Erstmap

Since the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and beyond, thousands of Middle Eastern Christians—as well as other religious minorities, such as Yazidis—have been raped, killed, or driven from their homes. These minorities have been safest under secular governments such as that of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, because the only other option within the Middle East is Islamic theocracy—which is, again, presently in the process of eliminating them. Israel, with its Law of Return, is no option for them at all, as its only Christian permanent residents are descendents of those who lived in Palestine before the State of Israel was founded in 1948, many of whose fellows were expelled during the Arab-Israeli conflicts of the mid-20th century. Christians who were not so fortunate as to have been born in Israel are not allowed to reside in Israel permanently. And even those Christians, according to Fr. Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Vatican’s Custodian of the Holy Land, have had their churches defaced, and have been literally spat upon, by Jews.

It is no surprise, then, that so many Palestinian and Arab Christians have allied with Assad—who is himself a member of a religious minority, an Alawite, and thus has an interest in protecting religious freedom in his country—or with other secular or pan-Arab governments, or have simply emigrated (often to the United States). It is also, accordingly, no surprise that the destabilization of the region by Washington military campaigns, which has favored the rise of the Islamic State, has been so devastating for these Christian communities.

None of this stopped Senator Ted Cruz from telling a group of these Christians, in no equivocal terms, that his support for their struggle is contingent upon their support for a State which has no interest in taking them in.

Sen. Ted Cruz was booed offstage at a conference for Middle Eastern Christians Wednesday night after saying that “Christians have no greater ally than Israel.”

Cruz, the keynote speaker at the sold-out D.C. dinner gala for the recently-founded non-profit In Defense of Christians, began by saying that “tonight, we are all united in defense of Christians. Tonight, we are all united in defense of Jews. Tonight, we are all united in defense of people of good faith, who are standing together against those who would persecute and murder those who dare disagree with their religious teachings.”

A State which denies citizenship to gentiles is the greatest ally of Christians! One wonders, then, when Israeli commandos will begin taking on the Islamic State on behalf of the persecuted.

Cruz went further, however: his final statement at the gala, before leaving the stage, was that “If you will not stand with Israel and the Jews, then I will not stand with you.” Cruz’s attitude appears to be shared by many other conservative American Protestants, who seem entirely willing to condemn fellow Christians, who live with the daily threat of rape and murder, for the sake of Israel. According to commenters on Mollie Hemingway’s recent piece at the Federalist, Maronite Catholics and Eastern Orthodox are getting what they deserve for not liking Jews enough:

Israel is not Middle Eastern Christian sects’ enemy.

Not by the wildest stretch of the imagination. If they harbor resentments, now is the time they dropped them.

Or they’ll deserve the consequences.

Well, dhimmis, you spent the last 1400 years building this trap for yourselves. Learn to accept the Jews or die ‘the vilest of animals’ as the Koran calls all Kuffar, Christian or Jew.

ME Christians just gave you a window to the virulent strain of Christianity that most Americans had long had bred out of them.

Let’s face [it], even as th[e]y are being slaughtered, ME Christians would sooner die than relinquish they [sic] antisemitism. It’s their choice.

These ‘Christians’ have two choices: life alongside Israel and the Jews or slaughter at the hands of Muslims.

You are way off base here. Their persecution by fanatical Muslims does not justify their antisemitism.

The moral case for Christians in the Middle East is undermined — perhaps undermined to the point of being not deserving of support — because of their not-so thinly-veiled Jew-hatred.

That is the *exact* point that Cruz was making.

Don’t like the Islamic State? You’d better be friendlier with Jews, then! It’s so simple—all these Christians have to do is call out the name of Benjamin Netanyahu three times under the sign of the Star of David, and Israel, in its unending beneficence, will transport them instantly to safety! Expressing support for Israel would normally get these people killed, but Israel and Uncle Sam are ready to repel the forces of the Islamic State immediately and forever—all they have to do is to say the magic words. And it’s not as though Washington brought the Islamic State into existence through its involvement in the Middle East on behalf of its Israeli and Saudi friends; to say so, in fact, would be grievously and atrociously anti-Semitic, wouldn’t it? And according to Ted Cruz and these other conservative commenters, anti-Semitism is a crime far worse than anything the Islamic State is doing.

The UK's demographics are illustrating the truth of GK Chesterton's observations concerning the human disinclination to believe in nothing:

In England’s second city of Birmingham, of 278,623 youngsters, 97,099 were registered as Muslim compared with 93,828 as Christian. The rest were of other faiths such as Hindu or Jewish, or none.

A similar trend has emerged in the cities of Bradford and Leicester, the towns of Luton, in Bedfordshire, and Slough in Berkshire, as well as the London boroughs Newham, Redbridge and Tower Hamlets, where nearly two-thirds of children are Islamic.

Last night experts said more must be done to ensure that society does not become polarised along religious lines.

I think it is fairly obvious that when people are being beheaded, it is a little late for that. To quote Jerry Pournell's apt observation, there will be war.

Professor Ted Cantle, of the ICoCo Foundation, which promotes community cohesion, said: ‘What we are seeing are several trends running together. There is a long-term decline in support for the established religions, notably Christianity; continuing immigration from the Asian sub-continent; and higher fertility among the Muslim population, which has a considerably lower age profile.

‘There is also deepening segregation exacerbated by the loss of white population from cities and more intensive concentration of black and minority ethnic groups as a result of replacement.

‘This is the real problem, as residential segregation is generally compounded by school and social segregation.

If he thinks segregation is a problem, just try desegregating those communities. Because communities that can't peacefully segregate will always eventually find another, less palatable means of doing so.

Well done, secular Britain. Out of its desire to weaken Christianity's societal dominance, it imported Islam. That's like leaping out of the frying pan and into the blast furnace.

Reader Keyser Soze had an interesting comment last week that I thought would be a good jump off point for today’s topic:

@Siirtyrion: You said, “Many scientists still go by this notion because it explains the frequent tradeoffs in mating and gives us a more complete picture for sexual selection as a whole. I understand that I uphold physicality as king, but understand that hypergamy isn’t completely about a short-term mating strategy, regardless of what some people may think. Women may be able to fund their our lives currently but rest assure, they still seek out Beta Bucks in other forms aside from monetary or material gain (i.e they still seek out physiological and emotional comfort from less than ideal males).”

Question for all:

Reading this, I had a thought. We often talk about women hitting the wall at 35ish and their sudden willingness to be me more reasonable with their expectations in a mate as they realize their SMV has decreased. I wonder if the above quote also plays into this. By the time women hit 35ish, historically (without modern methods of assisted conception) they are past their childbearing years. I wonder if their mating strategy changes at this age not only because of diminished SMV, but also because they are no longer looking for prime genetic material for reproduction as much as they are looking for “physiological and emotional comfort”. Perhaps this was implied all along, but I never thought about it this way before.

I hate to think this is going to come off as sympathy for the aging spinsters who had their cake in their youth and now, late in life, are looking to make honest amends for their past decisions, but it probably will.

A few months ago I broke-down Robin Korth’s aging sexual denial and in response we got a glimpse into the rationalization engine (a.k.a. the Hamster) at work in feminine solipsism:

My intent here isn’t to pick on Korth personally or really any woman in the post-Wall demographic in particular, but this self-insight is an excellent illustration of the feminine solipsism I often refer to on this blog. Furthermore, this sense of ego-blamelessness is then combined with the easy rationales and social conventions ready-made by the Feminine Imperative to affirm her self-importance.

Deti comments:

Robin Korth should be reposing in the love of her husband of the past 35 years, give or take. She should be doting on children and grandchildren as the esteemed matriarch of her family.

Instead, Ms. Korth is still out there acting as if she’s 25 years old. She’s still trying to navigate the sexual and dating minefields. In the end she’s trying to show everyone (but really herself) that she’s still “got it”; that she can still arouse a man sexually. It is all really about self aggrandizement. It is all about self- validation and affirmation. In the end, it’s all about Robin Korth. It’s pathetic and sad, really.

And no, Ms. Korth, your life is not the result of what you think about yourself. You are what you do. You are NOT what you think, read, or write. You are not what you were or what you’d like to be.

You are what you do. Period. Full stop.

And from The Difficulty of Gaming Women by Age Brackets by (the old) Roissy:

36 to 38 year olds

She is at peace with her spinsterhood and her failure in the dating market. She will acquiesce easily and gratefully to sex with very little game, as long as you don’t look like a grandpa. Her expectations are so low, it will be a challenge to disappoint her.

If you are prone to guilt, you might feel it when you inevitably dump a woman in this age range. Don’t. Remind yourself that her past is littered with her insouciant dumping of many beta men before you. You are merely an alpha agent of righteous karma.

Granted, Robin is well past the 38 year old mark by over 20 years, however even at 59 the description is still remarkably apt in light of Deti’s overview, however, the real lesson here is for men.

There comes (or should come) a certain empowerment for men after a point of maturation in life where he grows into an understanding of how the Game is played by women. As I’ve noted in the past month, this game, the former secret of women’s dualistic sexual strategy, is becoming more and more of an open secret amongst a feminine-primary culture becoming increasingly more assured of its primacy. If anything this plan for women’s optimizing hypergamy is just this side of proudly flaunting it to men.

As I pick my way through exactly this ‘plan’ in writing the next book, I’ve actually become less surprised by so many examples I find of this willingness with which women will overtly share their strategy for assuring short-term Alpha sexual desires during their SMV peak, and then consolidation on the security a Beta provider represents as their SMV decays beginning at around 30 years of age.

My purpose in writing this next volume of The Rational Male is to make men aware of just this life-schedule and sexual strategy, but even with my own efforts and the glaring willingness with which women will now confirm it, a larger whole of men simply don’t mature into this overall understanding.

For all the education the Red Pill represents for men, the larger blue pill whole simply don’t want to accept the ugly reality of women’s sexual strategy even when women openly confirm this for them – or when they do it’s too late for anything but pensive self-reproach and then signing the alimony/child support check anyway.

As this understanding becomes more widespread some social change will have to follow. Men will either become so pathetic as to ‘normalize’ it for themselves, and personally identify with what amounts to their open (proactive or reactive) cuckolding under women’s grossly overt championing of their Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks sexual strategy – or Men will come to the realization (hopefully sooner than later) that the fantasy of monogamous bliss based on a notion of intergender compromise and the ‘give & take’ (but mostly give) they were sold on was never in the best interests of feminine-primacy.

The Feminine Imperative was (and is) only ever concerned with men’s imperatives or male-specific priorities insofar as they align with the superseding, primary imperatives of women. Thus, as open hypergamy becomes more common and the truth of this duplicity and imbalance (really disinterest) of mutual sexual imperatives becomes more evident, men will again (as with Game) evolve methods and mentalities to consolidate on their own imperatives or simply live in denial of it all.

The Long Game

For almost 6 months I’ve had this post from Cail Corishev bookmarked. It’s an excellent driver for exactly this point: prior to the digital age men tended not to play a long game when it came to socio-sexual strategies. The short game is all that matters in the moment, and all that stimulates, but until the advent of digital forums where men could figuratively compare notes, most men were simply unable, and perhaps too distracted to ask the obvious questions about women’s hypergamy and how it plays out over the course of 10-30 years and the roles women expect men to play during those stages of their lives in order to accommodate their strategy.

In Cail’s piece he describes a woman he knew at age 30 and how attractive she was, and his consideration of starting a relationship with her. After a failing interest and 10 years of no contact, she reinitiated with Cail:

But while we were chatting, I saw some of her recent pictures, and whoa!  She’s gone from a 7-8 to maybe a 5, and that would be adjusted for age.  She hasn’t gotten fat, but that’s about the only positive note.  She looks so rough that I found myself wondering what I was thinking ten years ago, but I looked back at some old pictures, and she really was pretty at 30 — not a model or anything, but enough to turn heads.  Now she looks like she’s lived 20 hard years in 10.  She works nights at a pretty demanding job and has had some serious health problems, so I guess it’s no surprise, but it was really striking: ten years ago I ached for this girl, and now I wouldn’t look twice at her if I passed her in the grocery store.

That got me thinking about Rollo’s chart.  My own SMV, as far as I can tell, hasn’t changed much from mid-30s to mid-40s, just as his chart would predict.  I’m about the same weight, same build, maybe a little less hair, but I’d lost quite a bit of it already back then.  I’m not much better-off financially, but at least not worse, and I have more of a sense of direction in my life.  I’m certainly more confident, especially with women, and more established in my communities.  So some pluses and some minuses, holding steady at about the same level.  The amount of interest I get from women seems to support that.

She, on the other hand, going from 30 to 40, has gone from fertile to not likely.  She’s also a grandmother now, so instead of looking to start a new family, she’s focused (and rightly so) on helping her kids with theirs.  (If single moms don’t have much spare attention to give a husband, imagine the single mom of a single mom.)  An additional ten years of dating and relationships under her belt certainly doesn’t add to her appeal.  On top of those reasons, add the drastic decline in her looks, and now I not only don’t want to marry her, but as we chat I’m mostly thinking, “How soon can I politely say goodnight so I can get to sleep already?”  Harsh, but true.  Just as Rollo’s chart predicts, her SMV has been on a steady decline since we met — maybe more of a free-fall in her case — and now mine is well above hers.

I had a similar post to this I published back in December of 2011 – Protracted SMV:

It’s a simple matter to tell a guy he’s dodged a bullet in the cosmic scheme of things, but it’s altogether different to provably show him how he’s dodging it. For all the evils of facebook at least it gives him [men] an ability to see the forest for the trees, but the feminine can’t even afford him that. You must stay dumb, you must stay plugged-in for the feminine to maintain primacy. For all the benefits of a globally connected world, the feminine imperative expects you to accept a feminine-centric normalization of it.

What the Feminine Imperative fears is men becoming what Roissy terms Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma. Due to a lifetime of feminine conditioning, men tend to underestimate the leverage their SMV has in the context of women’s biological imperatives.

Pity for Reneé

I have a similar story to Cail’s. When I was a senior in high school I had a ‘friend‘ named Reneé, she was a gorgeous auburn-red head with a fantastic 17-18 year old body. We were good ‘friends‘ in the sense that it was clear I wasn’t ever going to see her naked and she had all of the personality trappings of a girl who knew she was attractive (she did modeling after high school), but also had the beginnings of a very self-important ego-invested feminist mind set.

I never really stayed in touch with her after graduation since by then I had moved on to women who enthusiastically reciprocated my interests and I moved along in life. It wasn’t until 2009 that I got on FaceBook and began having old friends look me up – Reneé was among the first. Very similar to the woman in Cail’s story we started to catch up with what the other had been doing through their 20s, 30s and now 40s.

As it turned out she was still fairly attractive for having had one daughter and never marrying the father, or any other guy for that matter. Most of the predictable single mommy issues and false-empowerment memes were bandied about by her, but the short version is here she was at 41 and her daughter was a year away from leaving for college. She was between jobs, but the one she had and the one she hoped to get were mediocre low to mid-management type, subsistence level employment.

She was and still is single 5 years later. The predictable questions about what my wife was like and how long we’ve been married came up, how we met, and where I’ve travelled in my work, etc. and I can honestly say I felt bad for her just recalling all of the life I’ve lived in the interim and basically forgot about her since high school.

She’s 46 now, and loves FaceBook as much as any aging spinster, but I really don’t want to call her that. In between the many pictures of her 4 cats (no lie) she occasionally posts some lament about how lonely she is now that her daughter has gone away to school and she comes home to an empty apartment these days. She makes not-so-subtle pleas to her FB community friends to set her up with ‘a great guy’ and all the dutiful Betas come out of the woodwork to tell her how pretty she (still) is and to keep her chin up and the right guy will “come along” – not so unlike the advice she gave me and at least half a dozen other guys I knew back in the day.

Reneé still clings to all of the feminist memes and mantras (reposts all the most popular), and complains of not being able to find a “great guy” anymore. This is of course infantile men’s faults for not manning up to her fem-correct standards, or else it’s a complaint about the ‘creepy’ men who really just want to bang her when she out with friends.

Unhappy Feminists

I hadn’t really ever considered using Reneé as a blog post subject until I read this article in Psychology Today:

According to a new survey released this month, your odds of winning the cash would increase if you skipped any 40-something, single female professionals and focused on the middle-aged male managers with one child at home and a wife who works part-time. In its Office Pulse survey, Captivate Network, a media solutions company, says its uncovered “profiles of the happiest and unhappiest workers.” And here it is:

• Male
• 39 years old
• Married
• Household income between $150,000 and $200,000
• In a senior management position
• 1 young child at home
• A wife who works part-time

And the unhappiest profile?:

• Female
• 42 years old
• Unmarried (and no children)
• Household income under $100,000
• In a professional position (doctor, lawyer, etc.)

Minus the professional status, essentially Reneé fits the profile for the most unhappy person in the western world today. Now, return back to Robin Korth’s comment, her life is the result of what she thinks of herself. What does this say about the decision making both she and Reneé have made in their lives?

I can’t say I have any sympathy for the likes of Korth, but for Reneé I do feel a pang of pity (in spite of Roissy’s advice for women of this age). For all of the accusations of red pill “misogyny” I genuinely do like women, and I’m not rooting for them to smash into the Wall. However I can see why my observations make this seem so – hard truths are often warnings that we don’t like to heed.

I often wonder if women of this profile aren’t as much victims of an ideological conditioning as Betatized men are over the course of their lives. Much of what’s resulted in Reneé’s life are the consequences of having (and still subscribing to) a mindset that’s based on equalist individualism, and she’s now beginning to reap what she’s sown – knowingly or not.

I don’t know the father of her daughter, but my red pill instincts (and knowing how hot she used to be) tell me the guy was likely a pump and dump Alpha bad boy. Reneé never struck me as the type to ‘settle’ on a Beta provider because she was too headstrong and independent® for that – she was certainly hot enough to attract the Alphas and independent enough to never consider a Beta for a relationship.

Observations

So my observation is this; while granting that women’s decisions are their own, and they should in all ways be accountable for the consequences that follow from them, how much of those decisions are based on a conditioning that promotes an idealized ideology of feminine, equalist independence?

For the same reason I can’t entirely fault a man with an internalized blue pill mindset over his conditioning, shouldn’t we also consider that women are likewise mislead by a similar influence? Are we (again) giving women too much credit for being rational independent agents under different circumstance?

For men’s part, it’s hardly avoidable that we become Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma by default for women in this cohort. Perhaps not as Alpha as we’re perceived, but as our SMV ascends in our 30s and (sometimes) through our 40s, it’s almost unavoidable that, even with a baseline of ambition, we’re seen as more desirable long term prospects.

In all honesty, were I to find myself single tomorrow, Reneé or women like her would never make my ‘to date’ list. Women love to complain that mature men really aren’t, and all they want is a young girl to fuck and coo for them. I would argue that men in my demo (at least should) have the depth of experience to know what the Feminine Imperative (and its social arm feminism) has bred and conditioned into women, and we honestly don’t want the hassle of dealing with it.

There is precious little reward for a man, and no appreciation, for having a big enough heart to save a woman from the consequences of her past decisions. That’s not meant as a callous punishment, just simple pragmatism.

As I stated in The Threat,

Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.

When you’ve spent your whole life attempting to ‘have it all’ on your own, perhaps men can’t help but be an agent of Karma when that ‘all’ includes a man’s participation.

Filed under: Case Studies, Foundations, Idealizations, Operative Social Conventions, Sexual Market Value, The Feminine Imperative

Two of my favorite charts (and I'm sure they're yours) is the S&P 500 PE ratio and dividend yield.  It is the basic comparison of what you're paying for a stock relative to what it pays you.

But every once in a while I like to go really macro and compare the country's economic growth to its asset prices.  In theory (bar international investments and trade) asset prices should not be increasing faster than economic growth in that all profits must come from economic growth.  Therefore, both asset prices and economic growth should grow at the same rate, otherwise we know there's either a bubble or a (well...it's been so long...what was it again we call stock markets that are cheap....um....oh!  That's right!) steal. 

So I took it upon my beleaguered economist ass to go and pull the data comparing the annual returns of the S&P 500 and subtracting out from it nominal economic growth which should in theory always be 0.

Heh, yeah right.


Naturally there's going to be oscillations and bubbles and troughs in any economy.  But given what we know about the PE ratio now being 70% higher than it should be, I just wanted another data set to view this from a different angle.  And this one didn't disappoint.

We see, during the economic crash, stock prices crashing even more sending the net difference between asset prices and economic growth into negative territory.  This meant asset prices were growing slower (crashing faster, actually) than economic growth was.  However, this only lasted one year (2008) and in 2009 where the economy contracted on a yearly basis by 2.9% the stock market punished this performance by awarding this slowing economy with a 25% increase in valuation.

This is like your kid coming home with straight F's and you increase their allowance by a a full fourth.

Since then the disconnect between economic growth and asset prices has continued as asset prices have averaged annual gains of 15% while the economy has managed just under 3%.

I'm going to say it again for the cheap seats and hope to god some future historian looks this up and sees it, but this is just another bit of proof that Americans are more interested in baloney asset bubbles than they are actual economic growth.  It is the modern day epitome of American psychology where we want all of the rewards, but without having to expend any of the work.

Does it matter that stock prices are being driven by retirement dollars and not profits?
Does it matter that equities are being driven by QE and low interest rate monetary policies which prompt corporate buy backs?
Does it matter economic potential in this country is so low corporations would rather buy back shares than invest and create jobs?

No, because prices are up and that's our super happy fun juice!

I know the federal reserve is powerful and that the world economy is already structured around a US dollar reserve currency.  But neither are more powerful than the forces of math and reality.  I just hope to see that reality manifested before I die.  In the meantime, Enjoy that Decline!

Every branch of American Christianity has a disproportionate percentage of women. This was an open secret when I used to go, and they tried everything to remedy it with men’s prayer breakfasts, war-themed posters, and screamo music. Of course, I use the word “everything” loosely. Try as they might, there’s something fundamental about 21st century American Christianity that is repelling men, and this is a big problem if you want your virgins to marry “a good Christian guy.”

Caveat: The only exception to this sex disproportion is Eastern Orthodoxy, which is a collection of immigrant communities and socially malcontent converts. If you’ve ever met an Orthodox, especially a convert, you’ll find they often have the same contempt for protestantism and Catholicism as the most virulent homoeroticist. So for the purposes of this article, I’m not considering them American Christians.

Here are my reasons why I quit going to your church:

1. Your music is saccharine

Christians assume that a distorted guitar is the definition of rock music. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Rock music is as much a philosophy as it is a sound. I heard time again growing up, “The only problem with secular music is the lyrics.” This is nonsense because in every genre, music and lyrics are innately connected. Imagine “Something in the way” by Nirvana with Jesus lyrics. It just doesn’t work.

But of course churches soften the “guitar and drums” element, and you’ll never hear a guitar solo that has any integrity. Perhaps there was some merit to early Christian rock (perhaps), but songwriters now simplify the chords so that churches can play it. So you’ll never find an A7 #9 in a church with “contemporary rock”. Because, you know, those extra two notes in the chord are just too hard to pull off. You might even have to have an extra volunteer guitar player, and the mild dissonance could make people uncomfortable with their edgy new form of worship.

“But worship is about lyrics, not music!” cries the Christian who glossed over everything I just said. Your lyrics are also sacharine. If you look at Bob Dylan’s “Slow Train Coming” (1979), you’ll find that at least there were a variety of topics on display. Not every song was a praise song. Some were simply doctrinal teaching songs, like the old hymns. Today, your lyrics are so hollow that many musicians are rewriting (and ruining) old hymns on their Christian rock praise albums.

If nobody is capable of writing anything with substance, then maybe the secularists are right that all Christians are stupid. And no, the exception of David Crowder doesn’t negate the broad-sweeping reality.

I don’t want to go to church to be entertained, because I can experience that at home. The world can entertain me far better than your ragtag band of volunteers and non-profit workers. If I want to experience religion, I want something otherworldly. I want an escape. Religion is supposed to be an opiate after all, but playing shitty soft rock is a reminder that I’m stuck on earth instead of in the next life.

But music isn’t the only source of entertainment…

2. Your sermons sound like a high school assembly

It seemed like every sermon was either about getting through hard times or being obedient to God. Most pastors I ran into knew fuck-all about the Bible and basic doctrine, which I guess is a product of giving a seminary degree to anyone with “a call from God.”

And what’s with the props? My childhood pastor brought a fishing boat on stage to illustrate being fishers of men or something. How insulting is that? I’m a grown adult, and I don’t need constant visual stimulation to pay attention to a lecture that I’m already interested in. I woke up early, dressed nice, and drove here to listen to you prattle. You’ve already got my attention.

One year for Easter, we took the song “Celebrate Good Times” and gave it Jesus lyrics. We also had cheerleaders with streamers. It felt very reverent for the most sacred day on the calendar. But the pastors weren’t aiming for reverence. They wanted people to think church was fun, and to their credit, they probably succeeded.

If you’re a pastor reading this and you learn nothing else from this article, take note of this axiom: What you hook them with is what you’ll have to keep them with. If you try to “get people saved” with funny stories and clever alliteration, then that’s all they’ll ever expect from you, and the actual teaching parts of your sermon will feel intrusive and unwanted.

3. Your buildings are ugly

I was in Charlotte, North Carolina. There is this massive evangelical church called Calvary. I mean, this is the kind of thing you see on TV, and not at 3am either. I went in one day to look around. They had this beautiful old organ several stories high, and they tacked two ugly screens on it so the people could read the lyrics. It completely upset the whole aesthetic of the room, but it was necessary since Jesus condemns the use of hymnals. After all, you wouldn’t want to miss out on the latest, most innovative praise chorus, would you?

The Catholic Church is actually having a substantial number of converts from protestantism. The Eastern Orthodox are being jump-started back to life with converts, and the break-off Anglo-protestant groups are finding evangelical converts demanding Anglo-Catholic worship. Why is this? There are a variety of reasons, but part of it is because people enjoy looking at pretty things and listening to pretty music. Even the Catholic Church is finding its own people are tired of bluegrass masses and dadaist architecture. For all its lies and manipulation, consumerism is right that what you are surrounded by affects the way you feel about that place and about yourself.

If the people are the bride of God, and if the church building is the house of God, then why must God have an ugly house? What wife doesn’t want to create a beautiful home for her family? And what husband would allow his wife to neglect their home? They call it the sanctuary, but it just looks like an auditorium.

4. Your Jesus is a pussy

The typical protestant Jesus is always calm and gentle and never emotional or assertive. Jesus has long, flowing hair that shimmers in the sun. He always has a neatly trimmed full beard. He wears brightly colored robes instead of pants. When he is hanging on the cross, his body is perfectly hairless. In short, the protestant Jesus is a woman.

The Catholic Jesus looks the same, except he’s holding his heart in his hands to give children nightmares. Funny how that statue is always placed at the back of the church. The historical Jesus was a sexless vagrant, not a bureaucrat with an MBA. Is it possible that a functionally homeless Middle Easterner wasn’t concerned about his body hair? You make Jesus look like a JC Penney model, and then you wonder why men hate going to church.

5. Everything is marketed towards women

I remember looking in the bulletin of a church I went to for a year. Every week, there were at least half a dozen activities for women advertised. At most, there would be two events for men in the distant future, and neither of them looked interesting. The only constant one was a prayer breakfast once a month at seven in the morning.

Look in a Christian bookstore. There are lovely pictures of flowers everywhere. Jesus on the cross is never very bloody (the exception being Mel Gibson’s snuff film, which was literally God-awful). You’ll never find an ugly person on the cover of a Christian book or CD. Lots of novels are written about 19th century debutantes. Even the music is acoustic rock that better appeals to women’s softness.

American Christianity is a service industry for women. The men are just there orbiting because they don’t know how else to get sex from their wives. Dalrock best explains how feminism has saturated Christianity, but he is fighting a losing battle. The reality is that pastors will always be afraid to speak on what the Bible says about women because they will lose their biggest clients. Pastors have to eat too, you know, and if public speaking is their own marketable skill, then they’ll do whatever it takes to survive.

1 Peter 3 makes it clear that women are to handle marital difficulties by being quiet and submissive, and St. Peter even calls women “the weaker sex.” Titus 2 says they are to be “home-workers” in the Greek. Beta Christians (i.e. almost all Christians) love to champion the Proverbs 31 woman who sells her surplus weaving, but they don’t realize that’s an occupation from the context of the home. It’s a surplus of what she was already doing. And if you’re open to the Apocrypha, Sirach 25 says that it is shameful for a woman to financially maintain her husband.

So I don’t go to your church anymore because they have nothing to offer me as a man. Give me one practical benefit from going to your church beyond career networking. I can read an inspiring sermon at home, and I can even choose one instead of taking a crap shoot at your lecture hall. The same is true with worship. You may argue that fellowship is necessary, but precious few of your people are worth imitating.

A person is colored by the people he is surrounded by, and I don’t want to be colored by the kind of people who go to church. The kind of people with an obsessive fear of Coors Lite or the word “damn.” The kind of people who think Fireproof and Mel Gibson’s Passion are high works of art defying the ethics and conventions of modern cinema. The kind of people who think women are the centerpiece of the household. The kind of who believe Chris Tomlin is as good a musician as Brian Wilson. You know, the kind of people who are American Christians.

Read More: Why Tolstoy Rejected The Church

As you all know the 1950's by every technology and inflation adjusted measure was not only better for everybody, but was hands down the pinnacle of US achievement and capitalism.

Because of this the left does its best to rewrite history, besmirch it, criminalize it, villainize it, and (as if it's not the most tiresome and broken record in their playbook) is remind us just how sexist and racist it was.  The 1940's and 1950's just simply cannot exist accurately in the history books for it is everything that the left hates and the most compelling and damning empirical data that proves socialism wrong.

Because of this I like to bring up the 50's occasionally, citing data and statistics and presenting logical, unemotional arguments as to why it was indeed the best decade in US history.  And today's leftist argument we're going to debunk is;

"Oh yeah!??  Well...umm....you know what...the WORLD WAS DESTROYED after WWII and the US was the ONLY country left to build stuff for them.  That's the only reason the 50's had such great economic growth.  It wasn't capitalism!  It was because the world was our bitch!  So..umm...yeah, so there!"

So young lieutenants, economists, Cappy Cappites, and book babes, let us do what the left refuses to and look at the actual data.

To see whether or not the true cause of the booming economic growth in the 50's was due to the rest of the world being destroyed, I decided to look at exports as a percentage of GDP.  To be honest, I truthfully thought there was "some" credibility to the left's claim, and so I was more than willing to adjust US economic growth to account for exports.  However, after pulling the data, I realized I didn't have to bother:

Exports as a percentage of GDP have actually GONE UP SINCE WWII.






















Yes, during 1947 exports were at a relative high, but after a 2 decade decline and stagnation, exports have consistently been going up since the 1970's.  Keep in mind a lot of this has to do with services (which were not as prominent in international trade as today), but the argument that the whole world was "just destroyed" and was helplessly dependent upon US exports which explained the booming economic growth we enjoyed in the 50's is just a lie.  And if we consider exports are nearly TWICE the percent they were back in the 50's, it's actually a damning testimony against the creeping socialism we've had since the 1960's (as well as American spending habits that we IMPORT even MORE resulting in a trade deficit).

The primary lesson to take from this though, ladies and gentlemen, is that you can almost always assume the left has never bothered to look up the "facts" they spew.  You, sadly, just have to assume whatever they say is either intentionally or unknowningly false and be willing to spend the 5 minutes to look up the actual data. 

A proud Norwegian sent me this. I cannot vouch for it, but it is funny. And perhaps even encouraging:

In the U.S. Marines, doing a mock war in the Norwegian city of Trondheim with the Dutch, Germans and other allies, training in urban combat. My infantry unit was positioned in a large soccer field next to an elementary school. Keep in mind there was no actual combat, even simulated; it was mostly just practicing maneuvers and tactics. But we still looked out of place with weapons and gear, etc. It's February. In Norway. Cold as hell. Snow up to our knees. Norway obviously has no snow days, so the kids were all in school.

Anyway, so Norway has this most delicious and amazing delicacy, I have no idea what it's called, but it's basically a bacon-wrapped hot dog; we just assumed it was called Candy of the Lord. As Americans we were naturally and instantly addicted. You find them at gas stations, and there just happened to be one on the other side of the school where we were camped. A few of my fellow Marines and I requested permission to go to the gas station and we set out on our way.

We made it to right about where the main entrance of the school was, and the doors opened; school was out. There were only a few kids, probably 6 or 7 years old. Lots of talking and laughing. Gawking at us as we walked by, with our guns and huge ridiculous snow suits. One precocious little guy made shooting noises at us. We made shooting noises back.

And then someone in my group. I don't know who. God help me I don't know who...

Someone threw a snowball and hit a little girl in the leg.

And those little Norwegian children unleashed hell.

There was a shrill cry in unintelligible gibberish and the doors to the school burst open. School children flooded out like a never-ending flood of something that never ends. Screeching, smiling, sprinting - how the hell were they sprinting?? - little bastards were slinging snowballs faster than the laws of physics should allow. It was like that movie Elf. If you can imagine riding in a fast car in a snowstorm and sticking your head out the window. Now imagine the snowflakes that are hitting your face are the size of snowballs. We couldn't see a damn thing. We couldn't run. We could barely breathe. Holy hell....

We tried to return fire and threw one, maybe two half-packed, crappy snowballs that fell apart in the air, arms flailing like limp-wristed fairies. I am from Texas. We were a unit stationed in North Carolina. We were so outmatched and out of our element, it only made them laugh harder. We were cut off from our main forces. We tried to perform a flanking maneuver but they were too fast. I think some of them were throwing rocks!

As for my comrades. I could see them speed waddling in their huge suits back to camp like a messed up pair of white Teletubbies, under withering fire. Screw tactics, screw me, screw the Candy of the Lord, this was survival! I was the slow one in the group. My snow boots were too big but they were the smallest size they had at Issue goddammit!! My Marines had left me behind.

I tried pulling my hood over my head and keeping my head down. No longer content to pelt my defenseless body with ballistic snow, the enemy swarmed me and dragged me down, cackling like a pack of hyenas descending on a wildebeest. I tried to sling them off by spinning. I came out of one of my boots and fell. I began to scream and plead for them to stop but they neither understood nor gave a single Nordic damn. They literally pinned me down with about five kids on each limb. It was then that I actually thought - oh sh*t. I'm really in trouble. My snow-mittens were ripped off and flung into trees. They started shoving snow down my suit. Have you ever had anyone drop an ice cube down your shirt?

Well now imagine someone shoveling handfuls of ice cubes down your shirt. It literally shocked the breath out of my body.

They left me laying like a Family Guy accident victim. Moaning and screaming in the cold. Rifle packed with snow and dirt. Boot buried somewhere. They ran away laughing, jabbering in their crazy language. I lay there trying to figure out just what in the great American hell had happened."

Never underestimate the power of swarming kids.

The sons and daughters of Norway didn't fear to take on the Nazis and the U.S. Marines. I doubt they will lay prostrate before the invaders from the Umma for much longer. The multicultural wall is beginning to crack:

Norway has become the latest country to consider stripping citizenship from extremists who travel abroad to fight jihad. The government said it was important to send 'a strong signal' to people thinking about leaving the country to join terror groups.

Jihad-tourists won't be the only non-Norwegians stripped of their Norwegian citizenship. That's all that the government is willing to say yet. The important thing is that people are finally understanding that nations are fundamentally based in the genes, not the paperwork or the geographical location. This isn't to say that some form of integration isn't possible, but it is impossible so long as any previous connections are maintained and it is a process that takes generations, not years.

The purchaser of "My Ex GF's Tits" has found her artwork a new home.  Specifically a frat house in front of a beer-pong table.


I cannot think of a better home.

Despite the vaccine makers thinking they had put the Wakefield controversy safely behind them, another researcher has uncovered an apparent link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and from the CDC's own data:

Background
A significant number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder suffer a loss of previously-acquired skills, suggesting neurodegeneration or a type of progressive encephalopathy with an etiological basis occurring after birth. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectof the age at which children got their first Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine on autism incidence. This is a reanalysis of the data set, obtained from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC), used for the Destefano et al. 2004 publication on the timing of the first MMR vaccine and autism diagnoses.

Methods
The author embarked on the present study to evaluate whether a relationship exists between child age when the first MMR vaccine was administered among cases diagnosed with autism and controls born between 1986 through 1993 among school children in metropolitan Atlanta. The Pearson’s chi-squared method was used to assess relative risks of receiving an autism diagnosis within the total cohort as well as among different race and gender categories.

Results
When comparing cases and controls receiving their first MMR vaccine before and after 36 months of age, there was a statistically significant increase in autism cases specifically among African American males who received the first MMR prior to 36 months of age. Relative risks for males in general and African American males were 1.69 (p=0.0138) and 3.36 (p=0.0019), respectively. Additionally, African American males showed an odds ratio of 1.73 (p=0.0200) for autism cases in children receiving their first MMR vaccine prior to 24 months of age versus 24 months of age and thereafter.

The troubling thing here is that the author of the paper, "Measles-mumps-rubella vaccination timing and autism among young african american boys: a reanalysis of CDC data" reached his conclusions by examining CDC data that reached the opposite conclusion and served as the basis for a CDC doctor's testimony before Congress. Bill Sardi writes on Lew Rockwell:

There is evidence of an intentional cover-up as it is alleged that data from children who did not have birth certificates (not a pertinent factor) was removed from the study to reduce the statistical power of the study and claim there was no significant association between autism and the MMR vaccine.... Dr. Hooker notes that the CDC used children under the age of 3 for a comparison (control) group, which is an intentional way of skewing results of its studies involving any alleged link between vaccines and autism.  Symptoms of autism generally don’t emanate among children till after age 3 and the control group was too young to have received a diagnosis of autism, he notes.

Not only does this "reanalysis of CDC data" reopen the possible MMR-autism link, but it calls into question the integrity of the entire field of vaccine research. If Hooker is correct and CDC doctors such as Dr. Colleen Boyle have engaged in vaccine fraud, it will entirely explode the basic assumption that vaccines are safe because it will render all of the CDC's data and assurances suspect.

Foreign policy and money have long been linked. The colonial view of mercantilism is centuries old. Some historians argue Rome was a conquest and plunder economy that started to collapse when they ran out of areas to conquer with reasonable effort. Money is the weak link of the US system. The Russians have been open with noticing this. It is not just the US world order system but the USG domestic situation. A big piece of this system are our vassals—er, friends in Europe. Europe is not the center of the dollar system, but much closer than US allies on the periphery in Asia and below the equator who have had crises in the last thirty years. I wrote months ago about Anglo-German tensions. It appears the tension is real—the Germans are cuddling up to the Russians and the Americans are spooked.

Anglo-German tensions have risen with open moves like gold repatriation, protests against the US Federal Reserve in Germany, and explicit anger over NSA spying. as well as spy ejections. The current geopolitical chessboard features the little Ukrainian piece that the US was eager to topple but Germany wasn’t, inspiring Victoria Nuland to say “fuck the EU”. Fast forward months later, and with a real civil war going on, it has been leaked that the Germans were close to a land-for-gas deal to end sanctions, bring a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine crisis, and keep the gas flowing. Russia is Germany’s 11th biggest trade partner. Germany is a bit more reliant than France or the UK on Russian gas, and right now Germany is the only piece of the EU able to fund all the bailout mechanisms and keep growing. Each time a nation needs some form of bailout in the EU, their share of the bailout responsibility has to be picked up by solvent nations. This gets ugly quick. Germany cannot absorb losses or hits, whether directly to them or to the EU. This is why it makes sense for them to reach out directly, as reported, to solve the USG-manufactured Ukrainian crisis.

Read the UK Independent’s leaked Germany-Russia deal article. Angela Merkel is involved, and the leak specifically cites her dealing with Putin. Contrast this with President Obama’s interactions with Putin.

Such strong trade ties between the two countries have also served to strengthen Ms Merkel’s hand and the Russian speaker has emerged as the leading advocate of closer relations between the EU and Russia. “This is Merkel’s deal. She has been dealing direct with President Putin on this. She needs to solve the dispute because it’s in no one’s interest to have tension in Ukraine or to have Russia out in the cold. No one wants another Cold War,” said one insider close to the negotiations.

It states basic diplomatic measures to get the gas flowing again, recognizes Crimea as Russian, sets up a looser Ukraine, and stops Ukrainian entry into NATO. Peace for Europe, but the USG does not get its way.

This also explains the MH17 crash being something to use on Germany and not Russia. This becomes a quick wedge. Read the land-for-gas link. Germany was ready to wrap up the Ukraine solution until MH17 happened. The initial accusation of Russian involvement paused the negotiations, and now everyone knows, which means the US can apply pressure openly on Germany. The indirect pressure has been out for a while. The US Federal Reserve warned Deutsche Bank for its derivatives portfolio and is throwing up regulatory obstacles to DB’s move into the US. Maybe Deutsche Bank will be the next AIG; Wall Street could use a new fall guy. MH17 is going to be investigated in the Netherlands with German technical help. It would be incredibly evil to set up a plane crash, but no need for much speculation considering no one has an answer for the first Malaysian Airlines crash. Timing is too odd, and so is the American rush to implicate Russia, and now its backing off as evidence seems to be sparse and not pointing to Russia.

The USG, mad drunk leviathan that it is, will not let a peaceful resolution happen quickly. It also must work to keep its clients in line. Germany is making long term moves and must see the future for the USG, which is a destiny the USG mandarins will not accept. German media is noticing that the USG is acting so wild that it would be an easy sell that it was the work of KGB moles to make the US look bad.  It is a bit of a mad world we live in where the Western media demonize Putin, who whether working for Russian interests or just his own, is setting up with the Chinese a monetary bloc to counter and slow down the USG, offered up a solution in Syria that stopped US warplanes, and was just trying to end a Ukrainian Civil War. The US media cannot admit we are at fault because the US media’s chosen good guys are at the helm of the ship. The USG can pull stunts like this now, but eventually the threats will get emptier or a big enough client will force action on a threat, and things will get ugly. Dollars hold it all together, and dollars will bring it down. Germany knows this. If Germany can set up shop in Europe as the regional hegemon, it might as well make buddies with the nuclear-armed eastern neighbor.

Whenever a major sporting event comes along, the progressive media always has a desired narrative. So it was with the recent World Cup, where it was widely hoped that a racially mixed team would win, proving once again the all-conquering power of ‘diversity’. Alas, when Brazil crashed to its 1-7 defeat against Germany in the semi-final, the desired narrative took a severe beating and started coughing up blood.

In its own way, the German team was also quite diverse, but not in the same flashy, frizzy manner as Brazil. Among its blond Aryan ranks it also boasted a Turk (Ozil), a half-Tunisian (Khedira), and even a Black player – well, half-black (Boateng). But overall the team looked White, and, worse than that, they played with Teutonic precision rather than the carefree carnival spirit expected from a truly ‘diverse’ team; in short, unsuitable poster boys for the progressive fantasy.

After this setback, the desired narrative’s next best hope was the Dutch team, which had a few Black players – there seemed to be about 2 or 3 – although this team too was less than ideal. When they were knocked out by Argentina in the other semi-final, the diversity narrative was pretty much nailed in its coffin. Argentina, despite some players having a little Indian and possibly Black ancestry, was again a depressingly White-looking and White-playing team as far as progressives were concerned. Whoever won the final was going to be a poor substitute for the multiracial French team that famously won the World Cup in 1998, or the default diversity of the Brazilian team.

With the narrative of diversity leading to success well and truly buried, all that remained was either to walk away or else find a negative narrative that bemoaned the lack of sufficient diversity at the top levels of international soccer.

With the World Cup continuing to generate the all-important hits, the Huffington Post decided to stay in the game with the negative story, “Why Are There No Black Men on Argentina’s Roster?” by Rachel Décoste, a Black female software engineer, who is also listed as a “motivational speaker.” The article seems to have been largely lifted from this Wikipedia page, so it’s good to see that Décoste isn’t entirely an affirmative action plant in the male-White-and-Asian-dominated tech sector. She at least knows how to surf the internet and copy and paste. One suspects that her motivational talks share a similar degree of originality.

In the article, she drew attention to the fact that back in the 18th and early 19th centuries some parts of Argentina had a much higher percentage of Black people than they do now:

“In colonial times, the proportion of Africans hovered around 50 per cent in half of Argentina’s provinces. General José de San Martín, the revolutionary who lead the charge to gain independence from Spanish rule, estimated that there were 400,000 Afro-Argentines who could be recruited to his armies. Black men made up 65 per cent of his troops. The 2010 census puts the Afro-Argentine population at 150,000, or less than half of one per cent.”

Décoste wants us to believe that this drop from 50% to 0.5% was due to genocide:

“Over the years, overt and covert government sanctions promoted ethnic cleansing and, some say, genocide.”

Given the fact that Argentina’s colonial population was around a fortieth of what it is now and that much of its increase was due to mass immigration from Europe, and that much of the Afro-Argentine population mixed in,  a figure of 150,000 Blacks in Argentina does not seem an unreasonable number for the country’s present-day Black population. The Wikipedia entry says that “over 5% of Argentines state they have at least one black ancestor, and a further 20% state they do not know whether or not they have any black ancestors.”

Rather than being “genocided,” all that can be said with any degree of accuracy is that Afro-Argentines, as a separate people, did not flourish to any great extent, and this fact on its own is taken to denote genocide. By the same metric the medieval population of Iceland, which declined from 84,000 in 1300 to 47,000 by 1800, must have been subjected to genocide (although that must have been rather difficult as the Icelanders were isolated from the rest of the world!).

Those Icelandic population figures are from Gregory Clark’s economic history, A Farewell to Alms. In that book he makes the highly significant point that most of the differences in wealth between the rich countries and poor stem from the much higher productivity of workers in those countries, a point that was also noticed by none other than Karl Marx, as Clark points out:

“When Britain was at its economic apogee in the middle and late nineteenth century, a number of writers argued that its ability to pay high wages and still prosper in international competition derived mainly from the much greater intensity of labour in Britain compared to the its low-wage competitors. These writers maintained that British workers were able to operate more machinery per worker, mitigating or even eliminating the wage cost advantage of the low-wage countries.

Karl Marx himself endorsed this view. The first volume of Capital, published in 1867, contains a short chapter, ‘National Differences in Wages,’ which attributes high output per worker in British textile mills to high labour intensity.” A Farewell to Alms, p.353

At this point in his book, Clark is comparing British labour to Indian labour, but elsewhere he refers to the even lower productivity of African workers. The extremely low productivity of African workers not only explains why Africa remains poor to this day, but historically it also explains why, when Blacks were inducted into the global economy, it had to be done through slavery (forced labour) rather than the wage incentives used with more productive workers.

Among all else, slavery was also a means of artificially improving the productivity of African workers, and by the same logic, its abolition, which happened in 1853 in Argentina, lessened that productivity and by doing so weakened their ability to compete demographically with Whites.

In an economy where two races with markedly different rates of productivity coexisted without any compensatory mechanisms such as welfare, and where the resultant differences in income expressed themselves in higher fertility and survival rates, we would expect the population with the more productive workers to expand more rapidly. This is exactly what happened in Argentina, assisted by largely White immigration.

In her article Décoste contrasts Argentina with Brazil, but that, alas, is an unfortunate comparison, because, while Brazil still has a considerable Black and mulatto population, it actually followed an identical trajectory to Argentina. It moved from a population that was majority Black in the colonial period to one where Whites predominate, and no one is accusing the Brazilians of committing genocide against Blacks.

The main differences between Brazil and Argentina were that Brazil had a higher initial Black population, abolished slavery later (1888), attracted less capital, and saw less economic development. These factors were of course all related and together explain why Argentina moved further down the road of ‘Whitification’ than Brazil did, although both were moving in the same direction until comparatively recently.

Progressives should be warned that comparing Argentina with Brazil is sure to raise some interesting questions and point towards some awkward conclusions that challenge their simplistic historical model of evil Whites committing genocide whenever they got the chance.

Chicks dig aloof and indifferent jerks. It’s a stereotype for a reason. Our ancestors who had experience with women beyond typing furious white knight screeds on feminist blogs and collecting cheetos dust in their manboob cleavage have witnessed this adage in action so often that it’s long been accepted wisdom, passed down from grandfather to father to son. (Until the chain of realtalk was broken with the advent of equalism.)

This facet of female sexual nature is so plain as day that even indignant feminists and ignoramus tradcons have conceded some ground on the issue. As they have retreated in shame ahead of the advancing armies of the Chateau id-palers, they’ve been reduced to arguing “yeah, well, ok but so do men!” and babbling incoherent nonsense about men preferring “bitches”.

CH corrected their misunderstanding in as gentle a manner as befits this noble house, noting that, absent a few rare self-gelding exceptions to the rule, the desire to love and be loved by a jerk is a far stronger and frequently expressed impulse in women than the desire to love a bitch is in those few men who like to be pegged.

Or: If the “bitch” is hot, men will still want to fuck her, albeit with reservations concerning any long-term commitment potential. If the “bitch” is not hot, they won’t.

Women, as is their sex’s formerly inscrutable wont, are markedly different from men in this regard. The jerkboy attitude ITSELF is inherently attractive to women, and women even prefer to harness the commitment of jerks to the detriment of beta male supplicants.

But, why bother retelling the wisdom of the ancients and of the clear-eyed moderns to low born plebes when one can summon a mighty Shiv forged of Heartistian steel instead? A twist of the hilt and equalist ego guts spill out in technicolor anguish.

Men are sexually attracted to women who show an interest in them or who are responsive during a date, the study found. On the flip side, women are not sexually interested in the responsive men they meet for the first time, the research also discovered.

“We wanted to understand the reasons for these gender differences,” said the study’s lead researcher, Gurit Birnbaum, an associate professor of psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya in Israel. “What makes a responsive woman sexually attractive, and what makes a responsive man less sexually attractive?” [...]

Men who perceive women to be interested in them rated the women as more feminine and sexually attractive. They also showed more interest in having long-term relationships with the responsive women than with the nonresponsive women.

Men dig non-bitchy, feminine women. Commence with the flabbergasting!

At the end of each experiment, the students rated their partners on scales such as responsiveness, attractiveness and masculinity or femininity.

Gender-based stereotypes may play a role in the men’s preference for responsive women, Birnbaum said. During a first date, people tend to rely on gender stereotypes for how they think a person should act. Men may find women more attractive if they fit the female stereotype of showing care and concern, she added.

Nope.

Or, men may think that responsive women are sexually interested in them. This may explain why men rate these “nice” women as more attractive and feminine, Birnbaum said.

Bingo. Also, I’d add that a nice, feminine woman signals to a man that she’ll be a faithful wife and nurturing mother to his children.

“I didn’t know until this [journal] article that men perceive responsive women not only as feminine, but also as sexually arousing,” Finkel told Live Science in an email. “I could have imagined a different set of results in which men found such women feminine, but then viewed them as dainty or less sexually desirable. Birnbaum and colleagues showed that the opposite is true.”

Yes, nicegirls aren’t just admirable or coveted for nonsexual reasons; they are also very arousing to men.

In contrast to the men, the women in the study did not rate the responsive men as more attractive or masculine than the nonresponsive men — a finding that surprised experts.

“Nonresponsive” = “jerk”.

The study did not reveal why women are not sexually interested in responsive men on the first date, but Birnbaum offered several ideas.

Women are typically more cautious daters than men are, and may be skeptical of a responsive man, Birnbaum said. Or, she added, women may think the men are trying too hard to win their affection and get them into bed.

Or, women may see responsive men as eager to please, or even desperate, Birnbaum said. Perhaps, the researchers noted, women may view a responsive man as vulnerable and less dominant.

Bingos all around!

“Regardless of the reasons, perhaps men should slow down, if their goal is to instill sexual desire,” Birnbaum said.

Or, be a challenge.

For Hivemind takes on the studies, see “Study finds that men like nice women, but not the other way around” and “Why playing hard to get only works for men.”

Mmmm. The Scalzied tears of a feminist clown.

So here we come to the close of yet another series of studies which vindicate CH teachings and game. I’d say my turgid vanity couldn’t handle any more old fashioneds, but no, my appetite for strokings is inexhaustible.

Lesson for women: The way to a man’s heart is straight and true.

Lesson for men: The way to a woman’s heart is oblique and discreet.

Filed under: Biomechanics is God, Science Validates Game, Ugly Truths

You can't trust scientistry. You simply can't. Think about how many times, over the last few DECADES, you were told that eating fat and butter and cream and cheese was bad for you. Remember how fettucini alfredo was once called "a heart attack on a plate?" Then read this belated mea culpa from a doctor who admits that he has been giving out worse than useless advice to his patients for years.

Milk, cheese, butter, cream - in fact all saturated fats - are bad for you. Or so I believed ever since my days as a medical student nearly 30 years ago. During that time I assured friends and family that saturated fat would clog their arteries as surely as lard down a drain. So, too, would it make them pile on the pounds. Recently, however, I have been forced to do a U-turn. It is time to apologise for all that useless advice I've been dishing out about fat.

The roots of our current confusion lie in a paper by an American scientist called Ancel Keys in 1953. It covered the increasingly common problem of clogged arteries. Keys included a simple graph comparing fat consumption and deaths from heart disease in men from six different countries. Americans, who ate a lot of fat, were far more likely to have a heart attack than the Japanese, who ate little fat. Case solved. Or was it?

Other scientists began wondering why Keys chose to focus on just six countries when he had access to data for 22. If places like France and Germany were included the link between heart disease and fat consumption became much weaker. These were, after all, countries with high fat consumption, but relatively modest rates of heart disease. In fact, as a renowned British scientist called John Yudkin pointed out, there was actually a much stronger link between sugar consumption and heart disease.

But Yudkin's warnings about sugar were denounced by a fellow scientist as 'nothing more than scientific fraud'. He was, as one of his colleagues colourfully put it, 'thrown under a bus'.

Meanwhile, the war on fat gradually gained momentum, to the extent that by the time I reached medical school in the Eighties, there was no mention of Yudkin's findings. People were cutting down on dairy products and switching to sugary carbohydrates and vegetable oils. This, it turns out, was a mistake. To turn vegetable oil into margarine, manufacturers used a process called hydrogenation (gas pumped through oil at high temperature), which produces trans fats. These are the Darth Vader of the fat world: good fats turned bad.

Unlike saturated fats, there is clear evidence that trans fats damage your heart. They were found in most shop-bought biscuits and cakes until they were removed in 2007.

Think about how many people have suffered ill effects from eating a bad, science-recommended diet. The amazing thing is that this doctor clung to what he "knew" even though "I put on over two stone, despite regular exercise. My cholesterol soared past the healthy range and two years ago I discovered I was borderline diabetic."

Observation is an important part of the scientific process. Not publishing. Not peer review. And it is eminently clear that too few people in the scientific and medical communities are observing anything.

From the inbox:

I have been married for [a few] years. I have [multiple] children with my wife who it is relevant to mention is [Asian]. We live in [the Asian country].

As far as my rank on the Game scale goes, I'd say I have a lot of gamma tendencies which were probably at their worst during high school and my early years of university. All the sort of behavior that I later learned women find unattractive was exactly the way I would act. I changed as I grew up and I lost weight, was introduced to Game, got a bit more confident and things improved. I think it is important I mention this past though because I probably display these tendencies more since marriage.

After I'd begun dating my wife one of the first things she mentioned was how I had ignored her the first time we met - something I noted as a sign of improved Game. We were fine when we dating and had a good sex life and both of us would initiate intimacy and we both usually reciprocated. This was healthy but our first year was turbulent for other reasons largely related to money. Since our first child, my wife has generally not initiated intimacy and when she didn't refuse, she became a lot more mechanical and treated it like an inconvenience. It continued on well after the birth and after our child became easier to manage.

She made the same sort of excuses mentioned by the spreadsheet man. She was tired, didn't feel like it, was sick and often stomach pains were the excuse. When I get angry or frustrated she will actually tell me I should just masturbate. She once suggested I'm treating her like a prostitute and she has also broken down with water-works when pushed. This is now just as bad after our second child was born. I should add that even her desire for a second child wasn't matched by much sexual desire towards me.

When she does reluctantly become intimate she avoids kissing me, letting me touch her breasts and sometimes keeps herself partially clothed. She more importantly doesn't seem to enjoy it and I''m not selfish or quick with her or. This has frustrated me because it is sometimes weeks or months between encounters and even when she does reluctantly do it, she is as described. Recently she's also been going to sleep early on days where we planned (around children) to be intimate.

Now since we've been married I have generally maintained a good weight, I don't drunkenly try to mount her or force her in any way. I have been given signals and even hit on by other women when at other social events, whether with friends or work related. I have always refused these advances without a thought or avoided flirting back. I naturally want the marriage to work especially with children and not a chance in hell of keeping them under the [Asian country's] legal system.

I have gone about things a few ways, I have told her explicitly that I can get what I want somewhere else if she won't. She was previously jealous of other female co-workers and friends - especially before marriage. She has responded to such suggestions by telling me I would "lose everything" if I ever did while maintaining a cold shoulder towards me.

The above was a bluff of course. I don't want to cheat on her and I would be wrong if I did but I have recently been very tempted. She still maintains the same cold attitude and I have recently been hit on by someone I am attracted to. Nonetheless I've resisted these advances but I would be lying if I didn't admit to being tempted. And this is what really worries me because I am tempted by female advances where I wasn't before. I could live with my lackluster sex life before by telling myself that the children should come first and adultery is adultery however I try to rationalize it. But as you can imagine, I am at the very least reluctant to stay married to her once my children reach maturity no matter how much it ends up costing me to leave.

The only things I can think to add are that she also belittles me, telling me I'm lazy even though I work full-time and recently got promoted. She constantly holds the children up as threats and associates not obeying her wishes as somehow not caring about the children. She plays my older child against me sometimes telling me I scare him when I am angry to her. She also uses them as excuses for not feeling like sex. A lot of our marital problems can be blamed on the lack of money flow but I don't much feel like getting more liquidity for someone that treats me like she does. Living where we live and her reluctance to move also make this a bigger problem. And despite this, we are actually quite comfortable and not lacking for anything generally speaking.

This debacle illustrates the central problem with marriage 2.0. The man simply lacks any material leverage, while the woman has the entire power of the state at her back. And unfortunately, while most women prefer to be at least a little circumspect about resorting to the leverage this gives them, the wife openly revels in her dominant position in the marriage. My strong suspicion is that she married him to avoid being married to a dominant man of her own culture and since the novelty and imagined status of the Westerner has worn off, she really doesn't want to be married to him anymore.

There are two things to keep in mind here. First, not all marital problems can be solved. Second, all strategies for addressing and attempting to solve marital problems have to be viewed in terms of estimated probabilities. It's not about knowing the magic word or striking the magic pose, but rather giving oneself the best chance of success. And sometimes that best chance is still a long shot, which appears to be the case here.

This man will have to decide what level of personal degradation he is willing to accept for the sake of being near his children. My belief, however, is that children are always secondary to the marriage. They are the fruit of the marriage, but both the husband and the wife who insist on always putting the children ahead of their marital partner are making a fatal mistake that will ultimately harm the children.

After some reflection, I think the emailer should simply return to his homeland by himself for two weeks to get his head clear. Being in foreign land is intrinsically unsettling in multiple ways. He should just go, without asking permission, without making a big deal of it, and without staying in close contact while he is gone. If she asks why he is going, he should tell her, honestly, that he is thinking of returning home and he wants to see what his employment prospects are there. No mention should be made of divorce or ending the marriage, no threats or ultimatums should be given, just a simple statement of intent.

She will probably react with dire theats. These must be met calmly and with civil resignation. "I understand, all the same, this is what I'm going to do." There is no point in explanations. She already knows perfectly well why he is considering a permanent return. And once there, he needs to seriously think upon whether he wants to continue to live his life that way or not, and if he wants his children to witness the ongoing humiliation of their father or not. There is no correct answer here, it is an intrinsically subjective call.

These ugly situations are much harder where children are involved, but to paraphrase the Biblical wisdom, he who seeks to gain his children will lose them. The only way to prevent a woman from using your children against you is to make it clear that doing so will accomplish nothing whatsoever, and since he's already made a very bad mistake of trying to bluff her, and having his bluff called, she's not going to believe any posturing on his part short of actually packing up and leaving for a time. The only way to nullify open threats such as these is to materially demonstrate their impotence.

It must be admitted that there is a chance that the woman will file for divorce during those two weeks. All he may accomplish here is to speed up the inevitable. But even that can be seen as a positive step of sorts. To be honest, this doesn't sound like a marriage so much as a wintry battleground.

It's always amusing to hear female opinions on how to solve a crisis caused by female behavior. Mostly because their first instinctive response is to deny it is a crisis:

“I think the fact that the guy communicates via a spreadsheet is the reason why he’s not getting sex,” is the verdict from relationship counsellor Francine Kaye. “If a man wants to be desired, he has to speak to a woman’s feminity. He has to stop complaining and start thinking 'What do I have to do in order for her to want to have sex?’ ”

A good start is the kind of wooing behaviour most husbands assumed they had left behind as soon as the ring was on the bridal finger. Erroneously, they think that compliments and flowers, hand-holding and general attentiveness are not just unnecessary but cheesy once they are married. Cheesy they may be, but necessary – as attested by the short shrift given to Mr Spreadsheet.

Did I not call that yesterday? What is relationship counsellor Kaye's statement, if not a retroactive justification of a woman's action. Translation: start paying attention to other women. Then she'll magically find her missing motivation. There are three things that speak to a woman's femininity.

1. Be attractive
2. Don't be unattractive
3. Competition aka (1) and (2) seen through the mechanism of other women

Choreplay doesn't work. Romance doesn't work. Vacations don't work. Talk doesn't work. Men have tried those things many, many, many times. Here is why it will never work to do what a woman says you need to do in order to make her want to have sex: the moment you do what she tells you is necessary, that "creates pressure" on her to fulfill her end of the implicit bargain. And women under pressure to have sex don't want to have sex, because women don't want to have sex under pressure, ergo doing what she tells you necessarily ENSURES that she will not want to have sex.

Did you follow that? It's a Catch-22, or in this case, a Sex-22.

1. She says she'll want to have sex if you take her to Mazatlan.
2. You take her to Mazatlan.
3. She is now under pressure to want to have sex.
4. Feeling under pressure prevents her from wanting to have sex.
5. Rinse and repeat.

So, don't bother taking her to Mazatlan. Don't waste your time on whatever women advise no matter how many women blithely recite the usual mantras. Go back to the basics. Go to the gym, improve your style, focus on your career and making more money, and either a) she'll be more attracted to you or b) someone else will.

You can't fix someone else. You can't change someone else. You can only control your own actions. If she wants spend her life as a sexless slug parked in front of a television, that's her choice and its on her. No one else.

Comments are disabled on all posts published during Approach Week to encourage readers to limit their internet time and go outside to apply the lessons they have learned here. Approach Week celebrates the spirit of the approach, which is, in essence, a celebration of the spirit of assertive masculinity.

Patrick insightfully comments over at Liger of the Blogosphere, using the Elliot Rodger shooting spree as a backdrop to explain why chivalry no longer applies in the context of a modern, industrialized, female-empowered society where the state has a monopoly on punitive force.

Elliot [Rodger] feared, and eventually, hated women because he simply could not understand them. His ineptitude in this regard was almost cartoonish, e.g. sitting on a park bench waiting for a cute single girl to approach him.

“Nice guys finish last,” is a cliche because it’s a truism most people don’t want to believe.

Elliot, having never harmed anyone in his life, was a gallant gentleman in his own eyes. What he doesn’t understand is that the high-minded concept of chivalry originated in a time when the abject brutalization of women was commonplace and expected. It was a sort of counterculture set against the time-honored beat’em & rape’em de rigueur of the day. And it only mattered because those practicing it — knights — were those most capable of brutalizing women. An intimidating, armored and mounted professional killer acting in a genteel manner towards a maiden he could otherwise violently defile is the stuff of romantic legend, and it set them apart as a class above the brutish peasant infantrymen.

Because the context of constant fear of sexual subjugation no longer applies, “chivalry” is an anachronistic concept, and being a gentleman is in more looking the part and behaving otherwise, like the well-dressed and stately character of Christian Grey who enjoys whipping and inserting butt-plugs into women. [CH] would say this misdirection and unexpectedness is like crack to women. And it is.

None of this knowledge ever permeated Rodgers’ brain, because he refused to believe it.

Filed under: Culture, Goodbye America, Rules of Manhood, Ugly Truths

“[My opponent] is running on Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable principles.”

“All of the investment banks, up in New York and D.C., they should have gone to jail.”

Thus spoke the surprise winner of an obscure primary that was expected to be won easily by the incumbent, a widely-hated figure who spent several hundred thousand dollars of his campaign budget on entertainment and needlessly expensive travel, and whose wife once worked for Goldman Sachs.

But the media doesn’t like this very much.

The reason is simple: Eric Cantor, the House Majority Whip, was a major figure in not only Wall Street’s Rolodex, but also the push for increased mass immigration—and Dave Brat, the economics professor who defeated Cantor, made mass immigration a central issue of his campaign. Laura Ingraham, a talk radio host who backed Brat, tweeted her motivation for doing so:

Rich Lowry NAILS it. Those arguing that immig didn't drive the Cantor defeat is "whistling past the graveyard." http://t.co/YNKgUMNDqL

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) June 12, 2014

It’s not news that progressivism has come to be on the same side as capital on many issues, of which immigration is one—the Kochs, who have become a metonym to progressives for well-funded ultraconservatism, back open-borders initiatives. So it’s not surprising that Dave Brat’s opposition to “Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundable principles” didn’t save him from the round of media denunciation that comes to anyone who opposes mass immigration.

What may be more surprising is the other media response.

Eric Cantor, you see, is Jewish—and Dave Brat is a Christian with a theology degree. Naturally, this means that Virginia’s 7th District, which not only elected Cantor, but reëlected him six times, is a raging hotbed of anti-Semitism. The New York Daily News floated this explanation, writing that Cantor “was highly visible as the only Jewish Republican in the House, in a district with a strong evangelical presence”, but the Times of Israel went all-out with it, headlining their story covering the election, “Could Cantor have lost because he’s a Jew?”

The New York Times also ran with it:

David Wasserman, a House political analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said another, more local factor has to be acknowledged: Mr. Cantor, who dreamed of becoming the first Jewish speaker of the House, was culturally out of step with a redrawn district that was more rural, more gun-oriented and more conservative.

“Part of this plays into his religion,” Mr. Wasserman said. “You can’t ignore the elephant in the room.”

Never mind that Cantor won the rural northern counties of the district, and that Brat’s largest margin of victory came in Hanover County, a suburb of Richmond, where two thirds of the votes went to Brat—never mind that Cantor was reëlected six times—no, those damn ruralites, clinging to their guns and religion, must all be raging anti-Semites.

Then there’s this Politico article, where things get really weird:

Matt Brooks, the RJC president, called Cantor’s primary “one of those incredible, evil twists of fate that just changed the potential course of history.”

“There are other leaders who will emerge, but Eric was unique and it will take time and there’s nobody quite like Eric in the House to immediately fill those shoes,” Brooks said. “I was certainly hoping that Eric was going to be our first Jewish speaker.”

Across the aisle, the reactions to Cantor’s defeat ranged from shock and distress to barely-restrained glee. For partisan Jewish Democrats, Cantor has long been a supremely annoying figure, perceived as a front man for a conservative party that’s hostile to the values a strong majority of Jews share on issues from economic inequality to gay marriage to immigration, the central animating issue of Cantor challenger Dave Brat’s campaign.

As Democrats seek to cement a public perception of the GOP as an intolerant and homogenous party, the defeat of the nation’s leading Jewish Republican over his support for more relaxed immigration laws can only help.

Incredible! Evil! Changed the potential course of history! …What?

One must wonder if the charge of anti-Semitism serves to mask certain other concerns, the airing of which would further undermine progressives’ already comedically absurd attempts to market themselves as tolerant. There are so many other lines of attack (some, like the belief that citing Max Weber is fascist, even more absurd than the belief that it’s anti-Semitic to win an election against a Jew) that it’s hard to believe that so many people could come to the same conclusion for so many different reasons—it’s far more likely that there are only a few underlying concerns, but that no one will admit them.

One of those is probably Cantor’s establishment role, his “Chamber of Commerce principles”, support for mass immigration, and ability to make himself palatable to a press that habitually speaks power to truth. Another is that, by electing Brat, the voters went off-script: Cantor was an establishment man in what was thought to be a safe district. Brat’s election is the exception that proves the rule: the voters’ normal role is to sit downstream of the media, think how they’re told to, and vote (and act) accordingly. But there’s still a third.

As The Federalist has pointed out, many reporters (and many Brahmins) see Christianity as something backwards, alien, and vaguely threatening—in a country where the vast majority of the population is Christian, no less. Religion just isn’t high-status among Brahmins: it imposes constraints against the often-destructive hedonistic excesses that the Brahmin intelligentsia prefer to promote, it demands community that isn’t based solely around status-seeking, and besides, those icky, backwards people in the South do it, so it can’t be considered cool the way Westernized Buddhism or Islam are.

Eric Cantor is Jewish—but Dave Brat is a Christian with a theology degree, and he beat a pro-amnesty candidate in a supposedly safe seat. That’s where the real objections come from.

If you read through the lessons these successful men say they learned from their fathers, a few common themes rapidly become apparent:

1. Caring and protection
2. Personal accountability and hard work
3. Courage and a willingness to fight
4. Commitment and self-control

Mothers are necessary for the continued existence of society. Marriage, families, and fathers are necessary for transforming a human society into a civilized human society. And anything that weakens the institutions of marriage, family, and fatherhood is an intrinsically anti-civilizational force.

Reader IHTG forwarded this funny gif of a dude teasing a girl right up to the line of sexual harassment, holding his frame, and then defusing the tension with yet more teasing. Any formal context is missing (which is obviously true for short gifs), but you can figure it out by everyone’s facial expression.

This is a nice little demonstration of the cocky/funny alpha male attitude.

The (one-sided) courtship opens with the male’s exaggerated pose of neediness requesting acknowledgement from the female.

The female responds with a “who, me?” gesture, as most women would to a man brazenly beckoning for them. The rarity of such a thing among the males of the genus westernius Manboobii is what provokes the submissive female auto-response.

The courtship enters the “shock and awe” stage, when the alpha male “air swats” the female’s buttocks.

Now that the pair are fully engaged with one another, the female expresses anger and indignation toward the alpha male for his surprise advance on her posterior. In lioness terms, she evades the male lion’s mounting and wheels around to make a threat display. But we all know how this ends.

The alpha male does not appease the female nor attempt a reconciliation. Instead, he grins sociably, points at the female as if to declare her facial expression the height of comedy, and faces the crowd of onlookers to enlist their support and preempt any move by the female to ostracize him.

Turning back to the female (her hands perched on her hips waiting for his apologia), he extends a handshake of friendship to defuse the escalating sexual tension, only to once again befuddle and arouse the female by pulling his hand away from her just at the moment she prepares to accept his peace offering.

Finally, the courtship reaches the apogee of its first phase, when the alpha male’s cocky antics elicit a smile and a flurry of lighthearted punches from the female, who has been awakened to a state of sexual receptivity and has begun the second phase of the courtship where she “presents” to the alpha male for a continuation of their mating ritual.

In related news, Elliot Rodger never faked out a girl with a phony handshake.

 

Filed under: Alpha, Funny/Lolblogs, Game, Videos

An African-American discovers to her surprise that, unlike Americans, Europeans aren't afraid of blacks:

I was going to the movies with a friend of mine from Yale who is black also. And there was a long line. And we were like, let's jump the line. These white people, they're going to be scared of us. We'll just go and jump the line. We'll get to the front of the line. So, of course, you know, we walked up to the front of the line, like, yeah, you want to try me? I'm black. That usually works in New York.

These people were ready to rip our hair out. And they were white. I couldn't believe it. And they were like, in French, what are you doing? The line starts back there. You can't just walk to the front of the line. They were, like, ready to kick our butts. I was shocked. I'm like, these are white people, and they're not scared of us?

That's when I realized I wasn't in Kansas anymore. And I liked it. I mean, of course, it was kind of humiliating, because you know, we're supposed to be the intimidating, scary ones. And then all these French bitches in high heels were threatening us. And they were in our faces. And it made me realize that the whole black-white game just doesn't work outside of the United States.

Because white people aren't afraid of you here. And at the same time, they don't hate you, because that sort of goes together. So I'll take it. I'll wait on line. Now I don't dare jump lines. So that opened my eyes.

It's true, Europeans, especially Continentals, are much less inclined to kowtow to Africans than Americans are. This may be helpful in understanding an aspect of the divergence of my position from that of the white progressive non-athletes. It's not that I hate blacks, it's more that I'm not afraid of them and therefore don't treat them like ticking time bombs. It's not just that I'm a continental European myself these days either, because I've been burning black guy's asses, talking smack with them, and forcing them back down since I was an 11th grade 100-meter sprinter competing in the city district against sprinters from Minneapolis North, Minneapolis South, Washburn, Edison, and Southwest.

If you know anything about men's athletics, you'll know that sprinters are the arrogant prima donnas of the sports world. Once you've faced down a big old branded Omega or a strutting member of the Disciples who is trying to intimidate everybody during warmups, calling out an overweight, overrated black woman with a big mouth is not exactly a challenge. The greater part of the black intimidation routine is nothing more than a front to mask deep insecurity. The whole performance, the eye-rolling, the neck-bobbing, the implied threats of violence, and the posturing, tends to fall completely apart when met with a sneer and a sarcastic word.

At one meet my senior year, there was a particularly unpleasant fellow who was getting in my face in the area behind the blocks while we were waiting for the race because I was the only non-black sprinter in the finals. He was going on about "white boy" this and "faggot" that and so forth. I didn't say anything, I just reached into my bag and handed him a banana. (We always kept a few around to fight leg cramps). He looked at me in total disbelief, at which point I said: "You've been pounding your chest so much, I figured you'd probably want one of these."

The other six guys just about sprained something laughing.

One upside to the Obama presidency is that it hopefully has dashed the ideas Millenials and liberal voter blocs had about the power of the Presidency. At this point, even Blacks have to be feeling let down that he never “Blacks up” on anything. Extremely low-information voters may not get it, but how much is it them not getting it or them getting it but choosing not to care? Denial is powerful. A pattern with the bully pulpit under President Obama is the diminishing size of targets. Obama’s general commentary resembles a gelded, browbeaten husband, where he decides to comment on the dumbest or least important thing and remains mute on stuff that matters. Maybe the best comparison is the dad who does not notice his oldest son being an oxy pill-popper or his daughter’s meth mouth, but he will sure as hell go nuts over the weeds in his neighbor’s lawn. Obama’s selective commentary creates the opportunity for a fun game.

Russia discusses plans for an actual execution of moving away from trade in dollars. While they have been kicked out of the G8, that does not diminish Russia’s standing in the international economic order. Anything that reduces the use and flow of dollars is a major deal in our financial situation. The possibility that G8 nations and other middle-to-large-sized economies are taking steps to drop the dollar is important. Do we get a comment from Obama? No.

NFL spends the 249th draft pick in the NFL draft on an openly gay man. Sports fans roll their eyes at the focus on Michael Sam. Do we get a comment from Obama? Yes!

The President congratulates Michael Sam, the Rams and the NFL for taking an important step forward in our Nation’s journey. From the playing field to the corporate boardroom, LGBT Americans prove everyday that you should be judged by what you do and not who you are.

Let us stop one moment to laugh at the irony in this comment from Obama. A President that no one would know if he were not half-Black is congratulating a 7th-round draft pick that casual fans would not know of or have seen cry on the strategically placed television cameras that “you should be judged by what you do and not who you are”. No one would know either of them if they were not who they are.

China has been pretty busy. China calls Iran a strategic partner, placed an oil rig in what was seen as Vietnamese waters and is holding military exercises with Russia. China is really flexing their muscles, and whatever happened with that Iran sanctions thing? Has that backfired completely? Iran takes the window of sanction relief to sign giant economic and military deals with Russia and China, and Israel and the Saudis are flaming mad. Who exactly is the US picking up as a new ally or partner? John Kerry calls the oil rig actions provocative, but what does Obama have to say? Nothing.

Elderly owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, Donald Sterling, asked his mistress on a taped phone call to not take pictures with some Blacks. This mushroomed into a giant fiasco for the NBA. The media ran with this as the most racist thing in the world—this month. Did Obama have a comment about this? Yes, many. In his words, Sterling made “incredibly offensive racist statements”. I hope he is not listening to Jay-Z’s albums, then, when he visits the White House.

In Syria, a nation where the Saudis and Qataris funded different rebels, and the US sent weapons for fighting as well as material, Syrian Christians are being killed daily. Some of the church’s oldest communities and individual churches are being destroyed. This kind of death and destruction solely on the basis of religion, and with USG being slightly culpable, would it, could it, elicit some words from President Obama? No.

After years of back-and-forth religious conflict that will likely escalate to a civil war, a terrorist organization of Muslims kidnapped just under 300 girls in Nigeria. Would President Obama comment on the bigger picture problem in Nigeria? Would he mention the steady flow of religious attacks by both sides, and maybe even the aftereffects of Muslims from Qadaffi’s regime (that he had hired as mercenaries) making their way back to Nigeria to do some damage? No, but President Obama did comment that the kidnapping itself was “heartbreaking” and “outrageous”. He speaks so well!

Commenter “The Burninator” muses about what an Amish Facebook page would look like.

I can’t imagine an Amish girl’s FB page.

Her:

“Today I churned butter with mama.”

Like 1

Amish father:

“Get back to work, girl!”

Like 124

:lol:

You have to hand it to the Amish. They have the preternatural ability to avoid corruption by the pozzed American dysculture while living in the belly of the beast. Part of the reason is the “boiling off” selection effect that results from their rite of passage known as Rumspringa, which assures that the Amish left in the community evolve the personality traits to successfully deter outside influence.

Another reason has to be hard work. Toiling in the fields or the farmhouse tires a body and mind so thoroughly that social media distractions become less tempting. The Amish are preoccupied with survival and community. The non-Amish are preoccupied with white privilege and gay weddings.

Filed under: Culture, Funny/Lolblogs

There are those who say that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth is merely a story. They will claim, falsely, that the Risen Lord is derived from an agricultural myth. They will assert, wrongly, that "Easter is originally the celebration of Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex." They will declare, contra the historical evidence, that Jesus Christ never lived or was crucified on a cross by the Roman authorities.

It is strange, is it not, that they should tell so many palpable lies in the service of that which they say to be truth?

The Apostle Paul once said that if the story of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ is not true, then we Christians are the saddest and most pathetic of all men. Everything we do, everything we believe, everything for which we hope and strive, is a lie.

It is strange, is it not, that so many observable and long-lived truths should stand so firmly on such a flimsy foundation of falsehood?

From Plato to Zelazny, men of letters have written of the purer things, that in their perfection spawn lesser shadows and imitations that reflect but an aspect of the true essence. From where does truth come, if not the Truth? And did Jesus not say that he was the Way, the Truth, and the Life?

Those who are Aristotelian devotees of reality stand by the Lesser Truth that A is A, and that A is never Not-A. But the Lesser Truth descends from, and depends upon, the Greater Truth, which is this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Yesterday the light shone in the darkness. Today the light shines in the darkness. Tomorrow the light will shine in the darkness. And the darkness will never, ever, overcome it.

It is not a story, it is The Story, it is the oldest story, it is the true story from which all other stories flow. Light versus dark. And despite the darkness that surrounds us, that pervades us, that haunts us, the light of all mankind is winning.

That is why, all around the world this morning, there are millions of men and women who will greet each other with three simple words of hope and truth and triumph.

Christ is risen!

Jesus wept? Oh no, my friends. Jesus charmed!

Jesus, like so many leading protagonists in the great books for men, had game, and used it to mesmerize the fuck outta his audiences of admirers. There’s a direct line throughout history leading from the thorny crown to the furry hat. Jesus was mystery, and Jesus was the first Mystery.

Proof of Jesus’ mad skills with the coy doubters comes to us via this nifty list of his best follower pickups.

One of the best-described of all charismatic leaders is Jesus. About 90 face-to-face encounters with Jesus are described in the four gospels of the New Testament.

Notice what happens:

The Son of God is about to raise your buying temperature.

Jesus is sitting on the ground, teaching to a crowd in the outer courtyard of the temple at Jerusalem. The Pharisees, righteous upholders of traditional ritual and law, haul before him a woman taken in adultery. They make her stand in front of the crowd and say to Jesus: “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The Law commands us to stone her to death. What do you say?”

The text goes on that Jesus does not look up at them, but continues to write in the dirt with his finger. This would not be unusual; Archimedes wrote geometric figures in the dust, and in the absence of ready writing materials the ground would serve as a chalkboard. The point is that Jesus does not reply right away; he lets them stew in their uneasiness.

Jesus used tension to build attraction.

Minutes go by. One by one, the crowd starts to slip away, the older ones first– the young hotheads being the ones who do the stoning, as in the most primitive parts of the Middle East today.

Finally Jesus is left with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightens up and asks her: “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”  She answers: “No one.” “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus says. “Go now and sin no more.” (John 8: 1-11)

Jesus is a master of timing. He does not allow people to force him into their rhythm, their definition of the situation. He perceives what they are attempting to do, the intention beyond the words. And he makes them shift their ground.

Jesus forced others into his frame.

He does not allow the encounter to focus on himself against the Pharisees. He knows they are testing him, trying to make him say something in violation of the law; or else back down in front of his followers. Instead Jesus throws it back on their own consciences, their inner reflections about the woman they are going to kill. He individualizes the crowd, making them drift off one by one, breaking up the mob mentality.

Jesus passed shit tests.

Jesus is a charismatic leader, indeed the archetype of charisma. Although sociologists tend to treat charisma as an abstraction, it is observable in everyday life. We are viewing the elements of it, in the encounters of Jesus with the people around him.

Game is applied charisma. I wonder if Jesus was a Dark Triad? Or should I say, Dark Trinity?

(1) Jesus always wins an encounter [...]

Jesus never lets anyone determine the conversational sequence. He answers questions with questions, putting the interlocutor on the defensive. An example, from early in his career of preaching around Galilee:

Jesus has been invited to dinner at the house of a Pharisee. A prostitute comes in and falls at his feet, wets his feet with her tears, kisses them and pours perfume on them. The Pharisee said to himself, “If this man is a prophet, he would know what kind of woman is touching him– that she is a sinner.”

Jesus, reading his thoughts, said to him: “I have something to tell you.” “Tell me,” he said. Jesus proceeded to tell a story about two men who owed money, neither of whom could repay the moneylender. He forgives them both, the one who owes 500 and the one who owes 50. Jesus asked: “Which of the two will love him more?” “The one who had the bigger debt forgiven,” the Pharisee replied. “You are correct,” Jesus said. “Do you see this woman? You did not give me water for my feet, but this woman wet them with her tears and dried them with her hair… Therefore her many sins have been forgiven– as her great love has shown.”

Jesus doesn’t follow conversational threads like an attention starved beta; he breaks them and makes his own. He answers ambiguously. He puts people in the defensive crouch, where tingles are born. Jesus follows the statement-statement-question format of effective discourse control.

The priests send spies, hoping to catch Jesus in saying something so that they might hand him over to the Roman governor. So they asked: “Is it right for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”

Jesus knowing their evil intent, said to them, “Show me the coin used to pay taxes.” When they brought it, he said, “Whose image is on it?” “Caesar’s,” they replied. “Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”  And they were astonished by his answer, and were silent.

Jesus the charismatic alpha male was unpredictable. You expect him to say one thing; he says another. AMOGs show deference and vaginas weep on cue.

(2)  Jesus is quick and absolutely decisive

As his mission is taking off in Galilee, followers flock to hear him. Some he invites to come with him. It is a life-changing decision.

A man said to him: “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” Jesus replied: “Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.”

It is a shocking demand. In a ritually pious society, there is nothing more important that burying your father. Jesus demands a complete break with existing social forms; those who follow them, he implies, are dead in spirit.

Chicks hate mincing betaboys. Jesus was not a mincing betaboy. Chicks dig rule breakers. Jesus was definitely a rule breaker.

The Pharisees complained, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus replied, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

Jesus perceives who will make a good recruit, and who will not.

Jesus was practiced in the art of target selection.

(3) Jesus always does something unexpected [...]

Some of the disciples said indignantly to each other, “Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor.” And they rebuked her harshly.

“Leave her alone,” Jesus said. “She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want.  But you will not always have me. She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare me for my funeral.” (Mark 14: 1-10; Matthew 26: 6-13)

A double jolt. His disciples by now have understood the message about the selfishness of the rich and charity to the poor. But there are circumstances and momentous occasions that transcend even the great doctrine of love thy neighbour. Jesus is zen-like in his unexpectedness. There is a second jolt, and his disciples do not quite get it. Jesus knows he is going to be crucified. He has the political sense to see where the confrontation is headed; in this he is ahead of his followers, who only see his power.

When was the last time you saw an alpha male do the dull, boring thing? Never.

(4) Jesus knows what the other is intending

Jesus is an intelligent observer of the people around him.

Jesus was situationally aware.

He is highly focused on everyone’s moral and social stance, and sees it in the immediate moment. Charismatic people are generally like that; Jesus does it to a superlative degree.

Jesus lived in the moment. Jesus did not suffer “paralysis by analysis”.

Jesus’ perceptiveness helps explain why he dominates his encounters. He surprises interlocutors by unexpectedly jumping from their words, not to what conventionally follows verbally, but instead speaking to what they are really about, skipping the intermediate stages.

Jesus knew how to “elicit values”, and build deep connections with people.

(5) Jesus is master of the crowd [...]

Crowds are a major source of Jesus’ power. There is a constant refrain: “The crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.” His enemies the high priests are afraid of what his crowd of followers will do if they attack Jesus.

Jesus was socially proofed.

[His disciples] are the privileged in-group, and they know it. Jesus admonishes them from time to time about their pride; but he needs them, too. It is another reason why living with Jesus is bracing. There is an additional circuit of charismatic energy in the inner circle.

Push-pull game.

Jesus can still arouse this crowd, but he cannot silence it. He does not back off, but becomes increasingly explicit. The metaphors he does use are not effective. His sheep that he refers to means his own crowd of loyal followers, and Jesus declares he has given them eternal life– but not to this hostile crowd of unbelievers. Words no longer convince; the sides declaim stridently against each other. The eloquent phrases of earlier preaching have fallen into cacophony. Nevertheless Jesus still escapes violence. The crowd is never strong enough to dominate him. Only the organized authorities can take him, and that he does not evade.

Alpha males can be taken down by a state-sanctioned beta male show of force.

(6) Jesus’ down moments

Even an alpha male occasionally gets cockblocked.

Leaving aside the miracle itself and its symbolism, one thing we see in this episode is Jesus conflicted between his mission– to demonstrate the power of resurrection– and his personal feelings for Lazarus and his sisters. Jesus let Lazarus die, by staying away during his sickness, in order to make this demonstration, but in doing so he caused grief to those he loved. The moment when he confronts their pain (amplified by the weeping of the crowd), Jesus himself weeps. It is the only time in the texts when he weeps. It is a glimpse of himself as a human being, as well as a man on a mission.

Vulnerability game.

Finally Jesus is taken before Pilate, the Roman governor. Jesus gives his usual sharp replies, and indeed wins him over. “Are you the King of the Jews?” Pilate asks.

King of the Poon, amirite?

“Is that your own idea,” Jesus asks in return, “or did others talk to you about me?”

“Am I a player? Only if you want me to be.”

In the crises, Jesus’ interactional style remains much the same as always; but the speaking in parables and figurative language has given way to blunt explanations. Parables are for audiences who want to understand. Facing open adversaries, Jesus turns to plain arguments.

Sometimes it’s necessary to drop the flirty banter and aloofness and draw a line in the sand that you don’t want a woman to cross.

Jesus the alpha male. Jesus the PUA (of disciples). Jesus the master of the crimson arts. Men followed him. Powerful men feared him. Prostitutes paid *him*.

Jesus is risen, indeed!

Filed under: Alpha, Game, Love

I was asked to reconsider my position on uninstalling Mozilla products and refusing to use them in the future:

You are probably here because you have been advised to consider reinstalling Firefox. You may, in fact, have uninstalled Firefox as a result of a recent campaign protesting either Brendan Eich’s being appointed CEO of Mozilla, or his supposedly being fired or forced by Mozilla to resign from that position as a result of a donation he made in favor of proposition 8. Brendan Eich did, in fact, resign; however, he did was not fired or forced to resign by Mozilla. Mozilla does not discriminate based on an individual’s personal political or religious beliefs. If you have been told otherwise, I encourage you to evaluate the evidence for yourself. First of all, I would like to point you to Mozilla’s official FAQ on Brendan’s resignation. I realize that some people will insist that this is just a cover story and that he was really forced to resign, in spite of whatever Mozilla may say to the contrary. So I would like to share some additional corroborating evidence. There are many inside sources who corroborate this, but the one I find particularly credible and compelling is Gervase Markham. He is in a unique position as an outspoken Christian and supporter of traditional marriage who works at Mozilla. Gerv has stated that he has it from sources he trusts that Brendan did step down of his own accord and was not forced out. You can read his full statement on his blog. Finally, I want to remind you of what Mozilla, and Firefox, truly stands for.

If you are still not convinced, I’d like you to consider one more thing. Consider for a moment, the possibility that Brendan really did step down of his own accord and is not interested in coming back. What more can Mozilla possibly do that would persuade you? Is there any further evidence that would change your mind? It makes sense to treat them with a good faith presumption of truthfulness unless and until there is evidence to the contrary. Why? Because if your mind can not be changed by anything, then they may as well ignore you anyway. There are always people who cannot be swayed by reason or any amount of evidence. Since their minds can’t be changed anyway, we all might as well ignore them and focus on those who can be persuaded by reason. If you are not open to any reasonable evidence, then you make yourself irrelevant to the debate. Don’t be do that. Evaluate the evidence fairly, and when in doubt, treat others with a good faith presumption of truthfulness. Then if evidence persuades you to change your position, it will mean something.

I read this. I read Markham's piece. I have evaluated the evidence and I am fully informed concerning the relevant facts. And my answer is a staunch and resounding no. I reject Mozilla. I reject what it now stands for.

I am aware Eich stepped down of his own accord. I am aware he was not fired, that his resignation was not demanded by the Mozilla Board, and that fewer than 10 Mozilla employees publicly demanded his resignation.

I am also aware that Mozilla's executive chairwoman Mitchell Baker issued this official statement on April 3rd: "Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it. We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves. We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better."

For what is she apologizing, precisely? To whom is she apologizing?

I am aware that Mozilla claims to "support equality for all." This is a blatant lie on multiple levels. Mozilla might as reasonably proclaim that it supports unicorns for all or a chicken in every pot. Mozilla clearly does not support the Constitutional right of free association or the right of free speech on the part of those harboring views it considers incompatible with its mission statement.

I am aware that "Mozilla Supports LGBT Equality". I don't and I will not support any organization that claims to do so.

I am aware that Mozilla has ignored tens of thousands of negative comments from current and former Firefox users and has refused to provide any statement in response to them. I am also aware that it responded quickly and publicly to a much smaller amount of criticism that threatened much less damage to the corporation.

A supporter of the move to ostracize and oust Brandon Eich declared: "I do think that any individual is free to choose to resign their own job or otherwise not conduct business with someone whom they know has taken an action that they consider unjust." I agree. That is precisely why I no longer want anything to do with Mozilla and I continue to recommend that everyone #uninstallfirefox.

Prior to the #uninstallfirefox campaign began, Mozilla Firefox represented 34 percent of the total pageviews here. That percentage is currently down to 20 percent, so based on last year's traffic, Mozilla can expect to lose at least 1,835,637 pageviews from the readers here on this site alone, in addition to the pageviews those readers generate on all other sites and whatever pageviews my household machines generate on an annual basis.

You may think that we exaggerate the craven wretchedness of our enemies. You may think that my boundless contempt for the r/selected, Larry's muscular backhands for his craven adversaries, and John C. Wright's withering scorn for the wormtongues is fueled by either a) a sense of offense at being opposed or b) an oversensitivity to criticism.

It is not. It is fueled by our clear-eyed view of what these creatures are. It is our awareness that they are, like the soul-destroyed abhumans roaming the Night Lands, broken and lesser beings who seek to pull others down into the mire that torments them.

By way of evidence, consider their own words about themselves. Here, for example, is Damien Walter:

I was 30 and, by any measure, deeply unhappy. I’d been pushing down a lot of horrible emotions from a damaging childhood, grief from many losses, and had trapped myself in a life I didn’t fit in to from a desperate need to fit somewhere, anywhere. I had no kind of spiritual practice at all. I was a standard issue atheist, and any encounter I had with religion was edged with inherited and unexamined scorn. Consequentially, I really had no tools to process the pain I was feeling. Today, my argument with the radical atheist rhetoric of people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett – both of whom I had read heavily at university – is that it leaves the bulk of its believers utterly amputated from their own emotional reality. It certainly had me. I was miserable, and in trying to escape from the causes of the misery I’d driven myself, repeatedly, to the borders of emotional collapse where I had, at long last, collapsed.

This is why they preach equality. This is why they preach tolerance. This is why they seek to disqualify and destroy those who stand above them, immune to the manifold terrors that haunt their empty chests. They are damaged people, broken individuals, fallen souls.

They live lives of lies and self-deceit. They lie about others; they lie about themselves:

I am by nature a non-political person. I tend to see both sides of most arguments, and there are merits and faults with any position in any political debate. Extremism is always wrong. Beyond that, who is right is mostly a matter of your tribal, partisan allegiances.

No doubt that is why he didn't link to Larry's piece he was criticizing and why David Barnett intentionally and admittedly evaded The Guardian guidelines in his hit piece aimed at me, lest I defend my position in a convincing manner.

But no matter what lies Damien and his broken kind tell, they will find no comfort whatsoever in confronting the likes of Mr. Corriea and Mr. Wright. They will find no peace through confronting me. They will find nothing but emotional collapse in this lifetime and damnation in the next as a result of their rejection of the Way, the Truth, and the Life that we do our feeble best to serve.

At least Damien has taken one step forward in abandoning the intellectually bankrupt world of the radical atheist. He knows there is something else out there. But he is still caught in the soul-sucking mire, he is still lost in lies and desperately lashing out at the likes of Larry and me in a vain attempt to find fulfillment in the approval of those he foolishly seeks to emulate.

But he will not, because there is no fulfillment to be found there. There is none to be found in telling lies, in making-believe, because even if he manages to convince others of his falsehoods, he will never be able to convince himself that they are true.

What Damien does not realize is that our strength, our being whole, does not come from within, but from without. The Earth-Current flows through us; we are empowered by the Master of the Master-Word. It is not enough for a man to reject the nonsensical teachings of the self-proclaimed wise, it is necessary to repent and to humble himself before God, after which he can stand again, washed in the sacred blood of His Son, unafraid, unbowed, and unbroken.

“Your a fukking pussy, u probbly couldn’t beat my retarded bro wit both of his hands tyed behind his back.”

I was 13 going on 14, rummaging around in an online gaming community then known as “The Zone.” The game of choice was Age of Empires.

“Oh yeah, you wanna know why I got such a nice tan?”

“Cuz you a fag?”

“No, because I drug the bed outside last afternoon and pork-roasted your whore mother on it.”

“Fuck u, u jar of dog piss. 1v1 in Room 19.”

“It’s on, shitheap.”

Ah, the joys of newly minted adolescent boys trading cheap insults about slutty mothers and dog piss. We did, indeed, do battle and my reputation was well earned. My Spaniards ran rough-shod over his woefully unprepared Persians. He called me a “dick-sucking cocksucker” before whisking off into another game room, obviously licking his wounds after being castrated by a gay jar of canine urine.

Any place where men come to gather and congregate—especially during the tumultuous teenage years—isn’t what anybody would call a “safe space.” We form bonds—often life-long—with other males and we battle back and forth in groups. At the global level, it can take the real, important ways of war, politics, and general power conflicts. Human history has been overwhelmingly influenced by males simply because, as I shall sketch out, that women are not interested in agency or seizing power simply to exercise agency or have real power.

This dynamic is fully on display in the video game community, as men have built, nurtured and maintained the community for years. Even when called nerds, treated like losers by women, men who loved video games still played them. It can be a brutal place from a shit-talking standpoint, either you can develop a thick skin, or you find out you aren’t cut from the right cloth to handle the banter. Competition can be fierce and reputations are difficult to make and easy to destroy. It is a mirror to real life, as people will shit-talk you, talk behind your back and often times don’t act in accordance with your wishes and best interest.

However, a curious and recent development has occurred, with women demanding access to this largely male-exclusive enclave. As usual, the typical female narrative emerges: those sexist brogamers have prevented women from engaging in gaming for so long, it’s time to change! They have swept into the video game community, set up shop and are making demands. As we see elsewhere in society, men are not men until they have a woman in his life, most likely “reforming” him so he fits her image of how men should behave.

Why did women wait until now to be gamers? And, no, I don’t mean some person who plays solitaire on his laptop or “Words With Friends” on her bejeweled iPhone. The primary reason is simply that the star— the power— of the industry has passed. No, I’m not saying video games are dead or anything of that sort, what I’m saying is that women don’t want actual power but the appearance of it. They don’t want challenges, they want simple solutions fed to them by media, “9 Ways to Feel Better Right Now,” “10 Reasons It Isn’t Your Fault You Married A Cheater,” and so on. They want empowerment, which by the nature of the word, means they want power handed to them, not taken.

The power that has been drained from video games is their ability to challenge the gamer. Video games are soft these days. I remember playing the original Super Mario for NES. There were no save games. Either you got it all right in one try, or it was start over from the beginning. Nowadays? Assassin’s Creed doesn’t even have a save function, as the game only proceeds if you don’t make a mistake. At worst, you are set back at most a few minutes, not an entire two hours. Early video games had shit for graphics, now some games have no substance and all flash. Guess when women wanted to be a part of the community?

A lack of real difficulty is the primary reason that women are now increasingly becoming gamers. The power of video games has been drained; there are no more frustrated afternoons where you try to find a way to kill a Red Dragon in Baldur’s Gate or deal with a horde of zombies in Resident Evil. Now, walk-through’s are nary a second away on Google with no worries about screwing up a game in epic fashion that results in a waste of 20 hours. Modern gamers are coddled.

It must be noted that the rise in online gaming, particularly for console games, has also been instrumental in drawing women to gaming. One of the primary reasons that Tomb Raider bombed with women—aside from the intimidating cleavage of Lara Croft—is that it involved a solitary female, isolated from society, fighting beasts and monsters. No group collaboration, no mindless affirmations —-just a woman and her guns fighting murderous creatures. Women—surprise!—need story lines and relatable characters in order to enjoy video games. Simple conflict doesn’t code for women, it has to have an emotional context to be understood. The desire for power, for wealth and fame apparently doesn’t work for women, it has to have a context. Once again, why are men so “over-represented” in positions of power?

Video games are not purely about entertainment through challenging the gamer to step up his game to meet the increasing difficulty of a game as it progresses anymore. Apparently, the most recent Mass Effect had significant homosexual themes. Insertions of homosexual characters into a story is a political act meant to challenge the ”tolerance” of the gamer. By dumbing down games, it allowed not only women to find a home, but to increase video games popularity. Just like how liberals destroyed the educational system in order to “have access for all!,” video games have been reduced to a vessel for political correctness, illusions of personal accomplishment and personal fantasy – which is my final point.

Take this article about a woman who revels in her rank narcissism and celebrates a female character who is a “complete human.” Apparently, she sprouted a ladyboner over the game Left Behind. In it, a limitless girl is girly but also methodically murders “a bunch of motherfuckers.” The author seems upset that “nobody wants to be a woman.” Well, yeah, no shit Sherlock. What man wants to be a passive-aggressive, back-stabbing person who thinks that power is gifted, not taken? Men, generally, don’t want to be women because we want to take power, not have it handed to us. However, she betrays what often hurts women when it comes to gaming and why they are flocking to it now: she wants what she perceives as powerful entities affirming her life as a woman and girl. You know, the resultant behavior of women after the death of God in a society where paternalism has shifted to the government and corporations.

She is moved to tears when Left Behind ends. Why, you might ask? Because it has affirmed her as a person, a woman who is both girly and can brutally murder people. She blurs the lines between her life and the video game in a way that betrays her damning and self-defeating narcissism: it isn’t good enough for her to kill people as a girl in a video game, but that that female character has to reflect her own life experiences. This isn’t some Xena fantasy, it has to be Xena plus taking selfies with your bestie after a falling out. I bet Andrea Dworkin is turning over in her shallow grave. She reinforces the idea that she only plays video games to act out the girl and woman she wanted to be in real life. Since she was never that woman, she has turned to video games which don’t challenge her at all, but give her an interactive movie that reinforces her fantasies:

That’s part of what makes Left Behind so special: Here, Ellie is the sun, the lightbulb that the rest of the universe rotates around. And she shines.

She never got to be the “It” girl, so she turns to a video game that neither challenges her abilities, but gives her an outlet to slake her desire for historical revisionism and naked self-possession. This is another reason that women have gotten into gaming. Playing Tomb Raider does nothing for women because a solitary female killing off wolves with a shotgun isn’t aspirational nor self-reflective. Emotional context is necessary and, as the preceding female highlights, that context is often centered out of self-delusion. The woman is moved to tears because she finally has found a game that reflects her desire to act on those who upset her (the killing aspect; she doesn’t confront people in real life) and her desire for a media outlet to value her relationships with other women (the Randi Zuckerberg problem).

This is the psychological progression: going from emulating Carrie from Sex and the City in real life to demanding an interactive video game so she can pretend to be Carrie on her Xbox. For this to happen, however, the challenging nature of male-centered video games has to be neutered. The banter I cited above? It has to go, because questioning people’s personal identities is challenging for women, so men can kiss busting each other’s ball goodbye. Mainstream games that approach the difficulty of Paper Boy for SNES? Sorry, but that doesn’t affirm anybody’s identities nor advance diversity or equality. It must be pretty triggering for a gamer girl to not measure up in the fantasy world of video games. Who can she blame if she can’t beat a video game? White males?

What these female gamers are demanding is a “safe space” where their egos go unchallenged, undisturbed. The disruptive nature of male behavior—equally disruptive of male and female egos—leads to upset female gamers who simply want a space to be, where they get to act out what they either can’t or, most likely, don’t have the girl balls to do in real life. They demand games that are simply interactive movies, revolving around emotional relationships (what they call “complex” and “real” human relations) between people with, apparently, fantasies of killing people and blowing shit up… after taking selfies!

The roaring cacophony of political correctness that dominates modern dialogues betrays the utter emptiness of modern society. These female gamers are not happy women in any sense of the word. Their lives are so despondent and lacking in true substance that they turn to video games, not to pass the time or indulge in destroying the Packers as the Bears in Madden, but as an outlet for the lives they don’t live in real life. When men question whether a woman is a true gamer, men are hacking away at a part of their beating heart. They start with themselves then see men as not-female and he must be doing X, Y or Z because she is a woman as men are not women. They port out the typical female-as-a-victim-of-men rhetoric that reveals their true unhappiness—the inability to find love and contentment with a man.

They are not simply looking for happy relationships with women. These women are seeking approximations of happy, loving relations with men. If that is the cloying worship of a gang of online gamer betas, so be it. If that is the fantasy of an alpha male romancing a female lead in a video game then game on! Inextricably bound up in the issues of seeking the trappings of power and fantasy is the fantasy of men loving them for who they see themselves as, not who they really are. The fantasies of power easily gifted to them is part of the fantasy, but it isn’t complete without the concurrent bestowing of sexy men upon these fantasy women. Male worship is expected and positive attention from sexually attractive men is fetishized.

This movement exposes more than a few things about women. It exposes how often they see themselves as powerful and capable in their own minds, but fail to display that in real life, so they turn to media to smooth the ruffled feathers of their egos. They don’t like challenges of any sort, especially to their self-identity. They crave male approval and will go to any length to secure it, even if to devalue it once it becomes rote and expected. Women want to be gamers now simply because it is easy—easy to fantasize about their idealized self, easy to secure male approval and worship, and easy to rock the boat and demand the world revolve around them.

Read Next: 3 Ways Women Have Ruined Video Games 

So I was traveling through France on the train today and saw that the forty-something woman pushing the food-and-drinks trolley was tall, slender, and looked vaguely Italian. I didn't think anything of it, but her appearance prompted the man sitting across the aisle to start asking her where she was from in French.

She must have noticed something in his accent that I didn't, because she answered in Italian. I didn't recognize the name of the town, but he obviously did. It turned out that he and the two women sitting near me were originally from the next town over in Piemonte. They discussed a few landmarks and families and so on while I sat there quietly minding my own business and editing John Wright's latest masterpiece on my tablet. They got a little exuberant at one point, prompting the woman nearest me to lean over and apologize in French, explaining that they were all essentially neighbors. From Italia.

"Si, lo so, anch'io parlo italiano," I said, which sparked considerable hilarity. The next thing I knew, I was getting quizzed about my last trip to Piemonte, the man bought a bottle of wine from the trolley lady, and was distributing plastic cups to everyone, including me. It's rather amusing. Even when you take the Italians out of Italy, the party travels with them.

Patriarchy has been extremely successful, despite its recent vilification. Most cultures worldwide are patriarchal – to find examples of successful matriarchal societies you either have to turn to ancient history, remote outskirts of the world or feminist fiction. However, this hasn’t stopped the feminist collective from queefing out books and even a hashtag hailing the end of patriarchy in a textbook example of incestuous amplification.

What patriarchy, after its apparent downfall, will be replaced with remains to be seen. Hamsterizations aside, there is surprisingly little data available about what life would be like in a society made up of only men or only women. An enterprising social scientist might want to perform an experiment where groups of men and groups of women are left to their own devices, having to work together to survive against the elements and build a civilization from scratch. However, this scientist would have a very hard time convincing ethical review boards that the inevitable suffering of his participants would weight up against the value of the data.

Luckily, reality television is not bound by ethical constraints and once in a while, in its never ending quest for viewer ratings, reality TV accidentally performs a very interesting experiment that social scientists would never be allowed to do.

Quite a few years ago, I had the pleasure of watching the Dutch version of Survivor (Expeditie Robinson) with my feminist roommate. That particular season would have two islands, one populated by men and one populated by women. My roommate had been promoting that particular series to me and the other students in the house for weeks because it would show us, according to her, what a society run by women – free from the evils of patriarchy – would be like.

And it did. Oh it did.

Here is what happened: initially both groups were dropped on their respective islands, given some supplies to get started and left to fend for themselves. In both groups there was some initial squabbling as people tried to figure out a local hierarchy. The men pretty much did whatever they felt was necessary – there was no leader giving orders. Men who felt like hunting, foraging or fishing did so. Another guy decided he was fed up with sitting on sand and started making benches. Others built a hut that gradually grew and evolved. Another guy cooked every night. Within days a neat little civilization was thriving, each day being slightly more prosperous than the previous one.

The women settled into a routine as well. The hung up a clothesline to dry their towels, then proceeded to sunbathe and squabble. Because unlike men, women were unable to do anything without consensus of the whole group. And because it was a group of at least a dozen women, consensus was never reached. During the next few episodes, the women ate all their initial supplies, got drenched by tropical storms several times, were eaten alive by sand fleas and were generally miserable. The men on the other hand, were quite content. There were disagreements of course, but they were generally resolved.

Eventually, the people running the program decided something had to change. In order to help the women out, three men would be selected to go to their island. In return, three women would take their place at the men’s island. The look on my feminist roommates face during this episode was priceless.

Initially, the three men selected for the women’s island were ecstatic, for obvious reason. But then they arrived at the island and were greeted by the women.

‘Where is your hut?’, they asked.

‘We have no hut’

‘Where are your supplies?’ they asked, dismayed

‘We ate all the rice’

And so on. The three men ended up working like dogs, using all the skills developed by trial and error in their first few weeks – building a hut, fish, trying to get the women to forage. The women continued to bitch and sunbathe. The three women who were sent to the men’s island were delighted – food, shelter and plenty of male attention was freely available. They too continued to sunbathe.

And that my friends, is what patriarchy is. My former roommate, unsurprisingly, is no longer a feminist.

Now this might all be a fluke, a white raven, an exceptional case not representative of society as whole. But that particular season of Dutch Survivor is not unique. CBS broadcast several Survivor seasons in the US, where men and women started off in separate groups. In most cases (the Amazon and One World), the result was the same. The men quickly got their act together, getting access to food, fire and shelter while the women spent a lot of time and energy on petty little squabbles, eating their meager supplies, getting drenched in storms and generally being pathetic. The opposite situation, where men didn’t get their act together while women quickly built a functional micro society, has not yet been observed outside of feminist fiction, and it probably never will.

Read More: Why Patriarchy Is The Greatest Social System Ever Created