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KevinD

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Everything posted by KevinD

  1. Actually, Jennifer, I'm more interested in what you have to say than in replying to the original message. Why would you go from saying that "no means no" — complete with capital letters and four exclamation points — to advising, practically in the next sentence, that he give her presents, repair her roof, and ask her out again next month? Which is it? Does no really mean "no"? Or does it maybe mean "maybe"? I'd really like to hear your response, and I am going somewhere with this, but I'll hold off on any further statements until you've had a chance to respond. To the original poster, I can only say that I think you have a lot to learn about women, a lot of maturing to do in your romantic responses, and as far as the particular situation you're in right now is concerned, I think that you're in for a lot of pain. I suggest that you do a message search under my user profile, and read every post I've ever made here on the subject of dating and love. My messages in this thread might be a good starting point — but again, you really need to read and study ALL of them.
  2. I'd like to entirely retract this post, and opt out of further commentary. I was unusually crabby yesterday morning — I'm sorry.
  3. I'm extremely suspicious of those who use "techniques" in dealing with other adult human beings. And I resent it IMMENSELY when I suspect that someone is using such a technique on me. (Edited to add Kevin's subsequent comment. -sNerd)
  4. Yes, Dan, that's exactly what I — and you — meant. Thank you so much for clarifying.
  5. Does it "take a man" to sleep with a woman? Or can any random guy do that?
  6. Here's an extremely open-ended question, one which I'd love to hear women respond to (though I suppose I can't stop guys from answering, too): What is the meaning of romance in your life?
  7. Unless I've specifically retracted something I've said or written, you can be sure that I most certainly did mean it, and in exactly the way I chose to express it. This is a dangerous statement. It might make sense to a female reader, since women have the inestimable advantage of having been near-experts on the subject of romance from an extremely young age. Men, on the other hand, have to LEARN romance; it generally takes a long time, and often a great deal of painful experience, before we can even begin to grasp a woman's nature and respond appropriately to her uniquely feminine needs. (And even then, most men still never "get it.") To say that a man should let his subconscious (i.e., his feelings) be his guide in handling an attraction, is not unlike advising a person who is completely ignorant about the stock market to make investments on the basis of what he "feels" will make him money. Unless one already has a great deal of stored, automatized (accurate) knowledge, his subconscious isn't going to be much help to him — in fact, trying to rely on it will likely send him straight down the tubes. Two basic things a man needs to be successful in love are: 1.) A solid understanding of the opposite sex, which is rooted in a deep appreciation and respect for women in general, and 2.) The ability to see reality clearly. When it comes to matters of the heart, far too many guys practically ONLY know how to feel, and to act on their feelings, which often leads to calamitous consequences. To be truly objective — to attempt an unbiased, third-party-like assessment of a situation without any reference to one's own emotions or desires at all — would not only be impossible to this kind of man, it would barely even be conceivable. This thread is a good case in point of a guy who urgently needs to set aside his feelings, and take exactly this kind of objective, honest look at his present situation. The one uncontestable fact of his dilemma is that the girl that he is so strongly attracted to has expressed that she does not want to have a relationship with him. What does it matter what the reasons are? Who cares if the reasons she's cited make any sense? Although his feelings may be pulling him in an absolutely opposite direction, the bottom line is that he's looking for love in the wrong place. He needs to respect this girl enough to drop her and move on, and find someone else who is much more enthusiastic about dancing with him. I've said it many times, and I'll say it once again: Guys, romantic love has nothing whatsoever to do with you or your feelings. That's a slight exaggeration, of course, but it's necessary to make the point. There's an old saying that men do the picking, but women do the choosing — in other words, you might have picked her, but if she hasn't chosen you, you're entirely out of gas. While you're at it, you can forget about confessing your feelings or pleading your guts out to a girl in order to get her to like you — that only works in the movies, or if you're a stud like Ross on Friends. This side of fiction, a woman only cares about who you are and how much she likes you; your feelings toward her don't mean a thing as far as her own emotional response is concerned. Which takes us right back to the principle that your feelings are fundamentally irrelevant: if you're dealing with a girl who sees you as John Galt, Howard Roark and Cary Grant all rolled into one, then by all means go ahead and fall in love with her. If, on the other hand, she starts to suspect that you're much more into her than she's into you, even if up to that point her feelings for you have been positive and on the rise, the sudden imbalance is going to make her feel very awkward and uncomfortable, and what feelings she did have for you will likely fast evaporate. As Jennifer indicated, women love and need an element of MYSTERY and CHALLENGE in the dance of romance — two things which are totally absent from the tattered shreds of the bad joke of what claims to pass for the courtship process today. Women complain all the time that guys move too fast — WAY too fast — that they don't give the process of love anywhere near a chance to grow and develop. For exactly this reason, I strongly advocate that a man employ a process of literal, old-fashioned dating; just pretend that it's about 1925, back in the days when men and women took delight in dressing up, going out, and enjoying a chivalrous evening together, long before such cultural institutions as Internet porn and rap music were invented. In other words: Just go out and have fun! (And no, "fun" does not mean sex.) View the dating process as simply the chance to enjoy each other's company, to talk, and to get to know each other better. Do this once a week across several months, and you will have built a solid foundation for a mature, enduring romantic relationship. What kills romance — and annoys the hell out of women — is the desperate and pathetic PRESSURE that so many guys seem to think is the key to a girl's heart — pressure of exactly the kind which several participants in this thread have brazenly advocated (and presumably still do, since they have not recanted their statements). Let me say clearly and for the record, since I'm in the business of making women happy, not miserable, that any man who advocates employing PRESSURE TACTICS on a woman is indeed much worse than anything I could possibly express on these message boards. The man who truly cares about women will shun PRESSURE as the deadly poison it is — he will pay careful scrutiny to all of a woman's signals and statements, and respond to them appropriately and respectfully. Should such a man find himself in the position of being told by a woman explicitly, in words, that she does not want to have a relationship with him — regardless of what her reasons may be, or for no reason at all — he would at once acknowledge her decision, back off, and LEAVE HER THE HELL ALONE. Have I made myself perfectly clear?
  8. With all due respect, Strangelove, both you and dondigitalia are quite pathetically naive when it comes to women. No woman is EVER going to reject you by saying "No way!" or "Get away from me!" — not unless you're practically trying to rape her. Unfortunately, an awful lot of guys will interpret anything less than a "forceful rejection" from a woman as practically an open invitation to continue the pursuit. As I've written many times on these boards, one of the most basic things a man has got to learn if he intends to be successful with women — i.e., if he intends to be a source of joy in a woman's life, rather than a painful and perennial thorn in her side — is that women do not reject men directly. There is always some reason, some excuse offered. It's never you, it's always her. It's circumstances. She'd really love to go out with you on that particular night, but she's busy. (She does not, however, suggest going out on another night.) She'd love to pursue a romantic relationship with you, but she just can't — she's having family issues, or she's much too consumed with school, or she's still not "over" her last boyfriend. (Actually, she was well over the guy a good three weeks before she dumped him.) Guys, take the freakin' hint when women talk to you this way. They're trying to be nice to you. They're trying to let you down easy. Believe it or not, women have pretty much the same basic emotional responses that men do. If a woman is genuinely attracted to you, she wants to be with you. She will actually go out with you when you ask her out on a date. She never gives excuses. She doesn't have to concoct multi-point "explanations" as to why she can't have a relationship with you. After all: 1.) She really wants to be in a relationship with you, or at least is interested in exploring that possibility, and 2.) Had she truly not been interested, she would have had many easy opportunities to reject you, long before there were any confessions of feelings and serious talk of a relationship. What every man needs to look for in a woman, ahead of any other virtues, traits or characteristics, is romantic interest in him. Your feelings mean nothing; if she's not feeling it for you, no relationship is possible, regardless of how crazy you might be about her. The problem is that most guys are solipsists in romantic love; they only focus on the intensity of their own feelings, and are notoriously oblivious to the emotional signals of a woman. Worst of all, guys will actually project their feelings onto a woman that they like — they assume, sans any strong evidence, and often despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary, that she feels the same way he does. She must feel the same way; the potentiality of such powerful emotions not being reciprocated is simply too terrible a reality to acknowledge or accept. If a man can learn to be sensitive and objective when it comes to women, if he can avoid trying to psychoanalyze a woman when he encounters "mixed messages" — if he would learn to interpret all reticence, confusion, weirdness, contradictions, excuses, explanations, broken dates, and (ahem) explicit statements from a woman that she does not want to be a relationship with him as extremely bad signs, and as solid, airtight reasons to cease and desist all further pursuit of her, then he would immediately be ahead of 99.9% of his miserably clueless and pain-wracked brethren, and well on his way to becoming a truly aware, successful, ROMANTIC man. P.S. I was in error in my previous post: Re-reading the first message, I now only count five rejections or reasons for not wanting to be in a relationship with him, not seven as previously stated. I stand humbly corrected.
  9. This is categorically the worst seriously-intended advice I have ever encountered in my entire life. I'm almost literally speechless — and I assure you that doesn't happen very often. What could I possibly say to someone who thinks it's appropriate, even advisable, for a man to really step up his game and aggressively pursue a woman who has told him explicitly, no less than SEVEN TIMES, that she DOES NOT WANT A RELATIONSHIP WITH HIM? What statements are coming to mind would get me banned if I expressed them, so let me just say that I strongly disagree with the above-described tactic, and roundly condemn anyone who practices it, agrees with it, or recommends it to others.
  10. Keeping in mind that a human being can only act within the realm of the possible, the answer is emphatically YES. Perhaps a prisoner of war has an excuse; this side of a bamboo cage, if you want to claim to "value" a thing, you'd better be DOING something to achieve and/or maintain it. A person who openly acknowledges that he's doing nothing — that he's sitting by idly while the things he purportedly values are being maligned, attacked and destroyed — is, simply put, not a valuer in any important (or even any unimportant) sense of the term.
  11. Why are you looking to other people to tell you how to live your life?
  12. Your question is difficult to answer as written. I have a sense that you're not telling us the whole story. You write: "The experiences we had were nothing like friendship at all." OK — what were they like? Have you been dating? Meaning: have you been calling her up, asking her out, and taking her out on literal dates? Has she accepted, kept, and acted enthusiastic on them? You say you "recently met" this girl, yet you speak of "our relationship," and say you have grown to have intense feelings for her. Something doesn't sound right here. Exactly how long have you known her? You claim that her powerful feelings for you are (or were) "blatantly obvious" — yet you provide absolutely no evidence for this beyond your assertion. In fact, everything you do mention seems to indicate that, if she ever did have feelings for you, she doesn't anymore. When a woman is strongly (or even modestly) attracted to a man, she typically doesn't announce that she's "not into commitment or emotional stuff" — assuming she's single, available, and sane. Ditto for "needing space," "just wanting to be friends," "it's not you it's me," etc. These are phrases that women use when they find themselves in the understandably awkward position of having to reject a man romantically, yet who genuinely want to avoid hurting his feelings or damaging his ego. You write: "Either she's denying her feelings for me or she's an extremely deceptive and manipulative individual." That's a hell of an alternative. Is it possible that your emotions may be causing you to project a response that isn't there — at least not nearly to the degree that you'd like it to be? You do realize that, taking everything you've written at face value, this woman has either been blatantly dishonest with you, or she's a certifiable whack job. Which would you prefer? If neither, then why are you so damned hot to have a relationship with her?
  13. There is still one extremely important point which needs to be made: There is no such thing as an immoral fantasy — sexual or otherwise. Thoughts, desires, feelings, dreams, projections, fantasies are emphatically NOT subject to moral evaluation. Only a person's actions can be judged in this respect, never the contents of his consciousness. More precisely: Fantasies and desires as such are neither moral nor immoral — though of course one can use fantasy, or can entertain certain desires, in a harmful or destructive way. A person can daydream instead of focusing on an important task at hand; he can choose to live in an unreal world of his own making, believing what he wants to believe, dismissive of facts and of truth. What a person wants and desires, and consequently what he enjoys thinking about, may be the result of an immoral mental process and policy (or the lack of one — i.e., of evasion), and certainly one can always decide to act on one's desires and mental projections, at which point said person steps fully into the arena of moral evaluation and judgment. But the crucial point here is that only actions — real, existential actions — can be moral or immoral. This includes, or at least it can include, the actions one takes with one's mind; what one chooses to do with one's consciousness, but never what one chooses to think about per se. (Emotions, of course, are entirely outside of the realm of morality; while they certainly aren't causeless, what one experiences emotionally is not within one's direct volitional control.) This is not to say that whatever a person feels, or thinks about, or desires is perfectly fine and is never worthy of examination. Sadistic or masochistic fantasies, for example, can and likely do indicate a very serious psychological and/or moral problem. But if this is the case, then such mental contents need to be treated for what they are; as clues and as important data about a person; not a cause for moral judgment in and of themselves. The distinction between the contents of consciousness and a person's existential choices and actions is truly a life-and-death one; it is Christianity, not Objectivism, which seeks to equate them. Jesus said that whosoever looks lustfully upon a woman has already committed adultery in his heart — an explicit declaration that a person's thoughts and desires are NOT to be distinguished and treated separately from his behavior. Throughout the Bible, one can find many injunctions against contents of consciousness — anger, jealousy, doubt, covetousness, greed, pride. While most Objectivists would dismiss these particular "sins" as nonsense, I wonder how many have identified to what degree their own thinking and lives may have been affected by the truly insidious lesson contained within them. What happens when a person accepts the notion that what he thinks and feels can, in effect, send him to hell? Invariably, some combination of repression and guilt, not to mention a tendency to view all emotions with suspicion — particularly those of pleasure. Pleasure and enjoyment, to this kind of mind, are truly "guilty until proven innocent"; one must concoct (i.e., rationalize) a super-literal "survival value" for every positive emotion — and if one ever can't justify a given feeling in this way, then one justifies it feeling guilty about it. Under normal circumstances, pleasure is self-justifying. Pleasure need only be tied to one's "survival" in the sense and to the degree that if a person is to live as a human being, he has to experience enjoyable moments in his life, and often. Pleasure is, in general, not a proper moral standard. There are, however, times when a person has every right to enjoy an activity for no reason other than that it brings him a pleasurable feeling. Emotions are not tools of cognition, nor are they a reliable guide to action — in general. But how could one operate in a field such as sex without constant reference to his feelings, desiring (and pursuing) that which brings him pleasure, and avoiding that which brings him discomfort or pain? A truly appalling thread on this site is devoted, at least in its last few pages, to the question of whether or not it is moral to masturbate solely and exclusively . . . for the purpose of pleasure. Incredibly, outlandishly, several otherwise intelligent and well-written Objectivists brazenly argue that it isn't. Their words have to be seen to be believed: Again, it's Christianity, not Objectivism, which says that sex has to serve a "higher" purpose; that pleasure and enjoyment must be justified, excused, tempered, forgiven — and felt guilty for. What the higher purpose is, or what it's claimed to be, is immaterial; the common denominator between this kind of statement and those issued by the Vatican is that both hold that sexual pleasure, of and by itself, is evil. A great many readers of this site would do well to learn, and take time to consider, that there is no such thing as sexual morality. Morality is a branch of philosophy; as such it deals with broad, fundamental principles which apply to all areas of man's life. There can be no rules, no injunctions, no commandments, no guidelines, not even any suggestions or advice that philosophy can give a person specifically on the subject of sex. To the extent that one acts (and argues) as though there were, one is following a religion, not a philosophy. Objectivism has only one thing to say about sex: It's good. Beyond that, you're on your own. No one can tell you how to live your life — not even in so important, difficult, and (for some) terrifying an issue as sexuality and romantic love. It will always be up to you to think, to judge, and to act in accord with your very best judgment; no person and no ethics can ever assume this responsibility for you. Philosophy can give you the direction and the proper mental method; it can light the way and show you the goal, but the specific steps you take along the journey are entirely up to you.
  14. Why are you looking to other people to tell you how to live your life?
  15. There is currently a quote at the top of the page which reads: "Those who forget the lessons of history, are doomed to repeat them." It's attributed to some character named "Santa Anna." The famous quotation is actually: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." And its equally well-known author is George SANTAYANA. I've seen some bad typos in those quotes, but this is RIDICULOUS!
  16. I don't even understand what this means, so most likely I didn't say it. My simplest answer to this is: Who "benefits" from living in a statist society? This, of course, is exactly what you're proposing when you speak of any program to extort wealth from certain individuals in order to aid others, however legitimately needy said "others" may be. Wait a minute, you might be saying, we're not advocating full-blown socialism here — we just want to pick a few people's pockets to send some poor kids off to college! But that's the problem with statist policies, and all immoral plans of action: as I said earlier, evil begets more evil, and given its destructive nature it cannot do otherwise. No matter how small and localized the dosage may be in the beginning, once you introduce a principle such as the initiation of force into a society, it's just a matter of time before you start seeing it everywhere. The answer doesn't stop here, of course — one could talk about the inferiority and ever-deteriorating condition of state-sponsored education, that what constitutes an "education" (as well as who is worthy of receiving one) is left squarely to government bureaucrats — the fact that the more socialist a society, the more its brightest and most productive members will be burdened and persecuted — the many scholarships and grants which currently exist without the aid of public money, and the presumably many more which would exist, if individuals and companies had more of their own money to voluntarily fund them — the reality that more and more, success is becoming the prerogative of the self-made, self-reliant and self-educated innovators and entrepreneurs — not the sheltered, parroting, diploma-ed drones which formal education is so expert at churning out. All of these arguments are really quite superfluous, though, once you grasp what I stated in my previous post: that the immoral is immoral — that evil can never be excused, justified or explained away, regardless of how allegedly "noble" one's results or intentions may be. The Ends-Means dichotomy is really just a variant of the theory/practice dichotomy, which itself is a variant of the moral/practical dichotomy. The Objectivist answer to "the ends justify the means" is the principle that, in every possible sense of the term, the moral is the practical. One cannot separate means from ends, just as one cannot separate reason from morality, or morality from practicality, or practical goals and ends from the full context of man's life and his long-range happiness on earth. Although the "ends justify the means" crowd like to imagine that they are exhorting a sensible, big-picture view, they're in fact dropping context in the worst possible way. If one can only arrive at a good end, so the argument goes — or at least if one can claim to be acting toward achieving a positive result — any and all crimes one commits in the process will be miraculously absolved. Objectivism's thorough refutation of any split between the moral and the practical demonstrates that no such results, and no such forgiveness, are ever possible. The "answer," in broadest terms, is to educate people to take ideas seriously, and to learn to think in principles. A single statement or answer may well not be enough to convince someone to go beyond his bromides and really think about an issue — not if he's been raised with the view that ideas are for ivory-tower intellectuals, and that "common sense" (i.e., the uncritically accepted views of those around him) is all he really needs. This is why it's essential always to answer intellectual questions in terms of basic principles, and why one should always trace philosophical issues down to their roots, seeking to understand them from the ground up. Despite all of the "political" yammering you hear these days, most of it is extremely superficial, and amounts to little more than name calling, finger pointing, with the occasional oddball conspiracy theory thrown in for good measure. We Objectivists really have our work cut out for us: we know it's not just the correct views or conclusions that are important, but the proper method of arriving at them. We have to teach the world not what to think, but how to think — no easy task, especially given the foothold that the brigade of unreason has had for many centuries. I think, though, that you're being a little too pessimistic. Sure, lots of people don't care about ideas, and maybe they never will. The good news is that those people don't matter. My experience has been that Objectivist principles are so inescapably true (assuming they're presented right), that virtually any honest and intelligent person can and WILL be persuaded by them — at least eventually. For this reason, I entirely support the Ayn Rand Institute and its goal of philosophic revolution, a mission at which it has already made some extremely respectable headway. If enough individual people discover the ideas of Objectivism, and decide that Ayn Rand actually had something good to say — and more people are doing so, every day and year— then the philosophic revolution is as good as won in our favor.
  17. To employ a process of reason, is to apply the method of logic to a given issue or problem. Logic, as defined by Ayn Rand, is the art of non-contradictory identification of the facts of reality. Rationalization, on the other hand, means starting with a conclusion, and then trying to work backwards to prop it up. For instance: Say my girlfriend is giving me every indication that she is losing her feelings for me, and wants to break off our relationship — but I'm so terrified of losing her, I seek out every bit of "evidence" I can find to convince myself that she still loves me and wants to be with me forever. I spin her negative statements until they have positive meaning — I blow the tiniest hint of a semi-pleasurable response from her vastly out of proportion — and that which I can't spin or inflate, I evade. I concoct a "reason" for everything: she's tired, she's sick, she's "not herself," she's under stress, and will soon be back to normal. Everything in my method is geared, not toward understanding the facts of reality, but specifically avoiding the one fact that I cannot bear to accept: that our relationship is irrevocably doomed. That's rationalization. A person who's rationalizing is not genuinely motivated to discover the truth, but to justify his feelings. Rationalization looks not at reality, but at what one wants to be true. It means the sin of living inside your own head; the confusing of the "I wish" with the "it is." As such, rationalization and reason have nothing in common; in fact, they're polar opposites.
  18. And the battle of the sexes rages on . . .
  19. It's not that ends don't justify means; it's that one cannot separate means from ends — at least not in the way that the saying implies. To put it another way: You cannot achieve a positive end by immoral means. Evil is evil, and begets evil, not good. (That the "means" are immoral is obvious; one does not need to "justify" the good.) Do please give any examples that may be confusing you, and I will gladly demonstrate why this is so.
  20. If you're referring to the single-essay pamphlet published by the Atlas Society, beware that it is an "updated" version of the piece which appeared in Who is Ayn Rand? You can get a used copy of the original paperback for $4 + shipping on Amazon. It's a good read, and definitely worth owning.
  21. Mr. Soulsurfer neglects to mention that his "lover, best friend and fellow student of Objectivism" is also his literal slave. Guy can't even spell "relationship."
  22. When a woman tells you she "needs her space," why don't you do something truly revolutionary and GIVE IT TO HER. Stop e-mailing her. DO NOT send her roses. If she is confused and conflicted, let her be confused and conflicted. In other words, let her work things out on her own — as she has indicated she wants to. Stop trying to "tip the scales" in your favor, as you know full well you're doing. This experience is no doubt excruciating for you, but you also need to know that it is not normal. This is someone you've been chatting with on your computer for five years, not an actual girlfriend. Your pain is real, but your words are those of a person with a dependency problem, not a healthy sense of romantic love. There is a tremendous amount of rationalization in your post; you are TERRIFIED that this could be over. That's not a healthy response. Perhaps a "break," combined with some hard and HONEST soul-searching, is exactly what you need right now.
  23. While I like this statement very much, and would say that it describes my own personal view (albeit from the opposite direction), I would clarify that a healthy sense of masculinity or femininity begins with an affirmative attitude toward one's own nature as a man or as a woman. By way of extension, or almost as a corollary, one can esteem the opposite sex in relation to oneself.
  24. This I believe names exactly the essence of the fear of death. (Again, by fear we mean a general and enduring feeling of anxiety.) Or to put it another way: People don't really fear death — they fear life; they're made anxious by its nature and requirements.
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