Paunchy, Middle-Aged White Guys’ "Ways of Knowing"
One of the favorite tropes of the Woke Left is the “Ways of Knowing” idea that is used to discredit any inconvenient fact or assertion. Under this gambit, things like calculus or classical music can be dismissed as Cis White Patriarchal Male indoctrination. For example, the claim can be made that Aboriginal Australians invented air travel but somehow lost the knowledge. Oddly, no ancient airplane boneyards can be found. Or was that the ancient Egyptians?
Women have their own “ways of knowing,” which are a complete mystery to anyone who isn’t one. So do BIPOCs.
I don’t know if trans women acquire women’s ways of knowing, but even if they do these newfound ways of knowing must be pretty shallow because they spent most of their lives as men. Perhaps the women’s ways of knowing come with the hormone treatments. Or, maybe trans women’s ways of knowing are a separate category. I have no idea. Who can keep up?
Does the trans woman lose her “Men’s Ways of Knowing” that she previously held? No. Because men’s ways of knowing are the Cis White Patriarchal Male oppressive body of knowledge that is false, violent, sexist, and racist.
That is a load of feculence.
Paunchy middle-aged white guys (PMAWGs) have many ways of knowing as I will enumerate below. Many of them include embarrassment, pain, broken bones, arrest, and ruin as motivators. But the lessons stick. Herewith, a partial list.
Taking Things Apart. This time-honored method is one of the best ways to learn how things work, as mentioned here. I have two friends who have disassembled MGB sports cars (I rebuilt the engine on mine) and put them back together to be more reliable than when they were produced (mid-twentieth century British sports car reliability was a low bar, but still). I took apart everything I could get my hands on and learned valuable skills I use today. Getting good at putting things back together takes longer, but, hey, no education is free.
There are take-apart activities for kids such as this, where boys and girls can learn how fun and educational disassembly can be.
What the science of taking things apart will teach a man is how to fix many things, and to know when something is too complicated, or dangerous, to fix himself. The eventual outcome of this skill set is The Honey-do List, which will teach a man to feign incompetence
Taking Stupid Risks. In 1970, in Troy, Ohio, a sixteen-year-old boy could visit the pharmacy counter in M&R Drugs (“On The Square”) and request ground charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter. The druggist would say “Gonna’ make some gunpowder, are ya’?” and the boy would answer “Yessir.” The druggist would then ask “Do you know your ratios?”, and the boy could answer, “That depends on whether you’re going for a Watson 1781, or a Bruxelles 1560 composition. We’re going to start with the modern 6:1:1 version and go from there.”
Notice I said the boy could answer. In this case, that didn’t happen. What did happen was the boy and his pals ran around the neighborhood setting off the black powder with unspectacular results. Here we learned (that word again) that a pile of gunpowder just sitting there goes “Pfffft” when lit unless it is contained. So we tried it in a drain pipe, effectively making a bomb. This produced much more spectacular results, one of them, unfortunately, being Steve going to the hospital with a seriously burned hand.
Other stupid risks include jumping off of the rusted hulk of a 60-foot lighthouse into twelve feet of water. You need to employ what is called a “sleeper” to minimize the depth of your landing. (pro tip: squeeze your glutes as tight as possible or risk getting serious sphincter injury when you hit the water), paragliding behind a moving vehicle on land, and drying trays of Indiana ditch pot with heat lamps in a tinderbox barn.
Blunder. This is when you learn or create something new while attempting to do something else.
George Crum, a chef at the Carey Moon Lake House in Saratoga Springs, was irritated by a customer who repeatedly sent his potatoes back demanding they be fried more and thinner, lost his temper and sliced the potatoes super thin and fried them until they were hard as rock. The customer loved them and potato chips were born.
General Electric engineer James Wright, while attempting to make synthetic rubber during WWII, made a sticky, bouncy glob of stuff that became Silly Putty.
In June 1908, a tea dealer named Mr. Sullivan sent a few loose leaves in small silk pouches as samples. The recipients assumed they were supposed to be dunked in hot water, hence the teabag.
Penicillin, chocolate-chip cookies, the heart pacemaker, fireworks, the microwave oven, Post-it notes, X-rays, and the inkjet printer were all invented by people trying to make something else.
Fuck Around and Find Out. One of the primary ways of knowing used by this demographic is known as Fuck Around and Find Out (FAFO), and many of us have the scars to prove we have utilized this technique. This is similar to Taking Stupid Risks but differs in one respect. When you are Taking Stupid Risks, you know it’s stupid, but you do it anyway.
FAFO, on the other hand, often involves doing something stupid while thinking it might be a good idea. Taking a drunken swing at some guy in a bar who looks like a wimp but is actually a jujitsu black belt is an example. “Finding out” consists of lying in a muddy alley writhing in pain. Without your wallet.
Other FAFO moves can be the result of overconfidence in your taking-things-apart prowess. Disassembling things like older TVs, computers, and microwaves that have big capacitors without knowing how to discharge them will get you a nasty shock. But you learned not to do that again, assuming you lived.
Also, you can’t safely use a lawn mower as a garage fan.
There are several sub-genres of FAFO, such as:
Early-Age FAFO
I tried it and Dad wanted to kill me.
I tried it and Mom wanted Dad to kill me.
I tried it and got whacks from the gym teacher. (For you youngins’ out there, whacks consist of a burly gym teacher or school principal smacking your backside with a paddle. If you’re particularly unlucky, your family jewels might take a hit, too.)
Middle-Age FAFO
I tried it and got seriously injured.
I tried it and got arrested.
I tried it and my wife wants to kill me.
Seriously, she gets the house and the sports car?
Older-Age FAFO
Forgetting you’re not a spring chicken anymore and getting seriously injured doing something you could do when you were twenty-five, such as jumping down from a pickup truck tailgate.
Holy hell, you can’t do that anymore, either?
That too? Geesh.
Spousal Correctives. Perhaps the most important “continuing education” program for the PMAWG. This is where the sharp edges of unrefined manhood can be smoothed. Under spousal corrective curricula, a man can learn important and useful skills such as:
Bath towels are folded in thirds, not in half, the way that whore of an ex-wife did it.
The proper way to load a dishwasher, not the way that slag of an ex-wife did it.
You can pull yourself away from restoring that sports car and do a load of laundry. This is difficult for men because to start a load, one has to pull on a knob. This is nonintuitive because in all other cases, a man would only pull on a knob if he was trying to remove it. Well, except for the choke on that sports car. Also, there’s that dial with incomprehensible laundry choices. Nevertheless, with enough practice, it can be mastered.
The salad fork goes on the outside of the dinner fork.
There are towels that are not meant for drying anything. They are decor. Some call it a “look-at” towel.
There is furniture that is not used for “furniting”. This is “look-at” furniture.
Non-Lived Experience
Unlike other popular ways of knowing, PMAWG practitioners do not always need “lived experience” (what other kind is there?) to understand things. They can actually learn from the experience of others.
For example, even if a PMAWG suspected that leaving a laptop stuffed with sex tapes, kiddie porn, illegal activity, and evidence of corruption at the highest levels of government at a repair shop and not coming back for it, might be a bad idea, the PMAWG can know for certain— using the parlor trick of observation— that leaving a laptop stuffed with sex tapes, kiddie porn, illegal activity, and evidence of corruption at the highest levels of government at a repair shop and not coming back for it is, in fact, an extremely bad idea. They can also learn that there will be no consequences if you are a well-connected Democrat.
A PMAWG can observe that one of his buddies fucked around and found out and the wife got the house, the sports car, the boat, and alimony. He will subsequently swear that he will never do anything that stupid. Next, he will doink that hottie at the gym, which will move this decision from the Non-Lived Experience category to the Taking Stupid Risks category. Still, something was learned.
Formal Education. Nah. Too much paying attention.
Autocorrect chose “saltpetre” for me but yes, it’s an American/British English thing.
It was a different age. The only times I remember there being an adult around was when going down to the river on summer afternoons until we turned 8 or 9 - the place had lots of strong currents and a body count to match, so it made sense for the parents to take turns chaperoning. Aside from that, our parents only had a vague 4-5 miles radius on us at any one time and any injuries short of a broken bone or a serious dog bite weren’t considered worth reporting at home. We carried knives, airguns, catapults and low grade explosives everywhere and nobody thought anything of it as long as we didn’t act stupid; boys will be boys and all that. Giving my own kids a fair shot at growing up the same way is one of the top three reasons I’m trying to move out of the city.
Ach, saltpetre. That brings back memories. Where I grew up (northern Italian countryside, late ‘80s) charcoal and sulfur were readily available to us kids but commercial grade saltpetre seemed impossible to get hold of. At one point we even tried using the efflorescence scraped off an old cellar’s walls - needless to say it was a lot of work for a very poor outcome.
Luckily we had access to all kinds of agricultural pyrotechnics from the local drugstore, that we could dismantle and reassemble into larger, more powerful versions; and several of us had hunting dads or uncles who could be persuaded to part with a few shotgun shells in exchange for chores. Boys these days really don’t know what they missed.