On the subject of my parking oopsie which, uh, my girlfriend might’ve just found out about…<grin>

No, it seems she just so happened to receive this from one of her Facebook friends. So it’s someone else’s story that inspired this, not mine. I guess we’re all getting to that age aren’t we?

I was going to put it up yesterday.

But I forgot.

GBIL continues with his Saturday evening mass-e-mail-virtual-blogging. That’s two that make the cut, in the space of a few minutes; well done, GBIL.

Thanks to an e-mail tip-off from GBIL (girlfriend’s brother-in-law).

Much of our behavior is cyclical because we simply don’t know what we want.

1. Decisiveness

Once upon a time, I was single and unattached. Aw, quit laughin’. Anyway, back in my younger years I had made a mistake of thinking I could become appealing to women if I worked harder at becoming appealing to most women. It’s a common mistake among young adult men. My other mistake was to define what most women wanted, according to what I had heard most women say they wanted. Young men tend to think young women see things & go through life the way young men do, which isn’t even close to being correct…

To my credit, I outgrew this after I had heard one particular phrase a bit too often: “Confident but not cocky.” This sounds like two things that are different, with a meaningful difference that will emerge and self-clarify if only you study it hard enough. But why do you need to study it? Logically, if both aspects of this desire are of paramount importance, it should similarly be of paramount importance to define the dividing line between confident & cocky and spend a few words explaining what this is. Nobody ever did, so I gradually came to the realization these were dumb, fickle women who were being asked their opinions…and throwing out incomprehensible, self-contradictory gibberish.

They were expressing a craving for exactly the same thing for which they were simultaneously expressing a revulsion. There was, and is, no dividing line. They wanted a man who knew what he wanted in any given situation…until such time as this quality might become inconvenient…and then they wanted this very quality to be deactivated, instantly, on command, like flicking a switch. These dumb women didn’t want a living, thinking mate, they wanted a stuffed animal.

In the years that came afterward, I discovered this was a very common problem. Dim women, thinking they were emotionally available for emotional involvement with a man on equal footing, but who really wanted a stuffed animal. The rest of us, much of the time, are like this too. We go through the motions of wanting to interact with each other, of wanting certain things out of life. But we don’t really want these things. Until we’re missing them, and then we want them again.

2. Waffling

Waffling is, of course, the opposite of decisiveness, and we all know we hate waffling. Everybody loathes the boss or the politician who puts up a good show of having made some decision, when all he did was wet his finger and stick it up in the air to find out which way the wind is blowing. We all detest that guy. We say, “just do what you think is right, even if I disagree with it; I’ll at least respect you for it.”

And then we got George W. Bush as our President. He did a lot of things a lot of people thought were wrong, but at least he got their respect for doing what he thought was right. Right? Heheheh. No, not even. If he stayed in office twenty more years, he would have been less popular each year than he had been the year before.

See, we get exactly what we asked for, and once we get it we’re unhappy with it.

3. Individual recognition

The other morning I woke up to the brain-cell-killing morning news channel talking about a couple of high school soccer players who would be hosting…something. It became very clear that the girls were celebrities, and a lot of people within & outside of the student body found it personally satisfying that these two individuals received an unnatural magnitude of attention, over and over again. In fact, this particular news story was paying attention to them for no reason other than the fact that the story was about them getting attention somewhere.

I went to high school myself, awhile back, and I remember how this works. In my day it was male football players. All the cool kids would learn to rattle off their full names, Christian-then-surname, as if it was all one single syllable. Which meant everybody else ran around working those names into conversation as well. If so-and-so busted his ankle skiing, it would make it into the school newspaper. There was one time I tried to get interested in the whole thing, maybe go to a Friday night football game just to see what the fuss was all about. It didn’t work because those people were not my friends, and furthermore, I just didn’t care. I tried this only once.

Many years into adulthood I realized: There is a reason kids have a craving for celebrity worship: They toil away in an environment of enforced sameness. The grown-ups do too…but, to make the economy go, we need to give the grown-ups some latitude to earn special privileges which we then say are, by their very existence, evil. But we do not need to permit our children this latitude.

So when you’re in school, you’re in the land of “if I make one exception I’ll have to make a thousand,” and, “because of the poor behavior of one person, we are all going to have to do without.” Everyone is on an unnaturally smooth, unnaturally polished, unnaturally even playing field. A playing field where no grass can grow — a dead thing. More like a stainless steel plate, upon which a ball bearing will not roll.

People get tired of it. They want someone elevated to a pedestal, so they can live vicariously through that person. And so X becomes worthy of special attention…and then X is recognized again…and again and again and again. But only X, because there is effort involved in learning about a new celebrity, so it tends to remain the same person or persons across a great expanse of time. For someone who is not X to achieve a minute in the limelight, remains resolutely unthinkable.

4. Masculinity

I mentioned the dumb girls who say they want a guy “confident, but not cocky” when what they really mean is they want male confidence they can turn on and off like a light switch. Somewhere I have a post with embedded video — I’m way too lazy to go searching for it — of a protester being shown his way out of a college bookstore by campus police. The protester is the one shooting the video, and he’s an absolute douche bag, playing out his Mahatma-Ghandi-civil-disobedience thing, but very badly. He keeps calling for some kind of sit-down to talk out the differences, over and over again…doing all of the talking…but sounding exasperatingly wimpy. Blah blah blah blah blah…and he’s got this nasal resonance thing going on that makes you just want to punch him.

His co-hort is taking a different route, spoiling for a fight the whole time, and one quickly estimates that his mouth is writing checks his body can’t cash. The interesting thing is these two people are hanging out together: Alan Alda and Mike Tyson.

It’s pretty obvious what is going on. Just as, when you form a social protocol that one person cannot be any more important than any other, people start to crave that very thing, the same holds true for masculinity. When it’s All Ghandi All The Time, people crave brashness, pugnaciousness, arrogant-bastard-ness. They want to see it and they want to become it. Boys who show too much of it at the wrong time and get in trouble with the law, disproportionately come from single-parent households and they live out their lives with a day-to-day deficiency in masculine role models. Protester #1 was avoiding masculinity because he’d been taught it’s a bad thing, and Protester #2 was compensating for something. No, not for that — for hanging around Protester #1.

5. Opportunities to become obscenely wealthy

Of all the leftist politicians and political figures out there who complain “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” have you ever stopped to notice how many of them are breathtakingly wealthy?

That goes for the people on the left who have no prayer of ever getting that far, as well. Once you eliminate any possibility whatsoever of getting out of the vicious paycheck cycle, and life has nothing more to offer that’s more lavish than next year’s vacation and that’s only if everything goes right, life becomes dull. People tend to underestimate how dull it can get, or to even notice there’s something missing when they can no longer strive for anything, reach for anything.

They start to crave the opportunity to acquire something out of the ordinary. They become easy marks for slick salesmen who sell houses, cars, timeshares that the prospect cannot realistically afford. They start to fall for the “you’ve arrived” method of salesmanship. This is very much like shopping for groceries without a list when you’re starving. But, imagine what would happen if you went shopping while you were starving but did not consciously realize you were starving. That’s where these poor wretches are. They’ve gotten rid of the opportunity to do something material and special, and they want it back again. They end up with a primal impulse, a sense of something missing, that is much keener and more urgent than it naturally should be.

6. Social unrest

How many times have we heard about CALWWNTY, “We’ve Come A Long Way, We’re Not There Yet”? How many times do we fail to ask the tough but obvious question: “Wait a minute, if we’ve come along way, and several decades ago we were getting told we came along way, we’ve been coming a long way every single year since then, would you care to explain why we’re not there yet?”

There’s a simple reason why these things drag on through the generations and nobody ever gets “there yet.” They become addicted to the conflict. They form their personalities, their identities, around this perceived truth that one segment of society is keeping another segment down.

And so you often see people lapsing back into it. How else do you explain the fact that America, a country with a black guy as President, needs affirmative action? The people who continue to complain about this, they become living solutions in search of problems. It’s very sad. These are entire lives wasted on a big nothing, by choice.

The dog chasing the car, may be as confused as all get-out, but he at least stops running when the car stops. The racial huckster in search of social-justice or social-equilibrium, is more confused than the dog. He never stops.

7. Aristocracy, titles, castes, inequality of privilege

Why do we have “ObamaCare waivers”? Seriously, why.

I’ll tell you why. We do not elect wonderful people full of charisma and charm to make us all the same. We elect them to tell us who all must be the same as who else, and who is allowed to be different.

Listen to these politicians give their speeches sometime. Just pick some speeches at random. They identify these problems with “some” people unable to acquire access to health care services…it’s always some people underprivileged. We need to make a new world in which everybody has whatever-it-is. It’s not good enough if the service is easy for some to acquire and possible for others to acquire. We need enforced same-ness.

But if you listen to the speech a little while longer, it becomes quickly apparent that these politicians would not be able to handle a new social order that works this way, in which everybody can do everything with equal ease. The minute they identify a problem, they have identified someone responsible for creating it and keeping it around, making the problem bigger. In other words, villains.

This is different from high school student bodies singling out individuals from among them to worship as celebrities. That has to do with manufacturing an identity. This has to do with stratification, building classes as opposed to building individuals. Also, it has to do with real power. Those soccer players mentioned earlier, their classmates want them to get attention, but there’s no special need for them to make real, powerful, influential decisions. We want people we know, to achieve fame; we want people we don’t know, to achieve power. We want strangers who are nearly guaranteed to remain lifetime strangers, to make the big decisions that impact us personally. And, deep down, we want them to make secret deals with each other they would not make with us.

And we want those super-people to have super-powers of some kind, to be able to do things any ol’ schmuck would not be able to do.

Like everything else on this list, the minute we get rid of it, it seems there are many among us who want it back again. And, among the people who want it back again, very many of them took point on the project to dispose of it in the first place.

People who hate each other can find ways to work together if they share a more intense hatred of some third party.

And, as I pointed out over on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, we tend to dismiss certain things as crazy-conspiracy-theories, just because someone wants us to dismiss them, even when we know as an absolute fact that they’re true.

Another observation: People who have some axe to grind, for whatever reason, against freedom…are given perhaps too much of an opportunity to influence or unilaterally dictate how certain situations are going to come out — when they make a point of displaying their hatred for the people who are in favor of freedom, rather than their hatred of freedom itself. I would characterize this lack of scrutiny on the part of the rest of us as perhaps the biggest mistake we’re making right now, at least among the ones that go un-corrected.

Hat tip to Althouse by way of Instapundit.

Gallup:

President Barack Obama’s job approval ratings were even more polarized during his second year in office than during his first, when he registered the most polarized ratings for a first-year president. An average of 81% of Democrats and 13% of Republicans approved of the job Obama was doing as president during his second year. That 68-point gap in party ratings is up from 65 points in his first year and is easily the most polarized second year for a president since Dwight Eisenhower.

Yeah, I know, more polling data. Yawn.

But give this one another look. George W. Bush was a polarizing figure and Barack Obama, as of January of ’09 when The God President was “ready to rule,” The Anointed One was going to fix this. Remember that? Fix the economic mess, make us more respected around the world and heal our divisions.

We are seeing the effects of the holy healing. Barack Obama’s ratings are polarized, because Barack Obama has a polarizing effect. Which is not to say it’s all His fault, and it’s certainly not to say President Bush wasn’t polarizing…the most reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that both presidents are & were polarizing.

Or maybe it’s us. We’re ready to be polarized. The Lewinsky matter, the debacle in Florida, maybe those are the events that put something unhealthy in motion.

In fact, I see a pattern.

Slick Willy wanted a knob job in the big chair; he lied about it, and when he got caught the democrats decided to circle the wagons and make it look like it was the other guys who had a problem. It turned out to be the wrong thing to do. They got what they wanted, but their cherished radical-left feminist movement has never been taken seriously since then, and it polarized the country. They blame conservatives and Republicans.

When Al Gore lost Florida and thus the presidency, democrats decided to fly all kinds of high-priced lawyers in to argue that Florida’s vote should be decided by means of cherry-picking the most liberal counties and extrapolating the results across the state. This time they didn’t get what they wanted. It was the wrong thing to do and it polarized the country. They blame conservatives and Republicans.

When Sen. Paul Wellstone died the democrats transformed his funeral into a pep rally with a perceptible overtone of “aren’t we so awesome we’re going to kick those other guys’ asses.” It turned out to be the wrong thing to do and it polarized the country. It doesn’t seem to me that they seek to blame conservatives and Republicans for this, but they’d much rather the whole thing never get brought up again. And if they could find a way to blame conservatives and Republicans, they would.

When it was time to confront Saddam Hussein about something, they decided to play it off like it was President Bush trying to avenge his daddy’s assassination attempt…conveniently forgetting it’s been time to confront Saddam Hussein about something, oh, every three or four years since 1991. This time, the intel said Hussein had to be dealt with for good, and they decided to make this look like a “lie.” It turned out to be the wrong thing to do and it really, really polarized the country. A lot. You know who they’d like to blame for this.

When Republicans tried to make an issue about the developing financial problems with Fannie and Freddie, the democrats stuck their fingers in their ears and yelled “I can’t hear you la la la.” That turned out to be the wrong thing to do. It didn’t polarize the country because it was a bunch of boring financial stuff…but it did break the country.

When New Orleans was flooded they blamed the President. It turned out to be the wrong thing to do and it polarized the country.

When they won the House of Representatives and the Senate they put Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in charge. That was wrong, and it polarized the country.

When it turned out democrat voters were evenly split between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, they spent all summer of ’08 trying to decide the matter through their “super-delegates,” none of whom wanted to be on record going on either direction on this. It turned out to be the wrong thing to do. It didn’t polarize the country but it certainly polarized the democrats.

And then there’s Barack Obama. In my living memory, I struggle to remember the last time a presidential candidate trashed the incumbent so thoroughly, in such bad taste, with such a consistency that, before every speech, you knew with absolute certainty what was going to be discussed ad nauseum. “FaPoBuAd” became our token word of choice to abbreviate the “failed policies of the Bush administration,” which quickly found a permanent home on the Obama Speech Bingo card. Well, at the beginning of 2011 it has become painfully clear that our country’s problems were not due to the FaPoBuAd. Inventing this boogeyman was the wrong thing to do. It was a big mistake; not so much from the perspective of the interests of the Obama campaign, but for the continuing survival and welfare of the country.

It polarized us, big time.

Am I reciting the history of the last decade or so unfairly? Making something up that didn’t happen? Leaving something out that might change things? Forming the wrong take on any of it?

Let me know.

In the meantime, these assclowns should never be given credit for healing any divisions about anything ever again. Not until such time as they really do.

Somebody please let the Nobel Prize Committee know…

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

Lee Doren’s mad. We all should be.

Margot McGowan at ReelGirl sets me straight:

Morgan,

Men are not more visual!!! That is a total myth! Men are allowed to be visual in our culture. Men watch and women watch themselves being watched.

Women are attracted to half naked guys. Not only that, women are attracted to completely naked guys.

Our disagreement is with regard to the statement “5x more skin shown by women than men from G to R rated films,” to which I say, damn straight. Women have better looking skin. We like looking at what they got, more than they like looking at what we got. It’s all about selling the movie tickets, so whaddya expect?

But Margot disagrees emphatically. That’s an awful lot of exclamation marks, I’d better re-think this.

I do agree with Margot on the “women watch themselves being watched.” That part is absolutely true. Female superheroes in comic books — they either show copious amounts of skin, or they wear a tight rubber/latex/spandex suit that shows every curve. The boys like seeing that, and the girls, well, this attire might very well be there to attract the girls in the first place more than the boys. Let’s think on this — what could a female superhero wear, that wasn’t either skimpy or skin-tight, that would attract the female readers? A Hillary-Clinton-pantsuit? No. The bod needs to be shown, because a superhero has to do something to exude confidence.

But Margot’s argument, which I see as one of “don’t you dare think men and women are any different” straight out of the 1970’s, falls apart right here. Should Batman exude confidence, fighting Gotham’s crime in a loincloth? No…he already exudes confidence fighting the crime. Us guys have the long end of the stick here. And it wouldn’t work. Nobody, of either sex or any persuasion, wants to see a guy’s butt cheeks sticking out of something.

Exhibit B would be my video game shelf which is crammed full of James Bond and Tomb Raider. Now, one of those franchises has a feature that allows the player to place all kinds of different skimpy outfits on the protagonist as he beats levels and earns “rewards.” It is not the 007 franchise. Once again: Nobody, anywhere, wants to see a guy’s hind end. We don’t even want to pay that much attention to his clothes at all, really. He should look alright…but his clothes? That’s just a way to get him looking alright, nothing more.

Exhibit C is my own flabby middle-aged man-bod. This time of year, with the beer-blogging really showing up and my gut dangling down by my kneecaps, I’m not going to go popping down by the pool and see a bevy of college-age vixens suddenly decide “Oh, hello handsome, I guess it isn’t that nippy after all I want to get an eyeful!” Not happening. Nobody wants to see me in the buff except my girlfriend, and that’s just because she’s a good liar. But let’s say I’m in better shape; let’s imagine I look like…oh, what are they drooling over now. That werewolf kid in the “Twilight” saga I suppose. Here, I can see Margot’s point. The women who crowd into the theaters over this “girl porn” certainly do seem just as stupid and empty-headed as any over-sexed male…

…but I doubt they could be sold anything stupid. See, that’s my definition. I think Margot has underestimated just how badly our judgment can be impaired by our hormones. That’s really where it counts, is in the making of decisions. Of course women like looking at half-naked men now and then…one would hope…but it doesn’t have the same effect. And the half-naked thing isn’t quite as central to the visual experience. A man who wants to wear something selected for the purpose of selling stupid things that the (female) buyer would not otherwise buy, is just as well-off going for a look that is something else. “Professional” seems to be dominant theme. A tailored suit. Get in shape first, take care of the skin around the face, tweeze the eyebrows, pull the hair out of the ears, then spend real money on the haircut and the suit.

Girls have it all over us here. If they want to sell us something we shouldn’t be buying, they just do the primping they’d be doing anyway and then show their legs. We don’t even stop to look at what they’re selling. We will buy up the whole inventory and we won’t look back.

So I think she missed the point, and maybe I should have explained it a little more specifically…but then again, I’m not a brain surgeon. The two sexes are not the same. If a woman does happen to enjoy looking at a half-naked guy somewhere…it stops there. It’s a visual experience and nothing more. No decisions are going to get changed, no purchasing behavior is going to be affected, or very little. James Bond might wear a speedo in one scene — which will make it to the trailer, so that the Lord & Lady of the Manor will agree “yeah we need to go see that.” But that’s it. Star Trek uniforms are always going to be different, with the gentlemen officers consuming more of the starship laundry resources covering up what nobody wants to see anyway. Lara Croft is always going to be doing fashion shows with skimpy swimsuits, for as long as she’s around…and Indiana Jones, and James Bond, will not.

Women just have nicer looking limbs all-around. They’re built to be seen. Even when women look at other women — if the woman who is a spectacle is some icon of fantasy or some other kind of fiction, the woman who’s doing the looking is going to want to see evidence of her fantastic-al-ness. That doesn’t end up being a sexual thing, but it ends up in exactly the same destination: display some evidence that you think highly of yourself. So no, you don’t wear long trousers, a rumpled up shirt and a heavy leather jacket with a bullwhip & a hat. Anything the lady-hero would wear in a crowd, that would get her lost in the crowd, is out of the question. That — near as I can figure, anyway — is the girl-on-girl rule.

Being a female is tough when you get to the costuming-department-of-life. The opportunities are all different, the stigma are different, the expectations are different and the reactions are different. I, for one, wouldn’t survive; I’m more of a “got my tee shirt, got my jeans, I’m all set” kinda guy. But hey, the super heroines who show the skin have it easy when it comes time to buy laundry detergent.

Update: Related: A new feminist movement to make us re-think the pink. Oh my, the more you pay attention to this stuff, the more complicated it becomes…

I’m surprised an eagle-eyed editor didn’t pick up on this. But with so much “opinion” being churned out by means of the tried-and-true method of “I simply pulled it out of my butt,” it makes me wonder if an editor was on the job at all. Just make sure the words are spelled right, put the punctuation in the right places, and let the presses roll huh?

The TEA Party is an interesting phenomenon that has to implode under the rules of logic and contradictions soon. The party that proclaims to be all about the US Constitution wants to be rid of the 14th Amendment, and the 17th.

They are afraid of classes that promote the overthrow of the government, yet turn a blind eye to groups such as the NSM, the neo-Nazis, and other right-wing Christian militia groups that actively are working towards this.
:
The first way to notice a bigot is by how much they mention the Tenth Amendment.

Now, to be clear, it’s not the love of the Tenth Amendment that makes one a bigot, but rather it tends to be a great indicator of those supporters of bigotry since the 10th Amendment was the tool used to allow things such as slavery, segregation, and now anti-immigration policies.

A simple look at history shows that those rallying for “states rights” were usually racist whites and they are rallying for some form of racism.

The TEA Party has to implode under logic contradictions soon, because it has an idea of what parts of the Constitution it would like to lop off…but…you can tell a bigot, because the bigot will show some decent respect to other parts of the Constitution the author of this editorial would just as soon like to see ignored altogether. That’s good…

It does my heart good to see some people getting eaten alive in their own comment sections.

This article should be a case study in liberal debate. First, misrepresent your opponents[‘] position. “Now the TEA Party in Arizona is so American that they no longer want to be ruled by America’s government. American rules should not apply to Arizona.” No, what they TEA party wants is for the Federal government to act within the bounds of the constitution, to stick to its enumerated powers and stop expanding those powers to encompass every aspect of American’s daily lives. And what they are trying to do in Arizona is say to the Federal Government, “you enact a law that the constitution does not authorize you to enact, according to the 10th amendment, we don’t have to follow it”. That IS following the constitution. Despite what you liberals would have people believe, the constitution is a LIMIT on the powers of the Federal Government, not a blank check for them do to anything they want. Ok, so now on to step two in liberal debate. You have misrepresented your opponents[‘] point of view and since debating their true position might lead to someone actually finding out what their true position is, just attack them. They are bigots, they are racist, they want to re-implement slavery, and so, therefore, they are wrong. Look, look at the “code words” they use to try to hide their true agenda, they must be stopped. No facts, no counter-arguments, just personal attacks.

FrankJ is trying to figure out why the left thinks so many things are “far right.” Concluding that it’s all relative, but not really, he came up with a nifty chart that is spooky accurate:

On the Hello Kitty of Blogging, I had some harsh words about “moderates” that fall roughly into line with this:

The trouble with “moderates” is they don’t know what is moderate…

Now most moderates turn to the nearest leftist for instructions about what they are to think is moderate and what they are to think is extreme. It reminds me of Homer Simpson getting ahold of $15,000 and asking the nearest car dealer, “does this car cost fifteen thousand dollars?” and the car dealer says, “it does now!”

If you’re faced with an issue and you want to figure out which position is extreme, and you just pick the one that cannot be expressed without using the words “always” or “never,” you’ll be right about eight times out of ten. If you decide it by asking the nearest moderate, you’ll be right only about two or three times out of ten because the moderate is going to ask the nearest liberal what he should think.

If you pick whichever position is more conservative, you’ll be right only one time out of ten. Seriously, think of an example. “I’m a conservative and I want a law against anyone having sex in this position” — that would be extreme. Okay, there’s one…but how often does that happen? What if it’s “I’m a liberal and I don’t think any executives in a company should make more than such-and-such a salary or bonus.” That’s extreme, but nearly all moderates will tell you that’s moderate. And right! But they are so, so wrong…moderates very often are seduced into being anti-freedom. You can’t call them useful-idiots, because moderates who do this aren’t quite so useful.

Now, if you want to be right only one time out of a hundred — ask a GROUP of moderates what is moderate, and allow them to discuss it among themselves before they get back to you. Then they’ll start trying to impress each other. In all likelihood you wont get a coherent answer back, they’ll just come to a consensus that Sarah Palin is a moron, we need to stop hearing about her, and let’s keep talking about her constantly until we’re not hearing about her anymore.

When do the moderates feel that they are most powerful? When there is a perceptible fatigue with “all of the fighting”; that the “two sides need to get along, and work together to get things done.” When do the liberals feel powerful? In exactly the same situation. They feel that all of the arguing has been done, and they are right to feel this way; they’ll simply package the liberal solution up, as the definitive answer to “all the fighting,” the moderates will believe it uncritically and thus be taught to parrot the liberal line. As if it were their own.

And presto change-o! The “moderate” solution to our health care crisis is socialized medicine, and the “moderate” solution to an oil leak in the gulf is a drilling moratorium. On and on down the line, we pick the solution that makes liberals happy. The moderates are satisfied and even feeling a little bit smug. Liberals stay grouchy. Nobody notices that, and since the solution doesn’t work there will be another “crisis” in a few years so we can go back Jack and do it again.

But meanwhile, deep down where the personal values are, moderates are actually conservative. They’re just conservatives who have more passion about making everybody agree to the same thing, than they do about seeing to it their personal values — or somebody’s personal values — have some bearing on the final outcome. Moderates, as I have said before, agree with conservatives that after a fight breaks out on the school playground, the punishment needs to be rained down upon the kid who threw the first punch and not the kid who threw the last punch. It is the liberals who live in their own little world, values-wise; they think all strength needs to be punished, unless it is strength that advances their statist agenda. This has been consistent: If it has something to do with capability, and they cannot control it, then it must be destroyed.

Most of us, including the moderates, are not willing to sign up to that. Only the moderates can be fooled into supporting this goal, provided it is packaged as something else.

Louis E. Lataif writes in Forbes:

Higher education in America, historically the envy of the world, is rapidly growing out of reach. For the past quarter-century, the cost of higher education has grown 440%, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Education, nearly four times the rate of inflation and double the rate of health care cost increases. The cost increases have occurred at both public and private colleges.

Like many situations too good to be true–like the dot-com boom, the Enron bubble, the housing boom or the health care cost explosion–the ever-increasing cost of university education is not sustainable.

Just 10 years ago the cost of a four-year public college education amounted to 18% of the annual income of middle-income families. Ten years later, it amounted to 25% of that family’s average annual income. The cost of attending a private university is about double the cost of public universities. Think of higher education as the proverbial frog in boiling water. It feels very warm and comfy but soon will be cooked.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

I see it as a smaller thing that is unsustainable within a larger thing that is unsustainable: We are evolving out of a place where, if you don’t produce something, you don’t eat. I suppose that is a good thing, at least at first, but we’re evolving in a constant direction a bit too far. With no signs of slowing down. We’re coming up with more and more ways for more and more people to create livelihoods for themselves without producing anything…you’ve heard the old adage “those who can do, those who can’t teach.” Perhaps private higher-level education is becoming more expensive, not quite so much because those who toil away therein are demanding more lavish lifestyles, but because there are more of them.

The whole thing strikes me as a misdirection. If we’re laboring away to create an advanced society in which everyone has a livelihood, and therefore no one needs to worry about whether they can get ahold of one — how come we have more and more people who make such a livelihood out of dictating who does & who does not deserve to have a livelihood? Should that not be an occupation in recession? In fact, it strikes me as an altogether unintended consequence. If your livelihood consists of handing down decisions on who else is entitled to a livelihood, well obviously that just beats the snot out of a livelihood that is made by working. So the lazy people are going to want the livelihood that consists of dictating who else can have a livelihood, since it doesn’t involve any actual work. This may not be a problem if the lazy people are in the minority. But when the option to be lazy has been around for a little while…lazy people always, and I do mean always, achieve majority status.

Glenn Reynolds says often that this is a “bubble” that is due to burst; whatever cannot continue indefinitely, won’t. To his credit, I have yet to see him declare anyone should seek any measure of comfort from this. They shouldn’t because the bursting of the bubble is going to be ugly. Don’t forget, as higher-level education becomes more and more difficult to acquire, the “hard” qualifications to be acquired from it are on a downslide, which means the qualifications to be expected from those who have not acquired one, are similarly on a downslide.

To put it in simpler terms, if the bubble doesn’t pop soon you’re going to need a Master’s degree to shovel shit out of a stable.

So. You can’t have a livelihood of any kind until someone says you’re entitled to have a livelihood, and for them to even consider saying it you need to attend some semesters and pay a rapidly inflating rate for the privilege. Just to be considered. This is the culmination of our efforts to build a super-sophisticated society in which nobody needs to worry about acquiring a livelihood.

Einstein is reputed to have said you can’t solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. I think that is applicable here.

On Groundhog Day I woke up like I always do, engaged in some carnal delight like I usually do, made the coffee like I always do, took my shower, got dressed, logged on to tweak the brittle liberals like I always do…heh heh. Gathered my gear, kissed my sweetie goodbye and walked over to the garage like I always do. Then I pushed the button on my keychain like I always do and the garage door slid up like it always does.

Something just shy of eight inches. Woops.

I tried it again, with the same results. Eh…this needs some addressing. There’s no other way to get in. After fiddling around for the better part of a minute I saw the problem: The metal door was catching on the bottom of the license plate frame. Did I really park the car that way? Is my memory going?

It turned out, yeah, maybe it is, just not in the way I thought. On Groundhog-Day-Eve, I forgot to set the damn parking brake…

Uff da. If your grandfather lived with you and he pulled these shenanigans, you’d start up with that speech about surrendering the license, right? I think most of us would at least give it some thought. What are the rules for this when you’re forty-four instead of eighty-eight? I think, at my tender age, it’s reasonable to have a one-time pass. Get some yuks in, make sure it doesn’t happen again or else the “it’s time, Grandpa” speechifying will begin in earnest.

Maybe I’m biased, but that seems reasonable. Okay then. How in blazes do I get to work, short of crawling around on the dusty floor like a little kid or something? It’s a li’l four-banger, and about eighty pounds of force disengages the car from the door. But I found it somehow impossible to maintain this while avoiding the beam that disengages the motor; there’s a gentle slope to the cement floor, so the vessel rolls back in place when I stop shoving; and as slow as it’s rolling, it’s so much quicker than the door mechanism. Just a two-by-four to block the tires, and this would be so much easier. But there is none.

I ended up sticking my foot in there to jam the Leatherman tool I carry on my belt, under the tire. And, mercifully, the first Groundhog Day misadventure was at an end. Yet another triumph for American ingenuity. Just imagine calling a tow truck over something like this…yikes…forget about drivers’ licenses, let’s talk about Man Cards. What does a tow truck driver’s hysterical laughter sound like? I’m happy to plead an honest ignorance on this point, like any proper red-blooded meat-eating beer-drinking Leatherman-carrying American man.

But clearly I’m fallible, and you have some idea of just how fallible I can be at times…

And so it arrives as something of a shock when I see things like this:

One of my favorite bloggers is Morgan Freeberg a.k.a. House of Eratosthenes. He is able to explain things clearly, although not always concisely. Simple ideas or complex ideas, when Morgan gets a hold of it, he can boil it down to something that is understandable. I urge you to make him a daily stop.

But I was a little dismayed when he rather off-handedly remarked that he didn’t like fisking, musing that doing so usually didn’t add anything to a discussion.

Of course, I’ve been doing a weekly (more-or-less) fisking of a liberal columnist for several years now. I don’t think Morgan’s comment was directed at me, because those fiskings are on a more obscure website that is more of a diary than a blog, but I did take it as whispered advice from an older brother. I hold Morgan’s advice in high regard, so whenever he expresses an opinion, I weight it a bit more than other people’s words. So I quit doing fiskings and figured that I would never do them again.

Until now.

Oh, dear. Maybe the blogs are enhancing our ability to communicate a little bit too well; we have some ditz who can’t even park his car & set the brake, making an off-hand comment about not liking the fisking, and because of that one thing we have some potentially wonderful writing dribbling off into oblivion.

I am not inclined to refudiate the remark about fisking; as a general rule, I still don’t like it. It encourages an intellectual vigor that is broad but not deep. The message behind it is one of “look how gloriously flawed my target must be, for behold the vast quantity of flaws I have uncovered in his work.” But what does that say, really, when you waded into the exercise with that very preconceived notion. And so you began with the intent of finding a bunch of flaws…you found them…this usually says more about you than it does about the thing you’re fisking. And when it says more about you than it does about the thing you’re fisking, and the goal was to say something about the thing you’re fisking, then what we have created is an abomination in that it appears to have met a goal when it really fell short.

That is my objection — it does not apply to what Captain Kardde jotted down after the “until now.” You do need to go read that, it is really something. The target of the fisking has it comin’. When I read things like this (comments by Bob Scott, target-of-fisking, in italics):

Even though I am not willing to conclude that the hatred spouted by conservatives like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck (Fox News) is responsible for the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the distinguished chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Arizona, along with five other Americans,

That’s mighty white of you, Bob. Seeing as how that’s what the evidence has proven.

…it is time for conservatives to examine that possibility.

Oh. I see. So, conservatives and the “hatred” that we have “spouted” are not responsible for the shooting, but we need to examine the “possibility” that we are.

It all makes perfect sense!

Aw fuck it, fisk away. What an insufferable jackass.

Anyway, in the evening I came home to an empty house because the girlfriend is taking evening classes. I’d much rather come home to find her, but in her place I found the two dozen St. Pauli’s I’d stocked in the outdoor (daddy) fridge the night before, a package from older relative containing a book called “The No-Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace And Surviving One That Isn’t“; and, Season One of the Six Million Dollar Man, produced for the first time on DVD Region 1 — yes! Plus a bowl of shake-n-bake chicken drumsticks in the (momma) fridge.

The slow motion, I have to say, has not aged well. In fact, the timing of the story in these episodes is much more tedious and plodding than how I remember. Maybe that’s because when I was seven I was just waiting for Steve Austin to jump over a wall or hit somebody. Another thing that I find interesting is that the influence of James Bond was much more perceptible than the way I remember it. Col. Austin is not just bionic, he’s a man’s man, capable of seducing any woman, relocating an engine from a pickup truck into an airplane, designing some super-world-saving-ramshackle device on the spot, apparently has an IQ of over 200 or so. Since he’s fighting bad guys who really have to be stopped, it goes without saying that he must work for some super-secret government agency. It’s an interesting comment on the times in which we lived back then; I wonder if it would have been possible to make this a couple years later, with Watergate & all. In fact, I’d wager not. Knight Rider did exactly the same thing, but he worked for “The Foundation.”

But still. In that subsequent era, with our confidence completely blown, when you went to the boob tube the real shadowy guys who were up to no good never worked for the government. Sure, you could tell they were bad because they wore nice suits…all the time…even in the middle of the night. Good guys wore plaid shirts unbuttoned down to the navel, and jeans that were skin tight up top around the derrier, flowing like draperies down by the ankles. Suit == bad. But the bad guys weren’t government agency employees, they were super rich megalomaniacs running large corporations. See the little twist? Government screws up…and in our national consciousness, this means free enterprise cannot be trusted.

Another thing that has not aged well from this show, and it is more central to the costuming issue: Steve’s clothes. I can see exactly what they’re getting across — here the scientists and generals and Oscar are briefing Steve on his next mission, and if you’re seeing this for the first time you can tell this guy in the middle of the room is the cool one because he’s a fashion plate. That’s how it looks in 1973. Nowadays, you look at it and go, why is that man wearing a carpet for a suit?

To the asshole book: Wish it arrived twenty years earlier, I could’ve used something like that. By sheer coincidence, Severian posted a comment, also on Groundhog Day, that said

This is why the left almost always wins. Bureaucracies only work when workplaces are harmonious, and so they create elaborate structures to enforce harmony. Since leftists are offended by almost everything, those enforcement structures err on the side of caution and begin enforcing mandatory leftism. And on and on the vicious circle spins…

And here we come to another elaborate thought about workplaces. Chapter four, “How To Stop Your Inner Jerk From Getting Out,” concentrates on avoiding the zombie characteristic of asshole-mania, how to keep from becoming one after you have been bitten. Perhaps this is where the relative wants me to concentrate my energies, I don’t know. It’s chock full of advice and has a self-assessment.

I’m pleased and proud to report that, of all the people who shared a difficult workplace with me and nurtured or became inextricably devoted to the thought that I’m an asshole, their thinking went something like this: Morgan isn’t doing every little thing, large & small, exactly the way I’d be doing it if I were Morgan, that makes him an asshole. And you know what, I’ll take that. I think something needs to be faced here, the word “asshole” is not so much a word that serves to insult, as a word that serves to dismiss. Once you go through life saying “I seek to dismiss any & all persons who do not do things exactly the same way I would do them,” then I submit you do not need to take an asshole self-assessment quiz, we already know the answer…such a being is lower than anybody who ever fisked somebody, or anybody who ever got fisked even if they had it coming.

And this ties in to Severian’s comment. If you have a workplace that is harmonious only because some busybody is “enforcing harmony”…and that busybody, or someone who shares a factional agenda with the busybody, is “offended by almost everything” — how harmonious is that workplace going to be? To paraphrase Stalin, it doesn’t matter who is the asshole, it matters who counts the assholes and therefore defines the assholes.

More than once I have wondered, how do we explain this to future generations? We are going to make our workplaces harmonious, by deferring to the opinions of self-appointed dictators in determining what is “offensive”…oh, and the dictators will generally be self-appointed on the basis of being super-sensitive to perceived slights. That is what makes our workplaces so flexible, so friendly, so welcoming. Above all, non-threatening. That is the paramount goal, so since that goal is higher than any other, we will achieve it by making sure your minute-to-minute behavior, actual & perceived, is adjudicated by some frenzied neurotic you’ve never met, who never had to convince anybody that he or she can be fair or impartial…someone who might very well be nuts. We will end your career over this. We’ll send you to special classes to make sure you understand these are the rules, so you know ahead of time that you are toiling eight hours a day under the Sword of Damocles.

That this creates a non-threatening business environment, is something that will be much more difficult to explain to future generations than — well, The Six Million Dollar Man’s leisure suit.

So there you have a day in the life. Groundhog Day. It covers a lot of subjects, and perhaps in the elaborate treatise above I have managed to tie all of them neatly together. Except for Steve Austin who’s just sort of sticking out there. But he’s cool like that. Nga nga nga nga nga nga nga nga nga….

Rudy Barnett and Elizabeth Foley, WSJ:

For months, progressives smugly labeled the legal challenges to ObamaCare as “silly” or even “frivolous.” Today their confidence must be severely shaken.

Late Monday afternoon in Pensacola, Fla., U.S. District Court Judge Roger Vinson delivered the second major judgment that the centerpiece of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—the “individual mandate” that forces Americans to buy health insurance whether or not they want it—is unconstitutional.
:
Consider the problems posed by the insurance mandate. The Obama administration argued that it was supported by the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. True enough, insurance is commerce, but not buying insurance is the antithesis of commerce. Commerce has always been understood as requiring economic activity. This was the rationale Judge Hudson adopted in striking down the individual mandate in the Virginia case.

Since this weekend, just before the ruling, I was treated to a dedicated lefty on the Hello-Kitty-of-Blogging who beat me upside the head (since I was the only one foolish enough to actually debate him on this) that this ruling is inconsequential because it WILL be overturned. Not quite so much that the ruling is wrong, that we need ObamaCare, millions and millions cannot get any access to health care blah blah blah…although there were some trace amounts of that. But it WILL be overturned, it doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong, I’ve proven my intellectual feebleness by expressing any sort of belief that the ruling means anything at all.

And oh by the way, my argument has been judged by these authoritative yet virtually anonymous busybodies on social media and found wanting.

But, back to the argument that it doesn’t matter what’s right or wrong, what the Constitution says, this WILL be overturned. Reminds me of the argument that it doesn’t matter if the Victory Mosque should or shouldn’t be built, it WILL be…hey, how’d that turn out. But the decision WILL be overturned. Wow, someone somewhere must have a sweetheart deal for Justice Kennedy.

I irritated the busybody and his sidekick with a hypothetical about a future America vigorously shoving a nascent socialized-medicine system through its early evolutionary stages…and running headlong into an “emergency” kidney shortage. If the government can do anything it wants, since it is “judicial activism” to merely declare anything at all unconstitutional…can the government order me to surrender one of my healthy kidneys? This met with two responses, both peppered with insults, each starkly contradictory to the other: Your hypothetical is unlikely, fantastic and stupid — and, who in pity fuck’s sake ever said your kidneys weren’t up for grabs from the very beginning?

All of which demonstrates two things.

One, those who have no love at all of liberty, principles of self-governance, self-direction, self-ownership and freedom…are viscerally resentful and angry toward those who do. It has been ever thus.

And two: Our lefties are experiencing a difficult time right now. Please be more considerate and gentle than I am.

Look what Cassy posted on her Facebook wall:

Men should concentrate on playing with their children and leave the care to women

Fathers should stick to just playing with their children as their efforts to look after them just end in arguments with their wives, a study claims.

I defer to my own wisdom on this…

It’s very simple; up until 1960, the world was run by white men in black socks. Since 1970, it’s run by women who like to complain about things. So of course we need to get ready for next year’s study that says men aren’t helping out enough…

As you read through about the study, one thing jumps out. Yep, you guessed it…one researcher, who seems to be functioning in a dictatorial capacity in reporting the findings and likely in conducting the study itself, a female with a hyphenated name. No reassurance whatsoever that the conclusions of the study were based in any way on the data the study found…just a belief arranged by legacy protocol, nothing more than that.

In fact, toward the end of the article, a confession of sorts:

The results fit into her other work, which has found that mothers can act as “gatekeepers” to their children, either fostering or restricting how much fathers are involved in caring.

I sense that lately the eggheads are getting more brazen about this thing…this, pop in with an agenda, figure out what you want the study to say, go through the motions of a “study,” come to the conclusion you wanted to come to from the very beginning, work the agenda forward. They seem to be putting less effort into hiding it. In years past, a passage like “The findings in the study remained the same even when the researchers compared dual and single-income families, and when they took into account a wide variety of other demographic factors…” would have been implicitly interpreted as: The findings in the study would remain the same even if other research teams were measuring them.

Nowadays, maybe I’m imagining this, but there seems to be an unwritten undertone permeating throughout that says: “The findings in the study remained the same and they always will remain the same, because we’re the ones doing it.” As in…who cares if we’re measuring it in an objective, reproducible way or not? It’s a study, we’ve got it, and we’ve got our diplomas too. Like it or not, you’ll be living your life the way we want you to inside of five years, ten tops.

In this case, with mothers as the active parent, and fathers as the passive one. Like cattle, in other words. Nice.

How come it is that academics and the left…but I repeat myself…seem so everlastingly intent on bullying people to live like some kind of animal species that is not people?

…say the seven out of ten.

Seven in 10 Americans would like to see Republican leaders in Congress consider the tea party movement’s ideas as they confront the country’s challenges, a new poll has found.

In a Gallup/USA Today polling released Monday, 71 percent of those surveyed said they want to see GOP leaders look to tea party positions when developing policy. Forty-two percent said that listening to tea party ideas was “very important,” while another 29 percent said it was “somewhat important.”

Support for congressional GOPers to adopt tea party positions was strongest among Republicans, with 88 percent saying it was important for party leadership to take tea party ideas into account. Fifty-three percent said it was very important and 35 percent said it was somewhat important.

The remaining three in ten thought it was tragic when Keith Olbermann’s show ended, and also agreed that President Bush caused 9/11. Probably eat their own dung, too.

No, I’m making all that stuff up…because I kind of have to. I don’t know who those people are, I don’t know where I’d be able to find them if I wanted to, and I don’t want to. You can see from reading further in the article this has nothing to do with whether the respondent personally approves of the GOP, or of the TP. The question is — should the former listen to the latter.

Maybe, I suppose…if they’re decent people…but have been living under a rock. An enormous rock. Short of that, and wanting the Republicans to remain a minority party forever, why would you say no? What would be the rationale? The letter “R” is just groovier than the letter “D” or something? I don’t get it.

…anytime they find out my DVR is taping Sarah Palin’s show.

Isn’t it awkward when there’s something to celebrate, and it’s worth some heap-big imbibing but it happens on a Monday? Just dang.

CNS News is flashing back to our lefty pals saying this wouldn’t be a prob-a-luhm. Woops.

As Allahpundit points out, this is not the final battle in the war because it’s a lower court ruling. I think Allah is making a big mistake in minimizing this though. The casual observer can now see this is a real problem; Sen. Leahy can’t just authoritatively intone “nobody questions it” and make the problem go away. Now it has to be taken seriously. That will cause, at the very minimum — granting the other side the benefit of the doubt, that the constitutional question will eventually be satisfactorily resolved — a devastating loss of momentum. And that’s at the very least. That is presuming the constitutional authority can eventually be found…or…conjured up.

pickelsgap, like many, relishes the most satisfying statement in Judge Vinson’s decision (on p. 42):

It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.

Margot at Reelgirl wants to re-define something.

I began to wonder how one — how we — might take the wussy out of pussy.

Is it possible to change the meaning of the word, to restore to “pussy” its deserved glory? Could we use pussy as a compliment? Could pussy denote someone or something as cool or heroic or impressive? “Rosa Parks — what a pussy!” or “John McCain is way pussy!” or “New York is a big ol’ pussy!”

At the moment, “pussy” isn’t even used to slight women directly. It is reserved for men, used among them to make fun of one another. It’s “sissy” for male heteros. It’s the politically correct big boy’s way of calling somebody a fag. And, please, don’t get me started on “pussy-whipped.”

People say “dick,” they say “asshole,” they say “prick,” but they do it with respect. Those words have power and punch, the way the word “cunt” has power. But “cunt” makes people shudder; they judge, perhaps wrongly, the user of the word. Meanwhile, poor “pussy” lies there limp, pathetic and, until this moment, defenseless.

Hmmm…I don’t know. As always, there is the weakness always inherent in any centralized attempt to re-define words: the decision ultimately belongs to those who use the words. Dictionary editors may say what they like, feminists may angrily stomp their little feet, but ultimately the final say on what a word means, belongs to an unwritten compact between the sender and the receiver of messages containing the word. The meaning is defined as it is put to use; and, between those two mighty dictators, it is the sender of the message who is dominant.

In fact I would say among all the latter-twentieth-century forces of revolution — and, in western culture, there have been many — this is the single lodestar of failure. The attempt to dabble in our lexicon. The benefits have been slight and the resentment it arouses is strong.

But Margot’s a bright gal in her own way. I think this was written up as a joke.

The passage about dick, asshole and prick being used with respect, however, is completely lost on me. I don’t recognize any such meaningful distinction, at least not along the axis of true respect. Pussy/asshole/prick are all male epithets; you take a Christian name that enjoys androgynous potential, like Lynn, Hayden, Riley — or, uh, Morgan maybe? — and tell me some complete stranger by this name is a pussy or a dick, in either case I know with almost absolute certainty you’re talking about a dude. No really, try it. That Morgan is a real prick. That Morgan is a pussy. Morgan is an asshole. Try to envision that the speaker is talking about a chick. It just doesn’t work.

The other equivalence between pussy and dick/asshole/prick is that in all these cases, you’re using a body part to describe a male subject’s abject uselessness. What really varies is the situation. “Pussy” is when you’re married to the guy, you hear a noise in the house at three in the morning and you want him to go check it out with a baseball bat and he won’t go: What a pussy! It means he’s useless. It’s a way of saying “what’s the point of having men around if they’re all like you?”

Dicks, pricks and assholes are equally useless just in different situations. You’re doing your taxes and your buddy turns up the stereo. Of course, to be a dick, this doesn’t qualify unless he knows you’re trying to do your taxes and turns up the stereo on purpose. What a dick. Again, useless. You need that guy around like you need an extra dick, or an extra asshole. On your forehead.

We see, here, why feminism has come to be irrelevant. People don’t like to be told by strangers what words they’re supposed to use for what purpose…or what they’re allowed to call Sarah Palin.

You can’t flout society’s rules, make a big show out of doing so, and then insist people start following your rules just because you want them to. I suppose generations ago that was alright; people were less sophisticated and more gullible. In the age of YouTube, this kind of hairpin-inconsistency is a more visible transgression and people are naturally going to have less tolerance for it.

They’re only going to fall for it if they’re complete pussies.

The other thing that thwarts my optimism in this campaign to re-define the word pussy, is that the word can only be given a new purpose if it is completely deprived of an older purpose. And “pussy” has an absolutely indispensable purpose, recognizable immediately to any man who’s had to conjure up manhood within a budding boy. If I call you a nancy-boy, a sissy, a creampuff, a lightweight, a milquetoast, a geek, nerd, flake, or any of the other derivatives…it means you need to man-up. It means I am desiring that you show some masculine attributes you have hitherto been derelict in showing.

But if I call you a pussy — it means you’d better do it because your momma and grandma aren’t here to protect you. If they were, of course, I’d be using one of those more delicate derivatives. You had better start being a man because right now you are among men. Which, in turn, also implies that we’re doing manly things of the “hold my beer and watch this” variety…things that probably have something to do with lighting fuses and running like hell. It is a reminder that your dainty disposition is dangerously incongruous with our selected pastime. This is not for pussies. Man up or go wait in the truck, pussy.

From The Borderline Sociopathic Blog For Boys, hat tip to blogger friend Daphne.

You knew it was out there somewhere…I know I did. But I’m still surprised at the length that results. Although I suppose I shouldn’t be.

Ka-pow, zowee.

Here.

Thanks to Mike, by way of an off-line.

From The Economist, hat tip to Dyspepsia Generation. Who is wondering “how come we take so much shit from these piss-ant places.”

Comment poster cylarz had some interesting thoughts about this lately…like…

Have you ever heard the familiar refrain that the United States is a bully and a victimizer of third world countries, especially those in the Middle East? Did you ever stop to wonder, if that were even true, how we got into a position of being able to do so in the first place? It’s not like the British gave us a grant to get started – we began with a continent-sized untamed wilderness, and proceeded to build a mighty nation capable of projecting its will halfway around the globe. How did we do that, when so many other countries can’t even control the territory they claim?
:
Why other countries would have a say in our affairs, is an idea that positively mystifies me, and I’m even more mystified as to why they’d have any more wisdom than we do. Aren’t their citizens human, too? The rest of the world divides its time between demanding our money and telling us to stay out of its business. Being an American is a lot like raising teenagers.

From Graph Jam.

Gerard lowers it down upon them…it is deserved, and deserved well.

I’m seeing a lot of “Woe is us” kvetching and whining cropping up around the sphere in the last few days. Powerline’s got a dose of this social media disease (SMD). Pajamas has a dose. Rove and Krauthammer are probably close to Patient Zero when it comes to the origin of the dose. Innumerable others have a dose. And now they all seek to “give a dose to the ones they love most” — fellow Republicans and the American people.

The SMD in question is the sudden onset of the “Oh, God, we’ve got nothing but losers to run for President in 2012” syndrome as they wander about the echoing warehouse of their traditional and perennial candidates and see… well, they see losers. And these clear and present losers constitute a collection of schmos that cannot be seen to be able to beat the New and Improved Obama that has emerged in the last week or so, phoenix-life, from the ashes of Tucson.

Wasn’t it only yesterday that many of these same doughnuts were dropping their pundit kibble around the idea that “Hey, Hillary could beat this guy!” Why yes, I do believe it was just about only yesterday. Today we’re back to the “This bozo is unbeatable.”

Gerard carries weighty words deserving of respect. Three years ago, this Fred Thompson fan was nursing his wounds and Gerard was one of the people pointing out the obvious — McCain is the guy, like it or not, and everyone who can see what’s happening needs to get behind him. Not that I ever agreed with that; I still don’t. At least not with too much enthusiasm. But give him credit for being consistent on this position, and the position makes better sense today.

Not to mention any names, but there are certain other people who were trying to talk some sense into Yours Truly back then — and seem to have flip-flopped now. Someone will emerge…someday…but the current lot is hopeless, so let’s just keep wishing.

The wisdom we need now is Rumsfeldian: You send the incumbent communist president home with the challenger you have. Obama is beatable. As much as any president who has ever presided over a crappy economy…but not with this agenda-driven, or not-agenda-driven, weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth going forth, pining away for the challenger the country does not have. And it bears repeating one more time: The unenlightened snowbilly chick is not yet among the challengers we have. If you’re complaining that she shouldn’t be running, do you understand that you don’t have a complaint yet? And if you don’t get that, then why am I listening to your opinion again?

What are these bozos trying to sell? Some of them are forthcoming about it. Most aren’t. They just drone on and on with that word that begins with “U”, toward what purpose I do not know…

Time for a re-definition.

“Unqualified”: An adjective we attach to people who tell the truth without using a bunch of bullshit euphemisms.

I finally figured out how we’re going nuts, and it doesn’t have anything to do with conservatism versus liberalism.

Well…that is perhaps overstating it…it doesn’t have much to do with it. Okay, maybe it has quite a bit to do with liberalism. But it has more to do with what you saw in Idiocracy. We humans in this day and age don’t have to do a whole lot to stay alive, and we have no natural predators. We’re starting to become idiots.

When I made a list of all the ways our thinking has started to suck green donkey balls, busted them out into their most simplistic elements and eliminated the duplicates, I found the resulting list had exactly thirty items. That seems like a good, round number. Let’s blog it.

This has actually been many years in the making. The plain truth that has to be recognized here is that we don’t really do an awful lot of thinking. Our day-to-day survival is not linked to our arriving at the right answer. Most of the time, when we make decisions about things, we do it for the sake of convincing those in proximity that we’re decent people. These are not decisions that are supposed to produce an outcome consistent with our stated goals. Things like “I’m going to vote for MONDALE!” are just ways of showing off our decency…and our absolute, complete credulity.

For decades now, we have not even been trying to show off any inherent ability. For the most part, what we’ve been trying to demonstrate to each other is harmlessness. Which, as you’re about to see, isn’t that harmless…

Our thirty widespread modern mental illnesses are as follows:

1. Given a factual observation, the recognition of one, and only one, valid conclusion to be drawn from it.

This is Number One for a reason. Too many people, on this point, are absolutely inflexible. Example: Sarah Palin made a reference to “our allies the North Koreans” and this means she is unqualified for the presidency…and she hasn’t declared herself a candidate for that office anymore than I have. But because she is unqualified for it, and this is “proven” by the fact that she momentarily mixed up her Koreas, she is to be hated. Oh, and you have to agree with all this. If you fail to, or if you even hesitate to, it just proves you’re crazy. Or you’re thinking with your little head; you want to wait until Todd Palin is looking at something else and then jump her bones. Or both of those. That Sarah Palin said what she said cannot mean anything else, and your failure to agree with that, also, cannot mean anything else. They are guarantees. Nice and simple.

People who think this way forget that one thing may mean — one thing, or it may mean any one of a lot of different things. It’s a very common problem. Poeple running around, like small children, all too ready to give voice to those magic words “Aha! Now this proves it!” Completely forgetting that someone else might have a different view of the situation and what it all means.

This is the most common mental illness, and it is by far the most damaging. People who are unable to express, or sustain, or give a decent respect to the simple idea: “I think A, but I do see how a reasonable person might think not-A.”

2. Insistence that there must be a certain point where (most) people have made enough money.

Ever run a potato-sack race?

If one foot can never be too far behind, then the other foot can never be too far ahead. The net effect is, not too much progress can be made.

It’s called communism. It’s been tried before; it always leads to suffering. That’s why.

3. Shadow-lurking; fear of unilaterally altering the outcome of a situation, even for the better.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and when you take steps to alter an outcome for the better, you need to put your name by the idea that the outcome is indeed being improved. This can be a scary thing. There is always the possibility that the outcome, when all’s said & done, is not being improved after all.

And so for the cowardly, it becomes an appealing proposition to leave all matters unchanged. You don’t get any credit for improving anything that way, but you might not get blamed for anything deteriorating either.

4. Irrational hatred of anybody who doesn’t share this fear of altering situational outcomes for the better.

This is understandable. If someone is being mugged and you stand down, allowing the mugging to proceed, it looks like a perfectly reasonable decision. Until someone else comes along to stop the mugging and then you look like a craven coward…which is what you are. But in that situation it suddenly becomes a great deal less subtle.

It’s understandable, but that doesn’t make it logical. It certainly doesn’t make it noble.

5. Directive 10-289: The belief that all human behavior is static; the failure to anticipate unintented consequences.

We see it time and time and time again with liberal policies. A tax rate goes up; subtract the old rate from the new rate, multiply the difference by the volume of commerce that comes under the tax, and the product is something you are absolutely sure to collect next year. Every single nickel! They do the same thing with tax cuts — a tax cut can be assessed to “cost” us a half a trillion dollars, or some such.

If humans were inherently non-intelligent, it might work out that way. But they’re not. When something becomes more or less lucrative, they change their decisions to adapt to the new environment.

6. Rejecting the delivery of a beneficial outcome, over trifling concerns about the process followed.

There is a simple test to discern whether this has crossed over into insanity: Does process matter over outcome? If the outcome falls short of the stated goal, is it acceptable anyway because a certain process was followed? If it gets that far, then what is being done is that a failure is being falsely regarded as a success. What if someone deviates from the stated process, but by so doing, delivers on the stated goal? If that is rejected then the reverse holds; a success is being falsely regarded as a failure.

From developing software, I have found the projects that really justify their existences are the ones that put humans in the role of being human. That is to say, all the repetitive work is systematically routed to the machinery, and all the creative demands are made upon the people. And yet, I don’t have to wait for too many years to roll by before I have to deal with the tiny minds, those who say that the proper place for the human “talent” is to do things exactly the same way some other human would do it; to follow the same process. In other words, the people should do the work of machines.

I have begun to view that as working backward. Wherever there are machines, humans should not do repetitive work. Not only is it tedious, but compared to the machines, people aren’t any good at it.

7. The feeling that if someone is wealthy, he must have done something morally reprehensible to become that way.

You almost can’t blame us for falling for this; it’s the better part of a century of programming straight from Hollywood. Wherever there’s a wealthy industrialist there must be a soul enshrouded in pure darkness, dedicated to evil. Facts are not considered. It’s just assumed.

But there’s something about this I don’t get: If you’re independently wealthy but have taken a leadership position in advancing the progressive agenda, suddenly you’re not evil anymore. If you’re Sen. John Kerry, you can dock your sailboat in another state to avoid paying taxes and you’re still wonderful. If you’re George Soros, you labor under no obligation whatsoever to “give back to the community.”

8. Oikophobia; the fear of the similar, or of the familiar.

This was once synonymous to “wanderlust.” Now it’s a polar opposite to xenophobia; it means, if someone is similar to your or your native culture, you’re afraid of it, or you’re automatically convinced it must be an evil thing.

9. Blame; every single situation leads to the same individual, group or class being at fault.

Do I even have to use the name “George W. Bush”?

10. Rationalization; every single situation leads to the same idea about what to do.

This seems reasonable because, and only because, humans in this day and age do not need to hunt for their food. And we do not toil away on the food chain underneath any natural predators.

Without a need to exercise basic intelligence, to vary our responses according to the flavor of the current stimulus, our ability to do this has begun to atrophy…

11. The denial of any difference between male and female physiology, psychology and/or aptitudes.

This was popularized during the 1970’s. If you acknowledged so much as a whiff of difference between the sexes, you needed to be educated.

It wouldn’t be possible to explain to anyone who was not slowly acclimated to the new order: Women could only be properly respected by people who pretended they were men. If you acknowledged there was anything different, and therefore special, about women that must have meant you were putting them down. This, necessarily, meant any acknowledgement of femininity was an insult — and that, in turn, had to mean women were inherently inferior.

In sum: Those who were really discriminating against women, successfully projected it on to others.

The tradition continues today.

12. Desire to be better than everybody else, coupled with a mutually-exclusive goal of resembling everybody else.

This is what Thing I Know #160 is all about:

Being better than everyone you know; being the same as everyone you know. You can have one, not both. I think we all get that. But too many among us want both. They know they can’t have both, but they’re unwilling to do things differently from the crowd, or to take second-place. They want it all. And they don’t know why they end up unhappy.

13. Upon hearing one side of a story, failing to factor in that there might be another side to the story.

The very essence of adult-like thinking. We’ve been losing it, a little bit at a time, for quite awhile now.

14. The cyclical and perpetual fantasy that all of human existence might be on the verge of extinction.

This latest eco-fad, too, has been going on uninterrupted since the mid 1970’s: The idea that man is about to cause his own distinction, inadvertently. That’s thirty-five years give or take. All along the way, ten years at a time, we authoritatively expect the oceans to dry up, become superheated, de-salinated, or otherwise uninhabitable…

Before the 1970’s, about every fifty years or so we have another prophecy of the end of the world. Whenever it fails to happen we come up with another prophecy.

Not healthy. Not even a little bit.

15. The insistence that the leader of a people, in order to be qualified, must be somehow different/superior to them.

This is really a fundamental split. Some of us think a leader is a sampling; his role is to meld the values and sensibilities of the people he leads, with some measure of common sense. Others think the leader is elected to bring wisdom that any other ol’ schmuck wouldn’t be able to offer up. The difference is that the second of those two groups, who are in search of some demigod to pick up all these ordinary people and move them to a place they wouldn’t otherwise be able to find, conflate values with wisdom. They see it all mixed together into one goulash which they want served up by someone who knows something they don’t, and therefore it isn’t their place to question any of it. Which takes a lot of the pressure off compared to actually thinking.

16. An exuberance about a stated method for solving a problem, enjoined with an inexplicable inattention to details.

My favorite example is sitting down to talk out our differences with our enemies. Nobody ever talks about standing around something with our enemies, holding wine goblets, admiring the artwork on the walls; no, it’s always sitting down to talk out our differences.

Once we sit down, what exactly gets discussed? The litany never seems to go here. Just sit down, that’s all.

17. Filtering out the facts problematic to a desired inference, with rage against anyone who doesn’t filter the same way.

This is what lazy thinkers do. They figure out what they want the conclusion to be, and then they treat all the evidence with selected hostility or gullibility, depending on whether the evidence befriends that conclusion.

They tailor the knowledge to fit the opinion, rather than the other way around.

18. Deciding on the morality of a proposed plan based solely on which classes of people it might help or hurt.

This is perhaps the most common. Certain people, you’ll notice, you can predict how they’re going to feel about a certain plan just by categorizing the plan as crudely as possible. Pro-white, anti-black…or…pro-woman anti-man. Pro-gay, anti-gay. It sets aside positions, or it gives away money. Or it imposes a new standard for child custody. To figure out how these people are going to vote, it isn’t necessary to wade into the details or even to figure out if something is required, not-required, prohibited, subsidized, taxed. Just figure out who it helps and who it hurts. Simplistic, childish thinking; right & wrong don’t enter into it.

19. Leaping to the conclusion that statistical over- or under-representation proves injustice, and therefore conspiracy.

My favorite example of this is women under-represented in Congress. People tend to forget, there’s a certain amount of self-imposed humiliation involved in running for something. Men are going to be more open to this. Women don’t like to be embarrassed, and that’s just the way it is. The same goes for hard sciences, computer technology, etc. If you can work miracles and fix things other people can’t fix, and make a huge difference, but not too many people are going to notice, then women are not going to be attracted to that particular field. Some will but most won’t.

When there aren’t too many people of a certain demographic group in a certain position…it very often might mean there’s a problem attracting willing candidates. It doesn’t have to mean there’s a conspiracy to keep them out.

20. Placing additional weight on opinions solely for the reason that they aren’t connected to a meaningful identity.

A candidate interviews for a job and you’ve got all these questions for him. One single wrong answer and he’s disqualified…but…a band of strangers says he’s capable of handling this job, the details of which are understood only by you and a few others. You don’t know who these strangers are and you have no way of finding out, if you cared. But with their signature upon a diploma or a certificate, suddenly you’re all done asking questions…

It’s cowardice. There’s no other word for it, since you don’t know anything about these people, they don’t know anything about you, therefore their signature provides you with absolutely no information that is useful to you.

In 2008, candidate Obama said, “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times…and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.” Had Obama used a hard reference to identity, like for example “Bob”…some guy somewhere named Bob, would look like a silly ass. “Other countries” somehow seems fitting.

We have this strange surreal reverence for the unknown, for the unidentifiable.

21. A lust for more and more guarantees; valuing security at the expense of opportunity.

Seriously, go to a country that is not America if this is your deal. There are scores and scores of them. Socialist mudpuddles who will cover you womb-to-tomb, but then tax away every dollar you make minus what you need to stay alive — to pay for all this “free” care. There’s no reason to extinguish the last candle of freedom on the planet. Just move.

22. Bundling; the inability to say “I agree with him on issue A but disagree with that same person on issue B.”

This is childlike thinking. Sure, some people are always wrong, or wrong so often it might as well be always; and some other people are right much more often than the average. But if you agree with everything a certain person says, or disagree with everything a certain person says, it can be fairly said you must not be paying attention.

23. Politics; people express opinions to manipulate others, instead of saying what they really think.

The real tragedy here is that people meet up and when they come to an agreement about what to do, they think they have done some vigorous thinking to reconcile different approaches and backgrounds. But they really haven’t. They’ve only made a point of expunging the ideas germane to the most incendiary conflict…which, nevertheless, might very well have been good, decent ideas.

24. Laodicean bell curve; the idea that if you take what is perceived to be the moderate position, you can’t go wrong.

The hazard here, which is actually an understated danger, is that an illusion of excellence is being imposed upon people who are actually cowardly. We mistake mediocrity for excellence, nothings for everythings.

25. Appeasement; laboring under the delusion that one side in a conflict can unilaterally decide the fighting will end.

It’s an extension of oikophobia. If fighting is going to continue only if both sides are resolved to continue the fighting — a proposition that anybody with the mental acuity necessary to graduate from sixth grade, should immediately recognize as ajbect nonsense — then, whenever one’s own country is involved in a conflict, it is one’s own side that should be prevailed upon to propose peace. Which means, to surrender. Since, to impose the same demand on the other side would involve all that inconvenient traveling and stuff.

26. Anti-Pillar-Five: The belief that nobody should be allowed to recognize patterns or trends.

It started out as a well-intentioned desire to fight stereotyping, like “blacks are lazy” or “Mexicans will steal all your stuff.” But now, any thought that begins with the word “whenever” has to be kept secret. We can’t even notice cultural differences anymore, like women from certain geographic origins wear certain clothes. If we do, non-judgmentalism is not good enough — it has to be immediately included with a lavish compliment, like “the sari that women wear in your country is so beautiful,” or else it’s a racist remark. No in-between.

27. The conviction that, if anyone anywhere thinks a certain thought, further action must be necessary.

Five seconds thought, and you realize this is an attack on freedom. You don’t have to legitimize bigotry to point this out; if further forceful, coercive action is to be expected when someone thinks a certain thought, that is thought control. It is the very definition of it.

28. We should expect to be punished, as a group, for the behavior of an individual who might be associated with us.

It starts at school, with the yard duty teacher saying “if I make one exception I’ll have to make a hundred.”

29. We should expect to be deprived of our livelihood permanently, if a complete stranger misunderstands what we say.

Sexual harrassment policies. Go to any training class, and what do they tell you: Intent of the accused does not matter, it’s the perception of the offended that carries weight.

Why is that, if the object of the exercise is to make the workplace non-threatening for everybody? This doesn’t achieve it. So who’s responsible for this rule? Who’s accountable?

30. Proxy offense; regarding the above, it is noble to invent ways an imaginary third party might be offended.

Especially if it causes REAL life-altering injury to the second party, a REAL, UNIMAGINED PERSON.

Maybe, in the weeks & months ahead, I’ll think of some more.

But one other thing to sort of staple on to the end here: Tax increases. I do understand how some sane and reasonable people would or might think they are necessary; the budget deficits are not pretty, the public debt that accumulates as a result is not pretty. And so I understand the conclusion…

…the excitement over it, though. The dedication to an entire way of life built up all around it. That, I don’t get. It seems to me to be unstable…unsettled…juvenile…nuts.

Update 1/29/11: You know, the President lately asked for a more civil discourse, and it occurs to me that with all thirty of these mental illnesses on an upswing, that is not possible. Somewhere…and I’m far too lazy to go out and look it up…I had conjured up a hypothetical about two answers to a single problem that appear to both be viable, but only one can be correct. I think I used a math problem, like two and two are four, or they could be five. That doesn’t work though, really…the guy who thinks 2+2=5 is obviously a jackass…therefore I cannot state with confidence that someone else must be insane, for thinking so. It would be perfectly understandable.

Here’s something that works: When, exactly, did the 21st century start. If I say it started at midnight local time on January 1, 2000 — and you say it started a year after that, which is actually a common situation where this question is concerned. It’s a simple matter to agree-to-disagree, and then pepper the conversation with cherry-picked “facts,” walk through the math involved, explore the concepts of counting from 1 versus counting from 0…we can relate it to counting the minutes from zero, and then we can relate it to counting the months and days-of-the-week from 1…

We can fulfill the President’s desire and have our civil discourse.

But! If one of us engages in any one of the thirty mental illnesses here, then we can’t. If every speck of evidence you present that the century began in 2001 makes me angrier and angrier with you, and earns you a preening snotty lecture from me about how you need to watch something besides Fox News, we can no longer have a civil discourse about this.

And that is why we cannot discuss politics in the workplace. Like I’ve been saying for years, we need to ask our friends the liberals about that. If we work shoulder to shoulder with them, we have to keep our mouths shut about political opinions in order to preserve our working relationships.

And I don’t think this is an accident. I think it is by design. A populace that is cowed into keeping its political viewpoints secret, or confined to the timid venue of blogs and threads, is an easier populace to drive into extremist leftward living. It becomes much easier to marginalize the people who think we all have a right to keep and bear arms…that babies are sacred and shouldn’t be aborted…that ObamaCare is likely to increase the public debt…that Saddam Hussein needed to be driven out of power…as fringe kooks, if there is a thick veil of anonymity between the sensible conservative and the sensible moderate. It becomes a simpler matter to deploy the bandwagon “of course everybody agrees” fallacy.

It arrives at the cost of this civil discourse we supposedly value so highly. Because then, having sold liberalism according to this “of course everybody agrees” technique, if you ever meet up with someone who doesn’t agree you have to bring down the Mighty Napalm Lava Hammer of Thor upon that person. You can’t go letting someone walk away in one piece if he says, where others can overhear, “Naw, y’know, I don’t think we need to have a carbon exchange system to save the planet.” In that situation, you become obliged to react the same way a Hell’s Angels gang would react to some skinny nerd wearing thick glasses calling them a bunch of ballerina pussies.

So no, Mister President, we cannot have a civil discourse about much of anything in this day and age. Because the most ardent fans of Your Holiness are going crazy in at least thirty different ways, and are determined to drag what’s left of our society along with them.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

What all the arguing is really about…

Creation.

Destruction.

Both links from Instapundit.

Sonic Charmer brings it. If you’re one of these time-travelers out of the 1970’s ready to get offended-at-the-drop-of-a-hat at any suggestion that men & women might be a tiny bit different…reading this will be like wiping out on your motorcycle on a gravel road wearing a thong & a grin, jumping in a vat of alcohol, then going back & doing it again.

To describe the cycle (starting arbitrarily somewhere in the middle of it – it has no beginning or end):

The more women pursue and indulge alpha-male-exclusive fantasies, the less they have (stable, monogamous) relationships with men in their lives. The less monogamy and stability, the more big government women support. The more that government involves itself in and arrogates to itself the right to control, suckle, and nanny every aspect of human existence, the less pressure women will feel to have stable, monogamous relationships with men, and the more inclined they are to join alpha-male harems. The more they join alpha-male harems, the more they’ll need big government to be their husbands…

Compounding all this is a little-commented but not-unimportant side effect: as government gets bigger and power/money more concentrated, the few alpha males who come out on top of the game become that much more alpha. There’s far more ‘spoils’ accruing to a President, or Senator, or CEO of a firm tied to/dependent on government – which, increasingly, means virtually all firms – in a big-government world than in a small-government world; there’s far more in 2010 than there was in 1910. That makes those alphas that much more alpha, which makes alpha-pursuing women want them more, which only helps further the sort of society that creates these mega-alphas.

He goes on to engage in some good old-fashioned generalizing. But, if you don’t like that, it’s going to be difficult to form a coherent, rational objection to it because he’s laboring under no delusion that his generalizations make for absolute, verifiable rules. As observations of statistical skew, they are entirely valid ones, and have been for a very long time.

And it’s a serious issue. I remember arriving in Seattle from out in the sticks, with some “skills,” wondering what I could make of them; I suddenly realized that with my talents all tied up in the figuring-out-what-needs-to-be-done-and-doing-it in an office — I was uniquely suited to do all kinds of things, which were overwhelmingly being done by nice looking and not-nice-looking females. Of course, like lots of young people my priority system was all tied up in paying the rent…make enough to just-get-by…and that helped. But there were a few moments where I had to wonder what was going to happen over the long term. “Business” seemed to know exactly what kind of creature should be doing what was then called “word processing,” and it was a female creature. Before you can achieve excellence in any position you first have to fit the bill of mediocrity.

Well, the computers had to be set up. Fortunately for me, the dream of a business-to-business service of a nice obedient sharply-dressed male setting everything up and then dashing off, so the female who worked there could just “push a button and make it go,” never actually materialized. Know-how made such an enormous difference back then. The dreams the entrepreneurs had about what technology could do, were (rightfully) out of this world. But the common reality, all too often, was a bunch of harried people swarming around a box that had lately consumed some gargantuan quantity of investment capital and were busily trying to figure out how to turn it on, plug it in, or achieve some other Step One with the damn thing. My time in the typing pool lasted all of four months, during which time I was sent out on all sorts of temp assignments where they “needed some kind of a computer guy.” The Marge-Simpson’s-sisters types lampooned by Sonic, would not have been sent out on these. At the end of the four months I was a full-time software developer. This was not a random-chance hire, this was actually set up by way of the old-fashioned Victorian-era introduction; I had made a positive impression, back where I came from, on someone who knew someone else.

My point is that this is not just damaging to the ladies alone, but on the gentlemen as well. And being the age I am, with the skills back then that I had, with what the business world was trying to get through, what I bore was very far displaced from the full brunt of the damage. Our sons as well as our daughters are being wretchedly and viciously short-changed here. The girls have to be wondering — with a special, acute reasoning not shared by the boys — what in the hell they’re doing getting this degree or that degree, if it will make a difference in their career prospects, if the money is being spent well. As for the boys, can they come out on top just being “some guy who knows a lot about computers”?

This passage illustrates candidly where exactly where headed:

The end goal sought is, as stated brilliantly in the comment unearthed by Vox Day…

…a polyandryous society that still maintains a “Sex and the City” civilization. They somehow expect to limit sexual access to the five percent of men they find attractive while the rest toil away to make life easier and more comfortable for them.

Yeah yeah, I know — a perfect description of high school, so we ought to cope just fine. It’s just evolution at work on the males. Boys can just be what they’re expected to be, and if they deserve to, they’ll climb into that tight circle of the five percent.

There is a problem with that though, and the problem impacts lots of people who aren’t males: What makes that five percent? In context, this is the description of the alpha male. Google the term “alpha male” and half the pages you get back will have something to do with “how to become” one. Definitions? Taking charge. Dominant. Socially desirable. Think, not so much of humans, but of sled dogs. Or wolves.

Problem: We’re not talking about canines or quasi-canines. We’re talking about people. When wolves hold some kind of “election” about who’s going to be the alpha, what they are evaluating is the alpha’s skills — how that alpha could function individually. How likely is that alpha to survive not only within the immediate group, but out in the wilds. From this, the other wolves make a calculation about their own odds of survival, should they consider forming an association with him.

It is only on this last point that humans share any commonality with wolves, as they select alphas — calculating their own odds of survival as they ponder the prospects of supporting a prospective alpha. We do not evaluate his individual skills for survival…or even for setting up computers. Within our species, it is all about the social structure. We have no natural predators and we don’t need to hunt for our food, so there are no other considerations.

As a result, the archetype of our “alpha male” fantasy is Bill Clinton, whom according to some legends has difficulty trying to work an ordinary blender.

We figure out who deserves to be called an alpha male, based on who can sharply turn the emotional vibe emanating within a room.

That is something girls do.

Our so-called alpha males, I’m afraid, are being shoehorned into the classic mold of females, far more than I ever was in my temp-typing-job days back in Seattle. Masculinity has been disconnected from knowing how to do things; we, today, wouldn’t know real masculinity if it ran up and kicked us square in the ass.

And the people paying the price for this are not men. We’re having a little bit tougher time getting work and when we get it, we’re paying a little bit more in taxes…but it’s the women who are losing their bearings on what it is they’re supposed to be doing, what they should know how to do, how to get good at it & stay good at it, whether any of it matters, how they’ll know it does — in short, what life is all about.

Review & Outlook, Wall Street Journal:

Amid his Reaganite sunshine and new admiration for the wonders of private enterprise, President Obama’s political message in Tuesday’s State of the Union address boils down to this: Republicans, it’s your budget problem now.

The deficit is awful and must be cut, entitlements are unsustainable and must be addressed, the tax code hurts growth and must be reformed, and government should be smaller and more efficient, but don’t look to Mr. Obama for ideas on how to fix any of this. Go ahead and cut spending and Medicare if you want, Republicans. The President will get back to you with his reply as time and politics allow.

After you, Congressman Ryan.

As political strategy, perhaps this will turn out to be shrewd. Republicans will advance their budget and spending cuts, Democrats will attack them, the voters will sour, and Mr. Obama will ride to re-election. It happened in 1996.

As leadership, however, this is an abdication that contradicts Mr. Obama’s rhetorical flourishes about a new bipartisanship and the need “to merge, consolidate and reorganize the federal government.” Beyond his welcome if vague support for reducing corporate tax rates in return for closing loopholes, Mr. Obama offered not a single new idea or spending cut. The bulk of his address was devoted to his familiar priorities that he said Republicans should spend more on. Green energy subsidies. High-speed rail!

This is the weakness of the American political system. An elected leader may have no plans at all and be gifted only in the talent of talking impressively. Such a deficit in talent is never really detected because it’s never really tested.

You just say “I’m going to make that deficit go away” — in majestic, sonorous tones. Then you make deals with Congress to spend money like it’s going out of style…at the end of the road every single budget has had a massive deficit and the public debt has ballooned, so you just say “aw, it’s those other guys who were fighting me. Their fault.” Again, sounding super-duper-sophisticated, and you get away with it.

There is no actual mechanism in the system to deal with this. It’s all up to the vigilance — or lack thereof — of the electorate. Blame the voter.

A member of Congress is unable to handle reality. While he’s sober, anyway.

No no, Ted Kennedy’s still dead. This is another guy.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (N.Y.), who is known for his outspokenness, praised Obama’s speech as “uplifting,” but said that House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) response was too dour for his taste.

“[Obama] was then followed by a guy who was bumming us out,” he said on MSNBC Tuesday night. “I felt like I just needed a drink when I was done with Paul Ryan.”

Althouse nails him for this.

Now, let’s think about this. He didn’t need a drink after Obama’s talk, but he did after Ryan’s. What does that mean? Apparently, Obama’s rhetoric comes with its own high, while Ryan’s is more of a plain glass of water. Is Weiner interested in reality or not? I think we deserve sober Congresspeople at this point.

Is it really this bad? Congress has a constitutional hold on the nation’s purse strings…the nation’s frayed, tattered, and oh so troubled purse strings…and it’s filled with a bunch of, uh, weiners who just like to sit and listen to “uplifting” speeches about unicorn farts that make them feel good. Three hundred million people are counting on these 535 to maintain some substantial connection to reality, and whenever they’re told about that reality these weiners start crying about how they need to go get blasted.

It is a mental illness of sorts. Measuring how real things are, according to whether those things make you happy or not.

Well, well. If it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad.

…the Venn diagram still applies.

But my reaction to the whole parade of silliness is gradually morphing.

Up until now, I have been nauseated by the spectacle of presidents — from either party — who do one thing, for a whole year, and then when the time comes to get up behind that big ol’ rostrum, say something different. This is not the kind of behavior we’re supposed to be seeing in that job. The office is not built for complicated men; it’s built for a simple dude, someone who is about one thing all the time. He gets up and delivers a report to Congress and to the nation on the state of the nation and what he intends to do about it, and from that, we have an executive agenda going forward.

Now, far be it from me to contradict the 92% who I’m told approved of the speech. I understand how this is supposed to work, we figure out what we’re “all” thinking and then we repeat it as if it is our own idea. But this has always bothered me. Obama spends money like it’s going out of style; this turns out to be unpopular, and so He gets up and delivers a State of the Union asking for more more more more more…and then says…oh by the way, we gotta do some belt-tightening around here. Presto chango, He becomes Mister Fiscal Responsibility.

This year I’m bugged by something different though. There is this meandering odor that we’re so lucky to have a president who happens to be this kind of duplicitous weasel. This doesn’t explain the 92%; that is an effect and not a cause.

But I remember this from during the Clinton SOTUs. Every now and then Bill Clinton would get up and extoll some conservative virtues…and there would be a palpable sense of…Hey! He’s really going to sock it to those Republicans now! This guy is so awesome, just so slick and greasy. Can’t be attacked because he can’t be defined. This is wonderful! …kind of like going to trial, and finding out the lawyer who represents you is the son of Beelzebub himself. One does not relish being so close to the Prince of Darkness, but hey, you want to win don’t you.

Let us speak with one voice.

We need to get this budget under control.

God bless the United States of America.

Those are three values, three priorities, three visions…to which, in His actions prior to last night’s speech, President Obama has been stridently opposed. Now He gets to throw them out there and get credit for them.

I don’t care if you’re a Republican or a democrat, or which side you want to see “win.” This is not how the presidency is supposed to work.