SophisticatedHillbilly
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User ID: 1964
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
How confident are you the pollster isn't compiling a list of political enemies? What do you gain by answering honestly? If the answer to the first question is "less than 100%" and the answer to the second is "Nothing," why would you ever answer honestly? It just seems like the obviously wrong decision (for non-Kantians, at least.)
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
Honestly I don't believe this entirely. The issue of try-try-try again-pass is real yes, but as Brexit shows it's an advantage inherent to the "Anti-Status-Quo" stance rather than inherently an advantage for progressives.
The problem is that conservatives believe you can just rest on your laurels and do nothing whatsoever to uphold your beliefs beyond voting, while progressives understand that to win you have to fight for your beliefs every single day. If conservatives tried half as hard to ban gay marriage as the progressives did to legalize it, it would be illegal.
Progressives collectively throw hundreds of billions of dollars towards their social goals, have numerous people whose entire lives and careers are dedicated to furthering the cause (many of whom abandoned more profitable avenues to do so) and have millions more who make art, put the values into their work, make public displays of loyalty, etc. Conservatives aren't even in the same ballpark of effort and commitment.
The sole exception would of course be Christian Evangelicals, who do all the same things progressives do to to actually attempt to win. And would you look at that, they did in fact get Roe v Wade overturned! Turns out conservatives can win if they actually care and put their money where their mouth is!
My experience with it is from working with a mining company that surveyed a rather large area, including our property, looking for mineral deposits. It was a large array, probably around 10'x10', carried by a helicopter, and the results were impressive. Can't remember if they let me keep any copies of the study, but I'll dig and see if I can pull it up as it may have more details. It was definitely considered pretty cutting edge at the time, but it was like 10 years ago. Might have been more of a proprietary secret than I realized at the time.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
There are air-mounted magnetic imaging devices that penetrate deep underground and are used in geological surveys. They're helicopter-mounted and able to pick up the depth at which the material of the rock underneath changes composition, so would presumably be able to pick up on the metal used in the tunnels somewhat easily, though I can't guarantee that.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
So maybe I just don't understand what people have been meaning by having a Bronze Age Mindset, because to be BAP's position seems perfectly ideologically consistent. Them raping and pillaging is bad, us raping and pillaging is good. What's more Bronze Age than that? For anyone reading this forum, the Palestinians are not your allies and never will be, so it seems only natural the Bronze Age response is "slaughter them and salt the earth"
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
I'm massively in favor of restricting genocide to only include killing and mass prevention of reproduction, but do you have a suggestion for what to call the cultural equivalent?
If tomorrow the Taliban broke into my house, forced me to learn Arabic, stop eating pork or drinking alcohol, changed how my workday is structured, altered the system of government I live under, and prevented me from living with my girlfriend prior to marriage, none of that is genocide but is definitely A Big Deal and I would like a word for it being applied to my entire society collectively. Culturcide is decent but a bit ugly.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
Force sale of X% of shares he held by his estate on the open public market at whatever the price was at his death (or some randomized time before it to prevent gaming) and the government collects its cut as those sell. Seems like a simple enough solution but I'm probably missing something.
What percentage of the revolutionary militia were we expecting to be habitual wife beaters, exactly? I think we'll be ok without them.
Approximately all of them, based on current standards of domestic violence. Minor physical punishments (slaps, spanking etc.) were common for men to apply to their wives if they misbehaved, just as they were applied to children. You'll have to cast aside more than just the militiamen.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
Can any resident lawyers here provide some insights on the decision to attend law school? I have a mostly-worthless journalism degree that I somewhat aimlessly (though debtlessly) acquired with a 3.0 GPA, and have over the last year suddenly become highly motivated and interested in getting my life on track (Late, I know!). Feel trapped in a cycle of working poorly-paying jobs related to my major and I'm looking for something that will open some doors for myself after spending years passing them by.
I'm smart, and I'm pulling ~175 on practice LSATs, and I have enough outside interest in legal affairs to read state-level court rulings on my own time, but I'm on the fence about the whole thing.
Primary concerns are:
- The impression I seem to get from the internet is that lawyers are all miserable alcoholics who wish they had become software engineers. Why would I spend 3 years to become more miserable than I already am?
- Bimodal income distribution. If I can bump up my LSAT a few more points, I have a decent chance of getting into a top school, (especially with AA bonus points) but is it just not worth going at all if I don't manage to pull that? Not super interested in spending 3 years to graduate and then earn $65k.
- Debt. Law school seems unreasonably expensive. I doubt I can get many scholarships if I manage to squeak into a T14 level school, and while my score would likely net me large scholarships at a regional school, that just brings me back to the previous point.
It doesn't seem like a bad option, but in some sense only because I can't think of a better one with the hole I've dug myself into.
(For anyone who remembers by months-old post about mining, that is still progressing slowly. I'm able to consistently make small batches of metal from ore now, but upscaling it requires a minimum $50,000 equipment investment, and I have nowhere near that amount of money on hand. Ore from one location in particular is producing some sort of steel-like metal that is unbelievably hard and surprisingly light. High vanadium content is probably a factor, but there's a lot of other stuff in it. A supermagnet-producer took interest in some tests that demonstrate dense concentrations of neodymium, but again lost interest when it came to quantity caps.)
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
This doesn't factor in property crimes though, right? Is looting a store considered a black-on-white crime or no?
Depending on how the property crimes play out, I could certainly see there being a sort of viking-esque respect for the criminals who bring in the goods. I mean a competent drug dealer or large Gucci raid make surely make up a sizeable portion of the wealth coming into certain areas. If it's a large enough portion, many may be willing to tolerate the violence inflicted by those conquering heroes. I think of traditional Cavalier culture, where the men on top of the system were expected to inflict violence, and those below expected to tolerate it, because of the way the men on top were seen as providing for everyone lower on the totem pole.
It also makes me think of some Twitter posts I saw recently (but can't find now) where a user was talking about how they managed to buy a house with money they saved by "boosting" (theft) and other users sharing similar stories. Crime does pay.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
You have to also consider game-theoretic consequences between societies and not just within them. Even short of an internal collapse, a society with a higher proportion of unethical people will eventually be outcompeted due to inefficiency. Of course, this can take many lifetimes.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
Things like this always make we wonder how much Republicans could drive policy by just adopting the opposite view of what they want as their stance. How many fewer dollars sent to Ukraine if the right demanded aid to Ukraine right at the start? Mostly just a silly thought, but the effect is so strong that sometimes I wonder.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
You must adjust high African scores down to increase their accuracy, and you must adjust low European scores up.
I've no education in statistics, but isn't this double counting? The average score for Africans is calculated including the high-achievers and low-achievers. If Africans score an average of say 85, and you then apply a penalty to the high achievers, by doing so you move the average down below 85, in which case a stronger penalty must be applied to future tests and so on, right?. You would improve the average accuracy of any individual test, but you'd skew the whole. I guess it's probably resolvable by keeping nominal and adjusted scores separate.
But really, how much of a concern is the precise accuracy here anyway? An IQ test takes what, an hour? Make people take one every year, or every time they apply for a job, or whatever. If the collective accuracy of 10+ IQ tests isn't good enough for society, then God knows how we've made it this long.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
My point isn't disagreeing with that at all. In that example you cannot 100% measure homicide-guilt, so proxies, as listed in the quote, are fine. Additionally, considering multiple proxies simultaneously is fine as well. A white person dressed trashy is less likely to be a criminal than a black person dressed trashy, yes, and so you can definitely factor in both the race and dress proxies simultaneously. If we ever had a perfect legal system that always caught every criminal (or even say, 99.99%), then the use of those proxies would immediately become pointless, as you could instead just check whether they've been convicted.
But for the qualities that are most important in official contexts we have plenty of measurements we can take instead. Between IQ, Big-5, a simple psych questionnaire, and a skills test, a bureaucrat/hiring-manager can know nearly all you'd need to know to make a decision about any given individual. It doesn't matter what the base-rate IQ of blacks is if Jerome sitting in front of you tested at 130. It doesn't matter that whites from Germany are known to be hardworking if Matteo tested at 10th percentile conscientiousness. With the accuracy we're capable of attaining in our postmodern era, the generalities frequently worsen predictions rather than improving them.
The problem we have now isn't that we overuse measurements, but that we ignore them because we don't like the conclusions and so weigh the scales to get outcomes that are deemed more acceptable. This is effectively using generalities backwards, which is definitely worse than using them forwards, but still worse than just looking at individuals and getting some stats.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
My position would be somewhere along the lines of: "If there is no way to evaluate the factor being considered directly, then discrimination based on proxies is acceptable. Voluntary proxies (like dress) are preferable to innate proxies (like race)."
Say redheads have an unusually high chance to spontaneously combust, and I don't want to hire them in my explosives factory. If I can measure an individual's combustibility, then discrimination against redheads is pointless and nefarious. If I can't, then yeah, sorry redheads.
Given that we can measure Big-5 personality traits and IQ in mere hours at most, effectively all proxies (race, education, class, wealth etc) are unacceptable nowadays, though they were fine before.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
Not sure how what this says about your overall thesis, but the "live fast, die young" car-guy/street-racing scene is still around in the Southwest at least, speaking from somewhat recent experience. They just have a basically non-existent online presence (outside of the occasional Instagram post), and are primarily made up of 14-25 year-old mostly Hispanic and black men. Heavy criminal elements, but what do you expect from a subculture whose "thing" is literally illegal. It also maintains a decent but smaller presence in some rural areas, mostly among Hispanics and Amerindians. Cars varied heavily, but each cultural group seems to have their favorite styles, whether that be speedy ricers or bouncing Caddilacs.
Just because all of us here are too internet-rotted to find them doesn't mean they aren't out there doing their thing. They don't usually show up at the car shows (even the ones that have no restrictions on the cars) because those are lame and don't tolerate the sort of insanity that the streets do. If you can't have a bunch of hot drunk women ride on top of your car while you burn donuts in a lot while 20 others do the same, is it even a car meet? If your car never leaves the ground, are you even racing?
The fact that it's mostly non-whites doing the real car-stuff is interesting to me though. The general draining of independence/gumption/wherewithal/determination/spirit inflicted by post-modernity really seems to have hit white people the worst (I mean just look at suicide rates.) At this point it's almost exclusively non-whites that I see out there doing the ballsy stuff, outside of a few old-timers that haven't lost the spark.
P.S. For anyone who gets the chance, flying down the road at 120+ MPH in the middle of the night in a shitbox knowing that you WILL die if you do the slightest thing wrong (or get unlucky) is an incredible experience and I 10/10 would recommend. This also goes for having your brakes go out on a steep downhill slope and knowing that you just have to ride your way down a mountain gradually gaining speed until you reach the bottom.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
Very interesting to know that about the Kinsey data, thank you. I never went as far as to actually look at the primary source (classic mistake!). Frankly it being defined that way makes the stats for farm areas absolute nonsense. Of course like half of people on farms have had "sexual experience" with an animal if you count something mundane like cleaning a horse's sheath!
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
But the article linked in the post you linked mentions that 4% of the female population had a sexual experience with an animal, with much higher rates among certain sub-populations (particularly farmers). I mean that's not exactly the 5% I mentioned off the cuff but cut me some slack. That just becomes more significant when taking into account that actual practicing zoophilia isn't even required for the overall point.
As to that data, my understanding is that the data is pretty all over the place, women fantasize about animals more often, men actually engage in the actions more frequently (but typically don't fantasize about it even if they do normally fuck animals,) and the actual rates of interest in it are pretty close.
The points about the pathetic-man-fetish are all valid though, and I'm not too attached to the overall point anyway, though I expect for anyone who does care about it, any nitpicks are unlikely to remove the emotional damage of "there are attractive women who have fucked dogs but wouldn't touch you with a 10-foot-pole."
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
Not him, and don't necessarily support his claim, but I think the logic goes something like
- ~0% of women want to sleep with your average incel (definitionally)
- Some percent, say 5%, of women want to have sex with a dog.
- Therefore there is a not-trivially-small group of women (millions!) that would prefer some dog action to poor old incel.
I think it's less about the idea that it has a major impact on the marketplace (though the complete non-existence of dogs would probably have some infitessimally small impact) and more just one of those realizations where people are hit with the fact that they are literally less fuckable than a literal dog.
Of course, this all falls apart if the focus is on "average looking" rather than "beta," as it only works if talking about incels specifically.
My own view is that what I laid out above is roughly true, but mostly just the fault of the bottom-tier men for sucking that badly. It's not even really a bad or shocking thing. As you said, furries exist, and they're a much larger group than loser-philes.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
To many, the fact the problem is happening is proof enough of that. If preventing rape at a societal level is a responsibility of the police, then rape increasing at a societal level is evidence of the police not solving it
The usual point of disagreement is, I expect, at the very start of that chain of logic.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
That doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of intelligent life theories. Some of my personal favorites are:
5. Intelligent life exists, but not in a form that is at all comparable to life as we know it. Perhaps it exists on some other combination of dimensions, leaving only strange occurrences when their "dimensional plane"* temporarily intersects ours. Perhaps they communicate in ways that are nonsensical to us, or seem to violate laws of physics, but this is only because they are 4 dimensional, or something like that.
6. There is a highly advanced species of subterranean-dwelling creatures that occasionally surface for reasons unknown to us and occasionally kidnap or observe people. Bonus points if you can tie this to Martin Van Buren's attempted expedition to the center of the earth and the Mammoth Cave Network.
7. A second intelligent species co-evolved with humans here on Earth and is controlling us or parasitically reliant on us for some reason. Could be lizard people, could be whatever else, but the idea is usually that they maintain secret control of all the world's important institutions while the actually-human-humans are basically livestock. Opens up exciting options for baby-eating and body doubles as well.
8. A second intelligent species evolved alongside but separate from humans here on earth and is still hanging around somewhere or is extinct. This would include all the weird theories of a giant-race still living in Afghanistan, a historical race of giants that once lived in the Basque region of Spain until the Romans worked them to death, a historical race of giants that existed in the Amazon rainforest, weird goblin people that used to occupy Ireland and are now the weird goblin people that live in the caves of the Appalachian region, and so on.
* Not really sure what the term is for "the set of dimensions on which something exists." Like if something is 2D+time vs something that is 3D+time,
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
Yes, he seems to be experiencing what has happened to many in the past: the Cool Thing went Mainstream.
It's always a wonderful experience when you find a corner of the art world that caters to people that think like you. It opens a realm of discussion, building on other's ideas, and just plain having fun that isn't otherwise possible.
But then the space gets invaded by "normies" and it stops being fun. The same rules that exist in the rest of society get implemented there as well, and the whole game is up.
The only solution I can see is to make things, and to join together with others who like to make similar things. You can't rely on others to do it for you.
I mean look at the furry community. It's full of people who self-taught drawn animation because they wanted animated furry content. Now it's a thriving art scene, and if that makes you go "eww" that's just proof of my point.
You want stories with old-school values? Make them. You want videogames with Nazis and hot women? Make them. You're gonna make the normies say "eww," and the only people who will appreciate what you've made are others like you, but that's okay because those people are who it's for.
And as a final note for all those who say "but I don't have an artistic bone in my body,": you can help in other ways. Anything more complex than a text-only work requires a lot of hands, and even text benefits from editors and the like. Provide funding, organize groups, bring in connections, manage projects, etc etc.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
Don't have any genetic tests, but I have unusually large amounts of exposure to both the Sioux and the Navajo reservations through work.
Pure-blood natives are rare, but they do exist. Somewhere around 1/100 maybe. They're usually easy to spot in that they speak very differently (not sure how to describe this, it's like they struggle with making certain sounds and so replace them with similar but different sounds) and look quite different (similar to the Aboriginal examples above)
Additionally, they're all quite old, and will be gone within a few decades. None I've known were married to a pure native.
Unlike with whites, no one I've met seems to care about this racial mixing. Most see it as a cultural identity more than a blood identity (though non-zero blood relation is typically a requirement, and some have stricter rules)
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
A very good post, thank you for sharing it. One of those eye-openers that I'm sure I'll see everywhere now.
Currently that is the case, and my only response is "Yes, and if Conservatives cared enough they'd be stealing our money to fund pet causes too."
But it wasn't always true. The early progressive movements were largely funded by progressives, progressive sympathizers, and donations by those who supported the associated causes. Conservatives could do the same, but they don't. An expected counterpoint would be the funds seized from the trucker protest but 1. That's not America, and 2. You have to actually put money towards building power structures (like the Federalist Society), not just in response to a single politically hot event.
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