Russell Shackleford

Correction- looks like they could also be soft points, which also is extremely problematic, pulling a clip now for context that I’ll post in a bit.

"We should never despair. Our situation before has been unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust it will again." — Washington's letter to Philip Schuyler, July 1777, after the fall of Ticonderoga.

Some gentle & heartfelt suggestions for all the e-girls, (e-women?) out there: Every relationship—especially the failed ones, abusive ones, the ones that were incredibly dark—is an opportunity to learn, to grow, to become wiser, and stronger. Women who whine about “all men”, as a proxy for their ex or their father, are blame shifting spiritual zombies. They are refusing to do the soul searching / self criticism required to learn anything from their experiences. Blaming other people is excuse to remain emotionally infantile, it represents a total refusal to learn or grow as a person. No matter how shitty the relationship, there are always two people involved. Both of them created the relational dynamics. Ladies, even if he was a cosmically evil monster, YOUR JOB is figuring out WHY you were drawn to him, why you stayed & how you can avoid men like him in future. What did you LEARN about your own strengths and weaknesses? How will you build on them going forward? Those are are some of the questions you need to reckon with privately. You should process the experience and come to terms with it on your own time; before talking to the world about it. If you haven’t dealt with much adversity, then what you learned in your first real relational difficulty, is probably going to be basic bitch garbage worth chatting with your fellow first wives club friends about over cocktails, but otherwise it’s of no use to anyone but yourself. Which is fine. But at the very least you won’t be projecting your unprocessed psychic mess through a political vernacular and trying to hold all men accountable for the sins of your ex husband/boyfriend or (absent/inadequate/abusive) father. If you are smart and have the capacity to be insightful, you need to process your experiences fully until such a time as you can make claims that aren’t cryptic references to your own unhealed wounds, or hamfisted attempts to dispel your own psychic damage by offloading it as “advice”. Such advice ranges from worthless to actively harmful, and you need to stop with that shit. However, in the fullness of time, you may be able to offer a perspective others find useful and if that’s the case it’s well worth putting into words. Doing so after you have fully come to terms with the experience such that you can just communicate what you learned, without blabbing about your private life to the world, is far more valuable to other women than mere gossip and scandal. Indicting people in your personal life on public platforms is utterly classless behaviour and should be avoided as much as humanly possible. You don’t have to listen to me but if you do, I am confident that the suggestions above will not mislead you, cause you to harm yourself, your relationships, your reputation or your spiritual integrity. ♥️

The currently fashionable male view of tattoos on women is a hysterical herd phenomenon, which pretends to be some kind of sophisticated anthropological "red pill"—except it's obviously wrong. The meme says "tattoo = red flag" and "no tattoo has ever made a woman more beautiful." These two observations are contradictory. What none of the Men Against Female Tattoos ever acknowledge is: Red Flags are Hot. Red flags are not predictors of stability, faithfulness, or sustainable compounding of value, but not all the attractions of human life are perfectly correlated with the preferences of uptight Anglo shopkeepers. The most sexually attractive traits are correlated with a propensity toward self-destruction: risk, recklessness, and self-endangerment, even to the point of death. Read Freud, Bataille, or even within evo-psych just look at Life History Theory. Self-destruction has always been one of the sexiest things in the world—and for good reasons, even if it cuts against long-term stability. It may be true that one tattoo rarely makes a woman more beautiful (in part because one tattoo has little signal either way), but what this popular refrain ignores is the following inconvenient fact: Many tattoos can make a woman far more attractive. If you've ever been to a bar at night (many of these men have not), the hottest woman there (according to the actual felt sense of lust averaged across all the men), will ALWAYS be the wild-looking, heavily tattooed baddie over the pristine girl in a sundress, assuming other traits are equal. If any of these anti-tattoo men were approached by one of these women below, in a bar past 11pm, they would simply wet their pants. They would not be able to handle it, and they've never had the opportunity, either. And I think they know that this is true, which is why they hysterically project against any woman with ANY SINGLE tattoo, with this weirdly intellectualized gloss that folds if you even poke it for a second. Men who love to talk about their zero-tolerance policy for tattoos on women are often just boring, fearful, cowardly men who know nothing of romance, love, sex, or death. All they care about is securing a loyal safe obedient slave who is guaranteed to never put their long-term value accretion at risk. This is also why many of them never get married at all, or stay perpetually divorced; and the ones who are married are often just uptight bores and petty tyrants over boring, lame little households. Can we also talk about how this anti-tattoo hysteria is itself a kind of inverted woke feminism—it's so prissy, so fixated on "trauma" (which is probably not real, and a left-wing bludgeon), etc. Sorry bros but the theory presented here is far more consistent with the data. It's OK to have your own preferences; you don't have to dress them up as profound social theories, which conveniently also frame yourself as a good person, and women you could never get as bad people!

🚨Ohio lawmakers have approved legislation requiring public schools to teach the "success sequence" beginning in the 2026-27 school year. The curriculum would teach students in grades 6-12 that graduating from high school, obtaining a full-time job, and marrying before having children are associated with a lower likelihood of living in poverty. The bill now heads to Gov. Mike DeWine for his signature.