Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Sexual Competition in Britain: A Case Study in Sadness


The Daily Mail has another story on scantily clad, drunk, and sad women in Britain. Courtesy of Roissy/Heartiste, the pictures and comments are revealing as to what they show unrestrained sexual competition among women for the few dominant A-holes they find attractive works out to in real life. Its not an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Vampire Diaries, Gossip Girl, or a showing of Twilight. None of that glamorized idealization of choices without limits (or crucially, guidance). Rather, complete and total sadness and desperation.



The story gives away the reason, though the writer Tanith Carney refuses to see it:

The standard uniform — micro-miniskirts, sky-high heels and low tops — was once worn only by prostitutes on dingy street corners. Now it’s a mainstream style adopted by almost every female clubber and party-goer under the age of 30.

Why do they cheapen themselves so — especially at a time when young women have never had a greater opportunity to reject crass sexual stereotypes of old.

After all, girls are outperforming boys at every stage of schooling. In the workplace, female employees are starting to out-earn their male counterparts.

Why is it, then, in an age of true equal opportunity that so many women are dressing in such a demeaning way?



Well, color this under the obvious. The women are competing for the few men they find attractive. Make most men their equal or worse in status, i.e. girls out-performing boys at every age of schooling, in the workplace, in social status, well they turn into sluts. Inevitably. Because being a slut is the price women have to pay to get attention and sex from the few dominant, Alpha assholes they find attractive.

Women, almost exclusively, will feel no sexual attraction whatsoever for guys who are their inferiors, socially, and not much more for those who are their equals. Equalization in status and earnings and everything else just serves to make nearly every guy sexually invisible and undesirable for most every woman. Save those on the very bottom of attractiveness. A socially egalitarian society alone, let alone the current one where women do better economically and socially than men, guarantees a society of sluts, a few Jersey Shore Alpha males (think the Situation), and most guys opting out for porn and X-boxes.

Why DO young women go out dressed like this? We meet nightclubbers in four major cities to find the surprising and unsettling answer to the question despairing mothers are asking
...
Tonight it’s Hannah Lawson’s 18th birthday and she’s out on the town with five of her college friends after spending three hours getting ready. Teamed with leopard-print ankle boots, her outfit lends a whole new meaning to the term ‘Little Black Dress’

As she and her identically dressed friends line up, hands on hips, only the mottled skin on their naked legs hints at the six-degree temperature. But Hannah proclaims it’s worth it to give them that all-important quality: ‘confidence’.

‘Male attention is good. Then you know you look good,’ she says.

‘Yeah, guys wink and make sly remarks,’ chips in her friend Eleanor, 17. They have only just hit the streets, but already they know that their skimpy outfits have made an impact — another group of girls has branded one of their number ‘a slag’.

‘They’re just jealous because we’re beautiful and look young!’ says their friend Ruby Crowther, 19.


"Slag" from another group of women? Spending three hours getting ready? Extremely revealing clothing on freezing nights? That's all competition for the male gaze, and of course the male gaze of the few men women find attractive. There are plenty of guys to go around, but they are either equal or slightly lesser in social stature, so the young girls, in the prime of their beauty, have to dress extremely revealing to gather the attention of the few dominant A-hole jerks they find attractive.

Joanne Avery, 23, is a clerical assistant from Chester-le-Street, Co. Durham, out clubbing in Newcastle. Her £45 Playboy skirt sits low enough to reveal a white thong, above it is tattooed her personal motto: ‘Couldn’t give a f***.’ It’s accessorised by another on her upper arm that reads: ‘Raw Sex.’

Joanne’s extensive wardrobe back at home — which includes 25 pairs of high heels — is made possible by the fact she still lives with her family. Indeed, it is her father who lends her money to help fund her £500 a month eBay shopping habit.
...

Joanne has no qualms about sharing the reasons why she is dressed so provocatively tonight. ‘I’m looking for a bit of totty. You have to dress in a certain way to get attention.
‘If you’ve got t**s, it helps. It does make me feel more confident. I’m a slut, but it’s OK to be a slut as long as you use protection, which most people don’t.’
For Joanne, it is simply not an option to dress more tastefully. ‘I’d never dress in jeans. I just wouldn’t like it. I always want to wear slutty clothes.’


One reason for tattoos among young women is to advertise sexual availability (to the dominant Alpha A-hole they crave, of course, not to the "icky" Beta males who are their equal or below). Hyper-competition for the few desirable men creates basically, a buyers market (among the few A-hole jerks women crave). Thus women in societies where they have unlimited freedom and a higher social position than their male peers have to slut it up. Just to gain sexual access to the few men they find sexy. If nearly every male peer were sexy, you would not see the tattoos, the revealing clothing, and the drinking.

Naomi Maxfield, an 18-year-old musical theatre student from Chesterfield, was out on the town  in Newcastle.

‘I like getting male attention. If I didn’t, I would think: “What’s  wrong?” ’ she says. ‘It’s quite a nice feeling. It makes you more confident. Guys smile at you, wink, whistle, try to chat you up.’

Natasha Parish, 19, a hairdresser from Newcastle, has taken an hour and a half to apply her fake tan, lashes and make-up. Once again, she cites the need to feel confident for her choice of clothing. ‘I think dressing up is a part of being a modern woman. I’m OK with how I look.

‘It is nice to get a bit of male attention, not too much. It makes me more confident if I know that I’m looking attractive.’


Again, of course, the only male attention that counts is from jerks. A-holes. Bad boys. Alpha males. The girls can get plenty of attention from their male peers, and without dressing in hyper-revealing clothing. They just don't want it. Because they find beta males unsexy. Or, alternatively they HATE HATE HATE Beta Males.

Given the acres of limbs that are exposed, you might assume that these girls are proud of their bodies. Quite the opposite.

It emerges that in many cases their outfits — and the male leering it provokes — are often a way to bandage up their insecurities in a world where they can’t match up to the  oh-so-sexy, celebrity stereotypes  of womanhood.

It doesn’t always work out as they hoped, as Sian, an 18-year-old carer on a night out in Cardiff, admits. Her insecurities about showing off her figure in such revealing clothes are so profound that she admits to drinking spirits with her friend to work up the bravery to leave the house.

‘We looked in the mirror before we left the house and were so upset that we necked half a bottle of vodka each.’

Her friend Beth, a student, is wearing suspender-style tights, made popular by celebrities such as Rihanna. She says she didn’t buy them to look sexy or fashionable, but to cover up her legs, which she describes as ‘vile.’

‘There’s lots of pressure to look good. Boys always want that perfect person and other women all look amazing.’

Natasha Parish also ‘hates’ her legs — though you would never guess it from the scarlet and black micro-mini she is wearing in Newcastle city centre.

‘I wish girls wore a bigger variety of clothes going out,’ she says. ‘That’s why I wear dresses — everyone else does, so I would look stupid if I wore a longer skirt or trousers. I do wish it was easier and that I could go out in less revealing clothes.’

When Amber Davies, 21, a full–time mother from Bristol goes out in Cardiff, she wears her full armoury including a push-up bra and false eyelashes. But she has the self-knowledge to realise that ultimately it’s not a very convincing mask.

‘The only problem is that this isn’t what we really look like. In the morning, you’d be there without your hair extensions, make-up and false eyelashes, or your body-control pants — and you’d look completely different. Nobody knows what you really look like when you’re dressed up like this.’



It does not get more explicit than this (note the full time mother going out for random hook-ups and worrying about how she looks to her random partner in the morning). Women have to show the goods to get the sex from the few guys they find sexy. The cost of feminism, of female sexual liberation, is hyper-competition among women for that hot guy.

As Charlene David, 25, and Stacey Leonard, 27, stop to chat, two male bystanders come up behind them, put their hands around their waists and tell them they look beautiful.

Far from brushing them off, both girls said it illustrated the usual reaction they provoked from men — and asked for the compliments to  be recorded.

Other girls were also seen being touched and having their bottoms squeezed by men coming up behind them — or being forcefully coerced into bars. Because they were barely able to walk on their stilt-like shoes, many couldn’t stagger away, even if they wanted to.
It is Leanne McGinley, 25, a mother-of-two in a leopard-print dress, who sums up the contradiction. ‘I do find the male attention irritating. But it would feel a bit weird if there wasn’t any.’


Yes of course. Male attention from icky Beta Males? Irritating. From the dominant Alpha A-holes who coerce them into bars and grab their behinds? Desirable. No one is putting guns to their heads, they spend an awful amount of money, often subsidized by their parents, to gain attention from the Alpha male. Hyper-competitive environments produce such reactions.

It’s a contest that can spill into aggression and even violence. As the evening goes on, the alcohol flows and the pairings start to happen. Catfights break out, with competing tribes of girls shouting ‘slag!’ at each other from opposite sides of the street.
It comes as little surprise to discover that the more the women dress like strippers, the more men treat them that way. Among the men we spoke to, one described the women out on the town as ‘eye candy for free’ — and a chance to ‘window shop’.

Toby Harris, 29, a project manager from London, says he likes women dressing in barely-there clothes ‘because you get to think whether you want to sleep with them later’.

‘It’s a certain sort of women who dresses that way — easy chicks,’ he says. ‘They’re definitely not a long-term prospect because they are easy.’ In many cases, that sexist view may well be crass and unjustified. After all, shouldn’t women be free to dress as they please without being judged? But whatever their motivation for dressing as they do, there is no escaping how the micro-skirted mob are perceived by men.

Tom Jones, 23, a landscape gardener from Cardiff, says: ‘It’s good to give the game away and know what you’re getting. The less clothing the better.’

For Lewis Quinn, 23, an electrician from London: ‘Being around all these women is like being at a funfair with glaring lights in your face — but they’re not the sort I go for as it’s too revealing for me.’


Yes, of course average women can "win" by having sex with Alphas they would otherwise not have, in today's liberated, feminist, equalist society. But they don't get commitment from the Alpha males, even if they do get casual sex.

Some girls reported that their mothers checked their outfits before they went out and said they ‘looked nice’. Others said their mothers sometimes accompanied them out clubbing, envied their figures — and even borrowed their clothes.

Psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos, author of the Home Office Review on the Sexualisation of Girls, believes society has become so influenced by porn culture that no one knows where to draw the line any more.

‘We are inheriting more from the porn culture than we realise — everything from fake nails to fake tans. Porn has become mainstream.

‘The sad thing is that the confidence of these girls has become directly proportionate to how they look. It doesn’t come from what they have achieved or what skills they have learned. It comes from how much attention and looks they get from men.

‘Of course, there’s nothing new about wanting to be desired and complimented. But with these young women, it’s not just that they like compliments. They crave them.

‘The problem comes when your only desire is to be desired.’


The problem is not porn. There are plenty of men, in fact most of their male peers, that would have been happy with them. Girls age 17, 18, 19, at the peak of their beauty, can dress in a barrel and get male attention. If women were picking from the mass of their male peers, you would not see the hyper-competition for just a few guys, the ones they find sexy, occurring. Hence the drinking, to degrade themselves essentially in pursuing men they have no real chance of staying with, and can only get fleeting sexual encounters with. Including a number of "full-time mothers" in the story.

That is not a particularly happy set of circumstances.

What women need is ... information. Information about their realistic chances at landing an Alpha and keeping him. It is pretty easy for any woman who is reasonably fit, breathing, and under 45 to have sex with an Alpha. Alpha males are not particularly picky about who they have sex with. Look at Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton, Herman Cain, John Edwards, and so on. For an Alpha, life is a buffet with sex from McDonalds and Nobu in NYC, at any time. Almost any half-way attractive woman can have sex with an Alpha.

But she won't keep him. Did Tiger Woods marry Rachel Uchitel? Did Bill Clinton leave Hillary for Monica Lewinsky? Did Herman Cain leave his wife for Ginger White?

For most women, they have a choice. Career wise they need to have the power to earn money, and think about the future, including what they will do if say, tragically hip careers in fashion or marketing or PR go belly up. Romantically, women need to be told, over and over again, from an early age, that they are extremely unlikely to keep an Alpha male. Even if they do, that Alpha male will almost certainly cheat.

If they want faithfulness, companionship, and someone to stick around after their parents inevitably pass on, they have to compromise, and do so carefully. They cannot wait too long, all the men just the few rungs below the Alpha males will be taken, or have done whatever they could to convert themselves into Alpha A-hole jerks. A woman at age 35, who rode the carousel of many Alpha lovers, is no real prize and increasingly the men she can choose from at that age are X-boxen bound slackers who've opted out for porn and amusement, or greater Beta Males who found Game, PUA-driven study, and have turned themselves into Alpha jerks pursuing casual sex with significantly younger (and fewer partners) women who have the advantage of greater beauty associated with youth. Even the most beautiful 35 year old woman, after all, is no match for a fit and ordinary 22 year old woman.

This means society must be honest with women. Let them know, their beauty will fade, often quite rapidly. That the few men they find attractive will not stay with them. That if they wish a relationship, one that has the promise of lasting, they need to carefully, as in Jane Austen's day, consider a man's character, his friends, his family, his habits, everything that reveals him as either trustworthy or not. And further, to not reject out of hand those men that on the surface can seem cold, remote, shy, unsexy, and look carefully at somewhat older men who have achieved some measure of success, without becoming either bitter or players in reaction to female hypergamy unrestrained.

Further, society needs to hammer home the message to women that they cannot in fact have it all, since no one can. Choosing to pursue sex means that for most women, they will never have a husband. If they want marriage or its functional equivalent, they must abjure pursuing exciting sex in favor of careful courtship among those who are at least somewhat sexy (though not as sexy as the A-holes in the clubs and bars that demand hyper competition from hypergamous women) and have the makings of good life-long partners.

Every woman and girl ought to have the right to choose her own destiny. Should she wish to pursue the life of Samantha from "Sex and the City" that should be her choice. But it should be an INFORMED choice, one made freely in the knowledge that she will give up any realistic chance at a life-long mate and will likely have kids by herself, with all that implies (emotional and financial hardship as the Welfare State ends, under mass immigration and running out of money; and sons bound for prison, daughters for the stripper pole).

Most women don't like this compromise. They know they've been cheated, and their pursuits are somewhat fruitless, hence the drinking of bottles of vodka to screw up their courage. Nobody gets drunk for a night on the town ... before they go out, unless they dread the prospect. Men don't get drunk before sitting down to play Call of Duty. They enjoy it.

Women as much as non-Alpha men get cheated by the current system. Women get told a pack of lies, that sexual freedom does not require a knife-edge caution, that disaster romantically can occur at any moment, and that a lifetime of happiness is just one mis-step from slipping away un-noticed. No, today does not resemble Jane Austen's in the repression of women, limited opportunities, and such. But it does in that only a few men can make satisfactory husbands, and every woman is in competition with every other woman. Even worse, marriage does not end the competition. For Alpha males at least, who will continue to screw around no matter what. They're Alpha males, after all!

Total freedom requires hyper-vigilance, among women themselves, to get and retain a proper mate. There may be no "shame" as in Austen's day, but the stakes are just as high. Having a husband/mate to guide child-rearing and companionship, or none at all. Instead women are sold fairy tales of taming magical bad boy vampires, in either glittery gay (Twilight, Vampire Diaries) or brutalesque (Buffy, Tru Blood) versions, or other variations (Mad Men, Sex and the City, etc.) No wonder they're sad. They've been cheated.
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Tuesday, November 29, 2011

A Tale of Two Pepper Sprays

Two recent pepper spray incidents in California reveal the two differing standards for Whites and Latinos. The UC Davis incident in which a UC Davis campus police officer pepper sprayed students who refused to move when ordered, has resulted in the Police Chief's suspension, an apology from the UC Davis Chancellor, and the suspension of the police officer as well as a full-blown investigation that could result in his firing and even prosecution. Meanwhile, in Porter Ranch, a woman who pepper sprayed fellow Black Friday Wal-Mart shoppers to get an X-box has not been charged and according to reports, is unlikely to be charged at all by the LAPD.

The difference? The cop at UC Davis is White, and the woman who pepper sprayed her fellow shoppers is Mexican.


The Wal-Mart pepper sprayer bragged to fellow shoppers that she would pepper spray other shoppers to get to the X-boxes on sale. She did in fact do so, and grabbed an X-box, paid for it, and left. She was caught on cellphone video with the pepper spray, and was clearly identified. A number of shoppers had to be transported to local hospitals with difficulty breathing and seeing.

America has now, two distinct and separate politicized justice systems, matching that of the political breakdown. One for connected, famous, and rich White elites, non-Whites, and such. And another for ordinary White guys and gals. Shades of "the police acted stupidly" by Obama, we have preferential, specialized treatment for one pepper spayer (because she is Mexican) and a virtual jihad for another, arguably in pursuit of his duties, and operational procedures as he understood them, because the latter is White. Certainly a Black or Hispanic officer at UC Davis would never have been suspended, in fact the whole thing would never have been an issue.

Is this sustainable? Very likely not. It is one more aspect of the eternal spoils struggle between Democrats, party of the anti-White folks (rich White elites, professional White women, non-Whites), and Republicans (against their will morphing into the White party). As memories of the Civil Rights era fade (NY Magazine had an article detailing Jessie Jackson meeting with the Occupy Wall Street goofs, Jackson asked them what LBJ meant to them and they answered Vietnam, he responded with Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, and more) and with it whatever residual White guilt among middle and working class Whites, this spoils system for justice becomes less tenable. Certainly as Whites fade into a minority, suddenly, in their own country, by being forced to accede to Mexican Mass Immigration (because the Mexicans doing the mass immigrating are given special, race-based preferences) and White second-class citizenship, while paying for everything, and getting essentially nothing, well that is nothing more than a pre-Revolutionary condition.

How and when this will explode is uncertain. But explode it will.
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Best Free Fonts

For a lighter change of pace, check out the best Free Fonts available on the Web. I've tried them with good results. The prior post was written in Vollkorn, from Friedrich Althausen and it is simply beautiful. Containing pretty much everything you'd need in terms of glphys, kerning pairs, accented characters (naturally for a German) and special characters, it reads delightfully on my screen in Ubuntu 10.4 Linux and Abiword. This post is written in Antykwa Poltawskiego, which is a revival of a Polish font used in the Twenties and Thirties done originally by the designer of that last name, and revived by the gifted Januz Marian Nowacki. It too looks beautiful, link here.


The first link, here, will get you to URW free versions of Palatino (done by the incomparable Hermann Zapf, yes the guy behind Zapf Chancery), as well as Goudy versions, Bembo (called Cardo), and of course (at the URW link) Garamond. One of the more hopeful things is the enthusiasm by type designers for reviving and preserving the old type faces, particularly those of the Renaissance and early printing, as well as "National Fonts" that preserve the unique smallness and locality of the nations they represent.

Vollkorn is beautiful, but retains enough of the German "Blackletter" aka Gothic/Schwabacher character to be interesting, while still highly readable. Poltawskiego looks like it came off a book from 1928, and is quite beautiful in a Beaux Arts Way.

Pride in the greatness of European heritage is not yet entirely dead. Against the Occupy people literally pooping at St. Paul's Cathedral is the enthusiasm of middle aged, middle class men for reviving the great type faces of the past. Heck one man even wrote a book about it, even if he does spend far too much time lauding Barack Obama in a way unbecoming for an ostensibly straight man.

Often it is the little things that tell you much about a person, or a society. This is one thing that is quite hopeful.

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Sunday, November 27, 2011

The Sadness, American and British Versions


For all of the Twilight movie frenzy, with Twilight Moms and tweens camped out, and "You Go Girl" positivism from Oprah, every White woman's Black Best Friend(tm), women in today's society are beset with sadness. For they have very little to be happy about. The Huffington Post has an article about women divorcing in their twenties. The Daily Mail has an article about women drinking themselves into oblivion. Both reflect a cruel irony.



In no place or time, have women had more choices, more wealth, more power, and more opportunities to be whatever they want to be. To decide for themselves what their lives will be. And in no time, place, or society have women been left to themselves entirely, without guidance, help, or advice on what real life boundaries will limit their choices. You might even argue that women have only one fleeting chance, often, at happiness, and can see it go by without even realizing it. This is why vampires are so popular, real life men disappoint them, and like the male geeks retreating into dreams of hot Vulcan or other Alien babes, women retreat into a fantasy of hunky dominant, violent guys fighting over them and for them. But the reality is sad. Above all else.

The Daily Mail piece has such things as:

Midnight on St Mary Street in Cardiff and everything is exactly as expected. Half a dozen young women slump in a gutter, men urinate outside a health-food shop and, as hordes stagger between nightclubs, someone lifts up a blow-up doll with a sex toy protruding out of it.

The street smells of urine and lager, police struggle  to break up a fight outside the Walkabout bar and a paramedic bundles a comatose girl on to a wheelchair. But it's a quiet night for 20-year-old Naomi Jenkins. She has 'only' drunk three shots of peach schnapps, cider and three shots of Jagermeister (during a drinking game called I Have Never) and still feels 'a bit sober'. Her friend Hannah Freeman, 19, was punched in a fight and stumbles about swearing and searching for a bathroom.

'We only do embarrassing things when we're really drunk,' Naomi says. 'I kiss random men in the street and Hannah has had sex behind a chicken coop.' She screams with laughter as Hannah lurches unsteadily in the stairwell of Charleston Bar and Grill on Caroline Street (known locally as Chip Alley) and unashamedly urinates in front of us. 

Amazingly, none of the 80-strong throng of passers-by seems to notice –or perhaps care. Hannah rearranges her minuscule dress, steps over her own urine, shouts 'f*** off' and the pair stumble back to Walkabout. It's only midnight, after all.



Obviously, kissing random men in the street, and having sex behind a chicken coop, are not the antics of happy women. Nor is the massive amounts of alcohol needed to lower inhibitions to engage in these acts in the first place. What's wrong, is that modern media gives women access to all sorts of hot, hunky, dominant Alpha men, and even an only middling attractive girl can often gain sex from an Alpha. But not commitment. [See Monica Lewinsky.] Even the most beautiful women cannot get faithfulness, see Elin Nordgren and Tiger Woods, or Elizabeth Hurley and Hugh Grant.


In days prior to the mass media attaining its critical mass (and just as crucially, its orientation almost exclusively to female consumers), women might occasionally brush past a hot, hunky Alpha male. But they would have little interaction with him. Now, particularly in female-dominated professions such as public relations, infotainment aka journalism, corporate finance, human resources, and such, women have much closer access to Alpha males. Think Monica Lewinsky again or the late Chandra Levy. Even more of course can see them every night on TV, or at the movies, or in the latest book. There's even a new category at Barnes and Noble (not making this up, nope) "Teen Paranormal Romance."


None of this of course makes women any happier. Indeed the fatness epidemic amongst British women is likely the substitution of food for love.

But as I found out on the streets of Cardiff after midnight, many of these women are –by day at least –well qualified pillars of the community. Among them I met teachers, nurses, occupational therapists, personnel professionals and full-time mothers, all determined to shake off responsibility and have fun in the only way they know how. By getting 'smashed'.

Every week, the ritual is the same: Groups of between four and six girls congregate to dress up and competitively drink bottles of cheap wine or sickly shots. Competition ramps up over who can wear the tiniest mini-dress, the highest heels or the reddest lipstick. Drinking carries on during the bus ride to Cardiff (many young women travel from the surrounding Valleys) and continues in bars between 9pm and 11pm, or until they feel bold enough to dance.

Condom in purse and telephone number for a pre-booked 3am taxi in handbag, they stagger between nightclubs. The ritual continues long into the morning when, dulled by hangovers, they congregate for McDonald's or fried breakfasts to giggle about the drunken 'fun'.

One rather more honest 18-year-old from Caerphilly admits that she decides what to wear depending on whether she is on the prowl for a partner. Tonight –in a transparent Primark blouse and black bra –she undoubtedly is. 'I wouldn't wear this if I had a boyfriend. He'd be like, “You ain't wearing that,” ' she says.


The desperate search for sex, with only the most guido-esque able to apply, is characteristic of a society that does not lay out, starkly and honestly, the choices and consequences for women, directly, starting in the teen years. Now for many, the way is clear: Snooki. Gym-Tan-Laundry, is the mantra, with the unspoken need to get out there, as drunk as possible, to have a hook-up and some sort of human connection. That is not happiness. Just look at the pictures.

Meanwhile, US women are not happy either.

A previous relationship left them heartbroken. They say you never really get over your first love. Tara, a 26 year-old freelance writer from North Carolina admitted during our interview, "I didn't think I would ever fall in love again so I figured it didn't matter who I married."

I can relate. Breaking up with my college boyfriend left me devastated. He wasn't just my first serious relationship; he produced the beats to my heart for years. I never thought anyone could ever make me feel that way again, so I settled for the memories and pledged my honor to someone with whom -- wait for it -- I was in a convenient relationship.

Madison also attributes a past heartbreak as a reason why she became Mrs. to Mr. Wrong. After being told over the phone by her first fiancé, "I have cancer and can never see you again," Madison had an understandably hard time trusting love. She married her ex-husband because "We were both financially stable and could have a good life. I loved him, but I'm not sure about actually being in love with him. I felt that I would never be hurt by him as long as I didn't give my whole heart."


"Celebrating" Divorce in your twenties is a coping mechanism. At best. Many simply never got over the hot, dominant Alpha male they could not keep.Because no one told them they were not hot enough, and young enough (compared to the guy) to keep him. That say, Annette Benning can keep her hot, dominant Alpha male because she's about thirty years younger than he is. That at best, even a beautiful woman the same age as a dominant, Alpha male producing the beats to her hearts, can only keep him for a moment.

Those unable to find a partner, tend to use food for love. Just look at any old picture of women in the 1940's or 1950's, particularly after wartime rationing ended. You won't see lots of fat girls or guys. Part of that is the "diversity tax" in which people retreat to the suburbs via private auto, or the internet, to avoid the inevitable crime that "diversity" brings. But a great deal of it relates to the atomization of society that does not any longer reliably match young men with young women. Everyone is on their own. With only the guidance of TV, movies, books, and popular celebrities to help advise on their love-lives. Which is to say, nothing at all helpful and positively harmful influences.

Most modern women in the US and the UK are profoundly unhappy. You don't see scenes like the above, or books "celebrating" what is a miserable failure — divorce in one's twenties, when it pretty much guarantees (for women) a much poorer position in the mating/marriage market.

I do not believe it is reasonable or even possible to restrict women's absolute and complete freedom to choose their life and their sex partners. Women however desperately need an honest, up-front, and direct guidance from other women (men will simply be ignored of course) about how choices early limit options later. Chase Alphas, and you'll be disappointed if you are not ready to be cheated upon. That is true for even the most beautiful of women, and the ordinary women won't even be more than a disposable object. In an endless choice, a menu of constant freedom, it becomes even more critical to select a guy for character and reliability, rather than pure sexiness. Choosing sexy guys carries with it, a fairly large cost for women. Cheating, unfaithfulness, risk of disease. But choosing a guy they have no feelings for sexually either is a one way trip to unhappy-ville, sneaking out to drink and hook-up with strangers in a desperate attempt to feel sexy in turn.

Society today is fundamentally dishonest with women, and cheats them out of a honest choice. It lies and says that freedom comes with no strings (it does). Society does not tell women that nearly unlimited freedom also means a very thin tightrope to find romantic happiness. That all that sexual liberation is a two edged sword, to be worthy of a guy they find attractive, they'll have to be significantly younger, with relatively few partners, be pretty, fit, thin, and with a pleasing personality. All things they cannot do much about except on the margins (eat healthy, exercise, refrain from casual hook-ups).

Society also lies in that very few women are aware of the risks of falling deeply for an Alpha — few other guys will compare. This is particularly true for the first guy, who remains perhaps the only guy in her heart. Not fun if he's with someone else.

It is not that women are choosing badly, though mostly they are. Rather, it is that women are being lied to, by a media-infotainment complex that feeds the worst delusions instead of the noblest instincts of women. Imagine a world where every guy watches endless Star Trek episodes featuring hot Borg Babes and Vulcan women fighting over some useless geek. That flipped on the gender, is the toxic environment women have to endure, and fight against every day, intellectually and emotionally.

The inevitable disappointment that most women endure, leads to over-eating to find love in food, partly, or binge drinking and useless hook-ups. Is Snooki happy? I think not. Nor do the women in the photos look happy. The road to happiness (and incidentally, women feeling positive not negative towards the West, and its civilization,and its people) requires honesty. About what a world of near total sexual and individual freedom requires. Which in turn is nothing less than constant vigilance and care, lest a woman's one chance at happiness slip away, without her even knowing it.

For the flip-side is, few men desired at all by any attractive women at all, needs to compromise. For many, a life of casual sex, and slacking will do just fine.

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Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Why No One Cares About the NBA Lockout

The NBA is in lockout. The players have called for decertification, having rejected the owners latest offer of a 50-50 split of revenues, down from the 57 percent split the players retained in the last contract, but up from the owners initial offer of 47%. David Stern is ready to cancel the entire season. And fans ... don't care. The comments section on the WSJ story on the lockout and loss of the season are littered with responses of "I'll watch Hockey" and "who cares." This was entirely foreseeable. The basic conflict is between owners who are viewing the books (the NBA claims not unreasonably that 22 out of 30 teams lose money) and players who see no reason to continue on as before.


The reason is fans. White fans. Who are ebbing away from the NBA. Buzz Bissinger (author, Friday Night Lights) saw this one coming, sort of. He noted the White fans have no one to root for:

I don’t think talking about any of this makes me a racist. I believe it makes me a realist. White fans want white superstars, or in the case of the NBA, at least one white American superstar. Unless the ghosts of Bird and John Havlicek and Jerry West return to the floor, that isn’t going to happen. And since it isn’t going to happen, the NBA will continue to struggle with an identity crisis that no one wants to publicly acknowledge.

Nor is there any way to change the reality since black players are better, stronger, faster, and have more basketball intelligence than any of their white counterparts. If anything, the percentage of white American players will continue to fall. The league is not going to move to the absurdity of a quota system. So maybe the best thing for whites to do, including myself, is accept the fact there will be no white hope, drop the work-ethic fallacy, and revel in a game that is embedded more than ever with beauty and grace and strength and acrobatics.


Except White fans cannot be guilted into "follow the NBA and put money in owners pockets or you'll be called a racist." That is effective one-on-one where White guys comply or lose opportunities with girls, jobs, and socialization. But it fails miserably where there is no penalty for not watching the NBA, not going to games, and not buying merchandise.

Whites do not really care to follow sports where they cannot identify with the players. Or let us narrow that down, White men (the sports fan base) do not care to follow sports that are nearly all Black and have all the superstars Black. Which endorse and follow the Black rap/hip-hop model. The owners cannot force the White fans to give them money. This is what the lockout is all about.

The entire sports complex is running out of money. The NHL had a season long lockout in 2004-5. The NFL had a Summer long lockout that killed the exhibition season. Money is starting to get tight. Cable rights fees are no longer able to sustain year-on increases because cable TV and sports are discretionary items for cash-strapped men. And sports featuring nearly all-Black leagues have little appeal. Yes, most White fans will agree that the Black athletes are superior to White ones. They just don't care that much. Not enough to keep paying cable or satellite TV fees to watch them. Even less to pay to see them in person, or buy their merchandise. The "Los Dodgers" have been forced into a sale, the root cause of which is that Fox which bought them in the first place was desperate to dump them to a charlatan. Who proved incapable of running the team and used it as a piggy bank as the demographic wave transforming LA made the stadium into a Mexican gang-ridden war zone.

The NBA has about $4 billion in revenue. The problem is that vastly inflated player salaries were predicated on: 1. The NBA making money in China which never happened; 2. Increasing money extracted from TNT and NBC (which never happened); and 3. Increasing arena admissions/revenue and merchandising money, which never happened. Costs are spiraling out of control and the NBA's "all-in" bet on 100% Rap and Black has been a poor one.

The NBA is basically stuck with a Black rap player base. Bissinger is correct, Black players at the extreme of performance are simply better. The best players will always be, nearly all but not exclusively Black. Which in turn is a major factor in White fan apathy. No one really cares, if there is not a nightly parade of huge Black men lumbering down the court, traveling, and dunking the ball and then beating their chest like rappers (the move was copied from Rap videos). White male fans just cannot identify. Besides Bissinger is wrong, while the NBA players have amazing physiques that demonstrate a rigorous diet and demanding workouts, most players coast through the season, and often the playoffs, Expending minimal effort in defense, no team play, and little sense of hustle. They coast on their talent and gym work, not skill and dedication. Shaq's abysmal free throw percentage is indicative of generally poor preparation for anything other than general fitness. Many other active players have similar bad stats for free throws, rebounds, defense, hustle and so on.

Besides, they're Black. Which means, a culture and identity far removed and alien (and also supremely uninteresting) to most White fans. They don't hate. They just don't care. Ordinary White guys in their own lives cannot boast and brag. They can't beat their chest when they do something they are expected, day in and out, to accomplish. They can't pose, mock opponents, and preen. The behavior and culture of Black athletes is as foreign and uninteresting to them as say, Eskimos or Mongolians. Black athletes aside from being a different skin color (it is natural and universal to prefer people of one's own race, a point made in Brown v. Board of Education in point of fact, regarding the "un-natural" desire of Black girls to play with White dolls, and the considerable effort of Bratz and Barbie to provide Black and Hispanic dolls), their behavior on-field and on-court is something White guys find distasteful. The virtues that White guys prize (because it is what they are expected to do): show up every day, work hard, don't complain, achieve and act like you always expected to do so, grace under pressure aka "don't choke," just are not there for almost all Black athletes.

White athletes who "act Black" generally find a chilly reception among fans. Tom Brady, known for arrogance, bling, glamorous wives/girlfriends, funny hairstyles, has not been embraced nationally the way say, Peyton Manning (Mr. Aw-Shucks who mocks himself) or Drew Brees or Aaron Rodgers has. And the man won three Superbowls. That's only one less than Joe Montana! Tom Brady is not just an excellent, but outstanding Quarterback, and White fans generally don't like him.

White fans give their love, and affection, to teams and players who embody their values and encapsulate their fantasy of what they'd like to be, if they were only stronger, taller, faster, and younger. Sports is a voluntary thing, no player, team, or league is owed a fan's money or time. Those that don't deliver, can get dropped. In favor of Call of Duty, or the latest movie, or an old one (on Netflix or Amazon), or an e-book, or a thousand different things.

The NBA is just going to have to live with its decision to go all-Black. A lot less money. The NFL would do well to pay attention. Though likely it won't. Quite likely, the season will be done. The owners will draft the college kids leaving school, a few retirees, club players, and foreign ones, and call it "your NBA!" Games will start next season, and players, not having a lot of money to fall back on, will dribble in. Taking a lot less money (which likely was the owners intention anyway).

The main beneficiary (ala Hugh Hewitt, you know who this benefits?) will be the outsider sports: MMA, Hockey, Soccer, and Rugby. Of them all, Hockey having the most games on (Versus and local hockey team affiliates) now will stand to gain the most. The sport is not that hard to pick up, is very fast paced (more so than Basketball), scoring is lower (so every goal counts), the players nearly all White, and team play paramount. Next in line will be the MMA, featuring mostly White athletes, lots of excitement, and a new higher profile on Fox having moved from Spike TV. Soccer of course has a SWPL connection, but has many teams like the English Premier League with a number of White players. Rugby is dominated by burly White guys with a smattering of Samoans. While the French soccer team is nearly all Black/North African, the Rugby team is all White. It is similar to American Football, but without pads or unlimited substitutions. Rugby is hampered by the division (confusing for outsiders and newcomers) between Rugby Union (for the upper classes), Rugby League (for the working classes, professionals), Australian Rules Football, Rugby Sevens, and so on. Plus, TV coverage is spotty and mostly limited to pay channels (limiting sampling).

Hockey seems the main winner, it is the easiest to watch on TV for most fans. Followed by the MMA.

Professional and amateur sports have a value in society. Given that so few other bonding institutions exist, to allow pride in one's culture and community, as Church attendance has fallen off a cliff, and voluntary associations like the Kiwanis and Elks Lodges have aged into irrelevance (no new members), professional sports are all that's left for many White Americans. Steve Sailer makes the argument that PC and Multiculturalism have made pride in White America something that can never be overtly expressed, lest the elites and PC enforcers punish you. Thus sports and professional sports figure into the only identities that are allowed to be expressed any more. You cannot be proud to be, say a White American from Chicago, but you can root for the Bears. That's a poor trade-off, and one that is not ultimately sustainable because eventually an all-Black Chicago Bears team turns off even the most avid White supporter, eager to express any identity at all. The growth of Hockey in places like Phoenix, Tampa Bay, Atlanta, and San Jose not to mention Anaheim which are not historic Hockey hotbeds reflects a search for a permissible White identity.

Either one of two things will happen. Either Whites will abandon any overt expression of any identity at all and retreat into cyberworld, a Facebook, Angry Birds, Call of Duty, Zynga Games driven existence, as the elites maintain total and complete control, or Whites will start to rebel as they did before, against elite opinion on how to act and live their lives.

And we know how Prohibition turned out.
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Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Gays Vs. Jews: The Brett Ratner Defenestration

The firing of Brett Ratner by the Academy Awards from the job as producer of the Oscar Telecast, and the fawning apology extracted from him by GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination) and other Gay groups, shows who really runs Hollywood. The female audience!


Ratner, the director of the upcoming Eddie Murphy/Ben Stiller action-comedy "Tower Heist," along with the "Rush Hour" series (starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker) and the final modern-day X men movie (X-Men: The Last Stand) was fired from the show after saying in an interview that "rehearsals are for fags." He then was forced to issue several groveling apologies. You can't get much more Jewish than Ratner, who spent High School according to Wikipedia in Israel. But Jews do not run Hollywood, rather it is gays, or rather the female audience that likes gays very much.


The CW actress (from the revival of "90210") Jessica Lowndes has released a song where she wishes she was gay. That's her to the right and above btw. Lady Gaga got her start, and rakes in tons of money, by appealing to gays. Katy Perry released "I Kissed a Girl," and Simone Battle released a song and video entitled "He Likes Boys" about an unrequited crush on a gay man. You could argue that nearly all Broadway shows, the X-Factor, American Idol, the Sing-off, the Voice, and all the other musical competition reality shows are big gay wonderfests aimed directly at women.

Even Tony Kushner is more gay than Jew. Kushner is very anti-Zionist, has advocated a single state in place of Israel and the Palestinians, and Zionists sought unsuccessfully to prevent him from being honored with a honorary doctorate at Brandeis University and there was an abortive attempt by City University of New York to revoke his honorary degree over anti-Israel statements. Barbara Ehrenreich among others rose to his defense. Kushner married Mark Harris, an editor at Entertainment Weekly, in Provincetown NY in 2008. Kushner's work in in the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's "Munich" is pretty much in accord with Queers for Palestine. Most gays are fairly anti-Israel and also anti-Jewish.

A goodly portion of the "alternative right" is mired in conspiracy theories, the main one being that the West fell into disrepair and despair, filled with PC nonsense, low fertility, mass non-White immigration, multiculturalism, and disgust at the culture and history and heritage of Western Civilization ... because of those "devious Jews!" In their view, those devious mind control rays just took over the poor helpless and defenseless West. Others hold that Gramscian Long Marches (the original was a desperate, fighting retreat not advance) through institutions allowed "mind control" by corruption.

I hold that either explanation, either "those devious Jews" or devious Frankfurt School intellectuals (Andrew Breitbart's view expressed on the Adam Carolla Show) are at fault, nor is some combination the reason for the West's decay.

Rather, it is broad social forces, moved by technological changes that impact marriage, family, spending, wealth, and other factors that has led to this state of affairs. In other words, history as it has always been -- broad forces affected in the exact wave by individual valor and cowardice, often in surprising ways. Individuals can and do make differences, both for good or bad, but cannot fundamentally change the tides. The way people marry, have kids, create wealth,consume wealth, make war, peace, and trade has the most effect on society. Not ideas that the vast majority including elites have only the most fuzzy grasp upon. If you went back in time and queried Castillian Grandees of the fifteenth century, on the Holy Trinity, only a few would have been able to understand it and explain it to you, and probably none what the Albigensian Heresy of a few hundred years prior had been. That's the elite.

Let us look at Jews in America today. Clearly, they do not run Hollywood, otherwise the concerns of Jews (assimilation versus losing one's identity and Jewish heritage) would be paramount in movies and TV. Every second movie would be Exodus and Steven Spielberg would have made "Munich" in the style of Sylvester Stallone's Nighthawks. Ratner would have won, not lost, the contest of strength against the gays. TV and movies would be filled with positive Jewish characters and positive portrayals of Israel and America. Movies like Yankee Doodle Dandy, produced by Jack Warner would predominate.

That moment has clearly passed, with gays now being the "new Jews." Most Jews today hold mildly anti-Israel, anti-Zionist sentiments (as evinced from the results of the efforts to punish Kushner) at best, awash as they are in the Yuppie mold of modern liberalism. The casual anti-semitism of modern liberalism as epitomized by Occupy Wall Street shows up in most Jews wishing that Israel would simply go away. Being as it is an embarrassing, working-class reminder of ethnic and unfashionable identity that is as "un-cool" as the battered easy chair of Frasier Crane's father on "Frasier."

Now, "Glee" features overt teen gay sex, and gay-themed characters and plotlines are everywhere. The GLAAD report on 2011 TV shows:

"While the number of LGBT characters is down, some of the most popular shows with critics and viewers such as 'Glee,' 'True Blood' and 'The Good Wife' weave storylines about gay and lesbian characters into the fabric of the show," says GLAAD's acting president, Mike Thompson. "... Americans expect to see the diversity of our country represented in their favorite programs and that includes gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people."

FOX is the most inclusive network, according to the GLAAD study, with LGBT characters representing about 7 percent of the population on its scripted series. "Glee" has several prominent gay roles, and "Bones" and several of the network's animated comedies feature LGBT characters as well.

GLAAD counted 19 gay characters among the 647 series regulars on broadcast series set to air in 2011-12 (although that number could change a little as details about characters are revealed), along with an additional 14 recurring LGBT characters.

On "mainstream" cable networks (not including channels like Logo whose focus is already on the LGBT community), GLAAD found 28 regular LGBT characters, down from 35 in last year's study. The number of recurring characters rose, however, so the total of 54 is in line with 53 last year.


Why is this? Why are gays so popular? Why is GLAAD more powerful than Brett Ratner (who has a successful career and has given Eddie Murphy a job, a favor Murphy returned by resigning as host of the Oscars)? Its because of the domination of TV and movies by the female audience. Which is very friendly to gays.

Women find gay men interesting (and author "slash fiction" whereby straight characters like Captain Kirk and Spock have gay sex). And also, fabulous. Not being interested in them sexually they are men whom they can deal with on a non-stressful basis. The result of a vastly extended mate market, with women "on the market" and "available" for years and years, leads to fatigue with constant approaches by men they find sexually invisible. Gay men offer a relief from that, the niche filled by brothers and fathers when the nuclear family existed.

Gay men's appeal to women is at least in part driven by the failure of the nuclear family, and declining birth rates, leaving many women single children bereft of male relatives. Gay men offer the next best substitute.

Gay men further only have cultural power in the way that Jews during the Golden Age of Hollywood had cultural power -- by offering stories and themes and creations that appealed to enough of a mass audience. It is true that Lady Gaga made a fortune appealing mostly to gay men and women. And that Tyler Perry made the most money last year of anyone in Hollywood. But few White people go to see Tyler Perry's movies, and his formula for success is to make cheap movies that only Black people are interested in seeing. He's the only one out there competing for that audience, so he gets pretty much most of it no matter how poorly executed his films are. Lady Gaga in twenty years will be as forgotten as Debbie Gibson is today. The same for Justin Bieber.

Meanwhile Jews like Siegel and Schuster exerted immense cultural influence (even if they mostly got cheated for creating Superman). The same with Jack Kirby, or Stan Lee, and the other nearly all Jewish writer/artist creators of comic book characters. By offering tales of nerdy guys who never got the girl transformed into heroes, they found a fairly wide group of guys (nerdy White guys who never got the girl) who lived vicariously through these (often faintly ridiculous) characters. The current flipside is the Twilight phenomena, where girls and their Moms lust after sparkly semi-gay pouty vampires. Following an ordinary girl who gets the hunkiest man alive (and has the second-hunkiest fighting the hunkiest for her favors). Even his vampire babies! This from another "niche culture" (Mormon Housewife) author. Just as Louis Armstrong taught a lot of White kids to swing, because he provided dance music, in the Depression, as did say Duke Ellington, Jews and Mormon housewives when offering stuff that a substantial portion of the population loves, can transform the culture.

For Jews in Golden Age Hollywood or Comic Books, it was a Yankee Doodle Dandy story of assimilation and simultaneous embrace of immigrant roots. Superman WAS American to the core, because he was (basically a variant of Moses delivered as a baby to the Promised Land -- America!) For Stephanie Meyer it was the longing of everygirl to get that one guy every girl dreamed of. For White teens in the Depression, it was dance, dance, dance. When the need was met, the culture was transformed into the specific shape of the individual artist. Respect for a master musician who made you dance, and was Black. Embrace of America and the Flag, with a living super-Flag. Getting that hunky guy by being special and magic (OK maybe the last is not so healthy). The need when filled changed things. But the need had to exist.

Tyler Perry is not going to change the culture. Neither is Lady Gaga. Katy Perry might, because millions of girls like her and want to be her (not the least of which is Mr. Katy Perry, Russell Brand). Gays are changing the culture because they are filling the need of millions of women. Who want tales of effortless sex with hunky guys and fabulous fashion, a life of eternal singlehood and choice (Sex and the City, originally written by Gay men for a Gay cast). Or stories of vampires, rich kids, and other hunks to drool over. Or fabulous singing and dancing where your native talent overcomes plain looks to land that hunky guy (Glee). Egged on by a fabulous best gay friend.

Gays writing and creating just for Gays, on their own, would be like Siegel and Schuster creating "Gefilte Fish Man" who has the magic power to eat as much Gefilte Fish as possible. Of no interest to pretty much anyone outside of the creator's group. Gays exist as a power group, more powerful than Jews (see Ratner, Brett, and the defenestration of) in naked power struggles because they deliver more of the desired audience: women. Who very much like their gays, thank you very much, which way is the next showing of "Wicked?"

And all of this is really just a reflection of social reality. Nerdy guys made Superman a hit from the first issue, along with many other comic book characters, because he filled that need. As did Twilight. Gays only exercise more power than successful producers (who are also Jewish as it gets) because they are beloved of, and deliver to advertisers and producers, the female audience. Who cast in very long lasting singleton choice-hell, demand tales of hunks and guys who will never hit on them, but offer sound advice on how to nail that Alpha.

The solution then, given that gays tilt wildly left (and demand a general libertine undermining of society that is in direct conflict with not only straight White guys but social health for everyone) is to change the conditions that give them power. Gays are not powerful because of their numbers or innate fabulousness. They are powerful because the specific condition of millions of single or late married women make them so.

Women generally happy with their husbands don't care much about gays. Even if only children, they inherit in-laws, helpers with child-care, and a husband they care about and can confide in. They don't need fabulous consumption and fashion and girlfriends and endless courtship to get the emptiness inside filled up, family and husbands do that already.

The solution is thus blindingly obvious and tremendously difficult. The restoration of the nuclear family. Nearly all the ills of modern society, the decline of the West, would be arrested if not reversed by the restoration of the nuclear family. This means generally, women marrying at an age (around 19-25) when they can get the best man available. And staying married, for the most part. This is extremely hard, because modern society has enormous incentives for women to stay single as long as possible chasing Alphas. To the detriment (maybe) of the women involved and of society as a whole unquestionably.

Women giving this enormous power to gays is neither normal nor healthy. At no time in the past has this ever happened in the West. It bodes ill for the stability and wealth generation of the West.
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Thursday, September 29, 2011

Reconsidering Sexual Repression

Science Fiction Author and Blogger Eric S. Raymond has a post up on Reconsidering Sexual Repression. Basically his point is that we will likely have to give up two of the following three things: family formation, sexual equality (women equal to men in all legal and social and cultural forms), and sexual liberty (no restrictions legal or social in any way of women's sexual activity). Raymond believes that giving up family formation is out of the question, so that the other two must go, by giving up sexual equality, in the form of "submissiveness" to men. Raymond of course is quite wrong (and considers the question only from the viewpoint, and a skewed, "White Knight" perspective at that, of women). But still it is quite interesting to see an older man struggle with the obvious, that the sexual order of the day is simply unsustainable.


Now, Raymond is wrong because women have already given up family formation. Women, of all races, and classes, are bailing on the nuclear family and having single motherhood instead. Women are doing this by choice, deliberate choice, because women have pretty much complete control over their own fertility. If they don't want to get pregnant, condoms, the pill, the morning after pill (a girl of maybe, 15 was there with her mother getting it at my local pharmacy about a year ago, proud and giggling, Mexican of course), various patches (heavily advertised on TV), and more. Plus of course abortions. If women did want to have kids, there are plenty of guys out there who are husband material. They just are not as sexy as the bad boys.

No, women are choosing, in various amounts among different races and classes, but still broadly choosing single motherhood with bad boys over marriage with some boring Beta Male who does nothing but provide and lacks that sexy domination women crave.

Black women moved from 24% illegitimacy in the 1960's, to over 70% nationally today, and over 90% in the urban core. Hispanic women moved from 17% illegitimacy in 1980 to over 50% today. Charles Murray's talk at the AEI on the State of White America had the following highlights:

Women in the upper 20% of income still got married and had kids, illegitimacy was only 4-5% for this group.
Women in the middle 40% of income had a 20% illegitimacy rate.
Women in the lower 20% of income had a 40% illegitimacy rate.

Clearly, there are a bunch of things going on. If you have a lot of money, being Beta is not an impediment to marriage. You can still be "Alpha" and have all those unsexy qualities women loathe: idealizing or pedalizing your mate, telling her constantly you love her, never checking out other women, never instilling uncertainty about the relationship, never being that guy other women want to have ... all that and more can be done and a marriage maintained if you are in the upper 20% of income. Being even a mini-master of the Universe makes a man by definition, sexy to women. Even his wife! So she won't divorce him, and will marry him in the first place. Since other men defer to him, due to his wealth and power, he's sexy! Thus worth having.

And of course, being married to him means a summer cottage in the Hamptons, heck summer as a verb not a season.

For women in the middle class, that increasingly is not in the cards. Raymond is correct, women find men who are their equal ... unsexy. No woman, anywhere, wanted a man who was her equal. That's a ticket to palookaville. Or single motherhood. If women in the Upper Classes have their pick of the mini-masters of the Universe, middle class women have Joe from Accounting. And no one wants Joe. He does not intimidate anyone, he does not boss any one around, no one fears him, he's not made of money, and thus power. Nothing. Why bother?

Shame, social inertia, a desire for security, those things still have limited White Middle class women to "only" 20% illegitimacy. But the tide cannot be held back forever.

Consider lower class White women. The ones most in need of a husband, to add another income to the table, to provide help in child rearing, to provide an extra security level. These women have reached near Hispanic/Mexican levels of illegitimacy. Why?

One reason is, that the men around them are not equal ... they're inferior! And no one wants inferior men. The only men they find even remotely sexy are those men ... other men are afraid of, and for good reason. The thugs. The bad boys. The crazy ones. These seem to be the only guys White Working Class women find suitable for impregnating them.

And lets review, shall we? Condoms. The Pill. The Patch. The Morning After Pill. Abortion. No woman gets pregnant by a guy she does not want to be pregnant by, in a sustained and deliberate choice. The same is true for Black women, who actively choose the thuggiest of thugs, because that is the only kind of man they find sexy -- one that other men fear. Mexican women are the same, consistently choosing for fathers, not the decent and hardworking men around them, which yes there are many still who would make them excellent husbands and fathers, but the dangerous gang-bangers and thugs.

As Roissy points out, Anders Brevik, who killed over 70 people, most of them defenseless teens, is getting mountains of love letters. If Chicks Dig Jerks, and they do, they dig even more thugs, bad boys, and violent men. As Roissy put it:

As everyday observation to those with the eyes to see demonstrates, the primary motivation is women’s love for unrepentant, rule-breaking assholes. That is the elemental, core female hindbrain algorithm that governs all other lustful dispositions and is the catalyst for her mate choice decisions.

Women love assholes because they are assholes. Because it inspires in women those emotions that most delight their pleasure centers. And that, based on the reaction it engenders from civilized men and women alike, is the truth too scary to contemplate.


Women love assholes. Any perusal of Twilight, or the other vampire chick-lit, will tell you that. As will any Rom-Com. This is just hard-wired. But it is not what you think. Because women did not always have the urge for assholes.

When women had significant social inequality, but mostly full legal equality, most women did not swoon for jerks. Assholes and thugs did not make women aroused. The comment by "Bounder" on Roissy's post Chicks Dig Jerks: Prison Edition would have been from Planet Bizarro fifty years ago:

I’m an attorney (fuck you too) and this impulse is even more pronounced among the alpha lawyer women. Frequently female attorneys are caught sexing their scumbag clients.

It starts early. HRC [Human Rights Coalition -- ed] has inmate letter writing campaigns and tons of female law students attend spending their 130+ IQs writing to 75 IQ scumbags. It is beyond fucking hilarious.


The female passion for thugs is one unknown, mostly, to men and women of about fifty years ago or more. It is entirely due to women being fully socially and culturally as well as legally equal to men. If not, in fact, superior.

Raymond is right, women find men their equal to be ... unsexy. Hence the "sexy" TV shows set in the 1960's, Mad Men and Pan Am and Playboy Bunny Club. Where the big shots are sexy master of the universe, and women compete to be his number one squeeze. Today Mr. Big would find a sexual harassment lawsuit, a workplace hostile to women finding, and all the men would be sexually invisible because they would not be the sexy guys higher up in the totem pole but men at the same position if not in fact, significantly lower down.

Almost no woman (with any options at all, any!) will find a man her equal even remotely sexy. None will find a man inferior to him sexy.

And as we've seen, no woman will have kids with a man she finds unsexy. But certainly will have kids on her own with men she finds sexy but knows won't stick around.

Raymond looks at it from the wrong angle: how can society get women a good husband? Given that women have now gotten the best of all possible worlds: maximum access to sexy men, and single motherhood with said sexy men. This is exactly what women wanted, because they in fact created it. They chose, actively, the men they slept with. And they chose to have kids with them, knowing them unlikely in the extreme to stick around and marry them and raise kids. Women, collectively, of their own free will, chose to trade sexy now and kids with sexy now over some guy sticking around. Figuring that they will be happier with kids by an Alpha, even dirt poor, than married and middle class with some icky Beta Male. Who lacks even the most tiny bit of sexiness.

Women don't want husbands ... of men who are equal. Nor are men bailing out of marriage. Women choose, and choose increasingly except for Upper Class White women (a tiny demo by the way) ... bad boys and single motherhood. Women are only interested in buying marriage if the man is sexy. Submission? They already have to offer that ... to the bad boys. Thats part of just admission into his bedroom.

Raymond's problem is his mental model. He assumes women want the things they wanted, in 1950, when significant but not unbridgeable social inequalities made most men fairly sexy to most women, and thus helped maintain the nuclear family and marriage. The men they would marry, were all relatively sexy, because they themselves while not subservient chattel, had significant social inequalities.

Now, women will NOT COMPROMISE ON THE SEXY. Not a bit. Men must be sexy to be considered for sex, and then marriage. All the re-jiggering of gender equality (and thus sexual freedom for women) won't address that, and is unlikely anyway. Women are no more going to demand, that they be now made socially unequal in any way, to their male peers. Why would they? What's in it for them? Having had a taste of the most Alpha of Alphas, be it the hipster jerk of Williamsburg for Middle Class White women, or the true thug for Working Class women of all colors, why would they go back? How can they go back? How can society re-make itself, depending on female consumer spending, so that most ordinary men are sexy enough for women to consider sleeping with and then marrying?

Please.

So family formation in the nuclear way is over. Family means, for Black women, a single mother and two children or more, each with different fathers (Black women lead the nation at more than 50% of all births of a second or later child to a different father than the previous). Of course, that makes for an interesting sibling dynamic, one fraught with rivalry more than love. But its damn sexy, dammit, for the women involved.

Family, for Mexican women, means basically the same thing, just not as much as quickly. For Working Class White women, it is closing in on the Black family model, and it is even for the Middle Class White women.

Which means just as in the Black demographic, you will see, rapidly growing, a lot of men who never married, and remain outside of both sex and reproduction. These are life's losers, and their way to "win" is to thug it up, as much as possible, because if other men fear them, women will love them. Yes, that is the equation.

Children, meanwhile, will live in a chaotic, threatening, and violent situation. One in which power is defined by the ability and willingness to deploy as much violence as possible as unexpectedly as possible. They will be poor, and their prospects very poor. The way in which people reproduce is the man becomes a sexy killer, and the most brutal of them gets the most beautiful girl. Men who are insufficiently violent, brutal, and ruthless get weeded out one or another from reproduction, only the most violent reproduce, and none take an interest or care in their children. This is the way in which most of humanity has lived, for most of its existence, and is a poverty-factory though one that produces for women some very sexy men. Men reliably more powerful and with higher status than themselves.

This is the ugly truth of it. Western Civilization is built upon repression. NOT as feminists say, half-truthfully, on female repression. But upon repression of women's ability to get the sexiest men. Western Civilization requires soaking up all those men who create violence and poverty into marriage. Into making them stakeholders directly into society, by giving them a small family, all their own, which they will mostly (not always but mostly) work themselves to death to keep and improve. Just as Napoleon ended the French Revolution and made peasants into ultra conservative Frenchmen by giving them small plots of land, so too did the nuclear family make most men into conservative, society improvers. Not ugly conquer-or-die gamblers.

Western Civilization means the end of sexy. The end of sexy men, anyway, as the supply of those truly sexy, the Alphas, who dominate other men and make them afraid, are limited in the extreme. And their ability to create massive harems is also limited. Thus, yes, Western Civilization does depend on sexual repression, but of unlimited choice by women of ultra sexy men. The supply of ultra-sexy men is limited, as are the options for Alphas, and women in Western Civilization have had the restriction on creating a vast pool of thugs, bad boys, and the like to choose from.

Moreover, if they had kids by these men, they'd pay the consequences (other men would not help them or help raise their kids). Lacking a husband, they'd starve, to put it bluntly. Critically, other women would not care, either.

Women were mostly free, to choose from any number of men, even though they could not create a vast pool of sexy men (rogues, outlaws, bad boys, thugs). They had far greater rights than that of other women, in other cultures, races, and places. Their rights increased, not decreased, over time, unlike that of say Muslim women. Women just had to choose wisely, for risk elimination as well as sexiness. Women had to trade-off on the qualities that made them aroused (violent domination of other men, or simply domination and increased status relative to them) versus those that would keep them clothed and fed: faithfulness, agreeableness, income, and ability.

What women could not do is create underwriters for the risk of bad boys, as the modern welfare state does today. Yes, in that sense women were suppressed, as people of Ancient Athens were suppressed by lacking Ipads and free Wi-Fi and streaming video. If a woman chose a bad boy, she chose all the risk. Women taking on the risk are quite capable of making informed judgments on that matter.

So what is likely to happen? More of the same. Birthrates will continue to fall, because women will chase sexy men, of whom there are either just a few, their bosses, the local thugs, Alphas who play in a rock band and have a drug habit, the handsome player. They'll choose single motherhood with the last Alpha guy they can have, fairly late, over marriage and family with a Beta Male fairly young. Thus guaranteeing small family sizes (another component by the way of single motherhood). Welfare is likely to collapse as Whites as well as Blacks and Hispanics demand it, under economic recession that becomes permanent. Creating a sudden drop-off of reproduction for all, as Welfare simply ceases to exist like the Roman Empire in the West around 400 AD. You can't have kids with bad boys, if there is on one to pick up the tab.

Life will get a lot more violent. For everyone. And there will be a race to the bottom for sexy, as delineated by violence. Since in an economic recession, the only way to make other men your inferior is to make them fear you. Men won't stop wanting sex, and the idea that women will return to social inequality no matter how small or marginal is quaint. And as dead as the England where Vicars get around on bicycles (instead of Mosques proclaiming Allah).

What will be interesting (in a Dark Ages sort of way) is the changes brought upon by birthrate collapse, all across the board. Now, the Welfare state subsidizes kids by Mexicans, and to a lesser extent Blacks. A birthrate akin to Whites (generally outside of Welfare for racial, cultural, and legal reasons) means social collapse. A Detroit writ large, ever more portions of cities abandoned to wilderness, smaller and smaller cities, less and less technology, and flight to security where ever "lords" may rule by utter violence. Just like the last Dark Ages.

Is this "all women's fault?"

No. It is no one's fault. It was not the Roman Emperors, nor the people, nor the gladiators, nor those who crucified saints, nor those who bribed Goths, or Vandals, or Huns, for the collapse of the Roman Empire. It just happened, because Romans stopped having kids, and many more died of the plague, of bad harvests and starvation, and so they could not hold onto anything. Bad Emperors came and went, and so did good ones. There just weren't enough Romans, as Roman women had fewer and fewer children, and the Empire became more and more slave and less and less free.

Women did not sit down and take a vote, to destroy Western Civilization. Women did not ask for the pill, the condom, the patch, and more to be invented. They did not ask for social anonymity, high mobility, and the destruction of social repression and cohesion (the two go together). Women did not ask for the modern consumer and media culture. Women did not ask for men to be brought DOWN to their equal or lower.

Yes women in the main agree with most or all of these things, but that is beside the point. Women just want what they want: men who are sexy, which means men who are higher than they are socially. That's hard-wired, it cannot be changed, it is part of women's innate biology. Women ARE flexible in how they pursue sexiness in men, just as men are flexible in how they pursue sexiness in women, for that matter.

The ugly truth is, no one man or woman is willing to admit, that wealth, power, and Western Civilization is built upon sexual repression. Not a total repression of women, but of Alpha men, women's ability to create vast pools of sexy Alpha men (in practice this means thugs) and the ability to get others to underwrite the risk of sexy men.

Western Civilization means NO SEXY MEN. Or damned few, at any rate. No wonder most women HATE HATE HATE Western Civilization. Who finds guys like Norman Borlaug, Jonas Salk, or Philo T. Farnsworth sexy? As opposed to say, Pele, Khadaffi, Carlos the Jackal, or Vladimir Putin? Western Civilization is the long slow grind, the constant search for new advantages, requiring massive amounts of nerdy, focused men who search for advantage because they like it, and are good at it, and need to ... feed their families. Thus nerdy obsessions turn to the Green Revolution, not World of Warcraft. Polio Vaccines not Angry Birds. The invention of Television not Magic the Gathering. Real technology to accomplish something of value, creating Western Advantage, not trivial past-times for men outside the mate market.


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Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Netflix and the Big Mistake

Way back in the 1980's, before he was a washed up politician, Arnold Schwarzenegger made a career out of spouting corny one liners.



In perhaps the greatest (Arnold movie anyway) movie ever made, "the Last Action Hero," Arnold told Claudius he made a "Big Mistake." Right now, Netflix is making a big mistake. The Christian Science Monitor thinks Netflix is creating Qwikster just to sell it. Again, Big Mistake.


America is not ready for streaming, and may remain unready for decades to come. Streaming requires cheap and easy bandwidth, which in turn requires a lot fat, high-capacity connections to the average consumer, already paid for and competing with other connections to offer low cost connectivity. Most internet service providers have usage caps, that impose fairly high fees past certain amounts of downloaded data. Heavy streaming of movies will blow past those caps and make the cost of connecting to the internet very pricey. That's a dubious proposition when people are buying cable packages without ESPN to save $30 to $40 a month.

America is a big, spread out country. Unlike mostly urban places where Netflix has expanded (Canada, Argentina, South Korea), most people in America still live in spread out suburbs. It will take a long time for high speed internet to be built out to those areas, and even longer for the data pipes to be fully paid for, and face competing connectivity offerings. Yes Amazon, and Google, and other people are thinking of offering their own data plans, but let us be realistic. Are they able to cover people in suburban Dallas, Phoenix, Atlanta, Chicago, and St. Louis? Plus everywhere in between?

Then too, Netflix faces extremely high costs in signing content deals for streaming. While Netflix can simply go out and buy DVDs if it has to, and has done so (as has Redbox), for a fixed and limited cost, and rent those discs out, streaming the content requires very pricey arrangements with content providers. Who having rapidly diminished revenue streams from TV sales, DVD sales and rentals, no real bump from Blu-Ray, and not much from global ticket sales or 3-D, are not in the mood to do anything but raise prices or build their own streaming center. [This is short-sighted, and guarantees piracy the way the lack of Itunes in the fragmented, Napster era guaranteed widespread music piracy, but that is another story.] Hollywood needs to make money, and they figure on doing it through streaming one way or another.

Meanwhile, those people wanting high definition video, or 3-D (for those who have it) will find Blu-Ray discs far more friendly. You can stop it and watch when you want, there is no stuttering or jitter on limited bandwidth networks, no pricey bandwidth cap fees, and the family can watch as much as it wants before returning the disc.

Yes, the troubles with the Post Office make the costs of the physical disk market potentially higher, but far lower than the endlessly increasing streaming. In a far-flung nation like the United States, the advantage of delivering entertainment on a physical disk still outweighs that of a network.

Yes this is the old "floppy net" or "sneaker net" way of moving files around, on a physical disk hand-carried to device that can read them. In this case, not computer files but DVD and Blu-Ray discs. This business model still works, generates a lot of cash, and will for quite some time.

Reed Hastings is still living in the mini-dot-com boom. When Facebook and Groupon were valued at billions despite not turning a profit at all, apparently. People don't have the money, to spend on pricey streaming plans. No matter how convenient they are, business-wise, requiring almost no people. Hastings can obviously see, "hey no mailing centers, no people opening and sealing envelopes, very little in the way of employees, hey cost savings." That's diving for nickels and dimes and ignoring dollars on the table. Anyone can open a streaming business, heck why wouldn't content owners go with Hulu, many of which are still partners in the deal, or Amazon, or Apple, or Microsoft, or any number of partners who can give them a better deal?

Meanwhile Netflix already has loyal customers, who have liked and used the DVD by mail rental service because of its cheap price and wide selection. To get into that business requires opening up and training employees to operate mailing centers, regionally. It requires lots of publicity and marketing. Netflix has a lot of expertise running their mailing centers, which are the core of their business. None at all really running streaming which places like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Hulu know a lot better than Netflix.

Sometimes nobody here can play the game, as Casey Stengel said of the hapless Mets. Or, "Big Mistake." Maybe even, "Not to be!"
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Monday, September 26, 2011

TV's New Fall Season: Hollywood's Sidebet

The Washington Times has a post up about TV's New Fall Season and how it consists of mean women and weak men. To summarize the story (go ahead, read the whole thing), men are mostly weak and loserish, unless they are hot studs, and women are "sassy" and "empowered" who sleep around a LOT, with the few men who are sexy (dominant, assertive Alpha A-hole men). There is a reason for that. It sells. TV is basically a land of commercials, wrapped around a few minutes of entertainment. Oh, yes, basic cable channels, and HBO/Showtime/Cinemax (commercial free) derive most of their money from cable subscription fees, not ads. And the commercial free channels like HBO get all of their money from subscription fees. But that is changing. Time-Warner cable is now offering a package excluding ESPN that costs around $30-$40 a month, compared to around $73 a month. Continued growth will rely on not a bottomless pit of cable and satellite rights fees passed onto strapped consumers, but ads. Even P&G is prepared for the "hourglass" shaped consumer demographic, lots of really poor people and a few high-earning consumers.

What is wrong with America (and the West) is nothing less or more than its consumer culture, which based almost entirely on the female consumer has pushed bad behavior to the limit, while trying its best to eradicate the best of female actions.


Most women, most of the time, in the West, have been fairly conservative. Yes movements like the Temperance Movement, Prohibition, and the like have catered to the desire to tell other people how to live their lives, something of overwhelming emotional value to upper class White women in America. But most women most of the time were focused on saving money, preparing for household expenses, improving the lives of their children, and wanting a better life for their sons and daughters than they themselves had. This made women in the West a mostly conservative force, wary of great social change, and deeply invested for the most part in their children. Yes there were bad mothers, and bad fathers, but for the most part the nuclear family and very limited consumer spending held back the forces of rapid social decay. This at a time when most women did at least some work outside the house, and for farm wives in particular, labor alongside men in many times and places. In the Depression, women worked even more outside the house, part-time, to keep households together.

Here is what the Washington Times had to say about the new Fall Season:

Unlike their broke, wimpy male counterparts, the women on these shows are mostly strong and self-sufficient, and critics describe them with glowing words such as “assertive,” “edgy” and, heaven help us, “sassy.” However, what these women actually are, generally speaking, are utterly awful human beings. They may be inspired by “Sex and the City’s” Carrie Bradshaw, but they act like Samantha, openly bragging about how badly they treat men. They make the sorts of crude jokes that are rightly decried when men make them on prime-time network TV, yet are celebrated for women as signs of emancipation. “Whitney,” “Are You There Vodka?” and “2 Broke Girls,” for instance, all have one-line zingers where the punch line is “vagina.”

The male characters are largely relegated to being ornaments, comic foils or villains. Those that aren’t wimps or fools are dashing rakes - embodiments, in a way, of the old virgin/whore dichotomy turned upside down. In Fox’s “New Girl,” which premiered Tuesday at 9 p.m., post-“Glee,” star Zooey Deschanel’s character has to find a new apartment because she catches her boyfriend cheating. Similarly, the titular “2 Broke Girls” become roommates only because one catches her “sleeps until 4:00” boyfriend cheating on her, and the other has a father who goes to jail for his Bernie Madoff-like crime.

TV’s women of fall, on the network sitcoms especially, are vain, selfish, shallow and controlling — a generation of “Mean Girls” grown, not surprisingly, into mean women.


You see this stuff because advertisers like it. And they like it because they have done quite a bit of market research showing that their female target audience, younger women, like it too. A lot. The ads on these network shows are in support of the idea that women are empowered, Sex in the City types, who can sleep around, with dashing rake-hell men, bond with lots of "you go girl" female friends, and dismiss the 90% of the male sex that lacks the sexiness required.

CBS's "the Good Wife" has a flavor of it, a glamorous depiction of the sexy betraying bad husband (but one that every woman wants) and an older woman still turning heads. A prime-time soap opera.



There is nothing wrong with consumerism, as long as it is not taken to excess. But the storylines blend seamlessly into the ads, of a society defined by consumption and where the type of consumption determines the type of person the lead (female) characters are: beautiful, glamorous, important, because they are consuming a particular type of man, or for the younger set, hot, sexy, desirable because they have the hottest bad boys and sleep around a lot.

The problem with all of this is that the consumption at some point has to end. No one save the very rich can live a life of consumption without saving. The entire "model for life" promoted by the entertainment wrapping the commercials does not work, for much of anyone outside of say, Mick Jagger, for very long. Sleeping around a lot guarantees sex with Alphas, but not commitment, and a life of single motherhood at best, not the fabulous families envisioned in Sex and the City. Most straight men are not falling over themselves to be the fabulous gay boyfriend of some new girl on the sexual marketplace. Most women who sleep around can get easy sex but little commitment from any worthwhile man. Most women past the age of forty don't turn heads, they make men want them to move, so they can see the hot young thing behind them.

Nothing in America's culture will change until and unless its consumer culture changes. This means ad-supported TV, which influences pretty much every part of society due to its massive reach and its stature of the bread and butter of Hollywood (movies are glamorous, TV production pays the bills). All that is a chicken and egg riddle.

Women in the past were naturally conservative because life revolved around marriage, kids, family, and above all, saving for that life. Savings, and the most prudent, cost efficient consumption meant women were an innate force for conservatism. Seizing the "Commanding Heights" of culture and politics and society: Professional White Collar White women, is not easy given the profound shift to consumption and not saving.

Steve Sailer noted this commercial:



"Suzanne Researched This," about how buying a McMansion is possible by bullying your fat stupid and weak husband. Notice there is nothing about value and saving. Indeed the consumption is all about overcoming the dumb husband, who is not able to see how cool the granite counter-tops are.

In some ways, this culture is the bill due from a near 70 years of uninterrupted peace and security, built through the Cold War duopoly of nuclear weapons and force, the stability from two coalitions desiring to minimize conflict. Allowing consumption to run rampant. The sort of broad social change brought about by television, rising wealth levels, easy contraception, urban anonymity, and highly personally mobile society. All of which seems to be coming to an end.

What is interesting about the CBS show "Person of Interest" is not just how masculine it is, but how it points out that the very technology that allowed anonymous, urban living is now taking it away. Surveillance cameras, massive government and commercial databases, plus of course Facebook, Google, and the rest leave bare most lives to anyone with any determination to pry them open. For any purpose, any time.



Yes there is the obligatory "Good female Black cop" to meet diversity quotas, but she's mostly irrelevant (and shown to be fairly useless, as she does nothing to stop crimes from happening). The producers, JJ Abrams and the brother of Chris Nolan, Jonah Nolan, talked about the approach in London and New York.

Which brings us to the latter show, "Person of Interest." Much is made, fairly directly, of the impact of 9/11 and how the attack made people aware that their lives were not as safe or secure as possible. While there is no footage shown, 9/11 changes the lives of the two male lead characters forever. And the technology used to combat terrorism is inevitably used (in the show, for good) to combat lesser crimes, in fact stopping them before they start. With two completely disconnected from society men, aiming to "be there in time." While flawed in execution, the concept and what the show is about, is so striking.

Inevitably the society of the Good Wife, 2 Broke Girls, and Are You There Vodka, Its Me Chelsea cannot co-exist with that of Person of Interest. Something has to give. And what will give is which ever notion is proven strongest. By ongoing events. TV currently holds that the future is mostly known. More of the same, a big fabulous party thrown for everywoman who can pursue granite countertops, or a fabulous life in the big city, or be sexy well past forty, if she's just fabulous enough. Because security and safety and things like water, power, electricity are all assumed. And that therefore there is a large appetite for shows depicting fabulous consumption in fabulous manners by fabulous women.

The minor side bet, made by some interesting people in Hollywood, is that this is not the case. That society will enter into a prolonged period of shortages, of water, of power, of food, of basic safety, and there is an appetite for shows about broken men finding redemption and meaning (and lawful revenge) by stopping worse things before they start. Basically a whole-hearted endorsement of pre-emption in crime and anything else because … technology gives us the tools to understand and predict behavior much more thoroughly.

Color this the Moneyball of Crime Dramas. The show is not about consumption, or money, sex and power. It is about above all an idea, that imperfect though it may be the way to stop horrible things (and take a moral revenge for 9/11) is to intervene with all the tools used to fight Al Qaeda. Not to put them aside in favor of Hope, Change, and fabulous girlfriends and clothes and men. But to use them, wisely, because there are many, many bad people out there.

That this show was made at all, much less that CBS put it on, is staggering. Yes Hollywood is mostly betting on Sex and the City. But it has made some interesting side bets.



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