Madness

Gay marriage is no surprise; the divorce rate shows not even straight people respect the institution

To much surprise, the U.S. Supreme Court recently refrained from taking up cases involving gay marriage bans in five different states. As it stands, same-sex nuptials will remain legal in at least 30 states. There’s little doubt the rest of the country will eventually follow.

Gay marriage is coming in full force. Whatever remnants of traditional marriage remain have been vanquished by the grinding march toward “equality.” It’s now considered counter-culture to believe marriage is reserved for one man and one woman.

As the nation debates the virtue of same-sex matrimony, the divorce rate continues to inch upward. After a rise following the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, the number of divorces filed flattened during the Reagan years. Since then, it has continued to climb, in concurrence with a culture that is becoming more liberal – even libertarian – in almost every way.

Changing family dynamics have even forced Pope Francis to convene a synod to discuss the church’s role in familial matters – including communion for divorcees who remarry.

The fight over gay marriage has largely distracted from the divorce trend. It’s gotten to the point where divorce – the splitting of a sacred bond – is done blithely, as if it’s the severing of a business relationship. Contracts can be nulled for a fee that’s less than a student loan payment.

Couples are making the decision to split based mostly on feelings of passion. When the flame dies, so does the marriage. The unfulfilled promise left in its wake has broader implications than just that of children raised outside a two-parent household. It helps drive society away from the idea of everlasting commitment.

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GamerGate and the incentives of threats

The GamerGate fiasco has brought with it the ugly phenomenon of internet threats. If we are to take our assumptions from the media narrative, then the side that is correct at the end is the one that received the most threats, and has capitalized best on these threats.

The incentives to make threats are literally less than zero. There are only disincentives. Anyone with reasoning abilities can see this, particularly based on the proportion of anti-GG coverage devoted to the threats.

Progressives simultaneously understand and do not understand this. There have been a number of blunders where “threats” turned out to be bogus, with obvious intent to stir up public hatred for GamerGate and initiate a spiral of silence by making #GamerGate feel dirty on the tongue of most.

There are astronomical incentives to appear to be a victim of threats. This truth has been leveraged many times in the form of fake threats.
fake threats

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Intellectual bankruptcy, gaming, and schmuckbait

Sometimes, I wonder if it’s possible to create a schmuckbait-to-thinkpiece conversion ratio. It plays to both sides of the cultural political debate: Just find one thing that triggers a person, and they write some longform piece that is all about “THIS IS WHAT IS WRONG WITH EVERYTHING.” Sometimes, they even throw in some intellectual criticism as though to settle the score in a smart way. It’s fun, fascinating, and you can probably make a drinking game or bingo or both about whatever cultural tragedy du jour is a meme. And really, that’s what memes that trigger emotions are: Schmuckbait. We’ll be getting to our colleague and latest victim to this in a moment.

Given that I’ve recently acquired a Nintendo DS and have been playing the Zelda games on there with some enthusiasm after having been consoleless since 2007, you might think I have some opinions on #GamerGate/#GameOverGate/Zoe Quinn. I actually don’t, really. Been too busy living off Twitter lately (though a rebirth is in order). But more importantly, I’ve come to understand that once you bring gamers into an argument, you might as well take your ball and go play elsewhere before they start calling you a faggot who likes to be fudgepacked by niggers in the ass (redundancy intentional) or a camwhore slut who deserves to be raped and murdered (and lord help you if you’re non-white or TG). Why? Simple:

A group gathering on the Internet + anonymity and/or lack of consequences = High chance someone’s going to act like a fuckwad.

We who have had enough experience in the gaming business refer to this as the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, or the GIFT. Supposedly devised either by Jerry Holkins or Mike Krahuliak (I think the former, since the latter just seems to have intellectual Tourette’s), it explains why most Internet discourse ends up turning into a shitstorm, more than anything else.  Gamers just happen to be specialists at this because, well, hormones + competitiveness + overstimulation = mental vomit. While this matter has long been limited to the forums and other dank locations of the Internet, Twitter and Tumblr and other social outlets have caused the GIFT to be amplified by 1800 decibels. It’s enough to punch out a black hole the size of the Solar System. Why? Our inane propensity to share things as though they were shiny. Even if it’s our own dick pix.

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Institutional breakdown in a time of Ebola

So, how is everybody feeling about Ebola today?

If exponential projections are to be believed (and the mealy-mouthed afterthoughts of our lizard authorities are not), then it looks like things could be shaping up to get pretty real. Or did you already know that?

Personally, I vacillate between mindblind social scientific absorption and horrified disbelief. As a good libertarian, I try to balance my sometimes-myopic trust in market coordination and social resiliency against a healthy awareness of black swan events and radical uncertainty—all underpinned, of course, by an awesome appreciation for those devilish cognitive biases that can make a lone summer shark attack look like a spree of sharknados. But I gotta admit that this Ebola thing is starting to bug me in a way that other spectacles don’t.

I first got the feeling that something might be amiss when I noticed the Vox set trying so hard to convince me otherwise. Then things got a little too close to the demonpit for comfort, so I summarily paid tribute to the Amazon gods for provisions. Having recently received my 2-day deliveries of the basic rations on the cheap—DuPont elastic waist hooded coverall suits (plus booties!) (2); Uvex stealth safety goggles; disposable latex gloves (100); plenty o’ Purell®; a 3M P100 respirator mask and particulate filter packs (3)—assuredly all very highly recommended by the buzzing prepper forums that I briefly browsed in a wild moment of womanly panic, I’m now feeling like I’m sitting a tiny bit more pretty in this gaping biotarget that is our nation’s capital. All that I really need now is the appropriate safety equipment for my sweet pugdog (hit a sister up if you’ve got the goods) and my superstitious Spanish soul will be that much more at ease.

You can think me a scaredy cat, but I could say I’m “building robustness.” Best case scenario, I get a last-minute tasteless Halloween costume at the reasonable cost of one brunch foregone and a couple of yucks at my morbid imagination. Worst case scenario, I get a few more worry-free days of life in an airborne Ebola situation.

Ok, so maybe I have more legitimate reasons to fear a fluke transmission from ordinary hospital errors than from airborne mutation or a 4GW surprise. Whatever, it made perfect sense at the time.

Clearly, my ritualistic and meager stockpiling does not indicate a real fear that a blood-letting global pandemic lurks in our near future. What truly worries me is the revealed massive failure of governance and series of pathetically botched responses that have allowed the epidemic to grow beyond control.

Those tin foil hatters over at the New York Times saw fit to print this grim diagnosis: “What is not getting said publicly, despite briefings and discussions in the inner circles of the world’s public health agencies, is that we are in totally uncharted waters and that Mother Nature is the only force in charge of the crisis at this time.” And Mother Nature is a bitch.

I can’t tell whether I should take comfort or despair in this shared realization. Looking around, I’m getting the hint that I can’t expect the relevant leaders and institutions to do an adequate job to protect me from the nasties they were created to monitor. A quick jog down memory lane might show you what I mean.

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How benign is the pink police state?

The University Bookman has published two responses to James Poulos’ pink police state series over at the Federalist, one from Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry and one from myself, in which I make a few points already covered here, and talk about lighting a friend on fire, but not in the pentecostal sense:

One thing that came to mind reading James Poulos’ series on the pink police state is an incident, in eighth grade I believe, in which a friend, with his permission, was dressed up in several layers of old sweatshirts, a smiley face painted in kerosene on his back, and lit on fire. We took pictures, of course, but this being the days before YouTube, we weren’t aiming for a viral video. Call it youthful nihilism, or the establishment of what Poulos calls a “zone of transgression,” at any rate he is fine now and has gone on to a promising career in multimedia. But he damn well could have died.

Poulos has gotten very close to a diagnosis most of us can agree on, and that’s a fine thing. The Tocquevillian notion that things are getting better and worse is something that much of the right could probably do with hearing more often. But it’s hard to read Poulos’s essays and not conclude that the worseness is accelerating. Moreover, despite the distributed nature of the new regime, it is possible to observe a certain logic to it. …