Tuesday, May 30, 2023

Lex Anteinternet: "How can you represent. . . "

Lex Anteinternet: "How can you represent. . . "

"How can you represent. . . "


Elk Mountain.

Every lawyer has been asked that question at some point.  Usually it's "how can you represent somebody you know is guilty?"

Usually, amongst lawyers, it's regarded as kind of an eye rolling "oh how naive" type of question.  For lawyers who have a philosophical or introspective bent, and I'd submit that's a distance minority, they may have an answer that's based on, basically, defending a system that defends us all.  Maybe they have something even more sophisticated, such as something along the lines of St. Thomas More's statement in A Man For All Seasons:

William Roper : So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More : Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper : Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More : Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

That's about the best answer that there may be, and frankly the only one that applies to civil litigation.  We can console ourselves that in representing the interests of the potentially liable, we protect the interest of everyone.

But what about plaintiff's lawyers?

Frankly, the excuse is wearing thin.  

I.e., I don't believe it for a second.  It's all about cash.

And this is a real problem.

The question is what to do about it.

Well, frankly, the average person can't do much.  But you don't really have to accept it, either.

Shunning has a bad name in our culture.  Indeed, one English language European source states:

More specifically, shunning or ostracising is a form of abuse. It is discrimination and silent bullying. Unfortunately, often people who have been shunned also face other forms of abuse, ranging from death threats and physical assaults to murder.

And there's a lot of truth to that.

At the same time, it was and is something that is often practiced to varying degrees in religious communities.  Indeed, up until the revision of the Code of Canon Law in 1983, Catholic excommunications were of two types, vitandus and toleratus, with vitandus requiring the Faithful to cease all normal connections with the excommunicated.  It was very rare, but it could happen. Since 1983 that distinction does not exist.  Some Amish, however, still have such a practice, and they are not alone.

Realizing this is extreme, I also realize, as I've seen pointed out twice, that land locking rich magnates cannot do it without local help. They always hire somebody, I've heard them referred to as "goons" to be their enforcer, and when they need legal help, they hire a Wyoming licensed attorney.  Indeed, in this instance, remarkably, the plaintiff did not use a Denver attorney, which I thought they likely would have. 

And this has always been the case.  Wyoming Stock Growers Association stock detectives were sometimes enforcers back in the late 19th Century, and they were hired men.  In the trial of the Invaders, a local Cheyenne attorney was used, but then again, that was a criminal case, which I do feel differently about.

Elk Mountain is basically mid-way, and out of the way, between Laramie, Rawlins and Saratoga.  People working for Iron Bar Holdings have to go to one of those places for goods and services.  There's really no reason the excluded locals need to sell them anything.  Keep people off. . .drive to Colorado for services.

And on legal services?  I don't know the lawyers involved, so I'm unlikely to every run into them. But I'm not buying them lunch as we often do as a courtesy while on the road, and if I were a local rancher, and keep in mind that outfits like Iron Bar Holdings don't help local ranchers keep on keeping on, I'd tell that person, if they stopped in to ask to go fishing or hunting, to pound sand.

If this sounds extreme, and it actually is, this is what happened with some of the law firms representing Donald Trump in his effort to steal the election.  They backed out after partners in their firms basically, it seems, told Trump's lawyers to chose Trump or the firm.

And there are many other examples.  Lawyers bear no social costs at all for whom they represent in civil suits.  People who regard abortion as murder will sit right down with lawyers representing abortionists, people seeking a radical social change will hire lawyers to advance the change, and the lawyers fellows feel no pressure as a result of that at all.

Maybe they should.

Or is that view fundamentally wrong?

Thursday, May 25, 2023

Lex Anteinternet: Upon reaching 60

Lex Anteinternet: Upon reaching 60

Upon reaching 60

That's how old I am today.

When I was young.  I was about three when this photos was taken, maybe two.  My father was 36 or 37.

Americans like to debate at what age you are "old", with that benchmark, and the one for middle age, moving over the years to some extent.  Some go so far as to claim that the term doesn't mean anything. 

It does, as you really do become older and then old, at some point.

The United Nations categorizes "older" as commencing at age 60, something, given their mission, that would encompass the totality of the human race.  Some polling you'll see suggests that Americans regard it actually starting at 59 or 57.  Pew, the respected polling and data institution, noted the following:

These generation gaps in perception also extend to the most basic question of all about old age: When does it begin? Survey respondents ages 18 to 29 believe that the average person becomes old at age 60. Middle-aged respondents put the threshold closer to 70, and respondents ages 65 and above say that the average person does not become old until turning 74.

Interesting.

It is not like flipping a switch, and it doesn't really happen to all people at the exact same time.  I'm often reminded of this when I observe people I've known for many years.  Men in particular, I used to think, aged at a much different rate than women.  I knew a few of my contemporaries who were getting pretty old by the time they were in their 30s, and I know a few men in their 70s who are in fantastic shape and appear much younger than they really are.  I recall thinking, back when I was in my late 20s, that my father was getting older, but wasn't old, right up until the time he died at age 62.

Having said that, I’m often now shocked, I hate to admit, by the appearance of women my own age, again that I knew when they were young.  It's not like I know every girl I went to high school with, but I know a few of them, and some of them have held up much better than others.  In that category, some of my close relatives have really held up well.

Up until recently, I could say that I've held up well, but this past year has been really rough health wise. First there was colon surgery in October, followed by a prolonged medical addressing of a thyroid nodule which was feared, at first, to be aggressive cancer. Working that out is still ongoing, but that now appears much less likely, meaning that only half the thyroid will need to be removed.  

All of that has reminded me of Jesus' address to Peter:

Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.

John, Chapter 21.

Peter, by the way, was between age 64 and 68 when he was martyred.  St. Paul was over 60, it's worth noting, when he met the same fate.

It's been rough in other ways as well.  One thing is that, in spite of what people like to claim, your fate is really fixed by age 60.  You aren't going to leave your job as an accountant and become an Army paratrooper.1 If you are a paratrooper, you're going to retire now, as 60 is the military's retirement cutoff age.  If you've spent decades in the Army, and retire at 60 (most servicemen retire before that), you aren't going on, probably, to a career you don't have any strong connection with.

In my case, as I started to type out here the other day and then did not, as it didn't read the way I really wanted it to, I can now look back on a long career, over 30 years, and largely regard it as a failure, even though almost everyone I know would regard it as a success.  I won't get over that.  I'd always hoped to make the judiciary, but I'm not going to, and there's no longer even any point in trying.  I'm reminded of this failure every time I appear in front of one of the new judges and see how incredibly young they now are, and also when I listen to suggestions that the retirement age for judges be raised up to the absurdly high 75.

At age 60, if I were to go to work for the state (which I'm also not going to), I couldn't really ever make the "Rule of 85" for retirement.  As a lifelong private practice attorney, I'm now actually at the age where most lawyers look at their career, and their income, and decide they can't retire, some retreating into their office personality as the last version of themselves and nothing else.  I'm not going to become a member of the legislature, something probably most young lawyers toy with the idea of.  I'm not going to become a game warden, something I pondered when young.2  I'm way past the point where most similar Federal occupations are age restricted, and for good reason.

This is, work wise, pretty much it.

I said to myself, this is the business we've chosen; I didn't ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!

Hyman Roth, to Michael Corleone, in The Godfather, Part II ,

I'm also never going to own my own ranch, which was a decades long career goal.  I have acquired a fair number of cattle, but my operation is always going to be ancillary to my in laws at this point.  When I was first married my wife and I tried to find our own place, with she being much less optimistic about it than I. There were times, when the land cost less, that we could almost make, almost, a small place. We never quite did, and now, we're not going to.

Indeed, thinking back to St. Peter, I'm now at the age of "you can't", with some of the "can'ts" being medical.  I could when I was younger, but now I can't, or shouldn't.  Others are familial.  "You can't" is something I hear a lot, pertaining to a lot of things, ranging from what we might broadly call home economics, in the true economic sense, to short term and long term plans, to even acquisitions that to most people wouldn't be much, but in my circumstances, in the views of others, are.  Some are professional, as ironically it's really at some point in your 50s or very early 60s where you are by default fully professionally engaged, with that taking precedence over everything else, including time for anything else.

One of the most frustrating things about reaching this age, however, is seeing that you probably will never see how some things turn out, and you don't seem to have the ability to influence them.  I'm not, in this instance, referring to something like the Hyman Roth character again, in which he hopes to see the results of his criminal enterprise flourish but fears he won't live long enough to.  Indeed, I find myself curiously detached from concerns of this type that some people have.  I've noticed, for instance, the deep concern some aging lawyers have about their "legacy" in the law, which often translates to being remembered as a lawyer or their firm's carrying on.  I don't have those concerns, and indeed, taking the long view of things, I think it's really vanity to suppose that either of those wishes might be realized by anyone.

No, what I mean is that by this age there are those you know very closely, and you have reason to fear for their own long term fate, but you really don't have much you can do about it.  People who seem to be stuck in place, for instance, seem beyond the helping hand, and more than that, they don't really want, it seems, to be offered a hand.  People who have walked up to the church door but who won't go in as it means giving up grudges, burdens or hatreds, can't be coaxed in, even it means their soul is imperiled.  It recalls the last final lines of A River Runs Through It. .

I remember the last sermon I ever heard my father give, not long before his own death:

Each one of us here today will, at one time in our lives, look upon a loved one in need and ask the same question: We are willing Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true that we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give, or more often than not, that part we have to give… is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us… But we can still love them… We can love—completely—even without complete understanding….

I guess that's about right. 

Footnotes:

1.  Or, I might note, a Ukrainian Legionnaire.  You are too old to join.

Interestingly, I recently saw an article by a well known, I guess, newspaper reporter who attempted to join the U.S. Army in his upper 40s.  He apparently didn't know that you are well past the eligible age of enlistment at that point.  He was arguing that there should be some sort of special unit made for people like himself, or like he imagined himself, well-educated individuals in their upper 40s.  Why should there be if you can recruit people in their 20s?

2. Wyoming Game Wardens were once required to retire at age 55, but a lawsuit some decades ago overturned that. It, in turn, was later overruled, but by that time the state had changed the system. Since that time, it's set it again statutorily, with the age now being 65 by law.  There aren't, therefore, any 67-year-old game wardens.

Statutorily, the current law provides:

9-3-607. Age of retirement.

(a) Any employee with six (6) or more years of service to his credit is eligible to receive a retirement allowance under this article when he attains age fifty (50).

(b) Effective July 1, 1998, any employee retiring after July 1, 1998, with twenty-five (25) or more years of service may elect to retire and receive a benefit upon attaining age fifty (50) as described in W.S. 9-3-610.

(c) Repealed by Laws 1993, ch. 120, §§ 1, 2.

(d) Any employee in service who has attained age sixty-five (65), shall be retired not later than the last day of the calendar month in which his 65th birthday occurs. 

Age limitations of this type are tied to physical fitness.  But what about mental fitness?  As mentioned here before, Gen. Marshall forcibly retired most serving U.S. Army generals, or at least sidelined them, who were over 50 years of age during World War Two, and that had to do with their thinking.  We now allow judges to remain on the bench until they are 70.  Would 60 make more sense?  And can the same argument be made for lawyers, who are officers of the court?

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Lex Anteinternet: Gerontocracy. A Rant.

Lex Anteinternet: Gerontocracy. A Rant.

Gerontocracy. A Rant.

I recently posted this on our aviation blog:

The Aerodrome: When you are keeping the original barstormers flying.

When you are keeping the original barstormers flying.


I've posted about this elsewhere, when I was really miffed about it, but Wyoming's Cynthia Lummis has introduced a bill in the Senate to raise mandatory airline pilot retirement ages up to age 67.

Lummis is 68.

Let's note the trend here.  Lummis is 68.  Wyoming's John Barasso is 70.  Wyoming's Congressman Harriet Hageman, at age 60, could nearly be regarded as youthful.

Joe Biden is 80. Donald Trump is 77.  Chuck Schumer is 72.  Mitch McConnell is 81.

This is, quite frankly, absurd.

The United States is, without a doubt, a gerontocracy.

Okay, what's that have to do with airlines?

We repeatedly here there's a pilot shortage.  What is obviously necessary to, in regard to the shortage, is to recruit younger pilots into the field. That requires opportunity and a decent wage.

Vesting the good paying jobs in the elderly is not the way to achieve that.  Indeed, depressing the mandatory retirement age would be.

I suspect this bill will not pass, but the problem it notes is frankly severe.

Why is nothing getting done in this country?  And why are young people so disgruntled by work that old people complain about how disgruntled they are.

In large measure, this country and society is completely dominated by the elderly.

Now, this smacks of ageism, and it is. But there does come a time when one generation needs to back off and hand the reins to another.  The Baby Boomer generation is past that time, and it refused to yield.

It's absolutely insane that the two top contenders for the highest elected office in the nation is between two ancient men.  Seriously?  Can people whose world views were formed in the 60s really be expected to lead on any current crisis?  We've never expected such old people to rule in times of trouble before.

Franklin Roosevelt, who was regarded as old going into his fourth and fatally final term, was 63 years old when he died.

Woodrow Wilson, who lead the country through the Great War, was 67 when he died in 1924.  He outlived his great rival, Theodore Roosevelt, by several years.  TR died when he was 60, just as he'd always expected to.

Abraham Lincoln was 56 years old, serving in his second term, when he was assassinated.  I note that because in the greatest crisis in the country's history, we had a President in his 50s. . . not his 70s or 80s.

And its not just the Oval Office.  As noted above, the levers of Congress' machinery are held by the ancient, in many instances.  Wyoming just turned its Congressional seat over to a "freshman" who is now a freshman at age 60.

Lawyers at age 60, as she is, ought to be looking towards how things are going to be handled in the next decade as they inevitably face decline.  That doesn't mean taking up a leadereship role in teh country.

And people aren't really choosing these antiquarian figures. They have no choice.  It's much like this meme from the Simpson's that is so well know, it's traveled the globe:


And you do, as they have the money, even if they ironically don't have the members.

We repeatedly hear that Wyoming is the most "Red State" (meaning Communist, of course, oh wait ... not that means the most conservative as red is the color of socialism. . . oh wait, that's not right, blue is the international color of the far right so that means. . . oh never mind).  Even here, however, party registration breaks out in this fashion:

Sure, that means that "independents" are about 9% of the figure for Republicans, but we all know that at least a quarter of the GOP is made up of registrants who have gone there due to the Simpsonian monster.  If you want a voice, you have to vote in the GOP primary.  

And that means you have to accept that at the end of the day, the people you are voting in, with the odd exception of Chuck Gray, who is another topic, are going to be old.

And it's not just in politics.  Business is often, but not exclusively, dominated by the old.  In something, I personally follow, although not everyone does, the leadership of the Catholic Church, the Bishops, is elderly and heavily influenced by Priests who came of age in a liberal era, and therefore are in conflict with younger more conservative ones.

The law is dominated by the elderly as well.  Look at any Supreme Court, for the most part. Wyoming just took a failed run at raising the judicial retirement age up from the current age 70, which is pretty old.  It failed, but it had the backing of the Chief Justice of the state.  And this is the second time this has been tried in recent years.

For a variety of reason, for most of American history, people tended to step into their work in a major way in their 20s.  They were often very fully established by their 30s.  Doing that now is difficult in the extreme, thanks to people over 60.

People look back on certain generations that never had a voice. "Lost Generations".  Nearly everyone in the shadow of the Baby Boom Generation fits into that category to some extent, some more than others.

Be that as it may, we're not going to solve long term budget problems, energy problems, border problems, and the like, looking to people who look out and see the world through 1973 lenses.

Tuesday, May 2, 2023

Lex Anteinternet: The 2024 Election, Part III. Spring shoots

Lex Anteinternet: The 2024 Election, Part III. Spring shootsMay 1, 2023

Perhaps its assuming too much, but it is my assumption that Secretary of State Chuck Gray views his office as a springboard to the Governorship and that he otherwise really isn't interested that much in the workaday role of the SoS Office. Certainly, he's doing a lot to keep his name in the news, or it is i the news anyhow.

Gray spoke at the University of Wyoming in front of a newly organized conservative student organization.  I suppose that makes sense, but what really struck me was the prayer offered by Gabe Saint, a figure in the organization, prior to Gray speaking.  According to the Tribune, it went:

Lord, please be with Chuck tonight. He has been a blessing to Wyoming and fights fervently for righteous change and to bring back American values,  Be with him while he is in office. Give him grace and wisdom. Lord, we ask that you deliver him from his enemies, because he has many. We ask that you protect him as he takes on the Goliath that is the enemy in the form of wokeness.

I'm not sure what to make of that at all.

This is another one of those areas where I find myself between two poles, between extremes on both ends, and wishing it was 1923, and I was riding out to check my sheep on a mule.


On one hand, I do feel that the American left is getting, leftier, if that's a word.  So perhaps doing on this on May 1 makes sense.


Not every proposition of the American left is nuts by any means, and depending upon what thread a person reads here, they might conclude from time to time that I'm a leftist, which I'm not.  But in the social arena, the left has gone completely off the rails and it's absolutely frightening.  That's what the right is referring to when it uses the term "woke".

On the other hand, the populist right has gone full authoritarian scary.


There are days anymore where it feels like Spain in 1935, hoping it doesn't become Spain in 1936.

Where was that mule. . . 


Anyhow, one of the things about the populist right and the far left is that they both live in a fantasy land.  The far left lives in one in which science, religion and reality don't matter. We can all be our own personal gods and everyone has to acknowledge that.  If Robert Reich came out tomorrow demanding that people who think they are polar bears be regarded as polar bears, it wouldn't surprise me a bit.  The far right, on the other hand, lives in a world where Donald Trump is some sort of heroic founding father saint and the election was stolen from him.

Most Americans don't like fighting much, as most people don't.  That's what the "advancements" in social issues actually means, on the left.  It isn't, quite frankly, that people have bought off on a LBGTQ+ agenda, they just want to be left the crap alone.  Of course, living in a society in which things are left alone, if they are corrosive, corrodes.  But that's what that really means, more than anything else.  The thing the right misses is that most Americans are not on the far right.  They're more or less in the middle, and right now I think they're moving to the left in reaction to the Republican Party looking increasingly like it's like the España franquista to be the national model.

Part of that reaction is the baffling adoption of lies by the populist far right. The rank and file really believe them, and by doing so fail to realize that they're a minority and becoming more of one.  That's giving us this goofball 2024 election in which it is increasingly likely that a 177 Donald Trump will be accusing a 180 year old Joe Biden of being old. They're both old.

There's plenty to fault both of them for.  Biden hasn't adhered to his expressed Catholic values, which should disturb voters, as a man who won'd adhere to his deepest values at least raises questions.  But he has done surprisingly well with the situation he was left with, and he isn't Donald Trump, which is why he's likely to win that contest.

Trump is either suffering from some sort of mental issue or a liar, or both, but he's absolutely scary in his contempt for democracy.

Which leads us to the prayer.

Chuck Gray is a Catholic, and the Catholic faith doesn't cut much slack for serious lies.  

Catholics also tend to hold a fairly non compromising view of the world in certain ways, perhaps best summed up in this letter from the Second Century.
Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign. 

And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.  

They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred. 

To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments. 

Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body's hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the ChristianÂÂ’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself.

 I don't know what faith Saint is, but his prayer strikes me as a sort of old time, classic, Evangelical one.  It actually reminds me a bit, and this isn't the only recent thing that's reminded me of it, of Theodore Roosevelt's 1918 speech in which he stated:

We fight in honorable fashion for the good of mankind; fearless of the future; unheeding of our individual fates; with unflinching hearts and undimmed eyes; we stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord.

Roosevelt stated that as he took his followers right into oblivion with the Progressive Party.

I'm not saying Gray and Roosevelt are co-political.  Roosevelt was a liberal Republican who became a radical one.  Gray is a far right populist.  I am saying that their branch of the GOP is probably taking it into political oblivious, however.

Anyhow, I'm not one to criticize a prayer as a rule, and I won't do so here.  People should pray for Chuck Gray, and for Governor Gordon.  But as part of that, for their souls and the courage to choose the righteous, honest path over the politically expedient.  Gray got his seat by flaming the flames of a fib, and that was expedient.  If he believes it, he's in serious need of reassessment.  If he doesn't, he should repent.

And as for ambition, and he's clearly ambitions, he should recall what was stated in Papal Coronation ceremonies between 1409 and 1963.

Sic transist gloria mundi.


Monday, May 1, 2023

Lex Anteinternet: Normalizing Mental Illness isn't helping to address it.

Lex Anteinternet: Normalizing Mental Illness isn't helping to addres...

Normalizing Mental Illness isn't helping to address it.



Guardrails on roads aren't put up because if they're not, everyone will drive off the road.  They're put there, so an errant driver doesn't drive off the road and get hurt or killed.

Drinking laws don't exist because, if they don't, everyone will take up drinking at an early age.  They're there because some will, to their detriment, and the laws make it harder.

Controls, of all types, exist as some, but only some, will go over the boundaries into self-destruction, or the destruction of others.

We should have remembered that before we started taking down the guard rails on sexual conduct.


Readers of this blog, if they hit only one or two entries, probably come away with the impression that I'm an arch-conservative or a flaming liberal.

I note that, as readers who only hit this one, are going to think "oh, reactionary conservative".  Not so, my views don't fit easily into a right or left category, and that's because they're all based on a set of guiding principles, one of which is the adherence and belief in science and nature.

Both the left and the right are fully at war with nature right now.  And this is one of the things causing the country to be so massively polarized.

I'm not in the Trumpist right by any means, but lefties who wonder how anyone could be should take stock in this.  Right now, a fair part of the left, and not even the far left, is pretty much invested in normalizing mental illness. We've gone from a state in which an aberrant behavior, but one that didn't otherwise control every aspect of a person's personality, was forced upon society as normal, and forced upon those who bore it as their singular identity, to one in which outright mental illness is now being proclaimed as normal.  There's a pretty big difference between a person experiencing some disordered inclinations, to having those inclinations define them in every way and be celebrated.

There's also a big difference how far down a scale a person goes once they depart from a genetic mean.  Some people, for example, might be excessively materialistic to their personal detriment.  Not too many take that all the way into compulsive theft.  Or, for example, some people might have an inordinate fascination with food.  Calling somebody a glutton is out of style now days, but not too many of those people take it all the way into compulsive overeating.  Some people are inordinately fascinated with themselves, but only a true minority take it into narcissism.  Some people drink more alcohol than they should, but then there are also alcoholics.

Part of what keeps people from going overboard with deeply seated negative personality deviations is societal and legal controls, legal controls being a species of societal ones.  The law will step in if you steal.  Societal pressure, anymore, will step in if you eat too much. You get the point.

Some of our deeply seated natural instincts are the ones that can really get out of control if they are allowed to delve beyond an acceptable mean, and decay into mental illness.  A person has a right to defend themselves, but not to become compulsively violent.  Those who do become psychopaths.  We shouldn't tolerate temping people into being psychopaths, but in fact with do.

As people know that abnormal is in fact not normal, they naturally get up in arms about it at the point where they're told they have to accept it in spite of the evidence their own eyes affords them.  The far right, as personally hypocritical as it is, at least on some social issues doesn't advocate for normalizing mental illness.

The left, in contrast, has at first done everything it could to take down the guardrails. . . we can hardly remember, for example, that Hugh Hefner was once prosecuted for obscenity.  Once that had the predictable results, and the decay really set in, its tried to normalize the decay.

And, as it was only a matter of time, we're just about to go through one more door, maybe, in which a mental illness/deeply destructive compulsion, is about to be regarded as "A Okay".  Inevitably, we're now going through one more door.  Consider this twitter post from the group Gays Against Groomers:

New pedo flag and “orientation” just dropped. Meet the “YAP” community: Youth Attracted Persons.

According to them, they are oppressed, and you are a hateful, fascist bigot if you oppose them.

Normalizing pedophilia was always the goal. They are the next victim class.

And already a Virginia professor is wanting to make sure that the term "minor attracted person" is used rather than pedophile, as the latter term might be regarded as offensive.

That's right.  Since Obergefell, we've gone from altering the normal, universal understanding of marriage, to forced acceptance that there's no difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality, to chose your own gender, and we're about to go to molesting children being a life choice.

And, take for example, Montana legislator Zachary Raasch.

Never heard of Raasch?  Well, if you are following the news, you've heard of him being proclaimed as a hero for disrupting Montana's legislature.

But not as Raasch, but as the self-proclaimed Zooey Zephyr.

Raasch was a high school wrestler who, at some point, decided he'd rather be a woman, even though that's genetically impossible.  He had himself surgically castrated and a pseudo vagina surgically created and is taking drugs to complete as much of the process as can be.  He's deeply mentally disturbed, as this Twitter post likely demonstrates to anyone who isn't so far gone down this path as to be unable to see.

Rep. Zooey Zephyr
@ZoAndBehold
This is my ideal relationship with a man: one where I'm riding him, and also ready to end his life.
Quote Tweet
SAKON🐳✨
@sakonlieur
Lose. #原神 #GenshinImpact #Childe #Lumine #rkgk
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That's deeply weird.

Raasch is interested in other disturbing things, such as transhumanism.  He's heavily into video gaming.  He's a Manga fan, as the distressing image above shows.  According to one person whose detailed his interests, who is of course only one person, he's  "shows all the classic signs of an autogynephilic—a man who (often spurred by pornography or fetish) becomes sexually aroused by the idea of themselves as a woman."   Raasch's known "relationships" have included at least two other men affecting the trans identity, one of whom was also a "furry".

Raasch has clocked himself in the mantle of a type of crusader, disruptively arguing that not allowing people afflicted with a desire to change their gender will lead to suicide.  Even pro LBGTQ groups assert this argument should not be made as it is counterproductive.  But all of this is instructive.  Starting no later than the 1960s, and perhaps a couple of decades earlier than that, we started taking the fences down.  By the time of Obergefell, we were ready, or at least some were, to knock a stone wall down.  Now it's so far down that a person who is obviously deeply mentally ill is being portrayed as some sort of crusader for civil rights.

And the next step. . . almost taken.

Many have been concerned that the US seems to be sliding towards fascism.  It probably isn't, in literal terms, as fascism properly understood is a corporatist political theory that has no real popularity in the US. What we are sliding towards, however, is on one hand a deeply authoritarian anti-democratic populist right and a deeply anti-natural left.  

Should this get any worse, the left will be more to blame for it than the right.

The left went to war with democracy in the late 1960s and began to advocate for rule by an autocratic court, which it apparently thought it could keep left wing forever, as lawyers were, and are, generally political liberals.  It certainly did keep it left wing for a long time.  Concern over this only developed when the court returned to actually interpreting the law, one really significant actually accomplished during the Trump administration.  Now the left, which was previously perfectly happy to leave the Court completely to itself, is howling with rage over supposed ethics concerns on the Court, something that it didn't care much about previously, and much of which is just a thinly veiled desperate effort to remove justices while the Democrats control the Oval Office and Senate.  At any rate, the left is now deeply dedicated to being wholly at war with human nature, vested in the concept that every human being has a right, basically, to be a god of their own.  Liberal commentators, like Robert Reich, who likely would have thought Raasch nuts up until relatively recently, are all for such fantasies now.

It's well worth remembering that it was the German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese radical left that appeared long before the extreme right in those nations.  German communists, which had its own collection of now benighted individuals who really aren't very admirable in real terms, appeared well before World War One and struggled to seize the country from the less radical Socialist when the German monarchy collapsed in 1918.  The Communists can't be blamed for the Nazis, but fear of Communism certainly contributed to the rise of the Nazis and their electoral success in a major way.  More than a few German voters who voted for the Nazis in 1932 were voting against the Communists.

And the Spanish Communists were headed for a clear usurpation of democracy in Spain before the Spanish right revolted.  The Spanish right was deeply anti-democratic, but the Spanish left wasn't dedicated to it either.

And while the claim that is sometimes made that moral decay in Weimar Germany lead directly to the rise of the Nazis isn't really correct, there's a slight element of truth to that, albeit it's only a piece of a much larger pie.  The Communists of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century were absolute in supporting the libertine.  Marx's dictum that "all wives shall be held in common" was a Communist position, and many early Communists expressed that in their personal lives flagrantly.  Whitaker Chambers notes in Witness than he and his wife became exceptions over time, starting at the point at which she became pregnant, as the expectation was that she'd abort the child, the Communist norm.

It isn't that the Socialist government of Weimar Germany made the country a moral sewer, but it is the case that following the First World War some urban areas of Germany did experience a notable moral decay, if a person can recognize one, that did repel some conservative Germans.  It was not the case that this was a major factor in the Nazis coming to power, but rather just one more thing.

Pre war Naiz poster, swastika removed, showing Hitler being chummy with German children, and therefore appealing to traditional values.  In reality, of course, Hitler never had any children of his own and shacked up with the fairly pathetic Eva Braun until right at the end of the war, marrying her only then.  He wasn't a family values kind of guy, but appealing to traditional Western European values made him seem attractive to some scared elements of German society. . . much the way serial polygamist and generally icky Donald Trump appeals to many legitimately scared Americans now.

And hence why I note it here.  On the right, there's a definite fascination right now with finding a vehicle to return to existential conservative values.  In the more thoughtful camps, this is being expressed in terms of Christian Nationalism. Some are just expressing it in terms of traditional conservatism.  But the populist right is really picking it up as people are shocked by the rapid change in this area and know it to be wrong without thinking deeply on it.  People turned to Trump in the first place, as he basically promised to burn the entire edifice down.

He's promising that again.

Yes, personally he may be morally bankrupt, but then Hitler wasn't a choir boy either.  People, in desperation, will turn to those who seem to be able to get things done.  And in doing that, they'll adopt the conspiracy theories that explain how something so weird could happen.

The left closing a blind eye to the really disturbing events going on here is feeding the right.  It's a rare person who can closely cut between two extremes and not fall into one.  People are being pushed into one here.

And the really mentally ill are being left behind.

This is the second time in recent decades we have done this.  Earlier we decided that people with mental illness, often caused by drugs or alcohol, would be happier if not detained. So we set them out on the streets, where they likely descend further into drugs and alcohol.  Compulsions in this are too can be massively overwhelming.  St. Matt Talbott found that in order to overcome alcoholism he actually had to take routes that avoided taverns, lest he fall into them.

In other words, he put up his own guardrails.

In the area we are referencing here, profound sexual deviance, that's also the case.  Prior to the aftershocks of the Stonewall Riot era, most homosexuals lead pretty normal lives, even if they engaged in the conduct.  The societal guardrails, of which the legal recognition of some of the natural law in the form of laws pertaining to families, men and women, were part of that.  Once that started getting taken down, it left those with pulls, often developed pulls, in other directions to try to stay on the road by themselves.  

Drinking is one thing.  Alcohol is a poison and while the species is long acclimated to it, it's an acquired taste of some degree.  But the biological imperative to reproduce, no matter how much moderns may wish to frustrate it, is wired into us.  The overwhelming majority of human beings will not fall into deviance, but in every society up until this very one, the societal laws, if not the statutory ones, operated to affect guardrails.  Even those people who like to note "but the ancient Greeks" blind their eye to hte fact that no less of a a figure than Plate railed against homosexuality.

Homosexuality, of course, is just one of the deviations, and in contemporary terms it's nearly a garden variety one.  All sorts of other plagues exist in this area, from people addicted to pornography to people who engage in serials conventional affairs. Indeed, the last item is the oldest of the deviations of them all, and probably the one that gets more people killed, even now, than any other.  

Some years ago, on a Catholic Things You Should Know, Fr. Michael O'Loughlin noted being in a group of friends, who were secular friends, in which one of them noted longingly that he wished he could go back and look at women the way he had before he had knowledge, to put it delicately.  There's more than a little to that.  Indeed, it's worth noting how many long married men remarry, and always have, very rapidly after a spouse dies.  It's likely a certain acclimation has something to do with that.  And its been noted that in our modern society, where the rules about monogamy and chastity have broken down, it's become harder for those with serial "partners' to really form a bond.  Indeed, according to psychologist, after men have had eight such partners, their chances of delving down into the below 18 ranks for more dramatically increase.

And the long example of pornography should warn us.  The entire culture is pornofied, but some descend into various types of mental illness due it.  Raasch likely has, although we can't know for sure what caused him to take the deviation that he did.  

But simply asserting that everyone has to accept it as normal makes no more sense than pretnding alcoholism is normal. 

Or, pretending pedophilia is normal.

But the logic is there.  If cutting off your member and having a fake vagina, and taking drugs to affect the appearance of a woman is normal, then pedophilia, which requires a lot less than that, must be too.

But it isn't.  Neither is transgenderism. 

Lex Anteinternet: A conversation with an old friend. The Good Death, and the Good Life and Existential Occupations.

Lex Anteinternet: A conversation with an old friend. The Good Death... : A conversation with an old friend. The Good Death, and the Good Li...