2D3D
2mo ago
When I bussed at Canal St we would get smartasses asking if we were serving cat. The chef would always get some FOB masters student to sotto voce ask if they REALLY wanted cat just go fuck with them.
The FOB I got close to said that he would actually do it, but there were no stray cats in New York to serve. He was convinced the rats ate all kittens and puppies, and 'only filipinos eat rats'.
I looked askance the next time I ate lumpia, then decided if it smelled this good I didn't care.
2D3D
2mo ago
When I saw the reddit post of the black dude with the canadian goose, I had two thoughts:
a) theres gonna be an INCREDIBLY stupid point about immigration being made about this
b) that fucking goose had it coming
Wild animals are not cute pets just waiting for a human to show it love before it becomes a golden retriever. Animals are smelly pissing shitting scavenging shitpiles who scream their desire to fuck in their barbarian language and autistically attack anything that strays into their self declared territory. Waterfowl are the most guilty of this because we humans think these graceful birds look cute but they are vicious shitting squaking fucks who go out of the water specifically to fuck you in particular if you so much as glanced in their general direction.
If haitians are brave enough fuckers to clear out pests, then they should be given the hoglands to settle. Tell them they are forbidden from any trade except killing wild hogs with spears. Go all obelix on wild boars. Just give them fresh water and hexamine tablets to ensure the underbrush isnt set ablaze trying to make heat and you've got the workings of a feasible hog management solution.
2D3D
2mo ago
Is it gauche to refer to my own post https://www.themotte.org/post/1160/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/249419?context=8#context
Where I specifically said that there would be a race between 'HAH THEY ARE EATING CATS' and 'can we please stop talking about cats' conservatives?
JD Vance folded, said that he was making things up to get the conversation going. Trump hasn't mentioned it once more. Any unearthing of proximate evidence is burning sacrifices to a dead god. The point was fumbled, and memory holing is the best strategy. Repeatedly digging up this corpse to pretend it can still tapdance is not really helping advance the cause.
2D3D
2mo ago
Historically the value of land and borders would have been tied to the people within the land that could be taxed, or chokepoints (ports, passes, bridges) that would keep the people or goods within a boundary to be taxed. A shitload of fertile plains is useless if peasants cannot work it, a shitload of peasants are useless if there is no land for them to work on. People are taxable, land is not. The Congo slavers sold captured slaves because their shitty land was unsuitable for agriculture in the short term, and these captives could be traded for horses guns and shinies that the congolese valued more than the ransoms of inland captures.
We also have to recognize that modern economic concepts like gross domestic product or national output is also a reflection of modernized sociopolitical advancements that allow quantification and tracking of inputs and outputs. A theoretical value of captured land has no real value if the local taxman and the taxpayer all collude to deprive the faraway sovereign of their dues.
In modern terms, the pre-Smith British view of Mercantilist economic victory was 'everyone buys my stuff', which reflects producer superiority and is the focus of trade wars. Smith and later Ricardo explored the theories of trade and comparative advantage to obtain maximal utility (US makes soybeans cheaply, so it should sell them to the Chinese who make plastic crap cheaply for mutual benefit), and this combined with the realization that colonies really were exercises in impoverishment to diminish the appeal of colonization or indeed other proximate wars.
The USA may have actually entered a hitherto unseen economic victory condition, where 'everyone wants to sell to me'. By being the buyer of highest priority, outsiders comport their own supply chains and production processes to the buyers preferences even without the buyer explicating as such. Japanese clothing giants commission Bangladeshi muslims to sew pride flags onto blue eyed blonde barbie dolls because the USA is the buyer they all aim to satisfy, not their impoverished kin or insignificant neighbours.
2D3D
2mo ago
Fun exercise: try to figure who, if anyone, the following statement refers to:
I am a Self Aware Individual, aware of and thus immune to the lies spread by propagandizers. Anyone who disagrees with me is a captured entity, and their failure to acknowledge the validity of my rational position reflects the depth of propaganda capture. What more, they believe THEY are the ones in the right, and that I am propagandized!
Hopefully people don't actually put self worth into internet points. Man, what a tragedy that would be if internet words actually mattered to us and we acted on it!
2D3D
2mo ago
To follow on @Dean's point on wars of conquest being too expensive to be profitable, there was also increasing traction among politicians and economists that the costs of holding foreign territory started outweighing the trade/taxes accrued from said territory. I don't have the specific literature, but Adam Smiths economic treatises regularly castigated colonial adventures as foolish, with no economic case for them due to the high frictional costs of maintaining economically leaky endeavors.
As technology improved and accessibility to said technology extended beyond European borders, the strength of relative threats diminished the European technological advantages severely. There is no point keeping a garrison in Hong Kong if the Chinese can attack strongpoints with artillery instead of swords. There is no point in keeping a Kabul FOB if the Taliban can overrun adjacent ANA positions with a text message and plink potshots eternally at US troops without consequence, etc etc.
The last major power to engage in a colonialist land grab (outside of Putin) was funny moustache man, and all his lebensraum would have lain fallow if he did not have a cooperative population working it maximally for his advantage The Russians slow worked under an ostensibly beneficial communist system simply because the communist system had unworkable incentives, theres no way they would have functioned as a slave people to faraway teutons.
If we introduce temporality into this discussion then it actually crippled the Texas=D/LNR and Mexico=Ukraine, and it becomes Texas=Ukraine and Mexico=Russia. The proximate relevance of 2022 Ukraines relationship with Russia is the 2014 Crimea and Novorossiya adventure, not the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union or the slavification of the Pale Of Settlement from god knows when to god knows when. 1991 Ukraine did not exhibit the same hostility to its parent patron as much as the Texans did the Mexicans back in 1991, but it certainly does since 2014. The animating force of hostility against Russia is the disregard for the internal motivations of the Ukrainian polity, and that fuckup is Russias own doing. Sticking with a Belarus model of relationship cultivation is yielding dividends in Hungary and maybe Romania in this year of 2024, and nothing indicates 2014 Ukrainians were especially lured to the liberal pieties of the West. Texas would not have seceded from Mexico without the change in political status quo, and in fact it brought in plenty of Anglos specifically seeking to escape the US diktats. Perhaps if Putin didn't fuck up his Ukraine adventure we would see Carlsonstan set up as an antiliberal tradcon utopia.
2D3D
2mo ago
To inject unnecessary levity into this serious discussion (my own view is Muscovy Delenda Est):
If Ukraine wants a permanent garrison of US forces, they should set up a PX chain called Dimepiece at the borders, where active US service members get one dime beers and dimepiece eyecandy Ukrainian girls/guys. It'll have far more US troops on leave there than any permanent garrison, with the advantage of US service members stumbling outside to buy some shitty charger at 30% APR. I wonder what's the slav equivalent of a dodge charger.
2D3D
2mo ago
I actually did this 'family photo' thing to figure out the girls family dynamic and understand what her relationship modalities are. Physical commonalities among the elder generations gave a preview of what the likely attractiveness would be going forward, but I myself underprioritized that because matchstick leg + pot belly chinatown uncle is my own fate so I know my place.
2D3D
2mo ago
Sales is ultimately about being the single point of contact to yell or be yelled at when things go wrong. The human capability to know the one person who can unfuck a fuckup asap engenders more goodwill and long term value than any optimized automated sales chain. As more processes get commoditized and systemized, it means the edge case failures narrow to even more complex interlinks, and thats where a good sales person would understand a clients specific needs and highlight issues in advance or understand the client and the product well enough to propose solutions rapidly.
Having said that, the negative reputation of salesmen exists for a reason. Relying on personal affective tricks to convince cajole or coerce cooperation in information asymmetric instances is definitely bad. The only way to keep sales agents on their toes is to ensure continuity of engagement (not further sales) because you can pin them down and yell at them if things fuckup. If the salesman can and does run away after selling you something, you gotta expect something fucky is up.
2D3D
2mo ago
Request bloat and cowardly/uncaring dev teams are usually to blame for useless features going nowhere. I've had to deal with a product that literally no one thinks is useful at all, but the request was built into production because no one cared enough to disabuse the boss of his false assumptions. 'Lets try and see how it works' turns into 'wait why is this even here' when it is caught four months later.
2D3D
2mo ago
Salma Hayek has Lebanese descent too, which has Arab thighmelt potential. I'll invite other brave souls to share any observations on cellulite/body fat distribution differentiation between races, since my casual observance maps too cleanly onto racialised beauty meta for me to suspect subconscious bias.
In any case, to see what a girl will look like in future just do a cute activity like compare family photos and look at the elders. Thats the easiest way to see the genetic destiny. An excess of surgery and vanity in said photos might allow a discerning individual to parse wealth outcomes too, so there is further useful info to be gleaned there.
2D3D
2mo ago
Legalised sports betting through Draftkings and the like seems to be the ultimate backdoor for financial fuckups. The emotional attachment, conscious or otherwise, people have for their faves and the now daily timescale refresh optimized for daily expensive dopamine hits. Its not possible to martingale an out even if the bets arent capped, because of the changing meta and emotional investment. Draftkings is evil, and I think it portends great ill for sportsball in the US.
As for the spirit of the thread, I was wrong on charisma. I used to think stacking int and str was what got you far in life, thanks to fucking biowares icewind dale and charisma being an utterly useless stat IRL. With social interactions mediated by common interests as kids, charisma seemed utterly unimportant and being socially adept seemed to be for losers striving for the approval of strangers.
Turns out being an obnoxious creep bragging about PRs and grades makes one unable to deal with the social meta. Making friends isn't the problem, navigating hostile social agents is the problem. Getting socially crippled with no awareness of it happening or recourse is not necessarily a better tradeoff compared to the eternal performance for approval.
2D3D
2mo ago
Everytime someone uses an AI generated custom emoji in a groupchat I weep for the continued straying away from the fuckbot future. I want my robot waifu to do my laundry and indulge in degenerate cosplay on appropriate demand, not drool out inconsequential slop. We could be solving for a pseudodynamic social management agent, and instead the best minds want to make AI bark in 16 vs 15 registers at once.
2D3D
2mo ago
Asian Americans (Indian and sinics) end up crowding the meta. Relatively safe New Jersey shitholes got rapidly gentrified and flooded with Asians to pull test scores up too fast. Its like a tragedy of the commons, too many smart hardworking kids in a shithole make them stand out less.
I'm reminded of that joke on reddit of the guy who lets off a few shots every now and then to keep property prices low. The actual meta for Asians should be to loudly complain that their kids sre getting bullied and becoming stupider at some low achieving district in order to dissuade overachievers from crowding out their kid. If the current meta favors 'best in class', then cripple the class at the outset.
2D3D
2mo ago
Great premise. Not too different from current asian meta of 'personality hacking' instead of achievement grinding. Asians are unpopular so use a Nigerian immigrant pretending to be ghetto in order to get the best success at hollywood scripts.
2D3D
2mo ago
Actually the race is between the right wingers yelling about cats REALLY being eaten by Haitians vs right wingers yelling that cats don't have to be being eaten by haitians in order for the threat to be recognized as extant but its irrelevant anyways can we please for the love of god stop talking about the cats.
Guess, uh, guess what's actually catching the attention of the right wing media ecosystem.
2D3D
2mo ago
The greatest Trump sin of 2024 is that he has lost the touch. All the criticisms of his rambling, incoherence, inchoate arguments or whatever, all that is secondary to his greatest strength: hitting the opponent where it'll hurt.
Crooked Hilary resonated as there was sufficient baggage in the info sphere to make it plausible that she was a corrupt incompetent burying bodies on her path to unearned power. Sleepy Joe was obvious to everyone who actually saw Biden speak from 2023 onwards, regardless of right-wing twitter edits. Lyin Ted, Fat Chris, etc... its all the same principle.
And if its not personal, its hitting on values. 2016 Trump hit the immigration nail beautifully with Build The Wall, and he got supercharged with the anger of normies following the Deplorables incident. Frankly he should have swung for the fences in 2020 with Defund the Police, but he fumbled the responde and Biden disavowed Defund from the start, leaving that round a dud in the Trump gun.
That was then. Now? He's got JD Vance, an attack dog that is whining more than biting, a right wing media ecosystem catastrophizing Ring Of Fire disasters out of very real but currently statistically ineffective culture war pain points, and weak attacks against Kamala. He isn't funny, he isn't hitting the pain points of economy and immigration with sufficient focus, and he's ultimately BORING.
Even the supercuts of Trump best lines are boring and inaudible. Theres nothing funny about HIS attacks on Harris and the Democrats, and without that what do we have? A boring rambly mess that doesn't even make me angry at the democrats.
Overall an absolute fumble for Trump. His concept of a plan to win is less tangible than SV pre-ideation startups that strode into VC offices with a dream and a rejected application to Caltech.
2D3D
2mo ago
Ok this one goes pretty hard. I dont put much stock in soviet films, architecture or music (plastic people of the universe arent soviet and its not possible to enjoy their music sober), and i already expressed disdain for soviet realism, but this poster fucks.
I personally blame the hays code for the weird plastic archie comics style plasticised all american boy aesthetic that permeated even the space raygun era of american science fiction art. ironically, watching out for commies made the outputs commie level fails. thanks hoover.
2D3D
2mo ago
The asskisser who pivots from tendieposting to bootlicking gets the crumbs before the boot. Commissars first rounded up the kulaks before the invalids, since there was time pressure to seize the outputs of production. You can take your time crushing Sergey the town drunk if he isn't going anywhere.
The ONLY thing appealing about communism is 'we promise to get rid of the degenerates you hate'. The low hanging fruit of public drunks and mentally incapacitated malcontents is a universal scourge everyone cheers to have removed. It is when the jackboots search for more necks to step on when the appeal loses out.
Whether the removed are helped or locked up is inconsequential. We just son't want them enshittifying our public space.
The downfall of western public spaces is entirely because criminal malcontents, especially but not limited to the highly melanated, act freely without sanction. Get rid of them and the animating disgust normies have will no longer be misdirected towards progcommie 'harm reduction' bullshit.
2D3D
2mo ago
Ben Garrison shows us the Trumps we see in our hearts but not our eyes, for his radiance burns our feeble eyeballs.
2D3D
2mo ago
Yea I get that, I truly truly truly do! Modern DEI wokism gives us distorted faces from ME:Andromeda and Star Wars Outlaws to design shitpiles like Concord or Dustborn, while the successors of communism give us gacha ptsd waifus and robot fuckdolls.
BUT that doesn't change the fact that communism is STILL ugly. Modern Starbucks seattle commies overlap with the capitalist class you rightly decry, pinning the hammer and sickle badges on their newsboy caps as they slave under capitalism, showing that true commies can't make anything beautiful. I think even the commie furries make ugly shit, with anything resembling beauty overlapping with nazbol furries.
I do not mean to be purely combative, but I really wish to know: what communist beauty actually is there? I am probably cheating by excluding modern China and its cultural/physical outputs, but like I really don't see communists producing anything beautiful historically.
2D3D
2mo ago
Thats what we have now! Capitalism produced Reagan, a square jaw movie hero turned president. Communism gave us Brezhnev, Castro, Mao and Kim Il Sung, all manner of fat ugly aesthetically and behaviorally discomforting golems. Even communist attempts at beautiful art were mediocre shitpiles, with Soviet Realism being a pastel pastiche of the colouring of Old Masters overlaid onto garish parodies of reality.
Communism is UGLY and gave us brutalism, plasticised film dolls ironically more unnatural than the west, and unaccountable leaders who didn't have any physical charisma at all. Che Guevera adorns all commie flags because he's the ONLY good looking commie. For every 10 Che simps there are 1000 posters of capitalists to simp over. But commies have ONLY Che to adorn.
Harris died in 2020 because she couldn't walk back her stupid defund rhetoric, and Biden eclipsed her totally on the campaign trail, with literally zero support for Defund The Police from Biden, not a single sanewashing soundbite. If you fuck up your point by saying something stupid, you power through and cede it so your efforts go somewhere productive.
Trump and Vance can still point to immigrant salvadorans and hondurans fucking up NYC. They don't do so because urbanites suffering hubris is a desired outcome for Trump, Trumps existing supporters and the remaining centrists who dislike far left open border crazies. Trying to tie the migrant threat to soccer mom suburbanites failed, and I'm not sure there is time to reload the chamber even if another bullet existed.
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