cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
12hr ago
Watched Hail Mary in theaters. I read the book beforehand and saw it with a friend that had not read the book.
We both enjoyed it, really good movie.
Movie was more cinematic, less science heavy than the book, which was probably a very good choice. Still had the same heartfelt moments.
cjet79
12hr ago
That is a good recommendation, especially if you are looking for a Hobbesian view.
I do read a lot of stuff on royal road, but I'm racking my brain to come up with things. I mostly don't feel like I encounter any of the ultra leftist stuff either, but I'm more aware that it exists. I just tend to avoid the works with certain tags like 'gender bender'
For a while on Reddit anytime any of the works of inadvisablycompelled were recommended, people would show up and complain about his "abhorrent" anti immigration views (aka middle of the road around here). However, It was hard for me to notice anything explicitly right leaning about any of the works. Paranoid mage maybe fits. The dungeon core story doesn't.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/72498/sublight-drive-star-wars is written by an Israeli that was about to join the Israeli military. Star wars clone wars fan fiction, with self insert MC on the losing side. Again, I couldn't pick up much explicitly right leaning.
Off Royal road, Michael Chatfield is ex military maybe ex marine. He has some series out. Again, no explicit right leaning.
Off Royal road and out of copyright is John Carter of Mars. Was probably leftist at the time it was written a century ago, but now comes off as heavy trad rightist.
cjet79
13hr ago
It's not like there's some fixed percentage of women whose class is who are destined to sell porn no matter what
Sadly there is a correlation with women that were sexually abused as children and teens and those engaging in sex work.
That category of women is luckily not a "fixed" percentage. But I do feel that maybe it changes the calculus a bit.
cjet79
13hr ago
Agreed that it is not currently a stable state of affairs, but I think that is a product of the current cultures views on the role of government and how the government chooses to behave (like whether they choose to follow the constitution).
The prohibition movement started in the 1820's, so it took them a century to build enough momentum and then eventually ban alcohol. And then the ban failed in clear ways and they reversed it.
Tobacco has been grandfathered into legality.
There are also many local laws on the books all around the country that ban "sodomy". Certainly enough to make it into a national law, but that was never done.
I think for a long time there was a very steep hill to climb to ban something at the national level, even if it was hated and reviled. You needed more like 70-80% general approval for a ban rather than just 50%+1 for a single election. Nowadays it does feel more like 50%+1 for a single election is enough to get anything banned. And overturning the ban requires something like the 70-80% general support (like Marijuana legalization).
It is reasonable and rational for any vested interests in a product/activity to get very worried when approval levels for their thing dip below 55%.
cjet79
17hr ago
Society seems to have lost the middle ground options between hating something + banning it and allowing it + enthusiastically supporting it.
I'm generally in favor of more things being legal, but heavily discouraged and frowned upon.
cjet79
1d ago
The "not perfect" is doing a lot of lifting in that statement.
Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine Russia seemed no worse than any of America's Gulf state "allies". Ukraine would probably get dumped in the same general category but much less bad within that category.
America has been friendly and "allies" with plenty of shit tier governments around the world.
I've been putting "allies" in quotes because an ally that you aren't willing to let have nuclear weapons is more accurately a protectorate territory.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union there has not been an ideological reason for Russia and America to hate each other.
Back in 2016 Trump had no reason to do saber rattling crap with Russia. He was instead picking a trade war fight with China. And you'd probably want Russia on your side if you start a trade war fight with China, since Russia can negate the main leverage over China: Fuel.
The general point is that back in pre 2016 taking bribes from Ukraine would not have been ok simply because "they aren't Russia". I would consider Great Britain to be one of America's best allies, and I don't think Hunter Biden's relationship with them would have been ok.
Meanwhile the lukewarm stance of Trump 1 administration of "we are not going to label you as enemies" was treated as being equivalent to treason.
cjet79
1d ago
I got the impression that the Trump "obstruction" was very similar to a "resisting arrest" charge by cops accompanied with no other crimes.
Basically go hard on accusing someone of a crime, when they protest their innocence as just about anyone will do, slam them with your body or investigation powers and now the cop has a guaranteed crime even if the original accusation was bogus.
But realistically it doesn't even change anything. We already know that Trump is extremely friendly towards Putin and Russia! We don't need any proof of campaign coordination to know how much they get along, he's pretty blatant in this!
He was friendly far below the "friendliness" that the Obama and Biden administrations had with Ukraine. Which amounted to million dollar bribes to Biden's son.
I very much felt like the Democrats were expecting their own level of corruption to be uncovered by the investigation, but instead it was a bunch of nothing. Like the jealous partner that insists you are totally cheating when it's then that has been unfaithful.
cjet79
2d ago
With Joe Rogan what you get out of the interview is often exactly who goes in. Boring Politician goes in boring political talk comes out. Funny comedian goes in funny podcast comes out. If I like listening to guest on other podcasts I will usually like them on Joe Rogan as well. It won't be that persons best podcast, just solidly average.
He has good comedian podcasts with Stavros Halkias, Ms Patt, Tim Dillon, (protect our parks crew), etc. but those are all people that are just excellent and entertaining on podcasts anyways.
cjet79
2d ago
The top-level post below this one (JeSuisCharlie's) is literally just a link with a quote from that link: the only user-provided content is the label for the link.
You don't mod it, despite that having less personal commentary than any one of Eetan's links.
It's not a top level post, it was a response to eetan.
Discussion engagement with a topic is a limited resource here. So if you spend the time to write up an in depth post and it take you half a day, you don't want someone sniping the topic by basically posting a dumb article or twitter thread.
Yes you can respond to them, but responses often get less engagement than the top level.
Other spinoffs of the culture war thread concept have been tried. The ones that allowed bare links are all dead.
cjet79
5d ago
I am appreciative of the comments from @faceh and @cjet79 (sorry if I summoned you)
Well its hard to complain when you give me a complement.
what makes me manly over my lifetime
In one of the original formations of my comment I was explicitly trying to wrestle with this idea.
I feel manly right now. It has been a journey. What would I tell to a young boy trying to embark on this journey?
This is not an entirely idle question for me. I have male cousins that are in the 16-23 range. I have two nephews that are young now but they'll grow. I have friends that are in their early 20's. I would like to be able to give them good advice if slightly prompted since unprompted advice is not worth the energy it takes to speak it. I've also found that just being a knowledgeable advice source and acting as you are gets some of the smarter guys to seek you out themselves. As I said above, being a man is recognizable. It is kind of one of the main benefits. Humans are social. They recognize social success, and being a man is ultimate social success for the male gender.
cjet79
5d ago
Again, it is not easy. If it is easy, then it less likely to contribute to the feeling of manliness. Because manliness is somewhat a sense of achievement. It doesn't have to be that. But it is and it has been. If you are upset about that, then the blame does not lie with feminists it lies with ancient human culture and norms.
Artificial and natural constraints are interchangeable in my view. If people believe that only the top 10% of height is attractive that is fine. They might also believe that only the top 10% of funnyness is attractiveness. Add an endless number of competitive "best of" categories. With enough categories most men can be best at something. Its important for males to realize where and when they can be competitive with others. The smart guys will create their own categories.
I will emphasize again that this cannot be easy. To be easy defeats the purpose of it all. Working hard at being good at something is the point of it all. Its what women want. If it is too easy you won't be proving anything.
cjet79
5d ago
I do think external validation is a "weakness", but that the line between external and internal is always blurry and nothing is fully internal. There is a spectrum and I think internal motivations are more lasting. That is why I have a problem with some of the Andrew Tate manosphere types. They are providing an external validation.
But truly internal validation seems a bit ... psychopathic to me. Humans are social creatures. Adam Smith is quoted as saying "Humans want to love and be loved." Optimum tradeoff from my perspective is probably 80-90% internal and the rest external.
What I really think matters on a social level is your personal belief in manliness. For many people that means external validation. I think it is healthy for most teens to have that external validation. To look to other male role models and see what works for them. But by your thirties as a male you should be charting your own path. I think midlife crisis is often men figuring out how to be manly on their own.
cjet79
5d ago
This creates an inherently muddled message to men. "DON'T listen to the siren song of red pill grifters, DON'T give in to misogyny, DON'T become a parody of masculinity. That's VERY BAD."
"Okay okay, but what should I do instead?"
"Fuck you, figure it out yourself or die alone."
It is a critical problem if you ask me. There are very VERY few well-known, popular male figures who espouse and represent a form of masculinity that demonstrates an appealing and attainable path an otherwise average guy can follow to get a meaningful, fulfilling life.
I will now answer how to become a Man
At its root "healthy masculinity" is an existential crisis that every individual man sort of has to navigate on their own. You can take advice from others, and the path you follow will be similar to many others, but it will still be your own.
The question young men need to ask themselves and repeatedly try to answer is "What makes me feel like a man?" They need to find answers that they can believe in. Then they need to pursue those things and believe themselves a man by achieving them. Humans are social creatures and they pick up on the behavior and beliefs of others. Women will love the genuine "I'm a man" energy, almost regardless of where it comes from. Other men will pick up on it and respect you more. Young boys will listen to your commands.
It can be almost anything, but you'll certainly notice lots of trends and similarities. A man is a provider. A man is skilled at hard things. A man has a beautiful woman. A man is knowledgeable and intelligent. A man has a family. A man is powerful. A man is wealthy. A man has convictions. A man fights for a cause. A man appears effortlessly cool or funny. A man has a strong healthy body. A man is a good father.
The path to becoming a man can be given. Someone like Andrew Tate can get young men to believe that having beautiful women is what makes you a man, and he will teach you how to get those women. But its a weak path, for two reasons:
- The belief is partly tied up with someone else. Its not internal. Thus you are relying on that person to maintain the belief for you. They have to maintain their mystique of manliness.
- You have not learned how to build the path yourself. A single path to manliness will not last you a lifetime. You need to learn the masculinity pathfinding skill to survive long term.
If you see being a man as having a beautiful woman, then you marry a beautiful woman and feel like the ultimate man. But slowly that woman ages, or her body is stressed and shredded by child birth. If she is no longer beautiful, are you still a man? No, you lose your man belief, and she notices and loses interest in you too. Both of you feel that the other has failed in the marriage, but you will both lack the words and ideas to describe it.
Instead you learn how to find many ways to be a man. A man is a provider, but what if you lose your job? A man has a healthy and strong body, but what if you get in a car accident and are maimed? This is why you must learn to forge a belief in yourself as a man for the things you achieve. A single path might become closed to you, so you need to know how to open new ones.
No it is not easy. Yes it takes a while. Yes the rewards are totally worth it.
cjet79
6d ago
A permanent end to such research would cost us the possibility of spotting potential pandemics before they occur naturally
I don't think that is true at all. Some of the most likely crossover diseases are from livestock. And tracking livestock diseases would not fall under the umbrella of GoF research.
Assessing a livestock disease seems as safe as having livestock in the first place, so there is no added risk.
cjet79
6d ago
While I am far from 100% certain that Covid was a lab leak, I take the possibility seriously. I share your frustration with GOF research, there is no way in hell that the potential benefits are proportional to the risks.
Just to reiterate those proportions: 7.1 million confirmed deaths, estimated 19-36 million deaths. Make the math easy and call it 10 million deaths. If you think there is a 1% chance it was lab leak then that is 100k deaths caused by lab leak.
My mother is a PhD microbiologist. She hasn't actively worked in the field in decades. Last time she did lab work it was for Monsanto's agriculture/husbandry products. I've argued with her about GoF research. She got upset with Rand Paul when he was grilling Fauci about GoF research. I felt at the time it was more of a circle the wagons type reaction, aka she saw a Scientist getting attacked by a politician and blue tribe brain had her reflexively defending the scientist. Never-mind the facts that Fauci is more of an administrator, and Rand Paul was an MD for longer than Fauci did anything resembling lab work.
In separate conversations I removed the names and political events and she agreed on the danger of these medical experiments. She even added additional reasons to be scared. Her descriptions of labs she worked in were not what you'd hope for with people handling potentially dangerous biological samples. But even agreeing on the danger of the experiments she didn't think they should be banned. Her objection is that "Gain of Function" research is way too broad of a term and could ban far more useful research. For example, messing around with Yeast so that it can ferment an additional fruit or vegetable for alcohol consumption could be considered "gain of function" research.
I respond back 'well then just ban working with the deadly pathogens'. She hits back that E. coli can be very dangerous but is used in a bunch of research simply because its ease of use.
It goes on: Ok, how about just banning GoF related to transmissibility or virulence. Well apparently that might ban vaccine research for existing viruses.
You end up in a situation where the people best suited to recognize and stop the dangerous forms of microbiological research are the same people that want to conduct it in the first place. Which is where we were 2019.
I generally think that its ok to trust scientists and that they can self regulate with their dangerous toys, and that was my viewpoint for biological research back then. Now I'm in alignment with everyone here, fuck this research, it needs to end and we can't trust you with these dangerous toys. Scientists, you had your chance to self regulate. Sorry if we are wrong about the cause, but we can't trust you to investigate yourself, and even a 1% chance of lab leak means you killed 100k people. I still can't convince my mom though.
cjet79
7d ago
We do care about the quality, but I view them ultimately as tools. And for me a tool that doesn't provide utility is a bad tool.
But that's not the only view on tools, some guys turn them into collectors items, some treat them like status symbols, and some treat them as end goals where they want the best tool for the job but are rarely caught doing the job.
You'd know best how he might have felt about tools. But I'll repeat the sentiment above. Id feel worse if my tools caused stress and uncertainty over any possible course of action my wife might take.
cjet79
7d ago
Lot of research has been done on this. There is a whole study in economics called "Public Choice" which studies these sorts of things. You are correct to notice that this is strange and doesn't make sense compared to other markets and products.
The main explanation is "first past the fence voting". Any system with a majority wins and takes all is one where only two parties tend to persist. One to win and one to chase the other. The chasing party will occasionally catch up and overtake the winning party. In European parliamentary democracies they often have representative voting, so as a party you only need to get a small portion of the vote to be part of the government.
What is also relevant is something called the "median voter theory". Since the US has first past the fence voting, the winning candidate will always appeal to the median voter. This tends to moderate candidates. As someone who is not a republican or democrat (im a libertarian), my perception of the two main parties is that they are mostly the same and tend to govern mostly the same. More wars, more government spending, more government intervention, rollbacks on government spending are minimal and ineffective. They tend to perenially disagree on issues that split the american people down the middle, but politicians on either side have little benefit to resolving those disputes.
cjet79
8d ago
I would think the data on it is more important than the machine itself. I have a decent gaming rig that I keep up to date. But if it crapped out and I was gone I wouldn't want my wife stressing about getting it working again. I'd possibly want it to go to a friend who might be able to get some use out of it after swapping out the hard drives.
cjet79
10d ago
The purpose of a bar is to provide a space where people can put their shit down for a while.
I Like this definition, and it reminds me a lot of the saddest of bar patrons that you tend to see at any place that is cheap or has deals. The sad drunk that is carrying way too much shit in life. They'll deflate and sink into the bar as the weight leaves their body, but they just can't muster the strength to get up from the bar, pick their shit back up and leave.
I'd also add a category of bar: The Sports Bar. A kind of raucous ambiance where men loudly cheer or curse as their team succeeds or fails. It exudes an unapologetic male energy that feels missing in most areas of life. The men aren't looking for partners or hookups, most of them are paired up and just taking a break from the lady to hang out with the lads. It can also be a very enjoyable place after exercising or participating in some rec-league level sport. Copious amounts of light beer, and greasy meaty foods to imitate the sensation of refueling. But also to wind down from the exertion of the sport.
cjet79
11d ago
I asked you only a month ago to stop with the low effort posts. You are doing this at the top level too.
I said I'd do a month long ban last time, and I'm not going back on that threat. 30 day ban.
cjet79
13d ago
That is interesting, I'd never heard the Victorian and Edwardian take on this. I arrived at basically the same conclusion as them. I am very much an introvert. I am comfortable and happy just sitting in my basement playing video games or reading books all alone. I realized many years ago that friendship is important for mental health, and I've tried to never neglect it.
cjet79
13d ago
Personally I've experienced the opposite. It's easy to make friends, stay in touch with them, and find activities to do with them.
I'm a parent of 3 and I only work part time remotely, so at least two of the factors listed apply to me.
I'm friends with a bunch of the neighborhood dads. We will have get togethers during the nice weather where the kids all just run around someone's house and backyard.
I've made some friends on TheMotte who are fun to talk with and play video games with.
I've made some friends on some of the games I play online.
I still have many friends from my time in college, I will have a few hour long phone chats with one of them. Another I get lunch with every other month. A few others I see regularly at underwater hockey. I'll have all the underwater hockey players over to my place for a get together on occasion.
My wife and I have about 15 cousins each, some of them live close enough to hangout but they are also in the process of getting married so we have averaged about two weddings a year while married.
I'm going to see Hail Mary with a friend and former roommate when it comes out. When I texted him I realized we hadn't texted or hung out in over a year. I haven't been avoiding him or anything I'm just literally too busy to hangout with all the friends I have.
I like having friends though. I enjoy hanging out with people and having deep or interesting or just funny conversations. My mother is a major contrast with me. She has a few friends that she might speak with a few times in a decade. One couple that might be considered friends with her and my dad, but that couple puts in all or most of the effort to get together. And otherwise she just has her adult children (3, including me) that she hangs out with. She doesn't like having lots of friends. She easily gets a form of social anxiety that makes her dread going out.
With everyone I know this is the same general pattern. They either have a 100-200 friends they can't possibly hangout with, but they try anyways. Or they have like 1-5 friends that they are barely trying to maintain. Both groups of people seem to be getting exactly what they want.
I think the main limiting factor on modern friendship is how many friends someone wants to have. And thus I don't think it's much of a problem at all.
cjet79
14d ago
I'm realizing while reading this list that I never liked traditional action movies. It's the big spectacle that I enjoy. Sci fi and fantasy movies with massive battles. Or large explosions in modern settings.
Marvel movies have been a boon for me. I unironically enjoyed the Transformers movies. I have fun watching Michael Bay films. Star wars original trilogy was my favorite as a kid. And I loved the huge starship battles in episode 1.
I do feel like theaters have been chasing a gimmick that will bring back moviegoers but ultimately it's good movies that would bring people out.
The theater I saw Hail Mary in had special vibrating and slightly rotating seats as their latest gimmick. I hadn't been to a theater in a while so I thought sure I'd try this out. It had two bad moments: one where I felt like some little kid was just kicking my seat and another when it pre jumped a jump scare. Some weird moments where I thought during a lull and sappy moment it was moving like a rocking chair. And mostly slightly positive moments where it was adding to the soundscape of the movie through vibration without having to blow out my eardrums.
It was a good movie with good cinematic moments. But if I had the option of watching it in my basement with my ~70 inch screen, with no worries about volume, with the same friend, and on my nice comfortable couch ... I'd choose at home.
The movie theater won out in this instance because I didn't want to wait, and inviting my friend over to watch a movie on my couch at noon is weird compared to inviting him to watch it at a movie theater with me.
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