Knowledge: Scoop It Up!

A couple of posts ago I talked about Sage Publications, and how they run freebie specials from time to time. Well lo and behold, another good one arrived in my in-box today. For the entire month of March, I have free access to their online academic reference encyclopedias—and you can have this too! A wealth of introductory knowledge in capsule form, upon a plethora of subjects!

This plethora encompasses, as you might anticipate, a quite generous range of feminist theory and the like—just the sort of raw material that we counter-feminists find most pertinent to our craft!

Okay, here's what you do: click on the link below and it will take you to an online registration form where you fill out a few data fields. Not much. It asks for your "occupation"; check "other". It asks for your "organization"; write CFAN if you feel like it! ;) Then push the button and you will arrive at a page with a three-step process, including a link at item no. 1. Click on that link, and on the next page follow the link at upper right which says 'Enter Sage eReference'.

And then, wah-la! You're in town! From there, follow your nose. You'll probably want to sniff around in The Encyclopedia of Gender and Society.

http://secured.sagepub.com/reftrial_faculty_us.htm

Have fun digging. No doubt you'll feel daunted by the dizzying height to which our enemy's Tower of Babel soars—this material offers a taste of it, a suggestion of it. They certainly stole one hell of a march upon us, during all those years when we were napping: they devised their plan early, they set their game afoot, they put their spin upon the issues, they decided what "reality" was. And then we awoke to find ourselves shackled to the bedposts! Heavens, we had NO idea what mischief they were brewing, did we? They took advantage of our good nature . . . and that is why we no longer have any good nature to bestow upon them! Our bad nature is the best they can expect now, and they have no right to complain about this.

But here, for what it may be worth, is a scrap of comfort: knowledge is power! And I mean that very literally and precisely. By "knowledge is power" I mean exactly THIS: that it is powerful to know! I am talking about the simple possession of information and nothing more. To know something is always more powerful than to not know something. Knowledge trumps ignorance every time, and you can take that to the bank, my friend!

Thus, it matters not whether you "do" anything with what you know: it is still better than not knowing. Oh certainly, if you put it to practical use, that is well and good. But even if you do nothing whatever with what you know, knowing is still better than not knowing! It is always better than not knowing.

Knowledge, even in the abstract, is power. I don't mean that it "empowers" power, I mean that it categorically IS power, purely on its own standing. And if you have knowledge stored away like grain in your silo, you will radiate power in a mysterious way that cannot be explained but only experienced and manifested.

I stated recently that the time for argument is past. You should take that saying to heart, and you should know in your heart that the opposition is not worthy to be argued with. In time of war, the supreme maxim is to know thine enemy — and such knowledge, such information, is rightly called intelligence. It is always better to know thine enemy than to not know thine enemy. And while it is true that your knowledge may guide you to DO something, it may equally guide you to NOT DO something—to do, in fact, nothing whatsoever when wisdom dictates that you should merely stand pat and count your blessings! For in this fashion you will attain the serpent's guile and lead your enemy into one trap after another. . .

To recline at ease in the knowledge of your enemy, free of the compulsion to engage your enemy at every prompting, is transcendental disengagement—which is the proper mood of the sage, the philosopher, the superior man.

All knowledge is power, and a particular knowledge of your enemy is powerful against your enemy in particular. But once again, all knowledge is power, and all power is power against your enemy because power is a universal thing—and your enemy cannot escape the universe! So don't sweat it, man! He cannot escape the universe, and therefore he cannot escape you. Through transcendental disengagement, together with an elemental understanding of power, you drag the carpet that your enemy walks upon—straight out from under him if that suits your plans!

This is highly metaphysical . . . is it not? ;)

When you are rifling that storehouse of information to which I have linked you, do bear in mind that general knowledge about the world is general power against your enemy, and that particular knowledge about your enemy is particular power against your enemy. But whatever the degree of particularity, bear in mind that it's all good!

You may already be aware, that the quest for knowledge can trigger psychic indigestion if you overdo it. Well, this happens NOT because you "eat" too much . No, to be more accurate, it happens because you fear that you haven't learned the right stuff yet— the sine qua non stuff. You are racing against the clock of your own mortality in order to process enough information that the "big secret" will finally click into place somehow. Or at least, that is what you are unconsciously hoping.

And that is where the psychic indigestion originates. It is not the sheer quantity of data forced through the hopper that makes you dyspeptic, but rather the simple fact that you view your "quest for knowledge" as some kind of a grail quest, and that you periodically feel stymied by the futility of what you have undertaken—which makes you burn out.

Rather than viewing your pursuit of knowledge as a "quest" of any sort, think of it as a journey—a road with many turnings that runs unimaginably far through a series of continually evolving landscapes and vistas. You should enjoy it and soak it up—or as much of it as you are comfortably able—and let the memories accumulate like sedimentary accretion layers in a geomorphic stratum. That sediment, my friend, is wealth. And power too, as noted earlier.

So once more, when you are rifling that storehouse of information, bear in mind that it's all good. Then relax and let the sediment accumulate. And recall that the time for argument is past. Bear this saying in mind whenever you feel you must devise an ensemble of intellectual rejoinders to ALL of the points you will encounter. Whenever this mood overtakes you, you are already mentally arguing with the enemy—even when the enemy is nowhere in sight! So stop it! Remind yourself that you are not conducting research for some mythical 'Big Book of Antifeminism' that will decisively refute every point they ever made and shut them up forever. That is NOT the way to fight this war, and certainly not the way to win it. It won't work because they are systemically impervious to any such line of attack—and by now we all should know this, for if we have still not learned this after years of arguing with feminists, then we have learned precious little indeed! (Just for the record, the way to fight this war is through demographic galvanization, coalition-building, and rhetorical attrition. A witty translation for all of the above would be: staring them down. But this is by-the-by.)

Seriously, if we intend to dismantle the feminist universe, then we ought to understand how the feminist universe is put together. And a large part of knowing that means understanding how the feminists see themselves and see the world. We seek this knowledge NOT with any plan to engage the feminists in debate, but merely on the principle that the better we are informed about them, the better we can anticipate them and thwart them, and the more effectively we can transgress that buffer zone of feminist subjectivism which (in order to fend off the encroachments of self-knowledge) they have constructed around themselves. Just imagine how intimidating it must be, to confront people everywhere you go who have "plucked out the heart of your mystery", and are feeling rather jaded about it all.

Bear in mind finally, that the power of the non-feminist sector is to define feminism from the outside. Such is the battle for feminism's soul. Feminism itself provides the least illuminating source of information about feminism as an embedded ecological phenomenon, and we who are not feminists can discern the truth about feminism just as well as anybody else.
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And now, for an extra treat, here is something entirely unrelated to the rest of the post. First, a not-too-recent political article which I'm sure some of you will enjoy, especially if you've not yet read it:

http://www.observer.com/node/46583

Oh by the way, the commenters at Free Republic roasted Mr. Rosenbaum rather unkindly—which I didn't think was necessary!

Now, if you finished reading the entire article above, you might recall that the author mentions a certain Slavoj Zizek and his painfully idiotic apology for Stalinism. (Not as bad as Hitlerism it seems. And why? Well, it all ties in with the ideological character of Marxism for some reason—that is what redeems it!)

Anyway, just by chance, I stumbled across that very same Zizek article. Yes, purely by chance: I wasn't searching for it specifically. But here it is. Whatever you might think of the author's rationalizing zig-zaggery, it IS an intriguing read:

http://www.lacan.com/zizstalin.htm