JTarrou
7hr ago
Virality is probably not correlated with pro-sociality.
So far as people like this are concerned, they're just overoptimizing for one aspect of social status and mining the cognitive dissonance for clicks. And what's the goal? In much the same way that bodybuilding quickly loses any connection to actual sex appeal, this "lookmaxxing" or whatever is another proxy being reified.
Young men will always be looking for ways to hack the social milieu in some way that gives them sexual access to young women. Most of them will be looking for One Simple Trick to avoid having to work too hard at it. Drugs, surgery, PUA classes, whatever. The con artists who sell them these fantasies may have a kernel of truth in their spiel, but only that.
Here's the reality: Becoming an expert at seduction, whatever we're currently calling that, is something many men are capable of but far fewer are willing to put in the work to achieve. Most men are best off building a decent life for themselves and trying to find a monogamous wife/girlfriend, not dating as a method of getting laid.
The fantasy is that you can do something easy to change that. Sexual access is competitive.
JTarrou
8hr ago
Mid-40s now, drank hard for a decade, then what civilians would call "hard" for another. These days I drink relatively little, maybe a case a week during the summer and fall, plus a few binges in there for vacation, fishing, deer camp etc. Substituted weed for the daily use, pain management etc. The friends I've kept have slowed down. Some of the ones that drifted off are still hitting it hard.
Every year at guy's weekend the drinks get gayer and gayer. Zero sugar fruity spritzers and vodka fizzes rather than SoCo and PBR. Every New Years involves finding out that the kids these days can't hang with an old cunt who barely drinks anymore. I'm stuck between that and the real motherfuckers who don't consider beer to be drinking and still take road fifths.
JTarrou
9hr ago
So far as the guns go, laws were enacted in the sixties and seventies known collectively as Saturday Night Special laws. These made much of the existing stock of cheap shitty self-defense guns for poor people illegal to sell. These were most often small pocket automatics in "mouse" calibers like .32 and .25 as well as snubbie revolvers in .32 and .38. Probably into the eighties, these would have been the most common sort of gun stolen or used by criminals.
The eighties and nineties saw law enforcement coalesce first around the .40, then in the early oughts to the 9mm. Bullet technology brought the 9mm on par with the more powerful, larger cartridges and "won" the handgun caliber wars for the current generation. Today you can buy a gun the size and weight of an old five-shot Saturday Night Special .32 which carries twelve rounds of 9mm.
The downside is that the most commonly stolen guns are now better, smaller, lighter, with higher capacity and more powerful rounds than they were forty years ago. But they are still the cheap, shitty guns mostly. For every real Glock used in a crime, there's probably three Tauruses and two Kel Tecs.
JTarrou
1d ago
Charitably and technically, it's any time the function of government doesn't follow the constitutional rule. When the structure of the constitution runs into the practice of power in reality.
Realistically and politically, it's whenever the opposing side does something that can even tendentiously be considered a constitutional issue.
But there are and will be actual crises. The constitution has been partially suspended using military and emergency powers (Lincoln, FDR, etc.). The Supreme Court has decided presidential elections, and so have private political parties. The President has started an awful lot of wars without a declaration of war.
In reality, unconstitutional behavior only becomes a constitutional crisis if another branch of government is fighting you on it, and both sides are relatively evenly matched.
JTarrou
1d ago
If you're thinking of this in terms of race, you gotta be more granular. Look for big families. Races don't have kids, people do. And people come from families with their own norms about kids. All you gotta do is find a big, close family to marry into. Find you a girl with double digit siblings, that will do more for your genetic legacy than trying to read the tea leaves about future social climbing.
My grandfather has nearly eighty direct descendants, I have thirty nieces and nephews and almost two hundred cousins. My family reunions are hundreds and hundreds of people strong. Some of us are criminals, some are religious nutcases, some are poor, more than a few are a bit trashy. But we are fertile. There will be no shortage of my clan in the future.
JTarrou
3d ago
It's quite the gambit to move to a foreign country for a better life and then extoll the virtues of your former society whilst being loudly racist against the majority of your new one. Bold move Cotton.
"Yes, I moved to China for a six-figure salary, but I would never let one of these chinks marry my son or daughter, they're racists!" - op-ed in a chinese newspaper
Of course, it says something about US culture that our "respectable" media organs are gagging to print this sort of slop.
JTarrou
4d ago
The American left has always sided with the opponent. They sided with the Confederacy, with Germany and Russia and Vietnam and Afghanistan etc. etc. etc. The only war in our history they supported "our" side was when they got faked out by the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Had Hitler not invaded Russia, the American left would still be on side with the Nazis and Stalin.
That's what it means to be "left wing". There is no other meaning or definition that explains the political phenomena.
No national identity can include the left, because the left definitionally opposes their own nation.
JTarrou
6d ago
Assuming that one's values are permanent and universal is a common religious belief.
As Ft says, this is conflict/mistake theory and while mistakes are common, the mistakes mostly occur because of conflict that incentivizes them.
Any group of three people or more will have conflict. Any group of people will have conflict with other groups of people. That's why we join groups. The liberal really does believe that he needs every immigrant he can get to break the back of white supremacy, to make sure his group wins. His group is just not "American citizens" in the way the conservative privileges that identity.
Every identity conceals a hidden struggle, a compromise, a division. America is red tribe blue tribe, white and black, male and female. It is only by forging a common identity that supersedes those divisions that people can get on the same side. But that identity in turn needs opposition to form it. We are Americans, not Mexicans or Canadians. The conflict, resolved at a lower level, simply moves up the chain.
The reverse is also true. The removal or delegitimization of one's opponent can lead to reignition of internal struggles. As the Soviet Union failed, the US became more internally divided. Without a simple global opponent to threaten the American identity, our political divisions steadily widen, even as policy difference shrinks.
The whole secret of fishing is where and when.
If there are no suitable mates where you are fishing, try a different hole.
Also, perhaps think long and hard about what you mean by "interesting".
Long ago, I thought interesting women were women who were interested in the same things I was interested in. Which meant all the interesting girls were lesbians.
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