MaximumCuddles
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User ID: 58
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
I routinely ignore stupid laws as a matter of principle, however it must be said the penalty and fine for breaking that particular law can be pretty steep.
As to your other point, in our atomized age social status and the benefits they infer aren’t necessarily given by your immediate neighbors, family and friends. You’ll be happy to have their love and respect on your deathbed but increasingly in order to actually achieve any sort of real success you have to be plugged into a larger scene which is chock full of the fake and gay bullshit that I routinely complain about. That stuff has a monetary cost, not merely a psychological one.
Me personally, I’ve been somewhat lucky to find a niche which allows me to not worry too much about nebulous social status. It helps that I’m not personally very ambitious, but merely concerned with living an excellent life as an example for my children and hopefully their children.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
This is one of those things that absolutely infuriates me as a numerate parent.
There’s strong evidence that child seats are much safer for very young children, but my understanding is there’s virtually no statistically significant increase in safety after children reach a certain size, like around 3 years old.
Quite literally at least a generation of third children were never born because of this spurious legislation and regulatory nonsense.
While my wife and I only have two children, we would have likely wanted a third even if we met and married just a year before we did. And getting a larger car would have been prohibitively expensive, even a used one.
I think the link between status and fertility as often is discussed here is a valid one, and the concept of ‘cultural inflation’ has vast explanatory power to mend the massive gap between our greatly increased wealth and our cratering fertility; you’re simply expected to buy a lot more shit and do a lot more expensive things to not be considered “low status”, and I think avoiding low status is much more paramount and painful than achieving high status for the vast majority of people.
The sort of benign neglect that many high functioning millennials / gen x / boomers got from their parents is simply no longer acceptable to society.
A married couple with noble hearts and the love and affection of their kin and community with still be considered a piece of garbage if they roll up in a beater station wagon with four kids with hand me down clothes and bologna sandwiches in brown bags.
I feel like there used to be a place for people who were humble but respected and respectable, I don’t think it’s false nostalgia to perceive that we no longer really have that option, ironically it’s been swept away partially by the huge growth in wealth.
My wife and I are extremely disagreeable & nonconformist types but even we are affected by this kind of intense material snobbery that our unbelievably wealthy society has produced. Collectively we have gone all in on K-Strategy and basically gutted the vast middle ground of family lifestyle that the majority of the world has occupied up until literally maybe a generation ago.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
Good ban. And I loved CWR.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
Bronze Age Mindset (BAM), the principle written work of Bronze Age Pervert (BAP)
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
My wife is from Latin America but also has a Spanish passport, and we’ve debated on and off again about moving to Spain with our family if things truly got out of hand in the USA.
I take her point into consideration but my response always boils down to “If the USA turns to shit, there’s nowhere really to retreat to.”
My children are American. Hopefully my children’s children will be American, and their children, and so on and so forth.
Although battles may be fought elsewhere, the war for the future is here, and nowhere else.
What would even be the point of running?
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
I’ll put myself out there, I think somewhere around on this forum I’m on record for having been a bike commuter for five years. I only stopped because it was no longer feasible due to a job change.
My typical route was always a mixture of road / bike lane / sidewalk. The last 30% of my commute was sidewalk, I could have rode on the roads but it was much more efficient in terms of time / energy to go sidewalk because of the specific circumstances of my commute.
I rode to work rain or shine, even in the snow and ice. Where I live is all four seasons, so inclement weather took all forms for me. I sometimes worked odd hours so I’d often be riding home in the dead of night.
Riding on the sidewalk was perfectly fine, to me it was not any less pleasant than riding on the road.
A few caveats;
1.) I rode a mountain bike. An entry level one from a good company, so not expensive but not super cheap either.
2.) The area I lived in was technically urban due to density but you would like conceive it as a “dense suburb”.
3.) The sidewalks were mostly well maintained. Some were wide, some we’re narrow.
4.) Pedestrian traffic was modest.
I think these caveats boost rather than detract the pro-sidewalk argument, however; wide, well maintained sidewalks are perfectly fine to ride on as long as you don’t have a bike literally only designed to ride on motorways.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
It’s basically never free.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
Just reading that gave me goosebumps.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
I noticed a big swing over the last year on some of my gen z coded meme pages on insta to be less overtly hostile to Trump to the point where they come off downright supportive.
And pretty mainstream ones, too. Not just crazy DR stuff.
The assassination attempt, while its been drown out in the mainstream press, seemed to really change the tone.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
I’m not convinced it would work out well without the sort of institutional cover the left gets, even in its currently decaying state.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
There’s certainly something to this.
I’m certain some percentage of people on the acquaintance level with me assume I’m a bit misogynist, but no one who knows me even modestly well thinks that.
Although it depends on your perspective, I’ve always been “successful” with women; at this point I’ve been in a good marriage with children for several years and before I was married my had a string of long and generally healthy relationships which generally ended due to outside life circumstances. I have a very satisfying and active sex life and I have since I was a teenager.
I’m not handsome at all, just somewhat tall and very strong and muscular.
I also have a lot of women in my family which I have strong and loving relationships, having many sisters, aunts, cousins, grandmothers, etc…
my parents are still alive, still married, and still in love. I grew up seeing them be kind and loving to each other despite sometimes trying circumstances and very different personalities.
Why do I bring all this up? What does this have to do with anything?
Because despite all that I wrote above, to the women (and men) that occupy maybe the furthest 20-25% of the Feminist memeplex, I’m still “incel-coded” and always will be.
It’s not my politics, I’ve long mastered “hiding my power level” in public as it’s basically mandatory in my line of work and community.
It’s likely 100% how I talk to women, especially in the workplace as my coworkers are often 50% or more female.
I talk to them like they are normal human beings; not men, mind you, as I’m very aware of the differences, but just normal fallible people. The “women are wonderful” effect is simply not active in my brain. I’m incredibly familiar with women and their experiences, and familiarity breeds contempt. I have exactly zero issue criticizing women for poor choices or behaviors, even in public. I’m not intimidated in the least by women or femininity, and that can easily read as misogyny for those who either are motivated to default to that view or lack the intuition to understand what makes me tick.
In my career I’ve actually mentored a lot of women who have gone on to do well for themselves. Part of the process is frank criticism of their work, which many are not used to before they meet me. Most women realize quickly I’m trying to help them and not shit all over them, and that I am actually very fond of women in general. The exceptions tend to be, almost without fail, deep feminist types who are primed to hear any criticism as woman hatred.
The most notable exception was a very privileged young black woman who was clearly very intelligent but intensely arrogant. I think she thought because we shared a skin tone and roughly the same level of verbal intelligence she could avoid criticism, and she was wrong. She blew up at me in narcissistic rage one day, and I mostly avoided her from then on and went back to cultivating talent elsewhere until she transferred to another job and then quit.
She works in publishing in Brooklyn now.
I’m not sure who said it but I’ve always found this amusing; “A misogynist is just a person who hates women as much as women do.”
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
If I remember correctly, “The Myth of the Rational Voter” is primarily concerned with the topic you speak of; policies that are politically popular but have almost universal condemnation from Economists.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
I’m a millennial with young kids so it’s do or die for me at this point.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
Neat, I had forgotten all about that. Reading this does remind me that I’ve actually met someone who did just that, took vows for a year and then changed his mind when it came time for permanent ones.
He was… very gay.
God, I hope so.
Boomers as a voting block are too formidable but millennials outnumber genx so it might be the first opportunity in a generation to actually smash that Ponzi scheme to a million pieces.
Someone’s got to take the hit when we draw the line, and millennials got mega fucked economically by a combination the vagaries of history and poor public policy.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
Also the same feeling you get when you’re stuck in a doom-scrolling loop. All three are of a kind.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
A random aside but I do sometimes wonder why in the west becoming a monk (or functional equivalent) a lifetime commitment while in the east it was possibly to take temporary vows.
I know there’s a world of difference between Abrahamic religions & Vedic religions and their offshoots but I’m simply unsure of the answer.
I wonder what the west would have been like if it were possible to take temporary vows like in Thailand and be a monk for a few years.
The real workaround is the shirt stay, which if you’re not familiar is a garter that wraps around your thigh and keeps your shirt tucked in with full range of motion.
I wear them almost every time I wear a shirt that’s tucked in.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
Some very common advice with seemingly strong evidence to support is to make sure you dress nicely, even if you are just hanging out at home. Obviously not like formalwear, that’s too much, but wearing nice clothes even if you are just by yourself is a strong psychological signal to yourself of your self worth and self esteem.
It’s great that you’ve intuited that. Of the several terrible bouts of depression I’ve had in my life, making sure I got dressed in proper clothes when I woke up was one of a handful of good habits that set a higher baseline mood for me and helped me climb out of it on my own power.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
The genetic swirl of Scots / Irish / English / Germanic / Nordic blood that eventually settled as the “generic white” main European ethnicity of the USA. Often the people who list “American” on the census as their ethnicity. The main population of Appalachia & The Midwest.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
“If you can’t laugh, you’d cry.”
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
On an semi-anecdotal note, this might tank support for Harris amongst Latinos, which was already weakening.
I’m hearing the word “Venezuela” a lot bandied about in TikTok & Instagram when taking about the rule of the Democratic Party, and none of it is flattering. Rather, it is dripping with absolute dread and seething hatred.
Unlike the college freshman types (both literally and in spirit), most 1st gen Latinos have extensive direct experience with left populism and this type of shameless vote buying and looting of the treasury. And contrary to what some segment of the anti-immigrant crowd likes to say, those amongst the immigrants that go through the bother and expense of naturalization very much do not want their adopted homeland to resemble the country they escaped.
I used to get a lot of pushback from my Latino part of my social circle for my open support of Trump, but not anymore. I’ve witnessed almost all of the blue-leaning Latinos slowly flip in the last eight years to at least tacit support for Trump. And I’m not in any way a bubble; my own family is a mixture of Amerikaner with some ADOS sprinkled through it. And my Latino family connections are very geographically widespread. I was even shocked to hear one of my friends, a very feminist coded Latina from New York, say she’s voting for Trump. Four years ago my views upset her deeply, but the reality of our situation has sunk in.
Although I personally am very in favor of heavily restricting immigration, it clearly comes with many benefits; one of which is a rich and varied experience with the many possible failure states in which a society can find itself. Much how people with direct experience of the Soviet Union are overrepresented in the vocal part of the anti-woke movement, so too it seems that 1st gen Latinos are populating the opposition to this profligate left economic populism.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
I’ve played Civs 2-5, my first one was Civ 2.
Although playing Civ 2 was a revelation and at this point a core memory of my late childhood, I’ll agree with OP re: Civ 4
Civ 4 with all the expansions is absolutely peak Civ. The strategic and tactical complexity and intuitiveness is without equal. I still remember, years later, some of those individual game.
My personal best was a domination victory at 1792 AD on a Huge Tierra map on Marathon. I was the Ethiopians, I was going for a culture victory but kept getting sucked into defensive wars that ended up with me counterattacking and taking small bits of territory. I had to pivot to an all out military strategy when one of my Allies triggered a huge regional conflict and I ended up pulling a great khan and swallowing up everyone who opposed me. At some point I couldn’t handle any more new cities but still had such an overwhelming military advantage that I just kept going, burning and looting everything that stood in my way. Meanwhile I had found the new world and was pumping out settlers and seeding the continent with trading settlements. Game ended when my napoleonic style army had reached the southern tip of my home continent, with me holding the entire northern hemisphere in both the new and old worlds and every hostile power with their backs broken and the southern hemisphere only sparsely populated after dozens of wars of annihilation.
That was 2016.
To this day I start a new marathon game a year, and pick a new leader and map type and pick away at it for months until I win or lose.
Am I allowed to nominate a one word replay for an AAHQ
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