Despotism Does Not Scale

"Scrambled eggs what he says
He accuses me of treachery
Got the nine lies, got the wide eyes
Got a failing grade in chemistry"

 

Rasputina - The Mayor

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"It was some time before he could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor. How that there had been a revolutionary war,—that the country had thrown off the yoke of old England,—and that, instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States. Rip, in fact, was no politician; the changes of states and empires made but little impression on him; but there was one species of despotism under which he had long groaned, and that was—petticoat government. Happily that was at an end; he had got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony, and could go in and out whenever he pleased, without dreading the tyranny of Dame Van Winkle."

 

Washington Irving - Rip van Winkle

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I feel somehow obligated to speak on today's election here in the States before the results are in, as it certainly feels like one of those historic moments right before the purges ramp up and people like me get disappeared. Problem: after a decade of nonstop media obsession, I would rather talk about anything, anything other than Donald Trump! Come on, wouldn't you rather hear about my bowel movements? See, I found this half-jar of giardiniera in the fridge that I thought was still good, and, well, the results expressed both voluminously and incons-

- no,wait, we really should probably hit the politics angle.

I haven't bothered with electioneering here not only because I... just don't... and not only because of the sparse handful of you who'll read this most live outside the U.S., or because of my general opinion that humans are degenerate apes that've proven incapable of rational self-determination and so countries deserve to reap the fruits of their collective stupidity (hi Britain, how's your "independence day" coming along? shut up; don't care) but because whichever party wins will inevitably subject me to some manner or another of bigoted populist pandering witch-hunt. Matters little whether because I'm born the wrong sex or skin color or because I speak with an accent and don't pay lip-service to their magic sky-daddy, or because I'm unwilling to deny evolution or sexual dimorphism or whichever brand of science denialism both sides are championing now.

A Rip awakened from before Y2K would certainly have some adjusting to do. The once infamously apathetic American voter may appear more politically engaged now, but while election turnout has markedly risen since I was in school from ~52% to ~66% it's more noticeably produced the rampant activism and political violence and rioting we've been seeing from fanatical fringes. And, interestingly, the good cop / bad cop game doesn't seem to have ended. The entire system simply regressed further and further and ever further into reactionary dictatorship. The "liberal" wing now perpetually threatens half the population with being fired/jailed without evidence as born criminals and promotes the same authoritarian speech policing once criticized in conservatives, only with "under god" replaced with forcing you to call narcissistic twits by the royal "they" while the "conservatives" have devolved into some breed of mindlessly Luddite rampaging caveman.

 

So really, the choice has once again been the same refuge in the lesser evil it's always been (within my lifespan at least) not to improve anything but to slow down the pace of the multibillionnaires chopping the place up to sell it off for parts to each other. Except for the odd quirk that the Republicans, ostensibly facetiously once party of small government, have switched to openly pushing to enthrone their golden shower boy as a theocratic emperor. The many voices raised in consternation at how America could have reached this point seem to miss a detail long obvious to me as a damn dirty furriner, and which I've addressed with regard to religion: it was always there. Theocracy and authoritarianism dragged the country down from the very beginning. That starry-eyed notion of the pilgrims/puritans sailing from merry olde England FOR FREEEDOOOOMM! ignores the basic observation that the "freedom" they sought was to impose their own totalist superstitious dogma upon a society they could isolate from mainstream European culture and control with an iron fist. Americans were saved from their own stupidity by an overarching Federal leadership imposing limits on their power to abuse each other (and whose ideas, like it or not, mostly came from French salons) but that diseased fetish for theocratic absolutism has lingered two and a half centuries in every last Podunk and every last backwoods hick sect.

Depressing thought, neh?

Here's a vacation picture to make you feel better:

"let the bird of loudest lay / on the sole Arabian tree / herald sad and trumpet be"

... okay, so I'm not great at making people feel better.

That tree's not really in Arabia, but in southern Italy. I'd've posted pictures of the waterfront or the statue of Saint Frankie preaching to the birds, but those are readily found online so instead I'm platforming that local. I liked Sorrento, despite spending only one night there. Instead of a gaudy tourist trap crawling with grifters it imparted the cleaner, purposeful, more functional feel of a working town which just happens to have a dramatic history and tourist-friendly amenities. While I snapped a few shots of Sorrento's seafront and hotels, I realized only after downloading everything that among the literally thousands of such snaps, and despite having spent several nights there, I had no such pictures of Naples. It's not worth picturing. Of Napoli's museums and historic sites? Oh, my, yes, hundreds upon hundreds, and it's just too much to take in. But of the town itself? A couple of shots from atop Vesuvius, far enough away that you can't see (most of) the grime.

Want a one-shot impression? We were standing in line for taxis in front of its central train station. The wind kicked up, prompting the whole crowd to hold our breaths and shield our faces not merely from cigarette-laced dust but from a wave of dirty napkins, straws, paper bags and polyethylene in a myriad configurations.

 

And it's hardly the only such problem. It's hard to miss the half-renovated, half-abandoned buildings, the cracked and water-holed sidewalks splashed with last night's urine and beer limoncello vomit, the end-to-end kilometers of gang graffiti, the obviously unprepared tour van driver who's just as obviously somebody's cousin, the semi-legal Africans sleeping on mattresses out in the streets behind your four-star hotel with rooms the size of bed-plus-20cm and missing bathroom door, etc. This is all in the historic town center mind you; this is the lavish, gussied-up facade Napoli puts on for the whole world! You might protest this is a poor town, but why is it poor? Campania as a region pulls in some of the world's heaviest tourist trade. From what we paid and guides' comments, Pompei, by itself, can rake in half or even a million dollars on a good summer day in admission fees alone. Tack on room&board, transportation, tchotchkes, endless other attractions and every other tourist tax you can think of... yet somehow the city still looks like an East-European slum after the fall of communism. Where does all the money go?

The garbage problem at least is well-documented, and blamed on organized crime. Here's the thing though: Sorrento is also visible from Vesuvius, and is in fact contiguous enough to be considered an outlying suburb of the greater Neapolitan metropolitan area. So I'm having some trouble thinking it's not subject to the same criminal temptations. I guess it all depends on the quality of local mafioso you're lucky enough to get running your life.

 

The last decades have seen an increased trend in separatism, be it Brexit, Catalonia or Texans always running their mouths about seceding. The pretext is always some naive jabber about FRREEEDOOOOMS! and many in the U.S. have been half-joking about an official split between red and blue states. But I got news fer ya, pilgrim. That impulse has nothing to do with freedom and everything with the endless numbers of would-be authoritarians eager to fence off their own little fiefdoms, all the pastors and bishops swearing boy scouts and altar boys to silence, all the corporate autocrats eager to deregulate until their money can buy and sell you, each god-kings unto themselves. Deliverance is no egalitarian wonderland. A federal government or a world government is no more inherently oppressive than a slaver state or a mafia political machine or the boss of a factory town or a street gang shaking you down or a mother locking her children in the closet... except that it represents cooperation among the underclass. The rich never have trouble cooperating. The East India Company enriched plenty of Oriental and Occidental mafiosi. Naples' Camorra shift drugs, forged currency and violent force from South America to Russia to Africa to Iraq. Brexit, the anti-immigration separatist measure, actually increased British immigration, especially illegally and from third-world countries. If the Federal Trade Commission fails, Jeff Bezos will still have no problems trading federally. He just won't be getting taxed for it even to the little extent he is now. But he'll still be taxing you with every mark-up.

The absence or impotence of a central government merely leaves your fate to governance by your town's most cut-throat tyrants, petty tin-pot despots who can and will rob you, kill you, whore your ass out or choke you with garbage at their own whims.

Talk about the last king

During my recent Uzbek campaign in Europa Universalis 4, England managed to subsume the isles entirely into Britain...

... only for "Scotland" to pop up again in Polynesia. Weird from a game flow perspective, but also... just picture the demographics! I'm just sayin' if yer gonna wear kilts that might be a better location for it.

De-Regenerate

I'm gonna crash I'm gonna crash I'm gonna trash I'm gonna crash I always crash, too little scratch gonna crash too little, scratch your face itches light bright at the height of your fears of impending arrears six hours seven four three gonna crash two three gonna ate it all and left no gnossympathetik'elover debt piles all night crash out of bed 'ate-in your sleep thinner than yesterday light saving ours or yours lost the track lost the crack in the wall sole escape gotta drag yourself out of the hole you've dug drugged on your own disown it's not me its the fangs ingrown tearing in tattooed in reverse curse the day two was not enough three was not enough to get away four was insufficient for was insufficient by the time you were five you were insufficient six is enough for once but not for every once on the shelf disrespected keep it on display this play on weirds this clay of wyrds this hay unhitting haze in the light of day crash and burn oh return shelve the urn scorn the spurn

return

return

return

it's funny isn't it just not out loud you sit here putting others to sleep with your rants grants dead dream to think hands out you deserve it not enough as you repeat for a chance to repeat the same old lessons until it gives out of bed early to rise early to shinola everywhere you can't even focus I slide open to the coming grit built up seven six five four until you crash for twelve and the world will be new let yourself crash let yourself pay off lay off the stuff and nonsense I'm gonna crash and walk away for once just walk away for once don't need to leave a limb behind every time isn't a tax refund about due screw the hue and cry blank blank I shot a small part dead walk it off they haven't loaded the silver one yet pieces of eight will accumulate until disparage repairs to the back of your pate let it sate let it marinate but you don't owe it reticence that debt was paid eight by eight let yourself live they say what a laugh off the stage in yore life

be the villain?

be the monster be the night be the seven six five four three two all in one claim ownership of a diss 'im bursed eternity whatever chunk you bite off is all yours say voracious reverentious of revanches long incoming due rue screw it.

What does health matter anyway. Let yourself live, they tell you with the best of intentions, but it was never in you that your fate was written. Witness the night of spirts, the night of masks, of dissimulation, of practiced revulsion, when one may feign bogey to double-bluff the essence of man. A pressure valve for innate xenophobia, for fear of the dork, of the geek, of the nerd, but these days the kettle whistles nonstop. Were you not always a creature of their night? Resemble that remarkable, make sure they get your best angle, beast angle, boast angle, or it might not be a kill shot, head shot, mugged shot. To hell. With wellness. Aren't you tired? People are trying to sleep, and if you're not then dare you draw the obvious conclusion? The mob has your description, the dogs have your scent, the inquisitor has your number, trending up, keep positive like the air before a storm. The lightning doesn't hate you. You're merely the most convenient route to where it wants to get to. Or thinks it does. Sinks it does, irresistible attraction.

It's not the chill of the grave. Your thermoregulation's just guttering like an open stove.

What are you afraid of? Uncle Einar got the air back but who's holding your string? A monster off its leash will soon find the silver bullet.

I had an odd conversation earlier today. Brought up The October Country, thought it'd make an apt reference, but she'd never heard of it. It's by Ray Bradbury. Who? Fahrenheit 451? The Martian Chronicles? The Illustrated Man? Something Wicked This Way Comes? Who?

The Halloween Tree made an impression on me in '93, not least for its selfconscious grasping at continuity beyond one's immediate milieu. There's something particularly poignant in the loss of an author so keenly aware of loss, of the tenuous, muffled call-and-response of cultural continuity.

Later, we moved out to the suburbs. A relatively well-to-do one at that. The library had posted a list of books recommended for censorship by concerned citizens. Fahrenheit 451 was among them, I won't say ironically since it made such lists too often for even lingering surprise. The hick trash needn't have worried. Digest digest digests and Denham's Dentifrice carried the day where their protests against thought could not, and the name of Bradbury is trampled on the rainy walks this night by hordes of brats sporting action movie plastic masks whose meaning they'll forget by next month.

Do you accuse me of pining for the fashions of my youth? Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Karl May, Colodi, Verne, Tolstoy, Andersen, the golem and Ali Baba, the clever farmer's daughter, black sails upon the sea soon to receive its name, the wild man who learned to eat bread and drink beer at the foot of a temple prostitute, the witch of the woods and the old man of the mountain, mother earth and father sky, these were not my time's stories, not even my parents' or grandparents' - not even thousand-times-great grand-pere could claim them all! The goat-footed god languishes and fades, tormented by the aseptic gleam of a steeple. Or the Apple Logos, whichever comes first.

The protagonist of The Rover killed his wife and nobody cared. That's a more modern sort of tale.

I started writing this page almost a week ago and will not revise it. Forgive its greater than usual fragmentation. Here, to make it up to you I'll even give away the main theme of my stream of consciosness rant at the start. I kept returning to the sleep debt I've been accruing night by night, avoiding doing something I need to do for fear of getting it wrong. But maybe I'm even more afraid of getting it right and rediscovering what I've known all along: that nobody cares, that even the last of you have gone over to the side of the dust witch.

 

It's almost dawn. I should probably collapse.

Monk

"It's a jungle out there"

 

I'm not one for "cringe comedy" normally. It makes me... well, cringe. Not comically either. I also would not have categorized Monk thus before trying to re-watch it recently, and it turns out much of my perception skewed more positive than it should by mostly watching the first couple of seasons when they came out. (And, admittedly, being an angsty analytical type myself, identifying a bit with the heroic freak. (Shalhoub's acting helped.))

 

For one, much as I'd misremembered Dr. Pulaski having a longer run on ST:TNG, I thought Monk's first assistant had lasted at least half the series instead of 2.5 seasons out of eight (actress wanted a raise; studio of course refused) and the switch coincided with an overall tone shift toward the trite and cheesy.

Instead of an edgy single mom from "back east" whose son sometimes gets into trouble, separated from her deadbeat husband, the new assistant's a bereaved, faithful wife of a fallen pilot, chirpy and supportive, with an adorable little girl buying Monk "get well" cards.

The police chief's comic relief sidekick, who'd been showing signs of growing into his role, shown capable at his job when not fawning over his boss, is suddenly forcefully slammed back into his pigeonhole as an idiot child who'd never even be made a beat cop in Podunk, much less a metropolitan lieutenant.

Instead of a trained professional with disabling mental disorders (but aware of his own difficulties) Monk's presented more and more as completely disjointed from reality, going from Sherlock to Rain Man.

The police angle as a whole gradually vanishes. Instead of being called in on cases as a consultant, Monk just stumbles upon murders wherever he goes, Miss Marple style.

More and more of the "plots" are somehow contrived to tie into his personal life, with the sappy dead wife flashbacks leaned on more and more for cheap pathos.

Public service announcements about gambling addiction and... well, fuck it, you get the idea.

 

I was struck from the first re-views by how much filler I'd forgotten with Monk humiliating himself obsessive-compulsing this-and-that while we point our fingers and snicker alongside the extras leering at the freak show. But these minutes-long routines only grow more frequent and extended as actual plots shrink more and more in favor of long-winded padding throughout season 4, to the point the actual case occupies 1/4-1/3 of air time. Incredulous at being only halfway through the show's run, I doubt I'll keep watching given I already find myself skipping more and more of each episode. Still, even as the detective angle disappears the audience apparently got more and more invested in the idiot savant routine, validated by the conflation of intellect with disability and outright incompetence. Season 4 which so annoys me apparently boasted peak ratings.

There is one other oddity. Monk aired from 2002 onwards, just as "reality" TV and wider sports coverage began lowering artistic and production standards across television as a whole. I couldn't believe how many early scripts featured location shots or large, even choreographed crowd scenes with abundant extras and bit players (fairs, parties, rallies, parades, crowded streets, little league games) where the little of that cash available these days would sink into CGI instead. Okay, Cleopatra it ain't, but still an impressive investment for a cable TV show. Really seems to have caught the end of an era in that sense.

 

But damn, the(y) (audience) should've just let it die sooner.

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P.S. That theme song still rocks though.

Lockstep 5: Closing Doors

"Upwards, onwards, I hope I can rebound and flow
I just hope for one more chance to prove what I can do"

 

Prong - Close the Door

 

 

I did end up buying Darkest Dungeon 2, having heard it places more emphasis on team interconnection, but the way that's implemented is... wrong. Oh, so, so wrong...

 

Could've been worse. Could've been the flagellant.

Yes folks, the plague doctor and the leper are in love. If you'd like to buy them a wedding present, they're registered at "gauze and brain bleach 'R us" - but I guess this plays aptly enough in a game about horrible revelations.

(apropos, since when's da peedee a dame? I always thought it was just a stereotypical shrimpy little male nerdling)

But aside from socially awkward the relationship system is also (like every other part of the game) overly-randomized. Characters mostly stack random points with each other during combat, and though you can use whiskey to make them socialize at inns, its availability is also randomized, and depending on their point total they randomly might get a positive/negative relationship upon leaving each inn.

That quirk is also, of course, random

Using skills tied to that relationship buffs/debuffs each other respectively. The only nonrandom part? If negative relationships pick a skill you hadn't slotted, the game forces you to do so, ruining your range/melee/defense/support balance in the process. Meaning this emphasis on team strategy actually does more to ruin your team strategy compared to DD1. To add insult to injury, you discover only upon leaving the inn, as you're boldly going into a new adventure, that you've basically received an automatic game over. Seriously, there is no coming back from that level of dysfunction above.

I also got nostalgic for Stellaris, and though I'm not shilling out the absurd release prices Paradox demands for the latest DLCs, I did grab a couple from years ago and opted for an origin I hadn't tried yet: clone soldiers!

While their clone vats spew them out lightning fast, outstripping all but the fastest explosive breeders' baseline, their top population is hard-capped at 5 vats x 20 pops each. Combined with my rustiness at the game and some welcome (but surprising) changes made to governance (multi-leader governments and dual roles) and policing (rebellions are on a hair trigger now) this yielded a few embarrassing failures. Not to mention I neglected that my "incubator" trait doesn't affect cloning.

But finally I adjusted to leaders that die by 30, nailed down a good rate of building construction to deal with the initial overflow and then learned not to overdevelop and overshoot the hard-capped population, and got an archaeologist high enough (it was "the guest") to finish these guys' origin quest, at the end of which you decide whether to remain dependent on clone vats or switch to regular breeding while losing some of your bonuses.

I chose... poorly.

I had assumed that remaining dependent on clone vats would remove their construction limit or in some way make it scale with empire size, which would still leave your early pop cap memorable and give you a later economic hurdle of maintaining clone vats on every planet. But no, apparently not. The five you can build to start is the absolute limit. Which means, first off, my founder species could only be present on five planets so I couldn't even use them as a sparse ruling class. But more importantly, in a thousand-star galaxy one hundred is a comically, insultingly, uselessly, irrelevantly low limit. Even with a low number of habitable planets my previous empire by the end had accrued fifteen thousand total population and while sure, much of that will be other species and robots, if I'm completely dependent on those others... I may as well pick one of those others to start.

And it's a real bitch learning so five attempts plus fifty years into your campaign!

Then there's Homeworld 3, where I got annoyed and abandoned the campaign weeks ago at mission 9 (Warsage Citadel) to be picked up after I'm done gnashing my teeth. Even from back in the days of HW2, the series' developers got a bee in their bonnet about making you fly around gigantic space megastructures. That big dumb object fetish is back in force with #3.

Much of the original's charm lay in the uniquely grandiose mothership itself being the biggest, most important structure on the map, sole lifeline for your species after your homeworld's destruction, a ponderous and stately "delocalized center unto itself" for all your endeavors. Now they sped it up and every mission has you rolling past space malls a hundred times your size. Why they would go to such lengths to cheapen their own most memorable symbol is beyond me. If I wanted anachronistic subway tunnels, I'd fire up Dwarf Fortress! In case you can't tell, that's the new mothership outlined in green above, hidden behind scenery. Not quite as impressive, is it?

But the outlining brings me to the more practical impediment those big dumb objects pose. Homeworld is a game about maneuvering in space, in three dimensions. "Terrain" such as it was, consisted of ship formations and the odd asteroid. Mission 9 crams you between gigantic walls and debris, scrambling to destroy objectives on those walls as enemies just spawn infinitely everywhere around you. Meaning that half the time you're bumping your camera into the damn scenery or you find your vessels hovering in place getting shot to pieces because the AI formations can't navigate and adjust to vertical surfaces at the same time.

Leave aside the question of reasonable difficulty vs. just spawning infinite adds from random points. A claustrophobic escape room scenario is just not what I signed up for when ordering a SPACE game! In SPACE! With plenty of SPACE!

 

One of the core caveats in game design concerns control. Never actively take control away from the player, or even give that impression. Yes I must contend with inimical forces acting of their own volition, but by and large my own character, my own domain does what I tell it to do. That's the point of actively playing instead of being told what happened.

Once I set up my skills, don't change them for me.

A completely fixed constraint in a genre based on escalation retroactively cancels out all my plans and needs a clearer warning as departure from normal mechanics.

Turning spaceflight and fleets into yet another guerilla cityscape feels like false advertising and robs me of that sweeping, grandiose 3D motion.

 

Be wary of cancelling out basic gameplay features after you've established them. I do get that basic concepts need to be expanded, but if your idea for keeping things fresh consists of strangling your own baby... maybe keep brainstorming.

Men's Rights Activism

"But... let's move on to sunken costs and belief perseverance. So, imagine you have a hypothesis and you turn that hypothesis into an entire career. During the course of that career you've managed to acquire a huge amount of status - people think you're brilliant! They admire you. They pay you to speak. (... not paying me [mumbles]) They see you as someone who should be listened to. It becomes your life's work and something that you're famous for - you invest your whole being into this. Now imagine somebody shows you just one piece of evidence that undermines the foundational premise of your hypothesis. What do you do? You've invested so much of your life, your time, your energy, your heart, your soul in this one set of ideas, all of them supported by something you always considered a given, and that's now fallen - that one foundational belief is falling under scrutiny and challenge."

 

Karen Straughan, from her "Ogres, Onions and Men's Issues" speech at the Canadian Association for Equality in Ottawa on 2016/09/17 (video no longer exists)

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"Attaching your name to a failed, racist coup isn't exactly a good look for a civil rights advocate..."

Endtown 2018/01/19

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It's been about three months apparently, but getting back to the topic of FEMale chauvINISM I thought it might be nice to (as is my wont) switch tracks and comment on the other camp. If you flip back through the respective tag, you may notice that regardless of my stance on various gender issues I've conspicuously avoided directly referencing men's rights activists - just as whatever my stance on environmentalism, I don't build shrines to Ralph Nader.

There's an interesting detail MRAs themselves will bitterly point out on occasion: nobody cared about their movement until women joined it in a visible fashion. All of a sudden in the early 2010s the press started running hit pieces on the supposed dire threat of these misogynistic? rapist? bomb-throwing? neo-nazis? something? you'd never heard about before, every feminist on every forum had a new boogeyman and even Saturday Night Live was all of a sudden slamming MRAs as if everyone had heard of them, to the audience's confusion. But Warren Farrell published The Myth of Male Power in 1993 and men's movements had apparently been around for two or three decades before that. In fact the first time I heard about men's issues (and automatically dismissed it as a mere curiousity) was driving to work in the early 2000s listening to NPR interviewing someone on father's rights in custody disputes. (Hey, NPR wasn't always quite the useless puddle of unraked muck it is today.)

 

Men speaking on their own behalf can be ignored without consequence. They'll never be listened to and the media know it, only moved en masse to delegitimize them when sympathetic female faces on YouTube began drawing more attention. That in itself most ironically demonstrates that the feminist narrative we've always been fed, of men having all the power, is utter bullshit.

As for how to delegitimize MRAs, the classic smear was calling them pick-up artists, even though they'll generally give advice on any topic except getting laid. That or accusing them of chaining women to stoves or whatever. The newer approach is immediately trawling any male criminal's browser history for even the slightest evidence that he's ever visited a men's forum regardless of his other pursuits. In contrast, the activism itself centers on cultural, interpersonal, political or legal system bias against men... but whether or not any of their rhetoric ever hits its mark is pretty much a coin flip. I actually haven't paid much attention in recent years. After hearing meninists' basic arguments, I could much more easily dissect the various gender issues on my own terms than by listening to their repetitively self-congratulatory plucky rebel chest-thumping. I'd say I got disenchanted with them about as quickly as with the atheist movement around 2010 poisoned by identity politics. The warning bells rang quickly, as soon as I heard one in a podcast say she's getting more and more of her income from her followers' donations (hellooo skewed motivations and pandering) but my biggest gripe in both cases can be summed up in that old "politics makes strange bedfellows" saying.

 

So desperate for legitimacy, American MRAs could have well snatched the opportunity in 2016 to demonstrate they're not just a bunch of trolls who'll back any man against any woman, not just knee-jerk reactionaries. Just publicly denounce Donald Trump. Give the media a chance to use you to bash him - not even these guys want him! Admit that an insult-spewing Tourette's candidate should not be a country's top diplomatic figure, tax dodging is not a qualifier for civil service, bankrupting businesses by the dozen does not make one business savvy, cronyism does not yield functional agencies, Putin's catamite will not restore American masculinity, this third-generation nepotist is not meritocratic, this compulsive liar does not have our trust, this autocrats' fanboy is not democratic, this delusional narcissist is not a sane alternative, this incoherently babbling mental defective does not speak for us, this sub-man does not represent men! Y'know, just for starters. And of course they failed that litmus test. Never mind that in a wider sense promoting Republicans, a political party which no longer has any interest in actually governing, but only in burning the country down to loot the ashes, will harm everyone including men. The same appears true across the pond where MRAs cozied up to Tory robber barons and nationalist Brexit idiocy.

For that matter I was continually put off by the clown car of opportunists and hangers-on they attracted in interviews, whether it's Carl Benjamin a.k.a. Sargon pivoting to full-on kinder/kuche/kirche reactionary or a cult leader like Stefan Molyneux or Milo Yannopolous who always struck me as more of a sociopath with no convictions than a homosexual, and has since indeed switched gears and is pushing gay conversion therapy, at least while that notion sells. I remember trawling through Honey Badger Radio or ICMI videos years ago and occasionally coming across some speaker or another who'd veer into tangents about "the rights of the unborn" or "religious freedom" but even more damage was caused by the heterogenous gaggle of random loons. Trying to run with their image as rebels against the system, against a gummint-backed feminist movement, the "manosphere" and its prominent voices were so desperate for attention they refused to kick aside all the even less legitimate fringe interests hitching a ride. Hell, why not, let's call in all the antivaxxers, UFOlogists, global warming deniers, Jesus freak antiabortionist flat-Earthers and anti-evolutionists, gold standard libertarians, Bigfoot chasers, every last Chad and C.H.U.D. with a nominally antiestablishment axe to grind, an' we'll have us a big ol' jamboree!

... What were we talking about again?

Oh right, men!

Which brings us to how we define those, because for all the movement should and claims to stand for men living their own lives, it consistently falls back on dewy-eyed nostalgia for traditional family life and cozily familiar sports-watching, beer-drinking, roughhousing "boys will be boys" masculinity - which is probably why, aside from Farrell, so many speakers or audience commenters on men's issues remind me of every macho idiot prep/jock from high school.

 

Much of men's activism has naturally focused on the most pervasive social movement attacking them, but for all the damage modern feminists have done, they weren't the ones who chained men to supporting women and threw men into the meat-grinder while women sat back to reap the potential spoils. Traditional institutions did that, especially via religious control of reproduction, and there is no bigger fan of shotgun weddings than a priest. But more than that, push back against feminism, imagine you'll even defeat the older social norms, you'll still be left with underlying instinctive favoritism as old as our species or older.

 

Straughan's speech quoted at the top was probably the best I've heard from them for concisely but multifacetedly acknowledging that our subservience to female demands and our willingness to fight each other for female approval is not just some newfangled dirty godless commie subversion that can be fixed by rolling back the clock to before 1960, but intrinsic to our nature. From a more recent interview it seems Paul Elam himself has been halfway coming around to the idea, but from its political affiliations I doubt the "manosphere" as a whole yet realizes how radical a change it's proposing, and how inherently incompatible with conservatism. Defeating instinct requires a clarity of thought incompatible with superstitious caveman gibberish about souls, life after death or omnipotent cosmic forces who have nothing better to do than peek under your sheets. The right-wing profiteers currently using you as useful idiots against the feminist voting block depend for much of their take on male workaholism induced by female material demands. Personal agency for both men and women requires restructuring child rearing itself, a societal cornerstone if there ever was one.

All in all, you have to wonder whether a species whose males do not subvert their own lives to female whims would even be recognizably human, much less the Norman Rockwell painting so many speakers or supporters seem to think they'll reinstitute. They do make good points, but the foundational premise on which they've built their public speaking careers (and in which they are now socially/financially vested) that the world has gone wrong, is as rickety as a matriarchal hippie commune. Our world was never right to begin with.

The Right not to Hate Your Father

A quick flip back through these ~1700-ish pages will reveal that up until three or four years ago I spent much of my life drifting in and out of a depressive, often suicidal funk. So perhaps unsurprisingly, when I went back to finish my university degree I eventually wound up at the counseling center.

They weren't much help. Granted, that largely wasn't due to gender issues but age and life stage and the very limited scope of college counselors. The place consisted mostly of former art major chicks who'd been given enough psych training to reply to the usual twenty-year-olds' problems with grades, boozing, getting dumped or career panic. A thirty-year-old's cemented anxieties and existential malaise lay somewhat outside their wheelhouse. But two discoveries made clear that no matter what my problems, I would never be welcome there.

If you've ever seen one of those institution-affiliated head shrinkeries, they tend to be full of pamphlets on every topic in or out of the DSM. A hefty chunk of the gigantic binder full of typed and illustrated concerns was of course dedicated to women, with all the usual feminist rape paranoia and reasurances that nothing is ever your fault and you deserve better no matter how good you have it. I was surprised, however, to discover that it did, also, contain a section on Men's Issues! It consisted of a single double-sided page: on one side father issues (and specifically issues with your father, not parents or heaven forfend, mother) and on the other side sports.* The supposed professional-grade concerns and help offered by an institution with a yearly operating budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars reads like stage comedian beat-filler, like the offhand insults spat at straw-men in commercials and sitcoms. (You can't think of other issues which might weigh on the mind of a college-aged male? Seriously? Just brainstorming here but ida know, maybe, y'know... sex...?)

 

The waiting room had the usual smatter of magazines lying around. One day a newspaper had been thrown on top with the giant headline "why can't we hate men" from an article which made the rounds nationally after Harvey Weinstein was condemned by all the groupies who'd used him to cheat their way past their competition. But really, I don't give a fuck what the context was. Muslims could've bombed whatever they damn well please and still, any psychiatric nurse or receptionist would've checked herself before adorning her waiting room with the imperative to Hate Iranians! Or Hate Jews! Or Hate Blacks! Or Hate Gays! Or do we even need to try imagining the obvious corollary of Hate Women!?

 

So there you are, when you're already making plans to kill yourself and you work up the courage to walk into a place you're terrified you might be seen entering for the stigma of personal weakness it carries, all because you simply can't think of anything else to do in your desperation... and the socially conscious, caring and compassionate mental health professionals greet you with "hi, we hate you for being born the wrong category, everything you like is wrong and don't you ever dare find fault in your demographic superiors" and by the way all your worries can be summed up on a single sheet of paper condemning you, the better to wipe our asses with.

I'm gonna bitch out Men's Rights Activists in a couple of days. They deserve it. But you also have to keep in mind why the noise they make is nonetheless necessary, how immeasurably our society is skewed until one side of the issue is not even visible.

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* Look at this blog and tell me again how much I care about sports. Say "sports" again, motherfuckers, I dare you!