“Know thy enemy.”

When I was in my first year of college, taking a year-long integrated studies course with a heavy emphasis on critical thinking, we endured a cavalcade of some of the most gruesome, egregious, sometimes even murderous character studies in sociopathy and self interest raised by this one particularly grinchy (and brilliant) professor.

Week after week we endured Pol Pot, Mein Kamph, George Wallace, Ayn Rand, and every other kind of self-justifying asshat and asshole you could imagine, with lectures that scrupulously addressed technical details but didn’t really address the, um, confrontative underlying horrors. (For instance we learned about former Alabama Governor George Wallace’s thoughts on the principles of States Rights but nothing about “in order to preserve Jim Crow laws.”)

Eventually people started snapping under the regimen, and then, at a certain point, someone (not me I’m retrospectively ashamed to say) asked WTF. The professor smiled over his reading glasses and delivered a pretty amazing lecture on pseudo-innocence and the importance of the phrase “know thy enemy.”

I mention this because infra of Skin::filter() has noticed that the Amazon Ad algorithm in my sidebar, which generally has sex, gender, relationship books that tend to lean feminist also… occasionally… cough up links for “seduction community” books like The Layguide: How to Seduce Women More Beautiful Than You Ever Dreamed Possible No Matter What You Look Like or How Much You Make or The Professional Bachelor Dating Guide – How to Exploit Her Inner Psycho

They’re books like this one, and this. Kinda strange seeing them come up in the same list as bell hooks and Naomi Wolf. Surreal, more like.

“Know your enemy,” maybe?

I’m sure he already knows about that, but… the world never ceases to amuse me, what with the small, bizarre things that surface from time to time. Just more proof that the universe has a truly twisted sense of humor, I guess.

I mean, seriously. Those don’t even show up in my recommendations.

He said it here.

Actually I hadn’t noticed. It’s funny though, and a little frustrating. Every time I try to re-fiddle the keywords for that Amazon ad I get something that’s mostly what I want with some… interesting stuff thrown in for… I dunno, roughage or something. One set of near-identical keywords and the outliers are books by wingers like Caitlin Flanagan or Ann Coulter. Another near-identical set and it’s a bunch of outright misandry like “The Rules” and Mary Daly. So I don’t know quite what to do. I actually think it’s good to have ads of some sort, but I’d really rather find a source that better reflects my values. (And by the way, I may not be the only one.)

Suggestions are always welcome, but meanwhile, since some (mostly older) sources in my blogroll are of the “know thy enemy” variety I guess it’s ok that some of the “recommended” books fall in the know thy enemies category as well.