Game of Thrones

“Only by accepting what we are can we get what we want,” says Littlefinger.

Roz obliges: “And what do you want?”

“Oh,” he says. “Everything.”

HBO’s massively hyped adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s massively hyped epic is two cuts above the rest of fantasy television. But considering the reigning champion is Xena and the only living opponent Legend of the Seeker, that’s faint enough praise to be damned to the cold regions of hell.

It isn’t that Game of Thrones is a bad adaptation on the usual terms: the costumes, sets and cast are all expertly picked. The plot mostly survives intact. Malta is beautiful. The problem lies squarely with the script: Beinoff and Weiss overwrite it like a broken typewriter. Scenes that approach good drama are invariably ruined by overwrought expo — and by the way y’all, there’s no point in having a great cast if you aren’t going to let them act. Aiden Gillen can do things with his face that convey “what I want is only everything” without the necessity of making a speech that no real person would make, least of all to a brand new employee at a whorehouse, in a city where everyone spies on everyone else.

Moreover, when distilling a story from a novel — a medium that laughs at time constraints — you are necessarily forced to pick and choose which events deserve the screen. You reveal your priorities and, if your understanding of the source work is flawed, you reveal that too. Beinoff and Weiss make sure it’s clear that A Song of Ice and Fire is bloody, full of sex and crawling with corrupt power players; i.e. that it’s Serious Business for grownup viewers, like The Sopranos or something and not at all like Lord of the Rings. But The Sopranos wasn’t all blood and sex, a good amount of it was devoted to Meadow’s schoolwork, and Tony’s suburban striving, and Christopher’s stupid writing career — and that’s a good thing, because real life isn’t all blood and sex either. The mundanity threw all the bada-bing mafiosi stuff into relief. It might have been the violence which made The Sopranos a poster child for subscription television, but it was the sociopolitics and therapy jargon and boring New Jerseyness that made it something other than another homage to the Godfather movies. Game of Thrones makes sure you never forget that it’s For Adults; what I hear is a pair of self-conscious producers protesting too much.

Elsewhere, bankrupt tropes of fantasy TV are inexplicably upheld. For example, just because Jaime and Cersei speak in thespian Brit accents does not mean Tyrion should do the same — if the best accent Dinklage can fake sounds like Trey Parker doing a villain voice. This is an imaginary kingdom, it isn’t as though it’s a potential point of inaccuracy. Besides, Illyrio speaks in the same stage accent as the rest, despite being from a foreign island city. Why even bother?

There’s also the sex issue. Apparently, HBO believes naked breasts are its station ID, so these are brought on whenever possible. There’s nothing wrong with naked women or men, or with sex in general, but the practical upshot is that there seem to be twice as many whores in Westeros as any other kind of woman. Giggly whores. This is not unproblematic in a story whose clearest heroine comes to personal power by mastering her husband in the bedroom. And while we’re at it, there’s also Renly Baratheon who, moving from page to screen, transforms from a three-dimensional gay man with an appealing and respectable character into a mewling, whining sensitive-guy parody.

It’s as though the whole thing is being shorthanded for idiots, and what’s most disconcerting is that it isn’t as though Beinoff and Weiss don’t talk a fine game about their methods and motives. They just don’t deliver. The show we get is made for no one: it’s simultaneously too childish for chin-strokers, too violent for children and entirely too half-assed for connoisseurs of the irascible cult object. If pulling the plug meant the money could be used to finish Deadwood, then at this point I’d give the regal thumbs-down and condemn this show to die.

Treme III

Highlights from last night’s Treme:

• A shred of humanity from Janette’s scary boss. The man’s clearly deranged — he ends a hissing admonition with “listen to your fish,” whatever that means — but he shows us two things: he cares about the food at least as much as the ego-trip, and he can occasionally handle frustration without having a meltdown.
• Nelson Hidalgo may love the city and its culture, as he repeatedly (and unctuously) claims. He’s still an out-of-towner taking profit on the money earmarked for clean-up, while natives like Albert Lambreaux do the actual work and can’t even return to their homes.
• Michael Huisman is great at being a bad musician. Sonny’s street performance is awful. When the kid pulled his cable, my first thought was that they were sick of his mealy-mouthed white-guy blues growl.
• Batiste’s frustration putting a band together is an echo of my own experience. You explain what you hear in your head to dozens of people, and you can’t find one with the time, enthusiasm or commitment to help make it happen. Especially in a town where everyone’s a musician, everyone has their own thing already. They want you for their thing, but they aren’t gonna do yours.
• Another shout-out for Wire fans: “Bullwinkle! Bullwinkle!”

Treme II

Geeking out on Treme. Some thoughts on “Accentuate the Positive”:

• Toni misses, and hates, Creighton; Sofia’s feelings are much less complicated. I predict this leads to escalating conflict as Sofia tries to make positive sense of her father’s death, and Toni finds her own grudge growing beyond her ability to control.
• Janette’s life in New York is accurate to my own experiences. Her boss, a Marimow-type asshole, is worse than any boss I’ve worked for. But the general theme of social loneliness, asshole bosses and living in an apartment with Ziggy Sobotka felt very real and was an interesting counterpoint to the Big Easy.
• I know Nelson Hidalgo is an asshole. He smarms up to the waitresses, but treats his workman cousin with rank condescension. He utters the word “cuz” in triplicate. I predict he’s going to be the guy to try and redevelop Albert Lambreaux’s housing project.
• Sonny and Davis are both much less annoying this season. Sonny is taking his lumps; in the opening scene, when his street gig is upstaged by a clearly superior act, he accepts it and moves on. Moreover, though he’s clearly not over Annie, he accepts her choice and doesn’t make a scene.
• Lt. Terry Colson is a welcome new viewpoint. The moment at the end, where he’s picking over a crime scene and a trumpet note drifts incongruously across the street, is the kind of naturalist absurdism that gives David Simon’s shows their lyrical quality.

The Sopranos

Warning: Complete spoiler ahead.

The Sopranos is about how the things a guy represses come back and find him.

Mafia boss Tony Soprano is seeing a therapist because his anxiety is making him faint. In these discussions, it comes up that his father was a wiseguy too, and that his parents had a miserable relationship. The therapist points out the obvious, that Soprano’s own repetitious scripts obviously began in his home life as a child; for example, his romantic preference for moody, unhappy women like his mother. After watching a series of these affairs, it becomes clear to the viewer, if not to any of the characters, that she diagnosed correctly.

Tony is like his father. He’s a highly competent boss in a violent, criminal business whose ramifications could make anybody’s head hurt, and like any right-thinking middle class guy, he copes with this by keeping his job and home separate. Home is a preserve where entirely different rules apply and in effect, he becomes another person. In fact, his strength as a boss is his ability to keep many things in his head separate — but the same quality is why as a husband and father, he’s most often a clueless Homer who gets obsessed on juvenile points and never sees the big picture.

He keeps at therapy — if only, at first, for narcissistic supply — and over the course of years comes to realize, very slowly and haltingly, that things are not so separate. People are more like each other than they seem, including perpetrators and their victims. Business always comes home, eventually. Slowly but surely, Tony’s repressed conscience rounds on him, and he has a transcendent experience during septic shock.

In Tony’s liminal consciousness, he gives himself the fantasy he wants: He’s a top salesman away on business, trying to book into a hotel. But he’s lost his wallet containing all his ID and credit cards, so he lies and books in under someone else’s name. At first, the fraud goes like a dream — he even gets along with the staff and guests! — but gradually, dissonant notes start up: he feels apprehensive when he is attracted to another guest (not his wife), and after tripping in a stairwell, doctors inform him that he likely has Alzheimer’s Disease. Finally, some Buddhist monks arrive with a lawsuit for the guy he’s pretending to be. Tony tries to explain that they have the wrong man, that the man they want is a mark, but they don’t accept that argument. The lawsuit will go ahead anyway because, as the monk says, “At some point, someone needs to take responsibility.”

Tony comes out of the coma with a change of heart. He makes up with his family, and though his solutions are largely materialist and superficial, his wife and kids are happier. His ethical crisis leads to compromises in business, which he makes even though it costs him. Peace begins to return, but it’s too late. The Soprano family are drawn — sucked, really, by their own bad karma — into a New York dynastic war, and arch-asshole Phil Leotardo has most of them killed over a grudge. The infamous “black out” ending is most likely a first-person account of Tony’s own violent death in a diner.

What Tony never grasped — what the Buddhist monks could’ve told him, but the therapists never did — is that you can lift yourself out of suffering, but that doesn’t mean you can escape responsibility. Somehow, whatever you did is going to find you, and then you’re going to get it, even if you “get it.”

The New Puritans

“These kids aren’t like the last bunch” is a standard news story, the kind that gets opinion columnists through writer’s block. Laurie Penny at The Guardian writes a typical story about the Millennial generation:

My generation’s ambitions, like our pop stars, are ambitious, bland and bourgeois. But with the world falling down around our ears, can anyone blame us?

Of course, we hear plenty of this in the United States, where the Millennials are — to suit every agenda from liberal progressivism to the Christian right — portrayed as some kind of domestic counterpart to the generation that fought in the Second World War. So goes the story, Michael Cera’s acting career proves that today’s twentysomethings are the Propriety Avengers, born to repair the damage supposedly caused when their elders relaxed social standards, by flocking back to bankrupt and universally despised institutions like marriage and having a job.

Here’s a Guardian reader called Carnyx with a dose of skepticism:

You mean what pop stars exactly, Amy Winehouse and Pete Docherty?

I’ve heard all this before when I was a teenaged “Gen X’er” back in the 80′s I used to curse my misfortune to have to be teenaged in the 80s, the press was full of articles just like this one talking about the new youth as “new puritans” we were apparently more conservative, responsible, moralistic and bland, wanted careers in the city and were not into sex. Brook Shields was going on about “virginity”, Morrissey and Boy George would just prefer a “cup of tea”, and the rising ideology towards sex was anti-porn feminism (I knew lots of male friends who advanced this cause they thought such earnest moralistic posturing gave them an advantage over other men in bedding women, not that they’d admit that).

The Smiths responded to Thatcherism with self-pity instead of white riots, half my hometown were unemployed, gangs of skinheads roamed the town centre fighting cause there was bugger all else to do, conservative Christianity was rising in the States, and worst of all most of my school classmates where Tories and the music lovers whom I was learning guitar alongside liked Eric Clapton and Chris Rea and Jesus even Chris De Burgh (although that was mainly because, despite my lower social status, I went to a private school due to a combination of high IQ and severe dyslexia, the school specialised in helping dyslexics … but to this day Alan Partridge still reminds me of school).

A little later me and my mates (as in not from school) used to spend the weekend sneaking underaged into the local uni union cause it was the only place in town that didn’t play bloody Stock Atken and Waterman and demand you dressed in shirt and tie. The union also sometimes had decent bands playing, but tension grew between us townies and the students, sometimes resulting in violence and the students started protesting in the uni newspaper that “real students” didn’t like bands like The Cult, The Damned, The Cramps, Motorhead, “real students” liked “Runrig and Queen”, and those other bands just drew in local ruffians who caused trouble (the local uni wasn’t big on arts and was full of rugger bugger engineers and medics instead).

Back in the 80′s I thought I hated my generation, but that was mostly because of articles like this attempting to define ourselves for us, by the 90′s with Madchester and Grunge these articles and our generation’s former self-appointed spokespersons in the media began to look so very wrong and out of step with what was actually happening. These 80′s articles about the “new puritans” were written by the minority of public school types I was unfortunate enough to have to attend school with (or actually a scowling humourless earnest subsection of them whom had access to the media) and all they announced was their own determination to be the bland conservative Morningside bourgeois types they already were, despite their youthful arrogance in seeking to speak for their generation they simply spoke about their own narrow social circles.

If youth support for the Tories is growing I’d expect it nothing of more generational significance than the southeast of England reverting to type after an extended Labour govt, oh and maybe Laurie ought to come over to Greece, dodge the molotovs and tell the latest generation of Greek youths how restrained they are.

Is Tony Soprano A Sociopath?

From Jonathan Wilde at The Distributed Republic:

Is Tony Soprano a sociopath? That, I believe, is the over-arching question of the series. Are we to relate to Tony’s suburban struggles with family and friends despite what he does for a living? Or should we recoil in horror at the monstrous acts he periodically performs without a hint of guilt?

Soprano isn’t a sociopath, just a self-justified asshole; a much commoner breed, maybe the commonest. True ASPD is maladaptive and can lead to functional disabilities in life. Tony’s behavior is fully adapted behavior, it’s just adapted to the demands of a culture where mens’ role is to be violent hierarchists (something Tony obviously had problems assimilating early on). Some of the mobsters depicted in the show come across as mildly sociopathic; but most are just soldiers who get by on a tragic worldview and lots of denial.

Marlo Stanfield from The Wire is a sociopath. Like Tony, Marlo kills people often and without hesitation. But he doesn’t appear to take slights or betrayals personally. Indeed, in a show where characters speculate endlessly on one another, Marlo never acknowledges the motives of any other person. His only sensitive spot is his obsession with his reputation, but when he talks about what he wants (“the crown”), his dialogue betrays shallow and unreflective thought processes.

Tony is full of qualms, full of subconscious self-betrayal and psychological complexities. He just represses them to fit the role he’s been groomed for.

Compassion

New York Times writer Tara Parker-Pope on self-compassion:

The research suggests that giving ourselves a break and accepting our imperfections may be the first step toward better health. People who score high on tests of self-compassion have less depression and anxiety, and tend to be happier and more optimistic. Preliminary data suggest that self-compassion can even influence how much we eat and may help some people lose weight.

This idea does seem at odds with the advice dispensed by many doctors and self-help books, which suggest that willpower and self-discipline are the keys to better health. But Kristin Neff, a pioneer in the field, says self-compassion is not to be confused with self-indulgence or lower standards.

This being the Times, this thoroughly caveated claim nevertheless returned suspicion and denial in the comments:

This sounds like it could quickly morph into another version of the everybody’s a winner self-esteem movement.

NO ONE in the world hates me more than I hate myself.

That said, a serious question: if we don’t hold ourselves to high performance standards, how can we, ethically and morally, expect others to meet those standards?

Oh good grief! Americans think so highly of themselves as it is.

and perhaps most eloquently,

I understand her point though don’t agree with it. I may be quite logical at a cognitive level if I self-loath, and quite logical at a reptilian-brain level if I still engage in survival rather than suicidal behaviours. It’s an unhappy tension at times, but at least it’s a familiar neighbourhood.

But these complaints are all either irrelevant or address themselves to questions the piece already answered. I suspect that they are what R. A. Wilson would call “robot responses”: post hoc rationalizations for reactive emotions. There are a lot of reasons why one wouldn’t agree with the philosophy espoused in the piece, but after reading The National Review for many years, one particular reason springs immediately to mind.

To a psyche fixed in the psychodynamics of childhood, the admonition to practice “self-compassion” will be misinterpreted one way and then the other, because its meaning is outside the range of possible ideas; indeed, it’s not possible to phrase the suggestion in a syntax that parses for such a person.

“How can I be fair with myself? I’m not the one responsible for the judgment!”

If one’s raison d’etre is to preserve for oneself, by any means necessary, the role of the metaphysically-secure dependent, then one will accept the judgments and imprecations that came with that role, and imagine that an honest evaluation of the self can come from nowhere else.

The foundation of self-compassion is knowing what can reasonably be expected of a person. If you find this idea challenging, start by asking yourself — with fearless honesty — what you can reasonably expect of others. This is a rewarding pastime in itself, because it leads to stressing out less over how others act. But if you have a sense of fairness, you will also eventually find it hard not to apply the same standard to yourself, and that’s where the real dividend is: shrugging off the part of our pain and shame that isn’t just useless and unproductive, but based in non-reality.

This isn’t a trivial exercise in navel gazing. Only after we are fair to ourselves can we confront the social forces that profit from our primitive imprinting.

Gender and Society as Zero-Sum

I was reading an argument on some masculist forums, trying to figure out what my problem is with the latest spate of “progressive” portrayals of male friendship. Some feminists are frankly hostile on the topic of homosociality; others are anxious about its exclusionary implications. For my part, I have long detected what seemed like a reactionary note in portrayals on TV.

Scrubs, for example, is a sympathetic look at an earnest, sensitive guy doing sensitive, human stuff: maintaining male friendships, cultivating sexual relationships, pining for the approval of a distant father figure. But Scrubs’ satire is nonetheless heavily derivative of “hegemonic masculinity.” We’re supposed to identify with Braff’s character for his “good heart,” but the show simultaneously solicits our agreement with Dr. Cox that he’s an obnoxious wuss. The female characters, in whom Scrubs’ authors invest so much humanizing care, nonetheless come across as pedestalized morality pets – the better to teach our hero a valuable lesson, perhaps.

What idea of masculinity resolves from this tension? Why, that liberal morality (for which the Braff’s character implicitly stands) and mature masculinity are irreconcilably opposed.

When the two are posed as innate enemies, the viewer can be expected to prefer the latter, which is why the trope is so codified. Nietzsche’s herrenmoral and sklavmoral – hero-worship of the winners posed against a loser suffering beautifully — are tempting because they’re so close to a truth about the morality of aristocracy, but they’re fundamentally encoded in the same morality, spun from the “tragic” cloth of nihilistic hierarchism. Where such “stoicism” leads is to the idealization of man as a shark.

This is a profitable ideal for some societies as a whole, but it’s a mischaracterization of human nature. For average men, chasing success in a stoical and unreflective way is a long-term psychic hazard. Those who try will inevitably make mistakes that must be justified, and end their lives as parodies of those justifications. This is a path fraught with suffering and indeed, for most men, the very homosocial relationships that Dworkin castigates are the bulwark against this outcome. People like Samantha Bee, who speak in terms of “sacking up” and beam contempt at innocuous instances of homosociality, are asking for the Spartan whether they know it or not.

But can Dworkin’s critique be right too? Does “patriarchal tolerance” come at an inherent cost to women? Athens, after all, relied on denying women the fruits of their economic participation. Is it conceivable that gender and society are a zero-sum game in which the power dynamics of sex forbid equal dignity to both?

Inequity

Usually, reading the comments at The New York Times or any other newspaper makes me wish for a nuclear war, but Doug Terry made a post that is so good, I’m going to quote it in entirety.

One of the basic problems with job creation in America is that employers have discovered they can treat employees as the enemy, on several different levels. First, pay them as little as possible, save for the “stars” who get almost whatever they want. Second, and more importantly, never hire anyone or put anyone on the payroll as an actual employee unless you have no other choice. Almost anyone can be listed these days as part time, temporary or an outside contractor.

Managers are under relentless pressure to keep the numbers up, to hit higher and higher targets for earnings. Wall Street only likes growth companies in growth industries and, conversely, punishes any company that appears to be slow growth. Top managers put pressure on those below and line managers who oversee the work of employees double up the pressure on the workers. In many cases, it doesn’t matter if the product is inferior or shoddy, just keep it moving. The only way to get promoted is to make your numbers and that means forcing the employees to do more work in less time and capital invested.

One evening in a grocery store near where I live I overheard the night manager talking to a new employee. He told what she needed to do and then said, “Or I will make your life miserable if you don’t”. This is but one example of what the American work environment has become like: threats and potential layoffs at every turn.

There are still far too many middle managers in American corporations. The general assumption is that no employee can do anything without constant supervision and/or harassment. Last summer, I saw two workers installing a wall near a street under a government contract. They had a full time person watching, just watching, them work, as if they could do nothing on their own. What a waste. The manager watching was probably making more per hour than both of the workers. We have created a system in many corporations where one group of people is presumed to have brains and their job is to harass those who don’t have brains, full time. We over value degrees and under value those who do the actual work. Next time you fly on a commercial airliner and you wonder why the flight attendants are so unfriendly, remember like most workers in America they are way over managed and under paid. You’d be unhappy, too.

Wall Street has sold out America and upper level management has sold out to Wall Street for the prospect of making millions of dollars per year in pay and stock options. American businesses, like banks and credit card companies, are oh so eager to clamp down on and kick out those who can’t keep up paying their high fees that they give no consideration to whether they might one day ruin out of suckers. The standard method of operation at banks, like Bank of America, is to milk a customer for every conceivable fee and dump them out of the bank as they sink into financial difficulty, problems that are often brought on in part by the bank itself. I once saw a video of a bank manager saying his bank would no longer accept customers who don’t already have a credit card. Was he unaware that one way people get credit cards is by having bank accounts?

The housing credit collapse of 2008 should have been no great surprise: it followed the standard “pump and dump” practices, with some added touches, of American business today. Borderline fraud has become a regular part of many business. Consumer product companies, indeed any company that deals with a large number of customers, have hidden themselves behind phone banks and voice mail so that only a few angry, frustrated customers can get through. Another example: I once went to return a faulty digital camera and went all the way through the process on the web, page by page, only to have to final page appear and disappear in one second before I could fill out the form. That page would have told me where to send the camera. I tried it again and the same thing happen. So, this was just a mistake? I doubt it. If you don’t have to talk or provide information, the company gets fewer returns.

Don’t look to major corporations to pull us out of recession. The whole concept of a virtuous cycle where employees are paid decent wages so they can afford the products of our society has been shattered. In part, this is because the market is now so large, here and abroad, that corporations can get away with fraud and near fraud for a very long time without being harmed.

We had a false prosperity from 2000 through 2008 based on easy credit and the grossly fraudulent actions of lending companies, investment banks, derivatives sellers and packaged mortgage insurers. It’s over and it is not coming back. Problem is, the bad to worse practices of American business were not shaken out of the system. Recovery depends on smaller companies, entrepreneurs and the determination of the American worker. A jobless recovery is just fine for a large portion of American business.

Humans will accept any level of inequality if it’s beautiful, if they identify with the chiefs or are strongly convinced that the gods desire it.

Mens’ Issues, II

I’ve written before about gender from the male perspective. In general, I am cynical of the view of gender relations promoted in the media, and of left-academia’s pro forma analyses. As a boy growing up in the 80′s and 90′s, I saw and dealt with a lot of anti-male role profiling, not just from TV ads but from teachers and school functionaries, even members of my family. How kids treat each other in co-ed schools owes a lot to the current state of gender norms, and I’m here to tell ya, shit’s fucked up.

That said, this guy is full of dogshit — and he’s an excellent example of the ways contemporary “Mens’ Rights Assholes” fuck up what ought to be a simple idea.

If you’ve been googling “misandry,” chances are you know this patter already: Feminists have captured the liberal state, bent it to their will and forced it to incentivize divorce, single parenthood, and infertility. On the other end, these snakes have hoodwinked the culture, especially “beta men” who are incapable of thinking for themselves, from the new realities of marriage in which traditional sexual politics are a game rigged against men. Because fecundity, not productivity, is the voodoo engine of this economic hypothesis, it follows that feminism single-handedly destroyed the West.

You might be feeling a deep inner emptiness lamenting a bygone age, as the paucity of proudly, inspiringly masculine characters in modern entertainment becomes clear.  Before the 1980s, there were different masculine characters, but today, they are conspicuously absent.  Men are shown either as thuggish degenerates, or as effete androgynes.  Sure, there were remakes of Star Trek and The A-Team, and series finales of Rocky and Indiana Jones.  But where are the new characters?  Why is the vacuum being filled solely with nostalgia?  A single example like Jack Bauer is not sufficient to dispute the much larger trend of masculinity purging.

OK, here are some more: James “Sawyer” Ford and Sayid Jarrah (Lost), Malcolm Reynolds (Firefly), Cedric Daniels (The Wire), Michael Bluth (Arrested Development), Dan Draper (Mad Men), Malcolm Tucker (The Thick of It), Seth Bullock and Al Swearengen (Deadwood), Bernie (Bernie Mac), Greg House (House, M.D.), Henry VIII (The Tudors), Dr. Goodson ($#*! My Dad Says), Gordon Ramsay (Hell’s Kitchen), Boomhauer (King of the Hill), Michael Weston (Burn Notice). If you want to look longer, you can find more. The reality is that despite the number of coiffured prettyboys playing strawmen in shows like Sex and the City, manly-men are drawn to shows about manly-men, and TV isn’t about to pass on those eyeballs.

He argues that the “contract between the sexes” is out of whack; with men discouraged from marrying by the double whammy of no fault divorce and alimony/assets division, they are less likely to agree to lives of quiet conformity at middle-class jobs whose only spiritual benefits were fatherhood and social status. Never mind that social status is still tied to income and employment; never mind that men have as much desire to be fathers as women do to be mothers, regardless of marriage status. He writes,

To see what happens when the role of the husband and father is devalued, and the state steps in as a replacement, look no further than the African American community.  In Detroit, the average home price has fallen from $98,000 as recently as 2003 to just $14,000 today.  The auto industry moved jobs out of Detroit long before 2003, so the decline cannot be attributed to just industrial migration, and cities like Baltimore, Oakland, Cleveland, and Philadelphia are in scarcely better shape.

All the cities listed were affected by industrial migration long before 2003, some nearly as profoundly as Detroit. Black people didn’t cause that. Neither did feminists. If you wanted, you could blame unions or investors or globalization or public education or corporate culture or politicians; like all economic phenomena, the decisions of many people produced this outcome.

He goes on to suggest that paying state workers amounts to a systematic wealth transfer from men to women. To support this claim, he cites an irrelevant point about the rising wages of highly-paid state bureaucrats (which, if anything, is moving in tandem with the growing disparity between high-paying and low-paying work), even though he acknowledges that sex doesn’t correlate strongly with employment by the state (due to hiring quotas?). He also cites womens’ outsized health care costs, though a quick perusal of the Medicaid patients admitted to a city hospital on a given night is likely to turn up three times as many psychotics (and drug addicts) of both sexes as anybody in need of womens’ health services. He also cites increases in nondefense spending overall, but to no particular end. His explanation is a blanket psychologism that feminists are making the state into a “husband substitute,” which isn’t just ad hominem, it’s also non-falsifiable and factually worthless.

He predicts that between Muslim fecundity, the exodus of alpha males and the proliferation of the “pick-up arts” and of a certain male cynicism that dispenses with monogamy, the breakdown of this order is inevitable. We’ll either be replaced by the brown races, or our men of character will start new families with right-thinking women and breed out the feminists and their socialist master-manipulators.  In other words, its yet another conservative Apocalypse fantasy, in which their most primal fear-fetishes (race war) and most unrealistic hopes (masculism slaying the left at a stroke) alternate freely and no other possibility exists.

In the author’s account, the plight of Western man is exemplified in George Sondini, the guy who made this video before murdering a bunch of middle-aged women in a yoga class. Now, watch the video. Listen to his flat, affectless voice, take note of his shallow interests and preoccupations, his interpersonal ineptitude; the man’s a sociopath, and the only takeaway here is that sociopaths can be unhappy too. The only people for whom Sondini should exemplify anything are activists for Antisocial Personality Disorder. Everybody else who relates to this man is playing themselves, projecting their mundane problems onto a guy whose serious problems aren’t comparable.

So there, in a nutshell, is why the mens’ movement can’t get its shit together: rage doesn’t lead automatically to insight, victimhood doesn’t lead automatically to legitimacy, and conservative paranoia apparently always leads to the same places regardless of the pretext. It would seem that the men who are the most likely to discern “white knighting” for what it is are also the most likely to spin a simple fucking problem with banal, proximate causes into some elaborate dumb shit explaining the entire world.