Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Kay S. Hymowitz writes in the Wall Street Journal:
“We are sick of hooking up with guys,” writes the comedian Julie Klausner, author of a touchingly funny 2010 book, “I Don’t Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters and Other Guys I’ve Dated.” What Ms. Klausner means by “guys” is males who are not boys or men but something in between. “Guys talk about ‘Star Wars’ like it’s not a movie made for people half their age; a guy’s idea of a perfect night is a hang around the PlayStation with his bandmates, or a trip to Vegas with his college friends…. They are more like the kids we babysat than the dads who drove us home.” One female reviewer of Ms. Kausner’s book wrote, “I had to stop several times while reading and think: Wait, did I date this same guy?”
I remember from years and years ago, “most” people would ask me things like “why are you so hung up on politics?” and my answer would be something variation of, “because that’s my money they’re spending…money that belongs to my kids who aren’t born yet…this stuff has a real impact.” And then “everyone” would ask me “why aren’t you interested in sports when everyone else is?” and I’d come back with “because…that stuff does not have a real impact.”
Now I’m not so engaged in self-worship as to say this is any kind of special ability of mine. It’s just a difference in concerns. Some of us make a special point of being concerned about things that matter, and some of us make a special point of being concerned with things that don’t matter.
Aw wait, that still came out wrong…
There is a possibility here that I’m not in any kind of minority; with the Tea Party and all, maybe I’m actually in the majority and it is only a perceived majority, and a factual minority, that goes the other way.
I dunno.
I do know this though: If you really do want to be all hung up on fluff, things that don’t matter, the “circuses” part of the bread-and-circuses…you can only be so engaged with it to the extent that your circumstances permit. Which team is going to win the Super Bowl — when the cupboards are full and the bills are all paid, that might seem a reasonable question to ask. And, let’s be fair about it, “Now that they’ve rebooted Star Trek, is Jean-Luc Picard still going to exist?” falls into the same category.
If your circumstances are such that even potable water is a matter subjected to some question, you probably won’t be asking about this stuff…
And this is where the ladies of marriageable age become frustrated. It’s the same thing we’ve discussed in these parts many times before. Modern life is too comfortable. We’re getting all fixated on a bunch of crap.
People tap into their Wells Fargo bank accounts through a Bank of America machine, or vice versa, and get socked a buck twenty-five for the “privilege” of accessing their own dough. They feel like their human rights have been violated. Time to riot in the streets. Grrrr!
And then they go pick up their morning frothy foo-foo drink at Starbucks for $4.50 and don’t so much as bat an eyelash.
What’s happening to young men? The same thing that’s happening to everybody else; the same thing that is happening to people in general. We’re losing our bearings. We are losing the ability to prioritize, because there’s no reason to.
We know the sun is going to come up tomorrow no matter what, and until it sets again, & beyond, we’ll still have enough to eat. There is no decision we can make that will put that in jeopardy, or if it is in jeopardy, will pull it out again.
We’re bored.
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Maybe a better question is, where have all the sensible women gone?
- Kini | 02/21/2011 @ 23:07If a genie allowed me to imprint one fact of life in the minds of all women, it would be this: you can put the toilet seat back down your own damn self. Seriously. It’s not like your arms are broken.
But if I got to choose another life lesson, it’d be: You. Can’t. Have. Everything. (Actually, this is a lesson all liberals, union goons, Obamacare proponents, and so forth need to learn, too, and there’s a remarkable degree of overlap in the membership rosters of all these groups… but I digress).
I really don’t see what’s so hard about this, or why 52% or more of the population absolutely refuses to grasp it. You choose to have a kid — your body, your choice, amIrite?– and you thereby choose to absent yourself from the workforce for three months, six months, eight months, a year. Or more, and always with the caveat that when you are at work, you’re liable to drop everything at any time if “mom stuff” gets in the way. And that’s all fine and good — the human race must propagate — but yet you somehow get all the credit for doing the work some other guy (and 99.999999% of the time it is a guy) does while you’re off maternity-leaving or breast-pumping or just-feeling-a-little-whoopsy-this-morning-ing?
This is fair… how? (And it’s always presented as “equality,” meaning “fairness” — have you noticed?). I can’t even come up with a counterargument for this. I’m reduced to sputtering incoherence by the sheer chutzpah of it all. I think it was David Hume who said that there are some arguments “so absurd, they elude all force of reason.” Maybe it was Elvis. Either way, this is one of them, and arguments like Hymowitz’s are another. Let me see if I can grasp it: you want a guy who’s tall, dark, sexy, handsome, and mysterious… who also holds down a steady job with a great paycheck (that he doesn’t mind signing over to you), and is more than happy to push a stroller around Central Park while you’re off at pilates class, and is always and everywhere ready, willing, and able to be your emotional tampon (and will not have to be told any of this but will somehow just sense it).
Piece of cake. Tell ya what, lady — I’ll hook you up with a guy like that when you fix me up with a millionaire heiress brain surgeon runway model arch-conservative video gamer nymphomaniac whose turn-ons include fat guys, fat guys who like to comment on political blogs, and fetching beers for fat guys who like to comment on political blogs.
Sheeeeeeesh. And this lady writes for the Wall Street Journal? How can I get a gig like that?
- Severian | 02/22/2011 @ 11:19Of course, I’ve always asked myself why do those women keep dating those guys when there are guys like me (of course, before I was married … but, there are still unmarried guys like me out there).
The answer I settled on most was is because we’re “boring”. The immature ones fixated on sports (and hey, I like sports — but I’m not fixated on them) or Star Wars (I loved the first series, but could never tell you the parts of a light saber or the specifications of an X-wing fighter) and … well I just never got into video games of any kind.
I think psychologically it is because they want to see the same kind of fixation on THEM that they see these guys have on these other things to make them feel worthwhile.
And of course you don’t need anyone to be fixated on you to BE worthwhile, but we all have these insecurites to some degree or another, and this is one way people deal with them.
So the guy fixates on them for a little while, or he doesn’t and she grows weary of trying to get his attention, and she moves on to the same kind of guy.
The kind of guy I am support you, take care of you when you need it, share stuff I like with you, let you share stuff you like with me … but by and large I’m going to let you be you, and if I didn’t like you in the first place, I would’ve picked someone else.
But somehow that doesn’t work for a lot of women.
- philmon | 02/22/2011 @ 11:25What’s notably absent in all of these “Men refuse to grow up!” screeds is any consideration of what women propose to give to the men they love. Like Gerard bowdlerizes regularly, they got A Hand Fulla Gimme And a Mouth Fulla “You Should Be Grateful.”
Try it for yourself sometime: if there’s somebody you’d like to get together with, sit down and make lists of what you intend to contribute to the relationship. Whatever tangibles you may present, you are most likely to be answered with “I intend to keep myself young and attractive (to whom, one wonders?” Nowhere is it ever likely to arise that there is an intent to love, honor, care for and cherish. No wonder young guys don’t want to grow up. What’s in it for them?
I’ve taken an admittedly radical pose on this, having been celibate for over 15 years since the last two female children I was incautious enough to allow myself to care about – and if you’d known me in my 30’s or 40’s, believe me when I tell you you’d be gasping at this information. I like girls a lot, but the current examples are selfish and unattractive beyond description. Plus an overwhelming majority of them are batshit crazy. And guess how I learned that.
What I’ve learned, belatedly, is that a guy can get along without. I’d rather there be someone close, but I sure don’t want it bad enough to go through that again.
- rob | 02/22/2011 @ 17:31Let’s see.
Men are stupid because ALL the men that are willing to date ME are!”
Got it.
So..
- CaptDMO | 02/22/2011 @ 18:28(to whomever)
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change
Courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference
…or something like that?
At the risk of sounding like a fuddy duddy:
If women want responsible men then they should quit rewarding irresponsible men with sex.
Why buy the cow if you get the milk for free? as the saying goes. Women wanted the sexual revolution, to free themselves from being housewives and from being tied to their children, well the flip side of that coin is that men are no longer tired to their families, their job or their responsibility to make a living to support their wives and children. It is only fair. The new male is only saying and doing what the feminist in the 1960’s wanted him to do. Sex is recreational and not tied to a commitment. Well fine ladies, “Sex in the City” works both ways. If you crave commitment then give some and be a little more chaste and quick hooking up with losers for fun and profit. The guy who can’t committ because he isn’t sure he is ready for marriage, has no carreer and no prospects of one despite a college education would change his tune if his only outlet was a magazine in the bathroom.
Women want absolute faithfulness, responsibility and maturity from their husbands and lovers but only offer a slightly enhanced standard of living through a bit more disposable cash in return. Who cares? Not most men, they’ll take the sex and then move on when the partner whines about committment. If women want a responsible man then they should act like a responsible woman. How about not droping their panties for any guy who will drop his pants; not abandoning thier kids to a daycare so they can have a “fullfilling” carreer despite having kids that need them (And denegrating the role of mothers in society) and not waiting until they are 40 think about children. I think a lot of good men would jump women like that. They wouldn’t have to be the prettiest, the most fashionable or anything else but committed loving wives.
Go ahead flame away I have the abestos suit on.
- Fai Mao | 02/22/2011 @ 20:24And then “everyone” would ask me “why aren’t you interested in sports when everyone else is?” and I’d come back with “because…that stuff does not have a real impact.”
Oh this is great! Priceless! Couldn’t have said it better, Morgan.
If people paid less attention to their fantasy sports leagues….and more to something the president said last week, or a bill in the Senate, or what’s going on in a House subcommittee, the nation would be far, far better off.
I remember making this exact point – using very close to those exact words to some co-workers while eating my lunch in the break room at work some years ago. One of them said, “I have no idea what you are talking about.”
A second listener turned to the first and answered, “I think that’s his point.” The girl who answered me first had no idea what a subcommittee was, or probably a senator either.
- cylarz | 02/23/2011 @ 02:31Fai Mao,
Far from a flame, this is a validation of your point (and I don’t think anybody here is likely to disagree with you, anyway.)
Here’s an excerpt from Stephen Hunter’s latest, Dead Zero. I resoundingly agree with every comma, having watched the same thing from the same perspective.
The West…has been destroyed by the people it was built to protect: its women.
The West lasted from AD 732, when Charles Martel defeated the Muslims at Tours, until 1960, where it fell without a battle. In 1960, the birth control pill became widely available. Many think of it as heaven, sexual nirvana, the route to self-expression, wish fulfillment, and liberation for millions of women. I think of it as Auschwitz in a bottle. It was and is genocide, as, using it, the women of my generation happily traded off 1,200 years of unparalleled growth, wealth, security stability, scientific and ethical progress for a second BMW in the garage. The West ceased producing at a sustainable rate, while Islam continued to populate the world. You may look elsewhere for the demographics. This fact cannot be avoided: we Westerners currently may be analogized to upper-class Brits on the deck of the Titanic, April 12, 1912. My, my, why is the great ship tilting a bit? Why, dear, it’s probably some minor malfunction that the handsome young men will soon fix. Meanwhile, may I have another aperitif, steward?
But not only did the pill doom the West from without by limiting population, it destroyed the culture from within by destroying the gyroscope of civilization – that is, the balance between the sexes. The sexes had existed for that glorious 1,200-year span in a kind of brilliant equipoise: men provided and protected, women nourished and nurtured. It was a sublimely efficient system, if harsh. The result was generation after generation of bold, intelligent, hardy risk takers, driven by their fathers’ sense of duty but made compassionate by their mothers’ mercy. They were afraid of nothing, committed to a larger thing than themselves, all united in their confident sense of destiny. The men did what they had to do, the women did what they had to do. Together, they built a thing called civilization. In all realms, from the scientific to the industrial to the aesthetic to the military to the intellectual and the medical, Western thought and culture prevailed. It was extraordinary, and it seems even now absurd that we threw it away in a single generation.
After 1960, the dominos fell quickly. Once the size of a family could be controlled, it shrank; women returned to the workplace. Soon – believe me, I am not arguing that they are “dumb” or in any way “inferior” – they were making equal or even more than the males, so male authority was challenged and, metaphorically, that leveraged and ultimately destroyed the whole concept of authority. Simultaneously, with small family size, more was invested in each of 2.4 children, so that the death of one meant a shattering emotional wastage. Soldiers could no longer died in the thousands, much less the hundreds. Without defenders, we are doomed.
There it is. Women were better off (and inexpressibly more attractive) before the ’60s. Keep in mind that younger guys born from the ’60s onward have never experienced a world without “feminism” and Speech Control. I wouldn’t mind being younger, I guess, but I wouldn’t be 20 years old in the Brave New World for all the tea in China. Virtually everybody I’ve ever met who was born during WWII and earlier takes it without question that, as Robert B. Parker notably put it, “Ive been a kid, and I’ve been an adult. Adult is better.”
Baby Boomers, and younger generations still, scratch their heads in wonder at this simple statement.
- rob | 02/23/2011 @ 10:08The Kay S. Hymowitz is somewhat childish, I think. She’s complaining that men in their 20s are immature. Maybe. But I think women are just as much to blame for it – Fai Mao is absolutely right. Stop dropping your panties for guys like this.
Ladies, stop trying to meet quality men at the local watering hole. Try church, a class, a hobby group, a political campaign, even at work. The good men are out there. Sometimes, however, they wear mechanics’ coveralls instead of a suit and tie.
Sheesh. If guys were finding out that fooling around with the beer bong into your 30s wasn’t a winning proposition and that women wanted nothing to do with a man like that…then pretty soon it wouldn’t be cool anymore, now would it? If there’s one thing nearly all men want, it’s women. We do what gets them.
- cylarz | 02/23/2011 @ 12:03