Enforce Course
I'm the Nascar police, arresting you for speeding. I want to win.
I scream, you scream, we all duckstack
By reading this you consent to any consequences and are liable for any risks incurred pursuant to reading the Duckstack and Duckstack related activities. Duckstack related activities include but are not limited to: Literally anything. The Duckstack is not responsible for any items or philosophy lost or stolen. But you can check the lost and found bin after.
Here’s the Deal
The art of the here’s the deal
“They” say you’ve got to spend money to make money. “They” claim that investment makes you rich. “They” want to increase your financial acumen. We know better than “them”. “They” compliment your financial acumen but “You” know they are lying— you have no financial acumen to speak of. What “you” have is something even more esoteric. “They” would tremble in fear at what you truly have. “You” have something priceless. Financial acupuncture.
Personalized Pronouns
On Consent Forms and Other Marks of the Beast
As part of a visionary effort to teach men not to rape, a few years back in a bunch of colleges in the UK and America they distributed consent waivers for the college students to use and fill out before having sex in order to make sure that you weren’t raping each other. It didn’t work, of course, because women can be raped even after signing a form that says “I hereby consent to sex.” As any feminist could tell you, the power differential is enough to count as manipulative. This week a guy bombed a fertility clinic, leaving a rambling manifesto message about how he "didn’t consent to be born.”
There’s a rhetorical technique called “reducto ad absurdum”, which basically says take all their premises as true, and then go to the extreme and see if it looks absurd. You stress test an ideology and see how well it holds up under its own assumptions. So we can see the limits of consent as a framework for understanding morality. Of course you will also see people on the internet talking about how they will never change their infant’s diapers without the infant’s consent. Of course, any homeless crazy can make a twitter account and pretend to be respectable and high functioning. If you see someone say something online that sounds absolutely insane, they probably are.
But not just insane people put pronouns in their linkedin bio. Even reasonable people can reach insane positions by starting at something reasonable. “don’t have sex with people who don’t want to have sex” is reasonable. “I didn’t consent to be subject to gravity” is not. Now, I am not “trad”. I am not a believer that the laws of nature should be held as some kind of high authority. But I wouldn’t say transexuality is the same as trying to build an airplane, for many reasons, the least of which is that it seeks to go against the grain of nature, rather than work with it. I’m not trying to make a compelling case here, I’m just saying I don’t buy it.
But plenty of people buy into this and they put their “pronouns” in their linkedin bio and HR and demand you recite yours at work and make all kinds of encroachments into your life over it so we can’t just not buy it and move on. But then when you point out “hey, you’re putting pronouns in your bio, you’re woke” leftists will get all coy and sophistic and be like “everyone has pronouns! There’s nothing woke about pronouns!” Which is perfectly consistent of them to say- after all, they’re already asking you to deny reality and your eyes, so asking you to play pretend that this is some politically neutral phenomenon happening in a vacuum really isn’t much of a stretch at all. Which is really what its about- not mastery of the laws of nature, but mastery of the laws of social culture. The first is Godly, the second is Satanic. When Satan beguiled Eve, his lie was not that she would be as the gods, but that she wouldn’t die. “you can get away with it” is his one lie and has been his lie since before the foundation of the entire world. This is why it is so vital (and terrifying) to believe God is Just.
I digress. There’s tons more I could say on this, and the Book of Mormon covers this even more, in excruciating detail. A secret combination is to be Mahan, master of this great secret1. The point is that you cannot really control other people’s perception- you can influence it, you can beg, bribe, persuade, and a multitude of other honorable and dishonorable tactics to bring someone around to your view, but you can’t control it. This is a law of nature. Its as immutable as gravity. It isn’t wrong to want to look good, but it is wrong to want to look good without actually being good- something for nothing. “get away with it.”
Nobody “has” pronouns. What you have is sex, which other people use to determine how they want to refer to you. This is because categorizing you serves a social function- As the same feminists often point out, there’s no benefit to acting as though a male is female in domains like women’s sports and such- in fact, its actively very harmful to them. So when people put pronouns in their social media they are actively asking you to sacrifice. For some people that might be no big deal, but that doesn’t change that they’re eager to fire you over it. If you can’t socially guilt someone into consent you can always use force. Cain was the first liberal.
Its all a proxy for respect. Consent itself is, even. The point of caring about consent is making sure people are respected. Of course in many cases it feels way more disrespectful to ask for consent. And in many more cases on top of that it feels less human. Harsh reality says sometimes respect is enforcing boundaries and standards including your right not to play pretend when you don’t want to. Whether you’re even playing pretend at all is not up to them- if you think you’re lying, and they think they are true, they are still asking you to lie.
Animal husbandry2 educates against this. If we let our chickens to nature, they would bathe in their own poop and peck each other to death. It is not in fact respectful to allow or even encourage them to do this- there is a higher virtue than consent, and it is called stewardship. Of course there are triter ways of putting this. Enablement is not obviously good and is even less obviously a sign of love. If asking your spouse for consent makes them feel respected, then it probably actually is good- but this isn’t an innate trait, its a part of a larger relationship dynamic. What you’re looking for is a healthy marriage, and myopia can make this worse even when its correct. Virtues must connect to an object to have meaning, they must be anchored in reality. If they aren’t, you’re just demanding people respect your pronouns. The more you understand reality, the more virtuous you are enabled to be3.
Lost and Found
You lost it? We’ve got it. Maybe.
We convert everything we find to text form in each Duckstack newsletter so if you need it back corporeal in the real world you’ll have to find a wordsmith to craft it back. Hopefully that’s not too inconvenient for you. Its just company policy set by the higher ups, we hope you understand. Here’s what we got:
The key to the city. There’s no label on it, so we don’t know which city, but to take this key back we’ll still need to see you ID.
$500 in debt to a loan shark at 30% APR. Please take this even if its not yours. Our intern didn’t sign a non-liability waiver before picking it up.
One Duckstack (this)
An electrical outlet ripped out of a wall. Somehow it still has electricity in it, and we’ve been using it as a mobile toaster for all the Duckstack employees working in the warehouse. Everyone loves the toast guy and we’ve got him hooked up to an ice cream truck speaker and everything, please don’t take this even if it is yours.
The key to Africa. We didn’t even know there was one of these. Is there one for every continent? What happens if you collect all 7?
A piece of plastic. Its the size of my thumb-nail, black, and angled with a hole and ridges. No idea what it goes to. No hints.
1 week old dirty laundry mixed with clean laundry. This is ours. We haven’t gotten around to it yet. Carl mixed them up.
A police siren: If you put this on, you become a police officer by right. Those are the rules.
history
shmistory
A voice from the curtains: “I'm gone forever. You'll never find me.”
Teaching toddler to pray. Wife suggested he say “thank you I was good today.” toddler repeated after her: “thank you for mama being good”
Baby had a birthday celebration where she got a fuzzy snow leopard which she hugged and cuddled and wouldn’t put down to open any other presents. And then she got the best gift ever (apparently): Socks. She tried to put them on by rubbing them on her shins. She grabbed as many as she could in her non-snow-leopard hand, and rolled around in the socks like scrooge mcduck.
The baby has begun walking. At first, she would only do it when we weren’t watching. She did it out of curiosity and playing on her own, but when we watch its right back to wanting to be held. But soon!
The baby has a word that goes something like “ajoop” and it consistently means “here you go”.
“cats don't lay eggs” -unprompted4
Consumer Credit Reporting
Optionally mandatory
We don’t have time to figure all this out. Just pick a number that describes you.
800- good
700- decent
600- bad
500- awful
400- abysmal
300- beneath abysmal. Outer darkness. The void beneath the end.
200- Wrapped all the way back around to good again.
100- Decent
Ducksnax
#072 - Parachute
Imagine a duck falling, and the duck opens an umbrella, and the umbrella is another duck5
This is a reference to the Book of Moses as translated by Joseph Smith
or just having kids but statistically most liberals are actually never going to have a chance to do that.
Reject caveman. Build moral nuclear reactors. Bomb your enemies morals with your superior morality-tech.
pushing the limits of the medium