KingOfTheBailey
No bio...
User ID: 1089
KingOfTheBailey
8mo ago
I disagree that poly is not victimless. I briefly dated a poly girl, and I hated being put in the double-bind of either not pursuing other women or having to have "the poly/ENM conversation" with them, and the latter made me feel like I was leaking bad memes into the groundwater. Missed out on a possible relationship with a lovely mainstream girl that way because my ethics wouldn't allow me to hook up under those circumstances. I've said this before, but a world where poly is more normalized is a world where it's more acceptable to proposition other people's partners because "they might be poly, you never know these days, she can just say no". And then you have a world where the baseline temptation to cheat is raised, making monogamous life harder for those that want it.
KingOfTheBailey
8mo ago
Was the government supposed to tell gay men to stop having sex?
If you take the COVID response as yardstick, which many on the left still endorse, then the answer should be unequivocally "yes". While not the same as HIV/AIDS, I found the contrast between the "stay indoors/wear a mask/etc" response to COVID and the soft-touch response to monkeypox incredibly jarring. After large parts of the country were imprisoned in their own homes and dissent suppressed in response to a novel disease, the message to the gay community dealing with its own novel disease was more like "please consider at least getting the names of the men you have unprotected sex with, so that we can actually attempt some contact tracing". I wish I'd saved some tweets from that era, which feels like another lifetime ago, but my browser history is being uncooperative.
That said, it all seems to have died down, so maybe the monkeypox response worked, which is more than can be said for the COVID response. And perhaps that soft response was necessary to get enough gay men to come forward and get vaccinated, which cut off the transmission chains.
KingOfTheBailey
8mo ago
Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?
Almost certainly, in the same way that they capital-D deaf community can be prickly about things like cochlear implants.
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
Part of it is that guy's page is sexually very loud and screams "you could have a sex life like this!" to get people struggling with OLD to fix their shit.
Unfortunately, it appears to have tempted you into thinking "I could have a sex life like this!"
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
Your comment was a big part of it starting, yeah.
I'm very sorry.
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
He is full of confidence that he has but to seek and he will find. And he feels that way (which isn't a bad way to feel, of course) because he is puffed up with sexual confidence. Nevermind that he gained this confidence because he has a stable, supportive relationship.
Bang-on. When I was younger and stupider, and closer to OP's age, I'd stumble into relationships that felt so easy and natural. And then I'd expect to be able to do that all the time, and the grass beyond the fence would start looking pretty damn green. Of course it wouldn't work like that, and I spent a lot of time single.
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
desire to try and have casual sex.
I felt similar feelings digging up the Tinder advice pages for whoever it was a couple of weeks back. I'm not as far along these roads as you (either relationship length or intensity of the casual-sex-desire), but I definitely felt it. I sometimes also feel it social dancing: we go out together and have a great time, but of course we dance with other partners, and I feel it dancing with pretty young women who really know how to move and to respond to my lead.
In my case I've finally found someone that I could see things going long with, after years of short-term relationships with (largely) decent women that just didn't work out, a whole lot of heartbreak on the apps, and years of lonely posts to various advice threads across the internet and manosphere. We've been together for a much shorter time than you and Syreen, and while we haven't yet had the exclusivity conversation, it looks pretty close and I find myself excited when I think of her.
Because we haven't had the exclusivity conversation, I'm in this weird position where I have the apps installed, but I don't need to interact with them. I haven't touched Tinder or Bumble for nearly a couple of months, despite them sending increasingly desperate notifications and promotions trying to lure me back. And on Hinge, while I haven't sent a single like, I sometimes open Hinge's "standouts" page and find myself so uninspired. Another one who likes wine and picnics with her dog? Be still, my beating heart! This is the best that the algorithms can find for me?
The grass is nowhere near as green as you think, unless you're a rare specimen. And you're probably not. Pursue novelty within the relationship, or direct that sexual energy into something else which isn't going to blow up one of the best things to have happened to you. Because you're a man, which means you're meant to have a layer of reason and virtue on top of the bag of random impulses.
Another thing to consider, if the anecdote and admonition doesn't help: are you scared of the relationship going well and leading, nearly inevitably, towards the "end state" of marriage? As others have said, it is not a static state, but meant to be a state where new kinds of growth become possible. Kids, yes, but also that you've taken all this bullshit off the table and committed fully to each other.
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
Enshittification originally meant when a platform linking two sides of a market (e.g., Uber) screws over both sides as it desperately tries to become profitable.
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
Saw this link going around Twitter/X:
https://theccf.ca/emergencies-act-use-unconstitutional/
OTTAWA: The Canadian Constitution Foundation (the “CCF”) is thrilled that Justice Mosley of the Federal Court of Canada has accepted the CCF’s arguments that the invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the Freedom Convoy protests was unreasonable and violated the Charter rights to expression and security against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The government has indicated that it will appeal, so this isn't final. Regardless: what are the actual effects of such a finding? Will the government have to pay any penalty? Can people whose bank accounts were frozen sue the government? Will it cause a significant loss of political capital for Trudeau and his government? Or is it just a slap on the wrist with no real consequences?
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
game theory reasons
Until you consider the iterated game, and realize that you're not going to be invited back if you order obnoxiously expensive meals and drinks.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Here is an extremely thorough guide that is very sex-focused, possibly more than you might want. But having some sexuality in your profiles seems like a good idea, and you can dial it up/down depending on what sort of women you're looking for. The guide's got 2023 edits in it so hopefully it's still relevant: https://killyourinnerloser.com/tinder-guide/
I found the messaging section quite useful - there are scripts to start off with where each message progresses towards a number and from there to a date.
It's unclear to me whether the paid features mark you as a "sucker" and the apps' algorithms try to keep you on the hook, or whether they work as advertised. Probably a bit of both. I know that if I don't open the apps for a few weeks Tinder starts offering premium subscriptions at a discount. Pretty sure that running out the daily swipe/like limits applies an Elo penalty if you do it too often.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Isn't this just a rephrasing of Merited Impossibility?
Hm, maybe it is. I initially thought Merited Impossibility was more about noticing.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
That's the motte. The bailey is that it's one side of a strategic asymmetric rule similar to Dreher's law of merited impossibility ("that's not happening and it's good that it is"). Not a big deal if you comply, but a massive deal if you push back. @WhiningCoil had a great post about it in the why-is-it-always-vidya arena, talking about game mods which remove current-year stuff:
... all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.
I haven't seen a pithy summary of this strategy. It doesn't really fit under кто кого. Maybe "it's not a big deal except that it is"?
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Why should society's failure to reify the pretenses it currently has about teenagers, or parents failing to parent, ever be my fucking problem?
It seems self-evident to me that a citizen should have an interest in the direction of the society in which he lives. As part of that, a citizen should also be interested in the way future adult citizens are likely to turn out.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
I think of it as conservatives erecting boundaries so that people can be as free as possible within them. In this case, wanting kids to wander the kid internet doing kid stuff and not being able to access porn.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
But there’s a also a finding-religion confound in my case.
Would you mind writing more about this, when you have a chance? Religiosity among Motteposters is very interesting to me, as I've been wandering a bit down that path.
KingOfTheBailey
11mo ago
I would've thought that Nigeria's population would be under-reported: it seems that everyone I've ever met has some sort of connection to the royal family.
KingOfTheBailey
11mo ago
I believe that men who only go to pull do give off a vibe, yes. Putting in the effort to git gud stops you from giving off this vibe. I also believed that I wouldn't enjoy partner dancing, but it's brought me a lot of fun and pretty much all of my relationships over the years.
KingOfTheBailey
11mo ago
I don't have any good examples. Graham and Determinate Systems seem to be trying to do this with their custom Nix installer, FlakeHub, etc. If they succeed in making a better user experience, then the default Nix experience becomes de facto controlled by a corporate entity instead of the Nix project and Foundation.
Declaring an explicitly antiwoke project will not work: it provokes a reaction and gets taken down before it becomes entrenched, and attracts witches more than contributors. Someone wanting to do something like this would hide his power level, build things that people depended upon, and make damn sure those projects don't get subverted, and work towards positions of community power and influence. I don't know how you defend against hostile forks.
KingOfTheBailey
11mo ago
The steak is completely immaterial. They wanted a pretext and anything would do. If you'd set no header image and left it as a white background, they'd still find a way to get mad about it. Picking the fight alone is asking to be squashed - a better play would be to build useful parallel infrastructure and a network of supporters, then defend it from being taken over in a plausibly-deniable way (like how some establishments have dress codes because that's a legal proxy for excluding the riff-raff they want to keep out).
KingOfTheBailey
11mo ago
Not just GoF research. After three years of misery caused by people playing God just to publish marginally more interesting papers than their peers, we now have a bunch of people racing to create a digital God, with who-knows-what outcome.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
At some point in the process, before you start talking numbers, I recommend (re-)reading Patrick McKenzie's guide to salary negotiation.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
That's a bit of an over-simplification, isn't it? Mercenaries have been a thing all through history, but it's an economic zone isn't going to inspire a volunteer army.
Something like that, because it shows that the correct thoughts were in people's heads and yet they still managed to get COVID so wrong.
More options
Context Copy link