Author Archives: Mr Nobody

  Fear, or anxiety, is driven by two factors: unfamiliarity and helplessness. And it can attack and be attacked from both of those angles. Either increase familiarity and habit enough that dealing with the object of your fear becomes so banal and workaday that it loses its emotional power, or develop your own knowledge andContinue reading “The origins of fear”

In response to a discussion of how the modern version of feminism took over the popular movement and became the dominant voice of female advocacy and identity in our culture.  Third wave feminists have won. And now they’re all so happy!     And as a result, all our social problems have declined, our children areContinue reading “The price of victory”

A system that cannot produce bad outcomes for someone is unlikely to produce good outcomes for anyone. Completely safe systems do not involve mechanisms and actions that interact with the world in any way significant enough to generate meaningful outcomes. And humans aren’t made for them. Or any living thing, really. Absolute safety and theContinue reading “The value of risk”

What should feminism be? Is there any good likely to come of embracing an overtly partisan interest? It seems that feminism should be, nothing more nor less, advocacy for the love of the feminine. Increasing the degree to which women and their femininity is valued. But feminism seems to mean something else. Hatred of theContinue reading “What should feminism be?”

There’s a trend among Christian authors, particularly women, to take an approach to the subject that is explicitly feminist. And not the old school kind of feminism, but “the proper view of history and the church is as an oppressive patriarchy, and women are not only equal to but equivalent to men” kind of feminism.Continue reading “Popular feminist Christianity”

One massive reason Afghanistan failed is cultural. It doesn’t matter how many bad men you stop, if you don’t raise up good men in their place. Bad men will always be there, and good men have to be there to resist them or your cause will fail. Now, I don’t mean to be placing theContinue reading “Why did the Afghan war fail?”

I couldn’t catch the tails of all the love songs that drift through the summer air. I couldn’t fit them in a jar or distill them and give them to you. I couldn’t find that catch, that thrill, that slow throb, and make it real between you and me. I couldn’t fit all those storiesContinue reading “You will not forget”

I finished this book a couple weeks ago. It’s very good. If you’ve read a lot of Sowell there are some sections that are very redundant to other works of his. But there’s a uniqueness to how this one is arranged. It broadened and complexified my idea of how culture works, or rather how culturesContinue reading “On “Race and Culture””

I am a father who served for many years as the primary caregiver for two young children. How did that happen? I made deliberate choices that sacrificed my earning potential in the formal economy for value and quality of life gains for my entire family at home. Did I earn less? Absolutely. Was it 100%Continue reading “Giving up responsibilities”

   We’ve got our minds on medicines and treatments, but have no idea where health comes from. We need interventions, sure, but health and growth come from within. You can’t create them with policy or funding or initiatives. That’s not where the life of humanity lives. And there are inherent costs to choices we’ve madeContinue reading “Medicated health”

I had a strange dream the other night where someone was trying to show me a family crest and tell me what it should be. They kept shouting at me and repeating the motto, so I wouldn’t forget. And when I woke up, I didn’t. I had to look it up to make sure whatContinue reading “Praxis in principia”

Let’s be brutally honest. There is a huge disconnect between what women say they want or even think they want and their actual instinctive reactions. Women are, almost universally, extremely prejudiced against short men as romantic partners. And they have some intense positive prejudices too. So yeah, money and status are the ideal ways toContinue reading “Advice for short men”

There are many great books in the Bible that have had great consequence for human thought, history, and personal living. But my own two personal favorites share the same attribution, someone with whom I’ve always felt a kinship. Everyone finds some person or story in the Bible that speaks to them personally, there’s such aContinue reading “My favorite Biblical texts”

This entry will be a bit scattered. My parents had their 50th wedding anniversary recently, and I had to give a couple different speeches in different occasions. And in preparation for that I wrote some notes. These are those notes. Dad took me places I didn’t want to go. My mom showed me places IContinue reading “Notes from a 50th anniversary”

Gaining weight is so easy, and losing it is so hard. That says something about the fundamental structure of the world and our own constitution. I spent weeks of hard work losing weight this spring. I managed a few pounds, got down from 186 to almost 181. And then lately I’ve been very busy withContinue reading “Backsliding is easy!”

If you have a chance, you should read the book Albion’s Sons. It’s a book about four groups from Britain that settled early America and how drastically different they were and how each tried an entirely different theory of rule and culture. All of them became America, in the end. But seeing how radically differentContinue reading “On Albion’s Sons”

Activism is fundamentally, structurally, about wielding power over other people. That is its goal. That’s not a criticism, it’s a description. That’s what distinguishes activism from other kinds of social and moral activity. It is an attempt to influence, control, restrain, dictate, or guide the behavior of other people. In particular, people you don’t personallyContinue reading “Activism and evangelism”

Men have to live with the hormonal burden that assumes you need to beget children. Our minds are calibrated around it, and it affects our approach to life. Men have to live with their aggression, that drive. Ensure the elevation of your bloodline in the present and its continuation in the future. It seems likeContinue reading “Adolescence and fatherhood in Peter Pan”

I’ve seen so many people call anything that portrays people as being different “racist”. Cartoons, old TV shows, costumes. Regardless of whether the portrayal or intent is actually negative or not, the mere fact of difference itself, characterization, is habitually and thoughtlessly labeled as racist. The very idea that someone from another culture might speakContinue reading “Are stereotypes racist?”

The lesson of the long history of sexual specification is that life is not best served by reduction to a single strategy or morphology. What then is the ideal number of strategies or morphologies for a species? At the individual and embodied level the answer is: as many as there are individuals. Each one providesContinue reading “A balanced equation”