The Eternal Scold

A popular game with the old Buckley conservatives was to figure out how to blame the actions of the Left on socialism or a quest for power. Whenever the Left found some reason to attack some aspect of white culture, the National Review types would work their fingers raw trying to explain why it was either due to socialism or a quest for political power by those dastardly democrats. Sometimes, they would combine the two, so that the quest for power was to impose socialism on us.

Some elements of the dissident right have inherited this tendency to reduce all left-wing activity to simple, individual motivations. The Left does something similar, but they prefer supernatural and mystical explanations. In fact, that is probably a useful way of describing the political divide. One side relies on magic to explain the world, while the other side relies on some form of self-interest. In both cases, the preferred answer strips the humanity from the actors and reduces them to robots or pawns.

The truth is, human society has a lot of complexity, because we have a wide range of human types. For example, the scold is a feature of all white societies, regardless of political and economic makeup. These are people who take pleasure in lecturing the rest of us about our failings. Sometimes they often find a home on the Left these days, because the Left defines the civic religion of the West. In a prior age, they would have been defending order and tradition, as part of the religious community.

These people are not motivated by greed or a lust for power. Their scolding of the population may result in elevated status or a comfortable lifestyle, but that is not what motivates them to scold the rest of us. Al Gore made a lot of money off the climate change rackets, but that’s not why he does it. He was plenty rich before he got the green fever after the 2000 election. What gets him up in the morning is the need to be Gaia’s prophet, an Ezekiel warning the rest of us about the end times.

A recent example of this is the decision, by some scolds on the San Francisco board of supervisors, to ban e-cigarettes. According to the news accounts, they will ban the sale of these devises and ban the shipment of them into the city. Strangely, people will still be allowed to possess them and use them in public. Perhaps the scheme is to ban the public use of them next and then criminalize the possession of them. That’s the way they attacked the sale and use of tobacco forty years ago.

Now, the anti-smoking crusades were allegedly about public health. Smoking is not only unhealthful to the smoker, it has a societal cost. Lung cancer is a terrible way to die and an expensive one as well. Public health is often cast in emotional terms, trying to save lives, but as policy matter, it is about saving money. Either way, the cover story for the taxes on tobacco and limits on smoking was about public health. We wanted to end smoking and therefore improve the health of the people.

Of course, that was never true. It was convenient that smoking was bad for your health, but the real motivation was the need to boss people around. The scold has to have someone they can bully. The reason is just an excuse. That’s what you see with these crusades against electronic cigarettes. There is no data suggesting they are unhealthful like cigarettes. Nicotine is not the issue with tobacco use. It is the other chemicals and the particulate matter from burning tobacco. That’s not an issue with e-cigarettes.

The funny thing about this is these electronic cigarettes are probably the best tool for quitting conventional tobacco use. They allow the user to wean themselves from the psychological habit as they wean themselves from the chemical addiction. There is some evidence suggesting the addictive power of cigarettes is not the nicotine, but the drug cocktail used to prepare the tobacco, in combination with nicotine. Therefore, this delivery system is a better way to get off the drug than other methods.

None of that matters to the crusaders. It never mattered to them when they were howling about smoking at ballparks or out of doors. What motivates these people is the need to lecture the public about morality. The scold always assumes pleasure is an indication of sin. Those hipster goofballs vaping in the coffee shop, therefore, must be doing something wrong. That’s the bat signal for the local scolds to rally and demand the activist be stopped, else the community will be at risk.

That’s the other thing about scolds. They always justify their activity by claiming they are sacrificing for the good of the community. In this case, they are looking out for the children, as if toddlers are growing beards and taking up vaping. In reality, it is just the same old people, the eternal scold, getting a rush from making other people stop doing something they enjoy. It’s not about money and it is not about power. For these scolds and busybodies, the reward is in being the scold. It’s who they are.

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98 thoughts on “The Eternal Scold

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  2. Regardless of the issue the ultimate motivation of the commie left is CONTROL. They lust after and seek absolute and complete control over EVERYONE. And anything that serves that agenda is acceptable behavior. This type of personality is pathologic. Immune to reason and logic. And just like the Terminator from the cinema screen they WILL NOT STOP……EVER. The ONLY solution to fanatical commies seeking to rule is the SAME and ONLY solution to fanatical Muslims who also seek to rule the world. Extermination. Nothing else will ever work. It truly is them or us. Either we convert to their evil pseudo religious political beliefs or they will exterminate us. There can be no compromise or coexistence.

    • I’m starting to suspect people who make these irritatingly lazy, simplistic armchair dissident comments are burgeoning fedposters.

  3. “Without some right-wing goofballs there would be no reason for the riot. If they did riot, they would be blamed for it and the media would be forced to report the truth,”

    Your theory doesn’t hold water. The original Antifa riots targeted Trump rallies during the election. There were no “right-wing goofballs”, just people going to Presidential campaign stops. They were attacked in the streets and the media did not, in fact, blame either Antifa or report the truth. This is where the “your speech is violence and our violence is speech” meme arose.

    • Well, we’re talking about the here an now. If we want to go back in time, Antifa was originally anarchists rioting against globalism. While interesting, it has no bearing on the present situation.

  4. The great scold rush of ‘19/20 aside, I suspect there is also something else going on with the vape thing.

    Knowing how scolds are really just a subcategory or perhaps function of useful idiots, I believe there is something afoot by big tobacco.

    Vaping snuck up on them. A lot of upstart vape companies had really good marketing. The lemming millennial consumers cohort were looking for their own kind of kool and found it.

    The regulatory environment around vaping was squishy as many vaping producers were not using tobacco – or even nicotine. Others were going up against smoking and still others were going after kids.

    Big tobacco needed to catch up. By lobbying for regs that would slow down the market and provide a sorting mechanism they have been able to pick a few winners and jam legal, FDA, and other costs onto the smaller players.

    Then surprise. Big tobacco buys a few of the strong vape brands. Then starts spending ad money on the dangers of vaping and why there should be age limits, etc.

    Cue the scolds to do the legwork. The same prog scolds whose children whore themselves on FB or instagram with a permanently affixed phone in their hands 24/7. Total garbage people selling garbage to each other.

    I hope I live long enough to see their reign of tyranny break wide open.

  5. The scolds are self-righteous. The Wiki definition of self-righteousness: Self-righteousness (also called sanctimoniousness, sententiousness, and holier-than-thou attitudes) is a feeling or display of (usually smug) moral superiority derived from a sense that one’s beliefs, actions, or affiliations are of greater virtue than those of the average person. Self-righteous individuals are often intolerant of the opinions and behaviors of others.
    In the end it all comes back to vanity. The left is vanity personified.

  6. Scolds are passe’ in the era of doxxing, anti-fa, deplatforming. Really who cares about some MSM screamer or 300lb land whale when the Left can simply destroy your life if you get in their way or say the wrong thing.

    There are simply too low on the threat index to be concerned about anymore. Though it’s nice they advertise themselves, so when SHTF you’ll know to classify them as threats.

    • Rod1963. You have a point. Nicolás Gómez Dávila said somthing like “taking a person’s microphone away is a kind of assassination. And the assassin could feel morally superior while doing it.” It used to be pressure groups, the supreme court and dirty political tricks got a great deal the job done. But things move way to fast these days . The liberal lefties apple pressure from every possible angle. “By any means necessary” is still the motto of the dark side.

  7. You say that human society is complex and that there are a wide range of different human types, and then go on to claim that a particular type of social activity is only ever driven by the need to scold and that all other motivations are false. I find that contradictory.

    Also, what is the need to transform society and stop people doing things that they enjoy if not a lust for power?

      • The first North American legally declared a common scold was Anne Royall. She sounds like a stand-up guy.
        “Royall’s books caused quite a stir and earned her some very powerful enemies, including Philadelphia’s Rev. Ezra Stiles Ely. In the 1820s, Ely tried to forge an alliance between church and state through the election of Christian candidates. Never fond of missionaries, Royall became an outright critic of Ely and the American Tract Society, whose pamphlets were liberally distributed during this time. In her books, Royall called Presbyterians ‘blue-skins,’ ‘blackcoats’ and ‘copper-heads’ as she detailed their political plots and thus earned herself a reputation as a vulgar, offensive woman. Occasionally her critics bought and destroyed her books. Others simply refused to sell them. While in Vermont, one ‘blue-skin’ shopkeeper pushed Royall down a staircase. Ely and his followers considered Royall a devil and devised a plan to punish her…in 1831, she began publishing Paul Pry, a newspaper dedicated to exposing all and every species of political evil and religious fraud…In 1836, The Huntress replaced Paul Pry. As with Paul Pry, the new paper exposed the graft, nepotism and laziness of government clerks…though she opposed slavery, Royall argued against the divisive tactics of abolitionists. Indeed, despite a personal abhorrence of drunkenness — she found the selling of alcohol in the Capitol building reprehensible — Royall also criticized temperance advocates. She objected to zealotry and the interference of the government in people’s lives.”
        https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0001/royall.html
        Women and public speech vs. private speech have been an issue since Telemachus and Penelope, which might account for the preponderance of female scolds. Or maybe women are just more talkative and disruptive.
        If you have an hour or so to spare, “Oh, Do Shut Up, Dear”
        https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yDByC-bdJcI

        • Dear Johnnyonenote. Ms. Royall was obviously practicing social criticism.The fact that the powers that be labeld her a public nuisance is what the establishment does. On the other hand I would consider Carrie Nation and the women’s temperance movement to be scolds. Simply running around wagging your finger and berating people for what you think are there moral failings and bad habits is just being a troublesome pain in the ass. The real trouble starts is when these kinds of intrusive naggs get some serious political power and can force people to bend to there will. We are enslaved to that kind of system now.

          • The convicted common scold Ms. Royall would most likely agree with you. Accusing someone of being a scold was a good way to shut them up, I imagine.

          • The real trouble starts is when these kinds of intrusive naggs get some serious political power and can force people to bend to there will. We are enslaved to that kind of system now…
            We are because we didn’t band together as men and force people to bend to our will…Like AB says if we don’t want to rule then we will be ruled or dead… Their rule ends in death for all of us and everything we hold dear…

  8. How much does the scold hate the smoker and not the smoking? Seems like most of these scolds are on the left and most smokers are in a different class.

  9. That’s the other thing about scolds. They always justify their activity by claiming they are sacrificing for the good of the community. In this case, they are looking out for the children, as if toddlers are growing beards and taking up vaping. In reality, it is just the same old people, the eternal scold, getting a rush from making other people stop doing something they enjoy. It’s not about money and it is not about power. For these scolds and busybodies, the reward is in being the scold. It’s who they are.

    This reads “scolds aren’t interested in power, they’re just interested in power”.

    Forcing people to not do what they enjoy is power. Having the ability to lecture someone and make them listen to it is power.

    Scolds are entirely in it for power – they say they’re concerned about other people so get have to have power over those people for their own good.

    I don’t know what you think power is if that’s not power.

  10. People whose psychology impels them toward scolding tend to be on the Left these days, simply because there is more reward for it. The social justice Mohawks bestow their approval on you for being holier-than-thou. You earn your Virtue Patrol stripes by bashing others who supposedly mess with the environment, mess with their health, mess with the urges of primitives to come to the West to collect their grievance payments.

    The Right, including the dissident Right, has its Old Believer scolds. They may get fewer accolades from mainstream culture but can count on the hosannas of the conservative faithful. Don’t think so? Try saying you don’t want to have eight children … or any children. Say you’re interested in ideas and things of the mind and don’t give a toss about repairing automobiles. Express a desire to stay in a luxury hotel when on vacation instead of a tent in the wilderness. You’ll find out what scolding is.

    The urge to feel morally superior is a constant temptation whispering in everyone’s ear. In falling for it, we reduce the sphere of gentle acceptance of human foibles and preferences that is so necessary to a society that’s comfortable to live in.

  11. Off topic: I’ve got to vent. A good friend of mine is a normie conservatard. When I criticize Trump’s almost total failure on immigration, he exclaims, “But we have the best economy in modern times!” I explain that nothing else matters if whites become a minority but he believes that we’ll all be fine if the economy is good. My teeth grind. Anyone else experiencing this?

    • Guest. Tell your friend to do some serious research on the suicide rate of white men for the past 20 years.

  12. Scolding is a form of virtue-signaling, and what makes scolding so ridiculous now is that what are virtues/vices in the Left’s secular religion are not true social virtues or vices. I’m not a religious guy, but scolding may be socially beneficial if it leads to a sensible moral code being upheld. It’s still irritating, but at least there was some upside.

  13. From John Ray, PhD of dissectingleftism dot com sums it up thusly: The purpose of leftists is to make people quit doing what they want and force them to do what they don’t want to do. Liberals are miserable and aren’t happy unless you’re miserable also.

    • H.L. Mencken said: “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” This is the leftist mentality in a nutshell. When you talk to a real leftist they always have that same satisfied smerk on there faces telling you that nothing you say will ever get through. Once you’ve been baptized into the humanist church of the perfect tomorrow, then forget it. Nothing will ever reach a person like that exept some kind of saver shock and utter disappointment. Which is why I stopped talking to those people long ago.

      • The Left as the new KKK is apropos. They think they are doing the right thing, even though they are going about it illegally and immorally. In their little world, all is good in what they do, reality be damned.

  14. Notice how Drudge has not posted anything surrounding the raging Twitter controversy currently underway with regards to Kamala Harris / African American cultural appropriation / 70’s busing controversy / slave owning ancestors, etc. Typical JQ behavior. He is a snake and pretends to a disruptor but behind the scenes, nothing is different – he is beholden only to one.

    • I used to check Drudge every day as part of my web-routine. Then it got too depressing. Like a new kind of yellow journalism. I’m blackpill down as it is. I don’t need to gaze at a list of How the World Sucks Anew Today, every day. Plus I get the impression Drudge himself has little to do with “his” site anymore. In the last few years it has all the signs of being taken over by young women.

      • Frip said: ” I’m blackpill down as it is. I don’t need to gaze at a list of How the World Sucks…” That’s exactly why I stopped reading Zero Hedge.

        • O. B. Tester;
          Zero Hedge can be overwhelmed with end-of-the-world alarms but he(they) will also post our own Z-man once in a while.

          • If you realize that every site has its own agenda it’s easy to pop in and see what’s going on. I still go to The Economist. Not because I believe in what they’re saying, but because it’s the pure, unrefined essence of globalist, corporatist, vapid thought written by self hating homosexuals in London who really do think they have some unique understanding of the world. They don’t play any new tunes on new information and that’s the point. The world is getting away from them.

  15. OB. C.S. Lewis

    “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

    Unfortunately time travel is not a thing or the best thing we could do would be to go back in time and whack the puritans before they get started

    We’d end up with a much less wealthy nation, no protestant or puritan work ethic but we’d but a lot happier.

    Baring that sink the damned ships before they get to North America.

    However if Dissidents get power they are probably going to have to build busybody resistant systems at every level so that this tendency which is deep within the bones of far too many White people can be squelched .

  16. Z: “What gets Gore up in the morning is the need to be Gaia’s prophet, an Ezekiel warning the rest of us about the end times.” Funny, well put. Yeah, there’s the need-to-show-my-big-brain/alpha-leader, scold. (Woodrow Wilson/Gore/Hillary). And the type that seriously suspects pleasure (church lady/journalists/Hillary). One of my first redpills on the scold theme was how it relates to class. It was either somewhere in Z’s “My Thoughts on Everything” or some older post. Our betters really do enjoy taking candy from proles. White proles.

    • When you don’t believe in God or an after life, all you have is an earthly life. And if your a crazed liberal leftist freak you will do what ever it takes to dampen down that nagging fear of death. Hence the nanny state and transhumanism. Of course they will always justifie there meddling by mouthing B S about the greater good( and yes there is a lot of personal satisfaction in the power to boss everybody around). But somewhere somehow paradise has to work. So if you think like that the borderless global managerial super state makes perfect sense.

      • If you’re not terrified of death, you’re doing Christianity wrong. What’s not to understand about being boiled in a vat of sulphur? Not for an hour or a day or a year, not for a billion years, but forever!

        • Good comment Felix. A church nearby always has some New Age milktoast motto on their sign each week. I’d love to jump the fence and put your more realistic line on the sign. So instead of their typical, “Believe in kindness.” It’d be, “Believe or boil in a vat of sulphur.”

  17. Vaping is being given the same treatment as tobacco not because of any health issue but because it’s a means of disobedience and pleasure. Therefore, it cannot be permitted.

  18. The scold is also wrapped into the larger anarcho-tyranny state. Lets remember that San Fransisco has feces and needles lining the streets and migrants selling roadside squirrel. Yet vaping and straws are forbidden.

  19. Z-man, thank you. Perhaps the best summation of the scold phenomenon I’ve seen in print. Amazing insight.

  20. Speaking of scolds, CNN is airing a show Sunday night called “State of Hate.” It looks like Jared Taylor is featured.

    • I respect Jared Taylor and his work over the years – I really do. But why on earth would any White with more than 2 brain cells to rub together agree to appear on a show about White Nationalism at CNN – let alone one headed by a brown as full of envy and hate as Fareed Zakharia? I don’t care how many “assurances” Jared sought and received – his agreeing to appear on such a platform was evidence of incredible stupidity.

      • I’ve viewed Jared in other hostile interview situations. He has always held his own. Albeit, I’m a fan, but I still say his appearances are a plus for our side. Watch and get back with us.

      • “evidence of incredible stupidity.” Oh chill out. If Jared appearing on massive CNN brings even 3,000 people to check out AmRen.com then it’s a positive. If just one of his lines sticks in the head of viewers it’s a positive. CNN pumps anti-white rhetoric 24/7. Jared showing up isn’t going to make that worse.

    • I am going to take a wild guess and predict that the subject will not be how much hate is directed against him.

  21. Lung cancer is a terrible way to die and an expensive one as well.

    My understanding is that it’s not actually more expensive than the ways people tend to die in the absence of smoking. Smokers actually have lower lifetime healthcare costs. Years in an assisted care facility or nursing home with disability or dementia, long courses of treatment for other cancers, heart disease, Parkinsons, etc. Getting old is an expensive business if you’re trying to drag out every last second you can.

    • Only one of eight smokers will ever get lung cancer. Those odds look bad to non-smokers but not so much to smokers. A respiratory therapist I knew well told me it was emphysema that should terrify smokers. But yes, smokers not only save pension funds muchly, but their bizillions paid in cigarette taxes save the children. Or something.

      • Back when I was in respiratory care, I knew a fellow tech who was a smoker. Discussing the idiocy of smoking one day, I asked her what she would do when she contacted COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, of which emphysema is one variety). She instantly answered “Commit suicide.”

  22. Progressives understand that the Ponzi Scheme will eventually bust and it will be back to the jungle again unless they control the unruly natives. But since many of the natives possess firearms, that won’t be easy unless they can disarm them first. Trying to implement full-on confiscation in one fell swoop would likely trigger the revolution, so they need to ease into it. First, sensitize the yokels to small encroachments on their liberty (like banning vapes), and then, little by little, up the ante until direct firearm confiscation is doable. They see this as the Holy Grail of parasite ascendancy.

  23. Scolds are useful to the people running things.

    People seem to need to be pissed off about one thing or another, but they have a limited capacity for it. The pc scolds direct the ire of the people toward trivial / stupid things and away from what the powers that be are doing.

    Remember the Junior Anti Sex League in 1984?

  24. This represents a sorta combination of CS Lewis’ aphorism about “omnipotent moral busybodies,” and TS Eliot’s brilliant observation that half of the harm that is done in this world is done by “people who want to think well of themselves.”

  25. One of the reasons the Dissident Right succeeded so magnificently in the 15-16 timeframe was that we were fun and anti-scold.

    If we can get back to that, it would be huge.

  26. If you look up scold in the dictionary, Elizabeth Warren’s picture is under it. Right down to rimless glasses. Scolds love rimless glasses, because they are the least adorned eyewear. They are purely utilitarian. To a scold, all the world is brought down to its utility value, and anything above utility value (which makes us uniquely human) is considered unnecessary pleasurable and a waste of resources. In some ways it goes back to the bonfire of the vanities in Renaissance Florence. In other ways it goes back to the ban on jewelry in Calvinist Geneva. It’s as if humanity has to exist in some minimalist nature to achieve enlightened form. To the progressive, that would be socialism. But socialism is just the mechanics of it. It’s a spiritual issue. A feeling, deep down, that God (or universal force of some kind) doesn’t want us to be too happy.

    What I’ve noticed however is that most really successful salesmen, people who have everything, will consider utility value to be like swimming through water. Materialism to a successful person isn’t about the material but about the experience, thus making the material subordinate to the man. In some strange way, the scolds, noticing the utility value of everything, elevate the material to a controlling influence, and thus makes them, in their struggle against it, to be more beholden to it (hypocrites). Scolds and hypocrisy go together like bacon and eggs.

    • You’re making a good point. What’s the difference between a scold and someone acting from righteous anger?

  27. A study of smoking by men in Finland concluded: “Smoking was associated with a moderate decrease in healthcare costs, and a marked decrease in pension costs due to increased mortality. However, when a monetary value for life years lost was taken into account, the beneficial net effect of non-smoking to society was about €70 000 per individual.”

    As to the last sentence, it doesn’t take into account the pleasure people enjoyed from smoking. And for some guys, maybe looking like Bogart for 50 years, and firing your mind like those guys in the Apollo 11 control room, is worth losing 7 years.

    In any case, the welfare and pension costs to the rest of are lower for smokers.

    • Jack, it’s a freedom thing—but that’s how this former Lib still views the world by and large. Your right to smoke is my right to sit on my lazy ass and get fat, which by far is worse if we are talking about the collective health issues and subsequent societal costs.

      Smoking was just an easy target to draw a bead on. The scolds will never rest until we are treated as one would treat a “pet”—to be directed and cared for by those with superior insight as to how we should live our lives. Pleasure is not a counter argument as it is these superior beings who will tell us that which constitutes “acceptable” enjoyment.

      • Compsci: I agree. I want to get rid of all anti-smoking laws, and special taxes on tobacco I was just providing some info. If smokers die before they get Social Security & Medicare, then the argument they cost us money is cast into doubt.

  28. Might I raise a hand to suggest a refinement? It is one thing to ‘scold’ people for flat-out immoral activity, such as that which is outlined in the 10 Commandments.

    But what you describe above–and what I think is the proper object of your scorn, is the scold who finds a NOT-immoral activity such as vaping, or burning diesel fuel in a truck, and arrogates to himself the authority to declare it “immoral.”

    IOW, they specialize in fake sins, not real ones. And the sins they specialize in are ones that they make up out of whole cloth.

    • I think a big part of it is, people forget that in order to survive, humans need one thing more than just food, clothing and shelter: they need to feel important.

      Most normal people derive their sense of importance from parenthood, or from family roles, or from their career. Religious people generally believe that if they are living a rightly guided life, then they are fulfilling God’s purpose for them somehow, even if it’s not apparent to them what that purpose is.

      Cat ladies, neckbeards, and assorted soyboys and Bugmen have no such recourse. What on earth would that shriveled little puke David Hogg do with himself, if he hadn’t been given something to screech about?

      They can’t shriek about the Ten Commandments or standard morality, because the cops and the churches have that covered. So, climate change it is, or refugees or whatever other nonsense the Noses have got cooked up for them next.

      • Huey P. Long, I believe it was, said that the secret of forming a political organization was “a title for every pissant and a tiny hill to piss from.”

    • Dad, something along Ayn Rand’s observation:

      “There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”

  29. I doubt this is a general pattern overall but I find it interesting all the same. I used to know a guy who was addicted to cocaine. Since I’ve never liked any illicit drugs, not even pot, I know very little about druggie subculture. I asked him what the attraction was.

    Surprisingly, he said he didn’t even /like/ cocaine all that much. What he was actually addicted to (he said) was the drama and the ritual of the whole thing: the cloak-and-dagger business of scoring, with all the potential legal perils, the secrecy, the funny little rituals with the razor and the mirror and the rolled-up $20 bill. It was almost like a religious ceremony.

    I wonder how many other addictions that might be true for — including the obviously addicted scold.

    • I speak from experience on this one, having been a physician who could not follow the Biblical admonition to cure myself.

      You should have asked your ritual-addicted friend whether he could stop once he got the bill to the nose, but before inhaling, the ritual having been fulfilled.

      He’d have been in the position of Wile E Coyote, hanging in mid-air, hoping not to fall.

      Scolds are the same way. They cannot bite their tongues, still their urges. That’s how they get their dopamine hits. Whatever the pathway, the payoff of addiction is the same: a supreme feeling of self-satisfaction that certainly doesn’t do anyone else any good whatsoever.

      • Eerily reminiscent of explanations of virtue signaling on social media like FB. I believe there is a researcher who published a book on this phenomenon—but I’m too lazy to look it up—heard an interview with him on radio.

  30. “… the National Review types would work their fingers raw trying to explain why it was either due to socialism or a quest for political power by those dastardly democrats….”
    ————————————————————————————-

    It was true then, and it’s true now. Socialism appeals to the rubes of the underclass because they think that it’s YOUR wealth that will get redistributed and not theirs. If you watched the last debate of those dastardly donks – it was basically ‘free shit for everybody!!!”

    When you are a wealthy globalist that has amassed enough power and money to move gov’ts you don’t have to worry about whether its socialist or capitalist. Details like that only affect the Dirt People, and who cares what they think?

    Socialists will be far more useful fools for them than capitalists and no bones about it.

    • Marxism had broad class appeal.

      The inventor and driver of socialism has always been the bored upper middle class kid. Marx was an upper middle kid who was richer than most people but not the richest. He was also a protestant jew who had to put up with never being apart of the aristocracy. So he became a journalist and then a layabout researcher. Che was also like this. He was an Argentinian rich kid training to be a doctor who got a woody watching Guatemala City burn. After that he decided he wanted to overthrow everything. College kids are exactly this demographic. Middle class kids who can’t afford to be a jet setter but are too entitled to do actual work. They want to be able to do nothing all day and be payed for the privilege. Just like how Marx lived off his sugar daddy Engels.

      These paragons of misanthropes who love humanity just use the legitimate gripes of the working class to ride to power. The white working class had everything it wanted by 1980 so they voted for Reagan and Thatcher. So now, the socialists plumb the depths of the lumpen proletariat that they can take command of. It’s this brown tide of voodoo and mysticism that is dooming us all.

      Finally, we have the upper class. Ever since modernity came they can’t justify themselves. Rousseau made a living by going around to French Aristocrats chateaus and lecturing them that they were evil and the only true path was the simple agrarian peasant life. He was so successful even Marie Antoinette had a peasant shack put behind Versailles so she could play farmer. Our ruling class loves being lectured about their own failures and always has. If they can identify that they are the problem, they don’t actually have to change.

      • And, our ‘dear leader’s’ wife Michelle once had an ‘extraordinary farm’ (or was that just a garden) out back of the White House to feed the multitudes. Someone once said, if I may paraphrase a Biblical solution, “Teach a man to fish, don’t just hand him a fish.”

        • If you give a man Fire, he’ll be warm for a while;
          but if you set him on fire, he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

        • Groups of people who will never be as good at fishing as your group will resent your group for its success and try to take your fish.

          The “teach a man to fish” aphorism depends on an assumption of a shared human nature, which is false. The nature shared by all human races is quite small. I used to think that the desire to care for one’s children was universal but realized that African men generally disprove even this.

      • Nonsense. Marx and his champagne socialists are the exception, not the rule in the upper classes. Similarly I don’t think our esteemed blog host understands the chronology of socialist revolution.

        This highlights yet another example of the left vs. right paradigm that Z is unsuccessfully trying to refute. The dastardly donks are not importing intelligent rich kids from capable families. They are importing – by the metric shit tonne – hordes of impoverished human trash from the third world. Whites are generally too smart for the cannon fodder work that will be required to undermine a wealthy nation where freedom loving citizens own AR15’s. You don’t send an asset to deal with that – you send a gang of vicious, expendable and easily replaced lower order primates to do it. There are not enough of those among democrat ranks which is why they need to import them. When told how to vote, these monkeys can be useful in the early stages of the conflict while some semblance of democracy still exist.

        And of course this is where the dastardly donks go awry: they think they will be able to regain control of their animals after they’ve served their purpose. That will be when their revolution enters the ‘Useful fool stage”. Those that are no longer useful will be eliminated. This is what those people do. We’ve seen it time and again.

        It is only in the final stages where the ‘left vs right’ gives way to ‘up vs down’ and ‘forward vs backward’ conflicts.

        • Thank you, Nunnya. More Petit Trianon eye candy.
          “If we assume man has been corrupted by an artificial civilization, what is the natural state? the state of nature from which he has been removed? imagine, wandering up and down the forest without industry, without speech, and without home.”
          https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sEzAPD4OaZQ
          Roughing it.

        • Mary Ann did nothing wrong. Her little folly was in fact quite modest for a woman of her stature.

    • Wrong, the most ardent supporters are college educated upper middle-class white professionals and their spawn. Look at the Hillary and Bernie voting demographics.

      Why? Because they have a soft, pampered life with lots of spare time to support diversity and PC/MC.. I never knew a white blue collar who held the same nut job beliefs.

      The debaters were targeting audience is minorities and white college students who are scare witless about job prospects and being saddled with immense debt. Also soccer moms/Oprah crowd.

  31. “Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” – H.L. Mencken

    About ten years ago I coined a word, which has not caught on, for today’s “moral” scolds who Lennon/Lenin-“Imagine” that their ever-changing, evermore liberty-extinguishing prescriptions can and must bring about utopia: Puritopians.

    • Even the Puritans took Sunday off to rest. Our current nemesis scolds never,ever take time off. They must derive some creepy pleasure from constant harassment.

      Best Puritan ever? Robert E. Howard’s Soloman Kane. Strict moral code,but he kicked serious ass when needed.His adventures through the Dark Continent are compelling.

    • ““Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” – H.L. Mencken” –

      I only scroll down after I post so there’s more originality to what I say, then I notice someone posted the same thing in a different way. Great quote.

  32. There was a Scold Extravaganza Wednesday and Thursday with lots furious talk about cages and free stuff for all!

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