Jacki : Truly, we’d have been better-off as a society had it happened that way. The arrival of spaceflight would have heralded a new pioneer era and brought out the best in humanity; the arrival of “constant connection” has turned us into seven billion navel-gazers continually searching for new and better ways to share photos and videos with our friends real and/or imagined. Let’s phrase it in the most heretical way possible:
Spaceflight would have returned humanity to the masculine state: exploring, driving, penetrating, discovering. Smartphones make us feminine: collaborating, communicating, building consensus, being receptive to what others put on our screens and in our minds. […]
At the risk of being indelicate, what you see there [picture above right] is nothing more or less than what happens when women become tired of feminized men. West German society spent seventy years trying to kill its vicious, nationalist inner demons and this is the result: nice young men who would never think about invading Belgium but who also can’t quite keep their women interested. Look in the eyes of that crazy broadii and tell me you think that my homebody with the beard there is sleeping alone. Just the body language of the two men indicates who’s going to wind up tapping that ass in the long run.iii
- This conversation happened on Jack Baruth’s blog recently (archived), starting with his post and continuing at length in the comments section, but I thought it’d also be of interest to the broader audience here, and with a few extra adnotations and links thrown in for greater context. In any event, Jack’s not even married anymore so I’m really more at risk of being ironic here than he is, but either way, neither of us serves as much proof for the theory that all married men/fathers are cuckolds. (I sincerely hope.)
So, enjoy!↩
- There’s no doubt about it, the girl’s dtf.↩
- And in the short-run, and the medium-run, and in all the other conceivable runs in all the other conceivable ways. So it goes that beta bois are fine and dandy until they’re in the same room as men who care not for your puritanical monogamist mores. Then all bets are off.↩
- Jack, you may recall, was also one of my heroes in my car blogging days. Though that was the better part of a decade ago.↩
- And affirmative!!↩
- This “jaguar kid” is the unfortunate son of one VoladoBraindead. But hey, a little adversity goes a long ways, especially in bubblewraplandia.↩
- Waitwut ? WTF do Africans have to do with anything ? Being “African” is the no more than the definition of being unproductive, unimaginative, and behind the curve. It’s a pretext for a scam, at best.↩
- What “we” ?!↩
- We all know what happens when idiots make predictions : people get hurt. And not even in an educative way.↩
- This is supposed to be an unironic discussion goddamit !!!1 ↩
- FTR, so was I. What of it ? ↩
- See I’m never clear on whether “Aspie” is used to mean i) “aspie [ short for aspirational ] would roughly be what they called “bourgeois intellectuals” a century ago” and as described by TLP, or ii) someone with Asperger’s Syndrome (the autism “spectrum” thing, namely the catch-all for highly-focused kids who don’t suffer fools (ie. others) gladly. They seem like a discerning bunch and it’s a honest shame they have such a bad rap.) I really never know. ↩
- Who can argue about my willfulness ? But my obtusity ? Pah ! Keep up, son ! ↩
- Remind me again, which part of the Internet is “mostly anonymous” ? Would that be the one that’s not for the poor ? No wait, that was the completely anonymous one. The “mostly” anonymous internet is just dry water repackaged.↩
- Indeed, the paper price of gold has precisely zero relevance on the cost of delivered goods, not least of all because of the yellow metal unfortunate physicality, the process of ascertaining purity, storage, security costs, etcetera. If only there were a cure…↩
- Not to mention heartrate monitors, motion sensors, and even breathing rate sensors, which, believe it or not, are now showing up in “luxury” cars. Seriously, I need my car to make an emergency manoeuver and call an ambulance because it thinks I’m “dangerously fatigued” (an actual “feature” set for market) like I need my barista to give me stock advice. What the fuck is the matter with you people ! ↩
- Jack is a shoe, well, “buff,” for lack of a better term. He owns like 1`000 pairs of AEs or something.↩
- If it isn’t on Qntra, it doesn’t exist.↩
- Just like apples are apples. And who doesn’t love apples ! You just don’t marry apples, is all.↩
Pete : Jack, as a reasonably astute armchair anthropologist,iv you’re all too right in observing that exploring and inventing – as is not presently the fashion – are rather masculine endeavours and that inane blathering – as is presently the fashion – is a far more feminine pursuit, but I’m afraid that you conflate cause and effect in your conclusion.
It’s not the smartphone’s fault that navel-gazing is du jour anymore than it’s the leopard’s fur spots that make him such a competent carnivore. The leopard would still be a fearless man-eating bio-machine even if you shaved him bald in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that the limp-dicks of the so-called “Civilised World” (ie. the “Democratic” West) were born to be the cuckolds of the Mussulmen hordes from the East. If it wasn’t phablets, it’d be something else. Since the baby boomers, North Americans have “just wanted nice things,” and so here we are : lying in the bed we’ve made.
The only thing protecting the castratedv United States from the same fate as Europe – now and for the foreseeable future – is the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean and the somewhat limited carrying capacity of airplanes relative to sea-faring boats and roads paved with IMF funds. That the Pacific Ocean is similarly enormous – and that the Chinese simply can’t be bothered to invade the Americas en masse, just as they could’ve but didn’t back when Zheng He was the man to beat on the high seas – means only that the US finds itself carrying the torch of Byzantium, aka the decrepit refuse of the Roman Empire : increasingly isolated, culturally bizarre, and of interest only to itself.
This is really the only explanation required to rationalise the diseased behaviour of status updates that include a picture of a KFC Double Down Dog with the comment “lolz ima get me a hard attack eatin this. yolo.” Not that every “dude” does this (really, what “seven billion” ? ISIS on the one hand and Chinese electronics assembly workers earning $0.35/hr on the other hand would like to know), but the petabytes of USG/AWS hard drives dedicated to nothing more important than precisely this is all that’s needed to allow this claim to stand in its broadest sense.
In any event, your kid seems to have a well-above-average shot at beating the odds ; even if the odds today seem long, they’re never zero. As for the jaguar kid,vi he’ll learn a lot more from poker than from his old man, even if the same would probably be true regardless of his parentage.
Jack : Africansvii and ISIS members and Chinese assembly workers have smartphones — they just don’t have iPhones. Every four years or so, the industry builds enough smartphones for the entire population of Earth: http:// www.statista.com / statistics / 263441/ global-smartphone-shipments-forecast/
I’ll argue that humans are fundamentally tool users and our behavior is, in a large way, shaped by our tools. I’m the same person I was when I was twenty-two years old but I interact with people very differently because of the available tools. Just look at something minor like Tinder — it’s changed millions of lives, often for the worse.
I will also point out that the vast majority of British conscripts in WWI arrived at the railroad stations without shoes and without the knowledge necessary to tie them. Our ancestors were often just as moronic and useless as we were,viii but they were processed by systems that were designed to support and defend the Western way of life.
Pete :
Industry predictionsix and Africans aside, as neither is particularly germane nor useful, this is precisely my point. ISIS and the Chinese also have smartphones, but they’re still increasing their market share of the world – if by different means – whereas Americans can’t even deploy a few thousand combat-ready soldiers, and so employ mercs (not benzes) and gameboy-drones in lieu. That only “The West” seems to have this problem with smartphones would indicate that the problem is indeed inside of them, not the fault of “the industry,” just like it’s Jennifer Lawrence’s fault that she’s paid less than her male co-stars.
Yes, we are tool users and yes, again, this is exactly backwards in terms of cause and effect. While it’s true that we’re shaped by our environments, the very definition of progress (despite the sullying of the word by liberalists) is that we increase control over our environments. If it wasn’t Tinder, it’d be those evil cafes where kids would get into no end of trouble, just as was the concern in 17th century England. Plus ca change.
As to our forefathers, the only system that allowed them to defend the Western way of life was the system that sent worthless young boys to die in war that men may return, just as ISIS is doing today. The feminine estimation of all life as being worth infinity billion dollars, despite the obvious economic and practical impossibilities as well as the corrosive social implications thereof, is the only thing standing in our way today. Not that it’s a small thing to overcome.
Jack : Peter, ironically,x I’m busy tonight parentingxi but I wanted to let my inner Aspiexii out for a moment.
Industry predictions for smartphone production are relevant because by and large production meets the target. As I know you are aware, with virtually any mass-produced good of nontrivial cost nowadays, from automobiles to smartphones, the factories produce what they plan to build and the pricing is adjusted until everything is sold… or perhaps you’re aware of some unsold full-sized-in-the-gas-crisis-era ’73 Chevrolets out there?
Secondly, to equate Tinder with 17th-century cafes is willfully obtuse.xiii With Tinder and the consequent social-attitude adjustments, it’s possible to have sex with a new partner every night of the week if you work hard enough. We now regularly read about educated, middle-class women who Tinder their way to fifty or more partners in the course of a year or two. Prior to the arrival of the mostly anonymous Internet,xiv that kind of behavior was limited to prostitutes and borderline personalities.
You might as well say that eBay has had no affect on the transaction prices of vintage books, which is demonstrably untrue, or that… I think you’ll like this one… “paper gold” had no effect on the gold price.xv
Pete :
This is partially true but not quite all the way there. While it’s certainly the case that (Tier-X) component suppliers (ie. of microphones, speakers, LED screens, gyroscopes, CPUs, etc.)xvi make such production targets and are largely bound to them by the simple size of the capital investment, what comes out the other side and into the consumer’s home is rarely confined to the initially intended market segment simply on account of fundamentally unpredictable market demand. Do you know which pair of Allen Edmondsxvii you’ll wear the last Friday of next February ? It’s for the same reason that economic predictions are so fragile and so painful when they go wrong, as the Ukrainians under Stalin found out only too well.
So whereas the aforementioned components might have originally been intended for smartphones, as demand for such devices peaks and then ultimately wanes, those component supplies, with the help of the front-line companies we know and love, will simply invent themselves whole “new” classes of products that are really product lines that previously existed (ie. cars, watches, TVs, etc.) but are now sold as “feature-enhanced”, “connected”, and “smart” devices, when in fact they’re little more than dumping grounds for (mostly) Chinese component manufacturers who’ve achieved such economies of scale and have so much skin in the game that they must offer their widgets to vendors for “almost free.” The net result is that the product market of almost every consumer category is flooded with so much pointlessly “improved” crud that it’s damn near impossible (and if not yet, it will be before long) to buy a basic dishwasher with a manually rotating settings dials that will last for 30 years, for example.
Lol this shit’s news to me.xviii I must need to expand my horizons. In any event, that you’re reading about this more only means that you’re reading about this more ; it doesn’t provide any information as to the relative frequency of such behaviour either past or present. The unbearable triviality of the ever-present “news” cycle has no bearing on reality. Sluts are just sluts.xix Period. You don’t get to pretend like modernity invented Tinder which in turn invented sluts. If modernity invented anything, it’s the “, middle-class woman,” which is obviously a label being thrown around a bit too liberally to be descriptive.
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