Why All Men Should Read PUA Blogs

Recently a commentator questioned why I link to blogs like The House of O even though I have repeatedly disparaged the lifestyle.  What interest do I have in these blogs?

It’s simple, really.  Even if your goal in life is not to cat around with as many hot girls as possible, it is still critically important to have the power to do so at any time for a variety of reasons.

Roissy’s essential message is that in order to be a pickup artist, all you need to do is behave like an alpha male.  It’s not necessarily about what to say to a girl in a club.  It’s more about how to change the way you think about yourself and your position in society relative to everyone else.  When you think like an alpha, the lines you drop on girls to seduce them come as natural to you as any conversation; in other words, the most successful men are the ones who are born as or who transition themselves into alpha males.

The key here is that being an alpha male has so many other implications that are entirely unrelated to the pursuit of pussy.  Having the alpha mindset helps you in every human relationship you have, not just with women.  Alpha males are better boyfriends, better husbands, better employees, better fathers, better sons, better friends.  All of these things simply happen from walking through life with the full appreciation that you are a fully incorporated man and that you have all the rights and privileges thereto appointed.

So what does it mean to be an alpha male, you ask?  Scores on this subject have been written by various alpha perspectives but here are some of the key traits that I strive to exude at all times.

Confidence.  If there is a single defining trait that all alpha males share it is confidence.  You have to be confident in yourself.  That means that when you set out to accomplish something, you do so with the belief that you will accomplish it, whether that be scoring a ten in a club or meeting a deadline at work or fixing a leaky faucet.  Whatever it is, do it with confidence.

It’s harder than it sounds.  That ten has a boyfriend already, your deadline might be impossible, and you are not a professional plumber, so why should you have confidence?  Because you are an alpha male.  If you believe yourself to be a strong, capable man, you can derive the strength and energy to overcome obstacles you might otherwise shy away from even when there is stark evidence that you will certainly fail.  That leads to the next alpha trait that I hold dear:

Fearlessness.  Alpha males are not afraid of anything.  I mean, truly afraid.  Every person will experience fear from time to time; I dare even the toughest of men not to quake in their boots if they saw a grizzly bear charging at them.  A certain amount of self-preservation fear is built into all humans, so certain natural aversions to things like ferocious animals or heights are natural.  When I say fear, what I really mean is fear of failure.

If you let yourself fall into the trap of caring too much about whether your succeed or fail you will never take the kinds of risks that all successful people took.  They say that the average number of failed companies the millionaire entrepeneur has under his belt is three.  There is little riskier than pouring your capital and your income stream into a business venture that might fail except possibly marrying a succubus who might divorce you, especially if you’re Mel Gibson or Tiger Woods.  The astronomically successful people in this world are those who will take a risk, fail, and then take the same risk again because they aren’t emotionally invested in their failure.

Case in point: I am about to accept a position at a company in which I will be under a great deal more pressure, the stakes are tremendously higher, and I am going to need skills that I am not sure that I have.  This could end in disaster for me and I may end up getting fired.  But I am willing to accept that risk because I am not afraid of failing, and the rewards are worth the risk.  Am I scared?  A little.  Will it stop me?  No.  Because ultimately, I know that the trepidation that I have isn’t real.  I know this because I am an alpha male.

Command.  Alpha males are leaders, not followers.  Sometimes alpha males will follow other alpha males because leading is always harder than following and often times the path of least resistance is appealing, but the alpha male only follows when two invariants are true: first, the leader he follows is at least as alpha as he is and second, he is ready, able, and willing to assume command when his leader is killed in honorable combat.  Or quits, or whatever.  Part of the alpha male way of thinking is to see the majority of the world as subordinate in some way.  The difference between an arrogant man and an alpha male is that the arrogant man makes sure to remind the rest of the world how he sees them at every opportunity.  Alphas are just as arrogant as arrogant men but they are smart enough to appreciate the use of tact and diplomacy.  You don’t get the best out of people when you’re pushing their faces in the mud with the heel of your boot.

Even when you have no real authority over anyone or anything, it is important to act as though you do and to acquire some authority as quickly as possible.  You, as a man, will be emotionally satisfied only when you have exhibited dominance over something.  The difference between an alpha and a beta is that the alpha seeks authority whereas the beta shys away from it, mostly because he is afraid and lacks confidence.  Alphas are categorically happier than betas.

(As an aside, I would just like to point out why feminism damages society so much: not every man can be a leader outside of his home.  In a society where the man is the head of his household and is appreciated as the leader in that context, he will be much happier than in a society where husbands are told to sit when they pee by their harpy bitch wives with Rosie Riveter tats on their biceps).

Integrity.  Alphas maintain guiding principles and don’t waver from them.  This isn’t so much an alpha trait but rather just a prerequisite.  You can’t fill the alpha role in any group if people don’t trust you or think you’re unprincipled and flakey.  People with integrity generally do what they say they’ll do, and followthrough is a highly alpha trait to have.

The reason that PUA blogs are enjoyable to read is because they demonstrate alpha by example.  All of the same basic principles described by players are equally applicable to business situations, domestic situations, even parenting situations.  The reason that this situation – i.e., the pursuit of pussy – is so perfect is because it’s universal.  Even beta chumps are born with a divining rod between their legs with a hunger that must be sated and which will guide their course through life.  Not every man works in an office, or has children, or is married, but every straight man outside the clergy has, at one point in his lifetime, attempted to get laid.

These guys are pushing a mindset by using concrete examples of which behaviors are alpha and which are beta.  They are also demonstrating a clear, practical application for this mindset as a motivational mechanism to adopt their way of thinking.

For me, as I have mentioned before, I have always been a natural alpha and PUA blogs simply put how I think into a vocabularly that makes sense, and from time to time someone – either the author or a commentator – will produce a different angle to a situation or an approach that I wouldn’t have thought of but makes perfect sense.  Even alpha males can benefit from the experiences of other alpha males, and I have used certain model approaches in situations entirely unrelated to women and achieved successes. 

Alpha think will improve your life.  If you aren’t on board, get on board.

How to Destroy a Liberal’s Worldview, Part 2

Part 2 in a series.  Read Part 1 here.

The War In Iraq

“Do you believe in blood for oil?”  The answer will be “no” or sarcasm.  “What will your boss say to you when you tell him that you can no longer get to work because you cannot afford gasoline?”  A smart liberal will follow up with “My boss wouldn’t be able to afford it either.”  “What about the guy who stocks the shelves at your grocery store?  For that matter, how are you going to get to the grocery store?”  “I’ll ride my bike!”  (I have an entire segment planned for people who ride bikes).  Another possible response will be, “We’ll use electric cars.”  If they go down that avenue, then you know you’re dealing with an idiot who lives in fantasy world because all that technology doesn’t exist.  The tangent will go like: “Can you buy a fully electric car today?  And by you, I mean you, specifically, because Tesla Roadsters cost $90,000.”  The answer will be no, but they might try to imply that if oil dries up, necessity will breed innovation.  “Sure,” you respond.  “But what about in the meantime?”

What you’re trying to show here is that our entire civilization is dependent on oil.  Most of us would starve if we didn’t have it because we would not be able to get food.  The punchline question touches on the morality of the issue, which is the reason most people state stupid things like “no blood for oil.”  That question is this: “Are you justified to kill for the things you need to survive?”

The answer is obviously yes and you can demonstrate that with any one of dozens of lines of reasoning.  It’s tough to convince liberals that every living creature has the right – in fact, the responsibility – to do anything, up to and including kill other living creatures – in the pursuit of its own survival.

Most liberals, however, try to slither out of this truth because it is out of line with their perceived concept of a higher morality – which, of course, exclusively belongs to liberals – and that is, rather than kill people for oil, we should just find another way to power our lives.

It’s okay to agree with liberals that in a perfect world we could flip a switch and continue our lifestyle with minimal interruption without resorting to killing for what keeps us moving.  It’s also okay to agree with them that transitioning away from oil is a smart move for the longevity of our civilization.  Try to demonstrate the reality of the present day.

“Bush lied!”  The simplest counter to this ridiculous statement is to simply ask: “Who’s the bigger fool – the fool, or the fool who followed him?”  This will imbue the liberal with glee. because they might believe you’re setting them up to deliver the atom bomb of smugness: “The fools who followed him, namely all those idiots like yourself who voted for him.”  The retort is to remind them of things they choose to forget, namely that the vast majority of senators – many of whom were liberals – agreed with Bush’s assessment.  The smart liberal will insinuate that they had no reason to think he would lie to them, and they were just misled because Bush is evil.  Your response should be: “So you think that in our society, we should blindly accept what our leaders tell us under the assumption that they are telling us the truth, without bothering to question it?”  Another good direction to take is this: ”When a leader tells you something, do you question why he’s telling you?  How about where he got his information from?  Do you trust his sources?”  “For something as serious as a war, would you really be willing to declare it for only one reason?”

Don’t forget that if somebody is telling you that “Bush lied,” they would only utter that statement if they believed that the war was legitimate if and only if it possessed weapons of mass destruction.  When I was trying to convince people that the Iraq war was a good idea at the time, I told them I didn’t care whether Saddam had WMDs because he was worth ousting since even if he doesn’t have them now, he has tried to obtain them before, is currently trying, and will try in the future, and what if he succeeds?  9/11, I argued, was just the straw that broke the camel’s back and it was important to send a message to the world and that is this: if you talk about attacking America and then America is attacked, we have to assume that even if you didn’t plan or orchestate the attack, you wish you had.  Iraq rattled its sabres for decades, someone else awoke the sleeping giant, and we retaliated.  The technique is not unlike disciplining a disobedient prisoner by killing the men to the left and right of him instead of him.  Liberals certainly decry this as barbaric, but I would argue that it is effective.  It’s only barbaric if the two men on either side of the guilty party are also innocent, and I believed that Iraq was guilty of something, even if not the exact crime that we were attempting to punish.

Then, of course, you can paint liberals as the hypocrits they are:

“When Bush was in office, all we heard from your team was how we needed to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Barack Obama has not withdrawn troops from Iraq and he has just sent thousands more into Afghanistan.  Where is Code Pink?  Why aren’t you protesting in the streets?”

“Obama pledged to end the wars, not increase our commitment to them.  Where’s your bumper sticker that says Obama Lied?”

“When I voted for Bush, he didn’t run on a platform of sending troops to war; he responded to an unforeseen event.  When you voted for Obama, he ran on a platform of ending the wars.  Bush didn’t do things he said he wouldn’t do during his campaign.  Barack Obama has done things he said he wouldn’t do, and hasn’t done things he said he would do.  Who’s the liar?”

Government Entitlements

My favorite question to open this debate is: “Do you remember the story of the Little Red Hen?”  (if they don’t, remind them).  “What about back seat driving?  Do you enjoy it when your passengers tell you how to drive?”  “How about when a stranger tells you what color to paint your living room?”  “All that said, do you think that people who do not pay taxes should be allowed to determine how tax money is spent?”  This question stumps even the most ardent of liberals.  If they dare to say “yes”, then take them down this road:

“Taxes keep our government, our infrastucture, our military, and all of the entitlements like SS, Medicare, Welfare, unemployment, etc. going.  But yet, there are many people in the country who do not contribute to any of those things.  How many people can we afford to be paying no taxes?  10% of the population?  20%?  50%? ” (Supposedly, under Barack Obama’s tax plans, almost 50% of families would pay no income taxes).  Of course they won’t be able to give you a reasonable number, because liberals are entirely divorced from actual numbers.  They have to be in order to think their plans could ever be funded.

“When you look at somebody on welfare, do you ever ask yourself what would happen if everybody decided to get on welfare?”  The answer is usually, “yes, but that won’t happen.”  “What would stop it?  Aside from a sense of self worth that is built into people who are not on welfare, e.g., conservatives.  Suppose me and 100,000,000 of my friends decided to all stop working because we were sick of funding liberal entitlement programs.”  “That won’t happen.”

“No, it won’t, because we haven’t enacted any legislation to make it desirable.  But this is a democracy.  Why stop at free heatlhcare?  How about free food?  After all, nobody should starve in this country; there’s nothing healthy about starvation.  If we’re going to pay for prescription medications and cancer treatments, we should pay for food too.”  “We already do, for the poor.”  “Yes, we also already pay for healthcare for the poor.  So you’re saying that if you can afford something, you should be expected to buy it?  For example, health care insurance?”

Your goal here is to demonstrate the unsustainability of this nonsense.

A subcategory of this is the “tax the rich” line of thinking.  My favorite derailment of this is: “So, your plan is to tax the rich, right?  Would it be fair to say that you never plan on achieving any wealth?”  “No, I do, but when I have that much I’ll be able to give more, so I won’t mind.”  “How much did you give to charity this year?”  The answer will be nothing, or they’ll lie.  If they actually did, just ask them how much their coat cost and why they bought a new one instead of getting one from the salvation army and giving the coat money to charity.  You want to demonstrate their patent hypocrisy.

“Where do prescription drugs come from?”  “Evil pharmaceutical companies.”  “They research them, right?”  “Yes.”  “That costs a lot of money, right?”  “Yes.”  (if they weasel out of this, it’s easy to prove that pharma spends billions on research, largely thanks to regulations imposed by liberal legislation).  “If these companies couldn’t have the freedom to price the fruits of their research at a point that allows them to recover their research investment, what happens?”  “They lose money.”  “And if they lose enough they’ll go out of business.”  “Yes.”  “And medical research will halt.”  “The government will subsidize it.”  “Right.  Through tax money.  So instead of the sick curing themselves, everyone cures the sick, right?”  “Yes.”  “Why is that better?”  “Because some people can’t afford the medicine.”  “I can’t afford a ferrari.  Will you chip in to buy me one?”  “That’s a luxury.  Health is a right!”

Most of the time, “Health is a right” is derived from the “life, liberty, pursuit of happiness” phrase, which, by the way, is the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, not the constitution.  The Declaration of Independence is like a vision statement.  The Constitution defines our government and the rights of our citizens.  If it’s in the Declaration, it isn’t a right.  But anyway. 

If they start going down the “health is a right” angle, ask them: “Would it be fair to interpret that line of the Declaration in the proper context?  The colonials were aggrieved that the British were denying them things they wanted, yes?  So when it says that all men are endowed with a god-given right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, would it be fair to interpret that to mean that no man has the right to deprive another man of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness?  After all, let’s not forget that endowed by his creator is a critical piece of that statement.  You can’t just take phrases out of lines you like and extend them to invent rights, can you?”

“So if the creator endows us with life and we aren’t allowed to take it away, you believe that this also translates to mean that if the creator attempts to take life away from someone, it is our responsibility to prevent him from doing it, e.g., by treating the sick with medicine?”  I have never heard a reasonable response to this question from a liberal.  A real world analogy would something like this: a dealer issues you a car loan, so the car doesn’t belong to you, you’re just using it.  If you stop paying the loan, and the repo man comes to take the car back, your neighbor has a responsibility to stop the repo man.  Of course this is absurd and doesn’t make any sense, but anyone who thinks that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” means that I have to pay for someone else’s medicine obviously doesn’t think straight.

Stay turned for part 3, I have a lot more liberal ideologies to tear apart.

… And you didn’t see it coming?

Obama’s first-year approval ratings are in the toilet and nobody, including the people who voted for him, is surprised.  After all, it’s the people who voted for him that are dissatisfied.

Of course they’re going to be disappointed.  Obama was the biggest most beautifully wrapped box under the Christmas tree.  Unfortunately the box was empty.

I, along with virtually every other thinking person in the United States, screamed at the top of our lungs that this man was all smoke and no fire before you people elected him and now a year later you’re finally catching on and are unsatisifed with his job performance.

It’s virtually impossible not to be smug about this.  When reality vindicates everything I say all the time, how can I not be?

The worst part of all is that Democrats fail to live up to the hype again and again and again, and despite this, America never seems to learn not to elect these charlatans who can’t possibly live up to the image they created for themselves.

I was having dinner with a few work colleagues a few weeks ago, all of whom voted for Obama and two of whom are self-proclaimed socialists, and they were rattling on and on about how they were disappointed with Barry.  My commentary boiled down to “I told you so.”

“But he’s better than McCain would have been.”

Gah!!!  The  very thinking that caused them to elect an inexperienced dimwit whose paygrade is that of an inspirational speaker – a far cry from the oval office – is the same kind of thinking that leads them to believe that McCain would have done a lesser job.  It’s coincidentally the same kind of thinking that leads them to believe that Bush is an idiot.

To be fooled by appearances.  How amateur.  How many times have we all made asses of ourselves by judging a book by its cover?  How many times have we ourselves uttered those words in aversion to exactly that?  And yet still,  intelligent people – one of whom might soon be my boss – can be fooled so easily, by nothing more than pretty words.

McCain would have been worse.  Why?  Because he didn’t promise hope and change?  Because he only got a C- in Teleprompter 101?  Because he didn’t impress you like Barry did during the campaign?  As their own disappointment in Obama tells them, it’s not how they come off in the campaign that matters, it’s how they do the job that does.  Since McCain didn’t win the election, it’s impossible to predict whether he would have been better or worse than Obama, particularly since different people want different things.  By their criteria, he probably would have been worse since he would have done even less than Barack has done to transform this country into a socialist oubliette.

And when it comes down to it, I think that’s why so many people are disappointed in Barack.  Those who voted for him and really believed his message were actually expecting hope and change (how naive!).  Those who voted against him are just watching in horror as Obama makes gaff after gaff and shows how completely inept he is at pretty much everything except winning elections.

As much as I cringe to write these words, we should have listened to Hillary when she criticized Obama by suggesting that the White House is not a place for on-the-job training.  I wouldn’t be surprised if she comes out swinging in 2012 with those exact words repeated: “I was right in 2008 and I’m right now.”  “Why did you join his administration if he’s so inept?”  “Someone’s gotta do the President’s job for him.”

If I didn’t loathe Hillary and her socialist ways I could run her campaign.  I predict that in 2012 we won’t be hearing anything about hope and change.  In a sense, Barack Obama is doing this country a favor.  He’s reminding this generation that fancy words and ideaological prattle are the tools of a politician who can’t deliver on any of his talk and are exactly what every conservative in the country knew them to be all the way back in distant 2008: a campaign vehicle.  When the most ardent of socialists who took Barack’s bull straight to the bank are embittered by his failures, we might actually see a grounded poltiical campaign based on reality instead of hype, a playing field where conservatives such as myself have an enormous strategic advantage.  If you can’t use a pretty speech to win an election, you’ll have to actually run on issues.  That’s my kind of race.

It’s a shame this lesson is so expensive.

Yin and Yang, Evolutionary Style

My wife and I were talking about Tiger’s mistresses.  I haven’t invested in the details of this particular non-story except to hear that he has them.  I informed my wife that had I been an international celebrity billionaire, she would have signed a prenup that explicitly states that I’m allowed to sleep with who I want when I want with no questions asked.

My wife, of course, was somewhat taken aback that I would make that assertion.  The assertion, of course, that a certain amount of money buys a man out of his obligation to monogamy.

The concept that Tiger Woods’ wife should expect Tiger Woods – one of the richest men alive – to put her pussy on a pedestal is really something else.  Does she really think that she is so spectacular that a man of Tiger’s means would sacrifice a gravy train of sexual gratification with virtually any partner he desires to worship at the altar of mongamy?  Please.

This is an illustration of a very fundamental difference in thinking among women.  I suspect that my wife, had she a billion dollars, would still want to sleep only with me and expect that I would sleep only with her.

Human beings are complex creatures and I am loathe to attribute everything to base biomechanics without solid justification, but I think in this case it is reasonable to do so.  A woman’s perogative is to have a baby and have a father to help her raise it; monogamy – at least the kind of monogamy that humans are instinctually prone to, which is shown to last about seven years – covers the critical path of human development, namely human infancy when both mother and child are at greater risk, since the child cannot survive by itself and the mother is handicapped by child care.

I find a readiness, particularly among women, to resist the assertion that any of their behaviors boil down to base primal urges.  A feminist might argue that I am trying to dictate reality, not explain it, or rather that what I’ve just described is unnatural and instead by the designs of patriarchy.  Evolutionary biology tells us differently: women who behaved the way I’ve described bore children who survived, and they, having inherited their mothers’ mate selection programming, also bore children who survived.  For every human alive today, your ancestors beat the evolution game.  You owe your existence to their instincts.

Men?  We propogate our lineage by spraying as often as possible.  A perfectly capable evolutionary strategy for a male is to impregnate as many women as possible with the assumption that the odds of at least one (or more) surviving are high.  A woman can’t play the numbers game; a man can.  If one believes the stereotypes and trusts one’s observations about the average modern man whose pickiness is several orders of magnitude lower than the average woman, one must acknowledge that it is likely that this evolutionary strategy has worked more often than not because it’s the strategy men are born to execute.  As a man, I testify before the court.

As with all living things we’re here to reproduce.  Men and women accomplish this goal in different ways, but ultimately we need each other.

Now, let’s switch gears a minute.

If we look at most cultures – and in particular, western culture – what do we find?  We find that we overwhelmingly follow the female reproductive strategy: devote a lot of resources to a single baby, and do so in monogamously.  Monogamously such that each man has only one baby momma at a time (while the children are young).  I believe many women would forgive a filandering partner if and only if he doesn’t impregnate his mistress.  Again, I believe this is instinctual: women want a man who is devoted only to her agenda (e.g., babies), not some other tramp’s.  Therefore, if a man sleeps with another woman, if no baby results, then he’s guilty only of putting her agenda at risk.  If a man sleeps with another woman and knocks her up, then he’s split between two babies, and this is bad for her.  Thus we have all sorts of stigmas attached to unwed mothers, cheating in general, etc. etc.

UPDATE: Reality proves my points for me yet again

We’re not ants.  I believe even the most mercenary of men who rise and sleep under only the guidance of their penises would not want to go around fathering an endless stream of children with the knowledge that most of them will die because he’s not helping to feed them, because fathers care about their babies too.  Why?

Because despite the fact that we have two different reproductive drives, the one that has clearly worked better for humans, as evidenced by all the biology related to human development, is the female strategy.  When a quadruped is born, it walks or dies.  Our babies are completely helpless for years after being born.  Clearly, the human baby only succeeds because it has a support infrastructure of not one but at least two adults devoted to its care.

But in our modern society, so much of this has been abstracted away by money.  Money is the great equalizer.  A woman doesn’t need a man to raise the baby (well… let’s say feed and clothe).  She needs the resources that man provides, and in our culture, those resources are all abstracted and collected into a single unit, money.  In the olden days, the woman could stay with the baby in the cave and the man would go out and come back with food.  In modern days a woman can exchange little green pieces of paper, or magnetic bits in a bank’s database, for provisions that can be delivered straight to her door.

Tiger Woods is a billionaire.  He could afford to raise hundreds of thousands if not millions of babies with his resources, depending on to what standard (maybe a few dozen thousand Americans, but millions of Bangladeshi babies).  So, I would argue that it does not matter if Tiger Woods sleeps around and barebacks all of his mistresses.  His wife’s lifestyle is not threatened, her children are not threatened, his mistresses’ bastard children are not threatened… etc.

Except for one thing.  What happens if Tiger likes his mistresses more than his wife?!  Women are extremely competitive and the fear that they will lose their husband – and the lifestyle he provides – to a hotter, usually younger woman – is probably the scariest thing for a woman to face.  That is why women are rabidly protective of their men and would never acquiesce to an open marriage.  They understand male nature.  They will often react angrily to a cheating man because they hate the fact that they are at the mercy of a man’s choice.  If her husband leaves her for a younger woman, what is she left with?  That’s how a woman who loves her husband one day can bend him over the table in divorce court and get even with him for the insulting her at the deepest level a man can insult a woman.  If you ever want to make a woman hate you forever, just tell her she’s ugly.  If you want to make a woman hate you for longer than that, marry her and then leave her for a younger woman.  Bonus points if the younger woman is uglier than she was at her age.

We have engineered a society that tries to discourage men from doing this by stigmatizing adultery and creating divorce laws that pile on an enormous penalty to men who succumb to the clarion call of fresh, hot, young women.  We could debate the merits of those – as I often have – but part of the motivation here is that older women have no chance of competing against younger women for male affection, and we all know it.  And while we as men might be inclined to think that we should be allowed to exercise our instinctual perogative instead of building a society based on a woman’s perogative – remember, if we made this common practice, your father would leave your mother for a woman who might otherwise have been your wife.  Is that what you want?

I want my mother to be happy.  And I want my wife to be happy today, and I want my wife to be happy twenty years from now.  In a sense, the fact that we as men don’t do what Tiger Woods is doing is one of the greatest gifts we can give to women.  They give us an awful lot in return, whether we know to appreciate it or not.

Of course, some women are just harpy bitches who deserve to be unhappy, divorced, and die alone with their cats.  Don’t marry one of those.

The Unraveling

I’ve been a global warming “skeptic” ever since I first heard the phrase.

For over a decade now I’ve had to endure wave after wave of eco-religious zealots call me a fool for denying global warming.  “The science” they scream.

Is it clear yet that “the science” is a result of a political agenda and is, and always has been, a errant fraud?

Let me lay it out for you play-by-play.

• Human beings are attracted to lush, fertile, naturally beautiful landscapes.  This makes sense.  We are animals, after all, and in a world much unlike our world today, we would have an instinctual urge to be where the food is.  We are pleased when we interpret our environments as supportive of our health.
• Anything that threatens our instinctual attraction to a pretty, healthy world is automatically bad.  This is particularly ironic since our actual health and well being is in fact totally divorced from what we instinctually believe is our health and well being, e.g., we are more likely to survive if we make money by defiling our immediate surroundings than if we attempted to harvest resources from it, e.g., Manhattan.  We exchange local pollutants for overall species benefit… but this is all beside the point.
• Anything that damages our environment is instinctually treated like a problem.
• Perception is reality.  Therefore, anything can be turned into a problem, whether it is pollution, inequality, Jews, etc. as long as it is perceived to be a problem.
• Perception that a factor is damaging our environment will be treated as a problem regardless of whether that factor is or is not actually damaging our environment.
• If a problem exists, a politician can be elected on the platform that he will solve it.
• If a politician invents a problem, he doesn’t have to worry about actually solving it because the problem is imaginary.
• Most voters will not allow a politician to invent a problem without evidence they trust.
• Most voters trust scientists.
• Scientists are driven by money and prestige.
• Money and prestige (and tenure) can be obtained by obtaining grant money for the scientists’ employers.
• Grant money comes from governments.
• Politicians run the governments.
• Politicians determine who gets grant money.
• Politicians need an imaginary problem to solve so they can get elected.
• Politicans need scientific evidence of this imaginary problem.
• Politicans can give grant money only to scientists who are producing evidence of this imaginary problem and give no money to scientists who refute it.
• Scientists will fake data to ensure the grant money keeps flowing, as evidenced by all of the leaked e-mails where scientists unabashedly falsify, hide, and lie about any data that doesn’t support a preconcieved conclusion attached to their grant endowment.
• Politicians get what they pay for.

In other words this entire thing has been about two things: money and power.  And anyone who has believed in this global warming idiocy was simply too stupid to see through this sham from the start and I feel sorry for them.  It must be pretty embarassing to have parroted the global warming mantra for all these years when it is now undeniable that scientists have been lying about it all these years.

The kind of person who believed in global warming will also be the kind of person who will immediately absolve themselves of any guilt for being stupid with the excuse that “the scientists lied.”  You know, the same way every single democratic senator tried to weasel out of accepting any blame for voting in to Iraq because “Bush lied.”

Sorry, I don’t buy it.

People lie all the freaking time.  The difference between a smart person and a stupid person is that the smart person is smart enough to know a lie when he hears it whereas the stupid person merely takes whatever they’re told for granted.

Isn’t the parallel between these pro-global-warming idiots and religious literalists alarming?  “Global warming is happening!   For real!  The scientists say so!”  No.  You’re not a fool for believing them when they lied, you were “taken advantage of” or some nonsense, right.  What about the person who says “Jesus did rise from the dead!  For real!  The Bible says so!”  He’s just a religious nutjob right?

This is why I defend religion and laugh at global warming idiots because it’s the same kind of thinking with one exception: global warming can be, and now has, been exposed as a fraud because it is ongoing and backed by observations we can make here, today, right now, and tomorrow.  The events of the life of Christ happened a long time ago and until we invent the time machine we are unlikely to disprove the Bible’s account of them – not to mention the inherent inability to disprove God.

In a sense, eco-religion is a proto-religion.  It illustrates why religion is the way it is.  Everybody is capable of, and to a certain extent desires the chance, to engage in this kind of thinking - blind devotion to something in hopes that it will bring some meaning to life.  The problem with a religion like global warming is that it can and ultimately will be disproven.  If you’re going to devote your religious fervor to something, you should devote it to the very thing – in fact, the only thing – that by its definition can never be disproven.  Yet again, those ignorant Christians are the ones doing it right and the eco-religious zealots are walking about with egg on their faces.

I told you so.

Women Scientists

One of my Facebook “friends” is a guy I went to college with.  He then proceeded to go down the road of SWPL faggotry by getting a masters in Human Computer Interaction, move to San Francisco, see U2 and Coldplay in concert, and wishing he worked for Google or Apple designing useless, expensive gadgets.

In actuality I am probably not his friend, as we probably do not see eye to eye on a variety of subjects, particularly on how to live.  And how to contribute to a healthy culture and a healthy society.

Yes, I know.  Even calling a culture “healthy” or “unhealthy” reeks of ethnocentrism.  People who use that word in a derogatory sense are themselves ethnocentrists; they simply ascribe to the peace/love/understanding/cancer fad that despite all evidence against its usefulness has yet to die.  I bide my time.

He commented on something one of his friends posted, a girl whose profile I could see because she is an alum of our mutual university and is part of that network.

The post was a link celebrating the “legalization” of gay marriage in Washington DC.  You know how I feel about that.

But here’s another interesting link posted by this rather singularly unattractive person, with excerpt:

Is Motherhood Keeping Good Scientists Down? How to Fix Research’s “Mommy Gap” – The Human Condition

Ugh.  Pass the bucket.

Last week, the Center for American Progress (CAP) reported that family obligations (read: child rearing) are still pushing young female researchers out of science.

The findings build on a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report from earlier this year that also dissected the biases against women in science, but concluded that much progress was being made. Taken together, the two studies suggest that the stumbling block for women researchers is not being a woman but being a mother.

Wait.  Stop the presses.  Is Jeneen Interlandi , the author of this piece, actually suggesting that the culprit behind the stagnation of a woman’s career is not a result of sexism but is instead a result of a woman exercising her right to choose not to abort her pregnancy and become a mother?!  Who would have thought?!

Of course, let’s not get away with ourselves.  We all know that institutional sexism is still the reason that a mother is penalized in her career but not a father.  After all, the father doesn’t stay home with the baby; he continues to work and add those years of experience on to his resume.  This is patently unfair.  Clearly, far too many Americans are still gender conformists.  Let’s get active!

Or let’s read on instead.

There’s no dearth of suggestions on how to fix the problem. The National Association for Women in Science suggests that universities make a more concerted effort to recruit women for open faculty positions—by targeting their advertising toward women and being sure to include female faculty members on any search committee.

There’s no dearth of suggestions on how to fix the problem because our taxes pay for cushy think tank jobs where idiots with degrees in things like sociology sit around all day and do nothing but consume federal funding and churn out worthless reports to be quoted by worthless 2 bit journalists like Jeneen Interlandi.

We paid the National Assocation for Women in Science to come up with the brilliant suggestion that recruiters should add, “Women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply” to every job posting.  Yes, we paid them to pull a play from the same old tired Affirmative Action playbook that we’ve been seeing for 30 years now.  And hopefully, faculty recruiters will be pressured by a strong desire to immunize themselves against anti-discrimination lawsuits by placing a vagina on every hiring committee to ensure that gender is not used as a factor in hiring decisions.  Oh, the irony!

The CAP recommends providing financial support to labs to offset the productivity loss when a scientist takes family leave, and providing women who are pregnant or have newborns with special funds to hire a technician to help them out in the lab.

In other words, instead of simply hiring a man who does not suffer a productivity loss when he has children, university faculty should hire a woman, pay her full salary, and then on top of that, hire a graduate student as a “technician” to do her work for her while she escapes to the breast feeding room (which used to be a man’s office) for 2 hours with her newborn.  Wait, there isn’t a feeding room in every single one of your university facilities?  That’s nothing a lawsuit can’t fix.

When I unravel the reality of a message like this one, doesn’t it become clear why these types of things have to be legally mandated because nobody in their right mind would ever do as Center for American Progress (CAP) suggests?  To me, this doesn’t sound like progress, this sounds like sexism; allowing a woman to have her cake and eat it too, typically at the expense of a man who was probably overlooked for his position because the hiring department hasn’t met its legally mandated diversity quota, e.g., there aren’t enough people with vaginas on the staff.

I really like this next suggestion:

And the NAS and others have endorsed “stopping the tenure clock” for faculty members who want to start families. Tenure-track scientists have a certain number of years to establish themselves—which means publishing as many influential papers in as many prestigious journals as possible, usually over the first decade of their employment. Stopping the clock means adding an extra year or two to that time frame to allow for a less productive year after the birth of a child.

Yes, of course.  The rules of the game do not suit women who also want to have children, so let’s change them.  If a man works 10 years, he gets credit for 10 years of work when considered for tenure.  If a woman works 3 years, takes 3 years off to rear chidlren, and then works 4 more, she gets credit for 10 years of work when considered for tenure.  Is this fair?  Why should we allow for less productive years for women when we could avoid a less productive year by just hiring a man?  This is often your tax money, by the way, since universities are primarily funded by the state.

Okay, okay.  It’s time to acknowledge the fact that motherhood is not just a valuable role in society.  It is the most important role in society.  If every woman in America decided that university tenure was more important than having babies, America would be extinct after one generation, now wouldn’t it?  Mothers ensure the continuity not just of our society, but of our culture and in fact our species itself.  So it is easy, especially if you are a woman with both career and motherhood aspirations, to suggest that our society should do as much as possible to cater to mothers and motherhood as fairly as possible.

But think about it from a man’s perspective for a minute.  As a man, I can never fill the role of mother, only father – and a foundational premise of this entire debate is that mothers are disadvantaged in the workforce whereas fathers are not because motherhood typically involves some form of maternity leave longer than a week, and I think this is a fair premise.  Since I can never be a mother, the only thing I can ever “be”, in the context of this discussion, would be a professional.  As a result, why shouldn’t I have certain advantages in that regard?

It’s a matter of perspective.  I would claim that a woman with strong career ambitions, such as to become a famous scientist, would view motherhood as a type of chore, one that will divert her attention from her goal.  In theory she wants children, but only if it won’t interfere with everything else she wants.  She doesn’t want to have to choose.

But there are other kinds of women, and I would argue that they are in fact the vast majority of women whether they’d admit it in open company or not.  I am married to that kind of woman.  That kind of woman sees motherhood as her primary motivation and her career as a secondary occupation that is, in effect, a means to an end.  For a lot of working people, both men and women, we work because we have to, not because we want to.  While many of us, myself included, enjoy our jobs, could we really envision ourselves working 40 hours a week if we were independently wealthy?

Science, though, tends to draw people who do it because they love it, and so to them it is not as much a job as it is pursuit, and motherhood is in the way of that pursuit.  But like all things, science and research is credentialized and monetized; there are only so many positions for research scientists to get paid to do what they love, and women must compete with men for those positions.  Thus, motherhood is a handicap.

Blame God, ladies.  I didn’t choose to be a man and you didn’t choose to be a woman, but we are what we are and we have to work with what we have.

To Interlandi’s credit, she readily acknowledges this:

But none of those solutions addresses the real problem. It’s not innate gender differences that hold women back (just look at this year’s Nobel Prize winners in science). It’s not even gender bias (OK, maybe a little, but that’s not the biggest problem). It’s that science is demanding and very, very competitive. No matter how family-friendly a given university is, a scientist who chooses to have a baby risks having her next big breakthrough scooped up by a competitor who chooses to spend 24/7 in the lab. Changing that will take more than a handful of policies; it will require changing the nature of the game itself. I don’t think that’s possible, and I’m not entirely convinced it’s desirable. It’s competition, after all, that spurs innovation and advancement.

For a second there, I was impressed.  But then in perfect liberal fashion, she acknowledges that what she calls a weakness from one perspective is actually a great strength from another, and then immediately invents a solution by way of legal machination to eliminate the strength and leave only weakness.

As she asserts:

What should be possible is distributing those trade-offs more evenly between women and men. Instead of obsessing over mother-scientists, universities should strive to create an atmosphere that encourages their male scientists to be active fathers. Only then will both genders be equally compelled to confront the family-work balance issue that right now rests too squarely on the shoulders of women.

Women are disadvantaged by the time sink necessary to raise a baby.  Rather than the university accept the fact that half of their workforce, their female scientist,s during childbearing years will likely bear children and be less productive while their children are young, or worse, not productive at all because they are out on maternity leave, the university should also compel men to be less productive while their children are young by some mechanism.  Thus, instead of losing half of your staff to the task of raising children, you can lose all of it.

Brilliant.

Some suggestions: Pay female scientists as much as their male counterparts, so that when scientist couples plan for a family, the woman isn’t automatically compelled to ditch her career simply because she earns less and he earns more. Have paternity leave on par with maternity leave; if you’re going to stop the tenure clock for child rearing, extend that offer to new fathers as well as new mothers.

If there’s a reason not to be liberal, this is it.  I can’t believe that a thinking person could come up with this as a kind of solution.  Let me repeat: this liberal’s “solution” is to make both male and female scientists become less productive as a result of having children instead of cutting our losses and letting only the female scientists become less productive.  I say “solution” because it’s only a solution if you acknowledge a problem, and that problem is that “it’s not fair.”

Life isn’t fair.

The real problem is that some potentially brillaint female scientists who might do wonders for our technical progress choose to have children instead of continuing their careers as researchers.  The author states this as clear as I did only a few paragraphs before.  So it’s not like she doesn’t know.  She’s just replacing the real problem with a fake problem, a facade, the problem of “equality.”  Standard ply of the liberal trade.  Why do they do this?!

So we’re going to invent a solution to an imaginary problem whose consequences make the actual problem worse without really addressing the imaginary problem either.  If we did what this dingbat is suggesting, now we’re in a situation where not only will we lose the contributions of brilliant female scientists, but we’ll lose the contributions of brilliant male scientists also for the sake of continuing the species.  Great idea.

And of course, in case you were wondering, when the author says: “Pay female scientists as much as their male counterparts,” there are two ways to accomplish this: raise the pay of a female scientist to that of a male scientist even though she has comparatively less experience in the field, or lower the pay of a male scientist.  As a budget-minded university comptroller, which would you do?

In closing:

No matter what institutions or individuals do, having both a career—any career—and children requires making choices, and then making sacrifices. The more demanding the career and the more ambitious the individual, the more difficult those choices will be. But women shouldn’t be the only ones who have to choose.

In a single phrase, we summarize the defect in thinking that causes liberalism.  Women shouldn’t be the only ones who have to choose.  Why?

Seriously.  Think about that for a minute.

What if I said this:

Women shouldn’t be the only ones who have to menstruate.

Absurd, isn’t it?

Yes, I agree: menstruation is not pleasant.  Being a man and never having experienced it I can assert with confidence this fact and there are few women out there who would disagree.

Now let me ask you how to solve this problem.  Do you stop women from menstruating or do you cause men to menstruate, too?  The choice should be obvious.  But the entire thrust of Interlandi’s piece here is centered around crippling male scientists’ careers the same way female scientists’ careers are crippled in the interest of equality.

A corrolary of this is wealth redistribution.  Does it make sense to make everyone equal by taking from the wealthy, giving to the poor, in hopes that everyone will have the same amount?  If you follow most western nations’ tax codes, that is exactly what we do.  These codes were written and passed almost unilaterally by liberals.  The better solution is to find a way to elevate the poor to level of the rich; instead of elevating half of the population at the expense (and thereby the lowering) of the other half, do nothing but elevate the lower half.  In other words, only elevate, never lower.

This is often scoffed at by liberals because they know fully well that it is much easier to take wealth from those who already have than it is to create wealth in those who don’t.  And why is it easier?  Because the wealthy are usually wealthy for a reason: they were the ones who were both capable and willing to create wealth by their own initiative.  The poor are sometimes capable, sometimes willing, but usually not both; that’s why they’re poor.  It isn’t right or wrong, it is what it is.  Until God starts creating men to be equal in both capability and drive, we will have diversity in results.

The same thought process can easily be applied to women in science.  A woman is born a woman.  What she does with herself is up to her, but ultimately she has to choose.  And if she chooses to have babies at the expense of her career, if we do anything for mothers scientists, it must be done at no expense to those unburdened by motherhood, e.g., men and childless women.  That means establishing a set of rules that does not handicap the people who choose to spend 24/7 in the lab for no reason other than that the people who can’t or won’t work as hard can reap the same rewards for less productivity in the name of equality.

Changing that will take more than a handful of policies; it will require changing the nature of the game itself. I don’t think that’s possible, and I’m not entirely convinced it’s desirable. It’s competition, after all, that spurs innovation and advancement.

Let’s leave it at that!

If she left it at that, she would be a conservative.

We live in an imperfect world.  Not everything is equitable or fair.  Not everything ever will be, no matter how many bills we pass or lawsuits we file.  It’s pretty obvious that women will always have to choose between how much time they spend as mothers and how much time they spend as workers, and it’s probably different for every woman.  That’s fine.  That’s life.  That’s what it means to be a woman in our society.

As for Ms. Scientist who posted this link, here’s what she had to say about this:

This is one of the reasons I’m not planning on having babies (other than dogs). The hardest part, I think, is that people can’t seem to comprehend that a woman would choose NOT to have children. God forbid a woman is more than a uterus….

Sometimes it’s good that a woman chooses not to reproduce.  This is one of those situations.

I bet if this girl took her head out of her ass for a minute and questioned why it might be that people “can’t seem to comprehend that a woman would choose NOT to have children” she might get a better understanding of what “people” really mean.  By people, of course, she means other women, probably her mother.  Might it be that most people – most women, no less – describe having children as the highlight of their lives?  This has been the case for the majority of parents that I know, particularly women.

Will a life of science be fulfilling?  Maybe.  Will having babies be fulfilling?  Probably.  Will a life with a little of each be the best of both worlds?  Ms. Scientist doesn’t intend on finding out, because she is going to be the next Jane Gooddall.  Knowing a little bit more about the mating habits of gorillas is certainly a prize worth risking your genetic lineage for, right?