Comments on: The path to power for all “decent men” consists in a deeply deceptive competition to appear maximally unthreatening

By: Random Observer

Random Observer — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 01:39:08 +0000

On reflection, all this suggests to me that:

Looking back on the iconic 80s film Revenge of the Nerds, I wish the Greeks had won. They were scummy, but still.

The 90s film Demolition Man, of all cultural artifacts, most accurately predicted the course of society.

Men should eat less soy & carbs & more fat. Either it will restore them [HT Mangan] or mercifully kill us.

By: Graham

Graham — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 16:48:52 +0000

Although couched in explanatory terms that prove just how far we have come from most of human history, that passage about the role of local male hierarchies does a good job of bringing into the modern age and modern language the accumulated, once obvious, wisdom of the past 100,000 years of human males and competition. Systems still just about operating 35 years ago.

So useful job on that.

By: Graham

Graham — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 16:42:57 +0000

Not that I wish to entirely object to the existence of the conquistador mentality, always a mindset and a capacity set limited to a minority of men.

What a mind-numbing, boring and even to some degree less developmental civilization we would have had. You need farmers to tame the land. Not farmers to take it.

By: Graham

Graham — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 16:36:31 +0000

A few points:

I admit I can also see the distinction between the 50s and today, although the cultural products don’t always strike as as dramatically different as all that. I can see pros and cons as a passive male.

Ultimately I cannot take entirely seriously any model of the universe that thinks of any period of American history as “violent patriarchy”. This suggests too narrow a grasp of human history. America has always obeyed its women to a far larger degree than other societies. Observers as different as Tocqueville and Freud thought it striking enough to comment on it. And that before female suffrage. How dramatic must it have seemed for it to draw so much attention. Others have suggested this was such a stereotype in early to mid 20c America that everyone in Britain grew up with it as part of their idea of America.

It looks like the author just discovered the obvious. The pacification of the bulk of men results in vastly greater power opportunities for the few who are not. If ever there was a telegram from the Department of Duh, that truly was it.

By: Albion

Albion — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 14:42:36 +0000

What is this about?

I am tempted to say ‘what is this bollocks about?’ but that would be, to quote from the example here due perhaps to when ‘the baseline of masculine dominance expression is held below it’s organic tendency, defined simply as what men would do in the absence of cultural campaigns to defang it, this increases the potential payoff to those who dare exercise it, as there are more resources to dominate precisely to the degree that other men are not contesting them’

Oh. Well, that explains a lot. Also, it’s all Trump’s fault.