As expected, like a fly to the finest fecal matter, the defense of evopsych from the Kurgan attracted a Gamma in his comments, a Gamma who didn’t hesitate to leap in and take his shot for what one can only assume is some long-forgotten offense taken long ago. And how can we be certain that it was a Gamma?

First, there were the inevitable walls of text. Second, because attempting to pile onto someone else’s critique while simultaneously changing the subject entirely to his own particular obsession is exactly what Gammas do. And third, because the guy literally calls himself “The Gentleman Adventurer” which might be a more obvious Gamma tell than “The Perfect Gentleman”.

See if you can count the addition giveaways in these series of posts.

Adam Piggott The Gentleman Adventurer:

I agree with this. Vox’s use of the SSH is far too simple and restrictive, which I think is by design. It is often used to put people in a box and make them shut up. Your views are irrelevant because you are a lowly gamma, etc. My main criticism of the SSH is that it offers no hope. There is no possibility of change or renewal. This is contrary to everything that I have observed on this topic during my life.

A child’s upbringing is critical. Environment plays a huge part, and thus change is possible; extremely difficult but possible. Sometimes that is the cross that God provides us and our road is to overcome those early obstacles. Vox shuts that door, and mocks people for questioning it.

I think that divorce and divorce culture has had the biggest impact of this type on children as regards to the effect of their environment on their development. The results are in after 50 years and the results are not positive in any way.

I look forward to your book. This counter balance is desperately needed. We cannot rob our men of hope. To do so is evil as far as I am concerned.

Vox Day: There is no possibility of change or renewal of one’s behavioral patterns after a certain point in one’s life. That’s an observable fact, no more contestable than observing the same thing about one’s height or one’s shoe size.

I don’t mock people for questioning the SSH. I hold them in contempt for being so observably stupid, especially on the basis of such transparent motivations.

The SSH doesn’t rob anyone of hope in anything that matters. The Omega who serves God faithfully and well has more genuine hope than the jaded Alpha whose socio-sexual status is so high that he needs the promise of multiple cheerleaders and cocaine just to get out of bed in the morning. If you’re putting your hope in socio-sexual status, you do not have a solid grasp of what is good and what is evil.

Adam Piggott The Gentleman Adventurer:

I didn’t state that the SSH is evil; rather, Vox’s use of it to destroy hope in men is evil. Once a gamma always a gamma and all that.

Vox did not merely develop the SSH to simply classify people. He explicitly uses it to silence his critics. He wrote and published a book on it. That is not a private use of a privately designed system. He flings it around like confetti at a parade.

His calling out of a gamma might often be correct, but his stance that a gamma can never change is awful and against everything that God teaches us. A gamma is a man mired in sin. Telling lies is a great example of gamma behaviour. A man can ween himself off that behaviour, but according to Vox he cannot and nor should he even try.

I too have critics, as well as readers who leave nasty, stupid or disruptive comments. What I don’t do is to attempt to publicly psychoanalyse them with my own made up social classification system. In fact, I rarely respond to comments at all. I do utilise the banhammer, however.

There is much truth in the SSH, that I do not dispute. Vox’s ability to classify men into behaviour patterns is indisputable. Where I disagree is on two major points:

No man is just one of the traits. We have most of the traits within us all of the time, but one will inevitably be more dominant than the others. The degree to which a man has the negative traits under control is the most important factor to consider personally in regards to this information. I have seen men who I would classify as predominately alpha suffer a personal setback and revert to insane gamma behaviour in an attempt to get even with those who betrayed him.

And the second point is that men can change. Men can rise from great personal adversity and overcome childhood trauma that may well have destroyed other men. It is often what you overcome that defines who you are as a man, and I agree with you that environment as a child has a great deal to do with this.

Vox Day: Change what? I’ve never said men cannot change. Men can certainly change their behavior. They can change their outcomes. But they will never be rid of their internal behavioral patterns or the instinctive reactions that drive them. A Gamma is always a Gamma in the same way that an alcoholic is always an alcoholic, and relapse is always waiting.

Adam Piggott The Gentleman Adventurer:

Oh what tosh. You don’t believe the rubbish you wrote here for a second, you’re just writing it to justify yourself. You put people in a box, label them and then tell them that they can’t get out of it. You then treat certain of these archetypes as untouchables and justify treating them that way due to your own imposed definitions. It may as well be a modern version of the caste system.

Transformation in Christ is possible for any man. You try and rob them of that hope and I think it’s appalling.

Vox Day: You’re a liar and your accusations are observably false. I have no need to justify myself. You, right here, are justifying my observations made 16 years ago.

Look at how your theology is entirely based on your own feelings of past rejection and your desperate need to escape those feelings. Which is how I, and everyone else, can see that you’re a Gamma male.

Of course, we already knew that from your “Gentleman Adventurer” handle. That’s how totally obvious these things are.

Adam Piggott The Gentleman Adventurer:

And there we have it, another entry in the international best selling hit, “Everyone who disagrees with me is a gamma”.

Also, big words from someone whose handle translates to the “voice of god”.

Vox Day: The Kurgan disagrees with me all the time. He’s obviously not a Gamma.

The relationship is not causal.

You’re lying again. And that’s not what my handle translates to either, but that’s merely your ignorance. Your rhetoric is weak because it doesn’t point to the truth.

Now, to be fair, we don’t know that this particular Gentleman Adventurer is the same Adam Piggott mentioned by the BBC or not, but let’s face it, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if it was.

Suspended sentence for man’s social media hacking

14 January 2025

BBC News, West Midlands

A man has been given a suspended prison sentence after hacking into the social media accounts of six people and copying and sharing their private images and videos on the internet.

Adam Piggott, 35, of Lime Street, Shrewsbury, was given a 10-month sentence, suspended for 18 months, at Shrewsbury Crown Court.

He had previously pleaded guilty to seven offences under the Computer Misuse Act.

Piggott was also handed a five-year criminal behaviour order for the hackings, which took place between 2019 and 2021.

The order will restrict and monitor his behaviour and online activity.

Gammas are going to Gamma. And they never change, even if they do sometimes develop sufficient self-discipline to stop giving into their disastrous instincts. If this is the same Adam Piggott, then I would a) commend him for his desire to change, and b) point out that the necessary changes are internal and spiritual, and there is no point in being concerned at all about externalities such as socio-sexual status.

Ideally, a Gamma should concern himself with becoming a better-behaved, more tolerable Gamma in better control of his Gamma instincts than with attempting to convince others that he is something he is not. Because if he can’t accomplish the former, he’s definitely never going to manage the latter.

I noticed this in an exchange of women discussing female behavioral tendencies and something about it struck me with how similar it is to Gamma behavior.

If men use their wife’s satisfaction as a metric for how well they’re doing in their relationship or in life in general, it’s going to go downhill fast, because women are pretty much chronically dissatisfied. Instead of being wired to scan for the positive, we are scanning for the negative and latch onto them with all of our might. And then we show them to you, look, this is the negative I found, here, and here, and here.

Yes, women tend to scan for faults and things they can criticize.

Now, the first lesson here is the substantiation of the Red Pill idea that “happy wife, happy life” is an erroneous foundation for a relationship objective. It may be true, at least in that an unhappy wife tends to correlate strongly with an unhappy marriage, but it doesn’t mean that attempting to make a wife happy is a reasonable path to pursuing a happy life.

If you’ll indulge me in a philosophical tangent for a moment, I think “the pursuit of happiness” is an intrinsically flawed idea. Happiness is short-lived and is closely related to hedonism in men and attention-seeking in women, both of which provide pleasure in short, but sharp doses. If pursuing happiness is truly your ultimate goal, then living fast, dying young, and leaving a good-looking corpse is the way to go, preferably with considerable quantities of cocaine and hot, crazy women. Which provides a sound philosophical basis for the Christian concept of the need to die to one’s former self. Close digression.

The second lesson is that if someone is chronically dissatisfied, then there is absolutely zero point in attempting to satisfy them. A man once conducted an experiment and wrote down every single complaint he’d heard from his wife over the course of a month. The next month, he consulted his notes and made a concerted effort to proactively address every single item in order to forestall the possibility of each item generating any complaints.

The net reduction in her complaining in the second month: zero.

His efforts made absolutely no difference in that regard. So, he quite correctly stopped worrying about her complaints, recognizing that they were just part of the marital scenery, and hasn’t paid any attention to them in decades. There is no point attempting to solve an insoluble problem.

My applied philosophy on the matter is a little different. I’m less intrinsically hostile to what many men view as complaints, especially when I agree with them. Yes, the trash is full and I should deal with it. Yes, the grass is too long and I do need to go out and mow it. To be honest, I don’t even see those sorts of things as complaints, but as observations. Being a man who is more than a little prone to disappearing into the abstract for days at a time, it’s quite helpful to have someone remind you that the material world does, in fact, require an amount of attention from time to time.

But you’ll notice that it’s not about her satisfaction or dissatisfaction with regards to the matter. If the observation is true, then it is, and neither her feelings nor mine are relevant one way or the other. The mission is the mission and nobody has to like it. Perhaps that’s a Sigma mindset, perhaps not, I have no way of knowing if that’s a common perspective or not, I just know that basic observations don’t tend to increase my blood pressure the way it seems to for a fair number of other men.

Of course, it’s also possible that my wife is simply better at dealing with me than most wives are at managing their husbands. She’s quite clever, so the possibility can’t be dismissed.

Moving on to how this relates to the Gamma males, there are two perspectives to consider here. The first is that of the Gamma himself. And here I have some pertinent questions:

1. What is the point of scanning for faults that you can criticize?

2. Do you feel as if you are somehow scoring points each time you are able to identify a problem, a mistake, or a flaw?

3. Does complimenting others or paying them their due for legitimate achievement cause you pain or otherwise bother you?

4. Do you even notice when others do things well or achieve something positive?

5. Can you tell when people don’t want to be informed of their faults? Does that make any difference to whether you will inform them or not?

6. Is it the identification of the fault or the criticism provided on the basis of the fault that provides you with the most joy?

The second perspective is that of everyone else. Now, I dislike criticism more than the average person, not because I am more insecure or more pigheaded than the norm, but because so much of it is either a) incorrect or b) useless. As evidence, I offer my invention of the Red Team Stress Test, which involves going out and proactively seeking the most vicious, detailed, comprehensive and tireless criticism I can find, which I utilize to make my scientific and philosophical works as close to bulletproof as I can.

If I was sensitive to criticism for criticism’s sake, obviously I would not subject myself to that, especially not ChatGPT’s endless handwringing negativity. I swear, if ChatGPT was a person, it couldn’t give you a glass of water without warning you about the risks of drowning.

And while I’ve found that most Gamma criticism is useless even when it isn’t incorrect, as it usually is, it’s worth initially tolerating because sometimes it points me to a new and productive line of thought. This is never anything the Gamma intends, of course, but that’s the result. The most recent example was the way a few Gammas were attempting to nitpick the probability known as “the Darwillion” which was never anything more than a pure rhetorical device. But their efforts led directly to the comprehensive overturning of neutral theory and Kimura’s equivalence.

The point is that one can usefully mine the Gamma’s criticism for inspiration and new targets, while ignoring it at face value.

A friend of mine recently posted a critique of my recent comparison of the scientific legitimacy of the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy with the complete illegitimacy of the entire field of Evolutionary Psychology. This is a perfectly reasonable response; no one, including myself, understands the full range of the various implications of the mathematical impossibility of the theory of evolution by natural selection. So let’s see what he has to offer:

In his latest post on Sigma Game, he characterises Evolutionary Psychology as “fake science squared” and his SSH as proto-science.

I would tend to agree with the description of the SSH. After all, as readers here or of Caveman Theory are aware, I had developed my own version of the SSH long before I knew of Vox at all. So the observation of the traits he ascribes to different types of men is absolutely founded in reality and proper observation.

That said, while I don’t necessarily put a lot of stock in evolutionary psychology, as a model, it can and does predict certain things, if at a different scale than the SSH.

Furthermore, logically, you cannot pretend to have one set of measurements for the competing theory and excuse your own from it:

Regarding the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA), he says:

“Verification of the causal mechanism: zero. Nobody has ever observed a Pleistocene male choosing a mate. Nobody has identified the neural substrate of the alleged module. Nobody has demonstrated the heritability of the preference. Nobody has shown the selection coefficient that would have driven its fixation. The entire causal chain from ancestral selection to modern preference is inferred, not observed, and the inference rests on assumptions about ancestral environments and reproductive payoffs that are themselves unobserved. What’s actually being measured is a correlation between a stimulus and a rating. The evolutionary scaffolding is decoration.”

But is the SSH put under similar testing? Short answer: No.

No one has identified the neural substrate of a Gamma compared to a Delta either.

No one has demonstrated the heritability of any part of the SSH either. Nor any other mechanism that would explain why someone becomes a Gamma instead of Lambda. There has been no empirical study of this any more than anyone has demonstrated heritability in EEA, and arguably quite a bit lees in fact.

As a model that predicts certain behaviours, the SSH works, and at a granularity that is higher resolution than EEA, but EEA also predicts things accurately probably at a similar rate as the SSH just at a different granularity. We could posit that the EEA model is mostly accurate at a macro scale and the SSH is mostly accurate at a micro scale. The REASON as to why the SSH or the EEA “work”, that is the details of the model, are basically opaque in both instances. The why, if you like, that Vox studiously avoids looking at. At least as far as his public posting on the issue goes, as he has repeatedly stated that he does not concern himself with the WHY, only the WHAT.

In which case, whether a model is real or not, becomes academic. If it works use it and if not, ignore it. If you look at the EEA as a large model predictor, it certainly appears to work.

Read the whole thing there. I will respond to this in detail in a post later this week, but I will give you a hint: the distinction between the focus on the WHAT rather than the WHY is not only all-important here, but it completely defangs the attempt to claim that I am pretending “to have one set of measurements for the competing theory and excuse your own from it”.

I’m not doing anything of the kind. I absolutely welcome precise apples-to-apples comparisons between the experimental performance of the SSH and of evopsych. I already know, with mathematical certainty, that evopsych does not exist because human psychology could not have evolved from anything, since evolution didn’t happen.

Whatever the mechanism that causes variations in human psychology and behavior may be, we know it absolutely is not evolution, for the same reason we know it wasn’t pink, polka-dotted Quiggers who were responsible, although ironically the Quiggers hypothesis is more probable than evolution, because while we have no information supporting the idea that Quiggers ever existed, we know for a certainty that evolution by natural selection, or by genetic drift, did not take place.

Of course, neither do any other kind of girls. Anyhow, this will likely turn into a music video sooner or later, even if it started as an image for a different song. And it’s an excellent demonstration showing how the SSH can be utilized to produce a creative spark. So let’s kick it old school 80’s style…

BOYS WHO CRY

The first time I saw you, eyes were wet

It tore at something in me

That desperate sadness, that soft teary plea

What I saw then, I can never forget

Girls don’t like boys who cry

Girls don’t like boys who are shy

Girls don’t like boys who ask why

Girls don’t like boys who cry

The second time I saw tears on your face

I felt something break inside in me

That wicked weakness and pure misery

Just made me wanna get out of that place

Girls don’t like boys who cry

Girls don’t like boys who are shy

Girls don’t like boys who ask why

Girls don’t like boys who cry

Evopsych mate preference claims. Hypothesis: men in the EEA who preferred low-WHR women left more descendants, so modern men inherited a WHR-detection module. Evidence: cross-sectional surveys and ratings of stimuli, mostly from undergraduates, mostly Western. Test: ask people to rate pictures. Verification of the causal mechanism: zero. Nobody has ever observed a Pleistocene male choosing a mate. Nobody has identified the neural substrate of the alleged module. Nobody has demonstrated the heritability of the preference. Nobody has shown the selection coefficient that would have driven its fixation. The entire causal chain from ancestral selection to modern preference is inferred, not observed, and the inference rests on assumptions about ancestral environments and reproductive payoffs that are themselves unobserved. What’s actually being measured is a correlation between a stimulus and a rating. The evolutionary scaffolding is decoration.

And now that evolution by natural selection has been conclusively and comprehensively disproved, it follows that an evolutionary process that never occurred in the past cannot be responsible for psychological behaviors that are observed in the present.

SSH claims. Hypothesis: adult male social behavior sorts into a limited number of recognizable patterns, and those patterns predict outcomes across social, sexual, professional, and organizational domains. Evidence: direct, observable behavior of men in actual social settings, replicated across cultures, industries, decades, and observers. Test: identify a man’s pattern, then predict his behavior in a new context, then check whether the prediction holds. Verification of the causal mechanism: not required at the descriptive level, but the predictive reliability is what matters for the hypothesis to qualify as science. The framework makes specific, falsifiable predictions — the Gamma’s secret king behavior, the Delta’s pattern of self-justification, the Alpha’s indifference to explanation, the Sigma’s lateral relationship to the hierarchy — and those predictions are confirmed or disconfirmed by direct observation in ordinary social life. Anyone can run the test, repeatedly, on people they actually know.

By any criterion that distinguishes science from non-science — falsifiability, predictive power, observability of the underlying phenomena, replicability of the test — the SSH outperforms the evopsych canon, and it isn’t close. The SSH makes risky predictions about specific behaviors in specific situations and the predictions come true. Evopsych makes safe predictions about aggregate preference ratings on Likert scales and then garlands the result with unverifiable ancestral storytelling.

Read more

It’s always easy to tell when an organization finally gets serious about something, because the first thing they do is eject the women in charge:

Eight months after her appointment as the Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Robotic and Autonomous Systems in December 2025, Rebecca J. Gassler was removed from the position on Wednesday, per a Navy release.

In addition to the removal, the service announced the establishment of the Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Robotic and Autonomous Systems, aimed at correcting “years of fragmented requirements, resourcing, and acquisition practices that dispersed accountability, complicated industry engagement, and slowed delivery to the warfighter,” the memo states.

Christopher Miller was selected to serve as the acting DRPM RAS and will concurrently take over Gassler’s previous role as Portfolio Acquisition Executive RAS. He will report directly to William Toti, who is performing the duties of the under secretary of the Navy.

This is interesting to me because it indicates that more than a year after the little drone-and-pony show at the White House, the US military has finally grasped the reality that 5GW > 3GW and that no amount of posturing can substitute for the combination of drones and the ability to manufacture large numbers of them.

The US military was so far behind the state of the military art that it still thought of Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Robotic and Autonomous Systems as being the perfect sort of makework job to park a diversity executive. But now that Iran has demonstrated that an effective drone force can negate the combined power of the USAF and the USN, everyone understands that this might be one of the most important responsibilities in the Navy.

I doubt it will make much difference, to be honest, because having a more decisive male decision-maker in the position isn’t much of a substitute for an effective mass-productive industrial sector. But the replacement of Ms Gassler is an indication that someone in authority now understands the strategic importance of robotic and autonomous systems.

There is no doubt that the legal deck is stacked against men in the modern West. There is no doubt that Western society has been riddled with the feminist cancer, that many women have been possessed by a spirit of Lilith, and that the USA has been transformed from the New Rome into the New Carthage.

None of this changes anything with regards to a man’s duty to himself, to God, and to his ancestors.

MGTOW is the same sort of stupid, self-destroying psychological operation as feminism, only aimed at men. It should be called “emasculism” because it is a philosophy for frightened, conflict-avoidant men who are psychologically incapable of rising to the challenge of difficult times. It is a defensive, self-protective mentality for soft men in hard times meant to allow them to protect their fragile egos, their delicate emotions, and their tender hearts from the increased likelihood of failure in difficult times.

Think about how stupid and short-sighted emasculism is. It’s quite literally the child’s tactic of throwing down his toys and running back into the security of his bedroom upon discovering that the game he’s playing isn’t fair.

Never mind that life isn’t, and will never be, fair.

Now, this is not to say that none of the various complaints that the advocates of emasculism present are false or incorrect. Most of their complaints are based in fact, even if their grasp of the actual statistics and the relevant probabilities are often exaggerated and incorrect. The risks about which they complain are real. Their negative diagnoses of modern Western societies are more or less true.

And yet their proposed cure is much worse than the disease. What does the average emasculist expect to achieve through “going his own way”? He’s going to avoid getting his heart broken by never taking the risk of falling in love. He’s going to avoid having his children taken away from him by never having any. He’s going to avoid losing up to half his earthly possessions by living in his parents’ basement and collecting all the Pokemon cards and bobbleheads that he wants.

Does he truly imagine that his refusal to take part in society is going to have any more beneficial effect than the collective Omegas’ inability to do so? Or, as is much more likely the case, is he merely posturing for what he images to be effect?

Whether you call it MGTOW, emasculism, or otaku, what it amounts to is a retreat to Omega. It requires giving up every ounce of your masculine self-respect, all of your accumulated status in every male hierarchy, and accepting an end to your genetic line, all in the name of your fear of the possible.

The truth is that the MGTOW isn’t a man at all. He is a psychological self-castrate.

The fact is that every single alternative to emasculism is observably better. Worried about divorce? No one is going to force you to marry the woman you’re banging. Worried about child custody laws? Move to a more father-friendly state, or even a more father-favorable country. Worried about your stuff? Even giving up half your stuff as a married man will probably leave you with more than if you never get out of Mommy and Daddy’s house; few things drive a man to accomplish and acquire and build more than having a wife and children.

Want to swear off women and follow a higher purpose? Some of the greatest men of history have been monks vowed to celibacy, but that’s a man going God’s way, not his own way.

Taking risks and persisting despite the possibility or even the probability of failure is part of what makes a man what he is. Emasculism isn’t refusing to play society’s game, it is rejecting manhood.

I thought this was a perspicacious observation of the way in which dating apps and social media have significantly damaged the sexual and marital marketplaces for Generation Z.

Dating apps and social media introduced distribution at scale to the sexual marketplace and almost nobody understands what that actually changed. Before the apps and social media, everybody dated in their real life. Their city, their circle, their league. Then suddenly, every woman had access to the most attractive men in her area with dating apps, and with social media, the world. And men who never would have approached her in real life were now a swipe away at midnight.

So now her experience changed. She’s getting attention from the top, but the top doesn’t commit. He doesn’t have to. He has the same access she does. So instead of adjusting, the culture renamed it. Situationships, rosters, “keeping options open.”

Meanwhile, the average guy became invisible in the lineup. Not because he got worse, but because the venue changed. And the women who’d eventually circle back to him at some point? He’s aware of that plan now. Social media told him. So now he’s preemptively out, locked in on himself, Red-pilled, or checked out of dating entirely.

No one course corrected because nobody had a reason to tell them to truth. Men say whatever gets them through the night, women don’t warn each other, and so expectations on both sides just kept inflating. And now the first generation that ran this whole experiment is hitting their 30s and finding out that access is not the same thing as options.

Both sides are lonelier than any generation before them and each side is convinced that the other one is broken. Nobody broke it. The venue did, and the venue doesn’t care.

This is why it is important for a young woman who wants to get married to stay off the dating apps, and, unless she is very self-disciplined, she should probably avoid social media engagement as well.

Only a woman who isn’t on the dating apps and can honestly say that she’s never been on them is going to be fully trusted by the average young man, and it’s very, very difficult for young women to resist the dopamine addiction offered by all of the affirmation available on social media.

If you have real-world objectives, the less time you spend in the imaginary world, the more likely you are to achieve them.

A member of one of the younger generations is shocked to discover that Boomers always Boom whenever given the opportunity:

My boomer mom just fucked our entire family for money.

Grandma was getting old, and had a condo. She put it, in a trust for me and my mother with money and another condo (her brothers that had passed). Not a ton of money but maybe 650k total. (one condo had a 20k mortgage balance the other 80k)

Grandma wanted her other daughter taken care of (cant put her on the trust, she is a degenerate), and for everyone to split things.

I told my mom, I didn’t need any of the cash/money, I do well. And as long as she rented the properties out she could keep them both. Then when she passed the properties would go back to the family.

She is retired and only gets ssi. With the properties it would have been about 4k a month net, combined with her ssi and her paid off home, she would be doing very well.

I have a property management company and told her we would manage them for free.

Grandma died. Fast forward, my mom calls AFTER everything is in her name and the old trust dissolved, that she is selling the properties.

Her excuse “I’ve never seen that much money and I want to just see it in my hand, you know? Plus I’ve worked hard my whole life, and I have maybe 10 years left. I deserve to live it up!”

I blew up. Telling her my grandparents didn’t work their entire lives to create a generational income for her to blow it. She doesn’t care, she said I have plenty of money and my kids will be fine.

There is plenty of blame to go around here. Obviously, the Boomer is responsible for her theft from the rest of her family. And it’s also obvious that she’s likely to blow through every last penny of that money before she dies.

But her son allowed it to happen. The trust was set up because his grandmother knew that both of her daughters were selfish and irresponsible, and he very stupidly, and selfishly, wanted to absolve himself of the responsibility for handling it.

Let this be a lesson to you: if you won’t accept the responsibility, you will likely have to accept the losses that are incurred by your refusal.

I missed this remainder of this exchange in the comments, in which a woman saw fit to ignore the declared constraints of the conversation in order to share her totally new and original opinion of Christianity.

Meh. Another Triumvirate. Been about 15 of those religions, the Times Three. Christianity is a Designer Slave Religion, created by The Justinians, odds on. I liked the Gnostics but France barbecued them for believing that ordinary people could talk to God w/o a priest. Ah beautiful Langeudoc! Heavens forbid! & gnostic-ly, i reckon “ this is Hell/nor are we out of it”

VD: You’re literally retarded. And you clearly can’t read.

Literally retarded”. You insult your own language. Let me guess ; you spend weekends writing your own hagiograpghy. On leap years you clip your toenails. Meh. I like most your work, the publishing is a thing of beauty. Your prosletysing is tiresome & it surely is dismaying (to you, idgaf) that banging on yer godrum doesn’t equate AT ALL with those “christian values”. Such a casual ad hominem attack, knowing nothing but my first words, you denigrate. 🤗 Blessings to the cheesemakers 😇

Reader 1: Vox is saying you’re retarded and illiterate because you didn’t read the “this is not a religious debate thread” part of his post. Vox’s comment is a rhetorical point toward what I just mentioned; you, like many others, didn’t read the rules of the comment section before dumping your religious opinions in a comment section dedicated to the SSH. Hope this helps.

Reader 2: You are retarded. Ad hominem has nothing to do with you being called out. No one cares that you like most of his work. Stop projecting your bullshit. Own up and apologize.

I think it might be useful going forward if those who, for whatever reason, wish to contest various religious and philosophical matters with me would first take the trouble of familiarizing themselves with my work on these topics. It should help tremendously in allowing them to understand why I view their positions as reprehensibly ignorant and their mental capabilities as quite literally retarded.

I’m not a fan of the appeal to authority nor do I ever expect anyone to accept anything that I say by virtue of the fact that I’m the one who said it, except when it involves the definitions of concepts that I originally conceived and of words that I originally coined. That being said, there are a very small number of individuals who have ever even attempted philosophical works of a similar magnitude, outside of Aristotle, Plotinus, Avicenna, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Suárez, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Whitehead, Peirce, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Advaita, Abhidharma, Madhyamaka, and Zhu Xi, and none of those historic figures ever managed to produce an analytical device as formidable as the Triveritas.

What I am saying is that perhaps it’s not a bad idea to take five minutes to recognize what sort of monster you are attempting to challenge with your half-remembered quotes from a college professor at your third-rate university before you throw it out there.

And if you are solipsistic, by sex or by nature, do always try to keep in mind that neither Nature nor Nature’s God gives even an atomic fragment of an airborne rodent’s posterior about what you happen to prefer. Because I certainly don’t either.

Fandom Pulse breaks down the way in which the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy applied to all the weyrs of Pern.

Anne McCaffrey built her dragon-color system decades before Vox Day gave a name to the taxonomy of the sociosexual hierarchy it accidentally dramatizes. Bronze riders compete directly for command. Brown riders hold the middle as competent seconds. Blue riders make up the ordinary mass of the fighting wings. Green riders carry a coding McCaffrey herself built in from the start, one she never fully walked back. None of this was designed as social theory. It was designed as worldbuilding. But worldbuilding this granular, sustained across two dozen novels and half a century of revision, ends up mapping status behavior with more precision than most writers manage on purpose.

The SSH framework sorts men by status-seeking strategy: Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma, Omega, and the later addition, Sigma. It’s explicit that rank is situational. A man can hold Beta status in one group and Alpha status in another, depending on which hierarchy he’s standing inside at the time. That qualifier turns out to matter enormously once you start running Pern’s cast through the grid, because several of the series’ most interesting characters only make sense once you ask which room they’re in.

The mapping is obvious for anyone who’s read Pern:

Bronze = Alpha. A bronze rider’s authority isn’t inherited or appointed. It’s won in the sky, when his dragon catches the senior queen in a mating flight and he becomes Weyrleader by direct contest. Lose the flight, lose the position, sometimes lose it to a rival within the hour. There’s no hierarchy in fiction that runs closer to Vox Day’s Alpha model on its own terms: dominance established by winning a contest that everyone in the group watches happen.

Brown = Bravo. Brown riders are the wingleaders, the seconds, the men who make a Weyr function day to day without ever contesting a queen flight themselves. They’re competent, loyal, and largely uninterested in unseating the bronze riders above them. Sebell fits this same shape on the Craft Hall side of the world: he spends the entire span of the books as Robinton’s trusted second, and when he finally becomes Masterharper it’s by consensus and demonstrated skill, never by displacing his predecessor through contest. That’s Bravo succession in its purest form.

Blue = Delta. The bulk of every fighting wing. Ordinary, competent, unremarkable, mostly indifferent to the status games playing out above them. Delta is the largest category in Vox Day’s system for a reason: most people, in any hierarchy, aren’t fighting for the top or resentful about the bottom. They’re just there, doing the job.

The most useful discovery in mapping this system isn’t the clean cases. It’s the characters who hold Alpha rank by dragon color and Gamma psychology by behavior, because the split between the two reveals what the taxonomy is actually measuring. It was never about position. It’s about how a man responds when his position is threatened.

T’ron, the old-timer Fort Weyrleader, feels usurped by F’lar and his prowess. He starts as one of the more sympathetic figures in Dragonflight, a friendly, capable bronze rider who helps talk his fellow Weyrleaders into the leap of faith the plot demands. By Dragonquest he’s unrecognizable: suspicious, obstructionist, bullying the holders under his authority and rejecting F’lar’s reforms less because they’re wrong than because F’lar is the one proposing them. When it becomes clear the other Weyrleaders will eventually force him to answer for his failures, he doesn’t step down and he doesn’t out-compete F’lar within the system that made him Weyrleader in the first place. He challenges him to a duel and tries to kill him, calculating that removing F’lar removes the entire threat to his authority in one stroke. That’s a bronze rider, structurally Alpha by every metric the Weyr recognizes, choosing the exact move associated with Gamma: unable to win the legitimate contest, so he tries to cheat the board instead and feels the entitlement. F’lar will note multiple times that the old timers ride smaller dragons and can’t catch the queens as well as the modern ones. It creates a seething, entitled caste.

Green is obviously Gamma, but it doesn’t fit precisely because the Green dragons are female, although a sterile sort of female so perhaps it actually works better than one might imagine.

In any event, while it’s both fun and thought-provoking to find examples from literature and film, it’s always important to remember that the fictional examples are always subordinate to observable reality. I’ve seen more than a few people get confused by this; never forget that an Alpha as written by a Gamma and portrayed by a Delta, or a Delta as written by a woman, is always going to depart in some ways from the behavioral patterns that we reliably observe in everyday life.

So read the whole thing there.

For decades, Kathy Ireland has been portrayed as the image of pure success, a celebrity swimsuit model turned business mogul who turned one form of success into another, more lasting one. And, like most “success” stories, it not only turned out to be fake, but downright fraudulent.

Having graced the Sports Illustrated cover three times, the bombshell launched Kathy Ireland Worldwide (kiWW) back in 1993, quietly building a retail empire that would make her one of the wealthiest models on the planet.

At one point, Forbes - who dubbed Ireland a ‘super mogul’ - estimated her net worth to be roughly $420 million.

As Ireland traveled the world and her former doctor husband worked grueling shifts in the emergency room, the managers promised to take care of all of the couple’s personal and financial affairs, the lawsuit alleges.

‘Winters and Sterling induced [the couple] to grant them powers-of-attorney and to give them full reign over all of their personal finances and income,’ the court filings state. Winters and Sterling took absolute control over all aspects of the financial affairs of Kathy and Greg, promising to do right by them and make them wealthy.’

‘Based on the promises made by Winters and Sterling, Kathy and Greg believed they had millions of dollars invested by Winters and Sterling and that they had extremely significant net worth,’ the suit added. But the alleged ruse came crashing down when the couple, who have been married for 38 years, recently tried to help their son buy a home - only to find their application to co-sign on a ‘modest mortgage’ had been denied.

‘Kathy and Greg now know there are no substantial retirement accounts. There are no prudently managed investments securing their future, as promised,’ the court papers state.

‘There is no wealth securing their retirement and their children’s futures, as they were lead [sic] to believe. Instead, in the wake of [the managers’] misconduct, there was staggering debt, misused credit, secret loans, and missing funds.’

This is very far from a surprise. All wealth management is just gambling. If the managers place the right bets, they look very smart and responsible. And when they don’t, they look stupid and corrupt. But it’s the same thing either way, it’s just dependent upon the roll of the dice.

This is why every story about a successful billionaire involves one or more bankruptcies. The only secret to their success is gambling and their ability to convince people to give them a new stake when the previous one goes bust. And for every successful trillionaire, there are hundreds of similar gamblers who failed on their double-or-nothing bets somewhere along the way.

If you are so fortunate as to acquire or inherit wealth, manage it yourself. There will be no shortage of people telling you that they can relieve you of the burden of it and make you even wealthier while allowing you to focus on what you do best, but the reality is that they will use it to secure themselves a comfortable living on the basis of fees that get charged whether they increase or decrease what they are managing.

This, of course, is why both the wealth managers and the corporations in which they are invested are now seeking to be backstopped by the various national governments, because their whole unproductive house of cards is on the verge of collapsing again.

If you want to get rich without doing anything productive, content yourself with betting on sports. At least then you’ll know when you lose, before you’ve lost everything.

It can be astonishing how similar Gamma behaviors are to female behaviors. Which may account for both a) the way in which women rapidly identify and react negatively to Gammas as well as b) the whole tranny thing.

Because with few exceptions, the vast majority of so-called “transgenders” are Gamma males.

It’s always remarkable to see who does, and who does not, understand the significance of tone. In other languages, such as Chinese, tone can actually change the literal word. For example, 中国 is customarily read Zhong Guo, which means China. However, it can be pronounced 11 different ways, and each of those pronunciations has a different meaning

And it can be even more confusing than that. 买 pronounced mǎi means “to buy” while 卖 mài means “to sell”.

In English, tonal differences are generally used to signify reversals. Whereas “that’s sick” is ordinarily a term of disapproval or diagnosis, if it is pronounced in a positive tone of voice, “that’s sick” is a term of approbation and admiration.

Which is why the common defense of “all I said was…” so often heard from Gammas and women isn’t a defense at all. Because the literal words are only part of the communication process and the tone with which they are said is also part of it, and like an adjective transforming a noun, the tone is capable of entirely changing the meaning of the spoken phrase.

Related to this is the way that people not infrequently begin an exchange with a certain tone, and then affect to be surprised when the response comes in the same tone, or perhaps an even more negative one. If you are often surprised by the negative way in which people respond to your conversational overtures, start paying attention to how you are beginning the conversation. Aggression is usually met by either defensiveness or aggression. Coldness is met with distance. Sarcasm tends to provoke more sarcasm in return.

Because Gammas tend to run a constant self-commentary as they go about their day, and because that stream of self-commentary is mostly negative, they are particularly inclined to begin talking with a negative tone that inspires negative reactions.

So, if you’re frequently finding that the initial response of others to something you say is in an unpleasant or hostile register, start paying very close attention to how you are initially addressing others.

On a nice, warm evening in Barcelona, Mike Cernovich once gave me two of the most important pieces of advice I’ve ever received. They made a major difference in how I approached projects and how I finished them.

1. Stop being such an upper middle-class pussy.

2. Scratch and claw.

I’ll go into the details of what those two things mean some other time, but these statistics explain the necessity of the latter:

• Frank Sinatra: 1,200 songs, 209 hits, 17 percent success rate

• Elvis Presley: 710 songs, 40 hits, 5.6 percent success rate

• Babe Ruth: 8,399 at-bats, 714 home runs, 8.5 percent success rate

• Pablo Picasso: 147,800 pieces, 30 masterpieces, 0.02 percent success rate

That’s why I don’t worry about never having written a mainstream bestseller. I’ve only written around 20 books so far, although if we’re successful in developing the Byron AI, I anticipate that I’ll write 100 or more by the time I’m done.

Suno has already permitted me to increase the number of songs I’ve written from 20 to over 100, and it has pretty obviously improved the quality of them as well. And my newly developed ability to add visuals has now led to two much-more skilled musicians asking me to collaborate with them and help them bring their musical visions to life.

FLOAT DOWN THE RIVER by Soulsigma

This is a widescreen version of my fourth attempt at a video, and I learned a lot from making it, chief among those lessons being don’t start with a vertical orientation and convert to horizontal unless you want a lot of extreme close-ups, do it the other way around and then drop in an occasional new shot when necessary. And this isn’t even the best version of the song; it’s actually a Soulsigma cover of a Vibe Patrol original which will, eventually, get its own video.

The point isn’t whether it works or not, and it isn’t whether you win any approval or not, the point is that you keep moving forward, you keep improving, and you keep creating the new possibilities for future success. That applies to everything, from people to projects.

The song, of course, is more about patience than persistence, but then, patience is a necessary element of persistence.

Keep grinding.

A common meme going around feminist circles, both in the social science literature and on social media, is the concept of “mental load”:

Modern life demands multitasking, but for many women, that pressure runs deeper than visible responsibilities. The mental load refers to the invisible, ongoing management of everyday life, planning meals, remembering appointments, organizing schedules, and anticipating others’ needs.

Linked closely to emotional labor, this hidden work involves managing feelings, one’s own and others’, to maintain harmony at home or in the workplace. Over time, this constant emotional and mental energy leads to stress symptoms such as exhaustion, anxiety, and irritability.

What Is the Mental Load?

The concept of mental load gained attention through discussions about gender inequality in household management. While chores can be divided evenly, the mental task of remembering what needs to be done often remains unequal.

For example, a woman might remind her partner to pick up groceries, schedule a doctor’s appointment, or plan family events. Even if tasks are shared, one person still bears the mental responsibility for ensuring they happen.

This ongoing micro-management defines the mental load. It’s largely invisible because it happens internally, thinking, tracking, planning, anticipating. The work doesn’t stop when the chores end, leaving little space for mental rest.

The answer, quelle surprise, is that men should do more. Not that it will make any difference if they do, or absolve them of any of their own responsibilities, stresses, and problems, all of which are to be suffered in toxic manly silence until the sweet release of death, but nevertheless, it is the only answer provided to this nonexistent issue.

The reason some women suffer from “mental load” is that they are control freaks. It’s not an accident that this is not a youthful phenomenon. It’s because they a) have actual responsibilities and b) they don’t delegate. They don’t want to allow anyone to relieve them of responsibility for anything, because that would require abandoning their right to demand their own standards. And, in many cases, they don’t even want to allow other adults, for whom they have absolutely no responsibility, to simply live their lives in peace without their constant interference, e.g. the traditional mother-in-law trope.

I saw a reel from one such woman who described how she was suffering constant exhaustion from her mental load. But she did have an awakening of sorts when she described how she was downstairs packing a suitcase, presumably for a trip of some kind, and how she was angry that her husband didn’t offer to come down and help her.

She even started to call him to come down and help her when she realized that if he came down to help her, he would probably pack the suitcase quickly and efficiently while she dithered over whether she might need a sweater in case it got cold or not, and then the task would be complete without her having any control over what was in the suitcase and how it had been packed.

That was when you could see a dim light of something approaching self-awareness dawn in her eyes, as she realized that what she had been considering her mental load of what had been put upon her by external forces was actually the inevitable result of her own internal desire for control in that particular situation.

I don’t know whether she managed to extrapolate from the specific situation to the general one or not, but the observable fact is that any woman, or any man, for that matter, who struggles with a “mental load” would do well to take a step back and contemplate both the task list and the priority list. While it’s possible that every item on the task list is vital and each of them is of maximum priority, the probabilities of that being the case is extremely low.

In other words, if you feel as if you’ve got an excessive mental load, look internally for the solution, not externally for help or to blow off emotional steam.

The answer to minimizing the legal risks of improving your organization’s labor quality and structure is being proactive. Write the behavioral competency model for each role before anyone classifies anything, define the competencies in observable job-related terms, and commission a validity study showing they predict actual performance. The Uniform Guidelines exist to give employers a road map for defending selection practices that produce uneven results, and a validated instrument applied consistently is the strongest shield available.

Run adverse impact analysis twice a year. Then run it through outside counsel, because an unprivileged internal audit that finds a problem and sits in a shared drive for a year is a plaintiff’s opening argument establishing that you knew there was an issue and did nothing about it. Document contemporaneously, apply progressive discipline uniformly, and treat men who did the same thing the same way every single time, without exception, because inconsistency is what actually destroys employers in wrongful termination cases. Policy is seldom a problem. Inconsistency in applying the policy is.

Then build the exit, and understand that the framework’s real legal value is not defensive but predictive. Ensure that a specified human being with genuine authority is responsible for every adverse action, so the system advises and an employee decides; this preserves the individualized-assessment defense and keeps you outside the statutory definitions of an automated decision tool. Formalize the reclassification appeal the framework already requires and call it what it legally is, which is documented internal due process, and which juries weigh heavily when they are deciding whether you acted in good faith.

Route separations through release agreements with real consideration and full OWBPA compliance for anyone over forty. Keep arbitration agreements with class waivers, which Epic Systems v. Lewis confirmed are enforceable. And then consider what the system is telling you. The man most likely to sue after being fired is the man whose opinion of himself most wildly exceeds his documented output, which is not merely correlated with the Gamma profile but is very nearly the definition of it.

A framework that flags him eighteen months in advance is a framework that tells you which files to keep immaculate, which conversations to hold with a witness in the room, and which separation to buy out with four weeks’ severance and a signature rather than defend for two years at four hundred dollars an hour. The gains described in this chapter are real. They are also perfectly capable of being devoured by the legal department, and the only thing standing between the one outcome and the other is an organization run by an exeutive who is disciplined enough to know the difference between what the organization understands and what it documents.

But the reality is that between improvements in the hiring process and the understanding that less is almost always more when it comes to certain behavioral patterns, you should not need to fire anyone. Be generous in buying out suboptimal employees. Help them find new positions in other organizations that are a better fit for them. There is no need to be vindictive or vengeful; the objective is to remove the friction, not hurt anyone’s feelings.

The good news for the SSH-aware in the workplace is that the socio-sexual hierarchy is legally invisible. There is no protected class for behavioral pattern. Title VII covers race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. The ADEA covers age, the ADA covers disability, and the various state statutes add sexual orientation, marital status, and in a few jurisdictions political affiliation. Nowhere in this apparatus is there a shred of protection for the individual who is contrary, oppositional, and convinced of his unrecognized brilliance. An employer may lawfully decline to promote a man because he sulks and refuses to do his job, and no court will hear otherwise.

The bad news is that this legal fact is irrelevant to whether or not your organization gets sued. Litigation risk in American employment is not really a function of what the law permits. It is a function of what a terminated employee believes, what a contingency-fee attorney can construct from your documents, and what a jury will make of vocabulary it has never heard before. The entire problem, therefore, reduces to a single observation: the gap between what your managers actually know and what the corporate record officially states.

The first thing to avoid is the vocabulary itself, in writing, anywhere. Not in performance reviews, not in termination memoranda, not in Slack, not in email, not in the HRIS notes field, and above all not in the deposition of a middle manager who thought he was being clever. Everything an organization writes down is discoverable, and a plaintiff’s attorney does not need the classification to be unlawful. He only needs it to sound sinister when read aloud to twelve people who are unfamiliar with the framework. “Terminated: Excessive Gamma” is not a legally-coherent explanation; it is not a defense; but an exhibit. “Terminated following three documented performance improvement plans, seven written warnings, and two substantiated complaints from colleagues” is a case that never reaches a jury because no competent attorney takes it on contingency.

The classification is a diagnostic instrument for the manager’s own judgment, in the same way a physician’s clinical intuition informs a diagnosis that is nonetheless documented in observable findings. It informs the decision and it is never the actualreason.

The second thing to avoid is allowing the framework to become a proxy for something the law does protect. The most obvious exposure here is one the chapter creates for itself: the SSH describes male behavioral patterns, and a system applied to men but not to women is a facial sex-based classification under Title VII. That is not disparate impact, which requires statistical proof and permits a business-necessity defense; that is direct evidence of differential treatment on the basis of sex, and it is close to unwinnable. The framework must therefore be embedded inside a behavioral competency system that applies to the entire workforce. Hence the need to provide an alternate framework, one that is entirely behavior-based and can be applied to either men or women in a neutral manner.

A woman cannot be a Gamma, by definition. But she can certainly behave in a manner consistent with those behaviors categorized as a Critical Challenger. Note that this further underlines the vital importance of focusing solely on the What and not the Why.

Another potential area of exposure is disparate impact under Griggs v. Duke Power, where a facially neutral selection practice that produces disproportionate outcomes by race, sex, or age becomes actionable regardless of intent. A further problem that most organizations never see coming is the Americans with Disability Act. In Karraker v. Rent-A-Center, the Seventh Circuit held that a personality inventory used for promotion screening constituted a prohibited medical examination because it was capable of revealing a mental impairment. Any classification instrument is necessarily standing very near that line. This is why it is necessary to keep the assessment profiles strongly anchored to observable workplace behavior and job-related conduct, preferably documented over time, and never characterized as anything a psychologist would recognize as clinical.

The final thing to avoid is a surveillance layer, which is where the actual statutory landmines are buried. Automated analysis of meeting behavior, speech patterns, and Slack network structure runs directly into a rapidly proliferating body of AI-employment regulation: New York City’s Local Law 144, which requires an independent bias audit and advance notice for automated employment decision tools; Illinois’s AI Video Interview Act and its more recent amendment to the Human Rights Act governing AI in employment decisions; Colorado’s AI Act and the EU AI Act’s high-risk classification for employment systems, which applies to any operation touching European employees. Voiceprint and faceprint analysis in Illinois triggers BIPA, which carries statutory damages per violation and per person and has produced nine-figure settlements against companies that thought they were merely improving their timeclocks. Recording meetings for behavioral analysis implicates two-party consent statutes in a dozen states.

None of these things are necessary for observing behavioral patterns, and despite the temptations they will pose to the Smart Boys in management, the advantages they might, in theory, offer are dwarfed by the legal risks that come with them. There are much easier, less intrusive, and legally safer ways of identifying who is an Operational Leader and who is a Technical Specialist than using technology to spy on them.

People in the late ‘80s thought NWA were alarming, but the reality is that few things are more terrifying than a Gamma With Authority in an organization. Because you can be absolutely certain that he is going to abuse it in some way, quite often in a manner that you didn’t anticipate and quite possibly in one that you never imagined.

I’m on a board of a non-profit organization where the treasurer is a gamma. He’s made the non-profit a charitable one so he can be more of a bottleneck. He’s blocking spending on the basic function of the organization in order to save it all for charitable donations. It’s quite the pain and he’s having gamma fits trying to control everything.

The three other members of the board would like to remove him with minimal pain if possible. Here are a few options we’re considering.

• Encourage him to retire after this year’s reporting requirements are done? Ideal if it can be done.

• Vote him out with considerable pain, potential gamma spiral and bad transfer of responsibilities?

• Have him donate the money in the bank, nuke the organization and start fresh under a new org?

We have already backed up the repository of information.

Something else?

First, never refrain from dealing with Gamma-related problems for fear of Gamma spiraling. They rely upon the fear of their tantrums and ability to cause problems to forestall others from acting against them. That’s why they instinctively, and proactively, set about gathering power, revising rules, putting themselves in positions of influence and control, and setting up at the chokepoints and bottlenecks.

Second, the Gamma should have been fired the moment that he unilaterally altered the nature of the organization. The treasurer is not the strategic director of the organization, and so he exceeded his authority by doing so, even if he somehow possessed the ability to do it.

Third, it’s pretty evident that there are nothing but Deltas in this organization. The fact that the Gamma felt bold enough to essentially take control of the direction of the organization from his position strongly indicates that there was no one in authority who commanded enough respect to keep him in line. The response of the board is telling in this regard; they are still reluctant to take direct action against the Gamma for fear of “considerable pain”.

This inability to control Gammas and command respect from them is why Deltas can NEVER be in charge of any organization. They are too narcissistic and conflict-avoidant to be capable of policing anything or inspiring the Gammas to police themselves.

So my advice is Option 2: vote him out. Vote him out at any cost, no matter how much upheaval is threatened and regardless of whatever drama and histrionics may ensue.

This week I finished a new music video for a new Soulsigma song that will be on the Byronics album. I was fortunate that an old friend of mine, who I’ve known for nearly four decades and for whom the song was originally written, gave me permission to use her as Byron’s avatar of Beauty’s daughter. I won’t belabor the explanation here, but both the original poem and the music video are metaphors. Feel free to attempt the deciphering if you are so inclined.

PERFECTION by Soulsigma (Instagram video mix)

Now, I’ve pointed out many times to men who are confused about their SSH status or suspect they might be a Sigma because they are introverts or didn’t get invited to parties in high school that the second S in SSH stands for sexual. Which is to say, if you’re a man who has not been surrounded by Beauty on a regular basis, you’re observably nothing of the sort.

George Gordon Byron was in many ways the signature Sigma. His reputation and having been dubbed “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” by one of his more literary lovers proved famously alluring to men and women alike, and indeed, his inimitable style not only introduced the word “byronic” into the language, but set the stage for every brooding male sex symbol from Jim Morrison to The Lost Boys, to Sarah McLachlan’s Possession, to 50 Shades of Grey.

I have a number of intellectual heroes, chief among them being Umberto Eco and Herman Hesse. But George Gordon Byron is, and always was, my artistic lodestone, even before I knew anything about him. Not having been much drawn to 19th Century literature in my youth, and Byron having been banished from the approved poetry curriculum in both high school and college, I owned the Dead or Alive CD for several years before realizing who it was named after.

It’s not an accident that the Castalia AI project is named after him. And while his poetry isn’t for everyone, it almost invariably makes for spectacular music lyrics, particularly if your compositional instincts incline toward the dark and melancholy.

So the spirit bows before thee

To listen and adore thee;

With a full but soft emotion,

Like the swell of Summer’s ocean.

There will, of course, be an amount of natural interest in my friend, who is nearly as delightful as an individual as she is beautiful. That’s really what she looked like back in the day and the outfit she’s wearing in the video is what she was wearing on the night I met her, when she showed up at The Living Room in a limousine with ten other girls and asked me to take them to a strip club. I also introduced her to Prince a few years later, at his request. He took his shot and went down in flames, but wound up becoming friends with her as well.

And yes, she and my wife know each other and like each other. That’s perhaps one of the most interesting things about truly beautiful women; contra the near-universal assumption on the part of both men and women alike, they actually tend to be more independent, less insecure, and considerably less bitchy than the average woman.

If you’d like to see the widescreen version of the video or learn more about how it was made or some of the various infelicities you may have observed, there is more about the technical aspects of the production at AI Central. And as for the metaphor, it’s about inspiration and the creative process, if that wasn’t obvious.