They are desperate to be cool, it’s so cringe.
I’ve worked hard to keep these kinds of men out of my personal life, to keep them away from me, out of my goddamn sight… It’s time for us to start getting revenge on the nerds.
And there’s the rub. I was there, and we still have the nerd-to-nazi pipeline pumping vast numbers of boys into the alt-right. And to this day, no-one wants to deal with them.
Curiously, Japan is entirely dissatisfied with herbivore men who just want to be left alone in their life with their waifu, but that doesn’t produce the next batch of cheap labor and soldiers for industrialists to exploit.
Yes, I’m bitter, and righteously so. Treat our kids better; acknowledge they have sexuality. Teach consent and human intercourse in public school. (We’re not going to do these things. We hold great contempt for our fifteen-year olds, whether men or women, and just can’t help ourselves.)
cringe = cringeworthy for anyone who needs an easy search-and-replace
This is something I observed regarding Trump in his first term, here this guy is allegedly super rich and now leader of the free world, and he still thinks he’s a total loser, hence his own inability to tolerate criticism, and obsession on harming enemies and bullying people.
He has to fuck other people’s wives and make John Kennedy Jr. eat McDonalds because even being President isn’t enough assertion of dominance to make him feel on top.
I have a tender self esteem, myself, and have deep-running neural pathways that will drive me nearly to self harm when I mess something up (e.g. drop my coffee, or burn dinner, or thoroughly lose my wallet). I have these structures of rational self-assessment so that when I calm down I can see I’m actually alright and have some sweet talents, and friends find me useful, and when not even that, at least lovable.
Trump with all his money and power doesn’t have that, and people like me can see Trump feels like a total loser propped up by hollow victories, even as POTUS, which is a fucking scary place to be. This is why cabinet meetings are a round-robin ritual of telling Trump how huge he is.
As for the tech bros, they succeeded in their careers which is exactly what we are taught manly men are supposed to do and still feel hollow (which is common when you fixate only on your career). They didn’t have that (possibly essential) experience where they collapse into despair as a young person and realize they need personal integrity or spirituality to climb out. (For me it was a moment of rational self-assessment and finding I was not wanting after all; that my depression and self hatred were based on delusions.)
As for Musk, his bio on Behind the Bastards suggests it’s really difficult for someone not to emerge from his upbringing without turning into a Disney / Marvel supervillain.
Thiel has his own backstory and obsession, and is perpetually feeling Death (his own mortality) chuffing hyperborean chills on the back of his neck.
So yes, these guys are desperate to cling to power, _because wealth and political transactional power are the only power they’ve ever known, hence J. D. Vance’s obsession on forcing women into natality which is likely to turn into Lebensborn style breeding programs (which inspired Atwood to write A Handmaid’s Tale. ) They are terrified of equality because then they’ll just be eccentric, antisocial dorks.
(I am an eccentric, antisocial dork, with few things to offer other than listening skills, peer psychology, computer nerding and moral philosophy, and in a world where we’re not all overwhelmed with bad news, that is more than enough to find friends, family and crew. But it takes some personal introspection and willingness to practice soft power to learn this.)
If they were able to step away from power, or we took it from them and forced them into peer group support, they’d eventually discover that they don’t need to be captains of industry (or James Bond supervillains) to be accepted and loved (and consequently, fed and homed by the community).
And when they’ve given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it’s not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wallIt’s true that we’ve gone from “oh good now it’s cool to be a nerd!” and rapidly progressed to “oh god the really bitter ones are using their success for revenge.” What’s wild is the image I have of an 80’s “reaganaut” (besides a bigot with bad taste) is someone who wants to be out and with people. They want a fuck ton of money to throw around in huge, public, ostentatious ways. These nerds are all obsessed with their fortresses of solitude. Like look even at your brolosopher grifters on the right - they live in sterile, expensive apartments. They never show themselves with people. They are offering this weird cult guru situation of “you don’t need people, you need my supplement and course and you will be a king like me.” Musk, Zuck, all those fucks (hyuk hyuk hyuk) believe and feed into this shit.
Now they’re mainstreaming eugenics and it’s getting really bad.
In the 1980s, being a nerd meant being a target for bullies, and we didn’t fare too well. The nerd hierarchy (in which the tech nerds looked down on Trekkies and Furries) was rather brutal, and informs why the furry / otherkin moral panic is mixed in with the trans moral panic.
Eventually, every company needed an MIS and nerds showed they were useful after all. This is not the good ending.
A parallel problem came from young people having libidos that no-one was allowed to acknowledge. We were all incels before the term, and they tried to teach me math when my brain was telling me I needed to rut. Even today, society disregards horny teens, creating a wide pathway to the Alt-Right (Immortan Joe’s Warboys) who respect only Alpha Males. Our Christian-centric sex-negative culture fuels the young-men-to-Nazi pipeline.
I don’t have a solution for it. The common response to horny-teens-gone-white-supremacists is to say yeah, fuck those guys in total contempt, so they’re going to continue to be an available and eager force of militants and voters for any charismatic strongman. They may go Herbivore (like Japanese men) once Generative AI porn gets good.
I’ll be the first to say millennials have a lot of bullshit and a high opinion of themselves, but something was cracked that made it so most of the white men of our generation aren’t complete total fuckwads who want to stomp marginalized people. If I remember correctly the majority of white male millennials (55%?) broke for Harris. We need to figure out what the fuck was happening at the time, cause I think it’s a lot more than just “Obama.” A ton of us came into the economy at a terrible time with the housing crisis. We were the generation of unpaid interns. But we didn’t go all gestures to musk and trump
In general, nerds have a history of being treated badly, bullied even, by the people you are talking about.
They arent around people because people harm them more than help them.
I remember the game Bully extended this take. The main character has no beef with the nerds, and helps them, but they still extend their victim complex to him and antagonize him.
Basically, it’s a problem with using the generalized word “people” in statements like that.
I think that’s a rather simplistic explanation tbh. There is literally a bro culture now about basically grafting capitalism onto self care that really fosters this shit too.
Zuck can piss off
I read the first chapter of Careless People last night and I never thought these people were such large dorks, but here we are.
This movie hasn’t aged well, for anyone who hasn’t seen it.
It was cringe when it released - it’s dated cringe now…
The saying money can’t unlame you still true.
Every major politician in the USA has major financial backers with their own agendas that they purchase through superPAC contributions and by funding re-election campaigns. It’s been the ruling oligarchy my whole life and I’m middle aged. Pretending it’s different or worse now is disingenuous.
Your statement reminds me of entrepreneurship: you’ve got a dream, a vision, a goal to improve people’s lives. What you don’t got is enough money to get your dream into the hands of people it will help. So, you go in search of people with money who honestly don’t give a damn about your dream, they just want to know how it’s going to get them more money, which they already have in abundance but somehow feel the need to continue to grow their hoard. They want to see business plans, with exit strategies. They want to maximize ROI, minimize (monetary) risk, minimize time to market - and those are the criteria your pitch will be evaluated on relative to all the others they receive all the time.
Politicians aren’t selling a business plan, they’re selling a legislative agenda. They don’t have to show ROI, they have to show low-cost electability.
It is worse now, at least the legal money side.
Citizens United removed the limits on the international money as well as the domestic money.
Why is the countey tearing itself apart? Because the foreign money has interest in weakening, stealing, amd profiteering from the USA.
Conversely, the domestic money wants to keep the domestic part from falling completely apart; at least until the real estate, votes, and grant money for the revitalization project are all lined up.
He’s such a fucking dork.
If they were posh people with “breeding” that wouldn’t make being the direct or indirect victim of their destruction any better, unless you’re an upper middle class Briton who has bern btought up with 19th century notions of “born to rule elites” such as most columnists for The Guardian.
I get it that people here derive a little enjoyment out of taking the piss of the character flaws of these wankers, but were they are coming from is not were this columnist is coming from.
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this but everything seems to be going down the tubes quite fast.
Yeah like having to accept all cookies to read the article.
Block third-party scripts, no cookie popup.
I will be happy if Zuck is Luigi’d before my death. Also Musk and Bozo.
I hope you aren’t from the US because that’s surely gonna put you on a NSA list
I have listened to MAGA pray for liberals deaths. I’m just saying it would be funny if they got luigi’d before my own death. I’m not calling for someone to do it. Unlike MAGA.
Fuck the NSA
Trump is scaling back the NSA and CIA isn’t he?
NSA take note, we can Luigi you too. Sit back and let the oppressors perish and it will stop with them.
I wouldn’t worry about the list. We are all on it by now anyway.
I’m not from the US and didn’t plan to visit anytime soon anymore so I don’t mind, just reminding others.
No one seems to have read Machiavelli’s stuff these days. It explains so much. Also, just history in general will tell you all about today’s happenings.
The Prince was a warning of what could happen. The Drumpf is the result of ignoring the warnings.
Imagine if, when Facebook rolled out, people were just like “no thanks, I’m good” and it never took off.
That’s exactly what happens when a Facebook competitor (possibly an ethical one) rolls out these days. Which is part of the problem. Zuck poisoned the idea.
Friendica exists, and it’s part of the Fediverse. It’s not going anywhere.
Dead things can’t, in fact, go anywhere.
I wanted to. I liked Myspace. It has character. Some of it was cringe. But you could at least customize it. Facebook seemed so bland. But I had an ex GF that insisted on it and I didn’t think it was worth breaking up over. I shouldn’t have been such a pushover.
I stayed on Myspace long past when the majority jumped ship. It eventually lost what made it special when the boy band guy bought it to twist it into something more music focused. But I still preferred it to the sterile, uniformity of Facebook.
You would break up over switching online platforms?
Nothing like that. It was more like she was insistent and I didn’t feel like it was a hill to die on at the time.
It sounds ridiculous now with everything that’s happened in social media in the meantime, but I can see that being a thing in 2006 when the vibe of social media was very different to what it’s become now. Back then it was just a tidy little PHP site for you to chat and share photos with friends and family on. Literally nothing appeared in your feed that wasn’t a post from a Friend. It was basically a Whatsapp group with a photo gallery feature.
Since Facebook didn’t have the baggage it has now, it’s much easier to read refusing to join your girlfriend’s circle of friends and family back then as a wider rejection of her as a person, same as if you refused to join her family Whatsapp/Telegram/whatever group chat.
I’m not taking her side here, but I wanted to give a bit of perspective for people looking at it through the lens of 2025.
I’m assuming the GF would break up with OP over it. Which is itself a big red flag.
Edit: fwiw, it does seem like there is quite a bit of drama and bullshit over choice of phone (Android vs Apple)
I used to hate the Android vs Apple drama vis à vis romantic partner choice, but then I realized that it’s in itself a great filter of people I don’t want in my life
when a guy that blocked her, she looked around as she thought people were listening to her.
I remember LiveJournal as something good. I wouldn’t use it, but felt a bit like Telegram today, except without Telegram, which is a good thing.
It was, until the events of the mid-2010s when most of the science fiction fandom community quit it and went over to Facebook, presumably because that was more convenient (i.e. on it already) than going to e.g. Dreamwidth (a LJ-alike that is still going). It operated in a very similar way to FB but somehow much more focussed maybe because it never got the ‘businesses having pages on there’ bit. Those of my friends who were on both, often used FB more as an events calendar than all-around social media.
