Tag Archives: Internet

Cosmo et al

I mentioned before, I got linked to by Cosmo. The link in the article  traced back to my odds of divorce post. This same article has since been posted in Elle, Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire, and Harper’s Bazaar, virtually a who’s who of the women’s magazine world. The writer, Asher Fogle, seems to be a somewhat influential woman in this world, judging by her LinkedIn, which lists her as an editor at multiple high profile magazines.

This has led me to multiple observations:

First, do these people have not have editors. I have nothing against Asher, she didn’t slander me or anything, but I am unsure what she was thinking. I know nothing of her, but I am almost entirely sure she would, at the very least, disagree with almost everything I write. In addition, I write primarily badthink and none of these magazines seem the type to court badthink. Linking to me runs a risk of drawing the Eye of Soros. It doesn’t look like the author or any editors actually reviewed my site or the link beyond the data. This is interesting.

Second, I am almost surprised by the incestuousness of the women’s magazine sphere. The exact same article was posted on 5 different major magazine sites (that I know of). Did she get paid 5 different times for the article? After looking into it, it turns out all five magazines are owned by the same company, so probably not. A search also turned up that MSN had the same article, although, AFAIK, they have no ties to that company, so maybe she got paid twice.

Finally, the major one is how little traffic these sites sent me. Cosmo gave me a grand total of 42 hits, Good Housekeeping, Elle, and Marie Claire  gave me 4 each, and Harper’s gave me 6, for a grand total of 60 hits. MSN gave me none. As a comparison, 2015/08/08 Lightning Round sent anywhere from 30-200 hits per a link, in a single day (some sites with multiple links can receive up to 300-500 hits) . Over the last quarter a buried link from TRP over a similar time period sent me 70 hits, a Chaos Patch from Land can send over 60 hits, , a Free Republic link sent 130 hits, and a RooshV thread sent me 60 hits.

None of the other links are abnormally high: my aggregator, Reaction Times sends me 50-150 hits a post, a link from Viva la Manosphere nets 100-300 hits, some TRP links have sent thousands of hits, one link from Scott Alexander got me over 2000 hits. I could go on but you get the point.

Why are major, international, professional magazines with paid writers, editors, advertisers, web designers, etc. getting so outclassed in this area? I run a poorly edited blog consisting mainly of long-winded posts laced with grammatical mistakes and typos on arcane socio-political theory on the fringes of the already fringe edgysphere in my free time, yet a single link from me sends multiple times more traffic than five major corporate magazines combined.

Their Alexa ranks destroy mine (although, being in the top 260,000 sites in the world for the kind of blog I run is still pretty decent, I think), so it’s probably not due to traffic.

Is it because the women who read 15-point clickbait lists aren’t the type to click-through to the source? Do they read nothing but the headlines? I was in one of the later points, maybe they can’t read more than a couple hundred words at a time? Was it the article itself? Is divorce risk simply not interesting to women?

I’m not sure what the reason is, but I found this discrepancy rather odd. When I saw Cosmo pop up in my referrers, I thought I’d get a deluge of visitors and was worried a minor internet outrage storm might engulf me. But instead, I got less hits than I do from a buried link on a random TRP thread.

More Encouragement for Bill

Bill over at Apocalypse Cometh was encouraged by the anger and planning of a young person who e-mailed him.

So, I thought I’d give him a bit more encouragement.

The rage that person expresses is not that uncommon among young men in their late teens and twenties. Our generation has inherited a world of shattered families, smashed gender relations, eroded civic virtue, and decayed social institutions.  Our education system is a broken mess of deceit, mental oppression, psychological castration, and exploitative larceny. When we finally graduate university, we face economic stagnation, unemployment, and hopeless economic prospects.

Rage is not uncommon. As an well-known example, advise him to check out /b/ on 4chan. (The link goes to Wikipedia. I am not linking to the site as it is very much NSFW. Do not visit it if you are prone to being offended by, well, anything). I’m not sure if Bill would know of it or not, it’s not something older folks are generally aware of.

The site is populated by, primarily, young adult males, mostly of the beta and omega male varieties. It is massive; it currently stands at about the 1,000 busiest website in the world (about 500-600th in the US), with about 18 million users a month (about 6% of the US population). As the origin point for almost every popular internet meme you may have encountered, it has huge cultural power.

Out of any place you can check, it is probably the best indicator of the attitudes of current generation of what young adult beta males. The anonymity of the site frees to talk as they wish without the confines of societal pressure.

So what are thoughts of the beta males on this site?

Rage, pain, and cultural nihilism.

It is infested with every kind of racism, violence, gore, misogyny, pornography, and the like you can imagine (and many you never would).  There are no taboos about anything: everything from suicide to religion to the handicapped is mocked and profaned. Those who don’t partake or object are mocked as “moralfags” (everybody on 4chan is labelled a ****fag).

Nihilism, anger, hatred, and sadistic glee permeate the site, but even underneath all that, it is hard to judge them for it. Because underneath all the rage is a sense of bitterness, pain, alienation, and unquenchable loneliness.

They are hurting; they are despairing. They are stuck in a society that is destroying them and are lashing out in the only way they know how.

Check out this comic which explains how many of them see themselves and their site. I’d embed it, but it becomes unreadable.

****

This is the new generation of young males and it’s frightening.

There are 18 million young males spending good chunks of their time on this site. They feel betrayed, hurt, and angry and they are desensitizing themselves to the normal moral prescriptions that hold society together.

When we talk about the decline and the destruction of our youth, this is what we are talking about. When we talk about the economic and cultural hopelessness among our youth, this is it. When we talk of the beta males being ground down, this is what we’re talking about. When idiots talk about man-children or Peter Pan boys who refuse to grow up, this is what they don’t know they are referring to.

All the theory, all the hypothesizing: this is where it exists in reality.

Bill may find “Someone” encouraging, but I’m not so sure. He’s only the small tip.

Most of these people are probably outcasts sitting alone in their basements who will never take action on their own, but out of the millions, there are probably at least a few thousand that are leaders, some that are organizing something.

Even if there isn’t, how can a society continue for long when such a large portion of its young adult males are this disengaged, this nihilistic, this bitter about their society.

What happens when these millions of young adult males bring this bitterness and rage beyond the internet? A few protests from Anonymous (as they call themselves) at Occupy and elsewhere have been largely ineffective so far, but how long will that last?

I don’t know, but when there is this much unfocused rage and pain, among this many of the coming generation, it can’t be good.

What happens when the unfocused rage becomes focused?

Maybe this isn’t encouragement for Bill, maybe it is, but I don’t think the consequences will be anything anybody likes.