Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
7hr ago
I think there's also the issue that intra-maga disputes are illegible to anti-maga people, intra-right disputes are illegible to anti-right people, intra-non-left disputes are often illegible to progressives, etc. There's some equivalence for the right looking left, but mostly in bad faith on the part of right-wingers, because we get the left-wing stuff megaphoned into our brains by the prevailing culture whereas the right is, in Scott's words, "dark matter". So themotte looks to some like a place of spirited debate over important questions and to others like an echo chamber of right-wing circlejerk. I happen to be of the former view, but opinions naturally vary.
Bartender_Venator
7hr ago
Sometimes the contrarian opinion is just bad, as your suggestion is. What is interesting is the struggle to find what the actual contrarian opinion is in the post-2024 world (it's not "da joos", either).
Bartender_Venator
14hr ago
I have no opinion on the merits of the case (though I also have no faith whatsoever that any branch of government respects Congress these days...). Just making a general point.
Bartender_Venator
14hr ago
You really shouldn't underestimate how socially petty people in politics can be. Of course, one also shouldn't forget that goes for plenty of people on your side, whatever side that is.
Bartender_Venator
14hr ago
With regard to the darknet, I would recommend - if it becomes an option of interest to SWIY at some point - going on Dread (darknet reddit) and browsing/lurking to figure out how things work for people living in the UK. The advice on there is generally good, but you have a ton of privacy rights in the US that I don't know if the UK has (e.g. the government can't open your mail willy-nilly). But my understanding is that DNMs are a significantly bigger phenomenon in the UK than the US adjusting for country size.
Bartender_Venator
15hr ago
I suspect somewhat that the experienced effects of psychedelics are less important for long-term mood changes than they look. Or, at least, that it's actually more productive to hang out with friends or watch a good movie than it is to strive after "insights" during a trip. Medical grounds are probably the easiest way to get ketamine, but there's always TOR.
Bartender_Venator
15hr ago
It may also be different in the UK. I have no idea, but every independent UK wine shop I've wandered into has clearly been discerning and hard-nosed.
Bartender_Venator
15hr ago
I learned this as a rule-of-thumb from the guys whose job at Stanford is to study the wine business, so I trust them. The way I would put it:
- Under 10GBP/USD, it will be awful. You cannot sell drinkable wine in the first world at that price.
- 10-20, it's not bad, but there are noticeable quality sacrifices that you can see in that spectrum.
- 20 was the anchor for the Stanford guys in part because that's what Duckhorn's Decoy was priced at at the time (now it's $25 on the coasts, still $20ish outside of big cities), and Decoy was their example of the perfect $20 bottle you can get anywhere in the States.
- 20-100 everything is marketing. Price is a signal, sure, but you can find wines in the low 20s that are better than wines in the 80s, and the difference is marketing/distribution. Also country of origin - imo France has the worst price:quality ratio, because everyone knows that French wine is Fancy, and South Africa has the best because ain't nobody thinking South Africa is Fancy.
- Above 100 you get into special stuff you just can't make for a lower price point. Some wines that are just bullshit marketing, of course, but for the most part there's going to be something special and expensive like long aging or a notable vineyard. Personally, I'm not sure I've been bitten by the wine bug that badly.
Personally, I would envy the super-rich more if they were doing cool shit with that money. I certainly wouldn't settle for some big houses and a lot of servants.
Bartender_Venator
17hr ago
I'm much more optimistic, in that I believe that much of the aspects of ourselves we consider to be distinctly human are actually necessary qualities of intelligence, and there will be many ways that even a superintelligence is human or hyper-human. And I would also rather see humanity gone and replaced by an able and energetic intelligence than eternally humiliated in something like a WALL-E future.
On the actual point of the conversation, SWIM would recommend to SWIY to be sure to source high-quality ketamine and start with small doses. If SWIY cuts out a line that looks like what you see in the movies he's going straight into the Interstellar black hole, that's what usually ruins ketamine for people. Put a nature documentary, some youtube drone footage of Iceland/Cape Town/Japan, or a cyberpunk anime on TV.
Bartender_Venator
17hr ago
I mean, TLP would diagnose this sense of change-as-death to be narcissism (to be fair, he diagnoses everything as narcissism). Personally, I'd love to be able to believe in Christianity - I find a lot of religion fairly silly and completely unfounded, but I also find modern scientistic materialism fairly silly and almost completely unfounded - but if the faith ain't there it ain't there.
Bartender_Venator
17hr ago
Yeah I mean the true super-rich, the kind of people who have too many servants to get attached to individuals. Money's a bit like wine, in that it matters if your bottle of wine is below $20 or above $100, but in between it's pretty much the same.
Bartender_Venator
19hr ago
In predictive processing terms: psychedelics relax your priors, which helps unstick the stuck ones (like depression).
The interesting thing about psychedelics is that you can titrate this somewhat, in ways that change it qualitatively as well as quantitatively. LSD/Psilocybin is a sledgehammer. Ketamine (in recreational doses, administered nasally, I have no idea about IV and no interest in trying) is more like pushing the clutch out on a manual car. "You" are still there, and can still contemplate things rationally, but you're separated from the world in a way that lets you be, for want of a better phrase, creatively objective.
The unfortunate side effect, for me, is that I spend a good deal of time on most ketamine trips thinking about how Nick Land was right about everything.
Bartender_Venator
19hr ago
This is why my only streaming service is the Criterion Channel. The only advantage of streaming over piracy is convenience, so might as well choose your convenience to funnel you towards good movies rather than bad ones.
Bartender_Venator
20hr ago
Returning to an organized religion is definitely the best outcome out of that possibility set. Oh, you mean I can just download a helpful and prosocial memeplex into my brain and all I have to do is accept Jesus Christ into my heart? Give me the pill - hell, give me two!
Bartender_Venator
20hr ago
My brother pointed this out to me about myself once, and it was one of the most cutting (unintentional) insults I've ever received.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
There are three classes of this: mean to the help (nouveau riche trash), explicitly nice to the help (lesser gentry), and "why would you be mean to the furniture?" (true money).
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
We had a kid from a Muslim family pledge our frat a year or two before I joined. He dropped acid with his pledge class, met Allah, dropped out of pledging, and every so often he'd show up at our parties with a big smile holding a can of Lacroix.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
He claims to have been "radicalized" during the Revolutions podcast researching the Haitian revolution, though I suspect it was a long slow metamorphosis into being a boomerlib (the sections of the Revolutions pod on Indians and slavery in the American Revolution are also extremely cringe). His tweets today are something about how there's no ethical consumption under capitalism but it's particularly unjustifiable to be a Yankees fan, and then as you scroll down it's the worst redditshit you can imagine ("You'll be shocked to learn the guy who popped up to defend Pete Rose's honor and scold me for being insensitive spends his time on twitter harassing transwomen and spewing invective against Muslims").
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Huh, I read it as an ebook and it flashed by. Books feel a lot shorter on Kindle, I guess.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Where exactly is here and what bars/gyms/coffeeshops do the pink swastika girls go to there?
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
A couple of people have brought this up, but there is no reasonable way to make the 1000+ page books listed fit in under 1000 pages, nor to blow up the smaller books to fit that size. Imagine a 999-page
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
All scores are compared to the 50-69 age bracket, even if you don't put in an age. I believe the test itself is a bit older than the usual internet quiz, since it's from Open Psychometrics.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
I completely whiffed on that bit, probably should be in slightly more visible text.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Could be worse, could be Mike Duncan.
Oh man, I didn't realize you added cannabis. I generally recommend against mixing it with psychedelics. I had the most sublime trip of my life after smoking weed late in an LSD comedown, watched the entire sunset transform into a knight falling in battle and rising as a phoenix, wingtip to wingtip across the horizon, and I've also had to sit for several guys who thought it would be a smart idea to rip their weed vape on a trip and then spent the next couple hours convinced they were about to die. For the audience: weed is an incredibly strong intensifier for psychedelics. Don't do it unless you are coming in with perfect vibes, and never mix it with ketamine or 2CB.
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