Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
At this point we do have very good archaeogenetic evidence for an elite caste of steppe riders taking over settled societies and maintaining distance from the agrarian population for a very long time. It's still visible, albeit highly diluted, in the Indian caste system, for instance. The reason people still talk about Nordicism in this context, apart from the WWII resonance, is because there aren't many people around from the Pontic/North Caspian steppe to crow about their Yamnaya forebears. I did say to the author that it would be more historically accurate to put a steppe on Tidus rather than just islands, for that reason.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
"Bartender Venator" is a reference to the main character of Ernst Junger's Eumeswil, that should probably be sufficient to figure out who I am.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
I don't think you've demonstrated that the struggle of divergent prototribes to assimilate in IIRC the bronze age directly maps to what can't be read as anything other than a criticism of modern welfare states.
I suspect that, like most commenters assuming this is going to culminate in thoroughly-litigated culture war thread talking points, you're jumping ahead of yourself and this is in fact going to get much weirder and more interesting.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Surely the closest analogue is Anders Behring Breivik, even down to focusing on killing the youth leaders of the enemy party. Not American, though.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Also, Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth, is somewhat hermaphroditic (I specify this because I'm not sure about Hestia in Greece). One of her symbols is a phallus, the flame has the power to reveal a phallus and impregnate a virgin, etc.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
There's almost certainly nothing you can do, unless it's a state university in a red state with a very particular hook in the course material so sufficiently egregious an elected official or journalist can use it to rile up some sleepy boomers. Welcome to the ivory tower - it's not going to get any better.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
In England all professional Americans without specific signifiers (very strong Southern yee-haw accent, for example)
I knew a Texan lawyer in London with a deep, deep Texas drawl. Liked his cowboy boots in the office, a lot of expansive mannerisms, etc. Apparently did wonders for his career - he was a fiercely talented guy and would run rings around the Brits and Euros as soon as they underestimated him.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
One man's excessive laissez-faire in finance is another man's government strangling every other industry. But that was largely baked in by the time Thatcher came to power.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
This post appears to have been removed without a modhat comment explaining?
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
I would like to see a full clip of the first, not conveniently cut before he finishes speaking. The context of the argument appears to be that he is pushing back against the tiktoker for saying that every word of Leviticus must be taken completely literally. He's clearly using it as a gotcha against her quoting Leviticus - he opened the argument with "I mean, Satan's quoted scripture." For the second, he is saying that appointing unqualified and incompetent candidates because of diversity commitments implies that black women are not capable of doing the job, that this is the argument that progressives are implicitly making when they appoint a KBJ to the Supreme Court because Biden committed to picking a black woman.
Something you will find if you spend time on themotte is that it's a good idea to check the sources people show you for their claims and think critically about them.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
Oh yeah, certainly, sector-specific deflation is usually good, because it means that real productivity/quality gains are happening. It's generalized deflation which kills the economy, I believe, because it kills the availability of credit and the velocity of the money supply. Even if there's an increase in general productivity, the effects on the financial system would be extremely dire. But I'm not sold on AI causing deflation - if anything, if AI creates a strong deflationary pressure, then it makes sense for the government to print money to pay for debt/entitlements.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
God I don't even want to think about what AI-induced deflation would do to the financial system. Luckily the AIs will all be hyper-optimized to get consumers to spend money instead of saving it.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
??? Before internet, maybe.
Finding high-quality, reliable information online was and remains difficult. That's one reason this place exists, to stress test the information people find online. As an academic I found literature reviews to be pretty grueling tasks even with Google Scholar and sci-hub at my disposal (something LLMs are actually getting pretty damn good at). Even finding the sort of weird and mixed-quality information that births crank theories had become quite a bit harder over the last decade, as search engines decided to promote "authoritative content" over giving the user what they're asking for for good or ill.
My gripe with crank theories of everything is basically similar to my gripe with a lot of rationalism, which has largely escaped crank status: there is an immense tradition of theory out there, and if you don't put in the years or decades required to study it you will at best be making new mistakes, but more likely making ones decades or centuries old. Plenty of great philosophers have said "everybody before me was wrong"; none of them arrived at that conclusion without exhaustive study of the tradition (yes, even Wittgenstein).
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Yes, when young Africans talk about this they often call it the "Black Tax". It makes the kind of low-level capital accumulation necessary for growing a black middle class almost impossible, outside of people willing to move to the city or to a different country and cut ties with their family - a very difficult and painful thing to do in any culture, but particularly in African cultures. On the other hand, it's good for Malthusian survival.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
My understanding of the current consensus on the Great Game is that neither the Russians or (sensible) Brits believed that the Russians could conquer India. Rather, they believed that Russian spies and then an expeditionary force could spark a massive uprising in India that would deny it to to Britain. Neither side was really aware of the immense logistical difficulties Russia would have faced in doing this, though, it was more an assumption that Russia would be able to overcome them at some not-so-distant point in the future.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Amusingly, Indian nationalists and Western post-colonialists like to point to a study that shows the Bengal famine was caused by the British, because it's the only Indian famine that doesn't correlate with the monsoon conditions which have caused famine in India since time immemorial. They then turn around and blame the British for all the previous famines, too.
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
In all my years on themotte, the most valuable lesson I've learned is that checking your interlocutor's sources is a superpower. Nobody else will do it, and there's a fair chance he hasn't.
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
Shades of the Judge. I agree almost entirely, but I'm compelled to point out that Isandlwana was essentially campaign-ending, in that the British had to completely withdraw from Zululand and plan a second, more competent invasion. Bad planning, sure, but it was also a perfect storm scenario for an African force to defeat European riflemen - a large part of the area the Zulus charged over was dead ground from the perspective of the British lines, and the British were undersupplied and had little space to fall back into. A Roman legion would have whipped the British there.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
I would not recommend buying new if possible. Go on Craigslist etc. and find a warehouse with lightly-used office furniture and you can get a high-end Herman Miller or whatever you want well within that budget. Offices offload barely-used expensive chairs all the time, particularly in volatile economic times.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
As a regular US-UK flyer, I'll also point out that the supersonic premium on a night flight is not much of a premium unless you are doing a very quick-turnaround meeting. What makes NYC-London miserable is that it's not enough time for a decent night's sleep - I would rather fly LA-London, than NYC-London, personally, and would choose subsonic over supersonic just for the extra sleep.
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
Hey, you could be an invertebrate that gets eaten alive by its young or, conversely, an invertebrate that gets to eat the smaller male after mating! I think it's fair to say this book is arguing that, to evolution, nobody and nothing has any "worth" at all except insofar as they can effectively replicate their genes by successful reproduction (except possibly their caloric value to something higher up the food chain). You're anthropomorphizing a blind and utterly callous force of nature, and even anthropomorphizing it as assigning rather modern values to its objects.
Bartender_Venator
20d ago
Weed might suppress the latter two but it definitely doesn't suppress neuroticism. Paranoia is a notable side effect of both smoking weed and the hangover from it.
Bartender_Venator
20d ago
I would add two further points:
- Urges satisfied physically are more satisfying. Obviously actual sex is more satisfying than gooning, but casual gamblers will also tell you that playing cards is more satisfying than pressing buttons, and there's something much more satisfying about smoking a cigarette than sucking on a vape. The act is done, the ritual is complete, you can now go do the next thing in your day/night. Maybe even go to sleep, if you didn't do too many lines off that hooker.
- These low-friction processes are much more amenable to optimization for addiction and wallet/soul-draining. The term slot machine designers use is "gambling to extinction". And we've gotten very good at optimizing things for addiction. It's not just that it's low-friction, it's that you can add all kinds of dark patterns into the process itself to get users hooked and get them to spend more and more of their money. Slot machine addicts often report that on some level they're trying to gamble away all their money, because that means they can finally stop their session. Gooners are a bit more resistant to that because post-nut clarity will eventually hit, but this would be the dream monetization process for OnlyFans to develop.
Bartender_Venator
21d ago
Prostitution, for all its serious problems, is as lindy as it gets. Fairly analogous to how playing roulette at the casino is better for society than sports gambling on an app.
Funnily enough, nowadays it seems like the tomboyish girls from conservative homes tend to swing right (I knew one who showed up for a coffee date holding Maps of Meaning, didn't own a single skirt), because if they go left they, uh, stop being tomboyish girls.
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