Maverick Philosopher

Callicles and the Marquis de Sade

Substack latest.

'Porn Literacy' Class for Teens

We are one sick society getting sicker with every passing day. Rod Dreher registers an eloquent protest:

What they’re doing is “good” in the sense that a public health educator teaching teenage junkies how to shoot heroin without killing themselves is good. The whole thing is evil to the core. We live in a degenerate culture that believes it has to teach its children that despite what they’ve seen on their smartphones, not all women like to be sodomized, choked during sex, or to have men ejaculating on their faces.

He rightly points his finger at the authorities who abdicate:

You bishops, priests, and pastors who are so worried that we Christians might not “engage” the world? What, exactly, do you offer to protect parents and children in your flock from this scourge? What are you leading them to do? Or do you prefer to rest in your banal pieties, and to allow those in your spiritual care to believe the same comforting lies?

This is a time for choosing. Choose to “engage” the Culture of Death by accommodating it, and you will die, spiritually. Resist it, and your soul might live. Help others resist too. Do not collaborate with it!

Part of the accommodation is the refusal on the part of priests, pastors, and parents to warn against the unbridled concupiscence that is at the root of the mainstreaming of pornography and the widespread acceptance of unrestricted abortion on demand. 

See my Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained.

Al Franken's Porn-O-Rama

What does it say about the Democrat Party that it would support a scumbag like Franken for the U. S. Senate?

Franken's Porn-O-Rama is no Satire

More here (Newsweek), here (Atlantic), and here (WashPo).  No, I won't link to the 'Puffington Host.'

Was Hefner a Condition of the Possibility of Post-'60s Feminism?

Damon Linker:

By mainstreaming pornography in Playboy magazine, and valorizing the pursuit of (male, heterosexual) hedonistic pleasure with his highly publicized playboy lifestyle, Hefner made a singularly important contribution to the overthrow of received norms of sexual morals that made modern (post-1960s) feminism possible. But he also accomplished this overthrow by exploiting women, reducing them to sex objects for use (and sometimes abuse) in the satisfaction of the insatiable (and now unconstrained) male libido.

If Linker's claim is that no sort of post-1960s feminism could have arisen without Hef's mainstreaming of pornography, valorization of male hedonism, and overthrow of received sexual norms, then I doubt it.  A sort of equity feminism could have arisen without the Hefnerian excesses and without women aping the basest elements in men.  I'd be interested in hearing what Christina Hoff Sommers would have to say about this.

That Playboy  was a necessary condition of the possibilility of Playgirl is a more credible claim than that the Playboy lifestyle was a necessary condition of the possibility of the rise of any sort of worthwhile post-1960s feminism.

Hugh Hefner Dead at 91

There is so much to say. 

For now, just this: If you have devoted your whole soul to the enjoyment and promotion of the pleasures of the flesh, then you had better hope that the soul dissolves with the dissolution of the body. Contemporaries will think that of course it does, but it is not quite obvious, is it?  

Hef thought of himself as a liberator and good person. But then I think of all the abortions, all the betrayals, all the marriages and families destroyed by the sexual revolution to which Hef was a major contributor.

Guardian article here.

David French, Hugh Hefner's Legacy of Despair

Callicles Anticipates De Sade

At Gorgias 492, tr. Helmbold, the divine Plato puts the following words into the mouth of Callicles:
  
     A man who is going to live a full life must allow his desires to
     become as mighty as may be and never repress them. When his
     passions have come to full maturity, he must be able to serve them
     through his courage and intelligence and gratify every fleeting
     desire as it comes into his heart.

     [. . .]

     The truth, which you claim to pursue, Socrates, is really this:
     luxury, license, and liberty, when they have the upper hand, are
     really virtue, and happiness as well; everything else is a set of
     fine terms, man-made conventions, warped against nature, a pack of
     stuff and nonsense!

Now let us consider what the decidedly undivine Marquis de Sade has Mme. Delbene say in Julliette or Vice Amply Rewarded:

     . . . I am going to dismiss this equally absurd and childish obligation which enjoins us not to do unto others that which unto us we would not have done. It is the precise contrary Nature     recommends, since Nature's single precept is to enjoy oneself, at the expense of no matter whom. But at our leisure we shall return to these subjects; for the nonce, let's now put our theories into  practice and, after having demonstrated that you can do everything without committing a crime, let's commit a villainy or two to  convince outrselves that everything can be done. (p. 30, emphasis  in original, tr. Casavini)

From the cover: "abridged but unexpurgated from the original  five-volume work especially for the adult reader." In other other words, the good stuff, i.e., the philosophy, has been cut, but the 'adult matter' remains. I get a kick out of this use of 'adult' -- but that's another post.

Chris Hedges on Pornography

Yesterday I said that there are some decent liberals.  Having listened to a good chunk of a three-hour C-SPAN 2 interview with Chris Hedges this morning, I would say he is a good example of one.  On some issues he agrees with conservatives, pornography being one of them.  Both liberals and libertarians have to lot to answer for on this score.  That the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment could be so tortured as to justify pornography shows their lack of common sense and basic moral sense.  This is made worse by the absurd interpretation they put upon the Establishment Clause of the same amendment which they take as sanctioning the complete expulsion of religion from the public square when it is religion that delivers in popular form the morality the absence of which allows the spread of soul-destroying pornography. Hedges has the sense, uncommon on the Left, to understand that the spread of this rot is a major factor in our decline as a nation.

The Victims of Pornography is a an excerpt from his latest book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.  (What a great title!)

And another thing.  If liberals care about women, how can they defend pornography?  Apparently they care only up to the point where it would cost them some agreement with conservatives who they hate more than they love women.  Similarly, liberals are all for women, so long as they are not conservative women, as witness the unspeakably vicious attacks on Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann.  Ed Schultz,  prime-time scumbag, the other night was mocking Michelle Bachmann and gloating over her withdrawal from the presidential race.  If he had an ounce of decency he would have praised her for being in the arena and participating courageously in the grueling process while respectfully disagreeing with her positions.  But respect and decency are what you cannot expect from leftist scum of his ilk.  You think my calling him a scumbag is too harsh?  Then read this.