Bartender_Venator
No bio...
User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
20hr ago
You are welcome to pattern-match me to as many caricatures as you like. Apologies if I'm impugning any of your actual heroes, as opposed to Erick Erickson.
Bartender_Venator
20hr ago
My increasingly regular agreement with you on forum culture is starting to feel like the Franco-Ottoman Alliance of themotte. Allah Allah!
Bartender_Venator
20hr ago
Defining bad faith is something like defining pornography, but when you spend enough time here you get a sense of what motivates whom. We've had an influx of low-quality, trollish posters doing the exact same schtick as MKC (AlexanderTurok is the last one I recall), though he's certainly the most literate of them so far. I suspect largely a meta-contrarian reaction to the 2024 Vibe Shift, as exemplified by Hanania/Karlin/Spencer/etc.; it'll pass like all the other motte fads ('member the civil war we were going to have in 2020? I 'member!)
because trying to make the most convincing argument for something you don't actually believe is an interesting exercise
When done as an exercise, that's entirely good-faith, and rationalists do that all the time. You should be able to do that! The key is as an exercise.
If it is more about the "bad-faith" arguer experiencing personal disdain for their interlocutors in the process of the exchange, I think it would capture a lot more posters here than just those who try on different positions for sport.
I think you're almost there. The key is that bad-faith posters are, psychologically, not posting to make arguments with some sneers attached. They're typing up arguments so that they are able to sneer. It's like the difference between someone who goes out to a bar and has a drink, and someone who goes out to a bar so that they can have a drink. Tribally-motivated sneering is pretty easy to spot because it's usually so ham-fisted, compared to a poster who puts real effort into his sneers.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
That's also the case with people who are arguing in purely negative bad-faith, except that their local sense of identity is even more purely tied up in winning the argument. Darwin2500 arguing with MAGApede2016 is a failure mode, certainly, but so is this - the non-failure mode is when people bring sincere theses to their top-levels, after exploring and considering the evidence on their own, and then debate things with other users as individuals. Some people are too tribal to be psychologically capable of doing that, and some just don't find it fun enough, but it's possible.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Do you actually believe in anything? In the space of a couple posts we've gone from "trust Principled Conservative Erick Erickson" to "trust America First Joe Kent." The only common throughline in all your top-levels is that you want to pick an internet fight with themotte's Trump contingent, and are happy to dance between positions, arguments, and sets of facts in order to do so. Kudos to the guys who have the patience to fisk your posts, I guess.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Ah, good for you. Well, this sort of thing is not an uncommon experience for men, so it's the sort of thing guys commonly joke about as if it would work.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
You've never had a woman pull the "I'm mad because I had a dream where you cheated on me" thing? Many women seethe in jealousy all the time for very little reason (and perhaps often secretly enjoy it for its own sake - jouissance). "Sure babe, q-tip my dick and send it to Labcorp" would be a very satisfying response, even if it doesn't address the deep underlying psychological cause of why she's mad about dreaming that you cheated on her (which, 90% of the time: she's bored/stressed/unfulfilled and subconsciously decided starting drama would be a fun distraction).
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
I regret to inform you that Count is, in that respect, just trying to be more English than the English. While there's a lot wrong with rural Scotland, you're also quite lucky to have avoided the English-class-system-hits-diaspora collision directly.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Some people are just normal and healthy, you know. (And some are too smart to care about politics. The smartest woman I've ever met doesn't give a shit about politics except insofar as it affects her family personally, anything else would be a distraction from math).
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
Depends a lot on latitude and season. I've swum in the Atlantic and it's not pleasant but felt like I could sustain it for a long time, and that was a lot colder than I assume the water in Rio de Janeiro is. But yeah much of the Atlantic will kill you very quickly.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
Hicklib is a state of mind. They're still motivated by a hatred of the podunk chuds they see as surrounding them, and still look up to an ideal of the rainbowed coasts. Many if not most have moved from smaller places in the midwest to Chicago. You even get hicklib transplants in New York and SF, though they usually try to hide it.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
US colleges generally do not have a category for "brown" - it's White/Black/Asian/Native American and then Hispanic as an 'ethnicity'. If you want special treatment as an Albanian, Turk, Egyptian, etc., you use your application essay to mention being Muslim a lot.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
Chicago is awful for this sort of hicklib/post-tumblr politics, but on a dating app you can basically treat it as 20%/80% "I'm cripplingly neurotic and vanishingly unlikely even to go on a date" or "I'm absolutely not relationship material, but play the first date right and I'm coming straight back to yours". You can respond to that signal as is appropriate for your goals.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
If you think that "not paying attention" means "stupid", you have a very blinkered view of human nature - as is common among people who are very into online politics, though, which is now a large and growing percentage of the population.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
Even crazier, I believe many old-timey sailors considered it bad luck to know how to swim. I suppose because you were acknowledging the possibility of going over.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
She's Albanian, they generally think of themselves as white and those who don't believe that the Albanian race is uniquely supreme and destined to rule all, starting with Dua Lipa and Xherdan Shaqiri.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
I mentioned those because they're on your substack as options for managing chronic pain, along with a lot of other good stuff. But nothing on there is a solution for the long-term mechanical damage sustained in a shoulder dislocation. Shoulder instability is a mechanical issue, not a pain issue, which can be greatly improved by these things, but not fixed - and I don't think, based on my experience, that it can be improved enough to make advanced climbing with strenuous overhead holds safe.
I apologize if I seem condescending with the pattern-matching remark, and would prefer this not to escalate into shit-flinging, but I do have to point out that you referred to it as "a muscle you pulled". That's just not the case. There's temporary damage to the rotator cuff and other muscles from the intense stretching involved as the bone is forced out of position, but there's also permanent damage to the labrum and similar soft tissues and, with subsequent dislocations, the bone itself. If he does not get surgery he will have to accept that his shoulder is permanently mechanically weakened - which is a perfectly valid option, and the one I chose - and he'll have to shape his activities around that. It's up to him but in his position I would get an anchor attached.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
Dude a dislocated shoulder with associated tearing is not chronic pain, it's a mechanical injury to your joint. This guy didn't pull a muscle while yawning, his whole-ass shoulder came out of its socket (already a serious sign of instability to have it pop so easily). Yoga, rehab, etc. will do a ton and I personally chose that over surgery, but a shoulder dislocation tears tissue that you will never naturally get back, meaning that your shoulder capsule is forever less stable. This means that even if you do everything right, future accidents have a significantly greater chance of re-dislocating your shoulder, which means weeks in a sling and months in rehab. It also makes a major difference to the holds you can do climbing. I would strongly advise him to see a shoulder specialist rather than just a general orthopod, and I can see why this may pattern-match to your experience, but no amount of techniques for managing chronic pain will affect the physical state of his labrum.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
This changes my assessment, but not recommendations, a little - your shoulder joint is clearly jacked up in ways that surgery alone won't fix. To dislocate like that, it can't just be the persistent damage from the traumatic dislocation, but also that your joint and muscles are jacked up around it such that it was ready to pop out under the tension (probably, like all of us here, from computer posture). The surgery will provide a lot of trauma resistance in the shoulder, but it'll also atrophy your muscles and exacerbate imbalances. Definitely go hard on strengthening and releasing the joint, and your body in general, and consider it one of your new good routines going forward once you can.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
Oh yeah if you're doing activities with a high risk of re-injury that's a different matter. I just lift weights and do yoga. Climbing you're often loading your shoulder in the weakest position possible for the labrum (that damned L-shape), and soccer you never know how you'll fall. But, for people reading, surgery is definitely not medically necessary just because the guidelines almost always say so (because they care about maximizing the outcomes doctors are rightfully sworn to maximize, whereas you also have to decide about things like the recovery time's impact on your life, playing the sports you love, your guess that surgery methods will improve in the future, etc.). My advice is the same in either case: get the best physio you can find, follow his recommendations religiously, and take up a practice afterwards that will specifically work on joint health. Yoga is great, Pilates is better as a workout in many ways but harder to do as regularly, supplement with face pulls every time you're in the gym. In the case of surgery, find a surgeon who's done it a million times, it's a routine surgery. Someone who works with athletes if you can, not someone who only does grandmas.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
Surgery is very much optional in your case from the sound of it, though orthos will almost always recommend it (I was lucky enough to go to a university hospital that was very bullish on rehab as opposed to surgery in general). I'd make the call for yourself on when you'd like to take the time one-armed - I will probably get it eventually when I have a lot of downtime and don't mind losing gains. I would strongly recommend prehab exercises before surgery as possible, and take your physio very seriously during recovery. Also worth considering that this is in the long run an opportunity to make yoga or some other joint health practice a continuing part of your life, in that respect my dislocations were a huge boon.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
It seems pretty obvious that men constantly surrounded by extremely fit, attractive women who don't spend all that much time around guys (because they're forced into obsessing over their dance) have difficulty staying faithful. But yes, it's not better than marriage - until she starts getting a little long in the tooth and the new ballerina is looking at you all starry-eyed. The same thing for bartenders and massage therapists, of course, just with a more variable field of play.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
It would blow your mind if you could even imagine the quantity and quality of pussy straight male ballet dancers get (yeah, all five of them). But men actually aren't just motivated by that - intrasexual esteem is much more psychologically important than getting laid.
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
I like how whenever BAP is mentioned, there's an inevitable conga line of the lowest-quality jooposters claiming that he hasn't contributed anything. BAP's undeniably one of the top-5 most important figures in forming the current Online Right, and it's pretty transparent the extent to which the notable BAP haters on twitter are little dogs trying to nip at the ankles of the big old dog. It's particularly funny when people make comparisons to someone like Fuentes - he may be a darling of the liberal press, but I can't think of a single idea that's attributable to him, or even (despite him being undeniably funny on stream) a meme other than 'the holly'.
The joke was, specifically, that you and I have very different styles of thought but agree on something strategically key. I like the Turks and have been known, in unguarded moments, to give grudging praise to the French.
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