House of Eratosthenes

Strong men, I notice, often scare weak women, and a lot of weak women who are scared of strong men claim it’s a case of a strong woman scaring a weak man. We have an opportunity here, as well as an emerging necessity, to try to come up with a working definition of “weak”: You probably are that, if it is your habit to conjure up conflict that didn’t exist before, and make it look like it’s the other person doing that. Or, if the conflict did exist before, you seek to prevail in it by removing the competition that is threatening rather than by improving on your own achievements and capabilities.

The more years I see come and go, the more impressed I am that weakness becomes a pattern of belief: A lot of people believe in weakness. They won’t admit it. But you can pick them out pretty easily; they treat things as the opposite of whatever those things are. They tend to shower lots of deferential courtesies on others who, in return, behave unkindly toward them. They treat mean people as if they were nice people, and nice people as mean people. They come up with ideas that have no history of working effectively, or that have very lengthy histories of botching everything up — and treat those ideas as if they were good ones.

And those people are very frightened of people who don’t do things the same way.

“Strong women scare weak men.”

Maybe. But have you considered, madam, that you might just be a b*tch?

Folks who put bumper stickers like this (“well behaved women rarely make history,” etc.) are invariably raging narcissists with entitlement complexes bigger than Kim Jong-Un’s. My not wanting to deal with you, then, has very little to do with our relative strengths and almost everything to do with the fact that life is short. You no doubt feel that a cosmic injustice has been done when the nose-ringed kid at Starbuck’s doesn’t give you quite enough foam in your triple-venti-latte-soy-mocha-frappacino, and that this warrants holding up the line for as long as it takes to get the regional manager down here to personally re-cream your beverage. But I don’t, because I just can’t see how giving the rest of us caffiene jitters, not to mention making us all late to work, is some kind of glorious karmic revenge on whoever it was that dumped Emily Dickinson at the altar.

Reasonable people may differ, I guess.

Point is, there’s more to “strength” than the ability to make people uncomfortable in social situations, especially at no physical, mental, emotional, or financial risk to yourself. That’s a lesson men absorbed soon after swinging down from the trees, which I suppose is why there are so many “weak” men about….
- Severian | 04/08/2013 @ 10:25
Strong men, I notice, often scare weak women

Last night, the wife and I were watching last week’s episode of “Revolution”. One of the former military bad-asses has fallen in love, gotten married and works as a librarian in a small agrarian community. Under an assumed name, of course, because his real name was associated with numerous acts of violence. These are violent times, but let’s disregard that for right now. Anyway, a group of armed thugs known as a kill group march into to town to get him and the other bad-ass. Those two-plus a pretty tough chick- take out 20 armed thugs who are looking to kill, maim and destroy. The leader of the thugs enters the home of the erstwhile librarian with the intention of killing the book guy’s wife. He even tells her that he’s going to carve her up. The librarian rushes in at the last moment and turns the thug leader into several smaller, less mobile pieces, thereby saving his wife’s life. When he goes to comfort her, she shrugs off his arm and runs shrieking away because “EWW, violence!!!!”. It was like a bad dream. What was worse was that it was entirely predictable. I guess the message is that it’s better to die that to be saved by violent means. Screw that. Someone messes with my wife or kids and there won’t be enough left to identify by DNA testing. Even better? My wife knows this and finds my stance comforting. This is because my wife is a strong woman. The TV wife? Not so much.
- Physics Geek | 04/08/2013 @ 10:35
Strong women scare weak men. Strong women scare weak women.

The rationale for the anti-Palin campaign in ten words.
- Rich Fader | 04/08/2013 @ 22:15

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Strong People Scare Weak PeopleSunday, April 7th, 2013

Strong People Scare Weak People
Sunday, April 7th, 2013