JTarrou
11hr ago
Virality is probably not correlated with pro-sociality.
So far as people like this are concerned, they're just overoptimizing for one aspect of social status and mining the cognitive dissonance for clicks. And what's the goal? In much the same way that bodybuilding quickly loses any connection to actual sex appeal, this "lookmaxxing" or whatever is another proxy being reified.
Young men will always be looking for ways to hack the social milieu in some way that gives them sexual access to young women. Most of them will be looking for One Simple Trick to avoid having to work too hard at it. Drugs, surgery, PUA classes, whatever. The con artists who sell them these fantasies may have a kernel of truth in their spiel, but only that.
Here's the reality: Becoming an expert at seduction, whatever we're currently calling that, is something many men are capable of but far fewer are willing to put in the work to achieve. Most men are best off building a decent life for themselves and trying to find a monogamous wife/girlfriend, not dating as a method of getting laid.
The fantasy is that you can do something easy to change that. Sexual access is competitive.
JTarrou
12hr ago
Mid-40s now, drank hard for a decade, then what civilians would call "hard" for another. These days I drink relatively little, maybe a case a week during the summer and fall, plus a few binges in there for vacation, fishing, deer camp etc. Substituted weed for the daily use, pain management etc. The friends I've kept have slowed down. Some of the ones that drifted off are still hitting it hard.
Every year at guy's weekend the drinks get gayer and gayer. Zero sugar fruity spritzers and vodka fizzes rather than SoCo and PBR. Every New Years involves finding out that the kids these days can't hang with an old cunt who barely drinks anymore. I'm stuck between that and the real motherfuckers who don't consider beer to be drinking and still take road fifths.
JTarrou
12hr ago
So far as the guns go, laws were enacted in the sixties and seventies known collectively as Saturday Night Special laws. These made much of the existing stock of cheap shitty self-defense guns for poor people illegal to sell. These were most often small pocket automatics in "mouse" calibers like .32 and .25 as well as snubbie revolvers in .32 and .38. Probably into the eighties, these would have been the most common sort of gun stolen or used by criminals.
The eighties and nineties saw law enforcement coalesce first around the .40, then in the early oughts to the 9mm. Bullet technology brought the 9mm on par with the more powerful, larger cartridges and "won" the handgun caliber wars for the current generation. Today you can buy a gun the size and weight of an old five-shot Saturday Night Special .32 which carries twelve rounds of 9mm.
The downside is that the most commonly stolen guns are now better, smaller, lighter, with higher capacity and more powerful rounds than they were forty years ago. But they are still the cheap, shitty guns mostly. For every real Glock used in a crime, there's probably three Tauruses and two Kel Tecs.
JTarrou
1d ago
Charitably and technically, it's any time the function of government doesn't follow the constitutional rule. When the structure of the constitution runs into the practice of power in reality.
Realistically and politically, it's whenever the opposing side does something that can even tendentiously be considered a constitutional issue.
But there are and will be actual crises. The constitution has been partially suspended using military and emergency powers (Lincoln, FDR, etc.). The Supreme Court has decided presidential elections, and so have private political parties. The President has started an awful lot of wars without a declaration of war.
In reality, unconstitutional behavior only becomes a constitutional crisis if another branch of government is fighting you on it, and both sides are relatively evenly matched.
JTarrou
1d ago
If you're thinking of this in terms of race, you gotta be more granular. Look for big families. Races don't have kids, people do. And people come from families with their own norms about kids. All you gotta do is find a big, close family to marry into. Find you a girl with double digit siblings, that will do more for your genetic legacy than trying to read the tea leaves about future social climbing.
My grandfather has nearly eighty direct descendants, I have thirty nieces and nephews and almost two hundred cousins. My family reunions are hundreds and hundreds of people strong. Some of us are criminals, some are religious nutcases, some are poor, more than a few are a bit trashy. But we are fertile. There will be no shortage of my clan in the future.
JTarrou
3d ago
It's quite the gambit to move to a foreign country for a better life and then extoll the virtues of your former society whilst being loudly racist against the majority of your new one. Bold move Cotton.
"Yes, I moved to China for a six-figure salary, but I would never let one of these chinks marry my son or daughter, they're racists!" - op-ed in a chinese newspaper
Of course, it says something about US culture that our "respectable" media organs are gagging to print this sort of slop.
JTarrou
4d ago
The American left has always sided with the opponent. They sided with the Confederacy, with Germany and Russia and Vietnam and Afghanistan etc. etc. etc. The only war in our history they supported "our" side was when they got faked out by the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Had Hitler not invaded Russia, the American left would still be on side with the Nazis and Stalin.
That's what it means to be "left wing". There is no other meaning or definition that explains the political phenomena.
No national identity can include the left, because the left definitionally opposes their own nation.
JTarrou
6d ago
Assuming that one's values are permanent and universal is a common religious belief.
As Ft says, this is conflict/mistake theory and while mistakes are common, the mistakes mostly occur because of conflict that incentivizes them.
Any group of three people or more will have conflict. Any group of people will have conflict with other groups of people. That's why we join groups. The liberal really does believe that he needs every immigrant he can get to break the back of white supremacy, to make sure his group wins. His group is just not "American citizens" in the way the conservative privileges that identity.
Every identity conceals a hidden struggle, a compromise, a division. America is red tribe blue tribe, white and black, male and female. It is only by forging a common identity that supersedes those divisions that people can get on the same side. But that identity in turn needs opposition to form it. We are Americans, not Mexicans or Canadians. The conflict, resolved at a lower level, simply moves up the chain.
The reverse is also true. The removal or delegitimization of one's opponent can lead to reignition of internal struggles. As the Soviet Union failed, the US became more internally divided. Without a simple global opponent to threaten the American identity, our political divisions steadily widen, even as policy difference shrinks.
JTarrou
9d ago
I don't see this as the important part, but I mean all the various minority groups that outperform the white average. Jews are a central example, but east asians, indians, nigerians, arabs etc.
Equivocation between whether jews are the oppressed victims of the holocaust or the perpetrators of a current one is a perennial favorite. It's different things. The left doesn't like right-wing nationalistic jews (Israelis), but they do like western communist jews who never went to Israel to try their stupid ideas. Often the second group are protesting the first. Meanwhile the right understands a nationalistic western-oriented regional ally, but isn't that fond of the "jooos" in NYC and Berkeley. It's just politics, and the requisite belief systems thereof.
JTarrou
10d ago
Because that's the historical dispensation of the modern left. There is a conservation of tribalism, people just move the groups around and emphasize identities to fit the current fashion. There is the exact same tension in the discussion of "white people's" wealth and the disparities between average whites and asians, jews, indians etc. All the structural advantages that supposedly keep the black man down in favor of the white man wind up disproportionately benefitting nonwhite or marginally white groups?
It's all just a conspiracy theory, essentially.
When faced with inequality of criminality, condemn "men" and guns. But not the most violent subset of men, and definitely don't enforce the current firearm laws harshly against that group specifically. Then, complain about different men and different guns to the ones causing the problem.
When faced with inequality of income, condemn whites and men. But not the most disproportionately wealthy groups which are no white supremacist's idea of a good time. Also no one can define "men".
It's all just a grand unified theory of white male christian hatred that explains all differential outcomes for everyone else, but only when the comparison is negative. It shifts blame from the political ingroup to the outgroup.
All this despite the obvious logical problems and the messiness of all the categories involved. This is the theology that holds the modern left together, the unified hatred of the modern global economy ("capitalism"), Realpolitik, Western civilization broadly, white people specifically, and of course men.
The progressive stack is always topped by whatever is fashionably considered the biggest opponent of these general categories. Global Warming, No Kings, Free Palestine, Pussy hats, BLM, NAFTA, MeToo, Nuclear Power, the Soviet Union, Iran etc.
The right has all the same things in places, but due to the class gap it's more drunk tradesmen and internet edgelords than senators and ivy league college presidents.
JTarrou
12d ago
Not sure if this was intended for me, but I'll take a crack.
Male advantages increase as the sport more closely resembles what sports aspire to replace. In soccer? Female skill and conditioning could overmatch untrained males. Grappling? Not nearly as much. MMA? Even less.
The closer you get to actual combat, the premium on male advantages rise and compound. Very athletic women average ~150lb. The average adult male is 200. On average, a top female athlete is giving up fifty pounds to the untrained joe.
JTarrou
12d ago
No women's team in any sport has ever defeated a U-15 boys team at anything except whinging about not getting paid enough for that level of play. The equality comparison must be lowered. Shall we compromise on thirteen?
What percentage of thirteen-year-old boys do you think the average untrained adult male could whip in a fight?
JTarrou
12d ago
Do you mean to tell me if the woman trains for a couple years, and is healthy / responsive to training, she wouldn't be stronger than the majority of men that don't train, or are just fooling around in the gym / not really progressively overloading?
Yes. Same thing for fighting.
The best female athletes in the world across a variety of sports roughly equal the athletic performance of ten to twelve year old boys. That's the general physical capability of extreme female athletes.
JTarrou
13d ago
What insightful commentary. Do go on.
Trump killed a civilization with a tweet. Hysterical. Chuck Norris jokes as political analysis.
JTarrou
13d ago
The final resting place of TDS: acceptance that it was just aesthetic snobbery all along. The greatest political actor in the US since FDR, vanquished both parties, slew the Bush and the Clinton dynasties, co-opted the Kennedies, rewrote the political playbook and realigned the party system, the international treaty system and US policies more generally. One day they'll probably teach this little banger in 300-level poly-sci classes, in the same chapter as the Fireside Chats.
So gauche!
JTarrou
18d ago
Let me tell the skeleton of a similar story about a good friend of mine. He's a bright guy, pharmacist by trade, musically inclined. Got hooked up with a real psycho. Not "omg my ex is craaaazy", real-deal double digit involuntary commitments, full bore diagnosed and sentenced bipolar. She's cute but not that cute, a solid 6 or 7 on a good day, kinda mousy. The kind of girl who ruins every event she attends by having a very public meltdown, taking bizarre offense to everyone and everything, and clinging to my buddy like he's the only white man and they're on safari.
Nobody liked this bitch, not his friends, not his family, not one single person in his life, and we told him. Luckily he dumped her after a couple months. We threw him a party on the theme of "ding dong, the witch is dead". We got him set up with new dates. They were back together in a month. They would break up and get back together a dozen or so times over the next five years. They had a kid, a lawsuit over custody and child support. Then they got back together, had another kid, got married. Then they separated, got back together, lasted a few more years before getting divorced and what does my genius friend do?
Knocks her up one more time after the divorce was filed.
Now he has to pay her mortgage and see this woman twice a week for the next twelve years, eighteen from when they split.
You can try to suss some deep social thing from this, but my guy had options. He had warnings, blatant and flashing. He was sane and smart enough to understand, he wasn't tricked or coerced. He had other women interested. Some part of her crazy just matched up right with his crazy and he couldn't stop going back to her. He had to be getting something out of it, I figure.
People are bad at relationships, and a lot of us are lying to ourselves about what we actually want and are actually willing to tolerate. I don't think that's an indictment of any higher organization than the people inside the relationship. That said, I think our social models of lifelong partnerships are pretty stunted in popular culture.
JTarrou
24d ago
No, but Devereaux is a long time Trump doomer.
He might even be right this time, but it would only be by chance.
JTarrou
24d ago
Devereaux is an interesting thinker on ancient history. On modern military matters, he's useless. Where Trump is involved, actively anti-intelligent. Put him with Dan Carlin, if you're looking for another historian eaten by the TDS.
Personally, I can't make heads nor tails of the Iran operation, and I doubt anyone else is doing much better. We'll find out in a year or ten whether it was a success.
JTarrou
24d ago
Israel is ~20% muslim arab palestinian, with full civil rights, representation in the Knesset and socioeconomic outcomes above average.
What you're calling an "ethnostate" is only because palestinians and jews are the same ethnicity.
What you're calling "apartheid" is the former residents of Jordanian and Egyptian occupied territory, which were never given citizenship nor a homeland by their former overlords either. And because Israel won't resettle an armed and hostile people who live beyond its borders within its borders, you call it apartheid. Every nation on earth that isn't resettling terrorist groups inside their country is an "apartheid state" by this measure.
JTarrou
27d ago
I saw a tweet to the effect of:
"I bought this before I knew he was a Nazi" bumper sticker on
1: A tesla - shitlib
2: A Ford - troll
3: A Volkswagen - legend
JTarrou
27d ago
1: Take 245 million and live like John MacAfee
2: Pay five hundred academics ten grand each to say that all my pronouncements are True Marxism.
JTarrou
29d ago
"Lying to investigators" is how the FBI, which to this day refuses to record interviews, frames people directly. You can't defend yourself, it's your word against the interviewer, who doesn't even write down notes as he goes, but writes it all down a few days after the interview, from "memory". They can literally write anything they want, and there is no recourse. Congratulations on your confession to 9/11.
JTarrou
1mo ago
There may be a doctor shortage, but there is no shortage of medical knowledge. All you are seeing is the artificial scarcity of the medical cartel, which restricts the credentialing institutions to enforce a shortage, increasing wages for credentialed doctors. This, however, is a dying model. My three-step solution:
1: Reducing the time, cost and eliminating the corrupt bottleneck of medical school. Break the AMA, streamline and prune the academic curricula, and Bob's your uncle.
2: AI. Current chatbots are probably medically superior in diagnosis to the average doctor available to the average american. This will only improve. The vast majority of doctor visits could probably be a pic uploaded to an app on your phone, with results in minutes and your prescription auto-ordered.
3: Crush the inevitable revolt of the doctors and all their stakeholders.
The whole secret of fishing is where and when.
If there are no suitable mates where you are fishing, try a different hole.
Also, perhaps think long and hard about what you mean by "interesting".
Long ago, I thought interesting women were women who were interested in the same things I was interested in. Which meant all the interesting girls were lesbians.
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