grow up to be nerds

SFG wrote this in the comment section at Half Sigma. I thought it hilarious and worthy of being shared:

Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be geeks or nerds,
Don’t let ’em pick software and build their own OS
Make ’em be jockies and preppies, oh yes…
Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be geeks or nerds,
They’ll never leave home and they’re always alone,
And never find someone to love…

Between Megan, Bob, Spungen, and myself, I’m the only one that really appreciates this little Craigslist write-up. Peter seems to like it as well. I find it to be friggin’ hilarious.

Whether or not the author is being self-depricating I do not know. If he honestly doesn’t recognize the pattern, that actually makes it funnier to me because there are two objects of humor. First there is the girl for being what she is (more on that in a bit) and then there’s the slapstick humor of a guy that keeps getting smacked by the handle-pole stepping on the same rake.

Megan has two complaints:

1. This does not describe every girl. It describes an archetype. The dude is dating the wrong chicks.
2. The dude is smug about his apparently (undescribed) superiority over her.

Both of these criticisms are quite valid. I’m a bit thin-skinned about jokes about “every guy” (or even “every guy” of a particular subtype such as nerds) and I can understand her consternation. He should have said “every girl you’ve ever dated”. That might detract of the humor if there is supposed to be a self-depricating aspect of it, but it would probably compensate that by increasing the audience. It needlessly puts women on the defensive because they’re not sure whether that’s part of the joke or not. I’m not sure either, as mentioned, but it’s easier to be thick-skinned when you’re not getting cut.

Spungen joins Megan in asking what basis the guy feels superior. That’s a fair question. Maybe the guy isn’t superior at all. He may well be part of a loathesome or irritating archetype himself. The thing about archetypes, though, is that all of them believe that their type is superior. It’s like religion, if you don’t believe yours is best, why follow it at all?

So why do I think it’s so funny? In part because it’s a variation on something very familiar to me. I’ve never dated or been in the apartment of a girl that the author seems to be inundated with. That type really has no use for a guy like me and that’s pretty reciprocal (depending on what she looks like and how long I’ve been single). He’s talking about the archetypal Post-Sorority Quirk Chick (PSQC). These girls may or may not have been a part of a formal sorority, but they’ve at least bought into aspects of the lifestyle and, in the absense of having any notably attractive features, have attempted to sprinkle in some quirky aspects. If you can’t be better, be different.

But while I’m not familiar with that particular archetype, what I am familiar with and have commented on repeatedly is a different archetype with the same motivations: the Goth-Bisexual-Pagan Threefer. The bane of my dating existence were those tried to be “different” by being alternative in what became to me an utterly predictable way.

What these two types have in common is a cookie-cutter approach to identity. The inane trying to be interesting. I think that’s where the superiority comes from. It’s not so much the lack of a dungeon motif as the lack of anything original or unique around her. It’s indicative of her cookie-cutter life. On the surface there is nothing original or special about her, but she is fascinated with herself because she has followed the blueprint for how to be unique and special.

The candles, the quirkily-named cat, the decorative birdcage, and the furniture with no discernable purpose. These are all desperate attempts of the PSQC to be novel and interesting… but she got it all at that ground zero of mass-produced, yuppie stuff, Ikea.

As a brief aside, the funniest thing at Walmart is the “alternative” clothing they have their. I once saw a hoodie with little plastic studs, a chevron on the shoulder, and an imprint on front of a screaming guy with a mohawk. There are also t-shirts of worn-looking old-style logos of Pepsi, Sunkist, and the type of of authentic thing that you might have gotten at a vintage shop… except of course that it’s brand new. Nothing “alternative” can really ever be bought at Walmart. It’s self-contradicting. It’s impossible. But people keep buying it apparently cause Walmart keeps stocking it. What an exasperating culture we’re a part of.

Back to PSQC. Her drive to be special and unique and interesting is further indicated by her rambling on despite his apparent lack of interest. It’s so interesting that she can’t seem to fathom that he’s not interesting. She’s like the girl that keeps telling you about some inane and non-sensical dream asking every couple minutes “Isn’t that totally weird?!” Anyone with any social sense at all knows that there is nothing, nothing, nothing interesting about non-sensical dreams.

Now let’s move on to my arch-enemy, the Goth-Bisexual-Pagan Threefer (GBPT). She likely either didn’t have enough friends or have the demeanor to be a PSQC, so she chose a different blueprint. Goth’s are totally deep. Bisexuals are sexxy. Pagans are totally on a higher spiritual plane than those know-nothings that tormented her in junior high or whenever. They all have in common that they are persecuted and misunderstood. Don’t you understand how persecuted and misunderstood she is?! SHE HAS SUFFERED FOR HER PAIN!!!! And she’s stronger for it. And more interesting.

There is an outstanding song by Bare Naked Ladies called “Aluminum” that absolutely nails this sort of person. It’s more geared towards the GBPT than the PSQC, but there is an element of truth to underlying problem with them both. If I could introduce you all to the song I would, but I’ll part with the closing lyrics thereof:

You’re so lightweight, how can you survive?
Recycling moments from others’ lives
You’re not as precious as you contrive

Aluminum to me
Aluminium to some
You can shine like silver all you want
But you’re just Aluminum

Yeah, you’re just Aluminum

Many moons ago, the Colosse Spiders basketball team was aching for a new basketball arena. Around the same time the NHL was looking to expand. So the proposed basketball arena was also set to double as a hockey arena. This was meant to up the value to sell it to the public that would have to vote on it, but in some ways it hurt the referendum more than it helped.

There were two prospective owners for the NHL team we were trying to get. The first was Stephen Goldberg, the Jewish New York implant that owned the Colosse Spiders. The second was Miles Carpenter, the owner of the local power company and the minor league hockey Colosse Crushers. Since the new arena was primarily for basketball, Goldberg was in the driver’s seat in the referendum.

Asking that voters pay for a new basketball arena apparently wasn’t enough for Goldberg. He also wanted full ownership rights to the stadium even before the voters had finished paying it off. He wanted to be able to personally pocket naming rights, advertising, revenue from other events held there, and even street parking surrounding it. The big thing, though, is that in exchange for the voters building him a new arena, he wanted it written down that any NHL team that came to Colosse would be his. Essentially, he wanted to freeze Carpenter out.

Carpenter, needless to say, didn’t like this one bit. So while Goldberg, the city Chamber of Commerce, and the city government tried to sell the arena, Carpenter was one of only a couple major figures against it. Radio talk show hosts supplied the ground troops of the opposition, but Carpenter supplied almost all of the funding.

Colosse was the only city of twelve voting that actually had a team threatening to move to reject a stadium/arena referendum. That didn’t hold Goldberg and the Spiders machine back. They vowed to keep putting it on the ballot until it passed. What’s really interesting about it, though, is what happened to Carpenter.

Carpenter was a bazillionaire. He was the owner of the local utility company. He was buying companies left and right. He thought himself to be somewhat untouchable. He was wrong. Carpenter was shunned by the business community. He and (more importantly) his wife were shut out of all marquee social events. The influence he’d used to get his oldest kid into the prestigious University of Colosse was no longer effective as his daughter’s admission was denied even though she had a better academic profile than did the son who got in. His utility company was kicked out of the Chamber of Commerce on a technicality.

As far as I know, nothing he did cost him any money. You can’t boycott the power company, after all. But it was apparently more than he could bear. Two years later, they held another referendum. It wasn’t quite as skewed in favor of Goldberg, though he still got dibs on the hockey team. Carpenter campaigned for the second referendum, it passed, and he was suddenly no longer socially toxic.

I think of the story of Miles Carpenter whenever the subject of peer pressure comes up. Carpenter had it all, but in the end signed on to a deal that denied him one of his dreams simply because it wasn’t worth having it all if no one you cared about liked or respected you. He gave up the millions he would have gotten from the hockey team in exchange for a little social detoxification.

When I was in junior high I started hanging around with a kid that lived around the block with an unsavory reputation. My folks, for the first time ever, prohibited me from playing with him. They thought he was trouble and even at the time I couldn’t disagree. But I loudly declared that just because he does bad things didn’t mean that I would. Didn’t they trust me? They just didn’t understand, which is the last rhetorical refuge for a kid without a valid argument to make.

I first started noticing in high school that it did seem to matter a great deal who you hung out with. Some guys that I was friends with in junior high started hanging out with the wannabee gangbangers. Once they were the smart kids in the regular class like me, but I doubt half of them ultimately graduated from high school. Others started hanging out with “South will rise again” racists. Ditto for that.

Granted, in many cases there were likely other things going on that drove these kids to these groups, though they usuallywere the I-don’t-have-friends sort of problem rather than the I-was-born-a-bad-apple variety. I first smoked pot because I was around kids smoking pot. I taught myself to learn how to like beer because I was around drinkers. These things weren’t the end of me, obviously, but they’re things I would have been much, much less likely to do otherwise.

Much of what I’m saying here will be obvious to a lot of you. What I find most interest about it is how soooo unobvious it was back when I was young. How silly it was. How stupid old people were for believing it. It just didn’t make any sense.

Then I think of Miles Carpenter. If a rich millionaire can’t stand up to the pressure of his social environment, a pimply kid hasn’t got a prayer.

A lot of men are of the belief that a lot of women are attracted to married guys. An episode of Seinfeld I ran across recently had George wearing a wedding ring for the sole purpose of pucking up ladies and he had greater-than-usual success.

There are doubtless some women out there that are attracted to married men. Maybe they’re also married and are looking for something on the side. Maybe they’re attracted to what they can’t have. Maybe they want to get married and can’t find a guy that wants to get married and the ring represents someone that was ready to commit. By and large, though, I think the perception that married men attract women is off-base.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the wedding ring actually sent a message of safety. If a guy is wearing a wedding ring, he’s less likely to ask her out. Her being nice to him is less likely to be construed as an invitation for him to ask her out.

So let’s say that an ordinarily looking man approaches an attractive woman to strike up a conversation. She’s probably used to being hit on and her first thought about the guy might be that he is going to do just that. She’s not particularly attracted to him, so she may feel that she needs to be careful not to give him anything he can use later to say “she was totally flirting with me”. She needs a degree of space. It’d be a bad idea to be at all flirtatious with him even in what she would consider a harmless way. You never know how a man is going to react.

Take the same scenario and put a wedding ring on the guy and it’s a vastly different picture. Yes, he may be looking for an extramarital affair. He could be a sleazebucket. Maybe he’s separated or in an unhappy marriage. If she gets wind of any of these things she is likely to put up some space. Absent these things, however, she is probably free to talk to him in the friendly manner with which she might talk to a female coworker. She can talk to him as a person without worrying about him as a potential suitor. I could see how that would be a load off her mind.

Meanwhile, he is probably thinking that he would have a chance if he were single and wondering why he couldn’t get these kinds of conversations when he was. That, I think, feeds into the perception that women are attracted to married men.

On the other side of that coin, being a married man with a wedding ring, I can more easily talk to women out of the blue. I do not have to worry about whether she thinks I am hitting on her or not. I don’t have to worry as much about saying that one little wrong thing that would make a relationship impossible. When I was single I would hold back even with women I wasn’t interested in simply because I didn’t know if I might become interested at some future point. None of this is a concern to me a married man. So I talk to more women. A woman out there or two might even be thinking that it’s too bad that guys like me are taken… but were I not married I would be a lot more self-conscious about talking to her in the first place.

The third factor that comes to mind also has more to do with what the man is thinking than the woman. When I was single, I would spend an inordinate amount of time trying to decode feminine signals. If I was interested and looking for a relationship, I would do a thorough analysis of signs that she was interested and signs that she was not. I would do this because I felt that I had to in order to avoid making a fool out of myself or missing an opportunity. I’d miss an opportunity if I didn’t realize that a woman was interested in me when she was. Likewise, though, if I thought she was interested and she wasn’t there would be a price to pay there as well.

Being married, though, means that I am absolutely free to assume interest whenever and wherever I like. I don’t have to worry about any false positives because I would never act on it anyway. If I talk to the nice young lady in front of me in the food line, I can go away thinking to myself “She totally wanted me” without having to actually examine whether there was any truth to that perception. I can assume all the women in the world would be interested in me and there would be no price to pay due to my fidelity.

I think all three of these things play into the perception that a wedding ring attracts women. A lot moreso than the idea that a wedding ring does, in fact, attract women.

Over at Bobvis there was a discussion about how much choice the unpopular had in their predicament. Spungen took issue with a recent poll that suggested that teenage girls with a stronger social situation are less likely to take abuse from a boyfriend:

As if it’s a ****ing choice. “Gee, should I stick close with my circle of friends? Nah, I’d rather wander around alone and hang out one-on-one with weirdos.”

By and large I agree with this assessment. Almost nobody chooses to have no friends. I do believe, however, that there is some choice involved. Some people are a little too happy off on their own that they don’t bother to cultivate the friendships they will later need. The conversation later turned to whether or not people are willing to cop to their unpopularity. Spungen believes that this is mostly not the case; I believe that people are fine doing so provided that they can blame it on a broken society rather than on themselves. I also made the comment that I knew more people that believed that they were helpless when there was something they could do about it than people that believed that their unpopularity was a choice when in fact it really wasn’t.

To which Spungen replied:

So Will, do you think popularity is available to everyone as long as they meet a certain set of criteria? If so, that would explain our conflict. I believe all (or most) systems have to have rankings, outcasts, and scapegoats. There will never room for everyone in the fold.

I agree that in most social circumstances there is never room enough for everyone in the fold. I’d also say that it requires more luck than anything to actually reverse your social situation for the better. I believe, however, that there are things a person can do that can help get them out of the social gutter (even if it lands you only a notch or two out of it). My experience (both first and second-hand) of unpopularity mostly pertains to guys rather than girls, so keep that in mind. In any event, here are the ways that one can improve their social standing:

1. You don’t have to outrun the gator, you just have to outrun the other guy. In this case, you make yourself a less obvious target than those around you. You make yourself look good by comparison. The cheap way to do this is to make other people look worse, but simply making yourself look better can help. This is really hard to do if you are unwilling to disassociate yourself with those that don’t change with you (which will be most of them). Nonetheless, in a larger social setting where you are not constantly with whoever it is that is hurting you socially, you can make some friends before they find out who your other friends are. That doesn’t work at all in social settings, though, and they will likely keep you running in place.
2. You can make a really bad situation not quite as bad by winning over the non-scared and non-malicious. There are people that will find some way to go after you. That’s a given. However, the better ammunition they have the fewer potential sympathizers you might get. The classic example here for me is my smell. I was not good about showering daily or wearing deodorant, which in the south that’s something you really need to be meticulous about. Not unexpectedly a lot of people ragged on me about it. I blew it off by saying to myself “Even if I didn’t have the smell they would just be making fun of me for something else. They’re just looking for reasons.” This belief was not at all incorrect. What I was doing, though, was warding off potential sympathizers by making myself more socially toxic than I needed to be.
3. The number of popular-to-unpopular people is not constant. If you behave like the unpopular guys, you’re all but guaranteed to be counted among them. Stopping doing so is not sufficient, but it is necessary to get out of that rut. If luck is opportunity meeting preparation, be prepared.
4. With some luck you can get a rabbi. In the 8th grade I had the good fortune (sorta) of being in the same class as a couple of the more pragmatic bullies. I helped them out with their schoolwork (ie gave them the answers) and they became what I call my rabbis. Their casual association with me warded off many would-be bullies, making my situation more tenable. They never would have gone to fight on my behalf or come to my defense, but they made it less likely that I’d need them to.

At least some of these would be unhelpful to young women since everything is so terribly different with them. Girls are more socially adept anyway and are much less likely to be lazy about hygiene and grooming. I suspect that only raises the expected standard to the point where money becomes more important to buy the right kinds of clothes and have the right kind of make-up, which is unfortunate. There are fewer ways on the whole a young lady can overcome not having money than a young man can. I’m so glad to be a boy.

None of these are going to take an unpopular person and just make them popular

I believe that the Battle Hymn of the Republic is one of the greatest song ever written.

—-

I don’t like people that say that they are spiritual but not religious. To me, that comes across as every bit as arrogant as those that say “My church is more correct than your church”. Maybe even more arrogant because at least the churchgoer isn’t saying that they’ve found the answers on their own without help, which is the implication of those that say that they have a handle on spirituality without help. At the same time, I find the notion that any particular church has it exactly right to be… unlikely.

I was baptized and raised in the Episcopal Church (USA), which was a (forgive the pun) godsend for me. I would not have done nearly as well in the Catholic Church or Mormon Church because of the rigidity of their beliefs. The funny thing is, though, that I often wish I was the kind of person that could put faith in a church’s tenets. I wish that there was a church that I agreed with all the time. I wish that I could completely buy in to what they’re selling. Really smart people believe this stuff, so why can’t I?

I wish that I could believe, with a degree of certainty, that God Himself picked a group of people to act as the final word and arbiter of His wishes. I wish I could believe, with a degree of certainty, that there was this guy named Jesus that took the bullet for all of our sins and by virtue of his having done so cleansed us. I wish I could believe that if I read and lived by this book, it would have all of the answers.

In a similar way, I wish that I could believe that all of our problems could be solved by having the government take care of us. Or that everything would work out okay if we just let the free market do its magic. Or that the Republicans were right about everything or that the Democrats were.

I would love to be a partisan warrior, a religious crusader, and a harbinger of all that is right. I am attracted to the imagery of that in the strongest way. I’m a comic book reader. I like right and wrong, black and white, good and evil. I get immensely frustrated by the constant equivocations that people make to excuse that which is wrong and diminish that which is right. And the most frustrating thing is that they make sense to me.

This all makes me sound like a wishy-washy person, which I don’t believe myself to be. Some people around me will describe me as being a moderate guy, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone describe me as wishy-washy. But I make decisions because decisions have to be made and not because an overwhelming since of what is right tells me to. Whenever I am told anything, there is a voice in the back of my head that says “maybe this is not so”.

The spoils go to those who fight for them. Religions that stick to their doctrine and demand adherence succeed while those that foster independence fall apart at the core. Our wars are not fought by those that spend their time questioning why, they’re fought by soldiers that have it within them to just do what they are told. The leaders are not those that question their motivations but rather motivate others to come around to their own righteousness.

People like me watch and say, “Hmmm.”

At the anime convention that I recently attended, I ran into an unexpected friendly face. Marianne Silbet and I went to the same school from about the seventh grade onward. She moved in from parts unknown. Marianne and I were never friends. The only real memory I have of interacting with her was when she went to the prom with Scott Sanders and the two of them plus Julie and I left the prom together and walked on the beach together.

The thing I remember most about Marianne, though, was that she was very, very unpopular in junior high school and I never remember her having very many friends at all. Marianne was sweet as sugar cane, cute if not hot, slender, acne-free, and at least after those awful junior high school years a smiley and pleasant person to be around. For some reason, though, she really, really got it bad in junior high school. And for prom the date she mustered up was Scott Sanders, one of the friends I was most ready to get rid of when I graduated from high school. The thing that I noticed then but struck me now was how completely, totally unfair that was.

I’ve mentioned before that I slummed around amongst the socially marginalized class of high school. I got to know a lot of them quite well. The guys, anyway. Some of them were a lot of fun to be around and I light up when I think about them. Some, like Scott, I would talk to only if there were absolutely no one else around and maybe not even then. But whether I personally liked them or not, I could easy tell you why they were unpopular. They were socially inept, they were fat, they were awkward, they were anti-social, they were smart-asses they were consumed with bitterness. The reasons go on and on.

I’m not saying that the criteria that found them lacking was a good one. It was stupid and superficial I am so glad to be away from it now. But at least I understood it. I knew what was hurting me and I could try to change it or I could accept the consequences of it. If they were to ask me and I were feeling particularly honest I could have told them ways that they could have improved themselves. It was warped and twisted, but it had its own little logic that if one could step away from themselves just for a little bit they could decipher.

But thinking about Marianne brings to light another observation: I have no idea at all whatsoever criteria, if any, the girls had for sorting themselves out socially. I have no idea what precisely it was that made Marianne so reviled and she’s not the only one. I knew a girl in elementary school named Louise that was dreadfully unpopular. As far as I could tell I was the only nice person to her. Then in the fifth grade her family moved and she went to another elementary school. Both our grade schools fed into the same junior high and apparently at the other grade school she had made quite the splash and when we ran into each other in junior high she had a lot of friends. Even though I was the only one nice to her in grade school, she was unusually cruel to me in junior high perhaps because she did not recognize me or perhaps because I was a throwback to an unfortunate time in her life. Other than the sudden cruelty, though, there was no big difference in her behavior to warrant the reversal of fortunes and I don’t think cruelty alone did it (there were a lot of cruel girls that were very unpopular).

A little closer to home, I understand why my wife was unpopular in K-12. I love her but she is stubborn and has unusual tastes and is not socially gifted. But the ferocity with which other kids went after her completely baffles me. I get angry just thinking about the things that she’s told me and there are things that were so bad, so much worse, that she refuses to tell me. When it comes to the guys that got it really, really bad in K-8 I understand why even if I think that the reason is dumb. But when it comes to Clancy, Louise, and Marianne I am completely and utterly baffled at the degree of derision they got.

My inclination is to say that the female social structure in schools is random and illogical, but it’s quite possible that I just don’t understand the logic because it was all in a world that I was not a part of. There were some that I understood. She was unpopular because she was fat or abrasive or socially awkward. But there were a number of them that I didn’t understand at all. I don’t understand either why they were unpopular or why they were as unpopular as they were. If I have a son like me, I’ll have an idea of what to say or what advice to give if they ask me why other kids don’t like them. If I have a daughter like Marianne, I won’t have a clue.

I would be surprised if Spungen agreed with Ann Coulter on… well… anything. But this excerpt of something that Coulter wrote for George in 1999 actually sounded like something Spungen might say:

Boys in Washington don’t know how to ask for a date. What they do is try to trick you into asking them for a date. They say, “I know you’re really busy, so call me when you’d like to go out to dinner” or “Call me when you’re back in Washington” or, my favorite, “Are we ever going to get together?” What are you supposed to say to such completely insane things? I’ve never figured that out, which is why these conversations tend to end in hostile silences.

“Call me when you’d like to go out for dinner” isn’t asking for a date; it’s asking me to ask you for a date. For male readers in Washington, asking for a date entails these indispensable components: an express request for a female’s company on a particular date for a specific activity.

There was recently a discussion here and there about whether one should or should not date across ideological lines. James Kirchick complains about how difficult it is being a gay libertarian-conservative when so much of your dating market is some degree of liberal. Ilya Somin comments on Kirchick’s piece with a list of reasons that people often overestimate the undesirability of cross-ideological dating as well as a list of more defensible concerns.

I think that Somin has it mostly right.

I believe that the people overestimate the importance of ideological harmony in relationships is because we invest far too much of our self-image into our politics (or maybe vice-versa). Somin believes that we too often confuse what we believe with how we behave. I would say that we are more likely to confuse what we believe with who we fundamentally are. When I hear people say that they would not date someone that voted for the other guy (and I have heard it), the underlying reason does not seem to be so much that they believe different things, but that their beliefs make them different kinds of people.

I’m not going to get on my high horse about how we shouldn’t make judgments about people based on their political beliefs. To be honest, a lot of the time you can. But those tend to be the loudest ones and not usually representative of the whole. Most people I meet don’t know what my political views are or how I voted (indeed, most seem to think that I hold whatever views they do and voted however they did). But that other guy that can’t shut up about America is a rogue nation or that a lot of our nation’s problems can be traced to liberal-supported minority groups? Yeah, you know exactly where he stands. It’s not hard to start getting the impression that everyone that votes the same way as he does thinks the same way and is the same way.

There are times when it is better not to become intimate with someone from the opposite side of the political spectrum. I had one non-relationship in college that couldn’t take off because she was an activist for causes that I did not believe in. It’s really, really hard to make a relationship work when you oppose their goal in life. There are also other factors that inform our political views that should also inform our dating habits. For instance, religion significantly influences how one votes and how one socializes and otherwise lives their life. Sometimes a philosophy can cause problems wherein one partner believes that the other is missing that last sense of enlightenment and is somehow on a lesser philosophical or spiritual plane. Or people think about things in a particular way. For instance, I have a number of rather unconventional ideas of the way that the world is. Not radical, just a bit unusual. You might be absolutely, positively amazed at how some people react when confronted with ideas that they’ve never really heard before. Some people get excited, others look at you like you’re the antichrist.

These are relatively minor exceptions, though. On the whole it is beyond foolish to try to go out and find someone that thinks exactly like you do. In fact, if you do find someone that does it probably means that neither of you are thinking individually and are both getting your thoughts, word-for-word, from a third party. And you should be afraid.

The most common cross-ideological relationship is the conservative guy and the liberal woman. That’s because men are on the whole more conservative (as defined by contemporary politics) and women are more liberal (ditto). In fact, one of the reasons that cross-ideological dating is so important is that without it we have a lot of conservative men that can’t find a woman and a lot of conservative women that can’t find a man. Market inefficiencies that we just cannot have.

How ironic is this… I just wrote a post lamenting how impossible it is to discuss racial issues because both sides get so self-righteous and defensive, but the more I wrote the more I had to edit and the more I edited the less I could say and eventually I couldn’t say anything that wouldn’t get everybody self-righteous and defensive.