solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
IMO while Trump is most likely going to lose, I'm not convinced that either Haley or Desantis have a chance of winning either. While I personally like Desantis he might be the least personable candidate since Richard Nixon if not Barry Goldwater. Haley, meanwhile, appeals to a coalition that's won the popular vote in a Presidential election once in the last 30 years (Dubya would get stomped in 2024 in the Electoral College as well as the popular vote if he performed as he did in 2000 given contemporary demographics.).
Put bluntly, save for a time in the 1990s when fiscal conservatism got trendy and people were really sick of crime and a shorter time in the 2010s when people were mad about Obamacare (which the GOP did a good job of milking for House purposes with REDMAP) the Republican platform has been dreadfully unpopular since the 1930s. For a Republican to win the Presidency they either need a God-tier candidate (Eisenhower and Reagan come to mind here.) or for the Democrats to self-destruct/be in office when something really bad happens. Richard Nixon didn't magically become more telegenic from 1960 to 1968, for example.
So, counterintuitively, Trump supporters aren't exactly wrong to value style over substance. A non-stylish Republican isn't going to win. Unfortunately for them Trump seems to inspire his opponents as much if not more than his supporters and was largely incompetent at governing, but it isn't as if the GOP had been putting forth an all-star cast before he showed up.
It's going to be cold so I'm going to cook either chili, 15 bean soup, or some variety of lentil soup. The 15 bean soup in particular is a totally idiotproof way to produce something that's reasonably healthy and tasty with no real work or skill. Chili is also idiotproof, but then I have a tendency to want to stuff a bunch of crackers in it that undermines the "healthy" part.
My biggest weakness as a cook (aside from general mediocrity and occasional intoxication) is a tendency toward making things cheap and healthy at any cost, and figuring out the flavor later. Sometimes this makes for weird things that horrify my friends (savory oatmeal, for example), but that taste fine IMO. On that note, I think I'm going to try buckwheat at some point.
My friends (SEC college townies) are a mixed bag but trend toward not great given how easily they're impressed by the stuff I make.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
Yeah, I also find myself incredibly cynical over this having been raised by a parent who was not, as Aella's article put it, a "paper tiger".
My youngest (half) sister actually went through a process something like this when our mother and her father divorced. He hired a tough talking idiot of a lawyer and proceeded to sue for custody based on allegations of child abuse (I wasn't told about this before they went through with it because they mistakenly assumed that I would side with my mother. I wouldn't have, but I would have told them that they were embarking on something very dangerous and foolish in the name of assuaging my stepfather's ego over getting screwed in the divorce. Mother didn't give a shit where my sister stayed as long as the child support and alimony checks kept coming in.).
Long story short, being intimately familiar with our mother's character I have every reason to believe my sister's accusations, but they were thin on physical evidence and in my opinion argued the case completely wrong. My sister was arrested as a runaway and then returned to our mother's custody, at which point my mother called her father on sister's phone, told him he would never find her, and chucked the phone out the window going about 70 miles an hour down the road. There was a struggle over the phone during which my sister was punched in the face, but it didn't land directly so there weren't any dramatic bruises for me to take nice pictures of. I got called in by our mother when little sister allegedly started threatening to kill herself (I have no clue whether to believe that or not.).
I got her out of there the next day and talked to his lawyer, a CPS case worker, and so on.
Mother hired a better lawyer (One would think that my stepfather would have learned something from mother running circles around my father in court for 15 years, but apparently not.), said lawyer successfully derailed my sisters' attempts at testimony (I wasn't there because it was supposed to be a preliminary hearing, not the actual custody trial.), and the judge told my sisters to their faces that he didn't believe them, dismissing the whole thing as some variety of teenage drama.
There was no heroic validation for my sisters, no revenge upon our mother, and in fact all they accomplished was putting my sister in actual danger.
To end, I'll just say this. There's never going to be any imposition of justice upon our mother. The only thing to be done is to try to live well and remember that once you're out it is you who is the author of your life story and you who can be your own worst enemy.
Our mother is now in her mid 50s, alone, and living on disability. She is clueless as to why her daughters want next to nothing to do with her. This isn't some grand act of karma, it just sucks.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
Even the author concedes that their strategy is only viable if the parents are paper tigers, and TBH I feel like their conception of parents who aren't paper tigers is abstract at best.
What do you do with a parent who is no stranger to breaking their own windows? Or, to get personal, what do you do with a parent who would burn their own house down (It was a shoddily executed attempt at insurance fraud in which we lost far more than the insurance paid us.) and then have the kid drugged for being sad about it (Mom doctor shopped until she found someone willing to diagnose me with OCD.)?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
I wouldn't go so far as to say Christmas is fully Grinchified, but I would say there's been a shrinkage of Santa. what's the point in Santa for people without children? For that matter, what's the point of a Christmas Day gathering when there aren't any nieces, nephews, or grandkids?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
Just to give an example, what happens when one of them brings in fleas? Getting rid of fleas in one cat is a pain in the ass as it is.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
Correct. Due to irresponsibility on my end (roommate had one cat, I adopted a stray cat, didn't get one of them sterilized in time, and the female had a litter of seven of whom all survived), I wound up with nine cats in a similarly-sized condo. It was a nightmare. Once the kittens grew enough to walk the place was permanently trashed. I spent a fortune on food and litter. It was very difficult to find homes for them in a town that's overrun with stray/feral cats.
I've since gotten it down to three (still pushing it IMO; two are being babysat until roommate moves in with her boyfriend and the end goal is to have one cat) and it's a night and day difference in terms of QoL.
Happy side story though: One of my friends took the worst, most feral of the two kittens I had for barn cats, and over a period of months the worse of those two has become an adorable, fully domesticated housecat. I didn't believe it when she told me until she showed me pictures of it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
To get out of the trailer park my dad joined the Marines and has since lived at least 10 hours away from his hometown in the rust belt, returning to visit maybe once a decade. Other than his mom, the one functional aunt, and intermittent periods of contact with/enabling of some cousins (including a cousin who came and lived with us Fresh Prince style for a few years) who lost their dad he has almost nothing to do with them.
It was an ugly disappointment coming from the white trash bullshit from my mother's side (See, even if you escape it's possible to wind up jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.) to find out for myself that dad's side of the family is pretty much the same thing with more drugs and prison sentences, all the way down to both sides having a cousin named K who lost custody of her kids due to drugs.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
Iran is a victim of its own highly successful population control policy.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
Right. I'm highly confident that Wagner executed some of its fighters for desertion/surrender. It wouldn't surprise me if Storm Z (whatever the Hell that is) has done the same. It wouldn't surprise me if Ukrainian ultranationalist units have done bad things to reluctant conscripts. I don't think that either the normie Russian or Ukrainian armies are shooting their own soldiers.
Do I believe it? No, and I assume that it originates from NAFO (American/EU pro-Ukraine propaganda) Twitter, who have also been implying that the Russians are using WWII era GAZ-AA trucks in the assault. The latter sort of obviously ridiculous claims (Sourcing WWII era trucks would be vastly harder and more expensive than just breaking some cold war era trucks out of storage, commandeering civilian trucks, or just resorting to pickup trucks.) lead me to dismiss anything they say out of hand, along with the fact that Z-Twitter hasn't even bothered to try refuting them. I'd believe it if I saw broad swathes of Z Twitter complaining about the Russians doing it and/or compelling video evidence that I didn't think was staged.
More broadly, and I say this as an American that neither reads Russian or spends time combing through Telegram, IMO Twitter (which is mostly posts from Americans and Europeans, not Russians or Ukrainians) from either side provides information of limited utility. There's been an assault on Avdiivka, it hasn't yet succeeded or been called off, and beyond that who knows. I suspect that it's been a bloody slog given that Avdiivka has been an uncrackable nut for the Russians since day one. Endless videos from both sides of equipment or men being blown up may be emotionally gratifying but they don't tell much by themselves other than that this or that piece of equipment has been deployed.
More broadly than the above, I suspect that, if ever, we'll get good books with accurate information at least ten and probably twenty or more years from now after it's all over. I expect that the Pentagon, if they have better numbers than they're giving (which appear to be regurgitations from the Ukrianian MOD, who are as unreliable/prone to exaggerated kill counts as the Russian MOD and frankly every MOD in history), are keeping them classified. As of now, I have little idea of what to think of the Avdiivka assault. We'll know whether or not it succeeds or doesn't in taking the place in due time and beyond that I can't judge the rationales of either side because I don't know the real manpower/casualty situation for either side. My best guess is that the Russians achieved some initial surprise, failed to translate that into quick victory, and have been reduced to another attritional slog. Whether it's worth pursuing as the Russians appear to be or not depends on factors I don't know.
Edit: In a not surprising development, the lower quality pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian Twitters are also liable to posting absolute garbage concerning the Israel/Palestine conflict.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
He needs to reach people who think wokeness is bad, but don't understand why every single institution has adopted it. The book explains why.
The problem here is that he viscerally hates that would be audience, and would sell them down the river for a fancy gummy worm, if that. Speaking as a working-class conservative, not only would I support Hanania being canceled, I would support his execution and gladly volunteer to do it myself. He's that much of a sneering asshole. He's the kind of guy to make racists defend black people to avoid the sheer embarrassment of being associated with him.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
The GOP has a much deeper bench of Presidential people
Does it? Trump stomped the 2016 field and appears poised to do the same in 2024 for a reason, and it isn't that the Republicans have a great bench. Looking at his closest competitors, DeSantis appears to be a walking charisma deficit and clueless at the art of campaigning, which is a shame because I like the job he's done in Florida a lot more than I like Trump's record in office. Ramaswamy possesses a brain and is willing to say interesting things, but is a transparently flip-flopping con man. Nikki Haley is only getting attention because the other options (Is Youngkin even running? He's undercooked even if so IMO.) are total non-entities (Doug Burgum? Lol.).
I'll grant you that the Democrats have troubles on their end (though I think Newsom is underestimated at one's peril), but it's more because being a successful Presidential candidate in the TV and post-TV age is HARD. Since Nixon (who more or less won 1968 by default as the Democrats imploded; note that he lost in 1960 against better put together candidates), the Republicans have had one great TV politician (Reagan) and the Democrats two (Bill Clinton and Obama). 2016 Trump gets half-credit because he created enemies as fast if not faster than supporters and only barely beat Hillary. Dubya IMO was passable but had the fortune of running against weak opposition (He barely beat Al Gore, the personification of boring, and still enjoyed the rally around the flag effect against Kerry.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
Yes, the LS-swapped Miata is our generation's Shelby Cobra. I'd love to drive one.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
To add, in most places there is A. more traffic and with that B. more cops on the roads and insurers that are less forgiving than in the past. Even in rural areas (and most teenagers don't live in rural areas, but either in cities with heavy traffic or suburbs that are likely to have plenty of bored cops) you'll get caught eventually if you make a habit of having too much fun, and my teenage hooliganism reached a fairly quick end upon getting slapped in handcuffs for speeding.
"Slow car fast" at least means you can hit the redline in second or third without going fast enough to be in "reckless driving" ticket territory whereas pushing something mundane by performance car territory like a Mustang or Challenger will get you "license revoked" territory quickly along with really outstripping the skill of your average driver (as compilation videos of Mustangs spinning out and crashing into stuff can attest).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
I'm biased because I own one, but an 8th gen Civic Si can be found in reasonably good shape for $8-10K and bad shape for about $6K. It's not a fast car unless you put money into it, but it's fun to drive (8K RPM red line and VTEC, yo!), gets reasonably good gas mileage, and is reasonably easy to maintain (There's a Youtube video that tell you how to fix almost anything on it.) while having lots of airbags unlike the Fast and the Furious era cars from the 90s and early 2000s. A 7th generation Si isn't as much fun without mods (The stock one I had felt pretty slow and I traded out of it quickly but the other one I had with a 6 speed swap was super fun and felt like you were going fast.) but is basically an uglier Mini Cooper that's way more reliable.
An NB Miata (1999-2005) can be had in decent shape for $5-6K if you're willing to be cramped and have parents who don't care about safety, and in my experience a mildly tarted up one gets more attention than much nicer cars that cost more money. Like the Civic, you can find a video that'll show you how to fix almost anything on Youtube.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
The people joining the union just want good wages and benefits to have a family. They don’t think like us here who want routes to be rich.
It's a long story that involves the Great Migration and George C. Wallace, but my maternal grandfather was a GM retiree, a rarity in the south. It's not an overstatement to say that getting that GM job was the best thing to happen to my grandfather and by extension my family. My grandparents (who grew up as farmers and were fortunate for their time to have received eighth grade educations) went from a working life fit for the Book of Job to being comfortably lower-middle class with a secure retirement.
Where things get interesting is that my father (high school educated) also went from broke to "making it" thanks to the auto industry, only this time it came courtesy of working for a non-union automaker (Nissan; he presently works for Tesla). The free market worked well enough for him. Would it have for 20th century autoworkers? I suspect so. Ford was late to unionization and I'm not aware of their workers having been poorly paid prior to it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
A real tragedy about these dark rituals, is that unlike the nicer variety, when it's over I have no feeling of resolution.
Speaking as someone with more baggage (blah blah blah mom with Borderline Personality Disorder, child abuse, domestic violence, and dead pets; firearms aren't cool in domestic arguments and Hillbilly Elegy made me cry because it hit way too close to home) who has done his own version of the ritual (less often now) I am genuinely unsure as to how useful they were. Maybe they were and that's how I got through it (albeit terribly inefficiently; IMO I wasted an enormous amount of time crying into my river of Steel Reserve over this stuff), but early 30s me wonders if I could've had a better 20s by going straight to the professionals instead of doing it the self-reliant redneck way (i.e. never taking PTSD seriously until I was armchair-diagnosed by a veteran coworker who'd done a few tours in the sandbox).
That said, if the drunk and crying part wasn’t so productive I think that just typing it out (usually meant for reddit support groups, sometimes posted, usually not) is helpful. Maybe it’s the act of journaling or just banging away at the keyboard. Often, by the time I’m two-thirds finished or whatever I no longer feel the need to say whatever it was that I was going to say. This is better than getting drunk around people, going down a spiral of telling stories, freaking people out and then feeling like an asshole hunting for sympathy. Relating to the above, maybe I needed that sympathy at some point but now being able to shock/unsettle people is more embarrassing than anything and I know how uncomfortable I am when someone hits me with a traumatic event that I can’t relate to/one-up.
One thing I am convinced of is that resolution is to some extent impossible because I remain who I am and my mother remains who she is. There’s little point in entertaining counterfactuals of how much nicer my life would be if I hadn’t endured this or that/been made a little weird as a result. I am bound by something, be it honor/a wish to be the better person, guilt, fear, or whatever such that I will never cut my mother off unless she mortally threatens me. Sure, our relationship is mostly an unrewarding exercise of “What the Hell does she want/need now?” but I’m the oldest and only son, it’s my job to make sure she’s okay (and thank God that she’s a disabled veteran and thus mostly the VA’s problem), and I owe it to my siblings to shoulder most of the load of her bullshit now because I couldn’t defend them from her when I was a kid.
One note, as to the younger memories, I’d mostly rather not. I’ve been crushed to hear things from relatives, what they thought/felt about how my sister and I were treated when we were little. I’ve been crushed from the other end to hear things from my little sister, things I’d thought that I’d spared her from. I’ll leave it at this: I’m fairly confident that I developed speech aphasia as a two year old because I had the word “no” beaten out of me.
The final note: My father says that I should write a book about it all. I doubt that I’ll ever get around to that or that it would be worth reading, but I guess that in its own way a procession of comments nearing the character limit and half-finished ones on Google Docs is something like a book in itself.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
I find it perfectly believable that Russian commanders would say "fuck them kids, fire the missile" when they notice a school being used to host troops.
More to the point, the front lines have been relatively static for a long time. There won't be kids in those schools, so it's just another building that if anything is less likely to be occupied by civilians.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
That's going to be tough to pull off as long as so many black Americans live in swing states (A bunch of Nigerians moving to coastal cities and doing well isn't going to change the electoral map all that much.). It can be (and has been done) with American Indians because there's not a lot of them, and Appalachian whites can mostly be ignored because they live in a handful of deep red states, but black Americans are too numerous, too strategically located (and institutionally embedded) to just ignore, and too convenient a cudgel for white liberals to wield toward white conservatives to pass up.
Maybe the Democratic Party radically changes its marketing strategy and the electoral map changes in the future such that Southern and Midwestern swing states aren't so important, but for now the Democrats are the party of Biden, and they're presently re-engineering the primary calendar to make black Southerners more important, not less.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
To be clear, I think the smart Nigerians would assimilate and do fine in America. It's just that given the choice like every other high IQ immigrant group they'll mostly gravitate toward wealthy blue cities and assimilate into that milieu (doing wonders for, say, Ivy League schools looking to become more aesthetically diverse), which doesn't really do anything to fix the problems of existing black Americans that mostly live elsewhere or to dilute the outsized political power held by that group (White Americans are also overrepresented by their political system, but they don't bloc vote anywhere near as intensely.). Black Americans (and the Robin DiAngelos of the world, for that matter) in places like St. Louis aren't going to be impressed that a bunch of immigrants that look like but don't sound or act much like them are making money any more than white Americans in places like rural Kentucky are impressed by people that look like them doing well in the Acela corridor.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
A lot of self-identified "libertarians" from the Ron Paul (appropriate enough given that I'd describe Paul as more an anti-federalist than a libertarian, even though he ran on the LP's ticket once) era were just disaffected paleocons (think Pat Buchanan) who'd lost the power struggle with neoconservatives in the 90s. Trump rolled in an more or less ran on a Buchanan style platform and ran away with that group.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
America has more successful immigrants of color than ever before. Has the argument that America is a racist country been refuted? I don't think so. If anything, we've just imported a bunch of Saira Raos to tell us how racist we are.
There are a few probably unfixable problems here: One, other groups being successful doesn't make black Americans successful. They can easily claim that the new arrivals discriminate against them just as much as white Americans (sometime moreso; it never occurred to white Americans to monopolize the business of black haircare products like it did to the Koreans), that new immigrants didn't suffer slavery or Jim Crow or whatever, and this can't be refuted.
Two, as alluded to above, there's nothing to stop the new immigrants from claiming that they, too, are victims of racism. It doesn't matter if they are in fact "privileged" in every objective measure relative to the average white American. There's status to be had in victimhood and if anything high-IQ immigrants will just be smarter at it than the locals.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
Are you going to force these elite Nigerians to live in places that most black Americans actually live and intermarry with them? If not, ADOS black Americans will remain a distinctive group, and thanks to disproportionately living in Southern and Midwestern swing states they will remain politically powerful above what their numbers would suggest.
Eh, the Italians were relatively Republican (as were the Germans) while the Irish leaned Democratic (AFAIK there's still a decent-sized partisan gap between Americans of German or Italian ancestry and those with Irish ancestry.). It's not a coincidence that Antonin Scalia and Ron DeSantis are big Republican names while the Democrats still boast politicians like Joe Biden and Mike Duggan. The GOP of that era thought that the Great Migration (Party of Lincoln!) was going to save them from the white ethnic hordes.
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