GROIN

Strong opinions are seductive because they seem like a confident and positive path. In times of crisis, you look toward people with these attributes to find a way out of the mess you’re in.

However, there’s a way to exploit this trust. You can hack other human beings just like you can hack computers, and one way to hack both is to create a false authority. Act like you’re confident and positive, and people are seduced by your strong opinion.

There is always a strong seductive influence to the ideology that pairs (a) victimhood, or the sense that your lack of something was done to you by someone else, and (b) revenge, or the notion that if you just take that something back, everything will be OK again.

Feminism is one such ideology. You have to be a true idiot to believe it, which is why they preach it at you constantly through multiple sources (Hollywood, academia, media, social pressures, government). Slowly they seduce your brain with this victimhood narrative.

But it’s an easy ideology to believe because it relieves you of the burden of solving your own problems and finding your own path in life. Instead of thinking, “What must I create in order to make my life meaningful?” you are thinking in terms of a pre-defined narrative, the intellectual equivalent of a TV dinner.

In this narrative, you have been wronged and all that matters is getting back what you deserve. Does this sound like a familiar plot? Over half of all Hollywood movies use it. Almost all American-style wars use it. Just about every #occupy-style protest uses it. Neo-Nazi groups use it. Whether it’s the banksters, the Jews, men, the popular kids, evil dictators or the rich, someone did this to you and you must crush them and get it back.

What they never mention is that very few things in life are actually tangible things. For example, the prosperity of a country. This is not a huge hoard of gold sitting in a bank somewhere. It’s a complex interaction between leaders, workers, planners and knowledge workers that produces an end result on a continual basis. You can steal a farm, but can you then work that farm and make wealth from it? Those who seized farms in Zimbabwe learned the hard way that it’s not as easy to make wealth as to seize the means by which others can make it.

Unlike most MRAs, I’m not bitter toward women. I recognize that the quality of women varies. Some women are faithless sluts, while others are not, and the proportion is about the same as it is in men. Most people are chaff who cannot make a strong decision on their own, and so they are faithless whores to whatever idea flits across their screens.

Unlike most PUAs, I realize that sex does not equal manliness. Further, I’ve seen enough of life to realize that sex is not what I want out of a woman. Spending my life chasing after poontang makes me a slave to the whores, not someone who rose above and saw the bigger situation, which is that most men who have red blood want a woman who is a battle-comrade, true comrade and partner in making a family.

However, I do recognize that feminism is bunk and that most MRAs are acting to affirm feminism rather than dethrone it. Feminists want women to have no obligation to men; MRAs want the same thing. Both use the same method, which is destruction of marriage and the family. The result is a lot of lonely women and men who live alone in bitterness, having been deprived of the joy of family.

I don’t expect I’ll convince a lot of people. Strong victimhood narratives are more seductive than what I have to preach, which is self-reliance and a journey of self-discovery and adventure in creating a place for yourself in life. Yet I know that in ten years’ time, those who take my advice will be much more satisfied than those who deny it.

Our modern lives are ruled by published science. These notions of truth, in the form of “studies” or “papers,” consist of a series of experiments on a topic, followed by the construction of conclusions based upon that data, and then the rest of us rely on those notions and act as if they were true.

The problem with this is that science exists in two stages. The first stage involves finding statistical correlations. We know a lot of smokers die of lung cancer. The second involves finding the actual cause. Nicotine is a mutagen? Tar keeps it bonded to fast-growing lung cells? Fast-growing cells are the most likely to become cancerous? We connect the dots in that second stage.

This brings us to the problem presented by another word in the first sentence of this post. “Published” refers to scientific journals, and then a trickle-down through the specialized magazines to the mainstream newspapers, magazines, TV shows, blogs, tweets, etc. that we all experience.

In that mainstream part of the science process, there are two ugly forces at work. First, the consumers who prefer pleasant illusions to complex (not even unpleasant, just requiring some thought to see the good from the bad) truths. Second, there are the people who pander to them and make money by offering products that these people want to buy.

People want to purchase affirmations of their behavior and lifestyles. They will run off and buy books and magazines that tell them what they are doing is the right way to live, or simply an acceptable way. They will also run out and buy movies, clothing, novelty items, etc. related to this “lifestyle.”

No matter how screwed up your lifestyle, as soon as there are enough of you to buy products en masse, you will have defenders in commerce. They want to sell you these products, and so they will legitimize your lifestyle. They will even do it by commissioning “scientific” studies that tell you that you’re good and the other team is bad. Whoever that is.

“Study debunks stereotype that men think about sex all day long”

[T]he research discredits the persistent stereotype that men think about sex every seven seconds, which would amount to more than 8,000 thoughts about sex in 16 waking hours. In the study, the median number of young men’s thought about sex stood at almost 19 times per day. Young women in the study reported a median of nearly 10 thoughts about sex per day.

As a group, the men also thought about food almost 18 times per day and sleep almost 11 times per day, compared to women’s median number of thoughts about eating and sleep, at nearly 15 times and about 8 1/2 times, respectively. – Medical Xpress

Who is surprised? We all grew up hearing that men thought about sex all day long, which was a convenient fiction that allowed our media to portray men as sex addicts and thus women as being in a defensive role against this onslaught. Women = victims, preached the media.

While that pithy lie gave women ammunition to use against men while arguing for feminism, it also had a bad effect on them. It taught them to see themselves as inevitable victims. So at some point, they stopped protesting. Whether that was casual sex with creepy guys in college, or even date rape by a colleague at work, or just feeling a sense of despair about life and ever having a mate, they went for it. We taught them to, with our trillions of dollars of media power, triggered by the need for some women to buy products that confirmed their lifestyle.

Science can be easily misinterpreted. That opens the door to manipulation.

Cigarette smoking has been shown to increase serum hemoglobin, increase total lung capacity and stimulate weight loss, factors that all contribute to enhanced performance in endurance sports. Despite this scientific evidence, the prevalence of smoking in elite athletes is actually many times lower than in the general population. The reasons for this are unclear; however, there has been little to no effort made on the part of national governing bodies to encourage smoking among athletes. – PLOS

This is from an article describing a scientific “review” published in a well-esteemed major journal. The point of the article was that by cherrypicking which aspects of a situation to analyze, and then presenting that analysis out of context, the exact opposite of a realistic outlook can be created.

For example, smoking decreases body weight and increases both lung capacity and blood hemoglobin, which are beneficial traits for a runner. Does this mean smoking is good for runners? No, because there are other ways of doing the above, and no, because smoking also has disadvantages.

Religion, science, government, etc. can be used to make lies out of the truth by looking selectively at the facts. Much of our modern world, especially the relentless con-artist propaganda assault against men, consists of such lies. It’s time we started calling them what they are and refusing to let them hide behind the veil of “science.”

Cycles repeat, but because life must be interesting, they rarely do it in the cut-and-dry way that machines repeat.

Instead, they camouflage themselves before they restart, creating a kind of cosmic “Where’s Waldo?” as we small creatures try to spot the entry of the recurrence.

One of the dominant themes of the MRM is this: society abandoned us, all is lost, so give up and start enjoying the small things in life (beer, drugs, sex, video games, masturbation).

To my cynical mind, this is a cycle restarting.

Every time a group of people feels abandoned, they have a tendency to protest, make some noise, then drop out, and only later rejoin society — but this time, with no power. Why? They dropped out. They let whatever they feared would happen, happen, and ran away, and now inherit the results.

The 1960s “tune in, turn on, drop out” has permeated through culture. Except now that our society is wrecked by the divisiveness and illusory promises of 1968, the only option left seems to be drop out:

My introduction to the world of politics was learning that the leader of my country was a no-good crook. Welcome to Generation X.

People wonder why those born between 1965 and 1980 tend to be nihilistic and wary of commitment. Why many of us keep an ironic distance between ourselves and just about everything. That’s because so many aspects of the culture we inherited were a form of lie told to us daily. And unlike previous generations, we never really got a hero. No FDR. No Camelot. Just one jerk after another trying to sell us snakeoil with a smile. The only president who even made an attempt to do things honestly, Jimmy Carter, was branded a fool.

Plenty of us rolled the dice as entrepreneurs because we didn’t trust the suit-and-tie corporate scene any more than we trusted politicians with comb-overs. Left alone as latchkey kids, we turned away from all that, creating our own worlds (the Internet) and cocooning ourselves in shallow pop culture, our very own Land of the Lost. As we reached adulthood, many of us sat alone at our computers, accepting all too often Reagan’s invitation to disconnect from our government and get on with the business of accumulating and consuming to fill the great emptiness.

For a moment, it looked like Barack Obama might finally give us something to believe in. But we weren’t terribly surprised when that didn’t work out, either. Among progressives, Gen-Xers may have been the least trusting of the sweet-talking pol from Chicago. Baby Boomers were stirred by the lingering hopes of their youth. Millennials had not yet faced betrayal by a politician they looked up to. But Gen-Xers suffered no such delusions. We never really looked up to anybody. We’ve tended to travel pretty lightly in this world.

Our grandparents saw ordinary people rise up in the ’30s and ’40s to demand — and receive — fair wages, Social Security and equitable growth over the next 40 years. Our moms and dads witnessed the great advances for women and minorities born from the rebellion of the ’60s. Those generations before us saw with their own eyes that the people could join together and fight back to gain something powerful for themselves. They understood that entrenched systems could be challenged, and even conquered.

Gen-Xers never got to learn this. We learned how to blow up digital aliens with a joystick. – Alternet

Note that I said “seems.” Seems is a troublesome word. It makes no truth assertion, contrary to its use in newspapers. It makes an implication, but that implication can be cynical, e.g. “If you were drunk, high and stupid, this might seem like a great idea!”

The above article is highly ambitious and covers many topics, but it really nails the dilemma of Generation X. They saw everything had failed: the old order failed, then the hippies failed, then anyone who wasn’t a hippie was trying to help us beat the Soviets.

Might as well go back into your room, play with your computer or video games, and drop out of the world. It’s interesting that Generation X may be our greatest drop-out generation ever. They basically invented the modern slacker. They became the stealth generation — by choice. You can still find them in the out-of-the-way places, doing whatever jobs allow them to keep mental stability.

What made them such wrecks?

Gordinier graduated from Princeton in 1988, a year after the stock market crashed and just in time for a recession that left him and many of his peers jobless. He recalls moving back home and using FedEx instead of Gmail to send out his resume. Xers witnessed the rise of the yuppie and the burst of the dot-com bubble. Theirs, he argues, was a bleak inheritance. “Instead of getting free love, we got AIDS,” says Douglas Rushkoff, author of 1993′s GenX Reader . “We didn’t believe the same kind of things as boomers. It was much harder to fool us.” – Time

They believed in nothing. They were, after all, nihilists, which is an honest profession if you can get it. The problem with that outlook however is total alienation. You see through the motivations of others.

Generation X saw how the Baby Boomers staged a massive liberal revolution culminating in 1968 and made all sorts of “positive” changes. Generation X then watched those changes wreck society as profoundly as the greedy yuppies of the 1980s, the Cold War or other massive schisms.

In the same way, MRAs have seen through the motivations of Feminism. On the surface, it proclaims equality; under the skin, it’s a theft expedition to take wealth, power and hope from men.

One thing is certain: dropping out, and indulging in small pleasures instead of taking on this system and changing it, is not the solution. The 1968-ers were crazy, definitely, but at least when they dropped out, they forced the system to change. Generation X and MRAs are still looking for that voice.

What is feminism? Like any good dessert, it has a surface and then a center.

The surface is this good-sounding idea of “equality.” We make women equal to men, and then everyone is happy. We all share.

Underneath that, there’s the problem that equality doesn’t relate to reality. Nothing in reality is equal. In reality, people take different roles and work together toward a goal.

When we look deeply into feminism, we see its center: a demand that women come first, using the justification of equality, at the expense of men. It’s women gaming the system for their own personal demands.

If extrapolated, this leads to a society where everyone does what they individually want, with no shared cooperation and no goal. In other words, anarchy. The ultimate freedom. And yet, the ultimate freedom to have chosen dysfunction.

With no goal in common, every transaction becomes a bribe and there are no social standards. You spend more of your time on society, working around its dysfunctions, avoiding offense, honoring all the petty people, than you do when social standards are high.

A man eschews a committed relationship with a woman to live on his own terms? How dare he put his own needs first? He must be a man-child.

Even women who don’t identify themselves as feminists feel extremely awkward when confronted by a typical Red Pill question: “What do you bring to the table in terms of dating and a relationship?”

Feminists tore up their side of the social gender contract and are desperate to keep men upholding their unbroken side of that contract. – The Private Man

While the above is true, in a broader sense it’s not correct. Feminism wants men to become slaves to women; the response however of “I refuse to serve” is to give up slavery, but also give up on civilization itself.

This means that the dysfunction spreads and ultimately you have to live in a more disorganized, less functional and less rewarding society. It’s like spiting your nose by cutting off your ears, or some other self-destructive but seemingly satisfying revenge-activity.

When MRAs demand equality, they are becoming a masculine form of feminism. They want equality for all men, and all women, which leads to a further denial of reality. In reality, no one is equal, remember — just like in the army, a corporation or even a primitive tribe, we all have roles. Equality destroys that.

The mirror image of feminism that MRAs desire will “feel good” for a little while, until they realize they have just empowered feminism and made a mockery of masculinity at the same time:

For the 1st time, Mary Kay has awarded the pink Cadillac to a man.

Jim Cundiff from Garden City, MI was awarded the most coveted award Mary Kay can present to their consultants.

“You’re familiar with the Stanley Cup or the Heisman Trophy, that’s basically what the pink Cadillac represents, I get the privilege to drive this car,” Cundiff said. – KLTV

That’s the face of equality for you. You, too, get the pink cadillac. You, too, get to victim status like a feminist. What don’t you get? A functional society and a role that is specific to men so there is a need for men. Now you’re more equal warm bodies with no particular value whatsoever.

In the end, that’s what equality means: because no one is special, no one is really worth anything. We’re interchangeable parts.

There are two dimensions to life, the human and that of external reality.

When we get neurotic, we consign ourselves to the human and ignore the cause->effect nature of the world outside us.

We can then tell others our judgments, feelings, interpretations and perceptions of events but not see how they come about and how to master them.

Rape is NEVER okay. A deterent yes, but studying the tribe does not warrant rape at all. – Kay, London

Arch-nitwit Kay is referring to the following story in which a skinny hipster and his French girlfriend wandered into the wilds of Papua New Guinea.

There, a tribesman in a “stone-age” tribe took a liking to the girlfriend, who he raped and bit. The skinny hipster decided to intervene and threw a fit, at which point the stone-age tribesman shot him twice with arrows.

The only thing I fault the tribesman for is not raping the skinny hipster.

Primitive societies are not like ours. They did not go through the long passage of evolution whereby we leave the comfortable jungle, go into the frozen north, learn how to make permanent agriculture and how to get along with each other. We develop really intense moral standards.

Unfortunately, we expect others to share those standards… which is not only not fair, but not rational. Those others haven’t gone through the same process. Their societies and their very DNA do not reflect a need for these complex moral codes.

If anything, see them as a previous state of humanity, one we want to evolve from. (I feel the same way any time I go to Wal-mart, or accidentally catch Dancing With the Stars, here in our modern society.)

Women can bluster all they want about who should or should not be raped, but the fact is that much like feral pit bulls attack and eat babies, quicksand draws even nicely-dressed people down, and rednecks shoot African-Americans without caring if they’re college-educated, primitive people just do what their instincts and culture suggest.

This is why a certain Toronto police officer told women to avoid dressing like “sluts.” Don’t dangle raw meat in front of pit bulls; don’t jump into quicksand; don’t hum the dueling banjos theme if you’re a Harvard black man deep in the country South.

Cause and effect. If you walk up to a grizzly bear holding a steak, it may eat you. If you wander into a primitive society with your girlfriend, local custom applies. That means rape, conquest, violence and possible domestic slavery. When in Rome…

Mr Scheurich, a graphic designer from Waikato, New Zealand, who now lives in Melbourne, Australia, was in Papua New Guinea visiting his anthropologist girlfriend.

She was there to study the Febi tribe from the North Fly district as part of her research for her doctorate thesis, when one of the tribesman decided he wanted her.

Mr Scheurich stepped in to protect the woman, but the tribesman retaliated by spearing him with arrows and hitting him in the head with a rock.

Mr Scheurich’s girlfriend endured a sexual assault and was also bitten, cut, scratched and badly bruised in the fracas.

The couple were only rescued after she set off their emergency locator beacon to raise the alarm, the New Zealand Herald reported. – The Daily Mail

Not everyone shares Western values.

Not everyone communicates in the language of civilization, with its laws, morals and judgments.

In fact, civilization makes us weak by making us depend on these things, or maybe it produces goofballs like this guy who thinks going with his girlfriend to contact primitive tribes is a good thing.

Having travelled in Papua-New Guinea in the Mt. Hagen area years ago, people here would not believe how backward the locals are. Stone age would be about right. Mr Scheurich should have been carrying a powerful handgun or rifle and had some locals as paid bodyguards. – B J Deller, Malaga Spain

Our strategy is to deny the world outside of us exists, and then blame it when we don’t get what we want.

That kind of passive thinking could cut your balls off.

I haven’t read this book. I will order it soon enough, because I like the topic:

Sometime in the 18th century, the word equality gained ground as a political ideal, but the idea was always vague. In this treatise, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn argues that it reduced to one simple and very dangerous idea: equality of political power as embodied in democracy. He marshals the strongest possible case that democratic equality is the very basis not of liberty, as is commonly believed, but the total state.

He uses national socialism as his prime example. He further argues the old notion of government by law is upheld in old monarchies, restrained by a noble elite. Aristocracy, not democracy, gave us liberty. – Mises

Who made society comfortable for the rest of us?

Aristocrats.

What are aristocrats?

Nietzsche says they’re the most warlike, vir-laden, powerful and smartest men among us. The beast that tames itself. The creative demon.

Everyone else is sitting around bickering about who got too many turnips, who’s kissing who under the plum tree, and what they’re going to eat, drink or fornicate with this weekend. In short, what you see on Facebook is what’s running through most people’s heads.

Aristocrats are the ones who think toward the future. Our academics and politicians now are wimps in comparison.

To an aristocrat, conflict is inevitable and not to be avoided. For that reason, one must do what is right and ignore those who are offended. Tolerance, feelings, equality, justice, etc. are the whining of those who cannot understand this principle.

The truth of these two axioms only ceased being obvious the day it was desired to base social relations on mutual hypocrisy, when it became necessary to forgive our neighbor’s vices in order to forget our own. And so now the reproach of intolerance has become the most terrible one that can be addressed to any man who, due to the exaltation and affirmation of his own opinions, tends to trouble the customary peace.

From this time forward, any policy that doesn’t benevolently assure that all forms of government are good, the apostle who doesn’t salute the rival religion with good-nature, the critic who refuses to speak of all works with the same banal indifference, all of these will receive nothing but the hatred of their fellow citizens, offended in their repose and tranquility.

It is possible that tolerance is the obligation of he who judges. He who seeks the beautiful wherever it is capable of showing itself can find it in Shakespeare and Alighieri, in Goethe and Rabelais. But wasn’t it Goethe’s duty to admit to be beautiful only that which Goethe saw? And what powerful reason could have incited him to write “Faust’ if he had perceived alongside this poem something of an equal beauty. The artist must be intolerant, just as the philosopher is intolerant, the sociologist is intolerant, and the priest is intolerant.

No being animated by a sincere faith, valiant and forward looking will admit there is a better or even equivalent faith. If he admits there’s a better one, why didn’t he choose it? And if he preferred a mediocre ideal to a superior one isn’t he like a poor madman who casts aside an inestimable perfume in order to satisfy himself with a vague odor? If he conceives of a faith equivalent to his he can only decide to choose by virtue of considerations exterior to that very faith, and in truth he will be without convictions or belief.

Nothing that has been great in this world was founded with tolerance, and sectarians alone have been creators. Can you imagine the fathers of the Catholic church making room for the pontiffs of Cybele and Originus saying to Celsius: “Maybe we’re both right.” Do you see Luther saying to the Pope: “We can come to an agreement,” and the Jacobins of ‘93 murmuring to the émigrés: “Everyone is right.” In the symbolic debate between Queen Atahalie and the young Joas, it’s Joas who is in the right: “He alone is God, Madame, and yours is nothing,” he says. Only our ideal is god, the others are nothing. So every spirit must deny and reject that which makes it suffer and can only admit thoughts that do not contradict its norm. This is the vital condition for its dreams and their realization. – Bernard Lazare, “On the Need for Intolerance”

Tolerance is the cry of the fence-sitter and person who fears injury more than doing what is right.

It is a backward-looking worry, a neurotic fear of the bad things that might happen, instead of looking toward what needs to be done for the future to be better.

Like all things whiner, it focuses more on methods than goals. It is worried that the methods used might hurt or cause offense; in doing so, it ignores the goals.

The West was won by aristocrats who brushed aside such objections, and while everyone else (especially the whiners) sat around keeping their thumbs warm, just did it.

We can learn from such intelligent men.