And some cool custom knives (below)
My ankle was feeling good enough this morning that the boot was actually more of a nuisance than the break.
Got Ava back from Furrydoc’s kennels. ‘Bout the second thing she did was body-slam herself right into that leg.
How did I end up with such a lunatic dog? She was amusing when she was a year or two or five years old. But she turns 10 this fall. Why can’t she just sleep a lot like a good senior dog?
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MJR, who sent this article decrying the current trend in “loud manliness,” said he was sorry it wasn’t more inclusive of women.
Actually, I think it’s perhaps more inclusive of us than we need it to be. Enough — and often too much — has been said about the rights, privileges, strengths, and demands of women. We’re equal now, and frequently ahead, in vast fields of endeavor. What’s left to achieve is detail. Yet now we’re innundated with ignoble, attention-seeking whines about how women are all victims of a mythical, male-blighted “rape culture.” Faugh! I’m embarrassed for the decent people of my sex.
I’m much more concerned with what’s being done to boys in increasingly female-dominated institutions. And how men of the future will manage to remain strong, vital, useful, self-respecting men. I’m horrified that boys and young men are being subjected to such toxic views of who and what they are. This toxic reversal is worse for male well-being than the stupid “sugar-and-spice, behave like a lady, submit, and be sure to be lousy at math” line was for us girls who grew up in the not-so-distant dark ages.
I don’t agree with the author of the linked article that manhood was easy and automatic in the past. I recall how often men had to struggle or even fake some faux ideal of manhood. And hey, it was guys who got drafted, guys who got stuck with a ton of dirty work. Manhood has never been easy. But I surely do agree that real manhood — and real womanhood for that matter — essentially consists of girding the loins and getting on with life.
/rant
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Ahem. Now go check out the cool custom Kershaw knives just arrived in the TZP store. These are Ken Onion-designed spring-assist folders and sharp tools in every sense of the word.
Oh dear… hope you didn’t have any real damage from the close encounter with the over eager dog. And I do hope the boot was on…
As for the man/woman thing, please forgive me if I don’t read that thing. I’ve read many of them, and find them all equally unimpressive.
Equality, in the sense they want, is not possible. No two things are alike, or have identical potential. To expect such “equality” for all human beings is irrational. The great problem is the attempt by so many to control others, to decide for others what is good – whatever the criteria, and regardless of the imagined good intentions.
Self ownership, self determination, and self defense are as necessary and appropriate here as it is in every other aspect of our lives.
ML — Yes, the boot was on. And thank heaven for that clunky old thing!
If by “the man/woman” thing you mean the article I linked to, never fear. It’s actually about manliness. Not about male/female relationships or power balance in any sense. It’s about being genuinely manly (which really boils down to being a grownup) rather than putting on some narcisstic display of manliness.
“Why can’t she just sleep a lot like a good senior dog?”
I don’t know about 4-legged seniors, but this 2-legged one doesn’t always sleep that well, either.
That’s a nice-looking knife, and I’m drooling. Have to wait till next month, though, to buy. Is there an address to order (and donate) by check?
I’ve always been an insomniac myself and it does get worse with time. Sigh. But dear old 14-year-old Robbie is a championship sleeper. Ava, a mix of two herd breeds, was born to have tons of energy. I just figured eventually she’d get over it.
That is a sleek looking knife, isn’t it? We’ll email you TZP’s snailing address from the store. If you don’t get it ASAP, let me know and I’ll send it to you personally.
I’ll have to get me a belt buckle like that. 🙂
Address received. Thank you.
I’ve posted pictures on Facebook of myself wearing one of my daughter’s tiaras. Does that mean I’m not presenting a manly enough image to the world?
Not sure what the writer is bitching about specifically, he didn’t give many examples of ‘loud manliness.’ But I agree with you that manhood doesn’t consist of being the Marlboro Man any more than womanhood consists of being Paris Hilton. In both cases it consists of being a serious adult. Which, alas, does seem more difficult with every generation though I expect most people work it out in time.
And my inner acquisitive boy is wishing I was still Mr. Suburban Man, because that sure is a pretty knife.
Kent: If there’s a little girl involved, you could be wearing that tiara at a tea party and talking like Queen Elizabeth, and it wouldn’t hurt your manliness any. Daughters have that power.
OT, I noticed my Seamonkey browser crashing when I got onto this blog recently. I suppose it is going obsolete, so that is understandable. But I wondered what to do next. I decided to try TAILS to see if I could live with it generally. Well TOR is very slow! Also when I tried to access the blog I got a 403 error from backwoods home, saying I am coming from a bad place in the world. Of course with TOR I have no control where the exit node is. Yes I can see why Dave excludes some parts of the world, probably tired of dealing with spam, but that policy also excludes TOR users. That is not too good since we tend to support privacy and oppose NSA…
I ran into the same thing with the FSW forum when I was using a VPN located in Netherlands, but that was easily fixed by having the admin let that IP address in. Unfortunately that won’t work with TOR since the exit nodes change from time to time and can be anywhere.
So I will probably stick with Lubuntu and get a more up-to-date browser going. A shame TAILS is so unworkable (I am using the TAILS Unsafe Browser to post this, which defeats the purpose of TAILS).
I’m running Seamonkey 2.33.1 – no trouble. Noscript plugin is active, and almost no sites whitelisted. I get it from the Ubuntuzilla repository, which should be the latest (haven’t checked recently, though). You can add it to your sources.list.
Thanks, I finally figured out Seamonkey was removed from the main repositories, and I have been running 2.20 all that time. Now it’s good (I guess).
The article was pretty good, except for the “Two generations ago men fixed stuff” part. I fixed things two generations ago, but a lot of today’s stuff is assembled out of black boxes full of computer chips.
Whenever I get accused of “male privilege” I remember Titanic.
I’d guess the lower survival rates for second and third class might be because they were on lower decks.
http://www.historyofthetitanic.org/titanic-survivors.html
Ok, I read the article. Sort of fixated on “fixing” things… 🙂 He doesn’t seem to understand that most things today are not built to be repairable. Heck, most things are no longer made in such a way that they can even be cleaned thoroughly. They are not intended to last that long.
I think the author touched on the right idea, as you did, but I wonder if he understands it much. True manliness and femininity are the product of being adult, a self owner, responsible… The externals of dress, makeup, body image and so forth are at best mere distractions…
Much of the image thing, the concern over what others think and demand, is natural to the immature. The social “obligations” crap taught in government schools, along with so much else, is intended to keep people at that stage.
The power struggle is simply the fight over who gets to control others, no matter their gender or situation. And that’s just childish. sigh
I guess I look at it differently (as usual). I think being “manly” is not just about what you can do, or even being “grown-up” (that’s just a part of it), but about being confident in yourself, and confident in being a man and knowing what men are for.
Gender feminism has done a lot to remove that confidence, and men — in bending over backwards to be fair with women, both in law and in attitude — have allowed themselves to believe (or were taught to believe) some of the emasculating concepts that gender feminists have insisted on. That was a mistake on men’s part.
Likewise women, on insisting that they could or should do whatever men do, have often become “efeminated” [no such word, but it’s the equivalent of emasculated], and have lost the ability to understand who they are, and the role they play in /true/ equality.
(E.g. combat duty for women is not “equality”, in my opinion, but is lacking in womanly common sense, and denies women’s ability to look for and find peaceful solutions to problems [not the same as compromising, BTW]. An armed woman determined to defend her home is not responding as would a combat woman killing an Iraqi in his home — and I know which woman I would trust to make the correct judgment in a crisis.)
Claire, all the social warrior justice nonsense is just controlled opposition, which is designed to balkanize the population against itself so that the people can never unify and resist.
Fascinating how “Ava” and “Alpha” start with the same letter.
No, Shel. She’s actually quite submissive to humans and very much a people pleaser. She’s just also rambunctious, high-energy, insane for affection and attention, and not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. (Not to mention she’d been cooped up in a cage for 11 days.)
I got the impression as I read the piece that the author was trying to write better than he could. He seemed to be trying to expound on something he knew little about.
Being a man has to do with your relationship with your family, and your neighbors, and your community, and your God. Your quiet confidence, self-reliance, ‘getting things done’, being able to fix things, etc., not at all.
[Being a man has to do with your relationship with your family, and your neighbors, and your community, and your God. Your quiet confidence, self-reliance, ‘getting things done’, being able to fix things, etc., not at all.]
I don’t know… seems to me it has to do with all those things. Or at least they are interrelated; it’s hard to imagine having a manly relationship with family and community, yet being without self reliance.
As to fixing things being impossible these days, that’s news to me. I’m always fixing things. Most maintenance on cars is even simpler than before; at least we no longer have to file points and grease vacuum advances any more (thank heaven). Changing fluids ain’t that complicated.
Plumbing, electrical work, all about the same as it ever was (except that solvent-welded plumbing is easier than soldering copper, which in turn was easier than threaded iron pipe).
Being able to fix things is another way of saying “not dependent”. A community of people who are not dependent is a community that does not need government, and is a community for which (strangely) doing for each other is commonplace because it eventually will come back around to you. That’s why the ruling class hates us.
Sheesh! He says he runs a magazine about manliness, and then it’s about ‘roadmaps and life hacks’? Sorry, my idea of manliness doesn’t include having some hogdog telling me how to make the road smoother. And he whines about ‘loud manliness’? I hereby LOUDLY decry the (forgive me please, women) girlie-man bi/metro culture that is now considered ‘male’. ICK! I would tell him to ‘man up’ but he wouldn’t have a clue.