Relevant Digressions

A bit of personal history. Back in the 1970s I used to be roommates with three young men who were living on unemployment after having all been laid off from the same company, Nuclear Metals, in the then-grubby industrial town of Waltham, Massachusetts. But I don't digress...

Now it turned out that their particular job didn't involve machining spent uranium, which their co-workers evidently did do. But I don't digress...

Little known factoid that may or may not be true: according to those roommates if you pick up a long piece of spent-uranium shavings with a pair of pliers and hold a flame under it from your disposable butane lighter it'll catch fire sort of like a sparkler. If you then sling it against the floor or a concrete wall it will burst in a big shower of sparks. I mention this because that's the kind of people who got hired to worked there -- people with no better sense than to set fire to absurdly toxic metals because the sparks look cool. But I don't digress...

Anyway, as I say that's not what my friends did for the company. Instead they worked on a line that made kajillions of microscopic ball bearings out of highly specialized steel bars for a photocopier company. The tiny bearings, which had to be perfect and uniform, were fabricated in extravagantly expensive high precision machines -- allegedly costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in the days when a pretty good Cadillac cost maybe ten thousand dollars! But I don't digress...

My friends worked the graveyard shift. I don't remember who their shift supervisor was but they talked about him all the time in these thick New England accents. It rhymed with "burn-ie," though, because they were always making up jokes about him in the context of trouble with those machines, which they called burners. But I don't digress...

So anyway, this shift supervisor got a bonus any time his crew exceeded their production goals. The machines, however, despite being expensive, and I think Italian, and very high-tech for the day and age, broke down. A lot. But I don't digress...

This allegedly didn't bother the supervisor so much, at least not at first, because he was always sure he could fix them. Any time a machine would go down he'd get a screw driver and unscrew an arbitrary panel or hatch or lid on the machine. Then he'd walk over to the tool cabinet, grab a hammer, walk back over to the machine, and hit it with the hammer. But I don't digress...

Now. It never surprised my friends that this guy's attempted repairs never worked. They were endlessly entertained that it always surprised their boss. Undeterred their boss would cheerfully walk back to the tool cabinet and get another hammer. But I don't digress...

The important thing about the exercise, and why this isn't a series of pointless digressions, is that my friends said that even though the hammer trick never worked, the guy really, truly, honestly, no-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend believed the problem wasn't that he hit the machine with a hammer. It was that he didn't use a big enough hammer and, especially, that all those hatches and covers on the equipment interfered with his ability hit it on exactly the right spot.

And the reason this whole shebang isn't an entire pointless digression is that anti-feminists (and plenty of other bigots) seem to have this feeling that the relationship problems, or work problem, or social problems in their lives aren't caused by anti-feminism, it's that there's not *enough* anti-feminism and that all that nasty feminist interference keeps them from hitting exactly the right spot.

The point being that for virtually all men feminism isn't the problem. Anti-feminism is the problem. And consequently no amount of complaining, hawking, barking, fulminating, or leaving your fortune to MRA "foundations" is going to do you any more good than it does the bull any good to go for the cape instead of the matador. But I don't digress...