Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
6hr ago
Something that's funny is that, when you spend a long time in a place like this, you start to get a pretty decent understanding of the psychology of various poaster types. For a lot of people, the arguments are just little props they use to get to the emotion they want to express. Someone wants to find reasons to say "this means civil war!" because he wants to be incandescently angry. Someone wants to write a 2000-word explanation of the Female Mind so that he can feel he understands the species. The anti-victimhood/Elite Human Capital people really wear it on their sleeves, though. "You're a loser, I'm a doer" (as far as I can tell, MKC lives a completely normal and unremarkable life in a completely normal and unremarkable place - not that I'm sneering at raising a family, that's a noble thing, but wildly out of step with some Manichean division of the world into "builders" and "whiners"). That's it, that's the whole post, everything else is a spandrel.
Bartender_Venator
9hr ago
I feel like I see this kind if application of rules-lawyering in a lot of inappropriate contexts, such as interpersonal relationships.
I find it irritating and honestly sometimes pathetic on the internet (it's almost always not intended, just the rationalist personality style, but it often comes across as "I'm afraid to debate as a debate, so I want to set the exact frame of the argument exactly where my evidence is strongest, declare the win condition which is easiest for me to achieve, then put every burden of proof I can on you, and declare victory if I can claim I keep the 10% of my argument I choose as my win condition"). Note that this is also how ratbetting works, frame control is often much more important than the substance of the bet. It doesn't help that I grew up around lawyers who tended to see that adversarial mode as implicitly a lesser form of lawyering compared to understanding relationships, pragmatics, iterated games, etc. In comparison, trying to "win" a conversation is a little gauche.
What I do understand is that a full debate, where both sides are fully allowed to contest the frame, takes a lot more work on the internet. You have to write instead of speaking, you have to deal with the inherent difficulty of conveying full meaning via posts, and you lack a direct relationship to your audience/interlocutor. Still, people here should recognize the difference between the two, that one is a lower mode than the other, and that winning or losing a rules-lawyering debate really doesn't matter very much unless the specific question of fact is seriously prior-shifting, which it very rarely is.
Bartender_Venator
19hr ago
Yes, ymeskhout was very valuable in keeping people honest, even if he didn't win every point he made (something to be valued on this forum). His, uh, changes of emotional valence and stability came later. Agreed entirely on gattsuru, he's one of the true motteposters to whom we are the comments section.
Bartender_Venator
20hr ago
they were both shut down early because adherence was so low it wasn't even ethical to continue it.
Adherence rates to ARVs once AIDS has hit a point that ARVs are imminently lifesaving are low enough to be one of the biggest complaints you'll hear from doctors in Africa. I know someone - a lovely and thoughtful woman - who's nearly died twice because she wanted to stop taking her meds, because taking them was admitting to having the disease. Africa is just a very weird place.
Bartender_Venator
20hr ago
I assume that Iconochasm is making some kind of esoteric point, because gattsuru is one of the last people here one could reasonably accuse of tribal blindness.
Bartender_Venator
23hr ago
That sounds like a totally unrealistic claim to me. Can you imagine this all-star lineup failing to deliver? They had important bipartisan Senators, Senators from the Bridge to Nowhere State and the Bakersfield-to-Fresno State, on board. They even had Kellyanne Conway to keep Trump happy. To me, this looks like a focused group practiced in relentless goal-driven executing, and they would have delivered us a wonderful celebration of patriotism and fireworks, maybe even multiple fireworks, up to a whole box of fireworks - look, these are busy people...
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I think many tech higher-ups either don't believe or don't want to believe that, because they don't see it themselves (or they're not articulate/nuanced enough to say they want to close the fraud and keep the elite). The reason half these guys went rightwards is that they started believing their lying eyes, and their eyes are giving them very strong data about the immigrant engineers high up in their businesses/portcos. I agree that this state of affairs is utterly insane, but if you want to convince them you will have to explain how unrepresentative their personal experience is - for Elon, I'd just call it fraud, he likes that.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Here's one way to think about it: public sentiment on, say, Indian immigrants to the US is definitely affected positively by the heavy selection we put on their immigration. Now imagine the filters required to be a direct report to Elon. If Elon thinks that H1b/O1 tech workers are incredible at their jobs, he's probably inferring accurately from those he interacts with.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
I'm not sure I'd believe it if I hadn't guided multiple Euro friends around and watched them react in the exact same way. "I vould like to see ze Val-Mart and ze Buck-ees!"
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I recommend popping through Milroy's when you're down in London, if you want advice for future distillery trips. May seem ridiculous to send someone down from Scotland to London for scotch, but those guys really are some of the best in the business. And right in Soho so easy to get out for proper pints after.
May have already recommended this to you before, but Sir John Soane's museum in London is a great alternative to the big ones if you want a very quick, very quirky, very cool little museum.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
There's really no need whatsover for Gladiator to have the plot thread of restoring the Republic; it's not as if Maximus doesn't have more than enough motivation to hate Commodus otherwise.
Historically accurate ancient or medieval movie, accurate not only in architecture, clothing, weapons and gear, but in beliefs, attitudes and behavior of characters, would be unwatchable and utterly repellent to normie public. Seeing hero of the story looting and pillaging the countryside, sacking towns, massacring POW's and burning heretics alive with clear conscience will be too much for modern audience.
I find this hard to square with the success of Game of Thrones, whose many departures from real history pretty much always land on the "darker and edgier" side rather than sanitizing. I guess the secret ingredient is tits?
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
It's the same shit as Gladiator. You can half-portray the past as it actually was, but only if it's a road-not-taken alternate history where the hero wishes he could turn the world into 1990s America. Don't expect too much from any movie that can get enough Hollywood money to get made - HBO's Rome is the freakish aberration. I'm not really sure where Kant fits in here. Kant has no place for the fallibility of human phronesis in his ethics, and nor does his deontology actually care about the truth per se, as opposed to telling the truth being one incarnation of the Categorial Imperative.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Good thing it's a different branch that has arbitrary power to define what the words in the constitution mean. Law of the conservation of sovereignty, ya know.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
I think it's because of the length of tournaments. Soccer has huge upset potential in single games, we've seen that already at the World Cup, but that variance gets evened out over the course of a campaign. Winning a competitive domestic league is a grueling slog, even though you do occasionally see a Leicester or an invincible Leverkusen (I'd dispute "most predictable sport", given some of the surprises we've seen, but maybe you have stats I don't). A knockout tournament also goes through a lot of rounds, including two-legged ties where you need to keep a lead across both matches and potentially extra time.
It's also worth noting that, for fans of most teams, the ones that aren't at the top of the money league, it's not really about the trophy, because seeing a trophy is a once-in-a-lifetime experience - it's about getting into Europe or avoiding relegation, or, for national teams, making it to the World Cup and getting into the knockouts.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
My mantra is always "repeated unstructured interaction". Activities are good at building shallow relationships, but it's when you're just hanging out and talking about stuff (alcohol helps) that you build the friendship.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
They debate when they are incapable of presence [sober thought] but reserve their decision for a time when they cannot well make a mistake.
This is also not an uncommon trope for Greeks/Romans discussing barbarians. I believe Herodotus says something similar of the Persians. Really, it's a pretty common thing across cultures, to discuss real talk over drinks and then finalize the next day, a surprising number of business deals get settled like that (and a lot more were back in the Mad Men days).
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
Make it like executives' stocks, they have to bet a consistent amount on themselves and can only change their per-game bet during during specific periods.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
In one of the arrest videos you can see this woman reach into the pool and pull against something with some force, twice, before getting her phone to take a picture of whatever she's doing, before she looks up and sees the plainclothes park cop standing above her taking a picture for evidence. Some people have also posted photos of chunks they've torn off. Vandalism is definitely happening, who knows whether that's the main cause or just a contributing factor, my priors are indubitably right and your priors are wrong and evil etc.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
I still have 74% of the city of Baltimore to run.
Best do that while you still run real fast.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
The other thing to note is that fixing one's posture and particularly upper-body muscle tightness (traps, chest will make your shoulders noticeably wider. Also, look into Ibutamoren/MK-677. It won't get you the huge results you want but it improves GH secretion in a natural pattern. With regard to athletic performance, in life you have to work with where you are - a lot of amateur athletes learn to live with the limitations imposed by their past injuries, they just came from a different origin than yours.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
lol that was the other clip I debated linking.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
Apologies for being unclear - standing a terrible candidate, then realizing it and trying to hide them, was what I meant by a disaster-class that might be a one-off (because it doesn't generalize to races with better candidates). I can't speak to the mechanics of the campaign.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
I agree with your critique of the OP, good to have the Manchester context in there. I would strongly caveat the Makersfield point: besides Burnham being a good campaigner and having the party apparatus focused on it, voters just really really like having the PM be their MP. Wouldn't you like it if your House rep was the President? Reform also ran a disaster-class of a campaign (possibly a sign of the future, possibly a one-off).
Re: a working Burnhamism, I think the London class are a problem for him in a different way than pure opposition. A working Burnhamism would be purely pragmatic, but the London types are already surrounding him with a "brain trust" that will try to make some ideology out of it, and that ideology will always happen to favour the status quo and the QUANGO/NGO/Civil Service/media blob who provide the "brains". I doubt that Burnham has the ability to bulldoze through court politics like that.
Andy Burnham is 100% a "vibes" politician, and it's worked well for him. He's very popular as the Mayor of Manchester, heading up a flagship bipartisan project (devolution to the North), and his absence from Westminster has left him untainted by both the bitterness of internal feuding and the failure of Starmer's government. He hearkens back to an older Labour that working-class voters felt cared about them. It's nostalgic anti-Thatcherism, but with a sense that if you took him round yer nan's for a cuppa she'd like him. "What a nice lad!" I wouldn't underestimate how sticky this could be with the elderly voters who dominate UK politics. If he can avoid substantive disasters like the one that sank Truss, he's Labour's best candidate to fight Reform. "Aw listen luv, it was always that Thatcher, it's like we're back in the old days, Nigel wants to bring 'er back 'e does..."
He does have a basic problem with governing, though. Well, two. The only critically important issues in British politics are the economy and immigration (healthcare and housing being downstream of economics). Burnham wants to be, and sells himself as, different from Starmer on economics. Lots of soft-soap pieces in the New Statesman about him bringing back "communalism". But British economic policy is hitting the hard constraints of the bond markets. Burnham's voters and MPs won't accept anything less than more spending, he's committed to following Starmer's fiscal rules limiting borrowing - rating agencies are saying things which, translated from econspeak, are serious warnings not to break those rules - and there's just not much fiscal room to squeeze the rich without hitting boomer homeowners and thereby committing electoral suicide. Many ways this can go wrong and few ways it can go right. On immigration, I'm sure Burnham is a true believer, but so was Starmer, and organized mobs burning down buildings tends to scare the hell out of politicians. I actually suspect he's more likely to keep tacking softly to the right on immigration, to avoid being on the unpopular side of both issues and to give himself breathing room on economic policy.
This comes to a broader, more speculative point: the UK (not just the YooKay) has become structurally ungovernable. In order to get elected, you have to match the other party's wildly unrealistic promises. When you get elected, you can't deliver, because your room to carry on down the safe path of procrastination is running out, there's no room to give the voters what you promised, and any path that would deliver real growth in the long run carries electorally unacceptable short-term pain (maybe an advantage of a Presidential system which at least gives you two years to act without an immediate leadership challenge). As 2010's outgoing chief secretary to the Treasury wrote to his successor, "Dear chief secretary, I’m afraid to tell you there’s no money left." In taking the Blairite road, where perception management is the chief tool of government, and all that matters is the next news cycle, for 29 years, the UK is coming to the end of that road. We're seeing the harbingers: every PM since Cameron's followed the same trajectory, where they get elected, popularity bump, polls crash faster than a shitcoin. I see no way out except slamming into whatever reckoning is at the end of it.
Andy Burnham: “I want to rejoin. I hope in my lifetime, I want to rejoin the European Union. I believe in the unions of all kinds. The union of the UK. The EU benefitted this country. Trade unions. People prosper more when they’re part of unions.”
That is absolutely hilarious. The Thick of It is a documentary, proven again.
It really depends, irl. I think Scott’s right, it’s all barber pole. If you are at a status level where, by sympathizing with the losers, you could be mistaken for a loser, people will use that to shut you down. Whereas if everyone knows you have a tinder harem, you can sympathize with shut-in incels; if everyone knows you’re fuck-you rich you can sympathize with the rednecks and rust belters; if everybody knows you’re a rarified academic you can sympathize with ghetto criminals. The thing about status games is that there’s always a bigger fish. On the Internet, there’s no obvious social status granted to a an anon poster (though people can make a play for it, and succeed or fail, as you can see in the contrasting examples of Cim and Count). This means that the moves used to shut down the kinds of discussion you’re talking about are actually more effective on the internet than irl, because online someone can always just accuse you of being a loser, and trying to disprove that puts you on the defensive and thus automatically lowers your status.
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