reactionary_peasant
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User ID: 2706
reactionary_peasant
8mo ago
Merry Christmas from furthest east!
Christmas in Japan is always a weird experience. It only exists in your house, if you ignore the bizarre Chinese-whispers you see in shopping malls and stuff over here, and even then, only if you make it happen. We made it happen this year and the young'uns have never been happier. Even roped in the Japanese in-laws this time and they're enjoying this strange foreign holiday.
Hope all of y'all celebrating today have a good one! Christ is born!
reactionary_peasant
8mo ago
I just pawn all mine off on my poor wife since she has one of those coin purses. I always keep a 500 though, Japan still has lots of odd situations where you must have a coin.
reactionary_peasant
8mo ago
Use metric for making vaccines and building jumbo jets. Use it when extremely precision is necessary.
Use base 12 for every day human stuff like buying stuff from the drugstore or measuring a table leg. I like dealing with 1/2, 1/3, 1/4. I don't like dealing with 0.3333 or 0.25. You get used to it but it's unnecessary and slower.
reactionary_peasant
8mo ago
This reminds me of a post by another user about most people's utterances being content free and conveying only signaling value. An example that always comes to mind is opinion polling. Consider people who answer "yes" to a question like:
"Do you think $PRESIDENT is a crypto-Muslim/Fascist/Lizardman?"
There's a small chance they actually believe this, but IMO there's a much greater chance that they take the predicate of that sentence and round it up to "is bad?"
I think that's probably what you're seeing when people say "Osama is great and the U.S. deserved 9/11." They just want to signal "U.S./Capitalism/Globohomo bad!" in a really attention-grabbing way and have put approximately zero thought into it beyond that. This is now how I interpret most of the bizarre, isolated of opinions I find floating around the internet.
reactionary_peasant
8mo ago
I think they're actually right within their own frame of how the world works.
Oppressed peoples consist of men, women, children, marginalized peoples, LGBTQWERTYUOIP, students, artists, activists, etc etc. It's never okay to go full-throttle attacking oppressed peoples. Why would you? Do you support maming children and murdering promising young art students? What kind of monster are you?
Oppressors consist of men, women, chil EVIL. And you don't negotiate with EVIL, you burn it to the ground, you destroy EVIL root and branch, you cleanse EVIL from the river to the sea.
Bombing the Axis powers and punching 21st century "nazis" are cases where the attacker had the will to get the job done. Someone also recently pointed out the example of Sri Lanka, where brutal reprisals against fanatical rebels... actually worked extremely well, because the attackers were merciless and willing to shed any amount of enemy (and perhaps their own) blood to win. The Allies were willing to do anything to win in WW2. "Nazi" Punchers get a slap on the wrist while alleged "nazis" get named, shamed, and humiliated.
Bombing random revolutionary SEA farmers makes them stronger because the U.S. was unwilling to follow up with whatever Geneva-convention-violating weaponry and/or hideous casualty numbers would've been required to grind the VC to dust. There were women and children at My Lai! (Unlike Dresden or Tokyo). Attacking Palestinians makes them stronger because the U.S. keeps Israel on a short enough leash that they can't fully eradicate the next generation of angry Gazan men raised without fathers. You can't go HAM on Gaza, there are women and children in there! (Unlike those towns at the Israeli border).
When I put it this way, the contrast is stark, but I don't think the people I'm describing see much inconsistency. Oppressors deserve what's coming to them after all.
reactionary_peasant
8mo ago
Interesting, thank you! Much more similarity to American CW than I would've expected. Even down to both sides being right of center economically.
reactionary_peasant
8mo ago
This might all be true, but it smacks of blaming cartels for smuggling drugs into the U.S. Sure, they are the ones literally bringing it over the border, but they don't do it because smuggling is an exciting challenge, or because they want to spread the Gospel of Heroine, they do it because there are a lot of American citizens who really, really like to snort coke and smoke meth. So it is with the black grifter class. If white Americans ignored them, they'd have close to zero power. But high-status white Americans are dying to hear about the latest totally real hate crime or revisionist history or whatever masochist nonsense, so the black grifters are just supplying where there's demand.
It seems to me that there is an elite black class that was raised on the Civil Rights movement that can't move on.
Even worse, there's also a PMC-elite white class who not only was born too late to get covered in the glory of the Civil Rights movement, but who also was born with the original sin of Whiteness for which there is no final atonement or forgiveness. And unlike the black elite, this is the class that controls our institutions.
reactionary_peasant
8mo ago
What do "liberal" and "conservative" mean in current-day Chile? Is the difference mostly down to economic policy?
Time to take a page out of the Golden Age of Piracy playbook and start flying Russian and Chinese flags for that leg of the journey.
What @KMC said. I'm sure this change of heart won't actually go anywhere, it will run up against the innumerable thought terminating cliches with which Canadians have been inoculated (do they say "No person is illegal" up there?) and be successfully contained. And even if it somehow overcomes this conditioning -- then what? The toothpaste is out of the tube, nobody has the guts to deport or worse, so rent will continue to be high and legacy Canadians will continue to find human feces on the beach.
EDIT: Phoneposting typos.
reactionary_peasant
8mo ago
I'm pretty sure America would elect Trudeau or his American equivalent for the foreseeable future if Canadian provinces were all awarded electoral votes. And America would be saddled with all of the low-skill immigrants that are causing the housing crisis. Large enterprises might benefit, but I don't think the average American would. It might have worked if it had been done 40 years ago.
reactionary_peasant
8mo ago
What do I make of it? "Hey, look over there! A distraction!"
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot
This is the first paper I've seen with an emoji in its title. I hope this isn't a new thing.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
Ukraine, like its neighbors, has a population pyramid that looks like a novelty buttplug.
Well, thanks. I'll never be able to unsee this.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
It's full of 110 IQ misunderstood geniuses who are smart enough to signal how smart they think they are but not smart enough to actually say much that's novel or interesting, and the more a Redditor does it for free, either as a mod or as a groupthink enforcer, the larger his karma/e-peen. So it selects for midwits with nothing better to do than farm karma and play reputation games. Any subreddit about $THING with more than >100 users quickly gets swamped with these people and stops being primarily about $THING. The Iron Law strikes again.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
Also an age issue, and a responsibilities issue. When you're in your 20s you feel invincible and are all "live fast die young leave a beautiful corpse." Death isn't real, it's a thing that happens to other people, not you. When the most you have to care for is a casual gf, who cares if you die? She'll move on. It's very different when you age and see your mortality appear over the horizon, or when there are people who you love deeply would be permanently, fundamentally changed or scarred by your death.
I'm sorry you don't have religion. I am religious, and more than the promise of an afterlife, the idea that life has meaning and that I have a purpose is what comforts me. It's not a perfect solution, of course, and I still feel plenty of doubt and existential dread. But it helps.
Look into Stoicism if you havent already. If I weren't a Christian, I would probably be a stoic. It's a very sensible response to life in a cruel, uncaring world.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
I think you just need like, a dozen kids, to eat all this shit and immediately burn the calories off playing outside.
I can't believe I hadn't thought of this. I don't have a dozen (yet) but this sounds like a great excuse to bake more.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
Baking feels more finicky to me than a lot of cooking. Ratios have to be perfect, eggs have to be beaten just right, etc or else the result is mediocre. Cooking to me seems a lot more forgiving. I can easily make a really tasty dinner just looking at what ingredients are left over from the week's meals. I can cook while only half paying attention as I listen to an audiobook or have a conversation.
It's probably just a practice thing. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, you can cook multiple times a day if you like and stay healthy, while most (delicious) baked goods are not foods you should be eating every day. I'm sure that if you worked at a baker for a month your skill would improve dramatically.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
FWIW I thought it was just for game streaming, so I actually did learn from your comment. I think I might have watched some pirated NFL stream on there a decade or more ago, maybe. When I hear "Twitch" I usually think of the LoL rat before I think of the streaming site. There are some of us who are really that out of touch.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
Because that transcript reads to me like "come on, you should totally draw art for my product, I can only pay 20% of market rates but I can get you lots of exposure, and you can come to my house parties and meet all the cool people, this will be great for your career".
Sounds like a mercifully inexpensive lesson about the nonexistence of free lunches. What an offer like that translates to is
You could work for $4k/month cash, or, OR! You could work for $1k/month, and every month you get to pull a prize out of the Mystery Box! Wooo! The Mystery Box! Who knows what's in there? There might be all kinds of cool stuff!
If someone willingly agrees to work for a pathetic salary with "all expenses paid," or draw art for "exposure," and they get what they signed up for, it's really not shitty or manipulative, it's just an unremarkable business agreement, regardless of what unrealistic hopes on party may have had.
Ask questions, get everything in writing, in a contract, and if it sounds too good to be true, walk away. I'm continually amazed at how my some of my colleagues and acquaintances just take others' word and then get disappointed when their own expectations let them down. Classic example: "We can't give you a raise this year, but I'm sure we'll be able to do something for you when the next performance cycle rolls around." Okay cool, write me a bonus offer right now for next year and sign it, otherwise I'm hopping on LinkedIn tonight.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
Based on my conversations with the handful of Australians I've know, I can't tell whether this was intended as threat or whether it's just the way Australian teachers talk to students.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
The ones I worked with were all men. They were friendly but mostly introverted.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
I worked with Poles and Ukrainians and had a similar experience. They meshed very well with the American engineering team.
Have you read "Till We Have Faces?" You might enjoy it, it's the rare book that's enjoyable both on the first read and on subsequent reads as well.
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