Atheist Coffee and Feminist Envy
This post is originally by past-version John Wright of 2011. But see my note below.
“I would love to see your thoughts on the current dust-up the Atheist community is having (right now) over coffee.”
For those of you who have not heard of this case, the fact pattern is this:
The young lady in question objected to a man attempting to court her according to what the modern world holds as a perfectly acceptable method of courting: after talking with her until four in the morning at a bar, he asked her to go up to his room for a cup of coffee. She objected, not that his attentions were unflattering or ill timed, but that he was sexually attracted to her at all. In other words, it is the fact that mother nature made her female that the young lady find appalling. With the utter inability to restrict her comments to proportionality (or sanity) typical of the Left, she likened the awkward proposition to rape.
Richard Dawkins, in the scathing fashion typical of the Internet, left a message on her blog mocking her for complaining about what was at most an imposition on courtesy, hardly an act of oppression or male dominion.
Need anything be said? It is one of the few times I agree with Richard Dawkins, who otherwise is a disgrace to the cause of Atheism I once served. He is right to hold the belligerence of the feminista up to mockery, and to contrast it with the real oppression of women by the Mohammedans
If the young lady were sane, or sincere, or in other words not a Leftist, she would be agitating for the return of Victorian standards of modesty, such that men and women would have a set of unwritten rules, known to both beforehand, as guidelines for when a young lady can be courted, and by what means, and when not.
You see, the idea of leaving the rules up to the individuals to agree upon each man for himself contains an absurdity: you cannot court a woman, or even ask her to dance, if you are already in a relationship with her and know her well enough to negotiate your own rules. The rules of courtship are rules on how to approach a woman who is a partial or a total stranger. Strangers can only be bound by unwritten rules that bind the whole society, with few or no exceptions.
And, of course, the hypocrisy of a woman who has been out drinking until 4.00, without an escort, suddenly wanting the protect of Victorian rules of modesty, but without being willing to pay the price demanded, i.e. to act modestly, is rank. If you are in a bar without an escort, and you are young and female, expect to be hit on. You and yours helped make this society exactly what it is: you cannot expect men to act like gentlemen when every single damn word out of your collective mouth for the past three generations has been a denunciation, a mockery, an insult, and a discouragement to gentlemanly behaviors.
In morals as in economics, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Do you regard modesty and chastity to be mere patriarchal restrictions and oppression, O ye ladies of the Left? Then utter no complaint when immodesty and unchastity of yourself and your sisters is answered by immodesty and unchastity by your menfolk.
That all parties involved are atheists makes the situation deliciously ridiculous. So, you think you can create a rational set of moral and ethical guidelines to guide human behavior, based merely on human reason and human appetites? Go ahead.
Behold the result: once group of morality-hating zealot screaming in holier-than-thou perfection of hot temper at another group of morality-hating holier-than-thou zealots. The cool reasoning powers that atheists praise seems not much in evidence.
Current John Wright (AD 2014) makes his comment below:
I am recycling the above post so that the following proportion might exist in the reader’s mind:
As the young atheist lady’s outrage is to the young geek swain’s comment that provoked it, so is the outrage of the White Liberal segment of the Black Community over the cop in Ferguson who shot a huge, strong, violent and dangerous robber while the robber was charging him is to the event that provoked it.
In the same proportion is the outrage of the feminists over the designs on the shirt of a space scientist to the actual degree of degradation such a shirt would impose on the female half of the race, if women still adhered to Christian standards of modesty, rather than, say performing simulated acts of anal sex with crucifixes in front of the Pope in order to protest something or other.
In the inverse proportion is the outrage, or rather, lack of it, expressed in public over the rapes, stonings, honor killings, female genital mutilation, and dress code imposed by Shariah Law.
Now, please notice what is going on and what is at stake. In cases where there is real racism, such as, for example, the expressed desire of the Muslim world to wipe Israel off the map, the Left is deliberately silent, except when they break out with enthusiastic aid and applause for the Muslim ambition. In cases where there is real misogyny, rape, and abuse of women, the Left is deliberately silent, except when they break out with enthusiastic aid and applause for the Muslim ambition.
In cases where either (1) there is nothing even remotely offensive to any woman, not even accepting the fact pattern as stipulated by the screaming ninny girl as totally accurate and true or (2) there is something which might be mildly offensive to a Christian lady of good taste and refined upbringing, but the feminists who both dress as vaginas and put on plays where vaginas talk, are estopped from voicing any complaint against a lack of chivalry in gentlemanly behavior in their menfolk on the grounds that they themselves are the foremost perpetrators of the degradation of Christian standards of chivalry in men and modesty in women, which they reject utterly and entirely and thoroughly.
So: in these cases and countless others, not only is the outrage, which is absolute and infinite, disproportionate to the offense, which is either microscopic or nonexistent, the reverse is also true: namely, when real offenses arise where real people are really hurt, killed, enslaved, maimed or abused, the Left either holds their tongue with a silence that betrays their true intent, or they voice sympathy and solidarity with the perpetrators of the atrocities.
There is a consistent pattern here. It is not random. If the Left were stupid or insane, they would sometimes, by sheer statistical random chance, sometimes voice real outrage over a real injustice, or dismiss as unreal a complaint that actually was, for once, unreal. But they are always silent over real outrages and injustices, except when (“Little Eichmanns”) they applaud them, and always outraged over imaginary outrages.
The only way to get a nearly perfect score of absolute unreality and absolute injustice in each and every stance voiced by countless people over countless years is if three things are true:
1. They all share, openly or tacitly, the same assumption
2. That assumption influences, informs, or controls each and every stance
3. That assumption, either directly or indirectly, substitutes justice for injustice in their thinking, reality for unreality.
If this were true, then the Left would have for unreality the same longing, adoration, loyalty, and hunger for truth which philosophers, scientists, reporters, engineers, and all men of good will by rights should have, and the same longing, adoration, loyalty, and hunger for justice which both victims and those lawmen and law-abiding citizen eager to avenge them by rights should have.
I submit that the one assumption all Leftists share in order to be Leftists is that life is unfair, and the unfairness is manmade, springing from the laws and customs, institutions and habits of mankind, which exploited a unsuccessful victim to the benefit of the successful victor; ergo any man, church or nation who is successful won its success under the crooked rules and corrupt practices of these same unfair laws and practices; ergo the successful are in the wrong, and the more successful they are, the more wrong; ergo again the only way their victims can be made right is for the successful to give away the ill-gotten fruits of success to the victims, and the laws and practices of man shall and must change to prevent the unfairness from happening again.
That assumption controls their every stance. For the Marxist, the assumption is that wealthy classes or nations prosper due to an unfair set of laws and practices, namely, the institution of private property, which victimizes the impoverished class or impoverished nation for the benefit of the successful. For the feminist, the assumption is that men prosper at the expense of women, due to the unfair institution of marriage and romance, and the subtle influence of grammar and tee-shirts, and the ever present threat of rape; for the race-hustler, the assumption is that Caucasians prosper due to racism and exploitation of lesser races, due to the freedom of association and freedom of hiring practices, which must be abolished and replaced with quota systems.
Now, in any case where the successful are successful not for the reasons claimed by the Left, that is, the success is due to merit, their remedies of abolishing freedom, abolish marriage, and abolishing private property are counterproductive to the stated goal. Race-hustling and quotas create more friction between the races and less success for the unsuccessful; abolishing romance and marriage removed the traditional protections women enjoyed against cads and cuckoos who leave their eggs for other men to raise, or Uncle Sam; abolishing private property abolishes even the possibility of success for anyone except the Nomenklatura and other pirates, monsters, and wild beasts.
Please note that if there were cases where the successful were actually ‘the exploiters’ as the Left describes, let us say, the Stalinists in Russia or the Muslim slavers abducting nubile Christian girls in Africa, it is the Rightwing Americans and the Christian gentlemen of the Western World who take the steps needed to abolish the evil laws and practices which allow for the injustice to continue, as when, for example, the Republicans fought the Civil War at disastrous and heartbreaking costs to free the slaves from their Democrat masters, only to receive feckless ingratitude in return (which is, sadly, how it must be, whenever true evil is abolished).
In all such cases, the Left have nothing to do. The problem is either in battle and being fought by the Right, or is already solved by the Right, or the Left are fighting and screaming the throwing hysterical fits to prevent the problem from being solved, on the grounds that the Stalinists or Oil Sheiks are in the ‘oppressed victim’ category.
Even if they had something to do, they could not do it. If they could fight a real injustice, then they would be heroes, and that would put them in the category of the successful. But, then, by their primary and axiomatic assumption, anyone who is successful is a cheat and an exploiter and a villain. So they cannot fight any real injustices.
That leaves only the imaginary injustices, things that cannot be solved because they are not problems to begin with. You cannot change something that does not exist. You cannot abolish the institutional racism in modern America because there is none. You cannot halt the conspiracy of men to keep womenfolk from studying science and math because there is no conspiracy: whether women could perform at the same average level as men or not is not an issue here. The conspiracy is an article of faith the Leftists MUST believe, because the alternative, the fact that women by their nature will not or cannot perform in the field at the same average level, is a possibility that leads to the conclusion that the institutions are not corrupt, but fair.
But if the institutions are not corrupt, and life is fair, then the failure and low station of the Leftist is deserved and merited and earned. He is poorer than his neighbor because his neighbor works harder. He is dumber than his neighbor because he lost out on the Darwinian crapshoot when it came to genes, or perhaps the stars frowned on him in the hour he was born. Who cares what the answer is?
Any answer that does not blame THE ESTABLISHMENT is equally unpalatable and unacceptable to the Leftist, because it directly contradicts the one assumption he must make in order to be a Leftist.
Any man who does not blame his fellow man for the injustices of nature is not a Leftist. He lacks the proper level of resentment to qualify.
Leftism is politicized envy.
You see, the Left are losers. They are stupid people who want to be thought smart; people with no taste who want to be thought cultured and artistic; selfish cowards who want the palm leaf of martyrdom and the gold medal of heroism; but who, in no case, can actually perform.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
