With over half a century of active battle behind me, I have a lot of practical cynicism.

Please note that I said PRACTICAL cynicism. There is also that very childish phenomenon I call Macho Cynicism.

Macho Cynicism is like the Mommy Professor Syndrome. The MPS is where a real rube or suburban kid, who is more a rube than any rube, comes to college with traditional values and finds a True Intellectual in the form of a professor who is The Only True Light and the True Source of Sophistication.

We used to say, “All freshmen are socialists and atheists,” not because all of them were, but because this Mommy Professor Hypnosis is so childish and laughable.

When a person keeps the Mommy Professor Syndrome on into his adult life, it is REALLY pathetic.

So Macho Cynicism is when someone decides that since all the tough old guys keep being negative about their sillier hopes. If they don’t THINK about it, they get the idea that Cynicism is a sign that one is tough and Realistic.

No one will succeed with the Mantra if he is a Macho Cynic.

But there are elements of PRACTICAL cynicism in what I have learned. One of them is that it always makes me VERY uneasy when someone says “Someone should…” or “We ought to…”

Stormfront is FULL of “Someone should” and “We ought to…”

Certainly there is nothing wrong with suggestions. But I have learned that a suggestion is a bad diversion if it is not succeeded by some word of what the writer has DONE. Most of our suggestions in BUGS are accompanied by a bit about that the suggester HAS done.

Most of the wisdom we get in GC5 comes straight out of battle experience.

You will notice a pattern in SF that I noticed long before. A person comes to Stormfront demanding that “we” Do something and expecting an imminent Revolution. Then they settle down into Macho Cynicism, The All Is Lost mode.

Every one of those ALL Is Lost types thinks he is just being mature, hard- nosed and, above all, Practical.

And the AIL crowd also has the barely concealed attitude that anyone who disagrees with them is being childish and is not Macho.

AIL is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nobody would advise a propaganda unit in the middle of a war to declare that anybody who thinks they have a chance is an effeminate wimp. But that is what Macho Cynicism does, in fact, demand.

My form of “cynicism” is to discourage anybody from holding back on action until “we” organize to do something or until “they” do something.

In football, if the huddle to plan the next play lasts so long it delays the game, the team is penalized. In war, if you spend all your time planning, you get penalized Big Time. Many a battle has been lost while a crucial division hesitated or just didn’t show up.