Ladies, you have a tool at your disposal we men don't have...

...And no, it's not sex.

Honestly, though, I've seen some examples of what Aurini's mentioned in action, and it truly can be very effective - unless someone recognises it for what it is, upon which one can always fall back on debate.

Fight the gun grab, folks.

A 12-year veteran by the name of Nathan Haddad is being made an example of by the US government in the latest gun grabbing movement.

He faces 35 years imprisonment for possession of 5 unloaded 30-round magazines in his car.

Donations are required for his defense, but if you can't donate due to geographical or other reasons then spread the word!

Well.

I don't really have much to add to this comment here from TCS. Draw your own conclusions:

I'm not sure what they sense, but here is what they should fear:

I'm an honorable man and I want justice.

There are no non-Feminist women any more than there are no men who aren't "potential rapists."

Regarding "fair", I tried being a good man, an honest man without regard to the social cost, and there was a heavy social cost. I am the best friend unworthy of intimacy, the helpful tool easily disposed, the ready protector called creepy.

I have smiled and nodded, understanding that many men are not like me and women have some legitimate reason for caution.

Women aren't being cautious, though. They aren't even paranoid, a real psychological condition that can be treated. They are instead reveling in faux drama to experience excitement in their lives.

I have drunk from the cup of injustice of unfounded suspicion for 40 years, understanding, apologizing, proving myself with physical evidence and independently observable achievement.

So, this will be "fair":

Pimp Daddy G.

I think this says all that needs to be said, really.

Diversity Singapore.

Seems like of late, there've been a number of cases of ethnic violence brought about by immigration and immigrants in ye olde anglosphere:

Hispanics purging Blacks from neighbourhoods,

Sword attacks taking place on London streets,

62% of Frenchmen believe they no longer feel at home in France,

And it seems like diversity > rape in the hierachy of victimhood. Hah.

A muslim who raped a 13-year-old girl he groomed on Facebook has been spared a prison sentence after a judge heard he went to an Islamic faith school where he was taught that women are worthless.

Adil Rashid, 18, claimed he was not aware that it was illegal for him to have sex with the girl because his education left him ignorant of British law.

Yesterday Judge Michael Stokes handed Rashid a suspended sentence, saying: 'Although chronologically 18, it is quite clear from the reports that you are very naive and immature when it comes to sexual matters.'

Oh hey, I never knew that ignorance of the law was still accepted as a valid excuse anywhere! But the trend doesn't appear to be so much a particular ethnicity, as opposed to the point of immigration. Singaporean muslims are a nice bunch; I live and work with them every day. They have their heads screwed on right, have been here since time immemorial as the natives of the region, and by all appearances like being warm, safe and fed like any other Singaporean.

Oh snap -

Is it true that the the House has acted to "temporarily suspend" the debt limit? Temporarily suspend? Oh god. We all know how that's going to work out.

If this is true, prepare for hyperinflation ahoy!

Edit: oh, snap. It is true.

Until May 19? Who are you kidding? Who are you kidding, really? Once the limit goes off, my money's on it never coming on again.

Oh, this will be interesting.

The Red Pill spreads!

DEMCAD (a.k.a Renigald), a Youtuber who usually speaks about prepping and the economy, has a couple of videos up on men's rights and issues. It's good to see more and more people getting a take on things.

Peering out of the box - 28/1/13.

A Voice For Men - Restaurant chain blocks mens' sites, AVFM included? Seems Norton might be the issue; investigations are underway.

The Spearhead - Swedish men leaving feminists to fend for themselves. Not surprising; as Uncle Bastardo said, "I truly wish to give you everything you say you desire, only it may not be what you want."

On women in combat roles - Aurini, Keoni Galt, and Vox Day point out that this insanity is possible because the point of the US of A fighting wars since WW2 is not to win, but rather to enrich the military-industrial complex.

An interesting comment:

Well, not to fear, I heard on the news further evidence that the American people are finally waking up. NOT

It seems that the national fast-food chain, 'Subway' advertises foot-long sandwiches. Some consumer activist discovered they were only 11 1/2 inches. Now Subway is being sued; and this was the topic of several local talk shows this weekend.

This was so reminiscient of stories I've read of the fall of Rome. While the city was under siege, the populace nearly rioted when the Caesar suggesting cutting welfare benefits. When the barbarians came into the city, they actually bypassed the Coliseum (which was still full of spectators watching the free circus) because their generals reasoned that interrupting the games would cause them more resistance than the few Roman soldiers still fighting would.

That's the future I see for America. As long as the Chinese and the Arabs don't cut off the cable TV, or the prescription drug benefits, or the welfare checks, they can fairly easily conquer us without much of a fight.

 M3 - Sluts shame good girls. Well, good thing I'm out of the market for the foreseeable future!

Sultan Knish - Building our own media. An important look into how the media strives to create consensus, and how we must fight it from the grassroots-up.

Blazing Cat Fur - Native causasians flee urban areas for the suburbs. Seems like the Second Ottoman Empire is chugging along merrily - just waiting for the whole of Europe to be hollowed out. If anything, the whole of bloody Europe under Sharia law would quickly mean the eradication of feminism in the continent.

 Hyper Report - Are we going to have forced debt creation?

Well, seems like the cracks are lengthening just fine. I'm going to get back into my box now, ugh.

What comes after?

I was got to thinking by a comment a couple of posts ago by DriverSuz. Here's the part that interests me:

MRAs are the only ones offering honorable women a safe haven and a viable direction for the future. MRAs are trying to bring the sexes back together, but not on feminists' terms. It has to happen sooner or later, either through peaceful change or societal collapse.

As for reactionaries, they might understand parts of the problem, but they don't seem to be offering viable solutions, which makes me question the depth of their understanding.

A little earlier on, I was linked to a comment of Dr. Elam's:

Welcome the death panels, folks.

Say hello to the death panels, boys and girls. This is what you get when you have socialised healthcare and a ponzi scheme, folks. This is what you're going to get with Obamacare once it's brought to full play, and how it's going to be as societies collapse worldwide - the weak and helpless get picked off first.

But let's go a little while back, shall we?

From June last year:

Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly.

He claimed there was often a lack of clear evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway, a method of looking after terminally ill patients that is used in hospitals across the country.

It is designed to come into force when doctors believe it is impossible for a patient to recover and death is imminent.

There are around 450,000 deaths in Britain each year of people who are in hospital or under NHS care. Around 29 per cent – 130,000 – are of patients who were on the LCP.

And now, Japan seems to be following suit:

 Taro Aso, the finance minister, said on Monday that the elderly should be allowed to “hurry up and die” to relieve pressure on the state to pay for their medical care. 

“Heaven forbid if you are forced to live on when you want to die. I would wake up feeling increasingly bad knowing that [treatment] was all being paid for by the government,” he said during a meeting of the national council on social security reforms. “The problem won’t be solved unless you let them hurry up and die.”

Yes, Meat Boy, it sucks. No, it's not going to get any better.

Hah. First it was the unborn - "they're not humans, they're not alive, they can't think". Now it's the sick and elderly - "they're parasites, a burden, they should hurry up and die". Who's next, the welfare dependents? Nah, their whored-out votes are still required. So maybe we'll be going after the disabled before moving onto other "useless eaters".

"Because there are no children in Crawford. Not any more."

"What do you mean? Why not?"

"No children, no elderly, no one with an advanced medical condition. Basically no one who might be a burden on the community. Crawford's all about the survival of the fittest. That's how they survived, while the rest of the world went to shit around them."

"Jesus Christ..."

"Well, just the opposite, when you think about it."

"What exactly did Crawford do with all these 'burdens'? What happened to them?"

"Well, you met some of them already."

"Fuck me..."

"Yeah. Anyone who got sick, anyone too old, anyone who was pregnant, anyone they figured wasn't strong enough to survive. To them those people were just mouths to feed, a drain on their precious resources."

"How do you know all this?"

"Everyone in Savannah knew. What was going on inside Crawford got passed around like a ghost story. Except this one was true."

- Exchange between Molly and Lee, The Walking Dead game episode 4.

I can tell you, things are already going to be just peachy. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to buy some blast shields for my box.

Edit: Seems like they're going to ask the fat and smokers to die next! Whee!

As I see it...

The differences, as I see it, between the four quadrants of the Androsphere can be summed up as follows:

MRAs understand and protest.

MGTOWs understand and reject.

PUAs understand and exploit.

Reactionaries understand and revert.

It's that simple.

Aurini - Men are responsible for feminism.

He's right, you know. We're responsible in part for this mess. By choice or by circumstance, we guys have got to fix ourselves before all of this will go away.

The lab ladies.

Everyone's got to start out small - you don't run before you can walk, you don't start out ladening yourself down when you start pumping iron, and you don't do calculus before you can do simple arithmetic.

I'm not sure what the general ruling is on this matter when it comes to game, but I've decided to start out small. Like M3 says, confidence is built by a string of steadily increasing successes, and if you fail right out the box, things aren't going to be looking up even though one of the tenets of game is projecting that aura of overconfidence. I don't think I've got enough to the real stuff to fake it convincingly, if you know what I mean.

Ian Ironwood has a very lovely guide to male dominance for beginners in a couple of easy steps, which I'm currently trying to apply in my daily life. It's not easy for one to break out of one's mould, of course, especially for a self-identified delta/gamma, but nothing ever worth having should be expected to be easy to acquire.

Just waiting.

Just preparing as best as I can and waiting for the signal to hunker down. It might be months, years. But natural law will hold, and one ought not be caught unprepared.

I, for one, welcome...

...Women into combat roles in the military.

This has been quite extensively covered by the Androsphere, and being raised in a society that claims to value meritocracy above all else, I applaud this move. Indeed, I would like to see opportunities for women who have passed the pre-existing physical standards to see combat, perhaps going as far as to set up a female-only company.

Now you ladies can join us men in the wonders of being shot, exploded, tortured, beheaded, imprisoned, enslaved, and raped by some Middle Eastern warlord's flunky who will surely be glad to have a change from buttfucking little boy soldiers and male PoWs!

Adventures in paleo.

I'll be the first to say it: paleo in this part of the world is a tad hard. Rice is served at practically every meal except breakfast, and I'll admit that I do love my rice and pasta a little too much for my own good.

Still, I'm eating at least one, if not two paleo meals a day. I'm trying to perfect steaming with a griddle and wok, and eating the results of steamed vegetables, fish, pork and chicken with a bit of soy sauce, with watermelon/pineapple for afters. Half a head of broccoli every day, too. Perhaps later on I'll actually manage to make a good egg custard; most of my attempts have ended in abject failure. Didn't stop me from eating them anyway; one of the jokes levelled at me in the navy was that I had the gut of a goat.

Do I look and feel healthier? I haven't really noticed, but like exercise, diet is a long-term thing. Perhaps I'll look back on this three months down the road and take stock again.

My body, my choice - I want some of that too, mm'kay?

 
"My body, my choice." It's a mantra that's been shouted ad infinitum, and I think it's a great mantra which highlights the importance of personal sovereignty to the exclusion of everything else, even a life. We must have control over our bodies, after all.

I really am in favour of this idea. In fact, I so fully agree with this idea, I'd like to suggest changing a few things in society to more fully put this concept in practice.

For starters, I spent two years in the navy as a conscript. My unit was a peacetime active unit, which meant we actually had to do our duties for real when there wasn't a war going on (mostly coastal patrol), and while this small part of the world is fairly safe, I was still expected to put my life on the line if need be.

Aside from that, the government took control of my body, telling me where I could be, what I could eat, what I could put into it, when and where I was allowed to smoke, how fit I have to be, and so forth. As an operationally ready reservist, I am obligated to pass a fitness test every year. Failure to do so results in me either having to go for a 20-session training course, a fine, or jail time.

Since it's my body, I demand my choice to not have my fleshy body co-opted to the point of potential death by the government to take bullets and bombs for people I hardly know. I demand that the government relinquish telling me what I can and can't do, and using the long arm of the law to force me to comply if I don't agree.

My body, my choice.

It will not work, stupid. It will never work.

Silly Singaporean government, you have been doing this for the past twenty years and you still expect a different result?

"Singapore’s birth rate of 1.20 children per woman, according to official 2011 figures, is one of the lowest in the world. It is well below the 2.1 statistic needed to sustain the population.

On Monday (21 Jan), the government announced a slew of incentives and measures to address Singapore’s much-too-low fertility rate.

The government will pay for a week of paternity leave for fathers of babies born on or after 1 May 2013. It does appear rather unfortunately that fathers of babies born before the crucial cut-off date of 1 May 2013 will have to fend for themselves.

Beyond the one week of government-paid paternity leave, dad can have a second week of paternity leave by tapping into mum’s compulsory 16-week maternity leave with her permission, provided the baby is a Singapore citizen at birth, mum qualifies for Government-Paid Maternity Leave, and both parents are legally married.

To help balance work and family commitments, parents with children aged 7 to 12 years will get two days of government-paid child care leave annually."

Blah, blah, more throwing money at the problem, blah blah, more benefits, blah blah, more priority for public housing, blah blah, more blaming men as white-knight traditionalists are apt to do.

Just come out and admit that the society you created, which deems anyone who fails to get their good little educated prole merit badge as a shameful failure is killing any drive to reproduce on the part of both men and women. That the crazy "children must have iPhones" culture you encouraged made children so bloody expensive most people don't even bother to have any.

Economics will draw first blood, society spread the rot, and demographics drive the nail in the coffin in our modern world.

But hey, you guys enjoy the worldwide decline!

Vox Day on the Rabbit People.

Came across this quote, and it was too good to pass up:

"The Rabbit People have three weapons and three weapons only. The first is to demand submission to their terms by virtue of the sensitivity imperative. If their interlocutor is unwilling to do that, they quickly move to the name-calling and the inevitable psychological analyses, again in the hopes of the interlocutor's submission. (This, by the way, is where most people crumble and permit themselves to be sidetracked into defending themselves against the charges that they are a raciss, sexiss, homophobiss rapiss.) Their final weapon is exclusion, which can be seen in the way feminized atheists like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers, (unlike Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens), shun debate with potentially competent opponents, and in the way gamma bloggers like Scalzi habitually attempt to attack people and arguments without so much as identifying them or even providing links to the arguments they are attacking."

Learn the weapons of your foes and how to counter them.

Peering out of the box - 21/1/2013.

Well, it's me again, peering out of this box to see the world tear apart at the seams once more.

A Voice for Men - Intactivists launch massive campaign. Good to see people out and about.

"Genital integrity activists from across the country are demanding that lawmakers ban the practice of circumcising boys. Popularly known as “intactivists”, these children’s rights advocates submitted the Male Genital Mutilation (MGM) Bill proposal to more than 2,000 legislators this week in an effort to require gender neutrality in federal and state laws that regulate genital cutting.

As director of MGMbill.org’s Indiana state office in Indianapolis, Jeff Cowsert wants all boys to be able to grow up with their genitals left intact. “When I was eight years old, my religious friends told me about circumcision,” said Cowsert. “I was silently outraged, and for the remainder of my childhood I mourned the fact that I didn’t have a complete body. I would not have chosen to be cut if given the choice, and I strongly feel that infant circumcision needs to be banned so that men can make their own choices about their own bodies when they are mature adults.”"

Sultan Knish - The guns of Obamerica. How urban America is rapidly decaying into one ugly mess.

"67% of firearm murders took place in the country's 50 largest metro areas. The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average. Those numbers are from six years ago. They have grown worse since.

Those are the crowded cities of Obamerica. The places with the most restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. These are the places where the family is broken, money comes from the government and immigrants crowd in from some of the most violent parts of the world bringing with them their own organized crime. These are also the places that have run by Democrats and their political machines for almost as long as they have been broken."

On the rock - We need men and women.

"We need both men and women for civilization to thrive.  The key is to cultivate the best of both sexes.  Teach boys how to grab onto their masculinity and guide it to influence the world and teach girls how to surrender to their femininity and help men reach their goals.  Both are necessary and good."

The one reason I'm a little more sympathetic towards the reactionaries (as opposed to tradcons) is that they walk the talk when they speak of going back to the old deal, with the ladies openly supporting repealing anti-male mechanisms like no-fault divorce and insane domestic violence laws. They offer female submission in exchange for male headship, and some go as far to admit that women as a group have generally been poor stewards of their voting rights - to the point that some actually openly admit they'd give up sufferage to go back to the "good old days". This is in direct contrast with tradcon women, who by and large want men to go back without them giving up all the goodies feminism has brought them over the last few decades.

I may not agree with everything they say, but at least they aren't bloody hypocrites.

Alpha Game - Please take away her rights. Vox comments on a NYT opinion piece in which a woman demands that since she feels suicidal, Pimp Daddy Government must take away her right to have a gun, and keep her safe and coddled.

"I have a much better idea. Since Ms Button clearly doesn't value her unalienable rights, and in fact, expresses a heartfelt wish to be relinquished of them, why don't our leaders take away her right to vote as well? It is entirely obvious that she is only going to harm herself and others should she ever make use of it.

She does provide a useful analogy, however, to show how responsible and freedom-loving men cannot do more to help women protect themselves from various evils, from crime by immigrants and other vibrants to being condemned to lives of poverty and lonely spinsterhood, because in post-suffrage America, women are actively preventing them from doing so.

Remember, the crumbling society in which we live is not merely the society that women wanted, it is the society they demanded."

One lady commenter gets to the heart of the problem:

"This is quite literally the stupidest thing I've ever read. These people are usually so big on choice, so why doesn't she just continue to choose not to have a gun? If that's not sufficient, then, given that most women elect to attempt suicide through overdose with pills, we really should be outlawing those instead. It's for the chil- er, women.

If anyone still wonders why everything progressives touch produces the exact opposite of what they ostensibly want, it's because their philosophy is not only entirely orthogonal to reality, but maximally internally inconsistent:

Get the government out of personal end-of-life decisions!

Suicide should be prevented by any means possible, including legislation!

Women's rights, women's rights, women's rights!

Abrogate our rights for our own sake, please!

Women should be allowed to assume combat roles in the military!

Eek, a gun, scary!" 

Cappy Cap - She is truly alone. Can you taste the schadenfreude oozing from this pity-me piece? There will be more and more women like this being added to the already growing heap as feminism wreaks havoc on both men and women.

Time to invest in cat food!

The Spearhead - 40 percent of surveyed Japanese men prefer bacheleorhood.

"In a recent online survey of 300 male readers of “My Navi News” a full 40% preferred bachelorhood.

However, in Kyo’s find the Japanese men are uncharacteristically frank — amusingly so as it turns out. The reasons they give for avoiding marriage are fairly diverse, but aside from the ones making excuses, they all appear to be saying something along the lines of “it isn’t worth it.”

Here are some quotes from respondents:

“Just looking at my married friends and how day by day they become more and more emaciated makes me think that I’m lucky to be single.” (25, Creative Arts)

“Hearing about the cruel way that some wives treat their husbands turns me pale with fear.”(25, Creative Arts)

“To me, married men just don’t look happy, and the more time passes, the more this look of unhappiness becomes apparent.” (36, Finance).

“Rather than having your wallet squeezed of its last dime, spending your earnings as you please has got to be the more appealing option.” (24, Communications)

“All your hard earnings, in the blink of an eye, disappear into the oblivion that is housekeeping!” (24, Medical care, welfare-service)"

Heh, heh. Enjoy the worldwide decline!

Hyper Report - Currencies being destroyed?

"Faced with a stubbornly slow and uneven global economic recovery, more and more countries, to gain a competitive edge, have resorted to cutting the value of their currencies. The Fed’s QE to other money stimuli by other central banks is heating up. As central banks expand their balance sheets, history shows that unwinding those balance sheets on a global scale are not in an orderly manner. In short, currency wars lead to real wars."

DEMCAD - Too late to prepare? Renigald comments on the aging power grid, a decline in US manufacturing, and Fast and Furious. 

Water finds its own level.

The basic principles behind hydraulics can be put in layman's terms as such: a fluid must have equal pressure along the same level.

Pressure may be defined as the force exerted over an area.

Hence, if you push down with a weak force in a narrow tube, you can exert a huge force over a wide tube. To obey conversation of energy, you'll need to push the fluid in the narrow tube down a long way to produce a slight rise in the wide tube.

Now let's look at society today, shall we?

Masculinity has been criminalised throughout much of the world. The result? Alpha men and PUAs pump and dump carousel riders, while clueless betas taught to pedestalise women get sloppy seconds, to be raped in divorce court in a handful of years. Boys growing up in single-mother households end up as thugs and brutes, which are so much better at attracting the next generation of carousel riders - men are being born and bred by their own mothers to see women as little more than fuck holes to be used and discarded.

Age of consent keeps on creeping higher and higher, while thanks to the comforts of modern society, physical age becomes increasingly more disconnected from mental age and the ability to give consent. My grandaunt was married at fourteen, a mother by sixteen, and that was common back in the day; people were forced to grow up fast. What do we have now? Child paegeants. Honey Boo Boo. Children's bikinis and other pieces of clothing sexualising little girls as young as bloody six.

Male leadership has been derided as bad, evil, and an instrument of the Patriarchy(TM); women are to be shepherded into leadership positions via quotas, even if they have less interest in them. What do we get? The rise of Fundamentalist Islam, which states that women are only worth half of what a man is, that if you're an alpha male you get four wives, and if you're not...you're a cur, and get to bugger little boys while waiting to die like a good disposable male so you can get your seventy-two virgins in heaven.

Intimate partner violence laws have gone absolutely insane, to the point where "emotional abuse" and "financial abuse" are the watchword of the day, when reprimanding a pet in a woman's presence is considered abuse under Australia's "The Plan". What have we ended up with? BDSM. People willingly entering into master-slave relationships.

I could go on, but I think you see the idea. For all the social engineering in the world, "undesirables" always start creeping back - and often in a far more destructive form than their original manifestations were. Water is going to find its own level, after all.

But hey, to paraphrase Cappy, enjoy the worldwide decline, folks!

The Islamziation of Europe continues.

Seems like the second Ottoman Empire is coming along quite well:

Hooded 'Muslim Patrol' vigilantes remove alcohol from drinkers and tell women to cover up as they stalk London suburb

An excerpt:

Police are investigating reports a gang claiming to be Islamic vigilantes have been confronting members of the public and demanding they give up alcohol and women cover their flesh in their 'Muslim area'.

The hooded men, who call themselves Muslim Patrol, have been filmed walking London's streets and calling white women 'naked animals with no self respect.'

The group is also shown taking 'evil' booze from revellers and film a cyclist being treated after a road accident, claiming they were injured because they were unclean.

In one exchange a member of the group says: 'We don't care if you are appalled at all', before calling themselves 'vigilantes implementing Islam upon your own necks'.

Reminds me of the report I read a while back where entire neighbourhoods in London locked themselves down and declared Sharia law to be in effect within the zones. Also sounds eerily like the religious police across the Causeway in Malaysia.

But hey, feminists, keep on looking the other way to fit in with the whole multiculturalism thing and railing on your own men instead of going after actual misogyny - with the steady decline of Europe accelerating, I'm just holding back an "I told you so" when all of you end up in burquas.

Who taught you to hate yourself?

Who taught you to hate yourself?

An excellent piece by Andy Man over at AVFM.

Regardless of the stripe you wear in the androsphere, be it MRA, MGTOW, PUA or Reactionary, this harkens to one of the fundamental truths of the red pill where it comes to relations between the sexes.

We men are not criminals for bearing a penis.

We men are not "women who have been poisoned by testosterone". Nor are we mutants, cavemen, dying out, or any other euphemism used to dehumanise us.

We men refuse to be duped any longer and buy into a revisionist history.

We men refuse to be shamed because of our biological sexual attractors.

We men shall not be demonised by a system that depends on us for its survival, and yet beats us into submission with the same breath.

We men shall not hate ourselves from some mythical "oppression" we perpetrate by the mere crime of just existing.

Artificial Inflation.

Another small incident on the bus back from campus: the service I take passes by a couple of schools, and depending on what time my classes start, the bus usually gets filled with gaggles of schoolchildren, which promptly empty out at their proper stop.

It just so happened that I was sitting at the back of the bus, and a small herd of schoolboys - five of them or so - seat themselves in front of me. By my wager, none of them were any more than eight years old; they're a bit noisy and active, as they should have been. No problem there.

What was irking to me was that they all had iPhones, and were showing their possessions off to each other in a display of boyish showmanship. There was something about them that irked me, though, and it wasn't until they'd gotten off the bus that I realised what it was about them that disturbed me so much.

Why on earth did they have iPhones?

Seriously, think about it for a moment. What does an eight year old need with an iPhone? All right, so many they need to be contactable. Then a normal phone would do just fine.

What does an eight year old need with an iPhone?

Seriously. I don't see the point.

Of course, when I was eight, there was someone at the door waiting for me when I came home, so I didn't need to be tagged with a mobile phone at an early age. Bloody hell, I still remember when I first got a hand-me-down phone when I was sixteen. I never called anyone, and no one called me, because there was simply no need to.

I didn't need a maid - my mother did the housework, and made sure my siblings and I helped out; and for the same reason, we didn't need daycare. We didn't need tuition that cost ridiculous amounts of money - we actually applied ourselves, and as I've mentioned in one of my previous posts, our parents helped out where they could. We complain about the rising cost of living, and I don't deny that inflation happens, but how much of this rise is our own fault and keeping up with the Joneses (of the Lees, if you want a local context?)

Bells and whistles, toys and trinkets, all designed to distract us from our miserable lives so we can go back and work - for the sake of buying more noisy, shiny, stuff.

What do we want? What do we need? How much of the stuff we have do we actually use, and if we use it, do we use it to its fullest extent?

Cappy Cap says to get rid of your stuff. I can't help but agree, especially if you're a MGTOW. You don't need fancy shit to attract women. You don't need a big home and plenty of status. Sure, you can go for stuff if that's your desire, but make sure you're doing it for yourself and not because society's telling you to. Anything else you don't need - get rid of it, or don't buy it in the first place.

A bit old, but...

A strain of gonorrhea immune to all current oral antibiotics surfaced in North America a handful of days ago.

From the article:

"A study released today by the Journal of the American Medical Association announced it had found nine patients with a strain of the sexually transmitted disease immune to the last remaining effective oral antibiotic.

This confirms the fears of both the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organisation who warned last year that untreatable gonorrhea, the world's second most common STD would soon become a reality.

Researchers observed that 6.7 percent of patients with gonorrhea at one Toronto clinic still had the disease after a round of cephalosporins, which is the last antibiotic which doctors are able to use to cure the disease.

Out of 133 patients who returned for a 'test of cure' visit, nine remained positive with the disease, which is roughly one in 15 people. This study revealed the first time that cephalosporin-resistant gonorrhea had been found in humans in North America."

There are two things that allow us humans to rut like we do today: antibiotics to deal with STDs, and birth control to deal with unwanted pregnancies. How much each contributes to what we have today is debatable, but it's undeniable antibiotics played a part. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the coming years, if this will really spread like wildfire like these disease watchdogs claim it might and how it might change people.

Then again, AIDS is incurable and a 100% death sentence - and yet doesn't stop us from going at it.

I guess time will tell.

Edit: my bad. The strain's impervious to all oral antibiotics, but the article also notes that resistance to injected antibiotics is also increasing. Hmm...I'll need to look further into this.

Good posture.

I've taken some advice that should really have been common sense and fixed my posture over the last two to three weeks. Get rid of that slouch, shoulders back and high, arms away from body, backs of hands turned forward, stride with a little jaunt and purpose. That sort of stuff; it helps to imagine I'm wearing a cloak and have a sword on my belt. Chin high, and when I sit down, I pretend I'm on a throne (which means either a regal posture, or a delibarate villainous slouch).

The rush has been amazing - maybe it's a placebo effect, but I will urge every slacker to give it a try. Just acting alpha makes me feel a little more alpha, more "yeah, world, it's just you and me. I know I'm going to die trying, but in a time when men can only be bastards, it's best to be a mangificent one".

What I didn't expect was for my back to ache so much about the shoulders; it's especially noticable when I do my lat-pull downs, especially the 190-pound reps. Have I really been slouching this long, slumping away through life that my body grew to fit that mould to the point where trying to break out of it is actually painful? Come to think of it, yeah. It's certainly something to reflect upon, what I allowed myself to become.

Studio Joho - Cleverman.

Peering out of the box - 14/1/13.

A Voice for Men - A small ongoing saga regarding an interview given by Paul Elam to Erika Jarvis of the Toronto Standard and the article's subsequent withdrawal. All too common - the original interview was saved and is linked in the articles.

Alpha Game - Given the recent debate about sexbots in the reactionary section of the manosphere, Vox Day notes that Canadian feminists are attempting a pre-emptive strike against sexbots. From the article: "The provisions are specifically meant to target the concerns that were expressed at the roundtable that sexbots will negatively impact the pursuit for gender equality and may unduly emphasize the objectification of women as sexual objects."

Um, wouldn't the exact opposite thing happen? Men seeing objects as women? What would the word for that be, subjectification? And while we're at it, why don't we use the same logic to ban vibrators?

Oh, right, feminists don't have much in the way of logic or sense of history or reality. Remember how well Prohibition turned out? As I've said, so long as a couple of guys can do a little programming and assembly in their garage and bedrooms, there is no stopping it.

"This Canadian attempt to preemptively ban sexbots is an overt confession by feminists of both sexes concerning their belief that women have nothing significant to offer men but sexual services.  Moreover, it is proof that their "pursuit for gender equality" is directly and fundamentally opposed to the most basic human freedom."

Oh well.

Edit: It turns out that the drafted law may be a hoax. In which case, I'll merely call out Poe's Law - that it is quite impossible (bar some obvious sarcasm) to tell the difference between a real extremist and a parody. And let's face it: this would be how they'd react to the production of sexbots.

In the meantime, someone who works in porn has a take on the phenomenon.

M3 - The Crime of Being Nice. As usual, he tells things like they are; maybe a few nice guys will finally get slapped into waking up.

Dalrock - Let them eat cake. A pure example of how many modern women are simply blind to the pain and injustice inflicted upon men.

"In reality these two separate statements represent the same underlying sentiment.  Those being crushed by an unjust system must have somehow had it coming.  While they can’t dispute that the system is designed to be used to punish men without a need to show any actual wrongdoing, all they can think of are the great princesses who rely on the system to play strong independent woman.  The unjust system gives them power, and that is more important than the suffering of innocent men and children."

Rex Patriarch - The marriage strike certainly must be getting worse, considering what's coming out of the mainstream media.

Hyper Report - Continued drought increases food prices further. Oh well...

All right, that's all for today; I'm getting back in my box.

I dislike talking to people.

Some of you folks out there might remember that I'd resolved a little while ago to start trying to speak to strangers a little more to build up my confidence at doing so. A little progress has been made - I've gotten a little friendlier and more open with the local security guards and fellows who staff the food court - but the emphasis is on the phrase "a little".

The problem is twofold. The first bump on the road is that most people in Singapore don't like strangers. People keep their heads down and mouths shut in public; I'd say about slightly more than half of the people I greeted with a nod, raised hand (palm forward) and optional "good morning" actually looked away from me when I did so. There was even a small minority of people, men and women alike, who openly flinched and walked away from me the moment I did so.

The second is that the tiny percentage of people who actually are not only not repulsed by my greeting, but actually want to make small talk (less than 1 percent, I'd wager), are by and large, devoid of much interesting conversation.

Let me explain this. There's a Chinese saying that's attributed to Confucious:

Great men speak of ideas.

Middling men speak of events.

Little men speak of others.

Now, I don't claim to be a great man - far from it. After all, I'm hardly anywhere near the level of being able to come up with any worthy ideas, only filter the ideas others have put forth and seeing which are acceptable to me and why. But at least, I can speak of current events and discuss them. A local scandal involving a town council and potential cronyism/corruption in the purchase of computer systems, for example. The US fiscal cliff. Demographics problems - both in Singapore and beyond, and in terms of more than the usual regurgitated talking points. A recent illegal strike (remember, all strikes are illegal in Singapore) by bus drivers over their pay and working conditions.

You know, events.

People on the street and on campus - they don't seem to know, let alone care. All they want to talk about is what's on TV, what's going to happen to the characters on (insert show here), where to go to get a good eating, how many Facebook likes they have...

Or perhaps I shouldn't talk about current events, but about hobbies. Okay, hobbies. I try to open with my weights training, since it's the most obvious thing about my from my physique, and then faced with the ensuing silence, talk a little about how it's improved me as a person. All right, now it's their turn to talk, and at least some people have interesting hobbies to chat about that aren't either video games or attention whoring on Facebook. Yet, all too often it isn't worth enduring the banal masses to find someone who actually has a hobby and is passionate enough to hold a sustained conversation about it.

And I sit there with an easy smile on my face for about a minute or so, wondering: why does this person feel the need to use a near-complete stranger as an emotional tampon in a face-to-face conversation? (As opposed to an anonymous blog post, where anyone can skip over my more whiny posts) Once it's clear the situation's unsalvageable, I make my excuses and leave. 

Part of this is my own problem, of course. I try to hint at men's issues and other red-pill ideas to more receptive folks, but they can't be said out in the open, of course, or else I'd be as much of a social pariah as if I were to suddenly turn a glowing radioactive green. Another part of it is that I really don't care enough about being liked by other people that I'm willing to rot my brain watching tee vee to see which local and international celebrities are fucking who, what's the latest puerile and passing trend, and one hundred and one other soulless and transient shiny distractions from life. If people want to live their lives that way, fine by me, but I'm not going to suffer through a sea of banality for the sake of playing nice.

My father used to complain to me that I didn't speak enough to people, to which I would usually reply that I would rather have a few deep friendships than a hundred passing acquaintances. Fine. Now that I'm trying to talk to people, I'm finding out how so many people don't really have anything interesting about them to talk about.

Well, at least it's some practice trying to tease out a satisfactory conversation, but you can't pull out what's not there sometimes.

I'm not saying that there aren't any interesting conversationalists out there - they crop up in the wierdest of places. But so many people aren't, that's the problem. And there's a by-election coming up in one of the country's constituencies - if this is a snapshot of us Singaporeans, how are we supposed to feel comfortable with any of us voting?

Aurini - a generation wasted.

"Every generation is progressively more poor than the generation before it. Despite our iPods, despite our technology, we can't afford a family. We can't afford children. All we can afford is this noisy, shiny crap that distracts us so that we can go back to our useless jobs and work. And you wonder why we're pissed off?"

[...]"This is a sick, broken world, and we are all beginning to notice it, and we are all beginning to get very, very pissed off. But ultimately, we are the ones who are going to fix this. My brothers and sisters, the future belongs to us. It's up to us to fix this sick, sick society that we find ourselves in. Do what's right, and we will prevail. We have been in dark times before, our species, and I know we have it in us to survive this one."

I have nothing to add to this.

I'm saddened, but not surprised. Saddened, but not surprised.

We sick sons of bitches, the human species, have signed each and every one of our death warrants.

From the UK Daily Mail:

Pregnant South African women are deliberately drinking large quantities of alcohol to harm their unborn babies in a bid to earn more welfare money, it has been claimed.

Expectant mothers living in the Eastern Cape, one of the poorest areas in South Africa, are bingeing on a ‘moonshine’ type drink which contains battery acid – with some drinking up to five and six bottles a day.

It has been reported they do it to claim a disability benefit from the government – using their disabled children as a source of income.

Video taken by Sky News shows a mother drinking a homemade brew called ‘kah-kah’ while heavily pregnant.

[...]The addictive milky brown brew is made from yeast, water and battery acid.

[...]The World Health Organisation said there has been an increase in the number of babies born with Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) in the area  since 2002.
The syndrome is also the most common birth defect in South Africa.

The irreversible symptoms mean children suffer from speech problems, physical deformities, learning difficulties and behavioural issues.

Families receive 250 South African rand ($29 US) per child, per month but a disabled child brings in around 1200 rand a month ($138 US).

That's what a human's future is worth to these people. A hundred and nine US dollars a month. That's what living a normal life sans physical deformities, brain damage and psychological problems is worth. 

A hundred and nine fucking dollars a month.
 

Which is why for all its other faults, I will firmly applaud the Singaporean government's stance on welfare: you don't work, you don't eat, and charities shall be largely private (any Singaporeans reading this will know what happens when government gets into charity. NKF case, anyone?) Bad behaviour of filthy human cockroaches is not to be incentivised or even tolerated.

I wonder if those hundred and nine dollars a month will seem so great a sum in the future when those handicapped babies grow into handicapped children and then handicapped teenagers and handicapped adults. I wonder of many of these fools actually have any comprehension of the long run, or even cause and effect beyond "gimmedat!"

But back to the point, at this moment, if a comet dropped on the earth and wiped us all out, I wouldn't fucking care anymore. Just when you think that humanity has bottomed out, it finds ways to sink to new lows.

Where's my box?

Team Civilisation.

Vox Day has made a great post over at Alpha Game about Team Civilisation. A notable quote:

"It is important for even the angriest, most justifiably bitter men of the androsphere to remember that the survival of civilization requires the joint efforts of both the sexes.  By all means, denigrate, shame, and mock those women who are actively, if unknowingly, attempting to bring civilization down.  But it is vital to be able to distinguish between civilizational friend and anti-civilizational foe."

Mm. With all the talk over at SunShineMary's about sexbots replacing women (or at least, what far too many of them have become today, both in and out of the Anglosphere), at least for the middling and lower-ranked guys, I really find it hard to feel sympathy for any of them who embraced, or still embrace the whole "men are useless, for they are but muscles, ATMs and sperm banks" mantra.

I remember back in 2000, when the whole "the Y chromosome is dying" nonsense (odd how the trumpeting stopped and was replaced with derision when it was discovered it was capable of self-repair, and fell quiet completely when its mutability suggested it might have been responsible for up to 30% of human evolution. Nature does take more chances with men than it does with women, after all.) was at its peak, and seeing an issue of Time magazine with "men dying out?" splashed all across the cover. I remember reading one of Angry Harry's pieces back in 2004, when he quotes one glorious biologist as saying "men are parasites". And of course, in recent times, we have Greg Laden from A-doubleplusgood declaring that men are just women whose brains have been poisoned by testosterone.

So yes, with so many years of "men are useless" under my belt even as a young man reducing me to my penis and muscles, (I mean, who cares about all the stats which point out that children do far better in intact households?) I can't say I care much for what these women think of being reduced to a pussy and womb by sexbots. Perhaps then they'll have to bring more than a warm hole and a baby bag (sometimes) to a relationship.

And Vox Day has pointed out how to do that. Hop on the boat with the men and women on Team Civilisation, because instead of giving all of you ladies the benefit of the doubt and sifting out the bad apples like in ye olden days, the strategy of the red-pill man these days is to sift and screen and search for the single good apple that looks identical to all the others in the barrel. Others have chosen to abstain from the barrel altogether and will need to be persuaded back.

Their standards will be high, so you'd better be prepared. Those worthy of being on the boat will be on board when the flood comes, and those who aren't - sluts and simpering manginas alike - will simply be swept away by the tide to come, whether it's from collapse or from a brave new world.

Coasta Concordia or The Dark Knight shooting? As Aurini says, you choose the action, you choose the consequences.

Because we're all in this together.

We need to be paladins (not crusaders). All of us. We need, amongst other things, to live our lives according to precepts of civilisation and be shining beacons of what we stand for.

For Team Civilisation.

Eating things that have "hydrogenated" on the label may piss you off.

 
In short, trans fats - which include anything that's been hydrogenated or fractionated - make people irritable and aggressive. If you can avoid them, you may well become a happier person.

Nothing can be conclusively 100 % proven from a single study (more is always merrier), especially in this field, but I'm hoping that these fellows pick up this particular ball and run with it. It's another stike in favour of paleo and cooking your own food from scratch, if nothing else.

Day in the life of an Evil Patriarch(TM).

6:00 am: Wake up in secret volcano base, fresh and ready for another day of oppression and misogyny.

6:05 am: Curl and wax moustache in an appropriately evil manner, ensure that top hat, monocle and cane are in top condition. You can't be an Evil Patriarch(TM) without looking the part.

6:15 am: Practice twirling moustache in an appropriately evil manner.

6:45 am: Breakfast is served in the refectory. On the menu is: baked sammich, sammich juice, coffee brewed with fresh sammich grounds, and sammich salad, all fresh from the mines. A nice glass wall in the side of the refectory allows Evil Patriarchs dining within a grand overview of the sammich mines (known informally as the "kitchen") and the women toiling within

7:30 Brief inspection of the upper levels of the salt - er, I mean sammich mines, with the thirty-second oppression brigade as escort. Bacon and lettuce deposits are still workable, while a tomato vein has been tapped out - arrangements are made to move womenfolk down to the second pickle shaft further underground. Shipments of aprons and spatulas are made and distributed appropriately.

9:00 am: Hold workshop on Game in conference room thirty-four of the secret volcano base. Young nice guys who are really creeps are taught to hypnotise women into having sex with them, the logistics of real hypnosis notwithstanding.

10:30 am: Game workshop is done for the day; the Game-aware omegas, gammas and deltas are sent out into the world to exercise their dastardly deeds in the name of the Evil Patriarchy(TM) and rob young carousel-riding women of the alpha male they so rightfully deserve. A hovercraft is dispatched to send the lads to the mainland; reports begin to trickle in steadily from others in the field. Cackle maniacally at evil undesirable men tricking women into spreading their legs for them, without any decision-making on the part of those poor dears as to whether they really should be putting out for these guys.

11:00 am: Receive daily blowjob from favourite brainwashed woman, who coincidentally is also naked (except for the chain leading back to the "kitchen"), barefoot and pregnant. Cackle evilly once more, twirl moustache for extra effect. Another tick towards the rape and beating quota is added, as all hetrosexual sexual activity is counted as rape.

12:00 pm: Working lunch with the Evil Patriarchy(TM) Obfuscation Committee. Goal: to further the ends of the Evil Patriarchy(TM) by benefiting women so as to create positive discrimination. This will ensure that none of them figure out that men and their penises, right down to babies moments out of the womb, are all conspiring against them. Orders are given to double down on the obfuscation by channelling yet more government funding in that direction. Memos are sent out.

3:00 pm:  Observe the formal induction of the latest batch of boys into the ranks of the Evil Patriarchy(TM). Twelve year-olds from all across the globe are flown into the Evil Patriarchy(TM)'s secret volcano base and escorted to the ballroom. There, they receive their official gold-lined Evil Patriarchy(TM) membership cards and are taught the secret handshake of the Evil Patriarchy(TM). Boys dying of malnourishment and child soldiers are educated at length about how, due to their simple existence and the fact they possess a penis, that they can magically keep down a SWPL on the other side of the globe.

3:05 pm: Slight mishap during the Evil Patriarchy(TM) induction ceremony as the Ugandan boys keep on emptying the pastry trays. The Evil Patriarchy(TM) commands amazing catering resources, but even that has its limits.

3:15 pm: Benefits of membership in the Evil Patriarchy(TM) are explained at length, including but not limited to: free dental care, a time-share at the secret underwater base, the privilege of working a 60-hour week or two jobs to cover for a nagging, frigid wife who'll frivorce you for your assets and any children anyways, the privilege of being more likely to be killed on said job and dying earlier, so on and so forth. The dental care is acknowledged to be pretty good, though, as is the discount on hats.

3:25 pm: Induction ceremony proceeds with much banging on drums and dancing around the mystical twenty-foot golden phallus that occupies the middle of the secret volcano base. Volcano takes this opportunity to erupt, which is taken as a good portent.

3:40 pm: Induction ceremony ends. Boys are shuttled back to their respective countries. Ugandan boys reluctant to return to war and starvation, but must return or else their existences will not generate enough magical sparkly oppression to meet production quotas.

4:00 pm: Group of Chinese boys found hiding behind the girth of the mystical golden phallus, unwilling to return to their lives of child labour in dingy sweatshops. They are properly spanked and sent back to their destined duty of oppression and misogyny with the magical penises of doom. Much moustache twirling ensues.

4:30 pm: Meeting with the Society of Brainwashed Women, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Evil Patriarchy(TM) consisting of women who are so foolish as to have vestiges of independent thought and fail to conform to enlightened feminist doctrine. Dress code for all women present is barefoot and pregnant.

4:40 pm: Standards and quotas are reviewed for the following activities: sister-punishing, gender betrayal, and giving good advice. It is pointed out that sister-punishing has fallen short of the quota by 8%, women responsible for the shortfall immediately assume the approved submissive doormat position and beg to be literally whipped into line. Evil Patriarchy(TM) whips are dispensed for self-flagellation in the case that enough men cannot be summoned to dole out the whipping.

5:00 pm: Meeting has been derailed into a discussion on the use of herbal extracts in uteral toning. The ladies are left to their discussion and the meeting is called to an early end, although the whips are left in the room for further self-flagellation if need be.

5:15 pm: Dinner is served. On the menu are sammich au lait, peanut butter and jelly sammiches, sammich mousse, toasted sammich and sammich casserole. Light talk is made with fellow Evil Patriarchs over how to best subjugate and control women. Theme for the discussion: impose consequences for choices that women make. Gold stars are awarded for the best suggestions and pasted on the notice board in the refectory to much applause.

6:15 pm: Make broadcast through the Old Boys Network, a form of communication so secret that the fact that it is not tangible or visible in any shape or form is taken as proof of its existence. All world leaders are reminded to comply with the Evil Patriarchy(TM) regulations that were discussed during lunchtime. Non-compliance will be severely punished with a trip to the Phallus Palace.

7:00 pm: Seventy-second grand council of the Hair Club for Men goes into session. Much hushed whispering is had behind closed doors. A heavy aura of...auraness hangs over conference room seventy-four.

7:30 pm: Ominous chanting can be heard from behind the doors. Men passing by in the corridor catch the jitters, women mysteriously aroused. The Hair Club must certainly be holding a lively party for everyone to be joining in!

9:30 pm: Turn in after a hard day's work of oppressing wymmyn, but not before receiving one last blowjob from yon evil patriarch's brainwashed, submissive woman. Remove monocle and top hat, ensure moustache is still appropriately evil and curly.

Beep boop, I am a robot...

 ...Beep boop, I am here to take your jobs. And your boyfriend. And your husband. And your beta orbiters. And so on and so forth.

SunShineMary has an ongoing discussion on sexbots on her blog here. I'm an agnostic, but a number of Christian reactionary blogs in the 'sphere make good reading and this post is one of them.

I suppose it was only a matter of time, 'ey? Ladies wanted to replace guys with the state, so turnabout is fair play when guys replace ladies with robots.

Edit: Nightskyradio has taken a stab at making some predictions as to how this will turn out.

We're all meat machines.

 
We're all meat machines.

It's a sobering, and as is usual for me, slightly depressing thought. Sort of like discovering Santa Claus isn't real, only he is, but he really lives in a third-world country to take advantage of the cheap child labour there.

In my game practice with the lab ladies (I'm sure it says something about me that I find it far easier to imagine people I'm familiar with as target dummies than near-complete strangers) I can see the marked difference from the complete invisibility I was labelled with for the first five months of my lab work compared to the last month and a half. No Don Juan here, far from it, but being warranted a second glance by a number of the lab ladies is...interesting.

I suppose it helped that we Singaporeans were recently voted as the least emotional people in the world. Go us. Of course, I don't intend to escalate any time soon, but just seeing the basic principles produce such a marked difference brings up various thoughts and emotions in me. Here's a small incident that happened a couple days ago. One of the lab ladies comes up to me and a friend while we're busy watching the readout from a piece of lab apparatus on an experiment we're doing.

Her: Hey, do you guys have a marker I could borrow for a moment?

My friend immediately starts patting down his labcoat, but turns up nothing and apologises. Now, I do have a marker in my labcoat pocket (always have one there, never know when I might need to mark a vial or two), but I don't turn, just watch her out the corner of my eye. Having determined that my friend doesn't have a marker for her appropriation, she turns her attention to me.

Her: Do you have one, [me]?

I ignore her and continue watching the instrument readout for a couple of seconds, then lazily reach into my labcoat and draw out my marker. Instead of handing it to her, though, I keep my eyes on the readout and hold out the marker to my friend with a small shrug.

Me: Give it to her, [friend].

My friend's a great guy and plays along as an unwitting accomplice, eagerly handing her the marker. What I do notice, as I continue watching her out the corner of my eye, is that she's not looking at my friend as she takes the marker, but me. Up till this point my insides feel like they've been all in a tangle, especially with using my friend like this, but I wait for her to turn and start walking away when it's my turn to face her and call out in the quietest yet most commanding voice I can manage at the time (my insides were still twisted, and it being a lab doesn't do well for shouting, either.) One eyebrow slightly arched (I hope, I didn't have a mirror at the time), one arm outstretched with my index finger in the air.

Me: [her], return the marker later. Set it on my workspace if you can't find me.

She half-turns, and her face lights up completely, betraying her spinning hamster for a fraction of second or so before shutting down again and giving me a nod and scurrying away. But what I'm finding most interesting isn't her reaction, but rather, my reaction to her reaction. She had no way of knowing I was attempting to apply Game, so I can't fault her. I, however, knew the whole thing was a farce, the courtship equivalent of going down to the range and shooting a few targets as opposed to going hunting - and yet the meat machine that I was reacted anyway.

My lizard brain's pounding and drooling away, while my more conscious and rational self is feeling...well, I don't know. By the time I finish collecting all the data I need and retrieve my samples, my lizard brain's stopped howling and all I feel is this mild interest, I guess, tinged with just a hint of disgust. Sort of like a naturalist who's just discovered a particularly interesting strain of yeast, and is now faced with the task of characterising it. Yeast, by the by, generally tends to smell really bad, at least in my experience.

Oh, and my marker was already on my workbench when I got back.

Game does open you to part of the bitter truth of how people work. We all like to think we're sane, where logic and emotion come together to produce some vestige of rationality through which we can view the world. And yet there are so many undercurrents present, and it takes a huge dollop of self-awareness to even notice it, let alone actively direct it where it needs to be.

The realisation that you're a meat machine is a shock to your system. How much of you is you, and how much is just a soup of chemicals floating about in a sea of cells, making you feel and do things against your better judgement? Sure, you hear about antidepressants and SSRIs and Ritalin and all that trash, but experiencing the raw stuff for yourself and identifying it as such truly drives the point home. Staring out of the box and seeing the world sail its merry way along its path straight to oblivion, all the shit in the world makes so much sense when you stop viewing most people as beings that even attempt to be rational, and start seeing them as meat machines whirring away on automatic.

We're goddamned meat machines, and there are far too few of us who know of, let alone try to harness or rein in our natures.