In “From Pickup Artist to Pariah: Jared Rutledge fancied himself a big man of the ‘manosphere.’ But when his online musings about 46 women were exposed, his whole town turned against him,” oddly, the most interesting and perhaps important parts of the article are buried or de-emphasized:

In 2012, he slept with three women; in 2013, 17; in 2014, 22. In manosphere terms, he was spinning plates — keeping multiple casual relationships going at once.

In other words… it worked, at least according to this writer. And:

I met four women at a downtown bar. All were on Jared’s List of Lays. Over cocktails and ramen, the women told me about Jared’s sexual habits, his occasional flakiness, his black-and-white worldview. [. . .] They seemed most troubled by just how fine he had been to date. “I really liked him,” said W. “And that’s what makes me feel so gullible.”

In other words… it worked, at least according to the women interviewed as framed by this writer.

How might a Straussian read “From Pickup Artist to Pariah?” Parts of the article, and not those already quoted, could be inserted directly into Onion stories.

The first sentence of Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take On Each Other and the World is “Dear Bernard-Henri Lévy, We have, as they say, nothing in common—except for one essential trait: we are both rather contemptible individuals.” Is being contemptible sometimes a sign of status? As BHL implies, the greatest hatred is often reserved for that which might be true.*

In other news, the Wall Street Journal reports today that “Global Temperatures Set Record for Second Straight Year: 2015 was the warmest year world-wide since reliable global record-keeping began in 1880.”

In Julie Klausner’s book, I Don’t Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux Sensitive Hipsters, and Other Guys I’ve Dated, she writes at the very end, “Around this time of graduation or evolution or whatever you call becoming thirty, I started fending off the guys I didn’t like before I slept with them. It was the first change I noticed in my behavior that really marked my twenties being over.” Maybe Rutledge’s mistake is of tone: Comedians are sometimes forgiven and sometimes thrown into the fire. No one is ever forgiven seriousness.

Houellebecq also writes, “there is in those I admire a tendency toward irresponsibility that I find only too easy to understand.” He is not the first person to admire irresponsibility. In Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!“, Richard Feynman says:

Von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of Von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since. But it was Von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility.