daguerrean
11d ago
This is why you might have heard of Bob Lazar.
This is the biggest cope I have ever heard about Lazar, he doesn't even address all his proven lies and fabrications about his own personal history.
daguerrean
11d ago
Did he have any evidence? I would think if you were going to blow yourself up to reveal some information you would bring the receipts. Just reads like typical schizo stuff including the paranoia of people trying to kill him. Given the incompetence of his explosive device I think we should have a low estimate of his credibility. And after all that the entity you want entrusted with it is Fox News?
daguerrean
11d ago
You don't get to call in sick with a doctor's note the day you're supposed to do the suicide bombing
daguerrean
11d ago
For all the tough talk about the second amendment, how often does this actually happen? I know that no two situations are exactly alike (you never step in the same river twice and all), and I'm sure you can find plenty of reasons why analogous situations in the USA that didn't invite retaliation weren't really analogous. Maybe I am forgetting something, but where were the armed lynch mobs executing Catholic priests in the 1990s? Jeffrey Epstein, while most likely killed by somebody, it certainly wasn't by a lynch mob of 2A enjoyers. I've listened to a lot of true crime podcasts about cases in the USA where the obvious perpetrator escapes legal consequences but cases where that leads to vigilante justice are exceedingly rare. Completely unprovable, but I would be willing to bet almost anything that if this exact situation occurred in the USA the public response wouldn't be much different. As others have pointed out in response to his comment, KR himself is a prime example of this kind of larping.
daguerrean
12d ago
your "catgirl" persona, which so many of your Twitter followers inexplicably seem to have bought
Wait, do some people believe Kulak is female lol?
daguerrean
12d ago
The terminology of "grooming" is confusing here. It implies they were getting too friendly with these girls on discord and maybe sharing explicit links with them. Reading wikipedia all the accounts given are just straight up rape. I can only read this as deliberate obfuscation
daguerrean
12d ago
You misread what I wrote. If you find pre-WWII population estimates of Jewry in Europe, published pre-WWII, as for instance in a Jewish encyclopedia, the numbers are lower than today’s estimates of pre-WWII Jewry in Europe. IIRC, by millions.
Really sorry to reply to this ancient comment, but I am having difficulty sussing out the facts in this giant thread. @2rafa and @To_Mandalay are saying that prewar vs postwar population counts of Jews completely destroys the revisionist narrative, you say it supports it. Does anybody have any sources on this? In theory this seems relatively easy to resolve factually. Chatgpt is hopelessly pozzed on this issue and absolutely worthless otherwise I wouldn't bother you.
Some people have enough heart to go around
Of course redditors would immediately understand the problem with this if after Dylan Roof’s shooting you had said “Damn. My heart to all White men today who will bear the racist fall-out of this mad man’s evil move” Most people just lack any self awareness or non-object level reasoning ability.
Edit: I know this is a lame boomerism “Imagine if the situations were reversed” but I can’t help it
The focus on amount of muscle fiber feels like pilpul. They are trying to get away with a distraction that ignores the elephant in the room, what about breasts? Breasts are undeniable evidence for sex (not gender) based division of labor. And unsurprisingly we generally find women doing the kinds of activities that are suited to performing with an infant on your hip occasionally nursing, slow moving activities in and around the home. I have to imagine in premodern times, before the advent of birth control that women were more or less either nursing or pregnant for most of their adult lives.
But it does not mean women were not hunting, because this period is also when people invented the bow and arrow, hunting nets and fishing hooks. These more sophisticated tools enabled humans to catch a wider variety of animals; they were also easier on hunters' bodies. Women may have favored hunting tactics that took advantage of these new technologies.
The fact that they seem to be counting fishing and setting nets as hunting seems like BS. While it is maybe technically true in a sense it obviously doesn't contradict the idea conjured up when one says "men were the hunters". I wonder if this is behind their uncited study of Agta people and they are counting insect gathering or fishing with a hook and line as hunting.
daguerrean
18d ago
You wouldn't want her to anyway :) We are all each other's men with aspergers.
daguerrean
20d ago
What is your theory for choosing baby names? Generally it seems the reason for picking one falls into a few categories: family name, celebrity name (including historical, religious or fictional characters), unique name, “I like the sound of it”, meaning (in a literal sense, like naming your daughter Chastity). Obviously you can choose a name for multiple of these, but I think this covers most common reasons.
Feel free to answer even if you don’t have children.
As for me, I only have one child and I went with my father’s name. I had no strong attachment to any figure I wanted to name him after. I felt chasing uniqueness was pointless, and too difficult to predict. I still can’t believe we live in a world where the commonly thought-of common/generic names like John are less common than things like Ezra. With no strong direction I figured at least I could make my dad happy if nothing else. But for a second child? I have no idea what I would do.
I have the slight (common) problem of having an ethnically Italian last name while my children will be 1/16 Italian. I can’t choose an Italian first name or it would give the impression of being 100% Italian. But non-Italian first names feel somewhat aesthetically incongruous with the last name.
I think name trends are interesting to observe as far as what they say about our values and social classes. The departure from traditionally common names like Mary/John/Peter in my lifetime obviously has a lot to do with falling religiosity, but I think it also speaks to declining respect for family. Without those anchors it seems most people are left chasing the phantom of uniqueness or trying to stay ontop of trends associated with social class.
daguerrean
21d ago
If one puts party over country
I am fairly confident they don't believe they are doing this, and they effectively believe that the interests of party and country are one and the same. It is not ridiculous to believe that a figurehead Biden presidency run behind-the-scenes by his handlers is better than a Trump presidency with a competent executive. After all, I'm not sure I wouldn't feel similarly about the reverse situation.
Christianity has, as a meme, proved itself to be pro-social, pro-growth, and pro-peace and we don't have a better replacement
I feel that in spaces like the motte this idea is taken so much for granted that it doesn't get the proper pushback it deserves. This goes back to the unfashionableness of internet atheism and the meta-contrarian nature of this space so Christians get away with all kinds of things nobody else would. A similarly bold claim about the value of wokeness would be absolutely destroyed here.
Honestly I have no idea if this is true. Christianity is certainly a successful meme (or at least it was) I can say that much, however is it pro-anything or purely parasitic? I'm not sure. I can say it certainly isn't entirely incompatible with civilizational flourishing, which is worth something and maybe places it above communism. But obviously the Roman civilization was able to grow and succeed prior to Christianity, so it's not like growth and all that was impossible without Christianity. Pro-peace? I have no idea, maybe to some extent but Christianity obviously isn't incompatible with war or genocide.
I feel pretty confident in saying you'll never get a majority of people to "believe" in Christianity in this ridiculous and performative way. If this is what Christianity is depending on in the future you might as well find a new meme because this one is past its expiration date. For all things there is a season, what was once adaptive is not always viable. Christianity's (supposed) pro-social aspects are unfortunately tied to a bunch of absurd factual claims that may have seemed more plausible centuries ago but are no longer so persuasive.
Edit: Meta-meta-contrarian fashion has turned back towards atheism. Keep up!
daguerrean
22d ago
I'm not a Christian so my opinion here is pretty meaningless. What strikes me about this quote is just how thoroughly drenched in progressive language it is. "Chronically poor", "question patriarchy", "challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege", "re-imagining social structures", "making reparations." There is nothing explicitly Christian in the quote, the only reference to Jesus mentions him only to demonstrate the hypocrisy of Christians. This post could have literally been pulled from /r/atheism. I don't think it would be inconsistent (what do I know) for a Christian to believe the above, but wouldn't a believing Christian and pastor generally phrase it in a Christian way? Where are the Bible quotes? The parables? References to God or Jesus? This guy just reads like Jean Meslier
daguerrean
25d ago
Maybe "ignore" is the wrong word and you could say "deny" instead, but 1 is exactly what I'm saying, they would deny the effect of fat-shaming on reducing obesity or deny that it played a critical role socially. They wouldn't say that fat-shaming had no effect on humans, but that it had no positive effect and generally not engage with the serious tradeoffs at play.
daguerrean
25d ago
Freddie remains the king of boldly speaking truth to power by heroically proclaiming exactly what conservatives have been saying for decades. This problem is obviously based on very deep and foundational assumptions of progressive ideology and seeing this as a problem to some extent entails reckoning with the entirety of leftism.
As I see it, the leftist reasoning goes something like this. The last hundred years of psychology, sociology and neurology have chipped away at the idea of human agency, attributing more and more of our decisions and outcomes to factors outside of our individual control. Perhaps it is genes being identified that are linked to obesity or studies that have linked obesity to "food deserts" or poverty or systemic racism, the sum is that as we gain more and more knowledge about the causes of obesity less and less of it is left to personal agency. Agency becomes a sort of "god of the gaps". And while this is most apparent when it comes to conditions that are borderline clinical like obesity or serious social failings like crime, there is no reason that similar dynamics should not be at play in less medicalized failings like "being an ipad parent" or "having childlike pickiness about foods". Perhaps you only eat chicken nuggets as an adult because you were raised in an unprivileged background where your parents never exposed you to more adventurous cuisines? Perhaps you have some as-yet-unidentified gene that makes you "supertaster" and thus highly sensitive to flavors? Perhaps you have some kind of nebulous "trauma" and relying on comfortable childhood foods is therapeutic, I don't know, this sort of BS reasoning is trivial to makeup if you are in the right frame of mind.
The basis of this is viewing a human as an automaton, a deterministic collection of neurons with no ghost inside the machine. If a shoplifter or obese person is merely a product of their environment (or nature) then a picky eater is really no different. All things must be permitted.
Of course I disagree vehemently with leftists here. I don't necessarily disagree on viewing a human as an automaton, after all I am an atheist and a materialist, so I can't claim that humans have some ineffable soul that directs their actions and is responsible for agency. However, I think leftists ignore the degree to which social attitudes and shaming are part of the very environment that inform our actions. For example, taking obesity, I agree that obesity is largely driven by genetics, food environment, sedentary lifestyle/occupation etc, and none of those things are really "personal agency", however, part of that environment is "social pressure to be non-obese", in other words, fat-shaming.
For some reason leftists tend to consider shaming and social pressure as completely irrelevant factors of the environment. I've brought this up in discussions on reddit, that maybe "fat-shaming" actually effectively helps people maintain a healthy weight, and this idea is usually met with disdain. However, leftists are highly inconsistent on this point, as they surely believe shaming people for racism to be highly effective and critical in stopping racism.
In my mind the ascended POV is to recognize that humans are largely controlled by their environment, but to recognize the critical role that shaming has played throughout human social history as one of the most important parts of that very environment.
Strategy games have always had a degree of DEI in the past, usually overstating the accomplishments of various factions. Even Civ itself had cope wonders.
I don’t understand (but in some sense I obviously do) the obsession with Tubman in particular. Frederick Douglass was vastly more prominent and famous in his lifetime, especially in the prewar period. Are black women leaders really that much more valuable to DEI types than black men? It’s not like we have any black men on currency either, so why not push for Douglass or some much more universally hallowed figure like MLK?
Edit: I'll just add, although seemingly forgotten by comparison Sojourner Truth was also a black woman and actually somewhat famous and moderately known pre-war, something that can't be claimed for Tubman.
Some stats: I searched newspapers up until 1860 on chroniclingamerica and although the record is extremely limited the relative frequencies should hold. Number of mentions:
Harriet Tubman: 1
Sojourner Truth: 104
Frederick Douglass: 2003
daguerrean
26d ago
I have a baby boy. Ideally in the future I would like to homeschool him. Despite academic success in my life I feel remarkably poorly educated, particularly in the humanities. Luckily, I have about five years before homeschooling starts in earnest and probably ten or more before my lack of knowledge would be felt acutely. What would you all suggest for me to read or learn that would be attainable for an academically inclined person with about an hour or so of dedicated nightly study over five years? This could be books, languages, courses or such. I would like to keep this academically focused, so excluding life skills like woodworking and things of that nature. I’m looking for things like “learn Latin to the point you can read X comfortably”.
If I get some suggestions I would be happy to report my progress in the weekly wellness thread to keep me honest and I would also happily welcome any partners along the journey. Thank you in advance for any assistance Mottizens.
daguerrean
26d ago
Not surprising given all the positive attention the United Healthcare CEO assassination got, these things are known to inspire copycats so I would not be surprised if there were a few more attempts in the coming months.
daguerrean
26d ago
Very good point. Worth noting the resulting parallels to 80s Satanic Panic. There definitely seems to be an element of choose the form of your destructor in that the dominant culture defines the form of its opposition.
daguerrean
27d ago
I like this idea very much, but I would caution you to be selective about the userbase and not promote it too widely as it seems easy to abuse and depends upon having relatively neutral users that aren't just going to slam the slider to 100 or 0 and downvote every piece of evidence on the wrong side. So I question whether an open forum like this will ever be successful. I would love to do, not exactly an "adversarial collaboration" (as have been popular here in the past), but a collaborative investigation of one topic or claim like this but just restricted to a personal project amongst friends the goal of which would be to produce something similar to Scott's deepdive posts
daguerrean
27d ago
Because I'm a retarded autist with only one special interest I have to weigh in with relevant evidence. When daguerrreotypes became popular in the 1840s they were vastly more accessible in the USA than in any other country on Earth including their home of France. In the USA you routinely see occupational portraits of people of every social class and profession, carpenters, lamplighters, sailors, farriers, mill-girls, coopers, teamsters etc. In France and the UK (with every other country being negligible) you only see the upper classes, military officers and the like, you never see occupationals of random working class people. It is clear to me that already by 1840 the USA was VASTLY wealthier than every other country on Earth, at least when it came to the wealth of average people and even the lowest like night watchmen or lamplighters in the USA had more real purchasing power than most lawyers or doctors in France or Germany. Note, this only applies to the North in the USA, the South basically had daguerreotype production patterns that were closer to Continental Europe.
daguerrean
27d ago
Recently there has been some discussion in the media about fare evasion, and I thought in light of @WhiningCoil's comment on low trust societies it might be of interest to you all.
Over the past five years the fare evasion rate on New York City's bus lines has risen from 20% to 50%. while there has also been a similar (but less dramatic) rise among subway customers.
Recently the MTA commissioned a study to investigate the psychology of fare evaders and The New York Post has picked this up and mocked the project.. The study broke down different "personas" of fare evaders like a software product manager might. The NYP felt that this was inane as the obvious conclusion was that scofflaws were simply motivated by a lack of enforcement:
The pricy research – which comes as the authority is crying poverty and pushing for a detested congestion pricing plan — is being blasted by critics as a huge waste that will only tell them what anyone with common sense already knows about scofflaws....If we are going to hire a behavioral consultant, it will be to help change the behavior of a criminal justice system that has determined that fare evasion should have no consequences
I enjoyed this article by Manhattan Contrarian that criticizes the New York Post for completely ignoring race when discussing this issue, and pretending that lack of enforcement is the source of our woes.
But even the Post, in both its editorial and news pieces, is not willing to talk honestly about the association of race and fare-beating. Neither their news article nor editorial says a word about the race of the fare beaters. The subject is too sensitive even for them. But the problem is that until we can have an honest discussion about the association of race and fare-beating, it is almost impossible to address the issue.
I'll note as an amusing aside, that even the conservative Post uses an image of a White teenager for their illustration of a common fare evader.
However, I have to disagree with Francis Menton of The Manhattan Contrarian here when he writes the following:
To enable such a program to begin and to move forward, it is necessary for the issue of refusal to pay fares by race to enter the public consciousness. Someone first must collect systematic data and report it and point out what is actually going on. If it is too sensitive to report by race per se, then how about reporting by zip code? And then the newspapers and TV stations and podcasts and websites would need to pick up the story and make something out of it.
The racial makeup of fare evaders is perfectly well known of course and actually quite openly acknowledged so long as it is being done by the right sorts of organizations for the right ends.
I also wonder why the Post refuses to ask why draconian fare enforcement measures are only now needed? Somehow the MTA functioned perfectly fine with its easily-avoidable turnstyles decades ago. To relate it back to WhiningCoil's comment, I can only say "I think the bottom line, is this is just what a low trust society looks like."
daguerrean
28d ago
I often feel like people get the system they deserve. That the system is a product of the people, and trying to change a system’s rules on its own can only have marginal effect. We have a low trust, somewhat dysfunctional society and so any form of healthcare is going to be similarly dysfunctional.
Nerdy discussions of voting systems like ranked choice vs FPTP always trigger this feeling in me, like the voting system doesn’t matter at all. Maine implemented ranked choice and it’s not really going to improve Maine, Maine was only able to do it because it’s the whitest state in the country and as a result extremely non-polarized.
Bonobos are a similarly fake species. They used to just be regarded as a subspecies of or geographically distinct group of chimps. They were invented to create a species of “woke” or “feminist” chimps that scientists could claim represent what human ancestors were like because chimps are too warlike and patriarchal. This is a redpill most simply aren’t ready for.
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