Author: VD

Pretty Lady issues a pronouncement:

I am afraid the time has come to speak strongly to you, my dear. This sort of thing is not for you to say. You are not the Representational Male, hard as you strive to be so. This is not a put-down; it is simply so. You are too Odd and Quirky. You drink blue drinks. You are Right Out as the Representational Male. Thank goodness.

The Lady is too kind. I am seldom paying attention, but if I have heard things correctly, Spacebunny and others in our social circle tend to use words such as “bizarre”, “alien planet” and “asychronous orbit” when describing my habits. However, the fact that even I can interact successfully with the Representational Male demonstrates how genuinely accepting and easy to get along with men truly are.

The rules are simple. It took me some time to figure them out, but once I did, I found that they were universally applicable, across language and culture. Once you understand that men are pack animals at heart, it’s not hard to see how they operate.

1. Shut the hell up. When granted entry into a new group of men, speak only when spoken to until it is clear that you have been accepted as an equal.

2. Accept every challenge. If you lose, accept defeat gracefully and acknowledge the winner while looking him in the eye. Trash talk is only acceptable among friends and only from winners.

3. Don’t take verbal banter personally. Smile and accept it, or give it back but in a friendly manner and with the same or a lesser amount of venom. The same goes for physical banter, except you should up the ante by a single step in order to dissuade those prone to bullying.

4. (For women mainly.) Never ever pass judgement on the group or something it collectively enjoys. To do so is not only offensive, but ensures that you will never be accepted because you have publicly declared yourself to be apart from it, if not superior to it. For example, this is why Spacebunny is tolerated by the NFL-watching gang while the other wives are not; she knows better than to whine about what the cheerleaders are wearing or their silicone content.

5. Understand that you are responsible to defend the group and its members in all circumstances. During my first soccer game in Italy, a defender took me down hard enough to draw a yellow. I had just joined the team two weeks before and didn’t even know the names of all my teammates; there were several I hadn’t met before that game. Nevertheless, three of them were immediately in the defender’s face, not because they gave a damn about me, but because they knew their responsibility as members of the group/team/pack.

6. Accept and follow the leader’s orders without open questioning or criticism, no matter how strange. If you have suggestions for improvement, offer them later, in private. I am much better tactically than the coach of my team, but I never challenge his authority or criticize any of his decisions, not even the incredibly dumb ones. (For example, starting three slow, out-of-shape guys in the midfield – two on the wings! – put us into a hole on Friday night that we couldn’t overcome.) But I’ve noticed that he’s begun to make some changes based on earlier observations we discussed.

As for what the Representational Man prefers in women, I suggest that Pretty Lady reconsider the accuracy of my assertion in light of the following point. Everyone accepts that most women are not attracted to men who, although intelligent, behave with the social grace of water buffaloes dressed like circus clowns. Men and women alike refer dismissively to these men as geeks and nerds. Why, then, would any man be attracted to the female version, self-professed intelligent women who never cease to loudly and boorishly announce their intelligence, their degrees and their career accomplishments to all and sundry?

If men were as attracted to law degrees as long hair, gentlemen’s clubs would feature scantily clad women reading from Black’s instead of sporting those gorgeous stripper manes. The evidence strongly suggests that what men like is very, very different from that which nominally intelligent women believe they should like. The fact that these intelligent women can neither recognize nor accept the realities does not speak well of the utility of their intelligence.

I, however, as the Distillation of Elite Womanhood, may make any such pronouncements that I like. We superior females must maintain some privileges.

But of course….

And meanwhile, Lauren attemps a little spin:

The many libertarians and anti-feminists who comment on Feministe will be surprised to know that everyone who posts comments on a feminist site is a spokesperson for feminism.

If Lauren will be so kind as to provide us with a list of accepted spokespersons for feminism, we shall be pleased to direct our criticisms accordingly. Of course, as we have recently seen, feminists are so desperate to avoid damnning criticism that they have recently declared Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin and Simone de Beauvoir to be unrepresentative of feminism despite their canonical status among feminists, leaving one to marvel at how dishonest and intellectually incoherent today’s feminists are.

Furthermore, as Lauren surely knows very well, the view expressed by the Feministe commenter is a very common one among feminists and has been echoed by many of her commenters. It is even probable that she shares it herself; if we are incorrect and Lauren is secretly pining for a man who is less intelligent, less educated and less successful than her, we hope she will let us know and we shall post a correction. Ironically, feminists, at least the straight ones, have a stronger urge to do the conventional “marrying up” than do most of their more traditional counterparts. Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for society, their very accomplishments work against them by limiting the pool of their prospective mates… and, of course, most of the men they consider to be worthy of their glorious selves are intelligent enough to avoid any serious involvement with them.

If you don’t understand basic probability? A Feministe dilemma:

There’s a sweet little phrase employed by lads in my town when they meet girls in bars and want to impress upon them how superior their genes are and how lucky the girl in question would be to get some of them in her vagina. It’s called “Dropping the H-Bomb.” As in, “So what do you do?” “I’m at Haaaaarvard Laaaaaw.”

The H-bomb has been said to be inversely effective for women trying to pick up men in bars. Actually, there is a worse one in this city. There’s no pithy name for it, that I know of, but let’s just say it involves the letters M, I, and T….

I have found that dropping these magical letters is an excellent first round of screening in the mate market. Anyone who says, “Wow, so you must be smart or something” is a tool. Anyone who shies away is clearly either insecure or less smart than me. Neither of which are qualities I look for in a date.

Now, imagine that this were a wealthy man writing. And suppose he drove a brand new Porsche and declared that he was uninterested in dating anyone who was insecure or drove a lesser car. Both men and women would, quite rightly, consider him to be an idiot, because there are things that make an individual interesting and attractive besides their form of automotive transportation, furthermore, there just aren’t very many people who drive Porsches in the first place.

Keep in mind that Zuffenhausen produces 31,250 cars per year, while M.I.T. accepts 1,045 freshmen in the same time frame. It is mathematically more reasonable to insist on dating only new Porsche owners than Ivy League graduates, whether you own a Porsche or attend an Ivy League school or not.

The comment is particularly amusing in that the feminista who wrote it doesn’t understand how completely conventional her attitude happens to be. The truth is that as long as intelligent women want to marry up, they will be inordinately likely to find themselves with no shortage of time to spend on their careers… or their cats.

It seems I am her dream guy:

I like men who dress well. I like men who enjoy good food and good wine, and who can have interesting, engaging conversations where they aren’t afraid to take personal risks and emote a little bit…. I like men who aren’t embarassed to go out to a swanky lounge and order a ridiculous pink drink.

Perhaps I order the ridiculous blue drink more often than the ridiculous pink one, (which, if made properly, is really more of a dark purplish red), but otherwise, it sounds as if I could be her perfect match.

Er, wait a minute… “I like men who will get up at 5 am to ride a bus to DC with me to attend the March for Women’s Lives — and who bring their own sign.”

Unfortunately, I am so vehemently opposed to the diabolical concept of “morning” that I wouldn’t willingly agree to be woken up at 5 AM by the entire Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders squad, in uniform no less, to watch the Vikings win the Super Bowl. I’m sorry, Jill, but it seems that the cruel fates have doomed what might otherwise have been a beautiful relationship.

UPDATE: On further review, I would. But not if it was only the aforementioned cheerleaders and the NFC Championship Game.

UPDATE: Just in case girls aren’t clear on this, men have little inclination to date, much less marry, any woman who has ever participated in a march, a candlelight vigil or a sit-in of any kind. Signs are nominally acceptable, but only if they are intended for use at a sporting event and do not involve a stupid acronym involving the broadcasting enterprise. A yard sign for a political candidate is questionable, but can be forgiven so long as it is removed promptly following the election.

The problem, as will be apparent to all right-thinking individuals, was obviously the lack of pygmy suffrage:

Marauding rebels are massacring and eating pygmies in the dense forests of north-east Congo, according to UN officials who are investigating allegations of cannibalism in Ituri province, where fighting between several rebel groups has displaced about 150,000 people in the past month. [January 2003 – VD]

Many of the displaced tell of rebel fighters capturing and butchering pygmies, Manoddje Mounoubai, spokesman for the UN ceasefire monitoring mission in Congo, said yesterday. The UN had sent six officials to investigate the accusation as well as other human rights abuses, he said.

Other UN officials in the capital, Kinshasa, and the eastern city of Goma said that widespread cannibalism had already been established. ‘Ituri is completely out of control and cannibalism is just the latest atrocity taking place,’ said one, who asked not to be named until the investigators deliver their report. ‘Perhaps this will finally alert the world to what’s going on.’

On a recent assignment in eastern Congo the Guardian correspondent saw many Mayi-Mayi fighters wearing parts of the bodies of their Rwandan enemies, in the belief that this would make them invincible. ‘We are hearing reports of untold horrors in Ituri,’ said Wyger Wentholt, of Médecins sans Frontières.

While the Congolese probably wouldn’t vote Hamas into power, this tends to add an ominous undertone to the analogy of democracy being two wolves and a sheep deciding on what’s for dinner.

Of course, considering the proclivity for barbecuing Africans shown by UN troops themselves in the past, one has to wonder if looking to the United Nations for help is the wisest course of action.

They’ve got a signed petition and everything! I’m just curious, what is supposed to be the benefit of allowing people like this, (not to mention those featured on the Tonight Show’s Jaywalking segment), to vote?

Just in case you wanted to know what the White Buffalo looks like.

The New York Times is very, very excited:

Scientists have discovered fossils of a 375-million-year-old fish, a large scaly creature not seen before, that they say is a long-sought missing link in the evolution of some fishes from water to a life walking on four limbs on land….

Other scientists said that in addition to confirming elements of a major transition in evolution, the fossils were a powerful rebuttal to religious creationists, who have long argued that the absence of such transitional creatures are a serious weakness in Darwin’s theory.

Given the past history of missing links, I’ll be interested to learn if there are any Darwinian faithful whose belief is dependent on this fossil being genuine. I can’t imagine there are, since the ur-faith has survived numerous frauds in the past.

Now, it’s entirely possible that the discovery is genuine, its purported significance is real and there is no fraud involved. Does it prove anything? No, it is merely a proposed solution to an obvious hole in the hypothesis, and will rightly boost confidence in that hypothesis.

But should this prove to be another fraud in the long and colorful history of evolutionary science, or even a simple misinterpretation of the paleontological data, it will be interesting to see if the New York Times will cover the story so prominently, or explain how this is a “powerful rebuttal” to evolutionists and “should undercut the argument that there is… evidence in the fossil record of one creature becoming another kind.”

As I’ve said many times in the past, I am an evolutionary skeptic, not an anti-evolutionist. I do, however, find it amusing that otherwise rational evolutionists will so readily accept ontological arguments in favor of their hypothesis that they reject in most other facets of life.

After reading the novel this weekend preparatory to writing a requested essay on it, I’m going to break the first rule here and talk about it. First, this is one of the gayest novels ever written. It’s not really about fighting, it’s about cruising, and if you can’t see that from the very first page, where the protagonist is metaphorically performing a Monica, well, let me introduce you to a concept known among the literati as “the metaphor”. (One could also argue that it’s quasi-occultic based on that scene and later developments, but the Ourorobos theme is not sustained whereas the gay one definitely is.) The suppression and frustration of men should not be taken literally here, it is representational of sexual frustration and the sublimation of homosexual desire.

What I found interesting about Fight Club, beyond the doppleganger aspect, was how the author got the psychological aspects of the transition to becoming a fighter correct while getting the details of physical combat so gloriously wrong. For example, the twenty-minute fight? Even trained fighters are exhausted after six two-minute rounds with breaks in between and many full-contact bouts are scheduled for only three rounds. My guess is that he was involved with a full-contact fighter or perhaps a wrestler for an extended period of time.

I’ll be interested to hear from the VPQF to either sustain or criticize my take on the book. And no, I haven’t seen the movie.

No wonder he decided that some people need killing:

The more I argued with them, the better I came to know their dialectic. First they counted on the stupidity of their adversary, and then, when there was no other way out, they themselves simply played stupid. If all this didn’t help, they pretended not to understand, or, if challenged, they changed the subject in a hurry, quoted platitudes which, if you accepted them, they immediately related to entirely different matters, and then, if again attacked, gave ground and pretended not to know exactly what you were talking about. Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand closed on a jelly-like slime which divided up and poured through your fingers, but in the next moment collected again. But if you really struck one of these fellows so telling a blow that, observed by the audience, he couldn’t help but agree, and if you believed that this had taken you at least one step forward, your amazement was great the next day. [He] had not the slightest recollection of the day before, he rattled off his same old nonsense as though nothing at all had happened, and, if indignantly challenged, affected amazement; he couldn’t remember a thing, except that he had proved the correctness of his assertions the previous day.

Sometimes I stood there thunderstruck. I didn’t know what to be more amazed at: the agility of their tongues or their virtuosity at lying.

It’s not often that you feel a sense of sympathy for one of the most infamous mass murderers in history, but it’s interesting to consider how the young Hitler learned to take this petty, individual dishonesty which he found so frustrating and apply it on a much grander scale to such lethal .

I found both sides of this coin to be quite interesting and relevant, Why Religious Believers Don’t Take Intellectuals Seriously and Why Intellectuals Don’t Take Religious Believers Seriously. I think he makes a better case against the intellectuals, – by which he actually means academics – (and I can just hear Renee saying “you would, wouldn’t you”), but then, as an academic himself, he is more privy to the intellectual sins of his peers.

This is not to say that much of his criticism against religious believers is ill-placed, but it tends to apply against the subset of the group that many Christians don’t find intellectually respectable themselves. And the idea that what he characterizes as “ultraconservative” pastors don’t ever preach on Matthew 25: 34-46 and the requirement to provide for the sick, homeless, hungry and imprisoned is simply ignorant, to his credit, however, he appears to be open to the possibility that he’s incorrect on that score.

Let’s just say that he wouldn’t get an A in debate:

No VD, apparently, it’s the JOURNALIST here who has limited comprehension skills. Let’s review. (A) You pointed out that teaching is not a demanding job. The usual salvos against teachers were then lobbed by you and (your band of yes-men and polygamy-ready ‘wimmin.’) (B) I agreed that in certain cases, teaching is not difficult. (C) Then, I segued into a discussion on how the profession of JOURNALISM is not that difficult EITHER (despite the fact I’m aware VD has difficulty taking in that which he dishes out.)

First, it has been proven many times, and in a variety of ways, that teachers are vastly overpaid for less work and lower performance than would be acceptable anywhere in the private sector. They get away with this because most of them are unionized government employees; they are the equivalent of DMV employees.

Far from being yes-men, most of the regulars here – to say nothing of the readers – disagree with me on many things, including polygamy. Most of them don’t even support the same political party I do. This the teacher’s first demonstrably incorrect assertion, it is far from the last, as I am not a journalist and I don’t believe anyone here will accept the ludicrous notion that I have any difficulty in taking criticism.

I have never said that journalism is difficult, far from it. The chapters of Media Whores that were posted here previously would surely disabuse anyone of the notion that I think it is a difficult occupation – not profession – or a noble one.

One would suppose that a journalist distinguishing himself from other journalists by advertising himself as ‘a Christian libertarian’ would have prepared himself with at least an AWANA club CUBBIE’s level understanding of the word of God before expounding on any topic having to do with Biblical matters. Claiming to be a Christian journalist, your Bible knowledge is less than the mathematical proficiency of the LEAST prepared math teacher I’ve ever heard of been prepared in mathematics.

Again, I’m not a journalist. The teacher’s ability to debate, or lack of it, leads one to conclude that most of his discussions are held with such CUBBIES and fellow school teachers. It’s much harder to win an argument when you can’t monopolize the floor and threaten to dock the other individual’s grade, isn’t it, Mr. Teacher. As for your cogent, persuasive and well-documented case against the depth of my Biblical knowledge, I refute it thusly: is not!

First-time mothers have “the matrix opened” by firstborn children. First-time fathers do not. Your “convincing” defense for polygamy from the Bible’s book of Numbers (offered in your blog with the past month) fell apart. I’ve watched teachers who are big enough to admit mistakes and/or to offer to look up information they don’t have.

This teacher is so limited in his ability to comprehend what he reads that he does not realize that the defense for polygamy from the Book of Numbers was not mine. I merely posted it as an interesting way of looking at the issue, whereas my defense of the institution has three primary elements, none of which are based on Numbers: 1) the many examples of men favored by God who were married to more than one wife, 2) the requirement of a church elder to have but one wife, which implies that other members of the church may have more, and, 3) the negative fruit of monogamy, which can be seen in the soul sickness and dying populations of the West.

As I wrote before, it is ironic, if not troubling, to realize that the American church accepts that which the Bible tells us God hates and hates that which the Bible tells us God accepts.

Let’s see a journalist do the same.

And for the third time, I’m not a journalist and have never claimed to be one. I have admitted mistakes before. I will almost surely do so in the future. However, there is no reason for me to do so here, as this teacher has not pointed any out. While he is perfectly free to express his opinion about whatever he likes, a naked assertion is evidence of precisely nothing and neither asks for nor requires an admission of error.