Abstinence

In game theory and economic theory, zero-sum describes a situation in which a participant’s gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participants. When the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero.

If understood through d-bag theory, zero-sum is the situation a d-bag wishes to bring about so that his absolute enjoyment is amplified by another’s absolute misery. In some cases (kinky sex) a d-bag will publicly vilify non-d-bags for immorality while secretly or openly practicing the crimes against which they preach. The “Abstinence” concept is a tool whereby some d-bags are able to enhance the pleasure of self-denial and masochistic punishment while impoverishing someone else by criminalizing their enjoyments.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries temperance movement leader Carrie Nation (pictured above) advocated illegalizing alcohol as a way of getting Americans to abstain from “the destroyer of men’s souls.” To achieve this end, “alone or accompanied by hymn-singing women, she would march into a bar and sing and pray, while smashing bar fixtures and stock with a hatchet.” Mrs. Nation’s displays of self-righteous piety and ecstatic, religious joy and her total intolerance of moderates, liberals and people capable of having a drink without getting drunk made her a d-bag national hero. She indiscrimantly labeled her enemies “rum-soaked, whiskey-swilled, saturn-faced rummies,” and applauded the assination of President William McKinley in 1901 because she believed that he secretly drank alcohol and that drinkers always got what they deserved. (This line of thinking is typical in d-bags).

Libertarian d-bags will often plead divine right for certain absolute freedoms (freedom of conscience / worship) while demanding that the state impose legal sanction on the freedoms (drug use, sex, and reading books) of those not divinely inspired. An interesting video produced by Parents for Truth shows how d-bags understand this legal double standard. In the video a concerned parent claims that the state teaches newly pubescent children (particularly girls) that they should have hot sex in a shower. Concerned parents fight back, not only by telling their children that pre-marital sex is a moral abomination, and forcing the state to do so as well, but also by getting erect nipples at the thought that a health-Ed book exists that shows a woman how to have an orgasm.

The grand wizards of d-baggery understand that in a zero-sum situation d-bags must gain political power in the state in order to impose abstinence on others while enjoying privileged freedoms themselves. But separatist d-bags also claim freedom of conscience in order to engage in the pleasures of abstinence. While it is true that the Apostle Paul said, “It is good for a man not to marry. But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband” (1 Corinthians 7: 1-2), d-bag prophet Roulon Jeffs (pictured at right) said in order to avoid immorality and pre-marital sex, and in order to make sure that women are abstinent till marriage, all women should marry him at age twelve. This practice has been institutionalized by his son, Warren.