leicsmac

Read an interesting Internet find tangential to this today: Louis Theroux has made a documentary about the "manosphere" (a word I cannot even bring myself to say, it’s so ghastly) and the liberal Internet is doing that thing where it pretends to be appalled by something it's been staring at through the window for six years. "Have you *seen* what's happening to young men?" Yes. We've all seen. You can stop clutching the curtains now. Almost every response to this stuff follows the same pattern, though: describe the pipeline, express horror, suggest better role models, move on, as though the problem is a staffing issue. As though Andrew Tate is simply what you get when there's a vacancy for Atticus Finch and nobody applies. Nobody seems especially curious, however, about *why the vacancy exists in the first place.* So let's talk about status, which is what this is actually about (underneath several layers of protein powder and performative sunglasses.) Human beings are, at a biological level, status-detecting instruments. We can't help it. You could raise a child in a perfectly egalitarian commune and by age four they'd have a ranking system for who gets the best stick. The brain runs on hierarchy the way a boiler runs on gas, not because it's noble, but because for a very long time it was the difference between eating and being eaten. We are apes with anxiety disorders, and the firmware hasn't been updated since the Pleistocene. Now, the modern world has done something genuinely remarkable. Over about a century, we've taken a serious hammer to the more grotesque hierarchies.. rigid class, fixed roles, and the assumption that your postcode determines your ceiling. This is actual progress, the kind you'd defend with your life. But in doing so, we've also removed something else: legible signals. Clear answers to the question "where do I stand?" And the brain, confronted with ambiguity, does not think "how thrilling, a pluralistic society full of nuance and possibility." The brain thinks *THREAT.* The brain would like a ranking, please, immediately, even a bad one, because a bad ranking is at least a *known position,* and a known position is a thing you can defend. Enter the modern attention economy, which (in the manner of a casino handing you a free drink) is only too happy to help. It doesn't invent the need but instead *industrialises* it. It takes every instinct we have about status and competence and belonging and runs them through a machine that converts them into metrics: follower counts, like-ratios, subscriber numbers. Suddenly you're not just alive.. you're being scored, silently and perpetually, by an algorithm that doesn't care whether you're thriving or drowning, only whether you're engaging. And when the score is low, when you feel small inside a system that quantifies everything and values nothing, a very ancient subroutine kicks in. Not "how do I become secure?" That's slow and effortful and requires the kind of patient, unglamorous inner work that doesn't have a merch line. No, the subroutine says: "If I can't feel safe, I can at least feel *above.*" There's a beautifully horrible experiment that demonstrates this, that I talked about last week. People were offered a choice. Option A: they receive £5, and a stranger also receives £5. Option B: they receive £3, and the stranger gets £1 (and presumably some billionaire somewhere pockets £6.) With B, they are *volunteering to be poorer.* It is, by any rational measure, stupid. And yet a significant number of people pick £3 every time. Not because it's more, but because it's *higher.* Sit with that for a second. People will *pay real money* for relative position. That is what the manosphere is selling. Not fitness tips and self-improvement. Not even misogyny, really (though misogyny is certainly the medium.) What it's selling is the £3 option, the warm, electric certainty that you are *above* someone else. That there is a natural order, and you are nearer the top of it, and the reason you feel bad isn't that the world is broken, it's that you haven't yet claimed your rightful position. "You're not lost. You're a king who forgot his crown." That sort of thing. Delivered by a man in a rented Lamborghini with the conviction of Moses on the mountain.

They think that because of the power they already have, consequences do not apply to them. It is the job of anyone, everyone else who can, to show them that they are wrong.

Well, yes, the double bind is obvious, as is the reason for it. They don't want integration at all. They simply want an ethnostate.

I think there are two reasons for that. First up, while a fair bit of what he says is noise, there is then stuff that either he or his supporters take seriously and (more importantly) act upon. Because of the nature of the man and how serious the consequences of such action are, even though such words and threats are often groundless I don't blame those who are in the firing line for taking whatever he says seriously until shown otherwise, rather than the other way round. Secondly, the man is the President of the United States, with all the power and influence that goes with that position. At the extreme end of the scale, he has only to make one decision and billions of people die as a result. Why on earth shouldn't anyone expect seriousness from a person in that position, particularly on the matters being talked about here? Speaking personally, I think the man and his followers are a threat to a great many living beings both through incompetence and flat out malice, and should be treated as such until they no longer have any such power to do harm.

Tbf if you're going to write a list of all the times that man has lied, you're going to need digital storage in the exabyte range. Or, if you're more old fashioned, practically all the plain paper currently existing for writing on.

Practically every single regulation written has been written in blood. Deregulation just means more blood flows again. Clearly that's morally acceptable to some.

Do you reckon that these people have actually detached themselves from logical thought that they actually believe what they say here? Or is it just a matter of talking a good game for the sake of keeping the Dear Leader in power, because they know when he goes they won't be far behind?

Depressing is absolutely the right word. As hinted at by @davieG in the article posted today, the Earth gives enough and is going to give more challenges to our survival without making ones up among ourselves for utterly pointless tribalistic reasons.

Yeah, that all makes sense. This whole matter is just so deeply frustrating. Such a pointless waste of innocent life, simply because some powermongers on all sides want to abuse their power in the name of their own self-interest and for the sake of a cause that is itself, at heart, pointless too.

Because in the interests of balance it's correct to put nasty events like this on a par in terms of priority with events of mass death and suffering. Apparently. But speaking less facetiously, second paragraph is spot on. Dense, stupid, and most importantly pointless. Sometimes our species can be very disappointing.

Oh, look, it's only what the entire climate science corps has been warning about for the last four decades or more.

And I'm not sure there would be many who would blame you. But one of the key elements of a democracy is to supposedly choose the best of humanity. Not someone so consumed by its worst elements that the moment he's no longer a factor anyone with shares in champagne and fireworks companies will have a very good day.

Well, if folks who think like and back Trump didn't have double standards, they'd have no standards at all. And that, if someone looks back to the time of Kirk's demise, extends even to here. Of course, they might claim injured innocence by saying such hypocrisy is hardly unique to them and they might have a point, but then a rather critical difference is that it's their hypocrisy and attitude that represents a clear, obvious and present threat to the future of all civilisation and our species - not just that small parochial enclave they like to hold up as "civilisation".

That's fair, though I would still classify it as a deliberate lie as anyone associated with this, Trump included, would know that simply removing the leadership would hardly "liberate" the Iranian people, and so their actions were in no way intended to be in benefit to those people no matter what they said.

It's almost as if the whole spiel about "liberation" was a lie all along. How about that.

"Some men improve the world only by leaving it." - Oscar Wilde, probably paraphrase.

And outcry, that, if I remember right, extended even to here. Even though I don't remember anyone who actually "reveled" in the guys death, rather pointed out that he became a victim of a system he had no problem perpetuating.

See above.

It's going to be full on end-of-Return-of-the-Jedi stuff when it does happen, man.

Yes, this is real.

On the contrary... https://godblesstheusa.com

Absolutely so - there's plenty of men like him, sadly - he's hardly unique in that regard. However, the degree of power and willingness that such men have to exercise such depravity is important, and he and his backers, right now, have more of both than practically anyone else. And that means they are the biggest problem, as it would be with any other with similar mindset and power.

That's unfortunate - perhaps you're using one of the key words that trigger a mod approval request? If you can inbox your thoughts instead, I'd be interested in hearing them. That's another possible category, yes. In any case, I would underestimate such people and the harm they can cause at our peril.

That's offensive to cvnts, given the man lacks both depth and warmth. On topic, heaters off over here too, would like to get some better electric ones installed instead of the old storage heaters I have before next winter.

That's right. There's quite a few people who follow Trump that are very intelligent and pretty successful. Which, given what we know now about the guy and what he's doing, means that they're backing all of those actions as well, with full knowledge of what they are and what they mean, for reasons that now can only be evaluated as self-interest directly reliant on the suffering and worse of others. I'll leave other people to mostly judge what that means about their character, but one thing I will say is that those people are far from stupid. They are incredibly dangerous. To everyone outside their "in-group" in the short term and to everyone wholesale in the long term.