The AK47 Podcast Season 2: Episode 20 with Libby Emmons

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Today's episode is with a very special guest from The Federalist writing family: Libby Emmons! She's a playwright, cultural commentator,  a mother, the wife of David Marcus. Basically she's awesome and we've been meaning to have her on the show for a while but it was this article on the Roxanne Gaye vs Christina Hoff Summers debates in Australia that finally moved the pieces.  Aaron promised to link to a bunch of stuff in the show notes, but he and Kyle are both experiencing Familial difficulties at the moment so none of their recent promises mean anything at the moment. Google Libby Emmons, she's written all over the place! 

The AK47 Podcast Season 2: Episode 19

The Chesterton School (Aaron recently became a co-director there) appeared on Apologetics.com Radio.  That's right!  AK47 has managed to get itself onto the real airwaves!  Hopefully not for the last time....

The gang in this episode talk about education, educational methods, and the Chesterton School.

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The AK47 Podcast Season 2: Episode 18

Aaron and Kyle come together to discuss various issues in politics, discussion, arguing logically, the state of discourse, and more.  Aaron tells us about his recent radio appearance and work at a private Christian university, we talk about everyone's desire to control others, Kyle expresses an unusual amount of frustration with how stupid and evil people are, we talk a little about the Mueller Report, and the recent backlash that Nathan Pyle, the creator of the Strange Planet comics, experienced over a tweet a couple of years ago.

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The virtue of hypocrisy

Apparently Socialists don’t like having their hypocrisy pointed out anymore than humans do:

This is the danger of being a radical and taking a stand.  Once you claim to have principles you gain a new ability: hypocrisy. The only people who can’t be hypocrites are nihilists who have committed suicide. For everyone else this is a real danger.

I wish there were more hypocrites. At least the hypocrite can repent and be corrected by their own standards. Sadly our world is overpopulated with Chesterton’s pathetic new rebels...

“But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. . . . As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. . . . The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.”

Two Articles on Film

Here is a long piece I wrote for FilmFisher on the MCU.

http://filmfisher.com/2019/04/stark-vs-rogers-central-conflict-mcu/

And here is my latest review for Hollywood in Toto.

https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/jt-leroy-review/

In defense of Harlots

W. Scott Poole is one of my favorite writers. He’s very much a leftist and seems to have also adopted just about every piece of the intersectional worldview. So I disagree with about 70% of what he writes. But agreement is not everything. It’s important to read those we disagree with, especially when we have shared interests. I highly recommend his books on horror, especially In the Mountains of Madness. 

But we’ve had a few “dust ups” on Twitter recently, one of which was interesting enough to write about.

Then I responded with this:

I was making a bad joke with the “labor of love” thing.  But his response deserves a Darwin Award:

This response is just utterly AMAZING. A) it has absolutely no argumentative purchase. This is basically just an ad hominem against two of the most brilliant thinkers to ever think. The ad hominem against Augustine is especially dumb because that’s from before his conversion, and I didn’t even bother googling the blow job thing (I’ll look it up eventually because ya know boredom). But none of this even matters because of B)

That was the point of my original retweet! I like Poole. He’s a good guy. I generally don’t respond to his political tweets because I don’t want to annoy him. I was basically saying I agree. I don’t think the government should be regulating sexual relations. Even monetized ones. Especially in a culture that has turned marriage into concubinage, that means virtually every sexual encounter is potentially monetized. 

Here’s an article explaining the Augustine/Aquinas potion on prostitution. 

Go read Poole’s books. They’re awesome!

Nature and “Gender”

This is a supplement to my most recent review for HiT (Hollywood in Toto). That piece covers the recent film JT LeRoy which deals with transgender issues. This is an expansion of the preamble.

1. Human nature is complicated, but it is a nature. This is the claim that there is an immaterial principle that gives shape to this thing we call humanity. A dog is not a human because it is objectively true that these are different things. This would be true even if all the governments of the world decided that dogs had the same rights as humans. Therefore the principle of humanity, the thing that makes it what it is, is discernible and probably self evident. Here self evident does not mean everyone sees this truth rather it is a truth that evidences itself, or a truth that having been seen cannot be unseen. This first claim is actually the most controversial, it is clearly not believed by everyone even though I think it should be.

2. Human nature does not always function as it should in the concrete. That is the unifying principle of humanity, the thing that makes us what we are, while perfect in the abstract does not manifest itself perfectly within instances of human nature. Christians usually call this sin, but at least it must be called a disordering. The ordering principle of human nature has a goal and purpose for us in mind, but we do not always live in accord with our nature. This happens for a variety of reasons, some of which are beyond our control which is why humans need to extend grace and compassion to each other in order to flourish.

3. Sex is a fundamental aspect of human nature. As the writer of Genesis proclaimed several millennial ago: “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Human nature is inherently sexed. The sexes are complementary, whether inside or outside marriage, and need each other for humanity to flourish. This has been accomplished in many ways throughout history but the most common and fundamental has been marriage between a man and a woman. Almost every piece of pre governmental society hangs upon this most basic covenantal relationship. This relationship is based in duties not rights, it is not primarily about individual expression and eros but sacrificial love for the other.

4. Gender is a relatively recent concept and seems to be philosophically vacuous on purpose so that it can be repurposed to whatever political ends it is currently needed for. The category of intersex on the other hand is quite ancient and completely disconnected from contemporary discussions of gender. The concept of Human nature easily accommodates the notion of intersex but not gender. The most recent Salisbury Review, a quarterly conservative magazine founded by Sir Roger Scruton, began with this “A woman who calls herself a man can have a baby, but a man who calls himself a woman cannot...There was a time when there were men and women plus a few unfortunate people whose sexual organs were a mixture of male and female.” Genuinely intersex individuals do not overlap with transgender persons very often and yet when pushed for scientific data on transgenderism they point to the intersex. Transgenderism, and gender language in general, does not seem to have meaningful definitions and this seems to be on purpose. At this point it is unclear to me how helpful or true the concept of gender is, but the political behavior of gender activists alone makes it seem a dubious prospect.

5. Civil Society and a virtuous public square require patience, compromise, and the assumption of good faith. In this spirit I have agreed to use the pronoun “they” when referencing an individual in this film. That person’s name is Savannah Knoop. They are played by Kristen Stewart. As I intimated in #4 I do not believe the cultural architects of the transgender project are operating under what I would consider good faith, but transferring that suspicion to someone like Savannah or a Hollywood production company does not seem warranted. I think these people are mistaken. We disagree about human nature but when asked nicely to do something, unless that thing requires me to actively engage in what I think is wrong it seems best to simply comply. If threats to freedom of speech were involved or charges of bigotry accompanied the request I would have ignored it. But that is not what happened. I’m assuming this lengthy preamble will be offensive to many readers. Some on the right want every issue to become a culture war, because they correctly understand that mainstream media characterizes them as backwards and bigoted. I am sympathetic with this impulse but I think it is ultimately misguided. Yes words matter, and I am not always willing to acquiesce on this matter. This time I am.