Kicking. Squealing.
1. More pandering for the women vote. Obama embarks on the “1 is 2 Many” campaign while Biden throws around the “1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted in college” lie.
2. Chad Ochocinco in as alpha a move as possible when proposing marriage to a woman. Ochocinco proposed to his girlfriend while playing Call of Duty. But Business Insider also shows a jealous/doting side. This poses the question: when does jealousy break from being a beta male trait to being an alpha male type trait in the mold of this Christian Grey that we keep hearing about?
3. An inside look at welfare office fraud. (Just realized that I’ve linked to Business Insider in my first three bullet points; the site has consistently interesting content).
4. I agree with about half of these. Office work sucks; men get a rush from male camaradarie; sometimes men want to just get in a fight; men are instinctively drawn to numbers and statistics. I’m curious about the title though. How does one learn something from being straight? We typically learn things about particular aspects of life when we have something to compare it to. If you’re statically straight, I don’t think you just “learn” something from being straight. You just know what you know.
5. I nod to pretty much everything Walter Russell Mead is writing nowadays.
6. I’ll read anything about generational decline.
Due you missed it. The legalize the youth immigration move is what Oblamer (I said that first) thinks will get him reelected. You need to tout Romney bro. I have since last election. He wants Paulenty for VP which I hate but he is the real deal bro.
A little bit of protectiveness is good here and there. Shows you care. As always, small doses.
The final year of my relationship in college I was pretty checked out in that regard. Didn’t care who she talked to at the bar our that she had orbiters going after her. Hell, I needed more beads for tits at apple river so I had my gf show her tits to get me more because I didn’t care who saw her tits.
It bothered her a lot that I didn’t give a shit, and though she didn’t break up with me it did cause a lot of problems and fights.
I left this comment at the Economist Generational Decline article
“Young people are expected to pay for student loan debt, mortgages, car payments, insurance across the board, not to mention have children and pay income taxes, property taxes, etc. How are they going to do this on an intern’s salary coming out of college in a job market that doesn’t need or want to hire them? Not to mention the money it costs for women to find marriage quality men and for men to find marriage quality women. Not to mention divorce payments of 50% of first marriages failing.
Your typical Baby Boomer answer is something like: “Man up! Life is tough soldier! Do it anyway!”
Millenials are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which they have learned can be had so long as a modest wage pays rent, and casual sex replaces the stress of all the expectations of a marriage that has a coins toss chance of failing.
The only selfish entitlement is Baby Boomers thinking that their way of 401k’s is better than that, a delusion that they have to cling to because they invested in that belief all their life.”
Love it or hate it, can anyone deny that this is what is happening?
Your item 4: the writer sounds like a successful realization of the New Liberal Man. He doesn’t like being this way but that’s all he knows.
I see what he’s trying to do, and this is a common style among young American writers that the system produces — he want to claim and champion traditionalism, but he’s doing it from a frame of apology. He wants something that feels right – masculinity, normalcy – but which according to everything he’s been taught is wrong.
Example: “I have often felt the need to apologize for being straight. Is that strange? It’s probably strange.” It’s not just the content. It’s the style too.
Even where he is talking about wanting to get into a fight he sounds like a girl.
In my stint as a grad student, I tutored a creative writing workshop. Nearly 100% of the output in that class was this same kind of hypomasculinity (sic).
Keep posting articles at GMP dude. That place needs a daddy.
Walter Russell Mead has the rarest of commodities on the Internet, Wisdom. His column on turning 50 is one of the most inspiring pieces I have ever read.
Going along with PA,
The thing that bothers me the most about GMP is that a lot of it is written by (this doesn’t include you, Chuck) twinkier, hipster type dudes who have this huge problem with pure, raw masculinity. Like PA mentioned, theye’re either embarrassed by it or, upon the realization they aren’t very macho or whatever, try to normalize *their* version of masculinity.
Like band geeks/theater nerds scoffing at the jocks in high school.
Furthermore, I am willing to bet 90% of straight men are wholly unconcerned with how gays view them, if they are viewed as gay, or actually have to realize one day in their 30s that hey, comraderie *is* cool. This piece is a lot more about the author trying to lay on the leather sofa and get some validation and catharsis than it is for the readers.
Young writers like that fellow at GMP ought to consider TS Eliot’s words:
“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
If Chad Ochocinco is alpha, then being alpha doesn’t mean shit. I barely even consider him part of my species. And I don’t give a shit if thousands of women want to fuck him. There is really something wrong with a typology that puts a pinhead like him at its apex, however much gash he pulls. And anyone who doesn’t get that I consider to be a degenerate.