Monthly Archives: June 2018

Of Lifestyles and Limitations

The red pill sphere has a major focus on self-improvement, which is one of the reasons why I enjoy being part of it. Men all sharing knowledge, encouraging improvement and driving each other forward is probably one of the things that we’re missing when raising boys today. However, it can be a bit of a double-edged sword at times. I had lunch with a childhood friend of mine earlier this week, and as conversations among men often do, it included his lamentations about not being able to get laid enough. This is hardly a rare topic topic in conversation for me, and I’ve developed a bit of a diagnostic model for rapidly diagnosing the problem the man I’m talking to is having in his relationship with women, that I call the PIECE model, short for Populate – Initiate – Escalate – Close – Enduring.

I came up with this model because I concluded that just about every issue men have with getting laid falls into one of the following areas:

Populate – How many women populate the man’s immediate area of activity. If you work in a male-dominated field, all your hobbies are either things you do alone, or activities that largely involve couples or just other men. You will have few interactions with women as a natural part of living your life, this means that unless you specifically set off time to go out to places where you meet women, engage in online dating or go out and do day game, you’ll probably not interact with many women.

Initiate – How often does the man initiate interactions with women. If you never really initiate interactions with women, you will never be in a position to reach the escalation stage. Some MGTOWs may work in female dominated environments, but advocate a position where you never initiate or interact with women unless the women initiate.

Escalate – How often is the man able to escalate the interactions. You can be surrounded by women at work, in your hobbies, and initiate interactions all the time, if you never escalate the interaction in some manner, you will not get laid a lot. One could go into details of kino escalation, topic escalation and so on, however from the big picture perspective the role of escalation is to signal interest. The most classical form of escalation is simply asking a women for coffee or drinks.

Close – How often and capable is the man of closing. Once the escalation has run the course, how capable is the man of isolating the women in an environment where the final escalation to sex can take place. The work done in the preceding stages lead up to this point in the interaction a man who is incapable of doing this will never get laid. Continue reading →

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Of Cogs and Continuity

Those of you who follow my twitter feed, will no doubt have picked up on my general sense of dislike for many social organizations, ranging from corporations, to government and the educational system. This could be viewed as a general anti-authoritarian or anti-social bent, and while this was a strong motivation in my younger days, my dislike these days is founded in something quite different. When evaluating any form of group, I find it very useful to begin with the reason for its existence. In a corporation this usually pertains to their core products, the frame through which they view their core business, and the extent to which, their main source of revenue is actually their main focus. When it comes to government it often takes the form of reverse-engineering from the effects to the causes.

In my essay on “The Good Boys” I argued that a social group should align incentives with the behaviors it requires from its population, and that a major problem in our modern western society is that the incentives are no longer there, which is the source of turmoil and conflict. I further expanded on this in later essays, covering how the various institutions that are tasked with raising a new generation of men are doing so based on outdated information. For instance, the blue pill guide to life is still based off the fact that society needs dutiful, conscientious and agreeable men, who work day after day at a job for which they have little passion, but which is secure and predictable. However, that the rewards for men who follow this check-list have to a large extent been removed.

Within political science there are those who think government can be run as a business basing this on the fact that government is in fact a producer of goods and services. Then there are those who think that applying business thinking to government means ignoring that government is generally not run with a profit motive. Both sides have some valid arguments, and it’s too grand of a discussion for me to handle within the scope of a blog-post. However, the former perspective is an interesting one in that if one views various governmental units as producers of goods and services, what information can one obtain? Continue reading →

Of Sepulchres and Suicides

Until yesterday, this was one of those essays that looked to be permanently placed in draft-limbo. This is a fate shared by quite a few essays that I have ideas for, but cannot quite figure out how to finish or what angle to take. Despite the fact that I found the subject-matter in this essay very interesting, there simply was no angle that encapsulated what I wanted to communicate. That is, until I heard of the death by suicide of Anthony Bourdain.

I’ve shared a little bit about my youthful culinary interests on twitter, what I didn’t share is that they were largely inspired by Mr. Bourdain’s book “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly“, to this day one of my favorite books within the genre. The book describes the journey of a young man from chucking clams in Rhode Island to the Rainbow room in Manhattan, drug use, alcohol abuse, and high gastronomy, but more than anything it was about passion. As the years passed by, my interests shifted a little, but I tried to keep up with Anthony’s work whether on the travel channel, the food network or other places. For someone who still has a passion for food, and all that surrounds it, he was the culinary Christopher Hitchens, an irreverent, ghost-pepper in an increasingly bland world of cuisine. However, as his career progressed, it was difficult not to notice the gradual softening of his, the cursing became more rare, as did the drinking, he quit smoking and he had children.

I stopped watching TV some time ago, so it was a few years until he popped up on my radar again, this time coming across my twitter feed in a retweet after my return to the manosphere. Out of curiosity I looked him up, found that he’d gotten divorced sometime earlier and was dating an MMA star. I clicked the tweet and I noticed the unmistakable Beta tells in the pictures, the fact that his girlfriend’s instagram was filled with pictures of her with other men that were 30 years his junior, and I thought to myself “That’s going to blow up in his face, maybe we’ll get the old hard drinking, angry, Anthony Bourdain back. The man who banned Billy Joel from every restaurant kitchen he ever ran“.

Alas, yesterday I saw the news coming across my twitter feed, he was found dead in his hotel, having ended his life in a case that appears related to “girl problems”. I was going to let this go, but then the inevitably “toxic masculinity” arguments came flowing out into the media “oh if only men were more like women, they wouldn’t kill themselves” and I figured, ah that is a perfect frame for that essay in my draft folder.

The big, often glossed over thing about suicide is that women attempt to kill themselves just as much or even more than men, they are just less successful at it [1]. They attempt to kill themselves so that someone will come to them and be like “Oh honey, are you OK, want to talk about it?“. Men are much better and more successful at killing themselves, because they do it because they are done talking. For women a suicide attempt is a comma in the sentence of their life, for men it’s the exclamation point at the end of it. If men were less “masculine” and more like women, we would simply see a drop in successful suicides, with an increase in suicide attempts. Continue reading →

Gendernomics: Of Mirages and Meat Scales

The first book I ever read on investing was a tome entitled “The Intelligent Investor” written by Professor Benjamin Graham. This treatise outlines Graham’s philosophy of “Value Investing“, of which Warren Buffett is the most well-known practitioner. As a young man I struggled a lot with understanding Graham’s idea of investing based on “intrinsic value“, because I couldn’t quite conceptualize what it was in my mind. Was it the value of retained earnings minus debt, the book value of the company, the projected earnings per share in perpetuity discounted by net present value? As I continued to feed my mind a steady diet of finance information, this did not alleviate the confusion, rather it compounded it. However, I still found immense value in Graham’s magnum opus. The one quote that has stuck with me for a long time since reading the book is:

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”

This is a valuable principle, because we often run into situations where what is popular is what is easy, makes us feel good in the moment and hurts us long term, while what is hard, makes us uncomfortable and brings us growth long-term is unpopular. This is illustrated by a conversation from the Andrew Ross Sorkin movie “Too Big Too Fail” in a conversation between Michele Davis (Cynthia Nixon), Neel Kashkari (Ayad Akhtar) and Hank Paulson (William Hurt)

Neel Kashkari: Poor bastard who bought his dream house? The teaser rate on his mortgage runs out, his payments go up, he defaults.

Henry Paulson: Mortgage-backed securities tank. AIG has to pay off the swaps. All of them. All over the world. At the same time.

Neel Kashkari: AIG can’t pay. AIG goes under. Every bank they insure books massive losses on the same day. And then they all go under. It all comes down.

Michele Davis: [horrified] The *whole* financial system? And what do I say when they ask me why it wasn’t regulated?

Henry Paulson: No one wanted to. We were making too much money.

In the short term, everyone was making too much money, and despite quite a few people being aware that it was going to become a major threat to the financial system, nobody wanted to be the canary in coalmine. They were faced with a choice, where they could side with the voting machine, face no negative consequences and in fact be positively rewarded, which was a much more palatable choice than to side with the weighing machine, face a lot of negative backlash from their colleagues, and potential lose millions. This is not uncommon, as whistle-blowers, “doomsayers”, and the messengers tend to be disliked because they ruin the mood.

A good analogy would be that a high school kid’s parents are out of town, and he decides to have a party. However, as the evening progresses, the party starts to get out of hand, people show up with kegs, before you know it the living room has turned into a mosh pit and people are playing ultimate frisbee with $200 china. If the kid decides to call the cops, or his parents, he is likely to be the person who faces negative consequences, despite the fact that he was not in the moral wrong. Continue reading →