Vice: The Ecstatically Wretched

Vice, again.  This time, "I INTERVIEWED FOUR WOMEN WHO REJECTED ME TO FIND OUT WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME."

[I]t’s probably my complete lack of ability to read certain basic social cues. Or maybe it’s the fact that I’m a short, gawky nerd. Or maybe it’s because I lived at my parents’ house until three months ago and asking your friend to let you borrow his apartment to watch Being Elmo with an aspiring model who clearly isn’t interested in you is pathetic. Who knows?  

Good Lord, what is wrong with this generation?  Either they're preening, fake-it-till-you-make-yourself-impervious egomaniacs or they're offering you a whip so you can punish them.

Take a look at reddit's /cringepics or /standup.  The amateur comedians on the latter are a lot like this article:  "Why did the chicken cross the road?  To eat me after I hit on a girl because I'M A WORM!"

Well, anything for attention, I guess.

Vice: Interview with "Pink Mass" Irritator Lucien Greaves

Vice is about ten percent interesting journalism, ninety percent narcisstic outrage creation.  This article, with Satanic Temple member Lucien Greaves (née Li'l Doug Mesner), is worth a read.

Instead, when we performed our Pink Mass at the grave of the mother of the Westboro Baptist Church’s founder, Fred Phelps, we were playing upon his own ludicrous superstitious fears. Ironically, the Church of Satan has never fully renounced supernaturalism, as we have.

My basic problem with Satanists is that they are always talking about how they don't worship Satan.  Satanism, from the LaVey seed, has always been a (nuanced) Social Darwinist, Objectivist, pleasure-focused philosophy.  Attaching Satan to the name not only confuses the issue but is a particularly cynical piece of marketing.  The black outfits, pentagrams and goat heads are all just logos.  Effective, I suppose, but always more important than their message.

The Pink Mass is of a piece with with the Texas, pro-abortion "Hail Satan" chant a few weeks back.  These people hate their enemy, middle-class Americans, so much that they're willing to, well, pledge allegiance to the Prince of Lies, just to piss them off.  I'd love to see these smirking idiots, laughing at their brave performance as the demon they summoned rises above them, seconds from eating their souls.  The biggest trick the Devil ever pulled, and all that.

Dougie--I mean, Mr. Greaves, and I do share a common interest:

In 2009, I went to a “Ritual Abuse/Mind-Control” conference in Connecticut where I listened to “experts” elaborate upon their beliefs in Satanic Ritual crimes. I thought they would be a fringe grouping of delusional people holding firmly to incredible beliefs, hurting nobody but themselves. What I found instead was a twisted subculture of licensed therapists, and their clients, who subscribe to a pseudoscientific belief in “dissociative amnesia”: The theory that some events—particularly sexual abuse—can be so uniquely traumatic that the conscious mind cannot comprehend it, and thus those memories are “repressed.”

I had quite a run researching this subject, fueled entirely by incredulity.  Some of the "memories" are beyond implausible.  It's hard to believe that the same mayor that fumfers through a city council meeting is an evil mastermind who has engineered a massive baby-sacrificing ring as well as completely obscuring it.  The people portrayed in these recovered memories are nothing like any person I've ever met.

Ace Gets Hot

Ace got hot last night:

The primary problem with the so-called elites is that they are not elite, and they are neither wise, nor intelligent, nor educated, nor enlightened, nor superior in any fashion save two, accident of circumstance and elevated self-regard.

 I agree.  We've been so indoctrinated about the triumph of democracy that we forget that, going back a thousand years before the last century, the aristocracy was trained to lead.  Noblesse oblige was the motto; the elites had a duty to those they they lead.

Were those privileges abused?  Of course.  Were some aristocrats ill-suited for their roles?  Naturally.  But not as many as we'd like to think.  And they all operated within a moral frame that told them what they should be doing, even if they weren't.

Somewhere on the Web there's a quote that every government turns into an oligarchy.  Usually, the elite is centered around power or money.  In our country, it seems that the elite is defined by their credentials.  The right schools, the right NGOs and community activist groups.  And everyone who's had a real job knows that the educated expert is always the one who doesn't know anything.

Team Squiggle

It’s remarkable how, in a mere twenty years, we’ve gotten to be a more transparent society.  Those secrets that were only whispered and then disbelieved are now captured for eternity and stored in the servers of YouTube.

Such is it with the Wal-Mart cheer, described by Dangerous Minds as the “Squiggly.”  In fact, I knew it as the “Squiggle,” back in 1994 when I briefly worked for the beast.

For those not inclined to visit the site for fear of being clobbered by Richard Metzger’s triumphalist, cranked-to-eleven Democrazy rants, a brief description is in order.  When Wal-Mart has employee meetings, they usually end with a cheer.  Seven lowly staff members (and occasionally a good-spirited manager) take to the front.  The crowd begins clapping in rhythm.  The first employee calls out, “Give me a ‘W!’” and the shouts the letter back.  The second follows with, “Give me an ‘A!’”

The Women in Sex Scandals are Barely Remembered

From Salon:

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/24/for_powerful_men_redemption_is_easy/

Don’t let the URL fool you.  The headline is:  “The women in sex scandals are rarely forgiven”

Here’s the telling graf:

Monica Lewinsky has gotten by but she remains the butt of jokes. Ashley Dupré, one of the women Spitzer cheated with, remains a punch line and struggles to make ends meet. Her dreams of becoming famous are mocked while Spitzer’s ambitions are lauded at least enough for him to believe he has a shot at running for public office. Paula Broadwell has been painted as crazy and clingy while Petraeus — well, he’s a powerful man.

Why is it telling?  Because it’s the only paragraph in the whole piece that mentions these women as separate from their roles as illicit sex partners.   Everything else is either a summary of the scandals or the history of the male politicians involved.  Even writer Roxane Gay can’t get away from the ugly fact that these men are more important than the women.

Bill Clinton is “still one of the most revered political figures of our age” because he was President of the United States.  Monica Lewinsky was an intern who gave him oral sex.  Who’s more deserving of public attention?  It takes a lot to become President, or Governor of a state or the head of a government agency.  It doesn’t take much more than saying “Yes” to have an affair.

General Patraeus’ lover Paula Broadwell was in a different situation than the human stress-relievers of the graf; what she did was actually worse, at least for her employers.  By sleeping with the subject of her biography, Broadwell raised concerns about her professional behavior.  If she had an affair with one of Patraeus’ assistants or even her co-writer, the situation would have been viewed much differently. It’s not sleeping with a Soviet spy, of course, but it’s on the spectrum.

Also, notice the terms “redemption” and “forgiven” in the headlines.  Note also that nothing of the sort is addressed in the article.  Gay seems to think that because these men haven’t been abandoned on an ice floe they’ve been told, “All is forgiven.”  The only reason Eliot Spitzer’s peccadilloes are Page 2 news is because Anthony Weiner’s are on page one.  Patraeus has been shunted to positions that are out of the public eye and peripheral to public policy; a big step down from running the CIA.  And all of these men have an asterisk in their CVs:  caught in a sex scandal.  They haven’t been redeemed; they’ve been tagged and released to their natural habitat.

Gay can’t be bothered to find out what Lewinsky is doing these days. Instead, she wants us to be ashamed that a woman who was paraded as the nation’s Head Intern, for well over a year, can still be a punchline when referencing blowjobs.  I hadn’t gotten the impression that Broadwell was “crazy and clingy,” but then, I don’t pay a lot of attention to those details.  Finally, Ms. Gay, have you considered that prostitution might not be the most successful way to become famous and that one who believes so should be mocked?

Small Business: Run by Dummies?

Captain Capitalism tells us “Most Small Business Owners are Dumb as Hell:”

Another reason for the spectacular failure of small businesses is their owners truly and honestly believe accounting is optional.  THat's the "hard stuff" and they literally have no idea how much they're making or losing.  All one has to do is watch Restaurant IMpossible where the host invariably asks the bloated sows about their "P&L" and they don't even know what that is.  Again, these are lazy, dumb people who started the business for "fun."  Not profit.  And since accounting isn't "fun" they don't do it.

I suppose that when we talk about being proponents of “small businesses” we’re really talking about businesses smaller than, say, Wal-Mart or GM.  Those are the kind that are tested by the market, employ more than a handful of people and don’t hold more than 50% of the market share.  These are useful for a dynamic society.  In contrast, the corporate behemoths can change the law to suit their needs.  The boutique businesses, as Cappy notes, tend to change the rules of business out of their own convenience.  

Promoting a maximum of economic flexibility is best but the law of averages still holds true.  We should be promoting small businesses, even if most of them are run half-assed by idiots.  The market should take care of those fairly quickly.

My girl tells me repeatedly to get out of the small-business business.  The firm is only as good as the guy who’s running it and, because of that, is subject to personality defects.

I worked with one man who was very intelligent but was also a bit of a loon.  His primary problem was ADD and a tendency towards hoarding.  The latter was mitigated by the fact that he owned a four-story warehouse, so all his junk got shoved to one corner or another.  His office was so strewn with stuff that to vandalize it one would have to clean it up first.

He helped me to understand that one way of managing ADD is what I call “taking the long way.”  Folks with unmanaged ADD are really slaves to their brains.  When their brains tell them that something is really interesting, they can’t let go.  When their brains tell them that something is boring, they can’t get started.  So, sometimes, to do things that must be done, they accomplish the tasks by taking a lot more steps than are necessary.  Instead of adding 2 plus 2 to get 4, they add 1 plus 1, plus 1 plus 1.  Same result, more steps, but each of those steps is more mentally manageable than the easy way.

Fine for him, if that gets the job done.  But being in charge of his own business, everyone had to go through the exact same steps as he would or he would throw a fit.  

This kind of system attracts the wrong kind of employees, and this problem is the real failure of most functioning small businesses.  It becomes clear that one’s job isn’t performing the tasks necessary; it’s satisfying the boss, whether it’s practical or not.  As time goes on, no employee wants to make a decision unless they are sure that’s what the boss would decide, and every decision gets deferred to the boss.  If the business is at all successful, eventually the number of decisions become too great for one CEO and he either has to restructure or come up with some semi-functional but non-productive ways of handling the burden.

Turning Moms into Feminists--80s-Style

Last week’s childbirth class brought me a ghost from the past I’d forgotten.  I met an 80s-style maternal feminist.

The class was about breast feeding.  The woman was monomaniacal about the subject.  Although everyone in the class planned on breastfeeding, she sold it as if we were all dead-set against it.  She had the partners introduce ourselves with, “I know XXXX will be a terrific mother because...”  She all but suggested that we follow the world-wide (read, third world) average length of breastfeeding of four-and-a-half years.  She gave a gift to one husband who talked about how his wife was “beautiful, inside and out” and one to a woman who she believed was all alone in the world, though she tried to explain that her husband was working. She gave us cards with letters on them, telling us to think of a breastfeeding-related word that started with that letter, so that she could riff on the subject.  She asked the teen with her mother if “Dad was in the picture.”  All while being warm, empathetic and implacable.

The best reference I can come up with is the cartoon mother from Pink Floyd’s The Wall (God help me).  I got the impression that one could dispute her, whether passionately, logically or from authority, and it would make no difference in what she did and less in what she believed.  She would “listen” to you, “hear” what you’re saying, “understand” how you feel and brush aside your arguments.  The women in the room took an instant dislike to her.  Everyone in the room was a child in her eyes.

The authoritarianism was her own personality flaw.  Her frame, though, was very interesting to me, even as I was uncomfortable.  It brought back memories of the maternal feminism that was part of the atmosphere in the 80s.

The story as I’ve pieced it together was that the feminism of the 70s was a bit of a washout.  It went too fast, too soon.  From the ERA to Susan Brownmiller* to Andrea Dworkin, the aim of the movement was to radically alter life on the ground for the average man and woman.  The ERA seemed to be the breaking point, being rejected by Jane Housewife for reducing traditional female privilege.  I remember the big sticking point being being the elimination of alimony, since women and men were now to be equally capable of supporting themselves and a family.  Back then, women wanted to keep their husbands and admitted that they didn’t want to go to a job.

Maternal feminism was the reaction to the failure and, man, we were soaking in it.  Taking the slogan “The personal is political” to be a description of a process, feminism taught women that their emotional needs should be everyone’s top priority.  Candles, backrubs and “communication” were the order of the day.  Taking a cue from the New Age movement that ran parallel to rad-fem, we started hearing about feminine earth-mother power, goddesses and the sacred mystique of childbirth.  Not to mention that most ridiculous of phrases, “womb envy.”  Basically, “Hooray for what women do!,” with an air of superiority and mumbo-jumbo.

As I started this piece, my original question was going to be, “What happened to it?,” but as I write, I realize that it never disappeared.  Maternal feminism became as unremarkable as a wall.  Sure, it’s changed a little; the personal did become political.  Now women can list all the insensitive things their husband did and the catalog will hold weight in divorce court.  The cult of self-esteem is a cottage industry.  Custody is built around the mystical connection between mother and child.  Women’s feelings are paramount in every situation.

Most importantly, the entirety of beta-formation is built around the message of maternal feminism.  Women are gentle and kind, women are precious, women should be idolized and served.  Our instructor quizzed the nineteen-year-old boy, doing his best to “man up” and be a dad, as to what Dad should be doing while Mom is breastfeeding.  “Uh, rubbing her feet?,” he stammered.

“Ooh!  I like that!  You get a present!”

*Originally read "Catherine Brownmiller" in error