Awww, it’s Valentine’s Day. That day your adorable little daughter hands out cute little Valentine’s Day cards to all the adorable little brats who pull her pony tail when they get bored in math class. Such a special holiday. It’s nice when Hallmark gets to hit a few of its sales goals. And then there’s the way I used to feel about Valentine’s Day back when I was younger….
On February 14 around the year 278A.D., Valentine, a holy priest in Rome in the days of Emperor Claudius II, was executed.
Indeed, for guys who are single and don’t have a whole lot going on on the romance front, this day just seems to rub it in… Circulate a petition in favor of banning the holiday, and you’d get a host of signatures. Predominantly male signatures. Guys that couldn’t get a date and guys that wish they’d never married. It’s just one more day of the year where it especially sucks to be stuck as an incel.
Hustle culture. You appreciate it if one of your teammates on the field or the pitch embodies it. It’s not bad if they provide for you out of their paycheck either. We’re taught to never knock the hustle. But, like the cheesy third grade Valentine’s Day Party, it can become a self-parody. Your job can eat you as a human being. Then you are stuck wherever it drops the part of you that it can’t grind up and digest. What is left of you won’t be the good part and you won’t be dropped in the place you believe you want to be.
There truly is a time to knock the heck off. In economics, we measure it in terms of declining marginal utility. Psychologists and Psychiatrists discuss burn-out and stress disorders. At some point your spouse wonders when you intend to actually return home – or if she should care whether you come back at all. Man does not live by bread alone – or by his paycheck alone either.
Never once at the start of my workweek — not in my morning coffee shop line; not in my crowded subway commute; not as I begin my bottomless inbox slog — have I paused, looked to the heavens and whispered: #ThankGodIt’sMonday.
Apparently, that makes me a traitor to my generation. I learned this during a series of recent visits to WeWork locations in New York, where the throw pillows implore busy tenants to “Do what you love.” Neon signs demand they “Hustle harder,” and murals spread the gospel of T.G.I.M. Even the cucumbers in WeWork’s water coolers have an agenda. “Don’t stop when you’re tired,” someone recently carved into the floating vegetables’ flesh. “Stop when you are done.” Kool-Aid drinking metaphors are rarely this literal.
This false love of work is a substitute for something else. I mean, what else do you do if nobody can stand you socially? What else can you do if the romantic aspect of your life is comedy on a good day and an ongoing Black Pill chemotherapy any day else? Hustle culture is good in short bursts. It helps you effing nail that occasional must-have work project. IMHO, if you are in that mode for more than maybe five or six weeks per calendar year, you need to get your life straightened out. At some crossover point, happiness is worth more than some award or cash bonus at your job.
So Valentine’s Day is about a consumerist illusion of eternal happiness. So do we castigate the lie, fake it ’til we make it, or just kick back with a cold one and enjoy the show? Happiness is a wide range of different things. You can’t have it just pursuing work or just pursuing something else. It requires a balance. Be both “businessman” and “hippy”. Don’t be an archetype of either. Don’t worry about how much of each you are. Happiness may require a certain unattachment. But then, if you’re unattached; then why does it feel good instead of numb? Happiness may just be something you can’t worry about. Worrying about it chases it far, far away.
Does economic satisfaction kill romance? All of these high divorce rate countries do pretty well. Does feminism kill romance? All of these places are a wee tad more feminist than say India or Yemin. It could also be that divorce rates are uncoupled from romantic satisfaction. Places like Chile where divorce is procedurally difficult; rank high on the list. A lot of deeply religious countries make either list. Catholic countries are in the most divorced list and the least divorced list.
It could be the essence of what makes a marriage succeed or fail is not completely encapsulated in what makes us all buy the flowers and profess our romantic attachment on Amerika’s holiday of commoditized romance. Perhaps, even when it comes down to romance, you need to run the family a bit like a good small business to keep it afloat at all.
MGTOWs, Incels and other undesireable men hate Valentine’s Day with a purple passion. How could they not. Some deserve it. Some never had a chance. Some even choose it as a lifestyle.
However a man with no love gets there; this day is a funeral for them. Their hopes, their dreams and their self-respect all get buried by all the wallowing in what they never get to have. That cute little cherubim didn’t shoot them with a bow and arrow. On these poor souls he used an AK-47.
And then there’s what happens when they love you not. Those who are close to you can be the most deceptive and destructive. If you are weak, don;t worry. They’ll just crush you like an expended beer can and call it a day. No muss, no fuss, no confusion or subterfuge required. But what if that object of hatred is at least on paper the most powerful man in the world?
Then we get diabolical skullduggery worthy of The Julio-Claudian Roman Emporers. In Rome The Praetorian Guard handled these things. We in Amerika have the FBI instead.
“There were meetings at the Justice Department at which it was discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet could be brought together to remove the president of the United States under the 25th Amendment,” Pelley said on CBS This Morning, citing his interview with McCabe. “They were counting noses,” Pelley added. “Not asking Cabinet members whether they would vote for or against removing the president. But they were speculating: ‘This person would be with us, that person would not be.'” “This would not perceived to be a joke,” Pelley said. He also says McCabe confirmed that Rosenstein was serious about someone wearing a wire in the president’s presence.
It shouldn’t shock the world that a place that has declared war on convention decades ago isn’t the place to work on finding the conventional family of your dreams. When you move to a place that makes gender as a social construct official municipal policy, that probably shouldn’t knock you over with a feather-duster. It would seem romantic happiness is a function of far more things than security and sexual market value. There is an entire social and societal infrastructure required if you want good, happy families.
It’s an age where most churches don’t preach The Song of Solomon because of the naughty fornication bits and then you can’t walk down a major city street without having the image of some random pelvis jammed in your face. That dichotomy sharpens if you are young, around a lot of other young people and a thousand miles from the comfortable place you grew up. It’s as if the places that are geared around helping young people gear up their careers also seem designed to make finding true love and contentment just about impossible.
Maybe Cuba and Venezuela are less popular places to stay. This is devastatingly wrong. California has one of the most perfect climates and some of the most beautiful natural scenery on the planet. It has developed some of the most brilliant technical and industrial achievements known to recent humanity. And the people who live their now can no longer stand the place.
Two thirds believe its best days are over. 53% intend to leave. California is seen as a giant Disneyland. It still has to exist in the real world and face those problems. No place you will ever live is a complete vacation. Unreal expectations are a part of the California problem.
Another problem occurs when people act as if those unreal expectations are objective reality. The locusts have eaten the grain and ruined the previous verdure of the fields. They now must molt and fly elsewhere to defoliate those crops as well…
What happens when you don’t love the one your with but are stuck there? You get the situation that The Tories (and all of Great Britain) have with PM Theresa May. Breaking up is hard to do. The tragicomedy over what sort of Brexit England will pursue serves as evidence.
Theresa May has once again been humiliated over Brexit after Tory MPs pulled their support for her plans. The PM’s strategy was left in tatters on Valentine’s Day after Brexiteers abstained on her motion, leaving it to be defeated by 303 votes to 258.
Is it any wonder that some MGTOWs get cynical and thing the whole game is rigged. Sometimes the game really is rigged. What type of sick individual cheats at love? The FTC offers us some helpful insights.
The FTC announced this week that romance-related scams have surged recently and generated more losses than any other consumer fraud reported to the agency last year. The number of these romance scams reported to the agency jumped from 8,500 in 2015 to more than 21,000 in 2018. And the amount lost by victims has quadrupled over that period — reaching $143 million last year. The median reported loss for victims was $2,600, about seven times more than other fraud tracked by the FTC.
Yep, that bride from Tajikistan is no more real than the Nigerian Prince with lots of money to launder. They both have your email address and you wonder how sometimes. What would make you do it? The fact that it works? I would hope you’d get tired of cheating people the way you eventually get sick of any other scam. It just makes it a harder, more cynical world. One more Black Pill for the suicide bottle.
Amazon abruptly abandoned plans Thursday for a big new headquarters in New York that would have brought 25,000 jobs to the city, reversing course after politicians and others objected to the nearly $3 billion in tax incentives promised to the company. “We are disappointed to have reached this conclusion — we love New York,” the online giant said in a blog post, adding that it already has 5,000 employees in the city and plans to increase that number. The stunning reversal was a serious blow to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, who had lobbied intensely to land the project. The Seattle company had planned to spend $2.5 billion building its new offices.
Sometimes you can’t ignore crazy. Sometimes the best decisions you make are relationships you avoid. Amazon was there and ready to do their part. It wasn’t reciprocal. It’s a better decision than many of the other ones Jeff Bezos has made lately. Parting is such sweet sorrow for Amazon. New York can continue to enjoy that decline. It will give Illinois and California a run for their money in the state people want to be from. Tell successful people that they are evil, and that you don’t want them; and they will eventually agree. They then walk off. Amazon just went bye-bye.
The compromise legislation does not allow for funding for the wall, although it does fund other barriers. This shows a completely obstructive approach taken by the Democrats, and Trump is defeating them by forcing their hand by beginning construction in Texas and now, threatening to use an emergency to begin building the wall by using military funds available to him. He showed good faith by offering compromise with the Democrats on many issues but, like other presidents in the past, knows when to get around a truly intransigent Congress, which is counting on defeating him on this issue so that they can bully him on everything else. Without a government shutdown, they lose their pressure on him and forget that for many if not most Americans, the border wall has become an important symbol of ending the constant flood of foreign invaders across our border to depress wages, vote Democrat, and demographically replace the historical American people.
Finally, someone points out one of the difficult truths of the Holocaust, which is that many of the killings were carried out by Eastern European partisans and civilians who associated Jews with Communism, pornography, and organized crime. Once the Communists were driven out of these territories, the long-standing resentments which could not be voiced previously were unleashed, igniting brutal retribution. This should be a reminder to all minority populations in diverse nations that they can use the law to suppress natural rejection of diversity for only so long, but that doing so guarantees that once the conflict comes into the open, it goes ballistic into snarling Lord of the Flies Nietzschean territory rather quickly. If anyone on Earth still has any brains — doubtful, to be honest — they will see that Netanyahu is telling us that diversity is over and we should end it peacefully before that ceases to be an option. Following the Trump model, Netanyahu also brilliantly trolled Iran by calling for war and then stealthily deleting his tweet, essentially reminding Iran that it, too, can play provocation for only so long before tolerance snaps and Israel — emboldened by US withdrawal from Syria and Trump rubber-stamping military action by heartily approving foreign military aid to Israel — begins destroying anything it wants to. If they learn from the two gulf wars, they will follow Bush I and not Bush II, which means that they will level Iranian infrastructure and doom the nation to permanent poverty instead of attempting to “fix” a situation for which no known remedy exists.
Humans suffer from being social. That is, when they look out a room of smiling faces, they want to do what makes those faces happy. This clashes with our knowledge of the bell curve, human character, and the committee mentality because those people do not know what is good for them and if given the decision, will screw it up. That is the lesson of democracy, and we learn it again despite Athens having documented the path from equality into narcissism for us. Well, what can we say? Human hubris — think the Tower of Babel, Garden of Eden, Moby-Dick, and the One Ring — knows no bounds, and our individualism expresses itself through a desire to become powerful through the herd instead of through what is realistic and good, and in doing so, we enslave ourselves to the inertia of the herd, which like the mythical Disney lemmings desires in its heart nothing more than to charge over the edge of a cliff. After all, choosing death means being in power over death in the primitive symbolism of the subconscious. When humans got power in America, they did what they always do, which is to democratize or rather install bureaucracy; that bureaucracy got big, and started redistributing wealth. Now we face the same situation that the Soviets and the “yellow vests” in France do, which is that making government an economic participator raises costs to the point of economic shutdown, and making government a social participator turns people into insecure and greedy individualists who will gladly sacrifice all of their fellows’ tomorrows for a few pieces of silver today. Thanks to our high taxes and entitlements state, Americans can no longer live a decent life on a regular job. Good work, democracy.
So Valentine’s Day is an interesting conundrum. The ultimate in Operation Forced Fun. Like New Year’s Eve, it seems like a holiday for those who feel like rubbing that sick burn in on those who just aren’t doing as well or having as much “fun.” But false appearances deceive and we all fight the demons inside nobody can see. Be gentle to others this day. No matter how they look on the outside. YOU.JUST.DON’T.EXPLETIVE.KNOW..