problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
It depends on the region, I think. In East and (most of) Southeast Asia I'm generally comfortable with the idea of living in the bigger cities; as overwhelming as they can sometimes be there's a lower baseline level of dysfunction, lower crime rates, less urban decay and a much lower chance of having run-ins with junkies, fent zombies and other such unsavoury characters. To be quite honest if I was fully capable of freely moving elsewhere without having to incur extra costs, I would go somewhere in Asia (I currently live in Australia as well, and while I like Sydney enough there are a couple reasons why I would not stay here long term).
In most Western countries I would definitely prefer not to live in most of the cities; granted it depends on the country but the level of dysfunction in many of the urban cores is hard to stomach. The smaller cities and towns are consistently much nicer.
You’re going to receive a pretty large barrage of responses filled with hair-splitting that supposedly illustrates the notion of American exceptionalism. Highly patriotic Americans view themselves as distinct from and superior to pretty much every other country on Earth, they view themselves as uniquely meritocratic, uniquely free, uniquely honest and uniquely stable as a society.
However, as someone who has lived in and travelled to a dizzying number of places you can put me in as one of those people who has no desire ever to live in America, and you would have to pay me to go. As far as I am concerned if they want their country to themselves, they can have it (nor is it their obligation to take in any immigrants). But the idea that America isn’t already subject to “endless subsidies, bureaucratic bloating and clientelism” is a fantasy, and has been for a long time.
I would love to talk to anyone who relates at all to being in this boat.
Not only am I pretty certain I'm autistic (undiagnosed but the constellation of social deficits, special interests, executive function disorder and intense catastrophic burnout fits me all too well to ignore), I have independently written about coming across the normifying tendency in my own life and steadfastly refusing to succumb to it. Most of your comment could have been written by me, and fucking hell I also write massive unreadable blocks of text which then get trimmed down to something more manageable.
The primary difference is that I don't live in "merry-go-round cycles" as you describe them - I am now sustainably functional, though currently working in a job that threatens to burn me out a lot. And neither do I swing back and forth in terms of the actual opinions I hold; I have always been rather politically radical from young and very strongly police any such tendency to just moderate my opinions since I view that as stultifying one's own intellectual development for the sake of social harmony. What has varied over time is my ability to argue my positions, and the amount of energy I have to care about them and articulate them.
When it comes to keeping myself intellectually honest, I personally find that hashing things out with people and participating in places like this one helps; actually trying to test your opinions and rearticulate them via debate really helps clarify and sharpen your point of view. It can change your point of view too, but at least reasoned debate is an actually valid means through which to shape your beliefs as opposed to simply succumbing to a zeitgeist.
Epistemic status: Stream of consciousness ramblings written at work.
Or in other words, the larger/denser the city, the more authoritarian the populace must be for it to function, for the raw density of assholes per square mile is far higher in a megatropolis than it is anywhere else on Earth.
East Asia is weird in this regard, actually. Asian city-dwellers are extremely low in NIMBYism and you generally don’t see the same kind of hyperregulation that you find in the West when it comes to zoning laws, building height restrictions, street food regulations, etc. Even when they exist, enforcement is spotty to say the least (China is a great example of a country where there’s a huge and seemingly-contradictory gulf between “the rules on paper” and “what happens in practice”; in practice many supposed infractions aren’t strongly policed on the local level). Things like road rules are for the most part regarded as just a suggestion. The result is that Asian cities are much more bustling and loud, Chinese and Southeast Asian ones in particular, and you often have to negotiate your way through a city. Mixed-use spaces are the norm; in Malaysia, China, South Korea, Vietnam and so on it’s normal to find a historic temple, a large park, a street market and a major shopping centre all right beside each other. Traffic is pretty much always wild beyond belief and motorcycles/electric scooters will wind their way through streets clogged with vendors. Generally in practice there’s also less focus on enforcing banal aesthetic matters such as trying to make sure everyone’s lawns are trimmed to the Correct Height and so on, in this sense the vibe is in some ways less authoritarian and regulated than American cities.
The way in which they are more authoritarian is in their policing of crime, in particular drug-related offences, and as a result you don’t end up seeing dealers, junkies and other such seedy shit on the streets. Their power to investigate and punish these offences is much greater than it is in the West, and often policy-makers are very mindful of ghettoisation and take serious steps to prevent it from happening. China’s hukou system, which they used to control rural inflow into the cities so as to prevent the creation of large slums during their rapid modernisation, is probably the most radical solution to that, though that system has relaxed considerably as of late. All of this is reinforced by social attitudes as well - there’s more of a competitive, hard-nosed “get to work” attitude in Asia which very much relies on pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, not relying on handouts, and staying on the straight and narrow - if you take drugs you get ostracised socially. There’s just not the same kind of self-destructive, crabs-in-a-bucket inner-city mindset you find in many Western countries. This results in a general lack of crime and bad behaviour since you don’t really end up with a large, disenfranchised, heavily substance-dependent segment of the population that goes on to cause further issues. In America there is a political push to protect this class of citizen at the expense of others, an idea which your average Asian likely would find repellent if not outright incomprehensible.
In other words Asia is both more authoritarian and more laissez-faire at the same time. You don’t have to be uniformly more authoritarian on the whole to maintain a stable society, rather, you have to be authoritarian about the right things. I have to say that I generally agree with the Asian approach on what they have chosen to prioritise and police, I like night markets, I like mixed-use spaces and hate seeing hobos crawl onto a train just to piss all over the floor, but I grew up in Asia too so perhaps I’m biased. My family travelled from Malaysia to the UK recently and were generally just appalled at the level of dysfunction in London (from what I hear, within three days they witnessed two robberies, and saw beggars in many of the shopping streets); it’s a meme here that much of Asia is low-trust but frankly the “low-trust” Asians are often shocked at the state of many Western cities.
I do not like this argument of “that’s just living in the city bro” either but to be fair, this specific issue really does appear to be a bit of an intractable problem when you live in high-density environments - which a city necessarily is. Other things that libs hand wave as just being part of Living In Da City are clearly and obviously avoidable and to a large extent concern how people behave; East Asian cities for example lack much of the issues with violence, theft and drug use that is pervasive in many North American and some European urban cores, but there isn’t really much you can do about a physical lack of space and the sardine-like parking conditions that results from it. It may be the one context where that argument is actually applicable.
This is why I'm not using the word "winning" to describe what occurred with Iran; they were capable of creating enough attrition to force the US to give up. The US, however, did not achieve the overwhelming bulk of its aims even in the best-case scenario for the US going forward, even the purported "gains" trotted out likely could have been achieved via diplomacy instead without incurring so much cost, and that is the relevant metric when trying to assess a statement like "The US has so much global power that it can effortlessly topple every regime, and nobody can do anything in response". It doesn't matter what word you assign to the whole sorry situation, though it's more accurately described as "US failure" than "Iranian victory".
I just don't really know what people are updating on in this conflict with respect to military might.
Quite evidently people who believed the previous statement about practically unchecked US power certainly need to update! That is not a hallucination; it was an actual position which was triumphantly and openly stated by some users, as the links provided by Dase illustrate.
American defeat was well outside my model, so this is "winning too much", as it were.
I did not necessarily expect this outcome either, and I remember arguing with users here at the start of this war who were pre-emptively gloating about America having global unrestricted power to bulldoze everybody Chyna decided to associate with, that the good ol' US of A enjoyed such an overwhelming military dominance over virtually everyone else that they could just walk in, topple regimes and replace them with puppets, then walk away in slow motion while explosions detonated behind them.
Turns out none of these takes aged well at all. It was ridiculous hubris then and it's ridiculous hubris now, and at this point one would expect to see grovelling mea culpas from anybody remotely capable of updating their priors.
Honestly, the only thing I've played for a while is online Scrabble, which I have become very good at for no particular reason. There is literally no practical use to knowing things like "what are all the admissible two letter words in the American Scrabble dictionary" and yet I continue.
The latter. You have a semi-separate nervous system of sorts in your gut, called the enteric nervous system, which orchestrates the entire digestive process (including peristalsis) and has a sleep-wake cycle of its own regulated by your circadian rhythm. It's a large collection of neurons that's about as sizeable as a cat's brain, and can operate by itself if disconnected from the rest of your nervous system.
The real philosophical question is whether such a thing is independently conscious to some degree, but that line of questioning leads nowhere good.
What kind of differences would even need to be reconciled between people who don’t live with each other?
These aren't religious disagreements, and I didn't cut this family member off entirely, merely reduced contact with her. It didn't get so bad I would fully initiate NC, though I do have a lot of annoyance over a lot of things. It's not on the level of some of the horror stories I believe some others in this forum could tell.
To answer your question, I did live with the family member in question; circa two years ago my elder sister moved back in with me after her then-boyfriend of five years called a temporary pause on the relationship, which eventually led to a break-up. It's hard to give a full picture of why I soured so heavily on her without massively long essays (longer than this one) detailing the pattern of behaviour that eroded my sanity overtime, but the reason for trying to reduce contact was simply that I started to notice just how aggressively one sided my relationship with her was.
Note that for several years I suffered from a chronic illness that made it extremely difficult for me to work (which I have written about before here) and she would constantly lambast me; she barely even cared to talk to me then - she had a stable job then and a relationship and I had none of these things. After I recovered, found stable employment, and generally began to pull my life back on track, she suddenly became more interested in spending time with me. She wanted to go out together, talk more often, and generally have a closer relationship, presumably because I had finally become someone Worthy Of Attention. Then, when her own relationship collapsed and she moved back in with me, the dynamic shifted again, and suddenly she wanted emotional support. And despite the fact I was still getting back on my feet then I did provide it, to the point that my own mental health seriously began to suffer (and if I tried to withdraw after spending hours reassuring her, she'd often follow me and continue the conversation). But it soon became clear that there was a lot of underlying behaviour from her that would simply not change, and persisted long after she had gotten over the breakup.
Her general hygiene was awful. During this period she quit her job and started pursuing self-employment, which gave her a far more flexible schedule than I had, yet I would always see dishes in the sink left out for days on end, clutter in the hallway so thick one could barely walk, and hair clogs in her shower drain that resulted in standing water; eventually there was a carpet of black mold growing on the bathroom floor. I was the one who scrubbed the floor after getting back from work (the drain would clog and the mold would always accumulate again though), and at one point the mold had even spread to the blinds and pillows, which I also had to clean. Keep in mind I am not a tidy person at all and do not believe that everybody must kowtow to the member of the household with the lowest tolerance for clutter, but when you end up with black mold everywhere that's a sign that the situation was ridiculous.
In general I always felt as if she often displayed an intense lack of reciprocal care or interest in other people's lives, except when she wanted to tell you that you were Doing Things Wrong, and she would not prioritise you if it caused her inconvenience (though you would have to deal with many of her neuroses, in contrast). One prominent example of the sheer lack of consideration involved a holiday I was planning, where I made the mistake of asking whether she wanted to come, and what should have been a simple yes-or-no decision somehow remained unresolved for months. Every time I asked, she treated me like I was pestering her, and my planning was delayed repeatedly because I had no idea whether she was joining. Eventually she decided to come, something I never forced her to do, and then spent much of the latter half of the trip constantly complaining over every little annoyance in spite of the fact that my leave was limited and hers was not. So many little instances when she was living with me showed she just did not care about my time and did not appreciate the extent to which every other family member put their lives on hold to accommodate her when she needed it.
She could be good, even fun, to be around. But the problem I think was that she felt at liberty to embrace some of her most indulgent tendencies because she thought she would never be dropped like a hot potato by family members. Eventually the sneaking suspicion that she just did not give much thought to my wellbeing looked too plausible to ignore, and when she moved out I took the opportunity to give myself some space from her.
Have any of you intentionally reduced contact with/outright cut off a family member you used to have a good relationship with due to irreconcilable differences? If so, how did it go and do you feel regret about it?
I did so recently and can't stop feeling guilt (and also a lot of anger) about it.
problem_redditor
11d ago
Are any of your friends named Barney Stinson, by any chance?
(I kid, of course.)
I can have a quiet cocktail (what was offered as an alternative) or read a book in bed any evening.
I agree, but being in Mexico opens up a constellation of other options you could capitalise on, all of which may offer you more utility than going to a soccer game it doesn’t seem that even you’re particularly interested in. It’s not a choice between “soccer match” and “reading a book in bed” (that I concur is an awful value proposition when you’re in a foreign country), it’s a choice between “soccer match” and “seeing Teotihuacan” (which is all lit up at night) or “wandering the historic centre trying out the local food” or “watching the mariachis in Plaza Garibaldi” or any number of other very local things you could be doing.
Coolness per se doesn’t matter as much to me as enjoyability does. If you’d enjoy the match, then yeah, go for it. But there are other options you can avail yourself of which might be better for you, depending on your bent.
problem_redditor
11d ago
Just a question:
Why?
Why should he go? Sounds like negative utility to me. Straits-dwellers have a pejorative word for this behaviour: kiasu, which roughly translates to FOMO on steroids.
Seriously who cares if you’re cool or not only losers care about that.
problem_redditor
12d ago
A nitpick, but the Chinese state’s capital back in the days of Rome would have been Chang’an (modern day Xi’an) or Luoyang, not Beijing. Beijing has really only been the Chinese capital ever since the Ming.
'Careers' with very short times, nearly as bad as professional sports stars, and not likely to return the same high incomes.
There are many careers with limited shelf-lives, and I would also note that the vast majority (read: virtually all) of athletes do not earn high incomes and are nowhere near likely to do so in the future, outside of statistical outliers that represent less than a fraction of a percent of the total. For example in my country, Australia, half of elite adult athletes live below the poverty line, considering incomes from all sources including other jobs, and that sample reflects the top percentage of athletes in terms of skill level. Your chances of earning high incomes in sports is close to nothing; hell many Olympians are in dire financial straits and leave the games riddled with debt since they are responsible for their own training, travel and coaching expenses. That is, of course, assuming they even make it there. The vast majority of people in sports must work side hustles to live, and it carries a far higher possibility of bodily injury than any modelling job. To point to "professional sports stars" is like pointing to supermodels as representative of your average modelling career. They are the tip of a very large iceberg.
While I certainly do not think they're the best longterm career choices, given that I do not morally object to people being athletes, I do not see modelling as something so incredibly and uniquely distinct that I think it warrants any sort of special treatment. If you're canny it is certainly also possible to build connections while modelling and then pivot into adjacent roles such as styling or talent management, and it's certainly not unheard of for people to pursue modelling or modelling-adjacent work while obtaining education, especially given its nonstandard and flexible nature. Most people who find work in modelling or sports won't do so as their primary source of income, and this is fine - the idea that the only jobs that should exist is stuff that you can do full-time for your whole life isn't true. There is a valid place in the economy for jobs that allow people to earn some income on the side or for a temporary period, and I am certainly not about to start policing people's choices and preferences like some kind of moral busybody.
EDIT: added more
problem_redditor
14d ago
This is reminding me of this one Shoe0nhead tweet:
karl marx rising from the grave finding out his movement has been taken over by fat ugly mentally ill losers who think being healthy is fascism and cant even own guns because they will k*ll themselves
“Marxism is gay?”
“Always has been”
this "affirmative action for minority posters" thing is taking on the character of a Motte urban legend.
To clarify, I didn't mean "minority" posters as in a minority demographic, I meant minority posters in terms of holding and expressing unpopular views (hence why I referred to "ideological diversity").
We are sometimes slower to act on people who are being reported a lot for having unpopular views, because frankly there is hardly any active poster here (with only a few exceptions) who, if everything they said was getting reported, wouldn't end up having some comments cross the line and the mods getting a sense that this person is a Problem.
This is true enough, and I do understand this principle. But there exist unpopular posters here who are capable of engaging within the rules of the forum and don't repeatedly flout it (in spite of the fact that I am sure they get reported). magicalkittycat and Goodguy are some examples who, in spite of sizeable ideological difference from many of this forum's users, I would prefer to keep around. This user's behaviour on the other hand regularly brings heat and not light, with relatively few quality contributions to show for it unlike other posters like Dase/Ilforte.
I am telling you the same thing. The fact that some poster really grinds your gears does not mean you should take the opportunity to write screeds about how much they annoy you.
I realise moderation isn't a task that can be 100% consistent all the time, and had I ever been offered a moderator position I would probably refuse. But this kind of user criticism does not seem particularly out of pocket for this forum; it's something that happens on this forum a lot.
So just to clarify the rules for the future (and I am asking this to clarify, not as a rhetorical question): What is the definition of "personal", and does criticising the visible behaviour of a poster here without extending into their personal life count as overly personal? If not what's the criteria for moderation? Because it has been stated before that criticising people isn't against the rules, only making personal attacks, and as such before this I would have thought criticism restricted to how one's behaviour breaks the rules is fair game, especially considering that virtually every time any other user has reacted with hostility in this thread, it was in response to bad faith.
problem_redditor
15d ago
This is the only correct answer for such a large sum of money.
Yeah the absolute gall of this user never ceases to astound me, especially considering she routinely violates so many of the rules of this forum. So many of the rules are about limiting antagonism, charitability, kindness, avoiding low-effort participation, avoiding weakmanning, providing evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory one's statement is, and she just freely flouts all of these rules as if they shouldn't apply to her. In this thread alone she has done this to at least two separate users: she has assumed your mental state and accused you of not seeing women as anything other than body parts to fuck and jerk off to, then accused someone posing her a hypothetical of asking her to "concede" to a whole list of imagined uncharitable points of view that were present nowhere in the original comment. It’s nothing but flagrant bad faith.
I understand the point of having affirmative action for minority posters in order to ensure ideological diversity, but when someone pollutes the commons this consistently and has such a small (nonexistent?) roster of quality contributions they end up having a strong net negative effect on the forum. And somehow you collectively got singled out alongside her for being inflammatory in spite of the fact that you were responding to a ridiculously uncharitable and downright slanderous picture she painted of you. Incredible.
Where did you get any of that from what he said? You've basically imputed all of your own imaginings onto him based on one comment posing you a hypothetical.
For what it's worth, I agree with @TitaniumButterfly. Your commentary is routinely so incredibly low quality I barely respond to it, but I would honestly prefer not to see it here.
Even assuming it is "different", the idea that you can only objectify people if you can see their junk is an idea I reject. Traditional "sexy poses" for men include things like action poses, strength and power poses, work poses, rebellious or defiant poses, etc. And if those men are all the way naked, then you can't see that they can afford that Hugo Boss suit, or what kind of work they do, or whether they're in some kind of uniform, or what kind of social status they have, or whether their sleeves are rolled up as a signal that they are about to get their hands dirty. Men are often sexy because of what they can bring in the way of protection, social status or resources. The way men are objectified reflect that, and just because they are based on what men can do or have or can get or earn doesn't mean they aren't objectifying. Being objectified as a tool as opposed to an ornament is still objectification.
I also very much disagree with the idea that female sexuality is anywhere near as PG as your portrayal. There's many examples of women cheering over and consuming scenes with men in various stages of undress, e.g. those in Twilight, which featured widely popular fanservice scenes of a shirtless underage Taylor Lautner who had to undergo short-term dehydration and consume 5,000 calories per day to maintain his muscle tone; he eventually had to negotiate for fewer shirtless scenes. Or, you know, the very many times Ellen featured shirtless male dancers to titillate her female audience, for example here and here and here - video 1 is a full-scale performance featuring male "entertainers", video 2 was a challenge for male Bachelorette contestants who had to dance sexy for the women in the audience for tips (said tips were stuffed into the pants of the men), video 3 is a strip dance Ellen set up for a specific woman in front of a live audience. Let's also not forget the constant male nudity on display in majority female-viewed dramas like Bridgerton, which features a very nice array of exposed asses, here and here are some examples. Also I'm not unfamiliar with gay porn (as a member of the target audience), a genre that apparently has 50% female viewership, and I can tell you there is a lot of cock.
Definitely agree that the hoe scaring countries off the beaten path are the nicest ones and tend to contain the most idiosyncratic and interesting things. Also they're not crawling with tourists and souvenir shops trying to sell you tack shit, or if they are it's in a very unique local way that's still of interest to an outside observer.
Overcurated leisure experiences like cruises, resorts, very guided tours and so on are overpriced and negate so much of what I like about travel that I barely view it as an option.
Many good examples in Southeast Asia. One of the examples that comes to mind for me is the Khmer capital of Angkor, which at its height in the 13th century boasted a population of approximately 900,000 people (London at that time had a population of approx 80,000; Angkor's population was over 11 times larger). It's likely to have been the most populous city in the world during its heyday. There isn't consensus about the causes of the empire's decline and the city's eventual abandonment; some explanations I've seen relate to increasing competition by neighbouring kingdoms such as Sukhothai and Ayutthaya who would regularly conduct raids and incursions onto Khmer territory, others stress the effect of environmental shifts that resulted in poor harvests and clogging of the canals that irrigated the city, causing out-migration from the area. Certain other hypotheses suggest that elites freely moved elsewhere to take advantage of burgeoning trade networks accessible from the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers. The coup de grace that spelled the end for Angkor was when the Thai sacked and burned the city in the 15th century, at which point the remnants of the Khmer court moved south to Phnom Penh.
Funnily enough this would later happen to the Thai as well in an act of historical karma - the city of Ayutthaya eventually ended up amassing a population totalling 1,000,000 around 1700 (one of the world's largest cities at the time) but they were then sieged by the Burmese Konbaung dynasty in 1767 and destroyed. It's a less compelling candidate than Angkor though, since the city was not fully abandoned and is still a provincial capital.
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