I have only one nudist anecdote but it does involve a harsh racial divide.

Once, on a beach in Brittany, I noticed that none of the French went into the water but that the girls and women were many of them sunbathing nude.

However, into the water noisily plunged the northern barbarians, British and Dutch. Not much changed in a millennium and a half, then?

I always thought that Curtis “Moldbug” Yarvin, Heinlein’s successor as tech-libertarian propagandist, had an identical pompous, pedantic writing style.

For some reason, sci-fi writers tend to be sexual perverts of some kind.

https://thembeforeus.com/moira-greyland-i-was-born-into-a-family-of-famous-gay-pagan-authors-in-the-late-sixties/

it took a lot of character for Heinlein to resist becoming a cult leader like Hubbard or Rand.

I don’t know about that. Cult leaders are typically people with what is now called a personality disorder. Pathological liars, narcissists, sociopaths, etc. They may be particularly “high-functioning,” but when you read their biographies they come off as utter scoundrels.

So I wouldn’t go so far as to say it would take “a lot” of character for an influential author to resist that temptation, just as it shouldn’t take a lot of character for a money manager to resist stealing from his clients.

My young children were scandalised by the topless beach volleyball at Carteret in Normandy, but the game’s probably finished by now.

A nudist resort at Benares
Took a midget in, all unawares.
He made members weep
For he just couldn’t keep
His nose out of private affairs

he also had what The Onion in its 1998 prime called a Naked-Lady Fetish

.Wait a second , doesn’t every guy have that?

Why Isn’t “Nudist” an Identity Politics Identity?

For example, he was really into nudism … that serves as a logical excuse for why all the women in America have to go naked all summer.

NOT IN THE CURRENT YEAR! PLEASE GOD, NOT IN THE CURRENT YEAR!

Wokies don’t look good naked.

Oh Christ, not Heinlein again.

I picked up one of his books (maybe “Stranger”?) as a teenager, and after about a page and a half I couldn’t bear it any more, the bad writing was just torture, even for a teen. Who cares what his ideas were? — the dude couldn’t write his way out of a candy store with a troop of boy scouts as his guide.

Pretty much all sci-fi rolls that way. The “gom jabbar” passage in Dune is kinda-sorta tolerable, but after that… kill me please!!

If you grow up on Coleridge, Catullus, and Oscar Wilde, you’re bound to bump into a few disappointments.

The culmination of such efforts was his 1961 novel Stanger in a Strange Land. The novel, which follows a human raised on Mars who returns to Earth and starts a church that rejects jealousy in lieu of ritualistic free love, took little time to become canonical within 1960s counterculture.

I only met one real life devotee of Stanger in a Strange Land: a friend of a friend in college. Being about my own age, he was obviously born too late for the 1960s counterculture, but he tried to recreate a bit of it within his own personal orbit anyway, without much success as far as I could tell, beyond temporarily convincing a post-hippie hippie co-ed to do some free love with him.

His other cultural polestar was that ’70s movie about the young man who sleeps with the old granny. Maybe that was his backup plan if reigniting free love within his own generation didn’t pan out?

“His other cultural polestar was that ’70s movie about the young man who sleeps with the old granny.”

Harold and Maude? I enjoyed that film as a student, not sure why.

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

It is common for liberals to say many young men are libertarian when they are young and naive but become liberals like themselves when they are older and wiser. This certainly wasn’t the case with Heinlein. He was an FDR Democrat in the thirties but was very libertarian by the sixties.

The same was true of my journalistic hero H.L Mencken when I was a college journalism major. Mencken was the darling of the liberals in the twenties but lost popularity with them in the thirties when he started attacking FDR and saying nice things about Coolidge. My other journalistic idol in college, George Orwell, started as a socialist but wrote a positive review of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom when he was older.

There was likely more actual polyamory in the US past than today. In the US past there was much more experimentation with “intentional communities”, mostly religious and what today would be called cults.

The Oneida Community was a perfectionist religious communal society … practiced communalism … group marriage … Oneida stirpiculture (a form of eugenics) …

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

My understanding is that the female decedent’s of the Oneida weren’t cooperative with their mum’s communal blah blah blah. Beyond the communal sexual practices, they, both male and female, thought the product of Oneida industry should be retained by the heirs not distributed to the workers. The Oneida probably are the best documented case of the failure of polyamory to be multigenerational.

“Heinlein was a close fan of the great Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov, and when his pedophilic Lolita”

The first sentence of wikipedia’s page on Lolita:

“Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov that addresses the controversial subject of hebephilia. ”

Wikipedia is correct, Sailer is wrong. Further, I never read Lolita or saw its film adaptations. It’s a sad measure of our society that so many people loved this twisted tale of kitty porn.

“While Heinlein’s kinks for polyamory and transgenderism have elevated themselves into privileged identities in the 21st Century, his nudism fetish is increasingly out of fashion.”

Being attracted to the nude female body is a fetish? Who knew! Maybe “nudism” is out of fashion because it’s the one thing he was supposedly into that isn’t degenerate, sick, and or weird.

The problem with Nudism is an increasing percentage of people are living arguments against it.

There was a small beach area sort of isolated by some rock formations south of Zuma Beach (IIRC) that was rumored to be a nudist beach. So me and a couple of my curious high school friends made our way over to it and discovered one of the simple truths about perception and reality: It was almost all middle aged fat guys; a couple of them lucky enough to have their scrawny middle aged wives (or whatever) sitting beside them. We made a hasty retreat.

New Jersey has one of the most popular nude beaches on the east coast. When non-nudists picture Sandy Hook in their minds, they think that it is going to be populated with models, but a few moments on the beach will quickly disabuse you of that notion. It’s the same cross section of humanity that you would normally encounter, except without bathing suits. In fact one could make the argument that a nude beach self selects for the unattractive, since there is little value in seeing them nude, just like most polyamorous are physically unattractive.

The reason why nudism hasn’t really taken off is that Americans are prudes at their very core. A nude scene in a movie will cause a movie to receive a more-strict rating than it normally would, while a scene containing violence or blood or other gore will receive a shrug from the ratings board. In addition, most people are quite uncomfortable with the mixture of children and nudity, even in a non-sexual context. My English-teacher friends tell me that they must censor Romeo and Juliet (Zeffirelli 1968) because of its brief topless scene but when I was in school we watched it without any issue.

In Blame It on Rio (Donen 1984) Michael Caine and Joseph Bologna decide to go to a topless beach where of course they run into their daughters Demi Moore and Michelle Johnson. Moore’s straight long black hair was placed perfectly to cover her areola but Johnson was more of a trooper and was truly topless in the movie. Also, despite the physical similarity between Bologna and Moore the father/daughter casting is switched for reasons of plot.

Growing past sexual jealousy is part of the maturing of western society, away from its roots in barbaric Middle Eastern tribal practice. Finding a new sexual partner is one of life’s greatest delights. To deny this pleasure to someone you supposedly love is just selfishness, motivated by insecurity, sanctified by a ridiculously obsolete religious idea.

Looking closely at the pantheon of Golden Age Science Fiction writers, it is is notable just how many of them were weirdos or perverts of one kind or another.

Polyamory doesn’t work. It’s against human nature. Jealousy, an inborn human trait, will cause troubles within the ranks and eventually one man will emerge as the alpha within the clan. In hippie communes, this is what usually happened. The problem of disease spread and childcare also becomes important since most men aren’t willing to care for children they aren’t sure are theirs. Our unmarried slut society isn’t even working out as most of the promiscuous age out of the game and find themselves sad and alone as time passes. Monogamy is the proven strategy to long-term health and happiness for both the individual and society.

Polyamory seems to have burst upon the American mainstream over the past two decades.

… What? Where? When? Is he talking about the inflow of recently-arrived unassimilating Muslims? I would have bet that “journalist” would be a pretty safe occupation for faggots, but there is the problem that fags often, even after legalization and acceptance, live in their own world.

It’s remarkable – the speed at which Hollywood churns through starlets. I’d never heard of Michelle Johnson (I never saw the movie you mentioned) but looking her up on IMDB, I notice that one of her starring roles was Beaks: The Movie, a horror flick about killer chickens.

Harold and Maud! Do you enjoy knives?

Well ya know, the Dutch are yokels.

It is easy to find nudity attractive when everyone is young and unwrinkled, such as during the adolescence and early adulthood of the boomer generation. As the years pass, the attraction fades and eventually only the most zealous (or credulous) keep with it. On the other hand, from my very limited experience of it, I will admit that there’s a “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner” aspect to it, meaning that it can lead you to a state of indifference toward others’ imperfections.

Nudism is just a trick dirty old men play on young hot chicks to see them naked on the beach. Much how many of the cults of 1960s California were horny old codgers with some rizz and gravitas convincing lost little girls and women from broken homes that, you know what, wearing nothing (or next to nothing) and sleeping with the leader and obeying him was really the way to happiness.

Today, being a nudist is out of fashion because its everywhere online. For a guy in the 20th century, fantasizing about a world where all the hot young chicks frolicked naked was a pipe dream. This was the era where the Sears Catalog was used as sexual stimulation for many men and Hugh Hefner could pretend his “swingin’” Playboy scene was mysterious and cool instead of cheap porn with Hollywood escorts. The emergence of the bikini mid-century was a scandal and had movies/songs dedicated to it (my favorite: “The Ghost and the Bikini.”)

But today, you can hop online and find 10,000 different attractive enough women in pornographic scenes and doing nudes on OnlyFans. Heinlen’s fantasy perversion has come true, and he would be bored by it. Either that, or he’d never leave the house and have a serious pornography addiction.

OT – Let them eat cereal!

Kellogg’s CEO Encourages Cash-Strapped Peasants to Eat Cereal For Dinner

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2024-02-28/kelloggs-ceo-encourages-cash-strapped-peasants-eat-cereal-dinner

Dig in to a nutritious three-course dinner of Fruit Loops, Honey Smacks, and Frosted Flakes.

In the future, you’ll own nothing and you’ll eat crap.

Nudism is a hobby, not an identity. Nudists are social. They love nature and good weather and, most of all, idle chit chat with other nudists.

True unless you’re into round and doughy.

His other cultural polestar was that ’70s movie about the young man who sleeps with the old granny. Maybe that was his backup plan if reigniting free love within his own generation didn’t pan out?

I believe you mean Harold and Maude, where some teenager sleeps with a Holocaust survivor in the 1970s (!).

I’m pretty sure the guy you’re describing was a sex addict who was trying anything to get his rocks off. Would not be surprised if he also tried some gay hookups or swingers clubs (if he could get a hooker or easy gf to go). Probably had a huge pornography habit and thought Hugh Hefner was some kind of swinging cool kid.

Heinlein’s rightward turn did little to temper his promotion of sexually transgressive ideas. If anything, it reinforced the notion that sexual freedom should be protected as a private right. He lamented monogamy and monotheism as the two sacred cows of western civilization and continued to take aim at both in his novels. The culmination of such efforts was his 1961 novel Stanger in a Strange Land. The novel, which follows a human raised on Mars who returns to Earth and starts a church that rejects jealousy in lieu of ritualistic free love, took little time to become canonical within 1960s counterculture.

“Geniuses” and “intellectuals” are always trotting out their brilliant new insights on why whatever it is the society has been doing is wrong–“backward”, “unhealthy”, “damaging”, “primitive” …–and it really ought to be doing their great new wonderful idea.

I’d say that perhaps the most fundamental insight of an intelligent person is that a society’s long existing practices are culturally evolved and exist because … they work.

And, of course, the corollary: breaking them for your new fangled “great idea” is almost certainly doing to “not work”–and quite likely be a disaster.

Heinlein smuggles into Moon a lot of propaganda for polyamory via his narrator…

I read a lot of science fiction when I was young, and as a typical straight teenage boy I found quite a lot to titillate me. (I very distinctly remember reading The Puppet Masters and getting a kick out of all the nakedness). At the time I assumed that the authors were simply exploring alternative sexual possibilities the same way they explored alternative technologies or alternative social structures or alternative histories and so on. That seemed to me the whole point of science fiction: exploring all the possible ways that things could be different. I gradually noticed though cases where authors would repeat the same distinctively odd scenarios in different stories, and I eventually came to realize that in many (most?) cases the authors were simply using the narrative freedom of science fiction to safely smuggle their own personal sexual fetishes into their their work.

Also: Naked? With Strangers? In Europe, It’s How You Relax at the Spa.

Steve, I’m surprised you didn’t mention Stranger in a Strange Land‘s most famous devotee, the iconic Californian, convicted murder, and charismatic cult leader, Charles Manson.

Manson picked up Stranger in a Strange Land in prison in 1963 and was fascinated. The New Republic writes (https://newrepublic.com/article/145906/charles-mansons-science-fiction-roots):

In 1963, while a prisoner at the federal penitentiary at McNeil Island in Washington state, Charles Manson heard other prisoners enthuse about two books: Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and L. Ron Hubbard’s self-help guide Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950). Heinlein’s novel told the story of a Mars-born messiah who preaches a doctrine of free love, leading to the creation of a religion whose followers are bound together by ritualistic water-sharing and intensive empathy (called “grokking”)…Manson was barely literate, so he probably didn’t delve too deeply into either of these texts. But he was gifted at absorbing information in conversation, and by talking to other prisoners he gleaned enough from both books to synthesize a new theology. His encounter with the writings of Heinlein and Hubbard was a pivotal event in his life. Until then, he had been a petty criminal and drifter who spent his life in and out of jail. But when Manson was released from McNeil Island in 1967, he was a new figure: a charismatic street preacher who gathered a flock of followers among the hippies of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco.

Manson then went on to attract a following among newly emancipated prole white working class women from the Central Valley, whom he trafficked for sex to various entertainers like The Beach Boys, under the guise of running a band himself. But the atmosphere of his cult – mind control, mindless sex, drugs – is very much an homage to Heinlein’s novel, with its ironic presentation of free love and organized religion. Not that Heinlein ever cared to be associated with Manson.

Although I grew up in southern California, I was not allowed to read Stranger in a Strange Land. Instead, my Naval Academy graduate father presented me with Starship Troopers on my tenth birthday and told me to read it. I’ve been a devotee of the far right and a fan of the Master ever since.

Though sometimes confused with polygamy, polyamory is distinct in that it tends to be gender egalitarian and queer affirming. …

The first election in which women voted as equals to men was run by polygamists:

…Utah held a local election earlier than Wyoming did. This meant that Utah was the first place that women actually cast ballots in an election.

The first woman in the United States to cast a vote was Seraph Young…

Women’s Suffrage: 1870-1896

Not quite true. Unmarried women could vote in New Jersey in the early years of statehood. A full half-century before Seraph (Brigham’s grandniece) was born.

Suffrage activists across the United States strongly supported Utah women in their efforts to gain voting rights in 1870. They believed that Mormon women would vote to end polygamy. In the end, however, they were wrong. After gaining voting rights in 1870, LDS women did not vote to end polygamy.

Women’s Suffrage: 1870-1896

Mormon men likely surmised that the territory’s women would uphold church doctrine at the ballot box.

Whatever the motivations, Territorial Secretary S. A. Mann signed an act granting roughly 43,000 Utahn women (those at least 21 years old, and either US citizens themselves or the wife, daughter, or widow of one) the right to vote on February 12, 1870. Six months later, the women of Utah voted in territorial elections.

Women’s Suffrage in Utah

My English-teacher friends tell me that they must censor Romeo and Juliet (Zeffirelli 1968) because of its brief topless scene

Overpaid, lazy, dimwitted, whiny teachers showing soft porn movies in class instead of actually teaching.

Walter Williams was right:

Schools of education, either graduate or undergraduate, represent the academic slums of most any university.

I have never been to the nekkid beach at Sandy Hook, and have zero desire to go, but I have heard that it is the biggest sausage party this side of the Krakow Kielbasa Fest.

Moldbug’s style is a slightly less prolix version of Carlyle’s, which is itself in the tradition of the Erasmian ideal of copia.

A joke in a ’60s Playboy had a nudist hiking alone in the woods belonging to his camp. He would occasionally come across signs saying “Beware of homosexuals”, each somewhat lower than the one before. The last sign was barely above ground level, and obscured by vegetation, so he bent over to have a look.

It said, “We told you so.”

” The search for the man who terrorizes Nudist Camps with a bacon slicer continues. Inspector Lemuel Jones, of the Metropolitan Police received a tip off this morning. He hopes to return to the case when he is back on duty “.

Ronnie Barker 1976.

Blame it on Rio is truly hilarious and Michelle Johnson was breath-taking.

Heinlein did get back to form briefly is his later years. “Job: a Comedy of Justice” is quite funny.

Heinlein’s claim that he started writing science fiction due to a contest turned out to be bunk. His posthumously published novel “For Us, the Living” is a pure propaganda piece for free love, and absolutely terrible as a piece of fiction. But it is retroactively interesting in how many themes and turns of phrase found in that novel surface in his later works.

Beach nudity can be dangerous due to UV sunlight exposure.

Just like shirtless (male) bathing suit exposure or bikini wearing. Only more so.

There are somewhat effective sunscreen lotions but only short term effective.

Sun exposure can really age your skin and models and skin aware celebrities (men and women) are careful to cover their faces and arms, not expose them.

I have seen the negative effects of this on a woman I knew long ago from up north who loved to tan. I live in a southern latitude and everyone we knew warned her about her incessant tanning.

Some years ago, after about a 30 year gap, I happened to see her in a store. She was younger than me but looked much older, shockingly so. Really had ruined her skin.

I’m sure hard core nudists are aware of the dangers. Outdoors, with wind, sand, bugs, etc. not a great long term practice, Though some Vit D benefit.

People in southern latitudes (especially women) usually cover up head to toe, with large hats/scarves. Refined women prior to the mid 20th century always covered up carefully, to preserve their younger skin look.

I think “nudism” as a sexual titillation is very short term. Like eating too much ice cream, the buzz quickly wears off. The imagination is stronger than the reality.

How many people over say, 25, look good naked? The visual appeal thing is mainly a male trait anyway. If women cared much about male looks in humans, we’d never have made it as a species.

I really wish you didn’t tell me that about Heinlein. Such a cuck, that he ran around in cuck circles! THAT particular cuck ring too. Were they secretly pegging Ray Bradbury in the UCLA library basement in order to power themselves to the moon? Shieeet. DROPPED.

OT:

Do we need a codicil to Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings?

https://gab.com/Dissidentsoaps/posts/111981940805483071

–> More shots fired without effect than held in two magazines: shooter is lady cops. <–

The Gab link says "90 shots" but I only hear about half that.

Agree.

Also would like to point out for the “every single time” crowd– Robert Heinlein, not a Jew.

the Hedonism resort in Negril sounds great until you’re an 18 year old lad sitting on the beach chair and a sun dried 65 year old female British/French tourist is wandering in front of you with her tiny shriveled tits wrinkled up. not sexy at all and not a paradise in that moment. in fact no nudist hippy colonies are sexy, because statistically speaking the girls that go to them aren’t hotties. it seems nudist events attract the grossest and most depraved people. hotties don’t do nudist events, only the hideously unwashed do.

My English-teacher friends tell me that they must censor Romeo and Juliet (Zeffirelli 1968) because of its brief topless scene but when I was in school we watched it without any issue.

Also saw that in US high school English class in the ’80s without issue . . . except that the movie had to be watched over two days because it was too long for one class session, so when on the second day the English teacher duly fast-forwarded past Olivia Hussey’s breasts from the first half, there were loud groans and jeers from the class.

“Refined women prior to the mid 20th century always covered up carefully, to preserve their younger skin look.”

Before around 1930, a tan meant that you worked in the fields, so women covered up. Indeed women who DID work in the fields took the most care – long sleeves, high necks, huge bonnets.

Post-WW2, a tan meant you could afford air travel somewhere hot, so tans became fashionable.

There are indeed quite a few casualties whose frequent trips to Greece and Spain in youth are now reflected in ruined necks and chests. Sad!

I get the impression the pendulum is swinging back to pale. Using tanning beds is stereotypically chavvy (or whatever the current term is).

I forget which comedienne said that tanning was a waste of time “because men are only interested in the pale bits“.

My English-teacher friends tell me that they must censor Romeo and Juliet (Zeffirelli 1968) because of its brief topless scene but when I was in school we watched it without any issue

oh man what a hit! freshman year lit class, filled with dudes not interested in romeo, but kinda into juliet. still a snoozer movie. but then, the hottie rolls over and her tits popped out! OHHHHHHHHHHH YAAA OHHH! the crowd goes wild! the cool old teacher laughs and blushes. such a good all-american moment. the bell soon rang and we walked out and thought nothing more about it. we aren’t puritans.

i wonder if that movie is allowed today at schools or would it offend the mean fat girls?

In fact one could make the argument that a nude beach self selects for the unattractive, since there is little value in seeing them nude, just like most polyamorous are physically unattractive.

Bingo. Throw in BD/SM enthusiasts as well. In all three cases the “kink” is flaunted to compensate for the lack of attractiveness. It’s almost a tautology: to be “attractive” MEANS to be such as only needing to use the normal, accepted methods to find a mate.

“Sexologists” tell us that fetishist are usually men, and my theory is that women “pretend an interest” (to use a phrase William Burroughs liked) so as to nab a mate. It’s just a more extreme version of using makeup, dieting, exercise, etc. After the ring is applied, it may or may not continue to be employed.

A friend once took me to visit the “legendary” Hellfire Club in NYC and this scene from Sunny exactly captures the experience, right down to the catering. Except the locale was admittedly historically interesting, not the Philly tenement in the clip.

“You can’t tell under the mask.”

Both points made in Seinfeld episodes, both by Elaine, in fact.

People in southern latitudes (especially women) usually cover up head to toe, with large hats/scarves. Refined women prior to the mid 20th century always covered up carefully, to preserve their younger skin look.

In the Hamptons episode, Elaine is sunbathing with a big hat and veil, to protect her youthful skin.

I think “nudism” as a sexual titillation is very short term. Like eating too much ice cream, the buzz quickly wears off. … How many people over say, 25, look good naked? The visual appeal thing is mainly a male trait anyway. If women cared much about male looks in humans, we’d never have made it as a species.

An entire episode was devoted to Jerry’s new girlfriend, who prances around his apartment naked. At first he’s delighted, but quickly becomes squeamish as she performs such actions as struggling to open a pickle jar. Discussing this in the coffee shop, Elaine insists that only male nudity is problematic: “The female body is a work of art. The male body is utilitarian, just for getting around, like a jeep.”

No opportunity for sanctimony, aka virtue signaling [sic]. If someone can invent a reason that nudity is virtuous, then it will join the Progressive Stack. Viz, nudity improves the weather, nudity cures covid, nudity eradicates/annoys europeans, nudity annoys/eradicates Christians, nudity annoys republicans, etc.

OT — [through drywall] Steve! Steeve! Today on NPR Fresh Air‘s Terri Gross will host O-Ren Ishi, host of the podcast White Straight American Jesus, as he discusses “Christian Nationalism” and its connections to Donald Trump, January Sixth, and six foot tall invisible bunny rabbits. I tried to link something but I guess because it hasn’t aired yet there’s nothing on the site.
https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/
https://www.straightwhiteamericanjesus.com/
O-Ren’s fatuous tome is Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism–and What Comes Next, and Amazon says:

Watching the eerie footage of the January 6 insurrection, Bradley Onishi wondered: If I hadn’t left evangelicalism, would I have been there?

The insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, was not a blip or an aberration. It was the logical outcome of years of a White evangelical subculture’s preparation for war. Religion scholar and former insider Bradley Onishi maps the origins of White Christian nationalism and traces its offshoots in Preparing for War.

Combining his own experiences in the youth groups and prayer meetings of the 1990s with an immersive look at the steady blending of White grievance politics with evangelicalism, Onishi crafts an engrossing account of the years-long campaign of White Christian nationalism that led to January 6. How did the rise of what Onishi calls the New Religious Right, between 1960 and 2015, give birth to violent White Christian nationalism during the Trump presidency and beyond? What propelled some of the most conservative religious communities in the country–communities of which Onishi was once a part–to ignite a cold civil war?

Through chapters on White supremacy and segregationist theologies, conspiracy theories, the Christian-school movement, purity culture, and the right-wing media ecosystem, Onishi pulls back the curtain on a subculture that birthed a movement and has taken a dangerous turn. In taut and unsparing prose, Onishi traces the migration of many White Christians to Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming in what is known as the American Redoubt. Learning the troubling history of the New Religious Right and the longings and logic of White Christian nationalism is deeply alarming. It is also critical for preserving the shape of our democracy for years to come.

[Princess Bride quote, you hear it inside your head, I don’t even need to specify it]

The Heinlein case is symptomatic, to some extent, because it diagnoses a type of (sexual) behavior & is good for detection of peculiar psychological types. Aside from individual, personal traits, let’s see what is statistically significant.

In my view, polyamory is a life-style suitable for some kind of urban middle class childless population, essentially egocentric liberal types without serious devotion to any goal in life & whose mantra is “freedom from shackles of tradition”. It is a facile & not a sustainable way of life; also, it is very marginal & almost invariably doomed to fail, as stats show- virtually all polyamorous & open marriage arrangements rather quickly collapse. It has nothing to do with polygamy/polygyny, which is a historical, social & economical pattern of marriage- just an “experimental” phase among middle class urban disoriented decadents without children. With children, it becomes complicated & most girls and boys coming from such “families” are damaged for life.

As far as real polygamy- ca. 99% marriages in Arab and similar societies are monogamous. Polygamy is more present, 15% to 30% among some Muslim African societies, but blacks are a race apart from other races, so polygamy among Caucasians and Asians is in reality extremely limited.

So far as the “jealousy” meme goes- it is astonishing that so many proponents of alternative sexual life-styles are so obsessed with it & consider this normal human emotion something to be eradicated. Sexual jealousy is a healthy sign of a true & authentic erotic love. Those who are almost ideologically committed to elimination of jealousy are mentally deranged people, probably encumbered with some hardly explicable pathologies.

Heinlein was, from what I know about his position on these matters, a typical rebellious spirit whose central motif in life was freedom & who was stranger to passions, family & deeper normal rhythms of life. He liked to play games, speculate, probe uncharted territories, explore erotic novelties… but he was shallow, psychologically infantile & definitely not a material for a strong & flourishing society.

Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Lawrence, Dostoevsky & Freud would have dismissed him as an archetype of vitalist & intellectually curious infantilism.

Yeah, I’m not sure why “indecent exposure” is still a thing these days. People who march in gay parades are exempt from it. What about all the guys out there who identify as flashers? What’s the rationale for telling them they can’t be their authentic selves?

great article about Heinlein. Starting with Stranger, most of his novels are trash. But “Friday” is really good — he’s back in top form.

https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2014/08/01/biden-swims-naked-upsetting-female-secret-service-agents-book-claims

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-13141597/Bradley-Cooper-totally-fine-walking-naked-home-father-nude-house-adds-used-shower-dad.html

his nudism fetish is increasingly out of fashion.

Is this really true? My gut says that it is but had the number of nude beaches and nudist resorts actually gone down? Are there stats for this?

I’ve heard that going topless on beaches is associated by young French girls today with their mother’s generation and of course you don’t want to be like your parents. If “Blame it on Rio” was filmed today, the girls would be the ones covered up and embarrassed by their topless saggy parents.

Of course an increasing % of “French” girls wear burqas – the trend is in the other direction.

Why Isn’t “Nudist” an Identity Politics Identity?

Well, this question cannot be answered until “they” have researched which way the majority of nudists vote.

Be sure to click through and read about the poor man in St. Johnsbury Vt. who suffers from the naked woman fetish. Who knew the Babylon Bee had taken over the local paper.

Neither a nitty nor a gritty be. Keep dancing around the fact that most religions at their founding, the standard big ones as well as Scientology, Nation of Islam and Charlie Manson (three sides of the same imaginary demonic coin) simply schemes to ensconce the leaders in an endless-supply-of-underage-poonanny-and-we’ll-pay-your-bills-and-expenses lifestyle.

This happens on the micro level as well. It’s a safe bet that Heinlein did not always check IDs. My own supposition is that he had quite a vigorous policy of aggressively not checking IDs. On the bright side, unlike the typical Poly-Ammonite, he was not fat. In a tradition where Lot’s daughters said “Come let us make our father drunk with wine so he will lay with us” and then Lot’s daughters made their father drunk with wine and lo he went into them and he knew them Heinlein is squarely astride the tradition. The clear implication of Time Enough For Love is that Lazarus Long has sex with his daughters who are actually his clones.

As Ashley Biden’s diary teaches us the current occupant of the Flowers For Algernon Dementia Ward at 1600 Pennsylvania likes to show his penis to people just like LBJ as detailed in Sylvia Choksondik’s upcoming Get That Thing Away From Me: Life on the Presidential Detail.

In Tolkien’s Middle Earth Legendarium Turin the first human engages in incest with his sister. Tradition is a funny thing.

Whatever his merits as an author, Heinlein was fundamentally a dirty old man, a fact I gathered when I was reading his stuff as a very young man.

“… he also had what The Onion in its 1998 prime called a Naked-Lady Fetish.”
A bit like Patrick Stewart then. (Extras)

The greatest argument against nudism is aesthetic: the deplorable physique of the typical human. That goes double for the contemporary American people. They are giving obesity a bad name.

For example, he was really into nudism, such as into The Door into Summer and The Puppet Masters. The latter is a brilliant alien invasion story that serves as a logical excuse for why all the women in America have to go naked all summer.

Nekkid women! What was he, like permanently 13?

Gotta say though, getting up to speed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters#Plot

It really is too damn bad we don’t/didn’t have such an easy method for identifying our alien slugs and alien slug infected. (The yard signs were quite helpful a few years back.) Imagine our alien slugs had had such a straightforward–and repulsive–visual marker. We could have–and would have–made war on them, killed them and stopped the infection many decades ago and never have gotten to where we are.

Now, of course, our establishment has been taken over by the alien slugs and our future–the future of the West–looks quite dire.

Is this really true? My gut says that it is but had the number of nude beaches and nudist resorts actually gone down? Are there stats for this?

I think nude beaches are as common as ever, and their number has most likely even increased recently. The weather has been unusually warm in recent years, and more and more people are moving to Florida and other Southeastern and Gulf states with large beachfronts. The long term trend with clothing in America is to wear less and less of it – a century ago everyone wore tuxedos and elaborate dresses, whereas now, normal attire includes tank tops, shorts, and flip-flops. Surely wearing one’s birthday suit around the back yard and at other events has become more common than ever, and thus, nude beaches are even more numerous than they were in the past.

The physicist Richard Feynman enjoyed the LA strip club scene. Of course he only went for the orange juice and intellectual stimulation.

“Sometimes Richard would suddenly say, ‘Let’s knock off and go somewhere and fool around!’ The usual place we went was a topless bar in Pasadena, called Gianone’s. There was always something happening at Gianone’s in the afternoon, every day of the week. We’d walk in, grab a table. Feynman knew everybody there—all the ladies; Gianone, the owner; and anybody who was a regular. He would go behind the bar and pick up an orange juice, because he never drank anything alcoholic. He would also grab a half-inch stack of those paper doilies, or place mats that they put down on tables in restaurants, and come back to the table. We might continue doing physics, or we might watch the ladies dancing on the stage. Frequently people would come by and chat, and this was the sort of entertainment that he liked. But it was kind of deceptive because, believe it or not, although this particular environment might not seem conducive to doing something like theoretical physics, over the years, Feynman actually did an enormous number of calculations in that place.”

https://www.plannedman.com/the-means/work/part-two-feynman-strip-clubs-and-the-nobel-prize-as-a-performance-enhancing-drug/

If, on the other hand, you can write like Heinlein, you’ll be a rich man.

Nudism used to be very popular in Germany (especially East Germany), and young women were often topless even at swimming pools. This openness seems to have unfortunately disappeared. Open question whether the change is due to discomfort with Muslim men leering at them, idiots with camera phones or, I suspect, the combination of the two.

Ahh the concept of watching women on a nudist beach… but truth be told, young American women of contemporary times are simply wrapped up in celluloid and full of blue black tats (and let’s not mention the nauseous piercings which pierce…well everywhere), nothing like the California cuties of that idiot, TB spreading, perv Heinlein active years Lets face it we just can’t have nice things in anything anymore…we live in sad times Perhaps, like a philosopher in the seventies once said; “one day a rain will come and wash everything away” but that’s unlikely

“Geniuses” and “intellectuals” are always trotting out their brilliant new insights on why whatever it is the society has been doing is wrong–“backward”, “unhealthy”, “damaging”,

In fairness, there is nothing wrong with floating crazy, non-conformist scenarios, especially in creative art. Heck, they don’t call it science fiction for nothing. Whether these ideas catch on or get elevated to political programs by “serious” policy people isn’t really the fault of the artist.

OTOH, I suppose there is a natural bias for “intellectuals” to sneer at normie culture. It wouldn’t make the intellectual look very important or interesting to just say: “conventional wisdom seems about right, I don’t see any important issue to talk about here.”

Beach nudity can be dangerous due to UV sunlight exposure.

There are some places you definitely wouldn’t want to get a sunburn at a nude beach. Also, asking someone to help you put sunscreen on could be problematic.

Heinlein’s acquaintance Jack Parsons was a very odd one, by the way. From his wikipedia page: “Unable to pursue his scientific career, without his wife and devoid of friendship, Parsons decided to return to occultism and embarked on sexually based magical operations with prostitutes.” There is plenty more. Plenty more.

Reading JPs and related pages also makes me think he inspired certain parts of Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus!.

(Hitler and his fellows were with some frequency accused of occultism, consider Hell Boy for a recent example, but what was going on at JPL and in California seems to dwarf that.)

With the advent of family Facebook pages, Instagram, and other social media, “psychological nudity” has become commonplace, as friends and even strangers gain observations of, and insights into, our private and intimate lives. The revelations of physical nudity are small beer compared with psychological nudity, and so, physical unity has declined in popularity.

“Some things are best appreciated in private.”

Most nudities are banal. Perhaps this is your situation. Other’s nudity must be beheld. Sometimes it requires the imposition of nudity to make those who are resistant to my nudity to behold it. Like the Filipino family who live next door.

Why hasn’t nudism become a identity politics identity?

Well,other than Amazon, Walmart, Target, The Gap, Old Navy, etc., getting f*cked royally, it sounds like something the 1% would love, amiright?

I’d say that perhaps the most fundamental insight of an intelligent person is that a society’s long existing practices are culturally evolved and exist because … they work.

Indeed, this is more or less Hayek’s central insight.

Like most SF writers, Heinlein can’t write. Nothing but wooden characters and cliche-ridden prose.

The reason why nudism hasn’t really taken off is that Americans are prudes at their very core.

No – more likely the reason nudism isn’t more popular is that most people look better with their clothes on.

What was he, like permanently 13?

Yes. Lafayette Hubbard claimed to have cucked him while he watched, and if you’ve read any Heinlein you will see that as very possible (Hubbard also claimed to be able to talk to plants). They did live together at one point.

Interestingly enough just to get off on the L Ron Hubbard tangent, Jack Parsons was indeed a handsome devil (yes he looked like Hollywood’s version of a sexy Lucifer) and yes he was a Satanist (technically a Thelemist) but he made that one mistake-he befriended Elron

It ended up with Elron stealing Jack’s life savings and Jack’s beautiful open marriage wife who helped Elron in this Having one’s partner run away with another man happens especially if you stupidly advocate open marriages (like always this is something that Rob Heinlein never really thought through) but stealing money was back then and still is a criminal act

The hilarious thing is that we have correspondence between Parsons and Aleister Crowley where Al specifically warns Jack about the need to not trust Elron

Now seriously, how absolutely immoral do you have to be that the world’s top Satanist warns people not to trust you? Think about it-the Beast 666 goes out of his way to help people because he sees that you are…evil Seriously, Elron was psychopathically evil from the very beginning

-and remember all this happened BEFORE Elron founded you know what

[Michelle] Johnson was more of a trooper

Trouper. That idiom has its roots on the stage, not in the squad car. As in “the show must go on”.

Trouper vs. Trooper
Trouper vs. Trooper – Meaning, Difference & Examples

Yet another example of many homophonic “smart people’s errors”. The unlettered often don’t know these phrases at all.

…and was truly topless in the movie.

And bottomless, in one brief shot. She was 17 at the time. Good thing the state they chose to film in was not New York or California, with their strict protections for underage actors, but Rio de Janeiro. The shot itself was in a grey area between innocent and “sexualized”, and the actress on the cusp of adulthood, so there wasn’t much of a fuss.

Also, despite the physical similarity between Bologna and Moore the father/daughter casting is switched

Fastidiousness was not a hallmark of this production. The story bounced back and forth between São Paulo (“where the work is done”) and Rio (“where the fun is done”). To illustrate such travel, they used a stock clip of a Varig jumbo jet. For what was the equivalent of the Trump Shuttle! C’mon, guys… Trump used 727s, not 747s, and that Varig was on its way to Lisbon.

This is the AI age. Don’t be so quick to count out nudism.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/feb/28/beverly-hills-middle-schoolers-use-ai-make-nudes-c/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=socialnetwork

Beverly Hills police said they launched an investigation after a group of middle school students were accused of using artificial intelligence to create nude images of their classmates.

A tradition of verbosity which most readers find exasperating and pedantic.

The selling point of nudism, especially Twentieth century German nudism, was quackery. It was supposed to enable health benefits. The health benefits of nudism are a checkable criterion and I’m guessing that there aren’t any worth undoing social mores.

OT:

[MORE]

Heinlein would certainly be canceled by the woke ninnies that run sci-fi these days, since two of his three legs (militarism and libertarianism) are a bridge too far for those who like the freaky stuff sexually. Heinlein struck me mostly as a guy who would try anything and didn’t like strict definitions, so more of a free love dude, whereas the new trans and GLBT/LMNOP-Puritans have a rather rigid moralism to their whole system, even when it is undefinable and impossible to fully explain or understand.

C’mon, they were doing a sex comedy, not a documentary. Who cares whether they used the correct stock footage of an airplane flying from one city to another? “The correct Varig logo has a robin’s egg blue background and in the movie the background of the logo was navy blue. Real Varig pilots wear shoulder epaulettes with 4 gold stripes. In the movie, the epaulettes only had 3 gold stripes. ” Who GAF? Fast forward to the scenes where Demi and Michelle (especially Michelle – Demi didn’t get her breast implants until years later) are topless on the beach.

At Rotten Tomatoes, the movie has a critic’s approval rating of 7% and an audience approval score of 40%. Any movie that is 4x or more more popular with audiences than with critics is a sure winner in my book. That means that the movie is actually entertaining trash, which this movie is. The movie equivalent of junk food. Do you check inside your McDonald’s hamburger to see if the pickle slices are authentic French cornichons produced in the Champagne region?

Michelle Johnson was not much of an actress (she was a fashion model and the director picked her out of a magazine ad without hearing her speak a word) but at (or almost at) 18 she was very easy on the eyes wearing only a bikini bottom (or even less ). Once she hit the Wall her acting career ground to a complete halt.

This same commenter recently asserted that any man who says he preferred Bailey to Jennifer on WKRP was just “virtue signalling”. As if tastes don’t vary.

The earliest nudists, in Germany (where else?), were quite prudish in many ways. Exercise buffs, vegetarians, proto-eco-freaks. Some may even have been teetotalers, which is quite extreme for Germans.

A 1929 farce by a British (who else?) playwright teased their attitudes, while mocking his own countrymen’s prudery in the process:

Barely Memorable

I still remember going to a European beach with topless women for the first time decades ago. I was expecting beautiful women like in a movie, but to my horror, it was mostly older women and men with all that entails. Totally not what I was hoping.

Today in America? It’d be even worse. It’d be a parade of morbidly obese, tattooed bodies.

I’ve heard that going topless on beaches is associated by young French girls today with their mother’s generation

It’s true. Even in Sweden and other parts of Europe where nudity is far more practiced, the younger people will cover up more in saunas and beaches while the older ones will let it all hang.

Demi Moore and Michelle Johnson. Moore’s straight long black hair was placed perfectly to cover her areola but Johnson was more of a trooper and was truly topless in the movie.

I am pretty sure Demi Moore was topless in the movie and you could see it all though there wasn’t much to look at as she was rather small. Michelle Johnson was a different story. 😉

OT — But delightfully iStevey — So the NFL got rid of the Wonderlic, what’s the worst that could happ —
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/10111148-nfl-draft-prospect-tyler-owens-says-he-doesnt-believe-in-space-and-other-planets

100+ unarmed Palestinians massacred by the IDF at night.

800+ wounded by Israeli gun fire.

All while these people were trying to receive humanitarian aid (food, water, medicine) sent by foreign countries.

pic.twitter.com/tSjBq7HC0T #Gaza #Israel

— S.L. Kanthan (@Kanthan2030) February 29, 2024

https://twitter.com/CensoredMen/status/1763216777264144873/video/1

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1763279095318679791

I wonder if it’s for similar reasons we no longer have open showers in high school. At least in my area they either have shower stalls or don’t shower at all.

My fellow mom friends were all horrified that we took our kids to a traditional onsen in Japan. “How could you let your kids be naked in public? What about weirdos??” The baths are sex segregated and filled with families, many go as often as once a week and eat dinner there. I asked my Japanese BIL if anything untoward ever happened on the Men’s side and he was aghast. “The other men would not stand for that.”
I am by far the most conservative mom in my neighborhood and am fine with this sort of thing but only let my kids consume media from before the Awokening and keep them off the internet.

OT — Follow-up to earlier comment still in moderation — Here is the interview by Terri Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air of former evangelical preacher turned Nazi-finder O-Ren Ishi. Ishi is biracial and illustrates the iSteve pattern of biracial people sometimes tending to decide they like one half better and the other half needs to apologize for existing even though it’s not a race to begin with plus it’s suspended in mixture. More details on O-Ren Ishi in the other comment.
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/29/1234843874/tracing-the-rise-of-christian-nationalism-from-trump-to-the-ala-supreme-court

Moore was topless but with her hair strategically placed covering her areolae; Johnson let the puppies breathe with full force.

I like at least a little left to the imagination.

Thanks for correcting the commenter’s grammatical error. (Although I hear rumors that when we are all in the internment reeducation center, the food will be worse in the correct-grammar section, to punish and deprogram us, because Republicans are supposed to be stupid.) However, a suggestion: Do not use “reply” to specify the source of the solecism; merely note the solecism in the box; most people will not bother to scroll-up and locate the culprit. Thanks.

Post-Cerebral Hemorrhage Heinlein Novels Ranked:

1. Friday
2. Job: A Comedy of Justice
3. The Cat Who Could Walk Through Walls (Solid first 2/3rds, then slips into solipsism)
4. To Sail Beyond The Sunset (Ditto)
5. Time Enough for Love (Uneven. “The Tale of the Adopted Daughter” might be his best overall)
6. I Will Fear No Evil
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.
.
.
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Last – Number of the Beast/Pursuit of Pankera

If your woman isn’t jealous then she doesn’t find you that attractive.

Who cares whether they used the correct stock footage of an airplane flying from one city to another?

Who would care if they showed Lubavitchers feasting on boar at a luau on Oahu? Or a show about lifeguards in California filmed in New Zealand, with the steering wheel on the starboard side? (I vaguely remember seeing something fitting that description years ago.)

It’s not that it was wrong, it’s that it was screamingly obviously wrong. How hard was it, even before Tim Berners-Lee, to contact the airline and ask which particular craft they used on the route, and order shot of that one?

Brits and Yanks know little about the geography of South America. But a shot of a 747 or A380 connecting London and Liverpool, or Newark and Boston or Dulles, would be noticed by the laziest one-flick-a-year stockbroker in the audience. Today such a gaffe would be all over social media.

The movie equivalent of junk food.

“Why Isn’t “Nudist” an Identity Politics Identity?”

have you seen what people look like naked these days? that’s a bridge too far, even for hardcore leftists. nobody want to see that.

“I never saw the movie you mentioned”

It’s a New York Jew perverted melodrama but with gentile names. Michael Caine is Woody Allen.

If you grow up on Coleridge, Catullus, and Oscar Wilde, you’re bound to bump into a few disappointments.

Aged 17, I couldn’t get enough of Orff’s Catulli Carmina, and I thought The Importance of Being Earnest was the funniest thing ever.

Coleridge? To this day, he remains as mysterious to me as William Blake. I mean, wtf?

Utterly useless trivia:

There’s a scene in Exorcist II: The Heretic where Richard Burton flies from New York to Washington. The scene is illustrated with a shot of a 747 taking off.

Later in the movie, when he returns to the United States from Africa, the same 747 is shown landing in New York (presumably at JFK).

The plane portion of Planes, Trains and Automobiles features the 707 from Airplane!.

There’s an episode of the 1970s Hardy Boys TV series that took a great deal of ‘inspiration” from Airport ’77. (Incidentally, Airport ’77 was released in theaters two days before the 747 collision at Tenerife.)

This episode features stock footage of a 737, a 727, and a 707, all of which are supposed to be the same aircraft. I think there’s even a shot of a 747 but I’m not going to slog through the entire thing to double-check:

I was in the south of France a few years ago and saw plenty of topless young women on the beaches. It hasn’t gone out of style. These were ordinary beaches where families went, not nude beaches.

Why should we believe your unevidenced claim? Your attestation would be more credible if accompanied by photographic evidence.
————
OT — DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE?

Observator says:Next New Comment
February 29, 2024 at 1:28 pm GMT • 9.6 hours ago • 100 Words ↑
Growing past sexual jealousy is part of the maturing of western society, away from its roots in barbaric Middle Eastern tribal practice. Finding a new sexual partner is one of life’s greatest delights. To deny this pleasure to someone you supposedly love is just selfishness, motivated by insecurity, sanctified by a ridiculously obsolete religious idea.

is what a fat person terrified of being left would say.

Believe the highly intelligent Rob Henderson has a new book on this topic. His highly memorable turn of phrase, “luxury beliefs”, is one in which we will probably be using to describe this phenomenon going forward.

OT — I see the post-Clinton Democrats maintain their bizarre obsession with Haiti. Expect a new government soon.

Can’t get enough of that “Sugar Crisp”!

Thanks for correcting the commenter’s grammatical error.

There was no grammar involved. It was a simple homophonic substitution. You see these all the time– reign for rein, phase for faze, pour for pore. The late Kevin Phillips made that last blunder more than once in The Cousins’ Wars– like I said, it’s a smart person’s sort of error– which is forgivable, but Basic Books allowed it to go through, which is not. (I hope they paid to repair the documents Phillips poured whatever over.)

…the food will be worse in the correct-grammar section, to punish and deprogram us, because Republicans are supposed to be stupid.

I’ll bet you the priciest Starbucks on Sixth Avenue, home to Basic Books*, that few if any of their proofreaders are registered Republicans. Or were 25 years ago. They need a refresher course in easily-confusable words.

But that would be homophonic!

*Which, by the way, has just released an updated edition of Dying of Whiteness, which I’m sure everyone here will rush out the door for a copy of. For your internment re-education seminars.

A great injustice!

This is a movement that Sailer must lead.

The first nudist golf course.

Not just white identity but white nudist identity. Not just citizenism but nudist citizenism.

The next printing of “Noticing” should feature Sailer and his readers in a nude group photo.
A fantastic front cover. People will NOTICE alright.

The problem with Nudism is an increasing percentage of people are living arguments against it.

The boomers are all in their 60s and 70s now.

I remember that nude beaches were kind of a thing back in the late 1960s, 70s.

Agree with your assessment.

Michelle Johnson was not much of an actress

Michelle was married to Matt Williams who is the third-base coach of the San Francisco Giants (and former manager of the Washington Nationals). They were married 1999-2002 during the latter part of his playing career with the Arizona Diamondbacks. During their 3½ years of marriage Matt made about $30 million dollars*. If half of that money is Michelle’s and she lives a quiet lifestyle, I think she should be set financially, especially since she has no children. Perhaps she can play a convention and sell autographs for extra money if needed.

*

If you read about Ron Hubbard’s life he comes across as a scoundrel. According to one account from someone who was there at a small meeting of sci-fi writers, Hubbard exclaimed If you want to get rich, you start a religion. His naval service in WWII is a mess. Committed bigamy in his first marriage and his second wife divorced him citing schizophrenia.

Heinlein had a sense of humor…Starship Troopers wasn’t a militaristic novel, it was a satire on military fiction, of which there are many novels…

I’d say that perhaps the most fundamental insight of an intelligent person is that a society’s long existing practices are culturally evolved and exist because … they work.

Not really. Bloodletting lasted >2000 years.

Polyamory doesn’t work. It’s against human nature. Jealousy, an inborn human trait, will cause troubles within the ranks and eventually one man will emerge as the alpha within the clan. …

Yep. Jealousy is our genes yelling “We matter!”

While not as obviously broken/insane as the “must have immigration!” b.s. or our fertility situation–which fail basic 6th grade math–with only a little knowledge of human sexual behavior, polyamory fails a trivial game theory 101 analysis.

If you could actually force people to do it, polyamory would be a way of culling the genes of diligent “provider betas”–precisely the unexciting but productive “thing” guys who have made the West (and now the East) so prosperous–as the gals coming into heat would somehow manage to get knocked up by the group’s alphas. But absent a gun to the head, these arrangements are so unstable they usually just spin apart.

… Our unmarried slut society isn’t even working out as most of the promiscuous age out of the game and find themselves sad and alone as time passes. Monogamy is the proven strategy to long-term health and happiness for both the individual and society.

Well said, Rich.

Adults will often show nude photos and films to young people in order to get them in the sack. It’s an especially common tactic of homosexuals. There was no reason for your teacher to show Zeffirrelli’s R & J when there are so many other versions that would be more appropriate for high schoolers.

Rather than babble about some dead hack writer and sex weirdos and skyclad beaches, we should be far more concerned about the three trillion dollars in commercial real estate loans coming due in the next three years. Values of office properties have sunk like a stone now that everyone’s working from home. Unless our coward government does something there are guaranteed to be monumental loan defaults followed by bank failures.

I am distressed by what appears to be a general forgetting of how transitive and intransitive verbs work; NPR hosts (college-educated people who talk for a living) twist their sentences backwards to avoid speaking properly. As with Ebonics, if the meaning more or less gets through, that’s good enough.

So far as the “jealousy” meme goes- it is astonishing that so many proponents of alternative sexual life-styles are so obsessed with it & consider this normal human emotion something to be eradicated. Sexual jealousy is a healthy sign of a true & authentic erotic love. Those who are almost ideologically committed to elimination of jealousy are mentally deranged people, probably encumbered with some hardly explicable pathologies.

Excellent–thanks Bardon.

As I said above, “Jealousy is our genes yelling “We matter!” You care about things that matter to you. The genes of people who don’t care about their reproduction, won’t be around very long.

Heinlein was, from what I know about his position on these matters, a typical rebellious spirit whose central motif in life was freedom & who was stranger to passions, family & deeper normal rhythms of life. He liked to play games, speculate, probe uncharted territories, explore erotic novelties… but he was shallow, psychologically infantile & definitely not a material for a strong & flourishing society.

Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Lawrence, Dostoevsky & Freud would have dismissed him as an archetype of vitalist & intellectually curious infantilism.

Confess, I don’t know much about Heinlein. I read science fiction when I was an adolescent, then grew out of it. Someone told me I should read the “Stranger in a Strange Land”–that’s the “grok” thingy–when I was late HS or college age. Yawn. (Maybe I read the “Moon” thing too–not sure.)

But you paragraphs above are sort of my take. There’s just a lot of nonsense from many smart, but somehow “just don’t get it” people that wanders off into the weeds, just misses understanding of actual human experience.

“Polyamory seems to have burst upon the American mainstream over the past two decades.”

Nothing “bursts upon” the mainstream over two decades.

Much better would be, Polyamory may seem to have burst upon the American mainstream, but actually took over two decades to establish itself, only that lacks the hyperbole that content provider Christopher M. Gleason was looking for.

“Ethical non-monogamists.” English version: pretentious sex fiends.

Just today, I came across a “thing” in the hollywood reporter which spoke of the murderous heads of a massive drug dealing gang (the Flenory brothers of the black mafia family) as “successful businessmen.” (google aided and abetted thr by placing all sort of detours on its first page of results, when I punched in “black mafia family” and “murder.” I had to punch in the same keywords at duck duck go, in order to learn anything.)

“American sexual dissent”: That’s what used to be known as sexual deviancy.

In what passes for American journalism today, maximum clarity has been replaced by maximum confusion. These characters do not want readers peeking into the Wizard’s curtain. They see their business as mainstreaming evil.

Arthur C Clarke was quite obviously a pedophile His move to Sri Lanka was basically after poor boys who needed the money In his famous TV series Arthur C Clarkes Mysterious World there are a lot of boys in the background He never really hid it and the producers tolerated it

As Roger Scruton, English philosopher and writer said “In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions.”

Heinlein was a bold and unconventional thinker but shallow. He started early in his career, writing Libertarian juvenile fiction and ended it writing juvenile Libertarian fantasy.

interesting

“For some reason, sci-fi writers tend to be sexual perverts of some kind.”

From none other than HuffPost, but I’m guessing this time, the Unz-dot-com crowd isn’t going to have a problem with that.

The LA Times recently ran a story about the Child Exploitation Section of the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit, which contained a mind-boggling statistic: of the more than 100 offenders the unit has arrested over the last four years, “all but one” has been “a hard-core Trekkie.”… While there may be quibbling about the exact numbers, the Toronto detectives claim that the connection is undeniable.

In fact, Star Trek paraphernalia has so routinely been found at the homes of the pedophiles they’ve arrested that it has become a gruesome joke in the squad room. (On the wall, there is a Star Trek poster with the detectives’ faces replacing those of the crew members). This does not mean that watching Star Trek makes you a pedophile. It does mean that if you’re a pedophile, odds are you’ve watched a lot of Star Trek…”It has something to do with a fantasy world where mutants and monsters have power and where the usual rules don’t apply,” Det. Constable Warren Bulmer told the LAT. “But beyond that I can’t really explain it.”

Rest assured, you can skip the section on toxic masculinity (which is apparently required of every HuffPost blog entry), and just move on the LA Times link, if the former hurts your eyes more than reading about pedophiles. As for the article in general, I always figured there was something “off” about that show, but I certainly wouldn’t have guessed THAT.

They’re not the best thing for you, but they are delicious, especially Honey Smacks.

Great articles Steve.

The ancient Greeks claimed athletics in the nude were an antidote to flabbiness. Male pride prevented it from becoming excessive.

allowed today

Perhaps not legally. I believe the actress was 14 or thereabouts, you hebes.

Nudism, in its best form, is a kind of relaxed experience of being free & psycho-physically recuperating. There is a sort of innocence in it- at least, judging from some nudists I know.

It is essentially asexual, because eroticism flourishes with partial covering, uncovering, titillation, gestures, .. .. Nudity in your face is actually anti-erotic. Especially if you consider that most nudists are physically…..ewwww, I won’t comment.

I don’t know about Trudeauistan, but how many times have I read of someone in the U.S. being arrested “for possession of Star Trek paraphernalia”?

Schools of education, either graduate or undergraduate, represent the academic slums of most any university.

As a teacher, this is sadly true. My graduate classes involved a copious amount of busywork but none of it was rigorous. As for undergraduate teachers, in New Jersey one must complete a major in their subject and recently a regulation was added that one must complete at least a minor in their subject to teach 7th or 8th grade. An elementary-education major, which features SAT scores comparable to sociology and criminal justice majors, can only teach up to 6th grade in New Jersey now, where it used to be 8th.

Brandon’s trying to show US citizens who’s boss by showing what his F-15s could do to them if they resist his cosmopolitan gun control.

NOW – Biden: "For those brave right-wing Americans… if you want to fight against the country, you need an F-15. You need something little more than a gun." pic.twitter.com/ce3BJEEo7G

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) August 30, 2022

Love them 2,000 pounders, apparently.

The U.S. has provided Israel with large bunker buster bombs, among tens of thousands of other weapons and artillery shells, WSJ reports.

The surge of arms, including roughly 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells, began shortly after the Oct. 7 attack and has continued in… pic.twitter.com/hOte80XQYE

— Clash Report (@clashreport) December 2, 2023

Unlike most animals, humans don’t really come into heat. The period during which human females are fertile is somewhat subtle – it can be detected by paying careful attention and keeping track of menstrual cycles and temperature charts and so on but it’s not obvious and given the (lack of) success of the rhythm method, far from perfect.

What normally happens in groups of feral humans such as Mormon polygamous cults is that the alpha male endeavors to get rid of the beta males entirely so he doesn’t have to share the females at all. As the young men reach sexual maturity they are expelled from the cult for some imaginary offense – not keeping to the cult’s impossible to follow rules that exist only in the head of the alpha.

You center your thinking about paternity but it’s really about sex. In modern high income households there are few if any children. Nerdy intelligent white and Asian people (the SBF crowd) just don’t have children at all any more. The fertility rate in S. Korea now is .72 children per woman and is expected to fall further. In Japan last year, births fell for the eighth consecutive year, to 758,631, a drop of 5.1 percent. The number of deaths, at 1,590,503, was more than double that figure, meaning the overall population declined by 831,872. The same thing is going on among non-Hispanic whites in the US , it’s just masked by the immigrant influx and counting people like the Venezuelan murderer guy as “white”.

What age range would you say they were? Over 15 years ago I was at Sandy Hook when I ran into students at a neighboring* high school to the one where I taught. They got a kick out of seeing a teacher at the beach. It was two boys and two girls who were in the latter part of their high school careers, and in New Jersey one must be 17 to drive.

After we were done chatting I advised them to leave this part out of their What I Did On My Summer Vacation essays in September and they were polite enough to laugh.

As Peter Akuleyev alluded to, this was an era where cellphone cameras were not really a thing, so there was a higher implied degree of privacy. In addition, while tattoos were a thing, they weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now. I wonder if the tattooed know how shitty they generally look.

*

They were married 1999-2002 during the latter part of his playing career with the Arizona Diamondbacks. During their 3½ years of marriage Matt made about $30 million dollars*. If half of that money is Michelle’s…

In Japan they used to fly 747s (in a high-density seating configuration – over 500 seats) between Tokyo and Osaka because it was such a heavily travelled route. This lead to the highest single aircraft death toll in history (if you don’t count the WTC crashes) – the crash of JAL Flight 123:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_123

The cause was a structural failure was caused by a faulty repair by Boeing technicians following a tailstrike incident seven years earlier. When the faulty repair eventually failed, it resulted in a rapid decompression that ripped off a large portion of the tail and caused the loss of all on-board hydraulic systems, disabling the aircraft’s flight controls. A contributing factor was the high number of cycles of pressurization/depressurization from the very short flights – 18,800 cycles in 25,000 flight hours. The plane continued flying, but uncontrollably, for another half hour, leaving many passengers time to compose final notes to their loved ones.

It is possible that better, Captain Sully type pilots would have figured some way to make a landing and save at least some lives but the Japanese pilots failed. In the similar United Flight 232 crash, of the 296 people aboard, 184 survived despite the total loss of hydraulics. Another pilot/ flight instructor who was flying as a passenger knew of the earlier crash and had practiced controlling the plane with only engine thrust in a flight simulator and he talked his way into the cockpit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232

a mind-boggling statistic: of the more than 100 [sex] offenders the unit has arrested over the last four years, “all but one” has been “a hard-core Trekkie.”

How bizarre.

I used to watch Star Trek back in the 60s.

Leonard Nimoy died in 2015 at the age of 83. William Shatner is still alive at 92. James Doohan, who played Scotty the engineer died in 2005 at 85.

Earlier today, FPC’s @TheWizardofLawz joined @CamEdwards on Cam & Co to discuss the Garland v. Cargill Bump Stock Ban Oral Arguments at SCOTUS and our Linton v. Bonta CA 2A Rights Restoration Lawsuit victory.

You can watch it here: https://t.co/YgQbx0HwqS pic.twitter.com/7Ar6SNuLhR

— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) February 29, 2024

Huh so when you claimed the Bruen decision would "drastically affect the safety of a large swath of the US population," apparently you meant for the better! https://t.co/B4VVniLynP https://t.co/5yGPEL5Who

— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) March 1, 2024

"ID cards would cost $100, purchase permits $50 and concealed carry permits $400 under the plan. It would also increase licenses for gun stores and gun dealers as much as tenfold, raising a retail dealer’s fee from $50 to $500." https://t.co/h9snLgm4qA

— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) February 29, 2024

"Today, House Judiciary Committee Republicans, led by Chairmen Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ), launched an inquiry into the ATF's recent attempt to regulate the lawful private sale of firearms." https://t.co/DxoT9RNlZf pic.twitter.com/s2uaZVp4OH

— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) February 29, 2024

In the 1955 novel, in 1929 NYC, Auntie Mame sends her 10 y.o. nephew to a nudist school where the girls sometimes pretended they were fish laying eggs on the floor and the boys would “swim” between them fertilizing the eggs. Mr. Babcock earlier objected to Epstein’s Dalton School because of its radical Jews.

“Leonard Nimoy…William Shatner…James Doohan,…”

I suspect they’d find this kind of association pretty dismaying as well, though now that I think of it, something seemed a little off with Shatner, too — but again, not THAT. With regard to Nimoy I do recall there was a Hollywood rumor about a fellow Canadian actor who was known for playing risque characters (I’m going to take a wild guess and say the rumor originated with one of her publicists) and who played a character on one of the spinoff films (and by that point, Nimoy was allegedly an executive producer), who did a late night impromptu photo-shoot on the spaceship set with her boyfriend, in which she wore nothing but Vulcan ears.

When Nimoy chanced upon them, he ripped up the film and told her if she ever tried that again, she would be fired. But Nimoy claims that never happened.

I will say I did like GalaxyQuest a lot, and the Alan Rickman character seemed like a pretty obvious homage to him, but maybe someone who’s into sci-fi will be able to point to a number of other alien characters played by former Shakespereans who might also have been referenced.

My memory is fuzzy, so I looked up on the Internet. While Moore does have hair down her chest, you can see everything in a number of photographs.

the crash of JAL Flight 123

That notable accident took out this fellow, whose voice Americans of a certain vintage will recall:

(a title=”https://youtu.be/C35DrtPlUbc?si=0qq5FSyBhiQ1K0DZ&#8221; href=”https://youtu.be/C35DrtPlUbc?si=0qq5FSyBhiQ1K0DZ”>Version with English subtitles)

George Takei is also alive at 86. One of the last survivors not only of Star Trek, but of a fascist dictator as well. One your Conrad Black has a soft spot for.

For everybody else here, Canada has her own version of Jan 6:

Letter from a Canadian Political Prisoner

There is an ancient anecdote about how a Greek city dealt with an outbreak of female suicides. The city fathers decreed that all suicides would be carried naked through the streets to the cemetery. The outbreak ceased forthwith.

In the 1955 novel, in 1929 NYC, Auntie Mame sends her 10 y.o. nephew to a nudist school where the girls sometimes pretended they were fish laying eggs on the floor and the boys would “swim” between them fertilizing the eggs.

The inside jacket collage of Patrick Dennis’s later mock memoir, Little Me, includes a picture of a grown man with a boy and a girl on either side, all nude, on the rug looking up at a television. That’s 1950s nudism in a nutshell– innocent families going about their daily business like everybody else, just minus clothes.

Re: Letters from a Canadian political prisoner

It’s appalling. Trudeau is a pos.

except the Zeffirrelli Rom and Julie is by far the best one, beloved by adolescent girls the world over The nude scene is very, very brief-blink and you miss it

All good points. There have even been some studies done showing married people in committed long term relationships Iive longer.

We have done the experiment with the Black community over the last sixty years of replacing husbands and fathers with welfare checks and the results have been disastrous. The same thing has been happening with working class Whites, just at a slower pace. Getting and staying married is increasingly becoming an upper class thing, as Charles Murray pointed out in his recent Coming Apart book.

Most men just do not care much about children who are not theirs so two people getting married and staying together usually ends up best in the long run.

I read about this disaster, following the crash of AA Flight 587, on November 12, 2001, four blocks from our home at the time. (We were vacationing at my wife’s family’s place in Trinidad.)

My late father-in-law exclaimed, “That is naked sabotage!”

Before any evidence was in, while telling the public not to jump to any conclusions, the FAA and NTSB jumped to the conclusion that the crash had not been caused by a terrorist attack. For five days following the crash, the panicky feds floated a different, entirely speculative theory as to what had caused the crash. Birds in the turbine. The wake from the previous plane. The First Officer’s overuse of the tail rudder.

Whatever the truth may have been, the feds’ panic gave away that they were convinced that the crash was a terrorist attack.

The feds asserted that the plane went on fire only after its tail fell off, but several retired firemen and cops insisted that they saw the plane catch fire before the tail fell off. (Once the tail fell off, the machine immediately dropped from the sky.) The feds also insisted that the crash was completely caused by the tail falling off, when in fact that had never happened before. In the case you cited, Jack, the pilot was able to fly the machine for an additional 32 minutes in circles, before it crashed into the side of a mountain.

The authorities sought to make the First Officer, Sten Molin, the fall guy, allegedly for overusing the tail rudder, but if that were so, such crashes would be happening all the time. The local paper, The Wave (Howie Schwach, editor), did tremendous journalism, and many people from around here, including yours truly, are convinced it was downed by an act of terrorism, e.g., by a “shoe bomber,” like the English moslem convert, Richard Reid, who was tackled by passengers when he sought to blow a passenger jet out of the sky 40 days later.

“Remembering Flight 587”

https://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2010/11/remembering-flight-587.html

Splendid cultural commentary, Steve Sailer.

I read Stranger in a Strange Land when I was 14, and was greatly enthused for a few months.

Unfortunately, it served as a gateway drug leading to Atlas Shrugged which hijacked my adolescent mind for a few years, to my everlasting shame. I even went to some creepy Objectivist meetups that should have shaken me back to reality, but didn’t.

Oh well, I’m a freethinker now.

Heinlein did get back to form briefly is his later years. “Job: a Comedy of Justice” is quite funny.

Obviously a matter of taste, but I disagree. I’ve read all of his post-Moon novels and to me the only one that succeeds even partially is some of Time Enough for Love – most of “The Tale of the Adopted Daughter” was good, and the descriptions of 1916 Missouri culture in the last segment were good. The rest…bah. Heinlein suffered a TIA (basically a mini-stroke) post-Time and the five books he wrote after that (including Job) are, to me, terrible; I read them hoping for signs of his earlier brilliance but no such luck, and he died before I gave up on him.

All that said, there are plenty of gems scattered in his oeuvre, if you ignore the post-Moon crap: the juveniles, as Steve says, are wonderful and full of life, especially the last two: Citizen of the Galaxy and Have Space-Suit, Will Travel (Starship Troopers isn’t really one because it was rejected by Scribner’s, and Podkayne of Mars is too stupid). The Puppet Masters is really good, and his terrific novella If This Goes On- got ripped off by Margaret Atwood in the terrible The Handmaid’s Tale.

Heinlein turned out to be one of the most important writers of the 20th century because the juveniles were so good and pervasive (school libraries had them!) but that influence is quickly waning as the woke idiots cast everything good into the outer darkness. But the books are still out there; check them out.

(And good handle!)

In the 1955 novel, in 1929 NYC, Auntie Mame sends her 10 y.o. nephew to a nudist school where the girls sometimes pretended they were fish laying eggs on the floor and the boys would “swim” between them fertilizing the eggs.

We need a little Christmas, indeed!

I wonder if it’s for similar reasons we no longer have open showers in high school. At least in my area they either have shower stalls or don’t shower at all.

Yup, like you I grew up with open showers, but my kids all have stalls and even individual shower rooms at their schools and athletic facilities.

I wonder how much of it is because people value personal privacy even more now that “there is no such a thing as privacy” or because everyone has mobile phones. Or perhaps because of the “rise” of open homosexuality and even transgenderism.

I also think of about whether this is now tied to kids not playing outside together without adult supervision like in the old days and it’s all supervised playdates (and no sleepovers either).

My fellow mom friends were all horrified that we took our kids to a traditional onsen in Japan. “How could you let your kids be naked in public? What about weirdos??” The baths are sex segregated and filled with families, many go as often as once a week and eat dinner there. I asked my Japanese BIL if anything untoward ever happened on the Men’s side and he was aghast. “The other men would not stand for that.”
I am by far the most conservative mom in my neighborhood and am fine with this sort of thing but only let my kids consume media from before the Awokening and keep them off the internet.

Very good. You can have this experience in the U.S. too if you know where to look. For example at Korean spas that have spread throughout major metropolitan areas of the Unites States.

he talked his way into the cockpit.

That ain’t happening post 9/11.

Growing past sexual jealousy is part of the maturing of western society, away from its roots in barbaric Middle Eastern tribal practice. Finding a new sexual partner is one of life’s greatest delights. To deny this pleasure to someone you supposedly love is just selfishness, motivated by insecurity, sanctified by a ridiculously obsolete religious idea.

Finding a new house is one of life’s great delights. If you care for someone at all, you will burn their house down. As the Christian Scriptures have it “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man burn down the house of his friends” (John 15:13 ,Claudine Gay translation)

Prism, WHERE IS THAT BABY?!

Still the funniest thing on wheels, you’re not crazy.

“Coleridge? To this day, he remains as mysterious to me as William Blake. I mean, wtf?”

I hear ya bud, and I get it, but you know… you somehow just never forget your first love. And for me it was Coleridge.

My parents barely graduated high school, but they both had an enduring respect for education, and they had this sort of cargo-cult faith in the magical power of books, no matter what they were about. (My mother taught me to read age four using both the King James Bible and MAD Magazine. And “The Highwayman” by Noyes. And Coleridge.)

Which is to say, they just sort of larded up our house with books of any kind, they didn’t even know what was in them: they just went to garage sales and bought arm-loads of books and just left them lying around the house willy-nilly, confident that me and my sibs would just sort of pick them up and read them on our own. Which we did. For me, a typical day’s eight-year-old reading was Dr. Seuss, a medical textbook, Don Martin, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex”, “I Start Counting,” and Macbeth.

So, the first book I ever read on my own was not “The Cat in the Hat,” it was “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

And I had done a grievous thing,
And it would work ’em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.

You never forget a thing like that.

Thanks, looked up Jack Parsons, what a mess.

My young children were scandalised by the topless beach volleyball at Carteret in Normandy, but the game’s probably finished by now.

I should hope so! It started in the summer, no?

Marion Zimmer Bradley belongs on that list as well.

Yeah, that was it.

I saw it a long time ago. Sort of an early ’70s period piece. I don’t remember having much other reaction than that.

I had forgotten the detail about her being a “Holocaust survivor”. If the movie were made today, that would probably somehow be grounds to ban it, though the exact logic would be vague. Cultural appropriation? Traducing of the sacred? Antisemitism?

One consideration militating against forcing the popularity of nudism à la trannyism is simply that many Americans, especially those Northeasterners who possess The Megaphone, live in climates which really demand clothing for comfort. It’s all very well for tropical people to go around nude or nearly, and it’s not too unpleasant for those who dwell in Arcadia (or other nice parts of California), but only seasonal nudism is really plausible in New York and a merely seasonal fetish just won’t support the political ambitions of the sex perverts and their allies both cynical and hysterical.

(You might suggest that people could just go nude indoors–and indeed, many already do at home–but people have to move around and public venues rarely have the kinds of cloakrooms they would need for everyone to be constantly doffing-and-donning all their clothes. People wouldn’t want to carry bundles of clothing around in supermarkets or restaurants. By contrast, trannies’ wigs (or combat boots), tics, and odd fashion choices, plus the chips on their shoulders, travel with them all the time.)

With respect to Heinlein:

I remember reading that Heinlein was distinctly unamused by impecunious hippies who had read Stranger and researched his home address showing up at his door asking to “share water.” Of course Heinlein was famously the author of the slogan “an armed society is a polite society” so he was not without ways to encourage people to go away.

Heinlein wasn’t afraid to shock readers, whether with the (ritual) cannibalism in Stranger or the incest in Time Enough.

After Robert A. Heinlein died, his widow Virginia (Ginny) Heinlein was entitled to, and did, reclaim the copyright to Stranger In A Strange Land. She then approved publication of R.A.H.’s uncut first draft of the book. In this case “uncut” doesn’t mean more salacious, but rather more verbose. The original publishers (G. P. Putnam’s Sons) had requested Heinlein to trim down the manuscript before publication, and he did this apparently without rancor. Having read both versions, I think the trimmed (i.e., first-published) version is much better, and apparently so did Robert A. Heinlein, because he told interviewers as much. Many of the changes are just omitting redundant adjectives and so-forth, though some plot-irrelevant passages were also excised. I don’t begrudge Virginia Heinlein her royalties on the later publication of the original manuscript, though, since comparing the two versions gives a useful example of good editing!

She was Moira Greyland’s mother. And yes, she also sexually abused her. The father was a pedophile and the mother a lesbian. Her parents had a circle of equally perverted sci-fi writers colleagues.

I should have noted that the indigenes of Tierra Del Fuego lived nude at the chilly, rainy Southern tip of South America and prospered, but their necessary habit of gathering around bonfires for warmth day and night most of the year actually inspired the European name for their domain. They even carried constant fires on stone hearths in their boats.

It seems unlikely that the multitudes dwelling today in the temperate regions or at even higher latitudes would like to live in a similar fashion.

I’m pretty sure the guy you’re describing was a

Well, I didn’t know him well enough to answer that definitively. As I recall, he was from the Pacific NW, which always seems to have this inner-Hajnal throwbackiness to it. My impression was that he wanted a comfy, easy life, and so the supercilious feeling of being an extraterrestrial among the earthbound appealed to him. (I haven’t read Stranger, but I gather that’s what it’s about). The free love component sealed the deal. He just wasn’t finding too many matches. But maybe he did eventually and now lives contentedly with his manic pixie dream girl on the Willamette.

it’s not too unpleasant for those who dwell in Arcadia (or other nice parts of California)

This reminds me, we’re at 165 comments and why has no one mentioned, the Naked Guy of Berkeley?

He was a textbook activist for nudism as an identity politics identity: he had some kind of superficial Marxist colonialism/oppression analysis to back his nudism and a mental illness. Were he alive today he would cause a leftist Narrative Collision meltdown: on the one hand he was antibourgeois and norm-breaking [good], but on the other hand he was a young man flaunting his fitness [bad]. Alas, he took the path of other activist/martyrs and offed himself.

Finding a new sexual partner is one of life’s greatest delights.

If you’ve found it so, then respek, but my own experience has been that in most cases it’s pretty disappointing. I mean, there’s a reason these partners aren’t already committed elsewhere.

For any readers who still have enough of life’s runway ahead of them to make decisions that matter about this, my advice is that if you have something good now, there’s nothing better out there to justify the sacrifice.

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
She was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Ebora.

Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
Such deep delight ‘twould win me
That with music loud and long,
I WOULD BUILD THAT DOME IN AIR!
THAT SUNNY DOME! THOSE CAVES OF ICE!
And all who heard would SEE it there,
And all would cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes! His floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes in holy dread,
For he on Honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

I knew when I was five years old that I was going to be an artist, no wondering about it.

What’s a “line marriage”? Lining up for sex? Marrying your parents and/or children?

From those excerpts above, Heinlein sounds like a crashingly dull writer. One of the indicia of bad fiction is cramming huge amounts of exposition into what are supposed to be the characters’ casual conversations. It’s the main problem with science fiction: you have to explain, explain, explain everything: how the machines work, how many moons the planet has, what people eat for breakfast, what their marital structures are–the most basic things. It’s why I’ve never cared for science fiction. It’s excruciating.

The only exception I’ve found is Ray Bradbury. That’s because he made living on Mars exactly like living in Los Angeles.

“It was an Abyssinian cat,
And on her dulcimer she sat”

I think that’s how it goes…

It’s remarkable – the speed at which Hollywood churns through starlets.

That blind item site had an account of what is purported to be the making of Blame It On Rio.

https://www.crazydaysandnights.net/2017/11/four-for-friday-raped-for-part.html

“Lisa” = Michelle Johnson

Blimey. And I’ve only scanned the first couple of paragraphs.

“He told me unequivocally that no man would ever want me, because all men are secretly gay and have simply not come to terms with their natural homosexuality.”

It looks as though Walter came from a pretty dysfunctional background himself. Men who like boys and adolescent males seem irresistibly attracted to orphanages, Borstals, residential homes, “care settings”:

“Walter’s father changed his own name from Walter H. Green to Breen after abandoning his wife and children to run away with Walter’s mother. Later in life, Breen sometimes denied they were his birth parents and claimed to have been adopted by them as a foundling child. In reminiscences he spoke of being raised in a variety of “institutional and foster settings.”

The 1940 census shows young Breen living in a Catholic orphanage in West Virginia, with his (by then) divorced mother living as a housekeeper in a Catholic church rectory less than two miles (3 km) away. Walter’s father was by that time living with another woman in Chicago”

Aleister Crowley didn’t half mix with a lot of different people, Parsons and Hubbard included. Hubbard was a piece of work in the Crowley mould. I see that Walter Duranty married one of Crowley’s Scarlet Women.

I read that piece long ago. Nothing new here. Teenagers sleeping around with old dudes in the film industry to get parts. Only Demi Moore became a star for her trouble. But making a movie just so you and your mates could get to bang young starlets while on holiday in Brazil is truly evil.
On the other hand, statury rape laws in America are ridiculous. By age 18, girls have had more sex than they’ll ever get later in life. 16 seems more reasonable, particularly in this day and age.

Key: https://goo.gl/PgVi7B

Overpaid, lazy, dimwitted, whiny teachers showing soft porn movies in class instead of actually teaching.

Eh? Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo & Juliet” is one of the finest adaptations of Shakespeare on film. To be fair, Zeffirelli was a bit of a perv (i.e., a normal human being, albeit a gay one) and his inclusion of a brief nude scene by his two underage leads was a bit controversial.

But there is strong justification for showing “R&J” in a classroom, especially since it’s a movie that teenagers would otherwise not be inclined to watch. The language of Shakespeare can seem extremely tedious to teenagers, but seeing it actually performed can demonstrate that there is real blood and life in those dramas that transcends time and space.

Do they have a representative sample of pedos, or are they patrolling Star Trek conventions?

Speaking of conventions, Trekkies cosplay, don’t they? I’d guess cosplayers, especially furries, are hugely overrepresented among perverts. Re: their statistics, do furries really not account for more than 1% of pedos? Or is there a large furry-trekkie overlap?

Seriously read Puppet Masters.

Farmers have surrounded the EU agriculture ministry building and hopefully they burn it to ashes and then burn the ashes.

Two mistakes, getting taken by Lafayette and that one time in the chemistry lab.

I’d say that perhaps the most fundamental insight of an intelligent person is that a society’s long existing practices are culturally evolved and exist because … they work.

It is true for globally Western (including Russia), “free exchange of ideas” societies that have, even in the absence of freedom, some ineradicable compulsion to investigate & question. But this is not the case with three mammoth types of cultures:

a) for Islamistan- they are living in a continual religious stupor & not evolving in the past 800 years

b) for India- they cannot liberate themselves from the basic Hindu cast(e) of mind

c) for east Asia (China etc.)- they cannot be but an anthill where individualism is an alien concept. Hyper-functional anthills.

I dated a girl at the end of my college years, and for a year or so after, who was a theater major and a bit of a libertine. One summer on our travels we came across a nude beach where we spent 2-3 days. This was 2000, iirc, and several years before smart phones became a thing, but we were still aware that people would try to sneak pictures, if you weren’t careful. Having to worry about cameras made it not entirely enjoyable, but mostly we were still too young to give a shit.

Probably about 30-40% of the men on the beach were clearly gay. There were a few men who were clearly exhibitionists (though absolutely no one would have ever wanted them to be, not even the gay men). There were a fair number of older couples who looked like they spent every damn day there. While most of the older women were as wrinkled and saggy as you would expect them to be, one or two of them weren’t bad looking for their age. It gave me hope for my 60s.

Along with us, there was a small but not insignificant number of other couples/young women in their 20s, and they mostly were pretty decent looking. I suspect that there are very few fat 25-year-olds who want to bear it all at the beach. There was one stunning young woman, probably about 21, whose face was nothing much to look at but who had the body of a goddess. Sitting there with my girlfriend, who was by no means unattractive (but has put on a crap ton of weight since then), it was hard to pretend not to notice.

I doubt the number of nude beaches has declined in the last 50-60 years. There might even be more of them. I think people were just more aware of them back before the time of easy internet porn. They have fallen out of cultural awareness in the same way that Playboy and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue have. Part of it is the fear of people taking pictures, but a lot of it (or most of it) is simply that no one cares anymore. Nudity is so easily accessible now that no one has to.

“I really enjoy looking at naked ladies,” Geary said. “I don’t know what it is, but seeing women without clothes gets me excited.”

Seems rather mainstream as far as fetishes go.

I agree with what every other reply to your comment has said. Speaking as someone who spent most of my 20s chasing after the alternative (see my other comment above), I came to realize that monogamy is sexual maturity. Few people want to spend their lives with a woman whose body count is north of 10 – or even 5.

Nowadays, with legal birth control and abortion, for any number of sexual partners greater than zero the number of children a woman ultimately has is inversely correlated with her total number of sexual partners – especially if you consider only women whose children aren’t entangled in the criminal justice system. Show me a good woman with 4-6-8 kids and I’ll show you a woman who has probably slept with no more than 1-2 men in her lifetime.

The 15-year-old in me would love to have a libertine society where we could sleep with anyone without consequence. The grownup in me – that would be the mature part of me – knows that isn’t possible. Sexual promiscuity in the West has coincided with tanking birthrates that may ultimately be the death of our civilization. Real maturity is finding one woman you truly love and sticking with her.

Hitler and his fellows were with some frequency accused of occultism, consider Hell Boy for a recent example, but what was going on at JPL and in California seems to dwarf that.

While Hellboy is a fine enough COMIC BOOK, I dare say we don’t need to use it as a primary source for historical details on the National Socialists and their possible Occult fixation.

Nudism is kinda Nazi isn’t it? Or maybe it’s Swedish (pre-Somali) in which case it’s good.

Franz Kafka was a follower of the quackeries of the German-speaking world and at one point I believe he was a nudist. At one point he was into this thing where you had to chew your food a certain number of times and it drove his father crazy.
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OT — Anon on 4chan said:

I’ve been starting to see weird internationals popping up all over my city in Texas. You can obviously tell they’re not from here, tall, lanky Africans just bobbing up and down like birds or something. Wandering around, seemingly not doing much.

What are they all doing here? If they don’t even have under-the-table jobs they’re working, why are they here? Are they actually getting thousands of dollars a month or is that just propaganda? Surely the state of Texas is not just handing these people money.

Ackshully, Heinlein is famous in sf-writing for deftly and unobstrusively folding exposition into his prose. It even got dubbed “Heinleining” by the sf-writing community. See the Turkey City SF Lexicon.

Not just writers, but Hollywood directors and producers as well.

…trannies’ wigs (or combat boots), tics, and odd fashion choices, plus the chips on their shoulders, travel with them all the time…

One of several observations in this well-written comment that made me laugh. Thanks Veracitor.

Nudism used to be very popular in Germany (especially East Germany), and young women were often topless even at swimming pools. This openness seems to have unfortunately disappeared. Open question whether the change is due to discomfort with Muslim men leering at them, idiots with camera phones or, I suspect, the combination of the two.

Thanks Peter, I think you’ve nailed two excellent points:

1) nudism is a “high trust” activity
Nudism can function ok in sort of “one-peopleish” places with high-trust norms. As you leave Europe and move toward low-trust tribal, Semitic, West-Asian cultures … The women aren’t there to be strippers for “men with gold chains” types leering at that them.

2) nudism is an “in the moment thing”
I.e. people comfortable being naked in this place, at this time. Having some a*hole taking pictures of your naked body for their “private enjoyment”–or posting them on the Internet–is not desired.

I’m not interested in nudism and don’t count its destruction as a great loss. But nudism is yet another high-trust thing being wrecked by these genocidal immigration zealots trashing of high-trust white nations.

My then girlfriend and I spent 2+ weeks touring Greece with a Japanese fellow our age whose parents were killed in that crash. We met him on the ferry from Brindisi. He said that he was traveling—this was 1986—in order to forget his loss.

He was a delightful fellow who made friends with whomever he met. Also, he could bargain with Greek merchants and pension owners like nobody’s business. Able to get them to meet his price but in a delightful way. If perchance we were to see our pension owner in the public market during the day, he would call out, “PapaSan” in a bright cheery voice and wave enthusiastically. Our landlord would smile broadly and wave back. There was no resisting his charm.

One day, we passed a group of Japanese tourists on the sidewalk of Athens. He said, “Watch this”, and tried to engage them in conversation. They recoiled as though he were a snake. After they had passed he explained that most Japanese were so reserved that they could not let their hair down and relax their guard amongst strangers, that he was different. He said his father owned a number of downtown residential rentals in Tokyo, or somewhere. He never lacked for money.

OT — Bernard Avishai on the Israeli culture war — holy cow, that last line — nice excerpt here:

Yet—and here the tragedy of Zionism begins—instead of adopting a liberal constitution, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, chose to make common cause with the puny United Religious Front (largely, the precursor of the NRP) and set down the rules of government in a smattering of Basic Laws, generally eliding the separation of religion and state. The 1950 Law of Return conferred a privileged status on anyone who could prove having a Jewish grandparent, and, increasingly, the definition of Jew required some rabbinical endorsement. (Curiously, Ben-Gurion was typical of a secular Zionist: he flouted dietary law, worked on Yom Kippur, and was interested in Buddhism.) And his reasons for this approach to government seemed compelling at the time. The Cold War was one: passing a constitution would have entailed either a coalition with the socialist left, including the Stalinists, or with the chauvinist right, including former Irgun terrorists. Siding with Religious Zionists gave Ben-Gurion a freer hand to design economic, military, and diplomatic policy. And he had other reasons. For instance, a bill of rights would have put Arabs on equal legal footing with Jews in a Jewish state that was still pursuing “ingathering of the exiles”—including, mainly, Mizrahi immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, many of them political refugees. In the face of an Arab siege, Ben-Gurion thought to bind these new immigrants to their strange home with biblical archaeology and liturgical poetics. Besides, American Jews and their investment capital had to be mobilized, and Ben-Gurion would have to appeal to their religious sensibilities. Many had developed a new fascination with the ancient Land of Israel. But very few spoke modern Hebrew, and their identification with the new Jewish nation was almost entirely vicarious.

And

“You give a helping hand to the distortion of the national identity of the nation from which you came, and, in every nation, that is a wicked act.”

Or

Given what Jews endured in the twentieth century, it would be tactless to call these Religious Zionist disciples fascists. Let’s just say they celebrate a nation that is enjoying divine election and frustrated glory, surviving through permanent, agonal war; a nation united by blood and faith, covering up irredentism with a rhetoric of covenanted motherland, educating by indoctrination, devoted to a code of behavior defined by hierarchy, and spreading cynicism about democratic norms, including the very idea of dispassionate truth.

https://archive.is/d6Pm0

Hopefully advanced in medical technology will allow us to eliminate homosexuals and perhaps other perverts as well.

We are in an age of deep silliness, but ultimately any nation/civilization that wants to preserve itself will have to do some sort of eugenics–to replace nature’s harsh culling. And hopefully a lot of pervert will be culled along with other various deleterious mutations in a general eugenic program.

well not really, if you read Sailer you see that the whole of Heinlein’s work was to put forward bizarre ideas to see what was going to stick

In Starship… he was frustrated about the communists of his time seemingly always winning so he was trying to put forward the idea of members of the military being considered as a special caste having special privileges as a way to cope with the communists-that idea didn’t start with him but was floating around especially in France

Communists or not, looking at the privileged yet submissive officer caste of US military of today we can see that that idea would not have been the road to Nirvana

Often when an idea in fiction is really stupid in retrospect (or just a bad novel period), the escape valve is that it was just a sophisticated satire so when people criticize that idea or the novel means those people are low IQ morons who did not see it was a satire all along

Heinlein really meant it…but being flighty he moved on to sexual perversions next and other things including that in the future whites will be meat cattle to blacks and there is nothing that could be done about it

What’s honey-dew?

OT: https://usatodayhss.com/2024/nil-changes-coming-florida-considering-nil-to-be-allowed-for-high-school-student-athletes

New pending rules could mean that Florida student-athletes in high school could soon be able to monetize on their image and likeness.

Introduced on Wednesday by the Florida High School Athletics Association (FHSAA), the initiative would allow student-athletes to capitalize on their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL). The change in policy would allow NIL related activity for compensation in such areas as “commercial endorsements, promotional activities, social media presence, product or service advertisements.”