Sunday, May 24, 2015

Quelle surprise! PUA marketing assholes complain about holes in their walled garden!

For reasons that fall readily under the headings of "unhealthy interests" and "trying to stay hip," I manage to poke my head into some of the bigger blogs in the right-wing cryosphere manosphere, PUA, men's rights, whatever other flavor of the week / rebaranding bullshit that's going on.

One complaint that I've always had with these fucks is their perverse commitment to monetization. For people involved in a jihad to save humanity from feminists and libruls, they sure do spend a lot of time selling you books and other bullshit. You'd think these sort of ideologues would be funneling that money back into saving civilization, but . . .

Let's just be honest. The whiny manosphere stuff is a sales pitch modeled on the early days of right-wing talk radio. That's why they're complicit in selling self-contradicting bullshit. "Women are sloots!" "Sloots are bad!" "Women only want relationships!" "Men should be plowing sloots!" "The loss of patriarchical households is ruining cibble-luh-say-shun!"

You'll note that consistency of message means nothing to these guys. Thematic and even ideological purity can get tossed right over the side of the HMS Manosphere if it means ginning up the outrage monkeys and getting more people clicking. They are, at the end of the day, crass marketers.

And now they're pissed that a lot of people are seeing the cracks in their walled garden business model and escaping. To wit, this "neomasculinity" bullshit from RooshV:

The red pill is a non-commercial version of PUA with cultural observations thrown in. They hold firmly and obsessively onto rigid dogmas such as the alpha/beta male dichotomy to explain all male behavior while basing their “truths” upon a shaky foundation of pop evolution. Because it has no council of elders to guide the ideology, it is now being steered by the mob and watered down—or outright trolled—by entryists who are blue pill.

The bolding is mine.

Here's the thing with these dweebs . . . their formulate is astonishingly easy to replicate. In fact, you can readily start a subreddit and start pimping it, which is exactly what happened. And, of course, people figure out that they don't need the books and they don't need all of the right-wing political bullshit. Pretty soon, the audience has escaped the walled garden.

Like all marketing assholes, their solution is . . . fucking rebranding.

If you don't like the conversation, change it. And that's what they're aiming to do.

Isn't it funny how quickly they get pissed when all their little jihadis run off without any guidance from their central revolutionary council? It's almost like keeping everyone in the walled garden and hooked up to the marketing machine is more important than the message itself. Gee. What are the chances that a right-wing leaning group of marketers might just be exploitative assholes soft peddling angry ideology in order to extract money from gullible and angry guys?

So, rebranding it is. Of course, it is. What else would it be? Allow the young guys to go around without their paid gurus? BAH! That's very unlikely.

Let's be realistic. Most guys who amble into PUA / Red Pill / men's rights /  manosphere stuff do so to get laid. The whole ball of wax is just cognitive behavioral therapy for people who are too proud to go to a therapist.

Girls are scary? Approach. See? It's not so bad.

That's not a massive revelation. It's Cognitive Behavioral Therapy 101. Identify a fear, then minimize the patient's anxiety by allowing them to learn that the experience is not going to be the end of the world.

In that regard, by bringing basic cognitive behavioral approaches to a mass of young men who are never going to visit a therapist without being ordered to do so by a judge, they're doing a massive service. Who gives a fuck how these guys take that first step as long as they take it, right?

The problem is that the marketers know most of the guys bail out from the rest of the program once the basic approach anxiety problem is resolved. That hurts the bottom line.

One of the creepiest things they do, in fact, is pimping the rape accusation fears of their audience. Think how perversely, fucked-uppedly cool that is?

You're selling a program for guys who are afraid of girls, right? What sells the success of the program better than, "Dude, you might be accused of rape once bag one of these sloots!"

How clever is that? And there's a wonderful push-pull. The reader in anxious and angry about the lack of available poosy, but on the other side of the equation you're also making him anxious and fearful about his possible success.

You're already selling to cognitively challenged and vulnerable audiences with this shit. These are the same guys who used to buy products to improve sexual prowess advertised in the back of titty mags back in the 1970s. Their judgment is, shall we say, often questionable.

The best part, though, is that basic cognitive behavioral therapy works. So the scam starts with something that's very scientifically valid. And that leads to the inference by the exploited party that, gosh, maybe this other stuff they say is legit, too!

It's a fascinating racket, but . . . people figure this shit out.

There's a reason a lot of people turn to the unguided forums for advice. The fact is that basic cognitive behavioral practices can be taught to anyone by anyone. Think about it. These fuckin far-right morons figured it out and passed it along, ferfucksake!

Most guys who get into this stuff want to get laid. I've seen the data on the subject. The retention rate for readership in the TRP world is fucking miserable, and a lot of the dropout rate is caused by success. Guys don't need to read all of the whiny rape accusations bullshit and the racist, anti-immigrant bullshit. They don't need the deeply anti-feminist screeds.

All they need is a soft nudge -- the cognitive behavioral nudge -- toward confronting their sexual anxieties.

That's not to say that the entire conversation is invalid. Quite the opposite. The battle of the sexes is a totally evergreen topic, and that's of course why marketers of all stripes constantly find a way back to it.

The problem, however, is that a number of the vulnerable and gullible are escaping the walled garden. They're finding free sources of information. They're learning that basic cognitive behavioral approaches to their sexual anxiety concerns are far more useful than three hundred blog posts about false rape accusations and how Hillary Clinton's cunt has an agenda set on strangling Western civilization.

My advice? Take the good, throw out the bad.

And for the love of gawd, always be aware that these motherfuckers are crass marketers.

Friday, May 1, 2015

Possibly the worst sentence I have ever read

This review gives rise to this . . .

But "What About This" is an authentic outpouring like a warm river in full flood; you get swept off the bank and its languid physicality destroys you.

We all struggle to maintain a certain level of economy in our use of language, but there's a difference between having a bit of diarrhea of the mouth and just flat-out needlessly jamming adjectives in there sideways to lard up a fucking sentence.

First, if you've never been in a river that's in full flood, let me assure that they are not fucking warm. Why does a flooding river need to be warm? Fucked if I know. This dude just wanted to make his labored metaphor about poetry sound more poetical.

Second . . . yeah, reviewers are typically terrible fucking writers. They're often writers who write about writers because they wish they could be writers, so they find jobs writing about writers in order to be writers.

Third: "languid physicality"? Huh? Unless you're describing what happens to an NFL nose tackle's gut while he's being blocked by two other guys, I struggle to see how anything that's at once capable of physicality can also be languid. #EnglishFail

Added bonus . . . this fucking sentence . . .

Editor Michael Wiegers carefully selected this work from 10 collections, including parts of "The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You," Stanford's best-known work — a swollen, ambitious 542-page epic poem in which even Jesus and Sonny Liston speak — as well as reams of unpublished work.

If you ever write a 542-page epic poem, you're an asshole. If you ever encourage people to fucking read a 542-page epic poem, you're a retard. Seriously, who the fuck writes a 542-page epic poem "in which even Jesus and Sonny Liston speak"?

Is that a fucking joke? I swear to gawd this guy was just stapling words the fuck together without any forethought. I assume that the only reason anyone would ever write a 542-page poem of any type is to troll the shit out of wannabe intellectuals.

SMFH. Just because you can use the English language to form sentences doesn't mean you should.