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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   4514 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 30, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Did he not make the jump to the lifeboat (as far as we know)?

He's here; his most recent post was about an hour ago. I've had a bit of trouble with the search function myself, but not the technical chops to troubleshoot it.

Is there a tool similar to Google Trends but for media headlines?

That would allow one to look up keywords and see how prevalent they were over the years in online newspapers' articles or headlines that can be found on Google News for example.

The Dailystormer and other respectable publications are constantly highlighting reporting of young, fit-looking people 'dying suddenly' or 'unexpectedly' and connecting it with the mass-scale RNA injection experiment undertaken in the West.

I'd like to test that claim if possible by comparing headlines from 2022 to 2019 and earlier.

The Dailystormer and other respectable publications

Honestly cannot tell if you're serious.

But I doubt aggregating headlines would really give you an accurate picture, especially with the trend of all media towards clickbait headlines.

The Dailystormer is ran by a handful of people, has covered many topics in depth that other media don't cover, for example what happened in Charlottesville, on January 6th, the adventures of Hunter Biden, geopolitical issues including non-American sources (Western media hardly ever present the Chinese or Russian POV).

They have a clearly expressed bias, they offer retractions / apologies when they get something wrong, they hold people on their side accountable...

There are a lot of topics that they don't cover and their coverage is usually surface-level, but their journalistic track record is much better than any big media I can think of.

I'm sure that they are other good small media out there, but I haven't looked too much.

But I doubt aggregating headlines would really give you an accurate picture

Just to make a comparison with what we have now. If writing about famous or non-famous people dying suddenly from unknown medical causes without any known chronic disease before 70yo is clickbait, it must be because people are curious about such matters? Kind of a man-bite-dog kind of news.

I'm sure a lot of antivaxxers are looking to stimulate their confirmation bias but can it be the only reason that'd be clickbait?

The Dailystormer is ran by a handful of people, has covered many topics in depth that other media don't cover, for example what happened in Charlottesville, on January 6th, the adventures of Hunter Biden, geopolitical issues including non-American sources (Western media hardly ever present the Chinese or Russian POV).

Maybe now and then they accidentally do some journalism between all the screeds about "kike faggots" and "nigger cunts," but if that is your idea of "respectable," that word clearly has a very different meaning to you.

Well for example today I read an article titled 'Disgusting Vaxer Cunt Dies of Heart Attack at 49'.

You may disagree with the wording of the headline but that same article taught me that not only did Julie Powell die at 49 from cardiac arrest caused by heart arrhythmia but also provided context: she was a fervent vaxxie, boosted in Dec 21 and had a black hairy tongue in late October, which her doctor found not to be a big deal (trust the experts!).

Moreover, she also tweeted what seemed to be virulent hate and did not get banned for it, until her ultimate ban to the shadow realms.

[>"I really can see the argument for slaughtering white people in the streets. It’s not going to happen, because most people are better than me, but Jesus. I see the temptation.

I’m gonna get banned, aren’t i?"](https://twitter.com/licjulie/status/1281476312528498688)

Some people may find that the headline is appropriately worded, after all.

While the article itself is very cheap, easy reporting, thanks to the modern tendency of publishing everything on Twitter; you will hardly get to read such an analysis anywhere else.

By comparison, you can read a cheap article written about crime, with the horrendous headline

'A Woman Was Murdered After Rejecting Her Co-Worker's Sexual Advances. 'We Had No Indication Anything Was Awry,' Her Boss Said.'

and potentially walk away with the idea that a white incel killed after getting turned down, while the perp is none other than Mr. 60%

There is no analysis of the dangers of mixed-race or mixed-sex workplaces, and the basic information is not even there.

While reading news is pointless, at least slurs are a shortcut compared to their leftwing version 'systemic racism', 'entrenched inequalities', 'lack of diversity', 'vulnerable BIPOC and LGBTQUP+ communities' etc etc.

And if you need a reminder that such writings are a threat to the powers-that-be, consider that once again their latest domain name was taken away at the same time as the hammer fell on Kanye.

Some people may find that the headline is appropriately worded, after all.

"Some people" may indeed. Yes, dude, I get it. You are the target audience for the Dailystormer. No need to hide your power level.

Everybody is a target audience for the Dailystormer, they are inclusive with their support of people like Kanye, Tulsi Gabbard, Greenwald...

I don't generally use slurs and find them distateful, but I understand that the shocking value is a way to generate an audience.

If your media of choice includes people that advocate for baby murder, child mutilation, US empire wars etc, how is it any more respectable?

I voted to support the war in Ukraine but at least I didn't say the c-word

This selective outrage over language is quite classist. Reminds me of the Martha Vineyard financial backers of open borders who immediately got rid of the handfuls of immigrants sent their way by the 'distateful' Republicans.

They would never call them 'illegal aliens' but they just couldn't find a spot on their million dollar estates to house them.

Everyone knows who and what the Dailystormer is about. You are not fooling anyone.

I have more respect for white supremacists who own it and say what they believe outright than tap-dancers.

Idk if everybody does as most people don't even know how to access the website, thanks to a number of internet services blacklisting them.

It certainly is an informative website for those that care about subjects that are censored in most other media.

I don't know if DS is strictly white supremacist, but maybe according to your own definition it is?

One would think they would not praise Kanye if they were supremacists.

I only say what I believe, I'm not sure what you think I should be saying that I am not saying.

More comments

Anyone got sources that present GamerGate from the "it was about ethics in video game journalism" angle?

What happened to the Carlsbad comment at the bottom of the culture war thread about American settlers vs immigrants? Did it just totally disappear?

I thought if a poster deleted a comment the replies would be left up. Was this removed by admins? If so, why?

I can still see replies via context on my own response, but it does seem unusual.

@ZorbaTHut, any chance you can clear this up?

Lots of ban evasion. The whole user network, at this point, is shadowbanned, just because we're tired of dealing with them.

If you liked Carlsbad's comments, you should check out his blog.

Is that the real Carlsbad? I was going to ask him but forgot to respond to his thread.

I didn’t like his comment but I’m concerned about comments disappearing.

With all that progress in machine learning, WHEN will be we able to upscale frame rate of old animes from effective 5-8 fps to 60 fps?

Early pre-neural network attempt (SVP) is about as effective as nil, older DAIN still leaves a lot to be desired.

It should doable in 2-3 years with ease, if someone cared enough.

The technology might already be there. There simply isn't enough money to want to do it.

There is also the fact that some of it might be impossible. The physics of an anime only make sense in 5-6 fps. If you try to scale it up, a human might be just as unable to do it as a machine.

Most ML models today match the absolute best human beings, because they are ones who label it. So, if a human can't do it, a machine will surely be unable to do it.

But, it should be totally possible to build something that looks plausible without artefacts for anime that has physical consistency to it.

So, if a human can't do it, a machine will surely be unable to do it.

I'm fairly sure there's humans who can do it, just it takes a lot for time to learn to draw and even still it's labour-intensive.

This is actually a case where a fan project is the probably the best bet.

There are some unique issues. Different elements update at different frame rates. Also they will scroll at full frame rate while animating at a lower one.

But there's not enough commercial or academic interest to pump money into research.

Fans and animation enthusiasts can put together great training sets on their own. There are enough nerdy types to play around with models.

Different elements update at different frame rates.

Yes, correct, but it seems to be a little easier task than deducing correct animating of body parts from known 4 running frames.

I heard there's Google frame rate upscaler, thought it seems it has no specific support for anime...

If our goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is it better to kill 40 million median Americans or 40 million median Ugandians?

On one hand, one American emits 15x more greenhouse gases than one Ugandan. On the other hand, Ugandan TFR is 2x the replacement ratio, so their great-great-grandchildren will emit more than those of the Americans even without taking into account Ugandan economic growth and American decarbonization plans.

The former - nuclear war would reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly and the ash would have a mild cooling effect.

Neither. By killing 40 million Americans, you would arguably (likely IMO) end up with worse global warming, since that devastating blow to the American economy would delay the invention and adaption of technology that replace fossil fuels and enable carbon capture. Dito for the Angolans.

Would killing 40 million African peasants be noticed by anyone except the peasants themselves? Not to sound rude, but my priors on ‘mass suffering and death in Africa’ is that it’s a page 8 story, and that on a slow news day.

When people say that utilitarians don't consider the second-order consequences of their actions, you know that's an outsider criticism, not a philosophical requirement, right?

More seriously: Ugandan TFR is 2x replacement right now, but a generation ago it was 3x replacement. Angola is still at 2.5x replacement, but they peaked at 3.5x two generations ago and are still falling. Their demographic transitions seem to be well underway already, so "TFR=constant" isn't even a good approximation right now, much less something you can extrapolate out for four more generations to come.

You are right, if Ugandan TFR is decreasing quickly towards replacement rate it makes no sense to try to adjust for it.

The 2022 UN World Population Prospects just came out. Under the medium fertility variant, the population of Uganda is projected to more than triple by the year 2100. The U.S. population is expected to increase by just 15%. More than 100% of the U.S. increase will be due to immigration.

While African fertility has been decreasing, the decrease has been much slower than other countries such as India and Iran where the TFR has come down rapidly. The UN projects that Ugandan TFR will fall to replacement (2.1) by the year 2071.

Just providing some context, not disputing the overall thrust of your comment.

I saw someone on reddit link this greentext image which explains some of the difficulties with basic reasoning ability that people with low IQ have.

I've read some books on the basics of intelligence research (which shows that intelligence is positively correlated with many outcomes that are good, and negatively correlated with many outcomes that are bad), but this text somehow phrased it in very concrete terms that I found interesting. Are there any other readings people have found that tries to contextualize the reality of living at a different intelligence level?

I know that, when people empathize with others, they tend to do so by "putting themselves in other people's shoes", which is trying to figure out how you would act given a different set of circumstances. But doing this with people of vastly different cognitive ability than you is flawed, and I want to understand some of the ways in which it is flawed better.

https://www.gwern.net/reviews/McNamara

Quote:

Some were trapped in boot camp: Gregory describes how many would be sent to remedial training repeatedly, failing the exercise requirements each time. They couldn’t understand how to correctly execute actions: in swinging from monkey bars, they would try to swing one bar at a time, coming to a halt each time; in running an obstacle course, they would have to pause in front of each arrow and think about what an arrow meant before understanding which direction to go, costing them too much time to ever beat the deadline; they would insist on throwing grenades directly at the target like a baseball, not understanding that throwing upwards in a high parabola would gain them the necessary distance; and in the mile run, they would sprint as fast as possible at the start and be surprised when they became utterly exhausted long before the finish line.

This was a great read; thanks for the link.

While this excerpt has relevance as a list of specific failings, it does have the caveat that repeating remedial training is the smarter option compared to getting shipped to Vietnam.

Emil has a blogpost on this sequence of 4chan posts.

How do only 3% get that last one right? That seems like, not as easy I guess as the other ones, but its just going line by line and saying "parents and teachers agreed in general here, disagreed in general here"...am I missing something?

Selection bias. You're mostly surrounded by people who are about as smart as you if you have a CNR job. People like cops, ER nurses, DMV clerks and Walmart cashiers wouldn't be surprised.

I'm sure it's a timed test, it's not testing can you do this, it's testing can you do this quickly and accurately, underpressure.

This post was discussed on the old subreddit. I was skeptical then and I am skeptical now. "Dumb" people (IQ less than 90) have trouble with abstract reasoning and complex cognitive problems, but "Imagine if you didn't eat yesterday, how would you have felt?" is not beyond their ability to imagine. It's almost like the greentext is trying to argue that low-IQ people can't parse a past perfect conditional grammatical construct rather than "They can't grasp hypotheticals."

Or, more likely, the person writing this is the kind of graduate student that would write this shit, and feels nothing but obvious contempt for his interlocutors in prison orange, who then have no interest in playing along with his little games. The dialogue reads more to me like a dude being uncooperative than retarded. Like when I, as an annoying brat 11 year old, would try to get my schoolmates to play intellectual word games and they'd reply to every question with "cheese." Just to piss me off, which was easier than it should have been.

As though I went to San Quentin, organized a basketball game which none of the inmates were very interested in at all, and ran to 4chan to excitedly announce: did you know most convicts are actually very unathletic? Practically crippled! Just let me dribble right by them and make lay ups all day! They barely played defense, and when they got the ball they would almost always turn it over to me and then go back to barely playing D.

If these were prisoners, there’s probably also a very high rate of undiagnosed mental illnesses that could plausibly make dumb but not retarded people much worse at communication.

This is really one of those things that makes me wonder a bit about the concept of IQ. Like, IQ tests undoubtedly to some degree measure intelligence, but also some degree the willingness to cooperate, do what you're asked to do, be social (ie. obey the purpose of the test) etc.; both of these then probably have something to do with one's ability to do well in modern working world, stay out of trouble with law etc. but are still similar concepts.

This realization came to me when talking about "dog intelligence", a concept - it seems to me - to at least in your normal vulgar parlance be mostly related to how well the dogs obey humans when humans order them to do things.

If you have subjects who are not cooperative for sugar blood tests, and eat a lot before blood sample is taken, is it a problem of blood tests?

I can think IQ tests duration is limited to 30-60 minutes so willingness to cooperate has little effect (for most individuals) even if it makes measurement of intellect per se less precise.

Note for some important things willingness to cooperate matters more than intelligence! Just there isn't a good method to measure it, and it's much more prone to change than intelligence.

Re dogs: I'm actually going to disagree about the dogs, because have you ever met a smart breed of dog that belonged to an owner that didn't train it or stimulate it enough? They turn into nightmare criminals. A friend of a friend has this border collie that she never trained right, it'll do things like chew on a doorknob to get into the house from the garage, then methodically poop in every room in the house. Like a determined goal oriented criminal.

Maybe this metaphor is going in a different direction 😂

I have to admit I've never owned a dog myself, I'm just going by how people generally seem to talk about dog intelligence.

I think you’re right, most of the dog intelligence lists you’ll find are based off of trainability and willingness to cooperate with humans. Which makes sense, since that’s the main reason someone would want to know how smart a dog breed is. For instance, Beagles are usually ranked near the bottom of intelligence lists. I have a beagle: she is very clever, but stubborn as a mule and extremely focused on food. Training her was difficult because unless you had food, she usually wouldn’t cooperate. Once you were holding food, she’d “remember” how to roll over, sit, whatever. Stupid? Not at all. Independent and focused on “what’s in it for me?” Very much so.

A large amount of dog owners talk in such matter, but it isn't unclear if it's plurality or majority. And I think that people who have such vulgar "dog intelligence" concept deny utility of IQ tests.

I'd bet quite a bit that this story is really just complete fiction.

I think this was the Freakonomics guy, but there was someone who as a grad student who had to go to low income housing an get answers to a survey.

One of the questions was something along the lines of

How do you feel about being poor and black?

a) Very good

b) Good

c) Uncertain

d) Bad

e) Very bad

Of course the most common answer was

f) Fuck you.

reminds me of this

That was in Sudhir Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day (it was his first exposure to Chicago's South Side residents as a grad student), but I've seen his work cited many times in Freakonomics content.

I want to start reading Girard and some of the stuff that has come from his ideas but not sure where to start. Anyone know of a good blog/book that is a primer of sorts on him, especially his ideas about desire?

The two episodes with Rene Girard on the podcast called Entitled Opinions are really good. He goes over memetic desire as well as his concept of scapegoating. I found everything he had to say very interesting and I listened to the two episodes two years ago but still think of them often.

The first episode: https://entitledopinions.stanford.edu/ren-girard-why-we-want-what-we-want

The second episode: https://entitledopinions.stanford.edu/ren-girard-ritual-sacrifice-and-scapegoat

Wanting by Luke Burgis

Does anyone know any higher ups in the Catholic Church? Maybe, specifically in Louisiana?

Still-current ‘American Conservative’ (the publication) blogger and former trad-cath Rod Dreher, who has spent a career moralizing to others, has divorced his wife and converted to Orthodoxy. I think it’s only fair and right the Catholic Church excommunicate him for his divorce and heresy.

Just wanted to see if anyone can put in a call, get the ball rolling.

  • -15

Alright we don't technically have a rule against recruiting people here for political causes . . .

. . . but if you're going to do it, you gotta do it in a more neutral way. This feels like part waging-culture-war, part not-writing-like-everyone-is-reading, and part being uncharitable.

I'm not sure what you were planning to accomplish with this but this isn't the place for it.

I was just taking a shot at poor old Rod, but I’ll do that more plainly in the future. I was and am not expecting to accomplish anything.

I do appreciate the Mottizens that have provided info about the current specifics of excommunication in this thread.

Obviously it doesn't necessarily require the conclusion that Dreher is a hypocrite because he can't hold his marriage together, just like it doesn't make Jordan Peterson a hypocrite to get addicted to benzos, and Joe Biden might still know how to raise kids even though Hunter. Some people roll snake-eyes when they're picking a spouse or having a kid or born with the wrong addiction gene combination. The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. "Behold, blessed is the one whom God reproves, therefore despise not the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he binds up, he shatters, but his hands heal."

But when people become famous for having a lot of thoughts on how everyone else ought to live, and point to all the bad things happening in your life as a result of your lack of discipline/religiosity/virtue, one might tend to look at how their lives are going and say: gee it seems like discipline/religiosity/virtue isn't getting you all that far is it?

I've been a Dreher reader for over a decade, I've found he has a lot of insight on many things and I think The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies were important intellectual contributions to the discourse. But, part of traditional marriage and family life is keeping your wife happy and happily obedient, a man must have the patriarchal leadership and charisma (I mean that positively) to actually lead. If Dreher couldn't deliver on it, is that really a model that is scaleable to society? Or is it a non-workable model?

In the same way I don't think drug addiction makes you a bad person, but it's a strike against you, and it's certainly a big red asterisk on your advice about how to live your life. Having an addict kid that fucks his sister-in-law doesn't make you a bad person, but it makes me think maybe you should have some grace and not try to insert the government under your leadership into my family life.

is that really a model that is scaleable to society?

It's possible that one or more of their philosophies is a model that is only scaleable to society. Perhaps if you instead only implement it on a small scale, without nearly-omnipresent support for your preferred culture along with a high-trust and long-time-horizon view toward it, it becomes impossible to rely on the benefits of that culture, because external forces will eventually break whatever you've tried to build on it, which creates a vicious cycle when even your allies stop seeing benefits to that culture and trust and long-term outlook. But, if you could somehow manage to create a whole world where the vast majority of your fellows are on your side, then you wouldn't have to worry so much about you or your family falling to temptations that all your peers are also trying to help you avoid.

On the other hand, I can't help but notice that this explanation sounds like exactly the same bullshit that incorrigible Communists use to explain why their predecessors only trashed their half of the world (because we cruelly didn't give them the whole world to play with!). So even if it's true in some case(s) it probably still means the philosophy is unachievable, as well as unstable even if it could be temporarily achieved.

Hypocrisy is only problematic if the person claims that they themselves adhere perfectly to the moral guidelines. Promoting morality while also falling short of the ideal is not bad, and in fact it is better than the alternative of not promoting morality. This idea is found in the gospel, where Jesus’ first disciples all fall short of the ideal, and where a repentant sinner is seen as more just by God than an otherwise righteous man who looks down on others who fall short.

I agree. In cases where people call hypocrisy like this, I find this Tolstoy quote is helpful:

“Attack me, I do this myself, but attack me rather than the path I follow and which I point out to anyone who asks me where I think it lies. If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side! If it is not the right way, then show me another way; but if I stagger and lose the way, you must help me, you must keep me on the true path, just as I am ready to support you. Do not mislead me, do not be glad that I have got lost, do not shout out joyfully: ‘Look at him! He said he was going home, but there he is crawling into a bog!’ No, do not gloat, but give me your help and support.”

People don't get excommunicated anymore, except in the latae sententiae (automatic) way. Apostates are automatically excommunicated (can. 1364), so you can already consider Dreher excommunicated and move on with your life without trying to start a harassment campaign.

Him getting divorced isn't an excommunicable offense, it's possibly not even a sin as long as he doesn't get remarried.

Public, formal excommunications happen every once in a while, but not of individuals who have already declared themselves to be non-members in the Catholic church.

What happened to Rod and his wife? What a plot-twist!

He blogged about it, naturally. Ctrl+F "divorce" for the relevant bits. Here's one:

My wife filed for divorce in the spring, but you should know that I believe she did the right thing, ultimately, because continuing in this ferocious pain after ten years was destroying both of us. It is a relatively amicable split, one that even our priests had suggested was finally the right thing. But even relatively amicable splits are terrible, and I beg your prayers for us all.

There may be other divorce-relevant posts in his archive but since I'm not a regular reader of Dreher, I don't recall.

Rod does not want to discuss it and thanks you all for respecting his privacy.

The Chapo guys have baselessly speculated he’s running around Hungary with a group of male grad students for a reason.

Rod does not want to discuss it and thanks you all for respecting his privacy.

I do respect his privacy, but I also hope it will instill a little more humility in a man who has spent decades opining forcefully about the institution of marriage, particularly from the angle of who ought to be legally excluded from it.

One quote from him:

I never tire of quoting Pope Benedict XVI’s saying that the best arguments for the Church’s claims are not its propositions and syllogisms, but the art it produces, and its saints. I think this is the case for marriage too, at least in this decadent culture. People are not persuadable by reason, mostly because they do not share the premises on which the arguments are based. We have to accept that. They will live out the consequences of the ideas they have chosen to believe. The truth of the way Jones, as a believing Muslim, and I, as a believing traditional Christian, have chosen to live will be vindicated by our lives, and the lives of our families. That will be our witness; no other can persuade people in the grip of this madness. That’s the only reason I became a believing Christian. I had the arguments down pat in my head, but my heart refused to accept the consequences, until I had driven my life into a ditch.

As Philip Rieff taught us, people believe Truth is therapy; it’s what makes us feel good. That’s a powerful idea. It happens to be a lie. But it’s one that people are going to have to learn for themselves. They will start asking questions that the secular liberal Model cannot answer, but we can. There’s going to be a hell of a lot of suffering before the Great Re-Learning takes place. Trads like us, Jones, are going to have to be around to help the walking wounded, and to show them by our lives that there is a better way. We must be prepared to meet them with mercy, not judgment, because the way it went with them, it could have gone with us as well.

I do feel for him, and wish him well in spite of everything. Ironically, worry about divorce is one of the principal reasons I gave just a few days ago for marrying another man instead of gutting it out married to a woman. I hope those words can never be quoted back to me ironically. Dreher is right that mercy, not judgment, is ultimately the appropriate response to the wreckage of a marriage, and that after all of our preparation and resolve, it is ultimately grace (whether of god or of luck) that determines the outcome.

Damn.

Normally I'm a big fan of privacy, but Rod has made such a public spectacle of his personal takes on morality that one can't help but wonder.

Is Chapo any good any more? I briefly listened to it years back, but it seemed to be getting less and less fun and more and more tortured.

They’re very doomer, but still have enough yuks to keep me interested. Skip the most-recent episode (no. 675), in particular. They’re on tour, but still decided to still try and put out an episode, and it was a low-effort attempt guest hosted by an improv comedy duo that bombed. Not indicative of other recent efforts.

Yes.

Rod Dreher had been out of the church for years, and formal excommunications aren’t done on public apostates.

Rod Dreher converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in the early 2000's after years of reporting on the sex abuse crisis.

As a professed apostate Dreher is latae sententiae excommunicated.

Anyone got some recommended guides to male fashion? I don't think I dress terribly but it seems like something that it would pay to know more about.

I am a gay man with a degree in fashion design who has spent most of my life obsessed with clothing. In the end the only two things that matter for a man are neatness and confidence. If you look sloppy, it doesn't matter how much confidence you have, people will write you off. If you appear to have no confidence, it doesn't matter how neat you look, people can tell you don't like yourself, and others won't like you either. You don't need a guide, in fact the more concerned with fashion you are the worse you are at it, which is the terrible truth I've arrived at. Pick out flattering styles that function and make you look put together that will earn you respect from the people you want to impress, but don't overdo it. It's a tricky balance, but err on the side of thinking too little rather than thinking too much. I apologize if these maxims are too vague, but if you're looking for specifics you've already lost the plot. (Don't get hung up on 2 button vs. 3 button jackets or the width of your tie or anything else. Invest in a functioning wardrobe and then wear it with the confidence that you know you've made good decisions.)

Derek Guy’s ‘Die, Workwear!’ is (IMO) the best menswear blog out there. But it’s not really a guide. His current ‘How to Develop Good Taste’ series, now on Part 4, is a good read.

Guy’s instagram account of same name has some funny inside-baseball memes as well. Like how Daily Wire pundits are now wearing the kind of #menswear-era cuts and styles made popular 15 years ago by Thom Browne and Tom Ford: https://instagram.com/p/CixgYj-LV-c/

As for a guide, it depends on what you want, because the internet has fragmented men’s fashion. There’s a bit of nostalgia for the #menswear era of the late Aughts, because it might be the last time trends for men all moved in the same direction.

Digging into Flusser’s and Boyer’s books and learning to pick cuts that flatter your (you, your specific body) are a great base. Guy touches on these in his aforementioned series.

Thanks for the recommendation on Die Workwear's current series, I hadn't been reading that blog for a while. On the other hand, I had to laugh when your man Derek had this to say in part 3, just before talking about your boy Boyer:

Timelessness is often oversold, but in recent years, I think the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. It’s a mistake to think that terms such as classic don’t mean anything. Certain styles, such as trousers made with moderate proportions or oxford button-downs that fit and flatter the wearer, are relatively resistant to trends. Classic tailoring also holds a special place in our culture because it’s the lingua franca of menswear—a language everyone understands, regardless of their background. Many designer aesthetics require specialized knowledge to appreciate, such as the shabby look of Kapital or the sculptural quality of Issey Miyake’s futuristic creations. But almost everyone can appreciate how a man looks in a well-tailored, moderately proportioned suit because of what it represents in our collective memory.

And if you have the stamina for it, there’s always the ‘Throwing Fits’ podcast and Instagram, if you want to try and chase fragmented trends based on the advice of two funny menswear bros.

https://old.reddit.com/r/malefashionadvice/comments/5da1dc/the_basic_bastard_basic_wardrobe_and_inspiration/

Start here, work your way out from there. Assuming you are the modal Mottizen (24-35, College educated or thereabouts, white, neither immensely fat nor really built, somewhat but not tragically nerdy; essentially the Basic Bastard incarnate) these are the core elements of how you should be dressing. Plain t shirts, OCBDs, well fitted chinos or jeans, leather shoes. Maybe find a nice dive watch. It communicates the right things and highlights the right attributes while fitting in the vast majority of social situations the modal Mottizen finds himself in. You can adapt these items to work, any nights out that fit between dive and cocktail bar, concerts for any genre that isn't Drill or Outlaw Country, church, or house parties without looking terribly out of place anywhere. Roll the sleeves up or down, pull on a nice blue blazer and a tie, or put on a good heavy cotton hoodie, you fit in everywhere. You'll be a little dressed up and look good, but you won't be a total spaz LARPer in a three piece suit at a ballgame or something.

Additional principles that a lot of online guides and their followers miss:

-- Eliminating the ugly things in your wardrobe is just as important as buying better things. The "Capsule wardrobe" idea is basically that if you have a handful of items that all go together and look good, and you don't have anything else, you can trade more frequent laundry for looking good all the time. For whatever reason, if you keep ugly things you will wear them at inconvenient times, it's like a rule of nature. Buy less, buy better, wear it more.

-- Fitness is the most important thing to your appearance. For men I think aesthetically it is just important to have the silhouette of someone who is neither massively fat nor tragically skinny, from there the clothes should hang just fine, but building better shoulders and a nicer ass is going to do more for you than any blazer or pair of jeans can do.

-- Pick clothing you are comfortable in. "A man should pick out his clothes carefully in the morning, then never think about them again." If you're constantly fiddling with your clothes and look like they are wearing you, you come across like a schoolboy resenting getting dressed for church, rather than a guy who just looks this good all the time.

-- Fit is king. Getting the right fit will improve comfort and look more than anything else, the right fit emphasizes your positive attributes and covers up your negative attributes. You can't just read a review saying "X makes chinos that fit good" because X might make chinos that fit that guy good but they might not fit you at all. If you work out, this effect is magnified, I'm not particularly all that good a lifter but my ass does not fit in the vast majority of brands that are selling stuff in my waist size.* The solution is to find the brand that cut stuff to fit you, that used a fit model that looked like you. Dedicate some time to trying on a lot of brands, until you find the one that works. Don't be afraid to tailor stuff.

-- Once you have your basics, thrifting is the efficient way to get great stuff cheap. Either Goodwill, or Poshmark/Ebay et al. Clothing loses the vast majority of its value the moment the tags come off.

*To get technical, the industry standard men's suit is drop 5-6", meaning a 40 chest to a 34-5 waist. Even a casual lifter could easily reach a drop 8 (40 chest, 32 waist) or even a drop 10. In the long run, if you lift or otherwise have an oddly shaped body, stretch fabrics are your friend, and get a tailor or get used to some mix of belting 5 extra inches on your waist or having your thighs packed like sausage casings. And for suits, separates are the way to go.

☝️ I’d be a little careful with a five year old guide from rMFA. Cuts and silhouettes are moving on from the #menswear era that spawned that subreddit. And watch out for the lack of a collar roll on the types of OCBDs they liked when that guide was written. Matt Walsh, as an example, dresses like a bad imitation of a gay guy from 2008. This stuff does filter downstream from the high-low world of tastemaking, even to guys who say this stuff isn’t what straight men concern themselves with.

rMFA isn’t terrible, but it’s mostly guys who reworked their closet 12 months ago giving advice to new people about to replace them on that forum.

Which part of it do you think doesn't work? The plain white/black t shirts, the ocbd, or the dark jeans?

In the past ten years, the athleisute thing has given us quality joggers, everyone wears minimalist sneakers rather than jeans and loafers, Patagonia or Arc'teryx jackets. The fit is personal, whatever you personally think you look good and feel comfortable in.

Beyond that you're getting into trends and Hypebeast fuckboy shit. Nobody on themotte should be worrying about streetwear fits, we're not collectively that cool. Classics are forever, with a flourish or a fit change every few years.

“Classics are forever with a flourish or fit change” is incompatible with “fit is king” unless you really learn what you like and flatters you, and are happy being out of sync with what is currently on trend in the mind of normies. If the average Mottizen thrifts a ‘50s Brooks navy blazer he’s going to feel weird about how square and structured the shoulders are if he’s looking to fit in, even though a navy blazer is “classic”, and even if he can’t articulate it.

You mention dark-wash jeans? That’s downstream of a niche Japanese interest in ‘50s and ‘60s Americana that the fashion world brought back over to the U.S. from abroad. I know no Mottizens were buying Momotaro selvedge in the Aughts, but Todd Snyder when he was still at J. Crew was, and then the GAP, etc. picked up on it. And now a five year old MFA guide recommends it, but the tastemakers that will determine what MFA is going to recommend in a couple years from now ditched dark wash a couple years back, and that too will filter down. It’s all going to churn, and churn, and churn, even for normies. A five year old MFA guide is already long in the tooth, and was itself born of trends — it didn’t opt out of them. And they ultimately won’t stick with them, either.

Also, dark wash jeans, in terms of “classic” rules, don’t offer enough of a contrast with a navy blazer, running a foul of not clearly differentiating pants from an odd jacket, even though that was (is?) an MFA favorite. MFA didn’t come up with some classic or objective reason dark wash jeans were preferable.

My point is, if you have the time, please dig through something like Guy’s series on developing personal taste because that has a much longer shelf life than an MFA guide and you’ll honestly be happier with the results.

Dude I was reading Die, Workwear when I was in undergrad 12 years ago; I've had Boyer and Flusser on my shelf for about as long. I'm not recommending this from a lack of knowledge, but from a surfeit of it. Ivy Style is more my bible, because that's the best that semi-athletic employed and educated white guys have ever looked, but I think Die Workwear does good work. Nonetheless:

  1. Recommending "Find your own personal style" to someone asking a question about fashion on themotte is like telling someone asking for dating advice to "be themselves;" or telling a newbie weightlifter to lift to an RPE of 7 in every workout, they have no idea what that means, or even worse they think they know what that means and get it completely wrong. Cliche: you have to learn the rules before you break them. You need a baseline of understanding of what stuff is before you can start to think creatively. Your advice, while theoretically spotlessly solid, isn't actionable for a guy just starting out. Literally name an actual item you think the modal mottizen ought to be wearing to look good.

  2. Also, dark wash jeans, in terms of “classic” rules, don’t offer enough of a contrast with a navy blazer, running a foul of not clearly differentiating pants from an odd jacket

The contrast is in the texture, rough denim vs. smooth worsted wool.

  1. “Classics are forever with a flourish or fit change” is incompatible with “fit is king” unless you really learn what you like and flatters you

Hence why my advice under "fit is king" wasn't "Slim fitting is best" or "loose fits are on trend;" the advice was "Go try on a whole bunch of brands until you find the thing for you." Put on a bunch of shirts and look in the mirror. Which one feels right to you? I guess that contradicts my theory that you want to tell the newbie everything, but fit is one thing that is impossible to pin down from afar, trying on a bunch of stuff is the best way to learn what you like.

  1. ...being out of sync with what is currently on trend in the mind of normies. If the average Mottizen thrifts a ‘50s Brooks navy blazer he’s going to feel weird about...

Being on trend is pretty rarely an actually attractive quality in a heterosexual man. Learned that the hard way a couple time. But I didn't recommend thrifting a 50s blazer, I recommended going on 2nd hand apps and picking up stuff from a year ago at a fraction of the price. If your trend time horizon is <1year, it really shouldn't be.

PS: I'll just link it for you because I know you were itching to when you gave me the history of darkwash jeans

I put absolutely no more thought into fashion than I have to. Because I'm heterosexual, hah.

These two heuristics should serve you well.

  • Well fitting. This does the lions share of whether clothing looks good on your or not. There are many guides online on how to asses this.

  • Be Generic. Min-Max the number of people you turn on/off with your choice of fashion. Some group might really like some specific kind of fashion but that comes at a cost of other groups disliking that.

  • Don't overthink it. Fashion is what women and gays compete with each other with, if you are a man into women, you don't need to go galaxy brained on this. As for websites and guides, I remember AskMen.com used to have relatively decent no bullshit guides. The last time I browsed that website was before 2016 so they might have gone woke in the meanwhile, but that shouldn't matter too much.

Hoping early Monday isn't too late for a small-scale question, so here goes:

In the wake of a friend falling victim to a phishing scam in which they were convinced to send a screenshot of a link to a password reset page (indeed, head-slappingly bad), I'm currently being dragged in real life for my hot take, two-part opinion that

  1. This scam was facilitated by the common advice that you should NEVER follow links because they could be from a hacker and then you will get hacked! and

  2. This advice isn't actually very good, in the sense that nothing bad can really happen to you just from following some random link.

As a web developer I know something about how the web works, but obviously I don't know everything, so I'm curious if someone else can come up with a really bad outcome achievable just by clicking on a link. Could you, say, send an API request to a bank from within your webpage, and then read the response and cookies from the host page? I'm thinking this would be blocked by both browser and site technology. This has to be what CORS is for, right? Not just to annoy me while I'm developing?

Anyway, like I said, suggestions welcome.

You gotta understand the zero-day market a little to understand how that works.

Ideally, it's impossible for just loading a webpage to do anything bad. Web browsers are massively complex pieces of software though, and they basically all have lots of bugs that render the situation non-ideal. Web browser vendors make active efforts to be aware of any such bugs as quickly as possible, and patch them and get those patches out as quickly as possible, hence things like Chrome's rapid update rate. A "zero-day" bug/exploit basically means a way to escape the web browser sandbox that the browser vendors / security community are not aware of yet. Once they are aware of them, they are often patched within days or hours.

Creating new exploits is very difficult and highly valuable due to how useful they can be against the right targets. But since efforts to discover exploits actively in use and patch the bugs they use are so active, it is also valuable to those who create and own them to not use them too widely - as soon as the right person notices them, they can be patched very fast, making that one worthless. They are generally created by national intelligence agencies, some shady companies and less scrupulous individuals, and may be either sold back to browser vendors, for 5-6 figure sums, or to those companies, criminal gangs, etc for probably similar or higher sums. It is to the benefit of such entities to not use them too widely, since they'll be worthless as soon as the wrong person notices them, so they're usually used in highly targeted attacks against specific individuals, and engineered to not be deployed unless the situation is right. Wider targeting probably only happens as a last-ditch effort to get a little more value out of something already patched, hoping to catch some users who haven't updated their browsers yet with a low-value but wide-net attack.

So ideally just going to a website shouldn't hurt anything, but it's probably good advice not to. Because 1. It does leak some information no matter what, 2. Less sophisticated users, or just people who are tired or distracted, can surprisingly often be tricked into entering credentials into phishing sites, and 3. You never know when you might be targeted for attack by something nasty, or not be the intended target but get it anyways, or just be the guy who had the bad luck to have the browser auto-patch run a little later than usual.

In addition to directly injection malware as the other commenters have stated, clicking on a link will also reveal certain information about the person and their device:

  • The IP address, which can be mapped to a physical location with at least city scale accuracy.

  • The browser's user agent, which typically contains the OS, browser and its version. This may then be used to find exploits that are likely to work in a follow up attack.

If your browser has an unpatched, exploitable vulnerability, the sky's the limit. It shouldn't be possible for a web site to run malicious code on a simple page load, but browsers don't always work the way they should.

There are probably some Auth based exploits if it's really targeted. For a system I work with for a number of reasons we have approvals handled as links in an email so when a user clicks the link it opens a page on our site that uses windows Auth to identify them and takes an identifier from the link to decide which deal they're approving. An attack vector could be someone trying to get something approved that shouldn't by sending someone with approval rights a doctored link.

With oauth there are also a whole lot of other posisbel vectors if you can get the target to also click some accept on a Google dialogue after opening the link.

The oauth angle cannot be overstated. Even CTOs can fall for it. PageFair was hacked this way a few years ago.

My employer has a whole bunch of intranet tooling all tied to my corporate gmail account. Every now and then I get randomly signed out so I have to click the right account and proceed, sighing and paying little attention. If you presented me with a doctored link that duplicated the google account login popup, I would probably fall for it.

Firstly, you say, "just" following a link, as if laymen can be counted upon to just click links and not just arbitrarily download and run things and enter their passwords. In the real world, sometimes you have to lie to people in order to make them do what you want in the first place. In this case, make them extra cautious around websites.

Secondly, I've had this real question and an answer I've gotten from other developers: Websites can probably inject malware onto your file system in the form of cookies, but such malware wouldn't be executed unless from a trigger that a website can't do, so maybe this doesn't answer your question.

No, it's still fairly good advice. If you watch, e.g. the Hacking Google series on YouTube, you'll see the start of the initial Chinese Aurora hack was in fact getting people to click on random links.

The basic idea is that due to weaknesses on some sites (I think XSS -- cross-site scripting is the term) or in other places, you get the people to execute code authenticated as themselves, which sometimes lets you do bad things.

(I am not a front-end person, or a security person, I just have had to follow some of the guidelines and tried to understand why).

Could you, say, send an API request to a bank from within your webpage, and then read the response and cookies from the host page? I'm thinking this would be blocked by both browser and site technology. This has to be what CORS is for, right? Not just to annoy me while I'm developing?

Yeah, it shouldn't matter, but if a site has e.g. an XSS vulnerability the attacker will need to be able to run some initial Javascript as the victim to kick it off. Sending an email so that they'll visit a specific page might be just that.

nothing bad can really happen to you just from following some random link.

Attackers can host exploit kits on the target site, which spray a bunch of exploits against your computer if you visit them. If your browser/plugins/extensions/OS isn't fully up to date this might very well successfully install malware. This was really relevant when I worked in IT security about 6 years ago but seems to have declined a lot recently; still, it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand quite yet.

Thanks for this, I hadn't heard of Exploit Kits before. That said, the vulnerability seems to come from the used-to-be-common experience where a browser would open an Adobe plugin or whatever, something which is uncommon-to-nonexistent nowadays. In the Wikipedia article the first source they site explaining what Exploit Kits are is an article from 2013!

I did ask for what's possible in the worst case scenario, so fair enough, but I'm still wondering if there are exploits that use a (modern) browser alone, without relying on opening other software. I guess this is another stupid question, but do browser plugins even exist anymore? I can't remember the last time I saw a page with a plug-in.

I'm still wondering if there are exploits that use a (modern) browser alone, without relying on opening other software.

Yeah. Any time there's a zero-day exploit for a browser you can be sure that attacks will start using it fairly quickly. For example, cursorily searching online I found an example of two from last year targeting Chrome in the wild.

Edit: Here's another relevant article, from this year: "Google Patches Third Actively Exploited Chrome Zero-Day of 2022"

do browser plugins even exist anymore? I can't remember the last time I saw a page with a plug-in.

I'd say Flash and Java are completely dead for any moderately recent website, yeah. Still, computers might have the plugins installed; perhaps for some internal corporate website that will never been updated. Other than that, I'd guess the Adobe PDF plugin should be fairly common too.

I seem to recall an alert from a while back whereby if your password manager autofills login info, that could make you vulnerable, if you visit a site that embeds a bank's login page within an <iframe>, the parent site would be able to read the relevant DOM elements. Requires a specific browser setup, obviously, but would this still work? Are there exploits that cannot be circumvented by visiting unknown sites in Incognito mode, as I do from time to time when I am curious about a suspicious link?

Not a real programmer but... Aren't your question parameters too wide? If someone has a perfect (presumably zero day) exploit then the link question is just how much can come over bandwidth before user wizens up, and with a modern connection, that's a lot. Granted the only huge hacking op involving zero day exploits I've ever read about was Stuxnet, and that was USB shenanigans not anything protected by https or modern browsers but still.

Aren't your question parameters too wide? If someone has a perfect (presumably zero day) exploit

I suppose so. If somehow Chrome granted a page access to the entire filesystem, obviously that would be very bad. But you're probably protected against such an exploit because come on, are you really going to be the first person they target with this attack? Although I retract this skepticism if you are actually a billionaire.

So okay, are they any known ways that a site could extract important private information about a user just by visiting a site (and, let's say, scrolling)?

If somehow Chrome granted a page access to the entire filesystem, obviously that would be very bad.

Spoof it as just another accept/reject cookies. Tech illiterate can't tell.

Gotta admit I'm not about to read all that API documentation for window.showOpenFilePicker() but it looks like the user has to have a lot more specific interaction, i.e. choosing files on local disk, in order for the site to have access. So you wouldn't be able to get access just using some generic popup.

Does anyone have any non incel/pua advice/resources at getting better at flirting (or otherwise improving one’s “game”). I recently moved to a new city where I have been trying to meet someone on Hinge, and while I feel like I get a reasonable number of matches I just think I must be really bad at the whole “texting long enough to get her to actually go on a date” phase of these conversations.

I’m also not sure what to reasonably expect in terms of reply rates. In the last month I get about 3 matches a week with people I would like to go on dates with. Of these two people agreed to meet up (although one ultimately stood me up, I’ve never actually had that happen before although I’m guessing that just happens a lot with online dating).

Other people have good advice already. More than a date per week is pretty good already. You should generally try to move any conversation out of the app as soon as possible. Depending on your demographic, preferably somewhere like instagram. In my experience if you have an active account with good photos, it serves as social proof and makes women much more relaxed about seeing you in real life.

Also it never hurts to get better photos. Online dating is a shallow impulse driven thing until you meet irl and you shouldn’t ignore this side of it.

That’s a good point, I have managed to avoid instagram thus far but I may just need to bite the bullet and do it!

Your problem might be texting too long.

If you are trying to meet people in person then that should be the second or third text. Ask for her favorite activities or favorite places to eat. Then pick one of those that sound fun and ask to go there with her. If she isn't interested in going to a favorite place to eat, or doing a favorite activity with you, then nothing was ever gonna work out (she got some bad vibe from you and just didn't tell you right away cuz that takes a certain level of brutal honesty).

In general though I would suggest looking for male friends rather than female dates. Being in a new city is lonely and having some buddies might be better for your mental health than finding a date. Its also easier to find male friends. Just sign up for some physical activities or sports teams. Or find something nerdy if that is more your speed.

If you find male friends that are single you can go out seeking females together, and you will both be more appealing by having some social status with another guy. If you find male friends that are in a relationship, then their girlfriend or spouse might have single friends that she will connect you to.

That’s a good point, I’m still getting used to being out of college and needing to work much more to meet people.

Generally I've found the best advice is to become a more interesting, happy and well rounded person while picking up hobbies that women enjoy. (Running, dancing, cooking, art, etc)

Visakanv is a rat adjacent writer who has good advice. This book is good, short but worth the $10 IMO. https://visakanv.com/

I'd also recommend Models by Mark Manson. Both of them give good advice without being super toxic toward women. I used to be heavy into pua myself but got out of it and ironically did much better with dating after I dropped the mindset. Feel free to PM if you want to pick my brain.

Is this guys brother named Mastercard?

Nah I think it's American Express.

I actually refuse to believe there is even such a thing as "text game".

Some of the most charismatic and energetic people I know appear dead on text. Obviously things such as quick wit, confident body language, and the million other below the surface signals that need to be sent to flirt effectively, can't be sent through text.

The mechanism through which OLD works is numbers. You match with a LARGE number of people. You text a large number of people. You luck out by having maybe around 1/20 of the people you match with agree to meet up in person at all. Unless you are within the top percentiles of looks, it's a grind.

I really don't think anyone is texting any combination of magic words that gets them a higher match->date conversion.

From my experience with OLD, it's just soul draining.

For every 100 matches (1-2% swipe-> match rate, so you can imagine the # swipes), 10 used to even reply to texts. Of that 10 maybe 0.5 used to agree to meeting up. Most of the texts used to die out within a few texts. Girls are looking for all kinds of "vibes", use the wrong emoji, you are fucked, that's just how things are.

OLD is really not worth the time if you are not in the 99.9 percentile of looks. It's a winner takes all market of the likes never seen before.

Disagree on magic words. The magic words are “Anyway, you seem chill. Want to grab a coffee?” or something very similar, within the first three or four texts. No point beating around the bush until a text conversation dies, and I think a lot of people are looking for the few magical connections via text rather than treating it as the minimal filter it should be. Just provide a safe, low-commitment date option and most people who responded to your first couple of messages will shrug and go with it.

I think this might be location,partner demographic and self demographic dependent.

Where I am, with the girls I got, many of them said things along the lines of "I like to get to know a guy a bit before I actually go out and meet them". Some even showed hostility towards the idea of having the first real interaction in real life (many proposed a long video call). Idk man my age demographic (23-25 year olds) are really weird and want to do everything online !

Fair enough! I’ve been out of the dating market since pre-COVID, and it’s possible/likely a lot has changed since then.

Aren't you gay?

Because the dating market as a heterosexual male is very very very different. So unless you looked around in that market as well, your insight might not transfer.

I am, but when I was on the dating market I was still trying to figure out whether I should try to make it work with women, so I was dating both men and women pretty actively.

What if most charismatic and energetic people are dead on text, and other charismatic and energetic people know this as "normal way to text." What you call "not dead on text" is basically mental illness and coming across as way too strong?

But your more general point, that OLD success is based on looks and not texting styles, is a different point. If attractive people can get away with texting however they like, that would support your theory that there is no thing as text game.

Well if you’re a girl, wouldn’t you want to talk to someone interesting, fun, funny, the slightest mysterious, and emotionally strong/mature etc? And you wouldn’t want to convey that you’re boring, not fun, have no humor, and are all around someone that a girl wouldn’t want to be around because he doesn’t make her life more enjoyable. Of course this would only work if you’re following the important advice of “be attractive”.

So to procure a date, perhaps think in terms of expressing the most interesting, fun, and good-humored side of you.

I'm fucking fascinated by this. Is it a real app? Has anybody actually used it? The website looks so fake it hurts, I think they literally photoshopped in the baby.

I tried googling it and all that came up was their own twitter account, which doesn't seem to have any user experiences to share. Has this app successfully beaten the problems The Right Stuff had with attracting literally any women?

Definitely worth a visit for the cringe factor. I too am looking for a model to live in my mansion and bear me 5 children in rapid succession. I just need to know if her estimated IQ meets my requirements.

Like, why did they even photoshop in the baby? There are already FOUR young children in the picture.

Like, why did they even photoshop in the baby? There are already FOUR young children in the picture.

To let you know that your model wife still puts out after the first four kids, if you find her on THIS app.

But like, I'm way way outside the target demographic for this, so maybe it's not meant for me.

If you're getting around 1 in person date a week you're doing fine, a lot of women on the dating apps are only window shopping and you shouldn't take it personally. Generally speaking more messages before meeting up is not a great use of your time. Hook them quickly, set up a meeting and then don't necessarily ignore them until then but don't force more conversations. Or just whatever is working for you. Don't get invested until you at least see them in person.

Kind of sounds like your experience is consistent with not being bad at the "texting long enough to get her to actually go on a date" phase, it's just that dating apps suck and have terrible reply rates. And nearly everyone reports that dating apps suck and have terrible reply rates.

So, what are you reading? (Another book thread with lots of answers is in the Fun Thread)

I'm picking up Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao. The movie was interesting enough, and it seems appropriate for Halloween.

I’m reading Cormac McCarthys new book, The Passenger. I’m enjoying it

Oooh, I should check it out, thanks.

The rumored upcoming diesel shortage - big deal or nah?

As someone who watches the energy markets I'm going to say nah. The cure for high prices is high prices, and in a pinch the U.S. can temporarily suspend the Jones Act to bring diesel in by ship from other parts of the country.

Prices could go skyhigh, but in the short term the economy can bear prices that are 50-100% higher. Prices in other countries are already that high.

Wierd question, but how do you fully move on from a breakup ?

It's been 5 months since i broke up with my gf of 2 years and i still find myself agonizing about it every once in a while.

We broke up on good terms, it was an amazing relationship and honestly we were just not in the same place in life. (Figuratively and geographically). I want to be able to look back at that time in my life fondly, but also move onto something new without feeling much baggage. Time has healed a bit and i have generally been looking forward, but it feels all too slow.

More experienced people int he sub, how have you dealt with this before ?

If you're not texting her or stalking her social media you're far ahead of the game. (If you are doing those things, time to stop.)

The only real answer here is twofold： Time. Or, if you want to drastically shorten the time period required for the numbness or apathy to kick in： Meeting another woman/girl.

This is the intuitive, frustrating, simple, and complete answer.

How much time depends on your own disposition, and it could be a considerable amount. Alternately, if said former flame does/says something that pulls back the veil, as it were, and reveals to you (via somehow) some unsavory reality you may have been previously blind to, this can douse the embers pretty thoroughly.

Yeah, the hard part is that it was an amiable breakup. Over our entire 2 years relationship, we never fought once, so it hard for me to go full cold turkey.

We have avoided chatting to help both of us move on. But, we have exchanged chats once or twice in the last 6 months, one of which was a rather embarrassing rant on my part. (Nothing I'd regretful or hateful though)

We decided not to block each other on social media, but I also don't obsess over it or interact with her through social media and vice versa.

some unsavory reality you may have been previously blind to, this can douse the embers pretty thoroughly.

Ah man, I'd hope not. The entire relationship was built on us being 2 people without a poker face. We've broken up, but I'd suck to have 2 happy years of my life yanked away by something truly evil. I mean, a big part of why I even fell for her was because she'd win a 'nicest person on planet earth' award if there was one, and I was the cynical devil's advocate to keep her collateral guilt in check,

Meeting another woman/girl.

Yeah, that's what I'm tending towards. I've met a few people, but it lacks the same enthusiasm as the last time.

There is a 'me' problem at the bottom of it all. I was the one who initiated the breakup, in part due to commitment issues, unwillingness to do long-distance and a mid-life crisis.

So I am in this conundrum where casual intimacy just never feels as rewarding as a real relationship, but my life circumstances keep me from being able to reciprocate the expectations that come with a real relationship.

This is the intuitive, frustrating, simple, and complete answer.

Yep yep yep yep. It's never easy huh.

Yeah you're just going to have to deal with it. I was fucked up from my major break up for around 1.5-2 years (depending on who you ask). But it does get better eventually.

Probably every {Time Period Unique to the Person and Relationship}, things get half as bad until you live with it.

Not to freak you out but it's now been 12 years and I still had a dream/nightmare about her last week. It'd been forever since that'd happened though.

12 years? Jesus.

Have you had any sort of contact with her during that time?

Not really, we hooked up again maybe a year after the breakup but haven't talked since then and aren't friends on social media.

To be very clear I'm still 100% functional and happy - I've been married with 2 kids for quite a while. Just very strange having my subconscious toss me a random gut-punch on a Saturday.

I know what you're saying. One can 'move on' in all ways that count but the brain still has this person's image indelibly carved in it such that it pops back up, unbidden, on occasion.

In my case, I'm still a bit hung up on my high school girlfriend who broke up with me the first semester of college (different colleges, mind). That wrecked me for like a year and then later, just as I was patching things up with her (friendshipwise, at least) she died in an unlucky accident.

I'm on good terms with my second ex, although it took years to come back around. But I made a concerted effort to work on that since, well, I didn't want to leave us on a negative note in case something like the above happened.

With the current Ex, its frustrating because I kinda want to skip ahead to the part where we at least 'tolerate' each other again. But I don't even know if that's in the cards this time.

Still aiming to get to the 'married with kids' stage at some point.

That wrecked me for like a year and then later, just as I was patching things up with her (friendshipwise, at least) she died in an unlucky accident.

Dude, that sucks. I'm sorry to hear it!

Yeah, long enough ago that it doesn't bother me daily, but I still have her face seared into my memory and I know the world is slightly worse off than it could have been.

Suffering through that event really impacted my perspective on maintaining relationships even through hardships. Namely: I generally refuse to give up on friendships that I've come to value.

Another thing I get the feeling you may also experience is that this is the sort of conversation that isn't possible to have in almost any context.

With friends, they may listen for a bit, but eventually, it's mopey and "too heavy". You don't want to pay a therapist for the privilege of discussing it. At least I learned that a long time ago...

I generally refuse to give up on friendships that I've come to value.

I hope this doesn't translate to anything dysfunctional. I try to hold onto relationships as long as possible too, in general. For exes, it's almost comically absurd how you can go from the most intense intimacy imaginable to being strangers. But I've also tried to get more comfortable about letting relationships go when the other person has radically changed. I used to take it as a personal affront when there was a slow growing apart.

I hope this doesn't translate to anything dysfunctional. I try to hold onto relationships as long as possible too.

The way it seems to manifest is that I am aware of how I become strongly attached to my relationships, so I put up pretty significant barriers to letting other people get close to me, and thus only those very few who manage to penetrate said layers end up being part of my 'close' circle of friends.

Which, I have to say, has generally served me well in avoiding too much emotional distress. The last ex just managed to get through those barriers and did so in a way that led me to actually think I had finally found somebody worth trusting and keeping long term, then cut it off in a way that almost seemed designed to be maximally distressing to me. Just shattered my trust for no good reason.

So it reinforced my possible unhealthy tendency to distrust people's intentions. I've worked through a lot of it but I have a hard time visualizing a situation where I trust someone else that deeply ever again.

For exes, it's almost comically absurd how you can go from the most intense intimacy imaginable to being strangers.

I occasionally laugh at the ridiculousness of having some random person out there walking around knowing most of your deepest, darkest secrets, possibly enough to nuke your entire life if they chose, and you are explicitly NOT on speaking terms with this person, and yet there's the general expectation that they won't do it.

But I've also tried to get more comfortable about letting relationships go when the other person has radically changed. I used to take it as a personal affront when there was a slow growing apart.

Similar with me. I think I'm able to recognize when a relationship becomes actively toxic and cut it off (and as mentioned above, I rarely let someone in close enough for it to get to that point), but I much prefer to just kind of render an appropriate amount of distance as the situation requires, whilst not severing the link.

This tends to get MOST tricky with family members, where I still feel some obligation to render aid and comfort.

I HAVE managed to mostly purge my innate tendency to try to help people even when they reject good faith attempts at assistance.

The best thing I've found to do was distract yourself, try to do fun, mind absorbing things, and try not to go to places that remind you of the relationship or breakup.

I've found that eventually you HAVE to go to the places that remind you of the relationship, if only to help overwrite the memory.

Trying to avoid them constantly is a major hassle.

I'm about 1.5 years out of a breakup and the emotional wound has scarred over, but it is still tender. And the circumstances were worse than you describe.

1st: mentally speaking this is almost exactly the same as experiencing drug addiction withdrawals. The only way out is through. Likewise, you have to cut off contact completely to allow it to happen. Can't be feeding the addiction.

2nd: There's no set timeline. The feelings tend to come in waves. Eventually you'll be able to go an hour without thinking of her. Then a day. Then you'll have a week where you feel "normal," but will still have off days. Weekends are still often hard for me. The intensity of the waves will fade if you let them.

3rd: The tactics most people recommend to move on fast don't work. Don't jump into a new relationship, or casual sex, or distract yourself with video games or TV or other frivolities. Spend time on things that are constructive and BENEFIT YOU somehow. You want to come out the other end of it better than you are now.

4th: If you find you have strong feelings of any kind remaining 6+ months on, write them into a letter. You probably shouldn't send the letter, but sometimes that helps with absolution. I sent the letter to my ex almost 1 year into the breakup to get the last vestiges of my feelings out. I can't know if she read it, but being able to let the emotions flow was in fact cathartic, and it still comforts me later.

The one thing I'm not sure about is what to do when she moves on. If you have any channels of contact with her you'll figure it out eventually, and it will likely trigger some primal feelings and set you back in healing. Maybe just start mentally absorbing the idea now, visualize her happy with someone else. And eventually, visualize yourself happy with someone else.

Longer term, maybe there's a friendship to be resurrected down the road, but you can't make that a goal now.

I have 19 years of retail management experience. A recent BS in Nutrition & Masters in Global Management.

What career opportunities can I find? Preferably outside of retail. Preferably over 72k/year (I make 65k now).

I'm having a horrific time finding something, anything.

I've applied for probably 500+ jobs - and gotten only a few interviews and one job (my current one I've been at for 9 months after 19 years at GNC).

Any thoughts, feelings, ideas, recriminations are welcome.

(Edit: should this have waited for the Wednesday thread?)

The easiest thing is going to be to use your network to get into something. Do you have a linked in? Do you have contacts from your retail management career who have moved into other parts of the business like finance or logistics? A good reference to (figuratively) put your resume on someone’s desk will be more affective than any other strategy.

Something in logistics or project management, perhaps. You could probably move into business/technical management shortly after that, if it interests you. There's a ton of project management for health-related things from my recent searching, but there's an awful lot of "general PM stuff" out there, and it usually pays reasonably well.

As far as applications/interviews go, a network really does help, in my experience. It's stupid, and I hate that it matters, but... strongly consider reaching out to people you know and seeing if they have any leads.

Try to get involved on the import/export side of things?

I'd start going to industry conventions like https://west.supplysideshow.com/en/home.html but that one starts tomorrow, so unless already in or near las vegas I'd wait for another one.

I was looking through news coverage of the crowd crush in Itaewon, that killed 153 people. There were a few videos from CNN and other US News outlets, none from FOX news. I went to the fox youtube channel and it seemed to be mostly US political news. Is the FOX news a "general" news channel or purely a political news channel? Or is it uniquely insular and focused on US politics.

It's on their website https://www.foxnews.com/world/dozens-south-korea-cardiac-arrest-seoul-crowd-surge-halloween-festivities-officials-say

Fox News just has a weird relationship with youtube in terms of their clips being uploaded by random people more often than others. Their actual youtube channel isn't meant to convey news, but is more spicy 2-5 minute clips that are uploaded every few hours for virality potential.

They also try a bit harder to promote their app to audience, and it doesn't seem to have failed like CNN's did 6 month ago.

They have news shows which are more general, but with unsubtle conservative slant (and most conservative Americans would say the other cable news channels are unsubtle about liberal/progressive slant), but there are also opinion shows which get the most ratings and are more focused on US politics.

Do you find that many persons you're acquainted with suffer from an issue that roughly translates as follows:

A) They don't know what they REALLY want in life (in the broadest sense) and can't precisely describe it.

B) They use some other metrics or method to find what they THINK they want. This could be looking at what is popular or buying into marketing campaigns or just doing what "feels good."

C) They usually get what they THINK they want but it turns out it's not what they truly want, so it doesn't satisfice the need/desire.

D) They spend additional efforts convincing themselves and others that they DO want this thing and its actually great.

E) They careen through life being mostly unhappy and yet not sure why since on paper they have very few unfulfilled needs.

This is NOT anhedonia, it's more like either not knowing oneself well enough or lacking the language to precelisely ID or express one's 'true' preferences.

In contrast, I think I can identify things that I want, be it in music, movies, food, a romantic partner, etc. with high precision.

And I am accurate in this identification so if I acquire/find such a thing, I'm actually contented if it meets the criteria.

Thus, I am generally happier on average because I seek and find things that actually satisfice my actual desires.

The shortfall is when I identify something I want in theory and upon searching it turns out such a thing doesn't exist and will probably not exist for a while. Which is saddening.

But different from seeking things you think you want but aren't actually what you would want if you knew what you wanted.

On mobile, at gym, sorry for gaps in the explanation, but The Last Psychiatrist (Edward Teach) talks about pretty much only this, in a hundred different ways. In the absence of any higher moral principles, you don’t even know how to desire things, and so the consumerist system steps in to teach you what and HOW to desire. All it cares about is keeping the money flowing, so it’s not weird that no one actually becomes happier, and it substitutes the much easier illusion of happiness by making identity (as divorced from actual deeds) the centrepiece of satisfaction. People allow this because the system promises absolution without requiring action, and people hate hate hate actually doing something to change their lives.

I'm following. I'm trying to get at whether it is as common as it seems to be or if that is more an artifact of my own perception.

I also see people who, from the outside, appear to be locked into lives that they are fully content with and thus they have "solved" for their own personal happiness. And I envy those people a bit. No more searching? Sounds nice.

But more common seems to be those who are wandering around in hopes of stumbling into some kind of contentment and not having any decent search strategy.

I find a more common problem is going through steps A) to C) above, and then more like:

D) Realising that they are not happy with the thing they thought they wanted

E) Moving on to the next thing they think they want, rinsing and repeating

F) Wondering why they are tired, broke, and don't have any rewarding experiences to show for it.

Point.

Although that seems to be a strategy that at least allows someone to possibly stumble into something fulfilling, if they can avoid the dozens of possible failure modes.

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