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I’m joined once again by , President of , for a continuation of our last two discussions on the limits of consensus reality and the liquid nature of the Overton Window along with Peter’s most recent post, We are the Soviets in 1972.

This is the first time I’m uploading video. I normally keep my camera taped up and I didn’t take the time to clean it before recording so it’s got that soft vaseline-look magazines used to use to shoot Oprah, Miss Piggy, and Delta Burke.

Despite this new palsy I’ve developed where I keep using “arguing in the affirmative” to mean arguing in the alternative, this is one of my best episodes. In true decadent fashion, we seamlessly collide high and low brow topics, especially in the back half of the recording. As two mature men of letters, we tackle taboo topics with care but you still gotta pay if you want the goods.

Strong Ideas Held Lightly

We are the Soviets in 1972

There are few subjects I find more interesting than the history of the USSR. This “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” is a microcosm of the entire twentieth century and a foil to so many of the stories we like to tell ourselves about society…

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10 days ago · 75 likes · 13 comments · Peter Banks

Topics discussed:

• Chud 2.0

• IVF, genetic selection

• Nairobi and Mogadishu

• Camouflage and dazzleflage

• The antinatalist effects of pronatalism discourse

• Harm is always subjective

• Is egalitarianism now more socially corrosive than the kind of racism normally labelled “white supremacy?”

• We wuz Soviets

• The miseducation of Jason Arday

• Elite Human Cynics

• The joy and life-satisfaction of

• Selling women’s underwear at the flea market in Miami

• Hyper-violent ginger cops in the Sunbelt

• The Tiktok reaction to Lindsay Clancy and the counter-reaction to it

• ’s broadcasts with Nonzionism and Nathan Cofnas

• Riding the female-brain egregore

• and the Presbyterian Tobacco Agenda

• ’s Delete Human Capital

• Becoming a landlord in your 20s

• Saving your first $100,000

• Kids are cool, parents are annoying

• Hereditariansim, biodiversity, selective breeding

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If you were to travel back to 2020 and ask anyone remotely right-leaning if they thought Big Tech was suppressing opinions held by hundreds of millions of Americans, they would agree it was. Specifically, they’d argue their opinions and attitudes were suppressed through techniques like shadowbanning because they sat to the right (not left) of the Overton Window. Honest questions about crime, intelligence, race, sex, economics, the efficiency and integrity of our elections, COVID and its treatments were met with strikes, bans, “fact-checks,” and assorted throttling engendering many on the right with a sense of paranoia and disenfranchisement.

By December 2022, once Elon Musk had completed purchasing Twitter, , Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger released the Twitter Files confirming as much. The plights of targeted individuals like Alex Jones, Stefan Molyneux, and Donald Trump were chronicled in detail for our reading pleasure and moral indignation.

When the first coverage dropped, I texted a friend about a specific piece. He asked if there was anything in the coverage we hadn’t already known and the truth is, most of the novel information came in the form of mechanics and details. The basic orientation of the repression was always obvious.1

But flash forward to 2026 and opening Twitter (now X) involves some cocktail of teen takeovers, “migrant invasions,” urban youths knocking out elderly Asian women, the buttholes of women who would have cut hair for most of human history, and videos of Slavs crossing their heart as they head butt drones. While it’s possible Musk is now throttling leftwing speech, what’s obviously true to anyone with eyes is that he isn’t downregulating most rightwing speech (although certain opinions on global conflicts can still trigger the banhammer).

Roughly two thirds of my own content consists of articles but audiovisual content just hits. There are gabillions of examples of videos in which two people see the same occurrence and come to different descriptions and understandings of what happened, both often understandable. For instance, the death of George Floyd, the shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and that dress whose colors people couldn’t determine all register as events that leave lots of room for the viewer to interpret them.

Jason Arday’s intellectual capabilities and honesty are not among such ambiguities as he fooled no one, not even those who pushed him. Similarly, Caitlyn Jenner’s sex and gender are not ambiguous and neither are the age, race, and sex of those most likely to assault you on public transportation.2 No one is worried Caitlyn Clark will behead them on the light rail in the same way that no one is worried Terrence Howard will become a mathematician.3

As noted scholar and age-gap enjoyer Richard Hanania writes in “The LGBT Dialectic” (2023),

“As long as social media censorship policies aren’t tilted in favor of the left, conservatives have a strong natural advantage over LGBT. A lot of arguments for non-conventional identities and orientations can sound plausible when put in essay form, but people recoil from their physical manifestations. This explains the success of LibsofTikTok.”

If there are any liberals left in America who want people to be less bigoted, they should stop trying to prove the most deranged rightwinger’s fantasies and nightmares correct. To be honest, Jason Arday seemed like the love child of Forrest Gump and Bubba Buford but outfitted with received pronunciation and heralded as the smartest black guy to ever live. Every day new body cam and dash cam videos from various law enforcement agencies gets uploaded to Twitter and YouTube channels like Midwest Safety and Police Activity and every day another alleged martyr and victim of white supremacy is shown to be a common criminal at the end of his rope, tweaking and evading, a dangerous, tragic figure most people would avoid if they could.

Last year Curtis Yarvin wrote,

“When you conform to your enemies’ pattern of their enemies so well it gives them a boner, it is always your fault. They always expect you to be their own cartoon villain. Actually, the narrative has no flavor unless some kind of right-wing villain shows up. And because we never learn, we always do.”

Everything contained in that passage is correct but I no longer believe it to be a right-wing phenomenon.

Progressives can’t help but force non-adherents to participate in humiliation rituals and religious rites that confirm their worst suspicions about them and the liberal people who keep courting them, but every day they get mogged by simple audiovisuals showing that Jason Arday would have been at the bottom of their class, that a lot of chicks have wieners, and Zendaya is good-looking but not Jennifer Connelly Requiem for a Dream double-sided dildo hot.

While Hanania is right to observe that liberals read and conservatives watch TV, he uses it as a way to make right-leaning people sound like morons, but it’s using the written “information environment” instead of audiovisuals of the actual environment to determine who’s smart and what makes a woman that looks so stupid to everyone who doesn’t have their head buried in a book or a newspaper.

It’s hard to imagine an end to liberalism but it’s unclear just how much Civil Rights can survive the iPhone. When your ideology can be humiliated by anyone with a data plan, you’re going to have to invent some crazy tech if you want people to repeat your bullshit as fact.

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Not quite a decade ago I realized that managing gyms (and especially trainers, who are prima donnas by default) sucked and I decided to become unmanageable. I realized that people who were on average less intelligent than me were allowed to get away with murder while I, sensitive young man with brains in abundance, was scrutinized over the tiniest things and frequently held to account for the actions of people who were slow, tardy, malicious, or uncoachable while HR pretty much prevented me from fixing it. I had just moved back to my home town, Miami, after 16 years. I quit management, got certified to work the other side of the business, and signed up for lots of annoyance and downward mobility. At the time, I thought I wouldn’t be so micromanaged.

I can remember sitting in the lobby of the place I first trained people with Sagrados. He was this huge Cuban kid fresh out of college, 5’10” and 235 lbs, yoked. He had the kind of physique that carries a fair amount of body fat but is so muscular guys envy it and women want to feel it. On a visceral level, most men know who can fuck them up and women can spot it too. Despite not having a Hollywood sixpack, this guy could throw you without breaking a sweat. He was freak strong and could actually move, having come up doing two-a-days in August in Miami where even the kids at small Catholic schools can turn you into a vegetable if you give them a few plays. Plus, we were both bald and handsome.

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The gym was THE national luxury brand that operates in all the big cities in the U.S. Not the one that sits in strip malls for suburban soccer moms to do step aerobics while their kids stab each other but the other one that’s actually hostile to kids, the one with all the fancy bath products, anorexics working the desk, and wealthy gay dudes blowing each other in the steam room. The day we started, the brand was hosting some massive event at all of its locations where they put up so much imperial iconography, Hitler would blush. But since we live in America and not World War II Germany, it was all 100% corporate LGBTQ Lisa Frank rainbow barf flags and banners and men cycling in sweatbands and 5” inseams like Olivia Newton-John had invaded and conquered the motherland.

There we were, a common minority combo in South Florida: A Cuban guy (just getting started in life) and a Jewish guy (a decade his senior), both stocky and bald sitting in the lobby of a place way too nice for us, sticking out like sore thumbs. On top of it all, I had enemy colors on: An American flag hat that made every single person I saw ask if I was military. When I told people I was just patriotic, they knew not to speak to me.

But Sagrados was different. He started the same day as me and, while we were pretty different in a lot of ways and didn’t hang out much socially, we would work out together and gossip now and then. Because we went through a lot of the same trainings, socialization, and difficulties at the same time, it was inevitable we would bond.

He told me how college had been really rough, which shocked me because the school wasn’t known for its academic rigor and he looked exactly like the kind of guy who’s up to his ears in pussy. No homo but the guy was a real specimen. Over the coming months he would drop incredible amounts of weight despite already looking great, but to underscore just what this guy looked like: There are pictures of him sitting on a boat in his trunks, cigar dangling from his mouth, and a five o’clock shadow beginning to come in, all of it looking totally natural the way people always look best doing what they’re meant to and Sagrados was meant to be a jacked Cuban guy wasting his days working out, fishing Biscayne Bay and being rich. Crazy that I’m now in my 40s and I’m writing about a 23 year-old trainer like he was Jeff Bezos, but the main thing to underscore is that Sagrados looked like the kind of guy who’s supposed to have a cigar in his mouth, the sun in his face, and his boys by his side.

I still remember where we were sitting when he told me he had played football at a minor school in North Carolina but quit because all the guys were racist. Sagrados was Cuban but basically white. I don’t know if I can even remember hearing him speak Spanish but he was convinced the bullying and racism were too much so he quit. Despite not being the toughest guy myself, it stuck out to me that a guy this big, who could bench 400 lbs for reps was so sensitive but, in my experience the biggest guys really are the most sensitive. This dynamic would ultimately be the end of him.

He gave me tips on how to do muscle-ups and once, working out on the beach with him, I watched him go for a stroll with a 300 lbs tire, flipping it 30-something times in a row when some punk challenged him. And I can remember doing a stupid team-building exercise where we had to pair up with someone and try to move them out of a circle using nothing but your hands in theirs and sheer force of will. But what I really remember about the guy were his huge hands. There are some people you meet in this world and you can just feel the energy radiating off them and Sagrados was one of them. I myself have Les Grossman hands but when this guy shook yours, they completely disappeared, swallowed into a vice of hairy knuckles. You could feel the power coming through it. And that’s what he did. He threw me like I was a featherweight. When you’re outmatched, you’re outmatched, and with this guy it wasn’t even close.

But Sagrados was foreshadowing when he told me about quitting football. We both cleared six months with the company, which is about how long it takes to figure out the trade if you’re going to figure it out at all, and we both quit to work elsewhere within a week of each other.

Leading up to his exit, he lost a tremendous amount of weight, landing somewhere around 200 lbs. He did loads of met con workouts and ran long distances in the sun on top of extreme dieting with occasional binges. He would eat way more strictly than me six days a week and then binge way crazier than I ever would on the last. He was a man of extremes who loved CrossFit, David Goggins, tequila and America. Young, earnest and capable.

I can’t tell you exactly what pushed him over the edge but talk to any competitive bodybuilder and they’ll tell you extreme dieting while pushing your body will fuck with your mood, hormones, and general physiology and psychology. He had cut out almost all carbs, save for binging, which was always followed by workouts that seemed more about punishing himself and “earning your carbs” than what’s efficient or productive. He had taken very basic ideas of good and bad that we all use and created a host of rules by assigning good or bad properties to organic, neutral things like carbs and cardio.

But the other big thing was that our boss, a massive Brazilian woman with a failed career in law, was a huge, cutthroat bitch. Totally obsessed with money, status, and looks, she masked all of her most base careerist desires as company ones, playing extreme favorites across a 30-something person staff while punishing the people she frosted out for lack of production, while still signing all of her emails “Esq.” This wasn’t really my vibe or Sagrados’ but I was older and more accustomed to being at the mercy of corporate psychopaths. Again, Sagrados was someone who quit a sport where grown men deliberately concuss each other for fun, because his feelings got hurt. He had been asking to transfer locations since he felt like he wasn’t getting a fair shake, but more than fairness, he couldn’t deal with the general way we got treated. After writing our boss’s boss an email outlining all the ways he felt he’d been fucked, she told him no and that’s when he decided to quit.

We started on the same day in March and quit a week apart in August. But two weeks later I’d see his post on his Instagram letting me know “the bad times far outweighed the good ones.” He had just moved to North Carolina to take a job as a Crossfit coach that he was excited about and seemed more cut out for than the corporate luxury gym life. He had just started seeing a Southern belle who looked exactly how every guy wants every young girl to look. Having quit a job he hated, found one he liked, and secured a new girlfriend, he grabbed a shotgun and took a selfie with it.

His funeral was massive. Held in the church that belonged to his high school, he was surrounded by his family, hundreds of friends, and dozens of us who had had the pleasure of working with him for the previous six months. That bitch who was always on his case and making him miserable sat in front of me a row or two up and over in full Miami funeral attire. I couldn’t believe she had the nuts to show up but I was one of the only people who had seen the email in which he called her out for exactly who she was, stating exactly why he wanted out.

The thing is there’s no moral here. I went to the funeral. The lot of us dipped and got drunk in Coral Gables. We were all wearing black, mourning our friend at a busy bar on a weekend night when everyone else was trying to have a good time and we all spontaneously started dancing. We all knew it was the thing to do even though it seems weird or inappropriate. No one had to talk or tell anyone else to start moving. It just sort of happened. At one point I went into a porta-potty outside and smoked weed with this guy who was way up the food chain from me but so many of those distinguishing markers disappear when you’re going through it together and someone’s holding. Despite the dancing, drinking and weed, we all cried a lot. I still think of him. This guy who was bigger than life but couldn’t take it.

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Every month I answer the question, what would Steve Sailer write if he wasn’t smart enough to understand Steve Sailer and this month I chose to write about the sexdemic occurring between female teachers and their students.

From my latest at MAMA:

While many gladly cash in on ad revenue from such stories which titillate and intrigue a certain set of the population, no other outlet but is willing to ask: If getting paid millions of dollars to creampie your teacher is victimhood, who wouldn’t want to get victimized?

While my piece lays out The Definitive How-To Guide, curious minds want to know what’s driving the increased incidence and I’m here to answer.

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Many plenti papa mama like for tok bad to pipol we no get pikin just for fun?

Why you no need nag people make dem chop expensive products or date fine women or put cities for dia bio?

I don train plenty doctors, lawyers, and financial people wey go vex well well if dem hear me call dem mere CFAs. Even though most of dem look like born winners, e fit be say dem parents dey nag dem make dem work or study pass wetin dem for do. But I bet say most of dem choose dia own profession and workload by demself — look at di plenty ones wey parents work for completely different field from dem. But once dem get dia credentials and jobs, nobody need tell dem make dem marry fine women or buy luxury cars or build big house for fine area wey get good school. Somehow, dem just sabi am.

E clear say people get different status signifiers depending on dia background and wetin dem like. For example, one Pakistani client wey I train before, e just dey happy say e don reach U.S. and e happy well well say e don reach Texas. For am, status na to go whole hog for assimilation: e get truck, e dey carry different bag every day of di week, e get two German Shepherds, and e brag to me say e try barbequing for di first time. But I don also train people wey dey show dia status with credentials, how much jet fuel dem dey burn for one year, casual anti-Westernism, and either Prius or G Wagon depending on which status hierarchy dem prefer.

I dey think about dis one because plenty people dey play with di idea of taking parenting and “making it (?)” high status. Forgetting for one moment how forced deference go work any better than forcing people make dem call me woman, my bigger concern na practical: **If being parent dey so good, if e dey such aspirational thing, why dem dey nag plenty people make dem do am?** Another way to ask di question na: wetin deliberately childless people sabi wey parents no wan admit? For parents wey dey out there, wetin everybody else dey think say e dey true about una wey una no wan admit?

Avoid di 27 Club

Once e clear say dem no be di next Curt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix, goyim dey become adults sometime around age 27 when dem deactivate dia OnlyFans accounts for di first time (subscriber or creator), hang up dia “showing hole hat” (one of dose glittery JonBenét sombreros), and have dia first of several religious conversions. Jews get bar mitzvahs. For age 13. Which na suspiciously around di time we start dey lust afta 27 year-old shiksas wey we want make dem make us men. One professional goblin wey dem call rabbi go swoop in make you sing ancient language in front of bunch of other goblins wey dia ear hair no get match all over di world. Di whole process go down far away from di objects of your shiksa lust and for such humiliating fashion say nobody go wan fuck you anyway, your soul go despair for di forest of ear hairs where only your actual mommy fit try console you.

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Why don’t you have to nag people to consume expensive products or date beautiful women or put cities in their bio?

I’ve trained a fair amount of doctors, lawyers, and financial professionals who would completely sperg out if they heard me refer to them as mere CFAs. While most of them seem like born winners, it’s possible they got nagged into working or studying harder than they otherwise would have but I bet most of them chose their own professions and workloads based on the preponderance of them whose parents worked in completely different fields from them. But once they had their credentials and jobs, no one had to tell them to marry beautiful women or buy luxury cars or build huge homes in nice neighborhoods with good school districts. Somehow they just knew.

It goes without saying that people have different status signifiers according to their background and preferences. For instance, a Pakistani client I once trained was elated just to be in the U.S. and even happier to be in Texas. His idea of status meant going whole hog on assimilation: He had a truck, a different carry every day of the week, two German Shepherds, and bragged to me the first time he tried barbequing. But I’ve also trained people who display their status with credentials, the quantity of jet fuel they burn in a year, casual anti-Westernism and either a Prius or G Wagon depending on their own preferred status hierarchy.

I’m thinking about this because a fair amount of people play with the idea of taking parenting and “making it (?)” high status. Forgetting for a moment, how forced deference would work any better than forcing people to call me a woman, my bigger concern is practical: If being a parent is so good, if it’s such an aspirational thing, why do so many need to nag people to do it? Another way of asking the question is what do deliberately childless people know that parents don’t want to admit? For parents out there, what’s something everyone else thinks is true of you that you don’t want to admit?

Avoiding the 27 Club

Once it’s clear they aren’t the next Curt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix, goyim become adults sometime around age 27 when they deactivate their OnlyFans (subscriber or creator) accounts for the first time, hang up their “showing hole hat” (one of those glittery JonBenét sombreros), and have their first of several religious conversions, Jews have bar mitzvahs. At age 13. Which is suspiciously around the time we start lusting after 27 year-old shiksas who we would like to make us men, a professional goblin called a rabbi swoops in and makes you sing an ancient language in front of a bunch of other goblins whose ear hair is unmatched the world over. The whole process goes down far away from the objects of your shiksa lust and in such a humiliating fashion that no one would want to fuck you anyway, your soul despairs in the forest of ear hairs where only your actual mommy can attempt to console you.

While it doesn’t work exactly like a switch, there are things you leave behind or should leave behind when you become a man but we’re going to come back to the divide between boys and men in a minute.

Do you want to be an evangelist or chosen?

The other dynamic at play (deliberately embedded in my language) is the idea of The Chosen People vs. Goys. I don’t normally talk this way, but since the Jews are on everyone’s minds lately (yes, I’m talking to you), it’s worth exploiting to make my point.

The general idea is that there are far more people who are not chosen than are. Additionally, Jews don’t proselytize. The only new members we’re really interested in come from babies. We don’t go knocking on people’s doors to spread The Good Word and we don’t go around telling the rest of the world to outbreed us, not that we could ever catch up if we wanted to. There’s an acceptance that not everyone is chosen, which doesn’t make it their fault, but also doesn’t change whether they’re chosen or not and, in that acceptance, is the idea that you don’t have to make them observe Jewish law. Why would they want to follow laws they don’t believe in and why would you want to waste your time making them? Doing what you’re supposed to be doing, following the covenants and commandments is not cheapened by someone from the outgroup going to church instead of temple. In fact, it makes it rarer and rarity is one of the things that can bestow the halo of “built different” around anyone angling in on status. Despite the passions of some online, the idea that not everyone is going to follow your way of life is completely baked into the worldview. Being special and being pedestrian are at odds.

Gain dependents, gain power

Yet many Jews and gentiles alike will tell you you’re not really a man until you have kids. For the purposes of this piece, I don’t want to question the fundamental logic there. I’m more interested in finding its parameters. Obviously, there’s an injunction emanating from your family and tribe to spread your bloodline but there’s also the idea that by taking on dependents, you prove your mettle and your ability to lead. It’s this second dimension where I want to expand the discourse.

You can look at having kids like it’s bimodal: Either you have 0 or you have kids. Still others encourage having at least 2-3 in service of some alleged social contract to keep the population at the same size or larger for eternity. They use framings regarding TFR, pronatalism, and societal/economic collapse. But obviously, a person having 5-7 kids is living a very different life from someone with 1 or 2. But what happens when you reach beyond your own kin to take on dependents? Do the same people who drone on and on about TFR regularly extoll the virtues of people who adopt? Do they themselves adopt children above and beyond the ones their own biological constraints can handle? Conversely, do they chastise people who adopt for not expanding the pool of humans alive at any given moment (the nominal goal of boosting TFR)? Not really. Most people don’t actually care about TFR. It’s mostly just a rhetorical framing device to bring up having kids in the first place, in the same way that , author of One Billion Americans, doesn’t actually care whether there are 300,000 or 1,000,000 Americans—the guy only has one child himself! They care about boosting their own status and the status of people who have already had children.

Brackish Waters, Barren Soil

Why did Scott Alexander have children? (Normal Version)

First, let’s scare away the rationalists with Roko’s basalisk…

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a year ago · 95 likes · 24 comments · Rohan Ghostwind

The one sin you’ve never committed

I know people who have divorced but thankfully there’s almost none of it in my family and I have trouble thinking of any friends of mine who have divorced, with all of my childhood friends still married and only one set of their parents having divorced.

While I don’t hold grudges against divorced people or even think about them much, I’ve shot my mouth off about divorce a lot in the past, likely owing to the fact that my family never needed the social technology of divorce to manage neglect and betrayal. You could say I was punching down to get up, performing cope or some other form of defensiveness while trying to virtue signal. On a fundamental level, I privilege loyalty in my personal relationships because I’m so used to the people who are supposed to look after my best interest acting bored, tired, disinterested or even disgusted with me even those most charged with shaping me.

The Walt Right

In Defense Of Cope

Among the men of Generation Z there are vanishingly few aspersions that carry anything as canonical a payload as the charge of “cope…

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3 months ago · 53 likes · 12 comments · Walt Bismarck

But to get to the point, it’s obvious I was judging the one sin I’ve never committed and every day some tired, frustrated, (potentially emasculated) parent decides to fire up a post about TFR or childless people, or nagging you to get your fuck on, just remember they gotta punch down to get up. It’s not that they’re under the impression their kids will find their web history and decide it was a good thing their dad was spending half his life calling other guys faggots for not having kids. They’re just judging the one sin they’ve never committed while desperate for validation from the very people they insult.

People run on external validation and when you fail to validate them they think you’re cheating. While telling them to focus on themselves never works, explaining the relationship between status and rarity can at least get them to stop talking to you about how cool they are. As writes in Is Pussy Not Enough?, “Having children is not an accomplishment (…) hispanic teenagers do it every day.”

Bukkake’s most recent piece, Why Poly People Look Like That can be be found here:

NormieWorld

Why Poly People Look Like That

It’s a very funny joke, because anyone who uses the internet kind of knows what you’re talking about. Poly people are ugly. They are ugly little sex freaks who won’t shut the fuck up about the system of cuckoldry they operate within, while people make wojaks of their worst facial expressions from the video they decided needed to be made about it…

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21 days ago · 53 likes · 17 comments · Lance Corporal Scott Bukkake

Topics discussed:

• Clifford (1994)

• Any Ever (2011)

• The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia (2009)

• P Diddy

• Bed Stuy

• The fast-paced world of linen sales and CDLs

• Trying to interrupt an armed robbery

• Jewish waiters

• Hollywood dog actors

• Joey Fatone’s Maine Senate candidacy

• Selling your bussy

• Arsenio Hall (Pamela Anderson’s ex bf?)

• Having lots of gfs even though you suck

• High-achieving and under-appreciated women

• Looking like you’re not to be fucked with

• Columbia Heights

• Jim Goad

• Lavell Crawford

• The Matthew Shepard myth

• Being dedicated and talented at having sex

• Millennial mommies + zoomer fuckboys

• The 27 Club

• Does cocaine boost your IQ?

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This one is a real heater so make sure to upgrade to PAID so you can enjoy all the #realtalk and #ideas too taboo for the drive-through.

Topics discussed:

• Drive (2011)

• Obsession (2025)

• Millennial exuberance

• Millennial stoicism

• Step dads, Dadstackers, gnome beards

• Starting Strength, beer guts, functional alcoholism

• Totalitarian Copacetics

• The Girlboss to Grindset Pipeline

• What competence and reliability look like

• Men who pressure you for sex, women who pressure you for church

• The arbitrage of shiksanomics

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This week I was joined by to discuss his recent essay Taxonomy of Male Fagginess which answers the question: What kind of content would pump out if he was a huge flamer? We also discuss La Cage Aux Folles (1978) and The Birdcage (1993).

His novel, The Stud, which centers on a hyper-natal dystopian future, is available for pre-order NOW.

Topics discussed:

• The Birdcage (1996)

• La Cage Aux Folles (1978)

• Rugby

• Miami before and after covid

• The rich world of Morning Glory Milking Farm

• ’s take on Heated Rivalry

• Scaring the hoes

• Whales Gotta Swim with Whales

• Compulsory androgynization

• Oral culture

• Trying to rewire human behavior with op-eds

• Cleopatra

• Are Asian men less favored among gay men?

• Are gay men more accepting of power differentials in relationships?

• Should you lean into the things people fetishize you for?

• Falling in love with someone from a different group

• How the stories we tell reflect our resentments and jealousies

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In light of the recent release of Obsession, which features a (spoiler) female character wreaking havoc on a man of dubious strength, joined me to discuss Basic Instinct, which also features a chaotic female lead causing chaos for a man of dubious strength. This episode will hit especially hard for anyone who has ever loved a crazy woman or been counted among her casualties. For those worried about more spoilers, you can do yourself a favor and watch both before listening, but if you’re just here for Lirpa and Yours Truly, just hit play like always.

After the paywall, I talk about threatening to kill a man at a bar in Brooklyn and how it helped me empathize with women’s hormonal swings.

Topics discussed:

• Basic Instinct (1992)

• Chudstack

• Girls on film

• The femme fatale archetype

• Sleeping with Tony Soprano

• Violence

• Nudity

• When villains are the cool guys

• How hormones not only affect your behavior but your perception of your own behavior

• How women experience their own evil

• Are spergy guys more susceptible to female manipulation?

• Borderline Personality Disorder

• Feminism’s effects on art and culture

• Ice pick mommies

• Women who deflower men

• The Cassandra Complex

• The good and bad sides of over-the-top masculinity

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When something kills a goddess

While many await the Christopher Nolan treatment of The Odyssey, eager to air their vision of the epic against his, there’s another, lesser known version nested in one of my favorite books, I am not Jackson Pollack by John Haskell:

“The Trojan War begins like this: A young man named Paris is resting on his elbow in a lush green meadow filled with trees and grass and there’s a stream flowing through the middle of this paradise. Three goddesses are standing in front of him—Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. They’re posing, waiting to be chosen by this young man, and to that end they’ve offered him gifts. Hera, queen of the gods, has offered him power. Athena, the goddess of war, has offered him victory in battle. Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love, has promised him the most beautiful woman in the world. Which is what he wants: Helen. The most beautiful woman in the world. With Aphrodite’s help he goes to her, woos her, and seduces her away from her husband, the king, and carries her back to Troy.

Paris doesn’t know the ramifications of his actions because he doesn’t want to know. He chose Helen not because he needed her but because she inspired in him more desire. He was living on a beautiful mountaintop with a beautiful woman and yet he couldn’t resist the possibility of having something more, of choosing a new kind of luxury. He was excited by the temptation of picking either A or B or C, and he didn’t realize it was a multiple-choice question. He could have picked “none of the above.” He could have said, “No thanks. I appreciate the opportunity but I’m fine here on my mountaintop with the woman who loves me.” He could have seen the story in a completely different light. But then he wouldn’t have been Paris.

The Judgment of Paris is a painting by Lucas Cranach, and in the painting the goddesses are completely naked. Aphrodite has a thin veil covering part of her body but basically they’re naked. Paris is fully clothed. It’s his judgment, and because they’re naked, even though they’re goddesses, they’re his women. They’re his women, but only in a dream. In the painting he’s shown with his eyes turned dreamily upward, and in the story the goddesses have been brought to him in a dream. But he doesn’t know that. He thinks they’re real. He believes they actually are standing in front of him, naked and completely exposed. And to the extent that it’s a dream, they are. But it’s not just a dream. When he chooses one particular goddess, the other two feel rejected, naturally, and they hate that. It kills them to be rejected, and when something kills a goddess, something else has to die.”

I am not Jackson Pollock is odd in the best way. In it Haskell weaves various stories, films, dramas, and descriptions of paintings to write on themes rather than events. He pulls from Hitchcock, using Psycho multiple times. He tells the story of Mercedes McCambridge, the woman who voiced the devil inside of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, and her real life struggles with faith and alcohol. And it covers the intensity, manipulation, and ruthlessness of Harry Lime in The Third Man. The book is timeless because Haskell writes on timeless subjects like habit, unrequited love, human captivity and agency, but rather than telling stories, which requires time (this happens and then this happens), Haskell suspends time as if all the scenes have already played, every painting has already dried, and the story of life itself has already been told. Instead of letting time pass, he juxtaposes these elements next to each other, collapsing the space between millennia. The story of Topsy the circus elephant’s death includes a retelling of the way Ganesha, the Hindu god of obstacles and remover of obstacles, got his head.

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Haskell pulls from thousands of years of human history, mostly exploring the constraints of the human condition as rendered through art capturing our failings, our loneliness, our greed, war, and sadness for whosoever shall read his written words. Everyone must be a child of their own time, and Haskell, born in 1958, is perfectly positioned to write about films that came out in the Golden Age of Hollywood, just preceding his birth, as well as so many of the greats that debuted during his youth. Haskell tackles deep, heavy subjects with plain language, most frequently examining film, the medium of his time, to illustrate what might as well have happened on a hilltop in Anatolia thousands of years ago. His writing never ruins your desire to watch the films but instead adds layers of complexity to them, making you want to watch and rewatch them through his lense.

Something else has to die

Curry Barker’s Obsession is a contemporary telling of the same theme Haskell pulls apart in the section of I am not Jackson Pollock called “The Passion of Psycho.” Haskell’s piece also features the preternatural forces of Norman Bates’ mother Norma in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the influence of a figure long ago painted, disappeared, and rediscovered by x-rays all passing through the canvas of Jan Vermeer’s Girl Asleep at a Table.

Books like Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws make the case (hard to dispute) that scary movies are really about sex but I would add that many movies about sex are among the scariest there are.

Obsession asks what happens when you get what you want? What happens to the dog who finally catches the car? Is Obsession about fear or sex? It’s obviously both.

The film features a sensitive young man (ironically named Bear) who has the hots for Nikki, one of two total babes who work at a family-owned guitar shop. Nikki is about to put in her two weeks’ notice which presents both a problem and an opportunity. If Bear fails to act, he’ll never get a chance to ask her out. The good news is that if he strikes out with her, he won’t be forced to work with her for too much longer. The other problem is Bear is weak.

Bear is a SIMP but rather than turning to The Red Pill, The Manosphere, bone smashing or hoe-scaring ideology to correct course, he does what any sensitive young man would. He tries to solve his problems (distinctly male) by acting like a woman (buying stuff and using everything but personal accountability):1 He goes to a store selling Wiccan and Pagan objects, settling on a novelty item called One Wish Willow that’s supposed to grant you exactly one wish (in an obvious-to-the-audience Monkey’s Paw kind of way).

But as often happens when you take shortcuts and refuse responsibility, things don’t quite go according to plan. Rather than landing the sweet brunette next door, Nikki becomes obsessed with Bear but turns into way too much of what he ordered. The natural order of life relies on Nikki (beautiful, petite, feminine) and women in general passing over weak men, at least until they’re ready to be strong. But by overriding his own approach-anxiety with magic rather than action, Bear unlocks darker aspects of female sexuality. Nikki promptly begins transgressing all of Bear’s boundaries, destroying his reputation, and using nothing but pure emotion to get what she wants but, of course this is necessary to the plot trajectory as only weak men put up with this shit and the audience needs to learn a lesson about ignoring their own limitations at the end of this thing.

As The Last Psychiatrist writes in “Real Men Want To Drink Guinness, But Don’t Expect Them To Pay For It,”

“I know this is going to sound like madness, but 8/10 that approach anxiety is defensive, you think you want something you really do not want, that person is not for you, I don’t mean not good for you, I mean you do not really want this (...) but the horrifying, Ju-On reality is that the symbol ceases to be a symbol for you the moment she violates her own symbolism—the moment you get to know her—and then the want DISAPPEARS. Just like fear. If that ghost in the window so much as coughs like reality you will scale the wall and beat it the fuck out.”

Without offering you any real spoilers, you probably have a vague sense of how this one ends. Humans have been documenting it and weaving it into their art for thousands of years. While it’s been a few decades since the femme fatale was an acceptable part of Hollywood narratives, feminism is pretty crusty at this point, Hollywood is on the decline and the appetite for knowledge our society regularly suppresses is large. Independent writers and directors are eager to take up the mantle, showing human relations how they actually are, if dramatized for the screen.

Obsession is the first great film I’ve seen this year but I haven’t had enough time to figure out if it’s one for the ages. As far as I am not Jackson Pollock goes, you just have to get yourself a copy and argue with me if I’m wrong.

In my 20s I worked in hotels, I got an English degree, I was a lot more idealistic than I am now. My hardest day at work involved going in for the 3:00 pm to 11:30 pm shift when the computers were already down and all of the reports were long out of date. We didn’t know who was coming and who was staying. We had to manually check over 140 rooms to try to figure out what was going on. My bosses left work early. Everyone from the Front Office Manager to the Assistant General Manager and the General/Regional Manager waltzed out the door with smirks on their faces because none of them wanted to face the mob. Meanwhile someone in our crack marketing department left the online booking system open so we got substantially overbooked when we weren’t even able to manage the reservations we already had filled. On top of it, we couldn’t make new room keys, which meant that every time someone wanted to check in or just go back to their room, we had to send one of three front-of-house employees up with a master key to let them in only after he got done escorting all the other people ahead of them to theirs. Imagine an entire lobby packed with dozens of pissed off people staring you down with no place for them to sit and no security to help you.

While that was my hardest day, it wasn’t my worst. My worst happened when two young doctors and their tiny daughter checked in. This particular hotel had two cramped, noisy rooms directly behind the front desk and next to the elevator shaft on the first floor which also hosted a bar. Almost everyone we ever checked into these rooms pitched a fit and asked to be moved but they took the room graciously without complaining, no problem. We were busy that week and it’s all we had.

What people who don’t work in hotels don’t realize is that people live their lives there. I don’t mean they stay permanently checked in. Rather, people propose in hotels but they also cheat on people and get injured in them. They start business partnerships, commit fraud, get into domestic disputes, and kill themselves. Talk to any career maid and she can tell you about the time she or one of her colleagues found a body before lunch. Some businessman with a few bad breaks who never recovered, leaves a note, a $100 tip, and a grieving family who gets spared the trouble of cleaning him up. It’s always been hard to maintain faith but some things make it harder than others.

And when that couple checked into the hotel, that’s what happened to me. In the middle of their stay we took a call for a medical emergency happening two walls and a few feet behind us. There were one or two more calls and then it was over. The wife miscarried in front of her husband and daughter. There wasn’t much time between the calls but she wouldn’t let us call an ambulance. Both her and her husband were doctors. It wasn’t her first. She probably knew what was happening when it was happening but I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t trying.

When I went into work the next day, I started streaming tears. My boss tried to get me to pull it together but I was inconsolable. I kept saying that you have to try. I didn’t know why they didn’t try. As I said, I was a lot more idealistic then.

I’m not very good with guns and I’m too old and injured to be a firefighter but I’ve been blessed enough to have had the opportunity to spring into action when it mattered, times when I was able to stand up first. I’ve put out no fewer than three fires in my life, mostly from being in the wrong/right place at the right time. I had to carry my dad to the car once after his heart stopped and subsequently started again, and I pulled a nonlethal Daniel Penny move on the L-train once when a drunk kid got into it with some rando minding his own business. I’d like to think I don’t go looking for trouble but, of course, most people will just watch two strangers fight instead of doing something about it, which is what I learned once I became the fight. But back at the hotel when I was 24, whether it would have done anything, whether we would have even gotten an ambulance there between those two or three phone calls to the desk, I did nothing.

Today is July 4th, the 250th anniversary of the founding of The United States of America and it’s also the first anniversary of the flood at Camp Mystic where twenty-five girls, two counselors, and one of the camp’s owners drowned to death in what is otherwise an idyllic part of an idyllic state in a country struggling to figure out what it wants to be.

I live in Texas, only a few hours away from the camp and what everyone in or outside of Texas knows is that Texas is America but even more. The people, the food, the trucks, everything really is bigger here. There’s a sense of life and excess that permeates everything. There are lots of great Americans but as someone who left Miami, DC, and New York to settle here, it feels like everyone’s hearts are bigger here too. When foreigners think of America, they’re usually thinking of football, ribs, country music, trucks, and Texas, not salad, fútbol, EV’s, dance music, or The Midwest (sorry). George Floyd may have died in Minneapolis but he’s probably the world’s most famous Houstonian, all apologies to Sam Houston.

There’s no shortage of angry partisanship here but people with politics different from mine help me all the time here. A liberal surgeon helps me get an MRI for cheap even though I don’t have insurance. A Palestinian kid helps me move a table too heavy for the two of us already working on it. A labor lawyer gives me tips on scaring the shit out of a contractor who’s in breach of contract. And people surprise you. A girlboss who works for an environmental NGO tells me about her concealed carry license. We may be slightly cartoonish but all of us are complicated.

Courage and heroism are not specific to Texas or even America but all the best places share qualities with all of the other best places, and in Texas people are quick to shoot you but we’re also quick to rush into danger. If the phrase, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” were ever true, it’s truest here where terrorists regularly get smoked running into churches.1

Texas is more violent, more sexual, and more religious than most of America. Everything is turnt up here but it’s also easier to be idealistic here. Even if all of the Buc-ee’s and Costco propaganda coming out of America’s date with FIFA is top down astroturfing about the wonders of capitalism, the sentiment is genuine. People really do love Texas. Old habits of honor and friendliness die hard here, just like idealism. Like Californians and Floridians, we can’t help but be any other way.

The heroes of Camp Mystic are exactly who you think they are. Young counselors like Ainslie Bashara who saved all 16 of her campers even though the water rose so quickly it trapped their cabin door shut.

Counselors like Emma Fultz who saved 14 of her campers. Dick Eastland, one of the owners who drowned trying to save these little girls, and men on the U.S. Coast Guard, men like Scott Ruskan who saved 165 people on his very first rescue mission, and so many others who broke windows, ran and swam to do what they could to preserve lives more fragile than theirs.

Though honor and courage aren’t specifically Texan or even American, these are the qualities that make a nation great. Today I’m thinking about the girls who drowned when they were just living life in Hill Country and I’m also thinking of the heroes, both living and dead, who ran head first into danger so that others could live. Whatever we call this place in 250 years, we need more heroes, more backbone, more fearlessness. More maternal women and ballsier men. So many bitter, spiritually downtrodden people hate it here but it’s hard not to love it when you think of the spontaneous heroism so many display every day. The people I’ve described here are the people who make me proud to live in America and proud to live in Texas where it’s America but more. We can choose to try to match their greatness or we can choose politics, division, our own poisoning as so many of the people covering the Camp Mystic flood have chosen to do, looking to score political and spiritual points on white, rural, Christian Americans who choose to lead a life illegible to prestige opinion-makers. The choice is ours but we don’t need everyone onboard. Every time you get to be the first one to stand is another opportunity to be the hero, to solidify your place in heaven, and shape the direction of those around you. Given the choice between siding with cowards and heroes, people will mostly side with heroes. You just have to be willing to become one.

Happy Independence Day to all who celebrate and may you use your independence to make this a better, more courageous (and slightly more Texan) country. May the memories of the victims be a blessing and may you remember them when the sky lights up tonight.

You’re a woman, I’m a machine

Everyone who knows an addict knows their environment is constantly conspiring to reveal their secrets but addicts know this is true of everyone sober too. People are always betraying themselves, dying to doxx their souls and expose themselves not in spite of their primping and preening but because they think that trimming their spirit’s bikini line will stop you from noticing their stretch marks. And I’m no different. My instincts tell me I’d hate to know what my listeners and readers think happened across my life to give me the exact figure they see when they read my Substack. But when I think about it, I’m pretty familiar with some of the worst things people think about me. The warm embrace of cope can’t be overstated, but my appetite for looking at myself from someone else’s perspective is large whether they hold me in high or low esteem. All that cognition clouded but compelled by sheer narcissism and the desire to know which inputs produce which effects.

When people can’t easily categorize what you believe, when your thoughts, decisions, and the way you live your life are illegible, people will call you weird, racist, a freak, incel, MAGA, alt right, mentally ill, sociopathic, and my favorite, nihilist. They need to wrap you in a label so they can digest your vibe and move on without upsetting their stomach. They have things to do and the longer they spend figuring out what you are, the more time they’re not checking their phones, ordering things, jerking off and gambling.

To be clear: I get annoyed when people ask their readers to care too much about them since it’s usually an easy way to shoot yourself in the foot (if you’re the author) but the problem is you guys keep subscribing, and paying (thank you), which tells me something I’ve said piqued your interest, you already care, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest and dumb. If I were still single, I’d tell you to say your prayers, that it’s curtains, that we’re basically married. Alas, my wife, who is my wife, is my girlfriend for life.

The devil you know

More and more you guys have been asking me what I believe as if I’m obscuring it by not citing some prefab label you already know but never would have come up with. The thing is I’m always advertising what I believe. I just don’t lead with, “Here’s what I believe.” I state it as a fact of life or an uncomfortable truth and I don’t care whose ideology it clashes or jibes with. Telling you I believe what I’m saying is both obvious and deflationary. And while I spent the opening of this piece telling you I try to deliberately think about the negative qualities people see in me, I spend very little time thinking about which of my good qualities might come off as negative or overly abundant in the package that is Ancient Problemz. So here’s my earnest pitch for amping up one single quality I have in spades that most people need more of:

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In an effort to maintain our chud passes, and I sat down to discuss the basedsploitation film Citizen Vigilante (2026) and describe the contemporary media environment.

Topics discussed:

• Citizen Vigilante (2026)

• Chuck Klosterman’s I Wear the Black Hat

• Language cops vs. language criminals

• A funny thing happening in Genoa

• Boomer sex scenes

• Shooting the messenger and other bloodsports

• Does Elon possess the kiss of death?

• Judging governments as if they did the will of their people and judging citizens as if they controlled their governments

• Stacey Abrams’ campaign spending

• The sign of membership in the leadership class is a complete lack of accountability

• The New York Times tenuous relationship with nuclear families and monogamy

• Turning the comments off

• Making something so bad it can’t be ignored

• The perimenopausal rite of passage that is writing an editorial

• Why you should socialize with men you don’t approve of

• How to make an action movie

• Sperging out during sex with tiny Spanish women

• How now one loses more than you

• Do evil people think they’re evil?

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While many Substackers have covered Dad Brain, which Glo and I discuss in this episode, these two pieces from are particularly good and worth checking out. I make reference to him in the podcast but unfortunately his name escapes me in the recording.

The preview includes many clips stitched together so you can get a flavor for various parts of our discussion but if you absolutely have to hear more, you’ll want to open a paid subscription today.

Holodoxa

Are Great Dads Made, Born, or Selected? How Do We Make More?

Last month, I finished reading Darby Saxbe’s book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives, which is available for pre-order and is due for publication June 9th. The book could be a great Father’s Day gift for the bibliophilic dads out there! She graciously joined me to discuss and debate some of the major claims of her interesting book…

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3 months ago · 19 likes · Stetson

Holodoxa

The Once and Future Dad

I previously published a conversation with Darby Saxbe about her new and exciting book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives. Surveying the landscape of the relevant science and politics, we found many areas of agreement but have differing perspectives on how we should go about promoting more men into marriage and fatherhood. Below, I provide some additional sociopolitical context to our fatherhood conversation, cover some of the main claims made by the book and then provide some of my own criticism of specific claims. I also have a related but distinct review of the book at…

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2 months ago · 15 likes · 5 comments · Stetson

Topics discussed:

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It’s Father’s Day and the first daddy posts are rolling in. You have the grillers, doomers, pronatalists, and people who can’t STFU about their dead dads, who will undoubtedly still be dead next year, plus the single mothers doing stolen valor, and the children of single fathers all jumping in to chime in.

I’ve been up since 3:00 am since I can’t sleep and my wife is soundly slumbering, but I’m a DINK with only a cat colony and garden to take care of so I will not be interjecting any cute tidbits about wiping butts throughout this. I do talk about my dead dad in it but this is really a piece for people whose families are estranged or go no-contact or people who see it from the outside and correctly think that something has gone wrong. This isn’t the piece about why I don’t have kids that people keep asking me to write but it’s not exactly a great commercial for what families are like either. If you read past the paywall, you’ll get to all the happier stuff with my uncle who swoops in to save the day.

I’m writing this all today (as in just before you read it) so maybe you can cut me a little slack on the typos this time.

F • t = m • ∆v

Speaking of—here’s some unexpected tidbits about the impulse-momentum theorem used in physics that I’m going to warp into a metaphor: Seatbelts work by prolonging the period you stay in contact with them during the transfer of force from the car colliding with you so that the force dissipates across more time rather than less, creating a slower, smoother deceleration for your body rather than a jerky, faster one. The flip side of this is that shorter the impact of an event, the more intense the transfer.

The impact of the Jeep hitting my Equinox and my foot hitting the floor each took less than a second but I’ll probably be limping my whole life. But my dad died just one day short of his 95th birthday and despite being an intense person, his impact on me is substantial but mostly genetic, with the man’s energy dissipating across almost a century beginning in 1929 and being more than halfway burnt out before I arrived on the scene when he was already 56.

When he died, I hadn’t spoken to him in a few years. Only a few years earlier he and my half-brother tried to defraud my mom while she was on her deathbed, and by proxy me and my sister. For what it’s worth, my dad was already set to maintain control of 75% of their wealth. He just wanted to maintain the other 25%, seeing as he was 91 years young at this point and needed to start thinking about his future.

While we went almost four years without speaking in the years before he died. We had also gone months without speaking while I was in college. At some point I realized that while I called him, he never called me. But he also didn’t like silent treatment and put my mom up to begging me to call him every time she and I spoke. He never had anything to say to me but felt slighted I’d noticed. We didn’t fight. I didn’t hurl insults at him. I just saw the situation for what it was and reciprocated.

After the second period of putting him on ice for a few weeks or months, my mom was so successful in convincing me to call him, I called him at work almost every day for 15 years and we had the same conversation every time. I would ask how he was, how the dogs were, and how the market was. Then we’d hang up. Aside from saving money and working terrible jobs the only other things I was doing were working out and chasing girls. I thought it was weird to brag to my dad about getting laid all the time so he mostly thought I was a moron and a virgin until my sister who knew I was very much not a virgin told me he was worried. More than the virgin thing, I just didn’t want him to think I was gay. After I began bragging to him about all the sex I was having, he just thought I was a moron.

Despite not taking a dime from my parents after I graduated school, which they graciously offered to pay for and I graciously accepted, my dad somehow got it in his head that my wife and I were trying to scrounge around for money. Suspiciously, this theory only materialized once we had left New Jersey to move all the way down to Miami to take care of my mom, who had lost about a third of her body weight and was on an oxygen machine, and him who was just used to her doing everything for him. To be clear, quitting work without having a buyout available on our lease made me and my wife’s financial situation far worse than it would have been had we left them on their own but people will never forgive you for what you do for them.

All of my final memories of my father include him putting himself before my mom as she lay there dying, knowing he forced her to sign documents under duress and without legal witnesses who would have known this was not kosher, and then trying to erase whatever connections or lineage that might exist from him to me and my sister, who is as close to a saint as a Jewess can get.

When he died, my brother buried him the next day and refused to contact me or my sister. We spent two weeks getting condolences from all manner of people who knew him or grew up with us but none from the rest of our family, who were told to keep it a secret. When my brother decided to set a date for a huge memorial without inviting us, I picked up the phone and had my final conversation with him, realizing my policy of not calling people had been correct the first time.

At this point, I only have two family members I speak to anymore: my uncle and sister.

While we don’t speak all the time, there’s none of this discomfort since there’s no beef. While it took her having a son to start to get a better understanding of me and exactly how variable men from even your own gene pool can be, my sister has been a pretty good sister.

As for my uncle, he got married and divorced before I was even old enough to remember but he never had kids. While my dad was always around but never engaged in what we were doing, my uncle lived with us for a few years, the two of us literally sharing a room out of economic necessity. I never got enough of whatever genes made him so athletic, or wild, or into guns, but a lot of my swag comes from him. He took me fishing. He would shoot hoops with me and he taught me how to play guitar, often late at night when my dad was long asleep after spending the whole afternoon sitting on his ass and reading. My dad never even played catch with me but I can still remember my uncle picking me up so I could dunk. The duration we were in close contact was so much shorter than I had with my dad and, of course, while I still sit on my ass plenty, that’s whose life trajectory mine most resembles, as it is intensity that leaves a much bigger mark on people than stability.

As I write this, my uncle is waiting on a lung transplant and I don’t know which way things will go but it’s not really in our hands. Whether he lives another 20 years or another 20 months, he took what was in front of him and made it his in a way my dad never did. A man, if not a father.

May all your uncs be intense.

Oliver Bateman Does the Work

The Work of My Father

In the years leading up to my father’s death in November 2014, he derived considerable satisfaction from following my writing career. As a man who spent decades "selling himself," he enjoyed when I would savage a former or current employer as a way of drawing attention to myself and my writing services…

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3 years ago · 22 likes · 10 comments · Oliver Bateman Does the Work

Coming clean

Look, the intro to this is all biographical. It comes off like a combination of bragging and confession but it’s necessary to build my case. If you want to skip over it, no hard feelings but just as strivers use credentials to build their ethos, fuckboys must use notches on their belt to establish aura. This is my story.

It’s really hard to talk about this subject without making myself sound like an absolute morally reprehensible scumbag, a title I hung up when I broke up with no fewer than two women in New York to date my wife in Miami. Alas, I’m not doing this to be inflammatory but I have such a violent revulsion to bullshit in areas where I have domain expertise that I can’t keep my mouth shut. The truth matters and it doesn’t change just because the teacher at the front of class doesn’t like the conversation.

Longtime AP readers know I lived in the DMV for seven years, with three of them spent living in NW D.C. making between $14.00/hr and $15.50/hr. Without giving the exact years or neighborhoods, I’ll just say that I was there immediately before the big gentrification push that associated U Street with Obama and not crack. During that time, in the time before #MeToo, a horny sperg, who completely imbibed and believed all the gender equality myths millennials were offered, could break multiple dozens of hearts sometimes in a single year if sufficiently young, healthy, and decent-looking. I was a Jewish guy with a high verbal and no STD’s living in the striver mecca of North America so you can probably guess that I wasn’t scooping up low-concientious, low IQ, low aspiration girls but was, in fact, bottoming out inside of liberated, high SAT Elite Human Capital, who volunteered hundreds of hours per year just to get into expensive colleges and then work for all manner of NGO or three-letter agency thereafter.

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Like any kind of pills a stranger gives you, it’s best to try these before you start getting all tight about what’s true. Free advice is usually the worst so I’ll give you a taste but then you gotta pay. Not because I’m a greedy Jew (((true))) but because they’ll work better if I charge you.

1. Everyone who’s correct is annoying. Consider that the reason they annoy you is that they have a point. Figure out what you need to do from there.

2. Don’t bring brimstone when padlocks will do. Bringing moralization to a practical problem feels good but won’t solve anything and may needlessly antagonize people who would otherwise be less troublesome.

3. Justice is rarely satisfying.

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Speak of The Devil when he appears

A great man once said there are no strays, only SKILL ISSUE. Nonetheless, I get slapped with a lot of untrue and pejorative labels due to the high-openness that allows me to talk to so many varied intellects with so many ideas and opinions outside of the 3”x5” index card of acceptable opinion. It doesn’t help that I’m vulgar and so are most of my favorite thinkers. I’ve been called a nihilist, alt right, part of the manosphere, and a card-carrying member of The Bad People while I’ve never so much as said the n-word aside from a two-year window from 2020-2022 when I would say hi to Tucker Carlson when he appeared onscreen in Vietnamese rips of his network show, lovingly uploaded to Youtube with run-times exceeding his actual show-length because, for whatever reason, they would restart his broadcast before ending it.

Though I’ve recently argued that normal people suck and parents are annoying, not everything vulgar is true. On the other hand, many too freely dismiss ideas expressed in vulgar terms because they think it’s beneath them to engage those with different morals from them. I think this is childish, although more vulgar people would also call it female. Nevertheless, I caution against this. But to see clearly, we must unpair these valances because associating them demonstrates the mental capacity of a retarded child and not an intelligent adult. It’s acceptable to be a child or retarded but one should not do both for too long as people will lose patience with you when they find out you’re too old and haven’t been formally diagnosed.

And it’s not so much that society loves lies. It just needs more firewalls, curation, and gatekeeping as it restricts who can have physical borders, freedom of association, and the ability to protect one’s own interests, if it is to keep functioning at all. If you can’t stop people from getting stabbed, raped, or beheaded, you can at least stop them talking about who is doing it and how one might screen them out.

Negotiating multiculturalism means instantiating financial and bureaucratic walls to justify the existence of physical ones with plausible deniability that exclusion is the goal. The more you force people to occupy the same spaces, the more you increase demand for gated communities, Clear, Global Entry, private schools, and paywalled comments sections. Those who can’t osmose into the more desirable side of these firewalls have little reason to defer to the shibboleths their betters want to see in the world so you often end up with a group of people who will either lie or go along with lies while getting mad at people who tell the truth because they look like walking moral failures to everyone worth convincing. For more on this, check out the piece below in which I explain how normal people have lost most of their legitimacy/authority or you can check out ’s piece showing why so many people wipe their ass with the social contract their betters keep failing to enforce.

Despite penning many gripping reads on how to sell things and get people to fuck you, I find myself less interested in arguing these days and more interested in dispelling myths emanating from other people’s arguments. The New Atheists tipping their fedoras at Christianity were mad annoying but I want to destroy so many of the lies that prop up progressives’ own American brand of Lysenkoism that I’m probably just feeling the bigotry of small differences here.

The truth is, I would be completely willing to go along with someone saying you should have kids because G-d said so but when you break out a chart about how bringing life into this world will lower my LDL a few points, it just makes me want to chop my dick off and troon out.

I know it’s a malapropism, but as I told David Dennison in Never take yes for an answer, a good meme can dispel with an entire religion in a single image, and despite what people say about having a positive vision for the future, it would be better to create the conditions that create the future than the conditions that keep us envisioning one. After all, tequila and WWE have created so many more babies than anyone’s op-eds. It’s time to destroy. Can you feel it?