Before Kim

If Mia Farrow -- so-called feminist and activist -- is all smoke and mirrors and the appearance that she's an incredibly bad ass mover and shaker is a mirage created by Frank Sinatra, a man who died in 1998, then the way to bet is she's completely full of shit and has no idea whatsoever what she is doing 99 percent of the time.

I cannot begin to tell you how much I loathe feminism. 

I don't know how to solve the systemic problems we have that suppress the incomes of women and largely cut them out of having real power compared to men, but insisting that women somehow magically deserve what men have is all kinds of broken.

As best I can tell, real power is rooted in two things:

1. Fundamental competence based on substantial knowledge of objectively measurable things that aren't inherently social in nature. AKA "Knowledge is power."

2. Based on that, pull with a large number of people.

And that's why men make the big bucks. 

Giving women positions of power without requiring them to establish their competence like we do for men is like giving a loaded gun to a five year old.

When we allow anyone to gain access to important titles or positions based on proxies instead of proving themselves, it goes bad places. See fit example Donald Trump being President of the United States of America because, hey, net worth is a proxy of competence and don't confuse us with the facts that HIS net worth is evidence of his father's competence and not his.

I found Hacker News fascinating as a sandbox for exploring how male culture actually works in a virtual setting that minimized the impact of my gender. It was a little like being invited to hang out with them in the locker room while everyone sat around in a towel after a shower with less friction and less potential downside FOR ME.

It also came with less potential upside FOR ME than the guys got out of it, but it looks to me like most women never get meaningful access to any of that.

I read a business post mortem some years ago on Hacker News about some business founded by a woman. I wrote a blog post in reaction to it called something like "A decade late and a million dollars short." to try to capture the scale of how far behind women and are and that it's far worse than chronically a day late and a dollar short.

I mean no one read it. No one was really interested in anything I had to say and they still aren't.

But I felt the failure of this business was rooted in the gender of the founder and her inability to have those locker room conversations and whatever goes on there.

Her inability to go have a drink with the guys and have someone say to her earlier "Something needs to change" and have that be a conversation that moved the business in the right direction instead of just landing her in bed with someone she had no business sleeping with given she was his boss or business partner.

The demise of the business was a long time in the coming and involved multiple big debacles where they repeatedly did major overhauls instead of minor tweaks because she was a woman and that somehow fundamentally denied her the ability to meaningfully pick the brains of guys she saw and worked with every single day because men and women don't have platonic, intimate camaraderie.

If they get close at all, it almost always leads to sex. And those relationships are frequently shallow relationships where they really talk deeply.

They talk just enough to agree to sex, then settle into a relationship where he has a career and pays the bills, she does the women's work. And after THAT gets arranged, no meaningful conversation can happen lest it threaten the comfortable arrangement they have.

I'm a nonstop chronic disturbance and no one wants to have anything to do with me because I talk to people about important things, no matter who they are, no matter how we met, regardless of gender.

And it's left me in social cyberia. No one wants to have anything at all to do with me.

In order for the world to constructively change into a new format that's sustainable, we need new ideas about how things actually work. Those do not arise from over entitled women demanding equal pay for what they imagine is equal work because they have no idea what men really bring to the table and what they get paid for.

I worked at Aflac and trying to get people to be consistently productive and measure productivity effectively was a big headache for the company. The nature of the work is unlike making bricks where you can count the number of bricks you've made and also objectively measure if they are adequate quality.

Completing a single file took variable amounts of time and resulted in varying numbers of credits towards how they counted productivity. They were trying to automate easy claims and it was making it harder for people to make quota while they had a system that skewed heavily towards rewarding speed and high numbers and punishing people like me who were slower but more thorough.

I routinely cleaned up messes created by people being rewarded for their speed and, among other things, being allowed to leave early on Friday. And it really stuck in my craw as an individual, but it was also clear to me this is a systemic issue and it negatively impacts the health of the company.

I was handling files where people were threatening to sue in court because they had repeatedly sent the information in and still not gotten the benefits they were asking for in writing because someone super fast botched it over and over again.

Was I getting pats on the head for resolving it and keeping them out of court? Nope.

It's extremely clear to me that Donald Trump is actively damaging the US to make himself and his family richer. In other words, he is actively shrinking the pie while simultaneously taking a larger cut.

This hurts everyone and isn't sustainable.

I don't know what kind of harm Mia Farrow has done while playing at being a hard charging so-called feminist who essentially got the world to see her that way via the casting couch. 

She slept with an extraordinarily competent man for a time in her youth and then got dumped by him under circumstances that forged a reputation for her that was probably really a picture he painted that had nothing to do with reality.

Frank Sinatra most likely had no idea how to actually make women into real equals. Even if their lifelong friendship allowed her to routinely pick his brains, he almost certainly was not qualified to say anything useful about how to help women really reach some kind of parity with men.

Even if he had wonderful ideas, we have that meme that ideas are nothing, execution is everything for good reason. And on top of that, in my experience, being handed an idea by someone else leads to it being botched in execution.

If her formula for success was "Sleep with one of the most competent men alive today and let him fix you up." and she's not openly admitting that's the secret sauce, then whatever crap she's selling in the name of improving the status of women is probably only really serving her interests and probably failing to really help the fools looking to her for advice as a role model.

I've spoken about this before: 

Reality TV and social media make people FEEL like they KNOW these people. These people are very talented at scamming you into wanting to "be" like them and looking to them as -- cough -- "role models" that you enthusiastically emulate so you will stupidly buy their products.

You didn't get millions suing some asshole in court for posting revenge porn of you on the internet after you were already a little famous. You probably aren't half as pretty as Kim Kardashian and don't have a reality TV show and etc, so buying her clothes and taking sexy selfies of yourself all the live long day won't make you rich and powerful like her.

Odds are good that oversharing overly sexualized selfies will keep you in an entry-level job and bar you from marrying well. You won't be respectable enough in most social circles to be the boss nor even marry the boss. 

And before we had Kim Kardashian convincing women to cut their throats for her benefit while imagining that emulating her was a path to success, we had Mia Farrow doing similar SHIT.

I don't know how to solve this. I do know that the material wealth and the rights and privileges of the over entitled Baby Boomer generation was forged in the fires of the hell on Earth called World War II.

And it's left us with incompetent jackasses in power who don't understand or appreciate what it cost their parents to create the social climate of the sixties and seventies and who themselves would never make such sacrifices.

Because the servants are supposed to do that and they are supposed to just get the benefits without doing the hard part.

This will not lead to a better future.