Charity

The United Way is Evil.

When I was seven or eight, the United Way 'came' to my school and hit us all up for the sweet sweet cash. 

Maybe my teacher did it wrong, or maybe I simply misunderstood, but I didn't exactly bring cash from my parents to pay them off, so the few coins I stuffed in the little manila envelope came from my own very meagre allowance.   So instead of getting generic 'feel goods' from my giving, I instead resented the adults for asking me, a small child, for money.  I was, after all, only a year or two removed from saving up for weeks to buy a three dollar box of legos, and my allowance hadn't changed in the interval.

Now that I reflect back on it, it is clear that the intent of these yearly exercises are to build a habit of reflexive giving, unhampered by thought, and starting with other people's money.  You don't ask seven and eight year olds for their allowance money if you want to create a lifetime giver.  I can't see how this is anything other than extremely gentle extortion. If the parents don't provide the (to them negligible) donation, its the kids who feel the pressure to contribute and the shame of failure. Most parents would happily sacrifice a dollar to two, even way back in the early 80's, to save their kids that sort of trouble... especially in the name of a good cause.

But since it WAS my money that I was giving up I always had to wonder about it.  I mean, when they wanted me to buy books from the book club, I got something for my money, but what happened to the change that I stuffed in those little envelopes?  For all I knew (back then) the teacher kept it for herself. 

Oh, I knew it was supposedly going to Africa to feed starving, underprivileged children (but I ask you? What was I in those days?), but how did I KNOW that?  Year after year things seemed to get worse in Africa, not better. Year after year, more and more charities seemed to spring up, demanding more money, more effort.  My cartoons were interrupted by please for 'For as little as ten cents a day'... or whatever the going rate was back then... and by Sally Struthers, looking like she'd eaten all the food donated before going on the air demanding more, for the children.

I must not have been the only one asking 'how do I know that my donations are actually going to underprivileged kids?', because it wasn't long before they started sponsorship packs, where the one kid you were paying for would send you pictures and letters and shit. 

This was, to my young eyes, a monumental failure of an idea. 

As 'proof' went it seemed entirely inadequate to me, to easy to fake in the short run.  As a charitable idea it was lacking as well. At what point do you stop paying for this 'one child'?  

I had a dozen ill formed ideas about how silly it all was, but I simply shrugged and moved on.  For decades the only charity I have given is to bell ringers at christmas from the Salvation Army, and of my time and labor for local causes. 

Now, courtesy of Ace of Spades comes a story that warms the dark tarry cockles of my shriveled and useless heart. 

For those of you too busy to click a link, let me sum up: This journalist from... Australia?... has been sponsoring a child for ten years and in ten years the quality of the letters and art haven't improved at all, and actually gone down hill. A seventeen year old child is still drawing simple, off-kilter boxes and triangles with crayon to represent a house.

What I like is the never-stated subtext... that it is in fact unstated subtext... that there is some sort of fraud going on here.  The closest the story gets is to ask 'Hmm... that's curious', and a brief reference to another journalist who actually travelled to Africa (country unknown) to find the child she had been sponsoring, only to find said child had only dealt with the Charity* when they'd taken her photograph.

But even in that case, the term 'fraud' is never used, never alluded too. At worst, the Charity* merely used the money to do better good communally than the individual promise they offered.

Umm...

That's a lie. That's fraud. If I had sent several hundred (thousand?) dollars to support some named individual, I would expect THAT INDIVIDUAL to have received the money, or at least the goods and services it bought. Not some generic 'community' that in turn may or may not include said individual. 

By way of analogy: If I wanted to get my cousin Tim** off the streets of Detroit, so I sent him a few hundred bucks, I would be extraordinarily peeved to find that instead of going to Tim, the city of Detroit took that money for 'improvements' for 'all the Tims of the city'. 

I didn't send Detroit the money, did I? I sent it to Tim.  It doesn't matter if Tim is actual family, or just a name and a photograph that tugged at my heart from a book or commercial. I sent the fucking money to fucking TIM, and TIM better be the one who gets it!

But we musn't question the saintly nature of our charitable organizations. 

Bullshit. 

I've got a lot to say on charities, but instead I'll let you ponder this one case, and what no one seems to be saying... at least no one official, and not out loud. 

* by this I mean the organization World Vision, the charity involved in this case, and somewhat facetiously the idea of these groups being actual charities. They are large businesses with excellent PR, and what they sell are remittances. 

** I do not have a cousin named Tim that I am aware of. Likewise, while I have a number of friends from Detroit, I don't actually know anyone that lives there. If I did, the last fucking thing I'd do is send them money. I'd rather drive to Detroit in a truck and help them move out than send them ten bucks for gas. 

The Death of Civilization

I had a thought today.

Our civilization is already dead. Think of it like a tree, standing there all tall and proud, home to squirrels and birds.  Dead as a stump.

Its actually been dead for some time. Decades probably. It, we, have been slowly rotting from the inside ever since.    We keep expecting the end to come quickly, suddenly, and violently.

Have you ever seen a dead tree rotting away? Sometimes they don't fall over. There is no grand moment of violence, just a never ending series of minor collapses, and no recovery.

Now, by itself that is a slightly dark, but not terribly persuasive thought exercise. But of course, I haven't actually explained WHY I had this thought.

You see, once upon a time people valued ability, skill... hard work. They did things with their spare time that required significant practice, learning and were generally useful to a large number of people.

We play video games. Sure, if you play them long enough you eventually develop something resembling a skill...

... but let me back up. We'll touch on our free time in a moment.

Convienence isn't really the explanation for what changed. By the time of our grandfather's generation the industrial revolution had been going for generations, and all manner of mass production, labor saving and so forth had already been invented.

It starts with the Boomers.

No. I think it starts earlier. I can't prove it, not in time for a simple blog post, but I suspect that a large number of the progressive minded elites in this country, the ones who didn't go to war (I or II), were already showing signs of the decay, masked by robust and living body of the ordinary people.

But with the Boomers we see it clearly for the first time.  Ask any Boomer to sum up the zeitgeist of their generation, their era, and you will inevitably hear about Woodstock, about the Civil Rights marches and the Vietnam protests.

Those aren't accomplishments. At best they are participation merit badges, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the vast majority of boomers didn't really do any of those things.

If you ask a little more, you'll probably hear about Fighting the Man, Free Love and 'sex, drugs and rock'n roll'.

That's not to say that great things weren't done, often by skilled and talented people of their generation. We put men on the moon, invented the Internet and the home computer. We put the power of a million minds on your desktop for you to watch elf ass wriggle across your screen before you got bored and switched to porn.

But for the first time in our era, our civilization, we stopped caring about the great creations of the age, the masters of science and industry, the creators and workers and shapers. We began caring more about rejecting the rules, fighting the man. We didn't care about success, we cared about the Revolution for its own sake.

And most of it was a lie.  Woodstock was, by all accounts, a miserable experience created by its own propaganda. Even the music was second rate due to shoddy preparation and planning. Even the best stars struggle under the conditions they were forced to play in.  The Vietnam protest didn't really do much to end the war, which lasted twenty years. Its more probable that the US government finally asked itself what it was doing there, unloved by almost everyone, and just gave up.  Twenty years from now we'll hear how Cindy Sheehan single handedly brought the Iraq War to a close by that logic.

And the Civil Rights movement? Well... lets just say that things haven't exactly gone as planned and leave it at that, for today.

There is a theme here, not just in the lack of accomplishment required to take pride in being a boomer, but in how all the things they prize are effectively anti-establishment. The word "anti-establishment" has become something complimentary, hasn't it?  But think about it for a moment. Do you like having roads to drive on? Establishment built that. You like having relatively crime free neighborhoods? Establishment.

The Establishment, for all its flaws, is something of a defining characteristic of Civilization itself. Civilization is far, far preferable to Barbarism, which is also Anti-Establishment.

The curious thing was that this sort of attitude began manifesting everywhere.  The very tale end of the Boomer Generation holds power now, and yet they'd rather use that power to tear down the very country they rule, to destroy the last vestige of The Establishment, The Man, and remake it in their own image.  What of Art?  Have you seen most modern art? It doesn't require a heck of a lot of talent to create most of it. The irony is that the real artists, the craftsmen with skill and vision, all seem to work in the corporate sector doing 'visual design' pieces or as 'hobby artists' working on the web for bux.  The guy getting the grant is more likely to shit on a plate and garnish it, selling it for forty thousand dollars in the process.  Since skill and accomplishment mean less than marching for the Cause, than Fighting the Man, the shit-plate gets the money and the praise, while the guy painting a mural on the wall of a chain restaurant gets to eat the plate.

The ultimate expression of this is schools. Teachers have the easiest degree of all college degrees, and they have the lowest IQ of any credentialed profession. They give out awards for participation to students, they reject thousands of years of math to teach 'fuzzy math', where just trying really hard make the answer right.  And yet, because it is 'for the children' they are among the highest paid professionals in the country. Not that you'll ever get them to admit it, of course.  They wail and complain about long hours, about being underpaid and under appreciated...  then they call a six year old a rapist for kissing another six year old. They throw a kid out of school for eating a poptart the wrong way (so that it looks vaguely like a gun).... the litany of indignities they inflict upon our young seems endless.

And when they finally go to far, when their utter lack of professionalism, accumen or ability is revealed? They aren't fired, they are made administrators, which is why there are now schools with more administrative staff than teachers.

Participation and believing in the right things is far more important that actually accomplishing anything.

As an indictment of the Boomer Generation, I think that would be far more than enough to see the lot of them tossed out to make their own way, without vampirically bleeding the young dry so they can have a few more years of living it up.

Unfortunately, that isn't the goal of this post.

No.

Its to point out that my generation, by which I mean both the Generation X crowd and the Millennials (hey, the Boomers claim nearly 30 years of people in their generation, why have they divided up the following generations into mere decade lengths?), have been raised by people who are merely squatting in the carcass built by better men in better times.  Far fewer of 'us' are interested in hard work, in craftsmanship, in anything that takes years to master than the Boomers were.  We worship celebrity, even of the most crass and pointless sorts. Make a fool of yourself on the Internet, make a million dollars. Film a dog doing dog stuff, make a million dollars.

I'd like to say the Nadir of this movement is Girls, a show that is a crappy rip-off of an older, marginally smarter show, with less attractive people and far fewer fans, but all the critical praise due a great, moving peice of Art.  Lena Dunham is the new model Sexy for our age, the goddess of beauty our debauched and worthless age deserves, but I'd be reaching.

The Tree is dead, but that just means things aren't going to get better, just slowly worse. Girls is merely a vanguard of the new depths we will sink to.

Idiocracy was Prophecy,  our Cassandra.

All Hail President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho!

The Bechdel Test as Microcosm

In the last year or so there has been increasing fervor for applying the Bechdel Test when discussing movies. For those of you who have never heard of the test, congratulations on being a normal person with an exciting and active lifestyle.

Oh, fine... I'll explain.

The Bechdel Test is a feminist ideal that any given movie should have at least two named women characters who have a conversation in the film that isn't about a man.

If a movie passes the test, it is acceptable for feminist viewers, or something.

Of course, rather amusingly, it can be hard to determine if a movie passes the test, as if it isn't really adequetely feminist then all manner of excuses can be used to force it to violate one of the rules. For example, the Book of Eli passes the test on its face, as the female lead talks to her mother about their captivity (at the hands of men!), and the mother (Claudia... so officially a named character) only has two or three scenes in the film, yet is incredibly plot relevant.

The Book of Eli is almost entirely built around the male characters, yet passes the test, so women have to come up with marginal rulings to exclude it, you see.

There is a good reason for it. The only thing the Bechdel Test actually tests for is, in fact, itself. It literally has no relevance to the quality of the film, its relative merits as entertainment or feminism or pretty much anything.  At best it can tell you that, yes, two women have a conversation on screen in the film.

Compare that to the much simpler 'how much did it make' test.   That test is measuring only one thing, the actual number of tickets sold, yet it can give you a lot of relative information that is actually objectively useful for evaluating a movie. Not perfectly, of course, but still far more accurate than the test.

Let us explain by way of example.

Assume a movie that only includes a single character, a woman. This film is a deep meditation on the human condition, and follows the premise that a feminine perspective is more accurate and relevant than a male perspective.  Deep, meditiative, insightful and undeniably feminist.  Possibly even good and entertaining.

Fails the test on two points at a minimum, and all three on a technicality (with no other characters, we have no reason to expect the sole character's name to be relevant or revealed).

Assume a movie in the vein of Birth of a Nation, only from a manospherian/gorean point of view. THe main character is still a woman, modeled after Sarah Palin. She spends the entire movie chasing down, capturing and brainwashing other women characters to be little more than meek servants and slaves.  For the sake of argument, we'll assume that any number of conversations with the movies antagonist (a free, liberal feminist woman) do not, in fact, even mention men, but instead talk about what it means to BE a woman.

Passes all three elements of the Bechdel Test.  It might be entertaining, but probably not to people who actually tend to evaluate movies with "the Test". It is undoubtedly misogynistic, possibly even exploitative. We still don't need male characters, but we could assume that this is only a significant subplot to a bunch of men capturing and raping women and it would STILL pass the test with flying colors.

Hell, I don't even have to imagine that second film.  Ilsa, She-Wolf of the whatever (There were some three or four of these) passes the Bechdel Test. True, most of those conversations would be about torture and pain and so forth, but again... not about a man.

Not that I expect anyone to actually put that film on the Bechdel Test website any time soon. They may be willing to admit that the test is flawed, but I somehow suspect that such an obvious counter-example would break them.

Because, ultimately, the Bechdel Test is a tool... not for evaluating movies, which it singularly fails at, but for political power.  The strength of the test, in many ways, is that it is utterly unconcerned with what the movie is about.  Lots of movies beloved of women include multiple female characters talking about what so many women already love to talk about... their love lives. And these films fail the test.

Think about it: A genre of films that is made for women, catering to their tastes, and employing far more actresses than any other genre is just as likely to fail the test as a film like Riddick (or for that matter, Alien, which famously passes!), which is more or less a 'guy flick' from the word go.

Not that anyone is seriously attempting to evaluate Rom-coms and other 'chick flicks' with the test. I note that most, if not all, the Harry Potter films fail, despite being written by a woman, and with the female character (hermione) being the most competent and capable character of the trio, to an almost insulting degree, simple because all the scenes involve people talking to, or about, Harry Potter, and not about, say... their hair.

It is also notable that Allison Bechdel, the creator of the test doesn't actually think much of it. She created it as a punch line in a cartoon in 1985, and noted in that very punchline that only Alien passed the test (at that time), and the women are talking about the monster (technical foul: The monster is clearly a man! Penetration, phallocentric, yadda yadda, rape analog beast!)

Which brings me to the post title.

Here we have a test that measures nothing but itself, can be easily subverted to produce the opposite of its purported intent, was a punchline to a comic strip and is essentially disavowed by its original creator, yet is used and protected, as a bludgeon for political purposes.

It is essentially modern progressivism in a nutshell. Not just feminism, which is merely one facet of modern progressivism (and in fact may be described essentially the same as the Bechdel Test, as I just did...).

Modern Progressivism is literally about nothing but itself, though it purports to be about a great many important and good things. Civil Rights? Only useful as a tool for more progressivism. Feminism? Only  useful to shut down debate and quash the opposition... national health care? Only important in that it forces you to come to the Progressives to get life saving medicine, making you dependent upon them.

Progress? Don't make me laugh. The Progressive Elite would much rather rule over a village of dirty, dark age peasants than a vast space empire. The Global Warming Fraud is proof enough of that. So long as they have marginally better stuff than you, they're happy.

In short, we have a political ideology that describes nothing but itself, has been entirely subverted to produce the opposite of what it claims, is a punchline to one grim, dark joke on humanity, and would be eagerly disavowed by most of its original adherents if they saw what had become, and yet it continues to exist as a useful bludgeon for political power.

Thus endeth the lesson.

Resolutions

As I noted earlier, I am not fond of the emphasis on New Years Resolutions, so I won't be making any. Still, it would be rather foolish to put off any self improvement projects simply because it is January, and history has shown that I, along with most other people, do better at following through on projects when I (and we) tell people we will be doing them.

Thus, for the rest of the month I am resolved to the following.

Daily posts on this blog.
Finish either Hobbes or Locke
Gym four days a week, with running on the three off days.
Increase my socializing*
Walk the damn dog twice a day instead of killing him for peeing in the house.
Casting.**

For socializing, it is hard to put a hard objective to the task as written. Essentially, I am something of a hermit. I leave my house for necessary food, work or school and not much else. This is simply not acceptable behavior.

Thus, at least once a week, in addition to my already minimal social calendar, I will go out for several hours on at least one purely social excursion, and attempt to meet (and learn names) of at least two new people each such trip.

Seems a bit autistic, but its not really, I simply have to eliminate the easy outs to force myself to actually be a human being and not some sort of primitive cave troll content to watch numbers scroll by on a screen, or what have you.

Further, as I am single again, I will also resolve to make at least two approaches of attractive women each week. Low numbers, but baby steps.  This is, of course, in addition to my other activities. I will, naturally, report in on the first of February with a revised list and results of my original resolutions.

Regarding Casting: I have, for years, been fascinated with metalworking, and I do have some meager skills at such tasks. Nothing professional, but I can get by as a hobbyist.  In a week and a half, however, I will have my first smelting furnace and crucible, so I need to have my die ready to be molded and other critical components (metal, etc...) ready to go.  I refuse to collect equipment that sees no real use, so I will, in fact, be blazing away with glowing hot metal before the end of the month. Perhaps I'll have a couple of pics or vids to show you when it is all said and done.

Failure in Slow Motion

Haha... just one day in to my new pledge (New Year's Resolution? Fuck, I hate trying to make any improvements to my life in winter... everyone always wants to point out that there's this one day.... shaddup, I get it, see?) and I've already missed a day.  Well two days.

Yesterday wasn't my fault, super serial, guys.  I got called out shortly after lunch and didn't get home until midnight.  All unexpectedly like.

Kinda like the Benghazi thing, you know?

Oh... you know. You know you know.

Maybe I'll try for a real post in a couple of hours, while y'all sleepin'. Lazy biatches.

Just a quick status update. 

In light of our utter lack of viewers, I have decided to suspend the podcasting portion for the time being. However, due to the lack of viewers, I have also resolved to increase the posting rate as I haunt the web for potential viewers. 

All out of Fucks and the Empirical Man

Sometime around September of this last year I realized that I had well and truly run out of Fucks to give.  The first and primary consequence of this realization was that I stopped worrying about what my boss thought of me, or the consequences of not being a shit-sucking weasel every day.

Not that I stopped being generally professional. I showed up at work on time, early really, did my job with full conscientiousness, and was generally a model employee... and I felt better about myself and less stressed because I no longer gave a fuck if the boss liked me.

Contrary to what I've heard about Confidence and Boldness, this did nothing to improve my work life. I was fired a few weeks later for a possibly unrelated incident involving the fruits of feminism... saying one of the many, many forbidden words of the modern workplace. Literally. I said one word that got me fired, and that word was "Porn".

I, however, gave no fucks, because the job sucked and I quickly moved into a new job that paid the same money but gave me more hours and had no real annoying office politics. I still gave no fucks, I was, after all, completely out.  Sadly, that job didn't last because I confused two different managers with the same name and the one that was in charge of me decided I had to go.

Again, no fucks were given.

This is neither here nor there.  In twenty years of keeping my opinions to myself and being a good, model, loyal employee, I had somehow sold away a very important and real part of my self identity, my soul. I had given away my fierce and burning urge to be myself.  I am not easily a slave, but habit is a dangerous thing.

In the wake of that... call it a debacle... I decided that I had, at last, run out of patience for the tread mill, for the sacrificing of my own sense of self worth, my own pride in myself for the gratification of increasingly idiotic, but lucky or connected, bosses, for liars and knaves and power drunk sociopaths... I was done.

Because I no longer had the fucks to give.  I had reached the point where the erosion of my pride had meant there was no social condemnation powerful enough to shame me into wanting or needing work to value myself. I had reached a sort of equilibrium, too much pride to go on, not enough to be forced back into it.

I have a very good memory for the defining moments of my life, the things that shaped me into who I am.  Thus I can tell you, objectively, that the promise of the man I was at age 6 was not the man I grew to be at age 18, and despite a general lack of effort since then, I've slowly but surely been finding my way back to that long lost promise.

I went from being an aggressive, determined and confident child to a sort of doormat, relentlessly 'civilized' to the point where I actually slouched consciously to avoid towering rudely over others, where I never stood up for myself, or others, because I had been taught, ruthlessly, that if anyone did anything worth getting into trouble over it, I would catch the worst of it even if, or because, I was in the right.

This is neither here nor there except as a framework for what I say next.  While I occasionally wished I was a different man, a better man, I wasn't terribly unhappy, and even in my halcyon youth I was rather hermit like in nature, solitary... so I can't blame the errors of my parentage for the one thing that pained me most.

However, not giving a fuck has led me to an interesting experiment.  The manosphere, the pick up artists, generally talk about alpha behaviors, even faking it until you make it and other such things. Its always sounded rather interesting, but ultimately academic and somewhat... difficult to verify.

Until now.

Note that I'm not terribly concerned at the moment with seduction and picking up chicks.  My luck there has managed to be tolerable for my circumstances despite my rather deliberate nebbishness, the false neurotic camouflage I have so long adopted to avoid giving offense.

Shedding that requires conscious thought.  Forcing myself to stand upright requires thought and effort. Not tucking my too-long legs under my chair only requires vigilance, as I have always sat 'alpha posture', legs out and spread, when I was given space... but I find I still unconsciously minimize myself in even a modest crowd.

After a week or so I have to say I don't feel any more Alpha, or however you want to phrase it. No more confident, no more self assured. I still have that empty well where my Fucks used to reside.

On the other hand, I do notice that I care less about those many minor offenses, real or potential that used to nag at me.  A rather minor case in point: Today I wore sunglasses inside.

There is no law, and damn few rules about sunglasses indoors, but it is something that is simply not done.

No one said a word to me, which is not unusual in and of itself and I didn't feel particularly rebellious doing it. Its sunglasses, man... its not like I was swinging my dick out and about or anything.

However, having made the conscious decision, with full malice aforethought, to challenge this unspoken rule of etiquette, I realized that I literally had no worries, not even the pale ghosts of the worries I still had after I ran out of Fucks, that used to plague me about every minor action or inaction. So what if someone thought I was rude, or that I was doing something wrong? So what if it wasn't the one thing I had deliberately chosen to do but some other niggling point of etiquette that I just didn't 'get'?

As it was deliberate, as I expected some condemnation, spoken or not, nothing else that might have worried me really applied.

In a sense, my sunglasses had set me free, if only temporarily and from the most minor, if constant, of stresses in my life.

In a sense, I was doing something I had never really done in the last twenty years or so: I was being absolutely true to myself rather than forcing myself to conform, and poorly, to someone else's standards.

Freedom as a pair of sunglasses.

Who knew?




While it is still early in my empirical test of the 'fake it till you make it' school of manospherian alphadom, I can say that I've had an early positive result.  I'm reluctant to read too much into it, after all I am deeply in the grip of a sort of apathy that seems to approach the levels of a psychotic break. It might not be the sunglasses, the rule breaking, per se but the fact that they merely demonstrated that not actually having a fuck to give means not being stressed by the little shit.

But if, in a few weeks, I feel I've made progress on maintaining my "alpha physical frame", and I haven't found a compelling reason to stop, I will progress my crude experiment to the next level. I have been cataloging the moments of my adult life that I have been more happy with myself in one way or another and will work hard on recreating those times as an organized whole.  Some I will start immediately, as they require investments of time to pay off, others will require more... thought.

For now, the glasses are tentatively chalked up to a positive result of... shall we call it the 'do what thou wilt' principle?  I think we shall.

I note that simply being lazy is not the same as doing as thou wilt.  Breaking the social norms of public comportment as a deliberate act is not the same as going grocery shopping in your pyjamas, as seems to be the current fashion.  That is a passive display of generalized apathy and contra to both my intention and my nature. It is a fault to be overcome for its own sake, not a statement of 'being true to oneself'.

But this post has hit the rambling stages, so I bid you adieu.

And I'm still all out of Fucks.