Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Leviathan is a great read but it's weird. Don't expect a straightforward work of modern political theory.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
The thing about the sort of Academic Experts who would have talked to or gotten money from Epstein is that due diligence just does not exist in that world. If Epstein had been tried for chopping up puppies with an axe, and it was national news, probably fewer than 10% of the professors etc. that he talked to would have thought to google him and respond with some condemnation of axe murder. It's a bit different for CEOs and university presidents, because their PA is supposed to do that, but I doubt many of their PAs actually do due diligence on routine meetings either.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I forget the comic who said it, but I recall a line that went "you know, being an ugly woman is a lot like being a man. You're gonna have to get a job."
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
The Hill Country, Fredericksburg, etc. are like that because they're affluent second home/tourist traps. Stay out late in a small town and you'll see the frontiersman admixture - or, as Mann's Satan quoted Bismarck, that "the German is never himself until he has half a bottle of champagne in him".
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Taleb calls it "dictatorship of the most intolerant" (never say he doesn't learn from his own ideas).
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I can't imagine any charity in Scotland that isn't utterly full of quangocrat shite, but Scottish Sports Futures at least does nice things for kids her age sometimes.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I find this argument generally compelling - although there's never a single determining factor in this stuff, you've done a good job isolating and naming a concept most people have trouble discussing. It does remind me of Nietzsche, who discusses this process extensively in The Genealogy of Morals, and shares an emphasis on individual character over rationalizing moral systems. I'd recommend taking a look at it for inspiration (Kaufmann or Del Caro translations).
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
>mfw Germans will literally have entire revolutions just so they can find an ideology that lets them be even more conformist
>mfw they did this like eight times
Though, to be fair, there was a properly independent-minded strand of German society that did emigrate here. You can see it in Texas, the Mountain West, rural Wisconsin, etc. In Minnesota it's drowned out by Sw*des and other Scandis, who are now the world's poster boy for "very nice but mildly stifling high-trust society that falls apart catastrophically the moment someone comes along and starts defecting."
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Most simply, Germans/Scandinavians are hysterical conformists with a tendency to go Way Too Far on whatever the current dominant ideology is. Luckily this one doesn't seem to involve any panzers yet. The Midwest more generally is always about 5-10 years behind the coasts culturally (5 in big cities, closer to 10 elsewhere), so the Great Awokening is really hitting them now.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
His social media handle was something along the lines of "gypsy gangster". I'd assume there's something in Bulgarian yob culture (I suppose I could ask Bulgarian friends, but that feels rather embarrassing) where Muslims/Gypsies are seen as harder.
Gaines County
Mohave County
Spartanburg County
centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor
Come on, man. You should know better than this. At least do the 30-second google research instead of jumping to the convenient correlation. I recall you being not so far away from this field professionally, and I've spent some time at the coalface on this, and when it comes to outbreaks of easily-avoidable communicable disease it's pretty much always oddball religious sects or low-trust immigrant communities or, in the latter case, apparently both. I'm totally happy to make the argument that "a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor", because it's right.
Feel free to cite this post smugly in a couple years if the possible trend continues and normie republicans do get memed into antivaxxing below herd immunity, or just down to the level of granola moms that have caused minor outbreaks in the past. Until then,
Edit: CPAR has mea culpa'd elsewhere in the thread - good on him.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Redditors aren't normies. They're barely even people. Prediction market rationalists did entirely fail to realize that the most compelling consumer use case was circumventing restrictions on ultra-degenerate gambling, but, eh, there are a lot more people gambling on Kalshi than there are seething on "r/nba".
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
I do think the Trump administration would have initiated more investigations and likely secured more arrests.
Oh, you sweet summer child...
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
For trivia night, show up early and ask the organizers/random people if there's a team you can join. Great way to make friends, just don't get too drunk or reveal any power levels.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
Capitalism (reactionary liberal/neocameralist as runners up). You're welcome for food and technology, folks.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
Mutual combat that is very much illegal, with additional penalties over 'standard' mutual combat, and often involves fighting cops! It was far more intense back in the day, but despite that, in the modern setup (where sometimes hooligan groups will even coordinate with each other where they'll meet to fight), there's still a fair amount of organization involved. The coordination involved is in avoiding getting identified/arrested by the cops in the process of doing that mutual combat, or in avoiding that while beating up random people, as also often happens.
Anyway, your point was about the time and expenses involved in being a protestor, and I submit that hooligans have more onerous financial investments required (tickets, beer, trains, flights, beer, hotels, beer), generally on lower incomes, and the time requirement is not terribly dissimilar (the main difference being protesting in the week during work hours, but that burden is spread across a lot of protestors and your typical US protestor probably doesn't need to take time off work - they're retired, or unemployed, or a student, or a bartender, or have shift work).
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
In Europe, normal people, almost all with low-income jobs or on welfare, have time to do this sort of shit every weekend for nine months of the year. They are setting out to commit more violent actions than American protestors, under much greater surveillance, and often dealing with police far more willing to use force than US cops. They aren't limited to one city, but travel around on their own expense committing violence all around the country and across the continent. They have no multi-million(/billion?)-dollar infrastructure behind them as American protestors have, no systematic legal support at all, and the media hates them rather than running cover.
Why do they do this? Because they want to beat up fans of other soccer teams.
The analogy isn't perfect, but what I want to say is that it's really not that hard for someone, even on a low income, to do this sort of thing if it's their main hobby. The full-spectrum infrastructural support from the leftist machine helps a lot, of course, and many of these people are given bullshit jobs by that machine in part so they can agitate, but it's not necessary for motivated people. This also probably goes some way to explaining why, in my experience, so much more of the resources of the leftist machine are dedicated to motivating people to become agitators compared to what's paid out to support actual agitators.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
The joke is that if you listen to this right-wing guy it sounds like the left are super scary and all-powerful and about to become literal ISIS.
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
I fold over the top corner to mark pages worth coming back to for quotes, references, etc. and the bottom corner to mark where I am. Half the people who see this think it's clever and half are appalled.
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
I'm not sure that's a climbdown. Historically, Trump has reshuffled personnel during major actions as people fail/prove themselves (that's how Bessent got to his position of power within the admin), and he's simultaneously sending in Tom Homan. We'll see.
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
I think you're mixing up Pat Buchanan with someone else - Buchanan was a paleoconservative exiled from the GOPe in large part because of his views on race and immigration. Here he is in 1993 talking about 'Brazilification', black-on-white crime stats, immigrant abuses of welfare, and demanding closed borders.
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
Ah, I don't mean in leftist spaces where they're talking about rightoids rather than to them - I mean in contexts where left-wingers and right-wingers are talking to each other (which is, I know, a highly unusual occurence, and probably has some variance per space). I suspect this greatly changes the makeup of the insults used.
Thinking about it, though I rarely check twitter comment beefs, a lot of the retweets there are "you are evil and devoid of human feelings", but I guess Twitter has that element of performing for a like-minded audience, and those still get dragged pretty often (the most recent one I recall was Joyce Carol Oates getting ethered by "wanye").
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
Two Jews are sitting on a bench. One of them is reading the local Yiddish newspaper. The other is reading Der Sturmer. The former says to the latter, “Why on earth would you read that drek?” The other replies, “Well, when I read our paper, we are a poor and battered people who suffer in ghettos, pogroms, and all manner of tragedies. But when I read Der Sturmer, we run the banks, the governments, the whole world – life is great!”
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
Urban revolutionary movements crush ruralites, historically, where there is a single capital and urban revolutionaries can easily take control of the military. I'm not sure that's the current situation. It takes total mobilization of the entire lib population of Minneapolis, united against an external threat, to cause significant annoyance to federal law enforcement. How many chuds in pickup trucks would it take to cut Minneapolis off from the power grid? I'd wager Kulak's twitter followers in Minnesota could do it alone. What the """urban insurgents""" have is organization and structure, which works well under a rule-of-law framework, but it doesn't go very far to mitigating the extreme strategic disadvantages modern cities would face without direct US military support.
Women naturally have higher bodyfat% than men, even before modern obesity, and so women with abs are rare enough that most guys will never encounter one in their intimate life or even their crushes. You've got to be a real connoisseur.
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