Powerbuilding is the best building

I've had it up to here with people acting like you can't be strong and look good. As if there is some sort of rule against doing curls after you bench. I've noticed this attitude all over the place, but nowhere is it more commonplace than in places such as Starting Strength.

Curls? That's now what Uncle Rippy recommends

The SS community is okay, but with the flood of novices there is also a flood of morons who seems to be under the impression that since Rippetoe does not include any vanity lifts you are therefore a curlbro for doing them.

The truth is, Rip doesn't give a shit if you like to do hammer curls. In fact, he stated here that he started lifting to make him look like Conan the Barbarian.

Can you blame him?

Rippetoe has never spoken against vanity lifting because it doesn't matter. Your squat will not be affected by some dumbbell shrugs. You will look pretty badass with a huge pair of traps, so why not do them?

Going out of your way to look good from lifting is the same thing as going out of your way to put up big numbers in the powerlifts.

It really isn't that much harder to do some assistance to make you look jacked so there's no excuse besides the fact that you don't care how you look.

I'm not saying that you should eat only boiled chicken breast and become some sort of bodybuilder, I am saying that having a badass yoke from shrugging 600 is awesome. Having a fucking pair of glorious arms gets the layman's respect, not your mediocre squat. You can have both very easily, so why not get both?

Various people who are both awesome lifters and jacked as shit include:

Jamie Lewis. Shitton squatter. He is also author of the totes awesome blog Chaos & Pain,
Stan Efferding. Squats 905 with just wraps
Ronnie Coleman. Everyone wants to be a bodybuilder, but no one wants to lift no heavyass weight!
Kirk "The Jerk" Karloski He wants to hold it!

These guys lift a metric shitton of weight and still look jacked, but some vanity lifting is just too fucking much for you because Mike Rippletoe didn't put them in the program. Get real, brah.

Even worse is the SS community's insistence on not doing assistance in general. Many moons ago, I recall making a thread on how to not get a "poopy" deadlift. The vast majority of people claimed I should switch to deadlifting every other week. Only one poster was for adding assistance work.

This is a strange, ancient, and undeniably evil cult that is attempting to make you weaker, but that's for another time because I've been awake for about two days now.