faceh
1hr ago
My general logic for 'deportability' is "does this person contribute a net positive to the country, or at least not impose an obvious liability."
If we're actively at war with their nation of origin, the possible liability of letting them stay is kind of obvious, if not quite self-evident.
So a foreigner who is mostly collecting handouts and may or may not be engaging in fraud or possibly worse/more violent crimes but is allowing others in their community to do so is higher on my list than a millionaire hockey player.
But all of the above should be on a short leash for any crimes they may partake in, in that regard. (I guess its worth noting that I also am generally down for exiling U.S. citizens for certain classes of crimes, for the same reason!)
I thus can't see Ovechkin as a target in that regard. If he did in fact break some U.S. law then I guess he has to go, but we've sanctioned Russia, not declared war on them, so I don't see that his presence in the ad is actionable by itself.
Of course this falls into my general "celebrities, athletes, actors should SHUT UP about political causes altogether" opinion. The NHL already had its kerfuffle with some players not wanting to wear Pride Jerseys and the players 'won' that exchange it seems the NHL has taken the lesson somewhat to heart.
faceh
2hr ago
50% of the time a very fetishistic orientalism.
Thin line between "fetishistic orientalism" and genuine "I'm looking for a wife who is relatively traditional, submissive, and loyal."
Like, my general perception is that upper middle class and above white women, especially the careerists, are just too assertive, neurotic, and often outright narcissistic to work well as a wife and mother I'd bind myself to for life.
So if I go looking at 'lower' class women in hopes of finding a diamond in the rough, am I engaging in "fetishistic ruralism" or something?
As someone with high risk aversion, I think it behooves us not to build a society that depends heavily on female labor when we know full well that this isn't sustainable without the relatively fragile technological base we've built up.
The time of relative peace and prosperity we have known for the past 80 years is not a historical norm, and could revert without much notice (with the caveat of AGI making this impossible to predict).
The society that optimized towards giving women full parity with men will find it much, much harder to adapt to such a reversion than one that kept the basic gender role ideals in place.
If society reverts back '100 years' then we don't have to re-establish slavery or anything, but we better have a sufficiently large labor pool (and high birthrate) to keep from falling back much further.
Seems outdated given the quality of cell phone cameras these days.
I dunno, I'm just extremely well prepared to avoid and/or combat any false rape accusations. Law Degree, experience with criminal defense, and a psych degree, so I've got a comprehensive legal, philosophical, and psychological understanding of 'consent.' I have experience handling domestic violence matters and I've seen the 'failure' modes that result when it comes down to only he-said, she-said and circumstantial evidence.
Likewise, I teach self defense, including to women. If I am a closeted rapist, I'm working somewhat against my own interest by teaching women how to fend off attackers.
And being very clear and specific in my text communications to make sure anyone reading it later (like a Judge or Jury) isn't going to interpret it the worst possible way. i.e., never put something like "Free pussy in room 205" in text, because that could end up in a court record later.
And I have on a couple occasions over the years turned down liaisons with seemingly willing women because they either struck me as the type who could flip and make such accusations on a whim, or I was not sufficiently in control of the circumstances that an accusation would be tougher to rebut. So much of it just comes down to "don't take a woman somewhere private unless you've vetted her." I'd much rather risk a public indecency charge because I got too handsy with her around witnesses than a sexual assault charge because I got handsy in private, all else equal. Both can get you put on the sex offender list, but the former is, funny enough, harder to prove since pleading the fifth can actually help you there.
That's the judgment call most guys aren't prepared to make because they don't know what to look for until AFTER it happens.
faceh
4hr ago
There is a technological component to feminism. The division of labor in a primitive, undeveloped economy cannot as easily support women's equality due to the vast amount of resources required to meditate the "biological functions" you identify, breeding, fighting, feeding, and so on.
Yeah.
But the deeper I get into understanding technology, the more I think technology is inherently a result of male specialization that most women can't comprehend on the same level.
Remember that infamous water glass test. If (most) women don't have an intuition for how gravity and fluid dynamics work on a basic level... how could they invent, e.g., sailing tech?
Men produce new tech, maintain old tech, and, ultimately, make that tech comprehensible enough that women can use it in their everyday lives. The whole edifice requires male psychology to operate.
So you can say "men don't fight, drones do." But men build the drones, maintain the drones, mostly fly the drones, and innovate new drone tech and tactics.
And, who fights if the tech fails? If we have mech suits that bring combat capacity about equal, we're still reverting back to sticks and stones if the mech suits break down.
I think the triumph of technology in the 20th-21st century is making war and combat less central to the average person's life. The warrior is less critical now than before, so fewer people will specialize as warriors, and we can elevate other classes up.
It did not erase the distinctions that make men better warriors, and, critically, has not erased the core, basic problem that makes warriors necessary, as Ukraine has discovered.
faceh
4hr ago
One of the basic precautions I've taken is having a very obvious camera that overlooks my living room (which, upon request, I will unplug) that can at least show that I didn't drag her through the door and carry her off to the bedroom kicking and screaming and that she had adequate opportunity to leave.
Hidden cameras can save you in a pinch but carry their own reputational risk if she finds them. "Oh the creepy perv who films women without their knowledge." Mine has a little light on it and an prominent cable running down to the power supply and isn't shaped like anything but an obvious little camera.
Its also useful for watching my dog when I'm away.
I've split the difference. If she noticed the camera and tells me to unplug it, I will do so happily because now she's well aware that I've taken that precaution, at least, and she can of course wonder if I've taken other precautions. There are no such cameras in the bedroom, bathroom, or elsewhere.
Oh absolutely, the human brain with its dunbar's number limits is probably not thinking "oh but what if this becomes a national controversy?"
I'm just saying, the relative power imbalance here is pretty slim. If it was some homeless teen runaway that they had pulled in and dosed with drugs, the disparity would be broader and possible noteworthy.
But the combination of the similarity of ages, basically similar social standing, basically similar economic strata... any power differential was mostly in their minds if any.
So despite how the emotional experience might have been intense, an actress turning down Harvey Weinstein and having her career instantly and irrevocably nuked is certainly in a less tenable position than a sorority sister trying to, I dunno, either climb the status ladder or lock down a Frat guy as a partner and being forced to change schools.
faceh
5hr ago
Seems pretty obvious the interactions were going to be awkward when you get a bunch of people with various levels of affection for each other into a social setting after they've done a drug-fueled orgy together. And anyone else who knows about it is going to be watching to see if they decide to repeat the performance and sneak in themselves or drag their own SO away from them to make sure they don't get pulled in.
And then the looming likelihood of some attendee being like "YO KYLE IS THIS GIRL WHO SNORTED KEY OFF YOUR JUNK?" and triggering a scene.
As someone who hosted various parties at my house, WAY less raucous than a college frat, you always have to keep that calculation running in the back of your head "If X shows up, will they get offended if Y is also there, and if Y isn't there will X start talking about Y behind their back and because Z is friends with both of them do I have to do damage control if I disinvite one or both of them?"
So the sometimes easiest answer is to to disinvite the one you judge as the most likely source of problem and, if they're a reasonable person, have the apologetic discussion with them later. I didn't have to do that often (once, maybe?) but plenty of drama happens behind the scenes that I simply wasn't cued into and got informed of after the fact.
faceh
5hr ago
Hence why filming everything in high definition from five different angles is a simple expedient to prevent issues arising due to poor recollection later, but the rules around when its appropriate to film, and especially keep or publish the records of the encounter are extra convoluted.
faceh
5hr ago
The unresolvable contradiction is that sociopolitical equality can't be built on biological inequality unless one explains away or minimizes those biological differences enough that the law doesn't have to actually distinguish between men and women as groups.
You can't have both men and women with equal social authority when society calls upon men to go forth and kill and/or die to protect the tribe, whilst the women are expected to bear the children to maintain the tribe. Literally unresolvable: send your women forth to fight, even alongside the men (which implies training them and equipping them for the task, a massive resource investment!), and you risk no children being born to maintain the tribe, the tribe dies, even if they do successfully fight off the invaders.
The law (formal or informal) must therefore say that only men (with perhaps narrow exceptions) are allowed to be warriors! And once the law recognizes at least that one distinction, all sorts of consequences inherently result as warriors will necessarily have a heightened prestige in that society (lest who would bother to join up?).
Were that the ONLY meaningful distinction (men fight and die, women live and birth life) we could probably keep things in balance but nature did a LOT more work on the distinct psychology and physiology of men and women than that.
faceh
5hr ago
Neither A nor B actually flow from whether a 'rape' happened, I'd say. Both flow from the social humiliation, but A attributes that social humiliation to, I guess, the general social environment, whilst explanation B attributes it to the influence of these frat guys being powerful enough to threaten consequences irrespective of the general social environment.
Which is to say, Explanation B is exceptionally uncharitable to the men. Because it seems apparent that they disinvited her due to the possibility of social humiliation of various parties... not to induce social humiliation.
SO I can find both 'true' simultaneously: nobody was 'raped' but everyone realized that social consequences were impending and tried to situate themselves to minimize the damage... but they had leverage in the form of the Halloween party and she had leverage in the form of a rape accusation.
The whole thing about #metoo was the implication that the power imbalance itself is enough to convert a facially consensual encounter into rape, but when the imbalance is "immature frat dudes with local social clout" and not "literal Hollywood magnate with the ability to nuke ones' career path" I suspect the average onlooker isn't as sympathetic.
It is incredible how the very acronym for non-governmental organization is now tied to government funding and nobody bats an eye
RIGHT?
I feel like when I was younger, if you were part of an "NGO" the implication was that you were privately funded but also worked in tandem with governments to achieve generally important goals. Like the Red Cross, or Amnesty International, the Government recognizes they provide important services that supplement the government's own capabilities and thus endorses but does not fund their operatons. Red Cross, at least still claims to meet this definition closely. This was helpful to make sure there is always excess capacity for emergencies, and possibly to avoid international disputes if 'official' government actors were to get involved in a space.
NOW, its basically tacitly accepted that a private organization can become an arm of the state but because of the label we don't expect it to be held to account by the voters, and also if the owners/operators become fabulously wealthy it doesn't quite register as "abuse of taxpayer funds" because in theory these NGOs can also take private money too.
And because the Constitution doesn't really create any strict rules on how such orgs can interface with the state the rules are made up and the funding can be tucked away in various large omnibus bills where nobody technically has to answer for or justify the spending.
On the flip side, as we've seen, that makes it fairly trivial to de fund them if the current President (with a friendly congress) turns a serious eye on them.
And yeah, I agree its a deliberate equivocation that lets them straddle the "private vs. public" divide without anybody thinking too much about how much that distinction matters.
There's plenty of other examples of grinding down the private/public distinction to a sheer fiction (revolving doors between large corpos and regulatory agencies, defense contracting, whatever Hunter Biden was doing) but the term "NGO" is the one that makes it a blatant mockery on its face.
Interestingly, I once pointed out that the social function of Sororities is PROBABLY to select for women who can be DISCREET about their promiscuity. quoth me:
Perhaps THAT is what these sororities try to filter for? Discretion? Like can you maintain public appearances and not hurt your sorority's social standing by, say, making your bad behavior obvious and obnoxious, can you conform well enough that nobody would single you out as a 'bad' girl or a goody two-shoes? Well you might be marriage material!
And clearly, Jane Doe in this instance failed that test HARD. Which, yes, you can reframe it thusly:
She was mistreated by those men, who allowed her to have sex with them even though they had no intention of returning any of that favor.
Feminism and the sexual revolution have done away with any sort of 'consequences' for having sex. That was the point!
You bang, and any further connection is completely optional. If you use protection, then you won't have to worry about a pregnancy or STD popping up, and nobody needs to talk about sticky stuff like 'marriage' and 'long term relationship', just keep things fun!
But uh oh that's not quite how human endocrine systems work, and the social systems we've built on top of THAT are still running on that basic hardware: don't make people feel icky, don't besmirch other people's status, don't break too many taboos at once (unless you're high status enough to do so), and people will rank you in their head accordingly.
One year back I had made the point about how schizophrenic our clashing taboos around sex and nudity are now:
Thanks to cell-phone cameras, women can send nudes to any guy they find attractive. This is not a big deal, "it's their body!" But thanks to cell-phone cameras, women are not as prone to whip out their boobs at a party on the off chance it gets posted online. Oh, and of course if you post a woman's nudes online you can often literally be prosecuted for revenge porn. Because sex and nudity are no longer a big deal, you see.
And here you get the worst instantiation of this paradox. The males got to exploit the 'norm' (but not really) that a promiscuous woman is not shameful to get some instant gratification here and the female, despite not doing anything (morally or legally) 'wrong' is still condemned for it, but the social condemnation is not subject to due process and does not care what her 'defense' is ("I'm a strong empowered woman who will not be shamed!") But we still do have one major, universally agreed norm which has legal teeth: Nonconsensual sex is very bad, and those who force themselves on women MUST be ejected from the social sphere. So its not only the ultimate sanction, its the only one that helps a humiliated woman regain social approval. Its literally the only consistent norm we have left, and we even choose to blur the lines around THAT. Wait, we also have strong norms around relations with kids, but I am NOT touching that right now.
And thus...
SOME days I wish I wasn't autistic enough to expect that social norms should be explicitly stated and followed, and that the actual law should at least try to conform to the actual social norms we follow, not just the kind of vaguely stated 'expectations' we have for people's behavior, that we know privately (or maybe not) are impossible for the average person to conform with. It'd be easier to just go with the flow if I didn't notice the contradiction.
But the on others, I look at all the snafus that normies get themselves into by following base instincts while running with the naive assumption that social rules don't matter, even though their own core psychology, at the end of the day, cares ONLY for social rules and maintaining status by not violating them.
Grumble grumble traditional rules are proven safeguards and all that.
And I just thank the lord that I'm just autistic enough to notice those areas where the stated rules conflict with the subtext/unstated rules conflict with the inherent human drives and desires and tactically avoid treading in those areas without sufficient protection. If it takes level 10 status awareness and level 9 charisma to sail those stormy social seas successfully I'd just as soon be a submarine, illegible to most until I CHOOSE to surface.
I'm dead certain that 95% of the time, everyone involved in the Ketamine/cocaine-fueled college gangbang 'gets away' with whatever they're doing. Fine, we just never hear about it after the fact because the players are more discrete or the Frat/Sorority are better at damage control. But I'm also certain that these people live lives much more filled with drama and dysfunction than is strictly necessary, and they'd be much more fulfilled living under the very basic, traditional rules that dominated society up until 5 (historical) minutes ago.
Take it up with the hippies.
faceh
1d ago
YES! As stated, I've placed bets, although zeroed on more specific races/outcomes.
What are your odds on the midterms swapping control of both House and Senate?
faceh
1d ago
I have not heard the 'GOP insiders' rumor, personally.
I also don't see Dems acting like they expect such a win.
The problem with citing PolyMarket, Nate Silver, RCP, and polls is they're all functionally drawing from the exact same data, nobody has 'insider' info here.
IF that dataset it tainted, biased, or otherwise missing something, which has happened before then they can't give you a more accurate picture just by aggregating them together.
And we already have some pretty sizeable polling misses in the primaries!
I think its fair to say the error bars are probably larger than you think. Like, after the Ur-example of a polling miss in Trump's 2016 original win, you should keep your salt grains on hand for reading political polls.
faceh
1d ago
Its unfortunate that I now assume a 50-50 shot of any given agreed upon date either ghosting me or calling off at the last minute... THEN ghosting me. And a 75% shot that they Ghost Afterwards.
Unless its someone I met through friends, so there's social consequences for doing so.
Designing your date ideas so you can salvage the night if she no-shows is... 'fun.'
I point back to the only viable solution being to have a 'roster' just so you can try to swap in another one and not completely waste your time. But that is a horrible incentive that makes the problem worse over time.
And yeah, if I were to Hinge-maxx I could maybe be lucky enough to find that girl who is new to the apps and hasn't been psychically mutilated yet, but that would require me to validate Hinge's business model, which I refuse to do.
faceh
1d ago
Basically what I'm saying. If the big national races are close, semi-coinflip outcomes should ultimately come down for the GOP in the end. You have to believe in a serious blue wave to expect a flip of the Senate, especially a flip that actually gives them 'control' vs. just a nominal majority.
faceh
1d ago
Yes.
Very literally yes.
If he didn't think they were within distance, why even bother? At this point, I suspect they view it as a simple matter of goosing turnout.
faceh
1d ago
Compared to Trump 1 this has been a positively stoic 2 years, with plenty of policy wins racked up.
I simply disagree.
The War is baked in, but as stated, gas prices have actually been on the downward trend, which is the main day-to-day reminder of the war.
I am genuinely surprised that the polls insist on a Democrat sweep at this stage.
Aside from Gas prices (which are trending down?) and a few bad candidates in races, the GOP is pretty well situated and the base seems motivated!
So I actually have some bets on some Prediction markets that there's a likely stronger Republican showing than expected, especially in Texas. Regardless of how 'bad' Paxton is, its just truly hard to imagine a Dem waltzing to victory there.
Which... we've already seen that the polls can have such a bias. As you're suggesting, if the polls have a bias AND any theoretical electoral fraud machine is crippled, we should honestly expect a narrow Republican victory rather than the certain blowout they allege is brewing.
Trump and Co. sure seem to be acting like they expect a good outcome.
So yeah. I will slightly update my priors on 'electoral fraud is a systemic problem and it impacts national elections' in favor of "true" if the Dems have an underwhelming night.
I AM bought in on the idea that the crushing of funding for various NGOs and similar government agencies that controlled the flow of 100's of millions of dollars with minimal accountability has resulted in the collapse of the overall lefty network of professional activists and organizers, and thus reduced their capability of shifting outcomes in various countries.
The amounts of rampant fraud that has come out in the last couple years is convincing me that there are well-oiled grift machines out there that convert tax dollars into either Mansions, Range Rovers, and Crab legs for some particular class of people, OR converts them into protests, election influence, and propaganda for particular candidates or causes. And STILL DOES, but has to be more judicious with its spending. Nudging a lefty candidate over the line in Bolivia, thus, would be less of a priority than, say, making one of your guys the Mayor of New York or Los Angeles.
And these flows were HIGHLY dependent on the U.S. government acting as a rich but absent-minded benefactor who hears a nice sounding cause or title and keeps writing checks because nobody told them what the money actually went to. Then you've got your George Soros' and Meckenzie Bezos supplementing these efforts, and funds being directed towards keeping those funds flowing, and it becomes a perfect parasitic organism.
So it is completely believable to me that organizations doing the work on the ground and sloshing money around to various causes in-country got dismantled due to lack of funding and these close elections are now slipping back towards the less-well-funded side.
I would want to see the actual money flows traced, however.
faceh
1d ago
I am absurdly happy to hear that.
From what I can tell if you somehow manage to be one of the first 10 guys she talks to and one of the first 3 or 4 she goes on dates with, you can maybe have a shot at getting her locked down before she either becomes embittered by the process or realizes she can exploit said process. It amounts to luck of the draw to both find a good one AND be one of the first to get her attention. There's no way to strategize intentionally to this end that I can see.
Its this kind of gamification I despise.
faceh
1d ago
lol, I know a guy who specifically went to China to find a wife. He's also divorced like 4 times so maybe not a great example. But his recounting of it is that she was basically going overboard to be appealing and supplicate his affections... and that as SOON as the airplane they were riding on entered U.S. airspace she swapped to cold semi-indifference and never went back. And, yeah, I can see that. Foreign women knowing precisely how to appeal to American men to get transported over to the grand utopia, and THEN knowing exactly how much they can get away with once they're there.
I have no reason to think Singaporean women would be better, but I think I'd enjoy Singapore more as a country.
The whole other issue with passport bro-ing is that once you've brought them here and they get situated, NOTHING stops them from absorbing the overculture and becoming an even nastier version of the women you were trying to avoid all along.
See @100ProofTollBooth and his insightful point here. You need a community to plug them into that will keep them on the straight and narrow!
The absolutely untenable problem that men have to contend with is that they can't just "marry a good one" - they then have to plug into a social circle and larger community that is predominantly "good ones."
Yes. It seems also necessary to "unplug" them from the screeching hivemind that will try to spike their anxiety 24/7 and feed her self-sabotaging advice to assuage that anxiety. This can also include her normal circle of friends. I keep hearing accounts that divorces are 'contagious' in social circles, as the first one to pull the trigger on divorce will get a lot of sympathy from the others... and will immediately start trying to sell the others on the idea of divorce so she's not the only one in this embarrassing social situation.
But if it comes out "oh my husband doesn't want me to use social media" that same hivemind will probably label him an abuser and redouble efforts to 'rescue' her from his influence.
You need other women - preferably high social status as possible - to "hold the line" on family and motherhood being the ultimate supreme good for women.
And this is why I fear its a downward spiral of feedback effects. The women who do this have to be HIGH STATUS for other women to follow suit. And 'they' have made 'girlbossing' and 'free spirit' women the pinnacle in the media lens, and shunted motherhood and being a pillar of one's community to second-class status in the majority of womens' minds, so there's no corrective mechanism arising!
Oh, that goes into my OTHER rant, the one about 1993:
That's the year it was made an explicit policy to get more women in college and they made it easier to get loans to get in.
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