“I mean, every part of a kaiju sells. Cartilage, spleen, liver.” – Pacific Rim
How do you stop two blind bums from fighting? Yell, “My money is on the guy with the knife.”
Number 1: Telling a child “no”.
Children are not small adults. Children’s feelings, for the most part, don’t matter. We don’t let children drive, buy booze, select their own menu, or make life altering choices. “No” is a complete sentence, and learning limits is required since no child is born with discipline: that has to be learned. And, that over time with enough discipline and effort, no can be turned into yes. Corollary: letting kids lose is important for similar reasons, because life is complex enough that they will lose. Plus, I love to see them cry when I crush them in chess.
Number 2: Demanding that visitors and new arrivals to our country follow our norms, not their own.
When I visit a friend’s house, do I walk to his fridge, open up a beer, impregnated his wife, and then demand to be given the remote control so I can watch what I want instead? No, unless my friend is a GloboLeftist. They don’t seem to mind. And they don’t seem to mind it when foreigners do exactly that when visiting or invading our country. Moslem women should feel shame when wearing their desert clothes in the United States, and Mexicans should be embarrassed that they don’t speak English.
The population of Modern Mayberry never changes. Every time a girl gets pregnant, a guy leaves town.
Number 3: Not pretending that fat women are attractive.
Yes, some people are fat. Exactly zero of them are healthy, and exactly zero of them are more than a 3 out of 10. I bring women as the rule, because no one has ever pretended that fat men are attractive. It’s just (my guess) the feminine desire to reduce mating competition by telling their fat friends to “never change, you’re lovely as you are” so they can have a better chance at banging Chad.
Number 4: Not letting your son quit.
Quitting is an addictive drug, because once a kid quits and sees no immediate repercussion in his life, it’s setting the stage for a lifetime of quitting. And no one likes a quitter, except my doctor when it comes to me drinking. And I keep telling him, if I’m a quitter, that will make me a hypocrite. I’d tell you more but . . .
I’m throwing “son” out here in rule 4, but you could (I suppose) put in a daughter, but don’t try to sell me on suffrage for women. That ship sailed over the horizon after they started celebrating murder moms.
When it failed, he was beside himself.
Number 5: Looking down on “consumers”.
“Consumers” should be shunned. There is no virtue in purchasing. As Mojo Nixon musically noted: You can’t buy cool. You also can’t buy virtue.
Number 6: Expecting young women and men to marry and have children.
This is their job. If young women want to wreck society by having lazy girl jobs, they won’t like it so much when they’re cold, catted, chardonnayed, and unChaded. This will revert, because if it doesn’t civilization will collapse. My solution is to drop the drinking age to 18 and encourage illicit keggers in forests.
You know, for the kids.
Is something that looks like pasta, smells like pasta, and tastes like pasta but isn’t pasta an impasta?
Number 7: Keeping your word, especially when it is painful.
Keeping my word is important to me, because the biggest pains in my life came from when people didn’t keep their word. And me, if I promise to do the dishes, I promise, I’ll do the dishes. There is no need to remind me every six months.
Number 7: Understanding that legality and morality are not the same thing.
When the entire basis of a society is based on the exact letter of a law, you end up with infinity Indians scamming airports to get wheelchairs to jump the line or “buying” a punchbowl from Costco©, using it for the party, and returning it when the party is over. These are people without honor. This failure is not the complete explanation of why India is like it is, but it’s part of the explanation.
Number 9: Acting like the country you live in was built by your ancestors and owed to their descendants.
A female lawyer in New York who wants to tell me that a “refugee” from Kheezewhizistan is just as American as my family, who have been here since before the Revolutionary War, is lying. She’s trying to give away something that’s not hers to give, and we’re not mad enough about it.
We’ll know Europe is healing when the part of Europe taking in the most refugees is the Mediterranean Sea.
Number 10: Saying, “I don’t know.”
I’ve observed that the best leaders with the strongest sense of self are unafraid to ask people to explain things, and to admit when they don’t know something. I’ve also observed that people who know everything invariably don’t. TrUSt tHe sCieNce!
Number 11: Thinking that honor, bravery, and integrity should be the norm.
They should be the norm. There’s a reason they started making fun of Boy Scouts©, then infiltrating them, then destroying them. The Boy Scouts™ was a wonderful force to create good men, which is the last thing the GloboLeftElite want. So they killed it.
Number 12: Thinking as much about responsibility as liberty.
Responsibility is the brother of keeping your word. It’s keeping promises you haven’t even made. It’s investment. Liberty is easy. Responsibility is hard.
If we arm the teachers, will the librarians get silencers?
Number 13: Teaching children that, yes, they will be judged by their table manners.
It’s true. They don’t have to use them every moment, but they have to know them.
Number 14: Admitting when you were wrong without explanation.
This is similar to number 10, but a step farther. It goes beyond ignorance into error. People who personalize and defend their errors are evil. Maybe even Evil.
Number 15: Incorrectly numbering a list.
JW, you mentioning Mojo Nixon codified my belief of our similar vintages and experiences.
Mojo was the self-appointed Jethro Bodeen of love. And fathered Debble Gibson’s two-headed love child.
Also, he ain’t gonna piss in no jar.
And was gonna open Mojo World, where if you try to buy booze and they card you and you’re old enough . . . you get it free!
But his real heart was reserved for Lisa Marie.
Mojo Nixon used to play here locally. Never got to see him live, but we would often go see another cowpunk/psychobilly band called “Southern Culture on the Skids” that had toured previously with Mojo.
Those were good times musically. It seemed like a lot of college towns (e.g. Athens, Austin, Chapel Hill, etc.) were cranking out all sorts of new and interesting genres of music that were starting to get airplay. Then one day I woke up in the early 00’s and it was all gone. It was like the music industry had died and everything on the radio had been replaced with hip hop and Taylor Swift.
Yup. I blame USAID.
Otis is still our leader.
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet as Bolshevik Revolution II will be a real mofo.
Tell me more about all the blessings.
I don’t think they’ve got the bugs worked out. Probably not in my lifetime.
If we arm the teachers, will the librarians get silencers?
We already did arm them with globohomonism. And if you have not been to a library lately any library, they are staffed with globohomo fruit loops.
Western civilization and your list are based on the Bible and Christianity and we all know, that can’t be. So we let it not be.
Thanks for protecting our spleens. Pretty important organ, it can provide an emergency supply of blood to your body.
Exactly!
And, it’s filled with credentialism.
Thank you for not exploding my spleen by omitting number 8.
I’m a giver that way.
“Number 3: Not pretending that fat women are attractive.”
I saw a bumper sticker that said “Lift your truck. Fat girls can’t jump”
It made me want to lift my truck, just so I could apply that bumper sticker.
Ha!
You have two number sevens. No eight.
I’m a spleen-saver.
Never mind read the whole article.
The Iron Law Of Internet Posting is that you will spot the obvious typo you made that eluded you for three proofreadings exactly five minutes after twenty-seven of your blog’s readers post about it in comments.
Well-played, maestro.
Thank you!
Starship Troopers spends most of the book defining responsibility, and shows just how important and elusive that concept is. That book should be required reading prior to considering yourself an adult.
There is a certain honesty in not obfuscating the fact that relationships are transactional.
Yes.
Sounds good on paper, but the last national body that tried to live by such a code was bombed back into the stone age by US armed forces and the might of American manufacturing back in the 1940’s. So, yeah…
Seriously, the unambiguous and lucid thinking required to manifest a thusly ordered society, would, at this point be literally a herculean task.
And yet, there is hope.
Love the list. Hate the state of morality in the country. But you do make good points. I think if we stick to the knitting (reform with integrity, and it will hurt) we can make a go of it. Thanks for omitting number 8. I’ve enough aches and pains already.
It was my duty. Although the spleen is optional, why get rid of parts when you don’t have to?
I assume you include women with children when it comes to telling them “No.”
Rule by fascist toddler is rarely about the toddler.
100%.