4/26 - P90X2 D68 X2 Ab Ripper x2 -- chins/pushups 19/40, 12/25, 10/20, 9/15
Friday, April 26, 2013
Today's Internets - "I guess you could say I am a loner..."
"Penning the next movie in the massive Star Wars franchise would be daunting for any man, and that's all screenwriter Michael Arndt is. A man, like any other. A man susceptible to studio pressure, fan expectations and writer's block, as this video — made for the eventual Blu-ray extras — reveals."
"Michael Arndt"
Writing Star Wars w/ Michael Arndt - watch more funny videos
"Culminating a two-week trial in which no hacking in the traditional sense occurred, a California man was convicted Wednesday under the same hacking statute internet sensation Aaron Swartz was accused of before he committed suicide in January. Defendant David Nosal was convicted by a San Francisco federal jury on all six charges ranging from theft of trade secrets to hacking, despite him never breaking into a computer. Nosal remains free pending sentencing later this year, when he faces a potential lengthy prison term..."
"Soul-crushing fun fact: Alison Brie dates Dave Franco, James Franco's younger brother. In a new Funny or Die sketch, the happy couple get together for a little cutesy couple foreplay banter. Then things get weird and Dave Franco tells Brie that he wants a "blumpkin." Words we never, ever, in a million years thought we'd hear out of dream girl Alison Brie's mouth: "Good luck getting Olivia Munn to suck your dick while you take a shit." "
Dream Girl w/ Dave Franco & Alison Brie from Dave Franco
"It should go without saying that the issue here is causation, not justification or even fault. It is inherently unjustifiable to target innocent civilians with violence, no matter the cause (just as it is unjustifiable to recklessly kill civilians with violence). But it is nonetheless vital to understand why there are so many people who want to attack the US as opposed to, say, Peru, or South Africa, or Brazil, or Mexico, or Japan, or Portugal. It's vital for two separate reasons...
First, some leading American opinion-makers love to delude themselves and mislead others into believing that the US is attacked despite the fact that it is peaceful, peace-loving, freedom-giving and innocent. As these myth-makers would have it, we don't bother anyone; we just mind our own business (except when we're helping and liberating everyone), so why would anyone possibly want to attack us? "
...Second, it's crucial to understand this causation because it's often asked "what can we do to stop Terrorism?" The answer is right in front of our faces: we could stop embracing the polices in that part of the world which fuel anti-American hatred and trigger the desire for vengeance and return violence."
Plastic Surgery Nation: Chinese Man Sues Wife For Being Ugly, Wins - All News Is Global |: "Plastic surgery is a hot topic at the moment in China. A recent advertisement for a Hong Kong plastic surgery clinic has triggered a hot debate in the country. The ad shows a family photo with a beautiful couple surrounded by three children who are, well, ugly ducklings."
"The photo caption reads, “The only thing you have to worry about after plastic surgery is explaining it to your children,” E-Today reports. After an outcry on Chinese micro-blogging sites, the advertising company had to issue a statement saying that the children’s photos had to be retouched. According to data from Taiwan’s Foreign Trade Association, three million Chinese undergo plastic surgery each year. The market of these “high-end medical services” has an annual growth of 10%, quite a bit higher than the global average of 6%. With their relatively much more advanced professional staff and equipment, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan are fiercely competing for Chinese clients."
Guys start massaging girls at random, get phone numbers. Counter-intuitive 101.
These dudes are hilarious.
"We're three guys who pickup girls using ridiculous challenges."
Exchange 'women' for everybody, regardless of the study participants - Women are in Weight Gain Denial « Natural Health care Products | Nutritional Health Supplements | Belmarra Health:
"Research showed that women, at an average age of 25, had put on up to 11 pounds over three years without realizing they had been getting heavier. This worries doctors because it indicates that national anti-obesity campaigns are failing and many women, in turn, are in danger of putting themselves at risk of cardiovascular disease and a number of other weight-related health issues. 466 women took part in the study, which monitored their weight for 36 months. Weigh-ins were conducted every six months and subjects responded to questionnaires asking them if they felt heavier or noticed any weight gain. The results were surprising. One-third of the participants failed to notice a weight gain of five pounds over the observation period, while a quarter failed to notice putting on more than 5 pounds."
"I'll venture to speculate that many men have the same thing going on. There once was a time not long ago where people (at least here in the US) were a bit more health/weight-conscious. Call it the Jack LaLanne-Arnold Schwarzenegger Era. It lasted about 20 years, maybe 15. It was a time many people quit smoking, went to gyms or health clubs, and weighed themselves daily. Now, not so much, especially the daily weigh-in on the bathroom scale. At the least, that's always been a good habit. Being obese or significantly overweight isn't just a women's health issue but also a men's health issue."
13 corrections officers indicted in Md., accused of aiding gang’s drug scheme - The Washington Post: "Thirteen female corrections officers essentially handed over control of a Baltimore jail to gang leaders, prosecutors said. The officers were charged Tuesday in a federal racketeering indictment.
...The indictment described a jailhouse seemingly out of control. Four corrections officers became pregnant by one inmate. Two of them got tattoos of the inmate’s first name, Tavon — one on her neck, the other on a wrist.
...The guards allegedly helped leaders of the Black Guerilla Family run their criminal enterprise in jail by smuggling cellphones, prescription pills and other contraband in their underwear, shoes and hair. One gang leader allegedly used proceeds to buy luxury cars, including a Mercedes-Benz and a BMW, which he allowed some of the officers to drive.
...Sen. Lisa A. Gladden (D-Baltimore), who works as a public defender in Baltimore when the legislature is not in session, said the large percentage of female corrections at the detention center contributed to the problem. “A lot of times, they become smitten with the inmates. [The inmates] talk really sweet and say really nice things, and the CO’s fall for them. You need to have a bunch of rough, ugly men.”"
[on the end of Angel] - "...it was very controversial at the time. As far as my interaction with fans, some people really got it and loved it and some people didn’t like it so much. But I personally loved it, because I thought that what it was saying – and I think he said it very clearly through my character – really, is that regardless of the amount of work that it appears ahead of you, you always stay in the fight. You do not give up. No matter how outnumbered you are, the battle for good continues. And I just thought it was such an optimistic and positive and wonderful ending, with a lot of meaning, as far as who these characters were. I thought it was beautiful. Just for me, that was the easiest moment I ever had playing that character, because in that last scene, it was actually my last shot as well. And I was just there, man. I knew I was saying goodbye to the character in the story and in my life and it was so easy to play. So I loved that episode and I loved the ending."
Obvious Headline is Obvious.
Law Requiring Warrants for E-Mail Wins Senate Committee Approval | Threat Level | Wired.com: "A Senate committee today backed sweeping privacy protections requiring the government, for the first time, to get a probable-cause warrant to obtain e-mail and other content stored in the cloud. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the package on a voice vote after about 30 minutes of debate, and sent the measure to the Senate floor, where it faces an uncertain future. The legislation, (.pdf) sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the committee’s chair, and Michael S. Lee (R-Utah) nullifies a provision of federal law allowing the authorities to acquire a suspect’s e-mail or other stored content from an internet service provider without showing probable cause that a crime was committed if the content is 180 days or older."
Details at the link.
Tip 597: Fat Is GOOD For You: Five Tips For Eating Fat So You Lose Fat - Charles Poliquin: "Certain fats are extremely good for you. These fats convey abundant benefits including aiding in the achievement of optimal body composition, the prevention of cancer, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes. Here are five tips for enjoying fat.
#1: Eat A Lot of Omega-3 Fats
#2: Use Coconut Oil
#3: Eat Butter
#4: Eat Avocado, Olive Oil & Nuts
#5: Go Low-Carb & Avoid All Processed Foods"
"In this 1995 Independent article, you can read about the former CIA officer who admitted that the Agency secretly funded and promoted Abstract Expressionism as a way for avant-garde, lefty types to reconcile their worldview with American values, rather than Soviet-style Communism. They operated in secret to avoid "the public hostility to the avant-garde," and hid their actions from conservative Congressmen who hated that long-hair junk."
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Training.
4/25 - P90X2 D67 Base + Back
Age 51/fought off a brain tumor/No Excuses - Bodybuilding.com - Over 40 Amateur Of The Week: Muscle Miracle:
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Today's Internets - "Worrying is using your imagination to create something you don't want."
Of course they did/NC fail - North Carolina Senate blocks testing themselves when passing welfare drug testing bill | The Raw Story:
"Republicans in the North Carolina state Senate on Monday pushed through bill that would strip public benefits like food stamps and job training for people who fail a drug test. In 35-15 vote largely along party lines, senators passed SB 594. A single Democrat voted for the bill, and no Republicans voted against it.
At the same time, senators rejected an amendment offered by Democratic state Sen. Gladys Robinson that would have drug tested lawmakers, the governor and cabinet secretaries. “We receive state funds, we represent the law, we institute policy,” Robinson told senators on Monday night. “So, it should not be above any of us to submit to drug screening.”"
You are a horrible human being, Katelyn Webster/cops can't be bothered to do their fucking jobs - It could happen to any young man . . . | A Voice for Men:
"...a young woman named Katelyn Webster, 18, with whom Matt previously had a brief fling, had told police that Matt stalked, choked, and raped her, and she showed them neck bruises to prove it. Webster claimed that all this occurred in — of all places — the parking lot of a wave pool, and that Matt stopped assaulting her only when her two girlfriends came along.
...Now police say that Webster lied. It turns out that the parties weren’t together that day after all, and none of them were at the wave pool. Webster and the two girlfriends had been at a dance club, and then they spent the night at Webster’s new boyfriend’s place. Webster concocted the rape claim so she wouldn’t get in trouble with her father because her new boyfriend gave her “sucker bites.” For his part, Matt was home with his parents at the time he was supposedly raping Webster. I suppose their alibis weren’t enough for police.
...How did police figure out the truth? Good old fashioned police work, right? Well, no, not really. Matt’s family shelled out $20,000 in attorney’s fees, and they retained a superstar criminal defense attorney in Western Pennsylvania. A few weeks before Matt’s criminal trial was supposed to start, the attorney’s investigator contacted Webster’s two girlfriends—the ones who supposedly interrupted the sexual assault. The attorney explained that the two women refuted the whole story, that they ratted out Webster about her new boyfriend and explained that she didn’t want her father to know. They said the “sucker bites” on Webster’s neck were courtesy of the new boyfriend. After interviewing the two girlfriends, County Police dropped the charges against Matt and arrested Webster.
...The County Police Superintendent, whose name is Charles Moffatt, defended his detectives’ work on the case. “We had a girl at the hospital saying she was raped, she had marks around her neck,” he said. But wait, Moffatt’s explanation is about to enter the Twilight Zone. Moffatt said the detectives did try to corroborate Webster’s account, but she said she didn’t know the last names of the two other girls and couldn’t provide their phone numbers.
Excuse me while I bang my head against the wall."
"Radical self-expression is a challenge for a legally contracted porn star, which is what Stoya became at age 21 when she inked a deal with the adult feature company Digital Playground. Stoya's contract requires her to show up in Southern California about 46 days out of the year to film X-rated videos...
The remaining 319 days, she's paid not to have sex on camera anywhere else. That's time for building the Stoya brand: porn-convention appearances, sure, but also composing essays on her Tumblr and for the Guardian and Vice, where she writes a regular column about "the pitfalls of heteronormativity" and the "metaphysics of cocksucking."
...you spend most of your time doing weird promotional stuff so they can get your face out there and make you into a viable persona." She found herself fielding questions like "Which member of your family raped you as a child?" and whether her parents hated what she did for a living. Stoya's answers didn't fit expectations. "My mom hates the fake eyelashes and high heels," she told Xtreme Magazine. "If I was doing turtleneck-sweater, Birkenstock-wearing lesbian porn, she would be so happy, I think she would actually cry." She had to deflect different porn-star stereotypes—first, the dimwitted bimbo; later, the intellectual brunette who's not like the other girls. "Because I'm pale and have small boobs," Stoya says, "people ask me about my thoughts on Occupy Wall Street." She told one reporter: "Mussolini started out as a journalist.""
"New York magazine has a very interesting article by Vanessa Grigoriadis on how the the passions of DIY chemists in a wired wiki world--combined often with the fruits of grey-market globalization--are making this a golden age of new experimental psychedelic and entheogenic drugs..."
Wait. What?
Dope.
Ancient Europeans Underwent Mysterious Genetic Transformation 4,500 Years Ago, Study Suggests: "The genetic lineage of Europe mysteriously transformed about 4,500 years ago, new research suggests. The findings, detailed today (April 23) in the journal Nature Communications, were drawn from several skeletons unearthed in central Europe that were up to 7,500 years old."
The Veronica Mars model is taking off - Zach Braff Kickstarting His Garden State Follow-Up, The Fantasy-Infused Wish I Was Here
With pretty damn funny promo vid.
It's worrisome when I consider how dumb I am, that apparently there are a lot of folks much dumber. About some topics, obviously...
"You answered 13 of 13 questions correctly. This quiz is a joint effort between the Pew Research Center and Smithsonian magazine. See below how your results compare with the 1,006 randomly sampled adults that took part in our national survey and review how you responded to each question. For more findings from the survey, read "Public's Knowledge of Science and Technology." You scored better than 93% of the public and the same as 7%."
Really? Because I'm a fucking idiot.
Try your luck - Science and Technology Knowledge Quiz | Pew Research Center:
"Do you know more about science and technology than the average American? Take our 13-question quiz to test your knowledge of scientific concepts. Then see how you did in comparison with the 1,006 randomly sampled adults asked the same questions in a national poll conducted by the Pew Research Center and Smithsonian magazine."
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Today's Internets - [Some of] The Rules of Life.
The Rules of Life - Postmasculine.com:
"RULE #1: BE SKEPTICAL OF EVERYTHING, FIRST AND FOREMOST YOURSELF. Ideology is the enemy of progress. Every ideology is formed to solve one problem but will eventually cause the next one. To become permanently attached to one belief-system without skepticism is to remain stuck forever. No matter how big the truth, how great the epiphany, how important the breakthrough, I will one day turn around and question it. Nothing is safe. Nothing is sacred. Belief is merely a temporary vehicle to shuttle me through greater expressions and manifestations of life...
RULE #4: JUDGE PEOPLE BASED ON THEIR BEHAVIOR AND NOTHING ELSE...
RULE #5: YOUR ACTIONS AND EMOTIONS ARE YOUR RESPONSIBILITY AND NOBODY ELSE’S AND VICE-VERSA...
RULE #10: NOTHING IN LIFE IS SO SERIOUS THAT YOU CAN’T LAUGH ABOUT IT. RELAX.
This is almost verbatim what my grandmother said as she was dying of a brain tumor. I was 13 at the time. It was one of those situations where she was given six months to live and we all had to sit there and watch the cancer slowly eat away at her, not knowing when the day would come. As time went on and her health deteriorated, she would often make jokes about her condition, or even jokes about her own death. She had a great sense of humor and some of the jokes were actually pretty funny.
Of course, not everyone in the family took them well. One night my aunt got upset and asked her to stop joking about her cancer, that it wasn’t funny and that she was having a hard time dealing with it (Oh, the irony, “Please stop being comfortable with your own death, because I’m not.”) My grandmother replied with the statement above, and it stuck with me in a real way. If you can’t laugh about it, then you’re probably taking it (and yourself) too seriously..."
Guns and Yoga - True-Life Tales - Patton Oswalt - New York Times:
"Shooting guns and taking yoga on the same day was the biggest “You got chocolate in my peanut butter!” moment I’ve had so far in my life. Guns and yoga are French fries dipped in a milkshake. Scotch and ginger ale. Elvis Costello’s “This Year’s Model” after a bad breakup. Reruns of “Law and Order” and having no life: they’re good together.
"Shooting guns and taking yoga on the same day was the biggest “You got chocolate in my peanut butter!” moment I’ve had so far in my life. Guns and yoga are French fries dipped in a milkshake. Scotch and ginger ale. Elvis Costello’s “This Year’s Model” after a bad breakup. Reruns of “Law and Order” and having no life: they’re good together.
...You shoot better when you realize that your soul is a leaf falling through time, and that work shouldn’t equal struggle. And yoga never aligns you with the universe better than when your forearm is still tingling from the buck and recoil of a .357 bullpup."
Dedroidify: Reality Model Playground!:
Dedroidify: Reality Model Playground!:
Monday, April 22, 2013
Training.
4/22 - GTG style/throughout the day - chins x20, pullups x17, chins x21, *pullups x23*/New PR, chins x10/9/22 -- P90X2 D64 V Sculpt [Back & Biceps] -- dips x20
Results of 30 days of Pavel's Russian Pullup Program [over about a 6 week period] - from a 17 rep max to a 23 rep max. And 23 is a new all time PR for me, beating by one rep my previous all time best from last summer.
Today's Internets - "...now we know what happens when police cordon off a neighborhood, declare it a Fourth-Amendment-free zone, send SWAT teams house-to-house, and hover helicopters overhead. People cheer and applaud."
The joy of global warming | Ioannes's Blog: "As I fly into a snow-bound Britain, I realise that you might be asking where global warming has gone as you shiver in the coldest March for 50 years and wonder what you will do if gas has to be rationed. I have been involved in the climate debate for more than a decade, but I am still amazed at how wrong we get it. Let us try to restart our thinking on global warming.
Yes, global warming is real and mostly man-made, but our policies have failed predictably and spectacularly. I was one of the strongest critics of the Kyoto climate change treaty, back when it was considered gospel. People were aghast when you criticised it then. Now Kyoto has no friends, and everyone remembers how they really did not believe in it. If we want to avoid our current ambitions failing in the same way, if we want to get past Britain’s unworkable and inefficient Climate Change Act and the EU’s climate policies, we need to face up to some hard truths...
We need to stop claiming that it will be the end of the world. Just as it is silly to deny man-made global warming, it is indefensible to describe it as the biggest calamity of the 21st century..."
"We place no reliance On Virgin or Pigeon; Our method is Science, Our aim is Religion." - Crowley
Robert Anton Wilson - A Lesson in Karma - Robert Anton Wilson Online Library: "...returning from school one afternoon, Luna was beaten and robbed by a gang of black kids. She was weeping and badly frightened when she arrived home, and her Father was shaken by the unfairness of it happening to her, such a gentle, ethereal child. In the midst of consoling her, the Father wandered emotionally and began denouncing the idea of Karma. Luna was beaten, he said, not for her sins, but for the sins of several centuries of slavers and racists, most of whom had never themselves suffered for those sins. "Karma is a blind machine," he said. "The effects of evil go on and on but they don't necessarily come back on those who start the evil." Then Father got back on the track and said some more relevant and consoling things. The next day Luna was her usual sunny and cheerful self, just like the Light in her paintings. "I'm glad you're feeling better," the Father said finally. "I stopped the wheel of Karma," she said. "All the bad energy is with the kids who beat me up. I'm not holding any of it."
Karma, in the original Buddhist scriptures, is a blind machine; in fact, it is functionally identical with the scientific concept of natural law. Sentimental ethical ideas about justice being built into the machine, so that those who do evil in one life are punished for it in another life, were added later by theologians reasoning from their own moralistic prejudices. Buddha simply indicated that all the cruelties and injustices of the past are still active: their effects are always being felt.
Similarly, he explained, all the good of the past, all the kindness and patience and love of decent people is also still being felt. Since most humans are still controlled by fairly robotic reflexes, the bad energy of the past far outweighs the good, and the tendency of the wheel is to keep moving in the same terrible direction, violence breeding more violence, hatred breeding more hatred, war breeding more war. The only way to "stop the wheel" is to stop it inside yourself, by giving up bad energy and concentrating on the positive. This is by no means easy, but once you understand what Gurdjieff called "the horror of our situation," you have no choice but to try, and to keep on trying.
And Luna, at 13, understood this far better than I did, at 43, with all my erudition and philosophy.... I still regarded her absolute vegetarianism and pacifism as sentimentality."
"An introvert is someone who loses energy when interacting with people. (I am one of these.) A quiet person is someone who just doesn’t feel the need to verbally dominate a group or to be heard constantly. (I am NOT one of these, I am a chatterbox around people I’m comfortable with and don’t lose my energy as long as we’re talking about something interesting.) A shy person has, in my opinion, a psychological pathology around interacting with people, be it fear of rejection, low self-esteem, conditioned expectation of criticism or punishment for speaking up, or excessive pride that can’t bear the judgments of others."
"You know, this explains a lot. Because all my life, I've had this unaccountable feeling in my bones that something sinister was happening in the universe and that no one would tell me what it was." Arthur Dent
Paper: Are You the Toxic One?: "Are you being honest or are you just being a DICK? I am a big believer in honesty. Some people in my life may use the term “brutal” when describing my honesty. However, I want to be clear: there is a difference between being truly honest and being a nasty scumbag. People who are being truly honest are doing it to help you see what is going on and to make a positive difference in your life. With true honesty, the one who receives it is the only one who truly gains anything. This is the purest form of giving. With the other type of “honesty,” only the scumbag will gain anything from it. Oftentimes, it is nothing positive; therefore, nothing good comes from it."
Living Freedom » Blog Archive » Boston: Aftermath: "Well, now we know what happens when police cordon off a neighborhood, declare it a Fourth-Amendment-free zone, send SWAT teams house-to-house, and hover helicopters overhead. People cheer and applaud. They turn out in the streets to wave little American flags. And next we can watch as they condone demand and slaver over illegal treatment of Suspect #2 (an American citizen). We can “enjoy” a new round of anti-immigrant and anti-Islam hatred. We can observe bobbleheads nodding from Los Angeles to Hartford as Good Citizens agree with all the new promises politicians and the state-security apparatus make as they concoct onerous new ways to “protect” us all. Did you feel that coming right from the beginning? Right from the moment the sound of the explosions boomed across the media?"
Living Freedom » Blog Archive » Boston: Aftermath: "We’re all supposed to pretend that violence against masses of people is something new — that somehow the U.S. is under unprecedented attack that requires unprecedented (and certainly Draconian) central government crackdowns and surveillance...
But we can only believe that if we’re a) big babies, b) hysterical drama queens, or c) completely ignorant of history. We’re supposed to forget that, clear back in 1955, some creepazoid some creepazoid blew up an airliner with 39 people on board. We’re supposed to pretend the Bath school disaster was perpetrated all the way back in 1927. And those weren’t even the first highly public bombings committed in this country.
Did the federal government concoct a security state over either of those horrors? No, because back then a few things still held government back. No, because back then the 24/7 propaganda-and-hysteria machine hadn’t been completely built yet. No, because back then, Americans didn’t wet their pants and quiver in the closet every time some moron with an agenda perpetrated evil somewhere in the country."
How Boston exposes America’s dark post-9/11 bargain - Salon.com: "Why did this story drive the whole country nuts? Because we traded rights for "security," and didn't get either..."
security theater, martial law, and a tale that trumps every cop-and-donut joke you've ever heard | Popehat: "First, just in case it's not utterly obvious, I'm glad that the two murderous cowards who attacked civilians in Boston recently are off the streets. One dead and one in custody is a great outcome. That said, a large percent of the reaction in Boston has been security theater. "Four victims brutally killed" goes by other names in other cities. In Detroit, for example, they call it "Tuesday". …and Detroit does not shut down every time there are a few murders...
"But Clark," I hear you say, "this is different. This was a terrorist attack." Washington DC, during ongoing sniper terrorist attacks in 2002 that killed twice as many people, was not shut down. Kileen Texas, after the Fort Hood terrorist attack in 2009 that killed three times as many people, was not shut down. London, after the bombing terrorist attack in 2005 that killed more than ten times as many people, was not shut down...
...the cost isn't just measured in dollars – it's measured in the degree to which it trains a population to freak out over minor risk and to trust blindly in authorities.
...it wasn't until the stupid lock-down was ended that a citizen found the second murderer: The boat’s owners, a couple, spent Friday hunkered down under the stay-at-home order. When it was lifted early in the evening, they ventured outside for some fresh air and the man noticed the tarp on his boat blowing in the wind, according to their his son, Robert Duffy. The cords securing it had been cut and there was blood near the straps. We had thousands of police going door-to-door, searching houses…and yet not one of them saw the evidence that a citizen did just minutes after the lock-down ended."
This is awesome.
A New Masculinity: "Then in late 2009, I began to travel all over the world. And within a few months it became impossible to ignore: masculinity and dominance are culturally relative. In America, most women consider me to be cocky and aggressive. In some Asian cultures, women even found me to be brutish and intimidating. Yet in many countries such as Argentina or Ukraine, I came across to women as sensitive and respectful. Hell, many of the women in Brazil are more sexually assertive than I am. And in Russia, when I told a girl I was seeing that most women in America find me to be too aggressive, she began to laugh in my face. “You? Are you serious? The reason I like you is because you’re so sensitive and attentive compared to Russian men.” Well shit. Not only was my conception of masculinity not even that masculine in many parts of the world, but I was attracting women because they perceived me to NOT be masculine. In Latin America, a girl I dated said she loved my lack of machismo and how well I listened. Great… Yet, back home women wanted to date me because they perceived me to be so crass and aggressive. What’s going on here?"
A New Masculinity: "Assortment theory can be subtle and hard to notice. But when you travel it’s impossible to ignore. If you walk into a room and only 10% of the women there speak English, then you’re immediately going to be at a major disadvantage with the 90% who don’t, and a major advantage with the 10% who do (they’ll find you exotic, interesting, etc.) Back home this plays out in less obvious ways: behave like a crazy party guy and you’ll attract crazy party girls; behave like an intellectual snob and you’ll attract hipster intellectually snobby girls; dress like crap and stop showering and the only women willing to overlook it will be women who dress like crap and don’t shower...
The point of assortment theory is that there are no (or very few) absolutes: no matter how you alter your behavior, that behavior is always going to naturally attract one subset of people and repel or simply not interest the majority.
...cultural relativism can’t completely explain it. If it did, men would simply adapt with new norms and move on. To a degree we are. But developmentally, we’re not. We can’t ignore that we ARE biologically different. Men have ten times the amount of testosterone pumping through us, which makes up bigger, stronger, urges us to take more risks, be more violent, less empathetic, want more sex, and achieve greater feats. This all on average of course, and there are exceptions. But the point remains. Everyone seems to agree with the sentiment that western men have lost something in the past few generations.
The point is, as a culture, there’s a void where our masculinity used to be. Created by the absence of our fathers, the futility of conventional career paths, the inundation of a feminized pop culture, this generation of men is floundering and has been for a while. It’s no wonder we’re staying unemployed, single, having more casual sex and playing more video games than any generation of men before us..."
"6. THE REST OF THE WORLD IS NOT A SLUM-RIDDEN SHITHOLE COMPARED TO US"
As Americans, we have this naïve assumption that people all over the world are struggling and way behind us. They’re not. Sweden and South Korea have more advanced high speed internet networks. Japan has the most advanced trains and transportation systems. Norwegians make more money. The biggest and most advanced plane in the world is flown out of Singapore. The tallest buildings in the world are now in Dubai and Shanghai. Meanwhile, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
What’s so surprising about the world is how unsurprising most of it is. I spent a week with some local guys in Cambodia. You know what their biggest concerns were? Paying for school, getting to work on time, and what their friends were saying about them. In Brazil, people have debt problems, hate getting stuck in traffic and complain about their overbearing mothers. Every country thinks they have the worst drivers. Every country thinks their weather is unpredictable. The world becomes, err… predictable.
7. WE’RE PARANOID
Not only are we emotionally insecure as a culture, but I’ve come to realize how paranoid we are about our physical security. You don’t have to watch Fox News or CNN for more than 10 minutes to hear about how our drinking water is going to kill us, our neighbor is going to rape our children, some terrorist in Yemen is going to kill us because we didn’t torture him, Mexicans are going to kill us, or some virus from a bird is going to kill us. There’s a reason we have more guns than people. In the US, security trumps everything, even liberty. We’re paranoid."
I’ve probably been to 10 countries now that friends and family back home told me explicitly not to go because someone was going to kill me, kidnap me, stab me, rob me, rape me, sell me into sex trade, give me HIV, or whatever else. None of that has happened. I’ve never been robbed and I’ve walked through some of the shittiest parts of Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. In fact, the experience has been the opposite. In countries like Russia, Colombia or Guatemala, people were so friendly it actually scared me. Some stranger in a bar would invite me to his house for a bar-b-que with his family, a random person on the street would offer to show me around and give me directions to a store I was trying to find. My American instincts were always that, “Wait, this guy is going to try to rob me or kill me,” but they never did. They were just insanely friendly."
Shut Up and Be Grateful: "The fact that you’re reading this sentence means that you are richer and more educated than 99.5% of people in human history. It means you have almost immediate access to over half of all of the information and data ever created by the human race."
The Prime Belief: "There is a belief from which all other positive beliefs flow. This is the prime belief. This is the belief that you are responsible for what happens to you in your own life, no matter the external circumstances. The belief that regardless of the situation, our decisions are our responsibility. Until a person has adopted this belief, change is impossible, and all negative beliefs will remain cemented in place.
Without the prime belief, people will feel powerless to their own lives. As a result, they will rely on excuses, pity, victimization and whining. They will overload you with statements about trying and follow-up with very little doing. They will talk of why things can’t happen instead of why they can. They will often be emotional vampires and strive to always make themselves out to be a victim. Until they adopt the prime belief, they will not change. Ever. They are slaves to their life circumstances, strident warriors for their own victimization, stewards of self-pity. They are a passenger in a car without a driver, blaming the collisions on the objects which they crash into. They cannot be helped. At least not until they choose to be. You can’t help someone who will not help themselves.
...if we all must believe something, then we may as well orient ourselves to believe what benefits ourselves and our happiness. The first and most important of these beliefs is the belief that we have control over what we choose to believe.
...beliefs require more than a simple choice to believe them. You don’t just wake up one day and decide, “I’m a happy successful person!” and suddenly become it. Beliefs must be cultivated, consciously tried and tested and steeled by reference experiences. Beliefs are worthless if they don’t contain some sort of real-world manifestation, some tangible benefit in the form of positive experience. The key to adopting the prime belief is the decision to go out and attempt to live the prime belief itself. It’s the decision to not only see the opportunity in every situation, but to actually attempt and live it."
"In one way, travelling has narrowed my mind. What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight.
Most important of all, the instinct for justice and for liberty is just as much “innate” in us as are the promptings of tribalism and sexual xenophobia and superstition. People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains; every time a Bastille falls one is always pleasantly surprised by how many sane and decent people were there all along. I have a Somali friend who, during the Western intervention in her unhappy country in 1992, became a sort of clearinghouse for information on human rights. At one point, a group of Belgian soldiers lost their heads and fired into a Somali crowd, killing a number of civilians. At once, Rakiya’s switchboard lit up, with every Belgian news desk calling her at once. Alas, these correspondents and editors only wished to know one thing. Were the Belgian soldiers Flemish or Walloon? To this paltry inquiry she replied — I suspect not without relish — that her organisation took no position on the tribal rivalries in Belgium."
- Christopher Hitchens
All This. Every Bit.
"“The men who post here were systematically raised, educated, brought up and socialized in a feminine-centric worldview...
We watched our mothers run roughshod over, mistreat, abuse, bankrupt, and undermine our fathers. And those are the ones lucky enough (like me) to grow up with our fathers living with us. Those less fortunate were deprived of meaningful relationships with their fathers; or denied a relationship altogether.
We listened to a daily pounding and pummeling of messages from absolutely everyone around us telling us that:
1. Our sexual desires were ignoble, base, dirty, predatory, evil and bad.
2. We did not mature as quickly as girls and that girls are just better at nurturing and caring.
3. Without the civilizing influence of women, we are violent, predatory, shiftless, lazy, irresponsible, incompetent and unfaithful.
4. We are sexist male chauvinist pigs bent on violently beating women to within an inch of their lives, depriving them of basic life necessities, and demanding they be kept barefoot and pregnant, chained to a kitchen stove.
5. If we are married or are fathers, we are the stupid, unthinking parent and we need the wife to be smart and sensible. She will always save our bacon and clean up all our mistakes.
6. If we are single men, we must be beer swilling, porn addicted, video-game playing fatsos living in our mothers’ basements...
Then a dude linked a post about- “what boys hear growing up”. Deti commented-
“The laws and culture are hopelessly slanted against men and in favor of women. Divorce and family law are crushingly draconian. Men are routinely put under incredibly onerous financial obligations including alimony and child support. An unhappy wife can blow up a family and take a man’s children away from him for no cause at all, or simply because she no longer wants to be married, or no longer is “in love with” him. Stories abound of wives keeping the kids and the marital home, moving the new boyfriend in, while the ex husband moves into a studio apartment and must pay her mortgage, all while his ex wife shtups the new boyfriend in a house he pays for in a bed he bought. Child visitation orders are routinely not enforced. Men are incarcerated for failing to pay child support– even when they are unemployed or laid off. A woman can have her husband slapped with a preliminary injunction or no-contact order or have him arrested and removed from the home merely by calling police and telling them “I feel unsafe”.
There are stories of women cuckolding their husbands, i.e. having extramarital sexual affairs and getting pregnant by another man, then passing off the child as her husband’s to cover the affair. When the husband later discovers the truth in the divorce, the soon to be ex husband finds he must still pay child support for a child who is not his. His wife lied through her teeth to her own husband about the child’s parentage, yet walks away from the marriage with cash and prizes...
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