Tag: Gamma

Reflections on a Gamma Icon

A Gamma wonders if perhaps he might have done better to avoid patterning his behavior on an iconic Hollywood Gamma.

A generation of American male teenagers, me included, saw themselves in Duckie—charming, quirky and overlooked. Duckie belonged an elite gang of best friends “Pretty in Pink” screenwriter John Hughes made the beating heart of his ’80s teen filmography—Cameron Frye in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Farmer Ted in “Sixteen Candles” and Watts in “Some Kind of Wonderful”—characters who embodied the pain of being young and not yet able to be honest about your own desires.

Beyond Hughes’ other sidekicks, “Duckie” has become synonymous with “weird friend thrown over for safe, popular choice,” adolescent canon reinforced by a generation of boys who mimicked Duckie—in dress, manner and seduction—to joke and serenade their way into the hearts of their dream girls.

Disciples of Duckie, we had it all wrong.

No, you don’t get to be with the girl of your dreams just because you want to. No, you don’t get to avoid telling her how you feel and then resent her for showing interest in another guy. No, it’s not romantic, but rather a little sad that you can only express how you feel to her father and in charming but empty gestures like lip-synching Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” And no, you aren’t an unsung hero because your dream girl doesn’t dream of you. You’re a bad best friend for not respecting her decisions and thinking that means her love for you isn’t worth anything.

Re-watch “Pretty in Pink” and Duckie comes off not as a role model but as a cautionary tale about what we can destroy while growing up: The movie may end happily for everyone — even Duckie, who doesn’t win Andie’s heart but nobly tells her to forgive Blane for canceling on taking her to the prom. Before all that, Duckie comes dangerously close to losing Andie forever: Not 30 seconds after the Otis Redding serenade, Blane shows up to take Andie on their first date. Duckie, not knowing about the date, accuses Andie of disrespecting herself by going out with a rich guy, and then threatens to not be there (i.e., not be her friend) if she gets her heart broken.

Never mind that Duckie doesn’t know Blane and has no claim on Andie, and, since Andie is a smart, self-possessed, attractive young woman, she has probably received this kind of attention before. Since Andie and Duckie have been friends since childhood, Duckie having his world rocked when Andie goes on a date feels less like unfairness and more like Duckie ignoring an entire adolescence’s worth of evidence that Andie isn’t just his pal or his valentine, but a woman and a person in her own right.

“But Duckie’s pain was real!,” I just heard a squad of ex-Duckies cry. I used this excuse to not grieve my own teenage heartbreak but instead make it the heartbreaker’s fault. I wish had known better than to think my high school best friend/crush would fall for me after months of not letting on, and then getting mad when she fell for someone else, and in between trying to woo her with a lip-synch performance (mine was Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home.” Laugh all you want.).

It strikes me that the primary challenge of the Gamma is overcoming his intrinsic narcissism. Again and again, in fiction and in real life, we observe the Gamma’s total inability to grasp that everything is not about him.

The Alpha jock doesn’t hate you. He doesn’t think about you at all when you’re not actively annoying him or one of the women in his orbit. The hot cheerleader doesn’t despise you. In fact, she would be offended by the very idea that she had any opinion about you at all. The normal people don’t particularly dislike you, they just want you to shut up and leave them alone. The Girl of Your Dreams is not, and will never be, attracted by the strength of your desire for and/or your devotion to her.

And literally no one thinks you’re charming or roguish. Snark and sarcasm are not wit. Neither are movie quotes, however apt. Just stop it already.

The world isn’t out to get the Duckies of the world. It simply doesn’t like them very much because they’re weird and reliably annoying narcissists.

In sum, the Gamma’s emotional pain is no one else’s fault and no one else’s problem.

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Everyone’s Got Trolls

But Salman Rushdie’s are arguably more dangerous than most.

Author Salman Rushdie has been injured after being stabbed on stage ahead of a speech he was due to give in Chautauqua, near Buffalo.

The writer, 75, was attacked as he took to the stage for the CHQ 2022 event before giving a speech on Friday morning.

He was attending for a discussion of the United States as asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression.

Witnesses claimed that he managed to walk off stage with assistance and the attacker is reportedly in custody.

This sort of attack should help your average actress, writer, or Internet celebrity keep their haters and stalkers in proper perspective. Anyone with even a modicum of success or fame is certain to attract trolls, but a few unfortunates have it considerably worse than others.

UPDATE: Apparently the attack was more vicious than originally reported.

Author Salman Rushdie has been airlifted to hospital after being stabbed up to 15 times, including once in the neck, as he prepared to give a speech in upstate New York. One witness told the New York Times that Rushdie had been stabbed ‘multiple times’ and had been lying in a pool of his own blood.

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The Rules of Trolling

The Saker releases a basic guide to trolling in the aftermath of the mass onslaught of neocon trolls on his site. A lot of it sounds remarkably familiar, does it not?

  • Rule number one: always make sure your comment is either the very first one (best!) or, at least, one of the top ones. This way you can best derail the discussion away from the actual article and make it all about your talking points. This was almost always the case when I was still writing for the Unz Review, and it is still very often the case on the Saker blog today. I would call this rule “the golden rule of trolling”.
  • Do not, ever, refer to the actual contents of article you comment upon. Doing so might lead the readers to familiarize themselves with the author’s arguments or, worse, the factual and logical substantiation of these arguments. You want emotion, not analysis.
  • Make sure to psychoanalyze both the author and the blog itself. Use sentences such as “you only write this because” or “in spite of the horrific censorship on this blog…” etc. This is basically the good old ad hominem disguised as some kind of insight into things the troll cannot – by definition – have any information about.
  • In your comment, make sure to align as many Neocon talking points as possible, you can join them together into (apparent) sentences and (apparent) paragraphs. This way you give the external appearance of making an cogent argument while doing no such thing.
  • Ignore the author’s arguments. If the author write “A”, do not directly dispute it, don’t even refer to it. Instead, write “non-A”. In fact, the ideal troll comment is one which never gives the reader a reason to look up the author’s actual arguments.
  • Make sure that your comment is formally polite. Thus not only do you sound respectful and sincere (“all I want is an honest discussion!“), but it reduces the chances that the moderators will send it to trash. You can be snarky, of course, but that opens up your comment to being sent to trash on formal reasons.
  • Claim the coveted “victim of censorship” status. Yes, even when you ignore (deliberately or not) the commenting rules! This technique is especially useful if your comment is illogical, off-topic or pain stupid. After all, in our times of “positivity” and “acceptance” it would be most politically incorrect to call any comment “nonsensical” or “stupid”!
  • Misuse terms, especially those which are often misunderstood by non-specialists. The perfect example would be the difference between “air superiority” and “air supremacy”, or use “contested airspace”. The goal here is not to make a fact based and logical argument, the goal is to repeat Neocon talking points as often as possible. With some luck, other commentators will pick up this misuse of terms and you will achieve a synergistic effect.
  • Go fishing. By that I mean this: post a number of statements and see if anybody else will “bite”, possibly a fellow troll (paid or not). Example, “it appears that a single Ukrainian MiG-29A shot 3 Su-35S in one mission“. With any luck, somebody will bite and, there we go, the synergistic effect will be achieved.
  • Ignore points made in the original article. This is a crucial one. If an author writes “A” and then goes into some details explaining the factual and logical basis for this argument, don’t engage, but ignore it! Pretend as if it did not exist. With some luck, those who just skimmed over and article won’t realize what you are doing.
  • “Bounce” external arguments. By this I mean simply write “I read fill the black” and ask for a rebuttal. The function and purpose of this technique is double: derail the conversation and (try to) force the author to waste his/her time debunking as many idiotic arguments as possible.

Fortunately, the development of SocialGalactic means our community no longer needs to deal with trolls or pay any attention to their ankle-biting antics any longer. And that’s all that matters, because as far as I can tell, there isn’t a single person of note anywhere who doesn’t have at least a few trolls incessantly posting nonsense about them on Twitter, on Reddit, or some other Internet cesspool.

Seriously, pick a random “celebrity”, however well-loved or trivial. I guarantee you a moment’s search will find trolls sniping at the late Olivia Newton John as well as at the latest Z-list British Love Islander and the most recent YouTuber to reach 100,000 subscribers. Self-appointed critics are the price of success, and it is one of the reasons why even the most famous attention whores who have assiduously pursued fame eventually find themselves backing away from the spotlights and the red carpets.

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Hypergamouse is Real

The punchline: I came up with this quote just a few minutes ago. I thought /r/atheism would appreciate

It’s the smug, pudgy gammatude that radiates from creatures like this that is almost impossible to parody or even exaggerate. You just know the guy is so impressed with his own lofty 110 IQ that he can’t figure out why the hot babes aren’t climbing all over each other just to be lectured by him.

And the grammar. Ye cats, what is with the creative approach to punctuation? It’s astonishing how many of these self-quoting self-enlightened philosophers still haven’t mastered the basic rules of the language they are attempting to use.

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The Price of Popularity

The Saker is the latest to discover that limiting comments becomes inevitable once a sufficient readership is obtained:

The problem is that this explosion in readership brought A LOT of new commentators who are not regular readers of the blog and whose comments were often quite disruptive of the normal mood of our comments section. So alongside plenty of very good commentators, many with true expertise, we good flooded with all sorts of very unhelpful types, including for example these:

GROUP A: the sincere (however misguided) ones

“Drive by commentators”: they leave one sentence, such as ” this author is an IDIOT”. No argument, nothing, just an insult.
“Preachers”: they have some agenda, say that nuclear weapons are an invention and do not exist. They will not even bother reading the article, they will just plug their slogans.
“Jew haters”: for these folks, Jew and only Jews, are responsible for all the bad things in creation, so all they can talk about is Jews, Jews, Jews and more Jews. These are the folks who will use that stupid trick of writing trick (((Raevsky))) around the name of anybody they suspect might be a Jew.
“Religious nutcases and assorted Bible-thumpers”: for them it is all about quoting Scripture ad nauseam no matter what the topic is. The worst of those are those who think that they know something about Christianity but, in reality, not only know close to nothing, but the little they know, they wholly misunderstand. They will bombard you with scriptural quotes to try to hide their own ignorance of the Scripture and its meanings.
“Brainwashed corporate media drones”: they will say that they read in, say, the so-called Institute for the Study of War, Foreign Policy or even CNN/FOX that the Russians are out of ammo, Putin has cancer, and the latest US Wunderwaffe will turn the tide and defeat Russia.
“Self-advertisers”: they just want to use the comments section to “plug” their website, book, ideology, etc.
“The offended ones”” these are the folks who are offended by something a guest author or myself have written and they are on a vendetta to get back to me/us.
“The entitled ones”: they believe that commenting on the Saker blog is a God given right, even if they don’t bother reading the moderation rules, and if their comment is not posted, they get seriously offended.
“Idiots”: these are folks who are too dull to realize their level of ignorance and incompetence. They think that they have the “right” to their opinion and they deliver their inanities with great gravitas and pomp. When their comments get intercepted, they go into rage.
“Sloganeers”. They are under the mistaken impression that a few disjointed sentences brough together in a paragraph amount to an argument. Typically, here is what they would write like this: “Putin is just a WEF puppet. The Russian army is getting hammered by HIMARS. Russia will soon run out of aircraft. So-and-so is a scumbag (and probably a Jew). The US F-22s and F-35 can quickly defeat the Russian forces.” 5 slogans, separated by period, no factoids, no substantiation, nothing but slogans. And BOY do they get offended if you tell them that they need to learn how to think before sharing their “gems of wisdom” with the rest of the planet.
There are many more, but I will stop here.

GROUP B: the deliberate trolls

Technique one: they flood the comments with questions/statements which are aimed at pushing the discussion within the confines of the official narrative. For example, they will repeat mantrically that the Ukrainians have defeated Russian forces in this or that location.
Technique two: they wait for a new post, and then the pounce like a pack of wolves. The idea is that if under an article the 10 out of 12 comments are very negative, then the article probably deserves that. That is an old psychological trick (read up on the Asch conformity experiment for interesting details).

GROUP C: computer generated trolls

These are trolls which don’t exist, they are just paid PSYOP operators supported by AI machines. One of the things which gives them away is that they never check if their comments are posted. We have had some of these which for YEARS post 3-10 comments PER DAY even though we banned them many years ago and none of their comments every get posted. Yet they still continue.

Fortunately, we have no need for comments anymore, because we have SocialGalactic.

DISCUSS ON SG

Scott Adams Comes Clean

Yeah, no one thought it was herpes, Scott.

Now, before we start, let me call attention to this gigantic sore on my lip. I know, I know. You’re going to say: is that giant herpes? No, nope. I burned myself on soup. I twice microwaved the same soup – I microwaved it, it got cold, and I microwaved it again – I overmicrowaved it. And when I took a sip, I quickly spit it out because it was scalding, but there was a little piece of spinach that was part of the soup that wrapped around my lip and wouldn’t let go.

WAAAH-AHH-AHH

And so I didn’t realize how bad it was until it actually blistered. I know what people are going to say in the comments. It’s monkeypox, right? Go ahead, just say it, say it. It’s monkeypox. It was NOT monkeypox, it was from hot soup.

Now, in the interest of proper context, at the time I was eating the soup, I was also f—— a monkey. But I don’t think that has anything to do with this. It was probably the soup. And I’m not gay, but the monkey was. The monkey was very gay. And I don’t think that gives you any risk, because I’ve read that you both have to be gay. But I was not gay, I was just a man having sex with a monkey who happened to be male, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Forget the monkey and the possible monkeypox. I’d say we now have a pretty good idea why his wife left him. What woman can be expected to tolerate a man who still hasn’t figured out how to eat soup by the time he reaches the age of 50?

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Rationalizing Creatures

Spacebunny makes an observation:

Women and gamma males are the ultimate rationalizing creatures. Instead of attempting to improve themselves and make themselves more attractive, they double down on what makes them unpleasant and repellent, attempting to drag others down to their level. Nothing is ever their fault. As the saying goes, if no one likes and wants to be around you, it’s probably not everyone else with the problem….. Most will never learn and will die alone and bitter because of their choices.

(nods)

One of the most important lessons required for graduation to full adulthood is understanding and accepting the concept that other parties are autonomous. We see functional children – which is to say women and gammas, among others – repeatedly failing to grasp that they have zero control and very limited influence over the decisions and actions of other people.

Look at all the neocons, who thought they could a) expand NATO eastward and b) invade and occupy foreign countries without experiencing any negative consequences. Now the entire world that is not already occupied by the US military is stacked against them as a direct result of their foolish and short-sighted actions.

Look at the Europeans leaders, who stupidly thought they could sanction Russia without Russia refusing to sell their nations the fertilizer, food, natural gas, and oil that they require.

Excessive rationalization is what happens when people don’t get punched in the face enough to understand that for every human action, there will eventually be an opposing reaction. If you believe you are untouchable, for any reason, then you are still a functional child.

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Mailvox: It’s All Nonsense

In which an email is received.

Are sigma males even more dangerous? and what are your thoughts on the ex gamma who are basically thought of sigmas? and I wanna specifically mention you about the “Wise thinker” youtube channel who seems to be fucking completely manipulating the sigma into a now normal man delta, or a neck beard gamma, and also the steve jabba site, that london pua, and the other false acclaimed gamma youtubers who seriously clim to be sigma and not living as one, suck pussies, though anyways, what is your entry of the sigma, I wanna know, and also make sure to look at these lil’ kids at YT

It’s all nonsense. Ignore all of them.

Before the concept of Sigma was introduced, every Gamma was convinced he was an Alpha. Now they’re all telling everyone how Sigma they are when they’re not redefining it to serve their own purposes.

It’s just further confirmation, as if any was needed, of a) how useful the concept is, and, b) how Gammas are going to gamma.

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You Can’t Stop the Smart Boy

I put up a solid meme from SG on Gab, along with a comment.

This meme should make the stupidity of the oft-heard midwit aphorism clear to even the most myopic midwit mind.

Of course, a Smart Boy couldn’t resist the temptation to prove that he’s a midwit.

@voxday that aphorism is true. Its misapplication does not invalidate it, merely demonstrates the intellectual incompetence of the user.

Of course, the aphorism is not true. It may or may not be true, because sometimes correlation equals causation, and other times it does not. A correct form of the aphorism would be: correlation does not necessarily equal causation.

But where is the fun in that sort of actual precision that doesn’t permit the Smart Boy to incorrectly correct others? The irony of the misapplication is that correlation is usually the first step toward proving causation. As a general rule, resorting to tautology in order to refute something that someone hasn’t said is highly indicative of a gamma behavior pattern.

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Jordan Peterson Bravely Runs Away

Better hide the meth, Jordan Peterson is feeling the heat again and bravely decided to give up his Twitter habit:

Initially, Peterson stuck to his guns, firing back at ‘panderers’, and insisting that the decision to feature a plus-size woman on the cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit was ‘a conscious and cynical manipulation by the oh-so virtuous politically correct’.

In another tweet he added: ‘It’s a conscious progressive attempt to manipulate and retool the notion of beauty, reliant on the idiot philosophy that such preferences are learned and properly changed by those who know better.’

However, after he continued to be bombarded with what he described as a ‘vicious flood of insults’, Peterson called it quits, announcing that he was ‘departing’ Twitter, while branding the social media platform ‘intrinsically and dangerously insane’.

‘The endless flood of vicious insult is really not something that can be experienced anywhere else,’ he wrote. ‘I like to follow the people I know but I think the incentive structure of the platform makes it intrinsically and dangerously insane.’

He continued: ‘So I told my staff to change my password, to keep me from temptation, and am departing once again.

‘If I have something to say I’ll write an article or make a video. If the issue is not important enough to justify that then perhaps it would be best to just let it go.’

If you ever want to know how a Gamma is going to handle something, just ask yourself What Would Jordan Do?

Not that getting off Facebook and Twitter and Linked-In is a bad idea in and of itself, but the only thing worse than rage-quitting is fear-quitting.

UPDATE: Social media isn’t for everyone, particularly not for those desperate for approval.

JORDAN PETERSON: The endless flood of vicious insult is really not something that can be experienced anywhere else. I like to follow the people I know but I think the incentive structure of the platform makes it intrinsically and dangerously insane.

MIKE CERNOVICH: Twitter is spectacular. I’ve made new friends, witnessed and participated in history, and learned as much as one would walking library stacks. You’re desperate for approval, this makes it impossible for you to not internalize (or at least ignore) the hate any public figure gets.

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