Anecdote on Takers

So in World of Warcraft we have a guild bank.  It’s like the community chest.  It pays for things like repairing gear.  You can also withdraw supplies from it.

Obviously the bank does not fill itself.  People need to donate items to it.

Over the last 2 weeks, 100% of the donations to the guild bank came from a group of people who like to sit around and make cracks about Barack Obama.  Some of them have voted for him, but none of them are presently pro-Obama.

On the other hand, 100% of the people who withdrew from the guild bank have made pro-Obama statements or have criticized George W. Bush at some point during casual conversation.

The numbers of the two groups are about the same: 5 donated, 6 withdrew.

Life has a liberal bias indeed.

Wrongthink

My new wife is currently undergoing the process of changing her name to mine as a result of our recent marriage.

Not surprisingly, I have been derided that I would be so bold as to ask my wife to change her name to mine.  “She sould keep it,” says she, “or you hyphenate it.”

My retort is simple and obvious.

“If she keeps her maiden name, or includes it as part of a hyphenated, unsustainable 18 letter monstrosity, then she’s simultaneously submitting to patriarchy because her name is her father’s name, not her mother’s.  And it’s even worse, because she’s acquiescing to her mother’s choice in a reproductive mate.  Her father is a nice guy, but suppose he wasn’t?  You don’t get to choose your father but you do get to choose your husband.  So, if a woman is proud of her choice in a husband and proud that she has a choice, the best way to express that is by taking her husband’s name and dropping her father’s.”

Most of the time, jaws drop.  And why?  Because the morons who parrot this anti-patriarchy crap have literally never considered this point of view.  It never even crossed their minds.

It’s not like I’m some kind of genius.  Any reasonably intelligent person could reach this conclusion if they bothered to think about it.  But a lot of people – and of course by people I mean women, since no man has yet gone down this road with me – concluded that taking their husband’s name was one step away from signing a petition to legalize honor killing – and promptly shut off their brains.

Now, again, if you’re thinking – and I assume you are or else you would have stopped reading this already – there are a few followups you might ask me about my response.

First, unsustainability – what does that mean?  Why is hyphenation unsustainable?  Simple really.  Hyphenated last names are something that up until the baby boomers would have been, and were, flatly rejected by husbands.  Sure, some of them got through.  But imagine what will happen when a feminist insists that her child’s last name be a hyphenated combination and raises her child (her daughter) to be a man hating bitch feminist who also strongly believes in hyphenation.  And she marries a pussy man who was also raised in a household where mommy wore the pants and he too has a hyphenated last name.  What, prey tell, will they do with theirs?  Jones-Green-Smith-Brown?  Next time it will be 8 names, by the way.  This hyphenation nonsense grows exponentially.  After ten generations, a hyphenated last name could include over one thousand discrete last names.

Try signing a receipt with one of those.

“But Evan!  The Spanish already do that!”  Yes they do, but Spanish last names are finite.  You can get away with it when there are only 10 last names in your entire language.  Obviously if a Garcia-Lopez marries a Lopez whose children marry Garcias you don’t have this problem.

The counter-idea that people come up with is the concept of both man and woman inventing a new last name that might be a shortened combination or something entirely new that both the man and the woman change their name to.  This is actually not a bad idea in theory, but it would only work in a diseased society like ours in which familial bonds mean shit.

The entire concept of a family name was invented so that kinship – blood relations – could be derived through nomenclature.  The modern west doesn’t have a strong need for that because most people who would even consider doing this don’t really care much about their parents, many of whom are probably divorced.  Since the families they get their names from are either broken or inconsequential because they hate them, it’s not a stretch to propose changing a name.  Since we have DNA tests and population sprawls, we don’t have to worry about accidentally reproducing with our blood relatives, another function that family names served.

On paper it sounds good and like it might work, but I would be willing to bet that if everybody who got married simply invented a new family name that may or may not be anything like either of the spouses’ names, the world would get very confusing in a hurry because it would rapidly become impossible to keep track of families.

Of course, the counter-patriarchy argument would go like this: the world already loses track of girls.  Once they take their husband’s name, they lose the name connection to their families and become part of his.  Guilty as charged.

But here’s what I describe as wrongthink.  If you can agree that it is impractical to hyphenate last names and that it’s a generally good idea to have some kind of lineage connection in family names, you’re left with only two choices: the woman takes the man’s name or the man takes the woman’s name.

Now, it is easy to understand why our tradition is that the woman takes the man’s.  Men generally owned the property and spent more time out of the house.  Feminists hate this legacy because it’s different today than it was then.  They cannot fathom that any woman who lived before women had the same rights or whatever that they do today could have ever possibly enjoyed their lives because feminists define their entire way of thinking based on some arbitrary concept of fairness they’ve invented for themselves which causes them to judge every aspect of every male-female relationship as being biased for or against women.  When women get the short end of the stick it’s tantamout to the holocaust but when men get the short end – even if it’s egregiously so – they are as silent as the grave.

In today’s world, when a wife takes her husband’s name she is appealing to tradition.  And to a feminist, that is simply not a good enough reason.

I have never read Gulliver’s Travels because I already understand the point I’m about to illustrate using it as an analogy, but if you don’t, read it. In Lilliput, a war has broken out between two nations based on how they serve their hard-boiled eggs: big end down, or small end down.

We could argue all day long about the merits of either, and in fact the Lilliputians do, often violently.  But in the end, as is the point of this story, the choice is completely arbitrary.

Now we can debate the merits in the marriage name, but I won’t bother because my arguments are not definitive nor globally applicable.  I married a woman who would immediately start looking around the house for my lost balls if I had even suggested that she do anything other than take my name because she relishes the biomechanics of the male-female relationship, not fights against them.  But there are women out there who don’t and while I don’t agree with them I at least acknowledge that their opinion on the subject - and I stress the word opinion – is as good as mine or my wife’s.

So coming to no real factual argument either way, were I to argue in favor of “patriarchal” naming, I would have tradition on my side.  In other words, look, whether it’s the woman’s name or the man’s name is somewhat irrelevant because we’re both equal parties coming into the relationship right?  So we just have to pick one.  She might as well take my name because that’s what our culture has always done and changing it for the sake of changing it will just confuse people and raise eyebrows.

The real wrongthing here is railing against tradition because it’s traditional.  A lot of the time, the tradition is as good of a reason as any other and in many cases there is a very good reason that we have collectively forgotten or only a few of us are clever enough to figure out.

I strongly suspect that people who bitch about “traditional values” and tradition in general were raised with parents who answered “why” with “because I said so.”  It’s easy to rebel against blindly accepting certain traditions without question when you have a lifetime backlog of unanswered questions.  “Because I said so” – particularly when a parent utters it - is a memory that warps in adulthood into an effigy of the irrationalism of the previous generation and by extension, all generations before it.  If a parent can’t or won’t explain to a child why something is done or should be done in a particular way, then the child assumes it’s because there is no good reason and therefore they are free to invent their own reasons.  Only very smart children take the initiative to find those answers and are successful.  The not-so-bright ones don’t bother or can’t, so they become anti-traditionalists.

Yes, I claim that people who flatly reject appeals to tradition are not-so-bright.  This has been my overwhelming experience.

Now, naturally, all young people have a certain amount of this built in.  Our culture, and therefore our species itself, can’t progress if nobody is willing to question how things were done.  But as young people become older people, enough time passes that they either see their own cultural experiments crumble in front of them (e.g., feminism, hippy-ism, communism) or they are given enough time to think about some of the cultural ideas they rejected in youth.  Many people who claim to reject their parents’ teachings wind up repeating their parents’ words to their own children verbatim and then realize only then that their parent were right all along.  Life experience has a funny way of vindicating those who had those experiences before.  I’ve always felt that it’s foolish to ignore people – especially people who have no good reason to lie to you – when they are trying to warn you about the dangers on the road ahead.  They’ve walked that road before.

But then again, I’m a conservative.

China – At least one generation off

So many assholes utter phrases like the following:

 ”China is going to be the next superpower!  The US will be China’s bitch in 15 years, once they develop!”

Mmhmm.  Most of these assholes don’t know any actual Chinese people.  They may know Chinese people who are ethnically Chinese, have Chinese parents, and maybe have even emigrated to the United States, but these people are a far cry from actual Chinese people who currently live in China and do not plan on leaving.  In otherwords, Chinese people.

If you spend 5 seconds thinking about it, even the most feeble minded among us could divine that perhaps the people who left China for the US did so for a reason.  The reason is usually because these people are smart, and having actually lived in China and actually know what it’s like, both culturally, economically, and politically, can appreciate the problems China has, and it has them in all three categories.  So these people leave China and come here – usually for better economic opportunities.

And ultimately, when people talk about “super-power” status, they typically mean economically, because everything follows from there.  The United States has a ridiculous edge on military technology over the rest of the world and it does because it has spent many trillions of dollars on research and development, much to the chagrin of whiney liberals everywhere.  If we didn’t have trillions of dollars to spend on research and development, we wouldn’t have spent trillions of dollars on research and development and we would not have the military might we have today.  Ipso facto, when we talk about the power balance in the world what we’re really talking about is money, because as is my mantra, money talks and bullshit walks.

People are simple creatures and they respond to stimuli.  They seek pleasure and avoid pain.  Money accomplishes both of those goals.  Since governments are staffed with people, it only makes sense to personify governments the same way.

Okay, tangent over.

I work with Chinese people in a professional business capacity.  In other words, I work with Chinese outsourcers directly.  90% of the e-mail I receive at work is correspondence with a foreign team of developers that I oversee as the project technical leadership.  I want to illustrate an aspect of Chinese culture that I have recently become acquainted with first-hand that will serve to prevent them from competing with American culture and therefore with America in any other capacity.

Recently, a young developer who I work with attempted to challenge me technically.  As you can probably imagine he was demonstrably wrong on every single point he tried to make from a technical perspective, and as you can also probably imagine, businesses cannot function unless the staff respects the authority hierarchy of the decision making process, namely, even if I’m wrong I am allowed to be wrong, because in our authority hierarchy, my boss holds me responsible for my work and their work, as his does his.  If I shoot myself in the foot by being an idiot, it’s my boss’s job to correct me.  But in the meantime, if he doesn’t support me and lets my junior walk all over me in public (i.e., in an e-mail chain privy to the entire team), then I can’t function as a technical authority.  Long story short, it’s a battle he could not possibly win.

So, he stepped on a giant land mine and was surprised when it blew up in his face.  Namely, he was publicly embarassed in front of all his peers.  Not only did I prove that he was wrong definitively, my boss got involved and called him out, again, publicly, to the tune of asking him how he could presume with a whopping two years of experience under his belt he could challenge the senior staff technically.

Nobody likes to be embarassed.  So he sent out an angry e-mail to his personnel manager (e.g., HR in China) declaring boldly that he quit.  We found this out, of course, because we have a spy on the States side who is also Chinese and speaks with the rest of the team from time to time in the native tongue and gets good gossip.

Two weeks later, he comes back with his tail between his legs, and acts as if nothing happened, pretending that he never declared that he quit and supposing that we would simply forgive him for going entirely incommunicado for two weeks while we’re busy facing a deadline.  My boss’s boss has already told HR over there to get rid of him.

Now, I’m not saying that an American would never have done that.  In fact I know people who have done things like that.  But there’s subtext to this story that my Chinese-American spy shared with us.  And that is this.

The kind of job my company offers to Chinese citizens is so desirable that in China they have declared workers in this industry to be “golden collar” – a step above white collar.  The guys on my team are not particularly attractive Chinese men.  Most of them are barely five and a half feet tall and are absolutely average.  But you should see the girls these guys score.  They are the hottest girls in Shanghai, which is the hottest city in China.  One of the more senior guys over there who’s actually a couple years older than I am recently married a solid 10.  I was impressed.

This guy who didn’t want to take my bullshit – a common attitude among young men in general – had to swallow his pride and make peace not because he wanted to score hot chicks, although I’m sure the thought crossed his mind; giving up a job that literally hundreds of people are lined up behind him trying to get is pretty damned stupid and unattractive.  He did it because quitting a golden collar job in China would shame his family.  I know what you’re thinking.  Intellectually you understand that and might even respect it a little bit.  But the idea of an American male submitting to another man for no other reason than because his family would make hiim feel bad about it when they found out is so emotionally repulsive to every successful man with testosterone in his veins that it would very rarely, if ever, actually happen.  If the American son gives up his job because, in his mind his bosses are all assholes, his family doesn’t shame him, they congratulate him for not putting up with bullshit and help him find a new job.

This is an example of the kind of cultural difference between the east and the west that will make it difficult for the east to compete with the west.  The cultural ideals over there favor holding people back and conforming while the cultural ideals over here favor independence and excellence.  In some respects the eastern cultural philosophy probably leads to more happiness overall since conformity is vastly easier to achieve than meteoric success, but as far as culture vs. culture goes, the culture that favors competition both within and without is going to be better at competing.

This stuff is so simple that even a child can understand it.  And this is why I am against socialism and “helping people.”  I prefer to live in a culture where we expect people to help themselves, because people are at their best when they are competing against the world and against each other.  Anything that motivates a person to work harder or better, with as few negative side effects as possible is a good thing.  We call this “healthy competition.”

Eventually, I see the world coalescing into a single dialectual culture, where it’s all mostly the same with slight variations - accents, if you will – kind of like Western Europe.  I think we’re at least a dozen generations away from that.  But as globalization increases and cultural exchange continues at the internet pace, we’ll see this effect occur faster and faster.  Humanity will pick the good traits from everywhere and drop the bad ones.  In that sense, while human biological evolution has probably reached its termination, human cultural evolution has just been rapidly accelerated.  And although it’s hard to observe at such a macro scale, we, as a species, are always trying to optimize our own culture by using what works and dropping what doesn’t.  As each new technological shift happens, new things start to work and new cultural patterns emerge.  We experiment.

So I say that China is at least a generation off because their traditional values will still hold them back.  This guy, if he does manage to stay employed with us, will always be in the back seat for as long as his career here lasts; if he didn’t have family pressures preventing him from taking a healthy risk and starting somewhere else with a clean slate, he might find himself in a position where he is the smartest one in the group and winds up a boss himself in a few months.  His potential is being stifled by his culture.  In time, this will change – these people that I work with are working for an American company with American values and some of them will rub off.  Their children will be raised more western than their parents.  This will continue.

But until it reaches critical mass, I think it will be hard for the Chinese, and therefore China, to truly compete until their culture catches up to the rules of the game.  In time, their communist government which exists only because of the cultural value of conformity will fail once it is no longer an acceptable reflection of their culture.  Watch for that.  A crack has already formed in the dam, but until it spills over, America is safe in its top position.

California Sucks

I’m just going to come out and say it.  The only reason people live in California is because it has beautiful weather.  That is what makes California what it is.  If you somehow airlifted California and dropped it on top of Saskatchewan, leaving everything else intact, people would flee the state en masse because it’s a crappy state to live in.

I have always been skeptical about people who move to a place because of its weather.  The reason is simple.

Suppose you’re an archaic homo sapiens, say, circa 900,000 years ago.  Your middle eastern stomping grounds are getting kind of crowded and you’re an ambitious young buck who wants to be the chief of your own tribe.  Why not?  The chief always gets the hottest tail.

East?  Nah.  Persian gulf.  West?  Nah.  Mediterranean Sea.  South?  Nah.  People live there.  North?  Sure!  That sounds good.

Except the farther north you go, the farther into Europe you go.  And guess what?  It’s freaking cold in Europe, and cave bears who literally stand 12 feet tall live in all of the caves.  If you’re a half-wit, you’re going to either freeze to death or get eaten by a cave bear.  It’s harder to live in cold places.  I argue that if the entire world had the climate of California, we would still be living in caves because there would never be any incentive to progress any further.  You aren’t going to freeze to death and there’s food growing on trees year-round because it’s sunny, warm, and 75 degrees for 350 out of 365 days per year.  Nothing inspires creativity and ingenuity like otherwise inevitable starvation and hypothermia.

You’ll note, mind you, that most of the people who start enormous businesses that everybody has boners for like fucking Google were started by people who emigrated to the state from somewhere else because they were sick of winter.

I’m not going to deliver a littany of all of California’s problems; you know what they are.  I will instead share with you a brief anecdote: my college buddy who hails from Capetown, South Africa moved out to California with a girl who grew up about 10 minutes from where I currently work on the east coast (although her family came from Boston).  They love the weather.  They live near fucking Google’s offices.  But she is now pregnant and they are seriously talking about moving back to the east coast.  Obviously, part of it is so that she can be close to her mother.  But the biggest part is the fact that they have no chance in hell of buying real estate in California.  Combined, they probably make about the same or slightly more than my wife and I do.  But we own a house and they own shit.  They complain about the taxes and they don’t want their children going to school with classes half full of illegals who don’t speak English.  She is a raging liberal, by the way, and they both voted for Obama.

Despite the reality of California, Time recently posted this bullshit.  To quote:

Its voters approved huge bonds for stem-cell research, high-speed rail and repairs to aging infrastructure while Washington was dragging its feet; its politicians adopted first-in-the-nation greenhouse-gas regulations, green building codes and efficiency standards for automobiles and appliances that have rearranged the national energy debate. Yes, it was also an early adopter of subprime mortgages — Countrywide, Golden West and IndyMac were all California-based — but life on the frontier has always been risky.

This paragraph is trying to make it sound like California is cutting-edge and that these supposed pros are actually a good thing.  Stem-cell research?  How is that good?  Greenhouse-gas regulations?  When your children are laughing at you for being so fucking retarded that you actually believed in global warming, remember that you read this blog and if only you had listened to me you wouldn’t have elected some assclown who raised your energy bills by 25% so you could pay for an imaginary solution to an imaginary problem.

And of course, the coup de grace of this piece: yes, our companies fucked the entire nation with subprime mortgages, but “life on the frontier has always been risky.”

What the fuck.   What frontier?  The pacific ocean?  Give me a break.  So when California adopts bullshit expensive legislation that does nothing but bankrupt them they’re leading us with steady,  sage-like wisdom and carrying the torch for the nation’s progress, but when its companies play a huge part in throwing the entire world into a recession, we’re supposed to chalk it up to the romantic notion of the wild wild west?  You’ve got to be kididng me.

Normally I wouldn’t give a shit because blaming a U.S. state for problems caused by companies that are headquartered there is fucking stupid, but the author of this propoganda turd does so fully in trying to establish how great California is because fucking Google has its offices there and Steve Jobbs invented the iPhone in San Francisco.  It works both ways, jack ass.

The 1855 book The Land of Gold dismissed it as “lawless, penniless and powerless.”

The author of The Land of Gold – yes, we underline book titles – was a prophet.  See?  Some ideas stay relevant for a very long time and don’t require “progress” to correct.  Another example of this would be the United States Constitution.  Lawless?  If immigration is the standard, then check.  Penniless?  Who would deny that?  Powerless?  Debatable.  But money talks and bullshit walks, so no matter how sunny it is in the Sunshine State, if California’s coffers are empty and its checks bounce, then no one will care what “California” thinks.

TIME published a woe-is-California issue called “The Endangered Dream” in 1991 after the aerospace industry collapsed.

But of course.  TIME was wrong then, but now it’s right.

But even with 12% unemployment, California still has an enviably young and productive workforce.

It’s amazing what happens when millions of Latinos flee the stinking shit holes they were unlucky enough to find themselves born into and grab on to the sides of trucks heading north to wind up in a slightly less stinking shit hole where they can collect free services and become parents of American citizens and therefore virtuall undeportable simply by having unprotected sex.

There’s only so many lawns that need to be cut and so much trash that needs to be picked up.  That young productive workforce is unskilled labor that quite frankly we can do without.  The only reason California gets away with it is because these people are illegal and they get paid under the table.  If California’s young, productive workforce were legal and then tried to compete with China’s young, productive, and massively cheaper workforce on unskilled labor such as manufacturing, they’d get their asses kicked.

When it comes to energy, California is not just ahead of the game; it’s playing a different game. Its carbon emissions per capita are less than half the U.S. average. And from 2006 to ‘08, it attracted $3 of every $5 invested in U.S. clean tech — five times as much as the No. 2 state. It’s by far the national leader in green jobs, green patents, supply from renewables and savings from efficiency. It’s also leading the way toward electric cars, zero-emission homes, advanced biofuels and a smarter grid: its electric utilities plan to install smart meters in every California home.

Bwahahaha.  Total waste of time and money.  This just makes an already expensive place even more expensive.  And you wonder why California is bankrupt?  Not, of course, that there is a direct correlation between its budget woes and it’s green industry – I’m sure there isn’t – but this kind of senseless and stupid government regulation is merely a symptom of a deeper problem – a legislation prone to believe in stupid things and voters prone to elect stupid people who also believe in stupid things themselves.

This public-sector foresight has created alluring opportunities for the most tech-savvy private sector on earth. The venture capitalists behind the high-tech and biotech booms see clean tech as the next big score.

This is called milking a fad for all it’s worth.  Liberals hate the rich.  This is what the rich do.  They play on the public’s mass stupidity, make a fortune selling them stupid shit they don’t need, and then laugh all the way to the bank in their 16 cylinder 8mpg hogs with supermodels bobbing on their dicks.

But the state’s business culture fetishizes long-shot ventures and game-changing ideas. Failure is appreciated, not stigmatized, and an entrepreneur without a few busted start-ups on his résumé is almost suspect.

Where do I sign up?

I need to stop.  TIME magazine will probably sue me if I keep quoting their bullshit story about bullshit California.

Ugh.

So Misguided

This post should have been titled How to Date a Pussy.

It’s hard to find anything on the internet that makes me gag harder than blogs written by feminists.  2 girls 1 cup is appealing after reading this drivel.

Read it for yourself.  It’s full of lulz.  Here’s some of the quips that caught my attention:

…but my mother never taught me how to test a guy for closeted sexism or male supremacy.

Assuming you know who your father is, that’s because your mother is a married woman who convinced a man to sleep with her and rear you.  We men play by many feminist rules such as no-fault divorces, and as a result we are extremely cautious.  Knowing the consequences of marriage, a woman who even hints that she might be a feminist is a giant red flag.  It means, “I’m a feminist and I agree with feminist ideology such as total denial of gender differences, insufferable demand that men see things my way without ever returning the favor, and legal double standards re: division of property.  If I get bored of this marriage I’ll wage-slave you because I can’t make the same amount of money that you can, but I want the lifestyle you can provide and p.s., we’re equal.”

Here’s a tip, young lady: if you want a quality man that you will still find sexually attractive after you’ve run out of Jane Austen novels to critically discuss, get one who you think might beat you if you pissed him off enough.  Drop this feminism immediately or die alone with your cats.

in the UK where I’d guess that most of the sixth form (junior and senior year equivilants) would vote Labour, or Liberal Democrat. My history teacher has the “Encyclopedia of Feminism” on her desk, and the guys in my classes *MOSTLY* accept that most of the female population of the sixth form is (or is ALMOST) feminist…

Just one more example of where Britain is headed.  Britain will be a Sharia state by 2100.

I have found that men who are generally fair and honorable to be very open to thinking about and understanding things from a feminist point of view. They may not have thought about it much before meeting me, but once I pointed out some very unfair things in society’s treatment of women, they were quick to agree and to look for those things themselves, a lot of times offering valuable insight, or things I haven’t considered before.

You date men who listen to Coldplay, dabble in Buddhism, and wear scarves that match their outfits.  You cook vegetarian meals together and they prefer cats to dogs.  You probably cheat on them.  Am I right?

I think feminism is really, at the core, about freedom and fairness, and any man or woman who has that kind of moral tendency will be open to learning and growing.

Except when it comes to divison of property and reproductive rights, in which women typically get the house, the children and more than half of the money, and in which a pregnant woman is allowed to kill the baby without the man’s consent.

I am married to a pretty good guy, but since I’ve gotten more feminist, he’s been quick to find the “flaws” in all the feminist ideology. I know he’s a critical thinker and that’s part of it, but it’s frustrating that he can’t seem to step beyond his gender and reason on my terms.

They’ll be divorced in 5 years.  If she hasn’t screwed other men, she’ll start, unless by “finding flaws” the OP means “hits me across the face.”

But, I think that its easy to make some important observations based on his hobbies (is he associated with a fraternity – if so, what type is it? does he drink a lot? how does he act around other women? Does he let you speak? Does he respond positively to your opinions? Is he respectful of what you want to do (especially sexually)? I would drop some *hints* about your political leaning, about your interest in women’s rights – see how he responds. etc,etc,etc.

If you need to conduct an observational study of your boyfriend to know these things, you should break up immediately because you know nothing about each other and are wildly incompatible.   

Evan Maxim #1: If you’re a liberal, date a liberal.  If you’re a conservative, date a conservative.  If your fundamental worldviews are not compatible, you will never work.

Does he compliment your body more than your thoughts? What are his political leanings? What are the lyrics to his ten favorite songs (do they denigrate women)? What are his ten favorite books (hint: if it’s that sci-fi author with the rapist space captain protagonist, run away!)? What are his views on religion (interpret as you will)?

Divorced.  A man who compliments his wife’s thoughts more than her body will turn his marriage into a sexless one.  Women who claim that they don’t want to be complimented on their body are totally full of shit.  Don’t believe me?  Try this simple experiment.  Go one month in which you frequently tell your woman she’s hot.  Then go one month in which you never say a word about her appearance but tell your woman that she is a deep thinker with ground-breaking, world-changing ideas.  Tally up the number of times you have sex in each month vs. the number of times she cries each month.

Luckily, I do have some older or more mature male friends who are well educated and have been taught by their mothers and female friends about what it talkes to have real relationships with girls, and who will ALWAYS speak out against sexism.

Beta chumps.  They’ll be friends forever and never hump you because they don’t make you horny.  I bet at least one of them is gay.

Dating, for me, is kind of a minefield at the moment, but I think that has a fair amount to do with how uncomfortable I am with my body. (I know, I know, everyone should be able to love their body, and I’m getting there, I think.)

Your body doesn’t matter.  A man should love you only for your mind, right?  Wait, is this another fellow sister placing value on her physical appearance?  Shame on her.  Get your fingers ready girls, it’s time to give this poor uninformed psuedo-feminist such a pinch!

there is this 4 year dating isolation that makes you feel like you will never meet anyone who shares your views.

No man actually shares your views, he just pretends to so he can get your pants off and you believe him because you’re stupid.

Thankfully being younger many men in our generation are more open to feminism and equality. There is nothing wrong with being completely blunt about, like “feminism is something that is really important to me and I really believe in equality” and see how he responds.

If he walks away, marry him.  If he agrees with you, ask him for fashion advice and set him up with other boys.  Boys are often more open to feminism and equality because purporting otherwise will get them tarred and feathered by the indoctrinating witches staffing the schools.  Once these boys become men, find their balls, escape the domination of these zeitgesting crones, and discover that everything they were ever told about gender relations and female equality is a bold faced lie, they will no longer be open to feminism and equality.  When they watch how the girls in the clubs melt for alpha players and completely snub the losers who still think girls want weak feminist men, they’ll learn fast or die virgins. 

If tells inappropriate jokes, if he’s patronising, etc. I call him out on that.If he stops and maybe takes on board some of the things I say, then he’s welcome to stay, if he doesn’t then he’s not worth my time.

Witnesses to the birth of a cat lady, all of us.  This woman will hit 35 and her dying ova will finally convince her to drop this bullshit and settle for that guy who still lives in his mother’s basement because he’s the only one as desperate as she is.

I dated a guy for a few months who didn’t get my “feminist” thing. He was also from a South American country where the machismo culture is much more ingrained. So be it. The relationship didn’t work out, but there’s nothing wrong with tolerating someone whose views on the sexes don’t line up exactly with yours, as with any other issue. It doesn’t mean they’re a date rapist. You’ll also learn a lot about the “other side” and maybe pass along your own enlightened ideas.

He had a big cock and he made her horny.  They had a lot of sex.  He dumped her.

To my knowledge I am the only male feminist in my year in high school.

Hanging, drawing, quartering for this traitor.

Of course, you could just shout “I LOVE ABORTION” really loudly somewhere and see who comes to talk to you.

Every man who wants to fuck you bare and never call again, resting assured knowing that you’ll abort the result at Planned Parenthood without costing him a nickel.  He’ll even save on condom fees and probably give you herpes.

I can relate, I find myself wondering all the time – is my boyfriend sexist?

Are you attracted to him?  If so, the answer is yes.  If not, dump him and find a sexist.

As a man just let me say that there are many pro-feminist college age men (I am one of them). It’s my belief that relationships can most definitely work between feminists and men; however, it has been my anecdotal experience that feminists who have bad experiences with relationships tend to still subscribe to an older (and rather un-feminist) model of dating in which the woman waits for the man to make the first move, and here’s just a helpful hint, the guy’s who are going around hitting on girls like crazy probably aren’t the equality-friendly men that you’re looking for…

Translation: no matter what these so-called feminists say, as a beta pussy who tries to play the open-mindedness card to score with chicks, I find that girls don’t live up to the hype and still expect the man to pursue them like a raging beast on a hunt and they probably buzz their clits off while fantasizing about safe rape.  The guys who are going around hitting on girls like crazy aren’t the equality-friendly men you’re looking for but you bang them at parties anyway because they have the balls to chase you and that’s exactly what your inner woman desires.

And it’s an unfortunate truth that, all ideology aside, relatively few women in modern society (feminists included) seem to have truly embraced a modern model of dating.

To quote the great modern philosopher king Roissy, biomechanics is god.

I guess for me, it helps that I am incredibly picky when it comes to men. I won’t be even remotely attracted to someone who reeks of chauvinism, and if someone who I previously found attractive drops a sexist, racist or homophobic comment, they are automatically out.

In other words, you want to die alone.

…honestly, the only guys I know my own age who aren’t complete chauvinistic pigs are the gay ones.

QED.

But I did talk to him about my political views before we got together, and was pleased to find him as politically liberal and skeptical of bullshit as I was.

You can’t be skeptical of bullshit and remain a liberal or a feminist, two of the biggest bullshit ideologies on the market today.

Beware of chivalry. In my experience men who open doors and insist on paying for things and seem like “gentlemen” don’t want an equal – they want some kind of pet. The feminist men I know are the ones who want to go 50/50 on a meal out and expect the door-opening to work both ways (sorry).

What do women who demand alimony payments want, other than alimony payments?

Even though we didn’t always agree, and even though it took me FOREVER to explain to him that THE PATRIARCHY IS REAL AND IT’S ALL AROUND US, he was always trying. He really wanted to understand where I was coming from.

He really wanted you to shut your freaking mouth about it so you could blow him.  A man can only listen to a harpy whine about partiarchy for so long.  Does he cum on your face?

I have prided myself on being an independent girl with a number 1 no boyfriend rule because it just complicates my life and males just don’t respect my ideals

Is it worse to be dependent or lonely?

…and especially if you can have discussions with him about feminist issues before you start actually dating him, you’ll be at a real advantage. Must better than going on a date with a misogynist pig who treats you like some sort of “prize” and not realizing it beforehand.

Much better to go home out half the cost of the meal with a dry vagina then full of free food and horny.

As a woman who is happily married to a very strongly pro-feminist guy (I’m typing this as he is cleaning up the kitchen – it’s his turn because I made dinner!), there is some good advice on here so I won’t repeat it.

The single simplest piece of advice I can give you is to watch out for any of these words or phrases.

“Such-and-such woman is crazy/shrill/hysterical/emotional/irrational/psycho/stalker/needy”

Translation: I make my cuckold husband eat my lover’s load out of my vagina and wear panties while he does chores.  Like me, he completely denies reality.  When he says anything negative about me or women in general, regardless of how true it is, I anally penetrate him with a strap-on and make him admit that he wants the real thing.

“X is frigid/lesbian” – 99% of the time this means ‘that bitch refused to shag me’. It means he can’t gracefully accept a woman’s right to reject him, and again, he believes his right to be with her trumps her right to turn him down.

At one point in the history of your genetic lineage, your ancestor was the result of a man exercising his right to be with a woman bceause he’s bigger and stronger.  You exist because a man’s right to have a woman trumps a woman’s right to turn him down.  Men invented rape laws because we are better people than feminists who, if the shoe were on the other foot, would not enact the same laws.  I know this for certain because feminists wrote divorce laws and the no-fault divorce is the closest thing to male-victim rape in this country and the feminists actively sought it and successfully made it legal.

So Much for That…

Alfred Nobel must be spinning in his freaking grave.

The Nobel Peace Prize?  SERIOUSLY?

Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize after being a U.S. President for 8 months without accomplishing a single thing abroad.

I am literally speechless.

In one fel swoop this committee has destroyed the prestige of all Nobel prizes awarded from this point forward.

Are you really so sure?

So, every year, my company hosts a flu shot clinic in the lobby.  And every year, assholes – mostly stupid middle aged women – insist that I need to get my flu shot, and that only fools don’t get flu shots.

Of course, when I ask them how they possibly survived when they were my age (before the flu shots were invented), they give me a blank stare.  They say that they got sick.  I ask for dates, and they can’t give me any – mostly because it either never happend, or what’s more likely, it was so inconsequential that they couldn’t remember the year or the month in which they got a flu they wish they could have avoided if only the magic of flu shots had existed in their heyday.

I have never, nor will ever, get a flu shot.  And now it turns out that you’re twice as likely to get swine flu if you get one.  “The flu” is not fatal (unless you’re an infant or circling the drain).  Swine flu can be.  Who’s the risk-taker now?

UPDATE: Girl’s life ruined by flu shot.  Sometimes I hate being right all the time.

If all of our scientific discovery over the last 100 years has taught us anything, it’s how little we know.  Wasn’t it Plato who said if I am genius it is because I know how little I know?  Socrates maybe?  Aristotle?

At the turn of the last century, the head of the U.S. Patent Office was quoted as saying that he doesn’t think it’s likely that we’ll see too many more patents because everything that can be invented has already been invented.  We look back at the absurdity of that statement and laugh and laugh and laugh.  However, that does not stop people from jumping on a bandwagon, like the flu shot, which has more questions than answers, and assert with authority that they are a necessity of modern life.

The same is true about global warming.  I watched in horror, my jaw agape, as some shit-for-brains from CNN International said with a straight face that Greenland’s ice sheet has been shrinking over the last ten years and that must mean that the planet is doomed.  Everybody knows about the ice age – you know, the one that ended about 15,000 years ago.  A lot of people don’t realize that there were 9 or 10 ice ages before the last one – indicating that we are in a cyclical glacial-interglacial period whose time scale is approximately 30,000 years.  Based on timescales like that, you’d have to be a total idiot to think that observing anything over a period of 10 or even 100 years tells us anything at all.  Keep that in mind when you pay Obama’s carbon credit tax on your heating bills this winter.

As it turns out, flu shots, too, are possibly a double edged sword.  Is it only now that we discover this?  Is it only 25 years from now when we find out that there’s a statistically significant increased chance of dying from pneumonia beyond the age of 60 if you took seasonal flu shots?  I don’t know.  I don’t have a crystal ball.  I can’t predict the future.

Here’s what I know.  I know that regular old influenza has an extremely remote chance of killing me.  I know that swine flu has a remarkable chance of killing me (5%?  10%?).  I know that flu shots have existed for less than one generation.  I do not know if flu shots have unforeseen side effects.  I know that having the flu once a year does not have unforeseen side effects.  Should I get a flu shot?

If this were on a standardized test, the answer would be no.  The middle of the bell curve gets half of questions like this wrong.  They can’t even work out how to minimize risks to their own health, but they vote every year.

Tying the Knot

On Sunday, September 13 2009 I married one of my blog lurkers.  Her vitriolic disgust with liberals (and in fact, most things) rivals my own.  We’re so much fun at parties.

I won’t bore you with details.  I won’t say in which county we got married, only that it borders a major metropolitan area in the American northeast.

Marriage is a big deal.  You may remember a time when gay marriage was a mainstream debate in America, when the liberals had nothing better to complain about.  I blogged about it several times.  If you believed the hype at the time, you might have gathered that the fate of democracy in the western world hinged upon whether or not two men could be legally married.

Marriage has serious legal consequences.  By marrying my wife, I am entrusting her with my entire future, indeed my very freedom.  As the legal sysetm today works, all my wife would need is the whim to divorce me and she will be awarded more than half of my possessions and turn me into a wage slave to her alimony and possibly child support payments for the better part of my life.  She will not be required to submit any resasons to divorce me.  She will not be required to provide any justification for why she deserves most of our material wealth.  She will not be required to provide any justification for why I should give her part of my earnings for an extended period of time.  If I refuse to provide her with money, I will be put into prison without being formally charged with a crime (which means I will be unable to appeal).  I will only be released when I give her the money, even if I swear it doesn’t (or ever) existed.  I will be treated as guilty until proven innocent, in other words, the complete opposite of good faith American common law.

You might wonder why I would ever want to get married when all of the above is true.  Maybe I like living on the edge?

No.  Fortunately, the martyrdom of a few brave heroes has made my future wife aware of what good it will do her.  I have made it clear to her that if she ever attempts that crap, I will destroy any assets that we have, shoot a gigantic dose of heroin into my veins, and then burn the house down with me in it.  I am serious.  She knows it.

Or, also, I trust my wife to not pull a stunt like that.  I wouldn’t have married her if I thought it were in her character.  I am literally betting my life on it.

Let’s compare the risks I take with marriage to the risks I took when I bought a home.  If I fail to pay the mortgage, I foreclose on the house, I have to move out, I might have a harder time borrowing money from banks in the future because my credit is ruined, and in the worst case scenario, I have to file for bankruptcy and essentially start on the bottom rung of the wealth ladder again.

When I bought my house, I had to sign dozens and dozens of documents in front of a lawyer, who was required to receive a professional doctorate degree at an accredited university.

When I got married, I had to acquire a piece of paper from a county clerk’s office called a marriage license.  By me, I mean my wife.  I did not have to show any form of identification of any kind.  In fact, I wasn’t even required to be present.  All she had to do was say, “my name is” and “the groom’s name is” and that was it, no questions asked.  Once acquired, the only thing left to make it legal was the signature of a guy with an empty criminal record and $35 to send away for a Justice of the Peace correspondence course.

At no time during this process was I required to sign anything.  No witnesses either.  Just a single signature from Father Joe.

Look, I’m all for marriage or I wouldn’t have done it.  But the fact is that the consequences of wedding are astronomically greater than the consequences of doing virtually anything else except committing a crime with a mandatory jail sentence and yet not only was I not compelled to seek legal counsel before entering into a marriage contract, I didn’t even have to provide any identification of any kind or sign a single document.

I’m simply baffled at how, from a legal perspective, how lightly we allow our citizens to enter into marriage when everybody should know by now how painfully difficult it is to leave, particularly for men.

This reminds me of a story my dad told me.  I wish I could find a link for you, but it goes like this: man bangs slut.  Slut gets pregnant.  Man is not aware of this.  Slut puts man’s name on birth certificate unbeknownst to man.  Man receives court summons and judge decides man is father because his name is on birth certificate.  Judge orders child support payment.  Man demands proof that baby is his.  Court refuses to compel mother to provide DNA sample to prove this claim.  Man pays child support for several years.  Man finally appeals court and compels slut to provide DNA samples.  Slut brings child to court so samples can be obtained.  Child does not belong to man.  In fact, child does not belong to slut.  Slut was never pregnant.  Slut abducted other woman’s child for court appearance.  Court never actually asked to see birth certificate, which was lucky for slut because it doesn’t exist.  Man payed thousands of dollars in child support for a baby that never existed.  Man was never reimbursed for money.  Man was not allowed to sue slut.  Slut received 30 days of psychiatric evaluation, was considered sane, but nonetheless was not charged with fraud or abduction.

In response to stories like this Tennessee has recently required that a DNA test must be done before a father’s name is allowed to be put on a birth certificate to avoid cases like this.

I trust Father Joe, and I trust most JP’s.  But seriously?  The laissez-faire treatment of the most importand contract you’ll ever enter into with the most serious consequences blows my mind.

Why Generation Y doesn’t stand a chance

Okay.  I’ve given it to the boomers here and here.  Now it’s time to turn the cannon on myself and my peers.

I am a child of baby boomers.  Generation Y.  Echo boomers.  Millenials.  Whatever you want to call us.  Anyone born between about 1970 to 1990.  The simple truth is that we don’t stand a chance.  Here’s why.

Our upbringing was essentially an elaborate cultural experiment, unsurprisingly conducted by a generation who sought to improve the world.  If they couldn’t change their own world and the people around it, they could change what their children are taught about the world.  Not knowing any differently since no one ever told them any differently, they would create the world the boomers could only dream about – one in which everyone is special, all people are tolerated, no one is ever judged, war is never the answer, fossil fuels are evil, diversity is celebrated, opinions are shared, inclusivity is doctrine, political correctness reigns supreme, and the gravest sin on planet earth is to hurt someone’se feelings or damage their self esteem.  Marriage is about love and you should go to college to learn, not to make money.

The instrument of indoctrination, of course, was Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education which came just in time to ruin the national curriculum.

So, throughout ouf childhood we were raised to believe all of these grand social ideas.  The only problem with these grand concepts are all lies that no one – including our parents themselves – ever took particularly seriously when it came to self regulating their own septic behavior.  While we were busy learning about our self esteem and “caring and sharing”, our parents were splitting up the property in a no-fault divorce, our leaders were lying about blowjobs on the world stage, and the SUV became the best selling car make on the market.

I can’t tell you how many of my peers are completely incapable of functioning in the real world because they are operating under a belief in rules that their parents invented, their teachers enforced, and their world ignores, breaks, and mocks at every turn because they are totally contrary to human nature.  How can we possibly be expected to fix the world’s problems left in the wake of our inept parents when we are probably even worse equipped to deal with them than they ever were?

Let’s break down a list of many of the worst characteristics of generation Y:

Rampant nacissism.  The single greatest consequence of a lifetime told that you’re a special little unique flower who can grow up to be anything and anyone and whose opinions must be valued in the spirit of non-judgmentalism and whose actions must always be viewed through a compassionate lens of moral relativism is abject and complete narcissism.  I would say at least one out of two echo boomers goes through life believing in the validity of any idea that floats through their heads by the sole virtue that it originated from them.  When you are taught not to judge others (and they not to judge you), why waste the energy even considering anyone else’s point of view?  They have theirs and you have yours.  Neither opinion is ever better than any other.

Unrealistic expectations.  A large number of my peers grow up to expect a similar quality of life to the one in which they were raised without anyone ever taking the time to explain to them how it was achieved, let alone empasizing the fact that having 300 friends on MySpace is not enough to land a middle income lifestyle and that life itself is actually harder than it seems.  This, again, is a result of our school system, usually held hostage by adamant, frothing parents, shoveling lies about our abilities down our throats.  The truth of life is that we can’t be anything we want to be, but you’d never get that impression if you heard the ridiculous things said in public schools.  For example, a kid in a wheelchair is not walking disabled.  He’s “differently abled.”  A kid with an IQ of 80 is not retarded, he is “special”.  The truth is that the kid in the wheelchair is not going to play professional basketball and the kid with the IQ of 80 is not going to be a physics professor.  But we weren’t raised to believe that.   Our “self esteem” was more important than the truth about our abilities.

We weren’t raised with out interests in mind, we were raised by parents who wanted so desperately to have perfect children that were as good or better than everyone else’s children that they had to find every reason to make us out to be more than we were.  Our parents refused to accept the idea that we weren’t smart enough to get into or complete college – they pushed us to go – all of us – without thinking for a minute what might happen to our self esteem when we try and fail.  Because no matter how smart Mr. 80 thinks he is or has been told he is, he’s not going to earn a 4 year degree, unless we rig the system by introducing….

Drastically lowered expectations.  It’s not enough that our parents set us up to pursue life ambitions way out of our league, the only way for us to meet the expectations set out for us by our parents was to lower the expectations so even the most meager among us could present as a success and mom and dad could drive around with Honors Student bumper stickers on their gas-guzzling flip-mobiles.  Honors classes are the new average classes and average classes are the new special ed.  What are the new honors classes?  There are none, except in Japan.

And it’s not just schools.  My peers were hardly asked to do chores.  Even the losers got trophys at the end of a rec season.  We were hardly ever asked to sit through boring things like family dinners or church services, or even long car rides without DVD players.  We were disciplined by “time outs” instead of a solid hit to the face with the ring hand.  We learned to demand instant gratification over delayed gratification.  With all of the peripheral distractions – better TV, video games, the internet, cell phones – most of us have extremely low attention spans, bordering on and including ADD.  We lack attention to detail, and anything that isn’t fun, entertaining, or new is almost immediately discarded.  Barely any of my peers are capable of studying for any length of time.

With this littany of problems, the only remedy is to make things easier.  To make life easier.

Unwillingness to acknowledge anyone.  My generation does not respect anyone for any reason.  Age, experience, or expertise are not qualifications for respecting the opinions and ideas of other people over his own.  The only criteria an echo boomer has for listening to someone’s ideas is he agrees with them already.  Humility is a character trait almost entirely absent in the entire echo boomer generation.

Unfounded faith in ideas.  This is a direct result of being raised by an entire generation of dreamers.  The boomers, many of whom were hippies, tried to instill the beliefs about people and ideas they invented into their children, and in many of my peers, it took.  Many echo boomers believe wildly absurd things totally contrary to human nature because they had it beaten into them from an early age.  The most common of these is an overly optimistic prediction of the behavior of other people; i.e., a belief that left to their own devices, people will do good, not evil.  That all evil is merely a reaction to evils inflicted upon them (of course, where did evil start, one might ask?).  Coupled with an unwillingness to consider other ideas because they didn’t originate from themselves makes this a particularly nasty trait.