Tiny Cat Pants invokes the immutable losers’ law:
It makes me think that there are libertarian men who just kind of are powerful, cantakerous, assholes by nature, but who, at heart, are good men. And then there are men who feel powerless in the face of whatever it is they fear and who set out to adopt the posture** of “powerful, cantakerous asshole.” They’re just pretending to be what they wish they were naturally….
TCP’s reader Gina adds: I had the same thought the original post, Exador and other do…if Vox Day has to say he is dominant, and Alpha, etc., then he isn’t. That guy’s internet persona must be the most contrived bunch of cr*p I’ve ever seen.
This is a typical Gamma Girl reaction. Hiss and deprecate, but from a safe distance. Of course, the fact that one is incapable of speaking factually about oneself – or anything else – doesn’t mean that everyone else is.
The truth is that those who are genuinely self-confident about themselves or their abilities don’t bother to hide it. I find false modesty to be far more offensive than honesty; your mileage may vary. Does a 6’6″ man saying that he is tall make him short? Does a man with a net worth of USD 3 million saying that he is wealthy make him poor? This is what passes for female logic… emotional “truth” trumps factual data.
There are no shortage of individuals here who know me personally, some of them very well. As they have not hesitated to bust on me at every given opportunity – WB, you totally had me going on “Antone”, by the way – does anyone truly believe that any of them, with the possible exception of Space Bunny, wouldn’t call BS on me? (And the evidence suggests that SB isn’t completely averse to doing that here either.)
Of course it’s true that some people are completely full of it, on the Internet as well as in real life. But the fact that some people are does not mean that everyone is. I wonder what these skilled amateur psychologists would make of Matt Leinart’s recent comments: “I’m a great leader. I just have a passion for winning. I’ve lost two games in my college career. I have the will to win, the passion to win.”
Clearly, the guy has to be a complete loser to say that. And Rod Marinelli is quite obviously a quitter, since he described himself as “relentless”.
I believe there are a lot of nasty little people out there like the appropriately named Tiny who simply hate anything that excels or anyone who does better than they do. I’ve despised their pettiness and refused to bow to it ever since I discovered that people who didn’t mind my enthusiasm for my beat-up, semi-functional MGB – which I LOVED – suddenly considered the mere answer to the question “what do you drive” to be bragging after I moved up to a Porsche. And four years of keeping my intelligence under wraps in order to socialize with the A-crowd in high school and my first year of college was about three years too long.
I assert that if you’re good at what you do, if you’re so smart, so successful or so pretty that it is immediately obvious to everyone, it is an insult to everyone’s intelligence to pretend that it isn’t so.