100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Can you actually point to any societies that collapsed as a result of, say, not exerting "sufficient intrasocietal controls on male avarice and female caprice"?
I think you can point to a lot of societies that absolutely failed to flourish because they didn't do this. I remembering reading the goofy book "Sex at Dawn" some years ago. It purported to show that monogamy and marriage was unnatural and that, akshually, tons of totally fine societies had practiced various forms of poly-like relationships.
Except all of its examples were undeveloped hunter-gatherer tribes that are still mostly existing in the stone age. Lots of sub-saharan examples and even a few from Papua New Guinea, aka the actual murder capital of the world.
When life is a constant battle against starvation, you don't have the luxury of resources to have to think long term. You live that beautiful, simple, horrifyingly savage life of "one day at a time." Once you figure our larger scale agriculture, you start to have more stuff and then you upgrade to the perennial problem of how to organize society. Every society that's flourished has settled on long-term pair bonding and marriage-til-death. Some have carve outs for lawful divorce, but the intent is clear.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
Serious and genuine question:
Why not just shave your head? I ask because I've been balding since 26-27. I took the "plunge" and shaved it at 28 and ... everyone says I look better, I don't stress about going bald whatsoever, and I can get a dirtcheap haircut from anywhere because nobody can fuck up a zero buzz cut.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
WHOOOAAAAA WHAT?
You're going to pair "tweedle-dee-tweedle-dum municipal incompetence" with serial kid impregnator? Damn, homie.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
"I'm doing all the stuff you said would send me to Hell and I'm loving it!"
Yep. Pretty common for sin to feel good in the moment. That's the whole "trick" of it.
She plainly has very conflicted views about her father, who seems in the small extract she provided to have been a sadistic piece of shit.
So having to face "sexual abuse as a child"
Childhood trauma does not entitle you to a lifetime of unlimited compassion from others.
I've been seeing this meme more and more across wide swaths of social media - and from all corners. People are starting to point backwards to "childhood trauma" (ill-defined, subjective, and often shrouded in mystery) as the root of all their problems. This is neo-Freudianism but, somehow, with less rigor and logic.
The entire process of adolescence and early adulthood is the process of recognizing that when bad things happen to you, you have some level of control in how you react to them. Yes, there are some things that are incredibly and objectively traumatic. They will take time to heal, but you have the tools and capability to fuel that healing process if you developed emotional maturity.
When people fail to do this, they not only become unreliable, they become socially dangerous. Most of the men in prison right now had a childhood of neglect and abuse to at least some degree. They are repeating the patterns they were exposed to. Sadly, many of them lack the IQ to even sort their emotions into reasonable buckets, let alone manage them constructively. Should we extend our inexhaustible supply of compassion there way, let them out, and hug them until they've changed? Alarmingly, about half of the voting population would YesChad.jpeg this idea.
This is all part of the rot and incipient counterproductive nature of "therapy culture." It invites negative feedback loop rumination on bad feelings, the opposite of personal agency, all while promising constant absolution from responsibility that one can presume and demand of others. It's a kind of inverted religion; a kind of satanism, if you will. A self-referential cult of the victim ego.
Returning to Aella, and the sexy-rationalist-e-girl archetype, perhaps you had some level of childhood trauma. Let's assume this trauma was real and not cultivated by a very online life that invites all of us to make emotional mountains of molehills. You're (self-proclaimed) like, really, really smart or whatever. Perhaps you ought to take the time to sort through your own emotional baggage and then move beyond it. In her tweets, she is literally calling for internet friends and strangers to defend her honor to other (mostly) internet strangers. This is an obvious sign of emotional immaturity. She is outsourcing emotional regulation to other people through the odd mode of chivalrous honor codes.
(Side note: I bet Scott does it)
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
Respectful but enthusiastic request for more anecdotes from your experience.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16d ago
Yes and no.
Biden / Pelosi style catholics are definitely solidly blue tribe and do vote democrat. There's even vestiges of old school machine politics for these kind of folks in states like Rhode Island and Massachusettes.
The problem is they aren't actually catholic. Just as "culturally Jewish" is a thing for totally non-observing "Jews" in the bicoastal cities, I believe "culturally catholic" exists as well for many democrat strongholds. To me, it's almost stolen valor. People like Biden etc get to say "faith is at the core of who I am" blah blah blah and infuse their speeches - and votes - with high minded moralism. But they aren't actually living or even trying to believe the doctrine of their faith. The Church is pretty damn clear on abortion and divorce, among other issues.
Theologically serious Catholics, nowadays, have to vote Republican because, of the two parties, it is the only one that isn't openly hostile to all of the bedrock elements of the faith. A lot of the politically motivated (and serious) American Catholics also get really into issues of religious liberties. One need look no further than the recent SCOTUS decision on tax-exemption status for faith based charities.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
Posts a thoughtful essay on defending Aella while also discussing the many sided argument about her public persona, her personal history, and how we should think about judgement in the twitter sphere.
Or some fucking bullshit like that.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
That said, her entire schtick is stirring up controversy, posting provocative things as "thought experiments," and bragging about her gangbangs.
I truly love this sentence. The first 75% of it is kind of ho-hum internet drama and then it hits that hard left turn to close it out.
And it's 10,000% accurate. Aella is a twitter clickbait troll. But she's "attractive" (sincere personal opinion: she is not). Okay, there are other attractive twitter spammers. Hmmm, how do differentiate? Rationalist community! Pretty good, but I need that x-factor, that pizzazz!
Oh, i'll just fuck a bunch of people and talk about it all the damn time.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
Nitpick and I know it wasn't your intent, but I have a hard eye for Walmart hate.
Your average Walmart does a little more that $1milion / week in sales. The average customer is a suburban woman making between $40-$80k per year. The average supercenter employs 300 people.
The trope of "lulz Walmart is for fucked up redneck towns" is categorically false. Walmart is an amazing, massive company. They were FAANG before FAANG was a thing, having picked up RDBMs for inventory management in the 1980s. They promote from within to an extreme degree. Walmart Labs, for data science and engineering, is as prestigious and as lucrative as a FAANG job currently. Their buyers are some of the best negotiators, marketers, and logisticians in the world. The conslutants (no, I spelled the right, go back and read it) from McKinsey etc. would give their left nut to get an in house job at Walmart - most don't.
And walmart sells what people want and need for ridiculous prices. In a modern consumer economy, it is the triumph of scale and American purchasing power. Walmart is why, how, and where we go to not only feel like but actually live better than 99.99% of all historic royalty in human history.
Amazon imports junks from all across the world. Google and Facebook make you the product by using surveillance capitalism to capture and re-sell your data. Walmart sells you a ridiculous TV for less than $500.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
26d ago
I think this will fail.
The humor on CumTown, and the dirt-bag left in general, is built on deep irony and sarcasm with a huge helping of funny sounding nihilism. It assumes you have a college degree or, if you don't, that college was at least on your roadmap for some time.
CumTown in particular has no sense of achievement, adventure, and purpose. It may be funny, but it's "dudes sitting around smoking weed and cracking jokes" funny.
Rogan is Rogan because he mixes so many different things but the underlying themes add up to a greater whole than the dirt-bag left. Rogan is curious about the universe, likes comedy and joking around, is more curious about culture war ideas, and, of course, wants to be in shape to kick other people's asses and hunt elk. For young men, this is a podcast that promotes within them the desire to set a goal and then take the necessary actions to achieve it. That's the nucleus of manhood.
But let's assume that this CumTown sperm fellow is the one that's going to win the race to the egg of young male voters (wow this metaphor is really getting stretched). What does winning look like? Because the problem for the democrats right now is that they don't have any conception of how young men would fit into their party. The major camps of male voters in the democratic party are: aging hippy boomers or their silicon valley equivalents, virtue signalling bi-coastal (and often bisexual) elites, men who want to be women (trans), and, well, ... women.
Young blue collar men? Please.
Young white collar? Lightly Dem through college years but as soon as they see their tax bill, they start to question things. If any of them run afoul of HR, they go hard MAGA in a hurry. Many here are smart enough to code switch in public (mostly in order to get laid), but you can bet a lot of them love privately smashing that Red Button in the voting both.
Dorky engineer types (the descendants of the Gen-X style "slackers")? Used to be far more reliable, but then left in droves when woke got woke'nd.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
If birth control is bad because it prevents the creation of persons, then so is not asking out people on a date. (This is now very contrary to the RCC, which views abstinence as praiseworthy.)
Eh, this is a misrepresentation. The RCC views abstinence outside of marriage as not only praiseworthy but necessary - all sex outside of marriage is sinful. But, regarding "not asking someone out on a date", the whole idea is that God has an individual level plan for everyone to use their gifts - we need not all follow the same path. The point is to actively follow the path God has set before you and to do so faithfully. Perhaps you aren't meant to ask someone out, marry them, and procreate. Perhaps your role is more monkish. If you're playing too much Warhammer, you have to ask yourself if you're being slothful, negligent in your duties, or complacent and self-indulgent. I think you might be right that God isn't pleased with incels - who stew in their imagined slights by imagined women. But he isn't displeased with those who have actively chosen a celibate life (be they clergy or otherwise) - so long as its done with care, intent, and intention.
As an aside, I really do like your deconstruction of birth control as "fractionally as bad as abortion or infanticide."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
18d ago
Here's the security video. The link is foxnews, so there's .... oh so much javascript and other crap. The victim is fully blurred out and there isn't any gore or shocking content, but still probably technically NSFW.
The interesting thing is that there are half a dozen children who act as nothing more than curious onlookers. I could give you 5 paragraphs on Kitty Genovese, but that would be wasted here on the Motte.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
27d ago
"If you x then unfriend me" style posts, I believe, are one of the best pieces of evidence for the argument that social media broke our brains.
This is because people can react to that post. And the only people (well, not only, but the majority) of people who would post a reaction to that post are going to highly validate it. "You tell 'em, girl!" that kind of thing.
The original poster is getting a source of approval and affirmation that is orthogonal to the original subject-object construction. By blasting "people who x", the poster gets thumbs up and smiley faces from group y who was never in the original "conversation".
The physical world equivalent of this would be something like saying "I told off my (ex)friend Tom because he likes Trump" and immediately having several people applaud you. This doesn't happen because, in the physical world, people are far less like to constantly re-count negative interactions publicly. Yes, of course, you do it with close friends or your drinking buddies or whatever, but, generally speaking, you're not walking around shouting about how you got into a fight with your drunk uncle at thanksgiving.
Social-media opened up this entire new vector of indirect praise related to fundamentally negative emotions and interactions. Which creates this really fucked up feedback loop of "the more negative emotions that I have in public the more I can count on public affirmation." How else can you explain people posting crying/screaming video selfies after Trump wins (or after x thing happens).
Negative emotions are a part of life. Prior to social media, I actually think the default pop-culture responses to them (talk to a friend, go for a run, journal about it, etc.) were good enough. They created a process of negative emotion --> sublimation of some sort --> return to normal emotional equlibrium. Now, with social media, the cycle reminds me of someone saying "Time to get good and drunk so that I can do some coke to get back on top of things."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
27d ago
I am now nearly certain we live within 100 miles of one another.
We must never meet. My mental image of you is as a 7'9" Ajax hurling kettlebells at random passers-by a la Donkey Kong. I cannot support the dismantling of that fiction.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
27d ago
(Always excellent when I can resort to life lesson from The Wire)
How do you deal with those who are too seasoned?
Because, eventually, you're going to have a non-trivial amount of people who actually have exchanges like this:
- What if you had a life sentence?
- Then I'd fucking escape.
Fat tails are real. Whenever I see someone make your argument of "we have to love them more, and educate them!" I know, and even sympathize, with what you're thinking. You're thinking of my cousin who's just kind of goofy bro who drinks too much, smokes pot, lives in his girlfriend's parents' basement, and has been to jail a couple times. His shit isn't in order, but it could be. Is it his fault? Eh, his dad wasn't there and his mom didn't try. Love him more, educate him.
And that feels good because it feels manageable if we all just pitch in! And for a good number of guys-like-my-cousin, it would probably work! This is why I am a believer in charity in principle.
But what do you do with people like our friend Sean (from the clip) who, when faced with a hypothetical life sentence, immediately defaults to "I will escape from prison so that I can murder a man" -- and means it (inasmuch as he can "mean" anything, driven by immediate emotion and instant gratification as he is).
The fat tails of society are both what lift it to new heights (real entrepreneurs, real political leaders, et al.) and what pose a constant existential threat. The social consensus since 1964 has been to look at that constant existential threat and say ... just got to love 'em more!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
18d ago
Positive vs negative discipline.
Positive discipline is doing things that are good but that require the completion of a behavior; working out, reading more, writing more, learning a new skill, whatever.
Negative discipline is abstaining from things - mostly that are bad from you - but, more generally, that you want to abstain from for whatever reason in order to shift habits. Drinking and drugs, obviously, are the big ones. But this is also dieting, masturbation, social media consumption, etc.
Positive discipline activities give you a generous feeling of accomplishment and instant reward. "I worked out today!" Negative discipline is more complex - while it creates, for me, a sense of "momentum" and the feeling that I'm "on a streak", if I focus too much on it it warps into an "oh no, don't break the streak!" feeling of anxiety or anticipation. So, the mental model I use is to treat it like a savings or investment account - set it up to be automatic, then don't think about it. Check in on the "balance" every once in a while and smile as it will often be larger than you remember.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
Can We Circle Back With Rome On This?
WSJ Article on Pope Leo and his concern about AI
Request: Tech ninja's of The Motte, find the non-paywalled version of the above.
The article states that Pope Leo has a specific interest in AI and it's potential impact on humanity. This makes Pope Leo perhaps one of only a few billion people who are concern about AI and it's potential impact on humanity.
There's some background about Francis, brief commentary on Catholic Social teaching, and some pithy quotes. I'd like to avoid the surface level of discussion on "Well, what does the Catholic Church think of AI?" and try to poke at the deeper issue here -
Why does Silicon Valley feel the need to build a lobbying strategy for the Vatican? Obviously the Vatican does not have the legislative or regulatory authority of the United States Government or the EU. They aren't going to try to fine Big Tech for anything. If there is a condemnation of "AI" (a term becoming more meaningless by the day) it's going to be predictable - we must respect human dignity, people should not be commoditized, avoiding sin on the internet is as important as avoid sin elsewhere.
Looking at it from a positive endorsement perspective, perhaps Big Tech thinks they can get the Vatican to offer a milquetoast endorsement of AI? We know there are dangers and we must be wary and ask for Christ's help, but AI is a liberating technology for the masses (or something along those lines). But, does BigTech think that this would actually significantly help their bottom line?
I'd hazard a guess that it has nothing to do with the bottom line. And this is my worry. As a free-markets, pro-growth believer, I've always thought we should let corporations be corporations and do what they are designed to do; make money. Civil liberties, the vision for society etc is what should be left to government and culture (and war about both we shall!). Corporations, in my view, should just be big dumb money-makers. "All they care about is money!" says the sophomore year self-proclaimed communist. To which I have always said, "Good! Then they're staying focused on their job."
This seems different. This seems like an ideological campaign. It's setting off a lot of tropey conspiracy theories in my head about Silicon Valley transhumanist techno-religion beliefs. Is this a trojan horse where the Zuckerbergian Lizard People are smiling to the face of the people while plotting to replace him? Perhaps that's too dramatic.
So, I offer it up to the Motte. Looking for explanations and perspectives on this while positing, at the outset, that this isn't just about the money. Which makes it a lot more important.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
I have been helped quite a bit by therapeutic modalities, even though it took me years to find ones that worked with good practitioners.
Your choice of words alone in that sentence suggests a verbal IQ (if not general IQ) in the top 5% (and I'm probably underestimating). You're posting on a niche forum that hyper-indexes on good argumentation. The most liked posts on here routinely surpass 500 - 1000 words.
Therapy didn't help you, you helped you. I know, that's an outlandish claim to make. I don't know your whole story. How could I be so presumptuous blah blah blah. But this is yet another part of therapy culture I find so contemptuous. For the success stories out there - like yours - I believe 99% of them are just that person improving their life. The therapist was in no way necessary. But the therapist then takes the credit. And invites well-intentioned and genuinely praiseworthy people - such as yourself - to proclaim the advantages of therapy. At best, at the absolute best, you could maybe view a therapist as a coach in the sports sense. They help you stay disciplined, offer nurturing advice, whatever. But who went out and did the thing? You did.
Where therapy isn't a satantic self-religion, it's a grift. Where it isn't a gift, it's non-sexual emotional prostitution. Where it isn't even that (in the academy) it's a rent seeking non-scientific field that shits out pop self-help books backed by "TeH scIencE" and propagated over social media. Evil turtles, all the way down.
Semi-related tangent: Can't find the article / essay, but I remember a ACX style post about how most alcoholics who aren't a) extremely low agency (i.e. retardation levels of IQ) and b) past the point of the dangerous chemical addiction wherein cessation can be fatal, will self-resolve their alcohol consumption to manageable levels over the course of their life. Alcoholics Anonymous is more or less a placebo. I'd love to find that article again as I have enough people in my personal orbit who essentially have been functioning alcoholics for several years at a time, become completely sober for several years, and then resolved to totally responsible occasionally social drinkers after about a decade mixture of the preceding two phases.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
As is become habitual for you, excellent writeup.
The problems for the "hot brilliant war hero ladykillers" archetype gets complicated with details, scale, and scale's inverted cousin, depth. Let's approach this from a few angles.
"1. We want strong men. Warriors!"
I do bemoan the fact that Congress is now only 5% or so military veterans. And, of that, an elevated amount are non-combat veterans (this in a nation coming off of 20 straight years of deployed warfare). And isn't masculinity in crisis? Shouldn't we have more ass-kicking real life G.I. Joe's on Capitol Hill?!
Well thank god for the likes of Eli Crane, Dan Crenshaw, and Marcus Luttrell! Not exactly. These guys are all former SEALs. They're badass credentials are unimpeachable. And they're wildly ineffective in congress. This is not only objective but obvious. One of my favorite examples is Eli Crane who for some reason decided to go on record with a gossip columnist for politico. This is bizarre. Politico is a DC specific news outlet that covers the "deep inside baseball" of Congress and The White House. Their reports are often ex-communications junior staffers and they live and die by their connections to politicians and their offices. There's a lot of quid pro quo and handshake deals. To be en effective politician, you have to know how to handle the press. You can't be too coy, you can't be an open book.
The one thing you don't do is go on record, multiple times, talking shit about your colleagues personal lives. It doesn't matter the party affiliation. There are 530+ members of Congress with complex networks of personal friendships, loyalties, and favors. Saying crazy shit about each other's policy positions is totally fair game, but you don't tell a reporter - on record, cited by name - "yeah, actually, that person drinks too much." This is because it will then be impossible to get anything done because no one wants to spend time with or trust you - you might dime them randomly in a gossip column.
But Eli Crane isn't thinking this way because Eli Crane is a SEAL. That's a hypermasculine world where everyone talks shit about everyone all the time. If there's a real problem it is handled directly and head on - "hey, bro, you and me slug it out in the parking lot." That was his professional calibration for years. And I am very happy we have thousands of other men like him on our side with their guns pointed in the other direction. But the job of "warrior" today (in the most traditional sense -- being an Air Force cyber general doesn't quite relate) is a hyper-specialized role because today's true warriors are the best in history; they are in the best physical shape, with the longest and most rigorous training, with an insane level of technological proficiency, and a support structure that costs billions of dollars.
Applied to other domains, however, they don't generalize well. So, back to the archetype, the problem here is that what the archtype assumes (at a higher level of resolution) is the JFK (and generations past) version of a warrior; a dashing young officer (because enlisted is low class, ew) who did a few years of service but not a full career, maybe saw some combat, and was in an elegant role; Navy PT boat captain, a British Cavalry officer, WW2 Fighter Ace.
Navy SEAL, Green Beret in GWOT? And enlisted? I dunno ... those guys can get into some shit. Again - I firmly believe these are the most pure form of "warriors" we have on the planet today. But the archetype model I started with above doesn't want that, they want Romance Novel Ready Warriors.
"2. Shooters gonna shoot and cads gonna cad"
This is more directly related to @FiveHourMarathon 's post. Can adultery be heroic and masculine if done correctly? If I am flying around bedding starlets instead of masturbating with my goon goggles on, my wife could maybe find some pride in that, right?
The problem here is when we consider scale, both large and small. It's possible to read the JFK sex files, chuckle, roll your eyes and go "Different times. Guy was an asshole. Got laid a lot, though." But what you're dismissing is the real human toll it all had on people like Jackie, Marilyn, and the countless nameless secretaries who undoubtedly went through all kinds of mental and emotional anguish (and, in some cases, physical - STDs, yall).
Okay, but, that's a couple dozen (a hundred) people. And it's not my problem. Can't we still, you know, try to support the idea of "Responsible cocksmen-ery"? No, we can't, because people will be irresponsible and, frankly, bad at it and irresponsibility and incompetence at scale are awful for society.
If men are suddenly "empowered" (lol) to run around like JFK trying to seduce the pants off of every waitress, it ends with the emotional and mental anguish of full families, with violently acrimonious divorces, with kids with fucked up families, and, on the harsher end, with actual no-debate-about-it sexual assault. Additionally, if I a have reasonable suspicion that my drinking buddy wants to Oval my Wife's Office, I might get a few whiskey's in me and decide to take a swing at him. Remember, men kill each other for money/drugs, respect (hierarchical preference in a male dominated space), and for control over specific females. Making Adultery Great again is a good way to Make America Murdery Again.
The archetype fails, here, when it's extropolated to scale. The sociological mechanism of monogamy-marriage is explicitly to create high social penalties to being a cad so that society doesn't eventually devolve into jealousy-motivated murder madness.
Was the adultery somehow necessary? Or an inevitable side effect.
It wasn't at all necessary and, mostly as you pointed out, the product of the lack of concept of real consequences for multiple generations of a family who had grow up as the elite of the elite of the elite. There's a reason they called it "Camelot" - the Kennedys, specifically, are the closest American got in the post WW2 era to anointing our own royal family.
As they say, one of the the best things you can do for your career is die. JFK catching a hot one from Lee Harvey Oswald's blammer prevented what I think was a highly likely outcome for his presidency - nothing gets done and JFK flames out publicly when his affairs become too much for Jackie to bear. The seduction of the Hot Young President gives way to the ugly truth. Goldwater wins in '64 - running on an even stronger "morality" platform.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
I don't know if she's capable of that, though. Again, doing untrained psychoanalysis over the Internet, but by all accounts her method of dealing with her traumatic upbringing was "do a shit load of LSD and permanently fry my brain" which is not really helpful.
If she's compounded her trauma through years of maladaptive behaviors, then the question has to be asked: to what extent is she culpable for her own behavior? If that answer is "below the level of generally agreed upon adult responsibility" then we're talking about involuntary psychiatric commitment.
But we're not talking about that because she's obviously a high agency, capable individual. That's my whole point - she's making these choices on her own. And, thus, my compassion is effectively zero because I know she can change but she chooses not to.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
Not the commenter you were responding to, but I'll bite:
First, re-create high social penalties for promiscuity for both men and women. I'm not the first to say this but the sexual revolution of the 1960s can be accurately viewed as the fight to let women behave in the same ways as the absolute worst of men. Being a "cad" or a "cocksman" should be socially treated the exact same as being a homewrecker. Dating is fine, but it should be used to figure out if there is an alignment of values and a shared vision for the future.
But, but, consenting adults! Who cares if two people just want to f*ck! Well, everyone, judging by this thread and many others like it. You have the situation now where promiscuity is not only tolerated, but lauded as some sort of expression of personal discovery, autonomy, and that most meaningless of words, _"empowering." Leaving aside the fact that this isn't true, the circumstances create a situation where the most antisocial of people can hit "defect" a million times and benefit greatly from it while those who are looking to cooperate are in a constant state of paranoid suspicion about any sort of medium length relationship they may find themselves in.
Second, get rid of no fault divorce. I know this is politically untenable, but I'm offering what I think is a correct solution. Marriage has to be meaningful and a real commitment, or else it's just a temporary tax arrangement with unbalanced incentives for the two people in it. Because of the history of marriage and family law in the US, women are usually the one's with the counter-incentive to staying in a marriage long term.
Much like @Amadan, I'm not actually that worried about following marriage rates because 1) I think most marriages today are shams anyway and 2) We're approaching a situation where 1/3 to nearly 1/5 of children are born out of wedlock. Marriage is so hollow now that policy positions that try to nudge people toward it aren't really serious about solving the problem.
I also agree with @Amadan in another way - blackpilling is not only (by its own definition) futile, I think it's just wrong. Once you pair secular materialism with battle-of-the-sexes blackpilling, the question has to be asked; why not just blow it all out in a cocaine-and-hookers weekend and then end it with a 9mm breakfast? Usually, the responses I hear are along the lines of, "I don't want to take such a cowardly way out", "I still want my life to mean something", "You should still try to be a good person." Hmmm, interesting how that kind of sounds like there's actually a higher level moral and ethical framework in play. Maybe these hardcore secular materialists really are trying to both fill and not acknowledge the God Shaped Hole.
Not to blow the scope of this comment into the stratosphere, but I do often think that we might be living through an inflection point in human history on par with the invention of writing, if not even moreso. The technological and political change over the last 100 years (which is a single long lifetime or about 1.5 - 2 "standard" lifetimes) is truly a phase change when compared to all of human history before. We've mostly outpaced our cognitive hard-wiring. So we see the effects of that across nearly every facet of life. I don't doubt that in 1000 years, it's likely some humans, looking at our times, will say "lolol, they totally had no idea wtf was going on during pre-Nuke early-AI." But this is no excuse to smash the like button on fuckItAll.mpeg. Do the best you can and try to find genuine happiness where you can. Even better do the "right" thing, so long as what you define as the right thing is a self-contained and demanding moral framework.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
I was trying to draw a parallel between "those in the know" in the tech industry and the same in the finance industry.
People who work in data science and engineering know walmart labs. Great reputation. People who work in finance know Allen and company. Great reputation.
People who do not work in those industries have never heard of either Walmart Labs or Allen and Company.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
27d ago
I broadly agree. For a certain subset of owners, they've literally labeled themselves as virtue signalers.
I have now seen Tesla's with bumper stickers that read "I bought this before Elon was a Nazi" or something to that effect.
Publicly broadcasting that you feel the need to qualify your previous purchase with a political semi-re-(un?)-justification is a sign of deep commitment to virtue signalling above all other considerations. I have zero tolerance for such people.
Regarding EVs in general, while I am not categorically against them, they still fail a very simply problem for me that gas 100% solves (and has for sometime).
Say that I am in the mountains (because I am!) I want to drive around to some various trails and fishing spots and whatnot. Uh-oh, running low on gas, and I'm 30 miles from a gas station. Thankfully, I've got a 5 gallon gas can on the outside of my truck.
With an EV, I don't believe a "pony battery" is possible? Correct me if I'm wrong. Even more to the point, with US infrastructure construction permitting being what it is, how long would it realistically take to get EV supercharger stations in all of the same rural locations that currently have well functioning gas stations?
This points to another issue with EVs but Tesla's specifically. The people who are really into them are inherently bought in to the idea of complex system dependency. It's hilarious to me that, in Teslas, if your car needs a software update - you can't drive it. If your main dashboard panel breaks for whatever reason, you can't roll your windows down. When planning a road trip, the Tesla software cannot simply plot the fastest route from A to B, but it must factor in recharging stations and battery life. Because of how battery recharging works, you will also likely be driving at between 20 - 50% charge for much of the time. Hilarious. How do we use this complex system we've created? Well, we hack it so that it kind of works in a counter-intuitive way. Also, don't deviate from your pre-planned course to much.
This is the very definition of over-engineered. But, I believe, for many Tesla owners, that is also the very point.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
I'll put this here because I've never put it anywhere else and this has been a week of extreme not good for me.
One of my best High School buddies killed himself in November of 2022. There was a group of about five of us who were inseparable all of junior and senior year. College did college things and we start to drift apart, but would sometimes still catch up when people tended to come back to the hometown for Christmas or Thanksgiving. After I learned of "Dane's" (not his real name) suicide, it fell to me, for various reasons, to contact his High School girlfriend. She was also part of this friend group and everyone had bet money that she and Dane were going to get married. They really were a loving couple.
When I called her and relayed the news, her reaction was pretty predictable. Though they had split finally over 10 years prior, she was still quite upset though still in control of herself. After the initial shock had subsided she do the normal thing and asked me how I was feeling about it.
And that's when I exploded. I didn't break down. I didn't sob. I got intensely angry. Not at her, but at Dane. Because I saw that a saying I had heard before was true; suicide doesn't end pain, it just distributes it out. Here was a woman who had shared her first love with Dane and then gone about her life peacefully. Gutted. A friend group of four other dudes who perhaps lament the fact that we've fallen out of contact with each other is now brought back into contact via tragedy. The family opted for a family only funeral, so the four of us got on a Zoom with the intent of meeting up somewhere for an irish wake for Dane. But, 15 minutes in, we kind of looked at each other and collectively decided, "No, we don't actually want to fly to see each other like this." Dane's dead, and it's hard for me not to remember that with some anger.
I think the circumstances surrounding your cousin are much different. I was only adding a perspective on suicide that I think goes unsaid sometimes. It's a tragedy, of course. I don't know enough about the last two years of Dane's life to know what he was going through. There's some mystery, in fact, about the final few days, but that's for the family to know. Still, the fact remains that that final act wasn't final. All of the hurt is still out there floating in the corners of the hearts of so many other people now.
I'll take a Jersey Mike's over most of the other sub shops, especially the execrable Subway.
But, much like @FiveHourMarathon, I identify as a Wawa Hypernationalist. When one factors in value in calories-per-dollar, Wawa is even more of the clear choice.
Now, if we're talking about ultra-premium sandwiches from traditional Italian joints, we have to confront the truth that the meats are secondary for overall quality to the bread itself and the freshness of the veggies, red wine vinegar, and olive oil. Tony Soprano ate his "gabagool" raw, or dipped directly into a mustard jar. Tony Soprano was a trash goblin from New Jersey who lived a caricature of his own life. This is not who you model your sandwich rubric on.
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