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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   23419 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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Overall, if in an intellectual debate space like this one somebody can unapologetically assert that he dislikes women when they argue with him, I'd say that's pretty suggestive that many men are uncomfortable facing the possibility of being intellectually bested by a girl.

One of the best allegorical moments of my life:

I was managing a Rock Climbing gym at the time, most of the part time workers were local teenagers. We had just gotten a MoonBoard for the gym and set it up, two of the kids Romeo and Juliet stayed after closing up with me to play with our new toy, both seniors in high school while I was a college grad at the time. Romeo was a pretty good hobby climber who had gotten into it with some buddies a year or so ago, Juliet had parents who climbed back in college before becoming bankers and had been climbing since she was 8, competing in youth level since she was 14.

Now the thing about rock climbing is, and why I recommend it to parents so much, is that it is possibly one of the more gender equal real sporting events. All the very best Pros are men, there are grades that no woman has ever climbed, but anywhere below the pro level it is mixed. You are more likely to run into men who are really good climbers in your gym than you are to run into women, but there will be women in the top grades too, and until you are climbing the top grades you will run into women who stomp you. Romeo was a good climber, but Juliet was much better. And worse, while Romeo and I hacked our way up routes with lots of swinging and cutting feet and grunting, Juliet would glide gracefully up the same climb. What she lacked in reach and upper body strength, she more than made up for in balance, flexibility, and coordination. Her technique was perfect. She danced up the wall, while I yanked myself up.

Romeo was a sweet kid generally, well behaved, responsible, a nerdy Fillipino with great SATs who later went to USC, we called each other "Grandpa" and "Grandson." Liberal politics, very respectful of the girls on staff generally (this was a regular problem we dealt with regarding other male staff). He liked climbing a lot, took to it in that classic nerdy-kid late bloomer way that I took to CrossFit and later climbing, it gave him a venue to be athletic despite not being on the football or basketball teams at his high school, it helped his self esteem as he got better.

As Juliet beat him, you could see his self esteem imploding, and he started acting out in ways I normally didn't see. He started making increasingly offensive jokes in a way that was out of character for him, he was almost bouncing around with nervous energy after each time he failed a climb and Juliet flashed it, cracking dick jokes or sex jokes at every half-opportunity. It got progressively worse as the problems went on. When he started in on Jew jokes ("Bet climbing a fence would have helped you get out of Auscwitz" or something like that) I had to ask him to help me with something in the storage room and tell him to knock it off, then told them I had to turn off the lights and I was headed home.

There's a saying I've seen in the Manosphere that women are human beings and men are human doings. Women are valuable in their own right, or at least as objects of sexual and romantic desire. Men are valuable only in the things they do. Disregarding debating its truth value, this is a deep insight into the insecurity of the male psyche, how we perceive the world. Every man hangs his self esteem on something he does. Romeo hung it in part on rock climbing. He didn't have some big crush on Juliet, as I recall, but she was a girl his age who would have been appropriate for him to hook up with, and being a healthy teenage boy he had probably thought about it. She had value inherently as a cute girl, his own value came from the things he did. Then, it turns out she is also better at the things he did, his sense of his own value imploded.

So:

I have had several disturbing conversations where the principle "most men dislike argumentative women" played out as the man getting visibly angry and breaking off the conversation as soon as I indicated my interest in offering (polite, calm, well-evidenced) counterarguments to whatever they were contending...Overall, if in an intellectual debate space like this one somebody can unapologetically assert that he dislikes women when they argue with him, I'd say that's pretty suggestive that many men are uncomfortable facing the possibility of being intellectually bested by a girl.

Makes a lot of sense to me. You've taken away their Doing while keeping your Being, it throws off the order of the universe for them, they have no place anymore.

I'll note the irony that I wrote multiple paragraphs to explain a woman's own experiences to her.

I like this comment because of the avalanche of "multiple things can be true at once" it evidences;

  1. Romeo was an otherwise good kid who didn't know how to handle his emotions in one specific context and - were this an office instead of a rock climbing gym - was certainly risking being fired with, perhaps, a lot of downstream career damage.

  2. @FiveHourMarathon demonstrated excellent leadership and tact in the storeroom-lights-out rouse ... but may have technically run a foul of HR policy in my imagined office-centric parallel universe

  3. Men being "human doings" is absolutely how many males self-conceive yet revealing that to women frequently elicits some sort of variation on "oh, get over it! Learn to love yourself." (Side note: this is where a lot of modern psychology utterly fails to help men. Build That Shed)

  4. Male performance related failure absolutely should be met with a constructive "hey, I lost, but I can get better / I can take pride in my level of effort etc." yet will also have a some amount of "HOLY SHIT I AM A FUCKING WASTE OF SPACE" as part of that process.

  1. I don't think you can really separate those two things. Romeo was 17 or 18 at the time, at least four years and a lot of maturing out from any white collar corporate work. It would be a very different act for a 22 or 23 year old college grad than it was for a teenager; and different again to see from 35 year old. Maturing is a real thing that happens!

  2. That's a reason I chose to avoid building a career in the white collar corporate world. Though I wouldn't say it was leadership, just being a few years older and recognizing my feelings from a few years ago in my grandson, and knowing he needed to cool off.

  3. Absolutely. The problem is that showing vulnerability as a man never helps bring you up, only brings you down. This is helpful when people perceive you as too high up for them, when they already like you and especially when they're a little intimidated by you, vulnerability brings you back into level with them and they like you better than ever. But when you're already below them, it just drags you down further.

  4. My view of healthy male self esteem mostly resembles what Rao calls "Losers" in the Gervais Theory of Management or whatever it was. That we label the same philosophy of life as "healthy" or "losers" probably says a lot about at least one of us. Healthy male self esteem comes from having a variety of Doings in one's life, a variety of accomplishments in one's history, which one can fall back on. I have been mogged by a hot tattooed 100lb female at the crag flashing my project; it doesn't lead me to implode or lash out because I have confidence that other things I've done, professionally or personally. I know I have a beautiful wife, got into elite schools, deadlifted a good weight, so when any one of those things goes wrong I think of the others. When you have nothing to fall back on, every injury kills you.

deadlifted a good weight

10,000% The only thing that actually matters in life.

The one thing you can really know. The iron never lies to you.

Your story makes me vividly imagine cutting her safety equipment and hearing the snapping sound as she breaks her neck.

I'm not a good man.

  • -17

I'm not a good man.

Well, this certainly isn't a good comment. Banned for a day.

Can you tell me which rule I broke, and whether the decision to ban me came before or after identifying that rule?

Unkind, unnecessarily antagonistic, not writing like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion, egregiously obnoxious, and multiple user reports.

I banned you for breaking the rules, so yeah, the decision to ban you came after identifying the rules you were breaking. But the case was, as you can see, wildly overdetermined. Coming back to open a rules lawyering session (as your aim appears to be here) is not going to benefit this account's longevity, though.

You misunderstand me if you think I'm interested in rules lawyering. What I'm curious about is how committed you all are to the rules-based order. So far, between me and the Jew-posters, you seem to be committed to banishing assholes more than having legible principles.

What I'm curious about is how committed you all are to the rules-based order.

The commitment is to the foundation:

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases.

The rules are crafted in service of that, moderation is conducted with it mind, and where the rules and the foundation might seem to conflict, the foundation trumps.

So far, between me and the Jew-posters, you seem to be committed to banishing assholes more than having legible principles.

I mean, one of the very first rules is "be kind," so banishing assholes is definitely also rules-based. Of course the rules are not self-enforcing and the mod team is not a calculator, we aren't always perfectly predictable and we aren't always right. But the vast majority of our users seem to get on just fine. In general if it looks like you're even trying to follow the rules, you'll be fine. It's the people that go looking for just how far they can go without getting banned, who tend to be the biggest problem.

In principle, it's fine to ask questions about the rules, and discuss them when it seems warranted to do so. But in practice, the vast majority of the time I get questions about the rules, it is from people who are looking for ways around the foundation itself, rather than ways to understand and follow the rules better. (Weirdly, it's also almost always from people who are obsessed with Jews for some reason, including one particularly persistent troll who has rolled literally dozens of alts at this point--like, think of the good such a person could do if they directed their efforts toward literally anything else! But this just seems to be an all-too-predictable symptom of the age.)

How old are you?

Physically, middle-aged. But in my mentality towards the opposite sex I fully identify with the male character.

Does it bring you comfort to be the opposite and equal of the black women who murderously hate those who have committed the crime of being better than them?

I have never felt comfort in four years and four months.

A shame. But then it would cost you nothing to at least keep such thoughts private. Candidness is appreciated, but this is particularly unconventional candidness because it demonstrates a lack of any virtue to your position (at least the guys who itch to run over protesters in the street are operating from some understanding of law, justice and the right to drive on the road their taxes paid for). Because of your comment, my (and others' perhaps) opinion of those who share your viewpoint on women will be diminished, and the preference for the dominance of the woke will be marginally raised as opposed to the preference for the dominance of, yes, those known as incels. Better my sister, girlfriend or daughter be canceled than murdered.

I'm well aware you're not the type who cares about moralizing or even pragmatic advice.

I would swear that you're female because I try to remember those few who mention that incredibly important in my eyes fact in this forum, but your latest comments in this thread suggest otherwise. I don't know what to think, but either way, the catharsis of me expressing how much I'm hostile towards the female half overshadows any infinitesimal effects it might have on the course of the future.

Well, it might be just my female-centric cucked socialization speaking, but in my observation, settling into the groove of thinking thoughts that are negative, unproductive and revolting is not worth the catharsis overall. Maybe if it was only two of the three...

The count depends on the viewpoint. For example, Ted Bundy wouldn't find my thoughts revolting, and he's the female sex symbol.

The female sex symbol? Come on now. Even a female sex symbol would be stretching it. How many admirers did he have, when compared to men of similar renown who weren't serial killers?

If you want to take tips from Ted Bundy you should consider that:
a) accepting Ted's view on what is revolting and not the general society's and acting on those values is likely to land you in prison, where it will be very hard to enjoy the company of all those flocks of hybristophilic admirers,
b) , which you likely won't have all that many anyway. Ted was hot and his face was well-known, while you, well, would be less likely to be having the problems you have if you could pull chicks with a mugshot.
c) Ted likely can't have a value judgment on what's revolting and what's not because he's a psychopath, the category does not exist for him. You may as well query a brick wall.

Ted is more of an incel sex symbol than he ever was a female sex symbol.

More comments

Why is it a shame? We can't exist in harmony and never could, don't you like that my existence is miserable? I have no power to exact revenge on the sex which I consider a major part of my misery, while you hold all the cards.

You have a very warped understanding of the way typical people think of those like you if you think sadistic fantasies are common. For the most part, I do not think of incels, the homeless or the destitute third worlders at all. I do not "like it" that your existence is miserable and likely wouldn't unless you actively wronged me.

If you think I'm some sort of a winner Chad or a woman because I found your comment distasteful, your inferenced are wrong and miscalibrated as well.

Dude, I think it's established that you're a dude, dude, we all measure others by ourselves, I wish my mailman died. Though from how old he looked and how long ago I saw him last, there's a fair chance that the bastard croaked already.

I think you might be less normal than you seem to think. Plenty of people get along, work together, etc.

we all measure others by ourselves

If so, then you must have very little of yourself, that you measure others by the whole of yourself.

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