no. 691

Woman: All Women are Liars

2010-06-30T19:47:00.002-04:00

I am a physician and absolutely do not believe the Palin account of Trig's delivery story. But I am also a woman, and your shock that if she would lie about this is simply a man's perspective. Women lie about pregnancy/birth/parentage all the time. Women withhold the truth when they get abortions and don't tell the potential father. Women have babies and lie about who the father really is even when they know. So what seems like a terrible lie to you doesn't even come close to lies women tell on this subject. This is why I think you overstep on the Trig issue.

The lie about Trig likely came about to feed her ego that she is a hero; she is a martyr for even having him. But I, and I suspect other women, see this as an intrusion. So even if you prove what is likely true - that she is lying - it is neither unique nor crazy.

Legitimacy

2010-06-30T17:59:00.004-04:00

Devil's Advocate and I agree on this: the current elite do not really deserve their high status in any meaningful way, as in having extraordinary value, worth or accomplishments relative to others who are not as high status.

There are very good arguments for this position. One issue is, of course, luck. Many extremely successful, rich or famous people are that way, as opposed to merely respectable or well-off, because of luck and not because they are intrinsically better. This can often play out in winner take all contests: 1000 people compete and only 1 or 2 win get all the rewards and glory, while the others get chump change and have wasted their time. If you ain't first, you're last. When this dynamic plays out because someone gets their first by a small margin,
you can't reasonably claim that the many people who were close deserve penury and obscurity while someone else deserves his billions.

Another issue is value transference, which Half Sigma outlines very well. Often times, you possess something extremely valuable and rare, called capital, that you can leverage to bring in tons of dough. The factory owner pays his workers pennies because their labor is worth little without his machines. Similarly for social capital.

And, of course, you can combine them, like when you inherit a factory.

(I pointed him to Half Sigma's blog, particularly his posts on winner take all contests, and I should have pointed out the series on Post Marxist class analysis and Value Transference. But he seemed dismissive of the HS, probably because HS talks about how stupid people are, in fact, stupid.)

We could talk all day about how the main factors affecting extreme success are not the same as how we would like to apportion praise and status.

We disagree, I assume, on whether anyone actually deserves such high status. His point in this Cleverness is not Intelligence series is to destroy the legitimacy of one group of people holding elite status, presumably because he feels there are other more deserving people we should elevate instead. He thinks of himself as the righteous vanguard of progress, an agitator who will bring down the current system so that we can build a new, better one in its place. And most likely, as humans are wont to do, he thinks he will be more respected when this new perfect world arrives. And posts like these are excuses for his commenters to shit on others and feel superior, if only for a moment. Of course, this is just conjecture and I could be wrong about his motives.

Personally, I don't like talking about legitimacy because it is an emotional issue, a feelings issue, that has a counterproductive relationship with truth. Arguments over legitimacy are arguments about who we should defer to, whom we have obligations to, who is above us and who is below us, who we should feel inferior to and who we should feel superior to. If a man has legitimate power, that means (almost) everyone accepts that he is superior to them and will not contest that. When you want to usurp the king, you need to attack his legitimacy just as much as his army and build your own legitimacy as much as your army so that the people won't reject you when you take over.Arguing about legitimacy is an argument about how we should feel about certain things and people. It has a counterproductive relationship with truth seeking.

Which means that you can't really understand the status game when you are worried about legitimacy. And it is a certainly a game. When you realize this, it's like if you thought you were a real estate tycoon, only to wake up and realize you were only playing Monopoly. The status game is just as shallow and silly and pointless as Monopoly. As such, you can learn to play the game to win it. But only if you can restrain your emotional involvement in the game. When you understand that status has nothing to do with deserving, you can play the game well.

Now, we all have emotional needs. We need recognition, human interaction, relationships and a sense of community. So you can't get completely outside of the game. But you can see it more clearly (This is commonly called "being cynical").

So, I think arguing over legitimacy is silly, because it is the same as allocating Monopoly money among the various people playing.

Coming Up
-More on status
-Why you should be idealistic when it comes to absolute goods and a sociopath when it comes to relative goods

Don't Be Embarrassed

2010-06-27T16:00:00.002-04:00

In a comment over at the Devil's Advocate, I wrote

And convincing the plebes that status is unimportant/unjust/evil is one way the high status maintain their position, because then no one is thinking about how to unseat them.

I just realized that I stole this nugget of wisdom from the Godfather. I know that there is a Godfather quote for anything a man could need and you've probably heard them all, but I hope this is new ground since the quote comes from a deleted scene in Godfather II so hopefully you've never seen it.

This is from the beginning of the movie, when Michael is hearing requests from family and friends during his son's first communion party. Watch from 3:00 to about 5:00

His niece, Sonny's daughter, and her boyfriend come to get his blessing before they get married. When Michael asks how he will support his new wife, the boyfriend replies,

"I'm embarrassed to say it, but I'm a major stockholder in the family corporation."

Michael then says,

"Don't be embarrassed. This contempt for money is just another trick of the rich to keep the poor without it."

And he grants his blessing to the joyous couple.

The Absurd

2010-04-16T09:48:00.002-04:00

Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions:

I would argue that absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics. Like skepticism in epistemology, it is possible only because we possess a certain kind of insight - the capacity to transcend ourselves in thought.

If a sense of the absurd is a way of perceiving our true situation (even though the situation is not absurd until the perception arises), then what reason can we have to resent or escape it? Like the capacity for epistemological skepticism, it results from the ability to understand our human limitations. It need not be a matter for agony unless we make it so. Nor need it evoke a defiant contempt of fate that allows us to feel brave or proud. Such dramatics, even if carried on in private, betray a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation. If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

Discipline

2010-04-14T22:41:00.002-04:00

Many talents are like easy credit. They can amplify the benefits of your actions but often people abuse them and without discipline, you can fall into a terrible mess. I have always looked down on people who just didn't understand "Spend less than you make," and pile up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of credit card debt. On the other hand, I have consistently avoided developing self-discipline yet somehow managing to get by. Eventually the house of cards must fall.

Steve Pavlina makes a fantastic point separating industry from hard work from willpower. Many people conflate them together. The first means putting in the hours, often of tedious tasks you cannot automate or delegate. The second means tasks that challenge your abilities. There are times when I can do lots of little tasks but avoid the hard ones and at other times I will try to tackle all hard problems and let the little tasks fall apart, creating new hard problems. Finally, willpower is a commodity. It's what allows you to do hard work but you only have so much of it so you must deploy it strategically. But knowing how to deploy it strategically is a hard problem itself:

Research shows (see for instance Your Brain at Work) that prioritizing is one of the most advanced brain functions, and a huge energy suck. In other words, we use the most recently evolved (and therefore energy-inefficient) parts of our brains, and it is hard work.

On the other hand, prioritizing doesn't feel like work at all. It feels like metawork that produces zero output. If you use workflow ideas like GTD, you know it takes significant creativity to look at the stuff in your inbox, recognize what they mean, and decide what to do about each item, and then pick one to process. Not prioritizing the whole darn list. Just picking one is hard.

Which means you should reserve your highest energy/top-gear brain time for prioritizing. For your weekly GTD review if you can produce that energy state reliably at the same time every week. But it can feel like a waste of your best brain time. You feel like you should be writing, coding or composing music with your best time, not processing to-do lists.

On a final note, Pavlina's number one pillar of self-discipline is acceptance. I've found that accepting your limits is enormously freeing, because you stop flailing about at things you will only rarely accomplish. But this is by far the toughest part of developing self-discipline for me, especially as a young guy. I feel a constant need to push through by boundaries, to test how far I can push my abilities. Accepting my limits is hard on my ego, equivalent to the pain a 38 year old woman feels settling for Mr. Only-Guy-Willing-To-Talk-To-Me.

Feminists Rally, Men Stare at Boobs

2010-04-06T12:00:00.001-04:00

In Maine, a group of feminists rallied topless to help erase the awful double standard that allows men to walk around without shirts on while women are forced to wear burkhas and ankle-length black robes that camouflage their curves.

PORTLAND – About two dozen women marched topless from Longfellow Square to Tommy's Park this afternoon in an effort to erase what they see as a double standard on male and female nudity.

The women, preceded and followed by several hundred boisterous and mostly male onlookers, many of them carrying cameras, stayed on the sidewalk because they hadn't obtained a demonstration permit to walk in the street.

Two intrepid National Geographic reporters (red arrows) used 100x magnifying zoom lenses to capture a scene straight out of an Amazonian tribal custom while an aspiring Maine PUA (blue arrow) racks up a few dozen day game approaches ("call me").

SWPL

2010-04-05T14:32:00.002-04:00

I've been seeing a waitress. Since its been a month and she had Sunday off, I rewarded her by taking her out to for breakfast the morning after instead of kicking her out for a walk of shame at 7:30am.

She doesn't have money or time for internet access so I get to clue her in to all the great things we have on the intertubes. I mentioned Stuff White People Like and summoned it on my iPhone. I started reading off some of the entries and she wasn't laughing. I thought maybe she's taking this a little personally. Some people are like this. Some people aren't. I showed the site to my straight-edge vegan grad student friend who just bought a mini, eats cliff bars and goes camping and he loved it. But it wasn't that. It just didn't register with her. She didn't find it funny because she has never been around these types of people. Anyone with an education from the northeast – NYC, DC, etc... - sees hundreds of these people a day, and familiarity breeds contempt. But down here in New Orleans, people actually like jazz music, there are poor black performers playing trumpets on the streets. Jazz is not a once-a-month put a CD in the Bose with a glass of wine get tired halfway through experience. It's a dance in the streets, weekend festival, authentic experience that no one would adopt as a way to feel superior to the uncultured cretins around you. Down here, its the uncultured cretins who like and play jazz.

Down here, people have a different way to feel self-righteous and superior to their neighbors. It's called Christianity. Up north, they would be the wrong kind of white people, the uncultured, scientifically illiterate bible thumping cretins.

Some things just get inverted when you travel south.

My Faults

2010-03-08T22:48:00.003-05:00

I have started writing many posts for this blog, almost all of which I have abandoned. Why? Because although I admire those who write well and want to return some of the joy reading has given me, my intellect has a Thomas Friedman disposition and most of the time what comes out is nonsense. Tempting, glamorous, inspiring nonsense. Unfortunately, the omniscient critic looking over my shoulder prevents me from publishing it, selling millions of books, advising Fortune 500 CEOs and traveling to world to develop more nonsense.

But there’s the rub. He claims to be simplifying complex ideas and making them more understandable. But what he is in fact doing is taking an already simple idea — say, that of a level playing field — and making it meaningless. You can boil something down to the essentials, but if you keep boiling it you’re just left with nonsense. The level playing field is already a boiled-down idea, comprehensible by high-school sophomores and Charlie Rose alike. Friedman’s alchemist’s brain transmutes the dross of the banal into the bullion of bull.

..,Friedman told The New Yorker that his analogizing instinct, which allows him to compare everything to anything and vice versa, is like a “pinball game going on in my head. Balls bouncing around.” The more apt metaphor would be a furnace. Every distinction, every objection to his vision for the world, every bit of countervailing evidence inconveniently popping up in reality simply melts away.

Female Athletes

2010-03-03T08:58:00.002-05:00

If I had to guess how a woman would break into a top level US professional sports league, this would be it:

Yoshida, the petite 18-year-old who became the first female drafted by a Japanese professional team, Kobe 9 Cruise of the Kansai Independent Baseball League, made her pro debut on March 26, 2009, at the Osaka Dome. She learned how to throw a knuckleball as a young girl by watching video of Wakefield.

Knuckleballer. It makes you wonder why more men don't learn how to throw them.

Question

2010-02-20T18:18:00.001-05:00

What is the point of power, except to be corrupted?

Israeli Alpha

2010-02-09T12:21:00.002-05:00

Saw this AP write-up in the paper this morning.

The women tattooed his name and portrait on their bodies and gave their children his name — Savior.

They spoon-fed the bearded, one-time healer as if he were royalty, brushed his shoulder-length white locks, sent him text messages when they were ovulating and slept with him at his bidding.
They turned over wages and welfare payments to him and lived in cramped, rundown Tel Aviv apartments with the children they bore him...

Police suspect Ratzon's clan is even bigger than they know. Gabai, the defense attorney, says Ratzon claims to have more than 30 women and nearly 100 children kept in various apartments in the Tel Aviv area — along with one legal wife who is not part of the group...

The attorney says he doesn't work, and Reichstein said he lives off the money the women give him. Women said their children's names are variations on his own, like "Tikvat Hagoel," — the savior's hope — or "Tiferet Hagoel," the savior's glory...

"He doesn't live like you or me. He lives differently. And the fact that the women accepted it and were part of it gave him the legitimacy that it was OK, that it was good for them," said his court-appointed lawyer, Shlomzion Gabai.

Why is he in the news? The police suspect him of enslaving these women and organizing a cult. Why, because his name means "Savior" in Hebrew, even though he does not pretend to any spiritual significance, and because he had clear expectations of modesty and fidelity from these women.

According to police, his lawyer and testimony from the women, Ratzon kept tabs on his "extended family" through closed-circuit TV, and fined them for violating rules that included modest dress and a ban on unauthorized telephone calls.

A little over the top for me, but nowhere close to being illegal. The police have been player hating this guy for a while, it seems, but when they tried to infiltrate his harem, he caught the undercover agent with his alpha stare:

He said a private investigator he sent to infiltrate the harem was badly shaken after her first encounter with Ratzon.

"He looked her in the eye" for about 90 seconds, "and she felt like she was losing control, it was a kind of hypnosis," he said.

The investigator, who spend a month inside the clan, reported to Wizman that the women "talked about Ratzon as if he were a god and the biggest honor is to spend the night with him," he said.

So, supreme alpha lives the dream and everyone else gets jealous but his prowess is so great that he wins the heart of the crusading PI sent to take him down. But over time, the police presence is too much for him, as they pay a couple of women to defect and fabricate some evidence that he is a criminal. Women are mercenaries, such is life. From the article, it does not seem that they have a real case against him, but you never know.

Here's the money quote:

Dvora Reichstein was taken into the fold four and a half years ago when she was 22, unmarried and pregnant with another man's child. From day one, she said, life with him was "like living in a prison" — but she had nowhere else to go.

"Today, I'm free to wear jeans, talk to my parents, meet friends, buy myself a cup of coffee without getting Goel's permission," said Reichstein, who had a "Goel" tattoo peeking out over her black turtleneck in a photo published in the Yediot Ahronot daily.

"I'm not the same woman who just a month ago sent him an ovulation SMS saying, 'I want to remind you that I'm ovulating, and if it works out, I'd very much like to be with you and carry your seed in my womb. Love you forever, your wife-slave,'" she wrote in an account of her life with Razton published by Yediot Ahronot.

Women will do anything to deny or rationalize their slutty ways once the moment has passed but sometimes what comes out is priceless.

Two Lists

2010-01-28T19:04:00.002-05:00

I finally ponied up and bought Impro by Keith Johnstone, a book that I first heard of at Alpha Status and that has made it around the blogs. Great read and its about $20 on Amazon so there is no excuse not to pick it up. Anyone who has reads the type of blogs on my blogroll already has an introduction to some of these ideas and so has the mental preparation to get a lot out of them.

There are two lists in the book, both of which he cites from scientific literature, that I want to extract from the book and put into public consciousness.

The first is a "Ten Golden Rules" for Number Ones (or Alphas), taken from Desmond Morris's The Human Zoo.

You must clearly displace the trappings, postures and gestures of dominance.
In moments of active rivalry you must threaten your subordinates aggressively.
In moments of physical challenge you (or your delegates) must forcibly overpower your subordinates.
If a challenge involves brain rather than brawn you must be able to outwit your subordinates
You must suppress squabbles that break out between your subordinates.
You must reward your immediate subordinates by permitting them to enjoy the benefits of their high ranks.
You must protect the weaker members of the group from undue persecution.
You must make decisions concerning the social activities of your group.
You must reassure your extreme subordinates from time to time.
You must take the initiative in repelling threats or attacks from outside your group.

I don't think they need commentary from me.

The next list answers a question I have been throwing around in my head since last summer, when I spent a night in the hospital on suspicion of Swine Flu. After coming down with a severe fever, I read that there had been several cases of this deadly disease on campus so I went to the infirmary and got tested. The initial tests were negative, but it may not show for 36 hours so they quarantined me in a hospital room, isolated and forced to wear a mask whenever a nurse came in or I left to use the bathroom. Sitting in that room alone, with no TV, I felt embarrassed and silly for turning myself in when I should have just sweated it out on my own, all on top of feeling shitty for being sick. But whenever a nurse came in, or I asked for a favor, their demeanor instantly alleviated my shame and uplifted my spirits. Somehow, with just a few unspectacular lines, I would feel like a million bucks, forgetting all my bad thoughts.

For a while, I have wondered how they, including the gay nurse, managed to game me so efficiently. It was a marvelous performance, a skill I envy and wish I had control of. Rapport-building skills like that can get a G into the century club in a week. For a while I had assumed it was some natural talent but now I realize that is was trained therapeutic technique and although they might have possessed some innate talent, these nurses were relying on experientially-acquired scientific knowledge.

Consider the following list, mentioned in a footnote of Impro but taken from Interacting with Patients, by Joyce Samhammer Hays and Kenneth Larson, published in 1963. It is a list of therapeutic and non-therapeutic verbal techniques, intend to highlight good and bad ways for shrinks and psychiatric nurses to talk with patients. Johnstone cites it as good influence for how teachers should speak to students and I cite it as a good influence for game.

Therapeutic Techniques

Silence

Accepting
"Yes"
"Uh huh"
"I follow what you said"
Nod

Giving Recognition
"Good morning, ..."
"You've tooled a leather wallet."
"I noticed that you've combed your hair."

Offering Self
"I'll sit with you a while."
"I'll stay here with you."
"I'm interested in your comfort."

Giving Broad Openings
"Is there something you'd like to talk about?"
"What are you thinking about?"
"Where would you like to begin?"

Offering General Leads
"Go on."
"And then..."
"Tell me about it."

Placing the event in time or in sequence
"What seemed to lead up to...?"
"Was this before or after?"
"When did this happen?"

Making Observations
"You appear tense."
"Are you uncomfortable when you..."
"I notice that you are biting your lips."
"It makes me uncomfortable when you..."

Encouraging description of perceptions
"Tell me when you feel anxious."
"What is happening?"
"What does the voice seem to be saying?"

Encouraging comparison
"Was it something like...?"
Have you had similar experiences?"

Non-Therapeutic Techniques
Reassuring
"I wouldn't worry about..."
"Everything will be alright..."
"You're coming along fine."

Giving Approval
"That's good."
"I'm glad that you..."

Rejecting
"Let's not discuss..."
"I don't want to hear about..."

Disapproving
"That's bad."
"I'd rather you wouldn't..."

Agreeing
"I agree."
"That's right."

Disagreeing
"That's wrong."
"I definitely disagree with ..."

Advising
"I think you should..."
"Why don't you..."

Probing
"Now tell me about..."
"Tell me your life history."

Challenging
"But how can you be President of the United States?"
"If you're dead, why is your heart beating?"

Testing
"What day is this?"
"Do you know what kind of a hospital this is?"
"Do you still have the idea that...?"

Although a major rule of game is to not be her therapist, I think this list is very informative. First, the top set are neutral ways to prolong a conversation, which is an important asset to have when you run out of things to say or are running one word game. You may think that probing is a good way to accomplish this, but in fact it can be counterproductive and there are better ways to elicit information. The lines are neutral because they are judgment free. Just like challenging someone will put them on the defensive, so will making it explicit that you are judging them, by admitting that you approve or disapprove, agree or disagree. Remaining judgment free is a key element of game because it involves toning down your maleness. All the latter techniques seem appropriate to inexperienced men. They think, "Of course reassuring her is good," or "Of course, if I give her advice she will be able to solve her problem and be happy," or "Of course, if I probe for more information and test to see if she's telling the truth, I will be able to fix her problem for her and then she will be happy." The point of this list is that these are wrong responses, they very logical, male responses. I think this is part of what the mantra "Girls aren't logical" means.

I'm With Coco

2010-01-14T20:42:00.003-05:00

Denise Romano MA, EdM !

2010-01-12T22:34:00.003-05:00

I thought that insulting a black man and demeaning his intelligence and language skills was racist!

In other news, I love her take on infidelity:

AND, any sex that Elin had with Tiger after his very first instance of infidelity (whether it was unprotected or not) WAS AN ACT OF RAPE.

WHY? Because Elin would NOT have chosen to sleep with him after that, as is true for most women. After the very first time he betrayed her, he was no longer who he claimed to be, and every sexual encounter with his wife thereafter was a rape because he DENIED her the information she needed to give full consent to sleep with him.

Had he told her what he did, she would NOT have slept with him.
Furthermore, I will say it again: Infidelity IS Emotional, Psychological, Verbal, Sexual, and Physical Abuse all at once.

Therefore, I see Elin’s having hit Tiger with a golf club as justifiable given that he raped her and abused her in every way possible repeatedly, and she now has to wait several months to learn what STDs she’s been exposed to.

So, if a wife cheats on her husband, he is justified to smack her around in retribution because she raped him!

By the way, how is infidelity verbal or physical abuse? Unless she's in the bedroom too and you're yelling at and punching her while you do the other girl. That I could see.

PS. Does anyone actually use NLP?

Psychopaths

2010-01-08T21:20:00.002-05:00

However annoying Denise Romano MA, EdM, has been, posting nonsense about hate groups and cults, her site has led me to some great blogs. Great meaning hilarious, that is.

Take "Encounters of the Psychopathic Kind," writing under the pseudonym minou999. This lady had a bad relationship with a heartbreaker who left her emotionally devastated. Understandable, something similar happened to me and I am sure to many other people. But she is still blogging about this two years later and is revising the history of their relationship to fit the narrative that he was a PSYCHOPATH who fiendishly manipulated her at every possible moment, each moment setting up the next until he divorced her. Here is her description:

I reflected on the “marriage” – a very short marriage. The Psycho was interested in me because my parents seemed to have money salted away in bank accounts and stocks and shares. He is working a long con with an elderly widow who has come to feel dependent on him. He hopes to inherit her house which she has left him in her will. But psychopaths are greedy predators, there is never enough, there are always more suckers out there waiting to be divested of their material goods.

He let me know some months before he “left” me – he was never really with me – he told me that he didn’t think my father had as much money as he let on. He said this a few times but I did not know the full significance of what he was doing or planning to do. You are caught in a confusing web – on the one hand he tells you how much he loves you and how much you can trust him, then he says things that show his true concerns but it washes over you – how can you possibly doubt Mr Wonderful?

I realised in my guts just recently how planned this marriage was, that there was always an exit plan, that there was an objective on Mr Wonderful’s part to extract as much money as he could. All the signs were there but my confusion stopped me piecing all the bits together and arriving at the only conclusion possible – Mr Wonderful is a con man. He is a dangerous con man. He is after money but he will do it in such a way that your life is destroyed, you are destroyed. I feel thankful that he met his new target when he was getting bored and frustrated with me – his plans were not progressing at all well. He tried to get me into a psychiatric unit so that he could get the house and the money but my parents managed to get me out of there. Strangely enough, I learnt from his first wife that he had done the same thing to her, for the very same reason, some 25 years previously!!! Proof indeed that psychos don’t change, can’t change, they just move on to different targets.

The “marriage” was a sham, it was an illusion put together by Mr Wonderful. He wanted me to believe that he was making a commitment to me – a commitment that in reality had a very limited life span and would be soon dropped when his objectives had been reached.

Fascinating.

My favorite is the post "Gaslighting," which she describes thusly,

Gaslighting is a term used in psychiatric papers and articles on psychopathy that describes the deliberate psychosis-induction perpetrated by the psychopath onto his targets. It comes from the 1940’s film Gaslight that starred Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. Charles Boyer plays the husband who has seduced Ingrid Bergman into marrying him so that he can locate and acquire for himself some jewels that he knows are hidden in her family home in London (he has persuaded her to go back there to live). In his searches of the attic he uses the gas light, and this results in the other gas lights in the house dimming, added to that he makes noises while he is looking for the treasure. His wife complains about the dimming of the lights and the noises but the husband says it is all in her imagination, she is getting mentally unstable and he says she needs medical help. He hides her belongings and then accuses her of being forgetful, he even enlists the help of the housemaid to further gang up on the already confused wife. The wife thinks she is going mad – little does she realise at first that that is the husband’s plan. It is a classic portrayal of the isolation and manipulation of a target by a psychopath. A friend from outside gradually makes the wife realise that she is being set up.

...

It is the planned, gradual and ruthless dismantling of a person’s self-esteem and self-confidence so much so that they become unable to confront their abuser, they become convinced that they are mentally or emotionally unstable, they feel they are going mad.

Then the psychopath “suggests” that medical help be brought in, the target becomes tainted with the stigma of being mentally unstable.

This story makes for a great movie plot, but I find it very improbable in real life. In fact, the entire premise is very film noir. We don't much care for the psychological thriller like this anymore. We only care about psychopaths who brutally murder their victims (Silence of the Lambs, etc...). The only falsely-imprisoned-in-mental-institution-but-actually-sane plot recently that I can think of is in The Skulls. And that was unusual because it was a man not a woman. The crazy lady whom everyone wants to ignore but maintains her own sanity comes up a lot (24 season 5, the Green Mile to name a few)

They tend to say things like:

When you are divorcing a psycho you are in for a very nasty and bumpy ride. Insults will be added to your already massive injuries, you are in a maelstrom of wicked, evil putdowns, mind-unsettling manoeuvres, and downright lies and prevarication. The legal system does not help – in fact the only person it seems to help is the psycho – you can’t touch him even though you and his other victims know he is lying. You are already at a disadvantage because the legal system presumes that everyone is half-lying and half telling the truth. The reality is that the psycho always lies and you are always telling the truth, so you will be treated as though some of what you say is lies and the psycho will be assumed to be partly telling the truth – how unfair is that!

The psycho, because he is unable to feel emotion, puts on a cool and calm appearance, he is confident, he is so sure of himself. You, on the other hand, are a quivering mess of anger, fear and confusion, you are prone to emotional outbursts and times when you feel your self esteem cannot sink any lower. That’s what people see and they think that the psycho is the sane one! You are behaving totally normally, you are reacting normally to an unreal and abnormal situation, fighting for your survival – but you have been cast as the mad one. [emphasis added]

Arlington Road is like this: Jeff Bridges gets painted as the crazy lone bomber even though he discovers that it is his seemingly harmless neighbors who orchestrate the plot. I can't think of others like this right now, feel free to post them below.

So, on one hand I find this blog interesting because it weaves a personal narrative that I have only seen in movies. I don't necessarily want to pile on this woman because of the silly narrative she rationalized to get her psyche through this divorce. I think her analysis is wrong and I will leave it at that.

However, I think it is a good opportunity to rant on something else: double standards for men and women. This time, in relation to dealing with heartbreakers.

Heartbreakers come in both genders and quite a lot has been written by men and women about such relationships, breakups and the damage done. This is such a common phenomenon that Alias Clio has a nice categorization of various types of male and female heartbreakers.

So, my first point is that this woman's experience is common, i.e. she is not unique in this, and that it happens to both genders, i.e. it is not just a problem of men preying on women (see Femme Fatale).

But of course we already know that bad things happen in life: you must try to protect yourself and if you fail, you must recover, get back on the horse, and continue the horseback ride of life. What I want to point out is how we respond differently to men and women to whom this happens.

Suppose a woman breaks a man's heart, by cheating or conniving to steal half his assets in divorce. As a fellow man, I would sympathize with this guy, try to cheer him up, but after a certain period of time I would say, "Dude, you've got to get over this. You need to start going out with us, meeting some new girls, recapture your glory days." Summary: when this happens to a man, he is expected to learn from his mistakes and avoid these situations in the future. Fool me once type of thing. He is expected to sort out his differences and take it upon himself to defend himself from something like this happening again.

But if a man breaks a woman's heart, we let her vent her feelings for years, continually talking about how devastated she is, how she was always an angel and did nothing wrong. Moreover, we let her portray herself as the victim, as a completely vulnerable waif who could never have stopped this. She gets to go to a counselor every week to talk about this, a counselor like Denise Romano who preaches "healing," but in reality this consists of support groups of other similar woman who talk about what happened, that is, continually ruminating on what has happened, keeping it fresh in their minds so that they never get past it. Women talk so much about healing, they never actually heal. They compulsively pick the scab off wounds. And you wonder why these breakups leave them scarred. Summary: women pretend to solve the problem, but never do and no one holds them accountable for this. Then they complain when it happens again, that they could never have expected it.

New York, I'm Thinking...

2010-01-03T10:40:00.001-05:00

So Christmas is over and I am heading back South from the big city. New Jersey, really, because that is where I grew up and where my parents still live but I spent most of my time in the city. Some reflections:

Always fly into NYC at night. Orange streetlights, green lights along the bridges, white headlights and red taillights along the highways, yellow office lights in skyscrapers, the Empire State Building, the enormous screen on the east side of the Prudential Building and the floodlights at Giants Stadium, Yankee Stadium or Shea (now Citi Field) spread out to the horizon, so get a window seat.

Northern girls are manly. From their cold demeanor right down to the way they dress. Southern girls dress to look pretty, Northern girls dress in armor. Cowboy boots are sexy; tall leather boots with heels are for ball busting. Southern girls wear dresses that flow and dance as they move. Northern girls wear skinny jeans, tall thin jackets and scarves; they wrap themselves so tightly they squeeze the femininity out.

Some foods are still regional. Good bread and pizza are two key ones.

Guidos are urban rednecks.

New Jersey highway planners are insane. At the junction of the NJ Parkway and Interstate 78, from the south you can only get on eastbound 78 and from the north you can only get on westbound 78. It's been like this my whole life and only now are they starting to fix this.

If you went/go to an Ivy League school, in NYC you will always and unexpectedly run into someone you knew/recognize from college and in the weirdest places, not just at the Harvard Club.

There is only one thing in the world that makes me emotional: walking by the World Trade Center site. An immediate, deep, visceral, joy-killing sadness strikes me every time I see it. New York City streets are canyons, where from any spot fifty-story buildings stretch as far as you can see in both directions. To have such a hole among all the skyscrapers downtown is shocking. To look from the Brooklyn Bridge towards downtown and realize that the twin towers were twice as high as all the financial buildings you see and that there were two of them there is shocking.

Holiday Movie Recommendation

2009-12-28T17:18:00.002-05:00

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. (1954). I remember watching this at my grandparents house when I was young and then I saw it last week on Turner Classic Movies. It's a musical comedy with a famous dance scene that's great fun. But I recommend it to you because of the plot. The movie could never be made today because it would send modern feminists apoplectic. (see Caveman Game, Bride Kidnapping and Rape of the Sabine Women)

Also, Great Scenes of Game in the Movies:

He begins with indirect game, staying aloof and disinterested while the AFCs at the table gush all over her. Then he gives her an alpha stare, negs her cooking and makes her qualify herself. When he knows he's hooked her, he switches to direct game, DHVs and pushes through the Last Minute Resistance. Finally, for relationship game he employs one-word game, letting her babble and giving short replies. Masterful. Even the G Manifesto suited down couldn't swoop so fast.

Note that two of the three screenwriters are women.

Find a Target-Rich Environment

2009-11-24T22:19:00.002-05:00

In the US, parents are apparently selecting for girls over boys:

What’s behind the modern-day girl fetish? One explanation: Women envision a brighter future for their daughters than they do for their sons. Boys are practically the underdogs these days, having fallen behind girls on nearly every measure of academic achievement, from college attendance to high school graduation rates. According to books such as The War Against Boys and Boys Adrift, they are in danger of becoming, as Christina Hoff Sommers has written, “tomorrow’s second sex.”
“The way society is now—I feel there’s a preference for girls,” says Linda Heithaus, a marine biologist from Hollywood, Florida, who has two sons and is contemplating doing IVF/PGD in the hope of getting a girl. “They can do everything a boy can do, plus you can dress them up. It’s almost like, to fit in, you need to have one.” Girls, in other words, are boys plus. They can play sports and have careers, and you can dress them in pink and take them to tea at the American Girl café. What’s not to like?

What does this mean? A high female to male ratio and more girls to game!

Sports are Dramatic

2009-11-21T15:07:00.003-05:00

FeministX is delightfully provocative when writing about her true passion, feminism. As Chuck describes it, you "enjoy it in the same way that [you] enjoy toothaches, charlie horses and hour-long poops."

I reread her post FeminismX and sports culture. Let me summarize her points, which were muddled in the original post:

1) Sports are silly. It is a "bunch of grown men piling up on each other and hitting balls with sticks,"

2) Sports are not noble; they are on par with "grunts and farts". Humans have admirable achievments, like "sky scrapers" and "Shakespeare," and "institutes dedicated to knowledge acquisition." Sports either steal men's attention from these pursuits, since those men "who never thinks to read a book [become] a well of encyclopedic knowledge and a fountain of analytical dexterity when the topic of sports comes up," or worse, they actively corrupt them, such as at colleges, by stealing funding from libraries to build fields and buy equipment.

3) People actually care about sports even though she finds them stupid. It is a "venerated pastime" and leads to the "idolization of an individual with a high level of physical prowess," who gets paid "millions of dollars."

4) Sports symbolize mankind's violent, prehistoric past. The real drive for sports is "zealous tribalism" and the "male desire to engage in tribal warfare," which "allowed one trive to abduct and rape the females of a neighboring tribe." It is a "cro magnon obsession" from our "caveman days" and is nothing more than "dogs chasing tails."

5) Sports are responsible for promoting a variety of miscellaneous faults such as "mindless conformity," "junk food," and love of "especially vapid" women.

There are also an implied reason: 6) Jocks are evil ("perfectly laudable efforts by script writers to air long fermented grievances against jocks").

Her real reason for writing the post, as she acknowledges, is to start picking apart the male mind, leaving no pettiness or vice uncriticized, which she accuses men of doing to women. She is tired of men "denigrating women for the silliness particular to the female gender" and wants to return the favor. Further, she finds most male defenses of sports lacking ( - "builds character," "teaches teamwork, "father son bonding," Title IX destroys sports) and the product of male egotism. As she writes, "Enough with the kids gloves. Someone has to have the integrity to speak plainly and truthfully about what sports really are."

In response, I welcome her attempt to shine light on male frivolity. It is a worthwhile perspective and in general I can sympathize with her on points (1) and (2). I can see how points (3) and (6) might accentuate one's hatred of sports, but since I don't hate sports they do not resonate with me. I find point (4) lacking in that it is a reason to find sports distasteful but not immoral or criminal. If anything, sports direct men's violent tendencies into generally harmless activities instead of actual warfare, rape and plunder. (As a caveat, observe the high rate of concussions and brain damage in NFL stars. And I did hear of a study that in a major city, controlling for important variables, rates of male on female domestic violence were statistically significantly higher after home basketball teams wins. I don't know the details but if you do, post it below.) Of course, point (5) is incoherent and I suppose she threw in these insults just for good measure.

My first response is that silliness does not disqualify anything. Humans have a tendency to go around declaring everything they find to be silly, distasteful or uncomfortable as criminal or, worse, immoral. I understand that by watching sports and playing fantasy football, I am engaging in an ultimately pointless endeavor. But as a nihilist, I would find everything else pointless as well under close enough inspection, so why shouldn't I do something that lends a little excitement to my life and gives me some basis to joke around with my male friends about? Football is no sillier than Monopoly, which of course glamorizes evil capitalist values of domination and extortion. We do both in order to have fun. You do whatever it takes to get you through the day and so will I. But I get angry when you go on a crusade to destroy my fun because you find it silly (see: Title IX).

My second point is that sports are dramatic. That is, sports are dramatic as opposed to theatrical. This is a distinction I picked up from James P. Carse's book Finite and Infinite Games. We tend to think of plays and movies as drama but they are in fact theatrical productions. The actors speak scripted lines, the director blocks their movements, the dancers move to a choreography, the stage hands move set pieces to specific places at specific times, the sound engineer plays effects on cue, all in an effort to elicit powerful emotions from the audience. Consider this clip from Spartacus that Alkibaides posted.

Watching it, you feel the righteous strength of slaves fighting a war of liberation, the fear of facing the imposing Roman army as it marches in formation towards you, elation as the first line of troops retreat and you chase after them and then the ignominy and despair as your side loses, meaning that you are bound to be crucified for revolting. But the movie makers planned this in advance and executed that plan through superb skill: Kubrick's directing, Kirk Douglas and Laurence Olivier's acting, costumes, stuntmen, editors and the artists who created the visuals of the expansive battlefield.

Instead, sports games are dramatic in that their outcomes are always uncertain, just like real life. Sports are war, just like in Spartacus, but unlike the movie makers, neither the players on the field, the coaches, the referees, the groundskeepers, the concession workers nor the audience knows how it will end. That is, just like a real war, where neither the soldiers, the generals, the politicians not the civilians know who will win. Of course, in retrospect it might seem as if the outcome was never in doubt, that Bill Belichick the evil genius masterminded each step of the championship run, but that is not true. The underdogs do sometimes win; the Giants did upset the Patriots in that Superbowl. But Spartacus will never, ever win no matter how many times you watch the movie.

Both endeavors are safe ways to indulge our emotions. The first sticks to a script, the second to defined temporal and physical boundaries and rules that are arbitrary and require the participants and audience to suspend disbelief.

Two Blogs of Note

2009-11-20T17:09:00.003-05:00

The first is Ribbon Farm. A great series of essays on human nature from a business/corporate perspective that you will enjoy. Especially the trail "The Way of the Sociopath," which includes "The Gervais Principle."

The Gervais Principle, like its predecessors the Peter Principle and the Dilbert Principle is an attempt to explain why everyone's boss is such an idiot and draws from the TV show The Office. The Peter Principle is that people who are good at their job tend to get promoted and those who are bad do not. When you see this trend acting on an entire corporation, you find that everyone gets promoted past his level of competence and into a position where he is bound to fail. Hence idiot bosses. The Dilbert Principle states that the incompetent workers are promoted out of the low level jobs, where real work is done, and into middle management because that is the place where they can do the least damage: they have less ability to corrupt or interfere with the actual productive workers. Rao describes the Gervais Principle as

Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.

In other words, there are sociopaths who run companies and enrich themselves by stealing the productive work of those at the bottom, the losers. But to continue doing this they need a buffer: clueless middle managers who spout off cliche business maxims and generally frustrate those beneath them so that the justifiable complaints go nowhere.

I recommend that you read his posts and comment over there.

The next is Unqualified Reservations. This requires some serious time investment to get grasp on but is well worth it for a historical and political perspective you would never otherwise come across. He styles himself a reactionary and Jacobite and this is certainly a rare to nonexistent view of American politics. The first historical lesson he teaches is, "What if the American revolutionaries were nothing but a mob of criminals who did not appreciate the English Crown imposing law and order." I myself have spent must of the last few days reading and digesting the "Gentle Introduction to UR" series, which consists of at least a dozen lengthy parts so far. I am always willing to read interesting writing and, I mean this in the best possible way, reading UR is like reading the Unabomber. I like reading perspectives outside the sanitized version we all must learn and subscribe to.

Mentors

2009-11-17T22:34:00.000-05:00

The church I attended during my childhood was very friendly and after the church service on Sunday, many people would stick around to socialize and talk. There were a couple of guys in their late thirties to early forties who were married but childless and liked to get away from their wives and hang out with the teenagers. I think it is typical for men of that age, knowing that they must put away childish things and focus on adult concerns, to enjoy pretending for fifteen minutes or so that they were still young. Anyway, they were fun to talk and had great advice. One of them, Larry, was a golf pro and despite being a regular church goer, understood the Bohemian aspects of Life. When I was about 13 or 14, he told me, half jokingly, that the smartest thing he had ever done in regards to understanding women was to spend an entire year sitting with a group of girls doing school lunch. He said he was able to study them up close like a zoologist in Africa. I don't think that he meant it as serious advice, but I took him up on it and for my sophomore and junior years of high school sat with a group of eight girls during lunch.

Around the time I graduated from high school, I considered this an embarrassing period of my life. I mean, its seemed pretty gay to hang out with only girls during lunch. I should have been talking about sports and video games with other guys. But this was one of the best things I have ever done. I credit it for a large portion of my skills today. Spending time with women is one of the best ways to get good with them. Eating lunch doesn't take that long so you have the rest of your forty-five minutes to talk, joke around and tell stories. Over time you calibrate yourself to the feminine rhythm and spending two years, Monday through Friday, in your youth at it will calcify that sense for the rest of your life. Today, I am extremely comfortable teasing women and developing a playful rapport with them. In my opinion, this is a top strategy to raise a budding player: get him to hang around with lots of women during high school.

The point of the story was that an older guy - the age gap was about twenty years - passed this advice on to me, one person to one person. He didn't get any monetary benefit from this, just the satisfaction that he had helped instruct one of the young adults in his church in the ways of the world. To me, this demonstrates the importance of mentors for young men. In our youths, we all needed guidance from older guys on masculine issues like getting women, whether from our fathers, older brothers, men at church, or random people we meet along the way. I like reading the Rookie Files on VK's blog for this reason. Here is a man in his early to mid twenties learning from accomplished players who are around thirty.

Mentorship is the male answer to the forms of female power discusses by Chinweizu. He writes about how mothers train their daughters from birth to exercise female power over the men in their lives and how mothers wield their power over their sons and try to control us from the moment we are born. As I see it, one of the ways that men can break this power is by mentoring younger men in the ways of masculinity. Being able to bed women is just one of the man ways that men gain their freedom from women and it is important that those in the know educate their younger and less fortunate brothers.

I used to be hopeful that the online community of seduction literature would accomplish this. However, as Roissy writes today, that community is quickly falling apart.

Female Decline

2009-11-03T00:09:00.007-05:00

This blog is not a tabloid, but I couldn't resist showing you the following comparison. I was shocked myself.

I know each and every one of you have spent quality time with your hand dreaming of the following female.

Perhaps, in your deluded youth, you might have thought: "If I could date her, I would put a ring on her finger and lock her down all for myself." You would have been wrong, as this video clip demonstrates. You only need to watch a few seconds.

Take note of how she brings her knees up to her chest and rolls around her chair like a manatee. Reminds me of this guy:

Apparently it's so bad this guy, who knocked her up, left her for a man:

There is a moral, however.

Who's More Racist: America or Europe?

2009-10-22T23:50:00.004-04:00

I like sharing interesting and insightful writing with you guys. Probably because I like finding similar things on other sites. But I'm not very good at the exegesis. I don't discuss them at length or draw out the major ideas enough to spur discussion. I'll try to improve that and give you all something to chew on.

Here's this week's installment. The essay is "Stranger in a Village" by James Baldwin, the black gay writer from the 1950s. The motivation for presenting it now is this post by Matt Yglesias:

There’s often a kind of conventional idea on the left that the United States is an unusually racist society. And I think there’s also often a kind of image of Europe as a place where more of the progressive agenda has been achieved than in the USA. But I think that you’ll find if you look at Europe through the eyes of the liberal agenda that while the German left has certainly been more successful than the American left at securing universal health care, it’s been much less successful at promoting a tolerant, integrated, multicultural society. And allowing for the errors implicit in making any kind of sweeping generalization, I’d say that’s pretty generally the case across Europe. This Swiss People’s Party campaign poster would, I think, make Jesse Helms blush. And I’m not even sure which of the Northern League posters from Italy is the most egregious.

In the US, in other words, racial problems have been more salient for a long time since we’ve been a racially diverse society for a long time. But by the same token, for all the problems we have with us today, we’ve made enormous progress over the years. Racial and ethnic tensions are a common problem in the world, and the United States manages diversity pretty well in comparison with other places (not just in Europe) even if we fall short in some absolute terms. Just look at Barack Obama. I think we’ll be waiting a while yet before someone of non-European ancestry is elected head of government in a European country. Denmark has some great public policy ideas, but it’s also kind of made itself into the gated community of nations in a way I don’t find particularly appealing.

I generally find this true. And it reminded me of this essay by Baldwin, which I read in college.

The story is thus. Baldwin, a writer and essayist, travels to a picturesque, stereotypical isolated Swiss village in order to have a secluded place to put ink to paper and get his writing done. As a black man, his race is always an issue vis a vis white people. But he finds his relationship with a villages very curious in regards to his race.

From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came. I was told before arriving that I would probably be a "sight" for the village; I took this to mean that people of my complexion were rarely seen in Switzerland, and also that city people are always something of a "sight" outside of the city. It did not occur to me-possibly because I am an American-that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro.

It is hard for Americans, especially white Americans, to realize how involved they are with blacks and black culture on a regular basis compared to the rest of the world. We think nothing of listening to rap or blues or jazz even though we might secretly never want to live near black people. Yet Europeans are only now beginning to deal with racial issues, having never imported Africans to work for them until now (in the form of mass immigration). Hence the merciless taunting of black soccer players like Drogba as monkeys despite their phenomenal skills.

The Swiss villagers reactions to Baldwin are comical, in that they are outwardly polite and completely oblivious to how patronizing they are

All of the physical characteristics of the Negro which had caused me, in America, a very different and almost forgotten pain were nothing less than miraculous-or infernal-in the eyes of the village people. Some thought my hair was the color of tar, that it had the texture of wire, or the texture of cotton. It was jocularly suggested that I might let it all grow long and make myself a winter coat. If I sat in the sun for more than five minutes some daring creature was certain to come along and gingerly put his fingers on my hair, as though he were afraid of an electric shock, or put his hand on my hand, astonished that the color did not rub off. In all of this, in which it must be conceded there was the charm of genuine wonder and in which there were certainly no element of intentional unkindness, there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder.
...There is a custom in the village- I am told it is repeated in many villages- of buying African natives for the purpose of converting them to Christianity. There stands in the church all year round a small box with a slot for money, decorated with a black figurine, and into this box the villagers drop their francs. During the carnival which precedes Lent, two village children have their faces blackened-out of which bloodless darkness their blue eyes shine like ice-and fantastic horsehair wigs are placed on their blond heads; thus disguised, they solicit among the villagers for money for the missionaries in Africa. Between the box in the church and blackened children, the IJ village "bought" last year six or eight African natives. This was reported to me with pride by the wife of one of the bistro owners and I was careful to express astonishment and pleasure at the solicitude shown by the village for the souls of black folks. The bistro owner's wife beamed with a pleasure far more genuine than my own and seemed to feel that I might now breathe more easily concerning the souls of at least six of my kinsmen.

The villagers have no idea of the terrible connotations involved with their "buying" African villagers or going blackface to collect the money for it. Yet they are perfectly polite to him when the pass in the street. He is not shouted at or demeaned. There is no one calling him a "nigger" or beating him up just for being there. They are demonstrating and extreme naivete.

This causes him to reexamine his own experiences and those of previous generations of black men and white men in America:

For this village brings home to me this fact: that there was a day, and not really a very distant day, when Americans were scarcely Americans at all but discontented Europeans, facing a great unconquered continent and strolling, say, into a marketplace and seeing black men for the first time. The shock this spectacle afforded is suggested, surely, by the promptness with which they decided that these black men were not really men but cattle. It is true that the necessity on the part of the settlers of the New World of reconciling their moral assumptions with the fact -and the necessity-of slavery enhanced immensely the charm of this idea, and it is also true that this idea expresses, with a truly American bluntness, the attitude which to varying extents all masters have had toward all slaves.
...For the history of the American Negro is unique also in this: that the question of his humanity, and of his rights therefore as a human being, became a burning one for several generations of Americans, so burning a question that it ultimately became one of those used to divide the nation. It is out of this argument that the venom of the epithet: Nigger! is derived. It is an argument which Europe has never had, and hence Europe: quite sincerely fails to understand how or why the argument arose in the first place, why its effects are frequently disastrous and always so unpredictable, why it refuses until today to be entirely settled. Europe's black possessions remained-and do remain-in Europe's colonies, at which remove they represented no threat whatever to European identity. If they posed any problem at all for the European conscience, it was a problem which remained comfortingly abstract: in effect, the black man, as a man, did not exist for Europe. But in America, even as a slave, he was an inescapable part of the general social fabric and no American could escape having an attitude toward him. Americans attempt until today to make an abstraction of the Negro, but the very nature of these abstractions reveals the tremendous effects the presence of the Negro has had on the American character.

The conflict between white and blacks over their own cultural identities has been going on in American for 400 years, while it has barely started in Europe. They haven to had to confront it like Americans and have not yet been relieved of their naivete.

But this conflict caused whites into enormous contortions of their moral beliefs. We tend to think of America as founded on ideals, like freedom and democracy, and that the establishment of democracy was a radical break from monarchic Europe. Yet this was not the most important element.

And the establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
This was, literally, a hard necessity. It was impossible, for one thing, for Americans to abandon their beliefs, not only because these beliefs alone seemed able to justify the sacrifices they had endured and the blood that they had spilled, but also because these beliefs afforded them their only bulwark against a moral chaos as absolute as the physical chaos of the continent it was their destiny to conquer. But in the situation in which Americans found themselves, these beliefs threatened an idea which, whether or not one likes to think so, is the very warp and woof of the heritage of the West, the idea of white supremacy.
Americans have made themselves notorious by the shrillness and the brutality with which they have insisted on this idea, but they did not invent it; and it has escaped the, world's notice that those very excesses of which Americans have been guilty imply a' certain, unprecedented uneasiness over the idea' s life and power, if not, indeed, the idea' s validity .The idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization (the present civilization, which is the only one that matters; all previous civilizations are simply contributions" to our own) and are therefore civilization's guardians and defenders. Thus it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men. But not so to accept him was to deny his human reality, his human weight and complexity, and the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological.
At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans-lynch law: and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession-either to come; to terms with this necessity , or to find a way around it, or (most usually) to find away of doing both these things at once. The resulting spectacle, at once foolish and dreadful, led someone to make the quite accurate observation that "the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men."

This is Baldwin's explanation for our violent history. I think this is up for debate. But he ends with this

.And despite the terrorization which the Negro in America endured and endures sporadically until today, despite the cruel and totally inescapable ambivalence of his status in his country , the battle for his identity has long ago been won. He is not a visitor to the West, but a citizen there, an American; as American as the Americans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the Americans who love him-the Americans who became less than themselves, or rose to be greater than themselves by virtue of the fact that the challenge he represented was inescapable. He is perhaps the only black man in the world whose relationship to white men is more terrible, more subtle, and more meaningful than the relationship of bitter possessed to uncertain possessors.
The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

There is certainly a lot to discuss here.

First, is our racial history, as opposed to Europe, something to be proud of?

Next, when a man like Pat Buchanan writes "America was once their[white working class Americans] country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right. " is it because, as Baldwin says, "American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist."?

Feel free to write whatever comes to mind and take the discussion wherever. For one, I haven't thought through how this jives with HBD.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan, who is British but now lives in the US, writing something similar

It struck me almost at once, if only in the music I heard all around me - and then in so many other linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, spiritual ways: white Americans do not realize how black they are. Even their whiteness is partly scavenged from the fear of - and attraction to - its opposite. Even something as stereotypically white as American Catholicism, I discovered to my amazement, was also black from the very start. (Yes, those Maryland slaves. If you've never been to a Gospel Mass in an ancient black Catholic parish, try it some time.)
From the beginning, in its very marrow, this country was forged out of that racial and cultural interaction. It fought a brutalizing, bloody, defining civil war over that interaction. Any European student of Tocqueville swiftly opens his eyes at the three races that defined America in the classic text.

Writing Skill

2009-10-19T11:57:00.002-04:00

I found an interesting post on the writing skills of my generation:

The best writers in the history of the world are graduating from college, right now. So everyone can just shut up about how no one can write anymore.

Having just graduated from college myself this past spring, I am flattered. But is she correct? Her argument goes as follows:

My generation devotes an enormous amount of time to modern technology such as the cell phone and the internet - email, blogs, Facebook, AIM, Twitter - only to produce inane, grammatically incorrect misspellings. Thus, many older Americans believe that we have lost the ability to write well. But what they fail to see is the enormous volume of writing happening daily among young people. Text messages, Facebook wall posts, and Tweets are all written language and young people do so damn much of it.

It’s the same situation today in that the best way to have a population of good writers is for people to write constantly, in the language that is theirs, so that they are great at expressing themselves.

People do good writing every day, in social media—when they write a note on someone’s Facebook wall, when they post a caption to a photo on flickr, or when they post a comment in a group on Brazen Careerist.

She cites some research declaring that

First, only 38 percent of the writing young people do takes place in the classroom. Prior to the Internet, almost all writing people did was for the classroom. The increased amount of writing that young people do outside the classroom these days is so significant that Lumsford calls it a paradigm shift.

So, this increase of writing among young people is fairly significant. When you add up the amount of time in your life you've spent texting, instant messaging, tweeting, blogging, commenting, posting on forums and writing emails it comes out to a lot more than previous generations (who, I should add, engage in these activities too). This seems to describe well the last decade of my life and the lives of my brothers and peers. We once looked at my roommate's cell phone bill and found that he sent a text message at the rate of once every five minutes he was awake that month.

But is this actually good writing? Yes.

Second, the type of writing that students do—via IM, Twitter, Facebook, and so forth—is actually great for building communication skills. Thompson writes that, “Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.”

The purpose and motivation, the sole reason of modern youth's writing is to communicate, to socialize. Which is exactly what writing is for. And we're pretty damn good at that. How are we so good?

Third, the students have an acute sense of what good writing is because they are almost always writing for an audience. Lumsford found that students are writing mostly to debate, organize, or persuade. This is much more demanding writing than most of the writing students do for school. And, in fact, students in the Stanford study were not as enthusiastic about writing for school because they felt that the only purpose was to get a grade.

We constantly have feedback on our writing skills. If your communication is not working, if people stop talking to you, then you figure out what will work. The last two lines are also ironic: we think that we need to teach students to write well so that they can communicate effectively once they are in the workforce. Instead, kids are already figuring this out on their own and we are teaching them pointless skills in school. I absolutely hated writing in school even though I always got great grades. Perhaps my generation will not turn out very many writers capable of long form essays. But since no one will pay for magazines anymore, there isn't really a demand for such writers anyway.

Will Wilkinson + Kay Hymowitz

2009-09-16T21:05:00.003-04:00

I'd like to bring your attention to the following discussion between Will Wilkinson and Kay Hymowitz, whose writing you have probably come across recently.

Kay wrote "Child Man in the Promised Land", about how "Today’s single young men hang out in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood," and the follow-up "Love in the Time of Darwinism," about "the chaotic postfeminist dating scene, where only the strong survive." Everyone's favorite herb then blogged about the latter with "The Menaissance and its Dickscontents".

You can watch it in the bloggingheads player or download the podcast from iTunes if that suits you.

Here are some of my thoughts, feel free to add your own in the comments.

-The dialogue starts out well because both acknowledge some standard Roissy facts: men want attractive women, while women want high status men; women have a "sell-by date" in their mid thirties while males' value continues to increase through their thirties and beyond;

-Wilkinson's alternate interpretation of a Roissy-like end of civilization. According to him, the current dating market is the result of the breakdown of cultural norms due to feminism and cultural change, which leaves men and women confused about their proper roles and how to fulfill them. Thus, we are in a state of ignorance regarding what the new cultural norms will be when the chaos clears and are in the process of discovering these new norms. I find this plausible; the literature of civilizational decline, including Roissy and the original Spengler, has always struck me as misguided.

-Wilkinson's discussion of male privilege. Previously men, regardless of how they stacked up in wider society, could look forward to at least being the head of a household and the master of one, small social hierarchy. Now, they cannot even expect that. Wilkinson is right that in any social change, where one group is raised up another is demoted. But we need to consider what privileges these men really had previously. And in general, I think that feminism benefits talented women at the expense of untalented men: women who get good jobs push out less qualified men who in turn find other careers and push out even less talented men, with the trend continuing on to the bottom. No one seems to care about the men lowest on the ladder; whenever they complain, people like Wilkinson respond that men have advantages over women in achieving positions of power. Frankly Will, the 99% of people who dont have the intellectual capacity or writing talent to become a pundit or the people skills and charm to become a successful politican don't give a shit that those men have it good. That's like saying you're privileged the local grocery store carries gefilte fish because not everyone can get that, don't you know.

-Wilkinson acknowledges that increasing freedom has made the dating scene more tricky for men and women to navigate but with the upshot that men like him have the opportunity to create self-actualized personalities. My question is how does this affect the marriage market from an economic/bargaining perspective. We all realize that the quest for the "perfect spouse" can backfire on us: we only have a limited time to gather information about our own wants as well as the qualities of potential mates and then search for an optimal partner so waiting too long can result in no spouse. Have we created a situation where the market for mates breaks down or clears below a socially necessary level?

Finite and Infinite Games

2009-08-07T11:14:00.002-04:00

Before I continue the series on Cooling Out, I need to take an aside to describe an idea I came across about five years ago and has greatly influenced my philosophy about life. In a used bookstore in Boulder, Colorado, I picked up a small paperback by James P. Carse called "Finite and Infinite Games." His distinction between finite games and infinite ones has important implications for political philosophy and group dynamics of any sized social circle, whether a binary friendship, clique, business, small town, etc... I don't know how widely available the book is; perhaps when I get the time I will post a scanned copy.

Finite Games

A finite game, according to Carse, is what we normally refer to as just a "game": Monopoly, football, elections. In each of these cases, there are players, rules, and temporal and spacial boundaries on game play, each of which are determined in advance and remain constant for the duration of play. For football, there are twenty-two players allowed on the field at any one time; rules regarding acceptable and unacceptable means to advance the ball as well as penalties assessed for infractions; play begins at 1 pm Sunday afternoon and continues until 60 minutes of gametime has elapsed on a designated field 120 yards in length and 75 yards in width.

The purpose of the game is to win. Every action is designed to further the goal of winning and when you win, you are given the title of "winner". This title denotes your superiority over the losers. The Pittsburgh Steelers are superior to the Arizona Cardinals and every other NFL team because, according to league rules, they won enough regular season games as well as all their playoff games and the Super Bowl. Barack Obama is superior to John McCain and every other American citizen because he won the election by receiving the most electoral votes. A title like "winner" or "President" refers to a competition that has ended; it is no longer in doubt who won and lost. Moreover, a title compels recognition by everyone else. We all must recognize that the Steelers and Obama are winners and grant them certain respect.

Infinite Games

An infinite game is directly opposed to a finite game. The purpose of an infinite game is not to win, but to continue playing. The rules are what facilitate continued play and constantly change. Carse analogizes this to the grammar of language, which we all must agree on and allows us to interact in a meaningful way. Yet language changes over time, words change meanings, new ones are introduced and old ones retired. In contrast, the rules of a finite game are like the rules of a formal debate: time limits, topic, alternating speakers, etc...

An example of an infinite game is friendship:

Johnston's answer is "that acquaintances become friends when they agree to play status games together." This means that we deliberately dominate our friends, just to accept their dominance a moment later. By flip-flopping in dominance over time, we become equally dominant on average. It's a "see-saw" principle. And any violation of this hidden rule (i.e. not accepting a friend's dominance when it is his turn or failing to "pay them back" for their dominance gestures) can destroy a friendship.

...

The delicate nature of balancing out status between friends is astonishing. When we are with true friends, we need to constantly assess the status balance between them and us, and playfully subtract or add dominance whenever needed.

A willingness to accept submission to your friend does not make sense unless you realize that it is a move calculated specifically to keep the friendship going.

In this case, the ball busting and continuous status games are a small price to pay for friendship. They can be annoying at times but friendship is worth much more than this. However, sometimes continuing play requires a much greater cost. For instance, how much can you forgive a friend? Would you be willing to forgive him if he:
-ate the last piece of cake
-broke your TV
-crashed your car
-stole your girlfriend/wife
-killed someone
-killed your mother/father/brother/sister/son/daughter/friend

In each of these cases, to continue the friendship, both you and he need to take various steps to recover. He needs to apologize, replace your TV/car, ask for forgiveness and demonstrate his trustworthiness while you need to forgive him, possibly help him deal with his sense of guilt. But most importantly, when it comes to this, whether he deserves your forgiveness or not has nothing to do with it. If you want to still be friends, you have to forgive him.

The Treaty of Versailles

One problem with a finite game is that the losers have to accept that they lost and accept the superiority of the winners over themselves. They can be badgered, threatened, bribed or tricked into accepting this, but ultimately each man has to decide for himself to accept it. John McCain does not go around protesting that the election was rigged or attempt to walk into the White House, go upstairs and lie down on the bed because he thinks it is rightfully his residence, not Obama's. Larry Fitzgerald and Kurt Warner have not made diamond rings for themselves or break into the Elias Sports Bureau to change the final score in the record books.

But losers do not always accept that they have lost. While from the perspective of the winner, as Quintus says in Gladiator, "People should know when they are conquered," the losers are not always willing to put down their weapons and accept their subjugation. This is where the problems of political legitimacy, cooling out and George Sodini come in.

Consider World War I. The Allies were victorious and set about drafting a peace treaty that blamed German aggression for the war and demanded huge sums of money in reparations. As we all know, this was disasterous. People do not just accept the poverty and humiliation that comes with losing a war. Instead, they will bide their time, smoldering with rage, until a man comes along who promises them wealth and greatness and then lash out at their enemies with violence. Hence Hitler and World War II.

The same is true of George Sodini. He was a loser in the dating game. He suffered from his continued failures, which only hurt his ability with women further. He grew desperate and angry.

As has been pointed out many times, women do not care one bit about beta males, creeps, losers. The probably never think about it but I'm sure it's natural for them to assume that these men deserve their celibacy and should accept it. The females attempt to badger, insult and demean men into submission, to maintain their power. They call Sodini a racist, a grievance misogynist. And you get rants like this from Fem X about how men are morally inferior.

But it is a fact of life that these men will not "just accept it." Misogyny has nothing to do with it. Is a slave wrong for hating his master, a man who makes him spend his life working under the Southern sun in a cotton field?

So

[Had women] better submit to such manipulation, unless they want to get shot[?]

To some extent, yes. "Deserves" got nothing to do with it. Coexistence is an infinite game. We all desire to live indefinitely, which is the very definition of an infinite game. We are all living here on the same planet; we managed to not kill each other yesterday so for the moment, we have succeeded in continuing play. But sometimes you have to take drastic measures to continue play.

Cooling Out: Part 2

2009-08-05T18:40:00.003-04:00

A few weeks ago, I discussed the tactic of cooling out, which is the endgame of a confidence trick.

The Influence of Ego:

As I wrote before, every confidence trick requires the mark's willing cooperation. Mugging and armed robbery are "Give me your wallet or I'll kill you," relying on the threat of violence and the innate drive for self preservation. Confidence tricks are "Give me your Kmart purse and I'll give you an Hermes one in return." They rely on enticement and temptation and greed.

Now greed is a simplistic interpretation of what is going on. That word signifies a Gordon Gekko pursuit of more and more expensive material possessions: Italian-tailored suits, Ferraris, houses on Central Park West, in the Hamptons and the Bahamas, etc... But greed itself is not the driving force; greed comes from somewhere and it is wrong to dismiss someone as greedy without understanding what drives him to pursue of money, career advancement or fancy possessions. The pursuit, not the man, is greedy.

Consider the temptation above: Hermes for Kmart. What is a woman who sports a Kmart purse? She is most likely has little money to spend and must rigorously budget what little disposable income her responsibilities leave her. Perhaps she is a single mother raising children and dresses them too is Kmart apparrel. Maybe she lives in a small town in Lousiana or Wyoming and dreams of moving to the big city but for some reason cannot: she must care for her aging father who has lung cancer or keep her meth head brother clean so he can start taking care of himself. Maybe she lives in the city but has struggled to get herself through college, has loans to pay, can only get a job doing clerical work and must confront wealthier women daily: her boss or in the ladies room at a fancy restaurant on her anniversary.

Now what is a woman with an Hermes purse slung over her shoulder? She clearly has lots of money to spend, either from a lucrative job or a doting father, husband or boyfriend, and can walk into a boutique without fretting about whether this one purchase will mean her kids have to wear old clothes or get a Hess truck instead of the XBox they really want for Christmas. If she has kids, she can hire an au pair to deal with most of the frustration while she is out shopping with her friends and regularly eating at the fancy restaurant. She might have a spacious apartment on the Upper East Side and show up in the gossip pages after attending a fundraiser or party.

Now, when you offer the first woman and Hermes handbag, you are not just offering some bits of leather sewn together. You are offering her the possibility that she may become the second woman, that she may attain the latter's higher status and value as judged by society. And once you make this offer, she slowly stops seeing herself as the Kmart lady and begins to see herself as the Hermes lady. She thinks of herself as someone that could attract a wealthy man or land a high paying job and she dreams of all the exciting romantic flings she'll have like the girls on Sex and the City. She imagines all the fun she'll have on shopping outtings with her new friends as they buy handbags and dresses and shoes. This is when she is ripe to be conned. Just as she starts to carry herself like an Hermes lady, she finds out that there was no Hermes purse after all, that she has lost her purse, cash and credit cards. But most tragically, she must face the harsh reality that she is nothing but a Kmart lady, still a cash strapped single mom who must resort to department store fashions. Falling back to earth from the clouds in this manner can be traumatic and cause havoc with one's ego.

Goffman:

Goffman's major insight was to see this tactic in operation throughout human society. In just about every human interaction, social status and value is at stake (that is, a more general sense of status, not simply what we have discussed here and at Alpha Status regarding some particular interpersonal interaction)

What is value?

For purposes of analysis, one may think of an individual in reference to the values or attributes of a socially recognized character which he possesses. Psychologists speak of a value as a personal involvement Sociologists speak of a value as a, status, role, or relationship. In either case, the character of the value that is possessed is taken in a certain way as the character of the person who possesses it. An alteration in the kinds of attributes possessed brings an alteration to the self-conception of the person who possesses them.
The process by which someone acquires a value is the process by which he surrenders the claim he had to what he was and commits himself to the conception of self which the new value requires or allows him to have. It is the process that persons who fall in love or take dope call getting hooked. After a person is hooked, he must go through another process by which his new involvement finds its proper place, in space and time, relative to the other calls, demands, and commitments that he has upon himself. At this point certain other persons suddenly begin to play an important part in the individual's story; they impinge upon him by virtue of the relationship they happen to have to the value in which he has become involved

Because value depends upon others, there can be a conflict between your sense of your own value and the amount of value others are willing to accord you

For example:
-approaching a girl to ask her out. You think of yourself as worthy but if she rejects your offer and refuses the date, you obviously are not.
-applying to college. Again, you think of yourself as intelligent and accomplished but if you get the thin envelope instead of the thick one, you aren't Harvard material.
-training to be a Navy SEAL.
-etc...

In these cases, you are hoping to obtain some social role - boyfriend, student, badass warrior - We can all find meaning and self-worth in social roles, which ones are up to our personal preferences, what is available and what society recognizes. But when you fail to obtain that role, you must be cooled out.

For the mark, cooling represents a process of adjustment to an impossible situation ‑‑ a situation arising from having defined himself in a way which the social facts come to contradict. The mark must therefore be supplied with a new set of apologies for himself, a new framework in which to see himself and judge himself. A process of redefining the self along defensible lines must be instigated and carried along; since the mark himself is frequently in too weakened a condition to do this, the cooler must initially do it for him.

Possible rationalizations for the above examples are: "She was a lesbian," "Reverse discrimination!" "Just attempting BUD/S was character building."

Above, you are denied because you are presumably unfit, but the relevant rejection does not always have to be due to a lack of merit. For instance, an infertile woman may want to become a mother but her biology will not allow it. She wants to obtain that social role and the corresponding sense of purpose but she too must be cooled out. She can be persuaded to adopt someone else's unwanted child, become an elementary school teacher in order to spend each day with young children or become a doting aunt or neighbor. Each of these options are less desirable to her but can still be worthwhile.

Moreover, you can lose a social role you once had
-dumped by your girlfriend
-fired at work
-retire
-your children die

Again, if you ground your sense of self on one of these roles and lose it, you will have ego issues to deal with and must be cooled out.

The most intriguing example is when you are doomed to die. For instance, the man who has terminal cancer and has only a year to live or the condemned man facing execution at dawn. Many people in the first scenario "live life to the fullest." They travel around the world, start charities, spend money while they still can. We think of this as noble of them, as instructive for how we should live our lives, but it fundamentally is about finding meaning in things that death cannot disrupt. Dying ruins everything you define yourself by so it is necessary to find other tasks in the interrim to maintain your ego.

Strategies for Cooling Out:

-Get a third party to do the cooling: friend, doctor, minister, the VP fires you instead of your immediate boss
-Consolation prize:

A lover may be asked to become a friend; a student of medicine may be asked to switch to the study of dentistry;[4] a boxer may become a trainer; a dying person may be asked to broaden and empty his worldly loves so as to embrace the All-Father that is about to receive him. Sometimes the mark is allowed to retain his status but is required to fulfill it in a different environment: the honest policeman is transferred to a lonely beat; the too zealous priest is encouraged to enter a monastery; an unsatisfactory plant manager is shipped off to another branch. Sometimes the mark is "kicked upstairs" and given a courtesy status such as "Vice President." In the game for social roles, transfer up, down, or away may all be consolation prizes.

-Try again: retake a test, go through BUD/S again
-Let him vent
-Stalling
-Bribery: pension, Hitler lets Rommel commit suicide and get state funeral instead of trial and execution, secrecy in exchange for silence

the operator and the mark may enter into a tacit understanding according to which the mark agrees to act as if he were leaving of his own accord, and the operator agrees to preserve the illusion that this was the case ... In this way the mark may fail in his own eyes but prevent others from discovering the failure. The mark gives up his role but saves his face. This, after all, is one of the reasons why persons who are fleeced by con men are often willing to remain silent about their adventure. The same strategy is at work in the ... custom of allowing a person to resign for delicate reasons instead of firing him for indelicate ones.

Moreover, since cooling out can be hard and unpredictable, there are preventative measures such as lowering expectations ahead of time: hiring as a temp instead of full time worker. The mark has strategies too: he can hedge. PUAs tell themselves before they approach a girl "I don't give a shit," "She's just one of thousands," "She's nothing special, there's probably some guy tired of fucking her" and they approach many girls so that he does not invest his identity in the answer of any one girl.

Next: Society, George Sodini and Cooling Out on a Grand Scale

The Neg

2009-07-28T21:42:00.000-04:00

Why does it fuel consistent controversy?

Blog posts such as these from Tyler Cowan and Conor Friedersdorf are attempts to neutralize the effectiveness of the neg, thereby eliminating the success of men who use it. These attempts are doomed - the neg will never lose its potency - but ironic, because while such men hold to pretty lies about what attracts women, they understand very well and accept the truth of what turns women off: creeps and losers.

The strategy is to goad its defenders into debates with normal people, thereby raising the general public's awareness of this "tactic," and to peg those who would use it as creeps and losers. Thus, when a man negs, his target or her friend will recognize it and disqualify the man as an unworthy suitor. Failure. The intended result is that of the classic pick up line "What's your sign?" It's clear why this once worked: astrology is chick crack and it allows you to immediately start qualifying her on her personality, all of which makes a great beginning to a seduction. Yet through oversaturation and persistent effort to tag it as creepy and cheesy, the line's effectiveness is negative.

Thus, their beliefs on human nature allow them only to sabotage other men, not improve their own lots. I find this dishonorable and petty, as it is a manifestation of slave morality, the attempt to invert our values by discrediting the qualities and behaviors of the successful, attractive and powerful.

Cooling Out: Part 1

2009-07-22T20:41:00.001-04:00

One of the main reasons why criminals and stories about criminals command public interest and imagination is that they understand human nature better than ourselves. You can look at a con man or pimp and write him off as a low-life, a nobody. But these people have their shit together. A prime example is Pimp, by Iceberg Slim, which I assume many of you have come across. Read between the lines, as they say, and overcome your disgust with the misogyny and you will learn a wealth of knowledge about human nature. This article by Erving Goffman, also, is a bombshell. Incredibly insightful into human nature, although less applicable to Game.

Consider con men (or "grifters")

The confidence game‑the con, as its practitioners call it‑is a way of obtaining money under false pretenses by the exercise of fraud and deceit. The con differs from politer forms of financial deceit in important ways. The con is practiced on private persons by talented actors who methodically and regularly build up informal social relationships just for the purpose of abusing them; white‑collar crime is practiced on organizations by persons who learn to abuse positions of trust which they once filled faithfully. The one exploits, poise; the other, position.

Con men know how to "separate the mark from his money" through their understanding of human nature. Perhaps you have seen The Sting or the Ocean's Eleven movies.

The con is said to be a good racket in the United States only because most Americans are willing, nay eager, to make easy money, and will engage in action that is less than legal in order to do so The typical play has typical phases. The potential sucker is first spotted and one member of the working team (called the outside man, steerer, or roper) arranges to make social contact with him. The confidence of the mark is won, and he is given an opportunity to invest his money in a gambling venture which he understands to have been fixed in his favor The venture, of course, is fixed, but not in his favor. The mark is permitted to win some money and then persuaded to invest more. There is an "accident" or "mistake," and the mark loses his total investment. The operators then depart in a ceremony that is called the blowoff or sting. They leave the mark but take his money.

But they also follow Law # 29 Plan All the Way to End, which is where "Cooling Out" comes in

Sometimes, however, a mark is not quite prepared to accept his loss as a gain in experience and to say and do nothing about his venture. He may feel moved to [p. 452] complain to the police or to chase after the operators. In the terminology of the trade, the mark may squawk, beef, or come through. From the operators' point of view, this kind of behavior is bad for business. It gives the members of the mob a bad reputation with such police as have not. yet been fixed and with marks who have not yet been taken. In order to avoid this adverse publicity, an additional phase is sometimes added at the end of the play. It is called cooling the mark out. After the blowoff has occurred, one of the operators stays with the mark and makes an effort to keep the anger of the mark within manageable and sensible proportions. The operator stays behind his team‑mates in the capacity of what might be called a cooler and exercises upon the mark the art of consolation. An attempt is made to define the situation for the mark in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home. The mark is given instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss.

Con men are not stupid, they know that a mark, even without his money, can disrupt their business. But to diffuse the fallout of your con, you have to understand why con games work. Most importantly, you cannot con someone who does not want to be conned. Every con starts by allowing the mark's greed to lead him into a trap. For example, if you receive an email from a Nigerian prince asking for help selling his ancestral jewelry collection, you only get involved because his offers you a healthy cut of the sale.

Why are we consistently conned? Greed is a small part

In many cases, especially in America, the mark's image of himself is built up on the belief that he is a pretty shrewd person when it comes to making deals and that he is not the sort of person who is taken in by any thing. The mark’s readiness to participate in a sure thing is based on more than avarice; it is based on a feeling that he will now be able to prove to himself that he is the sort of person who can "turn a‑fast buck." For many, this capacity for high finance comes near to being a sign of masculinity and a test of fulfilling the male role.

It all comes down to identity and self-image, which are funny things

It is well known that persons protect themselves with all kinds of rationalizations when they have a buried image of themselves which the facts of their status do not support. A person may tell himself many things: that he has not been given a fair chance; that he is not really interested in becoming something else; that the time for showing his mettle has not yet come; that the usual means of realizing his desires are personally or morally distasteful, or require too much dull effort. By means of such defenses, a person saves himself from committing a cardinal social sin‑the sin of defining oneself in terms of a status while lacking the qualifications which an incumbent of that status is supposed to possess.

Here enters the confidence man

A mark's participation in a play, and his investment in it, clearly commit him in his own eyes to the proposition that he is a smart man. The process by which he comes to believe that he cannot lose is also the process by which he drops the defenses and compensations that previously protected him from defeats. When the blowoff comes, the mark finds that he has no defense for not being a shrewd man. He has defined himself as a shrewd man and must face the fact that he is only another easy mark. He has defined himself as possessing a certain set of qualities and then proven to himself that he is miser ably lacking in them. This is a process of self‑destruction of the self. It is no wonder that the mark needs to be cooled out and that it is good business policy for one of the operators to stay with the mark in order to talk him into a point of view from which it is possible to accept a loss.

So, what exactly is the point of cooling out?

In essence, then, the cooler has the job of handling persons who have been caught out on a limb‑persons whose expectations and self‑conceptions have been built up and then shattered. The mark is a person who has compromised himself, in his own eyes if not in the eyes of others.

This description of cooling out is just the first, small part of Goffman's essay. In the rest, he goes through examples of how this one technique of grifters demonstrates truths of human nature at all levels of society. Read ahead if you want to, but in the next few posts I'll discuss the essay some more.

Shallowness

2009-07-17T11:53:00.003-04:00

This post by Master Dogen touches on a lot of issues: authenticity vs phoniness, feeling versus thinking, manipulation vs "real." And while he is addressing them in defense of Game, it is important to understand that these tensions come up for every person in any meaningful interaction with others, courtship being just one facet of human existence.

The key issue is not whether you approach the world mainly from a thinking, rational perspective or a feeling, authentic perspective. The tension is about shallowness vs. depth:

What is shallowness:

Shallowness, for purposes of this page, is interest in the lowest common denominator of human concerns, especially social status. The shallow side of life comprises: concern with looking beautiful or attractive to others, physical stimulation and pleasure (hedonism), winning at competition, one-upmanship, being an important person (i.e. more important than other people), social dominance and power over others, accumulating material wealth far beyond what you need for physical well-being, being thought intelligent/deep/insightful by others, getting your way right now simply because it's what you want (and so not listening to objections), keeping up with the Joneses, being a slave to fashion, saying politically correct things that you don't believe in for fear of losing the loyalty of your friends, getting away with unethical things as long as you're sure you won't get caught or you're sure that your friends will approve or wink in admiration (using social approval as a substitute for your own ethical judgement), sacrificing everything for the sake of a higher salary, making legalistic arguments that technically make sense and "win" in some recognized court but disregard the matters of real concern in a conflict, refusing to change your mind for fear that others will stop perceiving you as an authority, narrow-mindedness, limiting your company to people who agree with you, conspicuous consumption, judging people on the basis of things like whether they're wearing a brown belt with black shoes, vanity in general.

We can all accept that these things are shallow, even if we engage in them regularly and pretend that they have real depth.

But just because things are shallow does not mean they are unimportant. Why? Because to have any meaningful communication and interaction between people we must use really basic, trivial things as a basis i.e. the lowest common denominator. Consider a flower. When you think of a flower, you conception of it might include:
-the sense of beauty just looking at it
-the mirad species and hues of flowers you have encountered throughout life
-the emotions associated with events involving flowers: your undying love on Valentine's Day, your loneliness and depression at your father's funeral, the awkwardness and thrill of giving your homecoming date a corsage, the tranquility of working in your garden
-your knowledge of it anatomy, how bees pollinate the flowers and make honey

But to assign a word "flower" destroys this depth of knowledge that you have and reduces it to simple scratches of ink on paper or a few audible grunts strung together. No word can do justice to this depth.

Yet without accepting some shallowness, you can't even begin to start communicating this depth to another person. You start building up your language: you assign words to colors, even though a few letters does not due "blue" or "violet" justice. You make up words for "death" "love" "bee" and as you build your vocabulary up you can start to communicate complex ideas. Eventually, you can say very complex things but even these sentences, poems and novels cannot completely capture the depth you hold inside your head.

Understanding that language is incomplete does not invalidate its use. If you were to reject it, you would be dead in the water before you can even start. The point is that the only way to get the circuits of your brain matter and the circuits of someone else's brain matter in any sort of union is to embrace some shallowness. And this shallowness extends to everything you do with another person.

Which brings us to Game. People want to believe that their relationships have depth, that they have "true love". Such people feel a deep emotional attachment and they want to believe that this is shared, in the exact same form, between them and their partner. Then they come into contact with game and they learn that the interaction between boy and girl is somewhat shallow, that things dont "just happen." That one person might be more attached than the other. And this is immensely scary. But that's how it is.

Status Modulation

2009-06-30T21:26:00.003-04:00

I've discussed the issue of status before, mostly with regards to how people establish it and how it changes due to our behavior. The Improv Wiki has a list of high and low status behaviors as well as those which raise or lower another's status. We know that status is not absolute or fixed: it changes with time, as people negotiate among themselves who will rank where. And we know that this facet of human interaction is relevant to game.

But what we have not discussed much is how we employ status modulation to our advantage in human interaction. The distribution of status among people is like the physical topography of a battlefield. While some features are generally advantageous, like high ground or high status, and others generally disadvantageous, like an exposed, baren plain or low status, there is enormous ambiguity in the value of various positions depending upon your goals, resources and enemy. Fog might be advantageous to an infantry assault by a guerrilla force upon a much larger enemy: the low visibility would allow them to get closer to the enemy without being seen, helping achieve surprise, and to retreat more easily while confusing the enemy's maneuvers. But to an invasion force that requires the synchronized movement of hundreds of transport ships and accurate parachute drops near key locations, fog is deadly (see: the night of June 4-5, 1944). So, the fact that you can deliberately modify status gives you an opportunity to structure the battle to your advantage, but only if you know what lay out will be advantageous.

For instance, when gaming a girl, a simple strategy is to consistenly raise your status and lower hers. But this leads to problems:

When you start getting good with women — that is, when you begin noticing their eyes light up when you talk rather than their eyes avert looking for the nearest exit – your biggest obstacle (besides logistics) won’t be your lack of game; it will be too much of your game. It is very easy to overqualify yourself to women because once you see with your own eyes how powerfully game works you will have a natural inclination to press your full court advantage beyond its usefulness. And because we have a human tendency toward too much of a good thing, you will often lose women in set and have no clue why, and thus no handle on how to refine your game. Overqualification is like blood pressure, the hidden disease that slowly kills your success as a player. You hardly recognize when it is happening.

In this case, there is an optimal status distribution with the male higher, but not by too much, than the female.

Employing this knowledge is not limited to selfish, evil goals like picking up girls. Suppose you are an idealist who really wants to help this drug addict quit, or a high school drop out get his GED or some other random screw-up improve his life in some way. In all these situations, you know that your target has low self esteem, in some part caused by the problem itself, which prevents him or her from succeeding. The meth-head struggles with addiction but each failed rehab only proves to him that he is weak and thus he is less willing to try the next time around because he thinks his failure is inevitable. A simple strategy would be to befriend him and try to raise his status, thereby helping him regain his confidence and dignity, which was really the point of the exercise the whole time. But many times, the recipient of your generosity rebels against his new high status and flees. The bum does not think he deserves your help, praise and affection; it is uncomfortable and surreal to see himself as high status. This incongruity between his long-standing self-perception and your signals causes him to doubt your sincerity and reject your help.

Some work has been done on how to use status modulation to your advantage. For example, several of Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power: 1. Never Outshine the Master and 46. Never Appear to Perfect. Translated, these mean: 1. Never let your status get to close to or rise above your master's and 46. Never let your status get too far above those around you. However, not enough has been done from this perspective. I have been thinking about these issues but have not come to satisfactory conclusions.

Therefore, I challenge my readers to think about how to use status modulation to one's advantage in various types of situations. I offer the following two scenarios as food for thought.

First, I spent some time in a hospital several weeks ago due to suspected swine flu. Thankfully, nothing came of this but something occurred to me during my time there. There have been only a handful of times in my life when, upon meeting someone for the first time, I was immediately disarmed by their friendliness and most of these people were nurses. I've been mulling over how they accomplish this but haven't found an acceptable answer. However, it seems that status modulation is somehow related. As a hospital patient, you have a lower than normal self-image: you feel sick and impotent, you're naked under that gown and stuck inside a small, sterile room and those heartless doctors have poked and prodded you like a piece of meat. Yet in walks a female nurse in scrubs, which gracefully soften the fact that she would be a little too dumpy if you met her outside the hospital, and your heart starts to warm.

Second is the question of how you deal with someone who is of significantly lower status. One of my best friends is an Ivy League graduate who is incredibly successful at getting those of significantly higher status to like him, that is, at recruiting high-profile or senior mentors who give him advice and select him for choice assignments. It is a valuable skill career-wise. However, he is incredibly bad at relating to people of much lower status or intelligence. Whenever he meets someone his own age (say in a bar), he affects an extreme humility to avoid being perceived as disdainful, condescending or arrogant.

I consider the contrast between Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien as an example of this. It is clear from watching Leno on the Tonight Show that he is an intelligent man. Obviously lots of brain skills are necessary to be a successful comic. But also in a bit like Jaywalking, the extent of knowledge he quizzes people on is beyond the scope of what most Americans know. Things like foreign political leaders and world geography. Yet he retains the ability to banter with the stupid people he encounters on the street without denigrating them. On the other hand, Conan is a Harvard graduate, hence pretty darn smart, yet his entire comedic persona is self-denigrating and childish. I think that Conan is fundamentally uncomfortable being smarter than the people on his show and his audience. When a guest says something stupid, I don't think he has a good sense of whether everyone knows it's stupid or just him. So he can be overly deferential to guests and has a sophomoric style because he doesn't want to come across as nerdy or disdainful.

Mahmoud has got balls

2009-06-15T08:32:00.004-04:00

The recent Iranian election is a great opportunity to examine the game of power, which Alpha Dominance recently brought up.

(Recent) US politics is fairly boring for power analysts, mainly because there is little to no threat of violence surrounding the acquisition or deployment of power. Our politics is incredibly nasty and vicious, but consists mainly of name-calling and the relevant battles are about "controlling the terms of discourse" as opposed to imposing one's will via physical force. There is certainly a need for strategic thinking, as Robert Greene has pointed out, but when the threat of death hangs over a political dispute, it is much more interesting. Think Tiananmen Square in 1989 or the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. On one side you have the rioting populace, threatening to lynch those in power, and on the other you have the iron-fisted regime, threatening to arrest, torture and execute those who protest.

Consider the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Nicolae Ceausescu had ruled the country as a Communist dictator for 24 years but on December 21st his government was collapsing; there had been riots that month in Timisoara and Bucharest and he needed to give a speech to the throngs gathered in the capital to shore up support. Watch the millions before him chanting, feel the magnitude of their collective emotion and sense the heightened tension at the critical moment for Ceausescu. He fails to calm them, to turn their anger into his ally. He then had to flee the capital and was dead in four days, executed on Christmas Day.

This is far more exciting than any Obama rally.

A similar thing appeared to be happening this weekend in Iran. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the incumbent president, was running for reelection against a "reformer" and more moderate candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. The official results were 62.63% for Ahmadinejad to 33.75% for Mousavi, an impressive but somewhat unexpected landslide that led to massive demonstrations and protests over the weekend, the arrests of demonstrators and the placing of Mousavi under house arrest.

Two story lines have developed. One is that the polls were spectacularly wrong and that Ahmadinejad's rural base came out in massive numbers:

Dickey starts from the very different assumption that what happened here was simply that the Western press got wildly ahead of itself by assuming the more educated and cosmopolitan voters in Tehran and other big cities represented the whole country. In the event, what we might call Iran's 'silent majority', conservative rural voters and the working classes of the cities, turned out in massive numbers for Ahmadinejad. "It appears that the working classes and the rural poor--the people who do not much look or act or talk like us--voted overwhelmingly for the scruffy, scrappy president who looks and acts and talks more or less like them," he writes. "And while Mousavi and his supporters are protesting and even scuffling with police, they are just as likely to be overwhelmed in the streets as they were at the polls."

The other, the election was stolen by the current regime. Apparently the voting results are not consistent with the polling:

There can be no question that the June 12, 2009 Iranian presidential election was stolen. Dissident employees of the Interior Ministry, which is under the control of President Ahmadinejad and is responsible for the mechanics of the polling and counting of votes, have reportedly issued an open letter saying as much. Government polls (one conducted by the Revolutionary Guards, the other by the state broadcasting company) that were leaked to the campaigns allegedly showed ten- to twenty-point leads for Mousavi a week before the election; earlier polls had them neck and neck, with Mousavi leading by one per cent, and Karroubi just behind.

If this is true, then this extremely bold power move is very revealing

1. The willingness of the regime simply to ignore reality and fabricate election results without the slightest effort to conceal the fraud represents a historic shift in Iran's Islamic revolution. All previous leaders at least paid lip service to the voice of the Iranian people. This suggests that Iran's leaders are aware of the fact that they have lost credibility in the eyes of many (most?) of their countrymen, so they are dispensing with even the pretense of popular legitimacy in favor of raw power.

2. The Iranian opposition, which includes some very powerful individuals and institutions, has an agonizing decision to make. If they are intimidated and silenced by the show of force (as they have been in the past), they will lose all credibility in the future with even their most devoted followers. But if they choose to confront their ruthless colleagues forcefully, not only is it likely to be messy but it could risk running out of control and potentially bring down the entire existing power structure, of which they are participants and beneficiaries.

3. With regard to the United States and the West, nothing would prevent them in principle from dealing with an illegitimate authoritarian government. We do it every day, and have done so for years (the Soviet Union comes to mind). But this election is an extraordinary gift to those who have been most skeptical about President Obama's plan to conduct negotiations with Iran. Former Bush official Elliott Abrams was quick off the mark, commenting that it is "likely that the engagement strategy has been dealt a very heavy blow." Two senior Israeli officials quickly urged the world not to engage in negotiations with Iran. Neoconservatives who had already expressed their support for an Ahmadinejad victory now have every reason to be satisfied. Opposition forces, previously on the defensive, now have a perfect opportunity to mount a political attack that will make it even more difficult for President Obama to proceed with his plan.

If Mahmoud actually did steal this election, then he has demonstrated the correct way to go about it: go big or go home. It's better to claim you won in a landslide, having doubled your opponent's vote total than to go through some shenanigans just to come out on top 51-49. It's a tremendous show of force.

Negotiation

2009-05-19T10:06:00.005-04:00

The framework of negotiation is much more widely applicable to human interactions than most people realize. We know that we negotiate when determining our salary or the price of our car, haggling the price of some tourist trinket in Marrakesh or attempting to free hostages from a terrorist. Moreover, people in the West take a very reductionist view towards negotiation, where every business deal is the sum of many small negotiations about smaller things. So the term "negotiation" has a process and detail oriented connotation for us. Surely such a mechanical and sterile process does not apply to the wonders and joys of human interaction. A main theme I want to develop through this blog is that 1) almost every interpersonal thing you do is a negotiation over something and 2) that's ok.

As a first example, let's look at this discussion of Compliance and Value from BristolLair, specifically the issue of value. Many of us like to think that our value is intrinsic to ourselves, that there is some metaphysically real scale along which we fall. But DiCarlo points out that

Firstly you must realize that value is almost entirely based on perception. That's right. The only value that actually exists is inside the minds of the people around you.

The obvious implication of this for seduction is that you can influence others' perceptions to increase your mating ability. But how should we conceptually view this "influencing?"

Consider the alternative to negotiation: arbitration. That is when both sides come in and make their cases before a neutral third party, who then structure the agreement. A jury trial is an arbitration, where both the prosecution and defense present evidence and analysis regarding the guilt of the accused and the group of 12 peers decides the issues. Why do we operate this way? Because we believe that "guilt" or "innocence" are intrinsic to the person (if you did the crime, you did the crime) and that our decisions (prison or release) should conform to that.

Many guys' problems with seduction come from the belief that the result of their interactions with women will be the same as if some independent arbiter came in and decided himself: "You're poor and bald but she is hot so sorry" or "You're rich and drive a nice car so you get to sleep with Beyonce." Those of us who know better realize this is silly and that your actions make the biggest difference in whether you get the girl. You might call this "seeing the matrix" and I assume most of you know what I am talking about.

It is also important to note that arbitration and negotiation are processes of empirical discovery. We tend to think of them as methods of bargaining, that I want to pay a low price and he wants me to pay a high price and to "negotiate" we play games with each other until someone imposes his will on the other. But they are really methods of good bargaining, of making sure that the eventual deal is plausible and serves both sides's interests. The relevant information can only be discovered through bargaining. In arbitration, the discovery process is explicit: both sides present their cases. In negotiation, the stalling technique is an empirical way of determining how desperate your opponent is for a deal, any deal. Similarly, a lowball offer is a way to instigate a response from your opponent: if he is eager then he will probably accept a lower offer than if he acts insulted. In terms of pickup:

When your request is rejected, your value is in flux, and it is an opportunity for you to define it with your subsequent actions.
For instance, if you go to kiss a girl, and she rejects you, it's not necessarily because she perceives your value as being low. It is simply because she's not sure. If you go and try to kiss her again, right away, you may lose some points with her. If you get angry or upset, or otherwise deflated or thrown off your game, you will certainly lose value. If, on the other hand you are cool and nonchalant about it, or you humorously tease her and joke about it, your perceived value will increase. At that point, you can safely try again at a later time and your chances of getting the kiss will have improved.

Next post: Why its ok

Commencement Advice

2009-05-17T13:11:00.004-04:00

The decline of the American male is well documented, as are the inevitable cultural accommodations. It has now been noticed by a major newspaper. From a review of the new Michael Lewis book:

American men now find themselves in the same position as Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having done the decent thing, and ceded power without bloodshed, they are now looked on with good-humored disdain...

..."Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight."

This captures an important point raised all over: obsequious men do not get respect from women. Moreover, there is no ultimate vindication for doing the "right" thing. Good intentions do not guarantee positive outcomes. Acting in accord with human nature, not an abstract moral principle, is the correct path to gain a woman's devotion, compliance and love.

This also holds an important lesson for the Class of 2009 as it wraps up four years of feminist indoctrination in college: Feminism was an experiment. Women came up with a list of things that they wanted, like splitting housework 50-50 and more welcoming environments to play sports or work at a company, claiming that fairness and equality justified these changes. Some men went along. Just like the Soviets, they thought they could create a new man and a new society based upon enlightened male-female relations. On some level, I cannot fault these men for trying. Man's curse is that he is expendable. Columbus's discovery of the new world required dozens of men to risk their lives and sail across the oceans without knowing whether they would return. These men were enticed by the prospect of being the vanguard of our progress into the light.

But their experiment was a failure. These men are not happy, not respected or fulfilled. Their lives are slavery. Many will not admit failure. They rationalize their subjugation by endorsing the equality fiction, that their misery is the price for fairness. But those of us in our twenties and teens must look closely at their example and judge their lives rationally. They have not discovered a virgin new world, but a leper colony, and we should not set sail for its coasts.

Reboot

2009-05-16T10:19:00.002-04:00

The blog never took off like I expected. That is, the veins of inspiration I hoped to mine for posts were much too small. But drawing from the work of 11 minutes and Master Dogen, I feel that I have some meaningful contributions to make to internet discussion. Here are some topics I plan to elaborate on in the near future:

Status and Value interactions as Negotiation. This is an idea that many PUA writers intuitively understand but I have not seen a good exposition as such. For example, "value is almost entirely based on perception" and the notion of "value in flux." Moreover, status "is something one does, not something one has."

A discussion of Jungian functions, their implications for truth-seeking and meaning and their relationship to rationality in game. This is partly an attempt to overcome the head butting in this discussion.

and possibly others as I see fit

Global Warming Models

2009-02-24T22:49:00.004-05:00

This has always struck me as an obvious critique of global warming science.

I have always been suspicious of climate models, in part because I spent some time in college trying to model chaotic dynamic systems, and in part because I have a substantial amount of experience with financial modeling. There are a number of common traps one can fall into when modeling any system, and it appears to me that climate modelers are falling into most of them.

If the smartest guys I knew from school get paid millions of dollars to predict the stock market and still get taken to the cleaners relying on their models, how can we trust any climate model? Global climate cannot be that much simpler than financial markets. I've never seen any reason to trust the IPCC more than the quants.

Via Vox

Verbatim

2008-11-04T16:03:00.002-05:00

Wonderlic:
A: Did you look at the sample questions? That was so easy. How can you score below 50?
B: I guess if you're pressed for time, you'd make mistakes. Apparently you only need a 39 or so to be in the 99th percentile, but I already knew I was 99th percentile.

USA Basketball

2008-08-24T10:49:00.003-04:00

Gold Medal game was this morning at 2:30 am. I've watched the team's games this week, although this was the first time I sat through the whole 40 minutes to make sure they pulled it out. I'm happy that they won and have some thoughts:

Great game. Spain led by 5 in the first and pulled within 2 in the fourth. Their plan, according to the announcers, was to keep it close at the end and give themselves a chance, but they couldn't continue stopping the US and the deficit stabilized around 8. The Gasols had a ton of points in the paint and Juan Carlos had a million points off runners and hook shots that just floated in.

The refs sucked. Too many fouls throughout and they failed to be consistent. Kobe and Lebron each had 2 several minutes into the game (but were able to play smart then sit and let the US's depth take over).

Leading up to this game, Lebron was the leader. It was his first real chance at a championship (as opposed to Kobe, Tayshaun and Wade) and he took the task very seriously. Much different than Athens were he rode the bench under Larry Brown. But in the fourth quarter, it was Kobe and not Lebron who made clutch shots, especially that 3 pointer plus free throw. Just now, ESPN.com's headline for the game ran with a photo of only Kobe on the stand in his windbreaker and gold medal around his neck. Kobe failed his last shot at "Next MJ" this NBA finals and it's looking like Lebron won't get that distinction either. You have to at least be the best player on the floor.