Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Yes, it's a sign that somebody doesn't read literary fiction, history, or serious philosophy. It's also a result of a culture where serious engagement with text isn't valued in education (or in wider discourse). Even a typical university education will have a lot of surveying intended to give you a paragraph-length summary of some great work in your head, and the problem is worsened for autodidacts who aren't forced to spend serious time with any texts, unless they get obsessed with one. Needless to say, this results in a wider culture where people think what matters is getting a lot of summarized versions of other thinkers in their heads, then bouncing those legible, easily-digested summaries off each other in blog posts and podcasts. It's particularly amusing in philosophy when people try to summarize thinkers who really can't be boiled down into a paragraph-length take, ending up in a sort of Existential Comics-esque collection of caricatures.
Bartender_Venator
11d ago
This is in large part true re: South African sexual preferences. However, poor urban South Africans eat an extremely unhealthy and fattening diet, consisting mostly of the cheapest carbs available fried in the cheapest oil. Township food will fatten you up fast if you can afford it, and it's so nutritionally unsatisfying I'd guess even those with a little cash eat a lot of it. I suspect the men are significantly likely to do high-calorie-burning manual labour or be alcoholics/drug addicts, which probably explains a lot of the obesity gap in the urban poor.
For anyone inspired by @MaiqTheTrue's AAQC, I can vouch for my friends' tshirts at High Gothic Casual. I'm not even Christian, but they gifted me one (which they did not ask me to shill, I'm doing this because the shirts are good and they're super nice). It looked so good I immediately bought three more. The gold in particular really pops (but shouldn't go through the dryer, in my experience), and the men's fit is very flattering if you're an athletic type. NB that they are all-polyester if you don't like that, something to do with how all-over printing works.
Bartender_Venator
28d ago
For both 1 and 3 of your augmentation question, you will get excellent returns far quicker by working on your posture and flexibility. Do yoga/pilates, buy a massage gun and use it regularly (particularly on shoulders and hips). You can expect to gain at least an inch of effective height and much broader shoulders, and it will probably do more for your confidence than either.
I also notice you didn't mention fashion and dress. Particularly in the NYC area, and if you're making good money, this will take you a long way. Follow some tasteful instagram accounts or lurk styleforum to ensure you aren't unintentionally making yourself look ridiculous, though.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Not sure how to make money on this though.
Neither is the airline industry.
I can't speak for the current quality of Claude, but if you are struggling with the context of a philosophical work and would like a lucid, analytic-inflected explanation of how academic philosophers see it, your best bet is generally the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - hope that is helpful.
(PS - SEP does reflect the mainstream academic interpretation of philosophers, which comes with its own biases, such as the ludicrous claim that Nietzsche did not have a political philosophy. Think of it as a good teacher's opinion rather than gospel truth)
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Do these people want to come? I'm not sure they do.
From my experience talking to Anglosphere doctors, you would instantly collapse British, Canadian, South African, and probably Australian/New Zealand healthcare if you opened up the American medical system. (Don't laugh about the South Africans, they turn out some incredible doctors.) The big issue I've heard from them is less about the objective difficulty of getting US certified, and more that you're sacrificing even more years of your youth on a particularly pointless altar.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
I mean, it's the classic Freddie DeBoer progressive name cycle, right? Progs come up with some name for themselves that's a shifting, colloquial term, it's then used as a pejorative by conservaboomers (making it kludgy and cringe pretty much out of the gate), then progs deny that there was ever a core meaning behind the term when they used it. See also "SJW".
I see your point that it already existed in progressive circles, but these terms only get pinned down and reified once the boomer-right gets to them. The kludginess is inherent because those types don't really understand the social and memetic characteristics of progs and of different prog types. Compare, for instance, "bugman", "cuckservative", "chapo", and other terms from the internet-native right. These don't have the kludginess and don't go through the same cycle, because they were created on the right and designed to cleave online social reality at particular joints.
Historically, a great deal of American politics has been fighting over labels. Once these labels make it into mass politics, they quickly get reified as simply meaning "good" and "bad", and the conflict shifts to who gets to own the Good Label and hit their enemies with the Bad Label. Occasionally you really see how empty these labels are - for instance, in the careers of both Roosevelts, with Teddy jumping dexterously between identifications as the Good Label of his time shifted, and FDR redefining "liberal" to claim the Good Label while inverting its meaning. I suspect that boomers and other institutionbrained people these days are particularly bad at navigating this dynamic (compared to people from the newspaper age or internet natives), not being able to tell the distinction between label and meaning. That's how you get these very shallow and unconvincing arguments that "Democrats are the real racists" or "the hard right are the real Woke", scrabbling together a bunch of similarities meaningful and superficial, real and imagined, because the people making them are mired in the ostensible content of a label without understanding the meta-level dynamics at play.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
"Woke Right" is just a terrible term. "Woke" was always a kludge term to describe cringe leftists, then it got made cringe in its own turn by boomers, then, finally, the most out-of-touch hermits, sheltering in the ruins of the IDW, finally heard about it. Then, they had a great idea - why don't we call our right-wing enemies "woke"? That will- guys? Is anyone listening? Guys?
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
That actually fits even better into a feudal metaphor - a potpourri of overlapping contracts and privileges, such that the Bishop of Israel cannot be tried in a lay court, that the Free City of Moldova may have elections free from the meddling of the Duke of Russia, that the Emperor is obliged to varying yearly gifts of aid, that the Peace of God obtains here and here, but not here, and so on. Rule over a feudal realm and over a world-system looks pretty similar, because they both come out of attempts to realistically and multilaterally negotiate in a state of anarchy.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
One way to put this is that it's an example of the classic political debate "must the King obey the law?" In a "rules-based world order", the hegemon can still make the law, but they also have to obey it. This is, of course, good for the nobility (State Department, UN, Davoisie, etc.) and bad for a maverick King (Bush, Trump, etc., though one was too hawkish and one is too dovish), so one's position on the issue tends to be defined by who you support in that power struggle. Very few people in high places want a revolution that breaks both the Crown and the Court, but that sort of multipolarity is popular with outsider critics.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Aristotle saw fit to dedicate an entire book to poetry and drama, but not an entire book to woodworking.
This argument becomes very interesting if you extend it to Xenophon's books on animal husbandry and training...
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
They expected one of us in the wreckage, brother.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
The cultures are in some ways more compatible with the US, but there's also an element of those countries being poor and needing tourist $$$ more, so their tourist-facing norms ended up being shaped differently.
Basically all the stereotypes about X or Y European culture being rude/unfriendly/etc. are false. They come from a combination of clueless tourists not realizing they're being rude first, or from Europeans playing up cultural mismatches/national rivalries. Even Parisians are no less friendly than the inhabitants of any comparable big city.
There are also a bunch of intra-African stereotypes Westerners would find very surprising to hear, but they tend to reflect reasonably accurately how Africans experience other cultures, so they're largely a result of different selection affects from intra-African migration relative to Africa-to-West migration. (This is talking about general stereotypes, of course, not those stemming from national or tribal beefs, which are just as ridiculous as the Dutch calling Germans bicycle thieves, but usually without the joking aspect).
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
Gossip on the Hill is that Republican Senators feel they can push back on one of Gaetz or RFK and get away with it (but not both). I suspect it'll be Gaetz.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
Thinking about the potential economics and regulation of self-driving car rental firms makes no sense without considering their closest analogy: the airline industry. If self-driving cars do become dominant, it'll start to look, in some ways, at lot like they're airlines flying a colossal number of tiny flights - for better and for worse in terms of stock prices and average customer experience.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
Selzer was also an oracle up until random number dialing in Iowa stopped working. The shitting on Nate is mean-spirited, but the reality is that polling methods haven't adjusted for Trump and the response bias issue with his supporters - not to mention the way the game has changed every election he's fought. The models were, I'm sure, statistically beautiful, but garbage in garbage out.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
It's a legal thing, spending on "issue ads" is treated differently in campaign finance law from explicitly endorsing a candidate.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
And, according to former staff, has poorly controlled diabetes.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
SAE is generally considered very Southern, idk about Salisbury but at a lot of schools it's the ultra-Southern chapter.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
I was going to make an argument about Homer, but in fact after searching to back it up I'll just link this.
Two points he doesn't mention:
- The Greeks always drank their wine heavily mixed with water (this is a key point of the Centaur Wedding myth that distinguishes what it is to be Greek from what it is to be barbarian). Watered down wine looks much bluer, and can even turn fully blue if the wine is poorly made.
- There's a reason from modern times not to read Homer literally. Troy was not very far from a sea we now call the Black Sea. I wouldn't use the name of the Black Sea as an argument that some seas are in fact black instead of blue...
But yeah, it's just one of those things some academics are completely wrong about, but that Science! Journalists repeat because it's catchy and counterintuitive.
I would say that these hobbies aren't just high-status because they signal wealth, but because they can be used to signal taste, and taste is the virtue of the haute-bourgeois. There are better and worse ways to do each of those, and failing is obviously tacky (e.g. reading Harlequin smut/Star Wars novels, gushing about your holiday to Ibiza/Pattaya/Vegas, idk maybe taylor swift).
This is your tackiness detector going off.
The alternatives to the high-status pursuits you list are noticeably less legible in terms of taste. Partly this is because they do not, in fact, have the high highs that the people engaging in those high-status activities are seeking. No blog is comparable to a Great Book, etc. But, also, it's because they basically require you to already have deep knowledge about the blogosphere or your local area in order to judge whether or not someone has good taste in those hobbies (TV shows are something of a different matter in the HBO era).
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