I’ve written a lot on how teenagerhood used to be. In my day, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, it was just given that any one person would “be” many different things over the course of his or her adolescence. I myself was briefly a metalhead, a skater, a jock, a nerd, and a preppie, and I think I’m forgetting a few. And I was far from an outlier. That’s just the way it worked back then, because that’s how you figured out who you really are. There comes a point in every metalhead’s life, for instance, when he realizes that metal kinda sucks. Oh, it’s great for pissing off your parents, but once that’s accomplished, there’s really nowhere else to go with it. So you move on, your scratched Ride the Lightning CD being the only relic of your youthful Metallica phase. And since everyone else is doing the same thing, no one is going to call you out as a hypocrite, lest you come back with “Oh yeah, Jessica, you’re so cool in your cheerleader outfit. Weren’t you a Goth last semester?”
These days, though, your “phases” are all over social media. If you pick one, you’d best be prepared to stick with it permanently. And it can be permanent indeed — ask the kids who decided to “transition” when they were fifteen and are now killing themselves in record numbers, because they weren’t really “transgender”, since that doesn’t actually exist. Given all that, there are only a few “safe” identities for kids to pick, and they’re pretty much all just flavors of SJW. Which is why the #wokeness seems to be coming on so strong. There’s really only one or two “safe” ways to express your “individuality” — you can be an SJW berating other SJWs for insufficient #wokeness in the matter of race, or gender, or perhaps health (vegans and covidians), but that’s about it.
Severian, “Mail Bag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-11.
April 24, 2024
April 17, 2024
QotD: The mid-life crisis, male and female versions
Which is why I’ve found the COVID overreaction so bizarre. Realizing your own mortality changes things. You can always tell, for instance, when it has happened to a younger person — when they come home, combat vets often act like middle-aged men going through a midlife crisis. Readjustment to civilian life is hard. Read the great war narratives, and it’s clear that none of them ever really “got over it”. Robert Graves and Ernst Junger, for instance, both lived to ripe old ages (90 and 103, respectively), and were titans in fields far removed from battle … and yet, the war WAS their lives, in some way we who haven’t been through it will never understand, and it comes through in every line they wrote.
If the Covidians were really freaking out about COVID, then, I’d expect one of two broad types of reaction: Either party-hearty midlife crisis mode, or a new determination to get on with whatever’s left of life. Obviously neither of those are true, and I just can’t grasp it — these might be your last few weeks on Earth, and that’s how you’re going to spend them? Sitting in your apartment like a sheep, wearing a mask and eating takeout, glued to a computer screen?
If you want a measure of just how feminized our society has become, there you go. Call this misogyny if you must, but it’s an easily observed fact of human nature — indeed, it has been observed, in every time, place, and culture of which we have knowledge — that post-menopausal women go a bit batty. Though a man might know for certain that he dies tomorrow, he can still keep plugging away today, because he’s programmed to find real meaning in his “work” — we are, after all, running our snazzy new mental software over kludgy old caveman hardware.
Women aren’t like that. They have one “job”, just one, and when they can’t do it anymore, they get weird. In much the same way high-end sports cars would cease to exist if middle aged men ceased to exist, so there are entire aspects of culture that don’t make sense in any other way except: These are channels for the energies of post-menopausal, and therefore surplus-to-requirements, women. You could go so far as to say that pretty much everything we call culture — traditions, history, customs — exist for that reason. Women go from being the bearers, to being the custodians, of the tribe’s future.
Severian, “Life’s Back Nine”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-11.
April 11, 2024
QotD: North America will never be a “bicycle” culture
I’m deliberately discounting bicycles as a means of locomotion, you’ll notice, because look: America is a car society. Our cities are designed for cars. Indeed, given the vast distances involved over here, cars are what make our lifestyle possible. Europeans who haven’t been here, or who only visit the big tourist pits like NYC and LA, don’t get this. Even if you’ve seen the maps, it doesn’t really register until you experience it. I’m just guessing here, for purposes of explanation, but it really does seem to be the case that if it were possible to hop in your car and drive two hours due east from downtown Paris, you’d pass through three or four countries. There are lots of American cities where, if it were possible to hop in your car and drive two hours straight from downtown, you’d still be in that same city. The continental US is just mind-bogglingly huge; only Russians and maybe Australians share our mental maps. When you’ve got daily commutes that run an hour, hour and a half on freeways, setting anything up with bicycles in mind is just ludicrous.
Severian, “Cars, Bikes, Motorcycles”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-25.
April 5, 2024
QotD: When the faculty lounge turned nasty over the electric vehicle charging stations
Not because academics are worried about anything so prole as hypocrisy — as we know, cognitive dissonance only affects the Dirt People — but because eggheads operate on a different scale of values. Bentleys etc. are what those people drive … so professors have to kick it bobo style. Thus the faculty lot is filled with Priuses (Prii?), Teslas, and so forth. Back when The Simpsons was funny, it had a throwaway joke about Ed Begley Jr. driving a car so eco-friendly, it was powered entirely by his own sense of self-regard. If they actually marketed those, every professor in America would have one … but since they don’t, the “eco-pimp my ride” competition continues unabated.
Which is hilarious for two reasons. First, there isn’t — there won’t be, there can’t be — sufficient infrastructure to support more than a token few electric vehicles (EVs). Flyover State is nothing if not eco-friendly, though, and so they fell all over themselves giving the faculty charging stations … but see above: All they could manage was one charging station per level, in one parking garage. Which naturally led to much agonizing in the Faculty Senate, not to mention the student newspaper, the town newspaper, and every boutique coffee place and head shop in College Town. How can charging station time be most equitably distributed? Does the Lesbian Negress outweigh (supply your own joke here, please) the White FTM tranny? What about the genderfluid hemophiliac Inuit? Where does the wingless golden-skinned dragonkin rank?
Severian, “Luxury Beliefs”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-03.
March 29, 2024
QotD: Pay no attention to the empty suit behind the social media curtain!
Given all that, why not censor? Why not let your freak flag fly? Just as being innovative actually counts against you in the music biz these days — sure, sure, y’all might be the next Beatles, but we know Taylor Swift’s lab-grown replacement will move fifty million units — so there are considerable drawbacks, in the social media moguls’ minds, to letting just any old schmoe post anything he wants up on their platforms. What if Faceborg’s ad-generation algorithm decides to put a #woke company’s ad on a badthinker’s page? Faceborg’s entire business model rests on getting #woke companies to keep buying ads, since those ad buys are the only thing that keep the stock price up. And since those #woke corporations have made it abundantly clear that they don’t want those people’s business …
Swing it back to the top. Faceborg et al have figured out a surefire way to “make money” by manipulating their stock price. They don’t need a physical product to do it, but what they absolutely must have, the one thing from which all others flow, is “clicks”. Eyeballs. Whatever you want to call it, the whole house of cards is built on the premise that there are actual users out there — real, physical people, who exist in meatspace — who might theoretically buy the advertisers’ products. But … what if there aren’t?
Zuck et al have been pretty good at faking it so far, but as everyone knows, they are faking. For one thing, they keep getting caught. For another, even academics — the dumbest critters in captivity, Commodore 64-level NPCs who can be counted on to swallow the SJW narrative hook line and sinker — keep publishing studies showing that some huge number of all social media accounts, on all platforms, are bogus.
Indeed, you can test it for yourself. I know, I know, FED!!!!, but hear me out: Get a VPN. Sign up for a burner email. Rejigger the VPN, then use the burner email to sign up for Faceborg, Twitter, whatever. Don’t actually post anything; just sign up. It’s 1000 to 1 that even with no activity whatsoever, you’ll still be deluged with friend requests. The algorithms will take care of that, because as we’ve noted, they have to push the illusion that people are using these platforms, that eyeballs are landing on pages, that fingers are clicking on ads. You’ll get a whole list of “suggestions” of which accounts to follow, all of which — surprise surprise — are never more than a click away from some big advertiser.
Severian, “Own Goals”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-21.
March 23, 2024
QotD: The SCIENCE was SETTLED in the 1970s
For younger readers, back in the late 70s the nutritional Powers That Be got in bed with the corn lobby. It sounds funny, but they were and are huge, the corn lobby — why do you think we’re still getting barraged with shit about ethanol, even though it’s actually much worse for the environment than plain ol’ dinosaur juice, when you factor in all the “greenhouse emissions” from growing and harvesting it? Anyway, ethanol wasn’t a thing back then … but corn syrup was, and so suddenly, for no reason whatsoever, the PTB decided that fat was bad and carbohydrates were good.
Teh Science (TM) for this was as bogus and politicized as all the other Teh Science (TM) these days, but since we still had a high degree of social and institutional trust back then — living in a country that’s still 85% White will do that — nobody questioned it, and so suddenly everything had to be “fat free”, lest you get high blood pressure and colon cancer and every other damn thing (ever notice how, with Teh Science (TM), everything they decide is bad suddenly correlates with everything that has ever been bad? Funny, that). But since fat is what makes food taste good, they had to find a tasty substitute … and whaddya know, huge vats full of corn syrup just kinda happened to be there. Obesity rates immediately skyrocketed; who’d have thunk it?
… but again, this isn’t a deliberate thing with your average Leftie. You know how they are about Teh Science (TM), even Teh Science (TM) produced by people who thought polyester bellbottoms were a great look, which alone should tell you everything you need to know. They just learned “red meat is bad”, and so, being the helpful sorts they are, decided to boss you around about it. You know, for your own good.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-25.
March 17, 2024
QotD: Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany never had a “long game” … but Stalin did
The Russians, meanwhile, never stopped playing the long game. While Goebbels made a few token gestures at rapprochement with “the West” (yeah, they called it that), and to sell Nazism to ditto, his heart wasn’t in it, any more than the Japanese’s heart was in their “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” hooey. Stalin, by contrast, was always pimping Communism to the West — even in the deepest, darkest days of the war, when it looked like the Wehrmacht was about to march into Moscow, the propaganda directed at the West continued full blast.
Like the German and Japanese aircraft industries, the German propaganda industry was ideologically locked into its core mission: To sell Nazism to Germans. And they were aces at it, no doubt … but then the mission changed. The smart thing for the Germans (and Japanese) to have done with their conquered territories was, in the context of the war, to ease up on the Nazi shit for the duration. The Nazis could’ve had zillions of Ukrainians fighting for them in 1941 just as the Japanese probably could’ve waltzed into India in 1941 had they not been so … well, so Japanese, in the rest of the Pacific rim. Stalin would’ve done it in a heartbeat, had the situation been reversed, and to hell with “authentic” Marxism-Leninism. Win the war first; square the ideology later.
As this is running way long, one example should suffice. Goebbels approached the task of selling Nazism to Germans in the most German way possible: He created the Reich Culture Chamber, which controlled all newspapers, radio broadcasts, film distribution, etc. And it worked, as far as it went — Goebbels deserves his “evil genius” rep — but as we’ve seen, that locked the leadership into an ideological straightjacket. Telling the Wehrmacht to ignore the Commissar Order and buddy up with the Ukrainians would’ve been the smart thing to do, militarily, but it was culturally impossible. Goebbels did his job too well … and then the mission changed.
The Soviets had a similar problem inside the USSR, but — here’s Stalin’s evil genius — they had free reign in propagandizing the West. Goebbels hardly bothered, but the Soviets poured massive resources into it. Forget, as far as you can, everything you think you know about “Nazism” […]. Even if you look at it as objectively as possible, it still seems ridiculous, and there’s a simple explanation for that — it’s not for you. Unless you were a pure blooded Aryan, actually living in Germany (or within Germany’s potential military reach), [they] couldn’t care less about you. Which made being a “Nazi” in, say, America uniquely pointless — you just look like a bigot at best, a traitorous bigot at worst.
Being a “Communist”, though? That was universal. Indeed, that made you a Smart person, a very very smart person, and morally superior to boot. Why? Because you care so much that you’ve mastered this large body of deliberately esoteric doctrine, comrade … all straight out of the NKVD playbook. And if actual life as it was lived in the Soviet Union didn’t quite measure up to the promises, well, that’s because they didn’t have the right people — people like YOU — running things. It’s fucking brilliant — a totally ideologically closed, indeed brutal, system at home, presented as the most open-minded, enlightened, tolerant one possible abroad.
Which is why Joey G. needed a huge Reich Culture Chamber that never came close to justifying its budget, and Stalin needed, effectively, nothing. Being so very, very Smart, wannabe “elites” in the West were happy to spread Commie propaganda for free. The NKVD, let alone the Gestapo, ain’t got shit on the Junior Volunteer Thought Police of Twitter and Facebook …
… which forces us to confront the question: Which model of propaganda are our rulers using? Has the one morphed into the other? Is it real, or is it just “German efficiency”?
Severian, “The Myth of German Efficiency”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-26.
March 15, 2024
Peter Turchin’s notion of the “overproduction of elites”
Severian is on a mini-vacation at the moment, but still managed to find time to share some thoughts about Turchin’s “overproduction of elites”:
University graduation – a large crowd of students at a graduation ceremony in Ottawa, Ontario. This was the thumbnail image used on the “Elite overproduction” Wikimedia page, which seemed quite appropriate.
Photo by Faustin Tuyambaze via Wikimedia Commons.
Let us consider “the overproduction of elites”. Those who love Peter Turchin’s work love this phrase, as it finally gives a name to a phenomenon we’ve all noticed: The creation, promotion, and indeed valorization of what would more properly be called social barnacles — they don’t move, can’t change, and eventually bring whatever they infest to a complete halt. Those who dislike his work often haven’t read it, so they object to the use of the word “elite” — again, these are social barnacles; what’s elite about them?
Which is precisely Turchin’s point — “elite” is a descriptor of their lifestyle, and most importantly their self-image; it is almost perfectly opposed to their actual utility. The modern Ed Biz is set up to do little else but produce these (pseudo) elites, and therefore a kind of Say’s Law takes hold. Say’s Law, you’ll recall, is vulgarly summarized as “Supply creates its own demand,” and that’s what we see with the (pseudo) elites churned out by every college in the land — they expect, indeed they demand, “jobs” commensurate with their “education”, and thus make-work “jobs” in the Apparat are brought into being.
They take out massive student loans to get the “jobs”; they “work” the “jobs” to service the debt, and so on.
But that’s true of most “white-collar” “jobs” these days. What separates the “elites”, in Turchin’s usage, from the rest of them is not their utility, or lack thereof — the economy, such as it is, would function just as well (or not) with far fewer lawyers, accountants, insurance adjusters, and so on. The difference, comrades, is what we must call Revolutionary Class Consciousness,
stealingnationalizingsocializingliberating a phrase from Lenin.An accountant, I’d wager, views his work as a technical specialty. They’re “rude mechanicals” (that’s Shakespeare, darlin’; evidently Mr. Ringo is an educated man). Maybe not so “rude” — accountants make good scratch; they’re middle to upper-middle class, economically — but basically technicians. Accounting is a highly-trained, well-compensated job, but that’s all it is: A job. Accounting is what an accountant does; it’s not what an accountant IS. Contrast that to the overproduced “elites”, in Turchin’s sense, and you see what Turchin’s sense really means: An “elite” really IS his job title.
Note the shift: His job title. As we all know, so many of the overproduced “elite” do no meaningful work. How could they? We could easily do this for most any “job” in the Apparat, but one example will suffice. Consider “Journalist”. Formerly called “Reporter”, and back then it required some actual productive output. Some “shoe leather”, as the phrase was. To find out what they were up to at City Hall, you actually had to physically go down to City Hall and follow the Mayor around. These days — the days when Reporters are now Journalists — it’s just stenography. And not even real stenography, Claudine Gay-style stenography — the Mayor’s press secretary (who probably went to college with you) emails you a press release; you change a word or two and then reprint it, basically verbatim, under your byline.
A monkey could be trained to do it. Hell, a chatbot could be trained to do it, and that’s probably a good quick-and-dirty definition of a Turchin-style overproduced “elite”: If whatever “work” he does could easily be replaced by a chatbot, with no appreciable drop-off in either productivity or quality. Because that’s the key to understanding these people: They know damn good and well, at some almost-but-not-quite conscious level, that they’re social barnacles. That is the “base” upon which the “superstructure” — again stealing terms from Onkel Karl — of their Revolutionary Class Consciousness is built.
March 11, 2024
QotD: The profound asshole-ishness of the “best of the best”
The truth is, they’re not — or, at least, they’re no more so than the rest of the population. It’s just that they have jobs where total, utter, profoundly narcissistic self-confidence is a must. It’s what keeps them alive, in the pilots’ case at least, and it’s what keeps you alive if, God forbid, you should ever need the trauma surgeon. Same way with the sportsballers. I can say with 100% metaphysical certainty that there are better basketball players than Michael Jordan, better hitters than Mike Trout, better passers than Tom Brady, out there. There are undoubtedly lots of them, if by “better” you mean “possessed of more raw physical talent at the neuronal level”. What those guys don’t have, but Jordan, Brady, Trout et al do have, is the mental wherewithal to handle failure.
Everyone knows of someone like Billy Beane, the Moneyball guy. So good at football that he was recruited to replace John Elway (!!) at Stanford, but who chose to play baseball instead … and became one of the all-time busts. He had all the talent in the world, but his head wasn’t on straight. Not to put too fine a point on it, he doubted himself. He got to Double A (or wherever) and faced a pitcher who mystified him. Which made him think “Maybe I’m not as good as I think I am?” … and from that moment, he was toast as a professional athlete. Contrast this to the case of Mike Piazza, the consensus greatest offensive catcher of all time. A 27th round draftee, only picked up as a favor to a family friend, etc. Beane was a “better” athlete, but Piazza had a better head. Striking out didn’t make him doubt himself; it made him angry, and that’s why Piazza’s in the Hall of Fame and Beane is a legendary bust.
The problem though, for us normal folks, is that the affect in all cases is pretty much the same … and it’s really hard to turn off, which is why so many pro athletes (fighter jocks, surgeons, etc.) who are actually nice guys come off as assholes. It’s hard to turn off … but as it turns out, it’s pretty easy to turn ON, and that’s in effect what Game teaches.
Severian, “Mental Middlemen II: Sex and the City and Self-Confidence”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-06.
March 5, 2024
QotD: Begging the question
Severian, “Mental Middlemen II: Sex and the City and Self-Confidence”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-06.
March 1, 2024
Understanding the modern media
It’s hard for Baby Boomers and even some older Gen X folks to grasp just how much the mainstream media has changed since the 1960s and 70s. Helpfully, Severian provides the context to properly understand what drives them and why they do the things they do:
Proposed coat of arms for Founding Questions by “urbando”.
The Latin motto translates to “We are so irrevocably fucked”.
There is no local news, because all “news” is Apparat audition tape. Back when — back when they were called “reporters” — news people had a clear career progression within a specific industry. A hungry young reporter for the Toad Suck, Nebraska, Times-Picayune might end his days as a reporter for the New York Times or Washington Post, but that was as high as he could reasonably expect to go. Same with the television division — the bobblehead at WSUX in Toad Suck might end up, at most, on CNN or Fox.
These days, though, they call themselves “journalists”, and “journalist” is just an entry-level Apparat post. They’re not just auditioning for the NYT or CNN, of course. A hungry young “journalist” might end xzhyr career at either, of course, but also as a corporate communications director, a political campaign consultant, a professor of “journalism”, a Diversity Outreach Coordinator, any one of a million “Media strategies” and “Media consulting” gigs … or, of course, as an outright lobbyist, because all of those are just euphemisms for “lobbying” anyway.
And that’s before you consider that all the “independent” papers and stations have been bought up by huge conglomerates, and depend on advertising revenue. Noam Chomsky was right — the Media does dance to the tune its corporate paymasters’ call. He was just wrong on those paymasters’ political orientation. Combine all that, and even the most straight-up, just-the-facts-ma’am local “news” story will find some way to insert The Sermon. If you don’t see The Sermon, you’ve either found an incompetent journalist (which happens) … or you might be looking at something subtle.
[…]
The Media, like Skynet, is self-aware. This significantly complicates the stoyachnik‘s task, as The Media understands its own power, and it increasingly wants to drive Narratives itself, especially as its power is on the verge of… well, not collapse exactly, but certainly a sea change. Because The Media is not monolithic, and that’s part of its self-awareness. So many “journalists” do nothing but hit refresh on Twitter all day, and Twitter knows this — that makes Twitter the real power broker. Google, too, obviously is more self-aware than traditional Media. That ludicrous AI image generator represents years of effort; they expended enormous resources to get precisely that result. They understand how utterly dependent the lower layers of The Media are on them; they are more self-aware.
Let us […] use Google’s own AI “summarizer” to refamiliarize ourselves with the tale of Comrade Ogilvy:
Comrade Ogilvy is an imaginary character in the novel 1984, created by Winston Smith to replace Comrade Withers, an Inner Party member who has fallen into disgrace and been vaporized. Comrade Ogilvy supposedly lived a patriotic and virtuous life, supported the party as a child, designed a highly effective hand grenade as an adult, and died in action at the age of 23 while protecting important dispatches for his country. He did not drink or smoke, was celibate, and only conversed about Party philosophy, Ingsoc. Comrade Ogilvy displays how easy it is for a member of The Party to be pulled from thin air, and how determined The Party is to keep unpersons from the media.
The Apparatchiks at Google are more self-aware than the Apparatchiks at, say, the New York Times. That is, they understand their place in the Apparat better, and see the networks more clearly. They know how mal-educated “journalists” are, far better than the “journalists” themselves do. Google, like Winston Smith, knows full well that there’s no Comrade Ogilvy. But the “journalists” at the New York Times who are utterly reliant on Google for their “facts” do NOT know this. How could they?
And thus, the only White people in all of human history were Nazis. At least according to Google’s AI image generator, and therefore — soon enough — it’s what “everybody knows”. (And it’s necessarily recursive. The second generation of Google engineers will not know there’s no Comrade Ogilvy, any more than the current generation of “journalists” does).
February 28, 2024
QotD: When the rules in the dating market all changed
Under the old dispensation, back before the Clinton Era (1988-2001), everyone acknowledged that there were a lot of users and abusers, douchebags and parasites and losers, out there in the world. That being the case, simply being an all-around ok guy with a steady job — what the PUAs came to term “beta providers” — was, in itself, a pretty solid resume in the dating market. “Just be yourself” was every guy’s dad’s advice when it came to dating, and back then it was pretty solid, since it was assumed that the decent job etc. flowed from being a decent human being. And since every girl’s mom was telling her complementary things, the system worked … until it didn’t, and you can date the change precisely: June 6, 1998, the premiere of the HBO series Sex and the City.
[…] Everyone has met one of those “one of the guys”-type girls. They’re great fun, and while you know what I mean when I say they’re not necessarily marriage material as-is, you therefore also know what I mean when I say they really are what feminists all claim to be: Strong, confident women. They are what they are, and they know it, take it or leave it.
The problem is, most women — and, it goes without saying, all feminists — aren’t “strong, confident women”, in the same way the vast majority of guys aren’t naturally “alpha males”. That’s the dialectic I’ve been trying to get at in this series of posts. Sex and the City, as much as every episode needs to be burned and the ashes shot into deep space, was just the manifestation of a long-developing process. Thanks to all that “self-esteem” shit that started in the Seventies, sometime in the Clinton Era a critical mass of young women decided that what they needed was to be “strong” and “self-confident”. But they didn’t know how to do that, because the people telling them this were fat lesbian college professors. Then HBO, sensing a valuable market niche, got into the act …
Sex and the City […] is the gayest show in the history of television. Carrie and the Gals don’t act like women; they act the way women think men act — which is to say, they act like gay men. Recall that the late 1990s also saw an explosion of female “comedians”, whose one “joke” was some version of “I got my period today, but damn, I still crave dick.” (Sex and the City, you’ll recall, was pitched as a comedy). And that’s a serious problem, because as every straight guy has said at least once in his life, being gay would be fabulous if not for the “sex with guys” part. I mean, how awesome would it be (every young man thinks), if you could reorient your whole life around your crotch?
Severian, “Mental Middlemen III: SATC”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-06.
February 22, 2024
QotD: Why companies continue to irritate their customers with online social justice marketing
Ad company execs are walking into a meeting with a Starbucks-sized company right now. They’re pitching a bold new social media strategy to their clients. And they know it works, these ad men say, because look at all this data from Starbucks. Their posts average so much “engagement” every time, but look, when they post on “social justice” topics, their “engagement” jumps 350%!!
In case you were wondering how all this “social justice” shit keeps appearing in ads, despite the well-known effect of pissing off companies’ established client base, well, there you go — the company execs, being #woke Cloud People, want to do it anyway, and they’ve got whole binders full of data from the marketing department that prove “social justice” ups social media “engagement” with “the brand” umpteen zillion percent.
Severian, “Internet Tough Guys”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-10.
February 16, 2024
QotD: The PUA (Pick-up artist)
This was two decades or more ago, and College Town was in Podunkville. Imagine what they’re charging to get into the hot nightspots on the Sunset Strip. I bet just getting into the clubs costs these aspiring PUAs a couple hundred bucks, every week, for months. Then there’s all the other stuff Strauss said he did to transform himself into “Style” — laser-whitening his teeth, tanning beds, classes on elocution and posture, a whole new (and ever-changing) wardrobe, surfing. I can’t even begin to calculate it, but at one point he and three other PUAs are living in a Hollywood Hills mansion that once belonged to one of the Rat Pack — monthly rent, $50K. Then throw in the fact that all of this takes a tremendous amount of time, and consider the toll that must take on your body. I hit the sauce pretty hard back in my day, and one of the reasons I stopped was that the hangovers really started hurting — one night of bar-hopping now, and I’d be bedridden for days. I’m getting exhausted just typing this, and do you see what I mean?
And all this without getting a single girl. I think everyone here has been in at least one relationship, so we know that no matter how casual you keep it, bare-bones relationship management, even of pump-and-dumps, takes a fairish bit of time (so I’ve heard, anyway). I might be misremembering, but at one point Strauss claims he was managing something like four or five more or less long-term hookups simultaneously. I don’t think there are enough hours in the day …
Much better, then, to just say you’re a PUA. To do it Tyler Durden style, in other words. I’m pretty sure you could sell the illusion of yourself as a hardcore PUA with one not-too-expensive night on the town. Just dress up like one of these goobers, hit up one bar, and take selfies with a bunch of girls, making sure to alter the shot angles enough that no one can tell you’re in the same bar the whole time. Post one or two stories of your conquests a week, and you could portray yourself as some kind of pickup master in no time at all.
Of course, that’s if you want to consciously fake it. I have no idea what “Tyler Durden” was doing, not being a sociopath myself, but as Strauss tells it, his disciples got snookered into it. They really did want to learn how to pick up girls, but since dressing up like a PUA and talking about getting girls is much easier than actually getting girls, a night on the town with those guys ended up being an endless series of “approaches”. Again, it’s how you define “effective”, and Strauss lets the cat out of the bag a bit when he informs us of the PUA’s weird lingo for “closing”. There’s the “f-close”, of course, which should be obvious, but there’s also the “kiss close” and even the “phone number close” … and both of those count as complete successes.
Severian, “Mental Middlemen”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-05.
February 10, 2024
QotD: When Manchuria became Manchukuo
Further unpleasantness ensued in the wake of World War I, when both Imperial Russia and Republican China collapsed. The Japanese had a big railroad project of their own going in the Kwantung Leased Territory, which was threatened by the chaos. Moreover, the big Japanese railroad project had grown — as Japanese industrial concerns tend to do — into a ginormous, all-encompassing combine known as Mantetsu.
So far, so recondite, I suppose, but stop me if this part sounds familiar: Mantetsu was so big, and so shady, that it was all but impossible to tell where “the guys running Mantetsu” ended and “the Japanese government” began. And it gets better: Thanks to the Japanese Empire’s distinctive (to put it mildly, and kindly) administrative structure, it was equally hard to tell where “the Japanese government” ended and “the Japanese military” began. Even better — by which I mean much, much worse, but again feel free to stop me when this sounds familiar — “the Japanese military” was itself composed of several wildly different, mutually hostile chains of command, all competing with each other for political power, economic access, and glory. Best of all — by which, again, I mean worst — since Mantetsu was so big, and so wired-in to every level of the Japanese government, it basically got its own army, which was effectively separate even from the Army High Command back in Tokyo.
Here again, the granular details are insanely complex, and I’m not qualified to walk you through them, but the upshot is: Thanks to all of the above, plus the active enmity of the rapidly-rearming Soviet Union and the rapidly-accelerating chaos of the Warlord Period in China, Japan’s foreign policy ended up being dictated by the Kwantung Army, with almost no reference to even the High Command, let alone the civilian politicians, back in Tokyo. A particular warlord giving the Mantetsu Board of Directors — or, you know, whoever — grief? No problem — boom! Oh, that didn’t solve the problem, and now the politicians are dragging their feet? Might as well blow up a different part of your own railway, seize a whole bunch of territory on that flimsy pretext, and set up a puppet government to give you cover …
I don’t expect y’all to follow all the links right away, so trust me on this: Nobody involved in any of that stuff ranked higher than colonel. Indeed, the guy most “responsible” — if that’s really the word — for all of this stuff was a staff pogue, also a colonel, named Kanji Ishiwara. He and another staff pogue, Seishiro Itagaki, who was head of the Kwantung Army’s intelligence section, orchestrated the Japanese invasion of China, and while it’s oversimplifying things a bit too much to say those two clowns started World War II in the Pacific, I’m not stopping you from saying it.
From there, events took on a logic of their own. The rest of the Army was soon committed to the war in North China, which rapidly became the war in all the rest of China. The Navy, not wanting to let the Army hog all the glory, had gotten in on the war a few years prior to the Marco Polo Bridge, and soon enough they were causing all kinds of international grief on their own account. Put simply, but not unfairly, you had the Navy chasing the Army, and the Army chasing itself, all across China, with the civilian politicians lagging way behind in the rear, desperately trying to catch up, or even just figure out what the hell was going on …
Severian, “Lessons from Manchuria”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-21.
