2rafa
maybe it will all turn out fine
User ID: 841
2rafa
56m ago
The end point of this logic is that endless stream of Japanese media where all the characters are hot teenagers and everybody’s depressed their whole lives because media overfocuses on romanticizing like a 3 year period before adult life begins.
If games only feature hot young adults they miss out on telling stories about the middle aged, the old, the ugly, children, the disabled, and those are often some of the most interesting stories in any literary canon.
2rafa
1hr ago
All the God characters in God of War (including Kratos, Odin etc) that aren’t children seem to kind of freeze aging some time in middle age. Freya looks like a 40-something year old woman.
2rafa
1hr ago
you cannot tell me Aphrodite of II is not a man's face stapled onto a woman's figure.
Man I know so many real women who have vastly squarer or more masculine jawlines than this character, if that is really the ‘issue’. The reminds me of the controversy over the Cora character in Mass Effect Andromeda, whom BioWare inexplicably decided to give the Full Karen haircut (which itself was apparently reactionary ‘queerbaiting’ because they made her straight). Again, people said she looked like a man, even though in the real world many biological women have faces like this.
2rafa
1hr ago
Don’t most mainstream Freemasons lodges still permit no women members? (There are some offshoots that do, but not many of them). There are still a few all-male golf clubs. I’m pretty sure there are still a couple of super old school NYC clubs (not like the Harvard or the Union) that are still all male.
2rafa
1hr ago
“Don’t commit crime so you don’t get brutally raped by barbarians in jail” just doesn’t seem to work so well as a disincentive to me. Do white collar South Africans or Colombians commit far less fraud because of the poor state of their prisons vs, say, white collar Spaniards or Canadians? I doubt it.
Separation of prison populations by whether they were involved in violent or non-violent crime seems reasonable.
2rafa
1hr ago
The only game where I've personally not played it because the characters were ugly was new world
One thing I prefer about Western MMOs is the more mundane / ‘ugly’ character designs. I think it’s in part because I associate Korean MMO style beautiful character creators with Korean MMOs, and therefore entirely nonsensical (even by Blizzard standards) storylines, dull grinding, terrible quests and predatory microtransactions / p2w.
I definitely think BioWare took it a step too far with years of weirdly ugly characters in games, but Western MMOs are a more workmanlike kind of dull. And I just hate the anime aesthetic all East Asian games seem to have (even Dark Souls when they occasionally decide to have a non-hag female character), I hate it more than anime itself where there are at least some gems.
2rafa
2hr ago
New York has a large black population but working class African Americans tend to be more likely to work in retail, food service, the DMV and government jobs, some childcare, clerical and administrative work etc.
2rafa
2hr ago
Truly successful grifters almost always have to believe.
Almost.
I think if you actually look at the scammers that the public is most fascinated with, year after year and decade after decade, it’s not the crazy true believers. Or at least it’s not the obvious true believers. There are a lot of those. Holmes was a true believer, and a crazy one, but seems interesting because she was a blonde autistic woman in a world of men and because the blood testing thing was more salacious / bloody / fun than the usual scam. Like Trump’s inner life isn’t very interesting. He believes he’s the best and always has had supreme confidence in himself, psychologizing him isn’t appealing - even libs don’t really do it more than halfheartedly, they just call him an evil narcissist.
I actually think the public is most fascinated by the very small minority of grifters for whom doubts exist about the extent to which they believed in their own innate luck. Examples that come to mind are Anna Delvey and L Ron Hubbard. Delvey never believed in her grift, she just thought everybody else was stupid and deserved to pay for her. Hubbard literally wrote his own science fiction and seemed to be relatively self aware, those who have studied Scientology’s history have often argued he never really did believe the way that his successors did. Another example? Madoff, who shielded his own children from his scheme.
Absolute self-belief is common. To hold the knowledge that you’re a fraud in your head and still continue takes much more fortitude, and makes for a much more interesting grifter.
2rafa
3hr ago
I mean DC has been heavily black since 1800, maybe before, and certainly since reconstruction, so probably never.
2rafa
7hr ago
Yes, and that’s the point. I don’t think there’s any likelihood of some highly functional multiethnic Muslim civilization state here, but at same time Brazil-with-low-key-sectarian-warfare is also like even worse than Brazil. Occasionally religious and ethnic violence compounds because nobody has anything in common with anyone else. The Christians loot the central bank, the Sunnis loot the finance ministry etc etc just like in Lebanon.
2rafa
7hr ago
I don’t disagree, I’m not saying the action was successful. Clearly the studies that exist on lifetime contribution show huge net losses for third world immigration. But that wasn’t the question when they were imported, or are imported, which was ‘we need cheap care workers’ or ‘we need cheap factory laborers’.
2rafa
9hr ago
There are like multiple layers of snobbery here but yes a lot of both plebs and new money classes in places like Indonesia, Pakistan etc worship Gulf Arabs and their customs, dress, purported Islamic-ness.
2rafa
9hr ago
Almost nobody who works in retirement homes, wipes old peoples asses etc is a born American citizen. If you’ve ever had elderly relatives in these places you’d know this. The reason we can’t have an American kafala system that sends the workers home after they’ve done 5 or 10 years is the fault of progressives, and birthright citizenship of course for their children. But it’s all connected. Migrants are let in for broadly economic reasons (not in every case, eg Syrians and Somalis in Sweden, but Pakistanis in England, Turks in Germany’s and most Central Americans in the US arrived to fill labor market needs) and allowed to settle for ideological ones. In the 80s, Germany tried to mass deport the Turks but concluded it would risk social unrest and was too expensive, so eventually they just gave them citizenship.
2rafa
22hr ago
They go by first name which undercounts things since plenty of Christian French Africans have French names.
2rafa
22hr ago
Even the very largest and most ‘elite’ (meaning well funded) zoos have a handful - like 3-6 - full time vets on staff, meanwhile they might have a hundred zookeepers. The same major city might have thousands of full-time vets who work on domestic animals.
My understanding is that the vets who are on staff handle most day to day stuff or surgery for minor injuries, ailments, sicknesses, and then if they actually need to, say, operate on a lion they’ll just go to the country’s most prestigious veterinary college and find some professor who has spent 20 years working with them in the wild in Africa and have him do it, probably for free.
The only way to be a real big exotic mammal vet is probably to go to Africa or Asia and work on a big wildlife reserve.
2rafa
23hr ago
There has been a huge diversity, over the last 1300 years, of Islamic states, many of which were comparatively advanced and well-run for the time. I certainly wouldn’t deny that. There are a lot of quite functioning things in the gulf countries.
But I think this goes to what @Ioper and @crushedoranges were discussing (and disagreeing on) below, namely that what is being imported isn’t really a functioning (however you might define functioning) Islamic civilization at all. You can’t say “well, there are things that work quite well about Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi and Oman”. This - if anything - is why Houellebecq isn’t pessimistic enough in Submission. The Emiratis and Saudis, in his novel, ultimately take control of France and it continues in a somewhat civilized way and life is good, as long as you are a man and convert (as per @BurdensomeCount). But let’s not forget that the Emiratis literally banned their own citizens from studying abroad in the UK for a period last year because so many were coming back radicalized (they only relented, apparently, after the UK sent some support when they were being attacked or at risk of being attacked by Iran).
What is instead being created is a kind of red-green coalition, built on rage and anger which will no doubt only swell as mass automation hits shortly. The resentment of the student class maybe initially enables the destructive rage of the underclass, they feed off each other, the former covering for the latter until the former is no longer necessary. There is no goal but free money, more distribution, things will burn until they get it. You might just as easily say (and you would be correct) that many white protestors in BLM rallies cared more about the ideology of Black Lives Matter than many black protestors did.
2rafa
1d ago
Obviously the hard left in France strongly encouraged the protests that led to these riots, that’s not a conspiracy. Melenchon was cheering them on, and the next presidential election is probably him vs Le Pen. But the old white left in these countries largely doesn’t really understand the migrant underclass. If anything they remind me of those bourgeois Tehran communists who allied with the Islamists during the Islamic Revolution, before the latter swiftly and brutally dispatched the former. They are naive, they are stupid, they are fighting the battles of the 20th century, they do not understand the forces at play.
2rafa
1d ago
This is where descriptions of overt religious observance are less important, though. In many deeply Muslim countries, weekly mosque attendance (including for men) is below 50%. It’s not really about mosque attendance. It’s not really even about belief.
It’s about a much deeper cultural substrate. It’s about much deeper questions of identity and belonging. There’s that popular online meme mocking young western second and third generation Muslim men who drink, do or deal drugs, go out and hook up with (presumably non-Muslim) women, certainly don’t pray five times a day, but categorically, absolutely refuse to eat pork. The joke is the hypocrisy, but while it’s funny the irony misunderstands the point. They are still Muslims in a civilizational sense. Behaving like Baltimore gang members in St Denis doesn’t change that. Fucking a white girl doesn’t change that. A deracinated English boy who speaks Multicultural London English, goes to a 70% Muslim school, says in casual passing alhamdullilah and mashallah and inshallah brother (and versions of these boys are a feature of poor neighborhood public schools everywhere from Dublin to Vienna, by the way) is no longer a civilizational member of his ancestral culture. He may look like an Englishman, if you put him in tweed and send him to the Yorkshire dales. But he is no longer one in some real cultural sense.
2rafa
1d ago
[BBC News] Violent clashes, looting and buildings ablaze in France as more than 1,200 arrested after protests
Again the ressentiment of the banlieues has spilled out into the rest of France (again), normally so distant, so deliberately and proudly ignorant, in that distinctly French way.
Some observations:
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The Anglo press seems to have no qualms calling this largely violent and destructive rioting. There’s the BBC headline above, but even CNN leads with the subtitle ‘riots spread across major cities’ and the imagery of the burning Limoges town hall, a beautiful example of classical architecture that has now fallen victim to the decisions of 1960s, only via a longer and more expensive form of demolition. Other websites are similarly descriptive, a far cry from mostly peaceful protests. The New York Times says “France reels from largest riots in years”. Perhaps this is the clarity of distance speaking, perhaps the end of Woke I, perhaps liberals get more upset about Paris burning than Minneapolis. I suspect a combination of all three.
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In general, Anglo elites, certainly liberal ones, have more exposure to the urban underclass than French elites do. The French sent them all to the suburbs to be forgotten so that the XVI could be preserved in perpetuity for themselves. Yes, there are a few homeless, some African touts, a couple of bad neighborhoods around big railroad stations, but by and large much of inner Paris is - riots aside - actually nicer, safer and better maintained than it was ten or twenty years ago. By contrast, in Britain or America elite housing and business districts in the urban core routinely abut absolute shitholes full of the worst scum these societies have to offer. Yes there are suburbs far away from the chaos, but those exist in every country and true bourgeois professionals consider them crass anyway. You can live in the West Village, possibly the most expensive neighborhood per square foot in America, and still be regularly accosted by scary homeless schizophrenic drug addicted people, who were also seemingly still in control of about half of Washington Square Park earlier this year the last time I went home. In San Francisco the Tenderloin is in the middle of the one of city’s central commercial districts, tech executives (some of whom live in Palo Alto but plenty of whom do actually have houses in San Francisco proper) have homeless people break into cars outside their $4m homes to defecate on the seat and rummage through their storage. In London, section 8 equivalent housing sits next to $20m mansions, too. Lib elites, for all their faults, actually confront more of their poor decisions in Anglo countries than in France, where the standard approach seems to be to just pretend the problem doesn’t exist.
That is not to say, at all, that they make any better decisions. But SF liberal elites actually have to “and that’s a good thing”, which while delusional, involves a modicum more reflection than the head-in-the-sand policies of those who have and do run the fifth republic. There is a form of exposed ridiculousness in America because someone actually has to explain, with a straight face, why enforcing the law on broken tail lights is racist. In France, the equivalent policy would be that the police in the banlieues would just quietly decide they didn’t have the resources to enforce it.
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I actually think a lot of these demographics we see in this rioting accurately reflect the composition of under-25 year olds in major French cities. France bans all statistics on this kind of thing (see above), but demographic researchers have often suggested that the population of non-European first, second, third etc generation migrants in France is broadly quite similar to the equivalents in countries where governments do collect actual data, like the UK and Germany. Slightly higher, yes, but not substantially so. So if perhaps 21% of the UK is non-European, maybe the assumption was that it was 25% in France. I think it’s more like 35% in France, and I think among under 25s it’s probably more like 50%.
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One can’t deny that at least a noticeable minority of these rioters appear to be ethnic French. One thing one increasingly notices in a lot of European cities with native minorities, and London is a good example, is that the indigenous working class who remain largely assimilate with the migrant, typically Muslim, community, not the other way around. This makes intuitive sense, the white is deracinated and atomized, the Ummah is a after all a multicultural enterprise, and various South Asian and Arab Muslim parents are usually relatively racist against the other major ethnic group in these neighborhoods and so would far rather a daughter or son marry a white convert than, say, a British Somali. Anecdotally, I see small but growing numbers of white British Muslim, including many in South Asian dress, around parts of east London like Stratford now (yes, there are ginger Arabs, but I know an Anglo-Celtic phenotype when I see one). One of our office security guards is one of them, from Dagenham (one of the remaining enclaves of the former cockney London working class). He has converted to Islam, grown a beard, showed me pictures on his Instagram of his wedding and wife, who I think is Syrian. In the coming years and decades - and this is in part what Submission is about - many more of the remaining native populations will choose to assimilate themselves to this stronger, more forceful, more self-assured and ultimately more vital culture.
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There has been a lot of Raspail-posting on Twitter about these events, “they will burn your beautiful oak door” etc. I think what Raspail was correct about versus the ‘clash of civilizations’ types (they were right about some things, it must be said, but the particularly Islamic character of what is coming in Western Europe is not yet fully clear) is that a lot of this destruction is just a combination of entropy and lack of care or desire to care, rather than a particularly ideological hatred. Yes, there are educated 27 year old liberal hijabis at the Sorbonne well-versed in critical theory who can justify the burning of a 19th century city hall on the basis of anti-colonial resistance and the Franco-imperialist pacification of Algeria, but the rioting on the ground is primarily driven by rage, greed, and a fundamental lack of care or concern for the civilization, or the remnants of the civilization, in which these people live. This is something those indigenous French rioters, who have assimilated into another civilization (whether they have converted formally or merely abandoned their own identity for the void), also reject.
We often forget that in the great historic conversions to Islam, it was overwhelmingly the converted natives who burned their temples and shrines and idols, who slaughtered their recalcitrant priests. We must expect more of that.
2rafa
2d ago
I thought traffic models were actually pretty clear that if you could control the speed and, if necessary, the route, of every vehicle in an environment, traffic could be pretty easily eliminated. An accident or closure? Vehicles miles away are quietly redirected to the point a bottleneck never becomes over-congested; since everyone’s route / destination is known those going to different places can be relocated as clusters to avoid slowdowns driven by merging / demerging / excessive lane changes. If vehicles on the road get to a volume where traffic is more likely, you can very slightly lower the speed of cars further from the traffic. And, if everyone’s in self driving cars you can probably also increase speeds significantly, especially on roads with no pedestrians / cyclists like highways.
2rafa
2d ago
Isn’t the general consensus that once self driving cars are finally ubiquitous they can just ban humans driving and connect every sdc in a network that will dynamically redirect traffic, adjust speeds and change lights and crossing times to basically eliminate traffic?
2rafa
3d ago
The problem is that it’s just a far less impressive name than On The Origin of Species or something.
2rafa
3d ago
Trump reversed the vast majority of his tariffs (either voluntarily or because he was forced to) and the US’ balance of trade hasn’t changed in a favorable way.
TACO is true. Trump didn’t invade Iran, and he didn’t implement long term tariffs of the kind necessary to reverse the trade imbalance that was his original problem.
We bought our apartment. Two months ago, the building manager half-jokingly mentioned the owners (who I’ve only met twice, in passing, as they own one other unit which they stay in for maybe three or four days a year) we’re thinking of selling and might be willing to accept a ‘good price’ for a quick sale.
Here’s my justification to myself for buying in cash now:
In dollar terms, property in ‘prime central London’, especially apartments above £1.5m, is down about 50% since 2015. Even in nominal sterling terms they’re down about 20% in the last two years in Westminster, on average, once you actually negotiate. Meanwhile, my rent was double what it was just a few years ago, because an acceptable 2% rental yield in 2017 now has to be 5% or 6% I guess. Most of the people who live around here either have extremely high incomes or are idle rich, which means rent increases can be extremely high and arbitrary, often just to see what a landlord can get away with.
Possible cope:
I had posted a few months ago about liquidating a substantial proportion of what I had in US equities; no crash yet although I still feel pretty good about it. After everything was set aside, I had a number, divided it by a number, and took one of the segments and made that my offer. It was seemingly begrudgingly accepted after some weeks of trying to negotiate upward, but I held firm. Rich people didn’t have a problem with parking their money in London property as long as it held value (not necessarily increased in it, but held), but I think recent declines, inflation, and high treasury and gilt yields mean it’s now a terrible investment unless you actually need somewhere to live. A similar apartment sold for ~30% more than I paid three years ago.
Cope:
Old building so not affected by quality / cladding / whatever issues from recent decades, renovated and retrofitted in the last fifteen years, good management, and I already live there and have had no issues in the last few years. Everything works. I don’t have to move. I feel pretty good about it. While I am very pessimistic on the future of the UK, there’s nowhere I would rather live for now. In addition, I still have maybe 40% nw in the US, and while I’m paid in pounds, my business generates essentially no money from any kind of domestic market, all my clients and almost all of their / our mutual clients are substantially abroad and our fees are in dollars, so I think in the event of any catastrophic sterling devaluation or crisis (increasingly likely) I could negotiate a relatively proportional increase provided the business itself was still doing okay.
Paging @Corvos, @BurdensomeCount and any other Londoners here.
She was sentenced to 11.5 years in prison which is relatively long for white collar crime / criminal fraud (a lot of potential charges around like endangering patients etc would have been hard to prove)”. If you look at white collar criminals who get much longer they tend to be either SBF types who repeatedly violate their bail or other conditions and get the book thrown at them because the judge is annoyed, or there’s some surrounding sob story (Madoff was basically the effigy burned for the entire financial crisis, and his victims were wealthy and ran a big lobbying campaign around all the nice upper middle class Boca Raton retirements he
marginally inconvenienced‘destroyed’ whereas Holmes’ investors were mainly billionaires and VCs) that can be tied directly to the fraud.More options
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