I’m a little choked up

I’m not sure anyone has ever said anything quite so nice to a humble award-winning cruelty artist. Munson writes:

BRAVISSIMO! (Munson rises from his chair, enraptured, vigorously applauding)

Such nuanced invective! “You’re a maleducated twit, Sigrid.” Channeling James Kilpatrick no less! Keynesian/Mises Institute-man, that Dennis Miller-like slider caught me looking; couldn’t even take a swing at it. You have the precision of a coiled cobra, with much less empathy. In an age that honors meaty roundhouse rhetoric, you show the skill of an AWACS directed surgical strike, killing only those necessary, leaving the rest to their dreary lives of drinking curdling sour goat milk and fucking their grub-like mustachioed women. Your writing is a delight sir. I could not find the post that started the exchange; no matter, the artist rises above his inspiration. And you are no less than that VD.

The true artist creates only for himself, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t take deep satisfaction in encountering those Umberto Eco describes as his Ideal Readers. In case you’re interested, both the art and the inspiration can be found here.

Another commenter, one Odds, notes what makes puncturing academic gasbags so intrinsically worthwhile in addition to the sheer entertainment value provided:

It’s that “intellectual” style of speech that does it. So many kids, especially in worthless fields like women’s studies, think it makes them sound smart. There must be some course for liberal arts children where they tell them, “communication isn’t about conveying your position in the most precise and succinct way, but about illustrating your fantabulous credentials.” Then they end up saying far more than they meant to and it reads less like an original argument than a quote mined from an obscure, little-regarded essay. And deep down, in what’s left of their soul, they fervently hope that no one will notice they’ve presented their ideas through vocabulary rather than through arguments, and that they’ve made no argument at all.

It’s always amusing to see that the worst offenders in the great game of credentialist competition are the larval academics who don’t actually possess any credentials yet. There is nothing wrong with an extensive vocabulary or complicated sentence structure. But it is a grotesquely false to believe that the mere use of either is sufficient to make an argument convincing, and it is contemptible to knowingly use such things to try rhetorically intimidating those who possess dialectically stronger arguments into submissive acquiescence.

I further note that habitual reliance upon rhetorical bullying is a relatively reliable indicator that one is susceptible to such techniques.

It’s not your imagination

Most of the portrayals of men in the media are heavily weighted towards the negative:

Until recently, gender theorists and media researchers have argued or assumed that media representations of men are predominantly positive, or at least unproblematic. Men have allegedly been shown in mass media as powerful, dominant, heroic, successful, respected, independent and in other positive ways conducive to men and boys maintaining a healthy self-identity and self-esteem.

However, this view has come under challenge over the past few years. John Beynon, a Welsh cultural studies academic, examined how masculinity was portrayed in the British quality press including The Times, The Guardian and The Sunday Times over a three-year period from 1999-2001 and in books such as Susan Faludi’s 2000 best-seller Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man. Beynon concluded in his 2002 book, Masculinities and Culture, that men and masculinity were overwhelmingly presented negatively and as “something dangerous to be contained, attacked, denigrated or ridiculed, little else”.

Canadian authors, Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young in a controversial 2001 book, Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture reported widespread examples of “laughing at men, looking down on men, blaming men, de-humanising men, and demonising men” in modern mass media. They concluded: “… the worldview of our society has become increasingly both gynocentric (focused on the needs and problems of women) and misandric (focused on the evils and inadequacies of men)”.

The role of mass media in creating and or reflecting identity has long been debated and the findings of some studies have been questioned. Nathanson and Young admitted in their foreword that their findings were based on a small sample. Also, most analysis of media content has focused on movies, TV drama and advertising: mass media genre which are fiction and, therefore, not representative of reality and ostensibly “taken with a grain of salt” by audiences.

However, an extensive content analysis of mass media portrayals of men and male identity undertaken for a PhD completed in 2005 through the University of Western Sydney focusing on news, features, current affairs, talk shows and lifestyle media found that men are widely demonised, marginalised, trivialised and objectified in non-fiction media content that allegedly presents facts, reality and “truth”.

The study involved collection of all editorial content referring to or portraying men from 650 newspaper editions (450 broadsheets and 200 tabloids), 130 magazines, 125 TV news bulletins, 147 TV current affairs programs, 125 talk show episodes, and 108 TV lifestyle program episodes from 20 of the highest circulation and rating newspapers, magazines and TV programs over a six-month period. Media articles were examined using in-depth quantitative and qualitative content analysis methodology.

The research found that, by volume, 69 per cent of mass media reporting and commentary on men was unfavourable compared with just 12 per cent favourable and 19 per cent neutral or balanced. Men were predominately reported or portrayed in mass media as villains, aggressors, perverts and philanderers, with more than 75 per cent of all mass media representations of men and male identities showing men in one of these four ways. More than 80 per cent of media mentions of men, in total, were negative, compared with 18.4 per cent of mentions which showed men in a positive role.

Now, I don’t have any problem with negative portrayals of men per se. Men do commit most of the violent crimes. Men are responsible for starting most of the wars in history. Men do beat up women and rape them. I have no problem with men being portrayed in roles that are consistent with their actual behavior.

Where I have a huge problem with the media is when their portrayals of men are totally antithetical to observable reality. Due to hypergamy, most women marry men who are smarter than they are. So, how can it be possible that in Commercial World, men are inevitably drooling idiots who must be corrected and lectured by their smart, but ever-so-patient wives? And what is the point of this obvious social programming anyhow?

All the commercials in the world aren’t going to convince me or my children that Spacebunny knows more about computers than I do when I’m the one who gets her laptop talking to the printer over the network, just as a bunch of commercials that portray women as being cretins totally unable to prepare food aren’t suddenly going to have my family looking to me for dinner… not unless they want fried eggs and toast that evening.

The alarming thing is that if there isn’t any serious social programming intended in this particular regard – whereas there quite clearly is an amount of programming intended in the inclusion of a stock African character in every party or group of friends – then it is simply meant to appeal to existing female prejudices. And that is arguably more alarming, as it suggests that many women are adhering to such concepts in spite of all the easily observable evidence to the contrary.

Observations at the theme park

1. Where did the chavs go? There were two orders of magnitude fewer neck tattoos? The vibe distinctly changed from high prole last year to low bourgeois. Lower traffic too. Conclusion: economy is not recovering.

2. Saw many white families, black families, and Arab families. One interesting observation: the multiracial couples did not have children. And with one exception, the multiracial children were there with a white mother without any adult male figure in sight.

3. European children are by and large pretty well behaved.

Mailvox: a near-first

Oregon Mouse complains:

My husband used to live in Colorado. He took his family out for a small hike and a rock tumbled down out of nowhere and hit his 9 year old on the head. It knocked her out cold but perhaps feminism is the real culprit? How dare a 9 year old girl walk around outside!!

What a remarkable near-accomplishment! And at an even younger age than the famous Grand Canyon hiker! Do send us the link to the international newspaper accounts of her deed!

John Edwards, celebrity john

Lest we forget, this is the man for whom the self-appointed champion of women, Amynda Marcotte, worked because she thought he should be the President of the United States:

A call girl working for alleged “Millionaire Madam” Anna Gristina told investigators she was paid to have sex with former U.S. Sen. John Edwards when he was in New York raising money for his failed presidential bid, DNAinfo has learned. Edwards is the first big name to surface in connection to Gristina’s alleged prostitution scheme run out of an Upper East Side apartment.

The only remarkable thing here is that this news didn’t break when Obama was battling Edwards for the Democratic nomination in 2008.

Hultgreen-Curie claims another victim

The lethality of Hultgreen-Curie Syndrome is demonstrated once again:

She was just 80 miles short of becoming the youngest person in history to hike the Grand Canyon from end to end when tragedy struck, a loose rock some believe, tumbling her 300 feet below. Beautiful, smart, active and young as a newlywed at 24 years old, friends of Ioana Hociota say she was an experienced hiker, one of the best, but died last month because of one possible misstep.

‘It’s tempting for people to think that a pretty, beautiful young woman of 24 might have been out there, you know, out of her element and out of her head,’ her husband Andrew Holycross told ABC, ‘and she absolutely was not.’

Sure she wasn’t. She actually managed to get herself killed while walking outside, but we’re supposed to believe she was totally in control of the situation throughout. The grieving widower sounds rather like a PR guy for the Navy explaining why one of their heroic and pioneering pilots landed her jet in the ocean rather than on the carrier.

So much for the end of Tebowmania

I’m sure moving to New York City is going to completely reduce Tim Tebow’s media presence:

Mike Klis of the Denver Post reports that the Jets will send the Broncos their fourth-round draft pick. Additionally, the Broncos will send a seventh-round pick to the Jets and receive a sixth-round pick from the Jets.

And in other news, an entire season’s suspension for Sean Payton strikes me as within the realm of reason, but a bit on the heavy side.

Ben Bernanke evades the point

It’s not that a gold standard won’t help governments address problems, it’s that it won’t permit them to create a lot of them:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Tuesday took aim at proponents of the gold standard, saying that such a system handicaps the government’s ability to address economic conditions.

Bernanke spoke in the first of a series of four public lectures at George Washington University that is the central bank’s latest effort to counter a raft of negative public sentiment that has arisen from its handling of the financial crisis. The former Princeton economics professor delivers a second lecture on Thursday and two more next week.

“Since the gold standard determines the money supply, there is not much scope for the central bank to use monetary policy to stabilize the economy,” Bernanke said. “Under a gold standard, typically the money supply goes up and interest rates go down in a period of strong economic activity – so that’s the reverse of what a central bank would normally do today.”

It is the reverse of what central banks do today… and given the negative consequences of what the central banks have done, one would think that was a good thing. The fact that Bernanke even feels the need to createaddress the subject is a strong indication that the solution of central bank-created money is failing. Again.

Shoot the scientists

They’re now openly embracing technocratic world totalitarianism:

Since doing that issue, I’ve come to the conclusion that the technical details are the easy part. It’s the social engineering that’s the killer. Moon shots and Manhattan Projects are child’s play compared to needed changes in the way we behave.

A policy article authored by several dozen scientists appeared online March 15 in Science to acknowledge this point: “Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change. This requires fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions toward more effective Earth system governance and planetary stewardship.”

Scientists have been on the wrong side of every political movement of the 20th century. Because they are narrowly educated elitists almost completely unschooled in both logic and history, they tend to be heavily inclined towards top-down authoritarianism. And there is absolutely no reason to believe they will be on the right side of any of the geo-political issues of the 21st century.

Roissy tells Murray to “man up”

In which Charles Murray’s cowardly refusal to take on female hypergamy is correctly criticized:

Women’s improved employment numbers, education and earning power (some of it contributed by government largesse) has had the effect of SHRINKING their acceptable dating pool. Material resources and occupational status are one way women judge men’s mate worthiness (not the only way, but the one way that viscerally matters to most beta males), and the innate female sexual disposition to be attracted — ANIMALISTICALLY ATTRACTED — to men with higher status and more resources than themselves necessarily means that financially independent women and government-assisted women are going to find fewer men in their social milieu attractive.

Result? Men slowly discover that the effort to win women’s attention via employment is not rewarding them the way it did for their dads and granddads, and that now only herculean efforts to make considerably more than women will give them an edge in the mating market. The male fecklessness that Murray lambasts is actually a rational male response to a changing sexual market where the rewards of female sexuality go disproportionately to charming, aloof jerks over meager beta providers.

And make no mistake, the jerks are exactly to whom women, particularly lower class women, are dispensing their favors. When earning power and employment as a male attractiveness criteria has been subconsciously debased by women who don’t need male provisions, then women will shift their sexual adaptation algorithm to sexy cads for their thrills and romantic chills.

Knowing this, it makes more sense to shame women equally as vigorously as one shames men for social and family breakdown. In fact, as I have argued, if a prosperous, civilized, self-reliant society is your goal it actually makes sense to shame women MORE than men, because women are the gatekeepers of sex, and as such their combined sexual marketplace decisions carry more import in the direction the culture takes.

Read the whole thing. Roissy is absolutely correct. Murray has made a mistake in focusing on a consequence instead of one of the primary causal factors. Murry himself needs to man up and target the real problem, which is the sexual liberation of women from the civilized standards that are required to maintain the continuation of civilization.

The logic is impeccable. Consider:

1. IF women are permitted to have sex with whomever they please.
2. AND women show an observable preference to have sex with men who do not exhibit civilization-building or civilization-maintaining behaviors.
3. THEN men will increasingly cease to engage in civilization-building or civilization-maintaining behaviors.

After that, it’s just a matter of time before the civilization collapses and it’s back to the barbarism of mud huts, rape, and pillage. Or, alternatively, preventative action is taken regarding points (1) and (2). Which one is more feasible? Women often like to angrily demand of men of sufficient foresight if they want to control women’s sexuality. That’s the wrong and irrelevant question. The correct one is: do you like electricity, a reliable food supply, and the ability to live peaceably without having to shoot strangers on sight?