House of Eratosthenes

During our domain & database crash this weekend, we were going through the archives of Rotten Chestnuts as well as of our own works (RC is physically hosted over here, as a sub-site of ours), and we came across this excellent post put up by severian.

John Scalzi, author of Redshirts & other fine science-fiction works, has engaged in some Internet bragging about — um — not being able to press as much as his daughter. Somehow, “revoking the Man Card” doesn’t seem adequate for this.

Let it be known that my daughter can lift more than I do. Because she’s on her school’s weightlifting team, and also because she’s awesome.

sev quotes Darth Toolpodicus, who offers…

haha good for Scalzi’s daughter…but he has no idea how bad that is. My wife and I are both competitive powerlifters, she benches a lot for a female (180lbs). Her biggest complaint: After lifting for years, the only guys she outbenches are the one who are new to the gym…virtually all the guys who are there regularly pass her up within a couple months.

All Scalzi would had to do is SHOW UP at the gym…but “bro, do you you even lift?!?”

Then closes with a common refrain:

It takes a lot of effort not to notice things like this. It takes a huge, hermetically-sealed bubble, maintained with the zealotry of an industrial clean room, not to notice some very basic problems with the liberal worldview. And yet, guys like Scalzi and his umpteen zillion blog readers / Twitter followers manage it.

Normal people with red blood, gather up the facts and go wherever those facts take them. The conclusions come afterward. Our friends the liberals, though, reach the conclusions first. The facts are stenciled out according to whether or not they’re compatible with that favorable conclusion; the ones that do, are given extra weight, and then some thin rationale is contrived against the “facts” that don’t support the desired conclusion. The liberal calls this “debunking” and can explain, in great detail, why exactly it is a debunking. In fact, just try and stop him from explaining, and re-explaining, over and over again.

But, it isn’t really a debunking. And they know it. It is a process of filtering. God only knows how much energy it takes; if we could somehow capture just a quarter of it, we could end every energy crisis that awaits us, for all time.

Actually, I was thinking about this just an hour ago, paying bills. Out of ten companies who have to receive my money because they sent me a bill, two of them failed to keep their stories straight about what was owed. One complained of a past-due amount, I went back and checked my previous month’s records and discovered there was a confirmation number there. I went ahead and paid the amount, but I guess we have to have a conversation. A third company, a credit card, failed to include a $65 charge for lunch over the weekend; I wanted to pay off the entire balance, I tried to put in what they reported plus the sixty-five, but they wouldn’t accept.

My point is — that’s thirty-percent of the information I have, being not quite so much wrong, but sufficiently pockmarked with inconsistencies to be unworkable. At least let us say, in this case, not-immediately-workable. There actually are no past-due situations here, and I started gathering up the (correct?) balances at the beginning of the month, like I always do. There shouldn’t be any wrinkles to this at all. But, there always are some like this.

It made me think of liberals, because people who manage to receive and then report a perfectly smoothed-out-and-ironed “truth,” with no residual uncertainties whatsoever, whether they realize it or not, are confessing that they don’t live in the real world. It may be an overstatement to say they’re revealing that they don’t pay bills. But not by much (and I suspect, in many cases, that may be exactly the situation).

People who are caught up in this habit of massaging truth into some alternate form, like mashing a pillow up into the right ball to support your neck at night, so that it fits their preconceptions…they shouldn’t brag about doing this. It isn’t a positive human attribute, it’s not a strength. It is a weakness, which would interfere with the capturing & reporting acumen needed to pay bills…or…any human effort that has to do with managing information and is more demanding than that. And paying bills is very, very close to the simple-side of that spectrum. Real life has redundant and inconsistent reports. It has enigmas and illusory contradictions. It’s got lots, and lots, and lots, of uncertainties. People shouldn’t brag about being “able” to do away with these in short order, because they’re not dealing with it, what they’re doing is just ignoring the parts they don’t like. It’s kind of obvious.

Just like, people shouldn’t brag about not being able to lift as much as their daughters. That doesn’t make you a better parent. In fact, it is literally weak. But, if liberals were able to identify strengths as strengths and weaknesses as weaknesses, they wouldn’t be liberals.

Thanks for the linkage!

I’m not even so much amazed that Scalzi would brag about it. Yeah, ok, what kind of “man” with hair on his nuts would…. but whatever; that’s their twisted little culture. It’s the effort it must take not to notice this — and its obvious implications — that really floors me.

I played a lot of co-rec sports back in college. It was a good way to meet girls and burn off the nightly case of beer. But hungover as I often was, I couldn’t help but notice an interesting phenomenon: The girls went all-out to win, while the guys’ first priority was not hurting the girls. In any jump ball situation in basketball, for example, the girl would launch herself full force at the ball. And I mean that literally — if the guy moved out of the way, 90% of these chicks would’ve belly flopped onto the court. They simply had no idea what to do with their bodies.

The guys, meanwhile, would very carefully set for contact. They’d go for the ball, of course, but they’d invariably angle their bodies in such a way that they’d take most of the force of the girl’s wild headfirst dive. They’d literally save her from the consequences of her own action. (Needless to say, had another guy gone up for the ball in that fashion, we’d either have let him flop, or plastered him). And there are thousands more examples: I’ve seen countless guys go to block a shot, realize it was a girl shooting, and pull their hand down in midair rather than smack the ball. I’ve done it myself. (Needless to say, if it were a guy sending that weak shit up, he’d have Wilson tattooed on his forehead for a week).

The girls seemed utterly oblivious to all this, but it was evident to every man on the court. And that illusion of competence was very, very dangerous, because a) a lot of guys got hurt trying not to clobber the girls, and b) sometimes guys really did have to play man-style (in a championship game, for example), and then a lot of girls got hurt.

Poor Scalzi’s daughter is going to go through life thinking she’s a lot tougher than she is. Here’s hoping that it’s a basketball court or something where she finds out she’s not. The alternatives are horrible… and Daddy will be largely to blame.
- Severian | 07/15/2014 @ 08:44
It’s a Hultgreen problem…
- mkfreeberg | 07/15/2014 @ 17:41
[…] Very Manly Bloggers are astonished that John Scalzi’s daughter can bench-press more than he can. Well, to be fair, they’re astonished that Scalzi is not shamed by this revelation, as […]
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- House of Eratosthenes | 03/05/2017 @ 14:26
[…] The Soviets, you’ll recall, were all-in on sports… but, ironically, only individual sports. (The few teams were. of course, thinly-disguised Red Army teams). Training in isolation, performing in front of just a few (easily influenced) judges… that’s the Communist ideal. As Z Man’s post notes, youth participation in “sports” is dropping across the board. I suspect that trend is about to reverse, as the Left rediscovers populism and even nationalism (ask Joe Crowley). When’s the next Summer Olympics? That’s always good for advertising cute little White girls in Soviet-style sports like gymnastics. Swimming, too, I bet will take off soon (the Diversity don’t take well to water). Plus, an extracurricular is an extracurricular, right? And as we know, girls have weightlifting teams in high school…. […]
- Ghost Runner on Third | Rotten Chestnuts | 07/18/2018 @ 07:13

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“One of the Best Illustrations You’ll Ever Find of the Liberal Cocoon”Tuesday, July 15th, 2014

“One of the Best Illustrations You’ll Ever Find of the Liberal Cocoon”
Tuesday, July 15th, 2014