Maverick Philosopher

Who Put the 'Man' in 'Manufacture'?

A congresswoman asked the question recently. It is a  question from a fem-Dem that exposes her ignorance.

There is no 'man' in 'manufacture' in the way there is a 'bomp' in the "bomp bah bomp bah bomp" and a 'ram' in the "rama lama  ding dong."  

'Manufacture' is built out of two Latin words, manus, manus (fourth declension, feminine) meaning hand, and the verb facere, meaning to make.  Etymologically, to manufacture something it to make it by hand, which is something women can do and often do better than men.

It is also interesting to note that manus, manus (the singular and the plural are the same except that the 'u' is  short in the singular, long in the plural) is one of the few Latin nouns that is both feminine and ends in -us. Herewith, another reason why there is no 'man' in 'manufacture.'

I could easily go on, and you hope I won't.

But it does raise a question: why are Dems so ignorant? The person in question is a "white, educated female" like so many Never- and Anti-Trumpers. Educated?  Here is another word currently badly misused. Graduating with a degree from a leftist seminary doesn't make one educated in  any serious sense of the term.  We live in a time of inflation and not just of the monetary variety.

Why do Dems and 'liberals' generally have such low standards?  It is almost as if they have never met a standard they did not want  to erase, erode, eviscerate, eradicate.  

I have a lot to say on this topic, but it is time to get to work on more serious writing.  There is more to life than sanitizing the spaces befouled by leftists.  'Sanitize' in the sense of cleaning and making sane. 

MASA! Make America sane again! 

On the 'Congressional Catfight'

Some friends to my Right think women have no place in politics. I strongly disagree. But there's no denying that the recent 'catfight' in Congress supplies these extreme Righties with ammo.  

Tulsi Gabbard is one member of the distaff contingent who has more right to be in politics than a lot of men I could mention. Here she takes on the stupidest bunch of women on TV. 

Why Do Men Dominate in Chess?

Here at Quillette.

Universal Suffrage

I wrote, on 4 March, 

The war is over the soul of America.  The question concerns whether we should (i) preserve what remains of America as she was founded to be, and (ii) restore those good elements of the system bequeathed to us by the Founders, while (iii) preserving the legitimate progress that has been made (e.g. universal suffrage), OR whether we should replace the political system of the Founders with an incompatible system which can be described as culturally Marxist.

As I was writing clause (iii) I realized that some to my Right, people I consider friends, whose intellect and judgment I respect, and with whom I agree on many fundamentals, would take issue with my endorsement of universal suffrage. They are against it. Two points in response.

The first is that the 19th Amendment, ratified 18 August 1920, will never be overturned.  The Amendment states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." And so the question whether female citizens should have the right to vote, while of historical and theoretical interest, has no practical importance whatsoever. 

The second point is that, even if it could be overturned, it ought not be. Now I concede to my friends on the Right that women as as a group are not as politically astute as men as a group.  Their political judgment is inferior to that of men. This is a fact, and a fact is a fact whether you like it or not. We conservatives stand on the terra firma of a reality antecedent to human wishes and dreams. 

What I have just asserted is enough to bring down the wrath of  many feminists upon my head. They will hurl the 'sexist' epithet at me. And I will reply: It can't be sexist if it is true, and it is true.  This is a special case of a general principle: It cannot be X-ist if it is true.  Candidate substituends for the variable include 'age,' 'race,' 'species,' 'able,' and others. Particularly knuckleheaded is the accusation of 'ableism.' 

I have said enough to establish my conservative bona fides.

Why shouldn't the 19th Amendment be overturned?

Yesterday, on C-SPAN, I watched Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) rake Christopher Wray, FBI Director, over the coals. She did a superb job, a job as good as any man could do. So I put the question to my friends on the Right: Do you think that Stefanik should not have the right to vote and participate in the political life of the country?

To nail down my point, here is a list, off the top of my head, in no particular order, of just a few females  who are lot better politically than a lot of men I could mention:

Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, K. T. McFarland, Tulsi Gabbard, Riley Gaines, Candace Owens, Mollie Hemingway, Tammy Bruce, Faulkner Harris, Diane West, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Heather MacDonald.

Will the friends to my Right dismiss these women as wholly unrepresentative outliers? Do they have arguments? What might they be?

On the Gender-Neutral Use of 'Man'

Top o' the Stack.

Roger Donway writes,

As I understand it, there are no "gender-neutral" nouns or pronouns in English. There is the masculine gender, the feminine gender, the neuter gender, and the common gender. The last applies to entities which have sex, but in contexts where both sexes are included or the sex is undetermined. "Someone has forgotten his umbrella." "Someone" and "his" are in the common gender. So, they do possess grammatical gender. They are not "gender neutral." Not positive about this, however.

Excellent comment, Mr. Donway. You're right. Strictly speaking, gender is a grammatical category with the four subcategories you mention. I was being sloppy in violation of my own principles.  Properly expressed, my point was that 'man' has a legitimate sex-neutral use in standard English. When used to refer to both males and females, it is sex-neutral but not gender-neutral for precisely the reason you supplied: so used, the term's gender is common. 

The sex of an animal is biologically based and therefore not a linguistic construct. This fact notwithstanding, it strikes me as legitimate to extend the sense of 'gender' so as to cover social roles. For example, traditionally women as a group have instantiated the nurse role and not the doctor role. No surprise: women can give birth, which biological fact makes women as a group more nurturing than men as a group and suits them for the nurse role. I have no objection to referring to the nurse role, a social role, as a gender role, midway as it is between the biotic/biological and the grammatical. 

But this is an extended use of 'gender.' Strictly speaking, gender is a grammatical category!

Distaff Tribalism

You may complain, with justification, that women are more tribal than men, but the point needs to be balanced by the observation that they are also more familial, social, communal, helpful, group-oriented, and nurturing. Where would we be without them?

Masculinity

Substack latest.

Masculinity

Out and about yesterday, I caught a bit of Dennis Prager's radio show. He defended Daniel Penny's behavior in his confrontation with Jordan Neely as masculine, using the word correctly. In our infantilized, feminized, and left-dominated and therefore crime-tolerant society, Penny's behavior will be called toxically masculine by our political enemies. But to anyone who can think straight, there is a difference between the masculine and the toxically masculine.

On the other hand, there are people to my right, politically speaking, who deny that there is any toxic masculinity.  I must oppose them too.  I say to them: Are you seriously going to maintain that there are no instances of machismo that are not reasonably described as 'toxic'?

Consider the sad case of Cynthia Garcia. This foolish middle-aged woman and mother thought it would be fun to party with the Hells (no apostrophe!) Angels in their Mesa, Arizona clubhouse of a Saturday night. The 'Angels' of course demanded sex; she showed disrespect, even after they stomped her, and so they brutally murdered her. There are differing accounts of the exact details.  But the upshot was indeed brutal. Two of them stabbed her to death and attempted to cut her head off,  dumping her remains in the desert proximal to the Rio Salado shooting range.

 

Of course, normal masculine behavior such as that displayed by Penny is not toxic, and the feminization of boys is a serious threat to social stability and the survival of the Republic. But just as a Nazi is no cure for a commie, a biker brute is no cure for a feminized boy.

 

The subversion of language is the mother of all subversion. 

 

You should no more allow the Left's theft of perfectly good English words than you should allow their question-begging and question-burying coinages such as 'Islamophobia' and 'homophobia' and 'transphobia.' I have gone over this many times and I am not in the mood to repeat myself.  Enough compromising with our political enemies; resist them on every front.

 

Addendum

 

William Voegli weighs in on the Penny-Neely encounter at City Journal: 

Are New York’s subways safer, its homeless population less dangerous, than is generally believed? Than Tarannum and, perhaps, Daniel Penny seemed to think? The Times pointed out in February that the rate of violent felonies on the subway system was twice as high in 2022 as it had been in 2019. The system saw ten people murdered in 2022, compared with an average of two per year from 2015 through 2019. On the other hand, the Times pointed out that even after this increase, there were 1.2 violent crimes for every 1 million subway rides, which works out to about the likelihood of being injured during a two-mile automobile trip. Readers deliberating how much reassurance to derive from such statistics may reflect on the Times’s utter lack of such restraint and sobriety following the death of George Floyd in 2020, when the paper made no attempt to caution against sweeping generalizations based on the anomalous death of an unarmed black man in police custody.

You might want to bear in mind that truth is not a leftist value, and that leftists have a strange propensity to celebrate the dysfunctional, the transgressive, the grotesque, and the socially worthless as part of their nihilist drive to normalize deviant behavior, all the while attacking the sane, the decent, the socially useful, including the subway commuters on their way to work.  

This brings up a second point raised by Rahnuma Tarannum, about how the authorities not doing their job puts civilians in a position where they either do it themselves or suffer the consequences of no one doing it. 

Abdication of authority has dire consequences. Leftists unwittingly (or is it wittingly?) promote vigilantism. Remember Bernie Goetz, the subway gunman? In the same way, leftists unwittingly (or is it wittingly?) promote increased gun ownership among civilians. Either unable or unwilling to distinguish weapon from wielder, lefties unrelentingly repeat that guns cause crime. But then demonstrating their lack of common sense, they agitate for the defunding of police, the ratcheting down of criminal penalties, etc. So the people arm themselves. Surprise! How stupid can a 'liberal' be?

I am a staunch supported of 2A rights, but being sane and reasonable I don't want more and more untrained civilians packing heat.

It is true, as Bouie says, that no one on Jordan Neely’s subway car had any way to know that he had been arrested 42 times, including at least four times for punching people, two of which occurred in the subway system. Nor could they have known that Neely was on “the ‘Top 50’ list,” which, the Times explained, is a “roster maintained by the city of . . . people living on the street whom officials consider most urgently in need of assistance and treatment.” Lacking such knowledge, Bouie contends, Neely’s fellow passengers were obligated to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

The Double Denial by the 'Woke'

It is not unreasonable to maintain that there is no God and that nature alone exists. But suppose you take it a step further and deny nature as well. Then you are in the precincts of 'woke' lunacy.  Call it the Double Denial.

One way to deny nature is by denying that the biotic underpins the social and that as a consequence the difference between men and women is a matter of social construction and not a matter of biology.  But any sane person will grasp instantly that one cannot change one's sex by merely thinking of oneself as belonging to the opposite sex. It is also obvious that sartorial and cosmetic modifications will not turn the trick.

Less obvious, but equally true, is that chemical and surgical alteration of one's body cannot change one's sex even if the surgical alteration is of a deeply structural sort:  reduction of muscle mass, heart and lung volume,  bone density, size of hands, and length of limbs even unto the removal of portions of bones to make the altered person shorter.

But of course the 'transgendered' biological men who compete in, and win, women's sporting events do not and would not submit to the modern-day equivalent of the Bed of Procrustes: they are not about to be modified in the drastic ways just mentioned.  And yet such men are allowed to pass themselves off as women.  To add insult to injury, some of these impostors are then awarded 'woman of the year' titles.

What is going on here? It is one thing to condemn the injustice to women and overall idiocy of this, quite another to understand how it could arise and be taken seriously by otherwise sane people.

One thing that needs explaining is how leftists, who are supposedly for women and against their oppression by men and 'the patriarchy,' could embrace something so antifeminist as the allowance of male interference with women's sports. I suggest that what we are witnessing here is a collision of motifs on the Left. One such is the oppressor-oppressed motif. Another is the hyper-constructivist denial-of-reality motif. These motifs are in tension with each other. If men oppress women, then women need their 'safe spaces' where they can feel secure against real or merely perceived micro- and macro-aggression. Accordingly, there is obvious need for  sexual segregation in certain areas such as sports competitions, locker rooms, restrooms, prisons, etc.  But if everything is a matter of social construction, as per the second motif, then so are sexual differences in which case they are not innate and immutable, but malleable. A man can 're-identify' as a woman with or without chemical and surgical alteration. Add in a third motif that of expressive individualism and for good measure throw in the 'my truth' meme.  If 'my truth' is that I am a woman, then I am a woman and can compete against women. (There is little or no chance that any woman will 're-identify' as a man so as to compete against them.)

The conflict of leftist motifs explains the utter absurdity of wokesters who tolerate the grotesquely unjust penetration of biological males into female spaces.

Why are Women 'Over-Represented' among Realtors?

Here is my Substack answer to the title question together with a healthy serving of conceptual analysis as part of  my ongoing quest to disembarrass sad wokeheads and Dementocrats of their fatuities, fallacies, and overall intellectual feculence. ('Feculence' as you may know is from feces.)  I am being polite. I am showing some 'class.' 

But here is something very important for you to know.

In the political sphere, and not just there, the ability to kick ass is far more important than class. The first value clearly trumps the second. It is a mark of a RINO not to understand this.

So I predict that, even if the Republicans gain control of both the House and the Senate come November, they will not deploy their majorities in an effective way against their political enemies. Little will get done to reverse the assault on the Republic. And that is because they, as a group and because of the large number of RINOs, do not have the civil courage to punch back in the manner in which they are punched at. 

Trump tried to teach them how to fight, but they ignored his clear message, or, more likely, they simply lack the civil courage to implement it.  Of the four cardinal virtues, courage is the most difficult to display. For it, unlike the other three, exacts a high cost.  I myself lack the courage, not to mention the social skills, to enter the political arena. I'm Italian, a lover not a fighter -- until pushed to the wall.

In any case, no true philosopher could consider the political the locus of ultimate reality.

His Story

History is largely His Story, but part of that story is how place was made, by men mainly, but not solely, for Her Story. 

Word of the Day: Cack-Handed

Substack latest.

Short. Entertaining. Makes important points about language and male-female relations.  Improve your vocabulary. Read it!

Leftists, especially those of the 'woke'-Orwellian stripe, do not want you to have a large vocabulary. They do not want you to be able to think in a nuanced manner. 

Why Women are 'Over-Represented' among Realtors

Have you ever wondered why women are 'over-represented' among realtors? It is because they excel men when it comes to conciliation and mediation.  I don't mean this as a snarky put-down of the distaff contingent.  I mean it as praise.  And if females do not take it as praise, are they not assuming the superiority of male virtues? 

It is a non sequitur to think that if the Xs are 'under-represented' among the Ys, then the Xs must have been the victims of some unjust discrimination.  Men are 'under-represented' among massage therapists, but the explanation is obvious and harmless: men like to have their naked bodies rubbed by women in dark rooms, but women feel uncomfortable having their naked bodies rubbed by men in dark rooms.   It is not as if there is some sort of sexism, 'institutional' or individual, that keeps men out of massage therapy. If you retort that some women do like massages from men not their intimates, then you don't understand generic statements.  

Blacks are 'over-represented'  in the NFL and the NBA. Is that because of some racism 'institutional' or individual, that keeps whitey out?  Of course not. Blacks are better than whites at football and basketball.  Jews are just terrible.  Chess is their athletics.  Jews dominate in the chess world.  Is that because the goyim have been suppressed?  

Does my talk of blacks and Jews make me a racist and an anti-Semite ?  To a self-enstupidated leftist or 'progressive,'  yes.  For they are too often incapable, or have rendered themselves incapable, of distinguishing between a statement whose content is race and a racist statement.  If you accuse me of retailing stereotypes, I will point out that some stereotypes have a basis in reality.  Leftists tend to embrace negative and groundless stereotypes about stereotypes.

I am treading a via media between the excesses of the neo-reactionaries (NRs) and the even worse excesses of the leftists. My challenge to the NRs:  How can you fail to see the importance of equal treatment of men and women?  One NR of my acquaintance claimed that the notion of equality of opportunity is vacuous. Why?  To require that applicants for a job not be discriminated against on the basis of race, sex, or creed, is not vacuous.  It has a definite content. That it could use some spelling out is not to the point.  

What I mean is this. Some creeds are such that people who hold them must be discriminated against. Suppose you are an orthodox Muslim: you subscribe to Islamic law (sharia) and hold that it takes precedence  over the U. S. Constitution and Anglo-American law. You ought to be discriminated against.  You ought not be allowed to immigrate into the USA.  The U. S. Constitution is not a suicide pact.  

Kadın erkeğin şeytanıdır

"Woman is man's devil." (Turkish proverb)

Never underestimate the power of concupiscence to derange, disorient, and delude.

When Spanish bishop Xavier Novell resigned last month, the Roman Catholic Church cited strictly personal reasons without going into detail.

It has now emerged in Spanish media that he fell in love with a woman who writes Satanic-tinged erotic fiction.

In 2010 at the age of 41, he became Spain's youngest bishop, in Solsona in the north-eastern region of Catalonia.

[. . .]

It came as a shock when Religión Digital reported that he had fallen for divorcee Silvia Caballol, a psychologist and erotic novelist. The news site said that the former bishop was now looking for a job in the Barcelona area as an agronomist.

Caballol's books include titles such as The Hell of Gabriel's Lust and the trilogy Amnesia. In the blurb for one of her works, the reader is promised a journey into sadism, madness and lust and a struggle between good and evil, God and Satan with a plot to shake one's values and religious beliefs.

Story here.

The Eclipse of Sex by the Rise of Gender

Ponder this

"One Man's Datum is Another Man's Theory"

Why do I use 'man'? To exclude women? No, to exclude leftists, both men and women. I believe in equality when it comes to the exclusion of the destructive.

In the '70s, when it first really got going, gender-inclusive language seemed to many a very good thing indeed. It showed a welcoming attitude to the distaff contingent, a salutary openness, a gracious concession to those females who felt excluded by (what in fact are) gender-neutral uses of 'man' and 'he,' not to mention a praiseworthy recognition of the excellence of many women in many hitherto male-dominated fields.  Gentlemen are considerate of the feelings of others even when said feelings are unsupported by reason.   And surely it is true that some women are superior to some men in almost every field.  And surely people should be evaluated as individuals on their merits. 

It all started out with good intentions, and many conservatives went along with it, oblivious to the unforeseen consequences. But now, a half-century later,  we see where it has led. 

And so if I use the sex-neutral 'man' and 'he' and cognates, it is not because I am a knuckle-dragger, one who hails from the valley of Neander, but because I am a man of intelligence, discernment, and high culture, a member of the Coalition of the Reasonable, who is doing his tiny bit to resist and if possible reverse the subversion of our glorious alma mater, our fostering mother, the English language.   I am resisting politicization, tribalism, and the weaponization of language.   Can I ramp up my charge to the allegation that the Left is committing matricide against our dear mother?  I'll essay this later.

For I say unto you my brothers and sisters, the subversion of language is propadeutic to the subversion of thought.  The latter, I fear, is what our enemies intend, the thoughtless being the easier to rule and control.

Women Need to 'Man Up'

A member of the distaff contingent advises.  If men are too 'cocky,' then perhaps the female equivalent is the answer rather than the cultivation of grievances:

How did we create an entire class of highly privileged, mostly affluent young women who feel unsafe on campus, microaggressed at every turn, utterly unable to cope with the garden-variety misdemeanours of boys and men, who have been behaving badly since time began despite our many efforts (most quite successful) to civilize them?

Well, you know the answer. The universities are hothouses for a grievance culture that sees racism, sexism and misogyny under every rug. Many of the faculty derive their livelihoods from it. These institutions have constructed increasingly elaborate codes of conduct and large administrative apparatuses to detect and uproot these evils, however subtle and invisible they may be to ordinary people.

A member of the distaff contingent advises.  If men are too 'cocky,' then perhaps the female equivalent is the answer rather than the cultivation of grievances:

How did we create an entire class of highly privileged, mostly affluent young women who feel unsafe on campus, microaggressed at every turn, utterly unable to cope with the garden-variety misdemeanours of boys and men, who have been behaving badly since time began despite our many efforts (most quite successful) to civilize them?

Well, you know the answer. The universities are hothouses for a grievance culture that sees racism, sexism and misogyny under every rug. Many of the faculty derive their livelihoods from it. These institutions have constructed increasingly elaborate codes of conduct and large administrative apparatuses to detect and uproot these evils, however subtle and invisible they may be to ordinary people.

On Engagement with Females: The Anti-Biden Rule

With the exception of wives, sisters, and girlfriends, accept and return hugs, but don't initiate them. A gentleman is cognizant of the power differential between the sexes, and does not impose himself physically or psychologically.  And while the scent of a woman can can carry a powerful erotic charge, a gentleman does not creep up like Creepy Joe to sniff a woman's hair or any other part of her anatomy.

Being an old man does not confer carte blanche in this regard. Mild sexual aggression in the young man is perhaps tolerable, but few things are more digusting than a dirty old man.  You would have your doubts about a young man not on the make; but the old man, the made man, having attained a modicum of maturity, is more appropriately concerned with the impression he will soon be making on his Maker.

"You spent your life chasing women as your summum bonum? Well then, I shall grant you your heart's desire: for all eternity you shall chase women!"

Related: A Theory of Hell

Cesare Pavese on Romantic Folly

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living: Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. 177, from the entry of 30 September 1940:

The best defense against a love affair is to tell yourself over and over again till you are dizzy: "this passion is simply stupid; the game is not worth the candle." But a lover always tends to imagine that this time it is the real thing; the beauty of it lies in the persistent  conviction that something extraordinary, something incredible, is going to happen to us.

Who among us has not been played for a fool by the illusions of romantic love? Our restless hearts seek from the finite what the finite cannot provide. This is quite the predicament for those for whom the Infinite has withdrawn behind the veils of nonentity or sunk beneath the waters of oblivion.

"Dark is the morning that passes without the light of your eyes."

On the Loquacity of the Distaff Contingent

I had the experience yet again yesterday.   It is easy to get a woman talking; hard to get her to stop.

"Not always!" I didn't say 'always.' It's a generic statement.

"Men too!" Not as many.

"You're a misogynist!" So I hate women because I say something true about them?

"You're a fool to say that to a woman!" Now I agree.

Amy Wax Interviewed

Here is a taste:

Once again, you’d have to define racism. You’re basically saying any generalization about a group, whether true or false—and we know it doesn’t apply to everybody in the group, because that’s just a straw man—is racist. I mean, we could do “sexist,” right?

We could.

So, women, on average, are more agreeable than men. Women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men. They’re less intellectual than men. Now, I can actually back up all those statements with social-science research.

You can send me links for women are “less intellectual than men.” I’m happy to include that in the piece if you have a good link for that.

O.K., well, there’s a literature in Britain, a series of papers that were done, and I need to look them up, that show that women are less knowledgeable than men. They know less about every single subject, except fashion. There is a literature out of Vanderbilt University that looks at women of very high ability—so, controlling for ability—and, starting in adolescence, women are less interested in the single-minded pursuit of abstract intellectual goals than men. They want more balance in their life. They want more time with family, friends, and people. They’re less interested in working hard on abstract ideas. You can put together a database that shows that. The person who has the literature is a man named David Lubinski, and he shows that intelligence isn’t what’s driving it. It is interest, orientation, what people want to spend their time doing.

Now, is that sexist? We can argue all day about whether it is sexist. We can argue from morning till night. And it is sterile. It is pointless. Let’s talk about the actual findings and what implications they have for policy, for expectations.

[. . .]

A Rule of Engagement with Females

Accept and return hugs, but do not initiate them. Exception: family members.  Joe Biden take note.

Ersatz Maternity

Having renounced natural maternity, many women today seek an outlet in the political: they seek to become the nannies of the nanny state.

Seeking a Mate?

Better a loving heart than super smart.

The Visage of Disillusion

The faces of the elderly, especially those of old men, often betray disillusionment with life: they've seen through it. It's a business that doesn't cover its costs. (Schopenhauer) Women too are among the disillusioned, but they are 'under-represented.'  That is because women as a group are more child-like than men as a group.  Is that a sexist remark? Not if it is true.  And it is true as anyone with any experience of life knows. Therein lies the charm of so many old ladies: they've retained their girlish enthusiasm.  They are still eager to 'do things' and they complain of their men that they 'don't want to do anything.'  My wife's an old lady, older than me: she's into drinking and dancing with her girlfriends. Me, I'm into thinking and trancing in solitude. O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo!