Wrong number...

I've got a fairly new 800 number, and I've also got some new phone lines, which means I get a lot of wrong numbers, calls intended for the previous holders of the numbers. No, Brenda isn't here. I can't provide you with a new turntable. I have no idea what happened to those people...

Finally I had a really interesting wrong number today. I asked the caller if he wanted to do a call, and he asked for "Skyler". As far as I know, nobody by that name has ever worked in my group, so I asked him how long it had been since he'd called that number, and he said it had been a while.

I thought that was a little strange. The number would have to have been really old to have been a phone sex service that had the number before the trading company. But don't worry, it gets stranger.

He was happy to do a call, although a little perplexed by the fact that the phone number he had called went right through to a girl instead of to the dispatcher he expected. He asked for 30 minutes, then told me his fantasy - of being caught by a teacher while doing something naughty and punished. Hmm, his fantasy is my specialty, too...

So after the call we chatted for a few minutes. I wanted to make sure he had the correct number to call me back, and he went to look in his address book. Lo and behold, he had intended to call L Enterprises, but had dialed a number on the line right beneath it, my number that he had no recollection of having written down anytime recently - though it must have been within the past month, or the number would have been for a trading company. He'd forgotten to put any info about that number with it, so it was orphaned there, waiting to be called accidentally.

So I ended up doing a 30 minute call with a wrong number. Works for me.

The new face of Internet trolls

First, we need some definitions, nomenclature. What is a troll?

According to a must-read article in Wikipedia, "a troll is someone who comes into an established community such as an online discussion forum, and posts inflammatory, rude, repetitive or offensive messages designed intentionally to annoy and antagonize the existing members or disrupt the flow of discussion, including the personal attack of calling others trolls."

Not only will trolls begin bizarre threads for the purpose of creating dissention, they will hijack threads not about their favorite topics, take on alternate identities in order to keep flames fanned by pretending to carry on discussion, attack others not in complete agreement, and beg for help in defending themselves from the persecution.

The majority of site members try to reason with trolls or give help, regardless of how increasingly absurd the trolls make their situation appear. Members will fall all over each other to be helpful, and rarely does anyone critically analyze the story of the troll, which would not stand scrutiny.

This is a standard description of an Internet troll, a person who comes to a site for the purpose of raising hell and setting members against each other.

Keep in mind that though the Internet is an anonymous place, trolls often are not anonymous. They may be in a position beyond reproach, like one I observed on several food and wine oriented boards. Because this person was rich, confident, and semi-famous, he got deference from board members, moderators, and owners, then immediately started posting absurd threads and hijacking other threads back to a few favorite topics - topics so absurd on their face that no meaningful discussion really could occur - filled with personal attacks on other board members. The length of time it took to ban this person on a board was in proportion to what I would call the "sucking up quotient" of the board owner. In other words, it took about two years. Since the owner of this particular board was a celebrity ass-licker, the person was not banned until after many members had complained and then left, and many members had chosen sides. The two groups were, of course, "he has a right to speak his mind" and "STFU and go start your own board if you don't like it". There were a great many members banned in the rift, and an overhaul of ongoing moderation standards.

In fact, with improved moderation on many boards, trolls like this are rarely seen.

That's not the kind of troll I want to discuss today. I'm thinking of a somewhat different type of forum troll. This person shows up at a forum where they have a sincere interest, but generally is completely ignorant about the topic. They ask for endless advice in dealing with their situation, revealing in excrutiating detail things that just don't add up. Their endless questions are met, again and again, with flurries of posts from helpful board members who, as always, fall all over themselves in what appears to be a helpfulness competition.

The troll in fact never does seem to take any of the advice given. His situation is surrealistically fluid, impossible to pin down. He endlessly floods the board with "pity" posts: Help me!

If someone is to raise a question about a discrepancy ("You're having trouble thinking? Maybe it was all that dope you told us you smoked yesterday...") other board members immediately rise to the aid of this person, demanding that one and all should provide him with unconditional support in this, his time of need.

Board members who disagree with the troll keep their thoughts to themselves or share them in PMs to avoid being attacked themselves.

Ultimately it appears that it is impossible to determine whether the troll is emotionally unstable or merely a fictional device being used by a malicious interloper.

How does it end? I can't say that I know. One board I belonged to I left over a poster who dominated discussion in this way. The board just got too boring. A year later I happened back to that board and saw that that poster was no longer posting but was still a member in good standing. She bored herself off the board?

I'm currently observing two other situations like this on two very different boards I belong to. Ultimately the situations will resolve themselves, but til then, who knows? I will keep you updated.

Had a call last night...

From a guy who wanted a Mistress. It seems he wanted the standard Mistress experience, at least I guess so, which is really not what I do. I'm not even sure what those other girls do to their males.

I told him that my specialty is roleplay. and described (briefly) my favorite roleplay, that of the Principal in her office, correcting bad boy in need of firm guidance. He was a little reluctant, but decided to suspend disbelief and go with it.

Well my goodness. Not only did we manage to get through the whole lecture, but afterwards he was raving about how my technique sent him into subspace.

Mind control. Works for me.

Scientists making progress in eliminating the need for men

Just kidding, guys, but I got your attention, didn't I? What these scientists did was develop a procedure that turned mouse embryonic stem cells into viable mouse sperm cells. They then used these sperm cells to fertilize eggs, which resulted in seven baby mice being born, six of which reached adulthood, There were some developmental issues, but overall a nice first try.

Scientists are theorizing that this might become a useful procedure for producing sperm for a man who is himself incapable of sperm production, provided it also becomes possible to harvest and grow stem cells from his blood.

I think this would be a great basis for a work of fiction.

'Lab-made sperm' fertility hope

There's another dumbass born every day!

Ok, this guy has been posting in a phone sex forum for about a month. He's styled himself as a male PSO, you know, one of those straight guys who is willing to bash fags to get a buck, but couldn't act his way out of a bucket to do gay sex calls and make some real money. Because, you see, what he really wants is women to call him and pay him for phone. In a fair world, the women would be calling him because he's just plain good - a real man - instead of laughing at him, as they are. And if they're not going to be calling him, they should stop exploiting the sex drives of men and get into some other line of work.

Appropriate sound effect

I couldn't help but respond, to toy with him. It makes me feel like a cat that swats a baby mouse back and forth before finally moving in for the kill.

So I'll reproduce here for you what I wrote. I don't intend to ask his permission to quote him, so I won't be reproducing his words.

It is solely an issue of supply and demand. You guys stop calling and we'll find a different line of work.

The choice is really yours, and always has been. You can't change the men around you, but you can change yourself. You are neither a victim nor a slave to your sex drive, the same as with all other customers on the site - unless you have chosen to be.

You just need to learn to come to grips with the fact that evolution has resulted in an excess male sexual capacity. Survival of the species was ensured by having males ready to procreate during that brief time in the reproductive cycle when females are fertile. Unfortunately for you males, now that the species is no longer in danger of extinction this has become the challenge for you, wanting sex more often than the females around you have need of it. But as I always say, more challenge will give you males the opportunity to build more character.

Lots of guys do control their sex drives and don't call us on the site, nor do they become speakers for the purpose of hanging with the phone hos. If you're not a slave to your sex drive, then you can walk away from this site. If you stay and cling to what you say you abhor, your actions are speaking much louder than your words, regardless of what font size you may choose to use..

So the time has finally arrived to turn your glance down to gaze at your glistening ruby slippers, click your bejeweled heels and murmur three times, "There's no place like home...there's no place like home...there's no place like home..."

Welcome to Summer School!

I know you were planning on hanging out with your buddies, smoking, and having wild parties when you parents left town, but you forgot something. Mainly you forgot to do your schoolwork, so you didn't pass and you're grounded. But don't worry! Summer school is here to keep you out of trouble and buy you back some respect from your parents, peers and teachers.Yeah, right.

Although you may actually learn something to make up for all the time you wasted this academic year goofing off, listening to your ipod and text messaging in class.

It's time for a newsletter.

I continue to be disappointed by the number of you boys who get sent to my office for inappropriate behavior, but on the plus side, it has been giving me the opportunity to give strict guidance to those of you in need of it. I have noticed that a number of you boys have finally realized that it may be necessary to take action to head off predictably bad behavior, and have come into my office for preventative discipline. Extra credit is available for time spent working on your attitude while in my office! Since what you have a need for is discipline, I am the one who can give you that - to help you cope with the fact that you were born male and thus unable to see straight in the presence of a powerful woman such as myself.

But this does just give you more challenges to overcome and thus, more opportunity for character growth. Heaven knows you boys can use more character.

Mind control is so much fun and wonderfully effective, too. The nurse and I have been working to control not only your mind, but to possess your soul entirely. It will be a glorious day when all of you dear boys are able to follow orders and turn in your work on time for full credit.

There is no higher goal than to desire to become the willing slave of a wise and powerful Mistress, boys, and we are preparing you even now to be the best slave you can possibly become.

Regardless of what kind of dumbasses you are trying to be right now, you boys have shining futures ahead of you in the service of women of the future - strong, intelligent, and wise women, who can see through your false male patriarchal pride to bring you to a higher level of accomplishment that could ever have been predicted!

I will be responding here to an entry in my toy's blog, since the response is much larger than the original passage.

Dear Principal:

My interest in BDSM began a few years ago, and it is part of the reason that I am writing my novel, openly, on the Net. In my novel which can be found, along with my autobiography, at Writing.com, I talk about my own self-destructive sexual behavior. You can also Google the word, novelvision, directly to see my story. In the novel, “Tommy,” my protagonist visits an Internet chathost, the evil Vicki. She has entranced him and he first goes to her under the theory that she can help him understand his abusive father, a drunk and a pussy slave, whose financial largesse to a whore kept Tommy hungry at night as a child. And now, Tommy, himself, finds that he is as horny as his father ever was. And it is all complicated by a childhood murder. This actual crime is the part that most will be most concerned about in all of my writing. This novel is based on my true story. The novel deals heavily with social ostracism and supposed mental illness. Yet there is reason to believe that Tommy was never psychotic and in need of antipsychotic medications. Rather, Tommy (yes, me!) may have actually been autistic, having the condition known as Asperger’s Syndrome. After the worst of all this midlife crisis stuff was over, I wrote the Food and Drug Administration and warned them that the medication that I had been on, mellaril, may have catapulted me permanently into hyper sexuality. Anyway, Tommy ticks off the beautiful Vicki, and this shrewd woman begins her vendetta to the death. For my novel is about the evil of life, itself –as seen by a modern day Arthur Schopenhauer with a jerk-off problem. I do hope that you will take a look. I would like to ask you about the motivations of Internet Dominatrices. And I know you have opinions about your clients. pqt

First of all, I’d like to clarify the definition of the term “Internet Dominatrix” that you have used. I prefer to use the term “Internet Mistress”, since “Dominatrix” normally refers to a professional dominatrix who provides an array of services that doesn’t have very much in common with the services the Internet Mistress provides, and which generally don’t entail the personal commitment on the part of a submissive that he would show to a Mistress.

I have had limited association with Internet Mistresses myself, so most of my opinion is based on what I have been told by submissives recounting their experiences.

The Internet Mistress is into controlling males, and she is sadistic. She may use a variety of brainwashing techniques to establish this control, and many of these are expected of her. Generally the relationship between the Mistress and the submissive will involve her demanding that he do increasingly humiliating things to demonstrate how deep his commitment to her is. She may do research to find out private details about his life to demonstrate the extent to which she will go to exert control over him. Eventually she will have him do things to himself on cam, which she will capture and use as blackmail material. Often the progression is to forced bisexuality, and the “goal” is for the submissive to pimp himself out and pay her the proceeds.

I say “goal” in quotes, because generally the submissive has actively sought out this formulaic series of demands and has come fully prepared to acquiesce, so she is really only facilitating what he was intending to happen.

A sufficient number of Internet Mistresses provide these services gratis that the would-be “submissive” often demands a large expenditure of time and effort on the part of his chosen Mistress on the grounds that she does these things because she loves doing them, and he is providing a service to her by giving her someone to do them to. Since the relationship usually ends with the initiation into bisexuality (or sooner), generally no money exchanges hands, so she is usually unpaid anyway.

I think that perhaps you are referring to a different type of Mistress, the “Internet Money Mistress”, who fills a narrow niche. She demands money from her “pay pigs” and heaps scorn and humiliation on them, calling them pathetic and unworthy of being in her presence. They pay big, at least in theory, but in reality, there are many more women portraying themselves as greedy bitches or spoiled princesses than there are men of means paying for the privilege of being in their (virtual) presence. Many of these women can be found doing this over the telephone, in other words, as phone sex.

Electrons are free, so you don’t have to hook a sucker very often to make the enterprise profitable. Appearance is everything, so most of these women keep blogs making outrageous claims about automobiles and other big-ticket items they say they have received, making money domination sound like a growth industry.

The most self-declaredly successful woman I know in this niche alternated between bragging about men who pay her hundreds or thousands of dollars in a month and worrying about whether she would need to move back in with her parents to keep from defaulting on her bills. She finally ended up getting a very vanilla job, which doesn’t make it sound like all that profitable an enterprise.

Compounding this is the fact that this is really just a fantasy to most men who find it enticing. In fact, most of them have no desire to make continuing payments to a Money Mistress after the phone call ends, or may leave a small tip as a tribute.

I will reiterate that this is all highly formulaic. It is mostly acting and knowing how to apply the formula to the willing male. There is very little creativity, flexibility, or intelligence required to declare oneself a Money Mistress or an Internet Mistress. And just as with any small business, there is no start-up requirement for business skills. So while there are some Money Mistresses who understand the fetish and occasionally make some good money from a well-heeled pay pig, there are many more who occasionally get phone calls from men who pay nothing more then the cost of the phone call.

While there are (probably) Internet Mistresses out there who are intelligent and creative, etc, the terms I hear over and over again are words like “crazy”. I see Internet Mistresses get hold of what might be valuable information and show their hand immediately, giving the intended recipient merely a heads-up on what she’s planning. I see Mistresses take actions to publicly humiliate submissives that will have the end effect of making less money available to her or prematurely ending the working relationship between the two of them.

So often it really is a situation of killing the goose that laid the golden egg. While a long-term relationship may ultimately provide her with more money, she may be so obsessed with manipulation, subterfuge, humiliation, and control to the exclusion of all else that she will compulsively take steps that go counter to her own interests.

Since this is exactly what the submissive is looking for, they are made for each other.

Life imitating phone sex?

I noticed an obituary in Wednesday's newspaper

Michael Quarry, 55; lost light-heavyweight title fight

By Beth Harris
ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES - Michael Quarry, the younger brother of hard-punching heavyweight Jerry Quarry and a contender in his own right for the light heavyweight title, has died...at...an assisted living facility.

"He started not being able to talk or walk three months ago," (his sister) said Monday.

She gave the cause of death as pugilistic dementia, the same disease that had turned Jerry Quarry into a confused, childlike man before he died at 53 in 1999.

"His brain was atrophying in many areas," said his brother-in-law..."

Does any of this ring a bell?

I've talked to my boys over and over again about aggressive male competitive behavior, showing you how males of various species behave in exactly the same way. The example of the mountain goats we see in documentaries comes to mind... Butting their heads against each other, causing each other brain damage or killing themselves. For what? The (male) announcer will tell you that they are competing for the attentions of females. Of course, the females don't care. They aren't there, are they? No, they are off raising the next generation.

A scientific study has shown that human males who perform risky behaviors (bungee jumping was the one in this study) will tell you that they are doing it to impress women. Bingo. Exactly the same behavior. In fact, I started to mention this to a caller, and he immediately told me he did bungee jumping. I couldn't resist, and I asked him why. He told me it was to impress women. Well, doh. It's a no-brainer, literally, because it's a behavior that is not part of the conscious mind. The women who they spoke to in the study were, of course, not impressed. They thought it was a really stupid thing to do.

So what's the real purpose of these risky behaviors? Behaviors are inherited, after all. This behavior would not have been inherited if not for the fact that it gave some advantage to the individuals that possessed it.

The purpose is this: they are voluntarily thinning themselves out of the herd, and the biggest and most brutish individual survives to pass on his genes to his descendents.

Now there may be a major advantage to this if you are the biggest, baddest mountain goat. But in modern society, there is no advantage to being big and brutish and dumb. Males are still cavemen, adapted best to fighting, to hunting, with their bare hands and with rocks and sticks.

Boxing is the sport that best exemplifies this in all regards. Unlike bungee jumping, which is a stunt, it is a full sport, a way of life. And unlike bungee jumping, which for all the thrills and apparent risk involved, is basically safe, the participants in the sport of boxing are causing each others brain damage and long-term, killing themselves. And for what? They are doing it for competitive glory, aggressive competition being an end in itself.

They are thinning themselves out of the herd. But don't worry, there are plenty more cavemen where they came from.

Commentary on Commentary

A little more from John -

# John said, June 5, 2006 at 5:54 pm · Edit

Lol! I do seem to have hit a sore spot, haven’t I? I’m not going to waste my time attempting to deal with all of the falsities in your comment, since I don’t believe anyone who thinks that a particular group is superior to another based upon an accident of birth is really open to rational debate, but I did want to mention one thing.

Sore spot? Not likely. I just like to pick apart people's pathetic pseudo-arguments.

Any animal trainer can tell you that behavior is heritable. Aggressive dogs bred together will produce aggressive puppies. Animals with gentle temperaments pass them on to their offspring. And we are, of course, animals.

Behavior is a survival characteristic. People with certain behaviors were more likely to have produced surviving offspring in the past, which would result in them passing on these behaviors to their own offspring. These behaviors remain evident in the general population, irrespective of their relevance to modern society.

What behaviors are characteristic of males and females in the human species? Well, females will attempt to find a male who will stay at home to help her care for her young, thus increasing their chances of survival. Males will tend to attempt to keep a female under control at home in order to assure that she will stick around and raise his offspring, thus increasing their chances of survival to adulthood, while at the same time, he will attempt to sire as many more offspring by other females as possible, leaving the job of raising them to those females. Their chances of survival without a male in the wild might not have been great, but his investment was zero.

But we're still talking about historical times. Let's look back hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago, when our behaviors were taking hold of us.

Humans and pre-humans settled an inhospitable world sparsely. In fact, a lone human bereft of a tribe might not have run into another for years. To increase the chances of successful procreation, nature provided that whenever a male and fertile female met, he would be ready for mating.

Think of what this means. Your testosterone levels are so high that you're ready for sex at the drop of a hat. You think about sex every eight seconds. Tops. And you'd do almost anything for sex, even if it's risky. So the male would take great risks to get to the female for sex. The female did not take risks, as her breeding potential was much more important to the survival of the species than the male's.

Its funny that you pick Sweden as your example of successful socialism, since it is not in ‘fact’ socialist. Sweden is a mixed system of high-tech capitalism and extensive welfare benefits. Privately owned firms account for approximately 90% of industrial output. Privately owned means capitalism, not socialism.

Ooh, Sweden not a socialist country. News to them. Maybe we should try...Finland, where all public fees are based on your income level, so that a traffic ticket may cost you $50,000 if you're rich enough.

It sounds like what you are saying is that there aren't any socialist countries, and your argument is a red herring. Or are you planning on picking the most poverty-stricken and miserable country and assign it the classification "socialist" based on its poverty and misery quotient?

No doubt posting this was a waste of time, but it was a slow night anyway. And at least I had a good laugh reading some of the truly ridiculous inferences you made about me. Of course it’s my own fault, if I’d read your blog a little more carefully I wouldn’t of (sic) posted anything in the first place. Trying to discuss something rationally with you, would be like trying to have a reasoned debate with a member of the kkk, a waste of time. You both only see things through the twisted prism of your own ideology.

Though I have to admit people who hold the kind sick views that you do , hold a certain fasination for me. I mean, how do you come to the idea that some arbitrary grouping of people is better than another? Whether this grouping is based on race, nationality, or gender; this seems patently ridiculous to me. How can you judge someone just on the way they’re born? Whether it’s the color of thier (sic) skin, or thier ethnicity, or thier (sic) genitalia as seems important to you , it’s no way to judge a person. It’s the individual and what they do that matters, not the group they’re a part of.

I love people like this. If there were a god, it would have put them on earth to amuse me. It is so politically convenient to say that all people are exactly the same except for their own motivation. This makes it easy to take credit where none is due, and then to blame others for that which you are at fault. You see, there is no free will. You are controlled by your sex drive, typical sex-linked behaviors, and chance. You play out the roles of your ancestors, out of place and out of time. In another era you might have been killed and eaten by bears.

[In fact, there are quite a few politicians who I'm sure would be killed and eaten by bears within minutes if we released them into the wild...]

The pointless competitiveness of males is demonstrated in this very exchange. You have come to this blog to challenge my views because I don't agree with you that you are worthy, and you don't even know who I am. I challenge your perception of reality, and you must strike back, threatened by a woman who won't give you respect that you haven't earned. You see, you think you deserve adulation and respect of women because you have genitals. You take this as you badge of honor, like all other men, thinking that your genitals set you apart from other men. This is not something you are programmed to think deep thoughts about. In fact, you have been educated not to examine the bases of your beliefs.

The question of who I am and what kind of blog this is makes it all the more humorous that you have come here to trade arguments with me.

Since you obviously didn't notice, I'll clarify. This is a female superiorist femdom phone sex blog you are commenting in, and it is at least partly fiction and partly tongue in cheek. One of the blogs I keep was even started for the sole purpose of keeping track of a slave of mine.

Now for the news. I actually found an article in a science journal about a study demonstrating male bonding behaviors in lizards, my favorite reptile.

Male side-blotched lizards with blue throats stake out territories next to each other, and will protect each other against bigger, more aggressive orange-marked side-blotched lizards, even though doing so is very risky to them, and even though they are not related.

Think about this. Previous research has shown that individuals in many species will risk their lives when the lives of blood relatives are at stake. How far lizards have come in developing this particular behavior, a behavior which is, of course, inherited from their parents, just like the behaviors I discussed above.

Curious, this male behavior.

Female superiority and...bullshit

So I finally sat down to update this blog, and what do I find but a comment from some dude who is trying to lecture me on the connection between socialism and poverty without knowing anything about socialism or (I presume) poverty. Did he need facts? No, of course not. He was able to manufacture his arguments out of thin air.

Sorry guy, I'm a believer in content. I know stuff. You don't know stuff. Why? Because when you went to school, they taught you that all opinions are created equal, all facts are created equal, and an opinion is as good as a fact. So you watch Fox TV, the propaganda arm of the republican party, where they manufacture lies at the drop of a hat, spread them with malice aforethought, and move on to the next set of lies as the press, having lost interest in fact-checking, serves as a pipeline for the lies.

No. If your opinion is not supported by the facts as they exist, you are only deluding yourself by manufacturing factoids to support some proposition that you don't even understand.

That which we call a rose

Now for the fun stuff.

Degree-wise, women dominate in once-male bastions

By Ben Fuller

Associated Press

Washington - Women now earn the majority of diplomas in fields men used to dominate - from biology to business - and have caught up in pursuit of law, medicine, and other advanced degrees.

Federal statistics released yesterday show women now also earn the majority of bachelor's degrees in business, history, and biological and social sciences...

And in disciplines where women trail men, they are gaining ground, earning larger numbers of degrees in math, physical sciences, and agriculture.

Women now account for about half the enrollment in professional programs such as law, medicine, and optometry, up from 22 percent a generation ago.

Despite the gains, women earn about 76 percent as much as men...and are underrepresented in full-time faculty jobs...

While women make gains, the enrollment of men in professional degree programs is declining.

Boys need to have their aspirations raised just as girls have, said Tom Mortensen, senior scholar for the Pell Institute...

"Women have been making educational progress, and the men are stuck," he said. "They haven't just fallen behind women. They have fallen behind the job market."

What? Examine the facts. A more correct statement would be, "Women have been making educational progress, and the men have fallen behind women in educating themselves and the job market."

Fallen behind...

We've talked about this before, guys who don't work in school and women who do. The sense of privilege boys have because they are male, and the fact that they have decided that life will come to them as easily as A's in middle school, because they're good, just for being guys.

And the fact that we put up with this in school in order to nurture their fragile egos, so they can discover learning by themselves, or choose to sit on their duffs and watch tv, then complain about bad grades and sue schools for discrimination against males.

There's too much freedom in modern society. Given freedom, males get lazy and express their creativity through gambling and aggressive competition, as the entry I have linked to shows. Men need to be controlled. Looks like women are the ones who will need to do the controlling, and they are studying hard to do that. Otherwise men will just be excess, useless, like drones at a beehive.

I'd be damned if I'd ever support a guy who was unemployed because he'd chosen not to bother learning in school. Can you spell 'drone'?

Yesterday we talked about the distinctly male characteristic that is known as "competitiveness". You know what I'm talking about, and if you don't, read yesterday's entry. It's a semantic distinction whether we see this as a good thing or bad, and there are two sides to each coin, this one most of all. Of course, the flip side of this coin is to call it "gambling", where males will bet all on an extremely unlikely outcome rather than work to earn a slightly less valuable sure thing. To gloss this over by calling it "competitiveness" misses certain important aspects of male-oriented competition.

The competition is compulsive. There is no consideration of whether it is the best way to accomplish a goal, and in fact it might be highly counterproductive.

I often look on it as "scoring points". You score points by inconveniencing somebody else, by preventing them from getting something, even though doing so may mean that neither of you gets it. So you score points by cutting off someone as they are about to put their car in a parking space, even though doing so may prevent you from getting a better one yourself. You score points by passing someone, even if you have to do it 100' from the exit you are taking while traveling at 80 mph.

So in a fourth grade class, I observed a boy sharing his love of skateboarding with a visiting adult reader. A few seconds later I saw a scuffle in the area. What had happened? Another boy, hearing that the first boy had said he like skateboarding, had said, "I bet you can't do (some professional stunt)." The speaker, when questioned, said he had asked the first boy if he could do that stunt. The first boy took it as the challenge that it was. Why did he do this? It was the instinct for gambling, for jockeying for position and territory. The feeling that If he can't do that stunt, I will get points for making sure everybody knows he can't do it, even though I can't myself.

This was but a trivial example, hardly life and death. Now let's look at a more serious one, published in the Boston Globe yesterday.

SCSU student's shooting followed religious argument

Witnesses told police that Stetson and Bell got into a philosophical argument outside a local strip mall. Stetson was waiving a bible at Bell, who is a devout Muslim and currently uses the name Malik Abdul, according to the affidavit.

When the argument escalated, Stetson pulled out a pellet gun and Bell responded by pulling out a real gun and shooting Stetson in the chest, the witnesses told police.

He did what? Well, let's see. He got points for trying to convert a muslim to his religion, and he probably gave himself more points for sticking with the argument in spite of the clear lack of interest of the other participant in conversion. Then he got points for pulling out a gun and pointing it at the other guy, too. Too bad his points got reset to zero when the other guy had a real gun that he was willing to use, eh?

I would say there some sort of logical disconnect going on, except that logic doesn't seem to have played any role. Clearly the dead guy was gambling that pointing a gun at some muslim was going to increase the likelihood of him accepting jesus as his savior (more points!) while having no possibility of repercussions.

Any of you males out there who think this was a logical thing to do, please feel free to comment.

Link to story

All this brings to mind a story that was in the local news around here a year or two ago. Two guys were drinking in a trailer, and one of them ended up shot, allegedly by the other one. There weren't a lot of details available, but I heard on the local public radio station news that the dead man's last words were, "You don't have the nerve to shoot me."

A challenge and a gamble indeed.

Subscribe to From the Office of the Principal - blogspot

It is well-known that men outnumber women in the upper echelons of business. In spite of the efforts of women on the outside and on the ladder of what ought to be success, women are not coming close to men in upper management, and we have yet to figure out why.

Researchers Lise Vesterlund of the University of Pittsburgh and Muriel Niederle of Stanford University ran an experiment to find some reason why only 2.5% of women make it to the top.

In the first part of the experiment, men and women were asked to add up as many sets of double-digit numbers as they could within a five minute period, and were paid 50 cents for each correct answer. Next the volunteers were divided into groups of four. The same amount of money was going to be given out, but all of it would go to the person at each table who scored the most right answers.

For the final part of the experiment, the test subjects were asked to choose whether they wanted to go back to the 'piecework' model or continue with the 'competitive' model. Women overwhelmingly chose to go back to the 'piecework' model, even those who were best at solving answers and likely to win all the money in their group.

The researchers concluded that the factor in the difference is that men enjoy competition and women do not. I think this is a little simplistic, as "competition" is not the only thing that was being tested here, and certainly not the only character trait that would come into play.

In fact, "competitiveness" is a loaded word, with positive connotations that are valued in our culture. Is it really competitiveness when somebody without significant math skills is willing to wager that they will manage to take all? No, of course not. That is gambling, of which competitiveness is a small part. Gambling is, as we all know, a typically male behavior.

Again, look at what the women did and how we are describing them. If the women who participated (and by extension, those in society at large) are not "competitive", then they must be "non-competitive", surely a bad character trait.

Now look at what the males were doing as gambling. What's the opposite of gambling that you'll win or lose all? How about working to assure equitable distribution of earnings? Is that such a bad thing?

The article

Subscribe to From the Office of the Principal - blogspot

Ethics? What's that?

Panel says professor plagiarized, fabricated

BOULDER - An investigation of a professor who likened some of the Sept. 11, 2001 victims to Nazi Adolf Eichmann found serious cases of misconduct in his academic research, including plagiarism and fabrications, a University of Colorado spokesman said yesterday. One member of the five-person investigative committee recommended that Ward Curchill, an ethics studies professor, be fired, and four recommended he be suspended, university spokesman Barrie Hartman said. Churchill has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. (AP)

No comment. Dumbass.