Miscellaneous Feeds

RTT2e

Name: Baron Mida
Race: Human
Age: 42
UPP: 17372C

Money: 30K Credits
Special: Subdermal Armour +1

Skills:
Language (Zdetl - Zhodani) 1, Pilot 1, Survival (ice) 1, Carouse 1, Flyer 1, Gunner 1, Art 1, Steward 1, Gun Combat 1, Jack of All Trades 1
Admin 0, Mechanic 0, Drive 0, Electronics 0, Recon 0, Heavy Weapons (vehicle) 0, Investigate 0, Vacc Suit 0

History:
Declined entry into University; declined entry into Noble career; Drafted into the Army (Cavalry).
Term 1: Mishap - injured trying to suppress a rebellion in an Icecap; gained enemies Icecap rebels - mustered out of Army.
Term 2: Scout (Surveyor); mishap - ship damaged, had to hitchhike home; +4 Contacts, +15 enemies, 30K Credits, mustered out of Scout service.
Term 3: Agent (barely made the entry) Investigation 0; Mishap - investigation goes wrong and ruins career; musters out as Agent.
Term 4: Declined entry into Noble career again; Drifter (Scavenger); connects with J Aslan - Gun Combat
Term 5: Entertainer - homeworld celebrity; met J Vargr Noble at a high society function; Steward 1
Term 6: Rank 2 Entertainer (Art 1); Romantic relationship (Ally); Aged -1 Strength, -1 Endurance; Mustered out (Contact, 2-4 Ship Shares)

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My weekly game is cancelled until further notice.

On Wednesday major local corporations recommended avoidance of all non-essential gatherings. Later during the week came a spate of municipal and statewide lock downs and the declaration of a national emergency.

This time we had double cheeseburgers and fries individually bagged for each player from a national fast food chain.

I put the room numbers in the summary, so they coincide with narrative. Old timers may recognize this place. Corrective note to earlier narrative, [Room 18] did not have the curtain block the door to the south. I was reading from a paper copy and I should have used a magnifying glass. Now that I've seen it blown up on a screen the party should have been able to go that way.

++++ SUMMARY ++++

[Room 11]

From fighting the skeletons the party picked up any maces the skeletons had dropped (to improve their weapons) and proceed to the next room. Which was essentially the back side of another secret door. Peeking, the party noticed 5 Hobgoblins, one guarding another door, two flanking what appeared to be a throne, one standing in front of the throne reporting to whom was seated there the party's attack on the Hobgoblin barracks [Room 10] minutes before, and lastly the biggest baddest (4th level) Hobgoblin chief you ever saw. (Even his body double was wearing a Screen Actor's Guild "muscle suit" to play this role.

So the party decided to rush the guard, close the door and overwhelm the rest with Kobolds and Teenagers.

This eventually worked, losing only six Kobolds in the process. (They had lost the first nine fighting the skeletons. Sorry I forgot to mention that.)

Next item on the agenda was to survey and search the room they were now in, which was a 25 by 45 foot room an empty throne on the East end, a door in the South, 4 dead Hobgoblins each with 10 gold pieces, one big Hobgoblin with no treasure, and a secret door in the Southwest corner.

[Room 8]

Finding no traps on the secret door, Needles took the lead into a 15 by 15 foot room, only to be surprised by a Gelatinous Cube and got paralyzed. The Teenagers came in and destroyed it well in advance of Needles getting digested. Amid the remaining globs of viscous goo they found a magical warhammer, which the party prevented Grog from destroying, and a a box of 7 scrolls which DeBoDe identified and quickly pocketed.

[Room 7]

Lastly they were on the backside of another secret door on the other side of this room. (Since it was the backside, I decided to not make it a secret.) With another peek, the party espied two Ogres sitting at a table playing cards.

Given the time spent fighting the last two rooms I decided to call the game. Even though I "could" have, the next fight may have pushed it late into the night.

I decided to attach the party's map, if you can't take attachments, sorry.

++++ CHARACTER SUMMARY ++++

- A Barbarian named Grog.
- A Magic User Sole Practitioner (Detective Class) named De-Bo-De
- "Fred" the talking indestructible wooden fish amulet found in session one and taken possession by De-Bo-De.
- A Thief named Needles (who has a fear of needles)
- A Cleric named Torquemada, a Cleric who bought the Inquisitor package with his build points.
- Eleven "teenagers", who are apparently some sort of Sprite kin encountered two episodes back who want in on the "action".
- Rescued wimmenfolk from the village. One per each defeated member of the Hobgoblin tribe.

--
Tracy Johnson
BT

NNNN

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Lost Craft Crimzen Premium Red Ale
https://lostcraft.ca/pages/crimzen

Cloudy Amber, not much head,

Mild malt scent.

Spreads out and coats the tongue like it’s dancing with more bubbles than you'd expect leaving a slightly sour aftertaste.

Reminds me of sour cream glazed donuts.

Light weight, smooth, mild bubbles that dance across the tongue leaving sour notes.

Thanks to Mr.Noodles and Archergirl who taste tested this with me and Mr.Noodles for supplying us with the sample!

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Rikki-Tikki-Traveller 2e

Name:
Race: Vargr
Age: 38
UPP: A6E7A5

Skills:
Melee 3(4)
Admin 1, Animals (Riding) 1, Athletics (Dex) 1, Deception 1, Engineer 1, Explosives 1, Gun Combat 1, Heavy Weapons (Man) 1, Leadership 1, Medic 1, Recon 1, Vacc Suit 1
Drive 0, Electronics 0, Flyer 0, Mechanics 0, Profession 0

Stuff:
10K Creds; 10K/annum pension
Combat Implant -Enhance Melee (from 3 to 4)
Cloth Armour (self sealing, computer weave 0, chameleon, thruster pack) +8
Hostile Environment Vacc Suit (thruster pack, magnetic grapples, eye protection, computer weave 0) +12
Broadsword

History:
Army Academy declined entry; successful entry into Army-Support.
Term 1: Hostile planet (Vacc1), Rank 1 Lance Cpl, same plant as J Vargr (Dec. 1).
Term 2: +1 Endurance; Brutal gorund war (guns), Rank 2 Cpl
Term 3: Athletics 1; Planet (wild or hostile) with J Aslan (Melee 1); Rank 3 Lance Sgt; Explosives 1
Term 4: Melee; Heroism in battle, Rank 4 Sgt; +1 Endurance, Ageing -1 Strength
Term 5: Melee, Peacekeeper (Admin), Rank 5 Gunnery Sgt, Heavy Weps (Man portable)

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Games on Wednesday nights sometime after 6:30PM at World's Best Comics, 9714 Warwick Blvd Newport News, Virginia 23601. (We skipped the previous week due to fog.)

This time we had a salami pizza.

Disclaimer, I have decided to keep this a low information campaign. The party has no idea where they are or what world they are in.

++++ SUMMARY ++++

Today's game was a little bit more simple. They did basically four rooms (or 3 rooms and a hallway) with most of the time taken for debate on what to do next. My player's inability to make decisions or read clues is amazing.

Situation #1

Starting where they left off, the party sent off half the "teenagers" to guard the rescued Wimmenfolk and start walking back to the village. The were still in the room with the surrendered Goblins and the Sphinx statue with two broken glass eyes.

Getting the party to investigate the statue was a challenge. First of all, my gamers have gotten used to the idea that I'll simply tell them things just because they happen to be in the vicinity. After getting him to look up from his cell-phone, our "Detective" sub-class of Magic User DeBoDe, detected no traps and not magic. So I had to bring up to the plate the party's Thief, "Hey Needles, that's what you're here for. You have in front of you a statue of a Sphinx with two broken glass eyes. What are you going to do?" He decides to check it out with a cursory look, nothing. So finally saying again, "You have a statue of a Sphinx with two broken glass eyes (at this point I stomp my boot twice under the table), what are you going to do?"

He decides to check out the broken glass eyes.

So I tell him, they are big enough to insert a finger or a stick. (Fortunately, my player chooses a stick.) In one eye he finds a small poisonous scorpion which is easily disposed of. The other eye, turns a switch. (He turns the switch.)

The Sphinx rolls away and there is a stash of treasure behind it. (Whew!) A bunch of silver jewelry, nothing magical our Detective could detect. They decided to put it on the Barbarian's Pack Goat.

Situation #2

Next item on the agenda was to go down the stairs and check out the four other statues at the bottom. The statues were: #1 A skull, #2 A demon figure, #3 A screaming figure, #4 A frog creature.

They decided to check out statue #4 and without bothering to check for magic, when touched it turned into a Berserk half-frog, half man. After defeating it (and yes it took a few rounds), the decided to check for magic and found only the #2 demon figure had magical on it. Avoiding that, they turned their attention to statue #3 of the screaming figure and found a switch inside its mouth.

Turning the switch, the stairs they had just come down lifted up, and they were faced with a squad of 10 Demons armed with maces and shields.

There was a long pause and my Players could not decide what to do. If it were any other D&D Party they would have been rushed by the Demons. I finally dropped a hint, "Try turning the switch the other way." "Thud!" the stairs were lowered, thus blocking the demons.

Actually the dungeon did not allow for a two-way switch on this, I had to give them an easy way out to rethink it.

Situation #3

The party decides to ask their "guide" (the captured Hobgoblin "leader"), what was the quickest way to the rest of his tribe?

His response was to take the secret door in former Kobold's barracks (which the party discovered last session after getting the Kobolds to surrender), and it will take you to the Hobgoblin barracks. They found it was a narrow corridor 80 feet long so they had to go single file.

Arriving at the far end they found 10 fully armed Hobgoblins with more captive village Wimmenfolk. Using the tactic with the Kobolds, the party asked for their surrender or "your leader gets it". Demanding proof, they have the captured leader "speak" and the party only got peals of laughter in return, including a shout. "Hey Schlomo, we get dibs on your stuff!"

Unfortunately, the party could only fight them one person at a time with open door frontage. Grog our Barbarian took damage so they pulled him back and one of our intrepid of "teenagers" with wings healed him from behind when he wasn't looking. (Our Cleric had run out of healing spells after the battles with the Goblins and the Frog Statue.)

Noticing this ability, our party utilized the "teenagers" like rotating troops putting them up front. As soon as a "teenager" got seriously wounded, another "teenager" behind him healed him.

During the battle, one of the 10 Hobgoblins casually left the barracks out the back way. Ostensibly to report the party's incursion.

Also during the battle, Torquemada confronted at swordpoint in the narrow passageway why the captive "leader" (now called "Schlomo") as to why he got no respect from his underlings? "I'm the Chief's body-double, he said, it always works on the Kobolds."

At this point the party closed the door on the battle and made a careful retreat. It was an about face in the narrow hallway they were in, not a coordinated event at all. The Hobgoblins did not follow, but they heard laughter.

Situation #4

Back in the old Kobold's barracks the party discussed it. Questioning Schlomo about how to go about attacking his tribe. He tells them they could either, #1 take the long way around to the other side where he was captured, #2 try again down the narrow corridor, or #3 fight the "demons" under the stairs. He explained the the "Demons" are just Skeletons made out to look like Demons with a Phantasmal Force spell. His tribe knew about the Skeletons, but did not know about the switch in the statue as they thought the room was a dead end under the stairs closet. It is normally accessed from another room via another secret door.

There was another long pause getting the party to make a decision. So I finally dropped a hint saying: Going the back way is probably blocked by now since the tribe has been alerted. Going down single file again is a non-starter. But you can probably get more frontage fighting the skeletons, and get past them quicker and gain access from an area the tribe thinks is a dead end.

The party had another idea to go back topside and recruit the surrendered Kobolds (who had kept their agreement and left for other digs). So the Kobolds negotiated for a share of any treasure.

So getting in line for battle, the party fought the Skeletons, since the Kobolds were smaller they could fight two per every Skeleton. Our player for DeBoDe rolled the attack dice for the Kobolds periodically interrupting his cell-phone video game to roll the dice. (Not less than three times I had to mention, "Get off the phone and roll.") Eventually after defeating them the party found a red square in the center underneath the stairs. After some some more investigation they discovered by standing on it, the stairs would pivot up. Apparently this had never been discovered by the Hobgoblin tribe who had just let the Skeletons (disguised as Demons) stay in their room.

++++ CHARACTER SUMMARY ++++

- A Barbarian named Grog.
- A Magic User Sole Practitioner (Detective Class) named De-Bo-De
- "Fred" the talking indestructible wooden fish amulet found in session one and taken possession by De-Bo-De.
- A Thief named Needles (who has a fear of needles)
- A Cleric named Torquemada, a Cleric who bought the Inquisitor package with his build points.
- Eleven "teenagers", who are apparently some sort of Sprite kin encountered two episodes back who want in on the "action".
- Rescued wimmenfolk from the village. One per each defeated member of the Hobgoblin tribe.

++++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR ++++

--
Tracy Johnson
BT

NNNN

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An arcology is a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology." The original architectural vision for an arcology was an ecologically neutral, self-powering, self-feeding, and self-sufficient enclosed system.

What are microprocessors made from? Transistors. What are transistors made from? Sand.

Games are now on Wednesday nights sometime after 6:30PM at World's Best Comics, 9714 Warwick Blvd Newport News, Virginia 23601.

We had an extra large philly-steak, fresh mozzarella and tomato pizza.

Disclaimer, I have decided to keep this a low information campaign. The party has no idea where they are or what world they are in.

++++ SUMMARY ++++

We left off our characters in a 60 square foot throne room with one discovered secret door, a 20 foot wide open pit and De-Bo-De just having avoided a poison pin-cushion on the throne.

Our party decided to take the secret door and found themselves going 30 feet up where they found another door. Upon opening it up, they were presented with the backside of an apparently indestructible gray curtain that stretched from floor to ceiling that allowed a 3 foot wide gap between itself and a wall. Grog tried stabbing it, Torquemada tried peeking under it, both to no avail. (I told them it was attached the floor and ceiling like upholstery to a sofa.)

Grog make his detect magic check and avoided touching the curtain henceforth.

So the party sent the teenagers down the sides of the curtain only to report back that the paths were dead ends. The curtain apparently enclosed some internal room. De-Bo-De tried his luck and found a secret door.

Taking standard the precaution of having Needles check for traps and finding none, they sent Grog the Barbarian through first with the rest of the party as back up, only to find:

A hobgoblin entertaining himself with one of the kidnapped wimmenfolk. There was also a hobgoblin guard looking down an open staircase. (Since they came through a secret door "known" only to the occupants, they were not expecting anyone from that direction.) Having achieved an element of surprise, Grog attacked from the Guard's rear flank and Torquemada put his sword edge on the other Hobgoblin's backside and demanded surrender. Which was translated into perfect Hobgoblin by "Fred" the amulet who was nearby around De-Bo-De's neck and happened to overhear ("Fred" is only trying to help.)

This was the party's lucky day, for judging by the Hobgoblin's gear lying about they had captured the leader of the Goblin tribe.

That accomplished, the party hastily had the Hobgoblin leader and his former hostage get dressed and took the two Hobgoblins hostage themselves and forced them with their hands tied to be their new guides to this dungeon. So without further ado, the party was led down a staircase, to a room with 2 more Hobgoblin guards (who also surrendered), then through another secret door and found themselves back in the throne room they had left, albeit another secret door they had not found (nor had bothered to look for since it was behind a curtain next to one of those braziers).

Reorganizing with the teenagers left behind to guard their rear. The party was led cattywumpus across the throne room (avoiding the 20 foot wide pit) and took yet another secret door they had not found and up some more stairs to a 30 by 100 foot long room with 3 doors to the right, four statues at the other end, then it turned right to a 30 foot wide staircase going up.

Their new "guides" led them to the first of the 3 doors telling the party that his allied Kobold tribe lives behind doors 1 and 3, but the 2nd door is just a closet. Going through door number 1, the party found 20 sullen Kobolds being forced to clean and scrub their clothes, pick up their things and make their beds, overseen the stern looks of the party's wimmenfolk "hostages".

The party abrubtly announced itself that that had taken their Chieftain prisoner and bade the 20 Kobolds surrender their hostages. (The party really didn't say that, it was really announced by "Fred" translated into perfect Koboldic.)

"Ding dong the Chief is had, the mean old Chief is had!" Sang the Kobolds, once again in seemingly orchestrated dancing and song which in the next chorus said: "Can you please save us from this selfmade hell!?"

Torquemada, slightly out of character said via "Fred": "Just release the hostages leave these parts, and you can go." Since the Kobold's belongings were somehow set in order beforehand, and well packed including their toothbrushes, (even their underwear was folded), the Kobolds started to march in single file out the dungeon.

Somewhat disappointed, the "rescued" wimmenfolk watched them go.

Meanwhile the party decided to open the closet door (door #2) back in the hallway. The party Thief dutifully checked for traps, found none, decided it was unlocked, then had the original Hobgoblin guard of the Chieftan open the door.

Plop! An Ochre Jelly that had been waiting on the other side of the door dropped on the hapless guard. The party had to kill it with oil and flame but not before it had consumed the Hobgoblin.

A few giggles erupted from the last of the departing Kobolds. They had apparently kept the Ochre Jelly in the closet as a joke and didn't tell anyone.

That left the next step in this night's gaming agenda. There were three other things they could do:

#1 Investigate the four statues at the end of the room just before the stairs going up. (They were a skull statue, a demon statue, a screaming figure statue, and a frog creature statue.)

#2 Up the 30 foot wide staircase going up. To which the ex-Chieftain said were the barracks for 10 Goblins.

#3 Yet another secret door from the ex-Kobold's quarters going underneath staircase #1 which leads to the barracks of 10 Hobgoblins.

They decided to ignore the statutes and go up the wide staircase. At the top of which, were 10 Goblins with (you guessed it) 10 wimmenfolk hostages. However these wimmenfolk didn't have it as easy as the ones with the Kobolds and were in dire need of rescue.

Additionally the surrender call by from the party did not work as intended so we ended up gaming a battle. Three Goblins guarded the wimmenfolk, which left seven Goblins versus the party. This included the Grog, Torquemada, Eleven Teenagers, and the party even recruited the two Hobgoblin prisoners to fight on their side. (But not the ex-Chieftain.) Only Needles and De-bo-De remained behind to guard the ex-Chieftain.

About six rounds later the morale of the Goblins finally broke and they surrendered.

Being out of time we called it a night. The party having rescued 31 wimmenfolk. The next step would be to go though the secret door in the Kobold's barracks and confront the Hobgoblins, and as you may guess, an equal number of hostages.

Oh and by the way, I didn't mention it to my gamers, in the just defeated Goblin quarters there is a large statue of a sphinx with broken glass eyes.

++++ CHARACTER SUMMARY ++++

- A Barbarian named Grog.
- A Magic User Sole Practitioner (Detective Class) named De-Bo-De
- "Fred" the talking indestructible wooden fish amulet found in session one and taken possession by De-Bo-De.
- A Thief named Needles (who has a fear of needles)
- A Cleric named Torquemada, a Cleric who bought the Inquisitor package with his build points.
- Eleven "teenagers", who are apparently some sort of Sprite kin encountered last episode who want in on the "action".

++++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR ++++

--
Tracy Johnson
BT

NNNN

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I am officially sold out of my 20 tickets for this event!

First off, I want to thank all the guys who’ve reserved a spot to already. The response to what started as a small gathering of guys in Vegas has been overwhelming. As of this post I am sold out of my initial 20 tickets – in 5 days!

Jon (MLD) is also sold out of his tickets. Rich Cooper is about 3 away from selling out.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that I do have 6 extra slots available for overage.

However, once these are gone that’s it! The price will still be $500 per until March 1st. At that point registration goes up to (and stays at) $750. You must be a Rational Male Patreon subscriber to purchase a spot.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL…

We’ve just added a new gathering to the event activities,…

Watch Jon’s channel for details MODERN LIFE DATING

Games are now on Wednesday nights sometime after 6:30PM at World's Best Comics, 9714 Warwick Blvd Newport News, Virginia 23601.

We had an extra large ground beef and mushroom pizza.

++++ SUMMARY ++++

Disclaimer, I have decided to keep this a low information campaign. The party has no idea where they are or what world they are in. Except for Grog the Barbarian who had just moved in as a lone survivor after his raiding party was defeated during after their most recent campaign, otherwise the party grew up in this awful village of scum. Even though the party rolled up middle class characters, class distinctions for this village are rather, well, relative.

While still transcribing character statistics, I thought the group was developed enough to start adventuring. So we have:

- A Barbarian named Grog.
- A Magic User Sole Practitioner (Detective Class) named De-Bo-De
- A Thief named Needles (who has a fear of needles)
- A Cleric (absent this session)

Funny thing about HackMaster Barbarians, they cannot "knowingly" associate with Magic Users at First level. (So Mum's the word on De Bo De. Sssshhhh!)

I "woke" the party up at a small village of lowlife "Scum" on the edge of an unnamed river. Their "Village" being the closest thing to an organizational size one can think of. A collection of "Huts" is more like it. Otherwise known throughout these parts as "Huts of the Scum". In any case the village was raided by itinerant Goblins and all the wimmen folk were kidnapped. All the pretty ones at least, "pretty" for a Goblin is something better looking than the average donkey. Suffice it to say, any female who could disguise themselves as a muckraking boy or were past menopause were left behind.

Afterward, the "village" council drafted our young adventurers. First the Barbarian, only because he was the only one with any fighting experience. Secondly the Thief, so he could bail himself out of the stocks. The Magic User (Detective) De-Bo-De, because a village elder's wife had hired him to find out who her husband was having an affair with. (That Elder is hoping he doesn't come back to file a report.) And the Cleric, because in retaliation, that same wife decided to have an affair of her own with the Cleric and the Elder found out. (The Elder doesn't want the Cleric to come back either.)

After some minor adjustments it was discovered most of the party was so weak they couldn't carry their own equipment. So they transferred the weight to the of a week's worth of Iron Rations to Grog's trained pack goat. Since Goblins were litterbugs and there were no trail-side sanitation ordinances, the party followed the obvious trail to the Goblin's lair, where they had their first encounter.

They heard loud giggling and musical instruments.

Since De-Bo-De's profession was "Detective" they sent him, which was probably better than sending the Thief. De-Bo-De was able to "detect" the source of the noise, and using his specialist ability to use the 2nd level "Detect Invisible" spell at 1st level, he found some nearly a dozen invisible "teenagers", with butterfly wings. Making contact, he convinced these "winged teenagers" with their penchant for petty mayhem, to join them on a raid into the Goblin's lair, (as long as they hid their wings from the sight of Grog and stayed "visible". So they flew over to a nearby copse of trees where they made themselves look nearly human as I said, like teenagers.

After formal introductions with the "teenagers" the party finally made it to the Goblin's lair. Where they found a cave entrance with steps going down, De-Bo-De noisily went first and alone. Of course this alerted the sleeping guard who promptly retreated further inside enough so that De-Bo-De could hear a door slam. Reporting back, the party all went downstairs to a 55 foot square room surrounded by drapes and a double wide closed door to the left, with a rather well done mural of an Goblin face on the doors. The teenagers checked behind the drapes to find a 5 foot wide space behind so the room was really 60 feet square. Thankfully there weren't any Goblins in ambush behind the curtains.

They was however, a pile of garbage in one corner behind the curtains. Searching the pile they were greeted by a voice saying "Hi, how ya doin'?" Digging deeper in the trash they found a talking wooden fish amulet named "Fred", and having got the hint not to inform Grog about any magic, they showed it to De-Bo-De, who promptly confiscated it amid more giggles from the teenagers. "Fred" promptly told De-Bo-De that he can speak any language of his current or former owners, perform a "Change Self" spell for his owner once per day for 6 hours, as well as improving his owner's armor class by one. Fred also said he was fire proof, freeze proof, acid proof, and basically indestructible.

Makes one wonder why "Fred" was discovered in the trash?

The double-wide door with the Goblin mural was the next obstacle. It was easily pushed open however, but as soon as the party passed through it a "Magic Mouth" spell LOUDLY exclaimed "Ho Master, be wary. Enemies are at your door!". The party went through it, and Grog hastily did so avoiding looking at the thing because it was magical. Lastly as De-Bo-De passed by another Magic Mouth spell cast a Detect Magic spell causing a third Magic Mouth to declare (loudly) "Master, they have magic on them." (Grog cringed when he heard that.)

The next chamber was another 60 foot square room built out of white marble and with a lengthwise inlaid black marble steps going up to a landing with six columns of gold inlaid marble in front of parted parted black curtains going up to another room. The walls were covered with bas-relief carvings of soldiers fighting. (Oddly enough, they haven't found any Goblins.) To one side De-Bo-De found a secret door on a catch of one of the bas-relief statues, but the party decided to ignore that for the moment and continue on past the curtains.

This place was obviously built by better engineers and spell casters than these Goblins.

The next chamber was another 60 foot square room surrounded by a circle of draperies so that each corner was hidden by a curtain. In each corner was a brazier with burning incense which to one "teenager's" dismay caused him to fail his saving throw an sent him to a snoring sleep. Thus alerted the party held their breath and put them out.

But more importantly was the huge 20 foot wide circular pit in the center of the room and a throne on a raised dais at one end.

Looking into the pit, our Thief Needles could not see the pit walls any further than 20 feet down, so he dropped a lit torch. It promptly disappeared after 20 feet. (They all made a mental note of that, for later.)

De-Bo-De decided to check out the throne and without further ado, decided it was a good time to relax. So he placed his hind end squarely in the middle of it and made his saving throw versus poison as the trap sprang on his behind. If it had been Needles, he would also had to make a saving throw versus Fear.

All Fred could do at this point was laugh.

++++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR ++++

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The Rig was a highly classified military appliance used in training Special Forces. The Rig provided a perfect facsimile of the experience without having to send a trainee into danger.

We’re really gonna do it!

April 18th, 2020 my cohorts from the Rule Zero podcast collective and myself will be delivering a one-day TED Talk style mini-convention. In addition, I will be offering a few exclusive one-on-one opportunities on the 17th and the19th that will only be open to my Patreon subscribers.

The main event will include 1-hour talks from myself, Rollo Tomassi, Rich Cooper, Rian Stone, Jon from Modern Life Dating and Troy Francis – all the hosts of Rule Zero. 

After the event we will have a live poolside Q&A event that afternoon/evening where you can get some personal time with me or any of the other hosts. There will also be some unscheduled evening outings around Las Vegas thereafter.

Save the dates now, this event is a trial run for us to see about planning a larger one some time. I’ve never done anything like this so I’m glad to be a part of a team of mature Red Pill men who are really dedicated to making it happen, with a commitment to making it a high value event.

I only have 20 tickets to sell on my own. Patreon members, will get first crack at the registration before anyone else. The event will be limited to 100 attendees in total. 

Once these spots are gone, they are gone! 

This is our first time doing this, so the event is starting small, personal and exceptionally high-value. The side-gatherings I do, (and other speakers do) in addition to the one-day talk and Q&A will also be available to my Patreon subscribers first. I will have a few add-ons as we get closer to April 18th so join my subscribers here and you’re get all the updates.

Tickets are on sale NOW for the insanely low price of just $500. This event will likely sell out at this price point, but starting March 1st (if there are any spots left) the price will level off at $750.

It’s a gathering of men intent on discussing the relevant ideas of our time. As most of you know, I have an obligation to the truth, but I also want to stay as accessible and engaged as I can with my readers and listeners. It may be kind of short notice for some of you, but I hope you can join this gathering this spring.

While we cannot disclose the location of the event until we get closer to April 18, it will be very close to the Las Vegas strip. If you’re looking to book a hotel on or around the strip will serve you just fine. As you’d expect, there are some world-class hotels and casinos resorts in Vegas, so I’d encourage you make a weekend of it.

Not only will this be an informative event, but we’ll have a lot of fun too.

Subscribe to this Patreon today and you can use the link there to get confirmed for this exclusive first-time event. See ya in Vegas!

RULE ZERO LIVE! LAS VEGAS • APRIL 18, 2020 • $500

This story opens in media res, in the middle of heart-pounding action as the US Congress passes a modification to the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

I received this comment on my January 29, 2020 livestream of Rational Male 101:

I think Rollo is talking about an idea that I’ve read about before in Thomas Sowell’s famous book Conflict of Visions. One side of the spectrum says that humans are very animalistic despite their capability of rationalizing otherwise, and human nature must be constrained by laws and social processes (such as constraining hypergamy). The other side of the spectrum says that humans are entirely capable of overcoming their Darwinian natures through intentional decisionmaking and must be unconstrained in order to flourish. Everyone lies somewhere between the two. I assume most men here lean more toward a constrained vision.

Nature vs. Nurture is a constant theme in the Manosphere. Yes, it’s a constant theme throughout most natural sciences, but it’s a paradox that’s going to always pervade intersexual dynamics. And mostly because people’s belief sets are rooted more in one or the other. Personal responsibility versus biological determinism is an issue that defines what our perspectives are on a great many things; not just intersexual dynamics. This isn’t an issue of politics or even worldview. There are plenty of believers in our human capacity to rise above our personal circumstances and evolutionary dictates on both sides of the political spectrum. For every hardline Trad-Con espousing the virtues of the human spirit and freewill superseding our physical conditions there is a left-leaning humanist who’ll conveniently agree that humans aren’t beholden to what some inconvenient science says if it aligns with their belief set.

Most “old order” ideologies today are struggling with relevancy in what I called the age of “new order” thinking or our New Age of Enlightenment. This new order understanding is the result of the unprecedented deluge of information we now have access to in this millennium. Not only is it this new influx of data that’s challenging the old order ideologies, but also the accessibility to it that old order thinkers can no longer keep pace with.

The response to this influx of information requires us to parse it out like never before. In predictable human fashion most people will make a hard turn towards the old order dictates that used to be able to explain harsh truths to us adequately enough for us to move on to other things. Thus, we see the global Village return to an interest in old religions, shamanism, metaphysics and tribal superstitions (and a lot of Chick Crack) today. That’s not to say that some of these old order institutions never had merit. A lot of what new order data presents to us can be confirmed by old order beliefs and wisdom. What we used to take on faith can now be confirmed by new order information. But this is also problematic for old order believers. It’s never a comforting thought to be confronted with what you had thought was sublimely metaphysical actually being something that can, in fact, be quantified. Yes, your religion was correct about some things, but those things are no longer the magical articles of faith they once were.

But We’re Better Than That, Right?

The Nature vs. Nurture debate is really a polite proxy for the war between two perspectives – Determinism vs. Freewill. While questions of consciousness and personal philosophies are outside the scope of this blog, what is in scope is how these perspectives define the way we approach our understanding of innate mating strategies, long term relationships, forming families and raising children.

As I mentioned early, determinism feels wrong to both kinds of believers. When ever I debate the harsh realities of how Hypergamy works, not just for our species, but most of the animal kingdom, I’m invariably met with the question of whether or not Hypergamy is ‘Good or Evil’. There’s always a want to qualify what’s really a natural dynamic. Is a pack of wolves evil for bringing down a caribou to feed the pack in the dead of winter? It all depends on who you’re rooting for I guess.

The ‘sphere’s contemplating these scenarios are nothing new. Considering the moral implications of the uglier aspects of Hypergamy is just one easy example among many other naturalism vs. moralism dilemmas in Red Pill praxeology. Empiricists will explain the dynamic in the hope that knowing about it, and how it works, will lead to better predictive outcomes. Hypergamy works thusly X-Y-Z; now plan accordingly and build a better life upon that predictive model. Believers on the other hand will absorb this data and look for moral equivocation:

They believe that the goal of debate is to establish what is morally better, and what everyone should do. They argue about what is right.

The Believers vs. The Empiricists

On a recent video I did with Rich Cooper and Dr. Shawn Smith one point of debate was whether or not the idea of Hypergamy should be used as a “predictive framework” for understanding intersexual relationships. The topic of our discussion was the merits of Hypergamy in its expanded, robust, definition and whether it’s a reliable metric to compare people’s relationships (married and dating) against. As you might guess a lot of Red Pill awareness centers on Hypergamy; it’s why I continue to stress it even when my detractors lie about my interests. It’s really that important.

But as we we’re debating the ins and outs I posed another question to Dr. Smith, “If Hypergamy is not a reliable predictive framework for understanding intersexual relationships, then what is a better one?”

I wasn’t being facetious, nor was I trying to hit Shawn with a gotcha question; I genuinely wrote this question down in my preparatory notes for the show. If not Hypergamy, in its expanded definition, (that describes women’s innate mating strategy) then what is a good outline by which we might judge women’s (and men’s) motives, incentives and behaviors with respect to their mating strategies.

Do women even have mating strategies defined by their innate, evolved, natures? Or are their sexual, reproductive decisions purely an act of cognitive will, as defined by their socialization? If 100,000 years of human evolution didn’t shape women’s reproductive strategies, then what are we left with that explains the commonalities we see women using (with our new order data gathering) in their mate selection and breeding (or aborting) habits? Is it entirely freewill and personal choice? We’re certainly meant to believe it’s “her body, her choice” and the decisions are an extension of her cognitive will.

Yes, I get that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. The possibility exists that it’s both nature and nurture affecting women and men’s mating strategies – and certainly choice is involved in the outcome of those strategies. I’m more inclined to believe it’s both, or at least we want to believe our conscious decisions are what’s pulling the strings. I’ve been in all the livestream debates when we asked the question, “Do women have agency?” and if not then are we our Sister’s Keeper? The more moralistic a guy is usually the more he’s likely he is to include women’s lives to his list of masculine duties and personal responsibilities.

The underlying assumptions in all these accounts is “Aren’t we better than this?”

As reasonably rational, self-aware creatures, with what we presume is freewill and a liability of personal responsibility for the choices we make when exercising that freewill, then haven’t we evolved above all our base impulse? If not, then shouldn’t we have by now?

Every day I harp on about the fallacy of the Blank Slate that most old order thinkers can’t seem to disabuse themselves, but if we are in fact “above it all” then the fallacy of the Blank Slate, as well as the notion that we might ever be influenced by our evolved natures is all a moot point. If our conscious selves are in fact better than our evolved natures then the variables of evolution are rendered meaningless. All that matters is the self and developing our consciousness to rise above our conditions.

Our conscious minds are capable of overriding our innate natures. We can, sometimes do, kill ourselves by not eating. A fast or a hunger strike is something we can consciously do as an act of will. A sense of righteousness and virtue can get mixed into that conscious and our will supersedes our innate nature (we get hungry and need to eat or we die). It doesn’t change the operative physical state that our bodies need certain things. We often commit suicide as an act of will or the conscious act of our depressive emotional state. Again, will (however it’s defined) overrides our physical conditions, but how much of what we believe is our willpower is uninfluenced by the same physical conditions, environment, upbringing, socialization and personal circumstance that we hope to rise above?

Very soon, perhaps within my own lifetime, we will be able to genetically engineer humans. In 2018 a Chinese scientist broke codes of ethics to create the first gene-edited baby. The science, if not the technology, is already here. The possibility exists that human beings, through sheer force of will, can custom engineer our physical states to conform to what our ideologies would tell us is preferable. If you’ve ever seen the movie Gattaca you’ll understand the implications of this technology. It’s this author’s opinion that we are living in a time when the ideologies we subscribe to today will affect the ethics of what we engineer into the humanity of tomorrow.

Gattaca is science fiction, but the philosophical questions it poses are very real now. From a objective, humanist perspective this raises a lot of interesting questions. Should we engineer-out of humanity “diseases” like Down’s Syndrome? What about sickle cell anemia? If a gay gene is ever discovered (I don’t believe homosexuality is genetic), should we edit it out of humanity to ensure “normal” heterosexual human beings in future generations?

The Chinese scientist who broke the rules of ethics was reprimanded for his experimentation. “When the news broke, peers in China and abroad condemned him for manipulating life’s building blocks using a relatively untested gene-editing tool.” But why? Chinese official declared his experimentation illegal. It’s entirely possible that a new race of superior humans could be engineered to be better ‘adapted’ to live longer, be smarter, more immune to certain diseases, possibly eradicate some disease and make for a stronger human species. Why would it be wrong or unethical to strive for “perfection”?

Have we not elevated our will above our physical limitations? Or are we using our physical conditions as an implement of our will? We’ll find out soon, but our ideological bent and the ideas of what right and wrong is most certainly influenced and defined by the realities of our physical selves.

Rise of the New Order

This was a comment from Jack about the rise of the New Order:

Rollo, the digital age has ruined us. Culture and pop culture today move at an alarming rate, what was hip now won’t be in the next year or month, society has never moved this fast and as a result the new way is merely a day away from being the old way. The demon’s out of the ring now, no turning back, and there’s no real way to deal with the modern age.

If you are not born into greatness, or utilizing the vast knowledge of the net to surpass everyone and stay there, you get nothing. It’s now the same way with women, previously, our worlds were smaller and hypergamy wasn’t as out of control. There were checks and balances, God and church being two of them, shame was a motivator for keeping women in check as they don’t understand loyalty like men. Now, they have infinite access to all top men, with upwards access to all jobs, and no reprecussions for acting in their very best interests and base instincts at all times. This shrinks the dating pool dramatically to only a few desirable mates because they value themselves so highly. So, if you’re not a natural at flirting with women, or learned how to do it through you and the many other “red pill” men out there AND CAN KEEP THAT ON 24/7 WHILE DOING IT BETTER THAN EVERYBODY ELSE, you will get nothing or lose what you have.

It’s almost all risk no reward for modern men unless you’re alpha”, and even then you’re not safe. Women will always want more and better, so if you’re not constantly 100% on at all times, you lose. If Jeff Bezos and Johnny Depp aren’t safe despite their fame and fortune, what does that say for everybody else? It’s exasperating as a modern man, you have to be and do too much to compete on the global market, as a man younger than you I don’t know if you can understand how daunting it is to have to be everything all at once and it STILL not being enough. You can’t even stay established anymore, if you’re not constantly putting out content, you fall to nothing again and have to start from scratch.

Your competition as a red pilled man, are other men armed with this knowledge, and it will get harder as time goes on with more men are forced to adapt this way of thinking or give up entirely. The new system forces you to constantly adapt faster, and better than all of your peers, or die instantly. There is no rest, no reprieve, no time to catch your breath, either you constantly innovate and improve on the new or you simply don’t eat. I cannot understand how this can keep up when this new “enlightened” era leaves the majority of the male sex in the dumpster.

That being said, without men such as you or Dalrock, established constant fonts of content for this, the kind of thing men need to hear, there will be no direction for men in the coming years. Yes, someone might come along eventually to replace you and the groups you represent, the thought even, but the men like you are very much buoys and lighthouses to keep those of us drifting in the digital age’s ocean from sinking. Without that, we’re all absolutely lost. Without guys like you, it’ll be even harder to aggregate that information and even try to compete or establish relevance. So the destruction of Dalrock’s work means setting those of us who wish to live and fight for a better life back several years, which none of us can afford. Many of us have learned partly, or greatly from you and men like you, whether that’s connecting the dots or having the entire mind opened. So wether or not he wants to delete everything, his work must press on for every one of us who wants a chance to survive in this.

While I’m flattered to be considered one of the pioneers of understanding intersexual dynamics from Red Pill perspective, I can entirely relate with the sentiment of perpetual vigilance. “If [insert male celebrity] can’t make it in today’s sexual marketplace with today’s women then what hope does the average guy have?” is a common MGTOW refrain. I understand men’s desire to just throw in the towel and accept one’s sexless fate. We now live in a Global Sexual Marketplace. The old order rules for the localized sexual marketplace that the last 3 generations of men still expect to work for them today are a thing of the past. And this is only one symptom of the rapid expansion of technology and its effect on our cultural narratives.

For all the alarms we’d like to raise about humans’ genetically engineering future generations of humans, the effects of the meta-scale social engineering experiment that is gynocentrism are already here. Men have always formed adaptations to the realities of solving their reproductive problems, but never have a generation of men had to adapt to so rapidly a changing environment. And it’s only going to get more complex as we move forward.

Today’s men have few options available to them in our present state. Most of us will continue to keep pace and attempt to see the signs of ways to best advantage what comes at us in the sexual marketplace, and really life in general, until we can no longer keep up. Evolve or die. Keep pace with the trends and stay sharp enough to look ahead and leverage what you can based on an objective assessment of what human beings really are. Stay sharp until you no longer can. Hopefully, if you’ve wisely conserved and protected your resources during that time you’ll have some security until you die. If not, then you can expect to fall prey to the next generation of vultures who see your nest egg as their source of revenue.

Or you can give up. You can do just what’s necessary to survive in a system that passed you by and console yourself with complaining about how degenerate and unfair it is. And you’ll be right on both counts because that’s where you are. Old order thinking is very comforting, and it will be until there are no more old order thinkers – replaced by a succeeding generation of new order thinkers who themselves will be swept aside by new order thinkers.

More and more we’re going to see a return to the old order religions, metaphysics and tribalism as the generations that cannot keep pace with human advancement seek meaning and consolation. As a result we’ll also see a new virtue signaling and ego-investments in the power of the self, freewill and mindful consciousness. The Trad-Cons of today are already here and the more ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ social justice adherents apply their own brand of magical thinking, but for the same reasons. The effect is the same – the retreat from competing in a globalizing system that, sooner or later, will outpace us all.

And like all other aspects of this rapid advancement, even this retreating demographic will be coopted and commercialized by savvy ‘players’ who are still keeping pace. Formalizing the retreaters, organizing them, catering to their idiosyncrasies, all will be big business for those who learn to sell consolation (if not hope) to those who think they’ll never keep up.

Adrian and Jeremy Osborne live in the Danube Arcology. Both are current employees of the Danube Corporation. They’re entitled to a The Smartment™: a product of the Danube Corporate Family.

This is truly depressing.

Yesterday Dalrock announced that he’s stepping away from his blog. Not only that, but he’s contemplating deleting the blog and over 10 years of what can only be described as seminal work in explaining contemporary Christianity from a Red Pill perspective.

I’m not sure what prompted this decision. I want to chalk it up to burnout, but I’m afraid that doesn’t explain the desire to erase a body of work of Dalrock’s magnitude. Everyone gets burned-out at some stage and 10+ years is a long time to sustain a blog that’s as well-thought as Dalrock’s.

I’m talking with Dal via email now and I’m trying to make sense of this decision. Several people have already begun to archive the ‘best of’ Dalrock for posterities sake, but I’m not sure this aligns with his desire to remove his work entirely.

I’ve been friends with Dalrock for 10 years and it’s no exaggeration to say that no one has done more seminal work on examining Red Pill intersexual dynamics in the context of mainstream Christianity than Dal. His blog has been the go-to place for discussing the Red Pill within a framework of Christian convictions for as long as I’ve been blogging. In fact, we both began blogging at around the same time and we used bounce ideas off each other on the old RooshV forums in a private discussion sub Roosh himself had set up for the likes of myself, Dalrock, Roissy (for a brief time) and various other Manosphere notables of that time.

When I first launched this blog I gave serious consideration to include some section or dedicated space to issues of Red Pill awareness and how religion (Christianity in main) is intertwined in it. I gave up on that idea in the early days of The Rational Male because Dalrock had so thoroughly covered what I knew then would be a necessary part of what was becoming the “manosphere“. And to be completely honest, Dalrock did it better than I had the time to invest in making it worthwhile. So I stuck to my policy of never discussing religion (or politics or race) in specific unless it crossed over into intersexual dynamics.

In these 10 years the one forum or commentariat that I participated in with regularity was Dalrock’s comment sections. I would relate the ideas he was developing to Red Pill concepts and he in turn would use my ideas to better illustrate what he was seeing transpire in Christian dating, Christian marriages, romantic/chivalric idealism and secularism transforming intersexual dynamics in a Christian context. A lot of this came to a head when he (and I) began challenging a new generation of ‘masculinity pastors’ and their own misguided ideals, and their efforts to turn the Manosphere into their pet ministries. It’s these grifters who’ll be toasting the demise of Dalrock’s blog the loudest this weekend.

When I began work on my upcoming 4th book about the Red Pill and religion my first impulse was to coauthor it with Dalrock. I asked him more than once to consider going in on the book with me, but his desire for privacy and anonymity had him decline my requests. Instead I asked if he (and various other men I respect in the christo-red pill community) would be someone I could quote and consult for the book. This he agreed to. In the new book I quote Dal’s blog quite a bit; particularly with regard to scripture and his concepts of marriage and child rearing in our brave new world of gynocentrism.

Dalrock filled a unique position in the ‘sphere. He more than myself has always been a thorn in the side of Trad-Cons & Red Pill Pastors (Warhorn) and their efforts to force-fit their old order beliefs into what the Red Pill was making more and more Christian men aware of. The Red Pill has never been a threat to faith, but it has been a threat to men who’ve built social and personal frameworks around a church culture that validates their Blue Pill conditioned lifestyles. If Rollo Tomassi points out how the Feminine Imperative has replaced the Holy Spirit in contemporary church culture and doctrine, well, he’s just a sinning PUA who can be dismissed. But if Dalrock rips back the veneer of ‘Christian Kosher’ Feminism that pervades the modern church, that’s when these guys have to do their homework.

All that’s gone now. And, potentially, all of that work is at risk of being deleted. All of the well-thought articles that held feet to fire and challenged an increasingly more feminized church (and their male feminist ‘christian’ apologists) to seriously look at itself are going away. And as I said, I’m sure the grifters are rejoicing and seeing it as a sure sign that God is at work in the Manosphere.

Blogs are Dead

I’m wondering if the age of blogging is at an end. 12 years ago blogs were the way to express ideas to a wider audience. Twitter and most of the social media we take for granted today was around, but it was certainly less endemic as it is now. Hell, even YouTube was still privately owned back then. If you wanted to build an online media brand you had to really believe in what you were doing to make the effort worthwhile. Blogging has always been a labor of love. That’s especially true today because everyone on social media today is their own Brand of Me. If all you do it curate an Instagram account with no other function than to show off how great a life you live, congratulations, you are your brand. It’s second nature to us now, but it used to take a lot more effort to relate your digital consciousness to an audience. That was what you used to blog for.

Now, even the most basic social media accounts can be ‘influencers‘. In fact it’s become so endemic that big name brands and their social media PR specialists have figured out that tween-age girls like to think of themselves as ‘micro-influencers’ and “hire” them to represent their brands for as little as a 30% discount on the product itself. As I mentioned in last week’s post, the barrier to entry has been reduced to almost nothing these days. But that ‘nothing’ barrier removes the process necessary to really develop one’s passions, or develop what one thinks about their beliefs. Content is king, but just calling it “content” reduces passions and ideas to a commodity. Are you a content provider or are you an ideas person?

The commodification of ideas, beliefs, imagination, creativity, etc. is really where this ‘sphere and countless others are heading. It’s not hard to start an online brand. Drop-shippers are all basically selling the same Chinese product, but the brand, the logo, the competition is all just a popularity contest now. Want to be a Red Pill dating/life coach? Just read passages from The Rational Male verbatim on a 5 minute video shot on your iPhone 7 and call it your original work. It’s not plagiarism, it’s content deliverables, right?

The easier things are to produce, the more real creativity suffers. Assuming most people in the future actually have original content to deliver, the process also makes them beholden to prioritize the production over the actual product. Blogs are not very good at that kind of prioritization. I was always amazed at how Roissy/Heartiste could produce a blog post a day right up until ‘his’ deplatforming last year. Most of those daily posts were just current event filler crap and C&P’ed comments from his threads, but in between it all there were the occasional strokes of genius. And those genius posts became fewer and fewer in the last 4 years.

I’ve never posted for the sake of posting. Traffic has never been my priority on this blog. Neither has monetization. The message of this blog and my thoughts have always taken precedent. In almost 10 years I’ve never written an essays for an audience. I put forth what I think needs to be considered and hopefully people can use that information to construct a better way of living with it. But in the coming decade pandering to an audiences’ sensibilities will be the only thing most content producers will focus. Audience engagement and content providing is already trumping any real discourse.

And this is the real hard thing to accept about Dalrock’s retirement and deleting himself; it’s 10+ years of real, passionate, ideas and necessary debate that’s been instrumental for men in understanding the state of Christianity, church culture, Red Pill awareness and so many other related issues:

When I think of the wholesale destruction of Dalrock’s work I’m reminded of how violent members of a conquering tribe/nation/religion are prone to destroy the artistic and intellectual works of the society they’ve overthrown. The first order of business is to erase the art, the ideas, the ‘gods’ of the defeated tribe, or to plagiarize the best of it and erase the rest. Burn the books, destroy the symbols, appropriate and assimilate the ideas; in the end it’s an indictment of the one who’s doing the erasing. I have no doubt that once Dalrock’s work is gone there will be ‘grave robbers’ lining up to distort what he built to fit their own narratives and provide them with content to call their own.

And all for what? Roosh has decided to erase himself recently as well. All the work he created that was so influential in the ‘sphere, now that’s traded for a new kind of nihilism. And all the usual moralist suck ups are ready to see him as the Prodigal Son. See? We were right all along. Our faith is validated and confirmed! But all the same problems that brought us to questioning that faith are still where we left them. Only now there’s no one left to point out their inconsistencies. No one’s left to identify the Blue Pill conditioning that’s prompted so many men to leave the churches. No one’s left to call bullshit! Only those grave robbers are left; the same guys who’ve been apologizing for never understanding the Blue Pill or their compromised masculinity because their faith and existence depends on it.

Blogs are dead. Long live The Rational Male.

Just to allay any concerns, no, I’m not shuttering this blog. I’m still going to be writing here and elsewhere. I’m not unpublishing anything. Maybe blogs are now a dead media, but I do my best thinking here. And yes, I fully expect some ‘coaches’ will be lifting my material to fulfill their content quotas. Just be sure to remind them where they’re sourcing it from whenever possible.

I will apologize for not posting as consistently as I have in the past, but this is mostly because I’ve been focusing on the latest book. Like I said, I don’t post for the sake of posting. I craft my essays and I don’t publish them until I think I’ve stated what I needed to state.

The Old Order

I can remember a time back in the 1980s when I would visit my mother for a weekend and she’d insist my brother and I go to her church on Sundays. At this point in her life she was very much an Evangelical Christian. I would go with her because my mom’s side of the family had always been the religious side, and that was just part of who my mom was. I did have a basic faith in God and Christianity at the time, but my father was a card carrying atheist (and nominal Unitarian) for his whole life, so I had a pretty eclectic religious education when I was a teenager.

My father was a skeptic by nature and a lot of my own questioning nature was indirectly influenced by him. I can remember going to my mom’s church and suffering through the worship music to get to the sermon. I actually enjoyed the sermons because they gave me something to chew on intellectually. Not that the 15 year old Rollo was much of a thinker at that time, but I always had basic questions for these guys after the speech. When I got a bit older, in my early 20s, I started wondering who these ‘pastors’ really were as people and what made them qualified to deliver sermons. I really wanted to talk with these guys, but doing so meant I had to sit through their hard sell about how Jesus had saved them from themselves. I always thought this was kind of silly considering most of these guys weren’t much older than me. How hard a life could these guys really have lived by 25?

Most of these pastors weren’t used to was really having to engage much with their congregations beyond what was required of them to maintain appearances. I don’t mean that they were inaccessible; most of them had something outside of church that kept them involved with people. It’s that prior to the internet the way a pastor, or a church, did business usually centered on a man delivering a message (presumedly inspired by God) and then shaking hands with the faithful after the sermon was over as they filed out the door. End of sermon. End of discussion. 

If you wanted to talk about the sermon, or, heaven forbid, criticize the interpretation or message in some way that was a conversation relegated to your family, or perhaps a home group discussion. Assuming you even were in a home group or had a few peers you could discuss it with, you always risked running afoul of someone whose ego-investments in his/her faith would put them on edge by questioning it. The old order of religion, not just Christianity, used to be based on respecting the man delivering that message as God’s ordained spokesman, or reading whatever book he might’ve published, processing it yourself or with a handful of other believers, sussing things out and waiting for the next message on the next Sunday. There was very little engagement about articles of faith or doctrine unless you were a guy on the inside.

All of this changed with the advent of the internet and the globalization of mass media and communication.

Today, there’s hardly a pastor (mainstream or obscure) who doesn’t have a blog or a YouTube channel on which he (or she) contemplates his last/next sermon. In the 80s-90s even the most introspective religious leader would have only a handful of people to bounce ideas off, but today a sermon is almost focus grouped before the guy walks up to the pulpit on a Sunday. Meanwhile, that same pastor is engaged on two or three social media accounts discussing everything from religion, to politics, to praying for his favorite NFL team to make the playoffs.

The old order of how religion was done has given way to a new, globalized process of how we do religion. Today anyone, believer or not, has access to that pastor on a moments notice. Didn’t like the message? Thought the interpretation was inaccurate? You can tell him on his blog’s comment thread or fire off a tweet to start a discussion about it before he can even drive home from church. 

This is the age of globalized engagement – and this new paradigm is fundamentally altering old order institutions. What the Guttenburg press did for religion by publishing the Bible for the masses, now the internet has done for the old order way in which people can engage with the process of their beliefs – and not just religious belief.

The New Enlightenment

February of last year I wrote an essay about the Global Sexual Marketplace. In that post I described how globalization isn’t just about economics or demographics – globalization also applies to intersexual dynamics. Gone are the days when a young man or young woman could expect to meet one of the handful of eligible, single people in their high school, small town or limited social circle to pair off and start a family with. In the old order young people were stuck with the choices of a limited Local sexual marketplace. Today, with our instant, robust forms of communication, a worldwide sexual marketplace has now opened up the romantic prospects of virtually anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection. Don’t like your prospects in your hometown? Now there’s a whole world of men and women waiting to meet you. The old order of intersexual dynamics has fundamentally shifted and all in less than 20 years.

The rapidity of this shift is what I believe is at the root of the problems that surround the new way of doing the old order institutions. As a global society we are still reluctant to let go of the falsehoods of those old order institutions; even in light of the new order evidences and data collected as a result of this unprecedented access. While we attempt to reconcile our old order beliefs with what a global information network confronts them with, we cling evermore tightly to what we thought we knew because it formed the foundation of who we are. And as we try to make sense of it we are presented with both true and false narratives that pander to the fact that this information and technology is progressing at a rate that most human beings’ minds were never evolved to keep pace with.

My good friend Aaron Clarey (Captain Capitalism) recently published a tour de force article on women entering into and dominating most of the future of Corporate America, and how men ought to welcome this change. It’s a great post, so definitely go read the whole thing, but after I’d finished it I was struck with the idea that what Clarey was on to was describing an old order institution (Corporate America) and how we still perceived it from an old order understanding. On the surface it seems counterintuitive to think of women assuming authority over what was the Male Space of Corporate Culture as a good thing. Cap was being facetious for the whole thing, but his point was really this: women have coveted the reigns of Corporate America for a long time now, but their feminist thirst for power (Fempowerment) is based on an old order understanding of what Corporate America really is, or will eventually become. Like a debutant late to the party, the status and prestige that the Feminine Imperative sells women to believe is inherent in Corporate America is all old order bullshit. So, yeah, have at it ladies. The information age has stripped back the curtains on the Corporate America you assumed all that student debt to participate in.

Academia is another area in which this old order vs. new enlightenment understanding is taking place. Prior to 2000 if you heard a particular professor had a reputation for being tough, you had to get it from a third party. Today we have rate-the-professor.com or something similar. Now you can see how well a teacher performed from students who took their classes from a decade ago. 

GlassCeiling.com is an aggregate of current and ex employees rating the work environment of damn near any company today. Yelp.com does something similar to a businesses performance. And as a result most of these companies hire specialized personnel to maintain their online reputations – and this is the paranoia that comes from presuming old order impressions of a company are relevant in a new order paradigm.

Analog Thinking vs. Digital Thinking

“In the future, everything that can be digital will be digital.” 

I’m not sure who originated this quote, but I can remember it being tossed around in graphic design circles as early as 1993. Back then the print industry was transitioning to a digital way of production. Adobe Photoshop was at version 3.0 (when I started using it) and QuarkXpress was revolutionizing pagination for pretty much every publication at the time. The writing was on the wall. I was fortunate to be coming into my career on the cusp of the old order traditional ways of creating ads and publications (stat cameras and pasteup galleys) and learning their digital equivalents in design applications. I had to get real good, real quick, not only in terms of understanding the hardware, software and networking, but also in using it to create effective, creative, advertising. A lot of my contemporaries struggled with this transition. My mentors in design were old school designers. They taught me a lot with respect to effective advertising and design, but they couldn’t teach me the new tech that was changing every 6-8 months. Whereas in the old order a design agency only focused on print media and employed a full complement of professionals for each aspect of production (photography, typography, pasteup, pressmen, etc.) now I was responsible for all of these jobs and more to come as the internet opened up more new media to desktop publishers like me.

I had to get real good, real fast, and maintain my creative edge all while expanding into more and more new areas and methods of producing what I do. The old order designers either adapted or went extinct. Since the early 90s this narrative has played out across countless professions and trades. I can remember listening to Lars Ulrich from Metallica complain about how Napster’s peer-to-peer file sharing of MP3s was going to be the death of the music industry. The old order musicians weren’t ready to accept the realities of “everything that can be digital will be digital”.

Analog business models, analog thinking, that have formed the basis of who we are as a society are still in place today. In some ways we can force-fit those old order ideas into our new order digital reality, but eventually that old order thinking reveals its age. College professors, church pastors, your 9-5 corporate American cubicle supervisor, the self-help guru you think has some sort of relevance, the old pop psychologist whose heyday was in the last millennium, all these personalities and an endless number more are all struggling to stay relevant against the information that the new order of 2020 confronts them with.

It’s not that these people are luddites. They embrace the technology and the new means of disseminating their craft, their ideas, their ideologies, in the digital age. It’s that their thinking is still mired in the analog age – an age in which ideas were formed on information that was limited to what generations that came before could gather with the means they had available to them then. The ideas of an analog age are what we’re presently trying to force-fit into the new understanding presented to us by this digital age. We enjoy the luxuries, sensations and entertainment that the digital affords us, but we immerse ourselves in it without realizing how our old order thinking defines why we enjoy it. Our analog selves, the product of millennia of evolution, still defines what our digital selves are without realizing the dangers inherent in our engaging with it. As such we get digital addictions – pornography, social media, ‘engagement’ – and we make our analog selves dependent on a digital economy.

How many YouTube content producers rely on their ’side hustle’ revenue to pay their bills today? How many self-published authors have quit their day jobs to write for their new employer, Amazon, today (Amazon owns 86% of the publishing market today). How many former cubicle workers decided it was more lucrative to start an internet business than continue slaving away at a corporate gig that only made their bosses rich? Today, we’ll readily shift to the digital world to sustain us financially – in the end we don’t have much choice – but it’s the old order thinking that pervades this new “reality” and causes problems.

The number one way that couples meet, since 2005, is online. Via Tinder or Match or other net based ways. Gone are the days of boy-meets-girl, eyes fixed on the other across a crowded high school gym dance floor. Gone are the days of meeting your “bride” at church camp. Those are old order romanticisms, and ones that we still want to force fit back into our new order reality. We think in analog, but we live in digital.

Barriers to Entry

Another thing I did at age 15 was play a lot of guitar. My teenage, MTV fueled, mind really had a love for music. The heavier the better. But the barrier to becoming a “Guitar God” like my heroes was something that was very prohibitive at that time. If you wanted to get good; good enough to actually get a band going, you had to seek out a guitar instructor at the local music store who hopefully shared your taste in music. Beyond a once-a-week, 1-hour lesson, you had no other means of learning an instrument than practicing on your own, buying a book of guitar tablature from the music store, or endlessly wearing down a cassette tape by going back over the song you wanted to learn again and again. And all this was the process of learning to play just a song you liked. I had to learn how to compose a song, write some lyrics, form a band, learn to promote it, and somehow figure out how to scrape up enough money to record a demo in a music studio. The barrier to entry was very steep. You had to love the art so much that you would dedicate a good portion of your life to mastering it.

Today I can go on YouTube and find a 9 year old girl in a country I’ve never heard of before play Eruption by Eddie Van Halen, note for note, because she learned it from another YouTube “content provider”. We have far more resources to understand how to be competent in, if not master, virtually anything today than at any other time in history. We have access to the entire world’s aggregate of information in a device that fits in our pocket.

In his book, Mastery, Robert Greene describes how the barriers to entry into previously prohibitive arenas of life are gone in the digital age. And just like the music industry of the 70s through the 90s, old order industries and institutions have had to cope with the restructuring of their businesses and lifestyles as new generations of digital savvy (if not digital thinking) people become competent in, sometimes master, what took them decades of perseverance to master themselves. What we see in this shift is the Barons of the old order media, industries and institutions  – who jealously guarded their own knowledge-base – attempting to force-fit their analog thinking into a digital mold.

As a result, conflicts arise. When Über revolutionized the idea of ride-sharing in the digital age, the old order taxi companies enlisted every legal tool in their arsenal to fight the inevitability of their old revenue model disappearing. We see the same scenario play out in everything that can be digital becoming digital now. Even the old order institutions that built their mastery and prosperity on a successful pivot to the digital (the early dot coms) are finding that even newer aspects of the digital now threaten the successes of that initial pivot.

Content is King

Mastery is now easier to attain than at any other time in human history. The old order, analog thinking masters strictly limited teaching their secrets to anyone but the most worthy of apprentices. Those apprentices had to had the most serious dedication to their interests and would likely do menial tasks for much of their apprenticeships just to be in the presence of their mentors. That hard-won mastery is gone in the digital age. That’s not to say that practice and dedication aren’t still necessary for mastery today, but the barriers are largely removed. As a result, we are now encountering a generation of self-appointed “masters” in arenas wherein previously the title of that position of mastery implied respectability. Again, old order thinking predisposes us to believe that if a self-declared master online grants himself a title we should presume he “did the work” to earn that title.

For all this easy access to competency, mastery, information-based skills, what we find lacking is real, valuable content. It’s great that we have access to the tool boxes of old order masters, but what do we build with those tools? Thus far, not very much. Usually those tools build rehashes of old order ideas to be sold as something novel in the digital age. When I’m critical of the Success Porn grifters of this digital age, what I’m really drawing attention to is the reselling of old order, tired ideals. Motivational speakers, new age gurus, self-help “coaches” of today, are really only selling the same old order thinking in a more convenient, more easily disseminated digital method. The content is old. The religion is old. The thinking is old, and it’s thinking that is still firmly rooted in an old order understanding of how the world ought to be based on the limited information set available to the people creating it at that time.

The ease of the digital new order makes us lazy. For all of the access we have now, for all of the information we have, we’ve never been more unmotivated. The process of mastery, the process and dedication needed to attain it, used to contribute to the creative impetus required to use it. Today we’ve never been less creative in our thinking. It’s why we keep returning to old order stories and movie franchises. We just retell the same old order thinking stories in more advanced and colorful ways with the technology of the digital order. But we just repeat ourselves; or we add some social justice twist to stories that were timeless because the art took precedence over any other consideration.

The Red Pill

In the earliest days of the seduction community the forums that sprang up around men looking to get laid was an extension of this old order vs. new order thinking. The internet and conversation forums dedicated to Game, pickup artistry and dating were a predictable application of attempting to solve old order problems (getting laid) with new order information. Men in particular wanted to figure this out, so, as expected, they would coalesce and compare notes across the planet, each sharing their personal experiences with other men. Then further combining that experience with data available from psychology, anthropology, sociology, evolutionary theory and dozens of other related fields of study to provide a global consortium of men with a more accurate database on intersexual dynamics than they’d ever had available to them in any prior era.

Up to this point (I estimate 2001 or so) men had to figure out the dynamics between themselves and what women were becoming since the Sexual Revolution. And most of that “figuring it out” was based on limited information, based on old order thinking. The old challenges of understanding ourselves doesn’t change, but the way we think about those challenges is in constant flux; and that changing has become increasingly more rapid in a global age.

With that change comes conflict with the old order thinking. In terms of the Red Pill, old order thinking manifests itself as Purple Pill regressiveness. Often times the new Red Pill awareness conflicts with the old order thinking that present generations have based their existences on. They refuse to acknowledge the data we have access to now that we didn’t when they were forming beliefs and ideals that would form their personalities and ego-investments. Yes, there are certain timeless truths, but we must hold “common sense” to the same scrutiny we would apply to new ideas in this age. When I identify a person or a concept as Purple Pill this is what I mean by it; usually, it is an old order ideal being force fit to conform to align with new order data. 

We desperately want our belief sets, our ideals, to be confirmed by the information we have access to in the digital age. Sometimes this does happen and we feel validated for it, but more often we see that our efforts in building a life according to the old social contract or an old order way of understanding ourselves and the world is invalidated. And this is what either builds us up anew or forces us into stasis in our lives.

The Red Pill has been redefined in many ways on many occasions over the past 20 years to fit the sensibilities of people who really want to give a new validity to whatever pet ideology they think it should apply to. Most of these people have no business calling anything “red pill”, but they’re attracted to the concept as a proxy term for ’truth’. 

Initially, in the earliest days of the SoSuave Forums, we used the Matrix analogy to describe how a guy who still believed and still behaved according to his old order understanding (his conditioning) of intersexual dynamics was stuck in his ignorance. The old way of thinking about women – that up to that point was based on limited and largely inaccurate information – was still what a Blue Pill guy would accept as reality. It required a guy to “unplug” himself from that old order-informed way of thinking and transition to a new awareness of intersexual dynamics. Hopefully that guy could live a better life (even save his own life) by using the information in that new order tool box. Thus, we have the Red Pill analogy, but what the Red Pill really describes is exactly the casting off of an old order ignorance in favor of a new order thinking predicated on information we were limited from in prior ages.

We are entering a new, digital Age of Enlightenment. I know a lot of the Manosphere would tell us we’re heading for a new Dark Ages of degeneracy and decay. Enjoy the decline, right? If this is true and we are spiraling to more ignorance, depravity and superstition on a now globalized scale it will be the result of not changing our ways of thinking according to the new data we have access to today. It’s never been easier to become what we want to become today, but with that facility comes lethargy, a lack of creativity and insight, and self-gratifying sedation. Just because we’ve been enlightened by this new, globalizing knowledge-base doesn’t mean we know how to apply it.

If we do enter a decline it will be the result of an inability to unplug from a comforting old order way of thinking.

This essay is from an abridged preview of my upcoming book The Rational Male – Religion.

Respect comes very cheap today. In the last essay i made the case that there are gendered forms of Respect, each with their gendered understanding of what a universal idea of respect should entail. The same misunderstanding applies to our gendered concepts of Love; each sex presumes the other accepts and acknowledges their own ideals about love – men approaching love from outwardly expressed idealism, while women’s is rooted in inwardly (though increasingly outwardly) expressed opportunism.

For the most part this division of approaches to Love is something both sexes hold personally, and unless that person is an artist or a poet the expression of that approach to love is something we reserve for those we come to love. Love, like religion, is usually something we have a personal belief about, but it’s generally something we don’t broadcast to those we don’t love.

Respect is different. Our ideas of what defines respect is something we will broadcast because that ideal for Respect is something that’s socially expedient in getting the things we want. The first time I was told, “You don’t respect women!” was when I was 19. Even then, in my Blue Pill delusions, I saw a contradiction. The women (and sometimes men) who were telling me I didn’t Respect women were almost always after something. No one tells that you ought to be more respectful because they want you to be a better person, nor are you corrected because the ideal of respect was even a primary concern. No, people tell you to show respect when they want something or they have an interested invested in you deferring respect to the person or thing they believe you ought to be paying respect to.

Pay Tribute or Pay Respect?

In fact, the idea that one ought to “pay” respect to something or someone else really sets the context for the utility that Respect represents to them. You “owe” respect to an ephemeral ideal in the same way you “pay your dues”, like a personal debt that someone insists you owe because you want to be reverent of the concept of Respect. And this basis for Respect is why I say Respect has been cheapened today.

Even when I was 19 and women would attempt to shame me into deference to women with Respect, I saw the contradiction between women and men’s concepts of Respect. My male idea of Respect was one of the few things my father had imparted to me. So, naturally, I questioned the idea, “What do women actually do that’s worthy of my respect?” Respect was earned. Lord knows I hadn’t done much to deserve anyone’s respect at 19, but I did know that deeds and acts were something a man had to do to gain respect – and maybe somewhere along the way acquire integrity (another container word). My smart ass response was “I don’t know any women who deserve my respect.” And that was true, but every Blue Pill conditioned guy I knew then would tell me, “You’ll never get girls to like you with that attitude mister.”

So, basically, if I wanted a girl to be intimate with me I had to feign respect for her because she’s a girl? The Blue Pill teaches men, yes, and the better you are at pretending it the more a woman will appreciate you. This is where the debasement of Respect (as an ideal) in our feminine-primary social order begins. Unmerited respect for women only reinforces the Women are, Men must become principle. Men must become, men must qualify, men must perform. As such, male respect is something that is almost always in flux. Women’s respect just is, and thereby female respect is something more static.

Respect for the Sake of Respect

In a gynocentric society the predominant definition of respect, the one that is transferred to virtually all aspects of that social order, is the female concept. Automatic, deferential, but ultimately unmerited respect simply for being – female respect – is considered a useful tool, but cheapens the ideal of respect and what makes a person respectable.

When I outlined the difference between male and female concepts of Love, one of the first things men do is get indignant. They don’t like the idea that women don’t share their own ‘love for the sake of love’ idealism. My point was that women “fundamentally lack the capacity to love a man in the way he thinks should be possible for her.” This is difficult for a Blue Pill conditioned guy to wrap his head around. Much of who they are was built on the premised goal that women will “love him as much as he loves her”, so to suggest that this isn’t possible for him means that “women fundamentally lack a capacity to love men, period.” They conclude that if women cannot share his idealistic approach to Love then they cannot legitimately love him. His concept should be the only acceptable concept and therefor rejecting his concept is rejecting its legitimacy.

This same singleminded interpretation applies largely to women and their form of respect. If men would hold a woman to a merited, male, standard of respect, rather than a default deference to respecting her for no measurable reason, then those men don’t believe in Respect at all. It’s her way or it isn’t real.

Most men are afraid to appear disrespectful to women. This fear is compounded by the mass effect of a globalized sexual marketplace

When I was 19 I was concerned that I’d done something wrong. Why would women presume I didn’t respect them? I was perceived as a Jerk and I just knew that that wasn’t what women really wanted. I didn’t know it then, but this was a shaming tactic being used to keep me in line as a prospectively useful Beta. In a way I suppose it was a meta-shit test. An Alpha man wouldn’t care if women thought he was respectful. A sure sign a guy is Beta would be reflected in how he responds to being accused of disrespect of women (really ‘womankind‘).

In truth, a default respect for women is really worthless from a male perspective. I’m sure that just my typing this out will be enough to trigger most women, but if you are triggered, it’s more important to consider why you are. A default respect for females may seem like a socially correct perspective for an “upstanding leader of men” Blue Pill Alpha archetype, but it is men who adopt the attitude that women must qualify themselves to him who engender genuine respect among women.

Flipping the Respect Script

This is an important lesson in Game as well. One of the first things many of the old school PUAs would teach an AFC (Average Frustrated Chump) is to flip the script with respect to who is qualifying whom. The natural presumption for most Blue Pill men is that they must always qualify to a woman. Usually this entails proving his quality in various ways (buy her a drink, pay for dinner, carry the conversation, etc.), but the operative assumption is that she is the one whose Frame he is entering into. The PUA fundamental then was to flip this ‘natural‘ script; to get her to pursue him. In doing so, her subconscious confirms his high value – why else would she pursue? If a guy could cleverly tease this pursuit out of her it then creates a perpetuating feedback loop about him [until he fucks it up somehow by reverting to qualifying to her].

Flipping the qualification script with a woman presents one very difficult hurdle for the AFC: he must risk offending the social convention that tells him he must never disrespect a woman. This is where the larger, social, respect dynamic becomes apparent.

From a Beta male, Respect is cheap. Most Betas’ attention comes for free and is steeped in the idea that he must never upset the respect dynamic. But just like love, attention and interest, women don’t value Respect that is easily had. Too much circulation makes the price go down, and scarcity makes the price go up. We constantly tell men to make, and consider, themselves ‘the Prize‘, but to do this a man must risk offending a default female respect to shift the Frame to a default male respect. This is counterintuitive part of unplugging and learning Game.

That deference is what is expected. To respect women is common. What is uncommon is a lack of female respect. Therefor a default respectful deference is basic and plain to a woman. But it is the man whose respect a woman must earn who make the most significant impact and inspire the greatest emotional investment on her part. As I’ve stated in many essays, never deny a woman the satisfaction of believing she’s figured you out with her feminine intuition. Women expect a worthy Alpha to command respect amongst his peers, but also to expect her to earn his respect. And in her meriting it, she then holds a new respect for him.

Respect, as social dynamic, is an attempt to govern the terms of communication. Respect also has its utilities. It’s a rational for an easy dismissal of uncomfortable facts. For instance, Mansplaining presumes a lack of respect for women by a man who is trying to define what ought to constitute respect. It is a means of controlling a narrative. A “lack of respect” is an easy way to poison the well in any debate and also serves as the basis of a lot of straw man arguments.

Higher Love

Respect is defined by the party who decides what it is, and who should have it. In this way Respect is intimately linked with Frame, and since women’s form of respect is the socially predominant one today, the starting point of most intersexual exchanges begins with the presumption that a woman should control the Frame by means of a default, unearned respect. And to some hopelessly Blue Pill men who invariably mix that conditioning with religion, this respect then becomes a form of Reverence for the female.

In Part I of this series I dropped this line:

God is Love
[…] I’ve been exploring the way men and women idealize the concept of divine love from a god or some metaphysical source. Each sex has a gendered concept of love that they believe the other sex shares with them, but in fact doesn’t naturally come to without some education or experience.

To which a commenter left me this in the comments thread:

“God is love”. Rollo, this is just one more on the heap of things I am struggling with regards to my “christian faith”. I am very much looking forward to reading Alpha God and eventually your 4th book.

Unconditional love is the main message of the new testament. Could it be that Christianity is really that feminized not just by “the village” and feminized church today but actually? Could the New testament be a watering down of the old Jahve Religion? 

Zoltan

While I’m not planning on exploring Red Pill concepts of “unconditional love” on this blog, I will be picking apart the implications of how men and women’s differing concepts of love come to define, or set the understanding of an ideal of a ‘higher love’ (don’t sing the song, don’t sing the song,…).

So what does this have to do with Respect?

Everything if you consider the gender whose definition of what Respect should be is the socially predominant on at any point in history. Performance defines men’s existences. Performance determines respectability for men and earning one’s way into Heaven might be the highest form of respect, right?

More next week.

Thank you for your patience in my absence. I’ve been focusing intensely on the 4th book for the past 2 months and I will be for the foreseeable future. The good news is I’m ‘in the zone‘ so to speak. I have the ability to occasionally get myself into a flow state where an idea I was originally working on branches off into other ideas that I have to follow or else I risk losing the branch altogether.

This is just how my mind works. Regular viewers of my podcasts understand this in real-time. I can start off with a solid premise – often one I’ve been considering (repeating) since the early days – and as I’m making it I consider how it affects other ideas and I have to follow that thread. I know, it’s annoying sometimes, but I do my best to organize my thoughts once they’re all out on the table.

I do this in my ideation process when I’m writing too. Right now I’m looking at no fewer than eight notebooks (9 if you count my gym log) that I keep to return to when I’m exploring ideas. Two of these are full. The oldest I’ve had since my first book was published, but I keep returning to it because I scribbled down ideas regarding religion and the Red Pill back then. This was from an era when I was much more active on Dalrock’s blog and I was hammering things out with a lot of guys struggling with Red Pill awareness, and reconciling it with their religious convictions. It was then I came across an unpublished reconsideration of the concept of Respect. I titled it Respect Reconsidered with the intent of coming back to an essay I wrote in 2012 called Respect. This original essay was inspired by some of my earliest conversations on the venerable SoSuave forums circa 2002-2010. I still think it holds up pretty well, but my reinterest in the topic of respect has come anew from my working on this fourth book.

So, at the risk of giving away a little bit of book 4, I’m going to delve into the concept of respect today.

God is Love?

Book 4 is about squaring Red Pill praxeology (deal with it) with religion. As a part of this I’ve had to re-outline my original premise on Love and how men and women approach love from different concepts. I wont bore you with reiterating it here (there’s a whole category on love in the side bar), but suffice to say that men and women come to love, and have an understanding of love, based on gendered ideals that are specific to our biological and psychological differences as men and women. Most intersexual conflicts between men and women are rooted in the presumption of a mutual, commonly understood concept of what love is to both sexes. The truth is men and women hold differing mental models of what legitimate “real” love means to them. Each sex arrives at this understanding as a result of their experience as a man or a woman, and then molded by outside influences and innate idealism.

This was an important distinction to consider while I’ve been exploring the way men and women idealize the concept of divine love from a god or some metaphysical source. Each sex has a gendered concept of love that they believe the other sex shares with them, but in fact doesn’t naturally come to without some education or experience. It’s this presumption and misunderstanding that is the source of conflict between men and women and how they expect the other to Just Get It with respect to how they’d have the other sex love them.

But if men and women have different, innately gendered concepts of love is it possible that there are other higher concepts they might not share the same ideas about, but presumes the other sex just gets? I believe so, and Respect is at the top of the list of those higher concepts.

Respect is earned?

When I was having my now infamous discussion with Andrew Tate a month ago we (quite unintentionally) hit upon the concept of respect and how men and women view it differently. A lot of my female viewers – particularly the newer female viewers – despised the truths that we were discussing about the nature of women:

“No woman would ever agree to ‘share a hot Alpha’! Any woman who would must not respect herself.”

“No woman wants to have sex with a guy she doesn’t respect! If she’s not fucking you with any real desire it’s because she doesn’t respect the guy she’s with.”

“You can’t expect a woman to submit to a man she doesn’t respect.”

These were a few of the comments and responses that got me thinking; Respect is an idea that men and women hold different concepts of as a result of our innate sexual differences. The criteria that would prompt respect in a woman is not the same that prompts it in a man.

A lot gets made about mutual respect being a keystone of a good relationship. It’s one of those sayings like “Open communication is the basis of a healthy relationship” or “Relationship take a lot of work.” Respect is another truism that sounds right. Because it’s so ambiguous, and it’s generally only legitimized according to one sex, it’s easy (mostly for women) to use a “lack of respect” as leverage or an alibi to excuse behavior or a misunderstanding between men and women.

The concept of respect today is cheap. We use it far too readily to explain away why we, or someone we identify with did what they did. We use a convenient, subjective understanding of respect as a qualifier for describing what we agree or disagree with. And we use this cheapened “respect” to grade a person’s integrity according to what we think others should agree or disagree with – usually by how it aligns with our own interests.

Male Respect is not the same as Female Respect

The popular concept is that Respect is something that should be a default setting. People deserve respect. Disrespecting someone, or ambiguously implying a ‘dis‘ might be enough to get your ass kicked. Today’s globalized concept of respect is the subjective female concept – respect is always on. This is a respect based on ‘grace‘, it just is, and it should be freely given to discourage the idea that anyone is greater or lesser than another. We all deserve respect is very much a collectivist form of respect.

At first I thought that maybe Respect was something being confused with common courtesy, but no. There are two main dictionary definitions of what respect is, and this is where we will see the gendered difference between these concepts:

Respect

1. A feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.

2. Due regard for the feelings, wishes, rights, or traditions of others.

Courtesy

1. The showing of politeness in one’s attitude and behavior toward others.

Courtesy and the feminine form of Respect (2.) are very similar. Today’s global respect is rooted in the feminine form. I’ll explain this below, but a default respect based on race, gender, sexual orientation, culture, religion and other aspects of human diversity is the feminine concept; unearned and by default always ‘on’.

Women just are. Men must become.

This is an old Manosphere maxim. I’ve used it many times to describe the male Burden of Performance. To be a human male is to exist in a dominance hierarchy until your last day. Men must perform. In fact, it is part of our inborn nature to want to perform for women because it is the most deductive way to solve men’s reproductive problem. When a young boy sees a pretty girl for the first time his natural impulse is to find a way to draw her attention. Ride a wheelie down the street on his bicycle or some other, usually risk taking, feat to prove physical prowess and a capture her attention. Most male animals do some form of this showing off to get a female interested in eventually breeding with him. The PUA concept of Peacocking and why it’s effective finds its roots in this dynamic. Call that being a Dancing Monkey if you like, but performance comes naturally to men.

Competence, physical prowess, creative intelligence, dominance, social proof and preselection are the metric by which we rate a man’s respectability. The Burden of Performance is not only about women determining who they’ll choose to mate with, it’s also about men’s merit-based ranking of respectability and admirability. This applies to all social interactions (family, career, military, athletics, etc.). It is a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements that makes a man respectable. How we define this respectability by context of cultural, moralistic or personal metrics is the topic for the next essay in this series.

Male Respect is for Male Space

Of course, this definition can apply to exceptional women, but this concept of respect is male in origin. This male form of respect is part of a male dominance hierarchy. Women can insist on being included in this definition, but it rarely works out in their favor – at least not in the same way that a default female form of respect works for women. One reason women (the Feminine Imperative) insists on assimilating Male Space is in order to restructure it to have access to this male form of respectability. The problem is that in restructuring that space to accommodate their deficits, women fundamentally alter the nature of that male form of respect.

TheWarrior Princess strong female lead mythology that Hollywood writers think is empowering to women isn’t believable because our hindbrains understand the deception that’s being played on it. We’re supposed to respect this fictitious archetype in a male form of respectability, but it falls short for us because 100,000 years of evolution prevents our hindbrains from suspending our disbelief.

We know what usually happens when women are called to measure up to a male Burden of Performance. Today, transgender male athletes competing and dominating in female-division sports are a sharp reminder of this performance-to-respect distinction in gender. The gynocentric element that squawks the loudest about gender being a social construct is the same element that complains about male athletes putting female athletes to shame in the same sport or activity while masquerading as female. As a result, we don’t respect men who pretend to be women, and then outclass them in competency, in order to appeal to a male form of performance-based respectability. Our hindbrains, men and women’s, reject the legitimacy of what we’re expected (by a gynocentric social order) to respect by merit.

Men earn no admiration from beating girls, but women always are afforded admiration for defeating men. Why? Because our hindbrain presumes a state of performance superiority on the part of men.

Female Respectability

Women’s respectability comes by default.

Respect by virtue of just being female is due to all women, irrespective of performance. In a gynocentric social order this form of respect is the common one applied to social forms of respect. I’m still on the fence as to whether common courtesy is a part of this form of respect. As I mentioned above, default courtesy and respect are due to any and all based on race, creed, religion, etc. This is the due regard for the feelings, wishes, rights, or traditions of others. So it could be that courtesy is the expression of this default respect when we’re talking about larger narratives of respect (race, religion, culture, etc.) In either instance, respect is unmerited and really cheapened in a feminine-primary context.

But for women, just to be a female is to be entitled to respect; and only in the circumstance of intra-sexual competition among women is this form of respect ever challenged. Default respect for women is utilitarian for virtually all women. The entitlement to respect is constantly leveraged for advantage and special dispensation among women with men.

Women just are, is the premise here. Female respectability is never merit based, though it can be lost if a woman is convinced that she “has no respect for herself” or if someone casts that woman as self-loathing, but this is only effective when it comes from other women. In a feminine-primary social order men can never challenge a woman’s respectability without the risk of incurring some social backlash or damage to his own performance-based respectability. And labels of sexist, misogynist and chauvinist await any man who would challenge the default respect that is due to women.

Chivalry, Virtue and Female Respectability

A lot of this impression is the result of the old social contract and men’s evolved instinct to protect women. This protector instinct will also be the topic of another essay, but suffice to say that the evolved imperative to protect women (sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive) crosses over into the chivalrous notion of protecting the honor of a lady. At various points in human history (western and eastern) this protector instinct has crossed over into societal practices. During the era of Courtly Love a woman’s virtue became something to defend – and by defending that virtue a man merited respect by earning a woman’s favor. I’ve detailed this dynamic in prior essays; the romanticized form of Chivalry was a means to female power in an epoch when the entire social order was effectively a Male Space. Romanticized Chivalry was the feminism of its time.

The Feminine Imperative understood the protector tendency in men and exploited it in the practices of courtly love or romantic love being elevated to a requisite criteria for male respectability. The social pedestalization of women that forms the basis of the old social contract we know today was started in the ideals of romanticized chivalry. A big part of men’s Burden of Performance under the old social contract was his dedication to protecting a woman’s honor if he himself was to be respectable in the male form of respect.

Feminists will of course bleat that “In the past women were treated like property“.

Yet at some point along the way, even while a woman was a man’s ‘property’ (arguable) she was still held above the male form of respect and a female form of respect became her due. Even in the old Patriarchal Abrahamic religions wives and most in-group women were held in high regard and served as role model archetypes for female respectability. The only way to really lose this due-respect was to be a prostitute or an adulterous woman – both bad bets for men’s parental investment trade-offs and ensuring his own paternity in the long run. Being a nag was also something a respectable woman would avoid, but the operative here is that, default respect for women didn’t require anything like the male Burden of Performance.

Respect Your Elders – “Okay, Boomer,…”

One last point to note is that respect for one’s elders used to be included in this default form of respectability. This is no longer the case today, at least for men. My theory is that by virtue of being older the presumption was one of attained wisdom. Maturity implies mastery, or at least it used to. So, a default respect for one’s elders entered into religious canon. Honor thy father and mother, for instance, is a reflection of this default respect.

But in today’s gloablizing social media marketplace being old is a weakness and a liability unless what makes that man respectable is relatable to his prior performance. And even then respect is just a courtesy if it appears at all. Default socialized respect for women is generally a given in gynocentrism, but mature men are held to the performance burden of young men, because we have such access to seeing this performance difference in real time today.

There is a similar questioning of respect based on a position of authority for men. School teachers, martial arts instructors, policemen, civil authorities and military officials are examples of this diminishing respect. There is a saying that even if you don’t respect the man you should respect the office, but today this is no longer the case. Position no longer indicates respectability the way it used to under the old social contract.

Next week, I’ll be publishing part two of this series.

Today’s essay was inspired by the lead image you see here and the subsequent exchange I had on Twitter about it. What you see here is a rather nebbish looking husband, I presume post-surgery, recovering from his vasectomy in bed. He is surrounded by cutesy post-it note jokes his wife left him (kind of like the notes your mom might put in your school lunch when you were a child) on a plethora of sugary snacks from the pantry.

The number of kids we’ll be having in the future – Zero

Forgive me if I Snicker

Sorry your dong got dinged

Good-bye to your swimmers

Mini Nonuts

Your berries got crunched

These are just a few of the ‘jokes’ his wife spent an awful lot of time creating.

Beta men and their wives joking about their vasectomies has become the meme du jour on all the usual social media sites where women congregate to appease their egos, gloss their girlfriends’ and commiserate about their fates of being wives and mothers. Before I dig in here I think I need to point out the utility that social media has evolved to serve in most women’s lives now. There was a time when a woman’s indignation needs could be met by daytime television, talkshows and romance novels when living vicariously through their girlfriends’ lives wasn’t sufficient. Today, women’s innate need for indignation is provided on-tap courtesy of the internet, social media and cutesy-but-insulting images of a husband are almost passé. I know, I’ve discussed this topic on a few podcasts, but it’s becoming increasingly more important for a man to understand what social media is providing to women’s nature and how their relationships are indirectly influenced by the exchanges their wives and girlfriends are having online.

I’ve seen a few of these “I got a vasectomy and my wife thinks it’s funny” social media posts before this one. Creating little post-it note jokes to apply to the snacks in the pantry might seem cute, but why is this even a thing? Why is it women/wives think it’s cute to publicly ridicule their partner about the impotence he elected to have? Amongst the Facebook and Instagram shots of her life, amongst the motivational quote memes, and among the complaints about kids, marriage and domestic life a moment of ridiculing their husband seems par for the course. And it’s all acceptable so long as the context is one of being ‘all in fun’.

Marriage today is a dicey proposition for men. I talk and write a lot about the overwhelmingly high risks of life and livelihood men should consider when it comes to how we do legal marriage in this era. MGTOW or not most men understand that marriage is basically for women now – at least with respect to the legal protections and the win-win incentives that are advertised for women. If all a woman ever did was read about marriage from social media and popular culture one would have to wonder why she would ever want to sign up for a lifetime of dealing with a husband, or the caricatures of average men, at all. The contempt for men, even in the most good natured, humorous, ways is palpable on most social media. It’s entirely acceptable, even expected, to deprecate the foibles of men in marriage. We literally can’t do anything right in a ‘female correct’ online world.

And like the “child-in-a-man’s-body” that women complain about, most of these average husbands are okay with being the butt of the joke. In fact, most are enthusiastic about their self-deprecation because they’ve been conditioned to think that doing so endears them to the women who married them and proves they’re “secure in their masculinity”.

Can’t you take a joke?

The first thing any woman, and any Beta male, will say is, “C’mon Rollo, it’s all in fun. Imagine being so humorless as not to get this? Who hurt you?” I think there’s an underlying acknowledgement of the passive aggressiveness that inspires this ‘humor’. When a comedian like Dave Chappell throws caution to the wind and does a 90 minute comedy routine that is funny as hell, but attacks the unassailable ‘correctness’ of our present social narrative we laugh along knowing the latent message of the humor. So, what is the latent message of making a man’s (elective) impotency a joke?

Imagine what the outrage would be on social media were you to make ‘cute’ jokes in the same way about your wife’s uterine ablation or tubal ligation. At the very least women wouldn’t think it was funny. No one tells women, “Lighten up. What, are you so insecure in your femininity that you can’t take a joke?” When a woman is rendered infertile it doesn’t occur to anyone to make light of it, but for a man to be neutered – and at the mutual agreement with his wife – we find the hit to his masculinity hilarious. Why is this?

I realize I’m focusing on one incident here in this image posted on r/funny, but this is an example of a larger dynamic. It’s socially acceptable to ridicule the impotency of Beta men. As I detailed in Selective Breeding, women will openly attack men’s genitals as a reflexive response to the possibility that a lesser man might try to fool her Hypergamous filters. A guy getting kicked in the nuts by a woman is always funny.

If women’s existential fear is being tricked into reproducing with a Beta male, then forcing herself to settle on a suboptimal man must inspire an inner conflict in her. There are lots of controversial self-help books published by women on both sides of this conflict. Some argue for women to accept a Beta guy and just make the best of it, others (especially religious books) argue that a woman should never compromise herself and wait for the best man (the ‘soulmate’ husband God has preordained for her) to present himself to her.

In Selective Breeding I made the argument that women’s existential fear is the possibility of having her Hypergamous filter (feminine intuition) fooled by a Beta male and becoming saddled with his shitty genetics for the rest of her life. This is a primal, evolved, fear for women that manifest itself, often unconsciously, in many of women’s behaviors that we either take for granted or we have social conventions that accommodate them. Decidedly gynocentric societies will legally mandate against this existential fear.

But what about women who are already married or pair-bonded with men that their evolved subconscious knows is a suboptimal choice for her? What about women who are trapped in a marriage with a guy that her hindbrain confirms is not the ‘best she can do’? How does that primal fear of being saddled with a faithful Beta manifest itself? 

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

Sigmund Freud

Unconscious Contempt

I would argue that women today have never been more comfortable in expressing their contempt of the men they married. My recent essays on Polyamory and the deconstruction of men’s Paternity imperatives have been an exploration of how a feminine-primary social order is reimagining itself with respect to how men and women will come together and form families in the future. People will claim that women’s lack of respect for the masculine is the result of generations of men not living up to some old-school ideal. That might be so, but women have no respect for the masculine, the male experience, simply because they have no need to. 

Why do women feel comfortable – to the point of taking it for granted – in expressing contempt for their husbands? We can argue the basis of where this passive-aggressiveness comes from, but why is it okay to veil this contempt in humor?

why do we as a society normalize hating your partner wow i am so bothered this morning pic.twitter.com/gbdcu5Ddmd

— happy nicksgiving (@nickykens) November 13, 2019

Before I get run up the flagpole for being a humorless boor let me reiterate that I’m not saying men ought to read more into things like this. My point is the bigger picture here; why do we find this funny at all? I believe it’s a form of anxiety release for women who’ve committed to a lifetime of parental investment with a man that her hindbrain knows is less than what she believes is best for her.

These images were pulled from an Instagram account called Motherhood Through Letterboards. What’s interesting about this is the contempt for fathers and husbands that bleeds through what we should probably have a sense of humor about. You can have a look at some of these to get the context, but the latent purpose of this exercise is a release of the anxiety created by women’s pairing and reproducing with men that their hindbrains cannot accept as Alpha.

Again, we talk a lot in the Manosphere about how social media contributes to the gross overinflation of women’s sense of self. It’s easy to see how women overestimate their sexual market value, and then conflate it with their personal value, but there’s more to this than just the woman on OKCupid who thinks she’s a 9 when she’s really a 6. There comes a time when that woman with the overblown sense of self must “settle” on a man who her hindbrain believes isn’t the best she could do. The metric by which she judges what is the best she can do is also subject to this ego-overinflation.

The main reason most women agonize over the question of whether she should “settle” for Mr. Good Enough is rooted in this Hypergamous conflict that usually comes at a time in her life where her SMV and her options with men are decaying. Today, the reason we see the age of first marriage being pushed later and later in life for women is due to women prolonging this indecision. She knows she can do better than the less-exciting Beta who seems like her best option in her Epiphany Phase because she’s had better in her Party Years. She also knows she can do better because social media and a constant steeping in the new Global Sexual Marketplace has convinced her she’s actually a 9, not a 6, and anything less than perfect is a waste of her potential. All of this plays on women’s primal, Existential Fear of pairing with a suboptimal mate choice – for life.

But now she’s committed. She married the only guy who would date her in that phase of her life given her circumstances. She married the Beta in Waiting, who’s overjoyed that he’s finally found his Quality Woman who appreciates his type. He’s thanking God for bringing him a woman who tells him “I’m done with the Jerks” and wants to do the ‘right’ thing now – while her hindbrain is contending with her existential fear becoming reality due to her own necessity. Now add 1-2 children into this mix (his or not) and you get this passive-aggressive manifestation of her existential angst.

Fortunately for her there’s an unending number of women experiencing exactly the same unconscious contempt for the men they married online in dozens of popular social media groups. The desire to “punch him in the face” is always tempered with “love”, humor and platitudes about relationships always being “hard work”.

End Note: Vasectomies

I feel it’s incumbent upon me to address what will be the predictable binary responses of literalist critics here:

• No, I’m not saying don’t get a vasectomy.

• No, I’m also not saying that if you did get a vasectomy you’re a pathetic loser Beta.

I will however point out that when I see stories about how a Beta husband did come to the decision to get a vasectomy there are always a lot of subconscious reasonings that go along with it. For all the notions of egalitarian marriages and self-praise for being rationally evolved above the hindbrain interpretations, on some level of consciousness a man electing to sterilize himself is a confirmation of the value he puts in his masculinity. This is why women think it’s funny to ridicule your impotency. Her hindbrain has 100% confirmation that you know your reproductive viability has no value.

A man’s reasons for getting a vasectomy may be valid and in some ways empowering for him. I imagine there’s at least some confidence to be derived from knowing you wont be held responsible for any “accidental” pregnancies. I get why men would opt for it, but the way a woman’s feral brain interprets a man sterilizing himself is what I’m getting at here. You may think, “Well, I don’t give a damn what women think about it.” Fine. Totally valid, but I’m outlining a woman’s instinctual response to a man permanently preventing his own reproduction. There is a subcommunication underneath this decision that denotes emasculation, and this is what women resent.

In some ways I see wives celebrating their husband’s vasectomy for reasons that have nothing to do with improving their sex lives. In the original Twitter thread I had men tell me that they got a vasectomy at the suggestion of their wives, believing it would lead to greater sexual frequency (or any sex in a sexless marriage) only to admit that it never improved anything for them. So, why the goading to get a vasectomy? The dots I keep connecting are a subconscious desire on the part of women to geld a husband to ensure he never reproduces with other women. It’s almost like a service she’s doing for the Sisterhood. She’s making sure that her mistake never becomes any other woman’s mistake.