A Bike Messenger Lesson

My neighbor was sitting on the stoop smoking a cigarette, bike messenger cap propped at a jaunty angle, looking morose. I stopped to say hi. I normally enjoy conversation with him because as a bike messenger dealing with DC cabbies, rampaging Metro buses, lackadaisical cops, and douchey BMW-driving yuppies glued to their cell phones he usually has some funny stories to tell. Plus, his personal history is dramatic, having fled New Orleans with his girlfriend when their home (yes, in other parts of the country young people are able to afford a house together) was flooded by Katrina and winding up in DC living in a one bedroom basement apartment to carve out a new life for themselves. He had dreams to open a Cajun-style restaurant.

But this time was different.

“Yeah, me and my girl broke up.”

“Wow, sorry about that, man.” I didn’t need to ask who dumped whom; it was obvious by the way his voice trailed off when he spoke.

We talked a little more. He didn’t give specific reasons for the breakup and I didn’t console him beyond the most perfunctory acknowledgment. Consoling is for women. Men advise and motivate. So I told him to hang with me and my buddies next time we were out, there would be plenty of new women to meet. He said sure, but his slumped body language revealed a beaten man.

I remember the dark thoughts that went through my mind the first time I met him and his girlfriend a year ago: Scruffy low status bike messenger with cute, young Asian girlfriend moving away from the relatively provincial and poor New Orleans into one of the high-flying East Coast megalopolises, right smack into a rapidly gentrifying yuppie neighborhood, filled to brimming with players and alpha males on the make, flashing high status jobs, degrees, bottle service, connections, and sheer overwhelming numbers. As much as they are obviously in love now, their relationship is doomed.

I already knew their trajectory. She compared him to the competition, whether she was aware of this or not. He came up wanting. She flirted and soaked up her newfound power. He looked around and saw 5s acting like 9s and realized he was in a Twilight Zone where his girlfriend was now considered out of his league. She reassessed her sexual market value and slowly withdrew sex, snapping at him constantly for perceived infractions. There was nothing he could do with the meager game skills at his disposal. He reassessed his sexual market value and decided to move out of DC.

Turns out their unconditional love was very conditional. Sometimes all it takes is a move to a different environment to prove that.

People often accuse me of being too abstract in my writing; that what I say doesn’t have much real world relevance to the average person, except in the most extreme circumstances and under laboratory conditions.

On the contrary, everything I write about has the utmost importance to every one of your lives. The arid world of the theoretical is always lurking there in the shadows, stalking you, ready to pounce and devour you in a flash, leaving you wondering why your dopey new age beliefs or romantic visions of love or confidence that the mudbath of human nature doesn’t apply to normal people like yourself weren’t enough to spare you the claw and tooth attack of reality. You are all slave to your beast masters.

I hope bike messenger guy doesn’t see this post.

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How To Save Marriage

As I’ve said before, marriage as it is currently constituted is the worst deal imaginable for men: You give up on all other women forevermore only to run a better than 50% risk that the aging pussy you’re stuck with will walk off with half your money and the house on nothing more than her personal whim.

My advice to men has always been simple — don’t get married. The blessing of marriage is no longer needed to score a steady supply of sex and love.

But since I am the very Moloko Plus of human kindness, and understanding that companionate marriage has served the West well, I give some steps society can take to get the institution back on firm footing.

• Abolish no-fault divorce

When the law relieved husbands and wives of the obligation to give a damned good reason to leave their partners, it was a race to the exits, and beta males took the brunt of it under the new polygynous rules. Yes, some individual divorce parties will suffer without the easy out of no-fault. But the suffering of the few is to be weighed against the betterment of the whole.

• Stop browbeating women to go on to higher education (especially law school)

Only a person — like, oh, myself — with an excellent grasp of human nature could say this. Economically empowered (which is basically the same as educationally empowered) women face a smaller pool of dateable men. This is because it is in the very core of a woman’s nature to date and marry up. Women are not happy unless they are surrendering their bodies to higher status men. By pricing themselves out of the sexual market, they have been forced, when they do get married, to marry at their level or below, increasing the likelihood she’ll turn off the pussy spigot and make him go to the bathroom in the woods as her lawyers sharpen their carving knives. This trend will get worse as the ratio of women to men in higher education grows more skewed. Only the beautiful women have the luxury of marrying up to their hearts’ content.

Now of course, many women will bitch and moan, somewhat justifiably under the current cultural regime, that they need the education and better paying jobs to survive because they can’t rely on men to support them adequately. But here’s what they’re missing: Weaker women *inspire* men to protect and provide for them. In a social climate where women aren’t doing as well occupationally you will see men MORE motivated to improve their own job outlooks because they are fired up to provide for, instead of compete with, the women around them.

Women would be better served concentrating on improving their looks through whatever means necessary. Only ugly women should seriously consider grad school.

• Wives of alphas should learn to ignore their husbands’ affairs and mistresses

Alpha husbands who can get their rocks off with younger pretty mistresses won’t be as liable to walk away from their marriages because their sexual satiation, coupled with the wives’ loyal acquiescence, would discourage them from seeking divorce to clear the way to hot sex. Double plus societal bonus: More alphas tied up in marriage means more women available to marry betas.

The reverse scenario does not apply because a cheating wife is much more dangerous to the stability of the marriage than a cheating husband. Double standard? Of course! Deal. Human nature cares not for your equalist shibboleths.

• Reinvigorate the manufacturing sector of the US economy

This is related to point #2 above. It’s no coincidence that the slide in manufacturing in the past 40 years has tracked the rise in divorce. Without a solid manufacturing base to shore up the pride in self and incomes of left-side-of-the-bell curve men the cruel and merciless shark infested waters of the modern cognitive economy have chewed them up, leaving them utterly defenseless against the onslaught of fickle masculinized women armed with the imprimatur of no fault divorce and burgeoning incomes.

I haven’t seen this written about anywhere else. I believe the loss of manufacturing in America has contributed a lot more to divorce than people think. Manufacturing jobs gave men ill-equipped or ill-tempered for the academic life a shot at decent money and respectable standing in society, without leaving them castrated as office drones or service workers. And manufacturing, appealing so directly to men’s interests, ran no risk of being overrun by a workforce of women eager to operate heavy machinery. In a word, globalization has been bad for the American institution of marriage.

Libertarians may shudder at this suggestion, but then libertarians have never had a firm grasp of male-female natures.

Egalitarian liberals will shudder at all my suggestions, but then egalitarian liberals are discredited.

• Fire all the divorce lawyers

You’ve gotta clean house of the parasites before any of these ideas can be put into action.

• Fathers of daughters have to take a stronger role in punishing and publicly humiliating male interlopers and their slutty daughters

This goes against the trend of feminized doofus befuddled fathers acting like their presence is superfluous, but the return of the powerful patriarchal father would go a long way to curbing the excesses of both the interloper cads and the slutty daughters. Personally, I love sluts, and this suggestion would make my life harder, but what’s good for me is not necessarily, or even very often, good for society.

• Reform the ass-ramming that is child support and divorce laws

In the event of divorce, what beta ex-husband wants to pay a hefty sum to an ex-wife who has his kids 90% of the time and spends it on lingerie and beer for her bad boy lover? A lot of provider betas imagine this scenario and decide that learning game is a better option than walking down the aisle. I don’t blame them.

• Think carefully about gay marriage

Besides the slippery slope argument (which I believe is a legitimate one in this case, opening the door to polygamous arrangements), gay marriage undermines the procreative justification for marriage. Western companionate marriage is as much about kids as it is about love. Scrap the one reason and it’s harder to justify getting married for the other reason. (After all, it’s easy to leave a spouse you no longer love if there are no kids involved, and it’s easy to stay childless and love a partner without the codification of marriage.)

Undermining the procreative reason for marriage with legally sanctioned innately nonprocreative pairings undermines the whole. (Spare me the counterargument that infertile hetero couples can get married. The important concept lies in the potential of the couple in a natural unadulterated state to procreate, not the actual capability.)

Now personally I couldn’t care less if gays get married; it doesn’t affect my life one way or the other, so I will never agitate for or against it. What I’ve written in this post is a primer for society, not for my own hedonistic pursuit. The thing to remember is that INCENTIVES MATTER in human affairs, and right now there is a huge structural disincentive for men to marry and a structural incentive for women to initiate divorce.

Actually, I hope none of these changes happen. It would really cramp my style.

Postscript: Another option is to get the state completely out of the business of marriage. They’ve gone ahead and fucked it up pretty well, so why not try the alternative?

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Dragon Attack

Take me to the room where the red’s all red
Take me out of my head-‘s what I said yeah
Hey take me to the room where the green’s all green
And from what I’ve seen it’s hot it’s mean

If the Chinese have any sense of humor to accompany their embrace of manifest destiny they’d choose the above as their Olympics theme song. As this article insists, it’s the way things are shaping up for the 21st century.

What would those Victorian masters of old have made of the fact that Chinese security men were on the streets of London this week, ordering our own police about and fighting running battles with British protesters while bewildered athletes carried the Olympic torch on its relay through the capital?

It was a brazen display of how confident China has become of its new place in the world, just as the British Government’s failure to take a firm stand on Chinese abuses of human rights shows how craven we have become.

The West is weak, a willfully beached whale encumbered and suffocating under its own heaving mass, tired of living, growing old, losing faith, conceding surrender to legal and illegal invasions of foreign hordes with not the slightest bit of inclination or desire to assimilate, and I lay the blame for its critical condition and spiritual stupor squarely at the feet of those guilty Western equalists who got the vapors being Number One. The folly of the Iraq War was simply coda to decades of self-evisceration and puling retreat from national pride.

As it builds gleaming skyscrapers on its fields, China alone consumes half the world’s cement and a third of its steel.

What is happening is so extraordinary that economists have had to invent a new word for it – this is not an economic cycle, but a supercycle, a shift in the world economy of historic proportions.

When demand increases and supply stands still, prices shoot up. Iron, wheat and oil are all at record prices, despite slackening demand in the faltering Western economies.

A double whammy. Demand in the West for materials decrease but prices continue to rise on increased demand in China. A weakened economy could at least eventually benefit from a drop in prices due to weakened demand, but now that is denied us. I see a big hurt coming. Stagflation all over again.

China rises on these factors:

• dem asian smarts perfectly suited for the modern visuo-spatial tech economy
• fierce jingoism
• ethnic pride (what in the West would be called racism)
• a collective spirit of predestination
• a complete absence of self-flagellating guilt
• a first instinct not based on fear or apology, but righteous entitlement
• a less tender ethical sensibility

Remind you of countries past?

Yet there is audacious hope on the horizon.

But Western attitudes will change as well, with a likely shift to the political Right. White liberal guilt, the driving force behind political correctness, will subside as Westerners feel threatened by the global order changing, and their supremacy slipping away.

Anti-Americanism will disappear as Europeans realise how much better it was to have a world super power that was a democracy (however flawed) not a dictatorship.

There is even speculation that the intense economic pressure on countries such as Britain will cause them to trim down their bloated welfare state, simply because it will no longer be affordable at present levels.

I used to think that the physical death of the last wheezing remnants of the Boomer generation would be needed to finally slay the PC Eye of Sauron, but now I see that China’s triumph is the X factor that will re-energize American culture. Chinese supremacy may very well turn out to be a blessing in disguise for an anemic West. In the tribulation of real challenge, of growing powerlessness, America has the opportunity to toss off the shackles of navel-gazing self-doubt and deconstructionist -ism wallowing and reclaim a renewed sense of self. I foresee the Chinese Century ushering in a quietly robust Underground American Century marked by its jettisoning of postmodernist nihilistic silliness.

Real loss of power has a way of focusing the mind.

She’s low down
-She don’t take no prisoners
Go down
-Gonna give me the business
No time
-Yeah chained to the rack!
Show time
-Got a dragon on my back
Show down
-Go find another customer
Slow down
-I gotta make my way*

*yeah, i know this song is probably about drugs, but i liked how it worked as a china metaphor as well.

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Stuff Whiter* People Like Quiz

Hoping to prove to myself that I am a badass nonconformist, I read through all 76 entries to date at the Stuff White People Like blog and tallied up my score to see how many applied to me. I was as truthful in my answers as I could tolerate.

My white person score: 27 out of 76, which rounds up to 36% white.

*More technically, 36% whiter than the average white, since what that blog really describes is the kind of status whoring that upper middle class coastal city liberal whites like to pursue to separate themselves from the masses of unenlightened whites in flyover country.

I’m pleased with my score. It shows that I have just enough taste to enjoy the good life (green tea has anti-oxidants! NASCAR makes no sense to me!) but not so much self-righteous whiter person status posturing that I become the very thing I loathe (no, I really don’t give a shit about raising awareness!).

I’m so convinced that a lot of these things that whiter people like are merely grabs for status over other white people that I have an experiment in mind. According to this entry, white people love to go to ethnic restaurants (not including Italian) that are patronized by non-whites for the “authentic” experience, so they can tell their fellow whites about their new favorite foreign cuisine. This earns them major bragging rights. The more foreign-sounding the food, the better. Listen as they take great pains to pronounce the dish they had in its native tongue.

Now I like Ethiopian food, even though it gives me tremendous gas one hour after eating it. But I wouldn’t stop eating Ethiopian food if suddenly it was served in a bland cookie cutter suburban eatery and the waitresses were not real Ethiopians, like they are in the place I go to in Adams Morgan. I would continue to enjoy their delicious injera bread even if a hundred other white people were sitting around me eating the same thing, and that is because I go for the food itself.

So in my experiment I would take the most popular Ethiopian restaurant in a hip neighborhood in DC, one that the hippest white people rave about, and move it into a vacated McDonald’s restaurant in a 100% white suburban neighborhood, where I would then sell combo meals of authentic Ethiopian food at $4.99 a pop, with a big gulp honey wine and plastic utensils, served at the cash register by a non-Ethiopian, preferably a dour white hipster with a lip ring or a Chinese woman. If whiter people are truly going to exotic ethnic restaurants for the enjoyment of the food as they like to claim they are, then business should remain brisk in my new McEthiopian restaurant. If business slows to a trickle, then I know that the whiter people were only singing the praises of Ethiopian food when eating it had an “authentic” feel so as to score culinary gotcha points in the neverending struggle to reign supreme at the top of the elitist cultural heap.

Stuffwhitepeoplelike in a nutshell: Making fun of the tribalism of people who think they have risen above tribalism.

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A Scandal And A Link

Standing in the last minute Valentine’s Day checkout line at the supermarket with twenty other men carrying roses, cards and chocolates, I paid for my one economy sized bottle of grape seed massage oil. They eyed my purchase curiously.

Suckers.

***

Behold the world’s funniest (and most bitingly insightful) new blog:

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/

If you are a blue state status whore, you will get uncomfortable reading this blog.

I agree 100% with the #56 Lawyers entry.

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The Morality Equation

In my post on morality I offered a few thoughts on the shifting sands of moral certitude:

If you had the power in your hands, would you kill in such a manner as to ensure maximum pain and suffering

a. 10,000 Indonesians if it would save your lover’s life?

b. your lover if it would save 10,000 Indonesians’ lives?

I concluded with the following wholly scientific effort at a layman’s definition of morality:

Morality = genetic affinity + expedience + quid pro quo + self-serving status posturing

Commenter “godparticles” picked up where I left off and admirably quantified my definition:

I would probably give more weight to S (status posturing) like this:

M=(g+E+q) x S

…where M is defined as the strength of a moral decision. I guess you could create a scale of relatedness for g, a scale of convenience for E, a scale of likely material return for q, and a scale for the explicit ingroup approbation of the moral position, decision, or action for S.

Let this serve as an innocuous example: A middle-aged, poor black man recently asked me for a dollar outside a grocery store. I was sitting in my car waiting for a friend, and he approached with the opening, “I’m not trying to start any trouble or anything, but can I get a dollar for the bus…” I don’t usually carry cash, and that’s what I told him and he left… even though I knew I had a few bucks in my wallet. I’ve been begged for more cash before after having pulled out my wallet so that wasn’t going to happen again.

So the g was 0. The E was actually high. The q was 0. And the S was 0 (no one was watching to approve). HOWEVER, if my (very liberal) friend had been in the car, the S would have increased and multiplied by the E would have led me to give him the buck.

I liked godparticles’ strengthening of my morality equation so I refined the variables and scoring and added an example of my own in the comments:

given: M = (g + E + q) x S

where M = degree of moral umbrage and the likelihood of taking action to rectify the perceived injustice.

g = genetic affinity
E = expediency (I define this as fluid morality, which is similar to moral convenience. You’re more likely to adopt a moral position when it works to your benefit or is relatively painless to act upon.)
q = tit for tat
S = status whoring

The scale for each variable is 1-10, where 1 = no impact on your decision and 10 = influence of the utmost importance.

Let’s say you’re at a party with friends and your brother (who is in attendance) blurts out a racist joke (he has an awkward sense of humor). A hush descends over the crowd. Your response hinges on a series of subconscious calculations:

g = 10 (he’s your brother!)
E = 2 (it’s tough to call out a racist joke at a party and risk dragging out the discomfort. it’s even tougher when it’s your brother’s public humiliation on the line.)
q = 1 (you’re contemplating a moral action that will prevent your loss, rather than win you gains.)
S = 6 (you risk losing the approval of your friends if you seem as if you are acceding to your brother’s faux pas. acting will not raise your status, but it will prevent you losing status.)

calculating M we get:

M = (10+2+1) x 6 = 78

If M resides on a scale from 3 to 300, where a score of 300 equals a moral action that is easy to take, quite personally beneficial, and encourages the sort of self-righteous preening that feels almost as good as sex, then in the scenario I outlined above a score of 78 means you would probably hesitate briefly before deciding to evade your moral discomfort by changing the subject and yelling out “WHO’S UP FOR SHOTS!!!”

An M of 1 means “Kill em all and let bog sort them out”.

Now I’m curious how other common moral dilemmas would rank using the morality equation. Here’s an example from the battlefront:

You and your buddy are in a bar. He notices two girls, a hottie and her friend who was born to cockblock. He tells you it’s all his and he’ll signal you to join when he needs a wingman to occupy the obstacle. He approaches and soon the girls are laughing. You get the signal and move in, doing your best to draw the CB’s attention away from her friend and to you. But your natural charm infects both girls and the cute girl starts touching your arm and tossing you the flirty eye. Your friend is losing the set but you have a good chance of acquiring his target’s digits. You think about number closing her. The morality variables look like this:

g = 2 (no genetic relation to your friend but racially he looks like you.)
E = 7 (any decision you take would be easy to act upon, but getting her # could potentially cost you your friend’s respect since he’s standing right there. because it is only one friend and not a whole group of friends you feel you can smooth out the situation later with a little one on one.)
q = 8 (if you get her # you have a shot at adding a notch. if you don’t get her number you retain the wingman services of your friend for the future.)
S = 6 (you will gain a lot of status points with your friend if you don’t number close his target for yourself. but it is just one friend.)

M = (2 + 7 + 8 ) x 6 = 102

On the morality scale of 3 to 300, there is a one in three chance that you will put your friend’s feelings before the pussy.

Ask yourself, does this result match up with your personal experience dealing with the same situation? Would a good friend opportunistically number close your target 2 out of 3 times?

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Tom Brady Lessons

This made me laugh.

A female friend and I were at dinner recently when we both admitted something that, under normal circumstances, would get us kicked out of the female species.

Neither of us thought less of Tom Brady for having a baby outside of wedlock with Bridget Moynahan while juggling a burgeoning relationship with supermodel Gisele Bundchen.

Scientists are baffled!

But this is just part of what makes Brady amazing. He is that rare celebrity who isn’t judged by whom or how he dates because his accomplishments, coolness, elegance and good looks are too overwhelming.

I wrote about the basic truths of human nature and the loose concept of morality that everyone follows whether they admit it or not:

Sexually attractive people can get away with more.  And they will have more willing apologists excusing their actions.

Mothers of murderers will defend their wicked spawn right to the bitter end. Feminists will stay silent when Bill Clinton ravages interns and humiliates his wife. And women will give a free pass to star quarterbacks who abandon their pregnant girlfriends for supermodels.

Lesson: You can get away with a lot if you do it with style.

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