Goose & Gander (Equality, Merit, Standards + Brief Personal Update)

DWTWSBTWOTL

A quick update:

• I’ve been sick, this has combined with my allergies to make me truly miserable.
• I am normally critical of “Big Pharma”, but thank god for modern medical science.
• I’ve also been distracted by getting my orders and travel ready for my trip to Japan this August.
• I may do a video montage as a bonus video
• Being sick may impair my ability to write, but it did give me time to play around with Audacity, hence the intro and outro Music.
• Also Libre Office Impress for Ending and Beginning titles.
• I’ve also been trying to figure out my image archive. I have some 20,000 images and I am trying to tag them so I can find them when I want to use them in my videos.
• And I found some cool stuff on the Free Music Archive, not that I have used it yet.
• Current Reads: re-reading “Political Theology” by Carl Schmitt. Reading “Aristokratia, Volume 1”
• So, on with the show

I really like the phrase “What is Good for the Goose is Good for the Gander.”

• Evidently it can be traced back about five centuries.
• It reflects my standards based, meritocratic leanings.
• It also confuses people who don’t know what a gander is.
• As the French Syndicalist, Georges Sorel, once said, “There is only one pleasure greater than that of being appreciated by intelligent people, and that is the pleasure of not being understood by blunder-heads, who are only capable of expressing in a kind of jargon what serves them in the place of thought.”

For those of you who do not know, this is a gander….

 And this is a goose.

• Yes, a Gander is a male goose. There is a verb “gander” which is slang for “look”, but we can ignore that.
• Just FYI, a baby Goose is called a gosling. 
  
  
  
  
  
• They are so cute before they become tasty.

I did find it interesting that the dictionary reverses the sex order of the saying.

• A strict reading says “What is good for the (Female) Goose is Good for the (Male) Gander.”
• However, Dictionary.Com gives: “What is good for a man is equally good for a woman; or, what a man can have or do, so can a woman have or do.”
• To be fair, Wiktionary.Com does give it in the correct order, and provides a sex-neutral version which points to the essence of the proverb’s meaning.

While the proverb is great, Let us not forget what it is referring to…

• What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, but in our modern world, your goose is still cooked.

Now, I believe in displayed merit. This means I do not believe in equality.

• Any two people, even identical twins, are not equal. 
• I do, however, believe in standards and judging people accordingly.
• After all, this is how we determine an individual’s merit.
• Some standards vary according to the situation
• I value the Mechanic more highly than the Physician when I need my car fixed.
• Likewise, I value the Physician more when I am sick.
• Others remain fairly consistent.
• E.g., I always value the truthful.
• Different standards apply to different classes of people.
• Politicians, the Military, and Policemen should be held to a higher standard in our society due to their duties and responsibilities.
• This posits an inherent societally based inequality.
• Any two groups held to different standards are not and cannot be equal
• Those who meet a higher standard are intrinsically superior to those who do not, or cannot, meet that standard.
• Note that an individual may transcend their group if they aspire to, and maintain, a higher standard than is expected of them by society.

Our society does not grant equal rights to children.

• Neither are they held to the same standards.
• If a child hits another child, it would be considered cruel to throw them in jail for assault.
• Likewise, we look on with amusement at some of their more creative interpretations of the world around them
• I have heard it said that we begin to really possess the capabilities for logical reasoning around age 15 and complete them around 25
• However studies have shown that neither high schools nor colleges teach critical thinking.
• I cannot find a link for the statistical age at which logical reasoning skills develop and when the brain structures are fully formed, so feel free to take that statement with a grain of salt.
• Children are not the equal of adults

Any group to which we give a “pass” for failing to adhere to the nominal standards of civilized behavior is automatically less

• Further, one could argue that they are being infantilized. 
• When we fail to hold groups such as BAMN, Antifa, or BLM accountable for acts of violence, theft, or any other violation of the norms of civilized behavior, we are positing that the are inferior beings who just can’t help themselves.
• Just like when a toddler smacks their sibling in the head for taking their toy.
• Actually, they are less than the child, since we admonish the child.
• Full disclosure, I’ve disliked Antifa since the early 90s when SCAR (Skins Committed Against Racism) and SHARP (Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice) were running around in gangs and beating up the Goths, Ravers, and Street Kids for not being members of their clique. They’ve also ruined several shows.
• When Feminists allow, even encourage, other women to act out in illogical rants, how are they any different than the caricatures of patronizing men who are believed to diminish women by smiling at their tantrums and saying “There, there” or “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it”.
• What’s really amusing is how complicit the SJW crowd is at diminishing and infantilizing themselves.
• A more conspiratorially minded person must wonder if the “movers & shakers” are merely encouraging the SJWs in order to make them more malleable, or whether it is a self-defeating monstrosity, a beast with no head.

The lazy, the loser, the ugly, the stupid, etc etc resent standards.

• They find their feelings hurt when they realize that they do not meet the standards.
• Nietzsche and Kierkegaard referred to this as “Ressentiment”
• According to Wikipedia, “Ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one's frustration.” I recommend the article, it is concise.
• I do like the Kierkegaard excerpt “The ressentiment which results from want of character can never understand that eminent distinction really is distinction. Neither does it understand itself by recognizing distinction negatively (as in the case of ostracism) but wants to drag it down, wants to belittle it so that it really ceases to be distinguished.”
• Nietzsche points out: “But it is not the same concept [of] ‘good’; on the contrary, one should ask who is actually evil in the sense of the morality of ressentiment. The stern reply is: precisely the ‘good’ person of the other morality, the noble, powerful, dominating one, but re-touched, re-interpreted and reviewed through the poisonous eye of ressentiment.”
• But I digress, suffice to say that if Nietzsche were a prophet, his accuracy in describing the Modern World would have put other prophets to shame.

Sadly, for these SJWs, the elimination of explicit standards merely results in the impositions of implicit standards.

• You see this in the way that dissent within the SJW community is vilified. 
• Thought Criminals, to salute Orwell, or Apostates, to recognize the post-Christian roots of their ideology, are savaged.
• Much like how the early Church needed Satan in order to bind the sects and factions together, SJWs need the “fascists” (whomever they may be on that day).
• LaVey explicitly mentions this in his Nine Satanic Statements
• I plan on discussing the lineal descent of Christianity to Post-Christian society (I.e. Modernity & Post-Modernity) in a later video
• We expect a certain level of “Otherizing” of their opponents by the SJW community (it is part and parcel of the human psyche).
• However, the internal infighting of the SJWs really shows their devotion to  Matthew 12:30, “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” (NIV)

Ursula K. Le Guin authored an interesting work called The Dispossessed.

• The work portrays an Anarcho-Communist society that managed to be successful enough that they were ceded the moon of their world.
• The original society and the new society were isolated from each other.
• While professing to be free, social convention created a set of unwritten laws.
• E.g., Names were assigned by a computer to ensure they were unique, people had to “volunteer” for the hard labor of terraforming the moon
• Most importantly, dialog with the original society was restricted, as were certain ideas which risked undermining their ideology
• The story revolves around contact being made and involves an interesting critique of both societies.
• Bringing this back to standards, Le Guin is a fantastic Author.
• She doesn’t need the artificially restricted pool of “Women Authors” in order to stand out.
• She can be held to, and evaluated by, the same standards that makes any author great
• She is an adult.

I should also point out that the inherent subjectivity of any given set of standards is a non-issue

• Even if we bypass the philosophical argument that all things are subjective by virtue of our perception and contextualizing process, and merely go for cultural comparisons
• We can point out that some standards are actually cross-cultural: don’t murder, don’t steal
• Also, we are pointing out cultural norms. The sphere of discussion is the culture from which we culturally construct the standards
• The arena in which we fight is actually pitting those of the current standards against those who seek to lower those standards
• Standards can be arranged in a hierarchy based upon their difficulty and social cohesion.
• It is harder to tell the truth and suffer a penalty than it is to lie and gain benefits. 
• Further, social cohesion is increased by virtue of being able to trust what the other person is saying.
• Thus the person who generally tells the truth is superior to the person who does not. 
• Also, those who hold truth-telling as a virtue are superior to those who do not.
• Another example
• It is generally accepted that controlling your emotions is more difficult than letting them sway you to acts of violence
• Randomly assaulting people, even if they are despicable people, lessons social cohesion by interjecting doubts about whether one will be a target of violence.
• Remember, Barabbas was chosen over Jesus
• Devadatta worked against Siddhartha
• MLK was shot
•  Thus, those who refrain from randomly assaulting people are superior to those who do not.
• And, those who criticize randomly assaulting people are superior to those who encourage randomly assaulting people.
• Decrying the subjectivity of any given set of standards is merely an attempt to divert the discussion. It is the instinctual reaction of people’s ressentiment.

So, to summarize:

• “What is good for one type is equally good for another type, despite any irrelevant differences between the types.”
• Standards exist, whether you want them to or not. Eliminating overt standards leads to the creation of covert standards
• Failure to hold a group to the same set of standards categorically relegates them to an inferior status
• People can aspire to a higher set of standards than set by societal expectations and this makes them superior.
• The subjectivity of standards is a non-argument

Links are provided below. My notes will be posted to my blog.

Truth is found in the rubble of falsehood.

LITLLUW

----

Video Link: https://youtu.be/YmRvOBJzhSw

Music Used in This Video:

Swans - Better Than You (Intro)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylo6w-Umy0c

Ordo Equitum Solis - Father of Incantation (Outro)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW18XT-x39o

Current Reading:

Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty by Carl Schmitt
https://books.google.com/books/about/Political_Theology.html?id=MXPs7149s9sC

Aristokratia edited by K. Deva
https://books.google.com/books?id=ENsFmgEACAAJ&dq=Aristokratia&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi524r6-p_VAhUEzGMKHe3lDHUQ6AEIKDAA

Links:

Proverb Definition:

Dictionary: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/what-s-good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-gander

Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/what%27s_good_for_the_goose_is_good_for_the_gander

More on Geese than most would want to know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goose

Critical Thinking:

https://www.criticalthinking.org/https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/the-state-of-critical-thinking-today/523

Ressentiment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment

(Essay on) http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/genealogyofmorals/section3.rhtml

Hell, just read Genealogy of Morals
(PDF) http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/GeneologyofMorals.pdf

Nine Satanic Statements 

http://www.churchofsatan.com/nine-satanic-statements.php

Matthew 12:30 (I used the NIV)

http://biblehub.com/matthew/12-30.htm

The Dispossessed (Wikipedia)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed

Credits:

Goose, Gander, Gosling:

Pixabay
https://pixabay.com/en/goose-bird-animal-canadian-nature-35856/

https://pixabay.com/en/goose-top-hat-politics-politician-41344/

https://pixabay.com/en/gosling-chick-goose-fluffy-spring-810541/

Roast goose in yat lok restaurant

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roast_goose_in_yat_lok_restaurant.JPG