Capt. Tom Pickett: Things in this town are out of control. Two gangs is just one too many… What I’m concerned with is keeping a lid on things, and what we got here in Jericho is just way out of hand, and Sheriff Galt, here, can’t do much about it, right? Matter of fact, it might be fair to say that he’s part of the problem, right? Now you been going back and forth, playing both sides according to Mr. Galt, here, making yourself a lot of money out of all this. Well, it’s over, son. I’m coming back here in ten days, and I’m gonna bring about twenty rangers with me. I will tolerate *one* gang, because that is the nature of things. A certain amount of corruption is inevitable. But if I find *two* gangs here when I get back, then in a couple of hours there will be *no* gangs here. So it’s simple. One gang quits and goes home. You boys work it out. I don’t give a damn which one.
Why does Pickett say that a certain amount of corruption is inevitable? Sure, there’s no such thing as perfection in this vale of toil and sin, but might there be a more specific reason?
Yes: If there were no corruption there’d be no reason to have social measures to control corruption, so we wouldn’t have any such measures… but without such measures corruption would be low-risk and very rewarding. So corruption would appear. Thus, as Pickett says, a certain amount of it is inevitable.
For the same reason, as I wrote in a recent post, institutions like news media and educational institutions will always end up with some sort of bias, unfortunately. It is not a Nash equilibrium for them to be bias-free. This is because if they were bias-free, then we’d trust them… but if we trust them, they can get away with being biased without being detected. So essentially there’s no internally consistent scenario without bias.
Similarly, a zero-violence world cannot be an equilibrium: If there were no violence then we’d have no measures to prevent or punish violence, but if there are no such measures then et cetera.
A la mode: Predation and parasitism are ubiquitous in nature. Indeed, when computer folks first started playing around with evolving artificial life, one of the things they often noticed was the rise of parasitism and predation, even when they hadn’t built those features into their worlds at the outset.
It is tempting to think that we can solve this problem with oversight bodies that will discipline the institutions we’re concerned about, but those oversight bodies are subject to the same problem. There’s an infinite recursion problem here. Thus the ancient rhetorical question, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
This doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything or that all political institutions are equally good or equally bad. After all, the left took over our schools, so in principle we can do the same. But we must be realistic about what is achievable and how long such successes can persist. (If the left thinks their victories will last forever they’re using too short a time scale to think about these things.)
If the COVID virus is still prevalent then post-vaccine booster shots are not necessary: If the virus is prevalent then we’re constantly being infected with it in everyday life anyway.
On the other hand, suppose the pro-booster crowd’s response to that is that you need a booster because you probably go 6 months without encountering the virus. Well, if the average person goes 6 months without encountering the virus, the virus has disappeared; the pandemic is over.
Wow, you look like my ninth grade math teacher. (No, not really. That’s a mild neg.)
The human mating dance as it occurs naturally does not allow the possibility of the man making the first move. It is always the woman making the first move. I don’t mean the first physical move, which is always the man in my experience, but the first expression of interest. When the man makes the first move, it gratingly violates the biologically hard-wired mating dance, especially from the woman’s point of view: it strikes a woman as awkward and offputting. Women insist that they want the man to make the first move, but ridiculous untruths like this are exactly why we watch what women do instead of listening to what they say.
One way of looking at what I call “Game in the small”—the set of techniques like negs, starting out talking to the friend of the girl you’re interested in instead of that girl, etc.—is that it’s a way for the man to get the seduction process rolling without it letting on that that’s what he’s doing.
In contrast to Game in the small, Game in the large is the basic concepts like hypergamy, the importance of preselection/social proof, not seeming too interested, and the fact that women want alpha, not nice. A particular neg like “Wow, you drink like a guy” (LOL) is an example of Game in the small.
(I’m going to drop the capital G; constantly hitting the Shift key is annoying.)
Before I knew game, all the serious fooling around I ever did came about this way, with the girl making the first move, one way or another. Sometimes she was subtle and sometimes she was blatant, but the chick always initiated.
So I was recently ruminating about how things changed for me when I first started learning the ideas now called game, and I realized something: game radically increased women’s interest in me… but it didn’t change the elemental fact that if the man makes the first move— at least in an obvious way— women are turned off.
Women hate it! They say they love it, but they hate it!
What did game do? And it indeed did something, something electrifying and in-your-face obvious: Game made it easy to arouse women, even when you weren’t trying. Once I internalized the ideas and they became part of my natural behavior, there were two occasions in which half-drunk women blurted to me or my girlfriend that they wanted to seduce me out from under her. Just because I’d automatically, without trying, aroused them so much. And in general game made it easy to stand out from other men; hell; half of it is just avoiding common mistakes like being too modest or offering to buy chicks drinks.
But even with game, penis-in-vagina always came from the chick making the first move, just like before I knew game. It is possible that this is because I was so focused on game in the large, due to the magical success it was giving me in general, that I wasn’t using enough game in the small. But see the comments from others below about “going out to get laid.”
When I was single, the seduction process always boiled down to me “allowing” myself to be seduced by a chick. Game makes this infinitely easier because it makes women electrifyingly attracted to you, but it doesn’t change the basic fact of who moves first.
When PUAs say that cold approaches are hard to do, well, no; they’re easy. Just say Hi, and have several things to say after that. But if they mean that successful cold approaches are hard to do, then yes, definitely. Similarly if it’s not a cold approach but a chick in your social circle: she makes the first move. You can prompt her to do this by being masculine, fit, socially confident, not interested in her, not too nice, etc., but that doesn’t change the elemental reality of who moves first.
(Of course, if alcohol is involved a one-night stand, complete with awkward morning after, is always possible, game or no game.)
So the way I’d practice game today if I were single would probably be something like what Dex does in The Tao of Steve: just “be excellent [and masculine] in her presence” and don’t seem interested in her. You can do cold approaches all the live-long day, and it’s a good skill to have, but it’s not optimal in the sense of hunting where the prospects are best. That’s probably just improving your social circle game, and doing more of it, and going out to bars etc. often, so you get random social collisions with women often. That’s what I think my advice to a young man would be these days.
Specifically,
Be as attractive to women as you possibly can, using the knowledge that game gives us: Act as alpha as you can pull off, work out, have a good social network, don’t be modest about your past sexual experience, and if you’re inexperienced exaggerate your experience with suggestive hints (avoid outright lies; too risky). Have a particular niche; be a jock or an intellectual or a rocker or an artsy type or whatever. You can’t choose this niche at random; it has to be based on who you are. Take the time and money to dress cool, according to whatever is cool in the social milieu where you’re sarging. Use negs as appropriate and always be alert for shit tests and be good at handling them.
The Big Three things: Passing shit tests, social proof, and negs.
(By the way, you will be cockblocked, if she has less-attractive friends, unless you isolate. And in two cases, when I was in college, even when the girl and I did isolate: her “friends” actually followed us, intruded into the situation, and cockblocked! I agree with a Roosh post from years ago; we need to punish cockblockers.)
Thus: Social circle game, because you’ll see the girl again, you can display your awesome self in a natural, unforced situation, and eventually she can let you know she wants to fuck you. She talks to you with a flirty tilt to her head, while rubbing her hand on your shoulder. Or she invites you— and only you— over for a study session if you’re taking a class together. Or, whether you two know each other or not, she rubs her pussy against your crotch on the dance floor at the club. (It occurs to me that I’m assuming that you’re in a certain age bracket.) Or she just invites herself to your place at random.
(BTW, grinding her pussy against your crotch is actually not “making the first physical move” as I’m using that phrase. When I say “the first physical move” I mean something that’s intended to lead directly to sex. The girl is not expecting you to fuck her right there on the dance floor.)
If things are going well, then when the time is right you can suggest that the two of you go back to your place on some transparent excuse. (“Would you like to see my etchings?”)
My experience from when I was single:
Getting laid is either effortless or impossible.
There’s no “moderate difficulty” setting. Either you can’t get laid at all… or a chick you sorta know comes to your college dorm room, uninvited, and essentially demands sex.
And whenever one chick did this, it seemed like at least one other chick would come on to me in the next few days. I swear, women can telepathically sense if you’re getting laid and not looking, and they love that. Thus it’s always drought, flood, drought, flood…
What game does is increase the number of effortless cases.
One commenter says: “Another thing I’ve noticed is that, if I ever have a conscious plan laid out in my head to get laid, it doesn’t work. There have been times where I knew I was going to get laid, but this wasn’t due to any reflective internal planning or anything like that. Pretty much every time when I go out thinking “I want to get laid” I end up going home and [engaging the manual release].”
Another weighs in: “This touches on why the manosphere leaders would always stress “Don’t make women your mission.” Leaving your house with the specific intent to get laid (especially by yourself with no tribe) gives off a level of betaness and desperation that women are fine-tuned to pick up in your behavior. Alpha males are busy men who have a mission that takes priority over women. I had drastic improvement in my close rates when I internalized that principle… If I happened across a broad eyeing me up while I was out and about or partying with my bros I would approach as an opportunist, but leaving the house with sole purpose to approach women always produced a low success rate for me, personally.”
A third agrees:
“Yeah- going out “to get laid” doesn’t work. Trying too hard pedestalizes women and ruins your frame. Need to go out to have a good time in a place where there are women around and let the magic happen. The more experience I got, the more the female maxim of “it just happened” makes sense. As long as the conditions are right- that you are high status in the local environment and there is an isolated place to bring a woman to, it does just happen. If you plan to “date”, invite a woman along to do something fun that you like to do, that you would have done anyway, and make what you bring her along to your priority.”
Men should all do a certain amount of go-out-to-score PUA stuff anyway, because it develops certain social skills that are a good force multiplier in social circle game, but have that as your goal and expectation, not getting laid. If getting laid happens, consider it a bonus.
Neurotoxin 