Haley’s Halo is usually an interesting site, but it gets its fair share of trollettes. The most recent one is Natalie. She starts up her comment stream with…

Also, plenty of betas are off doing their own thing. Alpha doing his own thing = chicks. Beta doing his own thing = shlub a basement somewhere playing WoW.

Now, that is a fairly nasty ad hominem attack. I can do nice. Somedays.

Wrong. Wrong at the level of “the earth is flat” wrong. The Betas are working 60 hours a week, paying taxes and bills on time, keep to the speed limit, and are faithful to their wives.
The guys playing WoW are those without skillz who have given up. Those born in a better time are too busy at the gym, at their hobbies, and living… to worry about where they sit in some attractiveness to women grading.
Why?
Well, the environment has got so toxic that most men do not care. The Cocksman in the nightclub is a pale shadow of the real leader. But he is the best that is available to this generation of women, bar the traditionalists, who will find a crazy fundamentalist who is righteous and leads the family — just like Daddy did, and not that long after graduating high school.

That gets Nat going and she replies with…

You realize that there are people who still teach their kids the earth is flat? According the some people Columbus et al didn’t prove diddly 🙂

Also, your definition of beta is extremely limited and therefore inadequate. There is nothing inherently beta about working long hours and driving the speed limit. There is nothing inherently beta about faithfulness. An investment banker who can bench press his lawyer and get sex out of his wife just by winking at her can do all those things, but I really doubt you’d be calling /him/ a beta. These so called beta traits you enumerated are actually neutral and have very little to do with attraction.

What I think we have here is a category error. To put it simply, Nat defines Alpha as that which she find desirable, and beta in terms of undesirability. She thinks that is the system. I see the system in other ways. In a similar way to Aruni, I’d define men not by how many women they are desired by or what their notch count is but instead by the role they naturally fall into in society.

[A brief deviation. Men who are leaders will defer to local experts. All the time. The guy who runs the shooting range will then defer to the man who runs the gym and to his physician and his boss. The boss will defer to the physician and obey the rules on the shooting range and the gym. If there is a task to be done, men will self organize to get it done, with the most skilled leading. I’ve got three degrees, but spent a fair amount of time shoveling dirt and pushing wheelbarrows because others have the skills needed in the task at hand and I do not.]

I’m summarizing Auruni here.

Now, Alphas lead. The currency of the Alpha is that of respect, mana. As Aurini notes, he generally choose one woman, and she becomes the Alpha woman for the subgroup.

Betas, as Aurini notes, are part of the team. They are in effect, lesser Alphas. They are not the captain of the team, but they are in the team. These men are respected by the Alpha, as are their partners.

Zetas are those who are not allowed into the team. These are Nat’s “betas” living in their basement or having a low IQ.

Then there are the Omegas. Aurini describes these men as using a sneaky strategy, as the
sexual deviants. The guys you want to keep the hell away from your sister”. There are a fair number of guys who imitate the Alpha/Beta team of men with leadership potential but have no substance behind their words and their actions.

The problem, Ladies, is that the red pill and these classifications are metaphors. They are methods that allow us to make sense of the society we are in. We looking at women using the Alpha/Beta metaphor as a idea of who they desire when men see this as a way of describing how men organize their lives together.

What Nat is saying is that anybody who she accounts as Alpha she thinks as a Zeta, a person who lives in his basement. However, that leaves her blind to the Zeta, the playa, the narcissist, the user. Because they will look Alpha. And a Binary system does not allow for the development of discernment.