red pill

Mean People Suck: “Radicalizing the Romanceless”

Amazon Warrior

While people are still forming good relationships and marriages by finding like-minded partners, those happy people are relatively quiet, and online the poisonous communications of embittered men and women have a much higher profile. The “grievance bubble” of modern feminism — which sees women as endlessly wronged by brutish males — is now countered by the Red Pill grievance bubble of men who feel victimized by women who use and discard them, or even worse, ignore them and act as if even a friendly word is an aggression.

People who treat each other as objects to be used for sex or to fill an attachment need without regard to the others’ inner being suck. People who treat their intimate partners as valuable people first, treasuring their individualism and learning as much as they can about their partner, are the winners in the relationship game — inner security and confidence is sexy and attractive in both men and women. When the insecure start blaming everyone else for their failure to get their needs met instead of working on improving themselves to be better partners, we have groups of embittered men and women engaged in blaming to preserve their egos.

The Slate Star Codex blog (which is full of good reads for rationalists) has a great looong post about this meanness and how the cruelties displayed by the embittered are adding to the schism (h/t Instapundit.) He uses Google histories to trace the origin of the Manosphere and finds it to have started up after years of contemptuous references to men in the Femosphere. Here’s the priceless quote (referring to feminist web sites’ disdain and cruelty toward lonely men):

When your position commits you to saying “Love isn’t important to humans and we should demand people stop caring about whether or not they have it,” you need to take a really careful look in the mirror – assuming you even show up in one.

Please do read “Radicalizing the Romanceless.”

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Red Pill Women — Female MRAs

Doris Lessing, on Men

In the posts Life Is Unfair! The Militant Red Pill Movement and Madmen, Red Pill, and Social Justice Wars I discussed the Red Pill movement, a kind of men’s reaction to modern extreme feminism. Red Pill ideology, hammered out by a variety of more-or-less intellectual leaders online, is based on some partly-baked evolutionary psychology mixed with quite reasonable grievances about how the liberation of women starting in the 1920s turned into a male-bashing, male-stereotyping cult in the new millenium, and how this new feminist grievance bubble portrays women as deserving of equal treatment when it is to their advantage, but asks for special treatment when it is not, and ignores continuing disparities in divorce and child custody decrees. The posts Modern Feminism: Victim-Based Special Pleading and Purge: the Feminist Grievance Bubble cover that aspect. Another post of interest, Stable is Boring? “Psychology Today” Article on Bad Boyfriends discussed the tendency of modern women (and men) to avoid commitment for years while engaging in sex with partners chosen for sexual magnetism, then settling down with a more stable, more likely provider when their youthful sex appeal fades — a phenomenon called “alpha fucks — beta bucks.”

I am not a “social conservative.” I don’t believe there was some Golden Age in the past where everyone was happier because of rigid sex roles and societal expectations of early and forever-after marriage. Those customs and expectations were evolved under completely different conditions, and wasted the potential of many people. Nevertheless, there is an important lesson in enlightened conservatism, which acknowledges that self-organizing, evolved systems should not be torn down without understanding how they operated, and that top-down, government-sponsored innovations in social arrangements might have unintended consequences the “social engineers” fail to foresee. This post, “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor, gets at the destruction of communities after well-meaning meddling in their affairs by distant governments — not understanding the incentives and social signals in place, then overwhelming them with impersonal “aid” and destroying the existing system of financial and moral support (by family, friends, churches, and community businesses and organizations) in favor of dependence on government (or government-created black markets.)

I’m old and I’m married, and so these wars between extremes don’t affect me. My personal history is far from mainstream and I certainly didn’t benefit from the old-school rules — my father left when I was 5, and I had to work very hard to grow myself up without a lot of guidance outside of books. But because I am largely self-created, I can probably see more objectively than most. And I can see the Red Pill guys’ point, as well as note the lingering injustices to women that fuel some extreme feminist posturing. A social movement that has achieved some or all of its aims (women are free to enter any profession, women are competitive in political races, women’s salaries in exactly comparable jobs are very similar to men’s, rape is taken very seriously) will tend to persist while fixating on and exaggerating ever-smaller issues until reaching a point of absurdity, and the grievance bubble once begun goes on until the proper response to it is ridicule.

I’m not the only one who sees this. Sites like Women Against Feminism and the associated hashtag #womenagainstfeminism explore many younger women’s rejection of the anti-male extreme feminist position, and assert their strength as individuals and respect for men as partners. Where original feminism was a fight for freedom, modern feminism has turned into a fight for restrictions on freedom.

Vice has a great longread on “The Women of the Men’s Rights Movement.” by Alex Brook Lynn. Notable excerpts below:

It was just after she’d had her first child that Janet Bloomfield realized she didn’t want to go back to work and pay some nanny to raise her kids. She had gone to college to study film theory and assumed, like practically every American woman does, that she would start a career before marrying and having a family, but that wasn’t how things turned out. She met a man, fell in love, and stayed at home.

She didn’t feel ashamed of this decision, nor did she feel denied in any way—a close college friend of hers nicknamed Pixie had wound up in a similar situation when her son was diagnosed with some severe health issues. But other people, especially other women, apparently had a problem with Janet’s choices. She felt that her friends were disdainful of her and thought she was crazy or stupid to rely on a man for her income; they insinuated that her husband would “trade her in for a younger woman,” and that she would wind up broke and abandoned.

Janet and Pixie started writing letters back and forth while Pixie’s son was in intensive care, where Pixie wasn’t allowed to bring her cell phone. They talked about how housewives had fallen out of cultural favor, and about how Janet was a “victim of parental alienation,” as she would later say—her parents had gone through a vicious divorce and her mother had turned her and her three brothers against her father. In October 2012 these paper and ink musings became a blog, JudgyBitch.com, with Janet writing rants and Pixie doing the graphics and maintaining the back end.

As she was starting the website, Janet was searching for answers as to why her peers disliked stay-at-home moms and why her mother had had the power to separate her from her father. She found herself exploring a part of the internet that was full of complicated theories about social hierarchies, propaganda, and gender bias, in the process reading story after story of men being discriminated against in family courts and custody battles. Respect for traditional family structures was waning. The very concept of the family, in fact, was now regarded as a means by which men oppress women.

As she read more, disparate threads started clicking together—all these things were the result of a systematic vilification of the male gender. The misinformation, the lies, the poison, it all came back to radical feminism. Even her film-theory courses had taught her to watch movies through a feminist filter. She gradually acquired a set of beliefs with the help of a loosely organized online community of thinkers and writers called the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM).

Her new worldview ran counter to the way people were supposed to think and talk about gender and society. As she used her website to strike back against feminism, people got angry, which was fine with her—the more animosity she got for pushing boundaries, the more boundaries she pushed.

Today Janet is a slender blond just entering middle age who’s far more affable in person than on the web, where she is fierce, self-assured, and cutting. Even as she adopted her strident views, she didn’t share them with her neighbors in her small town out of fear of the imagined consequences. “My husband could lose his job,” she told me. “I don’t need all my kids’ teachers, and all the parents of their little friends, treating them differently because of my views.”

…

Later that year, three of these women formed the Honey Badger Brigade, a website and podcast on which they discussed men’s rights, feminism, and geek culture. Janet became a regular on the podcast, putting her at the heart of the YouTube channels, blogs, vlogs, subreddits, Facebook groups, and Twitter accounts that make up the MRM. Though the movement is all about defending men and boys from social misconceptions, discrimination, and feminism, in an odd twist it’s the female activists—pissed off, extremely well read, and spoiling for an argument—who are driving the conversation.

…

The most common concerns of the MRM [Men’s Rights Movement] include:

(1) The family court system, which activists say frequently forces men to pay too much alimony while not considering their feelings when awarding the custody of children;

(2) Government programs that assist only women rather than both genders, especially those that give aid to female victims of sexual assault—MRAs claim that men who suffer the same abuse are often ignored;

(3) The right to opt out of raising a child, since, some MRAs say, women can opt out of a pregnancy;

(4) False rape accusations, which MRAs think don’t get enough attention from a culture increasingly inclined to believe women who say horrible things about men;

(5) Fighting back against radical feminism, the ultimate evil as far as the movement is concerned.

These aren’t mainstream issues, but the modern-day MRM has acquired a constituency online that its forebears couldn’t have dreamed of. “We are growing exponentially because of the difference in modern communications,” Janet told me.

The internet, of course, has made it possible for people to broadcast their words to the entire globe without the restrictions that come with finding a publisher or being part of a larger organization. The floodgates are open, and everyone is free to write and disseminate long-winded manifestos, form tough-talking groups, and break away from them into increasingly splintered factions when disagreements arise.

Thus, you’ve got run-of-the-mill MRAs like most of the readers of AVFM, but you’ve also got a constellation of related online phenomena: the pickup artists (PUAs), who concoct elaborate systems for interacting with and seducing women; the anti-PUAs, who feel ripped off by PUA gurus promising to get shy young men laid but don’t deliver (they achieved notoriety recently because Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista shooter, frequented one of their forums); Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOWs), who have vowed to stay away from women entirely, often after being sexually traumatized or otherwise abused; and Red Pill, a catchall term for those who see the world as being dominated by women and oppressive to men, and exhibit some of the most extreme language of anyone affiliated with the MRM.

The Latest from Jeb Kinnison:

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, In Kindle and trade paperback.] The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of Death by HR

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat. For it is now fairly impossible for any company not to erect an HR wall as a legal requirement of business with the sole purpose of keeping government diversity compliance enforcers as well as unethical lawyers from pillaging their operating capital through baseless lawsuits… It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool… to craft counter-revolutionary tactics for dealing with the HR parasites our government has empowered to destroy us. All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Madmen, Red Pill, and Social Justice Wars

I have been working on a long piece about “Red Pill” ideology — which provides a useful vocabulary for discussion, even if their theorists have sealed themselves in a dissent-free grievance bubble. But the news compels me to comment.

The recent psychotic murder spree in Isla Vista has brought some of these online subcultures into the public eye — PUAs (Pick Up Artists), which the crazy young man (Elliot Rodger) had added to his hate list when their pickup techniques failed to work for him, and “Red Pill,” which some ever-opportunistic writers have tried to drag into the killer’s misogynist (but really misanthropic) obsessions.

First, let’s observe that this young man was crazy. Like others of his type, he generalized blame for every ego slight he suffered on a group of people regardless of their individual natures, and chose to kill as a final effort to feel effectual. This sense of entitlement to the regard of others without any accomplishment is malignant narcissism, and the lack of empathy and understanding of others — seeing them only as instruments to serve him — is psychopathic.

His dysfunction is less rare than it should be; we know rates of maladjustment rise dramatically in broken families and rootless lives, with his affluence only adding to his sense of entitlement to the respect of others. He is a fine example of why it’s misleading to talk of “poverty” as the cause of violence and social ills; very poor people in stable families with good social ties rarely go on killing sprees, and their happiness depends more on the regard of their community than their material possessions. Progressives currently are obsessed by inequality of wealth, when it is inequality of respect and love that makes for a sense of injustice and anger — and in that they are the ultimate materialists, thinking that an unearned government transfer of wealth will make the less favored feel more a part of the society.

Let’s also note that this error of treating members of a group as guilty of all the sins of a few members of the group is seen everywhere, even in many supposedly advanced thinkers. Progressives are so attuned to racism (which is now seen in even trivial prejudices and category errors made by others) that many commit the same error of failing to treat the individual person with respect, and some feminists are so eager to correct the thinking of everyone about gender issues that they slip into facile generalizations that treat men as the enemy instead of as necessary partners in creating a better future.

Like men, women can be strong or weak, responsible or passive, effectual or parasitic. No one deserves to be labeled and pigeonholed for their gender, race, wealth, class, profession, or tribe. Yet the human tendency to seek safety in groupthink is everpresent. Mollie Hemingway takes down the hashtag #YesAllWomen, which lit up with grievance bubble generalizations. The irony of women demanding equal treatment and recognition for their strengths and abilities, then demanding special protection and the suppression of any tendency to masculinity that might be perceived as threatening, is being noticed but it’s a peep amid the roar of “we’re righteous victims” politics. Having large groups of men and women at each other’s throats for perceived aggressions against each other is not a sign of a healthy respect for other human beings.

In Bad Boyfriends I lay out the attachment types and their flawed extreme versions. What happens when the people who are good at being married or coupled find each other, leaving about half the population to deal with partners who are selfish, cruel, avoidant, thoughtless, or just unreliable? Or in thrall of the “fairy tale” model, making them feel the center of their own personal universe, with others just accessories to support their entitlement?

Those less emotionally able interact, collide, grow bitter as they are hurt and hurt others, lose access to their children and find themselves abused and controlled, and band together in groups to nurse their grievances. To the extent that these groups help their members find strength to grow and develop themselves as stronger and better people, this is good; but more commonly they grow their bitterness and think that because they were hurt, all other men/women are hurtful.

To Elliot Rodger, murderous young man: I’m sorry the world did not give you exactly what you thought you deserved. There was something terribly wrong with you, and despite a loving family’s many efforts to get you help, nothing could reach you. I don’t know why you lost the basic humanity you should have had — organic mental defect you were born with, bad parenting, looming schizoaffective disorder — the reason doesn’t matter. May your example serve as a warning: if you’re a loser in life, work on accomplishing something concrete, no matter how small. If you can’t bear it, don’t take innocent people with you.

I’ll be back with some more thoughts later.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

The Latest from Jeb Kinnison:

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, In Kindle and trade paperback.] The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of Death by HR

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat. For it is now fairly impossible for any company not to erect an HR wall as a legal requirement of business with the sole purpose of keeping government diversity compliance enforcers as well as unethical lawyers from pillaging their operating capital through baseless lawsuits… It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool… to craft counter-revolutionary tactics for dealing with the HR parasites our government has empowered to destroy us. All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Life Is Unfair! The Militant Red Pill Movement

My readers usually get to the chapter about the aging dating pool and (if they are single) come back with questions: “Is that really true? Most of the good ones are taken??” And I have to answer, “Yes, that is the reality. There are always some people out there who would be good partners for you, but the older you get, the harder they will be to find.”

One woman (the BitterBabe) wrote of her investigation into the statistics she faces at 40, even in a big city. In the comments to that post I found an excellent summary of one of the men’s movements I’ve been encountering:

As you may have noticed, the Militant Red Pill is a postmodern networking movement that uses economic models as its primary narrative structure. It masquerades as conservative insofar as it lays claim to objective truth.

The Militant Red Pill attracts a lot of high I.Q. STEM/business types, because in the main, modern-day STEM/business types tend to be vocationally educated but not classically educated (i.e. you won’t find a Wittgenstein or a Newton there). Western culture at the moment rewards this type of education materially, ergo, these men, possessing a big piece of the pie, have internalized that such material rewards signify that they are superior and “know everything.”

The married ones simply cannot abide the notion that a masculine man could be married to a high-value woman that he does not have to manipulate (i.e. “game”). Unhappy in their own marriages (often for legitimate reasons), they seethe with resentment at the notion that other men have what they most deeply desire. Ergo they avoid most mainstream social interaction, preferring instead the company of other likeminded men (and a few women), whom they spend much of their free time soclalising with on Militant Red Pill blogs. It is a subculture that has many of the benchmarks of a cult, and it needs to be viewed this way in order to be understood.

I recommend all women become fluent in Militant Red Pill. Militant Red Pill has arisen in response to legitimate social problems. It is Feminism for Men and eventually it will go more mainstream, just as Feminism did. As I have posted elsewhere, there is a lot to learn from the Militant Red Pill about male attraction triggers. Furthermore, understanding their philosophy, techniques, and tactics will enable you to protect yourself from these men should you encounter one IRL.

This explains the “red pill” reference one of my reviewers made, which I thought referred only to The Matrix. There’s another story on the movement here, at Business Insider. Now I don’t think any of these comments are completely fair to the red pillers, but that is what their movement looks like from the outside.

The bitter divorced fathers we have all encountered have similarly organized, and they overlap. The entire online men’s grievance movement is called the Manosphere, a shorthand term for the interconnected web sites where these guys hang out. The trouble with dismissing them as reactionary anti-feminists is that they do make some valid points and ask some good questions. As a not-directly-affected observer I can see that, so I’m trying to engage and understand what they are saying — because I suspect angry tribes of men and women talking past each other are just harming us all and not resolving any of the serious problems of fatherless children, crumbling middle-class families, and aimless young people kept out of stable career-path jobs by economic stagnation and corporatist government regulation. In a time when women are the majority of college students and increasingly dominate important institutions, we still have an unwillingness to confront a reality that young men are now stunted and damaged by control-based public schools who try to force everyone into a college-bound straitjacket. We need to strive for a diverse society where all skills and roles are valued — women who want to stay home with their kids are doing a great service, and so are men who do the same thing. Parents who want the best education for their children and are prevented from escaping bad public schools are being damaged. The politicians who want to force equality of outcome on the sexes are just increasing the sense of grievance to get votes and retain power; meanwhile, the economy slows as people are blocked from pursuing their best opportunities and have their subsidies taken away if their income increases.

None of this political wrangling should stop young people from finding the right human being for them. I have to guess that much of the bitterness and anger comes from people on all sides who haven’t found a good, reliable, empathetic partner. It won’t solve all the problems of the world, but it will make it easier to be kind and generous when you encounter these angry souls.

And in Jimmy Carter’s immortal words, “Life is unfair.” We all start out with a bag of advantages and disadvantages. Women even in supposedly patriarchal societies have always had power, even when their roles were constrained; and almost all men have always had to serve someone to survive. Nearly everyone has a talent or characteristic they can be proud of, and some to be ashamed of. But it’s wise to remember the point from both most religions and recovery movements: you will be happier if you take account of the good and are grateful. Dwelling on the injustices and slights that everyone, without exception, suffers at one time or another won’t make your world a better place.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

The Latest from Jeb Kinnison:

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, In Kindle and trade paperback.] The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of Death by HR

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat. For it is now fairly impossible for any company not to erect an HR wall as a legal requirement of business with the sole purpose of keeping government diversity compliance enforcers as well as unethical lawyers from pillaging their operating capital through baseless lawsuits… It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool… to craft counter-revolutionary tactics for dealing with the HR parasites our government has empowered to destroy us. All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Jeb Kinnison

Writing About Life and Love

red pill

Mean People Suck: “Radicalizing the Romanceless”

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Red Pill Women — Female MRAs

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Life Is Unfair! The Militant Red Pill Movement

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