LeeEsq, that is completely hilarious. The complaints there are about _anti-Semites_. If you wish to prove anti-Semitism still exist, congrats, although we sorta already knew that.
None of that has a single fucking thing to do with criticism of Israel. In fact, only one of those article appear to be _about_ opinions towards Israel in any way.
And, Jaybird, you're basically just outright lying. No one sane has ever complained about Israeli forces 'entering' Palestine in the manner you imply. (And if you _do_ read sites where such complaints happen, I have to ask what the hell you're doing there.)
What people complain about is, in your hypothetical example, when Israel responds to the bombing by killing four random Palestinians and restarting settlements, or whatever bullshit Israel decides to do this week because they don't have to behave with human decency towards Palestinians. (Because the country that is _supposed_ to be shining a critical light in the world on that, the US, mysteriously always turns off the light when it reaches Israel.)
Likewise, there will always be a difference in outrage between _individual_ action and _state_ action. A random Palestine who is now dead...and we are supposed to do what, now? Track down his relatives and write them sternly-worded letters? Israel, OTOH, is supposed to be a first world democracy and should not be behaving in a manner that it often does.
I mean, right now we're all standing around talking about NSA spying which, in case we've all forgotten, started in response to 9/11. But we're standing around criticizing the US government for misbehavior, instead of criticizing the 9/11 hijackers! Why, we must all be pro-terrorist...or, alternately, we realize that 'criticizing terrorism' is a pretty stupid thing to worry about, as no terrorist is listening to us. Criticizing the behavior of random Palestinians is equally pointless, and even criticizing Hamas barely does anything. (As they see America as little more than a supporter of Israel no matter what Israel does...which is a pretty accurate perception.)
So you _are_ accusing everyone who disagrees with a specific action of Israel of being 'anti-Zionists', and by 'anti-Zionist' you mean 'people who wish that Israel would be destroyed'.
You assert that criticizing Israel is actually promoting the murder of Israelis. Genocide, if you will. You assert that someone stating that the Israeli government does was something that they do not agree with and don't think the government should have done is the equivalent of wanting them all to die.
And this is just confined to Israel...saying that, for example, Russia shouldn't be arresting people for protesting is not promoting Russian genocide. (I'm not sure whether or not this is true of _Israelis_ who object to their government's behavior.)
Would you ever question a gay person on something that they perceived as homophobic? Would you ever question a black person on something or someone they perceived as racist?
Uh, yes. People do that all the time. Just because one person says something does not actually make it true.
More to the point, no one is actually doing anything _to_ those people. Yes, if a member of group X experiences something and thinks it's prejudice against group X, perhaps we _should_ tread carefully about dismissing their own experience.
But when a member of group X see some other member group X do something halfway around the world, and some non-member says 'That action was wrong', no, we don't let the member of group X shut the discussion down with allegations of bigotry with no evidence at all.
Especially members of group X _much closer to the scene_ seem to have just as much, if not more, objection to that action. The Jews _in Israel_ are usually not that happy with the actions of their government that people in the US criticize.
Jews seem to be the only group that get constantly question on their perceptions what and is anti-Semitic.
Firstly, _no one_ gets to assert that criticizing a specific country is not permissible.
And 'Jews' as a group are not running around calling any criticism of Israel anti-Semitic. A very small group of Jews are doing that. They've just managed to hijack the political discussion about Israel in this country.
What the hell is an anti-Zionist? Someone with a time machine?
You do know that Zionism is over, right? It won? Like women's suffrage in the US? It set out to create the state of Israel, and such a state was, in fact, created. And unlike women's sufferance, there's not actually any way to 'repeal' it, so there's no conceivable policy that 'anti-Zionists' would have, except possible attempting to convince the state of Israel to close up shop. (Something that literally has never happened in the entire history of nations.)
Or are you using 'anti-Zionist' to mean 'people who want Israel conquered', which a) is rather goofy interpretation of Zionist, and b) a rather large slur on pretty much everyone who criticizes Israel. Most of the people who criticize Israel are criticizing _the actions of Israel_, not wishing that, for some completely unknown reason, that Israel would go away.
Why are they classifying their felonies with numbers _and_ letters, anyway? Turning a 'Class D' into a 'Level 7'. Huh? Is that better or worse?
In fact, is a Class D better or worse than a Class C? Is a Level 7 better or worse than a Level 8? What happens if they want to add a level...do they create Level 5.2, or do they move all crimes down? Or up? Or are the levels in order _at all_?
Why use codes at all? This isn't some frickin computer program where you have to index things. Classify them as 'Severe' and 'Heavy' and 'Moderate' and 'Light' or whatever.
Or, actually, there already _are_ codes in the law...namely, what part of the law it is. Make them 23.3.4 Felonies or whatever.
We need a non-stupid Supreme Court ruling, and if they won't do it we need a constitutional amendment, to create the principle: If someone sues in court saying the government is doing something to them in secret, the government _must_ admit to them whether or not they're doing that.
The entire premise of 'secretly' wiretapping people and whatnot is 'so they don't know they're being watched', which means it's complete nonsense the government can refuse to tell people _who have already figured it out and sued them over it_.
The frustrating part to guys like me are that it takes this event for people to actually start talking about it. We should have been talking about this in 2002.
We did talk about it in 2002. The country as a whole had a collective freakout about it when it was invented in 2002, when it was called 'Total Information Awareness', and we suspended that program in 2003. So the NSA just did it in secret instead.
Saying we 'should have talked about it' is silly. We did, we decided against it, and then the fucking government did it anyway.
The real question is why the fuck do we allow the government to operate any programs at all without our knowledge?
There should be no secret programs, and no secret laws, and no secret interpretations of the law. Period. (Secret _actions_, fine, although almost all of those should be immediately declassified when finished.)
I've never played Fallout and Fallout 2, but Fallout 3 was an amazing RPG, and Fallout New Vegas took that and actually added three or four legitimate different player paths.
I think, frankly, if comparing RPGs it's somewhat wrong-headed to compare a wide-open one and a linear one. There are always going to be advantages and disadvantages of each.
Of course, this Symposium attempts to compare _all_ video games to each other, which is completely crazy, and completely pointless,, as the best video game of all time is clearly Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle.
And the thing is, one of the boss fights _isn't even a boss fight_. It's fighting the second in command!
You should have the option of somehow sneaking past that, or convincing him to switch sides, and attacking the real boss (Who is a wimp) or just avoiding him also and doing something with the McGuffin. (Use it, throw it out a window, whatever.)
Likewise, it would have been really neat if you'd been able to figure out what _actually_ was going on before the end. I'm not saying that it should have been obvious, or something that players would figure out the first time, but it would have been cool to just hand the guy the thing and say 'I'm out, do whatever you want', and walk away laughing.
However, the _other_ boss...the way the game was setup, that fight was fairly unavoidable. You sorta did have to inflict a lot of damage, that was the point. But there could have been other ways to accomplish that goal. (For example, aimed another supernatural creature at them.)
I hated that boss fight, BTW, because the last time I played, I specialized in _unarmed_ combat. That was how I was playing the entire damn game, punching people in the face, and I wasn't about to change at that point.
It took _forever_.
And earlier I had to use guns with the guys guarding the keys to make that portal thing. It didn't matter how buffed I was, I wasn't making it down those corridors without getting shot to death.
Or, to put it another way, PUA books are as close to promoting rape culture as humanly possible without actually promoting committing rape. Usually. Although sometimes that line is very _very_ thin.
Hey, look, it's the guy who didn't bother to read the comments.
If you don’t think it’s rape, then…you aren’t being raped.
Because there are absolutely no circumstances where people might be raped and yet might not understand that's what happened to them. For the most obvious example, being unconscious.
And you're about to assert that isn't part of PUA culture...when there are explicit quotes from PUA books having to point out not to do that. When you have to actually _tell_ people that 'hypnotizing her is okay, but make sure she stays awake, or you could be facing a rape charge'...yeah, that's a problem. (And I like the fact the problem isn't that it is _is_ rape, the problem is you might be _charged_ with rape, but check your local laws!)
And I know in asshat world (I am assuming you are Asshattian, probably a native from the providence of Privilege by your accent.) there's no such thing as manipulating people, and that everyone is fully functional at all times and no one can ever be duped into anything and everyone deserves everything they don't manage to overcome (Until, of course, it happens to _you_, at which point you will scream bloody-murder), but most of us are smart enough to know damaging people's self-esteem to get them to have sex with you is, at the least, _unethical and something to discourage_, if not actually 'rape'.
More to the point, you have completely failed to notice that almost no one here (Well, Kimmi, but Kimmi is a troll) is calling everything PUA do 'rape'.
We are saying the PUA culture is a horrible misogynist toxin, a blight on society, promoted by complete asshats, which treat's women's vaginas as some sort of goal to be won, and is full of advice that is appears to lead _very close_ to rape. If it's okay to cheat and lie and manipulate to 'win a vagina' for the night, it's hard to see why it's unacceptable to sometimes just sorta take one. It's like cheating at solitaire...who does it hurt? (Besides the raped woman, but the entire point of this is near sociopathy towards women and failing to see them as actual people at all.)
Men may, indeed, have to take that last step themselves, the books _usually_ stop short of that, but that's still a horrible place for a culture to take people to, and that culture deserves to be stamped on as hard as possible.
In fact, 'touching' would probably be an entire chapter in the hypothetical book other people were talking about of non-asshat dating advice.
This is why I somewhat lament the current lack of two-person dancing. Frankly, the entire premise of that was to get two people to touch each other and stand really close for several minutes, with the option of staring into each other's eyes.
Instead, everyone just sorta flails around, sometimes touching, but usually by accident, and in ways that are more jokingly sexual than romantic. Or does line dancing. I have no problem with either of those, but they aren't very good 'Can we move this relationship to a physical level?' indicators.
What I gathered was that it was a combination of basic advice coupled with a few novelties that may or may not work, packaged and branded by a bunch of weirdos promising sex. Reading here, it seems that it has gone in some really new and weird directions.
It's not just the pickup techniques, which indeed get very disturbing the farther and farther you go. The surface ones, the ones they always lead with telling others about, are fine.
It's the emotional manipulation and the trust-abusey controlling stuff that is the problem, and the advice just keeps getting weirder and weirder and a little rapey at the end.
But that's not really the problem. The problem is more the entire culture of constantly churning through women. Their entire set of tactics is designed to make women off-balance enough that the woman will sleep with them, with absolutely no _attempt_ to dating the women. (Which, as I said earlier, would be fine if that was actually the _expectation_ of the relationship. It's usually not.)
The entire culture is to see women as prizes...hell, not even that. You _keep_ a prize. These are like frickin video game unlocks. I compared it to high school above, but that's actually unfair to male highschoolers. If _they_ find a woman willing to have sex with them, they keep her.
<not an actual advance in equality>'Hey, what if instead of seeing women as possessions to be fought over and won and controlled after we won them, we saw them as _disposable_ single-use possessions? They're not like a car, they're like a Kleenex!'</not an actual advance in equality>
And, like I said, it's sad, because there is a lot of good advice in those books to actually interact with women for men who aren't very good at it. It's sorta like if, instead of 'How to survive in the wilderness' books, we instead had a bunch of 'How to rob a bank and flee from justice into the wilderness' books.
No one here has mentioned the fact that the reason everyone _claimed_ it was about conservative is because Issa _specifically_ told the inspector general's office to investigate _just_ claims that conservative groups were targeted.
In other words, this wasn't Issa deciding to selectively reading something. This was Issa deliberately _creating_ something that was inherently a lie, and managing to lie about it for months.
It seems roughly akin to the mostly imaginary world portrayed in various movies, where car thiefdom is portrayed by a bunch of really cool guys who steal really cool cars, drive around with them for ten minutes in high speed chases, then abandon them.
That...is not a reasonable model of car ownership. It's not even a reasonable model of car _theft_. And it's being done by people who brag they couldn't possibly afford such cars...because talking about how poor you are makes you...awesomer?
It's so many level of stupid.
Look, I'm not condoning manipulation of women, but, men, if you do have some magical way to do that, and your overwhelming priority is to have sex (Which is rather pathetic), then, uh, find a reasonable attractive one and manipulate her into a 'relationship' where you don't have to do anything, and she isn't allow to complain when you cheat. Then move on when you get bored, or, hell, don't even 'move on', just start sleeping with other women until she _finally_ ditches you. That is what a _sane_ immoral person would do...and, in fact, a lot of them _do_. What I just described is, in fact, the traditional asshole behavior of manipulative men.
PUAs, OTOH, seem to think it's reasonable to have to keep refinding women. It's like the perfect combination of immoral _and_ stupid, and more harmful to women, and, like I said, only makes sense if there's some sort of psychological problem going on in those people's head, because it's actually much more work for much riskier payoff.
Yeah, I used to think the same way as you, because there is a thin veneer of useful advice in those books, and the people defending them always lead with it. 'We just tell men to be self-confident! We tell them not to pin their hopes on one women, to just ask and move on if she says no, don't dwell on it!'
Yeah, they do teach that, and that is, generally, fine. And they _also_ tell men to do a lot of other shit. A lot of very horrible stuff.
And it's not just the rapey stuff that's horrible. The entire premise seems to be that women choose to have sex with men who are higher status than them...so the way to 'win' is to _lower their perception of their status_ via emotional manipulation.
While this would be somewhat problematic in an ideal world, it's even more problematic in a world where women have been clawing their way up for equal status for a century and aren't actually there, and are constantly subject to body-image nonsense from advertising, and in generally tend to _already have_ a lot of self-esteem issues directly caused by men.
PUA comes off rather like a book that encourages employers to try to convince black people to work for less wages by convincing the black person they are generally stupider than the white people are, so should accept less pay. It would be problematic _without_ any history. With history, it's a lot worse.
Are we sure that the 40 year old who is constantly looking for a new 25 year old to bang is a huge step up from a PUA?
Actually...yes. If that was without any context.
PUAs behave in blatantly manipulative ways, and tend to impact a _lot_ more women. And not just the women who say yes. They wander around manipulating women until one of them says yes, but all the other women that he decided to randomly insult or whatever in an attempt to find one it worked on also exist. Seriously, I read about some of these 'tricks', and, yes, I find it amazing women 'fall for it' and decide this person is someone to have sex with, but, OTOH, I can't imagine people (Of whatever gender) coming up to me and saying some of that stuff and me not being _effected_ emotionally. And I'm not even a women, who are constantly peppered with absurd body image nonsense.
Likewise, they tend to do this _constantly_, whereas a '40 year old who is constantly looking for a new 25 year old to bang' is probably not actually 'constantly' doing anything. Most non-PUA men _keep women willing to have sex with them_, at least until they're bored. Whereas the entire premise of a PUA is repeated one-night stands. Even if the 40 year-olds are only keeping each 25 year old a month, that's fraction of the women that PUAs churn through.
More to the point...you seem to be assuming that there's something wrong with a 40 year-old man asking out a 25 year-old women. Now, yes, being older does mean he _can_ be more manipulative or be better at deception or all sorts of things that people shouldn't be in a relationship...OTOH, he can't very well be worse than a 'PUA', which the entire _premise_ is to trick women into sleeping with them.
Now, of course, WRT to _mentoring_ others, I have no idea. Just because they're better than PUAs doesn't mean they should be _mentoring_ people.
It's like we're in backwards world: Guys, rise above your instinctual desire to attempt to impress women with muscles, and cars shaped like penises, and guns shaped like penises, and penises shaped like penises, in an attempt to win them into your bed! Instead, attempt to impress...other men! By which women you won! (Why? Are you trying to prove to those other men that _you're_ the alpha sex God around here, and those guys should...all be sleeping with you? Turning their women over to you? WTH is this going?)
I mean, there's men operating in so-called 'caveman' mode, whose goal is to claim and keep as many women as possible, and there's civilized mode, which is for us to treat them as equals and find one of them that we like and spend our life with them...and then there's PUA mode, which is, uh, collect and discard them all, like they're damn Pokemon or something, and you want to earn all the fucking badges. (Note: I do not actually know how Pokemon works.)
I mean, hell, they aren't even doing the 'I possess a hot woman' correctly. The way to impress other men is to _walk around with one on your arm_, with the implication you own this one and can have sex with it any time you want (Note: None of those absurdly sexist opinions are mine.) PUA people manage to screw that up, by 'winning' hot women, walking out of the bar with them, and then _never showing them off_ to make other men jealous, or keeping contact with them to hopefully have more sex.
It's like 'Guys, you apparently don't even understand how sexism is supposed to work. If women are property, you don't just _throw them away for no reason_. You _at least_ wait until you're tired of them, and perhaps keep one or two used ones as spares. If you have a nice looking one, you show other guys you have it, and wear it around town for a bit. You are managing to fail at being misogynistic asshats.'
It is completely baffling from top to bottom, and I suspect there's some sort of serious mental pathology going on here.
When men see women as merely the provider of sex, there are two destructive ways to go about dating:
1) Act like they own the woman, and they _deserve_ to have a date with her that ends in sex. This is, obviously, very bad.
2) Act like they're asking for a _favor_. It's like asking to borrow someone's car. 'Hey, can I borrow your vagina for a bit?'
#2 is less assholey entitled quasi-rapish behavior, it at least assigned the woman agency over her body.
But it's still _entirely the wrong way_ to ask someone out.
The entire premise of dating is that both parties will enjoy every aspect of a date. (At least at first. Later on in a relationship there is obviously more compromise, but if you start off that way you're doing it wrong.) Men, you have a mutually beneficial plan that you have proposed, that both of you should enjoy. Ask her out with _that_ thought in mind.
I try that, but no one ever answers back. I'm starting to think the people on TV can't hear me at all, but can't figure out how to set the microphone volume.
I understand wanting to have _sex_, of course. But what continually baffles me is the idea that this is a numbers game, based not on the amount of sex, but on the amount and 'hotness' of women.
Look, there are clearly women out there that will have sex and not 'require' any sort of relationship, if that's the sticking point. I mean, PUA culture requires those women to exist, so I shall presume they do.
So why not just find _one_ of those women, and come to an arrangement? Wouldn't that be, I dunno, _easier_ than hitting on twenty women a night before finding one willing to come home with you? Am I missing something?
Likewise, and I might be spilling some guy secrets here: While how hot a woman is interesting...once they're actually having sex with you, it's not _incredibly_ important.
If we take the entire premise of PUA as true (And I'm not actually sure PUA actually _does_ work.) than, well, the entire premise is rather stupid. Either there are women out there willing to randomly hook up with men outside of a relationship (In which case, _keep their damn phone numbers_ if you want casual sex, you idiots.) or there are not, and the entire thing is a lie.
I rather suspect the entire thing is a complete myth, created (accidentally or on purpose) by a few super-hot, super-suave asshole guys who couldn't understand why other guys didn't have women falling over them, so decided to give 'advice', and didn't realize that 99% of it was that they looked like Tom Cruise and trolled pickup bars, and it doesn't actually work anywhere else and super-charisma is not something that can be learned.
Setting out with the goal of having sex with someone is idiotic for anyone who’s out of high school.
This is probably a little harsh. I don't actually care what consenting adults do. If there's some sort of place when men hook up with women and that's the point of the place, whatever.
Let me rephrase:
Setting out with the goal of _convincing_ a stranger, who normally would not be interested in you, into have sex with you is idiotic for anyone who’s out of high school. (Actually, it's idiotic there, also. It's just understandable.)
The sad thing is, there probably is an actual market out there of guys who need advice how to meet women, and how to approach them. It can be somewhat scary for certain kinds of men without a lot of experience to just walk up to unknown women and start interacting with them, and there's a _lot_ of real advice that could be useful...not only be confident, but also pay attention to what they want to talk about, etc.
And all that advice is buried in what are basically books for manipulative asshats.
As for the self-confidence thing: Men, don't think you're _better_ than a woman so she should go out with you. But you can't be apologetic, either. Ask her out like you're buying something (1)...you're setting up an exchange you both benefit from. You think you'll have a good time going out with her, and you think she'll have a good time going out with you. You aren't asking for a _favor_, you're proposing a mutually beneficial exchange of date that you will both enjoy. (You think. She might disagree.)
I wish at some point in society we'd start having books that explained how to date someone a year, all the way from asking them out, to figuring out if she's(2) someone you'd actually want to keep dating, to a stable relationship, to even moving in together, instead of how 'to have sex with them'. Setting out with the goal of having sex with someone is idiotic for anyone who's out of high school.
1) No one ever quote that out of context. ;)
2) Actually, these books could _almost_ be gender neutral. There's probably slightly different advice for men and women at the start, they tend to key off different things but all the advice would be generally the same. And for all I know these books exist, but I've never seen them or ads for them, whereas I see people talking about PUA books all the time.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Rand Paul, the Confederacy, and Liberty”
LeeEsq, that is completely hilarious. The complaints there are about _anti-Semites_. If you wish to prove anti-Semitism still exist, congrats, although we sorta already knew that.
None of that has a single fucking thing to do with criticism of Israel. In fact, only one of those article appear to be _about_ opinions towards Israel in any way.
And, Jaybird, you're basically just outright lying. No one sane has ever complained about Israeli forces 'entering' Palestine in the manner you imply. (And if you _do_ read sites where such complaints happen, I have to ask what the hell you're doing there.)
What people complain about is, in your hypothetical example, when Israel responds to the bombing by killing four random Palestinians and restarting settlements, or whatever bullshit Israel decides to do this week because they don't have to behave with human decency towards Palestinians. (Because the country that is _supposed_ to be shining a critical light in the world on that, the US, mysteriously always turns off the light when it reaches Israel.)
Likewise, there will always be a difference in outrage between _individual_ action and _state_ action. A random Palestine who is now dead...and we are supposed to do what, now? Track down his relatives and write them sternly-worded letters? Israel, OTOH, is supposed to be a first world democracy and should not be behaving in a manner that it often does.
I mean, right now we're all standing around talking about NSA spying which, in case we've all forgotten, started in response to 9/11. But we're standing around criticizing the US government for misbehavior, instead of criticizing the 9/11 hijackers! Why, we must all be pro-terrorist...or, alternately, we realize that 'criticizing terrorism' is a pretty stupid thing to worry about, as no terrorist is listening to us. Criticizing the behavior of random Palestinians is equally pointless, and even criticizing Hamas barely does anything. (As they see America as little more than a supporter of Israel no matter what Israel does...which is a pretty accurate perception.)
"
So you _are_ accusing everyone who disagrees with a specific action of Israel of being 'anti-Zionists', and by 'anti-Zionist' you mean 'people who wish that Israel would be destroyed'.
You assert that criticizing Israel is actually promoting the murder of Israelis. Genocide, if you will. You assert that someone stating that the Israeli government does was something that they do not agree with and don't think the government should have done is the equivalent of wanting them all to die.
And this is just confined to Israel...saying that, for example, Russia shouldn't be arresting people for protesting is not promoting Russian genocide. (I'm not sure whether or not this is true of _Israelis_ who object to their government's behavior.)
I just wanted to clarify that for everyone.
"
Would you ever question a gay person on something that they perceived as homophobic? Would you ever question a black person on something or someone they perceived as racist?
Uh, yes. People do that all the time. Just because one person says something does not actually make it true.
More to the point, no one is actually doing anything _to_ those people. Yes, if a member of group X experiences something and thinks it's prejudice against group X, perhaps we _should_ tread carefully about dismissing their own experience.
But when a member of group X see some other member group X do something halfway around the world, and some non-member says 'That action was wrong', no, we don't let the member of group X shut the discussion down with allegations of bigotry with no evidence at all.
Especially members of group X _much closer to the scene_ seem to have just as much, if not more, objection to that action. The Jews _in Israel_ are usually not that happy with the actions of their government that people in the US criticize.
Jews seem to be the only group that get constantly question on their perceptions what and is anti-Semitic.
Firstly, _no one_ gets to assert that criticizing a specific country is not permissible.
And 'Jews' as a group are not running around calling any criticism of Israel anti-Semitic. A very small group of Jews are doing that. They've just managed to hijack the political discussion about Israel in this country.
"
What the hell is an anti-Zionist? Someone with a time machine?
You do know that Zionism is over, right? It won? Like women's suffrage in the US? It set out to create the state of Israel, and such a state was, in fact, created. And unlike women's sufferance, there's not actually any way to 'repeal' it, so there's no conceivable policy that 'anti-Zionists' would have, except possible attempting to convince the state of Israel to close up shop. (Something that literally has never happened in the entire history of nations.)
Or are you using 'anti-Zionist' to mean 'people who want Israel conquered', which a) is rather goofy interpretation of Zionist, and b) a rather large slur on pretty much everyone who criticizes Israel. Most of the people who criticize Israel are criticizing _the actions of Israel_, not wishing that, for some completely unknown reason, that Israel would go away.
"
No law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
You know, the Confederate Constitution seems rather extremely _anti_-state's rights to me.
On “Charging Against a Tide”
Why are they classifying their felonies with numbers _and_ letters, anyway? Turning a 'Class D' into a 'Level 7'. Huh? Is that better or worse?
In fact, is a Class D better or worse than a Class C? Is a Level 7 better or worse than a Level 8? What happens if they want to add a level...do they create Level 5.2, or do they move all crimes down? Or up? Or are the levels in order _at all_?
Why use codes at all? This isn't some frickin computer program where you have to index things. Classify them as 'Severe' and 'Heavy' and 'Moderate' and 'Light' or whatever.
Or, actually, there already _are_ codes in the law...namely, what part of the law it is. Make them 23.3.4 Felonies or whatever.
On “Thank You Mr. Snowden, Also You Are a Coward and a Scoundrel”
We need a non-stupid Supreme Court ruling, and if they won't do it we need a constitutional amendment, to create the principle: If someone sues in court saying the government is doing something to them in secret, the government _must_ admit to them whether or not they're doing that.
The entire premise of 'secretly' wiretapping people and whatnot is 'so they don't know they're being watched', which means it's complete nonsense the government can refuse to tell people _who have already figured it out and sued them over it_.
"
The frustrating part to guys like me are that it takes this event for people to actually start talking about it. We should have been talking about this in 2002.
We did talk about it in 2002. The country as a whole had a collective freakout about it when it was invented in 2002, when it was called 'Total Information Awareness', and we suspended that program in 2003. So the NSA just did it in secret instead.
Saying we 'should have talked about it' is silly. We did, we decided against it, and then the fucking government did it anyway.
The real question is why the fuck do we allow the government to operate any programs at all without our knowledge?
There should be no secret programs, and no secret laws, and no secret interpretations of the law. Period. (Secret _actions_, fine, although almost all of those should be immediately declassified when finished.)
On “The Best Video Game Ever: “Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines””
I've never played Fallout and Fallout 2, but Fallout 3 was an amazing RPG, and Fallout New Vegas took that and actually added three or four legitimate different player paths.
I think, frankly, if comparing RPGs it's somewhat wrong-headed to compare a wide-open one and a linear one. There are always going to be advantages and disadvantages of each.
Of course, this Symposium attempts to compare _all_ video games to each other, which is completely crazy, and completely pointless,, as the best video game of all time is clearly Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle.
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And the thing is, one of the boss fights _isn't even a boss fight_. It's fighting the second in command!
You should have the option of somehow sneaking past that, or convincing him to switch sides, and attacking the real boss (Who is a wimp) or just avoiding him also and doing something with the McGuffin. (Use it, throw it out a window, whatever.)
Likewise, it would have been really neat if you'd been able to figure out what _actually_ was going on before the end. I'm not saying that it should have been obvious, or something that players would figure out the first time, but it would have been cool to just hand the guy the thing and say 'I'm out, do whatever you want', and walk away laughing.
However, the _other_ boss...the way the game was setup, that fight was fairly unavoidable. You sorta did have to inflict a lot of damage, that was the point. But there could have been other ways to accomplish that goal. (For example, aimed another supernatural creature at them.)
I hated that boss fight, BTW, because the last time I played, I specialized in _unarmed_ combat. That was how I was playing the entire damn game, punching people in the face, and I wasn't about to change at that point.
It took _forever_.
And earlier I had to use guns with the guys guarding the keys to make that portal thing. It didn't matter how buffed I was, I wasn't making it down those corridors without getting shot to death.
On “The Pick-Up Apologist: Kickstarter, Reddit, The Awl, and The Real Problem With Seduction Culture”
Or, to put it another way, PUA books are as close to promoting rape culture as humanly possible without actually promoting committing rape. Usually. Although sometimes that line is very _very_ thin.
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Hey, look, it's the guy who didn't bother to read the comments.
If you don’t think it’s rape, then…you aren’t being raped.
Because there are absolutely no circumstances where people might be raped and yet might not understand that's what happened to them. For the most obvious example, being unconscious.
And you're about to assert that isn't part of PUA culture...when there are explicit quotes from PUA books having to point out not to do that. When you have to actually _tell_ people that 'hypnotizing her is okay, but make sure she stays awake, or you could be facing a rape charge'...yeah, that's a problem. (And I like the fact the problem isn't that it is _is_ rape, the problem is you might be _charged_ with rape, but check your local laws!)
And I know in asshat world (I am assuming you are Asshattian, probably a native from the providence of Privilege by your accent.) there's no such thing as manipulating people, and that everyone is fully functional at all times and no one can ever be duped into anything and everyone deserves everything they don't manage to overcome (Until, of course, it happens to _you_, at which point you will scream bloody-murder), but most of us are smart enough to know damaging people's self-esteem to get them to have sex with you is, at the least, _unethical and something to discourage_, if not actually 'rape'.
More to the point, you have completely failed to notice that almost no one here (Well, Kimmi, but Kimmi is a troll) is calling everything PUA do 'rape'.
We are saying the PUA culture is a horrible misogynist toxin, a blight on society, promoted by complete asshats, which treat's women's vaginas as some sort of goal to be won, and is full of advice that is appears to lead _very close_ to rape. If it's okay to cheat and lie and manipulate to 'win a vagina' for the night, it's hard to see why it's unacceptable to sometimes just sorta take one. It's like cheating at solitaire...who does it hurt? (Besides the raped woman, but the entire point of this is near sociopathy towards women and failing to see them as actual people at all.)
Men may, indeed, have to take that last step themselves, the books _usually_ stop short of that, but that's still a horrible place for a culture to take people to, and that culture deserves to be stamped on as hard as possible.
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In fact, 'touching' would probably be an entire chapter in the hypothetical book other people were talking about of non-asshat dating advice.
This is why I somewhat lament the current lack of two-person dancing. Frankly, the entire premise of that was to get two people to touch each other and stand really close for several minutes, with the option of staring into each other's eyes.
Instead, everyone just sorta flails around, sometimes touching, but usually by accident, and in ways that are more jokingly sexual than romantic. Or does line dancing. I have no problem with either of those, but they aren't very good 'Can we move this relationship to a physical level?' indicators.
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What I gathered was that it was a combination of basic advice coupled with a few novelties that may or may not work, packaged and branded by a bunch of weirdos promising sex. Reading here, it seems that it has gone in some really new and weird directions.
It's not just the pickup techniques, which indeed get very disturbing the farther and farther you go. The surface ones, the ones they always lead with telling others about, are fine.
It's the emotional manipulation and the trust-abusey controlling stuff that is the problem, and the advice just keeps getting weirder and weirder and a little rapey at the end.
But that's not really the problem. The problem is more the entire culture of constantly churning through women. Their entire set of tactics is designed to make women off-balance enough that the woman will sleep with them, with absolutely no _attempt_ to dating the women. (Which, as I said earlier, would be fine if that was actually the _expectation_ of the relationship. It's usually not.)
The entire culture is to see women as prizes...hell, not even that. You _keep_ a prize. These are like frickin video game unlocks. I compared it to high school above, but that's actually unfair to male highschoolers. If _they_ find a woman willing to have sex with them, they keep her.
<not an actual advance in equality>'Hey, what if instead of seeing women as possessions to be fought over and won and controlled after we won them, we saw them as _disposable_ single-use possessions? They're not like a car, they're like a Kleenex!'</not an actual advance in equality>
And, like I said, it's sad, because there is a lot of good advice in those books to actually interact with women for men who aren't very good at it. It's sorta like if, instead of 'How to survive in the wilderness' books, we instead had a bunch of 'How to rob a bank and flee from justice into the wilderness' books.
On “Gooses and Ganders”
No one here has mentioned the fact that the reason everyone _claimed_ it was about conservative is because Issa _specifically_ told the inspector general's office to investigate _just_ claims that conservative groups were targeted.
In other words, this wasn't Issa deciding to selectively reading something. This was Issa deliberately _creating_ something that was inherently a lie, and managing to lie about it for months.
On “The Pick-Up Apologist: Kickstarter, Reddit, The Awl, and The Real Problem With Seduction Culture”
It seems roughly akin to the mostly imaginary world portrayed in various movies, where car thiefdom is portrayed by a bunch of really cool guys who steal really cool cars, drive around with them for ten minutes in high speed chases, then abandon them.
That...is not a reasonable model of car ownership. It's not even a reasonable model of car _theft_. And it's being done by people who brag they couldn't possibly afford such cars...because talking about how poor you are makes you...awesomer?
It's so many level of stupid.
Look, I'm not condoning manipulation of women, but, men, if you do have some magical way to do that, and your overwhelming priority is to have sex (Which is rather pathetic), then, uh, find a reasonable attractive one and manipulate her into a 'relationship' where you don't have to do anything, and she isn't allow to complain when you cheat. Then move on when you get bored, or, hell, don't even 'move on', just start sleeping with other women until she _finally_ ditches you. That is what a _sane_ immoral person would do...and, in fact, a lot of them _do_. What I just described is, in fact, the traditional asshole behavior of manipulative men.
PUAs, OTOH, seem to think it's reasonable to have to keep refinding women. It's like the perfect combination of immoral _and_ stupid, and more harmful to women, and, like I said, only makes sense if there's some sort of psychological problem going on in those people's head, because it's actually much more work for much riskier payoff.
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Yeah, I used to think the same way as you, because there is a thin veneer of useful advice in those books, and the people defending them always lead with it. 'We just tell men to be self-confident! We tell them not to pin their hopes on one women, to just ask and move on if she says no, don't dwell on it!'
Yeah, they do teach that, and that is, generally, fine. And they _also_ tell men to do a lot of other shit. A lot of very horrible stuff.
And it's not just the rapey stuff that's horrible. The entire premise seems to be that women choose to have sex with men who are higher status than them...so the way to 'win' is to _lower their perception of their status_ via emotional manipulation.
While this would be somewhat problematic in an ideal world, it's even more problematic in a world where women have been clawing their way up for equal status for a century and aren't actually there, and are constantly subject to body-image nonsense from advertising, and in generally tend to _already have_ a lot of self-esteem issues directly caused by men.
PUA comes off rather like a book that encourages employers to try to convince black people to work for less wages by convincing the black person they are generally stupider than the white people are, so should accept less pay. It would be problematic _without_ any history. With history, it's a lot worse.
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Are we sure that the 40 year old who is constantly looking for a new 25 year old to bang is a huge step up from a PUA?
Actually...yes. If that was without any context.
PUAs behave in blatantly manipulative ways, and tend to impact a _lot_ more women. And not just the women who say yes. They wander around manipulating women until one of them says yes, but all the other women that he decided to randomly insult or whatever in an attempt to find one it worked on also exist. Seriously, I read about some of these 'tricks', and, yes, I find it amazing women 'fall for it' and decide this person is someone to have sex with, but, OTOH, I can't imagine people (Of whatever gender) coming up to me and saying some of that stuff and me not being _effected_ emotionally. And I'm not even a women, who are constantly peppered with absurd body image nonsense.
Likewise, they tend to do this _constantly_, whereas a '40 year old who is constantly looking for a new 25 year old to bang' is probably not actually 'constantly' doing anything. Most non-PUA men _keep women willing to have sex with them_, at least until they're bored. Whereas the entire premise of a PUA is repeated one-night stands. Even if the 40 year-olds are only keeping each 25 year old a month, that's fraction of the women that PUAs churn through.
More to the point...you seem to be assuming that there's something wrong with a 40 year-old man asking out a 25 year-old women. Now, yes, being older does mean he _can_ be more manipulative or be better at deception or all sorts of things that people shouldn't be in a relationship...OTOH, he can't very well be worse than a 'PUA', which the entire _premise_ is to trick women into sleeping with them.
Now, of course, WRT to _mentoring_ others, I have no idea. Just because they're better than PUAs doesn't mean they should be _mentoring_ people.
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It's like we're in backwards world: Guys, rise above your instinctual desire to attempt to impress women with muscles, and cars shaped like penises, and guns shaped like penises, and penises shaped like penises, in an attempt to win them into your bed! Instead, attempt to impress...other men! By which women you won! (Why? Are you trying to prove to those other men that _you're_ the alpha sex God around here, and those guys should...all be sleeping with you? Turning their women over to you? WTH is this going?)
I mean, there's men operating in so-called 'caveman' mode, whose goal is to claim and keep as many women as possible, and there's civilized mode, which is for us to treat them as equals and find one of them that we like and spend our life with them...and then there's PUA mode, which is, uh, collect and discard them all, like they're damn Pokemon or something, and you want to earn all the fucking badges. (Note: I do not actually know how Pokemon works.)
I mean, hell, they aren't even doing the 'I possess a hot woman' correctly. The way to impress other men is to _walk around with one on your arm_, with the implication you own this one and can have sex with it any time you want (Note: None of those absurdly sexist opinions are mine.) PUA people manage to screw that up, by 'winning' hot women, walking out of the bar with them, and then _never showing them off_ to make other men jealous, or keeping contact with them to hopefully have more sex.
It's like 'Guys, you apparently don't even understand how sexism is supposed to work. If women are property, you don't just _throw them away for no reason_. You _at least_ wait until you're tired of them, and perhaps keep one or two used ones as spares. If you have a nice looking one, you show other guys you have it, and wear it around town for a bit. You are managing to fail at being misogynistic asshats.'
It is completely baffling from top to bottom, and I suspect there's some sort of serious mental pathology going on here.
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When men see women as merely the provider of sex, there are two destructive ways to go about dating:
1) Act like they own the woman, and they _deserve_ to have a date with her that ends in sex. This is, obviously, very bad.
2) Act like they're asking for a _favor_. It's like asking to borrow someone's car. 'Hey, can I borrow your vagina for a bit?'
#2 is less assholey entitled quasi-rapish behavior, it at least assigned the woman agency over her body.
But it's still _entirely the wrong way_ to ask someone out.
The entire premise of dating is that both parties will enjoy every aspect of a date. (At least at first. Later on in a relationship there is obviously more compromise, but if you start off that way you're doing it wrong.) Men, you have a mutually beneficial plan that you have proposed, that both of you should enjoy. Ask her out with _that_ thought in mind.
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I find it suspicious that this is in the wrong place, it supposed to be a reply to Chris above.
I'm starting to think _even my computer can't hear me_. (And I know the microphone volume is turned up on it.)
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I try that, but no one ever answers back. I'm starting to think the people on TV can't hear me at all, but can't figure out how to set the microphone volume.
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Yeah, I've never really understood any of that.
I understand wanting to have _sex_, of course. But what continually baffles me is the idea that this is a numbers game, based not on the amount of sex, but on the amount and 'hotness' of women.
Look, there are clearly women out there that will have sex and not 'require' any sort of relationship, if that's the sticking point. I mean, PUA culture requires those women to exist, so I shall presume they do.
So why not just find _one_ of those women, and come to an arrangement? Wouldn't that be, I dunno, _easier_ than hitting on twenty women a night before finding one willing to come home with you? Am I missing something?
Likewise, and I might be spilling some guy secrets here: While how hot a woman is interesting...once they're actually having sex with you, it's not _incredibly_ important.
If we take the entire premise of PUA as true (And I'm not actually sure PUA actually _does_ work.) than, well, the entire premise is rather stupid. Either there are women out there willing to randomly hook up with men outside of a relationship (In which case, _keep their damn phone numbers_ if you want casual sex, you idiots.) or there are not, and the entire thing is a lie.
I rather suspect the entire thing is a complete myth, created (accidentally or on purpose) by a few super-hot, super-suave asshole guys who couldn't understand why other guys didn't have women falling over them, so decided to give 'advice', and didn't realize that 99% of it was that they looked like Tom Cruise and trolled pickup bars, and it doesn't actually work anywhere else and super-charisma is not something that can be learned.
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Setting out with the goal of having sex with someone is idiotic for anyone who’s out of high school.
This is probably a little harsh. I don't actually care what consenting adults do. If there's some sort of place when men hook up with women and that's the point of the place, whatever.
Let me rephrase:
Setting out with the goal of _convincing_ a stranger, who normally would not be interested in you, into have sex with you is idiotic for anyone who’s out of high school. (Actually, it's idiotic there, also. It's just understandable.)
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The sad thing is, there probably is an actual market out there of guys who need advice how to meet women, and how to approach them. It can be somewhat scary for certain kinds of men without a lot of experience to just walk up to unknown women and start interacting with them, and there's a _lot_ of real advice that could be useful...not only be confident, but also pay attention to what they want to talk about, etc.
And all that advice is buried in what are basically books for manipulative asshats.
As for the self-confidence thing: Men, don't think you're _better_ than a woman so she should go out with you. But you can't be apologetic, either. Ask her out like you're buying something (1)...you're setting up an exchange you both benefit from. You think you'll have a good time going out with her, and you think she'll have a good time going out with you. You aren't asking for a _favor_, you're proposing a mutually beneficial exchange of date that you will both enjoy. (You think. She might disagree.)
I wish at some point in society we'd start having books that explained how to date someone a year, all the way from asking them out, to figuring out if she's(2) someone you'd actually want to keep dating, to a stable relationship, to even moving in together, instead of how 'to have sex with them'. Setting out with the goal of having sex with someone is idiotic for anyone who's out of high school.
1) No one ever quote that out of context. ;)
2) Actually, these books could _almost_ be gender neutral. There's probably slightly different advice for men and women at the start, they tend to key off different things but all the advice would be generally the same. And for all I know these books exist, but I've never seen them or ads for them, whereas I see people talking about PUA books all the time.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.