The article that started out as a comment, or pa&ptCrhuR Robinson Dorion salutem.

Quoth his mistress,

diana_coman ftr I asked him to publish that precisely as a prerequisite to come and ask for feedback & help to grow it, that's all.

Well... at first I wasn't going to say anything. Then I was going to say something in a comment there. Then it kept growing, and growing, and by the time it was like a thousand words and countless references I just gave up and so here it is.

The microfractureⁱ that started it all is that I can't simply let the

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

quote pass without pointing out it is fucking stupid. Yet this will be a lengthy discussion, so let's take our time with it.

One thing to bear in mind about that Alisa Rosenbaum character is that she's not some kind of great thinker, misunderstood or otherwise. She's an alt-flavoured Helena Blavatsky, occurring a coupla generations laterⁱⁱ but still substantially very much the same thing.

What thing is that ? Well... looky, it's hard as a woman, okayⁱⁱⁱ ? Nobody expects anything of you -- not besides clean sheets and pleasant scents wafting from any part of your body any time of day or night, and silky soft skin and warm food on the table and the children not ever being noisy, that is. Not really all that much, and what do you mean there's no children^iv !? Supposing she does all that or doesn't all that, the problem still remains : if indeed she's a people just like all the other people (a proposition altogether dubious, now as then, whenever the then), how can she go about doing things in the vein of the things people do ?

As it turns out, there's exactly two ways, and no more, and no others. One's to go into detail. The problem with going into detail is that it'll win you no friends^v -- which is something some women care about more than others, but also something most women care about significantly more than most men. The other's to try and make friends.^vi

The attempt to make friends as a surrogate pursuit of intellectual accomplishment in women has a rich history well documented, it's what produces the Florence Jenkins and the Julia Moores of the world ; and the Blavatskys, and the Rosenbaums. It's true that a whole tradition of wanna-be dorks^vii happened to latch on to her, thereby completing the "make friends" ploy ; but it is not therefore true that she (or them) had a point, and what's infinitely more important : it is eminently not true that the little incidentals, the tiny implications and the occasional^viii turns of phrase are meaningful beyond the pulp fiction they first saw light of press in. Quoting Rosenbaum is for this reason not so very different from quoting Spiderman, the comicbook. It's entirely possible it has great personal relevancy for coincidental reasons of private accident ; but it is kitsch, consumatedly and eminently kitsch. It has no breath, it can't possibly be suspected of informing the future, or the distant -- certainly not in the sense actual art does ; nor even in the manner.

Now that we've mostly figured out the context, let's see the quote.

First off, it is eminently not true that primitive life is entirely public. Not only is it not true -- the clueless retconning of "everything" is quite the same anti-intellectual mental process that blessed us with "global warming". That's precisely it -- some morons sat in a room somewhere, and while wholly in the dark as to what happened in the past they nevertheless had the mental... fortitude, let's call it, to not permit such small things as complete and utter cluelessness even slightly discourage them. They... figured out, from context, what things could possibly mean. That's why they're UStardians, after all, this process of hallucinating a new past every time there's a new question to answer. And besides... who says a billiard ball can't be as good a baldness-cure-formula salesman as the most hirsute of goats!

In actual reality, primitive life was entirely private.^ix The publicity of life is the cornerstone of "western" ie Roman civilisation^x ; in fact, the original Optimates ie Roman senatorial class consisted of... those people who... could name their fathers! That's the fucking "public" life of the primitive for you, apud Grammy Nitwit & her merry sewing circle friends. We'll spare the eager public a discussion of Greek tradition, as well as any discussion of, say, Bede's letters, past the very summary observation that the first, and foremost punitive measure for most of Western tradition was... the denial of public life (actually called "excommunication", literally the exclusion from publicity).

So, to sum up : do me a favour if you will, and don't accidentally bake^xi the idiocy of anal children in your model of an ideal world. Anal children are always socialism's harbringers, that's why the damned thing even exists in the first place -- by them, for them, through them. That "society of privacy" that the Clintons have absolutely realized is what the fuck you're trying to escape, and specifically because it is not even primitive -- it is militantly barbaric. The primitive is named for the cunt, it literally means "one who receives" in словѣ́ньскъ ѩꙁꙑ́къ ; whereas the barbarian thinks he knows better. Bar bar bar barbar bar bar barbarbar...

The correct cut is to actively and effectually repress the idiots out in the field, not to try and shily withdraw into the coy behaviour of (literally retarded) aging girlies.

1. There's a scene in there where Hopkins recounts (in character) what I suspect might be more personally authentic than given credit for : how as a child working on an egg farm and tasked with finding the cracked eggs with a candle he found cracks in virtually all the eggs. Such is the nature of all things here, it's not just the Holze that's crummy. It's everything. [↩]
2. And evidently informed by the experience of her foremothers, as she's very carefully (and therefore visibly) not making the same exam-taking mistakes they made. Speaking of such information, do you know the Romanian joke with the gypsy who stole a gun ?

   Before his turn, there's a Romanian guy accused of stealing a cow. The judge inquires why he stole the cow, the man protests he did not steal it, but raised it from calf. After some wrangling he is set free. Upon his turn, the gypsy is also asked why he stole the gun ; and he retorts that he didn't steal it, he raised it from pistol.

   The ultimate doom of the path of the least resistance approach to reality is that properly speaking no exam taker can learn from the experience of exam takers before. Exam taking being a purely formal affair, it then necessarily follows that no substantial accumulation can in fact occur, meaning that there's literally nothing there to learn (besides, of course, lengthy lists of spurious nonsense and assorted drivel -- exactly the sort of thing chicks excel at memorizing by rote). [↩]

3. At least, hopefully it's hard. [↩]
4. Yes, for the longest time the same men that didn't think their unwashed hands could have anything to do with dat peri"pueral" fever also didn't think it's usually poor sperm quality driving marital infertility. And they called it something to reflect this not thinking, too, because perimanusordida fever just wouldn't have had quite the same ring to it. [↩]
5. And of course is also beset by all the pitfalls awaiting men, too. [↩]
6. The attempt to make friends in this context is not to be misunderstood as some vague "aiming for the faint friendship of the entire world", that's common womanhood. Intellectual-aspirational womanhood trades that vague heirloom of cuntlife for a slightly modified version : aiming for the (comparatively) intense friendships of just some kind of selected few (a modification reinforced by some variant of mental transactionalism whereby the remainder "can be said to" not properly exist -- not "not matter", mind, the subtle differences in the malfunction of the brainbox are all there is, nothing "irrelevant" ever is irrelevant in that space). The intellectual history of the first wave "feminists" aka the suffragettes is very much definitive illumination on this point -- the intelligent, cultivated and intellectually productive women of the period wanted nothing to do with them, and regularly rebuffed them, in public as in private. The sales class, the women who couldn't run real estate agencies and travel agencies and such nothings at the time however, those were all for it. It pays nothing to confuse the two kinds, lest you end up electing Obamas for office thinking they're college professors or who knows what such lulz. There's a difference between Noether and Fiorina, yes ? A substantial difference. [↩]
7. There's this whole subculture, usually hailing some combination of Hayek, Rothbard &c as God's own gift to reason (usually spelled "Western civilisation" in-universe). They tend to use lofty words, but besides the "freedom" bumper sticker where "salvation" would otherwise go and so on there's indeed very little to structurally or substantially distinguish them from any other of the shockingly numerous but otherwise typically ustardian neoprotestant sects. It's really a lot like having the same figurine painted eight thousand "different" colors -- you'd think it'd have been perhaps time for a new figurine at any point during the past two centuries, yet no such luck. Next year, like two hundred times before, they're going to innovate again : new colors for the same old tired cans.

   Paint is cheaper than pneumatic presses (not to mention "new" colors can be had for free, all you do is mix "creatively" the old ones). What can be done ? From the Magical Mixed Juices Bestow Immortality end of that spectrum to the Magic Shit I Found Behind The Shed other end there's room for, apparently, everything one born across the Ocean could ever possibly want ; but in any case all the parochial cluelenessness, all the infuriating narrowness of perspective, all the wounded, threatened and abused notion of the self quite transparently impelling the effort from the place where curiosity would normally sit are always present, arranged in the same, endlessly perdurant array.

   I don't know, maybe it's something in the climate ; in any case, none of this is intellectual, not anymore than paint mixing is creative. [↩]

8. Very occasional, it's true, she's terribly arid as a writer. [↩]
9. Earliness is very much like stupidty and insanity. The only difference is that earliness resolves through the passage of time, whereas insanity aggravates while stupidity stays the same. [↩]
10. Ever see these morons depict a very blond Jesus ? "Western" civilisation of Southern Europe, whynot. Everything's West of something, it's a round Earth, right ? [↩]
11. To be perfectly clear, I don't think your point is at all weak ; I do think however that it is needlessly marred by ultimately spurious association. [↩]