Don’t major in something stupid

The evidence:

Brought up in a small town in Texas, she graduated from college with a double degree in photography and English before getting a job as a cocktail waitress at a strip club. She then worked as a stripper for four years before finally taking the plunge at 26 and placing an ad offering escort services.

Mmhmm.  I bet if she had gotten a degree in something that wasn’t a liberal art she could have found a nice easy office job that didn’t involve whoring herself out to internet perverts.

Note to parents: don’t pay for college if your kid isn’t going to major in something that is directly translateable to a career.  Don’t listen to anyone who tries to tell you that college is about higher learning and enlightenment.  College is an investment in the future earning potential of the student, nothing more, nothing less.  Oh, except for liberal indoctrination, but you can get that free on CNN and MSNBC.

Double major in two useless majors = whoring yourself out for $250 an hour.

 

Trust in Wikipedia

Quick thought:

Academics are constantly whining about how Wikipedia is untrustworthy.  Science (the magazine) showed that Wikipedia is no worse (nor necessarily any better) than any published encyclopedia collection in hardcover.

It is also a known fact that published papers are just as error prone – most articles, even in peer-reviewed works, can go for months or years before they are overturned because the experiment in question can’t be reproduced independently.  (Watch how I don’t cite my sources – oh no!  Take it on faith?  More like I’m too lazy to find links, google if you don’t believe me).

It is also a known fact that many, many clinical studies are biased, either because the demographic is hand picked, or the methods are improper, or there’s money at stake in the results turning out a certain way, etc.  Clinical studies should always be taken with a grain of salt.  Google if you don’t believe me.

I guess the question is: are academics more worried about a website eating their lunch, or the fact that Wikipedia is in fact wrong?  The nice part about Wikipedia is that if it’s wrong, the person who knows its wrong because they are an academic expert can log on and fix it.

In fact, I think academics, if they care enough to give quotes to press about how Wikipedia sucks, should institute an assignment in their classes wherein students are given a random Wikipedia article about the subject at hand (chemistry, biology, history, etc) and are told to fact check it – and to follow all citations to make sure they’re valid – and correct the page as they see fit.  The professor should then grade the wikipedia pages for accuracy (blah, I know they can change between submission and grading, blah blah, easy to get around).

If Wikipedia is so bad, prove it by finding pages that are wrong, and make it better.  Don’t just sit and whine about how it’s not a reliable source.

You may have heard about Citizendium, which was founded by one of Wikipedia’s founders and is supposed to be like a cross between Wikipedia and about.com where each page is edited only by people with expert credentials in their relevant fields.

It would be nice if Wikipedia had a feature like that as well, such as at the top of the page, people with credentials could sign the page and say, “Yes, I reviewed this and I believe it is true and accurate” and their real life names and credentials would be visibile (an edit to the page would invalidate the signature – an option should be, “View last signed version of this page”).

I think that would be pretty cool, and honestly, not very hard to implement.

Anyway..

RE: 10 questions that every intelligent Christian must answer

I thought I would take a crack at this.  I won’t embed the YouTube video because I hate YouTube in blogs, but I will link the video in case you don’t hate them as much as I do.  I will also transcribe the questions as they come.

Before I even begin, let me just say this, since everyone of course will ask.  I was raised as a Roman Catholic, although far from strictly – I went to church regularly only for a brief period when I was too young to care or for it to have any impact.  The last time I attended church was the day of my Catholic confirmation.  I will say neither that I am a Christian nor that I am not, since  I don’t have the answers.  But I thought I would take a crack at this since this is an example of someone trying to disprove the Christian God, and I’m playing devil’s advocate.

1.  How can (doctors) believe in medical miracles, and how can most Christians believe in the healing power of prayer when it is obvious that God does not answer the prayers of the amputee?  Since I’m smarter than the guy in this video I’ll generalize one step further: why does God answer some medical prayers (which conveniently are also known to be curable through some science like pencilin) but doesn’t answer medical prayers that are known to be untreatable by modern science (such as limb regrowth)?

This “GIIVideo” guy answers this already.  He says, “You have to make some kind of rationalization on God’s behalf such as that God has a special plan for amputees.”  He points this out as if there’s something wrong with that argument, but then doesn’t say what it is that’s wrong with it.  Requiring that God, if he is answering medical prayers, would be required to answer all of them equally is making the exact same kind of rationalization that someone who says that God specifically chooses not to heal amputees is.  The position he’s trying to take here is really this.  Assuming that you believe in a generous and merciful God who answers prayers, don’t you think it’s cruel that he doesn’t answer the prayers of amputees?  In other words, if it were you, wouldn’t you heal them?  A lot of people would say yes, and he’s trying to get you to use your own jugment about whether someone should be healed and agree that God makes the same judgment.  Since He clearly does not, medical miracles in their entirety must be a fiction.  That line of reasoning simply doesn’t hold up.

2.  Why would God be worried about you getting a raise while at the same time ignoring the prayers of these desperate, innocent little children?  It doesn’t make sense, does it?  Why would a loving god do this?

This question itself is making some pretty wild assumptions.  The first assumption here is that God is ignoring the prayers of these desperate little children.  In order for that to be true you’d have to assume that the children are in fact making prayers.  One of the cornerstones of the Christian church has been to convert Godless people to Christianity.  Why?  So that they can be saved through Christ’s sacrifice, right?  A more cynical answer is to put more money in the Vatican’s coffers, which is a fair point by any unbiased historical analysis of the church.  But if you’re going to claim that God ignores prayers of starving children you have to be more specific and say that God is ignoring the prayers only of the children who are in fact praying to a Christian God, right?

You also have to make a second assumption.  That assumption is that God does care about your raise.  I think this director conjured these questions after watching one of those hysterical TV evangelist programs where they claim that if you give them $500 you’ll plant a seed of faith that will yeild lots of money.  The dipshits who watch and believe these programs are often the group demonized as the “religions right” in America.  Anyone who would believe that praying for a raise is actually heeded by God isn’t part of the “educated, rational” audience listed a prerequisite for this video.  This doesn’t prove his point, by the way, this just invalidates his assumption.  This says nothing of the fact that Jesus, in the Sermon of the Mount (one of the few bible passages I’m familiar with) says explicitly not to desire to amass a fortune on earth, and in so doing, you instead amass a fortune in heaven.  If I were a true Christian, I wouldn’t be after a raise.  I’d be after a spiritual raise which can only be done by living a Christian life, which would involve me instead giving what money I had to the starving children in Africa.

The last assumption you have to make in order to field this question is that God’s solution to the prayers of starving African children would be to dump Mana upon them from the heavens (or otherwise feed them).  How do you know that God’s heeding of that prayer isn’t instead a quick death and eternal life in the Kingdom of Heaven?

Again, the director claims that in order to answer this question you have to say that God works in mysterious ways but again offers absolutely no reason why this statement isn’t true.  God does work in mysterious ways.  I think the director is trying to lead us down a path here of assuming that a loving, caring God means a God who answers all prayers, eliminates any and all hardships upon demand, and doesn’t let any mean, nasty, bad thing happen to anyone ever.  I am not a Christian scholar but I do remember that such a place existed: it was called Eden, and things were going fine until the original sinner (EVE) ate the apple.   As a result, we don’t live in Eden anymore, and bad shit occasionally happens, even to innocent people.

Let’s move on.

3.  Why does the Bible have verses in it like: “God demands that we kill homosexuals.  God demands that any girls who aren’t virgins when they are married be killed.  Etc. Etc.”  Every verse he lists is Old Testament.

Because the Bible is as much a cultural record as it is a religious one?  Not to mention that it’s all the Old Testament, and one of the biggest aspsects of the Christian faith is the idea that God sent his only son down to Earth to absolve us of our original sin, and once done, the rules have changed a little (i.e., New Testament?)

Besides, in case you hadn’t noticed, Christians generally believe that you have to be Christian to be on God’s good side, and things like being homosexual or having sex before marriage puts you on God’s bad side.  If you’re on God’s bad side, what does he care?   Oh and by the way, the sabbath day from that passage is Saturday and the sabbath of Christianity is Sunday!  OH NO, better throw out the whole religion right?  Come on.

 Just because you work on the wrong day of the week, you die?  That’s insane!

Insane according to you, perhaps.  Personally, I could be convinced that anyone who tries to merge into the right-hand only lane leading from Darnestown Rd. to Wootton Parkway after the Shady Grove intersection should be killed.  But then again, I have strong fascist tendencies.

4.  Why does the Bible contain so much anti-scientific nonsense?

Ah yes, the classic question.  This single question is the easiest one to use on dumbass college students to make them throw away their religion entirely because it’s so easy.  The director gives a few examples:

God did not create the world in 6 days 6,000 years ago.

This is the standard one.  Most Christians do not believe in a 100% literal translation of the bible (just like every single democrat does not believe in a 100% literal translation of the U.S. Constitution).  They like to use this in a sweeping generalization such as if this isn’t true, then none of it’s true.  But one simple fact remains: you weren’t around 6,000 years ago to see it.  I wasn’t there 6,000 years ago to see it.  And most importantly the people who wrote the bible weren’t there 6,000 years ago to see it.  “But the author of the bible is God!”  No.  The bible is the word of God, delivered through agents of God, but it was not written by his hand.  (was it?  My theology is hazy).  Either way, this one has been beaten to death so many times that it’s time to move on.

There was never a world wide flood that covered Mt. Everest.

Really?  Virtually every culture on the planet has a flood legend.  Maybe not covered Mt. Everest (which was only discovered in the last few hundred years as being the tallest mountain, which is probably what they say in the bible, which at the time probably meant a different mountain since the “world” to the biblical authors really meant mesopotamia).   The story had to come from somewhere.  Even if it never happened, so what?  Again, I don’t have a problem with the bible authors, or even God himself, making up a few stories here and there to illustrate a point.

Jonah didn’t live insdie a fish’s stomach for 3 days.  Why not?  In the 19th century a fisherman on a whaler was swallowed by a great blue and stayed in its stomach for hours and hours and hours and lived to tell the tale (the whale finally vomitted him up at the surface).  This is a historically documented event.  It is possible.  But again, even if it didn’t literally happen, so what?

God did not create Adam from a handful of dust.

God can do whatever he wants.  If He created the universe, then He sure as shit can create a human being out of dust, air, or cow shit if the whim suits Him.  I’ll never understand what part about this belief is so hard for agnostics/atheists to understand, but they use it constantly to try to disprove things like Genesis and evolution.  The very definition of God is a being who sits above nature and is not subject to it.  Therefore, any natural “law” was both created by Him and is breakable by Him.

Let’s move on.

5.  Why is God big on slavery?

This one is slightly tougher since the New Testament does have some slavery references here and there, but you have to remember that our lack of slavery is as much of a cultural parameter as the biblical authors’ proponence of slavery was.  Read some of John Calhoun’s writings about slavery.  Southerners did (and many still do) believe that slavery was the Christian way and was not immoral.  However, God, to my knowledge, posted only 10 hard and fast commandments and slavery was not mentioned as required nor prohibited, so it sounds like he didn’t really have an opinion, right?

6.  Why do bad things happen to good people?

Again, this dufus makes the claim that it makes no sense but he himself can’t justify it, because yet again, he claims that we have to make a rationalization that God is okay with this while at the same time he’s making the claim that he isn’t.  Neither is more valid than the other.  I don’t believe that God’s purpose in the universe as our creator was to make our lives devoid of bad things, even if we’re “good.”  What does me being a good person, or a good Christian, have to do with the probability that myself, or someone I love, will end up getting cancer and dying?  Does God exist to prevent all suffering?  No, quite obviously he does not, or there would be none.  What’s so hard to understand about that?

7.  Why haven’t Jesus’s miracles left any evidence?

“Again, you’ve created an excuse to rationalize it.”  Really?  What’s your excuse in rationalizing that they never happened?  Because there’s no physical evidence?  Of what exactly?  His resurrection?  That is Christ’s greatest miracle.  I’d ask you what possible physical evidence this could have left behind.  If a corpse is dead for 3 days, rises from the dead, and ascends to heaven (directly), that pretty much means that his body is just plain gone.  Wouldn’t that kind of mean there would be no evidence?  The only and best evidence we have is the fact that people say it happened in the bible.  We have just as much evidence that this happened as we do of any other historical fact that is illustrated only through writing.  But somehow, Christ’s resurrection is somewhat less valid when the only evidence is in writing than something more mundane simply because we’ve never seen or heard of anyone else rising from the dead.  But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?  Christ was uniquely the son of God, so he can be raised and no one else ever can.  QED?

8.  How do we explain the fact that Jesus has never appeared to you?

The only way you can even believe that Jesus doesn’t appear to people is to patently refuse to accept the fact that when someone says, “I felt Jesus enter my heart” they are actually telling the truth and there is some validity to the claim.  The people who believe that Jesus doesn’t appear to people will simply never be convinced until it happens to them, and with that close-minded attitude, it never will.

Jesus doesn’t appear as a shimmering ghostly image of a bearded white man in a toga.  It comes from within.  I haven’t personally experienced someone I would identify as Jesus appearing to me, but I have had moments where I swear that something else is at work inside of me.

I think people who even ask this question are so close-minded (despite the fact that if you ask them, they’ll claim to be very open-minded because they approve of same-sex marriage) that they will never, ever experience this.  I pity them.  There’s a lot more to life than what you can see with your eyes or touch with your hands.

9.  Why would Jesus want you to eat his body and drink his blood?

If you do a little reading about this particular thing, some of the apostles don’t even mention this phrasing when they recount the last supper. not to mention the fact that this was, according to Scripture, symbolic then and it’s symbolic now.   I think this is obsessing over a pretty trivial detail.  Next.

10.  Christians get divorced at the same rate as non-christians.

This is where this guy really tips his hand and shows what a dipshit he is.  The problem here is that this bozo hasn’t done enough reading.  God gave people free will.  “If God blesses the marriage that should seal the deal right?”  No.  The quote he quotes is: “What I have put together, let no man put asunder.”  That doesn’t mean no man can, it means no man should, at least, that’s how I see it.  There’s nothing conviluted about the fact that man has free will and by divorcing he is merely disobeying God, not proving that God’s cosmic power is too weak to keep two people legally married.

You will also note that legal marriage does not equal spirital marriage.  In order to be married a second time under God you need to have the marriage anulled which is not the same thing as divorced, and is generally much harder to obtain.

What a dumbass.

The end.

Food for thought

By now most people are also aware of a large movement in leftist America to more or less derail “Christian conservatives” (a.k.a. “evangelicals”) in universities and any/all publicly funded places.

By now most people are also aware that gay marriage (acceptance thereof) is and probably will continue to be an American political talking point until some crazy supreme court justices amend the constitution of their own accord by ruling that it’s illegal for a state to forbid gay marriage.

By now most people are aware of Warren Jeffs, the “prophet” who runs the FLDS church (i..e, fundamentalist mormons) out west where his followers practice (forced?) polygamy.

Where are all the liberals protesting Warren Jeffs’ jail sentencing as religious persecution?  If the worst crime he committed is polygamy, why aren’t they protesting just as hard for Jeffs’ right to marry mulitple women as they are for their own rights to marry within their own genders?

Where are all the liberals protesting the forced dissolution of a religious group by a tax-payer funded, democratically elected United States government on grounds that we disagree with their lifestyles?  Are they all too busy protesting our foreign policy and screaming about Islamic cultural relativism to notice that the exact same thing is happening in their own backyards but in one case it’s OK and the other it’s not?

Maybe if we had just dropped a bomb on the FLDS ranch instead of taking them away in handcuffs we’d see more people crying about it at freedom marches.

The only justification a liberal can sleep well at night with about Warren Jeffs is the alarming and horrific fact that pubescent girls are being “forced” into marriages with 50 year-old men as part of their religion. 

Let’s summarize the liberal view:

• 14 year-old girls who we don’t allow to drive, drink, or vote, should be allowed to make whatever choices they want against the wishes of their families in their communities when it comes to their vaginas and their unborn babies
• Adult men and women who we do allow to drive, drink, vote, gamble, and drive cars should not be allowed to marry multiple partners even if their religion dictates that it is a requirement for entrance into heaven
• Everyone, regardless of their religious inclinations, should be allowed to marry homosexually
• America is free to impose arbitrary values when it comes to “crazy christians” in their own territories
• America should not impose its values on the Muslim world because that would be ethnocentric.  Cultural relativism is the only civilized world view

Where have I gone wrong?  Please correct me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for breaking up the FLDS for the same reasons most liberals are – any group that forces young girls to marry (and be raped by) older men, even ones who may be closely related such as uncles and cousins, should be illegal in the United States regardless of religious views.  The framers of our Constitution made it very clear that federal laws trump destructive religious practices, partly because otherwise religion could be used as an excuse for any behavior, legal or otherwise.  The Mormon church, from which the FLDS claims to have sprung, explicitly states that even though polygamy is legal in their church, it is more important to follow the laws of the nation in which you live than it is to be polygamous.

The problem I have is the total inconsistency in the worldview of most liberals.  If anyone is going to defend anything about terrorist muslims ala Ward Churchill, they should be equally up-in-arms to defend Warren Jeffs because, and this should come as no surprise, the muslim world practices the same cultural forced marriages of girls at puberty that the FLDS does.  But in one case it’s okay to destroy a religion (and really, a culture), and in the other it’s not.  In the case that it’s okay, it’s American citizens we’re talking about, but in the other, it’s Iraqis.  What the fuck?  Oh, but by the way, wiretapping of international calls made by non-US citizens must be illegal and we should close Guantanamo.  What?!!  MAKE UP YOUR MINDS.

The next time you start playing violins for the innocent Iraqis whose culture is a lot closer to Warren Jeffs than it is to your own, think about the FLDS and the fact that you instincitively agree with destroying their culture even though you purport to supporting Islamic culture in the middle east.  At least Jeffs didn’t stone adulterers to death (at least, we can’t prove that in a court of law).

Clinton’s little lies

“I’ll tell you a quick story that I heard in Ohio when I was campaigning there,” she said. “A deputy sheriff told me about a young woman who worked at the pizza parlor there and she worked for minimum wage, she didn’t have any insurance. She got pregnant, went to the hospital — and I don’t blame the hospital. The hospital said, ‘We can’t take any more charity care. You have to give us $100 before we can examine you.’ She didn’t have $100. Went back another time, they told her the same thing.”

This is the story that Hillary tells on her campaign trail.  As it turns out – and as it should come as no surprise – is fabricated.  Let’s read on:

Sen. Clinton said the woman returned a third time “in an ambulance. And they worked hard to stabilize her, and she lost her baby. Then they airlifted her to Columbus to the medical center, and for 15 days they tried to save her life, and she died.”

The fact that this is a heartstrings story that has only partial basis in reality.  The woman was never refused healthcare and, in fact, had health insurance.  The $100-per-visit nonsense has a twist: turns out at one point in the past this woman did not have health insurance, and went to a clinic.  She didn’t pay the bills.  When she came back to this same clinic, they said, “sorry, we won’t treat you unless you pay $100 of your outstanding debt per visit”.  That’s awfully reasonable of the clinic since they would have been justified to deny her flatly until she pays up the entire balance.  You wonder why health insurance is so expensive in this country?  Because clinics like this one ate a loss by treating this woman who never paid the bills.  Women like this one are the problem.  If there were nobody like her out there, (i.e., everyone paid when they visited a hospital), healthcare insurance would be 1/10th the cost that it is today.

As it stands, part of the problem (and I know this because I have family in the industry), is the fact that hospitals are required by law to treat emergencies regardless of the patient’s ability to pay.  Emergency rooms are giant cash cow for hospitals.  They have to charge ridiculous fees in other areas of the hopsital chiefly to cover the ER cost.  No joke.

But I don’t even want to dwell on this.  I want to point out something else:

She got pregnant, went to the hospital — and I don’t blame the hospital…

She got pregnant.  Gee whiz, I wonder how that happened?

Look, if this woman had come down with a rare form of cancer or got hit by a bus in a crosswalk or something, my heart strings would be tugged too.  But of all the examples Hillary picked, she picked this one because she’s trying to appeal to women – her chief constituents – the ones she’s counting on to vote for her – but this example is a mistake.  Notice the phrasing.  “Got pregnant” huh?  Somehow I don’t think Gabriel was involved.  She decided to fuck, got knocked up, and is now dead because she couldn’t afford prenatal care.  Are my sympathies invoked?  Sure… are my empathies?  Not in the slightest.

If you can’t afford neonatal care, don’t get knocked up.  The only birth control that is 100% effective is abstinence, but since Democrats have been trying to put fucking on the same biological necessity level as breathing for the last 25 years, I’m not surprised that idiots who swing left can hear the expression “got pregnant” and somehow internalize this as if it’s something that just happened.

I didn’t start going raw deal on a girl (and raw deal means the pill only) until I new I was, at the very least, financially sound enough to carry the costs of an unexpected pregnancy.  This is the difference between responsible citizens and fucking assholes that drag the rest of society down.  You want to know why communism doesn’t work?  Because Trina Bachtel can’t keep her legs together.  I don’t care if she’s single, married, black, white, smart, dumb, pretty, ugly – if you can’t afford a baby, don’t have one.  If you can’t be certain you won’t have one using birth control, don’t fuck.  If you choose to ignore my advice and lose your baby and/or your life, please do not come crawling to me and ask me to vote for a candidate who will charge me thousands of more dollars per year in taxes to give idiots the freedom to do whatever they want without the risk of any consequences because someone else is footing the bill.

Honestly, I wish someone out there could possibly offer me a sound, sensible reason that the democratic position makes sense.  The two major arguments in favor of this mandatory charity are first that it benefits society and second that it’s the right thing to do.   The best argument I ever hear about “it benefits society” is that “if minimum wage people who can’t afford health care aren’t around, who will do all the jobs that you refuse to do?”  This argument is usually used to support amnesty for illegals, too.  Coming from a democrat this argument is hysterical.  In one breath they condemn a class based society and then use the fact that everyone knows – which is human beings naturally order their society on classes, and we instinctually divide ourselves into them by considering ourselves above other people whether we do it consciously or not – to argue why the wealthy need to give a free ride to the poor.  The second argument, “the right thing to do”, is equally hysterical since most democrats who use this argument on me are at least agnostic and usually atheist, and also have no response when I simply ask how much they personally gave to charity last year.  They’re fine with giving to charity as long as everyone is doing it so the cost to them is minimal.

So, what is it?  What is it about this story – even if it were true, that possibly convinces you to vote democrat?  Are you really that emotional that a weepy tale like this one is enough to open your pockets?

I just don’t get it.

Tested

A lot of people get really bent out of shape when you question anything about who they are or what they do.  A lot of them will also leap at the chance to vigorously defend their position.  The next time you find yourself doing this, ask yourself: who are you trying to convince?

100% of the time, if your first reaction to having any aspect of your life questioned is to formulate a defense, chances are you’re not convinced yourself.

If you really are sure about something, then you won’t need to defend it.  You’ll brush off the criticism without even entertaining the possibility that you’re wrong.  It won’t affect you at any level.  It won’t make you think, because you are already sure that you’re right.

So the next time you feel the need to formualte arguments in defense of something you firmly believe, the person you should work harder to convince is yourself.  Becuase you’re never sure about anything until you’ve had your shit tested enough times to know for sure. 

Interestingly enough, the older I get, the more I realize that there really are ubiquitous truths out there that, once arrived at, need no defense – that is to say, once you realize one of these ubiquitous truths, it falls immediately into this category which, from that moment on, you don’t ever question again.  This is contrary to a lot of the pop nonsense people believe such as truth is relative.  It isn’t.  It’s just much harder to find that it used to be.

Life’s not hard enough

It’s time to take a few minutes away from my “fulfilling job” to “troll” again.  Or something.

I like to read blogs by people whose lifestyles are diametrically opposed to my own for a reason that I would have thought is fairly obvious but obviously not: because the authors  live lifestyles diametrically opposed to my own.  How about that!

I also feel the need, on occasion, to offer a dissenting opinion.  Sometimes the authors read ‘em, sometimes not – I never really care.  This is as much a catalog of my own thoughts on life at the age I currently am than it is a public medium.  I only make it public on the rare occasion that someone might comment and elicit a response, such as this one.

I think my last post made it somewhat clear how I feel about the issue of the two decade spiel as a PUA.  Jack responded on his own blog.  My turn!

First, the assumption that I do the things I do, or that the gist of my post was the suggest that you’ll be financially poor, is wrong.  It doesn’t matter.  Money is a means to an end.  The fact that I own a house has more to do with the fact that I enjoy home improvement more than expensive vacations (part of that number my dad did to me was teach me how to use tools).

The foundation to which I was referring was entirely the kind of things you were talking about: all of the life experiences you are pursuing in your 20′s.

On one hand, you can do what Jack, and many of the authors of the blogs that I criticize, are doing.  You can go against the grain and do all sorts of shit that isn’t in “the blueprint.”  Nothing particularly new about that; people have been doing it for years.

On one hand, you can do what I do, which is more or less follow the mooing herd, to put it in terms you’d be familiar with if you read said blogs.

I don’t spend a great deal of time talking about my own life experiences for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that certain people read this blog, and certain people are known to get irrationally upset about certain activities in which I partook even if they occurred years before I met certain people.  Woah, I must really be whipped, huh?

Sparing the details, I was not, in hindsight, a very decent individual when I was younger (17-21).  I was not a decent individual because I fucked around with girls.

Starting at 16 I had a girlfriend whom I dated until I was 21.  This fact did not stop me from dating other girls.  One of my favorite past times was stringing a girl along to the point where, on more than one occasion, the girl was practically begging to hook up with me.  I would then use the “I have a girlfriend” excuse and snicker to myself that the girl was too easy and then start again with another girl.  I did this five or six times during high school and college and I regret it now.  I also sometimes regret the fact that I didn’t poke any of them, but not really.  Orgasms come and go.

I gave this practice up after I left college because I realized I was just too old for that bullshit.  That, and it was just too easy.  Granted, I never had nearly the kind of one-night success that the masters enjoy – I would work these girls for weeks or months.  About two months ago I was in Florida for my grandmother’s funeral.  She lives on a houseboat in Key West.  Her next door neighbor has a ridiculously hot daughter who works a bar downtown.  I wasn’t out to game her but I caught myself using tactics I used to use back in my college days almost subconciously and it bothered me a great deal.  It bothered me because not only do I have a steady girlfriend, but I thought I was past that bullshit.  After a few hours she wanted me to come back to her boat after her shift.  I was interviewing at the time so I had to pass up the weed but she persisted.  I passively agreed, but I later declined when I met her at Fat Tuesday’s.

Why did I bother telling this story?  To frame the point I’m about to make, of course.

Roosh claims I don’t have the balls to live his life.  He’s right – I don’t have the balls to travel alone in South America for months.  But he’s also wrong.  So is Jack.

Following the blueprint – working that corporate job – settling into that monogamous relationship – getting married – having babies – raising them – is so much harder than not doing it.

How do we know?  Isn’t it obvious?

The very point about all of “life” is that it isn’t easy.  It’s f’ing hard.  Being with the same bitchy woman, who is inevitably going to get fat, and who is inevitably going to love your babies about a million times more than you, is so much harder than even the hardest club pickup.  Everything about what I am calling adult living is just plain harder, and you know it.  Even if you refuse to admit it, you know it.

I realize that it takes a lot more balls to put up with all the responsibilities that adult men undertake and actually pull it off than it does to just disengage entirely and live the free-spirit bachelor lifestyle in which you answer to no one and play by your own rules.  Maybe I like the challenge?

Because I’m sorry, no matter how much you try to convince me that it takes balls to be a pickup artist, you can’t, because it’s just not that hard.  One time I spent 3 hours with a girl watching a Discovery Channel special on the Serenghetti and she told me, quote, “Your words make me so horny.”  I don’t remember what I was talking about, but come on.  I was also 17 at the time.  Are 17 year-old girls any easier?  Pfft.  I don’t think so.  Not that I’ve seen, anyway.  The older they get, the easier they get.

Why would anyone want their lives to be hard?  Well, you guys spend so much time talking about your grand plan of accumulating “experiences” – and that’s fine – it’s merely a matter of which experiences you want to have.  Personally, I’d rather have the ones that were harder to earn.

Naturally, these are opinions.  And they’re opinions that were formed really through nothing other than the fact that the lifestyle blogs I read which champion the game detail the same kind of exploits I used to get real kicks out of about 5 years ago, but things change.  And there’s a very high probability that things will change for you, too, it’s just a matter of when.

I’d like to close simply by saying that a standard exit strategy for any discussion on this topic is always, “as long as you’re happy, that’s the only thing that matters.”  I completely disagree.  Being happy is only one out of several dozen emotions that human beings routinely experience, and if I wanted to be happy all the time, I’d do heroin.  But most people who do heroin don’t grow as individuals.  I have grown exponentially more through my bad times than I have through my happy times.  My happiness is going to be achieved not through a chain of “in the moment” “experiences” that I chain together over the span of a few years while I casually contemplate “getting serious.”  My happiness is going to be achieved by climbing the highest possible mountain I can find and looking down.  I’m not sure myself where the highest mountain is – I’m not sure that I can even see it yet from where I stand – but I can tell you one I’ve already climbed and I can tell you with 100% certainty that it isn’t it.

Kenton Shufflebeam

Note to self: do not name your child something that might be copyrighted by J.K. Rowling.

I can’t decide whether a name like Kenton Shufflebeam was created by a Dungeons and Dragons random name generator for a halfling, or his parents had smoked a whole bunch of crack when they committed to a name like that.

Poor Kenton Shufflebeam, I bet he gets beat up a lot at recess.  Either that, or he fights back with Magic Missiles.

RE: Flipping the Switch

RE: Flipping the Switch

Oh Jack.

I think this post sums up the arrested development of young people that is fetch in the 2000′s.  The typical reaction to this lifestyle shift is “Ooh, wow, you dropped your corporate gig ’cause like, it was sucking your soul and stuff… you’re a rockstar!  Wanna make out?”

My take is this: Jack tried out adult life and decided he didn’t like it, so he decided to return to childhood for a few more years.  Maybe when he’s 29, 32, 36… he’ll decide to engage in adult living again.

Lots and lots of people come to this conclusion.  90% of them “go back to school” and enter some pointless graduate program and fritter away their 20′s not really accomplishing a whole hell of a lot.  Graduate school is the socially acceptable way of saying “I’m not grown up enough to be an independent adult so I need to spend a few more years in the incubator (a.k.a. institutionalized education).”

One of my dad’s favorite expressions is “it’s later than you think.”  It’s not that I don’t understand what drives these people to drop out of adult society to do stupid things like take bit bartending jobs or get useless graduate degrees, it’s just that I don’t relate to it at all.  Look, I spent almost 18 years in institutionalized education.  Our society has more or less prescribed that it takes at least that long for a person to be prepared to function as an adult, and I agree.  Obviously, it varies.  One of my dad’s other favorite expressions is that I was “born at 30.”  I couldn’t wait to get out of bullshit school so I could actually get on with my life.

I wish more or my peers would understand what they’re really doing by disengaging in life by doing things like quitting their jobs.  Yeah, work sucks.  Sitting in an office sucks.  But it doesn’t suck that much.  You know what sucks worse?  Ignoring any and all responsibility until you wake up one day with changed priorities and you break out in a cold sweat because you realize you’re 35 and your prime years are behind you, and you have absoluely nothing to show for it except for some glory stories that nobody at the age of 35 gives two shits about.

What you’re doing with your life, Jack, is pissing it away.  “Oh no Evan, you’re the one who’s pissing his life away sitting in your cubicle lol!  I am grabbing life by the horns and enjoying every minute of every day instead of hating it!”  Maybe – we’ll talk again 10 years from now and we’ll see who has more regrets.

The thing about doing what these guys do - mainly just enough to eek out a living and then party all the time – is that it’s like eating sugar cubes.  It’s great at the time, but when you’re done, you didn’t get anything out of it.  What I’m doing – and others like me who suck it up and sit in the cube instead of pissing away the day at borders and the gym – are building the foundation for the stuff that really matters, which these poor guys won’t realize matters until they’re a decade later and they’ve already wasted so much time, and they will beat themselves up far more than they revel in the good old days.  Or worse – they’ll do nothing but revel.  You’ve met old men who are revelers.  Are they fun to be around?

I guess my point here is that there’s absolutely nothing glorious about quitting a “real” job and getting a bartender gig which gives you the freedom to do a lot of nothing.  The correct adjective to use is tragic.  Because one day, when you decide you want to do something other than tend bars, go to the gym, and score one night stands, you will have to start at 35 instead of 25.  No big deal, right?  They say 40 is the new 30, 30 is the new 20, right?  It’s later than you think.