Tuesday 27 December 2022

Love thyself?

We've all heard this late 20th century cliche - you have to love yourself, possibly before you love anybody else, in order to be happy.

Now how do you do that exactly? I don't want to start on one of my lectures on the meaning of words like "love" and "hate" (TL;DR: they don't have a single coherent meaning). Basically, with many words, you look at the various way the words are being used and figure out what they're referring to in each case. If we look at a  few uses of "love":

- "I love my wife" means  I have  a unique bond that comes from having been in love, years of shared experience & goals, knowing each other better than anyone else does, and lots of sex...and a few other things...this is a different bond from:

 - "I love my friend". Meaning that I enjoy their company, have fun with them, may have known them for years etc, but the feelings involved are significantly different from those for the person I've shared a bed with for 20 years

- "I love Salt and Pepper fish from my favourite Chinese restaurant" - I get intense pleasure from putting that food in my mouth, I get an explosion of endorphins from so doing that.. almost.. rivals the pleasure the person in the first example has given me in many of our nights together. Obviously the dead fish doesn't give me support in the other ways she does. I hope that's obvious

So which of these ways can one be said to "love oneself"? Well you can't give yourself the support, fun & affection that wife and friends do, or you wouldn't need them. And one can't enjoy oneself in the way one enjoys a curry/pasta dish etc - not really. Or at least I don't think that's what the pretty young things on Instagram mean when they repeat this hashtag...

In actual fact I don't think I love myself at all, especially when I'm happy. In those times - fortunately they are frequent - I would rather say that I love my life. Matt Walsh jokingly says* on his show that he hates himself, but he seems happy enough, after a fashion.

So what do people mean by the phrase? I'd hazard a guess that they really mean "look after yourself", maybe? Or "stop internalising other people's criticisms of you, real and imagined". Instead one should internalise the uniformly positive things some people might say about you. Does that sound right? It is at least a little bit more specific & therefore meaningful.

I'd further assert that this is something only women would say - it means very little, emotionally, for a very masculine person (am I allowed to say this any more?). So I can only guess at what they're going on about. It's another indicator of the emotional & intellectual differences between men and women

Though I wonder if actually loving others & loving one's life would indeed be more satisfying to these folks than thinking about themselves at all. Letting go of one's ego & cravings being a good rule of thumb...which I've nicked from the Buddhists. But what do I know?


* if you can find it, among the 2000+ videos he's made

Sunday 10 April 2022

That old "posh" British accent - why did we laugh at it?

When I was at university, I used to laugh with my friends at the Monty Python sketches ridiculing posh English accents and the army officers that used them. This was in the very early 90s. The Monty Python sketches were getting really old themselves, and the accents we were laughing at were fast dying out. 

One of my reasons for joining in this humour was less honourable. Being young I hankered after friendship. When I got to university I found a lot of my fellow students going in a political direction I knew I couldn't follow. Today we'd call it the "progressive" Left. But I found that when I played Graham Chapman's sergeant major character, some of those friends laughed very loud*. I didn't share the political bent that made them laugh at some things rather than others - but social pressure encouraged me to laugh at that parody

How we laughed at the posh-speaking army officers. Except that those officers were the ones that were actually in charge of one of the best militaries in the world, widely respected.

I've been thinking about this again when I watched a documentary about Britain's campaign in the Falklands. It is their sort who ran half the world. They were not much like today's breed of Englishmen: who all seem to hate each other, who are negative about themselves, everyone around them, the future, our past...negative about everything, really, which they seem to think is a badge of honour


* my student friends even seemed political at what they'd laugh at. Maybe that's true of some of the things those of us on the centre-right laugh at. But I do think that "progressives" took the phrase "the personal is the political" excessively seriously. A huge number of them were obsessive about their politics. It was hard to talk to them about any subject without them relating it to the struggle against the Tories. This cultist frame of mind is incredibly inimical to the imaginative life

Sunday 6 February 2022

Why the Left argues that black is white

I expect my progressive opponents (what a dishonourable lot they are) will think that title means I'm talking about race, but that's not what this is about. I'm concerned with the way so many modern Leftist ideas seem designed to disorient everyone by attacking everything we believe. Progressives and postmodernists seem to have always hated science and logic, so they created this trend of undermining every certainty. 

This dovetails nicely with the attempts of Cultural Marxists to overturn everything that holds Western societies together and keeps them strong: liberties, democracy, capitalism, patriotism, Christianity. It is uncanny how academics have taught people to be tired of every one of those things. But pomo people hate logic and science themselves: things often created by white men and that frequently provide inconvenient obstacles for Leftwing claims. I'm also forced to observe that a big part of this trend is just to confuse everyone, to the point where minds are more malleable. 

The big example (for me) is the danger of saying "men and women are different" or "men can't be women". If you do so (I'm afraid of even saying it in print here, such are the speech fascists and their hold on social media platforms) the army of angry people accusing you of "hatred" - for expressing and opinion - beggars belief. 

Some idiot will accuse you of hate speech, there'll be a mob on twitter, none of whom will check what you say - crowds never think for themselves and, unfortunately, this happens online as well. 

It was too much already when these lunatics were trying to get people cancelled and socially ostracised for having the wrong opinion. Now they want us thrown in jail for it.

And there's a sort of inevitability about how governments just roll over every time and introduce bills for yet more censorship of speech that almost nobody asked for (except for a small bunch of psychopaths).

I confess to being puzzled and demoralised by how governments so quickly give in to this insanity, but I expect it's because of the "intersectional" nature of this kind of politics. The feminists and anti-racists are pushing these measures, so the trans lobby are included, even though feminists actually hate them, and soon it will be illegal hate-speech to say "men can't be women".

And all our principles of free speech are going, just like that, because a bunch of kids who understand nothing (they're not exactly philosophers, are they?) repeat brainless slogans like "free speech doesn't mean the freedom to utter hate-speech"

The argument is that if you disagree with someone on these matters, it's inevitably because of "hatred" - they're pulling the same trick the Left use on immigration every single time - and no one anywhere questions the logic of it even once, all the way up to the House of Commons.

Of course logic is a white man's creation to oppress everyone else, I forgot.. Well here we are, we'll past the stage where the quotes from Orwell's 1984 are getting old: Freedom is Slavery, War is Peace etc.. But young, ignorant people haven't read or understood Orwell - our teachers saw to that