End it like a man

This is how Alphas settle their differences. Quickly and openly:

Luis Suarez @luis16suarez
My apologies to Chiellini:
I deeply regret what occurred.
I apologise to Giorgio Chiellini and the entire football family

Giorgio Chiellini @chiellini
@luis16suarez It's all forgotten. I hope FIFA will reduce your suspension

To me it's rather remarkable how a lunatic Latin biter and an Italian can manage to end something so quickly and easily, whereas Gammas will do practically anything rather than simply admit that they are wrong, apologize, and move on. They tend to prefer clinging to their delusions and digging the hole ever deeper.

But notice that while Chiellini was quick to accept Suarez's apology in an admirably gracious manner, he did not do so until the Uruguayan striker admitted what he had done and apologized. Indeed, before then, he openly mocked Suarez. That, too, is Alpha behavior.

If you struggle with either giving or accepting apologies, keep this interaction in mind.

Ever the optimist

Glenn Reynolds attends the First International Conference on Men's Issues and comes away considerably more optimistic about the present state of intersexual relations than I am:

The thing that struck me most about the gathering was the palpable lack of gender tension. Men and women at this conference seemed to be on the same page, and the same team, in a way that seems almost surprising in these gender-divided times. Maybe that's because gender-talk, long a female domain, is also now about men. As another speaker at the conference, Warren Farrell, said, women can't hear what men don't say. So it's good that men are speaking up. As Farrell concluded in a Friday night dinner speech, the goal is "not a men's movement, not a women's movement, but a gender liberation movement."

With men and women both talking and listening, it gave me some hope that perhaps we'll see something new, and better, in the politics of gender. Will this spirit be able to overcome the politicized divisiveness that marks today's gender discussion? If enough men and women of good will come together, it just might.

The problem is that the sort of men and women who have combined to construct the current anti-male legal regime are exactly the sort of men and women who were not at the conference. And it remains to be seen how many of the women who publicly portray themselves as pro-male are genuinely pro-male as opposed to attempting to coopt any pro-male movement into the service of the Female Imperative.

The outrage du jour

Reddit readers list their favorite SF novels. Cue the complaints:

1. Frank Herbert Dune
2. Isaac Asimov Foundation
3. Dan Simmons Hyperion
4. Orson Scott Card Ender’s Game
5. William Gibson Neuromancer
6. Gene Wolfe The Book Of The New Sun
7. Neal Stephenson Snow Crash
8. Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
9. Robert Heinlein The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
10. Neal Stephenson Anathem

Five points if you can observe the primary cause of complaint. Ten if you can nail the secondary one as well.

The petticoat dictators

One of the observable patterns of history is the way in which some women simply will not stop trying to interfere with men's decisions and actions, even when they clearly have no idea what is involved. And, just as clearly, they don't give even the smallest damn about the men concerned.

The combat experiences were different for airmen from the ground troops, but there was a similarity in reaction. After three months, most infantrymen suffered from some form of battle fatigue. For the airmen, that happened after twenty-five to thirty missions. Still their commanders kept them in trouble.

Flight Surgeon McKittrick treated men who had reached, and sometimes passed the breaking point.... McKittrick saw to it that crews got liquor rations after a mission during debriefing. "It was done very methodically," he said, "and it did a great deal to settle them down and it gave them a little more appetite. it helped to relax them slightly from the horrors of a particularly terrifying mission that, all too often, surpassed fiction. And I'll be damned if the Women's Christian Temperance Union didn't try their best to put a stop to that."
- Citizen Soldiers, Stephen Ambrose, p. 103

I suppose we should be grateful that they didn't try to prevent morphine from being given to the wounded. Assuming they didn't. I find this amazing, especially when one recalls that liquor rations have been a formally specified soldier's right since the days of the Roman legions.

The relationship terrorists

It should go without saying that the men who are being victimized by these female "relationship terrorists" severely lack Game:

Convention has it that women are the gentler sex. But when it comes to relationships they are more likely than men to be controlling and aggressive, a study claims. Increasing numbers of women can now be classed as ‘intimate  terrorists’, meaning that they are verbally and physically violent towards a partner.

Psychologists at the University of Cumbria questioned 1,104 young men and women using a scale of behaviour which ranged from shouting and insulting to pushing, beating and using weapons.

They discovered that women were ‘significantly’ more likely to be  verbally and physically aggressive to men than vice versa. They concluded that violence was linked to controlling behavior such as checking up on partners and persuading them not to see certain friends.

I have to admit, I don't know a single male control freak of the sort that are so often portrayed in the media. But I do know a number of men who can't sit through an entire football game at a friend's house without receiving at least two or three telephone calls from their wives.

Some handle this female tendency better than others. My favorite was the time that, after a friend received a call from his wife during the game, he responded by giving her the following instructions:

1. Turn on the TV to channel X
2. Do you see there are little men running around? Good.
3. When the little men stop running around, set a timer to 15 minutes.
4. Don't call me again until the timer goes off.

Based on what you know of Game, do you think she is attractive or not?

Eve and the apple

Some things just never change:

If this isn’t a metaphor for the current Democratic Party, I don’t know what is. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) was supposed to ride in a cool new driverless car today, for a demo. There is video at the link. It’s hilarious and depressing at the same time.

As soon as Holmes gets into the car, she spots a big, red button. That button is clearly labeled “EMERGENCY STOP.”

She pushed it.

It killed the car.

It's an apt metaphor, to be sure, but I'm not certain a Republican woman would have been able to resist the temptation to push the big red button either. After all, we have no reason to believe that Eve was a Democrat.

Divorce sells

Everyone is familiar how sex is used to sell things to men, but they're probably not as cognizant of how divorce is used to sell things to women. Dalrock observes that these days, women's entertainment is drenched in advertisements for divorce:

I could go on at length, because entertainment aimed at women is drenched in this.  This isn’t just a secular problem either.  Every modern Christian’s favorite movie on marriage Fireproof is a story about a woman who has to decide if she should divorce her husband for the doctor she works with.  She doesn’t have a Cosmo quiz to help, but with the help of the Book of Oprah she is able to determine if she loves him or not, and if he loves her enough for them to stay married.  I won’t ruin the fun for those ladies who haven’t seen the movie yet, because figuring out if she should stay married or embark on an exciting path of divorce empowerment is the whole fun of the movie.

How do the pro-civilized fight that? Consciously and purposefully. Fortunately, we have the natural human desire for the pair-bond working in our favor, whereas no amount of Eat, Pray, Loves and Fireproofs can outweigh the observable evidence of the lonely cat ladies in our midst.

As for the women being sold divorce, Glenn Reynolds has the right advice: Ruminate less, try more.