The reports of Aunt Haley's death have been greatly exaggerated

Apropos of my last post, I would like to let readers know that I have heard from someone who claims to know Haley, and says she is alive.  This person asked me not to give any more detail than that.  Haley herself never responded to the email I sent around that time, but there could be numerous reasons for that--if she's neglecting the blog, it stands to reason she would never check that email address.  I myself never actively check the email address I use for this blog; I know of emails I receive only because I have notifications set up on my phone.

I'm still here, but what happened to Aunt Haley of Haley's Halo?

A reader sent the following email:

Hi Hermes, I thank you for your blog and grappling with many important issues. Have you found a better way in connecting with the remnant? Or have you given up that struggle?
Did you graduate medical school yet? 

I noticed that you and Haley both went silent in 2014. Perhaps you convinced her to come to the Midwest and are living happily ever after? ;)
She seemed like an exceptionally thoughtful and sane gal. (She is a she, right?)  Do you know what happened to her?

I have not found a better way in connecting with the remnant.  My blogging has trailed off because real life is just too darn busy, and frankly, I've lost some of the passion I used to have.  I don't know whether that's because of my age (I turn 40 later this year,) or because of the changing scene.  I have to confess, I don't want to seem like a vile sycophant, but Lawrence Auster had a huge influence on my thinking, and ever since he died, the blogosphere just hasn't been the same for me.

I graduated from medical school in 2011, and residency in 2015.  I am now working independently as a psychiatrist.

It's interesting that you mention Aunt Haley of Haley's Halo.  I think of her from time to time, and check her blog, only to find every time that her most recent post is still that of June 10th, 2014.  (It hadn't struck me until now that we both went dormant in 2014.  Though before my one 2014 post, my blog had been dormant for 3 and a half years.)  I just checked it again, and noticed that a commenter named dasheththylittleonesagainstthestones just commented on an old post of hers that she was killed in automobile accident on Fourth of July weekend 2014.  Can anyone confirm this?  If true, this is terrible.  I only exchanged a few brief emails with Haley, and commented periodically on her blog, but this oddly makes me contemplate my own mortality in a way that the death of a family member might.  I hope it's not true, but if it is, it just goes to show you never know how much time you have left, and almost makes me want to do something like marry a cute but overweight girl just to have some companionship (not even joking.)

Being a remnant

I told you I would never stop blogging.

One of our didactics experiences in residency is to be part of a "process group," which is essentially a therapy group composed of residents where we talk about our interactions and supposedly learn more about ourselves as therapists.  It's co-facilitated by two faculty members, a young psychiatrist and a semi-retired psychologist.

Today I had an experience which reminded me of my liberalism seminar in medical school, the one that provided so much fodder for blogging 5-6 years ago.  Today the group was small, with several residents and the young psychiatry facilitator absent.  One of my co-workers had just returned from a vacation to Hawaii, which she found a very pleasant place, and mentioned that Honolulu has a very low crime rate.  The discussion soon turned to the relatively higher crime rate in our city, and from there to the incidence of various crimes such as school shootings and the "knock out game."  This being a liberal society, and my co-workers being liberals by default, such discussion soon prompted unfavorable comparisons of the USA to other "developed countries," namely those of Western Europe, and speculation about the reasons for the difference.  Again, this being a liberal crowd, suggested reasons included gun ownership, lack of socialism, etc.  Of course, I held my tongue, since what I wanted to say was that the reason the USA has so much more violent crime is that we have a large black and Hispanic population, but, despite the fact that we have been assured that anything mentioned in group stays in group, I dare utter no such thing in any work-related environment.

Several people, our facilitator included, seemed to find it important to mention several times (particularly at the mention of the "knock out game" that "this can happen anywhere.  To this, I made one of my few comments during the discussion: "it doesn't happen in Smalltown" (a small town about 45 minutes outside of the city, a pleasant exurb with tree-lined cul-de-sacs and a nationally ranked school system, which is of course almost entirely white.)  Our facilitator was quick to say "ohhhh, yes, it does happen in Smalltown!" with a pseudo-knowing air, as if to say "don't be so naive."

When I got home, I googled crime stats.  Figuring the knock-out game would be counted as assault, I focused on assault numbers.  In the city, in 2011, the most recent year available, there were 463.9 assaults per 100,000 population.  In Smalltown, there were 47.1, or one-tenth the incidence.  The absolute number of assaults in Smalltown was 11.

So of course, it doesn't happen in Smalltown.  But why was our facilitator so adamant that it did?  Why did everyone seem to find it so important to reassure each other that "it happens everywhere!"  Well, for one thing, this fits with the modern liberal view of crime as a "random" act.  Since crime happens "randomly," it must be the case that if happens everywhere.  Also, if it does not in fact happen everywhere, if in fact we are safer in some places than in others, we may have to draw unpleasant conclusions about why this might be.  I think that the liberal mind heads itself off at the pass--even if one has not yet consciously contemplated the notion that there are, shall we say, demographic realities associated with crime, one's unconscious mind can sense that one's thought process is going in that direction, and cuts itself off.

Later in the day, a more sinister thought struck me: they want it to happen in Smalltown.  The left desires the destruction of traditional white Western European Christian civilization.  They desire the dispossession of the white race.  Not only do they want to ruin cities, but they don't want white flight to be possible.  They don't want whites (or Asians--several members of the group were Indian) to be able to live safe, pleasant, comfortable lives in places like Smalltown, free from the unpleasantries associated with less high-functioning populations.  This contradicts the leftist vast social leveling project.

This is why there was no point in attempting a rejoinder to "oh, yes, it does happen in Smalltown!"  Even if I'd had crime stats on hand, which I didn't, the facts weren't really the point.  The point is was that there is nothing we can or should do about these problems; we whites should let them wash over us like a vast tidal wave, obliterating our unfair white-privilege-gained existences.

Thinking about this brings back to mind this post, one I have reread several times in the last few weeks.  I'm particularly struck by the comment by New Sisyphus, who pointed out:

To be a traditional conservative in today's America is to reject, as a matter of course, almost everything one sees and hears. This is an enormously draining experience, one that causes a great deal of mental friction, conscious and unconscious.

And, given that overwhelming tide, yes, it is very hard for one who feels this keenly to imagine it being overturned. It's just so dominating. One hopes in vain for a sign--and sign--that it is being resisted, but it's not, not in any real way. There are individuals and small groups here and there, but the liberal message is unchallenged in TV, in the academy, in the professional organizations, in the movies, in the newspaper, in the elementary school, in the charity, in the church, in the government. 

This overwhelming wave assaults the conservative daily in a way a liberal cannot begin to imagine. It is a life under siege, seeing the enemy, yet powerless to do anything about it as it marches to its inevitable victory. 

I certainly felt like that this morning.  Virtually every hour of every day, one is assaulted with a wave of liberalism and is powerless to resist.  And since I wrote that post, things have not gotten better.  Barack Hussein Obama has been elected President of the USA, twice.  We have a grotesque federal health care law which, while not socialized medicine (leading the left to call it "right-wing" and "a gift to the insurance companies,") seems intended to destroy the insurance system and put us on the path to single-payer.  Same-sex "marriage" is spreading, state by state.  And all the while, the best "conservatives" can do is to claim that leftists are the true racists and sexists, and "conservatives" are the true champions of women and nonwhites.

I can't really draw this to a momentous conclusion.  I suppose I'm just venting.  But given the relentless leftward march of our society--and the intent to destroy every last "whitebread" Smalltown on the map--it's not clear how we can live traditional lives, even as a remnant in an enclave of like-minded people, assuming one can find any.

You're cooler than you think

I told you I would post again.

Negative thoughts about my ability to relate to other people have been a constant thorn in my side for my whole life. Over the past 2 years or so, a confluence of factors, including learning about the particular brand of social self-help pitched by the seduction community, moving to a new city where it happens to be easier to meet people from a conservative Christian background and thus who have at least something culturally in common with me, my increased status resulting from being a medical student (yes, it does exist, even if it's not enough to win a girl over by itself,) and the phenomenon of just being more comfortable in one's own skin that does happen as you enter your thirties, have given me reason to be more optimistic about this. I still become frustrated once in a while, but one thing I have learned is just how much your own self-perception influences others' perception of you.

I live directly across the street from a small supermarket, one that happens to be the closest full-scale grocery store to the university, and is therefore frequently patronized by students undergraduate, graduate, and professional. One evening a couple of weeks ago, on one my frequent saunters over there to pick up a few foodstuffs, three sorority chicks, to the best of my recollection a 6, a 7, and a 9, were wandering around the produce section chattering ditzily as they undertook the intellectually challenging task of selecting produce. I witnessed the following exchange:

Sorority chick: What kind of lettuce are you supposed to put on tacos?

Random passing undergrad dude: The shredded kind.

SC: (Oh, aren't you funny, blah blah blah, I don't really remember what she said) Want to come to our taco party?

RPUG: Sure.

Now RPUG looked like a pretty average guy. He wasn't a rock star. He didn't come across as super-alpha. It struck me that in the course of about 5 seconds, with one smart-ass comment, this guy had gotten himself invited to a sorority taco party.

My first reaction in situations like this has long been--and this time was no different--"Why can't I be that kind of guy? Why doesn't anything like that ever happen to me?" Maybe those thoughts come from the devil on one shoulder, because this time, another voice inside my head, call it the angel on my other shoulder, said "you are that kind of guy. Stuff like that does happen to you all the time, or at least it used to when you got out more." It occurred to me that I had always thought of myself as a low-social status nerd who is perceived by hot girls (and cool guys) as a low social-status nerd and is incapable of rolling with them. But something made me stop, do a reality check, and realize: when I was in undergrad, hot girls and cool guys invited me to parties all the time. I just always turned them down. "I can't go to parties where people drink and dance and listen to loud, currently popular music," I thought. "I'm not cool enough." But they didn't think I was a low-social-status nerd who couldn't roll with them. I created that persona in my own mind by acting that way.

The same thing happened when I started medical school. When everyone was new to everyone else and eager to make friends, I got invited to parties galore. But since I never went, figuring my social time was better spent at church where I was sure to meet a wife, I assume I soon developed a reputation as someone who just isn't interested in socializing and I stopped getting invited.

It's an uphill battle when you're fighting 33 years of negative thought patterns, but one thing I have to keep reminding myself of is that a decent appearance is actually easy to put on. In the past couple of years, I've learned to dress a bit more stylishly for social occasions, gotten contact lenses, and learned to use a bit of product in my hair, but even long before all that I could never have been mistaken for a Magic: The Gathering player. My freshman year of college, directly across the hall from me lived two of the biggest stoners I have ever met in my life. I'll never forget the time, early on in the year, when one of them, having somehow surmised that I didn't go out Friday night, said to me, perplexed and genuinely curious, "dude, did you just, like, hang out here?" Well, of course, I thought, don't you know I'm a nerd? But to him, I obviously looked like a regular guy, the kind who would be found at a frat party on a Friday night doing a keg stand or bumping and grinding with some drunk chick just like the rest of 'em. He didn't think I was a nerd. I did. It's actually easy to look like a socially mainstream person, and from there it's a choice to act the part.

As I said, it's not easy to change these thought patterns when they've been so deeply ingrained over so many years. But the evidence has long been right in front of my eyes--I simply chose to ignore it--that if I simply muster the cojones to blurt out the word "shredded" to some strange girls, I could find myself at a taco party.

It's all in your head.

I will never stop blogging

I'm sitting here in mid-day, with three weeks off from medical school, feeling overwhelmed despite having a totally open schedule--I have to write up the findings from my research project in the form of a real scientific paper, to be published in an actual medical journal--so I thought I'd procrastinate by posting a blog entry.

One of the reasons I don't post more often is that I have so much to do in medical school. Now, it's not that I'm always working; I wind up procrastinating as much as anyone else, but as long as I have work to do I usually feel I shouldn't spend the time blogging (merely browsing my favorite blogs is more passive, and thus easier to allow myself to do.) But I like blogging when I can, no matter how infrequently I do it, and thus one of the phenomena I don't understand is permanently closing one's blog. I was thinking about this after reading that Anakin Niceguy is closing up shop. Novaseeker did the same thing in January, and I know there have been other bloggers I used to read, or at least check in on occasionally, whose names I can't remember right now, who announced an official end to blogging. (At least those guys are leaving their blogs up, though. One thing I really can't understand is deleting your blog. Unless you fear that the thought police are coming after you in real life, what harm is there in leaving it up, for posterity's sake?)

Sure, there are disadvantages to being an infrequent blogger, namely, that you lose regular readership. There was a time when I was posting nearly every day, and got a lot more hits than I do now. When it's been weeks since you've posted, people simply stop dropping by, as I myself have with Ganttsquarry and A.J. Travis. But, they may post again someday. Why foreclose that possibility by announcing that you are officially done with blogging?

All of this is not to criticize or argue with people who stop blogging; just to say that, no matter how infrequently I write a substantive post, I'll always be around.

Adventures in gynecology

For the past six weeks I've been on an outpatient rotation, which means seeing patients in the office from 8-5. My weeks consist of family practice, pediatrics, and obstetrics/gynecology all intermingled together. This afternoon was a gynecology afternoon. Incidentally, this is at one of the top hospitals in the country according to U.S. News & World Report.

My second patient of the afternoon was a pretty, prim and proper, professional white 30 year old woman, the kind you'd expect to meet at happy hour at the yuppie bar near the local office park. I saw that she had a hyphenated surname and heard the nurse mention that the patient didn't want us to use the stickers with her name on them because she was changing her name. I walked into the room and introduced myself.

Me: Hi, Miss Hyphenated-Surname?

Pt: Yes.

Me: I'm Dr. Abooboo's medical student for the afternoon. Would you mind if I go over some history with you before Dr. Abooboo comes in?

Pt: Sure.

Me: So, I hear you're changing your name, is that right?

Pt: Yeah, actually the name they have on there is wrong, my last name is Similarsounding-HyphenatedSurname, but I'm getting married next week, so it'll be changing anyway.

Me: Oh, congratulations. So, what can we help you with today, do you have any concerns, are your periods regular, when was your last Pap smear, etc., etc.

Pt: Blah blah blah, yakity scmakity.

Me: OK, let me go find Dr. Abooboo and we'll be back in together to do the exam.

Exit.
[I should say here that the patient was very nice and pleasant, but I don't have the ear for conveying that in dialogue.]
Enter Hermes and Dr. Abooboo.

Dr: So, I hear you have some big plans! Where are you getting married?

Pt: Well, we're having two weddings, actually. The first one's in Turkey. My fiance is Turkish.

Internal dialog of Hermes of 5 years ago: (Oh, isn't that nice, I'm happy for her.)

Internal dialog of present-day Hermes: (Another one bites the dust.)

(Sometime later)
Dr: what do you do for a living?

Pt: I'm a management consultant. My fiance is too; we both work for the same company.

So this nice, pretty, highly educated and accomplished six-figure-earning white girl will marry a six-figure-earning Middle Eastern immigrant, probably have one mixed-race baby and deposit him in day care, then spend the rest of their lives blowing their combined six-figure income on a big house in some white-flight development with a name like "The Hunt at Glen Run," a couple of BMW's in the driveway, and international luxury vacations until they die in a nursing home. If their marriage lasts.

Later in the afternoon I saw an 18-year-old white girl who was there with her mother to discuss the results of a Pap smear and colposcopy. (Colposcopy is the screening test done after a Pap comes back negative, and often involves cervical biopsy.) She was cute, freckle-faced, with slightly eccentric mannerisms, the kind you can tell is a theater chick just by looking at her. She was wearing one of those knit wool caps with the brim that sticks out which theater chicks always wear. I don't know what they're called. Both mother and daughter were quite irate because they had had multiple Paps and colpos done at one of the other big hospitals in town and had never been able to get the results. They were both quite nervous about the fact that she had had an abnormal Pap. I looked in her chart, and saw that she had already had five colposcopies. Five. This girl was a freshman in college, and evidently she had already spread her legs for enough bad boys--or maybe one who was really, really bad--that HPV had already crawled in, put its feet up, made itself right at home, even built a little bungalow and had a party going on.

Call me naive, cultural leftists, but I'm pretty sure my grandmothers wouldn't have had five abnormal Pap smears by age 18.

This girl was not happy about the prospect of future Paps and colpos. "I'm deathly, irrational afraid of needles," or something equally eccentric, she said with typical theater chick melodrama. The doctor suggested she get the HPV vaccine. She immediately blurted out "I don't believe in vaccines." Her mother feebly expressed hope that if she were with one steady partner, maybe her future risk would be minimized. This normal, white bread, suburban mother, who took it in stride that her unmarried 18-year-old daughter was sexually active, was not wearing a wedding ring.

The fall of Western Civilization continues unabated. Gynecology clinic is the front line.

A true WTF moment

Thanks to the wonder of Facebook, I have just learned that a woman from my high school class is currently married to Mike Tyson. Apparently, they wed in June, two weeks after Tyson's 4-year-old daughter died in a "tragic treadmill accident." (I never knew there was such a thing.)

Here is a photo of the happy couple:

I didn't really know the girl, but I recognized the name, I looked her up in the yearbook, and yes, that's her. Who would have known that when I was 15, I was sitting in class next to the future wife of the notorious boxer a digital representation of whom I had spent countless hours trying to defeat?

Words fail me. Come to think of it, I don't recall there being a "common sense" class in high school.