Getting into this box is what's best for both of us. During your time in the box, you will learn so much, and yet experience so little. It's a wild ride, my friend, one well worth the time spent...and let's face it, you don't have much to do these days anyway.

Monday 31 December 2012

Yeah, you'd have to be insane to...


 ...Donate sperm these days. Why the fuck would you want to hand over your wallet and body to the state any more than you already are? At least force them to the point where they have to come up with more and more inane excuses to trap men into indentured slavery, will ya?

Kansas man donates sperm to lesbian couple to have kids, gets slapped with child support.

Eight children in eight years. We can't stop people from breeding, but who the fuck approved the mass adoptions? And did these people give any thought as to why one would want so many children without being responsible for them? Oh wait, kids are fashion accessories and pet rocks these days, remember?

Here's another one:

Another man donates sperm to lesbian couple, signs away rights to child, gets slapped with child support anyways.

And a good oldie:

Seems like "gay" doesn't override "man" when it comes to assessing your victim-level. Time to shut up and pay up!

I dunno, why not go after the non-custodial parent in the relationship? Oh wait, both of them are women, what a to-do when we can't go after the default target! Let's make one up anyway!

Now, when can men start suing surrogates for child support, too? Oh wait, never. The inanity of the situation befits our current collapsing system as the state digs further and further for wealth transfers.

The white picket fence dream.


For those who're unfamiliar with the term (despite me using it quite a lot), the white picket fence dream refers to a dream that I daresay many men even in this day and age still share: a stable job, a happy and loving family with a wife and kids, a small but comfortable home, and of course, the white picket fence that goes around the lot.

I think you can imagine what I'm trying to describe here; it's not just part of the American Dream, but part of the dream of a good portion of men everywhere. Can't speak for women, but I imagine a number of them want it too, judging not just by red-pill women, but various articles I've found highlighting that more women are desiring to stay at home these days. Seems like Average Jane is finding out that "having a career" and making someone else richer for nine to twelve hours a day isn't as rich and fulfilling as it's supposed to be, but Average Joe's known that for quite some time now. My recently married sister quit her job, citing "burnout". Yeah, let's hear Average Joe tell Average Jane he's suffering from "burnout" and needs an indefinite amount of time off work to relax and catch his breath. Let's see how well that goes over.

Anyways.

I remember in my blue-pill days that I wanted this dream pretty badly. There's not enough space for a picket fence here in Singapore unless you're filthy rich, considering that most of the population is stacked up upon one another like so many lego bricks, but a large, snuggly four to five-room apartment is the equivalent over here of your little house in the suburbs with a lawn and garage.

I also remember visiting one of my paternal uncles. We do this every Chinese New Year anyways, to see my paternal grandmother, but there was one particular instance which stood out to me.  I was about seventeen at the time, and we were going to sit down for a proper dinner instead of the drinks and snacks that we usually have during our usual short-ish visit (owing to various reasons). It was me, my parents, my uncle and his family, and extra seats had been placed around the table for us. My aunt was then pregnant with my cousin (their fourth) and had roped in my other three cousins in setting the table while she and my uncle made small talk with my parents. Being nowhere here nor there, what with not quite being an adult and yet not quite a child, I settled for laying back and observing my surroundings - and my eyes wandered over to my uncle.

I recall he looked particularly gaunt and overworked (not that he ever had or has much meat on his bones, when I asked my dad about it), not too far off from Paul Elam's description of his Uncle Walter, unlike Dr. Elam's uncle, my uncle looked truly happy.

Despite him looking like he was literally working himself to death -

Despite his eyes being quite thoroughly bloodshot from lacking enough sleep -

Despite the veins that crisscrossed his arms and the calluses on his hands -

He looked truly happy. He had energy as he directed the proceedings with my aunt and grandmother, drawn from some immense wellspring hidden within his thin frame. He smiled, smiled a lot, and truly meant it - you know the saying about smiling with your lips and eyes? That was him, as he herded my three cousins to their seats.


I know that it goes against general red pill thinking, that most PUAs would immediately denounce him as hopelessly beta, and MGTOWs call him stupid for not just allowing himself to be a workhorse, but taking pleasure in that status to boot. True, he has some things going in his favour - I've never seen him take any nonsense from my grandmother, aunt, cousins, or anyone for that matter. I guess he's still reasonably fit, tall and good-looking despite his frame (he still has a full head of hair while my dad and other uncles are balding pretty badly now). I suppose he has what some would call natural alpha tendencies.

His happiness was infectious, too, so I guess he has natural charisma with a tendency to bring others into his own frame. Despite all the stereotypes about pregnant women and hormones, my aunt looked pretty happy - and had been that way every time I'd seen her together with my uncle. My cousins looked happy, too. And even my paternal grandmother, who generally is a sourpuss (and has had numerous arguments with my mother), looked happy.

And I remember sitting down at the table, taking it all in, and feeling truly envious of my uncle. This magical, elusive thing that he had going on for himself which possessed his entirety and drove him onward - I wanted it, too. In that moment, I would have jumped through hoops, run over broken glass and swum through seas of fire if it meant that some day, one day, I could be sitting at a table with my extended family like my uncle was doing and feel as happy as he did.

Then I learned that in all probability, my uncle is a massive outlier and even if I swam through fire it wouldn't make the tiniest iota of difference; all it'd mean was that I'd be burnt beyond recognition at the end of it all with nothing left to show for it save maybe the Sword of Damocles having dropped from its hair and through my heart.

I learned that even if I managed to beat all the unbelievable odds stacked against me and achieved what my uncle had, it could be all taken from me with no warning, for no reason. And if I had achieved that and lost it, there would be no doubt as to where I'd end up - swinging from the rafters. Oneitis for women, I can harden my heart and give up, even if it will be difficult. Oneitis for my children, I would rather die than lose them.

Go on, mock me.

And what unbelievable odds might I face, you ask? I've mentioned one or two reasons before, yes. Suffice to say it's not too different from Cappy Cap's list in his cartel post, with a handful more points added for my personal taste. But here's Cappy Cap's list, for starters:

1.  Be in shape.
2.  Be nice.
3.  Be kind.
4.  Be reasonably intelligent.
5.  Be responsible/adult/mature.

Pretty simple, eh? Most unlike the long lists that stretch from the profiles of so many dating sites. A couple more points from my side for personal preference:

6. Be maternally-minded. I would never feel morally comfortable with asking someone else to completely give up their desires in life to fit mine, so any hypothetical wife material would have to want this to begin with. Yes, beta beta beta and all that, but there are some lines I won't cross.
7. Be financially responsible. (My own mom's a prime example of this; she chews me out for buying 60-cent broccoli instead of 50-cent broccoli) It shocks me, when I listen in on idle chatter in the lab, how many ladies in my degree don't even bother taking stock of their money. These are women who can do advanced calculus, so not knowing maths is not the problem.
8. Be pro-life, at least on a personal level.
9. Be possessed of the moral fortitude and self-awareness to, if during dating, refuse me if I attempt to game her into explicit sexual activity despite evident desire on her part.

Yeah, there's no doubt my uncle lucked out. I honestly don't think this is too stringent a list. Mrs. Judgybitch has another list with more points and of course we'd love to have plenty, but we guys are taught from a young age we don't get to have everything in life and have to make the best of what we realistically can get.

And yet somehow, this list seems like it's impossible to fill.

Now, I could apply myself. I'm finishing up my degree in chemical engineering now; I could have a decent starting salary once I come out into the petrochemical, biochemical or pharmaceutical industries. Enough to dress better than I currently do and have something in the way of future prospects, at the very least. I'm learning game, slowly but surely, practising basic concepts such as negs, agree and escalate, and putting on a mask of amused mastery/aloofness (or at least, what hopefully passes for one) on some of the lab ladies (mostly the nerdy/chubby hb2s to 4s. Baby steps, baby steps). Let's just say the response has been immediate and encouraging, not that I intend to take anything anywhere save my self-confidence.

Despite all this, though, even if I did find someone who filled this list, it won't change the lopsided local laws, and that damned Sword of Damocles threatens again with risks I can't accept. So, should I be complaining about the situation when I'm not going to be able to change anything about it and not take the risks, either?

As I touched upon in my post about my grandma's hypergamy, I would have worked like a dog for my family, but it's clear by now to anyone in the manosphere that beta bucks is hardly a reliable mating strategy these days. I can learn game, but no matter how alpha you become, there'll always be someone more alpha - as the old Chinese saying goes, "there is always one mountain taller than the other", and no single man can beat Pimp Daddy G.

And if there're any ladies reading this: despite the tediously maintained deceptions about all of us men as rapists, murderers, liars, cheaters and the like, most of us actually like you, or at least, used to like you. Sure, there are and always have been shitty men, but there are and always have been shitty women; we're all humans.

It's why we gave you Prohibition before you had the vote, it's why we gave you the vote when not all men had it either, then repealed Prohibition on your say-so. It's why we kept you safe when the world was a shitty place to live in, then let you out when the world was safer thanks to technological progress and let you do as you pleased. It's why my great-grandfather was shot during the early phase of the invasion of China by Japan back in the late 1920s, giving my great-grandmother and the rest of the family time to escape (it's sort of ironic how my grandmother emigrated to Malaya to get away from the Japanese, and they caught up with her anyways). It's why I see guys jumping through hoops and begging for some sort, any sort of female approval and validation.

Barbarossa scornfully calls this "male mother need".

If patriarchy had really existed in the fashion the feminists claimed it had, we'd all have backhanded you in the face when you started demanding things and sent you back to the sammich mines. Do as you will, just don't complain about the consequences and demand we "man up" and save you from them later. You can have a bite of the equality you claim to so desire and live with some of the consequences of your actions like men do, since Pimp Daddy G and his welfare checks can't give you intimacy.

But back to the point. I've grown to accept that what my uncle has is extremely rare and is completely dependent on the goodwill of my aunt, who thankfully by all appearances has plenty of moral fortitude to not wring him for all he's worth and kick him out the door. I've grown to accept I may never have what he has, no matter how dilligently I work towards those ends.

Who knows? Virtual sex is already coming out; maybe we'll get virtual families before the collapse comes. Oh god, I'm getting pessimistic again.

The white picket fence is dead, or at least, so rare that looking for it might as well account to looking for Lemuria or Atlantis.

Although I hear Atlantis isn't a bad place to live if you can find your way there.

Sunday 30 December 2012

Brotherhood.



 This video, especially the first one and a half minutes of it, is especially poingant, and when one takes a step back and thinks about it, the reason why is quite simple.

Men of different nationalities, of different ages, of different ethnicities, backgrounds, professions, educational qualifications, so on and so forth, coming together of their own accord and holding a line against an external threat.

Is it any wonder more and more young men are retreating into video games, when simple brotherhood is becoming criminalised? When escapist alternative realities are one of the few remaining places it is allowed?

Peering out of the box - 30/12/2012


 
A Voice For Men - Swedish men are second class citizens, the law says so.

Daily Mail - A pro-male party in the UK?

Roissy - We're going to need a bigger hamster. Cripes.

Cappy Cap - Predicting the popping of the productionless human bubble.

Wintery Knight - The effects of child care. You already know how I feel about this. If you want a pet, buy a damned dog. If you want a fashion accessory, go buy a ring or something. Don't fucking do this to another human being.

Hyper report for 28/12/2012 - China is busy isolating the US dollar, having recently signed 15 bilateral trade agreements that involve only the involved countries' currencies and chopping out the legs from under the US dollar's reserve currency status.

Bill Powell - On propoganda.

Le Cygne Gris - Predictions for 2013.

Dalrock - Feral love.

The Spearhead - Do women have any more duties to men? As we all know, nope. None that law or society will enforce, as opposed to the other way around.

Saturday 29 December 2012

The four levels of MGTOW - betas shrug.



A quick definition of MGTOW - an introductory piece.

Back to basics

Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW, individually Man Going His Own Way, or MGHOW)

Unlike Men's Rights Activists (MRAs), there is no necessity that MGTOWs engage in political activity or activism. MGTOWs may be active MRAs, they may cheer them on from the sidelines and send in donations or support, or they may not be politically active at all. There is a common point of awareness between various groups in the manosphere such as MRAs, MGTOWs, pick-up artists (PUAs) and reactionaries, yet how they react to the red pill differs considerably.

What MGTOW are not

Conservatives

Typical conservatives (neocons, socons, tradcons) are seen not just by MGTOWs, but the entire manosphere as nowhere near on our side. MRAs and MGTOWs identify conservatives as not so different from the feminists when it comes to misandry (to be examined later), but let's just say that the Bradley Amendment was passed by the conservatives in the name of "defending the family". PUAs take little notice of conservatives except for "Sunday morning nightclub", where they go to pick up "reformed sluts" looking for future beta provisioning, and reactionaries call the state of today's Christianity "Churchianity" and identify how feminism has seeped into tradcon thought to the point where they just call conservatives "pro-life feminists".

So no, the typical accusation levelled at the inhabitants of the manosphere that we're all just white male rednecks scared of losing our privilege and power holds no water, considering that we're not all even from the US of A in the first place, we're not all male (although admittedly overwhelmingly so), and most of us don't want any truck to do with the cons in their current state.

If anything, by their nature, MGTOWs are pretty far from what the tradcons want with their "family values" nonsense, otherwise they wouldn't be urging us to man up, shut up, and put up with our lot. Conservatives are no more automatically less misandric than anyone with a penis is.

But surely anyone speaking out or boycotting the status quo is a either a mustache-twirling, top-hatted misogynist sitting in his patriarchal volcano base while cackling madly, or a mindless brainwashed woman who can't see the light and needs to be re-educated properly.

Right?

Bitter

The other accusation levelled at MGTOWs is that we're bitter and suffering from sour grapes, that we're not good relationship material anyway, but oddly enough, a number of us come out of relationships. Then that opens the NAWALT/you've been burned argument, which then lets us point at those MGTOWs who never played in the first place. What gives?

Or perhaps it's just that MGTOWs are crunching the numbers and settling for freedom instead of their hopes and dreams, which will remain just that. Perhaps MGTOWs are taking the path of least resistance by dropping out of the game together (it is a point of contention with PUAs), but looking at the forces arrayed against them, who can really blame them for not wanting the play the game considering those risks?

Why MGTOW cannot be stopped

MGTOW is not a movement in the way that modern -isms are in the sense that there are no institutions, that there is no established organisation or hierachy of individuals dictating from up on high. It's true that there are a number of individuals spreading the message, but by and large the growth of MGTOW is fuelled by men looking at the figures, observing other men who've been put through the machine, and making the decision on their own to abscond from the plantation. This is proven by the sheer number of men coming to MRA and MGTOW sites and stating that they had come to the conclusions independently, and had discovered the manosphere after the fact, when they were looking for like-minded individuals on the internet.

For this reason, MGTOW is impossible to stop so long as the reasons for men to GTOW exist. There is no head for lawsuits to be aimed at, there is no activist leader to be jailed, there is no organisation to shatter. MGTOW benefits from the virtues of a disorganised resistance, and hence is quite eminently impervious to the usual take-down methods employed by those who would silence uncomfortable social movements. The only way for a state to attempt to deal with MGTOW is a host of increasingly punitive measures against men in general for refusing to participate, at which even the most blue-pill man is dangerously aware of knowing that the jig is up - this will be examined in further detail in a subsequent section.

A comment on CH:

"Things will radicalize organically. That’s one thing the manosphere is getting right. It is fighting an asymmetric war. Who is the leader of the manosphere? Roissey? Rollo? Roosh? Elam? Price? Dalrock? WHo do they have to shoot to get it to end? Every time a Bskillet dies a 3M is there to take his place. Mentu and Ashur went quiet but now we have Danny from 504. We have diversity. Roosh tells you how to bang, Dalrock how to marry, Pvt Man how to date. I guarantee you, you don’t need to tell the manosphere when to radicalize. The manosphere is not a club, an organization, a party. It is a living cell. It duplicates on its own. It expands on its own. It is open source. One guy has an idea and three more expand upon it, taking it to new places the originator could not have dreamed of. How may posts on other sites did 3M’s Incel manifesto spawn? How many men had how many discussions where further new ideas were born?

I gotta tell you, if this was a shooting war, I’d hate to be the general sent in to crush the manosphere. Asymmetrical forces are a hard nut to crack. The femifascists will have some successes but monolithic forces have a very hard time with these sorts of battles."



The four levels of MGTOW

In my observations (and practice) of MGTOW, I have taken note of a number of levels in which broad categories of MGTOWs may reside in. While Christians may vary widely in scope and status, they all revolve around a single idea: the birth and ressurrection of Christ. Similarly, feminists may claim to be wide in scope, but their ideas are all informed by one common rotten root: patriarchy theory. In the same vein, while MGTOWs may put into practice their ideas and concepts to differing extents, there lies one unifying idea that defines a MGTOW:

The recognition of the way modern society really works when it comes to the sexes, and a refusal to buy into and feed the system.

Note that this is hardly as neatly defined an idea as, say, the birth and resurrection of Christ, but it is what it is. It would be laborious for me to rehash why things are the way they are today (hypergamy, 80/20 rule, white knighting, Briffault's Law, et al) when other manosphere authors have gone over these topics over and over again, so I won't.

My reason for putting MGTOW into "levels" is not to suggest that there is an inevitable progression from one level to the next; there are many men who look at the situation and decide what hazards they're comfortable with dealing with, and then stay at that level, or move up or down as the situation befits. Nevertheless, my separation into levels is representative of the escalation of a MGTOW's increasing withdrawal from society at large and increasing starvation of the beast. It is difficult, but not impossible for a MGTOW to progress from one level to another without at least taking in part ideas and concepts from the previous level: while, for example, Cappy Cap still enjoys short-term relationships with women, he also particpates in economic disengagement.

Without further ado, the four levels of MGTOW:


Level 0: Situational awareness

This level includes men who are aware of the realities that face them in society, and yet deem the risks acceptable to have a go at playing the game. I will only touch briefly on this group, as there are not many of these around, and for good reason - the odds stacked against men having the white picket fence deal are still too bloody high. For the first time in a long while, men are having to filter women based on their ability to shrug off constant bombardment by society to give in to their hypergamous natures (and the same bombardment repeatedly chastises and criminalises mens' polygamous natures) and adjustment still has to take place, which may not happen before society at large collapses (yes, I'm that pessimistic).

Yet there are still some who seem to be content, if not happy. Men in this group may take precautions to keep what they have, such as learning game or through other methods (for example, Keoni Galt has made it clear in no uncertain terms that if his wife does try to pull him through the divorce meat grinder, he will pull out all stops and enact mutually assured destruction just short of actual violence) to minimise the risks as far as possible while still having a hand in play.

Which is why I do not consider this a level per se. Even though men in this group are aware of what they face, they do not reject any aspects of society because of their knowledge, which is necessary; pick-up artists, reactionaries and men's rights activists are also possessed of this knowledge, but their reactions to it are different. This is miles better than being a bumbling blue-pill average frustrated chump wallowing in propoganda and programming, of course, but does not truly fit the MGTOW label as has been put forth.


Level 1: Rejection of long-term relationships

Short brief: the MGTOW rejects all form of long-term personal relationships with women, including but not limited to marriage, cohabitation of any sort which might be classified as common-law marriage, picking up for a single mother's children, or any action which might be used in court to turn him into her legal indentured servant.

Common reasons for this:
a) Massive risk incurred by men in pursuing this course of action in the form of chilamony and frivorce theft, draconian domestic violence laws that follow the Duluth Model, being robbed of their children and having them alienated, all for no perceptible reason other than societal pressure and conditioning.

Resources withdrawn from society:
a) Intimacy and commitment that women desire, temporary or otherwise.
b) State-supported wealth transfers from men to women via the divorce, child support and domestic violence industries.

You may have heard of the marriage strike, in which large numbers of men are boycotting this rotten institution - either consciously or unconsciously, it does not matter. They're still out. A simple look through the manosphere wll turn up huge numbers of stories about men and children thrown through the family court meat grinder.

The effects of the marriage strike are interesting, and not just in the "where have all the good men gone?" "you're a sexist bastard if you don't have the hots for used-up sluts" and "man up and marry those single mothers like a good Christian man" articles. Men in general are leaving the plantation in droves - Dalrock has some interesting stats on remarriage and never-marrieds, and the stats do appear to be in line with many men adopting the stance.

As GirlWritesWhat points out in one of her videos: "We have soured the deal for men."

And she's right. As things stand today, there is no reason for men to get married whatsoever. Women have no legal or social obligations to men, and yet men are expected to carry all the traditional obligations while labouring at the same time under progressive ones.

So, they ask themselves. Why bother?

Why?

There is no reason for a man to get married today, ever. Why have children when they can be ripped from you at a moment's notice, and you'll never see them again? Besides, with surrogacy a man need not even get married to have one on his own terms - one example would be the Rotunda Clinic in India, which will for the price of US$20,000 do all the dirty work of hiring a surrogate for a man and give him a child with his own genes. Love, intimacy and companionship? One doesn't need to get married for that, even if one actually finds a suitable partner. Sex? Rollo Tomassi estimates that while game won't get an omega a hb7 or 8, he might be able to pull in a 4 to 6, which is just as well thanks to today's culture.

The only reason blue-pill men continue buying into the claptrap and feeding themselves to the meat grinder is that that's how it's always been done, that they're still feeding into the white picket fence dream.

The dream which doesn't exist any more.

When young men look up and see their predecessors hanging from the rafters, bullet holes in their skulls and as piles of ashes in before the steps of family courts, is there any wonder they are walking away?


Level 2: Rejection of short-term relationships

Short brief: the MGTOW rejects all form of personal relationships with women, including dating, one-night stands, friendships, etc. Any contact with unfamiliar women is kept strictly professional and at a minimum.

Common reasons for this:
a) Inane laws that govern the treatment of sexually-charged crimes such as rape or sexual assault compared with, say, murder or theft. Rights stemming from due process such as the right to face one's accuser (rape shield laws), the right to be considered innocent before found guilty (dear colleague letter, hanging in the court of the public, repeated calls for less evidence to be required for guilt, activist groups pushing for guilty verdicts irrespective of actual evidence).
b) The broadening of the definitions of these crimes to encompass a widening set of behaviour, to the point that post-coital buyer's regret can be considered rape.
c) The heaping of culpability upon men and the concurrent removal of culpability from women for their actions (such as sex when both parties are drunk).

Resources withdrawn from society:
a) Beta orbiter benefits to women. (Chivalry, etc.)
b) Greater loss of intimacy and romantic prospects for women.
c) A general growing indifference by MGTOWs to women (and an observable trend from men in general, too). Hate is not the antithesis of love, because it still implies the one doing the hating still cares to some extent about the hated. The indifferent merely ignores all of this.

To begin with, let's start from a comment found on Sunshine Mary's blog:

"Our entire social structure is designed to support women’s living any way they want.

Employers are required to follow a host of laws addressed to women in the workplace: anti discrimination in hiring, work assignments, work practices, workplace accommodations, and facilities. Anti sex harassment laws with insanely punitive consequences for men and insane definitions of “sexual harassment” (being defined as sexual conduct by unattractive men and any conduct by anyone that any woman doesn’t like). FMLA for childbirth and maternity leave. 

Women are allowed to do and say anything they want anywhere. Men are restricted in their speech and conduct. VAWA, which has a “must arrest” policy in a domestic violence call. Women can assault and beat men in public with impunity and the tacit support of feminists. 

There are new social customs to constrain most men. A man is forbidden to notice an attractive woman at work. He is not to comment on it, talk about it or even look a second or two too long. Nuclear rejections, public shaming are the norm if a man she deems unattractive deigns to talk to her in public. Men are never, ever to even notice good looking women. Older men are shamed from dating or having sex with younger women, and are shamed into dating women “more their age” for the specific purpose of providing men for lonely middle aged unattractive battle axe divorcees. Men are never, ever to comment on or appreciate a woman’s physical appearance, or compare an attractive woman to an unattractive woman.

Attractive men are exempt from all of these legal and social conventions."

Attractive men, of course, meaning alphas. For betas and omegas, the reality of life is stark. Interaction with women is potentially toxic and dangerous to men, thanks to the way laws regarding relations between men and women have been set up that almost unilaterally follow the Duluth Model, which assumes male perpetration and female victimhood.

When women are allowed to get away with light sentences for genitally mutiliating their husbands,  when they lie about rape just to win $10,000 in a radio talk show, to avoid trouble for coming home late, so on and so forth, when up to 41% of rape accusations may be false - why bother? When a man can get in trouble and have his life ruined and forever tainted on a single woman's word and society will howl for his blood, it's not hard to see why some men might very well decide the risk isn't worth the reward and disconnect from women altogether unless absolutely necessary.

Indeed, it would appear that many young men (and sometimes women) are getting sick and fed up with the way things are, and the men are absconding altogether. AVFM radio has had boys of 13 and girls of 14 calling into the show to share their lives and observations on misandry. When people are waking up from the matrix programming from a younger and younger age and saying "fuck you" to it, what can the only end result be?


Level 3: Economic disengagement

Short brief: the MGTOW refuses to produce more than is strictly necessary for his individual survival. He will do as much work off the books as possible to avoid taxation, and will endeavour to remain in the lowest tax bracket possible without jeopardising his way of life and acceptable standard of living.

Common reasons for this:
a) Lack of desire to produce due to being denied a meaningful and socially accepted path to respect within the grasp of the everyday beta man.
b) Refusal to pay into confiscatory wealth transfers from productive beta men to other groups via the state. The amount paid into taxation vs the amount of benefits received from the state is one example of this.

Resources withdrawn from society:
a) Economic production falls drastically as beta men refuse to be more than self-sufficient.
b) Taxation revenue falls drastically as beta men stop producing, resulting in greater debt and borrowing required to maintain government spending.

In Esther Vilar's work The Manipulated Man, she posits the following theory as to why traditionalism, interestingly, does not solely restrict the sexual natures of women as feminists claim, but also the sexual natures of men. Her theory, from what I remember from reading the book, goes like this:

*Men have three states: they are capable of great destruction, great creation, or great hedonism.
*For obvious reasons, we do not want destruction, but men will snap under pressure or participate in it for a cause.
*Most men, however, will default to hedonism, since it requires the least effort. This results in what detractors call "Peter Pan syndrome".
*In order to get men to produce, there are three methods that have been tried throughout history: forced production (I.E. slavery), restricting access to resources, and giving them a family.
*Slavery requires enforcement by other men, which in turn shifts the problem: how do the elite alphas convince the enforcers to comply? One way of doing this was to entice the enforcers with women who were attractive but not so enough for the alphas, but that does not solve the problem of slavery meaning that men will take every opportunity to underperform.
*Restriction of access to resources does not work very well because most men do not require large amounts of resources to be content. Food, shelter, and a source of entertainment is usually enough to satiate most men, leading to the stereotypical bachelor pad. Consumption in the modern world today is driven overwhelmingly by women (80-91%, depending on which economist you ask), so men producing enough to support themselves is insufficient to meet the needs of civilisation.
*Hence, there is a need to give a man a family to incentivise him to create. Enter traditional monogamous marriage, in which a man must give up his instinctive polygamous desires to settle for more reliably-provided sex with his wife.
*However, men do not have the certainty of paternity that women do of maternity. In lean times (most of human history), both men and women will tend to look after their own first, but as stated, men do not have that certainty.
*Hence, womens' hypergamous natures must be curtailed in order to allow men the assurance of paternity of their children. The sexual natures of women are curtailed only as a secondary measure to the primary motive of curtailing male sexual nature.
*With a family that he knows is undoubtedly his to work for, men produce to their maximum capacity and build civilisation.

Knowing this, remove a man's family from him, and he no longer has any incentive to produce. This is why chilamony is so important to the state - enforced by the long arm of the law, he is required to continue producing even though the joys of his family are no longer open to him. And today, Pimp Daddy Government has replaced the husband as the ultimate alpha that no single man can compete with, confiscating resources from men and using them to buy votes from women - a simple breakdown of which demographic puts in/receives more from welfare programs, taxes and government handouts, other things being equal, will quickly show this. Even the mainstream media has finally begun to pick up on this: "men dropping out of the workforce -  going hunting, fishing."

Men will jump through all sorts of hoops to get sex, but even they have their limits as to the crap they will put up with - and for many, the shit is overflowing. Without the hope of getting a family due to the dangerous climate of the sexual marketplace, the fact that being good providers is no longer a viable mating strategy, and that the alphas build soft harems of their own, the majority of beta men return to hedonism and stop production. This is an observable effect in Japan's "grass-eating youths", which 60% of young men between the ages of 20-35 self-identify themselves as. They stop wanting to climb the corporate ladder, they stop working hard, and instead produce just enough to get by and pursue their own hobbies and interests on their spare time.

This is what Paul Elam meant when he said: "Ladies, be afraid when men stop thinking with their dicks."

The Japanese government is terrified of this demographic in their already sinking economy. (See in one of my previous posts: the handsome tax) This step is when MGTOW moves out of the sphere of the personal and begins to catch the eye of the political, with reactions that will be discussed shortly later. Sometimes, the decision to disengage economically will be a conscious decision to do so, other times not so much. In the end, though, it all boils down to the fact that they aren't cranking out the tax dollars like they used to, much to the worry of many governments.

The idea is neatly summed up in Typhonblue's parable of the princess and the plough horse, in which she makes clear the essence of MGTOW, traditionalism, and the shift between the two. A small, yet powerful snippet from the parable:

"‘Stupid horse, I let you wear this bridle, but it was always mine. I just used it to control you! And look what you did! You were supposed to live for my needs, but you saved the best in this world for yourself!’ She pulled the bridle from the horse’s head. It turned back into crackled leather and rusted iron in her hands.

She stared at it, dumbstruck, and so did the horse.

Once the horse saw the bridle for what it was, old, worn—and above all, a bridle—his demeanor changed instantly. He reared up, pawing the air with his great hooves. In her haste to get out of the stall and away from him, the princess dropped the bridle.

The stallion turned his head to the stable door. The door was open. In her greed for the bridle, the princess had forgotten to secure it. The stallion’s nostrils flared, catching the scent of long night runs, open water and wild grasses.

He bolted through the open stable door, trampling the bridle to pieces in his escape.

The horse gone, the princess looked at the cracked leather bridle now laying broken on the ground. Off the horse’s head the magic was gone—there was nothing left in the bridle to want—and she felt a dawning horror as she finally understood her mother’s warning. The bridle’s only real worth was its ability to control the plow horse, and she had lost its magic forever."


Level 4: Societal rejection

Short brief: the MGTOW drops out of society altogether. He minimises contact with the blue-pill world and seeks to further his own ends on his own terms. For all intents and purposes, he does not exist. A urbanite might keep to his own apartment, while someone further out may simply head into the wilderness and go off-grid.

Common reasons for this:
a) Disillusionment and disdain for modern society.
b) An understanding of how modern society works, and a desire to protect oneself.

Resources withdrawn from society:
a) Anything that remains after levels 1, 2, and 3 have been enacted, due to the MGTOW practically vanishing.

Known as "going ghost" within the MGTOW community, the most extreme form of MGTOW is to reject a misandric society and drop out altogether. This level of MGTOW, at least in my observation, is the only one which strictly requires a conscious effort and decision on the part of the MGTOW - many men simply drift into stages 1 and 2, but a complete cloistering of oneself from society at large requires some level of understanding as to how the world really works.

In this level, the MGTOW interacts with society only as much as is required for him to survive. Unfamiliar people - men and women - are avoided, and contact, such as that which is required for him due to employment, is kept clean, public and strictly professional. This does not mean seclusion - MGTOWs in this level may have groups of friends whom they may share interests and activities with, but by and large they do not exist.

The minimalist lifestyle of level 3 is still in effect; the MGTOW may still work off the books for cash or barter, and will do his best to avoid paying taxes as much as possible. Less scrupulous MGTOWs may decide to bleed the system and hasten the collapse by sucking the system for all the benefits they can obtain. For all societal intents and purposes, the MGTOW is considered dead or non-existent - hence the term "going ghost".

Alternatively, the MGTOW may opt to leave society altogether and seek greener pastures. This is happening not just in the US of A, but in extremely high numbers in highly misandric countries such as Sweden. Whether it is self-imposed spiritual or physical exile, the end result is the same: one less worker drone paying into the system, one less card in the base of the house.


Reactions to MGTOW

History repeats itself

Interestingly, this is not the first time the MGTOW phenomenon has manifested itself. Similar conditions were found during near the end of the Roman Empire, when patrician men were refusing to marry the women of the time, for much the same reasons that MGTOWs are not today. Caesar Augustus slapped a bachelor tax on men in order to try and get them to breed, in order to get bodies to fill the roles that the patrician class were expected to fill (such as in the army).

It didn't work. Bachelors paid the tax and just went on their merry way.

Bachelor taxes have been tried too through various points in history, including the UK, Turkey, and even Colonial America., so why should they stop now? Indeed, now with news of Japan's proposed "handsome tax" and Sweden's "man tax", it seems that history will repeat itself.

And since the idiots who run these sanatariums know nothing of learning from history, as the Roman citizens absconded to self-sufficient germanic barbarian estates to avoid the increasingly punitive taxes and laws, so shall men abscond to countries perceived as more male-friendly. It's not a prediction, it's already happening.


Current situation

Thankfully, women in general are not completely blind. Even though most non red-pill women don't understand the cause, they are certainly feeling the effects of MGTOW - which is why we have all these "where have all the good men gone?" pieces from the left, and "why is chivalry dead?" pieces from the right. The benefits are drying up like thin spit on a hot stove, and it's off to Pimp Daddy Government with more cries of "gimmedat!" as evidenced by the recent election.

Recently, Suzanne Venker wrote an opinion piece titled "The War on Men". Dalrock has carefully taken it apart and proven that it's nothing but toeing the usual tradcon party line on how we men are supposed to be good little traditional wage earners and try and buy back into the white picket fence dream - which no longer exists.

Fuck that. Even before I fully decided to turn MGTOW, I like to think I saw women as more than their reproductive organs, and if I'm going to do my share in any personal relationship she'd better be doing more than just selling access to her pussy, or else she's no more than a whore. Should I feel entitled for selling access to my sperm or my bank account?

The tradcons want traditional gender roles for men...but not for women, and prove themselves worthy of the label "pro-life feminists". As to why I'm quoting reactionaries as sources for this tradcon phemomenon...well, they're the ones who've got their eye most on this.

I'm planning to invest in cat food companies.

Some ladies, of course, at least are the exceptions that prove the NAWALT rule and are more honest about the situation. SunshineMary had this to say:

"When I first began reading on sites concerned with men’s issues, I did not understand the “Men Going Their Own Way” (MGTOW) concept.  To be honest, I found the idea a little bit threatening and kind of scary.  As a non-feminist, I fully understand that women are very dependent on men, even if it’s just Big Daddy government.  If large numbers of men bail out, women are in serious trouble.  This is scary for a woman to contemplate if she is honest with herself and drops the false bravado for a moment.  My knee jerk reaction was that men should not “go their own way”; they should continue to take care of women but just somehow make women behave with gratitude and humility.

However, as I have spent some time on sites like Dalrock, I have had the opportunity to read more personal anecdotes about decent Christian men whose wives divorced them due to congenital discontentedness, destroying their husbands’ and children’s lives in the process.  Some of these stories are truly heart-breaking, but I’ve learned never to express sympathy to these men; they don’t want sympathy.  They don’t want to be pitied.  What they wanted was for their ex-wives to honor the commitments they made about “until death do us part”.  That such behavior is perpetrated against these men not by supposed feminists but by women who are ostensibly Christian women, who ought to be about the business of the Lord, makes it particularly galling."

"Men will not want to put that yoke back on even if it is offered to them.

I don’t know this for sure.  Maybe they will.  Personally, I wouldn’t want to, at least not for a bunch of useless, ungrateful, nagging, slutty, overweight, entitled, self-centered, ill-tempered grumblers, by which I mean a large percentage of American women.  Maybe somehow women can bring enough to the table to coax men into taking charge again, but I’m not sure what that would be; they might want to read my bl*w j*b tip, which by the way I’ve updated after rigorous scientific testing."


Endgame

So what now? Knowing all this, can the MGTOW lifestyle survive indefinitely as a safe haven for men?

This, unfortunately, is unlikely.

Stu from AVFM had this to say:

"Let me tell you what happens when men just adopt a MGTOW lifestyle, or avoid the potholes and just go on with life. Remember when things started to get really crappy for marriage, and men just started to say, well, ok, I wont get married, I’ll just live together? They change the law so that living together is legally the same as being married.

So, next, you don’t live with a woman, you just have a girlfriend. Then they change the law so that long term relationships qualify too. And on it goes, until you have ridiculous laws like Australia’s “Mistress Law”, where even a married man, with kids, who has an affair on the side, leaves his assets open to being accessed by the other woman. Ok, so nothing but the shortest flings and one night stands from now on. Do you think they are going to leave it there? We can all not have anything to do with women at all, and they will demand the state find a way to extract those resources from us, and give it to them. Sweden has had two tries at a man tax...they will pass it eventually.

It’s not just in personal relationships, anyway. False allegations, discrimination in schools, jobs, etc. You can’t rule out working with women, or being with them in a train, or lift, or bus, or pub, or in the line at Macca’s. Whatever safe house, or piece of ground you are standing on now that you think is yours, they will come for it. And if the only answer to that from you is that you will retreat to higher and higher ground, then you will have nowhere to run in the end. You have to fight back. There is nowhere safe. There is no line drawn that you can cross where they can’t come after you. 

When enough men are doing whatever you are doing to deprive women and the state of your assets and income, that is the trigger for the next round of draconian laws to regain access to it. This is exactly why we are in this shit hole now, because men just looked after number one, and tried to solve only their particular problem at the time. They just keep coming, and men just keep giving up ground and running."

Slavery certainly is one possibility. The other is complete and utter societal and economic collapse as beta men realise that both the alphas and their little harems have screwed them over. Social programming can only go so far. Shaming can only go so far. The betas and omegas are noticing.

And then they shrug. Whether it means another Dark Ages for humanity like when it happened in Roman times, I don't know. I like modern conveniences with the lights on and water running, but the end seems inevitable at this point; we are laying the foundations for what is hopefully not another cycle of prosperity leading to degeneracy and despair, but a straight path out of this mess. Would humanity learn from its mistakes.

And this has been repeatedly warned about by everyone in the know.

It's interesting how a lot of predictions made by individuals within the androsphere/manosphere have come true. Back in 2004, Angry Harry predicted in his piece "organisms" that an enormous "male brain" would arise from the consciousness of "men-who-sit-at-screens". Such an organism would have no real head and no single mastermind leading it, and yet like neurons coming together to form a brain, have a direction and purpose gathered from the collective efforts of all those who entered into it.

Today, we have...well, we have what we have; you can see it for yourself.





An unmagnetised piece of iron is comprised of many tiny domains, each magnets in their own right. However, they are randomised and unruly, and produce no net magnetic field as they cancel out each other. Observable magnetic force only arises when all the domains are aligned in the same orientation.

And as rulers of regimes during revolutions can tell you, beta men are much the same way.

Cappy Cap leaves us with this post:

"We are not a fad or a fashionable movement.  We are not a "faux-crusader" hobby for people too lazy to work at anything (going green, PETA, veganism, etc.)  We are a backlash against the biggest psycho-social atrocity foisted upon a people.  You destroyed our lives, our country, our economy and our people.  And without those things in our lives, we have nothing else to do but exact our toll of revenge."

From Glorious Bastard:

"Look, I could go all day!  It is the end of the day, and you are running out of others' money; and you have run out of your men’s patience!  However, you will not see the anger outside of the redness of our faces.  You are physically secure from harm; for now, until your violent brood of fatherless “youth” turn on you and all of us.  We will defend ourselves, but not you!  This is a trap.

You don’t see it, do you?  The fact that men are now indifferent means that you will now have to earn your keep.  Your rejection of your men, will now lead to their rejection of you.

You only matter in your mind; your sex is nothing to save you.  You are merely being replaced, can you feel that?

Of course not, and that is the point!  I truly desire to give you everything you asked for; it just may not be what you want.

You have failed.

Good day, and good riddance.  I don’t want to harm you, just send you away."

And from Rollo Tomassi:

"I will be nobody’s fucking slave and nobody’s fool.

You owe nobody anything. You owe women nothing. You owe society nothing. All of those things, those forces, those structures wish to impose a slavery on you and you need begin to reject it right now. You need redefine to yourself, “What it means to be a man.” And you need to begin to live that declaration of what it could, should, and would to be a man if you filter that determination with the first filter.

I will be nobody’s slave and nobody’s fool.

We will stop being men that are useful to women, useful to society and start being men that live life on their terms. You have a power that you give away. We voluntarily let chains be placed on us because we think that is what “The Good Man” does.

Re-evaluate everything."

The betas will shrug.

The chips will fall.

Friday 28 December 2012

...



"Just before you fell asleep, you said you were going to kill His Lordship."

"Did I? I must have been very tired."

"To think it?" said Savn. "Or to say it?"

Savn waited, but Vlad made no answer to this. Savn said, "why do you hate him so much, anyway?"

Vlad's widened nostrils flared. When he spoke, his voice was almost normal. "He's a necromancer. He works with souls. When he needs one, he takes it, and does what he will; he believes it's his inalienable right to do just that with a being he thinks lesser than himself. When he has no need of a soul, he does it anyway just because he can. Do you understand what I'm saying? Does that mean anything to you? Would you like it if your life was snuffed out one day, with no warning, and for no crime, just because someone found it convenient to do so? What sort of person does that, Savn?"

Then he fell back, and he seemed to fall asleep at once.

- Athrya, Steven Brust.

Your kid is a pet rock.


From Cappy Cap - why if you aren't going to bother raising your kids and outsource the job instead, you might as well get a dog, a cat or a pet rock. It'll be easier on both your head and your pocketbook.


Which is why I mentioned in my earlier post on childcare that if I ever have hypothetical children and my hypothetical wife is unwilling to be a stay-at-home-mother like my own mother was (assuming I didn't catch that in the filter first), I'll do the job, be a stay-at-home-dad, and hypergamy et al be damned. It's the school holidays now, and every morning on my way to the bus stop I walk past truckloads of parents all waiting to drop off their little lifestyle accessories (some just infants) at the several daycares within walking distance of my home.

After watching this video, I went out to uni and counted the number of obviously Thai/Indon/Filipino maids shepherding children around than people who could conceivably be their parents. Let's just say there were more of the former than the latter.

I refuse to put my hypothetical children through this wringer. If I can learn how to cook, clean, and grow vegetables, I damn well can learn how to care for my own hypothetical children.

Thursday 27 December 2012

The house of cards continues to collapse.



Social Security runs a 48.7 billion dollar deficit in 2012.

It's all coming down, folks. First the West, which will drag down the East, and then we're all well and truly fucked.

Me, I'm hiding in my box. Gotta get some steel plating for the thing - how else am I going to survive the blasts?

Idiocy.

Was bustling about the usual hangouts when I stumbled across this:


Now, the rape of anyone, male or female, young or old, is a terrible thing, as is any crime, but as anyone can tell you, it's a highly emotionally charged issue and one that those old bloody activist groups are going to press home. Men are killed and raped every day, who cares about that, eh?

The sheer levels of white knightery, calls for due process to be eliminated, and female supremacism are sickening. I had to take a deep breath, sit back, and remind myself that as Fidelbogen and Barbarossa point out, getting into an internet argument with gender supermacists and white knights isn't going to change anything.

Any of you men in the anglosphere who might be thinking of absconding here, I will repeat: don't.

The Singaporean education system - free-market mechanisms in a publicly-funded industry.

(Apologies if I sound like an idiot in this post, but I'm explaining this from a layman's point of view. As I said, my formal grasp of economics is only from a from an eighteen-year-old or freshman student might have, so excuse me if I make any bloody errors in my writing.

Anyways.)


Education, the Singaporean government likes to tout, is our big thing, complete with the whole "our people are our only resource" mantra. Of course, the government has just been a wee bit short-sighted in raiding our capital goods resources in order to produce more consumer goods - the figures that came out for this year's fertility rates are abyssmal - about 1 for both Chinese and Indian ethnicities, and 1.6 for Malays. But that's not what I'm going to be talking about today.

The Singaporean government is very big on education - it's the second largest item on the budget after defense. Education is massively funded; for example, I'm now benefiting from a government grant for all Singaporeans who wish to pursue higher education, that pays $15,000 of my $18,000 per semester for my Chemical Engineering degree for the whole of my course of study. Foreigners can benefit from this grant, too, with the caveat that they agree to stay and work in Singapore for a number of years (depending on the amount paid out by the grant. This is the most in medicine, middling in engineering, and arts...they get the least, as should be when someone decides to major in puppies and unicorns. I'd personally divide it further into puppies, which are at least somewhat useful, and unicorns which are useless, and defund the latter completely. Then again, I'm not God-Emperor of Singapore).

We pay for our schools. We pay for our teachers. We don't pay for school lunches and supplies, though - the needy in those areas are handled by private (or at least, government-linked) charities such as the New Paper Pocket Money Fund. But despite all the government largesse being lavished on the Singaporean education system, it still does a decent job at its job of education the populace, at least where basic functionalities (such as reading, writing and maths) are concerned - things like thinking for oneself...eh, that's another matter. Who needs real dissent and thinking when the purpose of education is to turn you into happy worker for glorious city-state?

Why does this happen?

As we begin to peel back the layers, an interesting phenomenon pops up: if you're a top student in any of the national exams, you're a fucking celebrity for your 15 minutes of fame. A small example:

Damn, I'm SMRT! Drink this and you'll be SMRT like me!

I don't think there's any other country in the world that turns its top students into goddamned national heroes, even if only for a little while. Your name gets into the newspapers, on the telly. You're used to sell health supplements. People talk about you and your fellow ubersmensch for the next two weeks or so after the examination results have been released.

And more importantly, they talk about your schools. And the schools get into the media, too. It used to be more competitive in the past - schools used to be ranked according to the national examination results of their students and this information made available to the public, but I hear it's been scrapped since I left the system seven years ago.

Nevertheless, it's easy to see here that the currency being used in the "market" of Singaporean schools isn't so much money as in dollars and cents, but rather, prestige. Schools supply education to the students, which in turn provide the schools with prestige in accordance with their achievements. Walk by any school in Singapore, and in all likelihood they'll have somewhere on their outer fences/walls a number of banners extolling their achievements in the academic, atheletic or other senses. "Produced top "N"-level student!" "5 sports gold medals this year!" "We did lots of stuff, so put your kid in our school and they will get smart!" If you're lucky, they'll even have a trophy cabinet displayed somewhere prominently with all their trophies up for everyone to see and admire.

There are three general types of schools in Singapore:

1) Normal schools. These are commonly found in neighbourhoods, and typically serve working-class to middle-class children. Fees are almost completely paid for by the government (a secondary education might be $15 per month), and the school is expected to abide by the Ministry of Education's school syllabus and educational policies. Note that when it comes to Singapore, though, spartan school facilities can still be pretty extravagent when compared with other countries - even in a low-status school, one can reasonably expect to find a library, a computer lab, and either a basketball court or football field.

2) Autonomous schools. There is some overlap with the former category ("neighbourhood schools" certainly provide examples of both), but these are generally identified by greater decision-making ability when it comes to things like additional stuff to the curriculum and building new facilities.

3) Independent schools. These are typically high-class schools with (compartively) long histories, all of which are in high demand by the populace when it comes to vacancies. Independent schools are able to set their own school fees (for example, $240 a month for the one I went to) and have some say in what they teach and go about, although they still have to follow the educational syllabus and policies as set out by the Ministry of Education. Such schools are the province of the local elites' children, but can serve as low as the upper edges of the middle class. As such, though, they have plenty of rich alumni willing to throw money their way, which results in

So here we have an odd situation. One would expect that with all the funding in the world, there would be no price signal for Singaporean schools to up their ante when it comes to providing good education (for the government-approved value of "good", anyways). Yet in the absence of mundane price signals thanks to massive government funding for education, another system has sprung up in its stead to regulate it in a manner akin to free-market mechanics. This way, our schools never quite get de-funded, and yet at the same time there's this rabid incentive to one-up all the other competitors and prove themselves the ultimate provider of education.

Interesting, innit?

Factors unique to Singapore

The Education Culture

I've touched upon the national obsession with education in one of my previous posts, so I won't go over it again in detail, save one salient point: we Singaporeans are fucking obsessed with the thing. Part of it's due to traditional Chinese culture in which scholars were venerated as being the top of society, and another part's due to our government pushing the idea on us top-down, especially for the other ethnic groups. Hey, they managed to get us to stop speaking Chinese dialects and effectively stamped most of them out in the middle and upper-middle classes through national campaigns and the schools; what's a little social engineering like this to them if they can do that?

Academic success is the be-all-end-all of one's childhood in Singapore. If you get your ass booted to the Institute of Technical Education, the perception is that you're forever stuck as one of the working classes. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, really, bar a few exceptions, and it's one that fuels the madness.

In addition, this education culture encourages the spread of information about schools, not just in the form of official reports and statistics, but also by word of mouth and anecdote. It's not perfect information, but it sure is a whole damned lot. If a school has a bad reputation (I.E. it cannot offer the students prestige), then one can expect the demand for its services plummet like a stone. During my years in secondary school, there was a case in which several sportsmen beat up a student, took down the whole event on video with their mobile phones (yes, some of those had video capabilities even back then) and the video went out on the internet. They weren't expelled (by virtue of being bloody sportsmen), but when the issue got out to the media, the principal made a very pointed...well, point of warning the student population not to talk to any media representatives about the issue. Essentially, the whole school went into information lockdown on the topic, and when the incident did come out as a half-page article in one of the local tabloids, it didn't mention our school by name (for doing so would have ruined it).

Geographical Happenstances

One important thing to note is that Singapore is a small country. Counting the main islands and all the little islets we lay claim to, we're about 650 square kilometres in size, and it takes about two and a half hours to drive from the east end of the country to the west (or a one a a half hour train ride, take your pick). Parents have been known to move homes for the sole purpose of being within the 1 kilometer radius of a good primary school, which increases their chances of their children being successfully accepted into said school.

This is very important, as it means no one school can have a monopoly on an area by sheer dint of it being the only school around. Students are free to pick and choose from practically any school in the country to attend (this is doubly so for secondary education and up, which has nothing to do with geographical location when it comes to admissions) as they can travel from home to school in a reasonable amount of time. The number of competitors for students is always high, and schools need to be kept at the top of their game.

Teachers

A small side note to this topic that I feel needs to be gone into. An interesting thing about Singapore is the absolute lack of unions. A bit of history here - during the 1960s, the local unions were a bit of a problem with their pro-communist riots and terrorism, so the government did something which I don't think would work anywhere else: all unions were nationalised by bringing them all under the umbrella of the National Trade Unions Commission (or NTUC) for short.

Now there's only one official union in Singapore, and the NTUC is often seen as a puppet of the government - or at least, known to serve the government's interests, which is in keeping in the theme of what would be lobbyist groups in other countries turned into arms of governmental control in Singapore.


But yes. No teachers' unions leading to teachers needing to pull their own weight. No salary by results leading to artificially inflated grades, or all that bullcrap coming out of the US of A, for example. For better or for worse, teachers aren't a protected class of worker in Singapore, and it leads to less of the "overpaid babysitter" syndrome that Cappy Cap refers to. Despite being regulated and trained by the Ministry of Education, as far as I can tell, teachers are essentially like any other worker when it comes to hiring/pay practices, regardless of their status in society. Maybe that's helped things along, I don't know.

Can this be applied elsewhere?

Sadly, I don't think the Singaporean education market can be applied to a whole lot of other countries, for the geographical reasons, if nothing else. From my understanding, schools are a lot more widely spread apart in other nations than they are here, allowing some of them local monopolies - which breaks the whole of the second point. I'm not sure how willing people are to relocate in other, bigger nations just so their kids can have a good education, but my guess is that it's certainly much less than here in Singapore, considering the opportunity costs involved.

Of course, there are also the other factors I've mentioned, and I'm sure that I've left out a lot of points that someone who isn't a layman could cover in more detail, too. But what I'm getting at is that the Singaporean education system does fall in nicely with what a lot of people are saying about free market education, only the free market here isn't determined by dollars and cents.

Wednesday 26 December 2012

Give me...




An enemy to fight
A monster to slay
A mammoth to hunt
A cause to uphold
An evil to vanquish
A future to save
A vision to realise 

Monday 24 December 2012

Improving oneself.



I won't deny it: I was a fat bastard back in the day.

I was fourteen, and weighed somewhere in the region of 90 to 95 kilos. For those of you on the Imperial scale, divide by 0.454 to get the equivalent in pounds, which is 198 to 209. Oh yes, I was a fat bastard. My school uniform had to be specially tailored, and I wobbled when I walked. I was happily shoehorned into the exercise program for fat kids my school had and even stayed in there for two years, but as they say: you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

And as everyone who's been through public school as a fat kid knows, you're an easy target; it didn't help that I preferred using a handkerchief rather than tissues, either. (God knows why that made me more of a target. Kids are cruel, that's the only explanation I can come up with.) To make a long story short, school life from the ages of 8 to 15 were not exactly rosy for me; those years beat into me a lot of beta/omega-ish traits that I still struggle with.  Keep your head down. Don't attract attention. Be quiet. Follow the path of least resistance. Avoid conflict. Eventually, I got sick of it.

So what did I do? First thing, I resolved to be not fat.

Oh, lots of people certainly resolve to be not fat, and get nowhere. I consulted my physical education teacher, worked out a routine consisting of strength training and plyometrics, and he sent me to hit the weights. For those of you who're not so familiar with the term, plyometrics as opposed to strength or endurance training, is aimed at developing speed, explosive power, and resistance to sudden impulses and exertions of one's muscles.

But it was simple baby steps at first. 50 pounds supine presses, 40 pounds lat-pull downs, that sort of thing. Ten years have gone by since then, and my weight plummeted from 90-odd kilos to 67 or so, then built back up to around 82 as I gained muscle mass. Today, I'm doing 60 reps of 210 pounds supine presses for my plyometrics, and my lat pull downs are 190, going to go onto 200 soon.

No magic bullet to be had. I just kept at it, and when things were getting too easy, I upped the ante. No special diets, although I never liked sweet things anyway (my main weakness is for spicy foods, the kind that's strong enough to bring tears, oh for a good coconut fish head curry) and I'm sure that helped. Try to keep a balanced idea of what went in and goes out, as opposed to just eating whenever and wherever.

The interesting thing was that as my physique improved, the bullying gradually slowed and came to a stop by the time I was about 17. My behaviour changed a little as I began to test and examine the new limits of my improved body, but I don't think my overall attitude changed that drastically - when I look back on things, I still remember a lot of times when the beta/omega traits still surfaced in me. No, despite my insides not really changing, the outside changing was enough to make a very significant difference. Guys would actually greet me in the hallway and show me some modicum of respect (a hell of a big improvement from beating the $%#$ out of me). Girls actually showed some form of interest in me, up to the point where I opened my mouth and said something (probably revealing that I wasn't quite as alpha as they thought I was).

It was a nice feeling.

Now that I've built my body up to some kind of respectable level (although there always is room for impovement, until I get to hulk status, hah), it's time to do the same for my persona, I guess. As I've mentioned in my previous posts, I don't intend to use Game to pick up any of the local ladies for any reason (being a no-relationship MGTOW and all), but it's a good lesson on the nature of human beings and explains a lot of observations I've made in my life, especially when it comes to my alpha thug brother. A lot of the traits involve growing a goddamned backbone, which I fully admit I'm lacking in, and as Aurini explains, that in turn can be applied to all facets of life, not just when it comes to attracting women.

If you can fake it for long enough and convincingly enough, there's a good chance you can become the mask. But baby steps first, grasshopper. Baby steps first. I didn't start out doing hundred-pound lat pull-downs - would've pulled something, if I had.

I've made a personal commitment: to meet the eyes of everyone I pass in the street, and hold it there for at least two seconds before breaking the gaze. To be clear, I don't glare or anything that might be construed as hostile, but a simple establishment of eye contact. It's been a tough effort, especially since I have to overcome the impulse that was beaten into me to keep my head down and sometimes I have to consciously remember to do so, but the results have been interesting.

Firstly, a lot of people either a) ignore me and keep their head down, or b) realise that I'm looking at them and quickly turn away in a fashion that's clearly submissive. How much of this is human, how much of this is me, and how much of this is our culture here in Singapore, I'm not sure. I'm not an expert in this field; all I have are anecdotes. But what I noticed is that by and large, we're a nation of rather cloistered people, to put it as kindly as possible.

So far, I've only had two people meet my gaze and slow down to acknowledge me: the first was a middle-aged (I'd guess late thirties to early forties) fireman who came on board the bus I was on. He caught my gaze, then proceeded to hold it for a good five to six seconds - I was honestly worried that he was going to take offense or even turn violent, but then he gave me a nod, which I returned. During those five or six seconds, amidst the overwhelming impulse to be the first to break the gaze, well...I could feel the static in the air. A few seconds, and yet it was enough to leave me feeling drained by the time the encounter was over.

The second was an elderly Indian lady who gave me a big, friendly smile as I looked at her - I think it was a genuine smile, at least - and I felt obligated to nod and smile back.

Small episodes, perhaps, but important in breaking this mould that I've allowed myself to be poured into. I don't doubt that there'll eventually be a point when some thug in a respectable guy's skin will take it as an invitation to violence, and I'm not sure how I'll eventually stand up to that, if I'll be able to keep my cool. We'll see.

Sunday 23 December 2012

Peering out of the box - 23/12/2012


*In the down notes, Keoni Galt and Bill Powell predict the start of a coming ice age in 2013. Makes me glad I'm 2 degrees off from the equator, although I need to look into this more. It's hard to do any sort of prepping in a place like Singapore, but I've tried to keep at least one week's worth of food for everyone under my parents' noses. If all fails and it's the end of the world as we know it, there's always the fall-back position of my grandmother's house up in Malaysia.

Of course, all this is conjecture for now.

*In the up notes, Glorious Bastard and A Voice For Men make predictions for the Men's Rights Movement in 2013, and the latter is on a fundraising drive until the 29th of this month.

*Dalrock looks for Peter Pans, and notes that things are steadily getting worse for divorcees.

*The Male Contraception Information Project reports on progress on the Gandarusa Pill and RISUG.

*Elusive Wapiti - remember kids, if a woman does it, it's not rape.

*Suz - if only those opposing us were like the young woman described in this post. Things for us would be much easier and civil. Sadly, we can't have nice things.

*Hyper Report for 21/12/2012 - Bank of Japan starts quantitative easing ten. When will the US learn that QE isn't going to help? Never, I guess.

*DemCAD - US government loses 40 billion in General Motors.

*The Real Singapore - IT Consultant gives up $5k a month job to become a toilet attendant. Are we starting to see economic disengagement locally now?

More Real Singapore - Women who made news locally, including sucking up to one's professor and bribing him for grades (at least she didn't use sex), accused of corruption in the local anti-drug force, and the Speaker of the House commits adultery and thinks it respectable and justifiable because it's for "bonding with the grassroots community."

All right, I'm getting back in my box, see you folks around.