Tag: culture war

Caught In The Middle

Rob Says2 Comments

ancient armor black and white chivalry

Things seem to be “heating up.” One of the latest things that I’ve seen on social media is the “NFAC” or “Not Fucking Around Coalition,” arming themselves and parading out to a monument and calling on the “White Supremacists” to show themselves.

The left is more or less controlling the streets, disrupting other people’s lives by blocking traffic, burning shit down, breaking shit, and beating the shit out of people.

On the other side of the coin, many moderates and conservatives vacillate between, “Where are da cops?” and “Get ready to boog.”

Chest Rockwell, @RuleZeroDad on Twitter, had a great tweet about it:

(Bold emphasis is mine.)

Listen. I get it. Something, something poking bear, sleeping giant, just you wait, we’re near a breaking point.
But seriously, fuck you if you advocate taking up arms when most of us have something to lose, and I’m not guaranteed freedom after I’m forced to join you and kill.
And here is the crux of the matter:
Most of us have something to lose. Whether it be our property, our jobs, our families, our freedom to not sit in jail or in a prison, or our very lives.
Every “cause” requires a martyr at some point. The problem with being a martyr is twofold:
1. You have to die.
2. You don’t get to stick around and see what, if any, results came from your martyrdom. You won’t know if you died in vain or not.
Everybody wants to join the cause, but nobody wants to be the first in line to be a martyr.
It seems like I’m seeing a lot of people talking a big game about “pushing back,” and yet I’m not seeing anyone actually doing anything about pushing back. I think that’s because of what Chest said earlier:
They all have something to lose. That, and nobody wants to be a martyr. I know I have much to lose and I sure as hell don’t want to be a martyr.
I’m writing this because I’m frustrated. I’m frustrated because the inmates are running the asylum. I’m frustrated because in all honesty, by the time the “sane majority” of the population actually decide to do something, it will be too late. We’re pretty much there already.
Mackenzie, @_KenziePuff on Twitter, tweeted a short video. In it, the guy who was talking said:
“How radical is your opinion when the cops and the National Guard are kneeling and doing the Macarena, dancing with protesters, and every major corporation has put out a message and donated money to this cause. How radical are your opinions really?”
He goes on about spray painting cop cars and the police doing nothing and then the video ends with the guy saying, “It’s being allowed to happen.”
We’re already there.
We’ve been witness to the demonizing of masculinity for some time now. We also been witness to “white = bad.” We’ve now been witness to people being shot by protesters in their cars as they are trying to leave a mob controlled area.
I honestly don’t think it will be long before we actually are going to witness a public execution of a civilian on the street, in broad daylight, by another civilian. All because they were on the “wrong team.”
Will that executed person become the “martyr” that is needed? If not, how many acts of brutality and violence will it take, with government and law enforcement backing away from it, before someone actually does something about it? What is it going to take to take back our country?
Is our country worth “taking back?” Is she worth fighting for? Plenty of people are sitting on their hands and wanting to have a discussion with “the other side,” which I’m all for actually. Except it seems that “the other side” doesn’t want to talk anymore, if they ever did.
Choosing a path of non-agression doesn’t mean that others aren’t training to murder you and take your stuff. – Jack Donovan.
If the Red Pill has taught me anything, it has taught me to watch people’s actions and their behaviors and not listen to their words. It’s easy to lie with words. Not as easy to lie with actions and behaviors.
One of the saddest realizations to me is that “those in power” whoever they are and may be, don’t want us talking to each other. They want that fight. They want blood to spill in the streets. They want us killing each other at some point.
Where does all of this end? Where does all of this go? I honestly don’t know. From what I’m seeing though, it doesn’t look like it ends well. For any of us.
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“Beef-Only”

Rob SaysLeave a comment
brown bull on green glass field under grey and blue cloudy sky
FIGHT ME.

A little while ago, I was reading a thread on Twitter, and a guy in the thread dropped this little nugget of gold. There’s a lot to unpack in that post and I’m not going to go into it too much. Suffice it to say, it got me thinking. I’ll let you guys read it for yourself and do your own unpacking of it.

Here’s a few thoughts that I had about it though:

A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict. From there, you can only crash into honor-based conflict mode, or back away and disengage.

I’ve encountered a lot of people on the Internet of Beefs, which is pretty much all of social media these days. You can’t have a conversation with them, you can’t talk to them unless it is in support of whatever their beef is. Think about binary thinking and lack of nuance here. Everything is black or white, everything is us versus them. The beefs that people have range from the large scale, global type of stuff, such as climate change, down to the absolutely ridiculous like, if you don’t have kids, your opinion counts for less to society at large.

I swear sometimes that people have nothing better to do in their lives except try and stir up outrage. Imagine that your life is so great, so absolutely “normal,” that you have to go out onto the internet and pick a fight over nothing. Beefing for the sake of beefing.

To continue operating in public spaces without being drawn into the conflict, you have to build an arsenal of passive-aggressive behaviors like subtweeting, ghosting, blocking, and muting – all while ignoring beef-only thinkers calling you out furiously as dishonorable and cowardly, and trying to bait you into active aggression.

This is one of the parts that drives me nuts. The fact that you have to literally duck your head and monitor what you say, just so that you can avoid a conflict with someone who literally has nothing better to do than stir up conflict.

The article goes on to describe what are known as Mooks and Knights:

A mook is an involuntary anonymous, fungible, angry figure desperate to be seen as significant. I was a mook over a year ago. I’ll admit it. I was raging for the sake of raging. Being a mook is mostly about taking sides in somebody else’s fight, whatever that cause may be. It’s mostly opt-in, which means you get to decide if you want to participate or not. You get to choose if your stress levels go up or not. You get to do this every time you engage.

Knights are the guys who have the cause that the mooks fight for. Here’s the thing though:

The conflict is happening for the sake of conflict itself. The goal isn’t to end the fight, but to keep it going, ideally without end. A war without end. A beef that never ends. Fighting for the sake of fighting. This is outrage culture.

The only reason for the fight is to sustain the fight, there really isn’t a strategy to all of this except to sustain and stretch out the beef. The knights are the instigators for the most part and the mooks are the cannon fodder and combat soldiers.

Why the beefing?

The mark of a knight of the vast round table of the Internet of Beefs is the relentless pursuit of the Holy Grift. A mercantile mission for the end of history…..

[P]ush come to shove, that the grifting motive will rule behavior rather than ideological ends. The grifters keep the culture war going…

It’s all about making money and getting the clicks basically. In many cases I think it’s all about trying to remain relevant. Especially when you are a knight of the Internet of Beefs and you need to make sure that the cash keeps flowing in.

While the mooks fight, the knights make money.

And there it is. Have a knight write a tweet or a post of some beefy outrage, whether it’s “real” or not, whether it truly matters or not, (in my experience, it usually doesn’t matter) add a link to the knight’s latest course, book, or seminar, click send, and there you have it. Agitate the mooks and get them fired up so that the dumpster fires get started and then bystanders as well as other mooks join in the foray and links to products and services get clicked. Money is made.

Get people agitated and they want to buy something to alleviate their agitation. It’s one of the oldest sales tricks in the book. It’s similar to creating a problem for someone and then selling them the solution to the very problem you created for them.

I’m not shitting on guys who want to make money, by all means, make your money. Do your thing. I’m just choosing to opt-out of the Internet of Beefs. I’m choosing to not be a mook anymore.

I don’t need to engage in the ‘rage. I don’t need to buy another course or book or whatever it is that is being sold. I’ll be fine without it.

Opting out is a great thing:

Your stress levels fall dramatically. Life tends to “slow down” somewhat. Colors, sounds, and the taste of things has become more vibrant. Maybe that last one about vibrancy is only something that I have experienced, it may not apply to you, but hey, you can always find out for yourself by trying the opt-out route. At a bare minimum, it won’t hurt you to try it.

Please give that article that I linked to at the beginning a full read. It might be one of those “aha moments” for you like it was for me. At the very least, it allowed me to see what was going on around me on the internet and it gave me a way to literally predict what is or was going to happen next.

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Accountability

Rob SaysLeave a comment

man-couple-people-woman.jpg

Lately I’ve seen men and women bashing on men. You’ve seen it as well I’m sure.

Man up! Stop doing this, be more of that, if only you would just “get it.”

And men, at least the one’s who do “get it,” understand that most women will avoid accountability like the plague. Can’t have it. It would mean that it is their (women’s) poor choices that got them where they are today. And it’s true. That really is why they are where they are today.

But there’s more to it than that. I’m sure that there is many factors that are way more complex than what I’m going to go into here.

We as men are partially responsible for the state of women today as well. Now we are NOT responsible for the choices that they make. That’s on them.

We ARE responsible for giving them a pass though. We are responsible for letting their poor choices slide. Women create their own bad habits and poor behaviors, but we as men are the one’s who enable those choices and behaviors by “going along to get along.”

Let’s take crime and punishment as an example.

Right now I’m seeing all sorts of women as teachers getting busted for having sex with their students. Some of these teachers aren’t bad looking, even in their mug shots. Part of me is like, “Damn, where were these teachers when I was in school?” But then the adult and potential father in me is like, “These women are predators, no different than if it was a male teacher having sex with a male or female student.”

Point is, it makes no difference as far as I’m concerned. They ARE predators. They should be punished accordingly. A male teacher convicted of having sex with a minor will get at least 5 years in prison, possibly a lot more. A woman? A year. Tops. If even that. Maybe 90 days in jail. Maybe. Probation is a definite possibility. A slap on the wrist.

I’m sure you are well aware of what I just said, but here’s where I’m going with it.

Who decides the punishment? A judge and/or jury. Usually a judge. Most judges are still men last time I checked. They are the one’s with the latitude when it comes to most sentencing.

Who wrote the laws? Again, most likely it was a man or men.

See where I’m going here?

Take it to the home for some of you. If you have kids, who are you most lenient on? Who gets the pass most often? Maybe you are truly “neutral” when it comes to punishment, and if so, good for you. But are you really? What about your spouse? Our children will test us as they are growing up, seeing where the boundaries are. Seeing what they can “get away with.”

We do it in our relationships too. I’m guilty of it. I let the girlfriend slide when it comes to many things. I’ve enabled certain bad habits because of it. I’m aware of it and I’m doing what I can to reverse it. I also know that ultimately she is responsible for her behavior. So I’ll call her out on it. The majority of the time, it works. I’m not a dick about it, I’m not a tyrant either. Just firm. I won’t budge. I won’t blink. She blinks.

I’m not bashing my own gender, god knows there’s enough of that going on in the world right now and has been for a long time. We can’t control everything someone else does, we truly can only control ourselves. But we can stop giving the women in our lives a pass all of the time. We can call them out when they do stupid shit. We can hold them accountable. We can show them through example that there are consequences for their actions and behaviors.

We can better ourselves and through our examples, we can show our women that they too, can become better.

We need to stop giving them a pass so much. We need to stop letting so many things slide. Stop being afraid of rocking the boat. Stop being afraid of upsetting the women in your life. Stop being afraid that she’ll “hold out” on you, that you won’t get the golden pussy.

She may get pissed at you, probably will. She may even leave you. That’s a total possibility. She’ll probably respect you more though, and if not, well, to me, the writing is on the wall.

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