reactionary_peasant
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User ID: 2706
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
I think it's hard to do before shit starts hitting the fan unless you want to live among a lot of oddballs and not a few simply deranged people.
My compromise is to live in a place where I fit in well (e.g. am not a cultural/religious/ethnic minority) and forge ties with my neighbors. When coronavirus had just broken out, before we knew how lethal it was, I lived with my family in an apartment complex where everyone was pretty much anonymous. I remember an eerie feeling that if things really went sidewise, I'd be living around a bunch of people who I didn't know from Adam. How would they behave when the cops stopped showing up? When there wasn't enough food to go around? Ever since I've been determined to live only in neighborhoods where I felt I'd be able to rely on neighbors at least somewhat in times of crisis.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
I have trouble with the details on this. How would they set the country ablaze? The most likely scenario I could think of would be a repeat of the Summer of Floyd, where a pretext is used to stir up mob violence and the police are ordered to stand down. But that only works in the left-leaning cities, so that wouldn't hurt the right very much. I think if the fed gov went crazy the states would probably pick up the slack. Southern states have a lot of armed and trained men who would probably be happy to volunteer in the Alabama State Militia, especially for the purpose of keeping the libs out.
Also, getting back to the original topic, I'm planning to live in a rural part of the U.S. with high social cohesion where I share the same cultural and religious background as the vast majority of the local population. This makes it even less likely for my family to be affected by any federal meltdown. The community is strong enough that it will continue operating largely unscathed and perhaps even better with fewer hostile regulations.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
Still pretty vague. So you think that we'll have Vietnam or Yugoslavia in the U.S.? I think it will take a lot more than just political turmoil to do that. We would need to lose a defensive war, or have a Great Depression level economic catastrophe, or get hit with a massive EMP burst, some black swan event that makes people truly desperate, before Americans resort to killing fellow Americans, regardless of how ruthless their leader is.
Maybe you could give some recent historical examples of mass slaughter in a wealthy first world country caused by political unrest. I can't think of any.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
If you're taking issue with "it all gets burned down" then allow me to clarify that I don't actually mean that every government/elite institution will be ground to dust leaving us in a state of anarchy, and maybe I also need to clarify that no I don't wish for a literal continent-spanning inferno that will physically burn the entirety of the United States to ash. I mean that the political system that perpetuates our current ruling class will be so severely damaged that something else will grow up in its place. I think there are a lot of steps between "constitutional crisis" to "children getting killed in front of their parents." You seem to think otherwise though, so could you fill in the gaps for me?
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I got hung up on that line too. I watched the recording and the way it was spoken was
"Not only unable to start a family, but increasingly unable to start a family."
i.e. that it's not just out of reach, but that it's getting even further out of reach
I'll probably vote for him this fall.
Why? Because I don't think Haley or DeSantis will stop my side from losing. At best, they will work within the bounds set by the the deep state machine, at worst they will throw their base under the bus to ingratiate themselves with the elite like so many Republicans do.
Trump is all the bad things his haters (and some of his supporters!) say he is. And if he gets elected, it's likely that not much will change since he's unpredictable and the swamp has a lot of inertia and defense mechanisms. However, IMO there are two main differences from 2016.
First, the GOP has become way more Trumpist. There is a movement in the GOP personally loyal to Trump, something he didn't have when he was just a meme president. They follow Trump because they believe American political system is corrupt and that they are not represented by anyone else in either political party. So they are probably willing to go further smashing norms and seizing power than any other candidate's loyalists.
Second, and maybe most importantly, I think Trump is probably big mad after the last 8 years. This time it's personal. I think Trump probably cares somewhat about America, the working class, freedom, apple pies etc. but vastly more than any of those things what Trump really cares about is validating his MASSIVE EGO. And the elites and deep state have spent the last EIGHT YEARS poking it with a thousand sharp little sticks. He's also now being threatened with prison. If he gets elected, I think there's a real chance he will do everything to punish the people he perceives as his personal enemies, the vast majority of whom are people that I detest for completely different reasons, and may also try to harm their political power and maybe even do something crazy and cause a constitutional crisis, all out of SPITE because of his severely affronted ego. Those are all things that I think are great, because TBH at this point I hate what America has become, I hate the GAE, I hate the progressive religion, I hate the apathy towards the decay of societal institutions, I hate the prioritization of aliens over citizens, and if it all gets burned down there's at least a chance something better will arise and my children won't have to raise their children in an enclave in the hinterlands to prevent their corruption and alienation.
Electing Trump in 2016 was throwing a rock through the window of Deep State. Electing Trump in 2024 is throwing a Molotov cocktail through the window of Deep State. Yeah, it might get put out quickly, or might even fail to ignite, but it also might land on a pile of newspapers and books. Voting for Haley or DeSantis is knocking on the door and threatening to write a sternly-worded letter to the HOA.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
What was the gist of his reporting? Anything contradicting the propaganda coming out of Moscow and Kiev?
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
Do you have any recommendations of artist like this? I share your line of thinking but I haven't discovered many. I'm a fan of Daniel Mitsui but he's about the only one I know.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
Thanks, I was considering getting a bench after seeing the other comment and that's a pretty reasonable price point. And as much as I hate to admit it, this is probably a good time to focus on cardio.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
I think your make "a flourishing biosphere" do a lot of work there. Do you mean "a stable ecosystem that humans can use to feed themselves and keep the planet in good shape," or do you just mean "preserving animal species because they're cool and having lots of different types of cool animals around is a good thing?" Or something else? I don't know how to extract utils from orcas outside of SeaWorld, they're cool to read about but day-to-day they mostly spend time hanging out in the ocean where I have very little chance to interact with them.
If it's the former, I'm on board because I think destabilizing and destroying the environment will probably lead to a lot of human suffering and death, so we should probably prevent that.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
No, it's not empirical. Not everything has to be, IMO.
I don't really understand your alien example. If they believed in a god that said humans were cattle to be exploited, I think I would just... disagree? Unless I were somehow converted to their human-hating alien religion? Which I think would be a really hard sell?
Re. caring about X while Y exists, nah, I reject your general point. This always smells like a motte and bailey to me that relies on conflating "nonzero" moral weight with "significant" moral weight.
The motte for this usually imagines a framing like "Why help starving children in famine-stricken Gondwanaland when there are plenty of starving Laurasian war orphans to feed?!" Starving children from any foreign country can be assigned roughly equal moral weight, so it's easy to say "we can care about both without neglecting either." The ratio of caring might be close to 1:1.
A less clear-cut example is "We can care about starving Gondwanan children AND the opiate crisis at home." It's a bit murkier -- who do we have a duty to first? Children overseas? Our own citizens? What about the children of our opiate-addicted citizens? Are they more or less important than starving children overseas? It's debatable, but the ratio her might be 1:2, or 2:3, or 1:4, or something similar. Both are serious problems.
The bailey usually smuggles in some problem of dubious moral weight, e.g. "We can care about both starving Laurasian orphans AND reducing plastic straw usage, you know!" It's impossible to just totally reject doing something about plastic straws, because their impact isn't zero, but it's hard to articulate exactly how much less important reducing plastic straw usage is than feeding starving children (in the opinion of most people outside the Motte, at least). Maybe for most folks the ratio would be something like 1:100, or 1:10,000.
So tl;dr while it's strictly true that you can care about X and Y at the same time, I find that a lot of people who make that argument are trying to steal some of the gravity of (actual) problem X to bolster their pet problem Y.
And so it is with human and animal suffering. Animal suffering is so unimportant to me compared to human suffering that I'd rather round the ratio off to zero rather than have to calculate some absurd number of bovine lives I'd need to save in exchange for the life of a single human.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
Kind of. Humans all have some innate level of value simply by virtue of possessing an immortal soul and being made in the image and likeness of God, whereas animals have neither of those qualities. So there is indeed a vast gulf between humans and animals.
But I also agree that we should prioritize which humans to help. I think this has been discussed before on the Motte, but I believe that people have a different levels of responsibility towards others based on family and community ties. So off the top of my head a rough order might look something like this:
- Your children and wife/husband
- Your extended family
- Your religious/ideological compatriots
- People living in the same community as you (e.g. same schools, same neighborhood, same social class)
- People living geographically close to you (same city, state, region)
- Your fellow citizens in the same country
- Foreigners who share your culture
- Etc etc.
Those are overlapping catagories that are kind of malleable depending on the exact situation. But I'll always think it's more valuable to donate money for mosquito nets in the 3rd world than to help chickens.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
I believe that the Great Chain of Being is more or less true. Also this
though in a "revealed preferences" sense I guess it's very common
is part of it. I try to be honest with myself even when it sounds ugly. If someone showed me a video of chickens in cages overlaid with dramatic music and anthropomorphizing narration ("the newborn chicks are kidnapped from their mother mere minutes after hatching...") I might feel sad for a few minutes, but I would also know I was being manipulated, that chickens don't actually experience motherhood or childhood, or really much of anything, probably, and I'd recall my belief that it's part of human nature (in the philosophic sense) to eat other animals, and so it wouldn't sway my behavior.
All of that said, there's room for nuance. While I wouldn't sacrifice a single human infant to save a billion cows, I would definitely be willing to spend a small amount of extra money to buy meat that could somehow be proven to be "more humane" (probably in that the animals' living conditions were more like their natural habitats, although I'm no expert). But I'm also very cynical about greenwashing, "organic" labelling, and other tricks to prey on the wallets of ethical consumers, so I'd need some pretty good proof that it's actually qualitatively different than a cost-minimizing factory farm.
Chinese background
I lol'd, that's a good guess, but no. They don't just value human lives over animals lives, they also think animal lives have roughly zero value and so they can be treated rocks or dirt. The gifs you've seen online aren't uncommon occurances.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
Since this thread is has devolved into discussing veganism instead of the meta point, I'll jump into that fray.
I think humans have infinite moral worth compared to animals, and I would save one human child at the expense of, say, 10,000 endangered orcas or whatever. Humans have dominion over animals and have the right to use them how we see fit. Abusing animals is not the same as abusing people, it's morally wrong in the similar way that dumping garbage in a public park is wrong or how dumping perfectly good milk down the drain is wrong. It's a waste of common resources and a poor use of them, it's disrespectful and reflects poorly on humanity.
One mental block I have against listening to vegans is that so many of them seem to have a heavy outgroup bias against their fellow human beings (though in practice this can really be further reduced to "that shithole flyover state I went to school in," it doesn't really include their like-minded friends). I cannot relate at all to people who think we should drastically reduce the population to avoid "harming the planet, "or that having children is selfish/evil, or that "humans suck." I like humans. I think we're pretty great. I think that human suffering is an infinitely greater problem than chickens in cages, and any cent spent on stopping the latter instead of the former is a travesty. So when someone tells me about the evils of cattle farming I want to pull up a list of neglected tropical diseases or statistics on opiate deaths and ask why I should care about chickens when we haven't solved these other (solvable!) problems, and then have them lay their cards on the table and admit that they simply hate people.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
Martyrmade, for sure. Listen to his Israel-Palestine series or "God's Socialist" about Jim Jones.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
It's because they're not viewed as a warrior class, they're viewed as backwards, stupid, dangerous, bigoted toxic males who probably signed up because they were too stupid to do anything else and/or they wanted to kill brown people.
There used to be a tiny grudging admission that at the end of the day these people actually did have some merit since they were putting life and limb on the line, but even that has evaporated as evidenced by the queering/feminization of the military (and recent ham-fisted attempts to walk some of it back).
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
That they weren't willing to settle and had some balls? I would've said the same thing of my ex-gfs, but when I met my future wife it was a whole new level of satisfaction and happiness.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
Hey man, good on you for taking the leap. You're probably right that she's not the one if you're not entirely sure. You're probably also right that you don't know who or what you're really looking for yet. It takes time and experience to know.
Believe it or not, this is actually a unique and wonderful time that you will look back on with fondness. I remember my young breakups and boy do you FEEL like you've never FELT before. It's sad, it's powerful, it's bitterly beautiful. Embrace it, feel it, listen to sad music, draw a picture, just really get it out of your system. You won't be able to feel this hard when you get older (or you will, but it will be a lot less romantic and a lot more bitter). Young hormones are a hell of a(n awesome) drug.
Watch this video and give it a think. I think I watch it once a year, it really puts things into perspective for me. https://youtube.com/watch?v=V_eCrIO0ECw?feature=shared
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
I'm losing access to my gym for the next few months. I've been doing the 4 major lifts (deads, squats, bench, OHP) and some accessory lifts. I also do some mild cardio, about 10-15k/week.
What would be a good stopgap program to prevent me from losing too much strength/muscle mass? I have the following equipment at home:
- Pull-up/dip bar
- Dumbbell set (up to 30kg)
- Ab wheel
I was thinking of just doing some random grab bag of isolation exercises (curls, flies, etc) but if anyone could recommend a coherent dumbbell program with good coverage, that would be awesome. I'm most worried about upper body (my legs are already huge).
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
I believe the original source was the famously bloodthirsty Hungarian monarch Keyser Söze.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
Your quote formatting is messed up, you need an empty line between the quote and your response.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
Is this normal?
Not really, no. That's a lot of animals in a short amount of time.
I love her and plan on making her my wife. I've already told her we're not adopting any of these and they are all going to other families. Part of me loves her for her kindness and love towards beings that need help
She's not being kind towards you, the person/animal who she's supposed to care most about in the world. Assuming you've clearly stated your preferences. I think it's time to draw a line in the sand. Pathological altruists who want to save every last animal or feed every last starving African often don't have enough room for a husband or wife in their lives. Building a family requires choosing and prioritizing your own over the rest of the world. You can't be an completely open-hearted starry-eyed do-gooder when you have husband/wife and kids.
If I put a baby in her, maybe she'll relax.
In the long term, maybe. In the short to medium term it will probably make things worse including in ways you hadn't imagined.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
Modernization proceeds at its steady slow trickle, at least. My tier-3 city's bus system finally started allowing you to pay with a QR code so I no longer have dig through couch cushions for 100s. Maybe we'll be able to do away with coins altogether by 2100 lol.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
I would also accept this.
Sure, I guess. "Bloodshed" is doing a lot of work here. You don't seem interested in explaining your belief that a political crisis in the U.S. is likely to lead to the mass slaughter of American children, so I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
EDIT: Looks like it was wise to stop engaging.
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