solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
8d ago
But if you replace this person with a random trucker or construction worker, you will discover why this person's job required a college degree.
I happen to work an office job at a trucking company. A lot of our office guys don't have college degrees, a lot of them are former drivers, and I would say that my employer is more willing to take a chance and invest resources into training someone than many (They hired me with a stale humanities degree and driving/dispatching experience from outside of trucking.), but as a rule the managers are either 50+ or have a degree. Similarly, while it's likely true that the best dispatcher would have driving experience there's a good chance that a random driver plopped into the office either isn't bright enough, lacks the necessary computer/literacy skills, or lacks the disposition/patience to sit in an office all day and be professional when things start going wrong. That, and the sort of drivers who have those skills make more money driving than the dispatchers and either aren't interested in management or are stuck in the golden handcuffs such that they can't afford to stick out the lower office paycheck long enough to make terminal manager.
And FWIW as someone who was a lousy student who nevertheless graduated with a 3.5 from a state school on scholarship I think at minimum a college degree demonstrates some combination of industriousness and competence (maybe not what you would call "smart", but one does have to attend some amount of classes, complete some amount of assignments, and pass some amount of tests) or at least some variety of talent to pass those classes with a smoke and mirrors show. Was I a pizza delivery driver first, an alcoholic second, and college student third? Pretty much, but I did write those papers, pass those tests, and was able to triage assignments and exams such that I made the grades I needed to with a minimum of effort. Was it a waste of an opportunity to be educated and/or network my way into a real career? Probably. Did pulling it off when I could've just dropped out and gone full townie demonstrate something? I'd like to think so.
Oh, and we tend to shuffle our dingbats into the safety department.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9d ago
Update on the project car:
Things have gone relatively well with it. The rear bumper/taillight had more damage hiding under the plastic than I expected but I was able to accomplish a 7-8/10 result for the cost of a $50 taillight and some time with a hammer. It's not perfect and not even good if you look closely at it but an untrained eye has to look for it so good enough and getting a perfect result would require a real body shop/far more money than is worth to me. I also got the last of the mud out. The car cleans up nice.
I replaced the front brakes, replaced the two bad tires, and got a four-wheel alignment. The car drives like a dream now and the suspension appears to be sound.
I have the part for the touchscreen but it isn't acting up so it's a low-priority item that I'll get to whenever I have time or it acts up (in which case I'll make time). I did replace the headlights because one of the LEDs died and I'm not a fan of blinding oncoming drivers.
The muffler is another low-priority item. The squeaking is annoying but a new replacement is expensive and reasonably-priced used options haven't popped up near me. I'll sit on it and either a local option will show up or I'll make time to drive however many miles round trip. In the meantime the car runs fine.
I have decided to keep the newer car and sell my old daily driver, the ricerboy Honda. That car is more fun to drive, but not that much more fun and I've had most if not all the amusement I'm going to get out of it, and it'll be easier to sell while being more expensive to keep. I have to put a fuel pump in it but that's a job that's more annoying (have to remove the back seat) than hard.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9d ago
Not OP and my situation is different (dealing with a parent, i.e. mother who almost certainly suffers from BPD), but Understanding the Borderline Mother was useful to me for two reasons: One, for whatever it's worth, it was validating in describing an at times weird and other times so over-the-top experiences that it's hard to describe or expect outsiders to believe.
Secondly, I did use it as a screening question when picking a therapist in my early 20s, i.e. "Have you read this?", and I think that doing so was helpful for finding one that had a frame of reference for dealing with my situation.
Otherwise, I'm not sure what a book is supposed to do. If you're at the point of picking and reading one about a relatively niche topic like this you probably have a decent to good idea of what you're dealing with. Maybe a book written by someone with letters after their name gives you the permission to feel however about whatever but in the end what happened happened and there's no undoing that. There's only where you are now and how you choose to deal with it or not, and the hardest part about being a survivor of child abuse (Ugh, that term is a touch cringe inducing.) is realizing that as an adult you are the author of your life's story now. Nobody is going to give you free karma points to cash in on living happily ever after and what you do when you're in charge is on you. As an adult dealing with a shitty spouse or friend the same applies.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9d ago
I haven't read the above two but Understanding the Borderline Mother is a lot. The good news is that Lawson's prose is engaging instead of dry.
Otherwise, however dramatic or severe some of the descriptions are, some of those were creepily accurate compared to my experiences with a mother who almost certainly suffers from BPD. I just laughed when I got to the bit about the Borderline Witch's motto: "Life is War". Sure as shit was for her, and she joined the Marines to learn how to win.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
14d ago
They think it's a foregone conclusion that NYC is going to go to hell because of Mandami. They don't consider the possibility that once in office he'll be more pragmatic, which frequently happens when socialists find themselves in executive positions.
More to the point, would NYC going to Hell even hurt the Democrats? Granting that John Lindsay was something of an inverse Bloomberg in terms of party affiliation, his tenure as mayor actually being a disaster didn't hurt the Democrats. They held the Mayorship continually until Giuliani, won the Governorship of New York immediately following his tenure, and Carter won New York in 1976.
I do think that the GOP is at risk of reading too much into '24 as it did in '04. '24 in particular was weird. Between the Biden drama and inflation the election was arguably the GOP's to lose, and they barely won it (See also: the 2022 midterms.). Trump is polarizing but at least some variety of popular. The rest of the GOP are almost as polarizing and lack the charisma.
More fundamentally, the GOP as a party (Trump sort of has a direction, but it's a largely incoherent and surface level imitation of Pat Buchanan, and the GOP has neither the numbers or the consensus to push anything through Congress.) hasn't answered its post '06/'08 dilemma. Educated Republicans (aka. the Mitt Romneys of the world) aren't a big enough coalition to win Presidential elections (and probably not the House since Democrats have caught up to REDMAP), their priorities aren't shared by anyone else (Hint: 2012 was as white, male, and boomer as the college educated will ever be again.), and 40 years of largely uninterrupted culture war losses mean that they hold no sway with the high school educated base. The hardest of copers can note that Reagan got smashed in the '82 midterms, but there isn't an incoming equivalent of the 1-2 tail wind of crashing interest rates and oil prices that juiced the economy in the mid 1980s. Even getting rid of tariffs returns us to the baseline of late-stage Biden.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
15d ago
Same here, to the point that I kind of missed the boat on boomer hate. I was a Gulf War baby with Gen X parents and Silent grandparents.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
15d ago
Setting aside the silliness over cultural milestones (Are Generation Jones and Xennials really that similar?), in fiscal/political terms Gen X is rapidly approaching Boomer territory, aka. retirement. Expect our gerontocracy problems to get worse in the short term as Gen Xers (a larger generation than the Silents) retire faster than old Boomers and Silents die.
Why, for example, is there suddenly such a fight over enhanced ACA subsidies? It turns out that somewhere along the way the ACA became a defacto extension of Medicare Advantage for the 55-65 crowd such that the most common age for an Obamacare enrollee is 64. Hell hath no fury like that of Bill and Shelley.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
24d ago
I think it's worth considering that our current Vice President is not old enough to remember Reagan being in office.
That said, this Millennial Republican voter's opinion is that Reagan is both overrated and over-hated. Why? Because he was mostly a continuation of Carter's neoliberal agenda with a more optimistic presentation. Good or bad, neoliberalism should be understood not as something imposed by the GOP (who, let us remember, never controlled Congress during Reagan or H.W. Bush's Presidencies) but also as a change in elite consensus within the Democratic Party. Pick something that Reagan is blamed or credited for and odds are that Carter really started it. Union busting? Carter appointed Volker whose interest rate hikes wrecked the sort of private sector jobs that were heavily unionized. That big military buildup? Also started under Carter, and for all his peacenik vibes post-Presidency he took a more confrontational tone toward the USSR (compare Carter's Zbigniew Brzezinski to Nixon's Henry Kissinger) than Nixon. Maybe we buy the idea that Reagan didn't care much about AIDS but I've yet to see a convincing argument that the US handled it radically worse than the rest of the developed world. Most Democrats voted for Reagan's tax cuts. As Governor of California Reagan was hardly a conservative firebrand. He signed off on tax increases while legalizing abortion (and he'd go on to screw over the pro-lifers again by nominating Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court) and no-fault divorce. Free trade and immigration? The Democrats have been free traders more or less continuously for the party's entire existence, and Congressional Democrats were more likely to vote for Reagan's amnesty than members of his own party.
IMO his legacy is outsized for both sides because it allows a certain brand of Republicans to act as if they had more to do with the good things that happened than is arguably the case and a certain brand of Democrats to avoid facing the fact that they'd largely been betrayed by their own party's politicians. Amusingly, certain right-wing ideologues figured it out first, which is why both Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan ran campaigns against Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
25d ago
I've read that argument by historians before, but I'd add this: The US simultaneously deployed a huge amount of soldiers in WWII while asking a relatively small number of them to do most of the actual fighting. Something like one in sixteen American soldiers saw serious combat during the war.
By contrast, the US deployed far fewer troops during the Vietnam War and asked those who did to do a lot more fighting. The USMC deployed and lost more Marines in WWII than in Vietnam, but those who did deploy to Vietnam suffered a higher casualty/fatality rate than their counterparts in WWII, with around 3% of those deployed Killed in Action in WWII vs. 5% in Vietnam.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
25d ago
I do believe that to some extent the plight of the "traumatized" (Let's pick on first world child abuse or domestic violence survivors for an example.) is that they were simply left behind by life getting so much better for everyone else that they find themselves surrounded by people blissfully unable to relate to the idea that bad things happen (I'm wildly oversimplifying here, but you get the idea.). When then "engineered" (I think the shrinks call this "securely attached".) become somewhere between the majority to the vast majority depending on what social circles you're running in, it can perhaps be alienating for those stuck by circumstances in the old ways with a different way of looking at people and the world at large.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
The newer Russian planes are fine compared to anything short of an F-22/35, but they can't build them quickly enough or at all (in the case of MiG 31s, or non-Flanker strike aircraft like the Su-22s and 25s, Tu-95s, etc.) to afford chucking them into the teeth of Ukraine's air defense network Gulf War style and they didn't start the war with huge numbers of them thanks to having next to no procurement budget during the 90s and 2000s. Does the Su-57 do anything that an Su-30/35 or MiG 31 can't also do (The R-37 is indeed clever.)? Who knows, because they've only built ~30 of them.
Mind you, even before being provisioned with Patriots and so on Ukraine started the war with a very good ground-based IADS thanks to being either the second or third-largest operator of the S-300 and other 80s era Soviet SAM systems in the world, especially given an all you can eat buffet of NATO recon. It would've been a tough nut to crack for anyone not named the USAF.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
My understanding is that contrary to stereotype the Russian Air Force has been extremely risk averse in how they employ their aircraft because they know that they're not that great at building airplanes.
The VKS basically did nothing other than relatively ineffective close air support with frog foots and helicopters (which, on a side note, proved quite effective at using anti-tank missiles at the extreme of their range against Ukrainian armor during the '23 counteroffensive) or lob missiles from outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses for the first year and a half or so of the war (notably expending a large number of them to little effect during Surovikin's campaign against the Ukrainian energy grid).
The major game changers have been the Russians introducing their equivalent of the JDAM (allowing them to drop far more tonnage for far less money from outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses) and their development of the Geran series of suicide drones. The latter has provided a cost-effective way of attacking into the teeth of Ukrainian air defenses and saturating them such they more frequently achieve hits with their ballistic missiles.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
I'm a big fan of Lionel Shriver's The Mandibles (published in 2016). Mania was a fun take on cancel culture. Apparently her latest novel is set to take on immigration.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Welp, I guess I have a project car now.
The friend of mine who recently passed away left me his car. It's nicer than my car on paper (nine years newer and with 90K miles whereas mine is pushing 250K), but I didn't love it when I owned it, and while mechanically sound enough it is beat to hell with loads of stupid body damage, and the interior is trashed (In my friend's defense, one of the things I hated about the car is that it has a white leather interior that looked great when new but is extremely difficult to keep clean, and the grade of "leather" Mazda used isn't winning any points in my book for durability.).
I'm in the middle of a bare-minimum cleanup (The driver's seat is hopeless and the back seat is rough, but the rest came out fairly well and leather conditioner smells much nicer than stale dog.), and working on a to-do list. I'm not sure what I want to do with it but, keep it or sell it, this pig is need of some lipstick.
In terms of relatively low-budget fixes, I need to do the following:
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Fix the rear bumper/replace the broken tail light. I'm fairly confident that the huge dent can be popped out if the bumper cover is removed, and you have to remove the tail lights to remove the bumper cover, so I've ordered the tail light.
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Replace the cabin air filter. I did this when I first bought the car from a chain smoker, but holy crap that was 7 years ago. Part ordered, and my fun observation is that cigarette smoke is easier to clean up than dog hair (It was a shorthaired dog.).
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Comprehensively finish removing the mud from when the car was driven into a sinkhole. Time consuming, but free.
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Repair the touch screen. Mazda touch screens are notorious for the digitizer cracking/delaminating and causing issues (namely, ghost touches that cause the radio to go crazy), but a knockoff replacement is cheap and the job doesn't look that hard. I've ordered the part.
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Rotate the two good tires to one axle, get two new tires, and an alignment. Hopefully nothing in the front end is broken, but the absence of clunking is an encouraging sign.
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The front brake rotors are warped enough to be irritating and are likely too worn to be turned, but hey the rotors are cheap on Rock Auto. The brake fluid also needs to be flushed because the brakes are even mushier than I remember them being. Low priority.
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The Y-pipe/rear muffler either needs to bent back into shape or replaced such that it sits in the hangers correctly and doesn't squeak over bumps.
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The driver's side door seal needs to be replaced because it is torn and makes for some annoying road noise.
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The LED headlights need to be removed and replaced with the stock halogens. Those were bright enough and the fans for the LEDs make an annoying humming noise.
Things I am unlikely to fix:
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The big scrape on the bottom/side of the car. You almost have to look for it and this would require real repair work.
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The driver side door skin is damaged from where the fender was smashed into it. I replaced the fender to fix that because it was surprisingly cheap to buy a whole new painted fender, but a whole new door skin is not cheap, and again it's another one of those things where you kind of have to look for the damage.
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Almost all of the undercarriage plastic is missing. Added together, that's a few hundred bucks worth of plastic, I never noticed a difference in fuel economy or road noise to justify it, and why would I pay to make changing the oil harder?
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The front bumper has its share of scrapes, but fuck it it's an eight year old car. It doesn't have to be perfect, just not look like and feel shit.
Thank you, and I'll get there.
I don't really blame myself at this point. I made my peace with that last year when I kicked him out. Could I have postponed the inevitable by letting him live with me until the bitter end? Probably, but by how long who knows and the cost to my sanity was going to exceed my ability to deal with it. I just couldn't do it, and I was far from the only one. We all did what we could and none of it was going to fix the unfixable. The only thing I had control over in that situation was how much I was willing to be collateral damage. I reached my end and that was that. We were still friends, exchanged dumb memes or whatever pretty much daily, and saw each other every week or so. I'm gonna miss him.
Sorry about the brother. Alcoholism blows and there isn't a damned thing those who care can do if the person holding the bottle can't find it in himself to quit or at least tone it down to a level that's compatible with the life you want to live. Take it from someone who's more acquainted with it than most.
Edit: I forgot to mention. We did get ahold of one of his cousins (He didn't have much family left and they lived a few hours away but I'm pretty sure that I met her once.) and she was very gracious. She mentioned having offered to let him move in with her. That brought me some peace to hear that he'd had somewhere to go.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Thank you.
The hardest part of this is watching my sister go down the same road with different details (and some invariably shitty boyfriends, one of whom shot himself dead in front of her). She's been spiraling downhill pretty badly lately (mostly because she refuses to give up on the latest shitty boyfriend, and I know it sucks to realize that you need to move out and start over from scratch again, but she was also between jobs for a few months so throw in "broke and the cards are maxed out" into the mix). I offered her a place to stay if she could find somewhere else for her dog, and she retorted that the dog is the only thing she lives for now (Guess how many times I heard that from my now dead friend about his dog.). Same story with mom (who she refuses to live with anyway) and our father (He'd probably give in she pushed hard enough, to our stepmother's fury, but she stuck them with the last dog she had the last time she stayed with them.). Her current plan is allegedly to continue staying with the shitbag boyfriend who was about to kick her out and commute 5 hours a day multiple days a week to her new job. I told her she should plan on moving there as soon as she can swing it but she says she doesn't want to live in the same city as our mother (I get not wanting to live with her but that metro area is big enough for the two of them and I'm pretty sure she's just stalling for time because she refuses to give up on the boyfriend.).
It just sucks. It's the guilt trip that never ends. Our mother was a cartoon villain of a parent and I wasn't older enough to have any chance of defending her, just older enough that I was the first to figure out to run and hide when I heard that tone in her footsteps. It wasn't my fault that I was mom's favorite and she wasn't. No amount of analyzing it to death will completely silence the part of me that feels like the sibling equivalent of a war criminal. I can't rescue her now any more than I could when we were kids. There's plenty of nice stuff you can read about "breaking the cycle", but the fact is that a lot of people don't and the odds for my sister aren't looking good.
Our stepmother is a far better wife than our father deserves and is ordinarily understanding, but she'll never totally get it. Dad will never forgive himself. It doesn't matter how outmatched in court he was. It doesn't matter how hard he did fight or how much he did spend when he could've walked away. It doesn't matter that weekend's at dad's were that much better. All that matters is that he sees his daughter in pain, doesn't know how to make it stop, and feels like it's his fault. So yeah, he'll give whatever she asks as long as he has the money. Mercifully, he made enough in crypto after Trump got elected that he can swing it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
It wasn't exactly the same situation, but my friend had also blown through a few hundred thousand in the form of an inheritance from his parents. He'd been a musician, worked various jobs (mostly in auto parts), etc. but couldn't really hold down a job after he started going down with heart failure and other health problems. Irritatingly, it's my understanding that some combination of having had a low on-paper income and having waited too long to apply for disability after he quit working (while subsisting on the inheritance) meant that he didn't have enough work credits to qualify. I don't know the exact details (Maybe he got denied initially and then ran out of work credits by the time his health was sufficiently bad.) but it was maddening to me because he was clearly unable to physically cope with any sort of labor or consistently show up because he'd have days he just couldn't do anything. You could get mad that he didn't do anything to help himself in terms of managing his health problems or maybe argue that he could've tried harder to get a work from home job but he didn't have a work history conducive to that and wasn't self-motivated enough to make it as a gig driver (Anyone can drive a car in circles, but doing so without crashing it and keeping it in good condition to use it for work actually takes some skill, and in my experience from that business a lot of people can't make themselves work enough to pay the bills without the fear of being fired.).
He'd lived hard in the small-time rock and roll scene, wound up with old people problems before his time, and most of his social circle from the good times had either died or aged out and moved on from that life. It really was sad and I felt bad because his life objectively sucked in a way that would've been hard for the best of us to cope with. It was just beyond his means.
There isn't really anything you can tell your friend that he doesn't already know. He has to love and respect himself enough to do stop with the drugs and put up with most likely being broke working a shitty job and having a mundane life because he wants more for himself than to be a statistic. You can't make somebody care about and for themselves. He's probably looking at what feels like an overwhelming amount of effort/self-improvement for what doesn't feel like a lot of return on investment. I'm sorry about your friend, because it sucks to watch.
“He lost his battle with mental health.”
I guess that’s the contemporary Facebook suitable euphemism for “committed suicide”.
Some of you may remember the roommate that I kicked out last year. He took his own life on Saturday morning after a 10/10 argument and crashout with his daughter. Things had been rough lately but I’d seen him earlier the night before at the bar and he seemed more or less himself, just buried in his phone reconnecting with a woman from his past after her breakup such that we didn’t really talk much. The last thing I told him was that we should get together on Sunday.
What do you even say? This story was never going to have a happy ending, but those of us close to him figured that his health would take him first, or a plausibly-accidental overdose. It’s never good news when you get called to the hospital, an escort is waiting to take you back, and a police officer walks in with the doctor. “Was he depressed or did he seem like he would hurt himself?” “I’ve heard the suicide talk so many times either as his former roommate or working at the bar that I would just say that I’d see him tomorrow.” “Was he diagnosed with a mental health condition and did he take any medication?” “What wasn’t he diagnosed with?” “Did he own a firearm?” “Yes, and now that you mention it I don’t think I’ll soon forget what it looked like. I’m guessing this is why I saw a bunch of cops and crime scene tape a few blocks from where he’d been staying when I went to pick her up?” “Yes sir.”
“I wish he’d called/said something. I didn’t know things were so bad.” Perhaps I’m overly grim by disposition (most likely true) or people really are insanely naive and think that things will just magically get better (true of that person I was delivering the news to; nice guy, though) but, really? This shouldn’t exactly have been a surprise, save coming from those who figured he lacked the guts to actually do it. His problems weren’t solvable by a pep talk, nor were they in any sense temporary.
“It’s my fault!” No, it isn’t. The last person he’d been crashing with had been the latest to reach the end of her rope (pun not intended) and told him that he had to go, but that doesn’t make it her fault so much as it made her the loser of the game of musical chairs (This is how I described it to her.). The fact is that everyone close to him at some point or another had done and tolerated what they could in attempting to help him. Some had more patience and resources than others but it invariably ended the same way: frustration and defeat before reaching some form of “I can’t do this anymore.” None of us who were in that hospital room have any reason to blame ourselves. Even in some fairytale alternate scenario where the right person in the right place got him through this bad night there was always going to be another one, and another one, and…you get the idea.
I don’t know at precisely what point our friendship became an exercise in palliative care, and I don’t know if most people think in such terms (I guess not, judging by the surprised reactions from so many.), but that’s what it was. Maybe this is going to sound weird but I find myself having grieved in advance of the event to some extent. I’m sad, but not shocked. I’ll do my part for those of us left behind and at some point the grief will subside and we’ll remember the end less and the better times we had together more. Goodbye, my friend, and damn it I’m sorry I couldn’t fix you. God knows I gave it my best shot.
Selfishly, I’m afraid the contenders for the next call are running a rapid race, and those are my father and sister. Those are going to hurt.
Oh yeah, bonus material: "Is his dog okay?" "Yes, and in fact it's been staying with a different friend for some time now." I'm pretty sure that's called foreshadowing.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Where does "good deed" end and "codependent sucker prone to being taken advantage of by friends" begin? I've struggled with the latter in life.
That aside, depending on if we're counting friends or just strangers the most recent one was either giving a friend a few hundred bucks to help with immigration paperwork (She's been here for over 30 years but has been stuck in some kafkaesque green card renewal Hell since Biden was in office.) or driving a drunk guy home from the bar I'm a regular at. The latter can turn into a shitshow if they're too belligerent to cooperate or too impaired to give directions but the man in question was just irritated that the bartender didn't want to let him drive, knew where he lived, and it was a short drive. I got a free shot for my trouble and was able to do the bartender (a dear friend of mine) an easy favor.
My greatest deed doubles as a hilariously over the top act of simping. A woman I was very much in love with at the time and who was also crashing on my couch wrecked her car driving to my place, clipped a parked vehicle and ripped one of the wheels off the car. She was just about to pay the thing off and I didn't have the heart to have it towed to her mom's place knowing it would never get fixed and she'd wind up back at the beginning of the "buy here, pay here" treadmill so I said "fuck it", had it towed to my place, and all but rebuilt the front end of her car over the next few weeks. In total I replaced both lower ball joints, tie rod ends, and sway bar links (What wasn't damaged was worn out junk anyway and the parts kit was cheaper than I expected so I just bought the kit.) along with one hub/knuckle assembly, CV axle, strut, and a fender badly spraypainted to match (The latter set of parts were sourced from a friendly local junkyard.). It wasn't perfect (The subframe was either bent or just badly out of alignment due to the wreck/repair.) but I got it to drive straight enough and the repairs lasted the rest of the car's life.
My take on helping people is that if I can I should, within reason. It took me a long time and a lot of money/free labor to learn the "within reason" part. It also took a long time to learn that doing nice things for people in hopes of being liked isn't going to fix not feeling particularly likeable.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
Whether or not "patriarchy" is a system that was codified (as in the Abrahamic religions) or simply a set of norms that turned out to be optimal for dealing with pre-industrial (or, perhaps more properly, pre green revolution) life, the idea is that beyond a certain point an excess of male intrasexual competition is bad because energy spent on that (be that fighting and killing each other in more primitive contexts, or power-swiping on dating apps and spending tons of time and money in bars for the non checked out in our present context) isn't spent on more useful things like working (This can still be seen by the fact that married men still earn more money than their unmarried counterparts.).
Likewise, some degree or another of enforced monogamy fixes the failure that in a purely free market the sexually successful male is completely relieved of obligations toward women or their children because the value of a given woman for those men rapidly approaches zero (aka. "a bitch is a bitch").
That such an arrangement also boosts fertility by enabling the median man to have a wife and children (that he is in turn obligated to provide for and defend) and that said arrangement is good at securing the loyalty of average men is a nifty bonus.
IMO the easiest way to demonstrate that patriarchy hindered certain men rather than women is merely to ask who dismantled it. Was it women? Not really. Sure, the feminists were a thing and they went along with it for their own reason, and capitalists were certainly happy to get a new supply of labor, but it was largely a bunch of upper-class male lawyers who did it.
Edit: Something I failed to convey is that patriarchy has fallen apart in large part because it's been rendered obsolete (save for the "enabling fertility" part, anyway; we haven't figured out how to get women to take what they can get instead of living childless in someone's Tinder harem or giving up out of despair for how lacking they perceive their options to be). Male provision and protection are pretty much worthless, and even loyalty to a cause or group doesn't mean much in a world where real existential threats to elite (or elite through scumbaggery; you can't take what doesn't exist from those who don't have it) men are rare.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
The problem here is that James will not lose his teeth and everyone knows it, especially James. What pretty much everyone misses is that patriarchy is fundamentally about dealing with male intrasexual competition. All the stuff psychoanalyzing women largely misses the point.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
It is kind of fun. No multiscreen needed, just a weed vape, a laptop, 30+ tabs, and a few hours to kill.
It gets old pretty fast though (same with porn in general). I quit weed to get a better job and don't really miss it. Kind of a shame, because fake weed vapes are dirt cheap while getting bored and going to the bar 4+ nights a week gets expensive in a hurry such that I kind of need a side gig to help pay my bar tabs (Last time that happened it spiraled out of control such that I wound up being a bartender, a fun but very time and money intensive way to develop a friend group of mostly fucked up people.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
~6-7 years. At some point /r/themotte was linked on /r/drama and I found it that way. God, I miss seriousposting on Drama.
I have plenty of friends, some closer than other but it's rare that I go more than a few days without seeing or talking to at least one of them. As much as my bank account protests I'll usually wind up going to the bar at least a night or two a week due to getting bored with not talking to anyone.
If I have a problem with said friendships it's that seemingly half my friend group (early/mid 30s millennials) moved out of the city I live in over the last 18 months. I did pick up a new friend though, at a reddit meetup of all places. The date that ensued from that meetup was a failure, but the friend is entertaining (a touch crazy but actually smart and entertaining to talk to) and we'll be meeting up for drinks some time in the next week.
I had a best friend and have had a few others who are close. He was a total fuckup and disabled in his later years but a great conversationalist and drinking buddy and had a huge friend group, a real larger than life personality. We'd talk or exchange texts daily. He took his own life a few months ago. I'm glad he isn't suffering anymore or burdening his friends but I miss him. There's always something that I would've called him to talk about and well, I can't anymore.
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