Governments Against Low Carb — Mangan’s
Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables — New York Times
The government wants us to be weak, fat and stupid. Where’s the liberal outrage? “My body, my choice” applies to late-term abortion but not to getting a steak the way I fucking like it? Thanks guys.
At this point I wouldn’t be surprised to find that cigarettes are actually good for you and they’ve been lying about that too.
Interesting post from an interesting blog:
Facebook: Worthless Fad, or Contemptible Amusement? — Mangan’s
Nice rip on Facebook, some subtle points made in the comments.
There’s this internet startup called Grouper and the way it works is some Wizard of Oz-type figure schedules an interaction between three males and three females at an appropriately chill Manhattan bar/lounge and, I dunno, see what happens I guess. So two friends and I went and saw what happened, which was nothing much.
Before I get to the battle report I’ll theorize a bit. The girls signing up for this are likely to be 25 at an absolute minimum with a hard ceiling on attractiveness and ranging from mildly disgruntled to very disgruntled. The guys are going to be people who think it’s easier to contrive a meeting online with three total strangers they haven’t even gotten a look at first than to just approach three attractive women. (Even on dating sites you at least get a picture!) So: two groups of people who have been preselected to be not-that-attractive to one another. One might think that Grouper could serve a valuable assortative function, helping these two classes to pair off and, you know, do it, for starters, but it seems that in New York especially everyone is too good for everyone else. And everywhere now men have spectator sports, video games, and porn, while women have various hamster bait such as corporate status-grasping, disgusting cultural forms from TV and radio, and vanity dildoes like Facebook and the fashion industry. With all those distractions celibacy doesn’t seem quite so bad. So I don’t predict that this gimmick the Grouper people have set up will be a story at very many engagement dinners, or even a notch on very many bedposts.
My friends, let’s call them “Matt” and “Eric,” and I arrived promptly at a new bar in the financial district and I for one was astonished that the girls had already arrived and were sitting at a low table in the back. So let’s meet our contestants! “Rebecca,” an advertising salesperson who enjoys long hours watching garbage on television; “Melissa,” a person with no future in acting and a sour disposition; and last but not least, “Other Rebecca,” a nurse with a diffident air with whom I didn’t get to talk much. They weren’t hideous or fat or anything. We settled into the pattern you don’t want to settle into, wherein the girls interview you about your accomplishments and what you “do” and “have you lived internationally?” (I liked the way she phrased that for some reason). Melissa asked me what I did late at the firehouse when we weren’t getting runs. I said I read, which is true. “Read what?” This could have been innocent conversation, a hopeful exploration of shared interests, et cetera, but from her it wasn’t: it was a demand for qualification, the equivalent of me asking her to be prettier. As such I immediately replied, “Oh, porn mostly.” Miss Sourpuss didn’t think this was funny, but fuck her. As responses go, I liked mine: it was dismissive and sexually charged, and a girl who wasn’t already determined to have a shitty time would have laughed. In this case I relished her contempt for a minute before turning back to the other one. I spent most of the rest of this time sitting calmly back from the table picturing sex with Rebecca and trying somehow to quantify my inclination to have it.
Blahblahblah. We spent a little time telling the girls about the fighting robots Eric used to build, a topic cooler and more interesting than anything any of them had ever involved themselves in. Naturally enough they found the whole thing very confusing and mildly distasteful. They didn’t think we were very funny, which is weird because we’re fucking hilarious.
We didn’t escalate this encounter at all. We stayed rooted in our chairs, let the waitress bring our drinks, and none of us laid a finger on any of the girls. We allowed the conversation to remain utterly tame, insipid even. This was a little silly. After they left we all agreed that while we didn’t want to see them again, we would have thrown them a bone that night. That being so, we should have just made that the goal and gone for broke, even with the very high likelihood of failure. Even short of that, we should have attempted to make the time there fun, if we were going to stay. Because ultimately we’re the men, and like it or not it’s our jobs to make things happen. And in this context failure is usually hilarious anyway! “We just didn’t click” is what girls and losers say.
The result is that even in a proudly promiscuous society, the very second our two groups parted the six of us all set about assuring ourselves that we’d be no worse off for never catching sight of the others so long as we should live. Nobody even got laid. In the interest of overcoming this tragic inefficiency (ok and snapping my recent slump too), I would have volunteered gamely to lay the rough-looking “actor” with all due vigor, but it was not to be. Good luck, ladies.
There’s just so much going on in this article. For one thing it’s convinced me that Max is no mere frat boy but a true member of the Silvio Berlusconi-Charlie Sheen pantheon, someone with staying power who will be crushing it for years to come. Great last page. Ahahaha let’s get a thread going on this one.
I know nothing about this blog or its author but this is a great post:
If you will be eating like a savage, like I do, the most important warning is: eat when you wake up. If you neglect to do so, you will regret it later. My campy metaphor for this is sleeping in a hunting cabin: if you are too lazy to stoke the fire in the morning you will have a chill by noon that you can’t shake.
I’ve become the leading proselyte and expert around work on this stuff (a good excuse to brush up on my biochem). One very muscular man who gave it a go complained that it made him feel like crap, and he also reported that even his sweat reeked of acetone. My suspicion is he wasn’t eating enough—and that for a guy his size that would be very difficult to do!
Personal trainers are wack. Here’s one observation.
I was at the gym and I saw a girl about my age, pretty but with an easy fifteen pounds hugging her waist, doing half-assed machine curls under the supervision of a muscular male trainer while discussing “relationship issues” with him. (Protip: “relationship issues” usually means complaints about the behavior of an alpha male with whom the girl has not established a romantic relationship. This is what girls talk about with other girls, homosexuals, and, apparently, personal trainers.) The exercise he’s prescribed is surely useless. There’s no sense blaming this trainer, who is taking money from a visibly satisfied customer, but the fact is that rather than making this girl healthier and more attractive, he’s doing everyone involved a disservice by keeping both her waist and her attention-craving ego well-padded.
Eric and I just had a lengthy discussion of the nightmare that is NYC’s transit system, and we’ve come to some pretty striking conclusions. Here’s a recap:
Top 10 MTA Names
As of the start of 2012 I will be cutting the “far” out of my life. That means no political economy, no ethical theory, no economics, no legal theory, absolutely nothing having to do with feminism, none of it. Governments will still kill, maim, imprison, and tax. Academics will continue to lie like it’s their job, because it is. Media shills will keep covering for all of them. Fat chicks will keep eating, whether or not I have anything to say about it. Of course this was known from the beginning, and apart from a brief political operation/bank heist back on campus, it’s always been intellectual curiosity rather than any strong hope or desire to “be the difference” that drove me. And yet there are plenty of other things about which I am curious. I’ve neglected them. Why? One reason we talk about these issues in bars instead of computer programming or crochet is that that is how people signal various group affiliations and loyalties etc. (Hanson).
So the plan is an information diet. (Ferriss). No more of the blogs I check every day just to check up on the idiots who disagree with me. No newspapers. The New Yorker but first I’ll have someone tear out some of the content based on a few criteria I’ll provide. (The New Yorker has been on a hot streak of holding my interest lately. Yes it’s a liberal rag but I’m not obsessing over that any more. That’s the idea.) No more reading Planned Parenthood v. Casey over and over for no reason. Maybe I’ll read a book; I used to read those things until they piled up to the ceiling.
This is not to say I’ll never return to these discussions in the future. But I need a break. These days I feel less like an imperturbable maverick and more like a lonely martyr, and that’s no good—we have better things to do than martyrdom. For example, these days when a girl flakes on me or deploys some feminist platitude, instead of taking it in stride and turning to the next one, I take it as (1) evidence of the statistical dearth of respectable girls and (2) a harbinger of Western demise. It is both, but I think I would like to have a good time of my youth while crushing my own badass goals. Muttering to myself at the bar—“Fools! Why won’t they see?”—interferes with those goals.
Also I quit law school. As a veritable shrine to bullshit, it would have been somewhat incompatible with what I’m talking about. Armed with that extra time, by this summer I’ll have hosted a hundred couchsurfers, taken another foreign adventure like the awesome one I had before school started, gained another fifteen pounds, made sweet love to ten new girls (or just one—hey, you never know), and gained great strides in my quixotic quest to master the piano. I’ll take up Russian again. I’m going to be selfish and utterly self-centered (which terms, in the context of a dissolute society, include helping my parents more and looking in on my grandparents and throwing footballs at my cousins). Though of course I don’t really expect to clear every single bar I’ve just set, none of it is in any way unrealistic. Energy and mood can be managed and we can insist on a high price for every gray hair if we want to.
Obviously this will have some consequences for the blog for the indefinite future. It’s not going anywhere, and the other authors are still permitted/encouraged to post on whatever. My posts are going to veer simultaneously toward the more practical and the more abstract. Not quite on the level of what I had for dinner every night, but then again I do have a post like that, because I thought it would be of use to someone who isn’t me. So you’re going to see my crappy shell scripts that I believe pass a certain minimal likelihood of being useful or interesting to others. On the abstract side, econ questions but only if they are mathematical (abstract) enough to pass the filter I have described, cultural shit like the thrashing I’m going to give that TV show Portlandia, and who the hell knows what else. Pictures of my cat, if I had a cat. Fiction the New Yorker would be lucky to have. I’ve also been thinking about writing a book or pamphlet about how to have sex (not how to get it), so maybe sketches of chapters will appear here.
It’s just as well. It’s been an interesting intellectual walk for me since the end of college. I would say that the broadest characterization of it would be my shift from Milton Friedman/Julian Simon cheeriness to the sort of Rome-is-burning mentality that now seems to me the better part of wisdom. But, in tension with the pessimism I have just expressed, I truly have the feeling that for those of us who are willing to embrace it, we now, currently, have available to us an astonishing amount of truth. The connections that have formed in my mind between seemingly disparate fields of inquiry, seemingly discordant voices, seem to me like a move toward truth, a way of explaining more phenomena with fewer ideas, as when Newton combined Kepler’s planetary motion equations with Galileo’s laws of motion (or when Maxwell reconciled light, electricity, and magnetism). Thanks to people like Robin Hanson we have remarkable ideas about why humans collectively keep choosing waste and vice over freedom and success. Guys like Tim Ferriss are giving step-by-step instructions for health and vitality and productivity. And we have something pretty close to Maxwell’s equations describing the heretofore inscrutable mysteries of love. Strange days indeed! These truths are not always palatable, and most of them draw active scorn from society’s mainstream, respectable censors. But they are there now, on the internet, for all who would seek them.
If the blog has brought these things to the attention of (a handful of) people, great. If I have elucidated those connections in a compelling way, great. Stay tuned.