dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
I don't imagine there's any good evidence to support this claim but I believe it completely
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
Gay dating today in America is pretty frustrating because the vast majority of men do not see themselves as alpha
Is this where the desire for "straight acting" men comes from in the gay community, or is it orthogonal?
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
you have a catch, friendo
my only caution is, as a long distance thing you kind of still are on your best behavior when you're around each other and aren't really experiencing what the other is actually like on an every day basis
so, I might not consider engagement until you've spent 6 months together in the same place
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
I can't believe I'm saying this, but if there was ever a would be assassin that could be a CIA asset it sure wouldn't be hard to convince me this guy is
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Yeah it's not out of line with what famous academics charge to speak for an hour.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
We get goods from China, we give them money, they buy assets. China develops and the US falls further behind. Our "comparative advantage" is debt.
Maybe I'm economically naive, but I think the goods we get from them have utility, and make us better. All they get from the deal is dollars.
I find Matt Walsh vapid and not very bright in general but sometimes I have to laugh at his antics. He produced this new mockumentary called "Am I Racist?" and tricked Robin DiAngelo into sitting down for an interview with him (while wearing the flimsiest disguise).
Robin DiAngelo figured it out eventually, weeks later, and offered a statement in defense: https://www.robindiangelo.com/about-that-film/
From her damage control statement above:
Matt asked what I thought about reparations for Black Americans. I said that I agreed with reparations but that it was not my area of expertise. He then pulled up a chair and invited a Black crew-member who went by “Ben” to sit with us, took out his wallet and handed Ben some cash. He said that if I believed in reparations, I should also give Ben cash. While some Black people have asked white people to engage in reparations by giving directly to individuals, reparations are generally understood as a systemic approach to past and current injustice. The way Matt set this up felt intended to put Ben and I on the spot. Because Matt was pushing this on us, I expressed my discomfort and checked in with Ben, to be sure he was okay with receiving cash in this way. Ben reassured me that he was, so I went to my wallet and handed him my cash and the interview ended.
My reaction to this is: what the fuck? Did she really feel pressured into handing a random black person money because they were talking about reparations? LOL
While we're on the topic of mockumentaries, Tyler Cowen mentioned in a recent podcast that Trump has a surprisingly good bullshit detector and that when Ali G tried to punk him, Trump figured out in like one minute that this was a con and bounced. Contrast to Noam Chomsky just going on and on. Ali G punks a lot of people, but not Trump? Completely unexpected!
Robin DiAngelo seems in a class of her own here. Self-punking, perhaps? Talk about being high on your own farts.
Do you know much about the modern history of Lebanon? Seems like late-stage multiculturalism to me. Exhibit A in what happens when you have too many ethnic/religious groups and welcome a huge number of refugees.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
I'm 0% bothered by the fact that a town can come up with incentives to get 20,000 people to move there (and grow by 25% or whatever). Even if they're immigrants, necessarily.
What's rather alarming is that it was not by the town's political process and that they somehow are all immigrants from Haiti? What's their legal status? And how did so many of them end up there? This requires a lot more light.
I certainly wouldn't want my town to grow by 30%, populated entirely by (e.g.) Sudanese refugees that are totally 0% ex-Janjaweed we swear, with no say in the process whatsoever.
Notably the local government believes it was a network of local companies that coordinated to attract the influx as they wanted to take advantage of very cheap real estate but there were not enough workers in the city.
I still don't really get it. Was it like
<businesses> government! we need a bunch of cheap workers to run our factories in Springfield. Maybe we can put together an incentive program or something to attract people back to the town? Fix issues with high cost of housing? New initiatives on reducing crime?
<government guy> mmmm, ... how many do you need again?
<businesses> oh, like 20,000
* government guy looks at clipboard of refugee camp populations in Texas
<government guy> they'll be there on Monday
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Oh, fair, it could be state governments or even heads of non-profits acting out of spite. It certainly seems at least coordinated. Why would it be overwhelmingly one ethnic group moving there if it was simply an artifact of free movement?
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
As an aside, the federal government possessing the ability to drop tens of thousands of migrants on your town seems like a surprisingly powerful instrument of coercion. Remembering the Washington Bridge Fort Lee lane closure scandal, I do wonder if this is over something as petty as the mayor calling the wrong person a cocksucker on a phone call, or whatever.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Why are these Haitians being admitted to the US when there's a neighbor conveniently next door to them called the Dominican Republic that they can move to? They share an island together, in fact, no need to get on a plane or boat.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
And of course the labor, cut down dry trees, sawed them for firewood, cooked all the food, carted all the water and we built the camp ourselves.
This sounds awesome how much per week do I need to pay for this getaway? $5000...?
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Isn't this kind of true of military service in the US? Isn't the army actually not a bad deal if you live in a poor enough area?
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Unironically, this reminds me of the "power principle" articulated in the Unabomber's Manifesto. We used to simply focus on survival, and by achieving survival, which took a large amount of effort, we were fairly satisfied. But now survival is almost effortless, and we have so much left over wanting.
In the place of survival, we invent things to pursue to try to find that same satisfaction. But they have to be things that are some kind of balance between hard and achievable. If they're too easy, we find the achievement hollow. If too hard, we despair. Just right, like getting a PhD in marine biology from a prestigious school. There we go.
Except some people never find that moderately difficult but achievable task. Or they achieve one and never figure out another one to replace it. Those people feel really lost. Life loses meaning. Integrate over society and you get, well, gestures at everything
My parents grew up south Europe, born during WW2, and I couldn't believe the level of poverty they endured. I visited the 7,500 person town they grew up in and even today in 2024 it still doesn't have consistent running water and each house has maybe 20 amp electrical service max. You could eat a chicken once a month on special occasions. Dinner involved some starch and beans, every night, usually the same thing. Family members having spent time either in prison for being reported by neighbors with a gripe, or serving as conscripts, or both.
Violence too? Each parent had a sibling killed under circumstances they never quite explain to me. Another sibling (my uncle) becomes mentally retarded from some disease they couldn't even put a name on, because access to health care didn't exist. "He just had a fever when he was young and was never the same when the fever went away". This is almost certainly from a preventable childhood disease that no longer exists in the modern world.
How fucking frightening a world was the relatively recent past. And yet my parents hardly complain about anything. I cannot fucking deal with listening to them stoically describe their upbringing and early life in the US (as illegal immigrants, another fun adventure) and then contrast with the median gen-Zer complaining about their absolute life of amazing luxury today.
I'm sure the horror damaged my parents in ways that aren't legible and that they would not have chosen it if they could do life again, but I'm also not sure this life of absolutely pure luxury we have today (by contrast) actually is the stuff that a good world springs from. Maybe the problem is bad morals, but I struggle to articulate it. It sure would be a shame if you needed the hard times to create the strong men.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
So... who are you voting for?
Is it too late to get Biden back?
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
The purpose of this point is to mostly share in my body horror.
So, I recently picked up a hunting camera. You know, to place it in spots I think I might find game in and come back later to review the video and see if it's worth getting up at 3am to watch the sunrise in that spot later while clutching a rifle.
To test the camera out, I set it up in my house and let it run overnight.
Annoyingly it produced .AVI files that ffmpeg (via mpv) can't view. But I installed VLC and that plays it fine. Whew.
Anyway, I watched the overnight footage and mostly caught myself on camera while not expecting to. Unposed, from unflattering angles.
Yikes. Nothing like watching yourself amble about in your underwear in the middle of the night, on grainy surveillance camera quality video, to give you a mini crisis about how your diet, exercise and posture is going.
I do have fairly large mirrors in my house so I can't escape a glimpse of myself if I'm getting too obese, and that's helpful, but surveillance camera style footage is next level. Seeing yourself from the back, looking around confused,how often you totter around limp-wristed, how your butt moves and what your gait looks like is quite a wake-up call. Especially when you're not expecting it.
I suppose actors and other professional look-gooders-on-camera eat, breathe and sleep in this desert of the real. But for average mopes like me it's crisis-fuel.
Annoyingly, I do exercise regularly, both lifting and running, and do intermittent fasting. I don't look terrible but I definitely don't match my residual self-image + whatever not-posed-but-still-actually-posed mirror shots show.
To spin this positively(?), I do wonder if my physical appearance would be improved overall if I was regularly seeing videos of myself like this?
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
So, Trump was on the Lex podcast https://x.com/lexfridman/status/1831010861248585738
I don't care to comment on the substance of this at all, except perhaps Lex asks Trump if Congress would become better if they all took mushrooms lol and, IMO, Trump pauses almost imperceptibly like "wtf" but then smoothly pivots into medical marijuana. Well done.
I find Trump's answers kind of uninteresting and he evades a lot of gotcha questions, typical politician stuff. But what always astonishes me when I listen to him talk is that his speech seems specially crafted to communicate with people who have ... 3 second long attention spans at best?
At first I thought this might be an example of Trump's dim wit, but I don't think that's it. I think it actually takes incredible skill to speak in a way where people with median IQ hear you and don't get confused because you're hyperlinking to things that came up too long ago and have long since fallen out of their short-term memory.
One example is pretty early on Lex asks him if politics is a dirty game? Trump says yes. Lex immediately follows up, almost interrupting, to ask him how you win at this game? And from there Trump completely totally pretends this has nothing to do with the game being dirty and instead he switches gears to answering as if he asked an independent question "how do you win at politics in general?"
I find that remarkable. I don't think I could do that. I'd probably spend a really long time constructing a solid answer that covers these points
- politics can be dirty
- <anecdote about outrageous thing my opponent did>
- but you gotta take the high ground
- <example of you playing dirty that you spin as taking the high ground>
- finish up with more milquetoast answers about meeting people and listening
and I'd probably impress the top 10% of listeners and make everyone else think I'm some huge bullshitter because they forgot most of what I said by the time I was done.
I don't really want to become some kind of Trump analyst but there are other examples.
One time during a press conference with leaders of Congress, Trump brought up winning Iowa and Schumer butts in, with a sarcastic comment about how you know Trump is in trouble when he brings up Iowa, and Trump just deadpan responds "but I did win Iowa". I found that remarkable because even Schumer, who successfully became Senator of New York and is the Senate Majority leader, used air time to say something snarky that maybe 10% of viewers would understand while Trump just took the opportunity to turn it into a positive for him that almost everyone understands.
tl;dr Trump's actually really skilled at communicating with the general public, much to the frustration of people who can rub two brain cells together and find his speech agonizing.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
you claim to care about free speech but isn't sending information about secret bases and military personnel to the CCP a form of speech? :thinking:
jk jk
isn't the Brazil judge making a similar national security argument though? not around secrets but around public order? X is fostering hate speech and supporting the return of the deplorable Bolsanaro elements, or whatever?
I'm not the Montana guy, but democracy is funny like that.
Not only do I, as a dual citizen, vote in an election in a country I've never lived in. In fact, I even vote for a member of parliament that specifically represents my interests living in the US.
It would be like having a Congressman for every American who lives in Europe, and another Congressman for every American who lives in Asia, etc.
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