domain:questioner.substack.com
anon_
2m ago
Given how Germany did govern their (brief) empire, I suspect that isn't exactly a good thing.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
6m ago
There seems to be something to that, yeah. I've noticed that in general, feminists tend to be people who desperately want a righteous cause they can stand up for. The sort of person who deeply admires those who participated in the civil rights movement (or other similar social changes), and wishes that they themselves could be a part of something so grand and heroic. Unfortunately, we're all out of causes like that lately, so instead people often fall into the trap of fighting that hard over insignificant things. Thus, modern feminism. It's plausible to me that you might find such people overrepresented among other types of moral busybodies.
Weirdly enough though, they also seem to be cat people, not dog people.
Ichor
7m ago
So women never discuss politics in female-only spaces? Is it just make-up and which boys they have a crush on then?
SteveKirk
9m ago
You can always tell when someone has had their preferences (or identity) overwritten by porn rather than irl experience, so that's a good place to start for any sort of "valid/invalid" distinction.
Personally I think racial preferences are just a healthy expression of racism.
TitaniumButterfly
10m ago
Offhand, it's always occurred to me as very clearly compensatory.
hydroacetylene
11m ago
So, prejudice + power?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
12m ago
(I guess this comment may be somewhat low-effort and/or more suited to the Wednesday Wellness thread, but in light of recent discussion I feel that it may still be appropriate for this thread.)
Are racial sexual preferences natural and mentally healthy, or racist, unnatural, and mentally unhealthy? Is a white man who finds himself afflicted with "jungle fever", an Indian woman who feels a desire to become "bleached", or a black man who has succumbed to "yellow fever" suffering from a delusion that has been inflicted upon him by stereotypes in the media (both pornographic and non-porn)?* Or are these preferences inherent and natural? Is a person obligated to find sexually attractive all people who share the same general category of sex/gender, weight, and figure? Or is attraction permitted to hinge on such minor attributes as skin/nipple color, hair texture, and lip size?
*For example, perhaps the aforementioned black man suffering from "yellow fever" actually just finds skinny, demure-seeming women attractive, but has been brainwashed into thinking that the women who fit that role are overwhelmingly East Asian, and there's no use looking for them elsewhere. Maybe the Indian woman thinks that only white men are capable of building attractive levels of muscle, with few exceptions. Et cetera.
hydroacetylene
13m ago
There are some dog breeds which are both not for an inexperienced owner, and very appealing to women with little experience with big dogs. I am not quite sure why.
DiscourseMagnus
14m ago
Speaking as a retail worker, litigiousness is a leading factor here, and I'm shocked that no one has brought it up (EDIT: I was beaten by a minute actually). Seeing-eye dogs were the original foot in the door that made it difficult to keep dogs out of any public space like a grocery store, particularly when combined with the ADA. In theory, this might have been a workable system: seeing-eye dogs are as well-trained as dogs get, and it isn't really feasible to credibly pass off a regular dog as a seeing-eye dog. (One small hole though: seeing-eye dogs do need to be trained in the first place, these seeing-eye-dogs-in-training are definitionally not necessarily trained yet, and it's a lot easier for some schmuck to pass off a regular dog as a seeing-eye-dog-in-training. Not that big of a problem, though; people who train seeing-eye dogs aren't themselves blind, and therefore aren't really able to credibly threaten a lawsuit over something something disability accommodation. Although, really, any psychopath can get all sorts of things by insinuating that they'll file an obviously frivolous lawsuit in the right voice. Sad!)
Then the idea of "emotional support dogs" or "therapy dogs" arose and everything went to hell. The preexisting infrastructure for mandating tolerance for seeing-eye dogs was repurposed to mandate tolerance for "emotional support dogs"; instead of acting as a disability accommodation for blindness, they acted as a disability accommodation for "I am mentally ill and will throw a fit if separated from dog". Many parallels here! The small core of asshole true believer psychiatrists quickly gave way to a much larger scene of asshole grifters who marketed identification cards, medical diagnoses, legal services, etc to the whole country's backdrop of asshole dog owners who wanted to take their dogs everywhere. Even then, it wasn't as bad a problem as it is now - but eventually, the normalization hit a critical point where businesses started setting policies of "don't even bother to ask for their medical I Need Dog ID Card they got off the internet; we just have to tolerate the dogs now", and then the I Need Dog ID Cards stopped selling so much and the normalization exploded through the roof as all of the dog owners who'd like to take their dog everywhere but had too much dignity to get one of the cards and call themselves mentally ill realized that they were now free to take their dogs everywhere. And so it goes.
A cascade of collapsing Schelling points falling to Moloch; no one able to stop them because of legally-mandated norms of politeness-to-the-unpolite and such. Very American story!
hydroacetylene
15m ago
You can leave your dog in a crate for a few hours, or in the backyard all day, what are you talking about?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
15m ago
They simply don't care about norms. I feel the need to point out that not all dog people are like this, of course. But there are a lot of people who simply do not give a shit that they will probably make someone sick by bringing their dog into the grocery store. It's infuriating. And don't get me started on "emotional support animals", which are just about the most antisocial thing I've ever seen from my fellow man. It's nothing more than people selfishly hitting the "defect" button, making the world worse for everyone - not least those who actually need a companion dog, like the blind.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
15m ago
OK, so I don't bring my dog to grocery stores or other places where the norms would suggest not doing so, but I do want to give you my gut response to the question anyway:
Are dog people convinced that all humans love dogs (except for evil humans) and therefore there ought not be a problem?
I don't care that you don't like dogs. I don't think you're evil for it, but I do think it's a sign of uptight neuroticism. My dog is a shy yellow lab that never barks outside her own home. She walks directly at my side and doesn't approach strangers. If someone was afraid of her, I wouldn't deliberately inflict her upon them, but I also think it is absolutely just their problem. If, for example, I was at a bar patio and someone was bothered by her presence, I would say that it's entirely incumbent on them to go somewhere else - the dog is normal and pleasant, the anti-dog guy is the unreasonable party, and that's up to him to act accordingly.
I'll agree that there is an annoying fraction of dog-havers that think their dog belongs everywhere. The flip side of this is that I've seen people on local Reddits whining about dogs on patios because they have allergies or they're scared of dogs. I am not at all inclined to accommodate their delicate systems and sensibilities.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
19m ago
But at the end of the day, dog-ownership, even by good owners, has to be one of the highest negative-externality hobbies in developed society. I can’t walk on the grass in my city because it’s invariably soaked in urine and feces.
Urine is harder, but anyone who isn't cleaning up their dog's poop is by no means a good owner. They are a terrible owner who shouldn't be allowed to have a dog.
ControlsFreak
20m ago
What I have going for me on the wife approval factor is that she's been using a Chromebook for the last few years. She was definitely annoyed at first, just because she had to learn new stuff. But once she learned, she grew to mostly like it... until the latest issues started popping up. It's a balance between feeling bad, saying, "So, uh, how about you learn another new thing?" and trying to package it as, "Yes, you'll need to learn a little bit, but this is a solution to your recent frustrations!"
There is something very sick in our society that people believe that their pets are equivalent to children. I'm not saying one shouldn't love their pets - I certainly loved my dog, and I cried genuine tears of grief when she died at a young age. But she wasn't my child, and I never got that mixed up. She was my pet, not a human, and not my child in any way. If it had ever come down to my dog's life versus the life of a complete stranger, I would have chosen to save the stranger in a heartbeat.
TitaniumButterfly
23m ago
If I wanted to flirt with dropping inappropriate comments I might suggest that in my experience the people who do this are almost entirely women and male self-identified feminists. It's a type.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
25m ago
Ugh. That reminds me of probably the nastiest person I've ever encountered. Back when I owned a dog, I had to stop at the grocery store for an item. I needed only one thing, and it was a cool fall day, so I knew it wouldn't be a problem to leave my dog in the car for a bit. When I came out 5-7 minutes later, I found some lady who started tearing me a new asshole about how stupid I was to leave my dog in the car, how she was just about to call the police, etc. Obviously she was a huge bitch - but the thing which really got under my skin was that she wasn't even right in her assumptions. I truly had been in the store for a short amount of time, and since it was a cool day it wasn't even warm in my car when I got in it. My dog had never been in any sort of danger at all, despite that lady assuming she was.
If nothing else, it was a good lesson in how you don't necessarily know what's going on when you arrive at a scene. I try to remember that lady and her faulty assumptions every time I encounter someone who I feel tempted to judge harshly because I saw them in a situation which looks real bad from the outside.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
32m ago
You can totally leave a dog at home while you go out. People are just overly protective of their dogs and act like it'll be a problem for little Fido to be by himself for 3 whole hours. And they're antisocial enough to not care about the cost they are inflicting on everyone else.
I just use a win10 desktop and Linux (mint xfce) laptop as a "home server." Both 8th gen Intel, which is still adequate for everything, and will be until they finally come up with a better video codec than vp9.
Modern Linux is so simple a non tech person wouldn't even notice the change as long as you use the default windows background. The browser is identical, and that's all that matters 99% of the time.
I've had random wifi connectivity drops on my android phone lately. Seems like something to with ip leases expiring: it will lose Internet connectivity on the 5ghz network, but switch over to the 2.4 network within a few seconds. I should try disabling DHCP and hard coding fucking everything
Win10 PC just developed a habit of graphics crashing (window frozen, mouse still moves, hard reset needed) when dragging Firefox between monitors. Jank just seems inevitable unless you buy apple and use them exactly as prescribed.
(Re. Crashing: main monitor plugged into GPU, side ones into igpu, browsers set to run on igpu for hardware accel reasons. And it only happens with Firefox: not brave, not Vivaldi, or edge, or the five year old version of portable chromium I use for running html games. Error seemed to start when setting the GPU to power-saving mode. There are a lot of potential factors, fuck)
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
34m ago
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
37m ago
The wife approval factor makes this hard, and I suspect it means that you are going to be limited to either Windows or MacOS for computer choices. Apple devices are way too expensive for what you get (don't @ me, Apple fanboys), but Apple at least hasn't turned to shit (yet) and they do care about making a good experience for customers.
If you're willing to brave the storm of wife disapproval, Linux is viable. I've been running it for a few years now and generally it just works. The only times it doesn't work tend to involve older games, which probably won't be a factor for your wife at least. But if she's anything like my wife, she will be put off by it and really want to go back to something she knows better. Only you can say if it's worth working through that one.
2rafa
37m ago
Many South Asians are, of course, elite human capital, but I have yet to be persuaded that the average Infosys H-1B is. And again, I say that as someone who has no strong opinion on H1B numbers while so much unskilled immigration is a bigger priority, even though I think the current number of the former is likely too high and they should be auctioned rather than the subject of a lottery.
zoink
39m ago
Of course you can leave a dog unattended. I've never known an adult dog that couldn't go at least 8 hours unattended.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
40m ago
@Goodguy's preemptive appreciation notwithstanding, what the hell is this post?
You write a lot of AAQCs, and then you apparently decide to "cash them in" with posts like this, and I've told you before to stop doing that.
Banned for 2 days so maybe you will believe me. No, this site does not need "petty bitching" and "spice" to improve the flavor.
I think in 1855 it was probably fairly uneven. The Eastern Seaboard sure, but not tons.
Still, broadly agree.
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