comicsansstein
No bio...
User ID: 582
comicsansstein
3d ago
The frustration I think everyone's feeling with this discussion is that while what you're saying is true in a certain way and for certain sample of people, it applies to almost no one here. A bad faith poster in this forum may cherrypick sources and cite only the studies already favorable the their viewpoint, but they're still citing and searching for and reading [abstracts of] studies - which puts them miles ahead of a median person, who gets their entire memeplex wholesale from a medium of their choice.
Now I'll give you, this leaves "regular" red tribers in a worse position - Fox et al just has a worse quality of journalism than NYT or WaPo, or whatever you thing the "default" blue tv station is. Or so I've heard, I'm not an American and I've seen <15m of Fox News material in my life (I try to never watch it, just so I can angle-shoot someone who would accuse me of getting my viewpoints from there).
But yeah, if I may be a bit self-indulgent, you arrive at a space where people are in the top ~5-2% of striving to be up to date on the news and research, and proclaim that a core tenet of their affiliates is "proud, resentful ignorance". People are taking it personally, even if they probably shouldn't.
A perfect microcosm of different faction's approach to knowledge would be 2020. In the beginning, you get grays and "high reds" freaking out about approaching epidemic, while the mainstream and progs are mocking them for being weird techbros, telling people to celebrate freely in the streets, and "justtheflu"ing it. Then the epidemic arrives, and suddenly everyone's got an opinion. The reds get locked in the "low" mode, so they inherit the "just the flu, bro" position and insist on folk medicine, evidence be damned. This is the source of the supposed March-April switch of the positions - there was hardly a switch, it's mainly different demographics. The blues find themselves in a more truth-aligned position, until they too err catastrophically for ideological reasons (telling people to go out and protest in June).
tl;dr As i/o on twitter put it, the worst of the right are retarded, the worst of the left are mentally ill.
comicsansstein
5d ago
Substituting "like" for "feel more affiliated with":
Rightists tend to wildly overestimate the number of minorities in their countries, be in gender, sexual, religious, or ethnic.
comicsansstein
7d ago
I often read or otherwise experience works that I know I won't get along with! I have much to say about e.g. Glass Onion's excellent lighting and camerawork, even if describing its plot would take me another 800 angry words. Last year I've read Babel just so I could critique it fairly. (And I hardly ever see it reciprocated, there aren't many leftists queuing up to read, I don't know, Camp of Saints.)
And then the Charybdis to your sentiment's Scylla is that I'm getting asked by wife and friends why the hell am I doing it to myself, why read something only to rant about it. Can't please everyone.
And then there's often a conclusion from lefty social media users that if someone reads/watches an Important work, but doesn't take the intended moral lessons from it, that it's a failure of Media Literacy on part of the reader. And this one makes me even more disinclined to bother. If the conclusions are supposed to be preordained, if it's all just a morality play, can we assume that I've taken all the lessons and skip the 'experiencing' part?
(Just to be perfectly clear, because this kind of sarcastic hypothetical often transfers badly across writing - yes, what I'm proposing here is a horrible way to engage with art, but reducing works to one-dimensional anvilicious Messages welcomes it.)
comicsansstein
7d ago
I don't think it's that deep. I think the normies, especially internationally, don't have the first idea about the state of the UK. Mentioning the crime discrepancies between demographics is the taboo in the west right now, so no, they're not freaked out about "POC violent youth", because they hardly have a concept of it. Fwiw, it might be a well directed show, possibly tugging at heartstrings of the parents in a "this could happen to you[r kid]" way. I wouldn't know.
comicsansstein
7d ago
"Adolescence"
As I was giving my brother a lift on Saturday, he asked me if I watched anything new recently. He told me that there's a new netflix series that everybody's talking about, about a murder in a high school, and that in typical netflix fashion there's been a race shift. However since the character in question is a murderer, the shift has been in a direction opposite from the often memed one.
Later that day, my wife told me that everybody's talking about a new series, and it's about a teenage boy getting radicalized by the far right. I acknowledged nearing about it, and she gently mocked me, saying that she can hear from the tone of my voice that I instinctively recoil at the premise.
Yesterday, I saw my high school geography teacher, now the headmaster of said high school, recommending the show on facebook. This was my final cue that it in fact reached some critical mass of normie recognition. I started reading up on it, saw that it was an UK production, and that gave context to the tidbits that I heard while jumping channels in the car on the weekend, with people on the (Polish) radio talking about violence against women in England.
I won't paste the whole synopsis from Wikipedia, but the tl;dr is that it's about a 13 year old who gets radicalized by The Manosphere, asks out a classmate who had her topless photos revenge-posted about someone else earlier (thinking that she'd be easy), she rebuffs him, later insinuates that he's an incel, the boy get cyberbullied, eventually he finds a kindred radical, and stabs the girl. The plot proper is in the aftermath of this, with various authorities questioning the 13-year old Jamie, and parents wondering how it all went wrong. In the end, Jamie decides to plead guilty.
Adolescence has been widely praised by critics. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Adolescence has an approval rating of 99% based on 72 critics' reviews, with an average rating of 9.3 out of 10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Stylistically bold and beautifully acted from top to bottom, Adolescence is a masterclass in televisual storytelling and a searing viewing experience that scars." Metacritic calculated a weighted average of 90 out of 100 based on 25 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".
Writing in The Guardian, Lucy Mangan stated that Adolescence was "the closest thing to TV perfection in decades", singling out the acting by Owen Cooper and Erin Doherty for particular praise. Anita Singh of The Daily Telegraph found the series to be "a devastating watch" and the acting to be "phenomenal", although she said that the single-take filming technique could feel "like a gimmick". However, Sophie Butcher of Empire praised the continuous shooting, stating that it was "the most dizzying TV feat of the year" which served to enhance the on-screen emotion.
Anneliese Midgley, a Member of Parliament, called for the series to be screened to Parliament and in schools, arguing it could help counter misogyny and violence against women and girls. Prime Minister Keir Starmer backed the call.
I tried to find something about the inspiration for the series, to corroborate my brother's info, and it turns out it was inspired by three cases of stabbing. The only one named by showrunners is the case of Brianna Ghey, a 16 year old transgirl stabbed by two 15 year olds, white girl and white boy. Possible speculation about the other two cases include Ava White (12 year old stabbed by a 14 year old "not named for legal reasons" 🤔) and Elliane Andam (15, black girl stabbed by 17 year old Hassan Sentamu). The filming started in July 2024, so Axel Rudakubana's spree couldn't have been an inspiration.
So, my first, second, etc. thoughts on all of this were unbecoming of this forum.
My nth thought can be summed as: the absolute audacity of them.
Yes, knife crime, and other violent crime, and crime in general is on the rise in the UK youth. But the unacknowledged elephant in the room is that the current UK teens are a dramatically different cohort from teens. The optimistic take would be that the "adults in the room" are recognizing the problem, and are laundering it as a white issue to make it more palatable for left-lib sensibilities. But I don't believe it. This is another in the long list of wild swerves trying to address anything but the root of the problem. Knife bans! Pointless knives, as suggested by Idris Elba! Illegal memes! Starmer would rather release hundreds of actual violent criminals to have more place in prisons for the "white supremacists".
Cf. "stop asian hate", where assaults perpetrated by other demographics were also presented as if it were the whites' fault. We get the usual kvetching about radicalization, Andrew Tate (ignoring the fact that he fake-converted to Islam, which suggests that his core viewer demographic probably isn't white British nor white American) and whatnot. Are white boys in the UK actually radicalizing? I don't know, probably not, the first pass suggests that in every place that isn't South Korea the boys/young men stay roughly where they were politically, while the world shifts from under them. But if they are, that's a reasonable reaction to the world that tries to scapegoat them for things outside of their control and treats them only with suspicion.
(Yes, I am aware that the perps ih Ghey's case were in fact white. But even there, the girl perp was probably the main instigator of the murder, a far cry from the fictionalized version.)
P.S. (From the synopsis: "Katie used this form of encoded language to accuse Jamie of being an incel". At age 13? I sure hope he was.)
comicsansstein
11d ago
Does it really, or does it lie about what it sees?
comicsansstein
12d ago
The thing is you don't even need to directly deport most of them. Like people said upthread, this is very unphotogenic and faces contest opposition on multiple levels. What you need to do is make them virtually unhireable.
A Haitian you hired caused a vehicular manslaughter ? Great, the trucking company CEO gets tried for something like felony murder, and the company pays a fine high enough that they'll be in the red for the next quarter. A bunch of Mexicans built a house which doesn't have a single right angle? Great, we'll make it so it makes fines for every code violation raise exponentially. You knowingly helped people cross the border illegally so that you'll hire them? Great, your company gets dissolved and auctioned off.
Within weeks, 75-90% would deport themselves.
comicsansstein
18d ago
Corrected, sorry about that.
The fact that a moderator here doesn't know who Lomez is gave me a brief pause. But I guess that shows that there is no one way to be extremely online, and even if the bubbles are coterminous, they're information bubbles nonetheless.
So for everyone's convenience:
Lomez, also known as *looks it up* Jonathan Keeperman, is a person from the BAP's sphere of influence, mostly known for Passage Publishing, a serious attempt at a right-wing publishing house. Unlike earlier attempts at "thing, but anti-woke" by e.g. Vox Day, this one seems to be of a decent quality: they have a mixture of compilation of texts by extant writers associated with the right like Land, Moldbug or Sailer, reprints of classics both high and middlebrow, and some new publications.
And sometimes, the tongue is planted firmly in the cheek.
Personally, he seems like a more decent person than his associates: BAP and Zero HP Lovecraft, although he'd probably resent being described this way. The worst I could say about him is that he takes it upon himself to sane-wash the pointless cruelty of the other two.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
I'm not exactly sure why it's being revisited now,
I believe that it's because the documents from trials were released to the public now
comicsansstein
6mo ago
Unfortunately no, I haven't touched it, not counting an uni project a looooong time ago.
Though occasionally, when doing frontend work, I've done some minor touchups on backends as diverse as Kotlin's Spring Boot and Elixir's Phoenix, and RoR is certainly closer to Django than those. So depending on the scope and time sensitivity of your need, I could maybe do something with it.
comicsansstein
6mo ago
I need a side job.
I am an Eastern European webdev, earning Eastern European webdev wages: good compared to the country median, so-so compared to the devs in the west, especially in the US. For reasons, I do not particularly want to change jobs, but at the moment things are going a little tight so I know that I can't just ask for overtime there if I need some extra money. Which I do because I want to expedite building a house.
So I need something that's either explicitly a small-scope side hustle or a series of odd jobs. What would be the best way to arrange that? Create a profile on upwork or something and trawl for limited-scope offers fitting mu skillset? Pimp my linkedin? Something else entirely?
Speaking of skillset, I'm fullstack-ish, on the backend side primarily Django, on the front I mostly do React and Angular these days, I used to do Vue too but haven't touched it in ~3 years so I'd need some time to get less rusty. Can setup things with Docker. Not ops - I don't know AWS etc.
(Yep, I'm the TS code monkey 120 IQ midwit walking among you ML intellectual titans ;) )
Inb4 "move to the States". It's not completely off the table if things go south enough either in Ukraine or with regulations throttling AI in EU. But it's a rather distant option.
comicsansstein
6mo ago
There is no plausible scenario in which we emerge from the war in a meaningfully better condition.
We ally with the USSR? Today's invasion might get postponed slightly, but the Soviets would still enter the eastern territories and loot under the guise of help. Katyń might not happen in 1940, but these officers would be probably killed after the war, like e.g. Pilecki. The nightmare march westward in 1945 during which Soviets raped basically every encountered woman between the ages of 10 and 80 would still happen. The latter is most certain out of those, as it historically did happen post-Barbarossa, when we were technically allied with USSR. After the Yałta, instead of a satellite state, we could have ended up as a fully fledged Soviet republic, which means the next 45 of oppression are some 50% worse.
We ally with the Reich? They had no scruples breaking Ribbentrop-Mołotow, why would they have any breaking a (highly implausible, ahistorical) Ribbentrop-Beck? (Seriously, the guy who I entrust my life to w/r/t historical knowledge, who is not a normie but a Mishima-and-Evola-reading /ourguy/, completely thrashes the linked book). The Nazis would still shell and bombard us eventually. The Holocaust would still have happened, maybe worse are the government would be collaborating with the German war-death complex instead of resisting it.
But long term, the worst would come after the war. See, nobody cares too much about Vichy Government these days, or the Swiss, or how Sweden supplied Germans with steel. That is because they had decades to wage a successful diplomatic and propaganda campaigns to bleach their history. Hell, pretty much nobody holds a grudge against Germany now. But Poland would be a poor satellite state, unable to have significant democratic relations with the west. What is nowadays a relatively fringe position would be a mainstream one: all the responsibility for the Holocaust would be offloaded from Germany to Poland. We would remain a pariah state for centuries. We might have not get allowed into the EU and NATO, and become a Belarus-style authoritarian backwater. The war that is happening right now across our border might have been happening on our soil instead.
comicsansstein
7mo ago
A nice example I saw was an image of 'boy with a hedgehog'. The boy was holding a hedgehog, but also his hair was a bit spiky, like the hedgehogs. I think it is most unlikely MidJourney had ever seen a composition/juxtaposition of that kind before, and both the hedgehog and the hair were modified to make the composition work
You're still anthropomorphising. A more likely explanation is that there pixel patterns associated with the token "hedgehog" were detected and then reinforced in the part of the picture containing hair, due to some visual similarities between the two.
comicsansstein
10mo ago
Toggle simplified reader view (available in Brave and Chrome, I think, the button is next to the bookmark star); or open the page style and remove the font from the rules (right click on the text -> Inspect -> in the "filter styles" box write font-family -> uncheck all the rules setting the "Charm" font).
comicsansstein
1yr ago
For the record, I think Haley would be a much worse president for everyone involved. She exemplifies the GOP at its worst - giving absolutely nothing to their constituents except for tax breaks to the business, constantly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory when facing off against Dems on cultural issues, and war adventurism in the middle east for the hell of it.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
Parentheses are rot13.
That thread did indeed prompt this question. I wondered if having no preconceived notions of what a (Freen Natry) is would make the people less likely to be stuck on an incorrect answer. I tried to give all the info a (Zntvp cynlre) would have, without tipping the hand too hard. I may have overcomplicated things.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
A puzzle, transformed from being about [redacted] to being about ice cream.
There is a famous gelateria in town, and the owners are rather insistent about only pairing specific toppings with specific ice cream flavors. Their 'old reliable' combination is whipped cream and chocolate chips paired with vanilla. You are aware of the combo, to the point of when somebody mentions choc chips and whipped cream you automatically think about vanilla ice cream.
You know that choc chips are also commonly paired with mint ice cream. They are also less commonly paired with caramel and strawberry flavors, although the latter only in some more specific combinations.
You know that whipped cream is sometimes paired with coffee flavor.
You are applying for an apprenticeship, and have to pass a test so that you won't break the flavor pairing rules. Among the questions, there is the following:
(Below, "flavor" refers to ice cream flavor, not the toppings)
We try to avoid making two-flavor combos where the dessert could be done as a single flavor in one of the two flavors. Given that, suppose you have a two-flavor dessert with chocolate chips and whipped cream (and no other toppings). What of the following flavor combinations would be the best choice for this dessert?
a. vanilla-mint
b. vanilla-caramel
c. coffee-vanilla
d. mint-caramel
e. caramel-coffee
I think that when presented outside the context of [redacted], the answer is obvious, but I want to make sure ;) I'll let you know what this is about in a day or two
comicsansstein
1yr ago
The hypothesis I've heard from my friend who watched it is that the showrunners wanted to make a Mass Effect show, but failed to get the licence, so they retooled as little as possible to (barely) fit Halo lore.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
A longtime friend living abroad slowly ghosted everyone from a friend group, with me being probably the last one. I had a recurring dream about meeting her again, which led to disappointment after waking up. After 3 or 4 instances of that, eventually I had a semi-lucid one when I suddenly went "Huh, I thing this is another dream. If it's not, tell me something that happened during all that time that I wouldn't be able to otherwise know." She just looked at me awkwardly and apologetically, and then I woke up. Haven't had a lucid dream other than that one.
(We're in contact again, in case you're wondering).
comicsansstein
1yr ago
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That it's a term that probably has a more narrow formal definition, but has been watered down to being thrown willy-nilly by people in /r/relationshipadvice and similar places, like "gaslighting" or "emotional labor"
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I've learned about in back in 2007 from the Bioshock previews, which coincided with Fountainhead and Atlas getting Polish editions in 2008 or 9 (there probably were some in the 90s, but with small print runs and niche). I've read the former, but not the latter. Which leads us to...
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I guess whatever the fuck Dominique and Roark had going on can be described as codependency if you squint? And considering that our autistic (cmon, can it be any more obvious with the fixation on trains?) anti-bolshevik queen modeled her characters after her... inclinations, there's probably some real life subtext here which I'm not familiar with.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
A few months ago, I've heard rumors about Chinese fishing fleets that hover near the edge of international waters and terribly overfish not to actually obtain food, but to intentionally crash ecosystems and harm other countries' economy. Is there any substance to those, or is it just another thing that someone made up, probably originating on /pol/?
comicsansstein
1yr ago
If you don't copy and archive everything some of the things you remember reading will succumb to link rot.
If you do copy and archive everything, some people will pull a Regina George and ask why are you so obsessed about the subject, indicating that you caring too much should mean that they should win by fiat. Most normies are close to this, therefore I often can't bring myself to bother with the cataloguing.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
My engagement ring was an armillary sphere (much like this one, only with a gemstone), which had a disadvantage of being impossible to resize. I had to be extra careful when picking the size, so after some back and forth with the jeweler he sent me a few measuring bands that he uses (turns out that much like shoe sizes, the actual dimensions of the "same" size can vary slightly depending on the vendor). That left me no choice but to present them to my now-wife openly, so she new that a proposal was coming, eventually. In the end, it was a good outcome because she tends to get overwhelmed when presented with sudden situations and that setup enabled her to have just the right level of surprise :)
Because the engagement ring is elaborate, for the wedding rings we decided on a simple design.
I'm halfway through Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. So far, I'm mostly surprised by how unpleasant and unattractive everyone is, compared to the adaptations. Also seemingly worse at keeping secrets than me, even though I'm not getting paid to do it.
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