Weekly Bric-a-Brac

Lifetime television, sea monkeys, borderline bingo

Welcome to the Weekly Bric-a-Brac, a round-up of random thoughts that never made it to full essay status but that you might find diverting just the same. This is a feature for paid subscribers-thank you! I’ll give a generous preview in hopes of parting free readers from some of their CASH MONEY.

Get Over It

A show fan recently said he liked Disaffected and likes how I crack him up, and he doesn't ordinarily "like homos". This was said in a jocular tone. 

I think this is great, and I'll take it! I don't much like my own kind lately either anyway. 

Let people be honest, and be honest back with them when you can. This is the way to be more at peace with each other. 

Not everyone's going to love you and your ways, and sometimes they're going to say it in a way that uses "naughty" words. Who cares? 

I'd take a guy like that in my corner any day over some uptight social justice type who pretends to "care."

Measuring what matters

The most important "discriminator" to use in judging the crazy actions going on all around us, big and small, personal and public, is whether or not a party or group is acting with a narcissistic motivation. 

It's not whether it's men or women doing "the bad thing." It's whether the aggressor, in situations where we can identify one, is behaving in a markedly narcissistic and abusive fashion. 

Men and women are equally capable of behaving this way. 

This my big disagreement with feminist takes on "trans women" (men) who abuse women. The ones who go into their locker rooms, who play on their sports teams, who get women fired for telling the truth. The feminists frequently say that it's "male behavior" animating this. 

No, it isn't. It's narcissistic and personality disordered behavior. Yes, it's often male-style when it comes from men, naturally. But it's not their "maleness" that makes them act this way. It's their diagnosable levels of narcissism. 

In the same way, it's not women's "femaleness" that drives behavior like the fake victim-camouflage and cancellation campaigns against men. It's the level of narcissism in the women performing these bad actions. Like the men, their abuse is female-style, of course. 

But in both cases, it's the unstable/narcissistic/abusive personality of the actors that is the identifiable mechanism and motivator. 

Most men are not personality disordered. Most women are not personality disordered. But those who are are highly visible, and behind a disproportionate number of cases of abuse. It's the same dynamic as we find in rape: a small number of very abusive men commit rape over and over again. 

It happens to be the case, today, that our culture is way too tolerant of (often praises it, actually) female narcissistic abuse. From my perch, more women more easily get away with lying and cancellation attempts because we do not recognize female-style manipulation, or we don't think of it as "as bad as" what men do. 

That's why men like me talk so much about female misdeeds. There's infinite cultural room for women who are genuinely abused by men to get help. There's just as much cultural room for abusive women to lie about being victims and to actually victimize men while getting away with it and being seen sympathetically. 

We're out of balance, and the deck is stacked in favor of women generally (not in every specific; see the abuses of men in women's spaces for example). 

I know I say things bluntly and sometimes sound to some like I think there's something inherently wrong with women as a sex. This is not what I believe, though.

Movie minute

Worth your money

Times are tough, and a dollar doesn’t go very far. One of the things my mother did for her children that I appreciate was teaching us the value of a dollar, how to shop for a good value using unit prices, and how to pick good-quality secondhand merchandise. 

When we went grocery shopping in the early 80s, generic brands were just becoming big. In those days, they were pretty much all foods in anonymous white packages with black lettering, like so:

Over the years, store-brand foods have become as good, or better, quality than many name brands. With few exceptions, it’s a sheer waste of money to buy name-brand. Like everyone, there are a few name brands I prefer that I think are worth the price.