Much like the Gulf War, Trump's presidency never happened. Yes, there were soldiers in Kuwait, and there was a man named Donald Trump in the white house, but there was never a war, and there was never a presidency.

Trumpism was a bubble, and on Wednesday, it popped. In 2016, it felt like the beginning of a new American nationalism. Without Trump, that "movement" dies. Will those embers merely fade, or can the fire be rekindled?

If you want to transform the world, or your country, you cannot fuel your movement on discontent, nor on reasonableness. No, transformation can only be built on a foundation of extravagant hope

Gold toilets aside, Trump never had extravagance, in fact he had no content at all. He was the first fully post-modern president; what he did was so filtered through media that there's no effective difference between what happened and what the media says happened

We projected our dreams onto Donald Trump. A successful mass movement requires belief in an infallible leader or an irresistible doctrine. There is no mass movement without a little delusion (we call it a little delusion) "Reasonable" people can't effect big change

In "The Feeling of Power" (Asimov, 1958), ubiquitous computation causes humanity to forget the fundamentals of math, including how to count. A technician rediscovers it by studying computer schematics, and the tech spreads to the military. This is an allegory for Pickup Artistry

The common misconception is that Pickup Artistry (hereafter, PUA) is about "tricking" women into bed with you. In fact it has nothing to do with this, because you can't trick a woman into bed any more than you can trick a cat into eating a treat. The cat is complicit

At the turn of the century, millennial men were in a similar situation to the erstwhile mathematicians in Asimov's story; in a future of ubiquitous sex, we forgot how to seduce women, because we forgot the fundamentals of being a man

Notice how just saying this, "how to be a man" creates tension. Being a man is not the same as merely being male. When I stand up and tell you this, it's audacious, because if you don't match my definition, that implies your manhood is deficient

When a man says, "I am a man" he is making a declaration to the world, and I see today how often men are embarrassed to describe themselves this way. Instead they say "I'm a guy," or "I'm a dude." This is how slaves talk, when they doubt their own manhood

The other day I was accused: “you can’t just make up a new theory of gender based on your vague feelings of discontent.” Hold my beer.

The old "theory" of gender, (as if it had scientific grounding) the one you can literally lose your livelihood for opposing, though only if you are a man, seems to me to have been fashioned exclusively by women feeling vague discontent

Quite on my own I had been reading about some of the early feminist texts, and it happens that modern gender theorists mostly disavow them. Obfuscation and dissimulation are to women as violent imposition of will is to men

The view of xerstory laid out in such books as The Second Sex is such a powerful and compelling lens that nearly all moderns look through it. We don’t even see it, the world now looks alien without it, and yet it colors everything

We must destroy the claim that women are “historically oppressed” and that this bottomless well of injustice demands a similarly endless ream of legislation to nullify all male advantages.

One liners (II): a thread of cheap thrills

Kink is how women sublimate the desire for patriarchy

You chase after sex objects as proxies for love objects

A woman challenges her man, a man squeezes a woman’s ass, both desire to feel firm flesh

Women are people, so what? If anything this is a license to treat them badly

If a small child scrapes her knee, her parent might "kiss it better". This does nothing, but both parties appreciate the ritual. Hanson finds that empirically, many medical interventions do nothing, but we pay for them, because they are an adult version of "kiss the boo boo"

Our institutions are prodigiously wasteful. Under the feel-good veneer of win-win cooperation—teaching kids, healing the sick, celebrating creativity—our institutions harbor giant, silent furnaces of intra-group competitive signaling

trillions of dollars of wealth, resources, and human effort are being burned to ash every year, largely for the purpose of showing off... institutions do end up achieving many of their official goals [but] they’re simultaneously serving purposes no one is eager to acknowledge

People are judging us all the time. They want to know if we’ll make good friends, allies, lovers, or leaders. And one of the important things they’re judging is our motives. Why do we behave the way we do? Do we have others’ best interests at heart, or are we entirely selfish?

Because others are judging us, we’re eager to look good. So we emphasize our pretty motives and downplay our ugly ones. It’s not lying, exactly, but neither is it perfectly honest.

One liners, inspired by that @yungdeleuze thread

The idea that ugly people have inner beauty is largely a myth

Spiritual beauty and physical beauty are related and mutually reinforcing

Sjws make themselves ugly because they have no idea how to be beautiful

Beauty is not nearly as subjective as you think