Doglife

Sex as a sport

Living in a Red-State or claiming a puritanical religion does not really indicate a lesser interest in sex, as the red-state obsession with adult material indicates. Clearly there is a market there that is in the closet and willing to indulge themselves only in private because sex has a negative stigma. I suppose that one way to make sex, and also porn, more publicly palatable would be to market it as a sport. A contest of fitness and skill and will. A version of wrestling where the winner gets certain benefits, or perhaps some kind of who-can-orgasm-first contest. Before you dismiss this, let me point out why this could work, how the athleticizing of sex would make it more acceptable:

Not for “pleasure”
The moral objection to sex is rooted in the fact that sex is pleasurable for most people. If the objective of intercourse is, say, for procreation, the it loses it’s offensiveness to moralists. In that case you clearly are not doing it for recreation, therefore you are not a hedonist or whoremonger. Well here you go, a reason to do it that involves competition instead of erotic bliss.

Feminism
Here we have an arena in which men and women could compete as equals and individuals. It’s about skill, not about upper-body strength or predatory instincts. Sex is the one arena in which men and women operate as equals in real life as well.

It is not all that different from many sports
Thing about the amount of close contact between MMA fighters on the floor, or boxers clinching, or basketball players posting up. Think about the nudity in professional wrestling, diving, tennis, bodybuilding. The only thing missing is penetration and heterosexuality.

Local sex leagues
These will provide all the benefits of any kind of local competition, like college or Olympic sports with the same tribal mentality and vicarious conquest. Conservatives love competition, and the lust for victory may eventually outstrip any prudishness.

Who fights your wars?

What kind of people do you get to fight futile wars? Do you send smart people, or people who are ready to die in the service of any objective no matter how pointless? Do you actively recruit and send forth the people who would make life better or the people at home, or the ones we can all do without?

Forget about Iraq or Bush or anything like that. Boil this down to the basic concept. You need a war that will be beneficial for certain reasons, but it not an essential war in that the safety of your citizens is not threatened, and nobody is in any danger of being invaded. Do you go tossing your best at the “enemy” or do you take the opportunity to get rid of some dead weight?

War could be seen as an equivalent of Keynesian hole-digging. You dispatch soldiers to another country, or to your borders, where they wait and, occasionally, die. They send home money as they do all of this, and are kept occupied, maybe even pick up a few skills and most of everybody is happy. But you don’t do this with the people who might actually be getting something done in other areas. You put only your most expendable in danger.

Why you don’t want to catch flies, with or without honey

This is the end-argument of people who like to appease, the why-can’t-we -all-get-along folks. You catch more flies with honey, meaning that you get more people to agree with you if you don’t piss them off. The big question is, do you want these people agreeing with you? Let’s say that you could get Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage over to your side if you were to be nice to him (or, if you are Republican/Conservative I guess the equivalent would be Jon Stewart), would it be worth it? If you could change the minds of the people you hate at work, the ones with the lame ideas who get by by being pretty or kissing ass, would you want to?

The line is between the people who have a genuine argument full of merit, and the people who just want to win a fight, who are looking to do this by breaking your will to argue with them. If I am right and know I am right, and know that my argument is unassailable and should be obvious to any adult, then I don’t particularly care if you join up with me.

Your continual dissent just marks me out as being smarter than you are, and when other people do I agree with me, we can all point and laugh at you and feel better about ourselves.

Flies are flies, people. You don’t want them in your house.

“Sympathy” vs self-interest

The same kind of nitwit thinking that gets you by on a daily basis with your retarded children and you dead-end repetitive job, is not really the kind of thinking that you should apply to matters of state or policy. This is why having a conversation about politics with a moron is so annoying and pointless.

Let me give you an example that I came across today:
Person 1 got arrested for doing something that is arguably wrong and tells person 2. There follows a conversation that can be summed up like this:

Person 1: That’s a gross violation of my civil rights!
Person 2 (the moron): Well, I have no sympathy for you if you put yourself in that situation!

Sympathy. This reasoning is applied across a wide spectrum of complaints. The arrest and deportation of legal and illegal immigrants, the harassment of minorities by the police, the harassment of environmental protesters by various arms of the government. A few years back it was applied by some Conservatives in defense of the harassment of legal east Indian immigrants in the wake of 9/11. The fact that they wore turbans and thus might be mistaken for Arabs justified retarded rednecks harassing them.

I love the fact that they view rights and freedoms as dispensations that they as citizens are allowed to “bestow” upon whoever pleases them. Bestow in the sense of having a favorable but irrelevant opinion of it. Like the “good” immigrants, meaning people from Europe and submissive Asian women imported to take care of old and aging rednecks in the rural south under the guise of marriage.

“Sympathy” should have nothing to do with how you view somebody’s rights. The more rational person sees everybody else’s rights as an extension of their own, meaning that if somebody else can get fucked because of their skin-color or ethnicity, then the possibility exists for me to get fucked some equally invalid reason. That’s it, common-sense self-interest. Pure selfishness is how you make a society better.

Note who these people tend to be though, the bigots and the people who hold dissenters in contempt, they tend to be Conservatives, hypocritical Christians, people who claim to be guided something other than logic. They claim a religion of kindness and humility and selflessness. The enlightened self-interest that I am talking about does not fit into their supposed motives for doing anything.