I’ve always had trouble with signing into my credit card issuer’s site. Authentication issues, security question issues, etc., On four different browsers and four or five different OSes, with and without adblock, etc.

But today takes the damn cake. Today, I get this as my “security” question:

Note: I am male, have always been male, and have never been married or even engaged and have obviously never added that as my security question.

And it won’t let me sign in without answering it.

This site was coded by damn idiots.

Jared Diamond strikes me as someone who is occasionally correct by accident.

He doesn’t seem to understand sociology or anthropology all that much. His explanations, though not as bad as Gladwell’s, are too pat and too all-encompassing.

Also, more is accidental and contingent than anyone gives credit for, especially even scientists.

Read Diamond, sure. You’ll learn a few things. But like starting with Twilight, it should lead to better, truer works.

Pickup artists are a disease on the face of human culture.

But it’s not just due to their misogyny and entitlement that they are hated: no, it’s because many of their techniques work, and work well.

Note that I am not saying their techniques are justified or appealing. Honestly the world would be better off by far if they all left. For like Jupiter.

But why people despise them is not the nominal reasons pointed out when that antipathy is expressed, because if their techniques were completely ineffectual they’d not even be relevant.

Women and men despise them because it is a relatively-effective tactic that low-status men (note: I also don’t buy into their construction of alpha and beta males, but some related concepts are useful) have of obtaining something they would not otherwise be able to, and this deeply offends people. Not because of misogyny, again. Misogyny has nothing at all to do with it  for most people– no, this is of the same sort of offense as if a hobo walked into a high-end restaurant and was seated and treated like a valued and wealthy patron.

The misogyny excuse is just tacked on after the abhorrence is already solidified as an excuse or post hoc justification, for in reality the real contempt arises from the violation of status norms.

A way to check this contention is to notice that when already high-status men who aren’t self-described PUAs use exactly the same techniques, it is considered “cute flirting” instead of high-pressure PUA tactics.

PUAs are hated because they are Weberian status violators, as I noted above, not because of their real and despicable misogyny. That explains the out sized vitriol they receive when other far worse problems that women face receive little to no attention.

Attempted and especially successful status jumping is always punished most severely in human cultures.

Why I would destroy the fat acceptance movement if I could: Yes, this is apparently real and not a troll. Also a common belief in the FA idiot tribe.

I like this piece, but this portion just isn’t true. It is a common myth, however.

What’s more: the words that Shakespeare wrote didn’t sound at all the way they did in the early 17th century. If Shakespeare were performed today the way he was performed then, modern audiences wouldn’t even be able to make out words. It would be like listening to someone tell a story in Gaelic.

We actually have a fairly good idea of what Shakespearean-era English sounded like. And it sounded like this.

If you can understand a moderate Scottish accent, you can understand the above.

Hell, my native Southern accent is thicker and harder to understand for most people than Shakespearean-era English would’ve been, as my partner found out when she visited my natal area with me.

However, go back around 200 years and the English of the time would’ve been utterly incomprehensible.

The main reason is that Shakespeare wrote towards the end of the Great Vowel Shift so English pronunciation resembled its modern phonology fairly closely.

I’m a complete language and word nerd so this is something I’ve studied a lot.

I thank the blackest heavens that I am anomalous, because though it wasn’t exactly easy to lose weight, it has been easy to keep off.

Still down 25% from my highest weight, and I’ll stay there for life.

All my family is fat. If I’m fighting genetics, I’m doing a remarkably good job. Nearly six years now.

I’m about the most stubborn person you’ll ever meet, so my results are anomalous for a reason I’m guessing.

But check this out. Unlike this dude, I don’t track a damn thing.

I eat what I want. But unlike most people, I look at the amount I actually want, and eat half of that.

Works a charm. Ain’t tracked a calorie, ever.

Best change I ever made: I eat better food, spend about the same amount, am far, far healthier and my knees don’t hurt anymore.

I’d literally do just about anything not to get fat again.

All you knotty-pated fools, fen-sucked flapdragons and blubbering blatherskites who say that money doesn’t buy happiness — if you haven’t ever been poor, sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.

You don’t know a thing.

That is all.

The race we don’t know we’re in is the one to create our successors before complete climate and ecological collapse.

It’s still a long race, but shorter than most people imagine.

The Singularity adherents and those opposing them are both wrong. Curiously but not surprisingly given history, they are both wrong in ways that completely occlude the debates we should be having.

We are in the stage now of debating which buggy whip is best to use on an automobile.

That will last a while.

I don’t particularly care for the German language or German culture for that matter, but I have considered moving to Germany just for the bakeries.

Magisterial arenas of wonder, they are.

Argh, so tired of hearing about Hillary Clinton’s email “scandal” from either side of the aisle.

A politician doing shady-ass things? Say it ain’t so! And even if she wasn’t doing them then, she was doing some other unknown ones elsewhere. You simply don’t get as much power as she has in the modern world and not be fairly scummy.

Just as true of male politicians as it is of female ones, by the way. There really is no difference that matters.

In the end, it also matters little who becomes president. Again, little to nothing will be done about climate change and in the lifetime of children alive now that will disorder the world so much that there might not even be a president in 2070+.

Usually I think Richard Dawkins is a buffoon, and wrong. But here I agree with him 100%.

When Islamic (or lest it go unsaid, Christian) culture oppresses women, to hell with that culture. I don’t give a fuck why it does so or the fact that other liberals think I should respect how Islam treats women because that’s “just how they do things.”

Cultural relativism can be good, neutral or evil — and in this case, it’s pure evil.

Again, that doesn’t mean I think we should be bombing people to freedom or that Dawkins is right about many other things, such as his belief that women in Western countries shouldn’t fight for equal rights because Muslim women have it worse.

But there does have to be some absolute standard for human rights (as a Twitter commenter pointed out), and I don’t give a damn who that offends in the liberal or the conservative camp.

But that’s me — if I ain’t making enemies, it’s not a day of the week.

To those who think the earth is not overpopulated with humans, the planet is going to disagree strongly with you, and soon.

And who are you to argue with an entire planet?

The max long-term carrying capacity of the planet with any kind of decent standard of living is probably around 500 million, I’d guess.

With this and the lack of affordable, decent housing everywhere in America, perhaps private home ownership should just be banned altogether?

Ok, ok, I’m joking. Well, half-joking.

Probably the largest factor contributing to the lack affordable housing is not government. Not the rich. Not inequality. And not developers — no, it is NIMBY-infected dumbass existing homeowners.

Why are so many people convinced they are the last “good” one to move into the neighborhood, and then want to shut and lock the gate behind them?

Maybe banning private home ownership isn’t the answer, but it sure would piss off a lot of idiots I hate and that is fun in and of itself.

Why the fat acceptance movement can go fuck itself.

You know what, I’ve been very fit. Extremely fit. For about five years in the army, I worked out 2-4 hours every weekday. Everyone around me was equally or even more fit.

And you know how often we thought about fat people, or shaming fat people, or spent even one single second contemplating fat people?

Not one second. Not one.

These people are so self-obsessed that not for one moment do they consider that almost nothing others do — and certainly not going to the gym and/or posting selfies of progress — has anything at all to do with them or with fat shaming. It literally has nothing at all to do with them, and I can guarantee that none (or nearly none) of the fit people they inveigh against has a single thought nor care for how fat others are.

No one goes to the gym to fat shame. No one posts selfies to shame others. Don’t like the posts about people doing healthy things, don’t read the goddamn things. Simple as that.

The fat acceptance movement had a possibility once of being something useful and meaningful, but is a joke and harmful to both itself and to society, and I will oppose it at every turn.

It is easy to imagine a culture much like our own except where altering or “photoshopping” images had become a celebrated and expected ideal, for the purpose of portraying more of what it felt like to truly be there.

Cameras do not capture well the feel of a place or an event. It’s the rare photo that does this, and even then it’s usually incompletely so.

In a different world, photographers would be more like painters where the images are expected or demanded by the public to be altered to better tell the truth of an event.

We’re accustomed to the way it is now, so to some the thought will seem monstrous; but the other culture is just as plausible, and they’d be just as appalled at our claim that an unaltered photo represents any truth of the world.