Around the Internet in 800 words

Too many items, not enough time to devote individual posts to them. So you get this pastiche of interesting stuff I’ve found and people have emailed me. Join me as we dive crotch-first into our crazy world.

…

A while back, a offended libertarian responded to my thesis on libertarianism and nerdiness with this:

I’ve long thought that libertarianism correlated pretty strongly with nerdishness- I just don’t think that’s a bad thing. People who criticize libertarianism on that basis are revealing far more about themselves than about libertarians.

It’s not a bad thing for a political philosophy to be associated with a demographic that’s known for bad hygiene, social awkwardness, and obsessing over Japanese cartoon porn? Kathy Shaidle begs to differ:

Most libertarians I’ve met are twitchy overgrown adolescents who are one step up from Trekkers on the appealing personality scale. They are curt, bitchy, brittle and huffy. When you’re around a libertarian, it’s always Thanksgiving dinner and they’re the teenaged cousin with the giant anime collection who’s read one book too few and stays coiled in his chair, waiting to blurt out some “shocking” comment he thinks is ahead of its time but is actually two hundred years old, in a boorish, loudmouth Penn Gillette way.

I just don’t like them. They bug me.

That’s the plain simple truth – nobody likes nerds, and nobody listens to them. Martin Regnen (who provided the link to the Shaidle post) pounds the nerd nail on its egg-head:

It doesn’t matter if libertarians are right about freedom, Austrian economics, and everything else. Neither they nor their ideas will ever have any influence or power anyway. Even people who agree with them will resist joining them, and there’s always the sneaking suspicion that unhappy people with below-average social skills are inaccurate in their understanding other people and society… so you can’t really trust their advice, can you?

For visual evidence, Martin provides an embarrassing libertarian rap video on economics:

Martin refers to how the video’s portrayal of Friedrich Hayek makes him look like a total loser (compared to the suave alpha John Maynard Keynes), but he misses the main reason why the whole thing is horrendous: someone actually thought it was a good idea to make a rap song about economics. As a subject, economics is about as cool and sexy as watching roadkill rot, and the song confirms it with these lame-ass lyrics:

We’ve been goin’ back and forth for a century
I want to steer markets! I want them set free!
There’s a boom and bust cycle, and good reason to fear it
Blame low interest rates! No, it’s the animal spirits!

Man, hearing those dope lines totally makes me wanna buy a copy of The Road to Serfdom and join the Ron Paul Revolution…not.

Advertisement

---

---

This is the unfortunate truth – if you want to sell anything, you have to be cool. Coolness is the primary reason why the Roissysphere blossomed out of nowhere to become a potent intellectual force in the span of less than three years while the much older men’s rights movement is perennially fighting off accusations of loserness. (Full disclosure: I am a men’s rights supporter.) If you libertarians want others to respect you, maybe even accept your ideas as correct, you need to drop the shtick and learn to be cool. Getting hyper-defensive when people point out the truth about you and making bad music videos will ensure you remain an ignored minority.

…

The ever-diligent Advocatus Diaboli dropped this item in yesterday’s post. Tiger Woods is apparently a pervert because once he pops, he doesn’t want to stop:

Tiger Woods’ sex fantasies are “not normal,” according to the Playboy model who claims to have slept with the golfer. Loredana Jolie told the New York Post that Tiger “would engage in sex from 9 p.m. until the sun came up the next morning.”

So wanting to have sex all the time is now abnormal. Under this classification, 99.9 percent of straight men (and 100 percent of homosexual men) are fucked in the head and need remedial therapy. The solipsism is strong with this one.

For the benefit of my female readers, here’s the reality of things: men want to fuck. All the time. The only thing that stops us from putting it in and out of you morning, noon and night are pesky little things like refractory periods and the realities of the sexual marketplace. If we had guaranteed access to pussy and were able to jump back into the sack immediately after blowing our loads, we’d be banging you 24/7. We’d be banging you so much that we’d forget our jobs, our friends, and everything else. We’d be banging you so much that we’d punch a hole in your cervix and let your uterus fall straight out. We’d be banging you so much that we’d all drop dead of exhaustion.

Tiger Woods is one of the rare men who got access to his own harem and he lived it up. Make no mistake, ladies – EVERY man would do what he did if he could. And if every man did, the world would be as Roissy described it here:

…there’d be grab-ass in the streets, on the metro, at the job, in the church pews, all hours all the time.  The city air would fill not with the sounds of traffic and construction and sirens but the gruntings of humans in mid-coitus.  Nature hikes at Great Falls would lose a lot of its ambience as the chirping birds and tree leaves rustling in the wind yielded to the Uuhs and Ahhs of sweaty thrustings.

Marriage?  Kids?  Um, yeah.  Civilization?  It’d putter along for a while, but eventually the voracious id unleashed would reverse human achievement so rapidly that the forests would retake the cities, as it is doing in Detroit right now.  I doubt you could walk M Street more than two blocks without seeing penis in vagina somewhere along the way.

Women love to complain when their men come too soon. Well, you’d better pray that a pill decreasing the penile refractory period is never invented, because you’ll be begging us to stop coming. And coming. And coming.

…

Do you remember a woman by the name of Sandra Tsing Loh? Wrote an article in The Atlantic last summer about how she cheated on her kitchen bitch husband and thereby concluded that traditional marriage should be done away with? Made the rounds around the manosphere? She’s back, and she has second thoughts:

Fast forward to 2010. When husbands and wives not only co-work but try to co-homemake, as post-feminist and well-intentioned as it is, out goes the clear delineation of spheres, out goes the calm of unquestioned authority, and of course out goes the gratitude.

Aside from the irritation of never being able to reach the spatula (men tend to place items on shelves that are a foot higher than women can manage), I have found co-homemaking inefficient. With 21st-century technology, it’s a straightforward matter to run a modern home. Sheep don’t need to be sheared; the wash is not done on a board by the creek; nothing needs canning, because we have Costco. Even someone who works 40 hours a week can keep a home standing, and food in the fridge, by himself.

What can turn into a second shift is not just negotiating the splitting of this labor with another person, but the splitting of decision-making authority. Two co-workers in the home also have the opportunity to regularly evaluate each other’s handiwork, not always to a positive effect. (Suffice it to say, stacking food in the fridge with precise geometric elegance is apparently not among my talents.)

In short, as the Tupperware totters lopsidedly about, in the domestic equation, the work I do at home is no longer a gift, but the labor of a mediocre colleague whose performance could be better.

It’s so delightful to watch someone who is so utterly wrong be presented with a big steaming plate of crow to eat. Unfortunately, while Loh sticks a fork in the tasty bird and brings a piece up to her lips, so close it fills her nostrils with its succulent, sinewy scent, she can’t bring herself to take a bite. Loh wants to admit that the traditional arrangement of marriage, with the man slaving away at a 9-to-5 job and the woman rearing the kids, cooking the meals, and keeping the place clean is superior to her bogus egalitarian arrangement, but the feminist programming is embedded too deeply in her psyche to let her speak the truth:

Still, a return to a life more like the 1950s, with one breadwinner and one homemaker, is an unreasonable expectation. It is particularly so since, as the breadwinner, I wish to be the husband, and hence what I’m looking for is a wife — a loyal helpmeet who keeps the home fires burning and offers uncritical emotional support when I, the gladiator, return exhausted from the arena. Who are the (actively listening!) men without money who can adapt to such a role?

So in the meantime, I may need to settle for a man who can simply make a decent tray of Manhattans and, while you’re at it, pussycat, make mine a double.

You can practically see the sparks and smoke wafting off of the hamster wheel of her brain. Don’t worry, dearie – we know you know we were right.

Thanks to Logicwontgetmelaid for the email tip.

…

Longtime readers will note I’ve had an acrimonious relationship with Hooking Up Smart blogger Susan Walsh, going back to this post in which I addressed her ill-informed views of game and human sexuality. That said, since then she’s been reading up on seduction materials and has written a post on game that is 95 percent on the money. I’m dead serious – Susan Walsh wrote something I pretty much agree with. Here’s a slice:

Game gives knowledge to men about what makes women attracted. A guy with Game, even if he looks like Neil Strauss, can be successful with women. This is powerful! You know that I’m all about the good guys, and with Game, they can body check a douchebag right out of the way because they have Game + Character. Imagine, you could have all the qualities of a good man, a man who will commit to you, love you, appreciate you, without all the crevasses that nice guys fall into. A good man can learn to be confident, a bit cocky, and funny. He can learn not to show interest too soon, which is always a lady boner killer. He can learn to tease you playfully. He can learn how to ratchet up sexual tension with a bit of friction.

When someone’s right, they’re right. I firmly believe Susan is a Woman Who Gets It. You will too, after you read her whole post. Which you should.

…

Finally, Snark dropped a link to an unbelievably hilarious site entitled “Book-A-Minute Classics“, in which great volumes of the Western literary canon are condensed to a couple of lines. Snark’s link went to their version of The Catcher in the Rye:

Holden Caulfield

Angst angst angst swear curse swear crazy crazy angst swear curse, society sucks, and I’m a stupid jerk.

THE END

Not too bad, but there are some real howlers in there. Here are some of my favorites. The comedy factor is upped if you’ve actually read the books listed.

The collected works of Jane Austen:

Female Lead

I secretly love Male Lead. He must never know.

Male Lead

I secretly love Female Lead. She must never know.

(They find out.)

THE END

Gravity’s Rainbow:

Thomas Pynchon

A screaming thing comes across the sky. It’s a V-2 rocket carrying twelve thousand pounds of symbolism, and it’s coming down on your poor, deluded, postmodern head.

THE END

Finnegans Wake:

James Joyce

I have created my own language to tell the cyclical history of humanity.

Reader #1

Brilliance!

Reader #2

(dies)

THE END

Here are two game-related ones. Jane Eyre:

(People are MEAN to Jane Eyre.)

Edward Rochester

I have a dark secret. Will you stay with me no matter what?

Jane Eyre

Yes.

Edward Rochester

My secret is that I have a lunatic wife.

Jane Eyre

Bye.

(Jane Eyre leaves. Somebody dies. Jane Eyre returns.)

THE END

And The Taming of the Shrew:

Katharina

Spit. Hiss.

Petruchio

Shut your mouth before I hit you.

Katharina

I can be civilized now that a man has bossed me around. I love you madly, Petruchio.

THE END

Literary reductionism is fun!

…

That’s it for me. I’ll leave you with this cool – and educational – song linked by Spike Gomes last week. Speaking of Spike, it seems he’s packing his bags and leaving the ‘sphere. So long and fare thee well.

Tagged as: Finnegans Wake, Gravity's Rainbow, J.D. Salinger, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Kathy Shaidle, Martin Regnen, Sandra Tsing Loh, Spike Gomes, Susan Walsh, Thomas Pynchon, Tiger Woods