solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1hr ago
For the extreme example, /r/raisedbyborderlines. It's actually kind of a fascinating place in that the median poster there is from an oddly niche demographic: They're usually the daughter (in an otherwise male-dominated website), almost always consider themselves the scapegoat child (and their brother the golden child who usually remained enmeshed with the mother and is thus some variety of emotionally stunted), and have a spineless father who remained married to their mother (when BPD isn't usually correlated with long-lasting marriages).
Anecdotal, but in my experience material concerning mothers with borderline personality disorder seems strongly oriented toward women, while the material oriented toward men is far more concerned with getting over a borderline ex-GF/wife than dealing with a borderline mother.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
13hr ago
Much to my chagrin as a Raider fan, Harbaugh really does seem to be doing an admirable job of turning the Chargers around. It's infuriating that all three of our division rivals (even the Broncos are much improved) have had the good fortune and sense to hire known quantity, "can't go wrong" coaches and should be set for the next decade while we're going to have to undergo a total rebuild.
On the bright side, seeing the Charger turnaround at least leads me to believe that Tom Telesco can drastically improve the talent level on the Raider roster, assuming he can get us an at least decent quarterback. The Chargers have always had a talented, if underachieving roster while the Raider roster has been chronically talent-poor such that it's hard to tell where the roster problems end and coaching problems begin. The two feed each other given that only risky young coaches or known mediocre retreads will touch our current roster. Unfortunately nothing about his Chargers tenure or what we're doing this year leads me to believe that he can find the right coaching staff. We wasted Carr's prime years on a rebuild that never produced even an average defense and I'm afraid that we're going to run Maxx Crosby into the ground before we get an offense worthy of his effort.
As much as I don't want to blame Mark Davis for everything (IMO JDR and Gruden were probably the best coaches available in those given years, even though he overpaid for Gruden by giving him GM powers.), hiring Josh McDaniels (He really must have a silver tongue.) was so monumentally stupid that I'm at a loss for words, especially after we had a front row seat to his wrecking of the Broncos.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9d ago
2004 was a rough time to be a liberal. Dubya won an election that was close, but not that close, and massively improved his numbers with Hispanic voters compared to 2000. The GOP won its fifth straight House election (and actually had a capable Speaker) and a 55 seat Senate majority. If you were a doomer, Bill Clinton was looking like he papered over a losing platform with sheer charisma and the blue dog Democrats were not quite dead but dying fast. Unless you were paying attention to Illinois politics, you'd probably not heard of Barack Obama.
For fun, here's a bit of what passed for terminally online leftism back during the W era. For bonus points, here's his predicting that Hillary would lose back in '05, and his take on the Borderers long before Scott Alexander.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
23d ago
Find someone you need to stay alive to piss off. Maybe it's an actual person, maybe it's an inner critic, the weak part of yourself that wants to give up, whatever, doesn't matter. Spite is a powerful motivator (at least, it is for me). Leverage the worst parts of yourself to motivate you. A most base example: I don't want to lose weight because I care about my health, but because I'm vain.
With that, I'm not sure of your background, expectations for life, age (I'm guessing mid-late 30s), etc. but for me (possibly one of the bigger fuckups on this forum) I look at it this way: I had a shrink throw up his hands during a consultation and ask how I was still alive. I took it as an insult. Sure, my life was intolerable at the time (as opposed to this time if I seek therapy again, where it's more a case of "I need to get better, decommission the neon sign on my head that attracts dysfunctional people into my life, and quit making shitty decisions to get where I want to be"), but I wasn't ready to quit (In fact, I sought therapy because my lifestyle at 23 was going to get me killed and a recent near-death experience had made me realize that I wanted to live.).
I've wasted most of my adult life, and at the age of 33 am giving it a half-assed go at getting things together, getting a career, and getting toxic people who use me and drag me down out of my life. Do I expect a happy ending with a family? No, I'd love one but am hoping for a smart but neurotic woman who also missed the boat and whose crazy clicks with mine, a partner to complain about the world with. Do I want to finally be a career man to impress my father? No, my easy gravy train job went out of business and I'm tired of being broke, dealing with roommate drama, and driving a 15 year old piece of shit car that I have to work on regularly.
I'm not exactly an AA success story, but I quit being a terrible (drinking until blackout every night) alcoholic the same way. At some point in my late 20s I just ran out of energy and got tired of feeling like shit every day, so I cut down on drinking, have days (sometimes multiple in a row!) where I don't drink at all, etc. and I don't wake up hating myself most of the time. I recently encountered a 36 year old CA who drinks like I did when I was 22 and good God now I understand why the 8th Step exists.
I guess the moral of the story is to use what you want to be as a goal for the future rather than a cudgel to beat yourself up with now. Ask yourself: "Am I a better man than I was yesterday, last week, month, year, etc?" If you can honestly answer with a "yes", you're on the right path.
Tl;dr, ground your expectations.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Let's not pretend that the teenage birthrate is dropping mainly because teenagers have somehow just recently learned how to use contraception that has become fantastically effective. This is nonsense.
Eh, Plan B became OTC for 17 and over in 2006 and for all ages in 2014. Last I checked, a course on Plan B is $20 at your local Walmart. I'd say that counts as "recent" and "fantastically effective".
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
I would also end all teen-pregnancy prevention programs, as they don't stop working when you turn 20.
This. Aside from the fact that most of America's fertility drop has been due to a wildly successful campaign against teen pregnancy (and say what you want about red states and their goofy abstinence only sex-ed, but red states had the biggest declines such that Alabama's teen fertility rate today is about where Massachusetts was in 2005), people don't stop seeing themselves as "young" upon turning 18 or 22. In my "millennial who grew up watching "16 and pregnant" cohort, the change seems to happen around 30 (when people either have a fairly stable career or have figured out that it's unlikely to happen) if at all, with many either missing the boat entirely or having trouble conceiving that they wouldn't have had 10 years ago.
Aside from being unconvinced that any pro-natalist policy within the currently acceptable Overton window would work, I am simultaneously convinced that the best solution to the problem is to just get rid of the mountains of still existing anti-natal policy that we take for granted as normal. An example of this is the government attempting to reconcile the fact that college educated people are richer by spending tons of money to make more people college educated (a massively time-consuming, K-selected career path).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
I'm not necessarily in favor of such a policy (because said policy would open Pandora's box in terms of parties trying to engineer the franchise in their favor), and it would be more complicated than the status quo, but pretty much every parent files a state and local tax return in which they claim their children as dependents, so presumably it would be as easy as "anyone who claims a dependent child gets to vote".
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
So far in my SEC college town one could be forgiven for not knowing that an election is happening at all. I've seen one Harris bumper sticker, while Biden had a fair amount in 2020 and Bernie had an overwhelming amount back in '16. There are Trump stickers and signs, but not as many as in '16 or '20 so much as just the normal level of background noise.
Then again, there isn't a Senate election (and Doug Jones' campaign did far more than the necrotizing corpse that is the Alabama Democratic Party), there isn't going to be a single competitive House election, and Trump is going to win the state by something like 20 points (My only object of curiosity is how many counties he can break 90% of the vote in.) so neither party is spending any money (and they're probably both depleted after litigating over whether or not to impose another VRA minority opportunity district upon the state).
It's nice in the sense that I'd really rather not talk about politics with normies when I'm out at the bar (Thankfully, we have football to keep us distracted throughout the election cycle.), but it makes for a weird bubble that along with being overly online makes it difficult to have any sort of intuition as to what people are thinking out in the real world.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
if Russians buy it then we truly are lost.
Eh, the lack of success of dissident Russian liberals in their own country suggests that that ordinary Russians don't buy them. That said, one of my dear Russian-American (The mix of vestigial Russian accent plus taught in law school Southern accent is hilarious.) friends who I have an incredible amount of respect for (He's both genuinely smarter than me and vastly more driven.) used to be an uncritically turbo-America neocon who mocked me for my cynicism (I was an unironic Paultard in those days. Ah, high school.) and now is a pro-Trumper so disillusioned (and ruined in his Slavic friend group over the Z question, being unable to hide his great Russian chauvinism) that he moved to China.
I'd spend a lot of money for the privilege of a night talking with Artem in a bar (tough shit for me; he doesn't drink).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Why appeal to moderates when you don't have to? The formative experience for the modern Democratic party is the FDR-LBJ era when they wiped the GOP off the map for a generation and held the House for 48/52 years from 1933 to 1993. Anything less is apostasy to them, and they still haven't forgiven Gingrich for having the temerity to actually win and do something for once.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
In 1960, the median family that was black or living in greater Appalachia wasn't living that much better than the 1860 median family.
Uh, no. I'm from greater Appalachia, TVA country. If you'd said 1920 or 1930 (I chose those dates deliberately because IMO given the choice contemporary neoliberals would've never electrified the South.) I might've agreed with you but rural white Southerners wouldn't have worshipped FDR/Truman and the Democrats 50 years past their terms if things hadn't gotten better when they were in office.
My Silent Gen grandparents were lucky to have 8th grade educations, worked in the fields as children, and went hungry such that they hoarded canned goods in their old age. My Gen X parents had 12th grade educations, didn't starve, and didn't endure child labor. People are nostalgic for the mid 20th century not just because of social mores but because we had incredible economic growth that we haven't come close to matching in the 21st century even with a giant immigration wave (Keep in mind that all that mid 20th century economic growth happened with de facto closed borders.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
IMO your last paragraph nails the problem, though I'd caution that the 2010-2020 GOP was built on demographic quicksand (because REDMAP was that good, and Democratic gains from '06-08 were reliant on a lot of soon to die blue dog Democrats).
What was the signature accomplishment of the Obama era GOP? Legislatively? I dunno? Shrinking the stimulus a bit? Scuttling the Iran Deal? SCOTUS killed 50 state Medicaid expansion? Meanwhile, the SCOTUS majority that voted liberal against W's signature culture war issue (same-sex marriage, and Trump's justices did the same with Bostock) was 40% Republican appointed. Why lie down and think of the courts when Republican-appointed justices turn liberal almost as quickly as Republicans can appoint them?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
I misread your comment (and extend my apologies). I don't think Cruz wins (He's way creepier than J.D. Vance.), but I misread the comment.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Bush wouldn't have focused on immigration, though, because Bush is pro-immigration (as was his brother, as was his father, as was Reagan) and would rather lose and tank the GOP for a generation with it than run against immigration.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Update:
The roommate is gone, as is his annoying not housebroken dog. Kicking him out wasn’t as hard as I’d expected, and that fact leaves me with more self-recrimination than relief. I aggravated an ankle and pulled some muscle or ligament in my hip moving his bariatric chair out of my place but that was worth it (and both are progressively hurting less day by day such that I’m confident that I didn’t hurt anything serious; I’m just on the wrong side of thirty and out of shape so these things happen when lifting heavy things and moving them in weird ways) I should have done this years ago and my failure to do so cost me an enormous amount of money. I take no relish in the situation I’ve exiled him to (a tenuous couch surfing situation in a cluttered up house that smells in a way that just stresses me out the moment I walk in the door, and I am pretty lazy/lenient about cleanliness.), but I had to do it. My obligations toward him ended long ago, I have to defend myself, and I’ll leave it at that. He muttered something about contacting his family up north and that’ll probably be the correct course of action for him to take.
I’m relaxing right now with my door open, cats going in and out, and the A/C turned off like I like it (I’m bad about forgetting to turn the A/C back on and he’d pitch a fit about it.). The last week or so has been a rough mess of feeling badly emotionally dysregulated but as I’m typing this I feel like I’m on the other side of it and past the worst of it. If everything goes right and I don’t happen upon anything better to do I plan on renting a carpet cleaner and deep-cleaning the apartment over the weekend.
This is what winning looks like. Maybe I don’t have it in me to feel satisfaction or elation over finally fixing my own fuckup but I do feel relief. I feel at peace. I appreciate everyone here (and my IRL friends) who pushed me to quit putting off/tolerating things and get rid of him. To my buddy RJ in particular, you don't owe me shit. Sure, I covered a $70 or so tab and stayed out with you on Sunday night till the bars closed against my better judgment but you busted your ass helping me move his stuff with little notice. You're a true friend and I'll never forget that.
IMO people will keep saying "Get a Honda/Toyota" as long as 15-20 year old Corollas and Civics (and Camrys/Accords) are still superior to their competition, and IMO they mostly still are (With that, IMO some Ford and GM models are underrated.). Reputations will remain stickier as the average car continues to get older, and the average vehicle in the US is nearly 13 years old (and the average car is 14 years old!).
With that, for Chrysler it wasn't just the 2.7 V6, but the Neons that blew headgaskets, 4 speed auto transmissions made out of paper mache throughout the 90s and early 2000s, LH and cloud cars that just fell apart in a hurry, and pickup trucks that, Cummins diesels aside, are the worst of the big three (They're nice, but they fall apart fast and have relatively poor resale value.). The 300s/Challengers/Chargers are reliable as far as I'm aware, but guzzle gas so they aren't really economical and are police magnets in certain areas.
Subaru IMO is unique enough (AWD in all their cars) that their customers are willing to tolerate issues like the EJ's headgaskets that other brands couldn't get away with. VW/Audi IMO have improved a lot since the crap they were churning out in the early 2000s, and German car buyers are less sensitive about long-term reliability since they are the most likely to lease their vehicles instead of buying them.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
Eh, I'm a bit more sanguine. Firstly, Trump supporters were probably high on copium before the candidate switch, and even Biden probably could have tightened things up a bit before the election.
Vance is disappointingly bad at message discipline (Please don't publicly project your mommy issues into your politics about women!) and the "hillbilly who made it out" schtick can be grating (I say this is someone from a close enough background that I I want to like him, but it comes across as less sincere than it probably is.), but it's entirely possible that the Democrats will stoop to their level and be emotionally indulgent with their own VP pick (Mayor Pete or Beshear, also a possibility that 2028 frontrunners are trying to stay out of it.) and in the end I don't think VP matters much or that Trump had a slam dunk option (DeSantis isn't any less awkward at Trump's style of campaigning.). It could have been worse; he could have picked Tommy Tuberville.
Harris will definitely be better at fundraising than Biden was, but I'm not sure how much that moves the needle on its own. She will definitely supercharge enthusiasm among the media, college educated women, etc. but those are the groups that needed the least persuasion in the first place and were unlikely to forget to vote or defect to Trump. Harris remains relatively untested at things that aren't intra Democratic Party politics and is likely to remain weak in the Midwestern swing states that actually matter for winning the electoral college. The Trump campaign can hit her for things she said during the 2020 primary while trying to outflank Biden from the left.
I expect polls to tighten up and that Harris will definitely get a DNC bounce, but we'll know more in a few weeks to a month where things really stand. With that, as much as I wanted DeSantis the first place I don't think he would be running away with this either. Presidential elections are hard and Republicans being bad at winning them has been an issue for them since Reagan was no longer leading the charge.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
There probably are better bars, and it also depends on what time you're going in. Happy hour is usually going to be a bunch of old men (who can be surprisingly cliquish!) and if you're lucky people 35-55 in for a drink or few after work (These can make for decent conversation.). The younger crowd are rarely going to be there before 9-10PM.
With that, I work at a bar (a cocktail bar that's more divey than it wishes it was) in a college town where the night shift mostly caters to grad students (Well, it wishes it could get more grad students in.), millennial hipsters, and the occasional disgruntled faculty members and actual, interesting conversations can be hard to come by. It's not so much that people aren't willing to talk to strangers (This does vary by age; Gen X and up are more receptive to this and Millennials and Gen Z less so.) as the fact that they usually go out with their spouse or in friend groups that take up most/all of their attention (This is especially true of Millennial/Gen Z women, who tend to go out in groups to avoid conversations with unattached men.). The vast majority of the single unaccompanied patrons are single men that are varying degrees of loser. Working at a bar will improve your social/conversational skills and I imagine that being a patron could as well but unless you enjoy drinking first and foremost it's IMO a really inefficient way to meet people and make friends. At least, it is at the place I work at and the other bars in town are either the same or worse (clientele I don't like, too loud to talk, too dead, etc.). Most of the time it's either the same regulars I deal with (and as bad as the alcoholics can be, the weirdos who don't drink are worse) either every shift or at least once a week or, worse, the place gets taken over by over-40s out for the weekend/for some nearby event that I have little to no interest in talking to. When I was working there consistently I'd say that I had a genuinely interesting conversation with someone new or who wasn't a regular once every 4-6 weeks.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
Maybe it's generational
In my experiences working at a bar, it's definitely generational. Gen X and older of both sexes are vastly more receptive to conversations with strangers than millennials and younger. In particular, young women tend to go out in friend groups that aren't all that welcoming to outsiders, meaning that the rare unaccompanied young woman that is receptive to conversations tends to immediately become the subject of competition for the attention of every single man in the place.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
As someone whose life story was a bit like Vance's (except in rural north Alabama instead of small town southern Ohio), it's weird. I grew up not really fitting in with the place (was too much of a nerd) and as an adult would rather hang out at the bar with your average blue tribe dilettante (I really like smart right wingers and or grey tribe types, but they're rare in my local college town social scene and or keep their mouths shut. I'd much rather talk to a liberal lawyer/law student than some low-info Boomer Gen X Reaganite or Trumper who hasn't updated their talking points since the 1990s.) than your local rednecks (I can talk enough about cars and football to fit in, though, and one of our regulars was impressed that I was the first non-tradesperson he'd met who knew what a glazier is.), but I don't really share their values. Somehow, in spite of not having been raised in the church, I turned out a fairly conservative person. I don't know what separates me from the average hicklib (There are plenty of those to be found in an SEC college town scene.), but at some point in my late teens/early 20s I felt it necessary to forgive my classmates for not having accepted me, to thank my teachers for what they did do, and while I'm not a churchgoer I've made my peace with God. Most of the people in the ruralville I'm from are decent and mean well, and as for the ones who aren't, there's trash everywhere I guess.
As for the borderer stuff, I don't know if Vance was or wasn't hamming some things up (The gist of his family having been part of the Great Migration strikes me as accurate, and while my father's side aren't from Appalachia they did migrate from the south to the rust belt and have been badly hurt by that area's economic decline and their own dysfunctions. My mom's side were the hillbillies, and apparently meeting them was something of a culture shock to my dad who'd grown up middle class in the Midwest.), but he nailed the toxic push-pull relationship between Mom and Mamaw (I do not believe that he was lying about that.) such that I was unprepared for that trip down memory lane and spent some time in tears.
I will say that I sympathize deeply with Vance's reactionary streak, even if I'm not sure (and I don't know if he's sure either) what the answer is.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
It's a weirdly hopeful message- you have the power to stop sucking and turn things around!
Right. He spends much of the book complaining about his mother being a dysfunctional addict (and life being made much harder than it had to be by bad financial decisions rather than real poverty), but apparently she sobered up (Maybe the book was a wake-up call?) and they reconciled. He brought her to the RNC and bragged to the crowd that she's nearing 10 years sober, suggesting that she should celebrate her 10 year anniversary at the White House.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
Correct. In the dying rural area where I'm from (in north Alabama, not southern Ohio), the Silent generation was the last really "normal" generation that mostly stuck around even though they mostly transitioned from farming to working in factories (I had several relatives who ran vestigial hobby farms in their spare time/retirements.). Boomers and onwards tended to move to suburbs closer to where the jobs/amenities were (and even Huntsville starting to get expensive hasn't revitalized the area where I'm from yet; it seems to be sprawling northward and I grew up on the other side of the river) such that my neck of the woods started dying in the 70s and was a sitting duck in the 2000s for the meth epidemic to take over and turn what was left into a white trashville as the retired Silents sat in their houses and wondered what the Hell went wrong.
With that, my other side of the family wound up in a crappy part of the rust belt thanks to the Great Migration (My grandparents also took part, but returned home and eventually George Wallace brought a GM factory to us for my grandfather to work at. My parents met each other in the Marines because the military was how Gen X got out of dodge.) and it's striking A. how much worse off my Millennial cousins are up there than mine from Alabama and B. how low the standards are up there. Like, I'm a fuckup by the standards of being college educated but I have a full time job, pay my own bills, have never had a problem with illegal drugs, and haven't been to jail so to them I'm a success. Maybe they were just worse to start with and my dad was the outlier success story on their side and my mom one of the worst on her side (Her sister was very much like J.D. Vance's mom from Hillbilly Elegy. Mom was...a cartoon villain tier psycho who put on an epic of domestic violence and dead pets.) but it's depressing nevertheless.
As for aggressively anti-social behavior, I did find it amusing that once Mom moved to a city with actual police it didn't take her long to start winding up in jail for her bullshit (Twice in a year, once for domestic violence and once for stealing from her job.). Luckily she finally succeeded in her decade-long quest to draw disability and now gets something like 90% disability from the VA, so she's not really my problem anymore and can go around making a mockery of "disabled veteran" (Lol the local diversion program for disabled veterans did spare her quite a bit of jail time for that DV charge. Apparently that wasn't her first offense for that, to which I can only reply "no shit".) with all the plate and stickers on her car.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
The closest you're going to get is that pharma companies are fundamentally in the business of solving their patients' pain issues (the "doing good" part), that the opiod overdose crisis is unrelated to this, and that overdose deaths aren't correlated with prescription rates. In short, Richard Lawhern is arguing that we have an overdose crisis A. because synthetic opioids that became pervasive in street drugs during the 2010s have a very low margin for user error and B. we have too many people suffering from something akin to shit life syndrome.
Perhaps a good sanity check would be to check on non-opioid problems with addiction. Say what you want about the Sacklers, but they aren't in the food and beverage industry, and thus can't plausibly be blamed for the rise in alcohol deaths or 10% of Americans being morbidly obese.
I don't want to live in a world with more pillheads, think that full libertarian wet dream drug legalization would be a disaster (It would almost certainly lower the death rate among active drug users, but you'd almost certainly get a lot more users, as happened with Marijuana legalization.), and even accept that crucifying the Sacklers may be a societally necessary action, but I'm not convinced that Oxycontin in particular is what broke everything.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
Here you go, courtesy of Jacob Sullum writing for the libertarian Reason Magazine. Amusingly, the one wrongdoing he accuses Purdue Pharma of committing was reformulating the drug to make it harder to abuse, which was correlated with an increase in overdose deaths.
Yep. I live in an SEC college town and we had to import our Trump supporting female bartender from California. There are few species of liberal more obnoxious than the first-gen college educated late Xer/Millennial liberal with high-school educated Trump supporting late boomer/Gen X parents, especially if they come from a place where the Moral Majority actually mattered. The middle-aged Yankee liberal English professor might be easy to offend, but was more tolerant in the long run. It's a shame I never got to meet her daughter, who is reportedly very high on the "hot, but crazy" scale (The professor is also this, according to the boomer regular who dated her.). My Gen X mom from George Wallace Democratic stock has been waging a Clintonian holy war on Facebook for far longer than my Gen X father's acquired Trumptardism and addiction to the dumb parts of right-wing Twitter.
Interestingly, the Southern liberals I know from more upper-class backgrounds have been vastly more relaxed about it. One of favorite drinking buddies (He is a hilariously obnoxious womanizer with a country lawyer's drawl and Yellow Fever when drunk.) is a lawyer's son turned Democratic campaign operative. Another is a 40-something professor who never got a steady gig, a hilarious, hopeless dandy who even his liberal female counterparts write off as gay (This does, in fact, cripple his dating life.).
My favorites to drunkenly talk history/politics with are female law students, by a mile. They're well informed and while tough in an argument, they won't take disagreement personally.
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