Merry Christmas

Had a post about Atheism i was going to punch out, but since it’s Christmas, i thought i’d leave it for another day.

Today it was snowing this morning. Just as Christmas should. Although each year without my brother at the table gets a little more sombre and the joy of the holiday grows lesser still, i still reflect and appreciate the family i still have and try to enjoy the time i still have with them before life starts taking more away from me.

So with the spirit of the season in mind..

1. Stay safe all who are/were affected by the ice storm. I’m lucky i got to weather it at my parents place who only lost power for a few hours. There are many still out there who are still without power.

2a. With the exception of one woman, all the workers I have seen from the city of Toronto, Toronto hydro, Hydro 1 and clean up crews have been men. It is not me out there, but it is MEN out there, restoring power and civilization. The end of men? I think not you capricious cow Hanah Rosin. Every woman in this city should bear witness to who suffers the elements to keep all our collective ass’s comfortable. I never take the work of my fellow man for granted every time i flick a light switch.

2b. A group of 42 hydro workers from Manitoba gave up their Christmas with their families to come help restore power in Ontario. Respect. It’s earned, not given. My respect, they have it.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-hydro-workers-head-to-ice-ravaged-toronto-1.2475491

3. I want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. No seasons greetings bullshit. This season belongs to Christians and their belief in Christ’s birth. I would not wish seasons greetings to Jews on Hanukkah or seasons greetings to Muslims on Ramadan. I don’t have to believe, but I don’t have to usurp either. Coming from Polish background, Roman Catholicism is ingrained in the culture. I broke bread with my parents. I did not spontaneously combust.

I’m an Atheist, i do not believe in God or Jesus. And like i said, i got a follow up post coming soon to detail much of what i have to deal with, but not today.

Today is your day. Enjoy it. Be safe.

Attaining Respect in a Man’s World

Really quick post.

Today’s Google Doodle is of the esteemed Grace Hopper.

My ego is not so fragile that i cannot point out when a woman does great things in the field of men and outperforms me. She had a gift and utilized it to it’s fullest potential. I cannot take offense at it any more than i could take offense at Mario Lemieux being able to score more goals than me in the NHL if in some alternate reality i could have made the NHL.

She earned the respect and admiration of her peers not by being a loud mouthed pushy bossy bitch, but by actually being adept in her field and performing at the same level or greater than her male colleagues.

I tried computer programming. It bored the be-jesus out of me. By all rights, Grace surpassed me and many other men by leaps and bounds in terms of knowledge and determination to apply it. She earns not only my respect, but admiration for doing things i cannot, and for working as hard as she did to make it into the Navy.

Just because one can do it, does not mean all are capable of the same.

What i take away from this story is that when women come along that truly want to play in a man’s world, and do so because they absolutely want to (not told to), because they have the skill and ability (not the handicap/affirmative action), and because they want to serve their fellow man/humanity (instead of their own short sighted, short term interest of showing up men), then those women will get the respect and accolades deserving of as any man would.

Grace was a rarity. I honor her achievement and females like her because they worked hard and had unique gifts they shared for the betterment of society like most men typically do. Feminists like to pretend that men do not give credit to women, and this is bullshit. We do give credit and praise when a woman competes on a man’s level and achieves based on merit. Work like a man, achieve like a man, earn respect like a man, you will be appreciated like a man.

No favoritism. No exemptions. No lowering of standards. No affirmative action. No quotas. No female privilege.

It’s just that it’s not very common that gifted women like Grace come around, and it’s disingenuous to pretend that every woman wants to/can be like her.

She was an outlier ( are you paying attention Sophia? 😛 ) and harbored a gift in math. Most woman are not/do not. The statistics bear this out time and again. As the lovely Caroline argued in her post and her comment section HERE, women simply do not flock to these fields because more often than not, it simply DOES. NOT. APPEAL. TO. THEM.

Why?

Because they simply aren’t wired that way.

Women pushed into STEM fields abandon them quickly, not because of patriarchy.. but because it simply goes against their evolved nature. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s reality. The delightful oddballs are the ones that thrive within a “man’s world”. We shouldn’t feel compelled to drive all women into these fields to ‘equalize’ the numbers. It would be folly to try. Only those that naturally want to should attempt it.

Grace, I commend you and your accomplishments and i recognize you for the outlier that you were.

++

Related: What happens to companies when you let womyn in based not on ability but on quota. What happens when you give spots to unqualified ‘equality outcome’ whores.

Where Anger Leads

I hear this quite a lot:

“There is so much anger in the sphere. This anger works against you and just makes you look like a bunch of angry bitter misogynists who hate women.”

I won’t deny there are many angry men in the sphere.

As i mentioned to Tarnished Sophia in my previous post here, a majority of the anger in the sphere comes from men who are freshly introduced into the sphere on what could arguably be the worst day of their life. The day their marriage ends, the day they get frivorced, the day they get cheated on by their soul mate, the day their kids are taken from them, the day they end up going to jail for a false rape, or not being able to keep up with outrageous sums of child support.

And they stay angry for a while, as everything they grew up believing about concepts of love, romance, chivalry, men and women comes crashing to the floor like a porcelain plate.  Much of the anger is justifiable, because it’s men who wake up to the fact they’ve been lied to their whole life and are now faced with the difficult task of having to accept a new reality and discard everything they thought they knew in order to digest and accept the new truths of the sphere.

It would be as if you worked hard for 35 years and investing wisely by handing over your money to Uncle Joe who everyone said was good with moeny, only to suddenly be told by Joe that it was all a lie, he wasn’t investing, he gambled it on coin slots.. all the money was gone, and you had to start again from square one learning about the realities of investing from real investors instead of listening to people who don’t know a thing about investing.

In Obsidian’s post about Ratchet women here, Off The Cuff left a very good remark that encapsulates what i have been blabbing about above:

There are two components of the sphere: getting men to first *understand* reality and get over their preconceived notions of how things should work, and then, processing the implications of it through discussion.

The former drives the latter.

I thought i knew how i was supposed to attract women. Be nice. Have a job. Be their friend and get to know everything about them before opening up your romantic intentions. You don’t want to come off as just being after sex now and add to the stereotype that all men are after is only sex. Yadda Yadda.

Once i swallowed the redpill and read every aspect of the sphere, no amount of me crying in my milk was going to change the reality of the game. Either i accepted how things actually work, or i would repeat failure. I wanted sex. I wanted a relationship. I wanted the comfort of a wonderful woman. That drove me to accept the redpill, dump all my blue pill mentality in the trash and get to the hard work of implementing the change required.

It didn’t happen overnight. There was a lot of anger along the way. A lot of anger to get out of my system. But eventually my keystrokes became less about leaving comments about all women being bitches and more about how my changes were netting positive gains in The Real World.

And this my friends, is why i get a little peeved every time i have to justify the latent anger the simmers just beneath the surface of the sphere. It’s because with the exception of a few keyboard warriors who continually enjoy leaving comments of blaming everything on women and living in their misery (because it’s easier to stay there rather than move forward and accept the new reality).. most men reach a point where they accept the new found reality and get to the hard task of slogging through their pain and anger, getting past those preconceived notions of how things should work, and start to internalize how things ACTUALLY work, and process how they themselves will work to take the best advantage possible within that framework.

From working within reality.