How many times have you heard this line from women and manboobs:
“You should be thankful for feminism because without it, you wouldn’t be able to sleep around.”
Of course, the effect that feminism has on the quality of the women we get to sleep around with is never discussed; it’s always assumed that quantity is the only thing that matters. Case in point: the feminist utopia of Denmark, where you can get all the slutty sex you want without fear of “judgement,” but where the women are poorly-dressed, hideous harridans more concerned with belittling you for being a man than being decent human beings.
In Roosh’s first “hater travel guide,” Don’t Bang Denmark, he lays into everything wrong with the most ignorable nation in Scandinavia: high prices, boring people, weak nightlife, and the bizarre social convention known as Jante Law. And of course, the women:
Even the style of Danish women is atrocious. They dress frumpy and dumpy, as if they just checked out of a homeless shelter. For some reason, these girls are big fans of dirty black military-style boots, turd-green or brown jackets (sometimes with a German flag on it), loose clothing, baggy jeans or MC Hammer parachute pants, and mismatched scarves or grandma shawls. Their favorite color is brown, since anything feminine like pink is sexist and breaks Jante Law. They step up their style game at night, but during the day they look like absolute hell. There seems to be a competition on how plain and unattractive they can make themselves.
If you want to get laid in Denmark, you better learn to shut your mouth and nod along with the stupid liberal shit that Danish women make on a regular basis. In other words, you’ll have to surrender your masculinity and your balls. This forced castration got so bad for Roosh near the end of his stay that he started flat-out insulting the girls he met instead, for no other reason than to ruin their nights:
I constrained my alphaness as much as possible when I wanted to fuck, but I furiously unleashed it when a mediocre girl tried to assert her superiority over either me or my country. I’m not a patriotic American, but I let those bitches have it by elevating my voice, pointing my finger at them in an aggressive manner, and using sound logic to destroy their arguments. The look on their faces was priceless because up to that point no one in their entire lives had ever used the phrase “you’re wrong.” Even though many nights I went home alone and jerked off (after briefly considering whether or not I should bang the hot Russian prostitute), I fell asleep with a smile on my face.
Like Roosh’s other travel guides, Don’t Bang Denmarkis rounded out with a story section detailing his adventures there.
If for some reason you’re contemplating a trip to Denmark, or you just want a funny and scathing piece of sociology, Don’t Bang Denmark is a must read.
Roosh’s Bang is easily the best resource out there for men who want to improve their dating life, but the book isn’t exactly heavy on examples of its methods in action. For that, you’ll have to turn to 30 Bangs, a memoir/short story collection that does what its name implies: details thirty of the women Roosh has slept with since he started playing the game over a decade ago.
From a pure didactic standpoint, 30 Bangs is helpful as it covers a wide breadth of situations that the prospective player could encounter. Roosh deliberately chose each story because they each have something different to offer; you won’t feel like you’re reading the same tale over and over again:
She must’ve had a sex dream. In the middle of the night she woke up and started making out with me passionately. I started to play with her boobs and then took her shirt off. I tried to unsnap her bra with two hands, but I failed due to my inexperience.
As a pure literary exercise, 30 Bangs is entertaining but falls far short of greatness due to its lack of narrative structure. Aside from being organized in chronological order (starting from Roosh’s first bangs to his recent trip to South America in 2009-2010), there’s nothing to string the stories together. While each tale is entertaining on its own, I was left pining for a greater story to tie them all together:
I can’t remember much of what was said because it was one of those painful interactions where she made so many inane and idiotic statements about astrology, art, and romance that my brain refused to remember it. The formula of our conversation went something like this: she’d say something stupid; I’d cringe and die a little on the inside before making fun of her in a humorous, sexist way; and finally she’d playfully hit me and move a little closer. I was becoming skilled at tolerating stupid girls long enough to beat their pussies up in bed. Since she had a nice body with a tomato ass, I decided a little pain now would be worth a lot of pleasure later.
I personally would love to see Roosh write an actual Paraguay-style memoir about his life on the D.C. player circuit, but 30 Bangs is an adequate substitute… for now.
Picking up women is a hobby usually practiced after the sun sets. Don’t pretend that nightclubs, lounges and most bars aren’t catered towards lonely losers looking to lay some ladies. When you dress up in your Friday night best and hit the nightlife circuit, you’re competing with countless other guys looking to scale the castle walls and take the princess slut home. A lone shark in a tiny pool desperately racing for chum, inflating the egos of the women you all hit on, increasing the chances that the only woman you’ll be going home with is Rosie Palmer.
What if there was a way to avoid all that? A way to meet attractive women without having to deal with cockblockers, ridiculous cover charges and the other assorted bullshit of nightlife?
Roosh, author of Bang, has got you covered with his companion book Day Bang. It’s exactly what it sounds like; a method designed to help you meet women during the day, while they’re shopping, at work or killing time at the fair trade coffeeshop. This isn’t a repackaged version of Bang, though; because the atmosphere of a supermarket or mall is different than a bar or nightclub, you’ll need a more subtle method of luring in the fishies:
What direct game does is give a girl a shot of heroin, putting her on cloud nine that a confident man thinks highly of her, but like all drugs, it wears off. A couple of minutes (or hours) later, she realizes that as cool as you seemed to be in the brief interaction that stroked her ego, there’s nothing of substance that motivates her enough to schedule one night in the week to hang out with you. She would have to be close to desperate to say yes. While direct gamesmen get numbers, they get pitifully few dates from pretty girls as a result. You can’t skip the connection-building process, because a connection is what it takes to get girls out on dates.
Day Bang’s method is so toned-down and unlike what you’d expect that you can’t even really call it “game”; it’s more about being an engaging conversationalist. Since women don’t leave the house in the morning looking to get swept off their feet, day game consists of hooking them by emphasizing your talents, qualities and experiences as a man, with only enough sexual aggressiveness to get her interested in a formal date.
And that’s the key to Day Bang: like Bang, it’s not magic. If you aren’t already in shape, have interesting hobbies and aren’t already a relatively solid guy, Roosh’s “elderly opener” and “ramble” aren’t going to help you much, if at all:
If you’re an old dude, understand that while day game puts you into position to talk to younger girls, it doesn’t necessarily make it easier to lay them unless you come close to what they’re looking for. To receive good initial responses from your approaches, you have to dress the part, which means a more modern and fit wardrobe on an athletic body. If you have a huge beer belly and you go to the mall wearing a ten-year-old Hawaiian shirt, I’d be surprised if you get anywhere regardless of how well you know the content of this book. Girls will simply peg you as a creepy old guy.
Fortunately, if you are a smart and cool guy, Day Bang is the extra bit of lubricant you need to grease your way through the cogs. Even if you’re not interested in nightlife, you’ll still want to read Bang first; Day Bang’s material builds on that book and is basically the sophomore level course to Bang’s Seduction 101.
Ultimately, the only way to get the woman you desire is to become a better you; the problem is that the accepted ways to do this are varying degrees of wrong. Day Bang is an invaluable tool for refining the diamond of masculinity that is you.
How does the idea of learning how to be more attractive to the opposite sex appeal to you?
Does it intrigue you?
Does it disgust you?
Does it not matter one way or the other?
Now everyone who answered yes to either of the last two questions, kindly recuse yourselves; you’re fucking liars.
Suck it up; everyone wants to be sexually desirable. It’s a fundamental part of human psychology: the desire to be accepted by others. The idea of making yourself more attractive is nothing new for women; put on your lipstick, slip on the high heels, stuff your bra with Kleenex and the boys will be none the wiser. Strangely enough, both women and men are resistant to the idea of men doing the equivalent. Men are told to dress well and make money, yet everyone has at least one example of a dirtbag (drug dealer, guitarist in a crappy band etc.) who breaks these rules and still gets the ladies. Even worse, you might be told to “just be yourself.”
So a 400-pound slob who surfs MRA sites all day should keep “being himself?” How’s that working out for him?
No, the magic ingredients that separate the pussy-hounds from the Forever Aloners are confidence and forwardness. Men with backbone and grit are sexy; men who can talk to women are sexy. Seems obvious, but real life is never that simple. Unless you’re Hugh Hefner, you need a kick in the ass—or a tap—to get you moving.
For those fearing fruity pimp hats and backhanded insults about girls’ nails, rest assured that Roosh is no “pickup artist,” but a normal guy like you and me. His method of getting you laid doesn’t rely on canned one-liners or cheesy magic tricks, but on making you more sexually aggressive and a better conversationalist. There are no stupid acronyms or nerdy slang terms like “kino,” just straight and plain talk:
It’ll be hard to last long in the game if your brain absorbs every negative incident like a dirty bar rag. That drunk white girl in Baltimore wasn’t only punching me but also my lame line, the guy who grabbed her ass in the club, and the friend who refuses to return her Hootie and the Blowfish CD. She wasn’t rejecting me—she was rejecting my approach because she didn’t know who I was. The only time a girl rejects you for who you are is when she has known you for years. When she knows you for a minute, a day, a week, or a month, you’re not getting rejected for who you are—you’re getting rejected for who she thinks you are. She’s using a small slice of what you presented to place you in a category she can understand.
Not only does Roosh go over how to make yourself a smooth conversationalist, he shows you how to direct every step of the seduction, from meeting the girl to your first date to how to disrobe her once it’s time for the dirty deed. No other book out there is this thorough, comprehensive, and dead simple; you can literally pick the book up and start using Roosh’s methods in the bars and clubs the same night. You won’t master it in the same night, but developing any talent requires time and effort; Bang’s method of sexual mastery gets you better results with less work.
Bang’s method also works not just because it’s simple and commonsensical, but because Roosh is brutally honest. Unlike the hucksters, he doesn’t promise you the sky or sugarcoat your chances, acknowledging the reality of physical appearance (and other ugly truths) in sexual attraction:
Let’s say you have hard genetic luck when it comes to your appearance. I’d compare you to a tennis athlete born with little natural ability. You have to practice six hours a day while the natural athlete practices two hours—yet he still creams you in most matches. However, because you’re committed and disciplined, you still stick with the game and pull out enough wins to make money on the circuit. You’ll never be a superstar or top-ten-ranked player, but you’ll be able to do what you enjoy, make an upper class living, and enjoy sex from your stable of groupies.
This is all well and good. Bang’s original subtitle wasn’t “Lay Supermodels in Sixty Days,” it was “More Lays in Sixty Days.” It won’t necessarily get you perfect tens, but it will get you better than what you’re getting right now.
If you’ve gotten this far into my review without closing out your browser tab in disgust, you’re already receptive to the idea that mainstream advice on dating is useless for men. Tonight, most guys are going to go home to either a box of tissues and bottle of Jergens or a bitter, mentally ill harpy who carries their balls around in her purse. They got there by taking the pabulum about “being yourself” seriously, by swallowing every lie that society foisted on them from their childhood.
Do you want to be one of them? Or do you want to be a man?
I’m going to drop a bit of truth here that will likely piss some of you off:
There is very little in the manosphere that is original.
A collective of men who’ve shucked off mainstream society to fuck girls, quaff beer and do obscene amounts of illegal drugs? No really, it’s been done before, going all the way back to the days of Rome. Hemingway, Bukowski, Miller; this path was worn deep long before we took our first baby steps.
I’m also going to drop some more truth:
The fact that the manosphere isn’t very original DOESN’T MATTER.
The manosphere’s detractors (read: cranky old men who think having an AARP membership makes them wise and intelligent) think that pointing out its unoriginality is somehow an effective counterargument. Unfortunately for them, I’ve read all the same books they have, but my brain cells aren’t rotting out due to dementia.
Way back in high school, I had an English teacher who told us that all of human literature and art can be distilled down to one of two themes: sex or death. That’s it. The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, Thompson; it’s either sex, death or the two combined. Originality was an impossible goal for the greats of the Western canon, and it’s an impossible goal for us.
It is not originality, but EXECUTION, that matters.
I’ve had more than one person, from my family to my friends, tell me that the hitchhiking trip I took last year has been done before. It doesn’t matter. It’s my execution of the trip—the specific things I saw and did, my particular worldview and writing style—that is important.
Roosh’s first memoir, A Dead Bat in Paraguay, is not an original work. It’s about how Roosh, tiring of the corporate grind in Washington, D.C., quit his job to sojourn across South America, starting in Ecuador and ending in Brazil. Along the way, he contends with frigid girls, dweeby backpackers, and a litany of foodborne illnesses that end with him having exceedingly painful bowel movements:
The next morning I emitted a constant flow of noxious gas so foul that the air trapped under my blanket was more offensive than a Port-O-Potty on the Fourth of July. I dirtied the bowl once more after waking up to the worst dream I’ve ever had in my life.
This story’s been done before. So why bother doing it again?
The answer lies in the execution. Roosh’s narrative successfully blends the low and high, taking you from his comic toilet escapades to his repeated attempts to seduce the local women in the cities he visits. He successfully gets the reader invested in his tale, whether he’s talking about his relationship with his younger sister or his explorations of exotic locales like Machu Picchu:
The first night of our tour we had a fried beef meal. As a result, for the next day I continually passed gas that smelled like the beef. My nickname in the Jeep became “Beefy Gas.” Mary decided this would be a great time to bring it up.
“Oh it’s extra beefy now, thanks,” I said. I wanted to jump across the salt table and strangle her, but I knew if I got defensive it would just confirm to everyone that I did in fact have beefy gas. I had to play cool.
I have yet to meet Roosh in real life due to our conflicting schedules, but I’ve talked to and worked with him behind the scenes online for several years now. He’s as close to a friend of mine as you can get from an online association. When I was preparing for my own pilgrimage into danger, I could have picked any number of books to read to prepare myself for the journey.
Plenty of other writers have had far wilder adventures than Roosh, yet I chose Paraguay because it was written for my generation. Roosh is considerably older than me, but his experiences in America—his ennui, his feelings of hopelessness, his desire to break out of his pointless life—mirror mine.
A Dead Bat in Paraguay is the lodestone of Generation Y men, the first generation of men in America deliberately raised to be as unmanly as possible. We were shunted into an educational system catering to girls and retards, then doped up with Ritalin and Adderall to turn us into little obedient drones. Television and movies depict us as doddering simpletons unable to perform the most basic household tasks without women—our wives, mothers or girlfriends—to lead us. When we got to college, we were accused of having “privilege,” of being racist and sexist, of being the cause of every ill in the world going back to the fall of Ur. And when we graduated into the workforce, we found that all the high-paying careers we were promised didn’t exist, leaving us to either flip burgers or work demeaning cubicle jobs with fascist HR ladies ready to censure us at the drop of a hat for creating an “unsafe environment.”
And people are whining about “the end of men?” No shit! And I hear that if you shoot someone in the head with a Desert Eagle, they’ll die!
That’s the most insulting part. Our Baby Boomer parents, teachers and bosses have literally been trying to ruin us since we fell out of the crib, yet now that their handiwork is starting to bear fruit, they’re acting indignant and pretending like they had nothing to do with it. It’s like they had no idea that their Marxist social engineering would have any repercussions down the road.
Hey mom? Hey dad? If you wanted your sons to grow up to be men, maybe you shouldn’t have raised them like they were women!
That’s why A Dead Bat in Paraguay, and why Roosh, and why the manosphere in general is so important. It’s the first wide-scale attempt by Generation Y men to reclaim their balls and their birthright. It doesn’t matter that this road has been traveled before. If it wasn’t an important road, it wouldn’t be so traveled to begin with.
If you’re looking for one of the best tales of masculine self-discovery in the modern world written today, read Paraguay. You’re not walking this road alone; men like Roosh and I have braved the horrors of hell, and we’re here to help.
I grabbed this one while mining one of those websites that features links to free Kindle books: not just old books in the public domain, but newer ones that publishers and authors will make available for free as part of special deals. Pretty much everything I downloaded sucked except for this, easily one of the most profound military history books I’ve ever read.
If you want to know why the U.S. keeps losing war after war, you need to read Street Without Joy.
The book is a first-hand account of the First Indochina War (1946-1954), France’s attempt to keep its colonies of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam under its thumb, and why they failed to do so. Bernard Fall is no armchair quarterback; he spent an extensive amount of time in Vietnam during the war embedded with several French military platoons, and also exhaustively researched the war with the help of classified French government documents. Originally published in 1961, Street Without Joy was the first book that correctly diagnosed why the French were run out of Southeast Asia with their tails between their legs.
Fall also predicted that America’s efforts in Vietnam would fail for the same reasons, and that the American military leadership wouldn’t learn a single thing from the French defeat.
Put simply, France lost Indochina because the French military, from top to bottom, was completely incapable of fighting counter-insurgent warfare. Like all Western militaries, the French expected to fight in big battles where their superior numbers and equipment would give them the advantage, a la World War II. Instead, the Viet Minh bled the French out over years through hit-and-run tactics, using the Vietnamese jungle and the people to their advantage. France’s generals could not adjust to this new reality, constantly seeking to lure the Viet Minh into a “set-piece battle” that never came.
This desperate search for the set-piece battle became an obsession of the successive French commanders-in-chief in Indochina until the end of the war. But Giap, the Communist commander, had made his mistake once, in 1951, against de Lattre, and he was not going to repeat it. In dozens of different engagements involving units from single regiments to more than two divisions, Giap preferred to sacrifice those parts of his units which were hopelessly trapped rather than let himself be “sucked” into the type of meat-grinder operation which the Americans could carry out so effectively against the “human wave” attacks of North Korean and Chinese Communists in Korea.
The set-piece battle had, in fact, become the credo of not only the French who were fighting the Indochina war but of the United States which, after 1952, had become more and more directly involved in its financial and often in its strategic aspects. The now-famous “Navarre Plan,” named after the unlucky French commander-in-chief in Indochina in 1953-54, provided, according to as authoritative a source as the late Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, that the French forces were to break “the organized body of Communist aggression by the end of the 1955 fighting season,” leaving the task of mopping up the remaining (presumably disorganized) guerrilla groups to the progressively stronger national armies of Cambodia, Laos, and Viet-Nam.
America never really got over Vietnam, and as a result, our own war-hawks keep spinning ridiculous theories as to why we got our asses kicked by a bunch of commies swatting mosquitoes in the jungle. “We were stabbed in the back by the liberal media!” “We won every battle!” Doesn’t matter. The purpose of sending troops to that shithole was to keep the Commies from taking over; the fact that the red star is flying over Saigon is all the proof we need to know we failed.
America lost the Vietnam War because we had no clue how to fight it. We lost Iraq and are losing Afghanistan because we’ve learned nothing from Vietnam.
“Street Without Joy” is the English translation of “La Rue Sans Joie,” the French nickname for a stretch of Route 1 in the Quang Tri province in central Vietnam, a vitally important road as it served as the primary land route connecting the northern and southern halves of the country. Because of its significance, the Viet Minh frequently launched surprise attacks on French convoys traveling the road, holing up in various villages along the way.
During the Vietnam War, Quang Tri was the northernmost province of South Vietnam, and Route 1 once again became a major ambush point for the Viet Cong. It was on the Street Without Joy that Bernard Fall was killed in 1967 while embedded with the 4th Marine Regiment. Street Without Joyremains one of the most important history books of the 20th century. If you have any interest in war history, read it.
Click here to buy Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina.
An odd way to kick off a book review, but when I saw that Mark Zolo (aka the Naughty Nomad) actually gave his debut memoir that bland, forgettable subtitle, I groaned. Everyone loves to think they’re unique and shpecial, and while I’m no stranger to Mark’s blog, my reflex is to gag whenever I see cliches like that.
The only way things could be any worse is if he’d added “no-holds-barred” somewhere in the description.
But get past the subtitle and you’ll realize that Mark’s telling the truth. Hell, the first chapter begins with him stranded on an Antarctic icebreaker vessel, trapped after failing to rescue another ship trapped in the ice. Forget the usual tales of drug abuse, drinking and sex with exotic, foreign women: while Naughty Nomad has them in spades (and they’re damned interesting), the defining parts of the book are Mark’s constant flirtations with death.
And by “flirtations,” I mean “full-on dirty dancing and Frenching on the dance floor.”
I shit you not when I say that over the course of the book, Mark manages to survive the following:
Getting run over by a car and having his arm dislocated.
Sneaking across international borders, evading AK-toting soldiers.
Smuggling drugs through multiple countries.
Being aggressively seduced by an African woman with HIV.
And more, way more. By all rights, Mark should be lying in a shallow grave somewhere in the jungles of central Africa, or the other places he’s been to. Yet through quick thinking and plain luck, he and his off-and-on traveling buddies (the perennial fuck-up Paddy and the boundlessly energetic Danny) escape unscathed, with fun memories of smoking pot and hooking up with hot girls.
Bottom line: if you’re looking for another travel story that goes beyond the usual tales of fucking and boozing (way, way beyond), Naughty Nomadis an absolute must-buy.
Words weren’t needed—we spoke the language of lust. I got out of the shower to find Nia dancing naked in front of the mirror. The way she moved her hips and ass was so sexy.
Boing! My dick shot up like a Looney Tune.
I laid her down on the bed and started kissing her, savouring every inch of her dark, soft flesh. I’d never been with a woman so slim, tanned, and confident about her body—it was like a breath of pure, fresh air.
After nearly an hour of foreplay, I finally slipped my cock inside her weeping little pussy. She was so tight. I didn’t have a condom, but that was the last thing on my mind. The missionary position with a freshly stitched dislocated arm was a bitch.
I was screaming inside.
Click here to buy Naughty Nomad: Not Your Typical Backpacker Story.
Roosh is back at it with a trio of new travel guides, focusing on the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Even better, for today only, he’s selling all three of them in a bundle for just $3. Whether you’re planning a vacation to eastern Europe or you just like Roosh’s writing, read on to see what I think of these new books.
Unlike Don’t Bang Denmark, which was a comedic skewering of everything about that country, Don’t Bang Latviais a more serious warning to stay the hell away. The skinny is that while Latvia was once a paradise of beautiful, loose women, hordes of sleazy sex tourists and annoying British stag parties over the years have turned it into an apocalyptic wasteland. The most attractive Latvian women want nothing to do with foreigners, while the middling-to-cute ones are soulless scammers hell bent on taking your money and leaving you dick in hand.
If you’re in a club where there are a lot of foreign guys, I guarantee there are tons of scammer chicks present. There are several signs to look for: they hang out in pairs at tourist clubs; they always dress sexy; they never buy their own drinks (it would reduce their profit margin); they make regular eye contact with foreign guys; they’re under 30 years old; and they aren’t in the club with a guy friend (they don’t want to scare away the male clientele). I like to think that my people-reading skills are advanced and that I can pick out acting better than the average guy, but there were three scam attempts done on me that I didn’t see coming. These girls are amazing actresses and will deceive you even if you’re experienced. As long as you keep the counterstrategies in mind, you’ll be straight.
The second Baltic country Roosh visited, it’s a huge step up from Latvia. The women are hotter and more feminine than Latvians and there are no scammers to be found.
The bad news I’ve already hinted at is that it used to be much better. In Tartu I met an American guy named Stan who had lived in the country for five years. He said it was poosy paradise when he first arrived. He was approached so often by girls who wanted sex that he had to tell them to go away. I’m sure the quality wasn’t always high, but the fact that it was happening could only mean good fortune for men who were in Estonia during that time. He also knew a guy who would regularly take a girl to a hotel room to bang and then return to the bar to find another one to take back.
The last country Roosh visited, it has the most attractive women in the Baltics, but they’re also the hardest to lay. Again, there aren’t any scammers.
I went inside and was stunned to find that it was packed with more women than men. The bar had narrow walkways with people standing up. The music wasn’t too loud. Was I in a bar in America? The logistics were perfect, the first time I had encountered such an American-style venue in Eastern Europe. All that was missing were the fat American girls in flip-flops singing along to Bon Jovi. My mood immediately brightened. I ordered a drink and leaned against the bar. I couldn’t believe I had found a spot that was tailor-made for me.
The biggest problem with all three guides is that they’re rather thin compared to Roosh’s previous ones, due to the fact that he spent little time in each country (a month in each) and due to the fact that the countries themselves are pretty small. Still, the low, low price (all three books for just $3!) makes them worth buying.
Click here to buy Don’t Bang Latvia, Bang Estonia and Bang Lithuania.
Colin Flaherty’s been getting praise for his recent book White Girl Bleed a Lot, on the spate of racially motivated black-on-white hate crimes in recent years, but Redwood to Deadwood is his previous book, on a hitchhiking trip he took a couple of years ago. Naturally, this meant I had to buy it. How is it?
B-O-R-I-N-G.
I don’t know how he did it, but Flaherty managed to take a topic as inherently interesting and captivating as cross-continental hitchhiking and make it as sleep-inducing as watching a school board meeting. Redwood isn’t that long, but reading it made me want to chew my fingers off from its sheer dullness. I can barely remember a single thing about the book reading it front to back.
In Flaherty’s defense, Redwood’s pedestrian nature isn’t entirely his fault. Flaherty’s a middle-aged man (53 at the time of his trip; he did it mainly because he hitchhiked when he was a kid and he wanted to see if it could still be done), and I don’t expect a guy with kids to be having the same wild and crazy adventures that a twenty-year old would have. Even still, he manages to kill Redwoodwith his dry, analytical writing style. Flaherty writes like a disinterested observer being dictated to by someone else, instead of an active participant in the events happening around him. Even when he talks about his older brother who was killed in Vietnam, I couldn’t dredge up any sympathy for the guy.
If the guys in those parts are eager to escape the ennui of their life on the plains, so are the girls. And their first choice is going after guys that are 5 years older, starting when they are 13. Both my companions and many of their friends found themselves on the wrong side of a sheriff’s desk answering questions about their romantic escapades with young girls.
Sometimes they did it. Other times they did not. Telling your parents about imaginary romantic encounters with the local ill-shaven hoods is also a popular pastime on the plains.
Redwood has some redeeming value as things pick up in the second half, and from a hitchhiker’s perspective, there’s some useful practical information in there. For example, I chuckled during the portion where Flaherty was refused entry into Canada for similar reasons as me. Otherwise, feel free to skip this book.
Click here to buy Redwood to Deadwood: Hitchhiking America Today.
NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on March 28, 2011. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.
I read a lot of books, around four to six a month, but I usually don’t blog about them because most of them simply aren’t worth the effort. They don’t inspire me, they don’t make me mad, they just go onto my bookshelf where I forget about them. The last time I attempted to write a book review was last summer, when I had just finished Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and was bitterly disappointed, especially since I used to be a fan of Shteyngart’s. Six paragraphs in and I realized I was blowing the whole thing out of proportion. Super Sad True Love Story is an awful novel, but it’s awfulness is entirely ordinary; the self-licking ice cream cone of modern publishing that Mencius Moldbug once expounded about. A book has to be extraordinarily good or bad to inspire me to write about it.
The 4-Hour Workweekby Tim Ferriss is such a book. I first found out about Ferriss a few months ago, when I was winding down at my old job and researching the burgeoning, pretentiously-named field of “lifestyle design,” the art of living a life that isn’t confined by a 9 to 5 work existence. I began reading Ferriss’ blog, figured he knew what he was talking about, and eventually went to Barnes & Noble looking for his book. When I first got my mitts on a copy of The 4-Hour Workweek, I was so enthralled I spent a good half-hour reading through it before I even bothered heading up to the cash register. I found it that compelling.
And what I found compelling about The 4-Hour Workweek is its underlying philosophy, which is so subversive I can’t believe Ferriss actually got the book published. The book is ostensibly about how to join the ranks of the “New Rich,” a class of entrepreneurs who spend most of their time traveling the world, having fun and goofing off and still make more money than you, but here’s the less PC summation of Ferriss’ beliefs:
The only way to survive and make money is to rebel against the system, even if you end up screwing over your fellow man in the process.
Now, Ferriss doesn’t advocate breaking the law or doing anything illegal. He’s not stupid. But most of his advice is based around cutting corners and bending rules to your advantage and everyone else’s disadvantage. For example, in the second chapter, Ferriss details how he won the Chinese Kickboxing National Championships in 1999 by exploiting two of the competition’s rules:
Since the weigh-in was the day before the competition, Ferriss used the time between the weigh-in and the championship to hyper-hydrate his body above the max weight limit after hyper-dehydrating to meet it.
His principal tactic when fighting was to try to push his opponent off of the elevated platform, as any fighter who fell off three times in a round lost by default.
Nothing Tim did was against the rules, but no one with a sense of fair play would dare argue that he was behaving in an ethical fashion. He didn’t train harder, he didn’t fight better, he didn’t go beyond his sciolistic understanding of the sport he was competing in. He was the equivalent of those annoying brats who, when we were kids, would invade our personal space to annoy us. When we told them to stop touching us, they’d start waving their hands an inch in front of our heads and holler, “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!” And in Ferriss’ case, “not touching” his opponents won him the gold:
The result? I won all my matches by technical knock-out (TKO) and went home national champion, something 99% of those with 5-10 years of experience had been unable to do.
He then goes on to brag about how his methods have become standard tactics for kickboxers competing in the CKNC. The lesson? Being aggressively passive-aggressive gets you what you want.
Virtually all of The 4-Hour Workweek’s practical money-making advice follows this formula: read the fine print, identify the loopholes and jump through them on the road to riches and glory. The very first chapter of the “A is for Automation” section is devoted to the wonders of virtual assistants, outsourcing all your busywork to a drone in India so you can free up time for yourself on the cheap. Ferriss even relays the personal story of one New Rich sadsack who used his virtual assistant to settle a dispute with his wife:
I can’t tell you what a thrill I got from sending that note. It’s pretty hard to get much more passive-aggressive than bickering with your wife via an e-mail from a subcontinent halfway around the world.
What a pussy.
This ethos of subtly ripping people off continues right down to Ferriss’ ideas of starting new businesses. For example, one of his suggestions is to create an info product (like an instructional DVD) by stealing paraphrasing information from other, authoritative sources. If that isn’t the definition of a con, the word has no meaning. But never fear, the rationalizations are here, as Tim explains why masquerading as an expert on a topic is no big deal:
First, “expert” in the context of selling product means that you know more about the topic than the purchaser. No more. It is not necessary to be the best – just better than a small target number of your prospective customers…
…Second, expert status can be created in less than four weeks if you understand basic credibility indicators. It’s important to learn how the PR pros phrase resume points and position their clients…
Sorry all you folks who’ve spent years becoming experts on particular topics the old-fashioned way, any yahoo with an Internet connection and a copy of Microsoft Office can do what you’ve done in the span of a month. I can’t help but think that most of the seduction community hucksters hocking overpriced, bogus PUA advice followed this method to the letter.
The really sad thing about The 4-Hour Workweek is not that it could get published by a major company, or praised by anyone of importance (like Jack Canfield of Chicken Soup for the Soul, a quote from whom is proudly featured on the inside of the book jacket), it’s that there’s very little to disagree with in its philosophy of living. Oh sure, there’s plenty to nitpick with its practical advice. During the chapter about virtual assistants, I was rolling my eyes every other paragraph: outsourcing tasks to a half-literate foreigner on the other side of the world is a really stupid move if you care about getting things right. But no one who has descended into the rabbit hole of this part of the blogosphere can disagree with Ferriss’ core beliefs.
Over a year and a half ago, I wrote this explaining why I christened this site In Mala Fide:
When the pseudonymous Asia Times Online columnist Spengler unmasked himself last April, he stated his reason for choosing that nom de plume was as a joke – the name of the German scholar who wrote The Decline of the West appropriated for a column in an Asian newspaper. A bad joke, but it has a point. The name of this blog, In Mala Fide, can be thought of as a jab in that vein. The moral configuration of Western society, as chronicled on this blog and others, requires its best citizens to rebel, to go against the grain, to behave in mala fide in order to secure their own fortunes.
That’s the central point of The 4-Hour Workweek: screw conventional wisdom and ethics to get rich. Leverage go-fuck-yourself Calvinist capitalism for your own benefit. Plagiarize other peoples’ work and pass it off as your own. Outsource your work to India like a good little free marketeer. Then spend all your newfound free time on vacation instead of raising a family, creating a useful invention, or otherwise contributing to society in any way. Be a parasite, a tick burrowed in the hairy ass of Western civilization, getting fat from sucking blood and giving nothing but Lyme disease in return.
You can argue that Tim Ferriss is a degenerate whose advice would bring the country down if enough people followed it, and you’d be right. But at the same time, he’s got the freedom to go tango dancing in Buenos Aires, scuba diving in Panama, or anything else he wants, whenever he wants. You, on the other hand, are working eighty-hour weeks doing a monkey’s job, with a dictatorial boss pulling on your nuts and IT weirdos reading your emails, all for a comparative pittance. He broke the rules and he’s happy and enjoying life, while you followed them and are a miserable sack of shit. Whose lifestyle sounds more appealing?
Examples of entrepreneurs going in mala fide to great success abound in our world. For example, take the infamous music video “Friday” that went viral two weeks ago:
Everyone agrees that there’s nothing redeeming about this video. The first time I watched it, I had to stop around the 1:30 mark, Rebecca Black’s droning and the awful lyrics were so grating to my ears. Hell, the part at 2:06 with the strobe light notebook gave me meningitis seizure flashbacks. What sort of moron would give this nauseating wench a microphone, let alone an entire music video?
Turns out that “Friday” was produced by the record label Ark Music Factory, whose business model revolves around bilking the rich parents of snotty suburban brats out of their hard-earned cash. For a mere $2,000, Ark will write a song for your little pumpkin, film a music video starring her, and then Auto-Tune the shit out of her voice to make her sound like a tone-deaf robot. It’s the brainchild of Patrice Wilson and Clarence Jay, the two black guys seen from 0:30 – 1:00 of this video:
I simultaneously want to punch those guys and buy them beers. The punch is for inflicting talentless munchkins like CJ Fam on the world, making my eardrums bleed with their bullfrog-like throat noises masquerading as genuine music. The beers are for discovering a way to make easy money off of wealthy idiots who spoil their lazy kids. I can’t think of a demographic who so richly deserves to be dicked over in the most insulting way possible. And our two captains of conning literally filmed themselves in that video laughing and smiling over their cleverness.
Bottom line – there are many, many people who, like me, feel they have done the right thing all of their lives. We went to school, studied hard, started at the bottom and worked crap jobs for starvation wages. We did this all in exchange for the promise of a better life down the road. Those promises have turned out to be empty. We now have nothing to show for it but massive amounts of debt with little to no hope of ever repaying. We don’t even have access to basic, affordable health care! Since they haven’t held up their end of the bargain, I don’t see why I can’t opt out of holding up mine.
“But but welching on your debts is immoral and unmanly!” Fuck you, wage-slave! Fuck you and your masters with a rusty pitchfork! The student loan scam is highway robbery, and anyone who kicks those assholes in the nads is doing the right thing.
In a corrupt world divided between suckers and those who do the suckering, your only duty is to yourself and your kin. You can choose the sucker’s path, the normal path, the path your parents and friends and co-workers took. Or you can break free, flip the bird to convention and do what YOU want, on your own terms and nobody else’s. Freedom is within your grasp; you just have to reach out and take it.
In the meantime, if you want fuel for your dreams, The 4-Hour Workweek is a must buy.
