue! Ah for the days when pearls were clutched over youngsters having sex with real humans of the opposite sex!

Yes, you have a point! There was a time when parents’ biggest worry was their youngsters necking at the drive-in. These days parents wish their kids would do something healthy and normal like necking at the drive-in.

We’ll have to get moving. We’re seriously running out of time. Unless AE can be prevailed upon to keep this comment section open for another week?

I have sent the following email to Ron. We’ll see what he says.

Dear Mr. Unz,

I am a longtime commenter on your website who posts under the handle “Intelligent Dasein.” A few of us were interested in preserving the unique commenting community which has built up under the auspices of the “Audacious Epigone” blog, which is shortly to be decommissioned. We were wondering if you would consider appointing one of us—myself, or another, or perhaps a panel of commenters—to take over the space. Thank you for your time and for this wonderful site.

-I.D.

This seems like an excellent format to keep things going, at least temporarily, perhaps permanently.
Perhaps a provocative conceptual paragraph would all it would take to get the comment ball rolling.

Yes. If you have someone like AE who is prepared to put in the hard work crunching all those statistics then that’s a huge bonus but it’s probably not strictly necessary. It depends on how you look at a blog – whether you see it as a place to post in-depth analysis (which is fine) or whether you see it as a mechanism to stimulate discussion (in other words if you see it as a kind of online forum).

I actually like the idea myself of a rotating roster of posters perhaps until a definite front-runner emerged

I like that idea. I’d be happy to contribute the occasional guest post, bearing in mind my monumental technical incompetence.

The real question is how does this actually get implemented?

We’ll have to be off to see the Wizard…
The wonderful Wizard of Unz.

We’ll have to get moving. We’re seriously running out of time. Unless AE can be prevailed upon to keep this comment section open for another week?

WordPress is ghastly. I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. The commenting system is totally useless. The advantage of Blogger is that it actually works. Unless you’re a hardcore tech geek I’d stay away from WordPress.

The few female authors who don’t write them fill their novels up with actual plots. Those who do the sex scenes just do plot points to get to the sex scenes. No one writes, or even speaks, like 19th century and early 20th people did.

Historical fiction in general suffers from that problem these days. The characters are always 21st century characters with 21st century social attitudes, they’re just dressed in historical costumes. If you’re a writer of historical fiction and you try to give your characters the attitudes and values of a previous era you will not get published.

Wait, does that picture say “binary”? Don’t they know that gender is non-binary? And do they call him a “Queen”? Amd why does he only get a “micro” chip? Does he not deserve a full-size chip, or is that reserved for the straight white males? And don’t get me started on the rainbow flag; it doesn’t even have black or brown in it.

Not as insecure as the man often feels about his masculinity.

A big part of why women don’t tell men about this, or why they fake orgasm, is because they don’t want to wound the ego of the man they love. They are worried about him feeling insecure.

And as a result there are a lot of men who are blissfully unaware that a huge number of women don’t reliably achieve orgasm through intercourse (and that some women are not achieving orgasm at all through intercourse). And then those men are bewildered when they discover that so many women are buying vibrators.

Personally I’m puzzled as to why there are people here who see female vibrator usage as a problem. If a woman wants to have orgasms and she finds that the most effective way of doing so is with a vibrator I can’t for the life of me see why anyone would disapprove of that. But then there are people here who seem to think that masturbation in general is wicked and immoral, and are outraged that women are no longer as consumed by guilt about masturbation as they used to be.

I know I’m probably out of step with the prevailing view around these parts but I actually think it’s a good thing that women are now less embarrassed about buying vibrators.

Another anecdote. A female friend of mine wanted to buy a vibrator and she insisted that I accompany her to a sex shop to get one. She thought the shop would be full of sleazy guys in raincoats buying porn. In fact most of the store’s shelf space was taken up by sex toys for women. All the sales assistants were bubbly young women (who were remarkably friendly and helpful). And on the day we were there most of the customers were women.

Well, I am volunteering.

Are you volunteering to take over the blog and run it more or less the way AE has run it? If so I think it’s a fine idea.

If you’re volunteering to run a different sort of blog on UR then I think that’s fine as well, although you’d probably find that you’d end up with a slightly different commentariat.

1. You don’t see a lot of feelings and outrage here?

I certainly do. It’s endlessly amusing to me that right-wing men seem to be convinced that they’re models of rationality.

3. You don’t think I can find a lot of crazier pronouncements here, than comparing the religious right to the Handmaid’s Tale?

I’ve encountered people right here on Unz Review who would love to see a world like that of The Handmaid’s Tale come to pass. The fact that it isn’t likely to happen doesn’t change the craziness of yearning for such a world.

There’s just a lot of craziness in the world today, across the entire political spectrum.

Have you read Germaine Greer’s book on female poets, The Slip-Shod Sibyls? She argues that the big problem facing women writers in the 18th and 19th century is that they had it much too easy. Women writers with genuine talent failed to develop their talents because they didn’t have to. They were over-praised for modest accomplishments.

She was talking mainly about poets of course. I don’t think anyone would argue that this applied to 18th/19th century women novelists who quite obviously did develop their talents. But I think it does apply to 20th/21st century women novelists. Many have been ludicrously over-praised and it probably has harmed them.

We just need to find a formula which wouldn’t put too heavy a workload on the person taking over.

I was hoping that you had just volunteered!

LOL. I don’t have the tech smarts and I certainly don’t have the math smarts. I’d be willing to help but I’m so technologically challenged I’d almost certainly be more of a hindrance than a help. I can barely cope with publishing my blog. I can’t even change the damned layout of the blog because I have no idea how to do it.

My technological ineptitude frightens even me.

In every novel I’ve read by a woman, the men always come off as chicks in pants. Women don’t understand men.

In lots of novels by men the women come off as either men in dresses or as male wish fulfilment fantasies.

It’s difficult for women writers to get inside the heads of male characters and it’s difficult for male writers to get inside the heads of female characters. In both cases because it’s a genuinely difficult thing to do.

I was going to surmise that perhaps the rise of the Tom Clancy-style thriller accounted for the increase in male novelist sales over the last 30 years

Male thriller writers have been selling massive numbers of books for at least a century. Edgar Wallace, John Buchan, Sapper, Leslie Charteris. And in the 50s, 60s and 70s writers like Ian Fleming and Alistair MacLean. And some guy named Mickey Spillane who sold several hundred million books. Erle Stanley Gardner sold several hundred million books.

It’s also worth pointing out that a lot of the books that in the past sold in huge numbers were never going to show up on the NYT bestseller lists. They were paperback originals and they were sold in places like railway bookstalls, rather than bookstores.

I suspect that lists of bestselling books almost always massively underestimate the sales of genre fiction. A lot of crime fiction and science fiction in the pre-WW2 period was sold in the form of pulp magazines.

As for women, it’s worth remembering that the bestselling woman author of all time was Agatha Christie, not Jane Austen or J.K. Rowling. In fact Christie was the bestselling author of all time, male or female.

There’s also little doubt that bestseller lists underestimate the sales of romance fiction.

All I can say to all the vibrator discussion is that it certainly seems like a blot on manly pride that so many of them have to be in circulation. Perhaps it’s that men are just that bad at the arts of feminine pleasure from watching too many disgusting porn video’s? Are most men just that terrible at good sex?

My impression, gained from actually talking to women who use vibrators, is that one reason that vibrators are popular is that quite a few women find it difficult to reach orgasm through intercourse. Even if they really like the guy and even if he’s a very attentive lover. They don’t get enough clitoral stimulation through intercourse. But a lot of women are reluctant to tell their guy, “Gee honey, I love you to pieces and you’re really good in bed but I just can’t reliably reach orgasm when we make love.”Because the guy would be likely to go and stick his head in a gas oven if she told him that. Or, more likely, he’d be so devastated that in future he wouldn’t be able to perform at all.

I’d guess that there are very few women who would say, “I have a vibrator so I don’t need a man.” But there’d be quite a few who’d say, “I have a fabulous man but if I want regular orgasms I need my vibrator.” And there’d be quite a few who’d say, “I don’t have a boyfriend at the moment but I still want sexual pleasure and I’d prefer to get it from a vibrator than from picking up anonymous dudes in bars.”

When a woman trusts a man enough to open up to him on the subject of sex she’ll reveal some very surprising things. Things that social conservatives are reluctant to believe. Social conservatives would for example be shocked to learn how many women are into kinky sex.

Women are nowhere near into porn as men…

Yeah, they are. It’s just that in the larger world, “porn” is defined solely in terms of men’s porn, i.e. visual. This is a benefit to women, who can indulge in their porn without most men noticing. Those who can see, however, merely smirk.

Tell me, how many copies did “Fifty Shades of Grey” sell, world wide? How about the other two volumes in the series? Those books were sold everywhere, even in airports. Did you ever read one of them? It’s a classic RomFic series; includes graphic porny text at semi regular intervals, with appropriate build up of the “will she? will he?” sort.

Go to a bookstore. New or used, doesn’t matter. See how large the “romance” section is. Pick up a Harlequin or other rom-fic and start skimming. How many pages does it take before some girl is in danger of foul ravishment? How many ravishings are their in the entire 180 page novel? What’s the narrative description like? How detailed are the words describing her swirl of emotions? Oh, and how graphic & anatomically correct are the details of the ravishment?

Yup. There it is. Like cleaning out someone’s garage and finding an old copy of “Letters to Penthouse”.

Buuuut….books are old tech. Stroll up to a 20 year old college girl and start looking into her phone, see what stories she’s carrying around – if she’ll let you. There’s a whole world of stories available from Amazon for 99 cents, suitable for phone or Kindle or other device than can be held with one hand. They generally go far beyond anything for sale in Barnes & Noble. Of course there are plenty of women pushing 40 who have their one-handed Kindle library as well. I know some of them.

Yeah, a lot of women are into porn, just not so much into men’s style of porn. This is part of that brain difference that John Johnson was going on about – that he does not completely understand, yet.

Triteleia Laxa’s suggestion to petition Ron to allow the blog to continue under other auspices seems reasonable.

I don’t think you’ll find anybody with the time and energy to do all that statistics crunching but that probably doesn’t matter. All you really need is a kind of minimalist version of the blog. Have the person who takes it over just pick a weekly topic at random. So all the postings would need to consist of would be a single sentence. “This week’s topic is marriage.” Or “This week’s topic is Hollywood Wokeness.” Or “This week’s topic is democracy.” With any luck once the first few comments appeared the threads would just develop their own momentum. That should happen if you already have an established commentariat (which we have).

The tricky part would be to find someone who could be relied on to continue AE’s moderation policies (which have obviously worked) and who was prepared to do the moderating. Maybe have two moderators to reduce the workload?

Another possibility would be to allow commenters to suggest topics. Or even have guest posters.

We just need to find a formula which wouldn’t put too heavy a workload on the person taking over.