Category: Uncategorized

Yemen and the art of dream-crushing

Here is a Game maxim which some may regard as controversial, although it really isn’t. Men who want a strong and lasting long-term relationship should crush a woman’s dreams without hesitation, if those dreams are not entirely consistent with her primary role as a wife and mother.

Also at Alpha Game, a lightbulb goes off in the mind of the resident Omega regarding his fear of approaching women. Thinking further about the subject of fear I had an insight. I began to ask myself why I was afraid. I started looking for the source of the fear, going beyond facing it and rather trying to understand it. What I found was that I am not afraid of girls. If I was I would not be able to go out in public. Really, why would I, a 6’2″ guy be afraid of a tiny 5′ girl? Nor am I afraid of conversation with a stranger. While I prefer my own company, having a pleasant chat with someone is not that difficult. What, then, makes me nervous when I approach?

RM contemplates how much of his desire to wait until marriage was the legitimate Biblical teaching versus Churchian custom and his own mask of delta. When I was a younger delta, I believed I had strong convictions about waiting for marriage for sexual intimacy. This was the result of my many years of churchianity morality training. Some of it was Biblically correct… other parts not so much. What I have come to understand is that this was more than a belief, it was a convenient mask for my delta ways.

And finally, the first Alpha Mail post.

Abusive social workers vs pedophile priests

I somehow doubt we’ll ever hear anywhere nearly as much about this, and the rampant child abuse being committed on a daily basis by teachers and other public school personnel, as we do about the behavior of pedophile priests from six decades ago. But give The New York Times credit for going against left-liberal orthodoxy and publishing the results of its investigation:

A New York Times investigation over the past year has found widespread problems in the more than 2,000 state-run homes. In hundreds of cases reviewed by The Times, employees who sexually abused, beat or taunted residents were rarely fired, even after repeated offenses, and in many cases, were simply transferred to other group homes run by the state. And, despite a state law requiring that incidents in which a crime may have been committed be reported to law enforcement, such referrals are rare: State records show that of some 13,000 allegations of abuse in 2009 within state-operated and licensed homes, fewer than 5 percent were referred to law enforcement.

Note that in the United States, 10,667 people made allegations of child sexual abuse between 1950 and 2002 against 4,392 priests. This represented around 4 percent of the 109,694 priests who were ordained and active during that time. Given that there were 13,000 allegations of abuse in one state representing one-fifteenth of the U.S. population in 2009 alone, this indicates that state social workers are 951 times more likely to abuse a disabled person under their supervision than a Catholic priest was to sexually abuse a child.

This doesn’t excuse what the pedophile priests did nor does it excuse the diabolical decision of the Vatican to permit homosexuals to join the priesthood in the first place. They eminently deserve whatever punishment they receive, in both this world and the next. But it puts the scale of their evil deeds into the proper statistical perspective. And while one could argue that physical beatings and psychological abuse are not as bad as sexual abuse and should be omitted from the comparison, one also has to keep in mind that none of the crimes committed by the priests rose to the lethal level either.

It also shows the tremendous hypocrisy of those who simultaneously claim that there is no truth to religion and yet attempt to hold religious individuals to a higher standard than they hold anyone else. Social workers and schoolteachers commit far more abuse, sexual and otherwise, than religious leaders, especially if religious leaders who are openly in direct violation of their religious standards are omitted from the equation as logic dictates they must be. (Why should we be surprised that a man who rejects the Church’s stand on homosexuality should also reject the Church’s stand on the sexual abuse of children or anything else?) But it is quite clear from the reaction of the state agency to the crimes of its agents that the Catholic Church’s reaction to the crimes committed by its priests was an entirely normal bureaucratic one. It can, and should, be condemned by Christians who believe in a higher standard for Christian leaders. Secular individuals, who don’t believe in any such standards, have no such grounds for similar condemnation, especially when they show so little interest in the far more common crimes committed by secular agents of the state.

The boundless evil of socialism

Socialist Hugo Chavez speaks out against breast implants:

Venezuela has one of the highest rates of plastic surgery per capita in the world and in some cases teenage girls have had breast enlargements as birthday presents from their parents. Now Mr Chavez has condemned doctors who “convince some women that if they don’t have some big bosoms, they should feel bad.” Speaking on state television, he said that it was a “monstrous thing” to see that even women from poor backgrounds were now choosing to pay to go under the knife.

Libertarians are in favor of women being free to improve the aesthetic appeal of their bodies if they wish. Socialists call big, beautifully-sculpted breasts “monstrous”.

Any questions?

The cost of post-Christianity

It is foolish to expect logical consistency from government, much less the media. But note the intrinsic contradiction between what influential members of the British public still believe their government to be and what their government actually proclaims that it is:

Item One: The state-sponsored Equality and Human Rights Commission intervened [in the case of the Johns family being denied foster parent status on the grounds of their Christianity] and argued that it was the duty of the state to protect vulnerable children from becoming “infected” with Judeo-Christian values of sexual morality. The rest is history, and in a startling judgment, the High Court held last Monday that the United Kingdom is a secular state and that Christianity as part of the law is “mere rhetoric.”

Item Two: Prof Simms comes down on the side of the latter [the pro-Libyan intervention position], citing Palmerston: “Our duty – our vocation – is not to enslave, but to set free… we stand at the head of moral, social, and political civilisation… when we see people battling against difficulties and struggling against obstacles in the pursuit of their rights, we may be permitted… if occasion require, to lend them a helping hand.”

Lord Palmerston was twice the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the second time from June 1859 to October 1865. At that time, the United Kingdom was an unequivocally Christian monarchy and Christianity was an integral aspect of its moral, social, and political civilization. Now, according to the High Court, the United Kingdom is Christian in rhetorical name only despite the fact that neither the laws nor the unwritten English constitution have changed. So, the only conclusion is that the United Kingdom no longer stands at the head of moral, social, and political civilization, but has been reduced to following the lead of the totalitarian pagan rulers of Continental Europe.

Britain can’t intervene in Libya because it has neither the ability nor the moral justification for doing so. On what basis would they intervene anyhohw, the inability of Libyans to democratically select their government? That would be ludicrous, considering that the British people have been repeatedly denied the referendum on the sacrifice of their national sovereignty to the European Union that they have been repeatedly promised. Political freedom is a predominantly Christian phenomenon and there is no evidence that it can survive paganism, which naturally gravitates towards totalitarian rule.

Consider the warning of one of the counsels involved:

It is important for Americans to understand these developments, so they can learn from the British experience. The first lesson is the speed and success of the secular ideology in replacing Judeo-Christian freedoms. In 1997, the United Kingdom was a more stable country than the United States; an evolving state with a millennium of religious liberty. If someone had told me then that within little more than a decade, stable Christian households would be deemed unsuitable to foster children, or that Crosses would be banned, or that hate-speech laws would be used to crush the very ideas of dissent, I would not have believed it. I would have been labeled an alarmist if I had expressed views to that avail.

The second factor to recognize is that the terms liberal, diversity, and tolerance are descriptors for a political program which logic and law alone cannot explain. Thirdly, the secular movement is but a variant of the utopian ambitions that have inspired man from the beginning of time. However, the endgame of such programs is always the same

Paul Diamond is exactly correct. The endgame of secular utopianism is always the same. It ends in the gulag, the guillotine, and the gas chamber. But the key point to remember is that however it ends, it always ends, because the Gates of Hell cannot and will not prevail.

Responding to a bully

The same brief clip has been uploaded over and over on the Web: A scrawny bully sucker punches a larger chunkier boy multiple times, as other kids look on, some taunting. Then suddenly, with the speed and agility of an alligator, the victim responds, flipping the kid and bodyslamming him. “There’ll be reprisals from other kids in the school and he still has to go to school somewhere,” Casey’s father told the Daily Telegraph. “He’s not a violent kid, it’s the first time he’s lashed out and I don’t want him to be victimized over that.” Casey’s father added, “He’s always been taught never to hit. Apparently other people’s parents don’t teach their kids that.”

There are some lessons worth noting here. First, smaller people can be bullies too, if they believe they can get away with it. This includes girls and women. And such bullies will continue to provoke and attack as long as the larger victim indicates his unwillingness to defend himself. This is why it is important to react strongly enough to inflict real pain on a woman or child the first time they hit you, as it will teach them an important lesson about your unwillingness to accept physical attack without the risk of serious injury. If a man submits to the physical bullying until it reaches the point at which he snaps, he’s a lot more likely to do more damage than he intends. In this case, the little bully was fortunate that he didn’t get his leg broken or his skull cracked on the concrete, not that he wouldn’t have merited it if he had.

And you never know who is going to decide to test you for one reason or another. A boy once inexplicably elected to kick me in the balls because I relayed his mother’s request that he go upstairs for dinner. It didn’t hurt, but I reacted strongly in order to communicate to him that attacking an adult man without provocation was an insanely stupid thing to do. Some people just need to learn life’s lessons in a physical manner. Don’t hesitate to instruct them in a calm, but thorough manner.

Second, I have reluctantly been convinced that people, and perhaps more importantly, the police, are much more accepting of locks and throws utilized in self-defense than they are of punches and kicks, despite the fact that locks and throws are potentially more damaging and lethal. So, if a bully throws a punch, instead of just trying to block it, step forward, grab the wrist, then step back and turn with your other hand placed behind the puncher’s elbow. This will use his momentum to face-plant him on the ground if you’re in the open or smash his head into the wall if you have your back to one and it will happen before anyone realizes what is taking place. If you’re dealing with more than one opponent and need a fast incapacitation, pull the punching arm straight to lock it and smash your forearm through the elbow. Even if you don’t break the arm, the guy isn’t going to be throwing any punches with it for a minute or two.

Third, learn to finish. Don’t step back when your opponent is down but not incapacitated or submissive, kick him in the face or in the sides. Once is sufficient, any more will have people thinking you’re trying to kill the guy and leaping in to stop you.

And finally, refusing to teach your kid to fight, or worse, teaching him to not defend himself, doesn’t mean that he won’t have to do so. In fact, it actually makes it much more likely that he’ll be targeted by bullies. Bullies, of both the physical and psychological varieties, are much more often cowards than real fighters, so they seek soft targets. Make it clear that you are not a soft target and there is a very good chance that you’ll never have a bully or a predator attempt to bother you in any way.

Polees is reel smart

Clearly the best and brightest are protecting and serving:

The Dayton Police Department is lowering its testing standards for recruits. It’s a move required by the U.S. Department of Justice after it says not enough African-Americans passed the exam. Dayton is in desperate need of officers to replace dozens of retirees. The hiring process was postponed for months because the D.O.J. rejected the original scores provided by the Dayton Civil Service Board, which administers the test.

Under the previous requirements, candidates had to get a 66% on part one of the exam and a 72% on part two. The D.O.J. approved new scoring policy only requires potential police officers to get a 58% and a 63%. That’s the equivalent of an ‘F’ and a ‘D’.

Why does Dayton need black police officers? Do they have a quota for Asian officers too? How about Turkish ones? Jews? And how is it worth hiring officers anyhow when you know before they’re even hired that they’re going to find the job too intellectualy challenging?

Never trust the experts

Zero Hedge underlines one of my personal maxims:

Confirming, yet again, that MIT Ph.D.’s (such as the FRBNY’s Brian Sack) are among the most dangerous around, a paper made the rounds yesterday by one Josef Oehmen titled: “Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors.” In the ensuing 48 hours, anyone who listened to Josef’s advice (who incidentally is not a scientist) and was also “not worried about the reactors” has paid an exorbitant price, possibly up to and including their lives. We demand that MIT School of Nuclear Science and Engineering clarify their position on the matter, and make sure that incidents such as this, where Oehmen’s paper received top billing due to its perceived “endorsement” by MIT and has since been completely discredited, never recur.

Full paper as was originally posted:

I repeat, there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors.

An expert is someone who is always correct when it doesn’t matter and usually wrong when it counts. This is one of the reasons why I never, ever, put any faith in credentials. Credentials are completely worthless, they’re not worth the paper on which they are printed. Experience is somewhat more useful, but when the experienced individual cannot provide clear and sensible answers to straightforward and logically sound questions, your BS radar should be sounding like a radiation alarm at a Fukushima nuclear plant.

How did that M.I.T. PhD-backed prediction hold up? “Dangerous levels of radiation leaking from a crippled nuclear plant forced Japan to order 140,000 people to seal themselves indoors Tuesday after an explosion and a fire dramatically escalated the crisis spawned by a deadly tsunami. In a nationally televised statement, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said radiation had spread from the four stricken reactors of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant along Japan’s northeastern coast.”

And now we know what an assurance from an M.I.T. PhD is worth. How much less, then, is a PhD from a lesser school or in a less rigorous discipline to be trusted? What must always be kept in mind is that the expert’s primary motivation is not what most people assume it to be. Their main motivation is to sound credible rather than make an accurate judgment so they will always play the probabilities and state the obvious because this a) allows them to be correct most of the time, and b) only be wrong when everyone else is wrong.

The divorce domino

I often find myself thinking that it would really behoove the chattering class to consider getting out of the large coastal cities before making grand, sweeping conclusions about modern society. It often appears to escape the mid-witted would-be intellectuals there that as large and influential as those cities might be, they only represent a small portion of the American population.

On Thanksgiving 2008, Dana Adam Shapiro, a few years removed from his Oscar nomination for directing the documentary “Murderball,” visited his childhood home in Boston to find that a good friend of his was divorcing. The friend had been married for three years and, like Shapiro, was in his mid-30s. (Shapiro is now 37.) This was the fourth divorce that Shapiro heard about just that month. In fact, after absorbing the news, he sat down to make a list of all the couples he knew, under the age of 40, whose marriages had already broken up. He came up with 14 names.

I am older than Shapiro. I am married. If I make a list of all the couples that I know whose marriages broke up before the age of 40, I can come up with a grand total of three. (I’m assuming the writer meant “couples” rather than “names of individuals in broken couples” here.) I can stretch that to seven if I include couples that I don’t know very well. That represents less than 10 percent of the married couples under 44 that I know. Regardless of whether I look at the Shoreview Bible Study, which has only seen one divorce out of 15+ couples, or simply look at the marriages of our closest friends, where six couples out of six remain married, it seems absurd to present what is a potentially useful documentary on why married couples who break up do so as if the number of couples doing so is unbelievably high.

This is not to say that all of those marriages are equally happy, that any of them are immune to the possibility of breakup, or that there is nothing to be learned from looking at the fate of failed marriages. I cannot sit and view the relationships of others as a “smug married” not when both my parents and Spacebunny’s parents are divorced. But we can either learn from the negative examples of others or repeat them, and I am optimistic that Spacebunny and I are intelligent and observant enough to successfully manage the former. And since I wouldn’t conclude, from the basis of my personal experience, that divorce is very unusual and rare, so why would someone from the opposite end of the spectrum do so?

There is some reason to believe that Shapiro’s perception of marriage is a warped one caused by his choice of the wrong friends. As with obesity, divorce appears to be somewhat contagious. If those you consider your peers divorce over what is not infrequently either blatant narcissism or petty issues, it is much easier for you to justify doing so. Whereas on the other hand, if you see your peers sticking together in spite of him being a fundamental pain in the ass or her being an irritating bitch, divorce over lesser quotidian offenses is all but unthinkable.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt to know that grass is just grass, wherever you go. Unless you’re married to a genuine psycho bitch, a frigid woman, or an unfaithful one, the woman you know is always better than the one you don’t.

It’s not hard to see the common thread in the three examples of failed marriages provided. “It’s all about me.” If your feelings for someone else are predominantly shaped by how they feel about you or what they provide for you, you probably shouldn’t get married. You’re not fit for it.

The libertarian Plato

Sometimes people make the mistake of asking what I’ve been reading lately. This post may explain why they seldom make that mistake more than once. Now, I may be among the more vehement critics of the dishonest Socratic logic presented in Plato’s dialogues, but even I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that the correct reading of Plato’s totalitarian Republic is to conclude the exact opposite of what is written in it, as Patrick Tinsley does in his very unusual paper entitled “Plato and the Spell of the State“:

[W]e will contend that totalitarianism is not at all Plato’s proposed solution to the problem of untrustworthy politicians. His mistrust runs too deep for that. Far from advocating the totalitarian state, Plato opens it up to the light of truth, exposing it as an unjust and literally unnatural breach of the convivial social order. And he does something else as well. As we shall see, Plato attempts to show that the totalitarian state is an abomination not only for its victims, but also for its rulers. This is so, it turns out, because the desire to rule is an unruly desire; it corrupts, corrodes, and even colonizes the soul that it seduces. In the end, the desire to possess the body politic will possess the body of the politician. Whosoever would be master is doomed to be a slave….

Before we understand Plato’s rhetorical strategy, therefore, we must see that the view of Plato as totalitarian proceeds from the false assumption that Plato’s dialogues express the author’s true beliefs, typically through the character Socrates. In fact, Austrians from Menger to Rothbard fail even to acknowledge that the Platonic Socrates is a literary character. They simply read the dramatic elements out of Plato’s plays and treat them as treatises instead. According to them, Plato believes what Socrates says, and nothing besides. But this way of reading Plato produces a paradox. Namely, that if Plato believed the words that he wrote for Socrates, then he should never have written them.

The way out of the paradox is to substitute a literary reading of Plato for a literal one. We cannot take Plato, or Socrates, at his word. Instead, we must read between the lines. In order to understand Plato, we must understand that his meaning, very often, is what he leaves unwritten—and that what his characters say in dialogue, Plato delights in deconstructing with dramatic details and unspoken textual cues. His text “knows for whom it should speak and for whom it should remain silent.” If Plato speaks through Socrates, then, it is only because Socrates’ speech is so frequently
ironic, concealing his true beliefs behind a veil of silence.

It would be an understatement to say that I do not find this argument persuasive. To be honest, I find Sam Harris’s arguments not only more compelling, but less indicative of past drug use. Tinsley’s conclusion strikes me as the bizarre result of combining libertarianism, Plato-worship, post-modern literary interpretation, an obsession with the English Vice, and an imagination unfettered by the limits of reason. This is not a paper that is likely to convince the average conservative Republican that libertarians don’t smoke marijuana. Or marijuana liberally laced with angel dust followed by a crack-infused chaser of tiger’s blood, for that matter.

To begin with, the supposed paradox is no such thing; few would be so foolish as to seriously argue that because Socrates happened to say a few negative things about writing, everything that Plato wrote down about his words is therefore completely and necessarily invalidated. Tinsley builds up a mountain, and a very strange mountain at that, from an insignificant molehill. But he’s just getting started, we haven’t seen anything yet.

One need not assume that Plato agreed with absolutely every word that Socrates uttered to take them at face value. From the ideological perspective, it doesn’t actually matter if the dialogues are faithful recreations of actual conversations in which Socrates participated or if the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues had no more connection to the historical Athenian than the dreaming Scipio of Cicero’s dialogues had to do with the historical Roman to take the words of those dialogues literally.

In fact, it doesn’t even matter if Tinsley is correct and Plato was actually a libertarian opponent of the totalitarian state. As an Italian admiral once told me: “In the end, it all comes down to Plato versus Aristotle. It always does.” Regardless of whether it was his intention or not – and based on what Rothbard tells us of the Greek’s philosophical focus on the polis rather than the individual, I am quite confident it was his intention – Plato has long been the ultimate champion of the collective. His writings serve as the foundation for the intellectual defense of the State and have been utilized as this manner by his fellow statists for centuries.

Even though one could not possibly accept it, one might be inclined to take Tinsley’s argument more seriously if it did not veer off onto a lengthy tangent on “the depraved depth of the tyrant’s erotic abnormality.” What on Earth, one finds oneself wondering, does any of this have to do with Plato, let alone the State?

“This anal orientation can also be found in the Sphinx’s riddle, which, by suggesting the two-, four-, and three-footed sexual positions associated with sodomy, “quite clearly [calls for] a pederastic explanation.” Oedipus must solve the riddle of his father’s crime. That the Sphinx’s “riddle of the foot” plays on the relationship between pedia and pederasty is confirmed by several ancient sources.”

It turns out that the point of this anal extravaganza is to inform us that Plato has constructed Socrates as the anti-Oedipus, who we are instructed was apparently was a passive sodomite in addition to being a parracide and a literal motherfucker. What we are supposed to conclude from all of this is that Plato is attempting to show us, in a subtle manner so subtle that it has been lost on classic scholars for more than two millenia that “when a tyrant perverts the natural order, the natural order perverts him, afflicting him with the most revolting and unnatural appetites”. This, apparently, is a “unique method for dispelling the state”.

Unique? Most definitely. Effective? Highly dubious. The correct reading of the author of The Republic? Let us just say that I remain unconvinced. But let us not speak too harshly of “Plato and the Spell of the State”, as what it lacks in compelling argument it more than makes up for in pure, unadulterated comedic appeal. I couldn’t care less if Tinsley is right or not, because on a scale of one to ten, I would give “Plato” a twelve. Because in this case, eleven just isn’t enough.

Fear and the dead dragons

Alpha Game’s intrepid omega is bold enough to tell the tale of how he attacks his fear of approaching women:

The biggest obstacle to success with women, or success in anything, is fear. The first time I cold-approached a girl it took me three hours to actually talk to her. When I finally did approach, I was a mess: my hands were shaking, my face was hot, my palms were sweaty, and when I spoke I sounded like a lost lamb my voice was shaking so much.

And on the other end of the spectrum, Nate does his best to belie my assertion that alphas have little to contribute to Alpha Game apart from idiotic braggadacio:

An insightful blogger here pointed out that the alpha ego, enormous as it is, is based in reality. The alpha’s positive self-image and confidence are the direct result of what? It comes from success. But success at what?

I have to say, I am suddenly beginning to feel a rather delightful sense of superflousness. Of course, being a well-paid professional not-writer, I see no reason why I should not succeed in becoming a hugely popular not-blogger as well.