By David Futrelle
Priorities, we’ve all got them. For example, my top priorities for the next year and a half are to 1) not die and/or 2) go completely broke. By contrast, the top priority of a Reddit “pickup artist” known as RedPill_Swinger is to procure himself as many potential future “lays” as possible, worldwide pandemic or no.
But alas, he’s not doing so well, and so he has turned to the Ask The Red Pill subreddit for advice on how to handle the “huge drop in the ROI of online dating apps.”
“I used to average one new girl/week before the outbreak of coronavirus and had (maybe have?) 6 plates,” he writes. “Plates,” for the uninitiated, is the oh-so-respectful Red Piller way of referring to women they date casually (“spinning plates”).
I told the plates I’m not gonna meet them until the quarantine is over cause I don’t wanna risk but I don’t mind fishing for new ones. So since the outbreak of coronavirus I only had a new entry who came over and we had sex. I was an idiot, I shouldn’t have risked.
Mr. Swinger, who says he’s an Italian living in Eastern Europe, puts part of the blame on “racism,” by which he seems to mean that women in his area are wary of people connected to one of the countries hardest hit by the virus.
This being said I’m not trying to shift the blame outside of me but I notice a huge change in the ROI. When they ask I don’t DEER [NOTE: Deny Everything? Even I don’t know what this acronym means –DF] but know that the “where are you from shit test” is hard to pass because my name is easy to link to Italy.m, and I also know that coming out is a deal breaker even though I have the same odds of being infected as them and I’ve got a OCD about following the quarantine rules (the new entry came over before the “curfew”), washing everything, sterilising and all.
He wonders if he should just lie and say he’s from Colchester instead.
Should I change my name and let them assume otherwise? I’ve got the plausible deniability that I’ve lived in Colchester and, no, people can’t tell the difference when I speak.
Yeah, I’m sure no one can tell the difference between an Italian and a British accent.
Even the Red Pillers think Mr Swinger’s post is a bit much.
“Jesus Christ, get over yourself,” writes one. “There is a pandemic going on.”
“You can’t possibly be that dense,” adds another.
And then there’s this fellow, who ignores the OP and offers his risk-reward assessment of casual sex in the age of coronavirus. In his mind, the virus
Doesn’t mean you can’t have sex. Let’s look at it this way:
Door #1: You have sex with a girl, get COVID and die. No big deal.
Door #2: You go around like a fucking sperg with a face mask and try to stay isolated, then die because a random guy sneezed in your face. Congrats.
I would rather take door #1.
I would suggest that he indeed take door #1 if doing so wouldn’t put others at risk.
Math is hard.
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@Alan Robertshaw
Right now she seems too preoccupied complaining about how awful the descriptor “Karen” is. All the TERFs are getting very upset about it, probably because they realize that they fit very squarely into its definition.
@Kat:
Beta … that’s that spell that you want the Midgar Zolom to teach your Enemy Skill materia so you can then nuke everything in sight with it, right?
@Naglfar:
They’re like the grasshopper, except that then they lecture you as if they are the ant and you are the grasshopper. Grasshopper DARVO, I guess.
#AndThenKarenSnapped has gone meta.
@Viscaria
Yes! I felt that way too, but didn’t want to say anything in case no one agreed with me. But the more I think about it, the more I think, Yeah, it’s a big deal. For one thing, death is super final. So I think that maybe this PUA ought to put a little more thought into what he says.
I took this to mean that sex with a woman you’ve already “had” isn’t worth the risk, but sex with someone new is extra sexy and therefore worth more risk.
Of course this implies seeing sex as trophies, new ones being shinier. Nothing to do with intimacy, no siree.
@Sheila Crosby
This particular attitude, far from exclusive to the manosphere, really says a lot about how our society views sex.
Logically, the most pleasurable sex is with a repeat partner because the two of you have the experience to know what the other really does and does not like. Sex with a new partner, who doesn’t even know what your buttons are, much less how to push them, should be LESS desirable.
But it is not about pleasure. We’ve certainly seen that with how PUAs seem to take no joy in the act itself. It’s about domination.
@Allandrel
Definitely. They want to assert dominance over women, mostly to feed their own egos. But I think they also want to assert dominance over other men, and that’s another part of why they do this: to try to prove themselves to be “more manly” than other men. It’s another case of toxic masculinity driving people to do pleasureless actions to ensure their place in a nebulous social order.
Darwin will sort it out.
I don’t know of this is of interest to anyone, but the Hobby Lobby owners have been caught out buying looted artefacts and forgeries for their Museum of the Bible. There’s been some interesting legal proceedings. But here’s a bit of an overview.
https://ial.uk.com/museum-of-the-bible-collecting-lessons/
@Anna,
That video is great. I’ve subscribed, just because he’s hilarious. Knowing my luck, he’ll turn out to be problematic.
@Naglfar, Dalillama:
One of my takes is that it fell just because it got too big to manage. (Which is mostly a specific part of the more general statement from Dalillama.) Really, that was part of what triggered the change from Republic to Empire in the first place. Roman armies were basically hired on the spot by nobles with writs going out and picking up farm boys after the spring planting… when the borders where the battle were being fought got so far away that the army couldn’t get to the battle and back before the fall harvest, suddenly going off to fight for Rome because a lot less appealing, no matter how much money was involved.
Then, of course, for popular nobles like that fellow Gaius Julius Caesar, long trips spent chatting with the somewhat disaffected soldiers meant having troops that were more loyal to him than they were to Rome, which had been the whole reason Rome didn’t have a standing army originally…
@Alan:
Hobby Lobby was in the news for that a while back… it didn’t help that some of the antiquities they picked up have since been shown to have been fakes as well. There appears to be quite an underground market in questionable biblical relics for those who like to insist on how pious they are.
(And, of course, the people who use money to make themselves look more pious was the whole reason for the moneychangers being thrown out of the Temple in the first place.)
Apropos of nothing, am I the only one who sees ‘Colchester’ and starts thinking ‘I am the duke of Chichester’ instead? (Groo the Wanderer ref for those confused…)
This sounds like a variant of Tainter’s “excessive complexity begets collapse” thesis.
I think there might be some truth to that. Over time any long-running system accumulates technical debt, and a nation-state is no exception. One way this shows up is in complex physical infrastructure that develops awkward problems that are hard to diagnose. For instance, something in New York springs a leak and is flooding a road and disrupting traffic, but trying to find the source of the leak reveals layer upon layer of pipes, wires, tunnels, and so forth under the street corner, all tangled with each other, half of them not on the official maps, and God knows which pipes and wires are still in use and pressurized/energized …
It also turns up in the social infrastructure. Baroque customs and ceremonial events that get layered onto until they become very expensive to hold and strain state coffers. A bloated legal profession that requires whole law libraries and not just a law book. Things like that are evidence of social-infrastructure technical debt. And sooner or later it all clogs up the works so much that, combined with some serious enough emergency, it becomes very attractive to just circumvent all of that cruft and rule by decree. And eventually that becomes the norm and not just a for-emergencies thing. This may be happening to the United States right now, with COVID-19 furnishing the emergency (or expedient excuse) and circumvention of red tape prompting power grabs by both state governors and the White House — who will inevitably come into increasing conflict as a consequence.
The oft-noted progression republic -> oligarchy -> dictatorship -> collapse -> republic may be a form of “second system effect”: technical debt builds up until a cabal of expert technocrats are a defacto ruling class because no common citizen can parse out how the system works anymore, so you get oligarchy; eventually it’s unmanageable even by them and some authoritarian figure, often using an emergency as pretext, cuts the Gordian knot via rule by decree; and then of course the inevitable result of cutting out the experts and all mechanisms of accountability occurs: a combination of incompetence and kleptocratic corruption that impoverishes the masses and destroys faith in the governing institutions, promoting civil unrest, at the same time it drains the state treasury and eventually cripples its capacity to pay the soldiers and the cops (and thus its capacity to keep the people with the guns and combat training loyal). Once that point is reached, state collapse is inevitable. But of course the people need some kind of organization to provide for public goods that the market would undersupply and to establish and maintain a basic set of conduct rules, so they assemble some kind of new government, often a republic, out of the rubble. And then it begins to slowly accrue technical debt …
Peter Turchin, on the other hand, thinks the main driver is simply population growth. I myself wouldn’t be surprised if population growth, technical debt, and other factors all contributed to the progression noted above.