ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
No bio...
User ID: 1012
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1d ago
How has that worked out for you? I have been thinking about whether or not I should send my kids to college. My kids are smarter than average and we plan to homeschool, so I think we could set them up for success pretty well. At the same time, I'm concerned that not having the magic paper might hinder them early in their careers. Have you experienced that?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2d ago
I am in my mid-30s, so I imagine we were looking at colleges around the same time. To be fair, I do also remember being shown the shiny new cafeteria and student union, and hearing about the new football stadium they were building, but I didn't care at all as a 17 year old. My parents were there with me, though. In hindsight, perhaps these amenities were aimed at convincing the parents, since they would be the ones actually footing the bill. Kind of obvious now that I write it out.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2d ago
Okay, that's fair. I suppose I might be typical minding. I think I am considerably less nerdy/autistic than many users here (no offense meant, I just mean that I'm a socially integrated normalfag) and even I based my choice of college mainly on (1) the fact that it had the field I was interested in, (2) that it wasn't located in an inner city shithole, and (3) that they gave me a fat scholarship.
I've often heard hat new stadiums/cafeterias/fancy dorms are built to "attract students" but I do not personally know anyone who compared universities in this way. Even the 100 IQ normies at my HS who you would expect might care about that stuff were much more interested in whether a particular school had a good "party school" rep, whether their bf/gf was going there, or whether it was the "correct" school for their family sports fan dynasty (I lived in the southeast). I do not recall once ever hearing about the quality of the dorms or gyms.
However! If I were an unscrupulous admin trying to expand my bureaucratic power, this seems like a really convenient argument to make. "We need 50 million dollars for a new gym to attract students to Foobar State! If we don't build it, students will choose University of Foobar instead! We can't fall behind!" And all the other admins have grifts of their own and know how to play the game, so I doubt anyone would stand in the way except to try to grab those funds for their own power expansion ("We don't need a gym, we need to expand and renovate student housing!")
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2d ago
I didn't say international students were demanding shiny facilities and more administrators, I'm just saying that the money from international students most likely goes towards increasing bloat and add more irrelevant facilities. Does a university actually NEED a state of the art massive gym complex or sprawling student union center? These always seemed like make-work bureaucracy expansion projects to me. More facilities = more employees = more admin. At least football can be justified as pulling donations from alumni. Certainly none of the money goes to making education cheaper or better (cheaper books, higher prof salaries, more profs to decrease class sizes, etc).
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2d ago
No? I don't think I said that? I'm sure the admins, like all useless bureaucrats, will cling to their gibs until the bitter end, even if it means completely hollowing out the educational mission of the university.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2d ago
Tell me more about that, because when I was in college I didn't demand any of that. I wanted cheaper textbooks and affordable housing close to campus. I went to local restaurants or cooked at home. Our gym was a little old, but it was fine. I don't recall any student protests demanding fancies facilities. Maybe that's a common thing at other universities that I'm just not aware of?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2d ago
International students are subsidizing (superfluous) university services, wages and administrative bloat. I don't think native students see much benefit from the money at all.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
4d ago
I don't think they will meekly accept it, no. But under the bioleninist framework, they are only strong because they are organized and their opponent is not. If the normie right begins to organize, it will successfully oppress the left. Probably not only via peaceful means.
I'm not sure how to define the "most leftist" ideas I accept. Probably some economic policies. I have some sympathy for protectionism, labor unions, and reducing income inequality.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
6d ago
Anyone played around with voice cloning and generation? ElevenLabs came out of nowhere a while back and blew everyone's minds, but are there any serious competitors to their quality? Or are they still the best around? Is it possible to do it locally?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
6d ago
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
6d ago
I don't want my enemies dead, but I do want them to think twice about expressing their ideas. Maybe I even want them to be afraid to express them. I want TPTB to run a propaganda campaign to associate people who express those opinions with foolishness, cowardliness, malice, perversion, and disloyalty. My enemies can go back into the closet and stop spreading their intellectual contagion. They will eventually dwindle in number and influence as they are no longer able to convert others.
Will this work? For a while at least, yes. I know because it worked on my side. But I think it will be more effective when we do it, because aristocracy is more stable and intuitive than bioleninism, and we have all the strong gods on our side (blood and soil, ancestral religion, family, unvarnished truth).
Then we can be friends and grill together in peace. No killing required.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
6d ago
It's been a while since I studied this, but IIRC the occupation of Taiwan was much less draconian than the occupation of Korea or the wartime occupations of the mainland. The Japanese built a lot of infrastructure there and developed the island somewhat. They also engaged in cultural repression, but again, I think it was less strictly enforced than in Korea.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
6d ago
Fair enough, sounds like he has more nuanced opinions than the average zealous nationalist. Good on him.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
6d ago
My gut says he's probably a PRC nationalist, though I say so with low confidence. Taiwanese have a generally warm view of Japan despite having been colonized by the Japanese for decades, so not all Chinese see the Japanese as a nemesis. The idea that "Japan was the ultimate enemy" is probably the strongest most unambiguous message in PRC propaganda, closely followed by "we must never forget the Century of Humiliation at the hands of Western powers" and "the CCP deserves undying gratitude for creating the 新中国 which awakened Chinese racial class consciousness and helped unify 中国人 enough to end their exploitation by evil foreigners." Given that, and given that the "Chinese=Han=Standard Mandarin" as an idea is pushed to promote national unity (no criticism here, every European country did it in the 19th and 20th century), I would take his linguistic theories with a grain of salt. Of course, I don't know the guy, so I'm speculating about his beliefs a lot here.
I'd be curious to hear what he actually believes if you feel you can broach this rather sensitive topic with him.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
7d ago
That's a tricky one. IMHO there's probably nobody on this board who is really qualified to disentangle the nuances there, since AFAIK we do not have any regular born-and-raised-in-the-PRC posters (and even if we did the fact that they post here would make them highly unusual). But my understanding is that zhonghua 中华人 /zhonghuaminzu 中华民族 is used to mean "ethnically Chinese people," and I have heard it used (often as "huaren"华人) in conversations where the speaker was simply a non-PRC Chinese (e.g. from Taiwan) but also by PRC Chinese appealing to the loyalty owed by huaren (or huaqiao 华侨) to the mother country (PRC).
Re disliking Chiang Kai-shek... that's a tough one since AIUI he wasn't a very sympathetic character. I think there are plenty of PRC haters who have little love for Chiang.
I confess to not knowing enough folks from southern China to really grasp their views on Chineseness and compare them with those of northern Chinese (with whom I had much more contact).
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
7d ago
Does your coworker speak Mandarin as his first language? Is he from the northern PRC? Is he a nationalist? Those are important factors to consider when evaluating his opinion. I agree with others that including Korean is highly suspect. It suggests a level of ignorant northern Han chauvinism, the kind that still sees China as the "middle kingdom" (IMO better translated as the "central kingdom") and all other so-called cultures surrounding it as uppity monkeys who were enlightened by the hoary and superior Han Chinese.
To your question, no, they are not the same language at all. A lazy analogy (in that you could nitpick it to death and probably find a more exact example) is that they are like English and, say, Romanian. Both are Indo European, both use the Roman alphabet. They probably have some words in common that could be identified by a linguist. But day to day, they are mutually unintelligible, and the Romanians do things to the Roman alphabet that make English speaker say "wtf," such as "ă" and "ș". They are only part of the same "Chinese" language in that all Romance languages are part of "Romance," and even that is too generous IMO.
I'm not sure that both sides' actions are comparable. The left cancelled people for relatively mundane political opinions and for making edgy jokes. Normies felt like you had to walk on eggshells under ascendant leftism. The right is cancelling people who say really tasteless things about someone who just got murdered in front a large crowd that included his wife and kids. They are also bashing trans people, but I think the vast majority of normies have mixed feelings about trans at best. The right is not going to cancel you if you make an edgy joke about women or blacks or if you express support for Gavin Newsom or whatever. I don't think most normies feel threatened by the right in the same way.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
8d ago
The Gellar device emits a wave called a Gellar field, essentially creating a bubble of real space around the ship.
Scrolling your phone with one hand in the grass.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
8d ago
This is true, but I think the online world has made it much easier and more rewarding to put on that new identity, and it is home to much more powerful and persuasive entities than the IRL world. Before the internet, your new persona might impress your skater or goth friend circle, and they and perhaps the cool kids at school would try to exert pressure on you. You might see an ad on a billboard or a TV commercial. It's much more insidious now.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
9d ago
Oh damn, I just realized they're different guys.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
9d ago
I get where you're coming from, but there is no way to turn down the temperature. The brainwormed extremist 5% on each side have control of the thermostat and are only interested in turning it up. The moderate left and right want the other side's extremists to stop raising the temperature, but they are unwilling to police their own extremists (or if they are, they are denounced as traitors and are sidelined). Neither side is willing to unilaterally disarm for fear of what the other side will do to them (though to be fair, I think the right is more justified in this fear based on the last 10 years). So the temperature will ratchet up until some event releases all the pressure.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
9d ago
For an additional data point, I "knew" this much about him before the shooting. I'm a trad social conservative, centrist on economic issues.
- He was some debate guy who went to colleges and did gotcha stuff
- He was the leader of Turning Point USA, a boomercon "college Republican org" that was about 20 years behind the times in terms of grasping the current political climate
- TP USA was the org that regur published cringe "wow imagine if the situation were reversed" style memes that were widely mocked both on the left and the online right
I'm trying not to get taken in by the St Charlie mythos that is popping up overnight. He seems like a decent family man and I don't think he was "evil," but he was definitely a talking head and political activist, two occupations that many Americans find vaguely distasteful on both sides of the aisle. That doesn't make his assassination any less horrifying or, frankly, radicalizing to me, but I'm resisting turning him into a Lei Feng or Horst Wessel in my mind.
The past few years should have made it clear to anyone that much of the Right's dedication to "free speech" is just as much of a lie as the Left's.
Nah, sorry. A lot of us were principled free speech advocates until it became clear that we were trying to cooperate with a group of committed defectors. Which, hey, "always defect" is a valid strategy, but when your opponent begins to mirror that strategy, you don't get to rewrite history to claim that they were defectors the entire time.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
9d ago
My thoughts on this are very simple. The taboo has been broken. Cancelling is fair game now and always for everyone. I 100% do not doubt that if e.g. Gavin Newsom wins a trifecta in 2028 we will be right back to the bad old days of internet deplatforming and cancelling of right wingers (only turbocharged because so many have come out the woodwork). People who throw around the term "woke right" are idiots who still think that this time, if the right presses the cooperate button, the left will stop smashing defect at every opportunity, contrary to all of recent political history.
Thanks, this is a good reality check. There seems to be a lot of romanticization of the trades happening these days, and I've always been a little skeptical. Sounds like hard but steady work that comes with its own set of tradeoffs. One of my sons is technically inclined but a bit ADHD/on the spectrum. I've been wondering if he would do better as a field tech of some sort rather than as a white collar desk jockey. Personally, my years as an IT dispatch tech were the most fun I ever had in my working years. Long hours and lots of BS, but a great crew, rewarding work (you can see the things you fix), and I loved getting paid to drive around and see different towns and the "backstage" side of many businesses. Sounds like working a trade has some similarities.
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