Are VFR readers an entourage of yes (wo)men?

A reader in England writes:

You never replied to my point that your female readers starting with the Thinking Housewife seem to agree with you on everything in a very submissive way. I would like Laura and other regular VFR commenters, such as Kidist, to have the guts to disagree with you more frequently. But they won’t, because for them you are the alpha male in residence and women love to submit to their alpha males, however tough they (the women) may sound elsewhere. It’s so boring hearing these women agreeing with you all the time. Not that the men are much better. It has similarities to Dylan’s entourage and fans always agreeing with him.

- end of initial entry -

Ben M. writes:

What do you think?:-)

Buck writes:

I submit that it’s wrong of you to have co-opted so many like minds in such a manipulative way. It’s easy to herd auto-bots. It’s simply not right that so many weak men and women should be compelled to such a disagreeable level of agreement. I’m sick and tired of feeling like a boring ditto-head with no thoughts of my own. So, I’m coming up there to whip your ass and to steal your women. You’d better have a Dylan lyric ready, because I just may have the guts to do it.

Kristor writes:

Your reader’s comment was a typical bit of evo-psych reductionism. He assumes that your female readers agree with you because they want to submit to an Alpha male, rather than because they agree with you on the substantive issues, having discerned the same truths that you have. It’s just like the liberals who think that traditional Christians are sexual conservatives because they are psychologically defective, rather than because they believe in the objective truth of certain spiritual and moral principles.

Ed H. writes:

I will begin by assuming that the reader from England who is unhappy about the lack of male-female conflict at VFR, is a feminist. I do this because feminism is as de rigueur in England as atheism, sour faces and bad teeth. Feminism is a pose which demands that its adherents interrogate, deconstruct, and destroy every social convention, except of course, feminism. One of the never-to-be-questioned principles of feminism is that males and females exist in a perpetual power struggle. Everything is about power, acquiring power, denying others power over you, and of course pretending that this neurotic twitch will lead to “freedom.” Thus if VFR female readers are not confronting, protesting, and defying the male proprietor of VFR, it’s a sign that they are weak, docile, subservient. Another name for this quest for power is egomaniacal self aggrandizement. My ego vs. yours. Which is stronger? I bet in such a contest our English female rarely loses. I for one have never seen the verminous [?] but iron clad ego of the die hard feminist ever penetrated. So let’s grant her a victory, let’s call her “free,” but let us also assert amongst ourselves that there is a higher form of communion possible amongst humans that is not about power, but about right thinking. Indeed we will say that we are commune with each other at VFR, because its definition of conservatism is that social order should be guided by “the good” not “freedom.” I myself have had disagreements with LA but I don’t see them as victory for myself or for LA but as friction that leads to better thinking, clearer understanding. I am sure that our feminist English reader has never once had any human interaction that hasn’t resulted in her mind as a win or a loss. But that’s the modern politicization of all reality, including even the most intimate and personal and private of relationships.

LA replies:

The reader in England is male. I have had many discussions with him over the years in which he repeatedly challenged various positions of mine, but never in an unfriendly way. One of his main characteristics is that he keeps obsessively repeating the same criticisms and claiming that I have not answered them, when in fact I have answered them—repeatedly.

He also has an obsession with the idea of who is an alpha male and who is a beta, and how are the betas to get out from under the domination of the alphas. In the past I have indicated to the reader, but to no avail, that this is a most uninteresting and unfruitful approach to things.

Let me go further. I think the notion of looking at me in terms of my being an “alpha male” is truly silly and fatuous, and can lead to no useful understandings. It is a mark of someone who is looking at the world through the filter of his own emotional dramas rather than dealing seriously with ideas.

Laura Wood writes:

Alpha men are a dime a dozen. It takes a highly discerning woman to find the ones who are right.

Note to the reader from England: I have disagreed with Mr. Auster a few times, but only when he was wrong. : -)

Hannon writes:

Having been a participant in various groups over the years I can say it is a comfort to see the level and sophistication of agreement between you and your readers. It may be that the apparent absence of “sufficient” bickering and disagreement is more to do with your editing of comments—who knows what writings are never seen by VFR visitors? I believe I made a comment about that at one point and suggested that readers should be grateful for what they don’t know in this regard.

The reader wrote:

“It has similarities to Dylan’s entourage and fans always agreeing with him.”

Exactly how much interaction and exchange of ideas is there between Dylan and his fans? That is a lousy analogy.

“Not that the men are much better.”

I usually learn more when I am in agreement with someone and we are “grooving” on a given subject. An adversarial start may turn into something good but more often it is a source of frustration. A veneration of confrontation for its own sake is even worse.

In Vilest, Unflagging Sycophancy,
Hannon

Fred D. writes:

I’m sorry but the “yes man” comment prompted me to write. VFR is not a website for “yes people.” It is for people who have been driven to VFR by the systematic lies and stupidity elsewhere on the web. I’ll wager the VFR readership is more thoughtful and better informed than any other news site in the world. Our nation is being systematically ruined, its defenses torn down, its culture pestilent, our patrimony squandered, its populace being replaced, and all of these processes are wrapped in a thick hard shell of lies and untruth.

I visit VFR three or four times a day to find some unvarnished truth. I know that if I ran a website like VFR, I WOULD LOSE MY LIVELIHOOD. Truth is in very short supply and speaking it a very difficult proposition.

It is near impossible to find a site that is realistic about immigration, Israel’s value to the world, and differences between races all in one place.

I go to VFR to assure myself that I’m not nuts. And that it is the prevailing Marxist cultural hegemony that spews forth its lies and believes them. I work with and am surrounded by people like “Parsons” in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—naive, ill-informed, and blind.

Please keep up the good work and I hope your health improves.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 26, 2012 07:06 PM | Send