WhiningCoil
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User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
5d ago
Link one: Don't avoid romance says more people are single nowadays and unhappier nowadays because more people have avoidant attachment styles in the past, with some (mostly circumstantial) evidence that the amount of avoidant attachment is increasing. Ends with an exhortation to not be avoidant but doesn't examine the question I would have thought would be of interest, which is why more and more people don't have healthy attachment styles. (Aftereffects of higher divorce rate? Internet usage? Weaker community institutions? Microplastics? I'm just spitballing ideas but wouldn't a marked societal-leve change in people's psychology be something you'd want to investigate the causes of?)
Your achive link isn't the full article. This one seems better?
Once again, it's remarkable all the hoops the article, or the researchers, jump through to avoid the obvious answer. People have avoidant attachment styles because our culture almost universally portrays marriage and family as an existential horror. Women fear being "trapped" in a marriage. Women's media my entire life has bent over backwards feeding women's neuroticism that every marriage is a "bad" marriage.
And on men's side, every single man has witnessed half their friends and family cut in half by divorce. Lost the house, turned into an every other weekend "dad", and a court ordered pay pig. Probably seen friends, family and coworkers spend a weekend in jail on some trumped up charges. I had a coworker arrested because his ex said he broke into her place. On a night he was on security cameras working late in the office.
Marriage has been turned into something horrific unless you literally trust the other person with your life. A gun pointed at your head 24/7, trusting the other person not to pull the trigger, and everyone has seen it. They know someone who's been shot. Probably a lot of people. And one wonders why kids who've watched this happen to their parents (or lost a parent to it) have developed an "avoidant attachment style".
WhiningCoil
4d ago
Now, the biggest hurdle holding back the poor family in the story I've linked to is a simple one: the Overton Window. If, for some unfortunate reason, the number of women crazy enough to act that way rose significantly, society would probably develop memetic antibodies or legal solutions. This might, sometimes, become strong enough to overcome the "women are wonderful" effect, if such women are obviously being the opposite.
Ah ahahahahahah.
Hah.
Oh man, that's a good one. That's a really good one. You really aren't from around here. Our society's worship of women is downright pathological at this point. They can do almost anything and it's excused. I mean even in your own home away from home, there are plans to just get rid of Women's prison. Women are too good to spend time in jail for their crimes you see? In fact, their reasoning is that since more women are being sent to jail, something must be wrong with the legal system, since women are wonderful obviously. So we'd better start shutting down the women's jails so they can't be sent there.
WhiningCoil
6d ago
Once upon a time, there was this concept of a "tight script". It wasn't so much about the quality of the dialog, so much as making sure every element of the film was telegraphed in advance. Some character is going to have a heart attack at a crucial moment? Show him taking his statins, maybe have his wife nag him about them. There was an understanding that payoffs were more satisfying when they'd been set up. Maybe this is just catering to midwits so they can point at the screen and feel smart that they understood a callback. Maybe, when you are building out a fiction, you need to signpost the elements of the real world that are in play or not so the audience isn't constantly wondering what from the infinite array of all possibilities is on the table here.
I often think about Blood Simple, the Cohen Brothers first film. Film opens with this lady talking about how much she hates her husband. Among the gripes she has, she mentions that he bought her a gun as a gift. Giving your wife a gun as a present? Can you even imagine such a thing? It's a six round revolver. Over the course of the 90 minute runtime, it discharges exactly 6 rounds. If you've been counting during the film, by the final scene you know exactly how it's going to end. It's a simple concept, but well executed. Everything has a set up, everything has a payoff.
At one point I read some article about the "Asian" method of story telling, which is less about set up and pay off, and more about doing whatever ass pulls are necessary to arrive at the scenes the director wants. The best of these films, if this is at all true, come off as surreal journey's through a director's id. Gozu comes to mind.
I swear we're getting the worst of both worlds. Scripts with zero set up and zero payoff, with none of the coherent vision or creativity of an auteur. A lot can be forgiven if it's done with style. All we get anymore is a 30 producer's coke fueled rantings filtered through a writer's room full of cynical activist who've ruined their lives with their poor choices and worse beliefs, with visual effects produced by some sweatshop.
WhiningCoil
5d ago
Right?! It's like either you've seen it, or you have some sort of mental blinders on that make what you've seen "not count".
WhiningCoil
4d ago
So I read Blindsight in about 4 days ish. That was a ride. Waaaaaay less comfortable of a first contact story that Mote in God's Eye, which was the last novel I talked about which brought recommendations of Blindsight. Here, and also a buddy of mine who just lent me his copy.
I liked it... but I didn't enjoy it. Like, it was rich in concepts and took the story in directions I never saw coming. But I felt like it spent more time trying to fuck with me thanks to the layers of unreliable narrators than it did advancing a story. And then of course it's just a total downer from a humanist perspective. I feel like Blindsight is a better recommendation to go along with something from HP Lovecraft than an almost Star Trekkish "Rah Rah Humanity!" first contact story like The Mote in God's Eye.
I guess if you love hearing about how much we suck and are doomed and the universe will trample us with it's indifference, Blindsight is pretty good. But something in me says Lovecraft did it better. Probably a matter of taste.
WhiningCoil
5d ago
There is one guy who should have been, if what his wife says is true. (I am sceptical, but she is the blood relative, so I believe her in public)
I repeat
It's like either you've seen it, or you have some sort of mental blinders on that make what you've seen "not count"
So someone in your social circle has had that happen, despite your claims that nobody has.
WhiningCoil
4d ago
But the natural slave cannot ultimately be freed; they can only be managed well, or managed poorly. Left to their own devices, they will manage themselves poorly. Aggressively managed ("literally enslaved"), they will lash out against the strictures of the arrangement, often violently (the free citizens of slave societies live ever in far of revolt). How much of the history of "government" is the history of developing increasingly sophisticated methods for obfuscating the nature and extent of the bondage imposed on the "mass of men," not only for their own ultimate benefit, but for the benefit of all? And--to what extent might we as a people be slowly forgetting that, as we seek to "liberate" those masses, by continuing to give them the resources of life, while withdrawing (or declining to enforce) any guidance?
Maybe this calls for an inverse catch-22. If you have enough executive agency to successfully organize a slave revolt, you clearly do not belong to the slave class. Welcome to the ranks of the masters brother.
Maybe it's less important that slavery is abolished, as there exist class mobility out of the lowest rungs of society.
WhiningCoil
4d ago
If you're incompetent and unteachable enough that you need to be governed with direct intervention, and restricted from handling your own affairs, you're also not really equipped to tell if your overseer is making good decisions on your behalf, and even if they aren't actively exploiting you, they can of course be making decisions that are suboptimal for your personal wellbeing, simply because they are not as motivated to do the best possible job.
IMHO, this is a perfect is the enemy of good situation. Is someone managing your decisions better than you, such that you are having even marginally better life outcomes than you were before them telling you what to do? Well, then how much of that added value they skim off the top comes down to competition between overseers.
Shit, I think we just reinvented the labor market.
WhiningCoil
7d ago
At the moment, most people openly advocating for racial segregation are Neo-Nazis. I think I speak for the vast majority of Whites, HBD-pilled or otherwise, when I say I would much rather have a randomly selected Black person as a neighbor than a Neo-Nazi for purely selfish Bayesian reasons.
But this goes to the core of it. What if normal whites have noticed enough that they decide "You know what, I'm going to act like every other race treats me." What if they preferentially hire whites the same way Indians favor Indians, or Jews favor Jews? What if they aggressively subsidize and import white residents the same way the federal government bombs small Midwestern towns with Haitians or Somalians? What if they start giving out contracts to white owned businesses the same way the federal government gives contracts only to black or minority owned businesses? What if they forgive debt for white's the same way the federal government keeps finding way to forgive debts exclusively for blacks? What if they give preferential medical treatments to whites the same way preferential treatments were given to blacks?
None of this requires deep supremacist neo-nazi beliefs. Just noticing and then going tit-for-tat. Realizing if you don't, you have no future.
WhiningCoil
8d ago
I would say this has been broadly true, so far. However, with the last 10 years of naked anti-white racism on display at all levels of society, noticing is off the charts. It's going to be experiments like these that show if your thinking, which has been true my entire life at least, still holds true. Or if, just maybe, enough "good whites" have been burned enough to take a gamble on racial solidarity, and bring their prosocial traits with them.
WhiningCoil
7d ago
Overwhelmingly, every time it's put to a vote, people vote for less immigration. People vote against affirmative action policies. People vote against racial carve outs. Don't pretend the call is coming from inside the house, and whites are inflicting this on themselves. The government is running amok, either because racial spoils are easy to lie about but still deliver votes, or because some unaccountable aspect of it has been captured by racial interest groups. Might be worth looking into that "Critical Race Theory" thing. Whenever it comes up, I always hear it's defenders claim "They aren't teaching that in schools, it's only a legal theory".
WhiningCoil
12d ago
This view of suffering, as some sort of negative imposed on life, is bizarre to me. I mean it makes sense coming from a person suffering clinical depression or otherwise deeply disordered. But suffering, by and large, is our biology's way of pointing the way to go. Only children think the world would be better off without suffering. Anyone who has ever seen a news segment or documentary about people literally born without the ability to feel pain understands what a nightmarish body horror that is. I'll never forget the one I saw. Turns out without pain, it's hard to keep an infant from clawing their own eyes out, chewing off their own tongue, fingers and toes, and other acts of senseless self mutilation. They won't cry when they need something, so the new parent, ignorant to the condition, first discovers something is amiss after the child, instead of crying to be fed in the middle of the night, lets their parents sleep peacefully while they remove their own eye with their curious searching fingers.
Suffering may seem pointless to the disordered mind, but every now and again we get a Twilight Zone like glimpse at a world without suffering, and it's a horror almost beyond belief. Like a hell out of Event Horizon or Hellraiser.
WhiningCoil
20d ago
Small changes in daily lived experiences can have an outsized impact. The crime rate can hardly budge on paper, but things that might poll as "crime" can increase exponentially in your daily life. Where I used to live was fine on paper. I lived there for about 15 years. Then things started getting really weird. Some things would show up on paper as "crime". Gas station on the corner kept getting robbed repeatedly. There was a shooting and a shooter on the loose in my townhouse parking lot after we had our first child. Women were getting dragged off the trails and raped in attacks so lurid and on the nose you'd think they were made up had there not been so much physical evidence and they caught the guy. Turns out sometimes, just sometimes, rapist do wait in the bushes to ambush women jogging on a trail in broad daylight. Same trail we'd walk our infant daughter on in her stroller.
There were plenty of non-"crime" stuff that just added to the overall ambiance of chaos. People suddenly started stopping me in my car on the street and screaming at me for money. There were more loitering gangs of kids smoking and shouting obscenities at my wife as we walked by. Often on the playgrounds we'd go to take our daughter to... and then think better of it. More stores started locking things up. But if you complained about it, some shithead was always there to remind you "Town USA's crime rate is actually below average per capita! And year and year crime has barely budged!" I don't know how to reconcile those insistences with the stark change in my daily life.
So I left. And in the last 5 years I haven't caught a wif of a crime or "crime" anywhere in my proximity. No stores I shop at have gotten robbed, I haven't driven by a house with a squad of police cars trying to disarm a hostage situation (I forgot to mention that one in my old locale). There are no strong "civilization is at the edge of chaos" vibes like I used to get on a daily basis, per capita be damned.
WhiningCoil
5d ago
You know, it might have been a fluke. I think whatever script they have to block part of the article failed to load on me one time from that snapshot of archive.org. Sometimes it's weird like that I guess.
WhiningCoil
7d ago
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Sometimes people with severe mental illnesses go off their medication because they feel better and think they no longer need it. They don't like the side effects, etc. Just because the medicine doesn't feel good doesn't mean you don't need it.
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Even assuming I agree, that only goes for Blacks. How does it go for Indians, Jews, Asians, Arabs, Mexicans and every other nationality colonizing America and carving it's founding stock out of it?
WhiningCoil
22d ago
Never Meet Your Heroes, Even Posthumously
When I was a kid, I discovered Harlan Ellison on Sci-Fi Buzz during his Harlan Ellison's Watching segments. They were my favorite segments, and I was crushed when an episode didn't have one. I would have been about 10 years old at this time. Luckily enough, they are all still available on Harlan's youtube. This one in particular I remember, being a comic card collector in middle school, along with most of the boys in my boy scout troop.
For me at that age, there was a lot to look up to in Harlan. He was witty, funny, charismatic, and never gave up on his childhood passions. More over he seems important and respected, his awards always preceding his name. I thought he was simply the best as a young nerdling. But I never read his stories. I can't even remember wanting to. Maybe I wasn't there yet, in terms of reading level. I honestly have no memory of what I was reading at that age. I do recall that by the time I was a freshman in highschool, I had read ample Ray Bradbury collections, and had been dabbling in Iain M Banks. For whatever reason I never circled back to Harlan until much later, picking up a ebook copy of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and being blown away by every story in it, especially Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes.
Over the last month, I've been working through The Essential Ellison: A 35 Year Retrospective. It's completely changed my view of the man, and not for the better. The tome really lays bare how autobiographical much of Ellison's short stories are. The barely disguised self loathing, the tireless hatred he feels for all of humanity, but seemingly goys above all others, and the immaturity disguised as worldliness. Qualities I admired as a child watching him on Sci-Fi Buzz I'm profoundly glad I did not grow up to emulate as an adult.
The facts are Harlan's father died when he was very young, he was constantly in and out of trouble, he ran away from home, he worked a smattering of tough sounding blue collar jobs, he spent 2 years in the army, he was expelled from college, he was married 5 times, divorced 4, and he had no children.
Through his fiction, you further learn that he was, imagines, or romanticizes, being the only jewish boy in a small Ohio town relentless victimized by it's shitty irredeemable goy population. He loathes goys, and it rears it's head in story after story after story. He hates their dumb kids, their dumb churches, their dumb music, their dumb bowling leagues, you name it, he hates it. And he hates that they're all bigger and stronger than him at 5'3". Does he really feel this way, deep down? Who's to say. But after 1000 pages, probably 500 of which riffed on that theme, I'm left with the impression some part of him must. Often cloaked in humor, or the virtue of the civil rights movement of his day. But in his fiction, he seems less interested in the humanity of Southern Blacks, and more interested in the inhumanity of the goy.
He returns to his childhood repeatedly in his fiction, and how much better things were then, when radio plays lit his imagination on fire and his father was still alive. This is a strain of stunted growth I too suffer from, as my grumpy rants about video games will attest. I find ample share of compatriots in this regard. But something about Harlan's inability to take on the masculine burden of supporting and raising a stable family casts a darker tint to his nostalgia.
Harlan Ellison's entire public persona was a fraud. Or at least, in many of his writings, his fear that he was a fraud came through. Stories about a 4 times divorced celebrity manufacturing a shameful charismatic and funny public persona to hide how much he hated everyone. Stories about a shameless womanizer who has worked all sorts of rough and tumble blue collar jobs... but only for a few weeks so he could say he did. In reality he (I mean his character of course) has soft hands only barely acquainted with manual labor. Which reminds you Harlan the author never draws on all the odd jobs he claims to have had in his fiction, beyond name dropping them. Lastly, multiple stories where a four times divorced main character convinces his first wife to get an abortion she doesn't want, resulting in her emotional destruction which he treats as a personal offense to himself.
Are all these details that sound curiously autobiographical true? Or angles Harlan plays up for want of something to do when seated at his typewriter? At this point, with enough dots connected, I suspect the worst.
After making it through The Essential Ellison, I'm hurt. Hurt that someone I looked up to so much as a kid was in reality a hateful, developmentally stunted man. And I mean emotionally, not physically, though I suppose there was that too. A man who for 35 years picked his wounds in public, on the page. He kept them fresh, knowing it's what put food on the table. I feel sorry for him, but I also sincerely wish I hadn't known all that. Ah well.
WhiningCoil
7d ago
Telling the multi-ethnic society "your game is so rigged against us, we will not play" and going to raise chickens in some rural white-only community
I've never felt more seen. Also, wives fucking love chickens, and husbands who can build coops.
WhiningCoil
19d ago
Men who want sex... get married.
/r/deadbedrooms would like a word. It's interesting you brought up closing on a home, and said marriage makes it so that neither party can get what they want without coughing up what they were offering it. It just doesn't hold up under scrutiny though. Virtually the only way to make the arrangement fair like you claim it is would be, is to make it so that you can have as much sex with your wife as you want, consent be damned, legally. But I doubt anyone has the heart to go through with that. So you are left with one side that can defect at will, and the other losing most of their assets and income.
WhiningCoil
12d ago
brain implants so that they intuitively understand that they oughtn't do this without needing the pain stimulus.
Ah yes, I can totally see how that will go. The screening for the disease will be more expensive than just getting the device and/or lobbyist will get the CDC to "recommend" that every child get the device, even ones that don't have the disease. Better safe than sorry. They can throw it in with the Hep B vaccine as soon as the baby is born. But then it turns out that when you offload vital cognitive function to this device, the brain never develops them itself, so now every child grows into an adult dependent on this device for life. Oh, and also you need a new one every 5-10 years. And when they break, now it's like pain insensitivity has been induced in you, and you get mightily banged up.
I guess mentioning the Twilight Zone is a bit dated of a reference. But if you've never seen one, a constant theme of the show was to heighten one aspect of the human condition to a point of terrifying absurdity. And while an autist or a particularly dim child might watch an episode and think "Ah yes, it would suck to literally wish for more time to read, and then be the only survivor of an apocalypse and have your glasses break", you are supposed to realize how foolish it is to have such a myopic focus in life in the first place.
So when I compared that medical condition to a Twilight Zone episode, I was implying there are lessons to be drawn from it beyond the literal "This condition sucks." I fully reject the notion that pain, physical or mental, is outdated in any modern context.
WhiningCoil
8d ago
It's going to be a real test of the vibe shift, that's for sure.
WhiningCoil
19d ago
"Emotional Labor" is just a buzzword people with "Emotional Intelligence" use to abuse you. I'm increasingly certain that "Emotional Intelligence" is just a measure of how good you are at emotionally terrorizing, gaslighting and lying. It's a measure of your capacity for toxicity in relationships. And somehow the same type of person who complains at having to be their spouse's "therapist" will also launch into a 3 hour free roaming tirade leaping between islands of seething negativity triggered by their salad not having adequate cranberries on it. She isn't paying $25 for a salad with only, what, 12 cranberries on it? And another thing...
And after not letting anyone else get a word in edgewise, she walks away from the interaction confident in all the "emotional labor" she did for you.
WhiningCoil
15d ago
Of course the same criticism of the right wing populists applies to the left wing ones: they don't really have any realistic solutions and the system will not let them implement any if they do. New York's equivalent to Jeremy Corbyn will surely have that same problem.
Depends on your diagnosis of the problem. If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution. Because with that anchor tied to your feet, no state project, be it reinvigorating capitalism, monopoly busting or state run grocery stores can possibly succeed. If the labor market is flooded with lazy scammers who shameless loot the till, it's not going to matter if the grocery store is a coop, state run, unionized or anything.
WhiningCoil
4d ago
I keep trying to break into Captains of Industry, but the tutorial is so dry, hand holdy and long I just get bored and wonder back to a game I know better. I get maybe an hour to play a game a night, and not even every night! I can't spend the whole hour being locked out of the interface until I click the exact button the tutorial tells me it's time to click, over and over and over again!
I really wish there were two levels of tutorial sometimes. The "Yes, I've played a game before" type where it has a much lighter touch, just gives me some short term objectives and a quick summary of how to get there. Then there could be the "wHaT iS cOmPuTeR?!" tutorials that explain what a mouse and keyboard are, and how to click on buttons and shit.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
We're All Sitcom Characters Now
If you've ever watched a successful long running sitcom, you've seen it happen. The characters start out mostly normal with a quirk or two. Maybe a little neurotic, or slow, or promiscuous. Four seasons in and the characters have all become deranged parodies of themselves. All their most entertaining qualities have been heightened, everything relatable or normal has been squeezed out. The character that was a little slow is now a straight up drooling retard. The promiscuous character obsessively fucks everything that moves. The neurotic character is only a step removed from Howard Hughes in his final days. You watch the last episode and the first episode of a sitcom, and you'll barely recognize the characters.
It's obvious why it happens though. The writers and actors give the audiences what they want. Sitcoms are (or were?) a cuttroat business. There was little room for artistic integrity, vision, or any other high minded concepts. Give the audiences what they want, or they'll change the channel and the show will be cancelled. Just shut up and do it!
I regret to inform you that we are all on a sitcom now. Everyone is enmeshed with an attention economy. Be it farming engagement on twitter, or upvotes on a reddit clone. And unlike actors who only have to inhabit their roles for hours a day, for a shooting schedule that might be weeks or months out of a year, those enmeshed in the attention economy must be in character 24/7. On social media, on streaming, on podcast, on youtube, all at once, all the time.
Some have whole heartedly embraced this. Twitter is full of people being characters, allowing the algorithm or engagement to tweak the dials on their personality. Like a second subconscious that lives in the cloud. Catgirl Kulak comes to mind. He's out there using an AI catgirl as an avatar, staying more and more in character as some sort of neo pagan feral/trad nordic catgirl with hot takes. It's a dangerous game he's playing, existing more and more in a fictional role. But there are others. The preposterous performative pro-Elon or pro-Trump nonsense I saw and tried to avoid on twitter this last week was really something. Twitter super users who've built their brand on being staunch partisans like Catturd out there acting like absolute charicatures of themselves. They're just sitcom characters anymore, and rapidly approaching the braindeath of the latter seasons. Others I don't think fully understand what was happening to them. I wonder how much upvote driven personality disorders had to do with certain flameouts here.
Because eventually every sitcom hits the wall. The characters have been intellectually and emotionally abused and lobotomized to such a point where there is no humanity left in them to ritualistically beat out for the amusement of the audience. It gets it's final season where the writers attempt to rehabilitate them just enough to send them off into the sunset.
There are no writers to rehabilitate you when the algorithm is done with you, and you've lived inside a cartoonish and horrifying version of yourself for attention for years on end.
Sometimes I think we should bring "back" the likely fictional "Rule of Thumb". Have minders in the street with rods. And not unlike how a slave rode behind Caesar during his Triumph, repeating in his ear "Remember you too are mortal", if they hear anyone neurotically bitching at the cafe, over brunch, at the bar, they run up and start striking them across their back and shoulders shouting "Perfect is the enemy of good!!".
Maybe the beatings should continue until morale improves.
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