Tag: SSH

Playing the Divorce Hand

From a discussion of an incipient divorce on SocialGalactic:

Son’s wife is definitely going to divorce him. Said they could do 50/50 custody. Son taking Vox’s advice, says he’s not going to play the custody game and argue over every little life decision with her. If she wants her “freedom,” he wants full custody, if she won’t give it to him, then she can have full custody and responsibility for the two kids 24/7/365. Says she was shocked to hear it, thinking she was going to have a nice set up. Says she’ll take full custody then. I think she thinks he’s bluffing.

My wife is aghast that he’s taken this position, but I agree it’s the right course. His wife can’t manage without him pitching in considerably. No way she’s going to do it without him in the picture helping out, working full time, and trapped at home every night as the kids sleep. She has no local support network. Even if she goes through with taking full custody, I can’t see her keeping it.

It’s a brutal and difficult decision, but it is the right one in the situation of a wife-driven divorce. Given the way the legal deck is stacked against men in the USA, she will have de facto full custody regardless of what the court-ordered custody structure is, only she will also have effective practical control of him as well.

This all-or-nothing approach leaves him a mostly free agent who has room to operate when she slips up somehow or tires of bearing the sole burden of single parenthood, as she probably will. A positive outcome is absolutely not guaranteed, but the probability of one is in his favor given what is known of her character.

The fact that she was shocked is good. It means she never even contemplated what is now the most likely outcome. And the possibility of turning all the responsibility for the children over to her ex-husband is going to grow more and more tempting to her over time, especially when she wants to pursue men who will be actively dissuaded by her having children.

Son’s wife definitely is not getting it. She made a list of what she wants in the mediation agreement. After listing several household items, she included “100% legal and physical custody” of the children. She then went on to list that visitation will be decided at the beginning of each month, with her getting at least one weekend with the girls. My son is resetting her expectations that she will have them every weekend, all weekend, and every evening as well.

Notice the wife’s incoherent desires and her inability to understand what 100-percent custody means. It’s simply not wise to base one’s strategy on such a creature’s ability to recognize, let alone be reasonable about, the best interests of the children.

As Sun Tzu says, to win, one must know the enemy as well as knowing oneself. This is why Deltas so often lose in situations they could easily win, as they make no effort to understand or anticipate their opposition, but are more concerned about being seen to be doing the right thing. Howeve, the last thing a woman who is ending her marriage in search of fun and freedom wants is to be tied down full-time by her children, with even less time for fun and games than she had when she was married.

It may sound callous and counterintuitive, but the observable fact is that in certain situations, the best way a man can protect his children is by demonstrating that he is willing to walk away from them.

DISCUSS ON SG

Never Seek the Nonexistent

Because most men are romantics, they struggle to accept the reality that a woman’s love for a man is usually conditional. And quite understandably, being romantics, they discount the observations of any men who tell them otherwise for a variety of reasons that range from accusations of misogyny to serial zifogyny.

It is, however, a little harder to discount the opinion of an intelligent and deeply empathetic woman on the subject. One cannot reasonably accuse Florence Nightengale of hating anyone or lacking observational skills.

In one sense, I do believe I am “like a man,” as Parthe says. But how? In having sympathy. Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other woman attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?

I am sick with indignation at what wives and mothers will do of the most shocking selfishness. And people call it all maternal or conjugal affection, and think it pretty to say so. No, no, let each person tell the truth from their own experience.

They really don’t have sympathy or the ability to empathize, because they are always judging everyone and every thing as a product on a social value scale that relates to their own egos and bounces off of themselves. There is no capability for genuine feeling.

This is what I have experienced with women, there is no capability for genuine feeling for other humans, or really in general, except when those feelings are for themselves and the other people are just proxies to bounce ideas off of.

“Women Aren’t Capable of Love”, Florence Nightingale

This doesn’t mean that men shouldn’t pursue marriage or stop loving the beloved, nor does justify the hatred, contempt, and fury so often exhibited by low-status males who are losers in the sexual and marital markets. But it does suggest that most men very much need to modify their basic conceptual models to account for the female tendency toward solipsism and the consequent effects.

UPDATE: A thought for the reactive contrarians to consider: If female love is unconditional, why do men have to earn it and prove themselves worthy of it?

DISCUSS ON SG

Attention is not Success

If at first you don’t succeed, just tell everyone that you meant to fail:

Jered Threatin, known by the mononym “Threatin”, is a solo artist, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist from Los Angeles, CA. He gained notoriety in 2018 following a publicity stunt on his “Breaking the World Tour” where he manipulated social media numbers, ticket sales, and fabricated a number of fake businesses to fool venues and music industry professionals into booking a European tour where he performed in a sequence of empty rooms. This hoax successfully displayed the music industry’s reliance on social media numbers and image. During the event Threatin released a public statement; “What is Fake News? I turned an empty room into an international headline. If you are reading this you are part of the illusion.” The stunt became a viral sensation and obtained mainstream media coverage from The New York Times, BBC News, Variety, The Guardian, NME, Rolling Stone Magazine, and many other major publications.

That’s his version, anyhow. This is how an uninterested party described it.

The short version is this guy faked having a major band to book a “European Tour” and no one showed up. Then people proceeded to make documentaries & news stories about this once the venues were upset with being tricked. When you read his website he spins it as all a publicity stunt to “expose how venues rely on bad social media information.” A.K.A. “jokes on YOU! I WANTED no one to show up to my shows!” haha.

Now, there is truth to the wisdom in turning lemons into lemonaide. And few business plans survive contact with the market intact. One has only to consider the convoluted paths to success of Marufuku Co. Ltd., the Connecticut Leather Company, or even, on a much more modest scale, Castalia Library, to understand the wisdom of flexible ambition.

But media attention is not synonymous with success. Any natural disaster attracts more media attention than even the biggest success. The difference can be seen in whether the course has actually been changed or if it is claimed that the obviously inadvertent deviation was the original objective all along.

And if there is one thing that we have learned over time, it is that gammas are always going to gamma and their jokes are always on you.

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Mailvox: Alpha Marriage

A man, presumably Delta or less, asked what he thought was a rhetorical question while erroneously assuming that he knew the answer.

Should the delta guy marry a woman who ran through alphas in college?

Yes. Of course. How clueless, how astonishingly ignorant, does a man have to be to not realize that all the alphas themselves uniformly marry women “who ran through alphas in college”. That has never, ever, been a dealbreaker for any Alpha who isn’t concerned about the unquestionable legitimacy of the heir to his throne.

Do these cretins really believe that Mick Jagger or Tom Brady or [fill-in-the-alpha-here] are marrying pure and virtuous virgin girls? Has anyone even heard of the Alpha CEO who prefers trad girls in long homespun dresses to femme fatales like Melania Trump? Do the rock stars marry sweet milkmaids and shepherds or models and video vamps?

The difference is that the alphas aren’t afraid to marry women with a statistically average amount of experience. To them, that experience is a rounding error by comparison, so it doesn’t even enter into their mind to be concerned about it. Meanwhile, the Deltas and Gammas are all terrified and insecure at the thought of a woman who will make a perfectly reasonable marriage risk.

The statistics are clear. There are three categories of divorce risk based on female sexual history.

  • Low: 0-1
  • Average: 2-14
  • High: 15+

Now, I’m not saying that Average risk is better than Low risk, I’m simply pointing out that Average is not High and most Average-risk first marriages will not end in divorce.

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A Word to the Fearful

Far too many young men are terrified to get married, but their fears are misplaced. I wrote this eight years ago in response to a piece by Rollo, but it’s every bit as relevant today, as it addresses why men have literally nothing to fear from divorce:

You can only control your own behavior. No one else’s. If your wife is unhappy about the choice she made, if her children and friends and family and fun are her priorities and she wants out, then by all means, let her walk! Show her to the door with a smile!

There is a saying: if you love someone, set them free. You can’t control her actions, much less her desires. You can’t control the legal system. You can’t control your feelings. You can’t control anything except your own actions.

Ironically, the more willing you are to let her go, the less likely she is to actually continue down that road. With what is she actually threatening you anyhow? Doing whatever you want to do all the time instead of what she wants you to do? Being able to follow up on any indications of interest expressed by women who are half her age whenever you’re so inclined? Do you genuinely think you’re going to be able to spend LESS of your future income on things you want if she only gets HALF of it?

Do the math. Whether women control 73 percent or 85 percent of the household spending (depending upon which survey you prefer to credit), keeping only half your income amounts to an effective raise between 46 to 70 percent. Effectively tax-free too!

It suddenly doesn’t sound so awful when you put it that way, does it. Remember, most men come out of the divorces that their wives sought happier and better off than they were before. Being around a miserable person who despises you and blames you for their various disappointments in life isn’t a desirable state of being.

Addendom 2023: While it is surely a terrible shock to the system for a man to be informed that his wife has decided to leave him – it’s happened twice in the last year to men with whom I am acquainted – in every single case that I’ve observed over the last 20 years, the abandoned man is a) happier, b) more energized, and c) going on dates with women at least 10 years younger than his ex-wife-to-be within six months of her breaking the news to him.

And let’s face it. In most cases, a woman’s decision to leave her husband is less than a complete surprise to anyone who is paying attention. Angry, unhappy, dissatisfied middle-aged women aren’t exactly famous for their stoicism or keeping their feelings to themselves. It’s not as if the Karen meme appeared on social media ex nihilo.

Divorce is also less common than it was during Peak Boomer. From one-half of ALL marriages, it’s now declined to one-third of ALL marriages, which means that a first marriage now has about a five in six chance of not ending in divorce. Throw in the reduced life expectancy of widespread vaccination, and the odds of staying married until death do you part is probably closer to nine in ten now.

Other than its generally unpleasant nature, the waste of time and money it entails, and the inevitably deleterious effect on the children, divorce really isn’t anything for the average man to fear. So, if you’re a young man who is afraid of marriage due to the perceived dangers of divorce, be aware that you risk missing out on one of the greatest and most important experiences of your life because you’re jumping at shadows.

DISCUSS ON SG

Why the Media Hated the Pick-Up Artists

Because, as it turns out, pick-up artistry proved to be an effective means of penetrating morass of lies in which every young man has been enmeshed for the entirety of his life. Krauser reviews Mere Christianity:

Having followed atheism for a few decades and lived a highly individualist and pleasure-seeking life I became aware of what Christian moral philosophers have warned for hundreds of years: atheism is a dead end. It ends in nihilism. I experienced such nihilism in 2016 and by 2017 I was looking for a better way. So far there’s only been one barrier to my converting to Christianity: my lack of belief in God. Aside from that small obstacle, I agree with the thesis that Christianity is one of the three pillars of Western Civilisation (white nations and the Greco-Roman legacy being the other two) and by removing Christianity from the West we have set ourselves into a rapid decline into nihilism and paganism. It’s a shit show.

Anyway, I give this preamble to explain why I decided to read Mere Christianity. I realised that every single time that I am an expert on a topic and I compare my knowledge to the media’s, I realise the media isn’t simply wrong. They are deceitfully wrong. They are deliberately hiding the truth in order to advance a false narrative. Whether the topic is global finance, mixed martial arts, Game, or anything else the lesson is the same: the media are liars. So, knowing that the media is virulently anti-Christian, I asked myself the obvious question:

Does the media tell the truth about Christianity?

The chances aren’t high, are they? I don’t mean that the media is atheist and therefore do they support Christianity, but rather can they be trusted to speak accurately of what Christianity actually is, of what Christians actually believe?

The logic is impeccable. And his conclusion is correct:

There is no logical inconsistency at all between the God of the Bible, salvation, and the existence of Evil.

I’m rather annoyed that I had to wait until I was 43 years old before learning that. I feel like I’ve been seriously lied to. It would’ve been nice if all those Philosophy Of Religion courses had laid out the arguments and let me make my own mind up.

He was lied to. All of us were lied to, repeatedly. The observable existence of Evil is not a disproof of God or Christianity, for what should be the obvious reason that Evil is a necessary element in Christian theology. This pathway from hedonistic truth to spiritual truth may explain why a commenter at AC’s place observes a surprisingly common pattern.

Manosphere –> Krauser / Heartise / Roosh –> Vox –> AC –> Cabal and Evil Aware –> God right down to the mentions in passing that blown the door open to the next stage could be a common pattern. Might explain why there was a never a hit piece on the likes of Krauser. And now Roosh is Christian I doubt they’d even whisper his name.

Remember, the truth always leads, eventually, to the Truth. And just as liars fear the truth, their masters fear the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

John 14:6.

DISCUSS ON SG

Mailvox: Trans-Lingual Propagation

A Finnish reader observes the SSH has now transcended language:

I know by now I shouldn’t be, but I still sometimes am surprised by the extent of your reach.

Last Friday I talked to a 12 year old schoolboy, and he said he’s a sigma. I asked him to tell me what he means by it. He said sigma means someone who doesn’t care about girls and just goes at it alone.

He thought it a bit weird I had to ask what it means. Apparently this is now part of the general lingo among Finnish elementary school kids, though not yet in the general culture here.

Your work is REALLY sending waves. It feels like reading your blog is letting me peek forward in time some 5-10 years, after which your concepts begin to pop up everywhere, often in somewhat twisted but still recognizable form.

Fascinating. I suppose one can hardly expect the pre-pubescent to be clear on the concept. It’s just one more reason that the book is a necessity.

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Want Has Nothing to Do With it

A follower on Gab wonders why anyone would want to be part of the SSH:

@SigmaGame Why would anyone want to be an alpha, beta, gamma, OR sigma? There should be a check mark for ‘none of the above’

It’s not about “want”. Everyone has patterns of behavior. You can’t escape them.

And on the subject of the SSH, I recently read an interesting passage about one of the more obvious Sigmas in history, Arthur, Duke of Wellington, recounted by Charles Oman.

“The march of the centre column was accompanied by the curious case of insubordination by three divisional generals (those commanding the 1st, 5th, and 7th Divisions) of which Napier makes such scathing notice. Their orders gave an itinerary involving a march over fords in flooded fields ; they consulted together, judged the route hopeless, and turned off towards the bridge of Castillo de Yeltes, which they found blocked by the Army of Galicia. Wellington, failing to find them on the prescribed path, set out to seek them, and came upon them waiting miserably in the mud. He is said to have given them no more rebuke than a sarcastic ‘You see, gentlemen, I know my own business best’ and allowed them to cross after the Spaniards, many hours late. The insubordination was inexcusable—yet perhaps it would not have been beneath Wellington’s dignity to have prefaced his original order with an explanatory note such as ‘ the main road by Castillo bridge being reserved for the Spanish divisions.’ But this would not have been in his normal style. Like Stonewall Jackson fifty years after, he was not prone to give his reasons to subordinates, even when his orders would appear to them very inexplicable.”

  • History of the Peninsular War Vol. VI, Charles Oman

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Gell-Man Amnesia in Action

It’s fascinating to see how completely the media fails to understand both the socio-sexual hierarchy and the sigma male.

Men online are more lost than ever, to the point of turning an actual psychopathic killer into a point of reference. Bateman is hailed for not conforming to the models of masculinity that’ve arisen on the web 2.0. He’s neither an alpha (a dominant asshole at the top of the social hierarchy) nor a beta (a submissive loner who’ll never get a girl). Bateman represents a new model of masculinity: The “sigma male”, inexplicably named with another random ancient Greek letter.

According to Google trends, the “sigma male” search term first appeared in early 2021 and quickly gained popularity over the past two years. In 2023, #sigma has over 46 billion views on TikTok. Sigmas “are known as the rarest males on earth, which makes them irresistible to women,” says TikToker Sel Nakim in an explainer video with almost 900,000 likes. “They’re at the top with the alphas, but they’re outside the hierarchy.”

Instead of boasting about their status like alphas, sigmas tend to be mysterious loner types. They think outside the box; they accept themselves and are proud to be different. They attract success and respect. Basically, they’re perfect. And Bateman – a man sophisticated enough to wear a suit to murder a homeless person – is their aesthetic king.

As it happens, the term “sigma male” was coined in 2011. But given the complete inability of the media to even understand which party is winning the war in Ukraine, it can hardly be surprising that they understand neither the concept nor its genesis.

Neither fictional characters created by Brett Easton Ellis nor serial killers have anything to do with sigma males. And they are very far from perfect; to the contrary, there is usually something fundamentally broken in them that prevents them from being able to operate within the hierarchy.

Nevertheless, the ideas, they propagate.

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