House of Eratosthenes

Today, we still have signaling. But the signaling is, too much of the time, from the suppliers to the those who demand, such that the demand ends up being nothing more than a reflection of whatever is in supply. The suppliers, in turn, then end up doing whatever they wanted to do. It’s then up to the consumer to find a way to make it fit.

The consumers have been losing their voice. We have quite a few transactions being closed, only for the benefit of the supplier, many of them without the consent of the consumer or only with consent from the consumer that has been somehow perverted. It’s either been regulated when the will is not there, or given freely but without due consideration, more as a conditioned response.

While that’s happening, we have a decline in masculinity, almost as if there was some orbiting radioactive source breaking down our stores of testosterone. Our culture is not what it was before. Too many women have a need to scold men, and because consumers are tailoring their orders around the whims of suppliers and learning to like it that way, too many men are manufacturing a need to be scolded.

Put it all together, and you have stuff like this:

As James Delingpole mentions as he writes at Brietbart, there is a contradiction here so obvious that you would have to expend good effort to avoid seeing it: Mother Nature doesn’t need us, we can’t do anything that has any effect on her, so send in your money right away. This is a hundred and eighty degrees reversed from the message you give to someone when you want their money, and they, whether gullible or not, can at least think rationally. In that situation it’s well-established what sort of story you want to tell: Here is the expected end-state if you do nothing, here is the more likely result if you do something, now see how far apart they are? You have influence, you can help.

Somehow, it made sense for someone to commission Julia Roberts to deliver the opposite message and tell us all how worthless we are.

The unavoidable conclusion one must reach is that, for one reason or another, this opens billfolds. I have to mull it over long & hard to consider it, let alone settle on it, even tentatively. But there it is. “Oh joy, I’m scum! Pretty-Woman-Mother-Nature says so! Where’s my checkbook?” If no one is ready to say that, there’d be no reason to put all this to video. Would there?

I guess that’s the big question. We certainly do have a lot of “producers” who act this way, putting together commodities that are built around this scolding ritual, usually involving aggressive females talking down to timid males. The commodities, once put together, do not seem to me to be languishing on shelves anywhere. Someone is buying them. Perhaps everyone buying is a female who wants to be more aggressive, who then tries to pass it off to the males she wants to dominate, with mixed success.

Or maybe we do have some masochist males lining up for slaughter. Exhibit A would be this story about Ray J and Princess Love:

Ray J’s girlfriend Princess Love was arrested in New Orleans after beating allegedly him up.
:
The singer told cops his girlfriend attacked him, which resulted in several cracked ribs, a busted lip and a torn ACL.

Someone allegedly heard her scream “I’m gonna kill you” at Ray J, but cops weren’t called until a hotel security guard saw the singer bleeding, according to TMZ.

Love was reportedly charged with domestic abuse and battery.

A source told TMZ that Ray J has since bailed his girlfriend out of jail and got her a lawyer.

Looks like the dude’s paying for his own hanging. Point made. Hat tip to Instapundit, who adds:

I blame today’s current climate of female privilege, which leads to a sense of entitlement and impunity. Also, note that despite hearing her say she was going to kill him, hotel security didn’t intervene until they saw him bleeding.

Over on the Hello Kitty of Blogging I made a comment about a guy at work who can’t drink at home because his wife is pregnant, and if she can’t drink he can’t drink. One of my former work associates from some twenty years ago said,

Check if he was raised by a single mom. I’m betting he had no ma[l]e role model.

Hmmm. Well there is certainly something that has changed in the last half-century or so, that could explain things. But, I doubt it in this case. It doesn’t fit with Ray J from what I can see. There’s something else going on here.

Brother-in-Law says,

What’s with these men growing vaginas ????

It could be just a simple lack of awareness that there is an issue. I wasn’t raised by a single mom, and by the time I understood there were some trolleys coming off the track here I was, if memory recalls, somewhere in my mid-twenties with one divorce behind me already. Even then though, you have to be much more well-informed and conscious of what’s happening, to start to take a stand against it, or even just to resist it if you’re into the think-globally-act-locally thing. By the time we get to actually choosing a woman who’s willing to do the driving so you can have a drink or two at the restaurant, showing sufficient maturity to turn away from this “get even for everything” tit-for-tat stuff? Well by then, I was nearly forty.

And in my case that was some good progress, good enough to make all the difference between failure and success. She’s puttering around in the bathroom as I write this and we’re about to bump into each other and have our daily race to see who gets the shower first. She’s a gem, but I found her relatively late in life.

That’s why I’m not in a big hurry to get snotty with the current work-colleague guy. We’re all susceptible to this. In fact I would say most of our present society, sorted by nose-count or by mass, is engaging in this ritual in some way. It’s as if we’ve figured out, or begun to labor under the delusion, that this is some sort of magic rocket-fuel that makes everything go: Tell some masculine figure he’s just a bunch of refuse and is not wanted. Somehow, all objectives worth achieving, are achieved through that, through the scolding ritual.

I could never respect Julia Roberts as an actress because she never took off her clothes on screen. What a prude. But to get on to the video, if Mother Nature can endure us all and evolve no matter what we do, then why are we worried about the “ozone hole”, “acid raid”, “global warming”, “glogal cooling”? Mother Nature can endure in spite of us so party on Garth.
- Open other end | 02/17/2015 @ 07:36
On the plus side, my theory that dating a girl who calls herself “Princess Love” is a bad idea is now empirically confirmed.
- Severian | 02/17/2015 @ 10:06
Here’s another part of it. My boyfriend’s dad was tough. He left home at nine. He went into the military and was at Pearl Harbor. He also fought in Korea. He was a s**thead to his son. So the son decided that he would never treat his kid like that. And he didn’t. The son is now 24. He’s a bit of a wuss and special snowflake. He has supporting himself by running a small business and that is helping him to grow up. I think there are other fathers that want to protect their kids from what they went through. it’s hard, but those tough times are what help the boy become a man.
- teripittman | 02/18/2015 @ 11:35
Oooh, so Mother Nature needs a favor?! Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she’s losing. Well I say, hard cheese.

-Montgomery Burns
- AMartel | 02/18/2015 @ 14:48
Julia Roberts was always a crappy actress. When she first started she had a compelling screen presence as a feisty waifish ingenue. That wore off quickly and she had no talent to fall back on. Now she’s just a bitter broad and difficult to watch; famous for being famous. The cashier at my local grocery has more charisma and charm.
- AMartel | 02/18/2015 @ 14:55
@teri, I think you may be missing out on a key difference between the DI-Dad who yells at his kid because he wants the boy to become a man, and Julia Roberts entreating herself to her own brand of amateur therapy by engaging this ritual. I don’t pick up that she cares too much about what becomes of her audience after being on the receiving end, like the gruff-tough capital-dee Dad does. Recall the thing about consumers losing influence as the suppliers supply whatever they want to supply. There is a demand to match the supply, but the demand is purely from consumers accommodating the desires of the suppliers, not arriving at the market with any sort of real need from their end.

Think of: Leonardo DiCaprio, in any movie in which he plays a tough guy. Nobody wanted to see that, the movie got made because Leonardo wanted to do it. Once the movie is out people will line up to buy tickets here & there, it may even make a profit. But the truth is this would be just another example of the “Wanna-conomy” I was describing, everything gets done because the suppliers wanna do the supplying. But speaking as one of the tough-Dad types who does some yelling because he doesn’t want his kid to grow up to be girly, I don’t have any similar desire to go yelling at my kid, and I’m probably not alone in that.

Julia Roberts doesn’t give a rip who her audience is, let alone what becomes of them. Probably doesn’t care too much about whether it numbers in the millions, or in the tens.
- mkfreeberg | 02/19/2015 @ 06:03
I was raised in an intact family, and my father was a bit of an asshole, but he taught me how to work, a trade, and honor. I shake my head weekly at the fuckwits I work with that behave like women in the way they try to get things done. Rather than tell you what they want, the manipulate, whine, and complain to each other.
After I divorced wife #3 (twelve years ago!) I decided to stop trying to have a LTR with women (yup, I’m a bit of an asshole, too) and try out being alone. As opposed to lonely. It was the start of the best years of my life. Yeah, I’ll grow old and die alone-I can deal with that. I won’t deal with living with a harridan that won’t respect me, because I don’t have to.
- Frank the Wanderer | 02/19/2015 @ 07:54
I was raised in an intact family. Dad was a much wounded veteran and had his flaws. Mom was a little over soft but, like my dad, a flawed but neat person. Guess that is me too. Its just that my main squeeze and I were lucky enough to realize that marriage is an awfully tough job so we better work at it. We made decisions about how we were going to try and finance and raise our children before we started the conversation about did we want to have any.

Our decisions meant that we were never going to have a lot of money for toys, expensive vacations, or getting our way most of the time. I not only love my wife but I like my wife. I am just not smart enough to do everything my way. Yes we have fights. We also enjoy each others knowledge and leadership. We believe that old fashioned hokum about the man being the head of the household (whole verse, not just the first half). We just do not believe that being the head of the household means being the boss. In point of fact my wife usually runs the household. On those rare decisions where a decision must be made and we cannot come to common terms I have done that. It averages less than once a year.

A man does what needs to be done. If that means waiting for years until the one that engages my attention caught my eye, than you wait for years. If that means going to work day after day because kids would not understand no food in the house than you go to work day after day. If that means you should keep your powder dry and your rifle clean, than you take care of your equipment. It means going on walks, or fishing trips or camping trips with the kids and your favorite lady then you take them to selected spots and make it possible for them to develop cob-webby memories to preserve them when darker days beckon.

I am a flawed human being. Do not claim to be even remotely close to who I should be. The truth is that I have always been lucky in my family. I have always admired men who work. Think of them as my brothers (and sisters) no matter creed or color or sexually challenged. Just do not much value those who refuse to carry part of the load and those who want to savagely complain about how how the rest of us are not doing what they want us to do.
- Theo | 03/11/2015 @ 21:56

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The Scolding RitualTuesday, February 17th, 2015

The Scolding Ritual
Tuesday, February 17th, 2015