reactionary_peasant
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User ID: 2706
reactionary_peasant
9mo ago
Did you accidentally post a new thread instead of sending a DM? Is there something to discuss here? You didn't even get his username right.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
This is fantastic and exactly what I was looking for.
LMK if you want suggestions for delicious low-calorie meals that still have decent amounts of protein
Yes please, I'm always looking for new ideas!
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
I imagine you don't actually want to do nothing but want to do something relaxing, low stress, and not explicitly productive. If that's the case, here are things that work for me:
- Go on a slow walk in the woods with your phone on silent
- Take a hot bath with no book or phone
- Read some guilty pleasure fiction (I like webcomics and trashy manga)
- Have a cup of tea and put on some relaxing instrumental music
Some of these require you to be alone with your own thoughts which is uncomfortable the first few times, but you quick get used to it.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
Thanks, this is a good idea.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
You caught me, I actually don't know my precise percentage. I Googled "body fat percentage comparison" and looked at a few charts, then looked in the mirror and eyeballed it. Actually measuring to get a more precise percentage seems like a hassle and like it wouldn't actually be terribly useful information.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
The trick is to find a Japanese friend who enjoys it and asks what's good locally. The national brands (Ozeki, Gekkeikan, etc) are mediocre and overpriced IMO. Assuming you live in greater Tokyo, there's lots of good stuff to choose from depending on your taste. I'm a big fan of dry floral sakes and sakes that you can heat up. If you're not sure what you like, head to brewery that has a tasting.
My "daily driver" is probably Daisekkei -- slightly sweet but not sugar, very delicate aroma, heats well. Delicious on a late summer or eaely autumn day. Now it's getting cold here so it's Nanawarai time -- when heated, it's dry and sharp, almost a bit spicy.
You should also try unfiltered nigorizaki. It's like amazake in thickness, but more alcoholic. Some places also sell "doboroku" which tastes even coarser and is supposedly similar to peasant homebrew sake way back then. Tasty but not something I'd drink every day.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
I'm about 20-25% body fat and really need to lose some weight. I love all kinds of unhealthy food and crave them often. I just started intermittent fasting again.
Does The Motte have any tips to share for successfully making permanent diet changes? Psychological/mental advice is especially welcome.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
Oops, yeah, I misread. You say government policy is the tool we've used to mitigate economic issues that spring from the earth.
I'm not really sure how to respond to you tbh. You seems to be criticizing something in my post, but I've already admitted in the first sentence that I don't claim to understand much about economics.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
I've stopped drinking since I poured my entire 80-bottle bar down the drain while shitfaced and remorseful. Best decision ever. Currently I only have a bottle of dry sake, some Early Times for winter toddies, and a bottle of Talisker Storm. Only have 1 drink about twice a week and feel way better than before.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
Are you a nihonshu fan? There's a lot of jizake where I live, it's one of my weaknesses, especially a warm glass when it's cold.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
Thank you for patiently dissecting my incoherent rant.
#1 When I've been back in the States, store hours have been reduced, services have been cut, and menus shortened. Maybe it's just my perception or the places I've been, but it seems different than 2019.
#2 The article was interesting, thanks. But this was concerning
So anyway, the basic story here appears to be that Americans saved a lot of money since 2019, and the value of their houses and retirement accounts went up in spite of rate hikes. That’s great news, and it suggests that much of the pessimism Americans are feeling about their finances is really more about the general unrest in American society and the scary stuff on the news.
and
Now, one slight note of caution. A bit of the increase in wealth — about $8300 for the median household — came from an increase in the value of used cars.
If my income is $100k/yr, and the price of consumable goods goes up 30%, BUT the estimated value of my house and car go up 50%, I guess on paper I have more wealth, but buying groceries and vacations is going to feel more expensive.
Also, as the article points out, if you don't have big far assets that have appreciated over the last few years, you're missing out on this wealth boom. Maybe that's why I'm feeling the squeeze.
#3 I don't have any specific examples for this one off the top of my head. I'll need to keep an eye out.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
Primarily about the future of the nation and social/political/moral grievances. The economic suffering was a catalyst but not the main point.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
Bringing up your (and my) conspiracy theory that this was probably not a good idea will get a lot of, "yeah, but we didn't know that then" even from people that half agree.
I just can't understand people who think this way. If we had Athenian democracy by random citizens I could probably forgive this huge mistake, but the Experts™ who make up the administrative state literally have one job. They should at least all be purged and a full retrospective should be done on how to prevent this sort of policy disaster from occuring again. I've said it before, but the docility and lemming-like behavior during, but especially after, covid have almost completely convinced me that the vast majority of people should have zero political power.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
Easy money or tight money? Or do you just want to believe what you want to believe?
No idea, man. Whichever one doesn't make less able to afford stuff with the same paycheck, I guess. You say it's the result.of government policy -- which ones?
ELIRetarded: Why has service gotten worse, and why is everything expensive and smaller now?
When I Google this I get a bunch of one-sentence explanations about "inflation" and "supply chain problems" but those just sound like things that most people think a smart person would say and/or that they heard from the TV box. There are also conspiratorial comments amount money printing, M2, the "true" inflation rate, etc.
Inflation and supply chain issues don't just fall out of the sky, they're the result of government policy. My economics-illiterate impression is that technocrat morons freaked out and started pulling levers during covid, ruining the economy in the process by causing mass unemployment and killing SMBs and pumping massive amounts of free money into an economy where money was already free, which caused serious inflation nothing to see here citizen, inflation is low, CPI is normal, everything is fine, don't trust your lying eyes or wallet and now another band of technocrats are raising interests rates to control the mess their comrades caused in the first place, compounding everyone's pain.
If the above is true, I don't know why there isn't a mob in DC with pitchforks demanding to cook and eat the bureaucrats responsible for flying the economy into the ground and royally fucking everyone who isn't independently wealthy. Please tell me my understanding is incorrect so I can stop being mad about this every time I buy groceries.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
There's an excellent podcast by Martyrtmade that goes really deep on Jim Jones called "God's Socialist: The Rise and Fall of the People's Temple." Includes lots of background info on the characters involved and actual audio from cult meetings.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
I described one religion overtaking another, and I described how one religion differs from another. Not sure what you're talking about.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
On the one hand, you bemoan the dilution of some truer, nobler Christianity of the past, presumably sullied in your view by forces such as the reformation and liberalism.
The sneering is pretty lame and unconvincing. Are you arguing that liberalism/protestantism didn't have any effect on Christianity? That it was good, actually? That there's no such thing as Christianity? What's your point?
But then that would surely bring you closer in your Christianity to Islam, undermining your Muslim exceptionalism claim.
It wouldn't, though. It's not as simple as "violence = Islam, nonviolence = Christianity."
Christians believe in the right (some would say duty) to inflict violence in self-defense, both personally and collectively. Muslims believe the same, but they also believe that dar-al-Islam must wage unceasing, righteous, bloody war on the dar-al-Harb until all profess the Shahada. That's a huge difference. So yeah, Islam is exceptionally violent.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
similar to how Christianity is often coded as implicitly White
I'm not sure this is on the same level. The only reason for this seems to be "a lot of Christians were white" and "white Christians made religious art portraying holy men and women as white," and that the same people who dislike Christianity also tend to dislike"whiteness" so the two get linked. Meanwhile, in Islam, Arab blood really does seem to have the special status as you described.
The quote from Sam made me chuckle. This was my "dumb normie" understanding of Islam back when I began trying to understand it a decade ago. The violence, sex slavery, torture, and oppression are a feature, not a bug. They made Islam successful. No amount of historical whataboutism from people who are still mad that they had to attend Sunday service as kids will change this.
The only Muslim that a non-Muslim can coexist peacefully with is an unobservant one, and even then there's the Agent Smith risk that you correctly identified. Fast food and unlimited porn aren't going to fix that. Just look at Europe.
It took Europe about 1000 years for their culture to develop antibodies to dogmatic below-the-sanity-waterline Christian crusader ideology
The culture didn't develop "antibodies," its religion was displaced/cannibalized by the growth of heresy/new religion that is even more destructive. The religion of the elites and then the masses slowly changed to Enlightenment humanism and soft/hard persecuted any decisive action in the name of the Christian religion. There are plenty of Christian men who would be willing to pick up a sword in the name of Christendom today, but they're not allowed to organize. In fact their own leaders discourage it, since many of them are converts to the new religion themselves, consciously or otherwise.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
Back then, the Right really did seem to be the people who didn't carefully examine both sides of the debate
Maybe the strawman of the Right that was allowed to be shown on TV. From the Right wing community I was in at the time, it was more "not this shit again" since it was seen as just the latest manifestation of age old, fundamental disagreements about humanity and human nature. "Okay but how about just a little bit of <insert horrible moral offense here>" doesn't merit much examination.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
My hunch is that these are largely the same people, and that they've never been interested in meta level principles.
It's almost always this, but I think most Motteposters (myself included) ignore this idea since it would make 90% of CW-analysis posting moot, and we enjoy our hate-read dopamine too much.
reactionary_peasant
10mo ago
- I don't know if it's because Westerners don't think that people could actually sincerely believe in their religion like that so they must be ACTUALLY motivated by something else (wrong, as their writings tell us), or their belief that inside everyone is a Westerner waiting to come out who supports gay marriage and diversity,
It's both of these things. And their go-to reason for why these sorts of people behave the way they do is "socioeconomic inequality." IMO this is the result of a reductionist worldview that flattens everything to care/harm. And then even only economic care/harm, because have as a society lacked widely agreed upon moral common ground to work from that the only pure evil that can be imagined anymore is economic privation. Any other evil can ultimately be traced back to a resource-poor upbringing or generational poverty or economic exploitation.
They can't conceive of faith or honor or things like that, those must be false consciousnesses obscuring the true, material cause of the anger.
Devil's advocate time. I think there's an is/ought conflation here. Is it the case that languages change, meaning that "Me got a burger" could one day be accepted as "normal?" Yes. But whether that's a good thing, or whether something is lost by those changes, are different questions.
I'm very sensitive to correct grammar usage and accurate diction (by writing this, I have now guaranteed that there will be at least one egregious mistake in this comment). I use both as indicators of conscientiousness, and as a conscientious person myself, I give greater weight and credence to the words of people who can follow grammatical rules and use words correctly. I think it's good to have grammatical rules and "correct" definitions for words for this reason, even if they're just conventions and there's no platonic world of word meanings
we can appeal to.to which we can appeal.Another, narrower argument is that the trend in English evolution seems to be towards simplification. As pointed out elsewhere, English used to have cases. We express the same meanings without cases today, though probably less precisely. And although we have added many words to our language, I'd wager they're mostly describing new things, and at the same time we have lost many colorful synonyms and their subtle shades of meaning.
There's also what appears to me to be an egalitarian pressure (that may not be unique to English, I'm not sure) where rhetoric has gotten simpler and coarser over time. Compare American political speeches written around the 1860s, with those written in the first half of the 20th century, with those written in the second half, with those written today. The only reliable source of eloquence in American government today seems to be our higher courts. Some of our Supreme court justices are still a pleasure to read.
Edit: Found and corrected four mistakes.
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