UPDATED on 05/04/2008

In addition to the eponymous monograph, The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays will include a generous assortment of rare and never-before-published writings by L.A. Rollins, perhaps the most notable — if not the most notorious — being an "updated abridgment" of the underground classic, Lucifer’s Lexicon.

Here follows a small selection of newly-minted nuggets for the craw:

Banquet, n. – 1. A sumptuous feast.  2. A presumptuous frozen dinner.

Dualism, n. – Duelism.

Godfearing, adj. – Afraid of nothing.

Holocaust revisionist, n. – One who denies being a denier.

Hurricane, n. – An act of God, which proves that God is a terrorist, an evildoer who should be put down like a mad dog.

Islamofascist, n. – A Muslim follower of Mussolini.

Jesus Christ, n. – The sin of God.

Jungian, n. – One who is a Freud of his own shadow.

Koran, the, n. – A holy source of toilet paper, like The Bible, The Talmud,  The Book of Mormon, the Urantia book, etc.  The Koran is also useful for children’s games of "kick the Koran."

L.D.S., n. –  A psychedelic drug more dangerous than L.S.D.

Legislation, n. – The poetry of power.

Liberal, n. – One who believes a woman has the right to kill her fetus, but not with a gun.

Moral Compass, n. – A direction-detecting device used by American and Israeli pilots to find bombing targets. 

Mithras, n. – An ancient savior-god who stabbed the bull, as distinguished from Jesus, who shot it. 

Ombudsman, n. – A watchdog without teeth who works for the thief.

Our Troops, n. pl. – Our thugs and assassins. Of course, we all support our brave thugs and assassins, because we are all cowardly conformist cunts, aren’t we?

Politically Correct, adj. – Intellectually crippled.

Satan, n. – The son, not the father, of lies.

Senseless Murder, n. – A murder that makes no sense, as distinguished from a sensible murder, the only kind of murder that a sensible person, wearing sensible shoes, would commit.

Solipsist, n. – 1. One who has only himself to blame. 2. One for whom masturbation is the only kind of sex possible.

Sour Grapes, n. pl. – Fruits, which when fermented, produce fine whines.

Suffer, v. – 1. To be human, according to Buddah. 2 To be a Jew, according to Judah.

Village, n. – What it takes to raise a village idiot.

Weapons of Mass Destruction, n. pl.  – The most dangerous weapons of all, so dangerous that they constitute an intolerable threat, even when they don’t exist.

Work ethic, n. – Slave morality.

Memento mori.

Elsewhere. . .

• 4/22/08 Update: Jim Crawford, host of the essential Antinatalism blog,  kicks off a series of posts in which he promises to provide chapter-by-chapter commentary on David Benatar’s maligned and misunderstood monograph, Better Never to Have Been.  If you have more than a passing interest in the multi-fanged case against breeding, you should know that Jim is also contributing several essays for the Hog-edited anthology, Against Life, Against Death, which will be released by Nine-Banded Books in 2009.         

• Via Hit & Run comes news that John Stagliano, director of the seriously great (if unheralded) confessional documentary, Buttman Confidential, is being prosecuted for obscenity. You can follow the press links here, and you can contribute to his defense here.

• Pat Buchanan has some kind words for Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke.

• "Our rejection of polygyny brings into stark relief the persistence of shibboleths and unspoken norms," writes Razib of Gene Expression in a nuanced and historically informed post on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the bourgeois-bound limits of tolerance.

• Meanwhile, TGGP points out that David Friedman stands virtually alone in his skeptical coverage of the FDLS  raid, which continues to unfold.

• Jack Malebranche, whose book Androphilia reads like something Justin Raimondo might have penned in more peaceful times, has a blog.

• The SPLC is picking on Kevin MacDonald, who apparently has a new book. In emphatically unrelated news, Sylvia Stolz is still in jail, along with this guy, this guy, and this guy. Wait for the documentary, I guess.

• And yes, Nicolas Claux is one talented cannibal.

Memento mori.

The Lawnchair Philosopher posts a most thoughtful review of Bradley Smith’s The Man Who Saw His Own Liver. An excerpt:

The writing style is at the same time sparse, and elegant. This is no
dry accounting, but a work of poetic prose, rich in metaphor and
emotional content. Each reminiscence stood alone for me; which might be
a drawback to the reader expecting a more linearly styled memoir.
Doubly so for those who don’t like their diatribes leavened with
subtlety, or self examination. Being the sort of fellow who likes to
bury his head in the cat box at the mere mention of politics, extremist
or otherwise, I was fairly taken aback upon delving into the author’s
‘infamous’ political predilections (addressed by Chip Smith in the
introduction). It made me glad that I read the book first; I still
haven’t ever read ‘On The Road’, and probably never will, because I
made the mistake of reading the bios first, and can’t get past the fact
of Kerouac being a total ass-wipe. Now, instead of picturing Bradley
Smith as some cartoonish Art Bell reject with a penchant for paranoid
conspiracy theories, I’ll always see him as a zen aspirant on his way
to cracking that last koan. And how can you be mad at a guy who writes
a line like this?…

I’ve always felt the urge to slip through desire, like an eel passing through nets cast out for bigger fish.

If
you like great prose, written by a man just an epiphany or two short of
emergence into a new, brilliant sphere, buy this book. There’s an
innocent clarity here, as well as a surprising sense of humanitarian
compassion.

Another recent review characterizes Liver as having "the feel of Ludwig von Mises passed through the filter of, say, Errol Morris (or, in his artier stages, Roman Polanski)."

Curious? Order your copy here, here, here,  here, or here. Autographed copies are available upon request through Nine-Banded Books.

Memento mori.

 The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays, by L.A. Rollins (With a new introduction by TGGP)

There’s work to be done, but we’re still shooting for a mid-summer release. Ordering information will be posted here and at Nine-Banded Books soon.   

First off, I should mention that The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays is coming together, slow and sure. In the next few days, I expect to post the cover and will probably begin taking advance orders. I’m still shooting for a mid-summer release, but this may need to be pushed back as Mr. Rollins keeps  providing new material, much of which is too entertaining and ornery not to go in. The man is on a roll, and I mean to give readers their thirteen dollars worth.

Recently, I’ve been engaged in some polite discussion with the Christian conservative folks at The Bear Diaries over the spirit-depleting subject of antinatalism. In the first round, I jumped in to correct a common misconception linking David Benatar’s ethical position with the more commonly encountered people-culling polemics of radical environmentalists. Soon after, I was joined by Jim Crawford, host of the singular Antinatalism blog, who proceeded to pollute the well with the usual counter-intuitive iterations. I chimed in to bat the pong and it went back and forth for a while, mostly to the snarkily professed amusement (and increasing irritation) of TBD habitués. The usual.

It must have jogged something, though, as it seems the eponymous Bear has since filed another antinatally-themed dispatch, this one banking off of Michael Cook’s overconfident dismissal of the dismal (which the Hog previously banked off of here). Rather than using the occasion to point up the meretricious content of Benatar’s thesis, however, the focus is trained more conveniently on the always available question of motive. Or more accurately, readers are asked to consider what environmental and nurtural factors might predispose a person to advance a particular view. "Did [David Benatar’s] mother not hug him enough as a child?" Herr Bear thus inquires, further averring:

It is important in our analysis of ideas to reckon with their origin.
If a given idea can be produced only by a certain kind of mind — well,
that should be of especial significance.

While I would not dispute that from a certain vantage this reckoning may be of marginal curiosity, it is too easily employed as a deck-shifting tack, and ultimately as means to avoid engagement with an argument that reflexively evokes hostility or incredulity. Such misdirectional responses are parcel not merely to antinatalism, but to the disparate catalog of "dangerous ideas" that inevitably rouse the synapses of mild-mannered thought criminals like me, who cannot but make the mistake of asking the next question. 

When I read the work of those who question genocide, or who openly doubt that racial differences can be explained without reference to genetic factors, or who defend those hurtful  Ron Paul newsletters, I am wisely aware of the fact that such views may be more or less informed by extra-rational factors. Atheism may be a badge of conformity in certain rarefied cloisters. And for all I know, Kevin MacDonald‘s dissident Jewish studies may be animated by an abiding hatred of Judd Hirsch. There’s simply no telling with these things. Suspicion may may be due, and trust is as reassuring as gossip.  But even an argument made in bad faith by an unhuggable motherless child may yet prove to be correct on the merits. And if the argument fails, it will always be possible to demonstrate why this is so without trotting out the couch.

Comments are open, if anyone cares. . 

Memento mori.