Bartender_Venator
No bio...
User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
17hr ago
Transatlantic perspective: Immigrants and Americans in general don't tend to pick up strong regional accents outside the Deep South/Minnesota/sometimes SoCal, whereas Brits and kids of immigrants in Britain pick up strong regional accents, but this is mostly due to TV/internet. Smaller American regional and city accents are dying fast, because kids are getting marinated in media from people who speak enough like them but without their accent, whereas in Britain they survive because the people around these kids speak very differently from the TV (and there isn't really a 'standard' British accent without heavy class connotations).
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
A) No, American Express, Chase, etc. do not "make all their profit" on bad debtors. That's why they have credit checks and you need a good credit score for premium cards, because bad debtors are a real pain in the ass for higher-market-segment banks. They make their profits off interchange fees (which tbh are kind of bullshit and should probably be illegal to do in the way they're currently done), and to get those fees they want stable customers who spend lots of money and pay their bills like clockwork. Get mad at bottom-of-the-market issuers, if you like, but that's a separate issue.
B) Not my problem. You're complaining about the existence of consumer credit. I'm talking about exploiting features of credit card reward programs, at the expense of the banks involved. If you want to make this about Late Capitalism and all that jazz, happy to have that conversation, but you gotta lay that out on the table.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
For history, ask it to provide citations with links for its claims, then you have the links to check.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I agree 100% on all this as someone who loves second-hand fashion and collecting obscure historical artifacts. Though to some extent boldness can still substitute for money.
I will put my hand up for one hobby this trend enables, though: credit card churning/airmilesmaxxing. This is the one thing I've found where you benefit from exploiting this trend, in that as airlines build systems to entice the ordinary consumer (and really, neither the airlines nor the banks are behaving particularly badly in this space, and they write off your pointmaxxing as a rounding error in their cost of doing business), a motivated and systematic person can get massively outsize rewards from exploiting the system. However, because the marginal cost of filling an empty airline seat is ~$0 (the largest cost to the airline of filling an empty first class seat is actually liquor), you get all the fun of intricately planned defection without actually harming the commons.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
It's not true to my knowledge, though I also believed it for some time. If nothing else, if it was true, you'd have airmiles obsessives writing thousands of blogs about optimizing it. Try to navigate the website of an average airline and you'll have a pretty good idea of how good their tech is. The talented guys they do have are generally in the "keep operations from falling apart in the next 24 hours" department rather than the price gouging department.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
"The Afrikaner is never happy if he can see the smoke of another man's fire" was a saying from the period. Another way to put it is that the Afrikaners, as the name suggests, were not European colonists who expected to someday just go home, or jaunt off to another part of their Empire. They'd severed their ties to the metropole, struck out inland, and developed the culture necessary to survive without imperial support (this happened in other places, too, particularly inland regions disconnected from maritime trade - think the Rhodesians, or the French plantation in the director's cut of Apocalypse Now - but Afrikaners did it earlier and in much harsher conditions, so their society changed more).
As to the point about Apartheid coming later than expected, Apartheid was also a reaction to urbanization and migration of black workers to the cities. The old system of a farmer having patriarchal authority over his farmhands and a mining company over its miners, worked fine for a rural economy, but once SA's cities started growing, and hordes of unmarried young men came to work there (with all the problems that has always implied in history even before you get to the racial factor), the National Party decided they needed a system that would work for controlling cities as well as the countryside. The "Swart Gevaar" doesn't really exist before urbanization - rural unrest can always be put down but urban riots get out of control - hence why Apartheid comes later than the colonial systems of control.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Quite possibly. That or HackerNews, I'm not on there but even the stupidity that gets crossposted seems fairly erudite. I know a bunch of extraordinarily successful guys who read ZeroHedge, generally with a "this is silly but some of it might just be true" vibe.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Yeah, I think one can appreciate Universal Culture in a Landian sense, as part of the technocapital Elder God summoning itself from the future. But a lot is also lost, and, even if we side with the hyperstitional space tentacles, we have a human duty to preserve, remember, and mourn.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
There simply aren't a lot of people who are truly xenophilic towards America
This is true for Euros and some foreign elites who have absorbed American blue-tribe memes. For the most part, people love meeting an American, with the same qualifiers as with any foreigner (respect/be interested in the culture, be friendly and funny, try to get off the tourist paths).
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Openness to foreign cultures, in my experience, is generally a bell-curve meme, with "wow, so many kinds of food" in the middle. Part of my political awakening was traveling a lot and seeing different stages of the world's progress towards becoming substantively identical multi-culti slop (with a few chintzy tokens from a people's old way of life), everything tossed into the blending blades of Scott's Universal Culture. It was realizing that I wanted Turkey to be Turkish that helped me realize I want America to be American. (Sadly this is far more complex than the culture war political narrative, and is more technocapital acceleration than just bad policy, but such is life)
Something I've realized in finding my way around contemporary fiction is that a big issue with writing about politics is that parody is now impossible. No matter how ridiculous the character, they will turn out to be real, and probably have an outsize representation in your feed. Anyone remember the "Wall of Moms"? It's an accepted part of current year protest tactics for older white women to use themselves as human shields to protect the poor PoCs, because their privilege will protect them from ICEstapo. I'm not saying this is at all the case with the woman in question, just that the most absurd hypocritical straw character you could imagine not only exists, but has already been made into a tool of the egregore. What did we think hyperstitional acceleration meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
I was going to type up a full comment, but it's midnight here and I don't have time. What I will say is that it's really nice in this discussion to see someone who mostly spends time in liberal spaces coming here with an open mind and looking to hear out perspectives from other circles.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
What happens when a detainee hurts someone or the fleeing driver hits a bystander in their recklessness.
This is a really good point I haven't seen people mention. This woman was, in the charitable reading, so flustered she was incapable of seeing an armed man standing a couple feet from her face in front of her, while looking right at him. What happens if he's not there, and a second or two later someone steps out from between the parked cars down the street? There's a reason car chases are dangerous even over a relatively short area.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
This is all a bit moot now that we have bodycam footage showing that the officer was walking across the front of the car to get to the other side, and the driver looked straight at the officer while accelerating. I assume that "don't ever walk across the front of a car in case they suddenly try to run you over/knock you out of the way" isn't something we can realistically ask of police.
Police, including ICE, are specifically trained not to do this.
What does this even mean? Police are trained not to shoot people? Yes, they're trained not to shoot people outside of particular circumstances where that person is posing a danger to others, which she was. Your previous argument was that the officer unnecessarily put her in a position to cause that danger.
But that just strengthens my point which is that she was not really blocking traffic, making her offence less serious.
The protest (news reporting on this seems terrible, but seems like a spontaneous thing in response to an ICE arrest) was down the road and she was blocking one of the routes out. It's not "blocking traffic" like some highway sit-in, it's trying to block the officers' route out of the protest. Standing in front of the car or not, they had every right and reason to either get her to move or to detain her on the spot.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
OK, I see the second sentence wasn't clear enough for you. In these high-pressure situations, you should expect officers to be running off their training and previous experience, and their training is about minimizing risks to themselves and the public across a wide set of situations, many of which are more serious threats than some lady in a car (in fact, the officer had previously been hit and dragged by a suspect in a vehicle). I'll also note that, generally, and though it's off-frame in the shooting videos, a protest in the middle of a residential street generally makes it less "quiet" at the time.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
I had an interesting experience this year on the topic. I'd always thought of myself as a Trauma-free guy, I've had a lot of bad shit in life roll right off my back (now, the cringe moments I remember are a different thing - "hey, remember when you mixed up Colin Firth and Colin Farrell in front of your high school crush? Or when you told a table full of people that Wes Anderson directed Trainspotting?"). But at the start of 2025 I slipped in an ice storm, seriously injured myself, and took about six hours to get seen and fentanyl'd by the doctors, would rate it number one most physically painful experience of my life (maybe in top ten most painful experiences if you include women and hangovers). I didn't think much about the incident for quite a while, since I was focused on rehab, but I found that occasionally, when I passed the place in question, walked down dodgy stairs, or when ice came back on the street and I had to cross it, I'd feel an entirely non-voluntary twinge of discomfort/fear/pain. Never more than a twinge, but a very noticeable one precisely because it was so non-voluntary. I can absolutely see how with other personality types, particularly with more serious traumas, this becomes the kernel of some kind of crippling phobia, if you ruminate on it and let it spiral in intensity instead of shrugging it off. Not saying all Trauma is like that, but now I've seen the involuntary mechanism up close it seems to me a fair bit of Trauma is a bad way of responding to something real in the mind rather than a purely constructed narrative.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
they can use a number of other safe techniques for pursuing and arresting them.
Getting in front of the car with a gun is obviously not safe, but nor is a potential high-speed chase or armed standoff at the suspect's destination, both of which often happen in scenarios where the guy gets away (obviously, the last one is much less likely from a liberal woman activist, but happens often enough with regular criminals). To forestall the inevitable, I'm reading your post as making a general point about police work, and I think that training and mindset are relevant to this because it's a matter of split-second decisions, and police work is not generally about dealing with nice liberal women, it's generally about dealing with questionably-sane and questionably-armed people with nothing to lose.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
Well, most notably, a person of similar prominence in the private sector (Harvard is not the private sector) would have hired a lawyer day one. Harvard supposedly told Gino she was only allowed two "advocates", and that she was not allowed to recruit anyone else in her defense. Now, this is mostly unenforceable bullshit enabled by the psychological and cultural power universities have over people in their world, but it still works on them. I once had to deal with an academic disciplinary proceeding in my old career (innocent, to be clear, but some people had a grudge and made Complaints), and they made it clear that I could not have a lawyer in the room at any time or it would be considered a violation of the Process, and violation of the Process means they will find a way to find against you - but I could have a family member for 'emotional support'. As soon as they realized my chosen family member was also a lawyer, they adjourned, rang up the university's chief counsel, and went into full cover-their-ass drop-the-charges mode.
The thing is, in industry people get fired all the time, and they go on to the next job with often minimal consequences (I've heard some amusing examples of the extreme circumlocutions employers have to go to in references for fired employees to say someone's a bad apple without being caught doing so. Always liked "You'll be lucky if you can get him to work for you"). In academia, someone getting fired for cause destroys their professional, social, and usually emotional life. Decent chance you'll lose your spouse, if you're married. It's more like being defrocked from the priesthood than losing a job. And the university's facade of being a "court" makes it all the more damning if they find against you. Harvard appears to have done a pretty good job with the investigation, but at least according to Gino's defenders it was not an adversarial process where she had a fair chance to defend herself - the Kafkacrats of the university told her to shut up, did their own thing, and came back with a report over a year later without giving her a fair shake to mount her (admittedly, extremely weak) defense.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
Kind of you to say. Other suggestion to understand the modern Left: Foucault is critical, probably Discipline and Punish or History of Sexuality Volume 1. The thing to realize with Foucault is that his work was both a major tool for the leftist project of tearing down old structures of social power, and their blueprint for building their own mechanisms of social control.
I am generally not a fan of reading a lot of stuff about object-level politics, aside from this website, but if you would like magazines, I would say the Claremont Review of Books is the best place to get political theory from the modern intellectual Right. Charles Haywood's book reviews for the extremely online rightist perspective. Left is harder to find a single source, maybe relevant NYRB articles. The Economist or Foreign Policy for the Establishment view (it's easy to get sucked into just following the right/left wing conflict, but ultimately their respective conflicts with the establishment are more important than the beefs they have with each other).
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
"Kind of weird how the US has 196 political parties, and all their platforms are 'give us free shit and support our ethnic grudges/neuroses'. Personally, I'm voting for the Greater Serbian Nation party, I just don't like how the Sorry For Being Swedish party is handling the economy."
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
I don't know when it happened exactly, but, if you look at her current social media posting Britney Spears is clearly clinically mentally ill. The South Park episode is a good summary of what fame did to her. Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez seem like purer examples of the "I'm grown up now, fuck you dad!" type, with triple daddy issues in Cyrus's case.
but the tl;dr is that all child stars go crazy or disappear. Props to Macaulay Culkin for pulling his life back together.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
I don't know whether or not she's a fraud, but she's a social psychologist, so I assume so. What I can point out is that, from a lawyer-side viewpoint, and I mean literal lawyers, the process she went through is so staggeringly unjust that even if she's 100% obviously guilty it will still shock and horrify a lawyer. Universities are allowed to essentially act as courts for their employees and students, with far more power over them than a private-sector employer has in almost any field, and have turned that into running deranged kangaroo courts. It's of a piece with how they handle sexual assault allegations, to give an example with an opposite culture war valence (amusingly, Gino is suing under the same Title IX used to justify those star chambers).
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
It's been very amusing seeing all the speculation in this thread, as a friend of the couple in question. All I'll say is that his wife is a formidable woman - she's a reporter covering energy/space/defense, works hard but doesn't take bullshit, and certainly didn't marry for money.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
One could sum it up as the two approaches being, respectively, geostrategic and civilizational. The Rubio doctrine seeks a correction of US state policy to respond to a changing environment, the Vance doctrine understands that the fundamental danger to the American people is the regime (not the administration, the permanent regime) and that Europe will be an enemy in that balance until they have their own regime changes. Eh, I like 'em both, and they often work together well - for instance, if you want to make nice with Putin, effortlessly slapping his client states gives him more incentive to respond in kind.
What does interest me is the Helberg quote. Looking at the transcript, he seems to be fumbling to give a non-answer to a question he maybe wasn't prepared for or didn't want to give specifics on (“Has the EU/UK done enough to limit the use of Chinese tech? Will the U.S. respect separate and distinct regulations by the EU/UK of AI and other tech-related activities, including search and so on?”), and when he brings up the National Security Strategy, he justifies it by referring to the previous question, also unrelated (“Would you like any further changes to the EU’s AI Act? If so, can you explain why?”). The sense I get from all of Helberg's responses is that he didn't really want to do a Q&A, he had some talking points about economic growth/deregulation he wanted to make without going into specifics, and the National Security Strategy line was a throwaway. Always a rough day at work first Monday after New Year's, I guess.
This website would be bilingual, and probably not for pleasant reasons.
More options
Context Copy link