reactionary_peasant
No bio...
User ID: 2706
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
I learned for 5 years in a formal setting and was once fluent enough that I spoke it all day long. I wouldn't learn it, it's been an almost completely useless skill. If you really must:
- Anki decks for memorization. Way back when, I hand-made decks of flashcards. I made several thousands.
- Handheld whiteboard for character writing practice. I spent probably 30-60 minutes a day just repetitively writing and erasing.
- Textbooks. The most popular ones out there will probably work fine for beginners.
- Chinesepod101(?) used to be good for listening. You could also look up HSK study materials for the lower levels.
- Find a speaking buddy, preferably from somewhere with a neutral accent (northern or eastern China). Pronunciation is initially very difficult and the grammar is also not always intuitive once you get out of the beginner phase. Also, textbook language and spoken language are quite different.
Again, I recommend against this unless you're just trying to learn a bit to speak at parties for fun or something. The amount of effort required massively outweighs the value you'd get, and I say this as a former sinophile who won awards in Chinese speech contests and wrote a thesis on the original text of a well-known ancient Chinese philosophical text.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
Yes, I have an MX Vertical and have used it for ~5 years. I no longer have any wrist pain (well, except for when I get carried away scrolling my phone). No downsides that I'm aware of, and it's occasionally a good convo starter in the office.
Look in to split keyboards as well.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
Judeo-Christian
Sorry to hijack, but why not just "Christian?" This term has always just seemed to me a politician's hedge against being called a "Christian supremacist" or something. I don't think the ethics of Judaism had much impact on U.S. history.
Apologies if this gets pattern-matched to the incessant JQ-posting/trolling we get here. But I really don't know why people use this word outside of political speeches or discussions of 1st century religious history.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
So you think that modern liberalism/progressivism isn't demanding and judgemental? It seems the opposite to me.
It "coerces to freedom" as Ryzard Legutko put it. You can live how you like, as long as it's not "discriminatory" and doesn't imply that some ways of living are better than others. You can choose any color of Model T you want, as long as it's black. You will not be judged for your choice of indulgence, but you will be judged harshly for questioning whether it is right to indulge.
So even selfish people can follow moral constraints out of fear, a desire for social approval, and social incentives?
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Why would not be possible to simultaneously be selfish and do something out of fear? Can you speak more plainly?
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
I'm loving the old school graphics. I'll check these out.
Are you saying that social liberalism/progessivism is more successful with secular people because it is better at appealing to their selfishness?
I suppose that that's one way to put it. But I don't think there's much of an active appeal to selfish, it's more that very few demands are made of people at all. You can live the life of a pig and demand the same respect given to a Socrates, because who are you to judge? Ad aren't we all owed a certain level of dignity simply by being born human?
The average straight white American male liberal does not stand to benefit from DEI, gay marriage, drug liberalisation etc.
Subscribing to the dominant creed has always brought advantages. You will not be harassed by the ruling class or their lackeys, you will be allowed into polite society, you will potentially have access to good jobs, you will be thought of as an upright and morally good person. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the power and status that you stand to receive are valued highly by certain personalities.
If anything, the success of social liberalism/progressivism often seems to come from (a) appealing to people's benevolence and (b) elevating benevolence to the status of the sole moral virtue.
Partially, but also a lot of fear and control of the narrative. I remember hearing people openly discussing how homosexuality was immoral and how gay marriage was an unconscionable oxymoron in the 90s and early 2000s. Now those conversations rarely ever happen, not because the anti-gay marriage side was discredited, but because the war for the feelings of America was won by the pro-gay marriage side through propaganda and shaming. Many of the people who opposed gay marriage 20 years ago still oppose it, only they now no longer dare express their opinion to anyone other than close confidants because it's unfashionable and it carries the risk of social ostracization or worse. And so, the younger generations grow up not knowing that an anti-gay marriage position exists and simply believes that the way things are now is "normal," and Social Progressivism wins another victory.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
Ah, that is considered praiseworthy, yes. Though I've always considered it less of a "blind" faith and more of a "courageous" faith. The ability to believe without signs and miracles, or in the face of suffering and despair. I admit I don't have any source for that.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
The only fun survival horror game I've played was Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money. It was pretty light on the horror, which was good. I've always wondered whether there was anything else out there like that. Atmospheric, suspenseful, tense, but not going to give me nightmares.
Anyone got recommendations?
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
Update on singing Christmas carols with kids.
First, thanks for all the recommendations! There were some I had never heard before and that I plan to sing.
I ended up printing off some songs from A Collection of Christmas Carols, a site that has PDF of a few hundred Christmas songs along with free midis and even a GitHub repo so you can create something of your own with the material. Really cool resource!
So far, we've learned The Twelve Days of Christmas, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, Gaudete, and We Three Kings. Today we started on the Sussex Carol, which is a little trickier for kids.
The kids are enjoying all of them a lot. Twelve Days of Christmas is fun because each one gets their own item in the list for a solo (baby gets to say "partridge in a pear tree!"). They love shouting the chorus of Gaudete and We Three Kings. And my daughter has started trying to harmonize on our own during We Three Kings, which is extra exciting because part of the reason I wanted to do this was to trick them into learning to enjoy singing!
Overall, great experience so far. 10/10, would recommend if you've got small kids.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
Christianity does not demand completely blind faith, though it does find it praiseworthy.
Not to nitpick, but my understanding is that even this has to be qualified. Blind faith is praiseworthy if you are not capable of understanding the foundations of scripture and tradition, but St. Peter wrote
If anyone asks you to give an account of the hope which you cherish, be ready at all times to answer for it, but courteously and with due reverence.
Children and those less mentally gifted should be praised for faith, but for those adults with the capability, they have a duty to understand what it is they believe and why. Sadly, many adults neglect this duty, but that doesn't change the reality.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
You've come across one of the many weak spots in my knowledge. I've read "The Closing of the American Mind" though I have read Fitzgerald-Stephen and de Maistre. I've always dismissed non-religious proponents of social conservativism as head-in-the-clouds idealists.
That said, what I meant by the above is that I don't think attempts to completely separate them succeed. They seem to want people to behave according to rules that only makes sense if there is a God so that society can reap the benefits of a pious populace. They run into a similar problem as did 20th century communists -- they ignored the inherent selfishness in the heart of every man. Traditional morality has to be underwritten by God to be taken seriously, or at least by a God-Like totalitarian state, in the Bolshevik case. They were part the laughing, jeering crowd confronted by Nietzsche's Madman, and are now having second thoughts and are frantically trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong if there are particular works that address the paragraph above. I'd be very interested in reading them since as I mentioned I am not terribly familiar with the work around this perspective.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
Nice zinger. If you're here to vent your feelings about conservatives, that's fine, but I don't think there's much I can contribute.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
"Social conservativism" isn't something that IMO can reasonably be separated from its religious roots. What you said is like saying "I don't understand the appeal of Zen meditation, it's boring and pointless, you just stare in silence at a spot on a blank wall without thinking about anything." If you don't hold any of the metaphysical and supernatural beliefs associated with Zen Buddhism, then yes, staring at a wall doesn't seem like a very fun or useful way to spend your time. If you believe that, as C. S. lewis put it,
All stories will come to nothing: all life will turn out in the end to have been a transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face of infinite matter.
then sure, any limitation on behavior is just needlessly robbing someone of pleasure and would have no appeal at all.
I think you need to try harder to put yourself into the shoes of people who have different beliefs than you. If you don't get the appeal of social conservativism in a world where there exist good and evil, where the Holy Family is the role model for behavior, where sex is treated as humanity's participation in divine creation, awful and sacred and ineffably beautiful, then I'm not sure what I could say to help you get into the headspace and imagine what it would be like. Maybe I'm being too harsh, and you've never been exposed to these ideas.
Re. people from socially conservative families being weird and maladjusted, I think that's probably very overstated. The evil, abusive, hypocritical Christian family is a trope in American culture. I think a good analogy would be "American southerners are dumb, loud, toothless rednecks." If you grow up outside the South, your impression of Southerners will be informed by jokes, stock characters, and Hollywood media, and will thus be very negative. If you travel to the South as a tourist, you might be surprised at how similar to the rest of the country it is, how everyone knows how to read and wears shoes outside and is more or less polite and amiable. And then you might pull up at a gas station and see a two guys in a beat up pickup truck, blasting country, one with a half empty beer can in his hand, arm lazily hanging out the window, while his buddy, sporting a confederate flag jacket, loudly carries on a conversation with him that would make any NPR anchor spit out their coffee. And your subconscious would think "Aha! So they're like that after all" and you'd return to where your from with a ready-at-hand story about how this one time at a gas station in Alabama, you saw living proof of how They Really Are Like That and your mind would conveniently blot out all the perfectly normal people you'd met up to that point.
You've probably met a lot of social conservatives, and an even greater number of people who were raised in socially conservative households. But you wouldn't know it, because most of us are normal ordinary people. The weirdos stand out, but they're not just weird to you, they're weird to us, too.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
What do you not understand? Do you want me to type of a list of bog standard socialcon talking points? Or are you asking about how we would change things given political power?
If it's the former, my beliefs don't deviate much from what the Catholic church teaches so you there's no mystery. If you ask more specific questions I can try to answer those.
If it's the latter: one of the points I was trying to make in my post is that a lot of us have given up on the current system since all peaceful forms of dissent seem to have been soft-criminalized or co-opted. We are waiting for an Alexander to come along and cut the Gordian knot. There is still action we can take today, though. Some of us are quietly moving to intentional communities and trying to rebuild the community life that was dissolved in the atomization of society so that we will better be able to organize and respond when that day comes, plus it gives our children antibodies to the globohomo zeitgeist (before folks start shrieking about repression -- there's a right way and a wrong way to do it -- my siblings and I are proof that the right way works).
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
I want to share a "view from the inside" as I think that I'm unusual here -- theist, practicing Catholic, married, a gaggle of young children, wife is SAHM, went to an unremarkable college, went to an unremarkable flyover state college, household income in the U.S. middle 50% band, work a middle management job at a mid sized corporation. Though I work in tech, I don't have any connections to Ivy League people, I've never worked at a startup or lived in NYC or SFO, and there is little to no wokeness in my workplace . In other words, a profile of what people would probably reflexively imagine as a "normal" traditional American family (although I suppose being an Evangelical would be still more stereotypical).
At least in my circles, the biggest problems are fear and demoralization. Fear of "having your grill taken away," of no longer being allowed to live a normal life because you've become a target of elite outrage, is very real. I feel like a broken record saying this again on the Motte, but it's so, so different when you have children. I think I would make a decent small-time politician (I'm probably to agreeable to make it big time), but I have small children and a sensitive wife, and I wouldn't want them to be subjected to the kind of insane harassment that would result from some Twitter rando or news outlet signal boosting something I say or believe in. My ideal senatorial or presidential candidate would hold beliefs that would be considered so anathema by the elite that he would have to be independently wealthy and have an iron stomach and brass balls to even stand a chance.
As for demoralization, there's a sense that I share with some of my peers that American institutions are just thoroughly rotten, that we've become dhimmis without realizing it, and that trying to organize politically to build institutional power as unabashed practicing Catholics would go over now about as well as it would under a Caliphate.
To get to the point, I don't think that the Right is starved for intellectuals because it can't produce any. Rather, the foolish ones who stick their neck out get sidelined or destroyed, while the wise ones hide and bide their time. If Michael Anton's Red Caesar suddenly landed on the Atlantic coast, captured Washington D.C., and declared a new republic, I have no doubt at all that these people would come out of the woodwork and that Caesar would be able to quickly assemble a mighty cabinet. But until then, what sense is there in outing yourself as a counterrevolutionary?
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
We can spitball ideas for why artists are more likely to be gay all day long.
Okay?
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
All I can tell you is that every time I've felt like this in my career, it turns out to have been a minor speed bump in retrospect. There will be another job opp like this even if you don't pass the interviews this time. Just keep your LinkedIn up to date and keep chatting with recruiters.
Some of your anxiety might also stem from a flavor of imposter syndrome where you feel as though the company you're interviewing for is deigning to offer you a bunch of extra money you don't deserve. This is incorrect. They saw your skillset and made a cold, rational business calculation that you were such a valuable to the team that it would be a good deal for them to spend yourCurrentSalary * 2 each year. That means that your skills.are valued at that amoubt among at least some companies. Don't feel intimidated and nervous, feel confident due to the vote-of-confidence you've received.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
My unsubstantiated pet theory is related. I've always imagined that if gays are overrepresented among intelligent or creative people, it's because they had greater incentive (and more energy) to use those talents simply because child-rearing, and often times a life in respectable society, were off the table.
Marriage and children require an unimaginable resource investment. Before having kids I used to enjoy reading philosophy and obscure history books. My wife used to draw, paint, and write. We still do that stuff, but probably at about 5% of our previous intensity simply because the vast, vast majority of our time is devoted to childcare, breadwinning, and homemaking. That's not a bad thing, because those things are very rewarding, but it sometimes makes me a bit sad that I have zero time to read challenging books and effortpost on the Motte.
I assume a gay man with no kids, or a gay man having hookups on the down-low to preserve his reputation in polite society, would simply have much more free time and energy and his disposal compared to his married straight peers, thus resulting in a greater proportion of gays among those who contribute to high IQ fields. Of course this is surely not the only factor.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
What are some of your favorite Christmas carols?
In preparation for Advent, I'm going to teach my kids some songs this year, and while we'll be doing the hokey kiddie stuff like Jingle Bells, I want to sing a few more serious and cool ones like Gaudete, Christus Est Natus or the Coventry Carol (okay, maybe we won't sing that one).
Also, tomorrow is the Feast of Christ the King. Here's an early happy liturgical new year to those following such things!
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
"You Irish sure are a contentious lot."
That's interesting, though. I wasn't aware of the Brazilian presence in Ireland at all.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
I use a vertical mouse and split keyboard. My wrists no longer hurt (except for when I binge-scroll my phone). If you have any wrist pain from typing, check out split keyboards.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
A man intervened and tackled him to the ground (I've heard unconfirmed reports that he was Brazilian, making this something of a wash from an anti-immigration perspective).
Although they can't say it out loud of course, I'm sure that most anti-immigration Irish are probably not at all concerned about immigration from Brazil.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
It completely depends on the woman.
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
Depends on what your goals are.
Consider whether you want your wife to be a career woman, whether you want to be very rich, whether you want to have 9 kids, etc. Those goals will probably narrow down which career tracks will allow you to achieve your goals. From there, pick something that you have at least a mild interest in so that youll be less likely to be miserable all day.
I wanted my wife to have the option of being a SAHM, for my family to live a middle class lifestyle, to work reasonable hours so that I could spend time with my future family, and to do work that wasn't soul crushingly boring (to me). So I went into tech, and it's worked out well so far.
If you're just trying to attract a good wife in the first place, then first off, all the usual dating advice that gets posted applies. As regards your job, I think it doesn't matter as much as how women perceive your character and your potential. Women want to feel secure. When I met my future wife, I was working a barely above minimum wage job (in my early 20s, before it became a red flag). But she said she could tell from the beginning that I was a guy with a life plan who was reliable and has his shit together, so she thought I was hot even though I was broke.
Sure, happy to share anything without doxxing myself. The long and short of it is that I fell in love with Chinese history and language, studied it in college, spent some time living over there, ended up repulsed by the deracinated "New China" that has almost no culture continuity with pre-Communist China, as well as the amorality of the average middle class Chinese person. It's a really bleak society with a really bleak culture amongst really bleak surroundings. It has very little to recommend it IMO, whatever you hope to get out of China, you can get out of other places with substantially less risk to your sanity/safety/physical health.
ETA: "Ways That Are Dark," for all its many faults, gives an accurate account of the core flaws of China. It's not all literally true, but it's truthy, stuff like that has happened and still does happen in some form. So I suppose some of these issues had existed prior to the revolution.
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