RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
No bio...
User ID: 2051
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
Kudos for actually putting in the work. It's not a proper study by any means, but at least trying to get an overview of broader tendencies is valuable.
FWIW, I've also never felt that this is a big deal if it's a modern setting. Even if the stats are slightly off, it's hardly unusual. What I really hate instead is the tendency for making every cast in all media a perfect match for [current year] US urban pop stats, independent of the setting, and for all morals to always reflect [current year] morality. If the setting is a rural backwater with an alleged clan-like family structure, concepts such as "blood money" you have to pay when your relatives screw up, etc. ... but then each clan has a perfect mix of distinguishable races from all over the world, absolutely everyone is constantly bitching about how blood money is unfair and actually, you can just trivially change families through adoption ... Why even bother? It's obvious the writers don't get how people who actually grew up in such a world would think, nor what the implications of different social structures and physical limitations are and how they would shape the world. It's all just "wouldn't it be cool if ..." but then keeping everything else bland and inoffensive.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
In the sentence construction "X means nothing, [elaboration]" , the first part is usually slight hyperbole, and the second part explains in which way it does mean something. So for example if I talk about a video game and say "HP means nothing, you're either dead or not" it tells you the important lesson that you can freely use HP as a resource, except for the very last point, which is the one that does matter.
For dating, if you meet couples in their forties or later, you'll often notice how little it matters whether they were successful daters in the past, had good conversion rates, etc. The rate only matters insofar as to get a single success. Then suddenly other things matter much more. And even if you have pretty crappy rates, you actually can compensate, by just trying more often, or trying for longer. So even that minimum rate tends to be lower than you intuitively think.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
Thanks a lot for the recs. Irontower indeed seems quite interesting.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
FWIW, I was raised (catholic) christian, found his remark about God mostly being referred as Father weird & didn't recognize his Mormonism since it's not very common in Europe. I would have preferred if he had been specific.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
I guess Outward was a worse example than i thought. It definitely "feels" indie in many ways, but probably is more like A game instead of AAA.
Nevertheless, even if I think about "true" Indie such as Trese Brothers, I struggle to think of examples that aren't noticably woke unless they literally have no story involving humanoids whatsoever (and even then, they sometimes somehow manage).
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
Always remember, dating for long-term relationships is one of the things where rates mean nothing, a single true success is enough. I also was struggling badly to get any positive attention whatsoever from women until I met my wife.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
Is Indie really better in that respect? I'm currently playing Outward and enjoying the gameplay, but in terms of setting it has quite a few insufferably woke moments. Before, it was Battletech, which is also very woke. It just seems to be in the water supply at the moment.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
I think at the core it's surprisingly a variation of "might makes right", but updated for a modern audience. It vaguely sounds moralistic at first glance, but it can also be used as a simple "your objections don't matter, you will die and we will prevail". It's also an important part of the progressive message as a counter to the natalist objection: Progressive ideologies generally have terrible TFR, and as such are liable to simply be replaced. So they adopted a self-conception as a vanguard that lives on in the ideals of the future society, even if they may not have biological offspring.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
Sure I've read those, but I'm curious to hear more.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
And boy the stories I have of what happens when they actually meet foreign men!
You can't write this and then not give us anything!
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
Ah, I was being facetious. Highly-educated Indians don't have a bad rep at all (at least not in London where I lived for a while, can't really speak about Scotland but would be surprised if it was different there), and being a doctor has always been in the particular sweet spot of being both reasonably high-status and being a good person that makes women swoon, even if the UK is arguably not the best place to be one. I'd be surprised if you'd struggle terribly.
On online dating in general, the worst at everything are universally men, and more obviously so as well. My point is rather that it seems like "medium-value" guys, while having less matches overall, seem to have a better ratio since mostly serious, normal woman show interest in them. "High-value" guys attract a lot of attention, which will disproportionally be crazy attention. That girls fall in love from like meeting you twice lends credence to this, imo. But in the end this really is just second-hand impressions from acquaintances; I've never used, nor intend to ever use, dating apps myself.
On therapies, I've gotten that impression more than once; Though it also seems to be the reason why some people seem to get stuck in therapy perpetually.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
Don't worry, as a Paki Indian in the UK you're bottom very slightly above bottom rung in terms of dating, and being a doctor is roughly comparable to construction worker in terms of income there.
On a more serious note, I've noticed that men who are having decent success (in terms of lots of matches) on dating apps seem to run into a lot of crazies, and it's unsurprising that psych med students have the worst ratio of all. Having "doctor/psych trainee" in your dating app bio kind of screams "do therapy for free, but you can tip me with sex". Neurotypical women also don't really want to date, they want to have a stable relationship, so they spend as little time as possible on these apps, so you're already oversampling from a biased sample.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
My experience has been that it's generally a fool's errand to try to change someone's behaviour whom you're not in a position of power over (heck, I find changing my own behaviour difficult enough, at least our daughter listens for the time being). Also, sleeping 16 hours a day is not really something people do for fun, does it really matter whether it's the depression or just physical? She is 81 and clearly very unhealthy, at that point it's kinda understandable to just wait for death with minimal discomfort, even if that sounds sad. It does not seem clear to me that "just become more active and healthy again" is actually an option on the table for her.
For your father-in-law, I would consider a serious talk about wasting away since he is clearly in a better shape and would benefit more from more activity, but in the end it's also up to him. We have a somewhat similar situation with my wife's grandfather, who was struck by the unexpected death of his wife. Before, he was unusually healthy for his age both physically and psychologically, since then he has started to explicitly say he's now just waiting for his time to come to an end. He stopped almost all physical activity and he has started to show signs of a rapidly deteriorating dementia. Despite all his children constantly trying to to talk him into becoming more active again, with varying angles. It's unclear (though not unlikely) whether he will actually die anytime soon - they're certainly not letting him.
In general, I'm happy that we have the options of modern technology and medicine, but it seems to me we're culturally failing pretty hard at gracefully taking advantage of them. Though I guess that is now going beyond the scope of this thread.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
The steelman of this is claim is imo that conservative christians have been the primary enforcers of the current political landscape where the (mostly secular) center-left is tolerating and even regularly allying with the far-left fringe, but the center-right (which is almost entirely the aforementioned conservative christians) is not even tolerating, let alone willing to ally with the far-right.
For concrete examples from my own life experiences, being a literal card-carrying full-blown stalinist communist apologist at university will certainly make you fringe and most probably bar you from the highest formal position of powers in the university itself, but you're unlikely to get kicked out for it and you can wield considerable influence through student activist groups, unions or similar. A professorship is also not out of question if you're otherwise sufficiently savy. On the other hand being even just a suspected Nazi-Sympathizer can easily get you kicked out from Messdiener or the Landjugend (the two primary rural christian youth groups, at least where I'm from).
As such, it's unsurprising that the far-right is especially negative about christian conservatives; They ought to be allies (at least occasionally), but really aren't.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
By contrast, politicians in Britain, America and Australia, which have the same migration situation but less monolithically progressive politics and media, will publicly say more should be done to control illegal immigration, stop the boats, it’s not right, it’s a crisis, propose some measures blah blah (I mean even Biden does this to some extent) but then actually do nothing. And in a way, that seems to stifle some of the dissent.
This seems to work across the west, across different topics. Here in Germany we regularly have even greens occasionally admitting the struggles to get the latest immigration waves integrated, that our social system is buckling and that we need to do something. But any policy that has any chance of actually reducing immigration levels is stridently opposed, the "hardest" option on the table seems to be to crack down on crime but that doesn't actually solve the large numbers of social benefits recipients, where the only solution seems to be "support them more, hopefully they'll get a job this time". In science, people are willing to admit that standards in the soft sciences are low and that something needs to be done, but actually firing anybody is apparently impossible (and admitting that they're very biased as well and take advantage of the low standards to advance their own political agenda is usually denied strongly as well).
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
6mo ago
The media is also still regularly uncritically reporting numbers from de-facto Hamas controlled bodies such as the Health Ministry. The UN is likewise blindly trusted, despite the fact that they have been caught red-handed over and over at this point. There is a very strong zionist lobby with a lot of influence, but the media landscape as a whole is a mix of very different biases.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
7mo ago
The self-determination in the current mainstream conception is always individual, though. It makes thus sense once you consider that individuals are indeed more free to live their life in the West than in Russia and self determination is supported on those grounds.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
7mo ago
In addition togenomic prediction/lifeview, https://www.orchidhealth.com has also recently entered the consumer market afaik. I have little personal info on them, though.
FWIW, a large part, possibly majority but at least close to 50%, of our college-educated left-leaning friends (and it's not even unpopular among our non-college-educated friends) is some kind of vegetarian. Among those who aren't, the majority is constantly stressing how little meat they're eating. The line between them is pretty fuzzy, since there's a decent number of people who claim to not eat meat at home, but sometimes outside when there's no other option, and these people will sometimes consider themselves vegetarian anyway, sometimes not. Almost nobody is an unabashed meat eater. As justifications go, animal sympathy is at the top for the stricter vegetarians, health benefits for the less strict (this actually includes myself), climate considerations are generally second line ("and btw it's also good for the climate I've heard").
Surprisingly, this did not greatly change when we became parents; Yes there's very few super-militant vegetarian parents, but we know multiple families where only the children eat meat, not the parents, and eating relatively little meat is actually the norm.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
7mo ago
Yes, I'm also considering writing a post about (the loss of) trust which imo explains large parts of our current problems. Blacks have lost trust in whites ever since the colonial era's blatant racism, and only ideologies that strongly denounce this past manage to successfully build a coalition with them. The right has lost the trust in public institutions since many of them blatantly push a left-wing agenda, sometimes even above the interests of the institutions they nominally belong to. Center-left people disgruntled with wokeness don't trust the right with power due to the moral majority & McCarthy era and more recently the rights failures to replace laws and institutions they got rid of with functional replacements.
The same is happening on the country level; Russia, after briefly moving towards the west shortly after the fall of the USSR, has lost the trust in the west due to consistent "will never happen -> has already happened, sorry" Nato-creep. China, India and many other non-western ascendent countries feel likewise betrayed by a western attitude they interpret as "we totally tolerate all cultures, except everything about them that's not about exotic food and funny clothes, or else you're a fascist and we'll punish you with sanctions".
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
7mo ago
As advice, one thing that is not explicitly banned but somewhat frowned upon and which makes people suspect a troll is writing a top-level post and then not engaging at all with the comments. You can't answer everything, but most regular people would at least be reactive for a short while after writing the OP.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
7mo ago
Vegetarianism/Veganism has already been extremely popular on the left due to animal sympathy, and they can be quite pushy about proselytising. Mandatory Veganism is imo a weakman. Anti-natalism is the same; Having less kids has been quite popular on the left (arguably in general) because it means less obligations, more money you can spend on hedonistic pleasures, more time to do whatever you want. In both cases, climate justifications have come long, long after people argued for & adopted the change in the first place.
Also disagree on the second point. If you're actually seriously trying to tackle a problem, you'll usually end up with some technical, politically agnostic solution. If I notice that a certain widely used statistical measure is biased by, say, base rates, then I'll just recalculate it with a correction term, write a proof that the correction term indeed does what it should and maybe write a paper about it. I don't advocate that more BIPOC representation will somehow solve it (well, maybe I'll advocate for more statisticians, but that's not considered political yet). If engineers notice a turbine having a rare but potentially dangerous unexpected failure mode, they'll add a component to compensate or re-design it.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
7mo ago
I was talking about Peter who assigned something ridiculous, though now he claims he was just trolling with that one.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
7mo ago
This ties in with another argument :re poverty-as-a-cause-of-crime. If you actually do some ballpark estimates for the average criminal, you'll frequently find out that they make money barely on par with a regular minimum wage job, often worse, with the added risk of ending up in jail. This goes against the claims of significant parts of both left and right; The left often thinks that people turn to crime since minimum wage jobs aren't enough to get by, but as it turns out crime isn't actually better so that argument is kinda moot; Many on the right think that criminals are self-serving egoists taking advantage of a well-meaning system for their own gain. As it turns out, the majority of criminals are probably just idiots who are screwing themselves over and others. And at least for me a lot of things clicked into place upon that realisation; For example you'll notice that many people who just barely get by have a certain degree of self-destructive behaviour that holds them back significantly, they just also have some admirable (or at least tolerable) qualities in addition. Your contractor seems like a good example.
I get the impression it's something else. When I lived in London, one thing I especially noticed was that many of the parks are arguably more beautiful than any german cities' I've been to, and if you look up the financing of restorations or new developments, it's not strictly London-specific, it's often from diverse sources. Same goes for the London museums in particular. Meanwhile, cheap neighbourhoods are worse dumps than anything I've ever seen in Germany. Trash in the streets, barbed wire everywhere, junkies, the housing quality would literally be illegal. Small towns are the same or worse; When I visited Hastings as a teen it looked pretty dead, lots of obvious junkies as well, and the english teachers who lived there also complained constantly about how awful Hastings has become (as a teen I didn't mind it much, actually found it fascinating). Other small towns I've visited as an adult also just look terrible, except for a minority of historically relevant cities such as Oxbridge, that often are disproportionally rich. I can't help get away with the impression that the UK is actively pooling its money extremely non-equitably into very few places (which is funny, given that the UK elite likes to talk about equity much more than the german elite does).
On the other hand in (western) Germany, it's not rare that I drive through a rural area and just stumble into a really nice, well maintained playground, or a park, or a nice-looking town centre. I only know the funding for my tiny home town, ~5k people, but I don't think it's unusual: large parts are actually from greater german/european sources, the town itself couldn't afford it. On the other hand, even the nicest centres of large cities don't really compare to central London. Eastern Germany is a different beast though, the countryside looks as awful as UKs, and the youth is fleeing in droves. On both sides, small cities often offer the best of both worlds and are correspondingly popular; Large enough to support most kinds of jobs, hobbies and locations, small enough to be somewhat affordable , with accessible nature & farms, and it still profits from certain funding sources explicitly targeted away from the large cities. I don't see something similar to UK/London happening any time soon.
Maybe it's just a feedback loop; once a critical mass of power is concentrated into a center it feeds itself until nothing else is left, the social equivalent of a black hole. In the past, countries didn't really care or even actively worked toward centralisation, so early unification countries are especially liable. Modern countries seem to care though, so late unification countries can stave it off successfully much more easily.
More options
Context Copy link