I’m often surprised by what gets people to respond to my posts. I’ll post something that I suspect will result in an angry mob chasing me down the street and I get crickets. This is not the sort of blog to generate a lot of comments, but I can see the traffic. I’ve had posts get thousands of hits in a day and just a few comments. On the other hand, off-the-cuff posts that don’t generate much traffic will sometimes get a bunch of feedback, none of it good.

Anyway, the lion murderer post seems to have got under some skin so I thought it might be good time to touch on some of the basic rules of life that shape my opinions. It seems to me that more than a few of you people have some misconceptions about where I’m coming from philosophically. Plus, I’ve always wanted to title a post “The Tao of Z.”

Let’s start close in and work out from there. I think a man has a duty to protect the innocent. That’s a duty, not an option. If you stand around and let harm come to a child, for example, you may be male, but you not a man. Even a coward will overcome his fears to save a child or a woman from harm. If you can’t be bothered or you think that is debatable, I have nothing but contempt for you.

This duty is not narrow, limited only to protecting children or old women. I’m just using some shorthand to keep it pithy. The reason a man has a duty to protect the innocent is the male of our species has an obligation to protect his world and all the things in it. We are the the apex species, the top of the food chain, the keeper of the world. As part of a man’s duty to guard his kind comes the duty to guard his kind’s environment.

That should not be interpreted to mean I worship nature like some sort of German hippie. Deer hunters, for example, provide a vital service by keeping deer populations down. Bambi is cute as hell, but the bigger picture means Elmer Fudd gets to blast her from his tree stand. On the other hand, Elmer has a duty to be a responsible hunter. Otherwise, he just an asshole getting his rocks off killing things.

That’s what offended me about the lion murderer. There’s no social duty being met by hunting exotic animals. In fact, it mocks the very idea of there being a social responsibility to hunting. It’s wasteful and pointless. Even if it is legal and somehow pumps money into the local economy, it’s morally null. Child prostitution pumps money into the local Indonesian economy, but that does not make it right.

Now, Elmer Fudd can be a responsible hunter, but he does not get to blast your schnauzer in the backyard. We have other ways to manage the schnauzer population and our culture has taboos against hunting neighborhood pets. In America, like most of the west, our women insist we protect the cute animals above all else. It may sound stupid, but we would not have domesticated animals if not for the female attraction cute fluffy animals.

In America, exotic African animals like lions have a special place in the collective psyche of the people. As I type this a commercial is running telling me for just a few dollars I can save a tiger. The lion murderer certainly knows this, but he takes pleasure in offending this sensibility. It’s vitally important to him that he scandalize the rest of us with his behavior.

That brings me to another one of my core beliefs. We have a duty to respect and maintain social norms. Letting weirdos and freaks dictate to the rest of us is how we ended up with Obama in the White House. Men who deliberately flaunt social norms are mocking more than just those social norms. They are mocking the rest of us. When I see some jagoff with ear gauges, I’m thinking the Middle Ages were probably not so bad.

Some of you people incorrectly compare public revulsion toward the lion murderer with the social justice warriors. There’s a whiff of libertarian crackpottery to that line of reasoning. Bitter weirdos assaulting normal people is the exact opposite of normal people rising up to defend the commonly held morality against the behavior of a deviant.

I flippantly said that sometimes you need to burn a witch, even if there are no witches because its clever and true. A confident society comes down hard every once in a while on a deviant to keep public morality from atrophying. Otherwise, the weirdos and lunatics begin to think they can flex their muscles. You can be sure that the other great white hunters out there are watching what’s happening to lion murderer and thinking it it is not a good idea to piss off the public.

I’m not starting my own religion so I will cut this short, but if I change my mind maybe I’ll write a longer more detailed post about my moral philosophy. I’ll just leave it with this. If the public was as choked up over the Christian bakers or the Little Sisters of the Poor as they are over the lion murderer, our world would be a vastly better place.