Wolf DeVoon

1 hour ago, KorbenDallas said:

About the 'incel' idea itself, the priority that these men place sex first is concerning.  Perhaps if they would think in terms of values and first sharing values with other women, maybe they would have more successful relationships.

I don't get it (I've often suspected that I'm stupid). However, as interesting as sex certainly is and was during the last 50-some years, it's certainly true that romance and marriage is more than sex. It's comedy, drama, light entertainment, windstorm and hail damage, high speed chases, and quiet evenings at home. I wrote about it in 'The 51% Solution' under the heading of Marginal Utility.

Quote

Like jealous siblings, your first and second notions of "goodness" compete for moral supremacy – i.e., to be recognized as Prime Directive, governing all else in your spiritual life. Perhaps you'll recall that my No. 2 was a hyphenated notion of goodness: Survival/Comfort. I used those words because I thought it would be easier for you to understand, rather than the technical term Marginal Utility, which is pleasure greater than pain, in an economic universe wherein maximum pleasure results from uniform want-satisfaction. Whether we call it Survival/Comfort or marginal utility or something else is unimportant. What I'd like you to consider is the generality of this concept. It embraces an economic theory, a standard of value, and a thousand details of "goodness" and "virtue". This is the power and meaning of a conceptual predicate: a class of value-units that belong together and derive scope because they have an implicitly shared purpose.

For instance, being Happily Married is subsumed and included. So is paying the rent on time, eating fresh food, buying a new pair of shoes, and doing part-time jobs that make use of my skills (sound system engineering, video production) instead of working for minimum wage as an unskilled laborer. Marginal utility results in want-satisfaction on the carnal plane of life: pleasure greater than pain. It is governed by the principle of diminishing returns, such as the declining enjoyment of successive bites of food.

"The amount of one and the same enjoyment diminishes continuously as we proceed with that enjoyment without interruption, until satiety is reached."
(Hermann Heinrich Gossen)

Every aspect of Survival/Comfort involves some sort of trade-off between pleasure and pain. Marginal utility is the common sense strategy of maximizing pleasure. To be happily married, I must love and honor my wife, remain faithful and honest, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me, from time to time, when I have to admit an embarrassing truth, and work at making the relationship successful. It's worth the effort because I have a particularly wonderful partner: she knows and understands that my 51% is devoted to something other than being happily married or paying the rent. Her love, her moral support, the beauty of her soul and her intimate trust easily outweigh the pain I experience shopping, cooking dinner, hearing idiotic soap operas on our TV set, and knowing that someday we will be parted by illness and death. This is marginal utility in a nutshell. It is better to cherish my wife and someday lose her, than to have never loved at all.

31 minutes ago, caroljane said:

 I asked you what women you knew

Intimately? 75 of which I married four and lived with two or three others. It's been an interesting life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk_ilymWo4s

Oh, the horror of it all!

Women marry for financial security, very important for husband to have a steady income.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/love-sex/72632931/men-want-beauty-women-want-financial-security-from-relationships

70 percent of women in relationships admit to having crushes on other guys, according to research from Indiana University.

https://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/a19547845/extramarital-crushes/

More and more women are jumping outside their marriages in search of no-strings-attached sex.

https://www.gq.com/story/ashley-madison-affair-cheating-site

“I’m nicer to my husband when I have something special going on that’s just for me.”

https://www.thecut.com/2017/09/why-women-cheat-esther-perel-state-of-affairs.html

14 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

I've seen lots of millenial girls be friends--protective friends--with pajama-boy, but they date the soldier.

The way I understand it, women marry for security and go over the hill to find a soldier of fortune to advance the gene pool.

Men are celibate (?) involuntarily (?) because they're lame, or stupid, or fat? Rubbish. I know lots of ugly / stupid / fat men with nice women.

"Incel" hooey reminds me of a graphic that explains much...

"involuntary celibate" ??  Who needs such a word?

On 4/25/2018 at 7:32 PM, Jon Letendre said:

From what I can see, you are vicious piece of shit. Go fuck yourself.

Heavens! -- a vial of nitro in sawdust. Ahem. I'd like to know what an "incel" is. Zank you.

While waiting to find out, this Drudge link caught my eye: the Tea Sips at UT think masculinity is a mental disorder.

(snicker) Let's ask Chris and Peachy what they think?

9 hours ago, Neil Parille said:

he was accused of raping one woman, but 5 other women were allowed to testify

Nope, not rape. Sexual assault.

18 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

Defamation is false, by definition....

If you walk out of your home tomorrow morning and MSK jumps you...

Agreed, defamation is malicious, "facts" spun in such a way as to harm reputation. Shrug. People do it all the time.

It would be ill-advised for anyone to assault me tomorrow morning or any other time. I don't fight fair.

21 hours ago, Mark said:

Catherine’s claim that Ridpath raped her, made recently on OL, would be libelous if she were not telling the truth.

This is all wrong. The only proper venue is a court of law, complaint filed with the police, or a lawsuit for money damages. In California, statute of limitations for rape is 10 years. Spewing allegations on the internet is a campaign of defamation, whether "true" or not. You say you've made a conclusion, based on claims you have no way of authenticating. I don't know anything about Catherine or Ridpath, except that this is a matter for due process of law, not tabloid gossip.

5 hours ago, Mark said:

Wolf,

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Careful, mate. "Justice delayed" refers to slow due process, unnecessary hurdles after a complaint is filed. It pertains specifically to legal proceedings, specifically criminal prosecution for alleged sexual assault, with timely complaint and relevant evidence, sufficient probable cause to charge someone -- not a fucking kangaroo court at ARI, or a campaign of defamation and libel, 30 years later. Jeez.

Do I have this right? ARI to "investigate" something that allegedly happened 30 years ago?

I've taken a lot of stick, ridiculed for being a foppish con artist, so let's look at some text. Finding Flopsie is two stories -- his and hers, presented sequentially and covering the same action adventure soap opera, seen separately by Chris and Peachy. A few words of set-up, please, because Flopsie is the 4th volume of their saga as a married couple.

Chris Cable is a far better man than I am. He was a Marine Corps officer, Silver Star and Purple Heart, resigned his commission, changed his name, and relocated to Southern California. He tried working in law enforcement and hated it, hung out his shingle as a private eye, age 32. Let's catch up with him at age 64, when Finding Flopsie opens on the campus of UCLA.

The second half (the "better half") of Flopsie is told from his wife's POV. What a woman! -- thick red gold mane with wisps of gray, movie star pretty, Stanford Ph.D. brilliant, a CPA and licensed p.i., and passionately devoted to her husband. Semi-retired at age 62, Mary Blount Cable does tax accounting for Hollywood producers. Here's the first page of The Way Peachy Saw It, second half of Finding Flopsie.

I don't give a flying fig whether anyone likes it or not. I'm not quite as stupid as people like to assume. I've read Hemingway, Irving, and Steinbeck, disgusting dreck, as far as I'm concerned. Whether you agree or not is unimportant. I've invested 20 years in developing an authorial voice of my own, and have no regret, no matter what it cost. Open two thousand novels at random, any page. Anything written in the last few years will have dope addicts, antiheroes, and paranormal heebeegeebees in drag, howling at Jupiter's moons. A straight white couple who cleave to each other? -- oh, that's Wolf Buffoon -- no book sales, no agent, and no publisher. Penalized and shunned because he writes hot sex scenes, mocks LGBTQ as inferior and inert. Signature work, never confused with any other novelist past or present, incapable of happy humble marketing because it just doesn't matter any more.

Now you can claim that you read two pages of Wolf DeVoon, dismissed it as trash.

" amateur-trash, sappy soap opera, bodice ripper, penny dreadful "

Thanks. I'll use that. https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/16439912-this-takes-the-cake-and-squashes-it

You've chosen to ignore content by Jonathan.

1 hour ago, Brant Gaede said:

Like "Ayn Rand"?

--Brant

we all don't start out with the name right for us

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) Eric Blair (George Orwell) François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire) David Cornwell (John le Carré ) Jacques Thibault (Anatole France) Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee (Ellery Queen) Amandine Dupin (George Sand) Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) Johann Schmidt (Max Stirner) William Porter (O. Henry) Benjamin Franklin (Richard Saunders) Allen Konigsberg (Woody Allen) Dean Koontz (Aaron Wolfe) Elizabeth Carlisle (Loretta Lynch) Hamilton, Madison, and Jay (Publius) Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) Agnes Bojaxhiu (Mother Theresa) Cassius Clay Jr (Muhammad Ali) Robert Parker (Butch Cassidy) Josephine Mentzer (Estée Lauder) Archibald Leach (Cary Grant) Lucille LeSueur (Joan Crawford) Farrokh Bulsara (Freddie Mercury) Jonathan Leibowitz (Jon Stewart) ... bunch of cowards!

Oh, wait a minute, I forgot good old salt of the earth Nathan Blumenthal (Nathaniel Branden)

Intensely proud of this, especially Peachy's story.

Nothing in my wallet, nothing in my briefcase

doesn't matter any more, not after Flopsie.

Up yours, troll hiding behind an anonymous avatar. I'm a public figure. Everything I post is indexed in a blink.

Meanwhile, guess who's going to Las Vegas in April and I'm not?

Peter Boettke and Donald Boudreaux from George Mason, Per Bylund, Robert Campbell, Cory DeAngelis from Cato, Douglas Den Uyl, Roderick Long (an old nemesis), Alberto Mingardi (a house guest in Costa Rica), Robert Murphy (a total doofus), Doug Rasmussen, and 200 other academic presenters, panelists, and moderators.

Tuesday, April 3, 2018 | 8:00 - 9:15 am
Session Chair:    Alexander William Salter, Texas Tech University

Papers:    

When Will a Constitution Bring Leviathan to Heel?
Wolf DeVoon, Author
 
A Theory of Self-Governance: Liberalism, Democracy, and Liberal Democracy
Alexander William Salter, Texas Tech University
 
Starving Leviathan: A New Fiscal Constitution
Robert Eric Wright, Augustana University
 
Leviathan’s Non-Constitutional Money
Richard Michael Salsman, Duke University

I was going to ignore it, but I decided to say something instead. I was talented 30 years ago. Past tense. Ever since then, it's been downhill, not a single new idea. Good joke on Google, proclaiming that I'm a novelist. Hahahaha. All I did was take a bunch of words and mash 'em up at random, paid people to plant phony reviews. I'm not actually poor. I have a swell chalet in Bern, vacation in San Tropez. Or I never left the Rust Belt, don't know anything about Hollywood or New York or Europe or Australia or carrying a gun or what O.G.A. means. See how simple that was? Didn't even ask for a pork chop in return. Guess what's trending on YouTube today? -- a black guy named Drake, another black guy named Kevin Hart doing something with an NBA All Star event, a three-minute video on how paintballs are made, and a Disney teaser for Incredibles 2, a cartoon. My fake novels sell no books. Capiche? No threat to anybody anywhere. Another couple years I'll have a stroke and that'll be the end of it, disappear without anyone bothering to notice that I left a stolen footprint in the sand. Here's something else to sneer at ~ http://screenwritingdoc.blogspot.com/

27 minutes ago, atlashead said:

There are 7 billion leeches in the world, and only so many prime movers/ideal/perfect people.  When you sacrifice your health to the masses, or your means of production to them, you are committing an immoral act in concrete, but an amoral act in means.  It DOESN'T HURT the prime mover to be virtually COMPLETELY SELFISH, in fact-it helps them.  When Hank Rearden gives up his metal, who did he hurt?  Himself and all the prime movers.  They would have made bullets, guns, knives, and barbed/razor wire with it.

In the cases of emergency it's most important to have a powerful BODY, that means working out.  At the same time, if you work in a physics lab, and you depend on your arms, it's important that you're not too sore.

We live in a world of animals-if you don't work you don't eat, but you have to have the chemical energy to DO work.

I need the Ignore button.

8 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

 It came out of nowhere six weeks ago. It's called Multiple Sclerosis.

Oh, God, Brant. Makes my problems seem small.

Interesting definitions of obscurity, aside from the pejorative of being unimportant

Reply all you like, I have you on Ignore for cause.

8 hours ago, anthony said:

necessitating all the more a philosophy and ethics which can.

Huh? Ought from is, a slam dunk. Man is a being of specific identity, physically and mentally. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.

This is why I have no cash, no credit, no car. I'm satisfied with the bargain, two years of my life well spent.