100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21hr ago
I was there for much of this and the incorporation of the online component was hugely controversial.
I'd like to hear more about your experience here.
existing IRL networks which later had a large online component mostly by tapping into the backlash to pope Francis
That's fair, but I see this as validating my point with different timing. I'd also very plainly ask if there's a real sense within any Catholic circles - and there could be, this isn't meant to be a leading question - that the online Trad-Cath-o-sphere is, on net, detrimental?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23hr ago
Conservatism INC's habit of perpetually trying to turn back the clock 10-50 years is a huge flaw in their character.
While I agree, the follow on statement of "Yes, but we need a future oriented conservatism" is actually a landmine. "Use what worked in the past, but adapt to the present / future" was the entire ethos behind small-l liberalism. And it led to psychotic progressivism. It's no wonder that the current conservative ethos is heavily reactionary.
My attempt to square the circle is; embrace certain unchanging eternal truths and do not let them slip or yield in the face of any kind of future. No surprise that I'm of the conservative / traditional catholic bent. But I'm also not Amish. In fact, I think a strategy for Conservatives (be they INC or wildcatters) should be an approach to technology in general as a means to re-introduce conservative ideas.
(Catholic aside: The Latin Mass movement doesn't exist without podcasts and other online spaces. Roll back the clock to 1975 - 2005 and the Latin Mass was close to dead outside of SSPX / FSSP / ICKSP. )
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
A Look into Hickman, wherein a Sensitive Young Man discovers the positional utility of money
I've written about Hickman before because I find him to be a very interesting character. This is a man who was purposefully homeless for years, a self-described constantly drunk anarchist, who then joined the coast guard to clean up his act, become a kind of hardcore catholic that doesn't quite fit neatly into the Online RadTrad mold, got married, had a kid, and now, apparently, self-supports via writing online. He's also something of budding real estate investor.
And although he still "hates money" he just can't deny that it's got some pretty nice features; like being able to live in good neighborhoods where your kids are safe as well as being able to choose the rough outline of your socio-political environment.
Hickman's journey isn't unique overall. It's definitely got a lot of color to it, of course. I see it, however, as a pretty normal process of becoming aware of second order social effects. As kids, we're inherently self-focused. Adolescence brings some awareness of things outside of ourself. Young adulthood continues that up to family formation. For most, however, it takes the actual having of children to ignite thoughts about the beliefs, behaviors, and opinions of larger groups of strangers.
Being 25 and single or dating means I have more or less complete control (or perceived control - memetic influence is for a different thread) over the ideas I let effect me. But a parent realizes that short of keeping their children locked up in the basement, their ability to totally control the kid's ideological intake is far from complete.
It's unremarkable to point out that what happens next is people use a combination of money and social organization to choose and maintain the ideological ecosystems within which their children live. Money can get you access to the right zip codes and/or private schools and clubs / sports. Social organization can get the right (wrong?) books banned from the public libraries, and the right (wrong?) drag queen story hour performers. Enter the ongoing culture war.
The interesting thing, to my mind, that Hickman's post illustrates is the reach of these topics. Hickman, although not living on the street anymore, is certainly on the fringe of "normal" society. He's a very-online yet pseudo Amish dirtbag Catholic who lives in dying upstate NY. Yet is talking in the same direction that leads to HOAs, school boards, zoning, planned communities and all the other things that are top of mind for the most milquetoast suburbanites. Short of a true EXIT mentality, you can't not be in the culture war.
And I think there's something useful here to contemplate in terms of the very Vibes based general feeling of anxiety that generates thousands of thinkpieces across main stream and alternative media and internet outlets. If many of us feel like non-voluntary conscripts in the culture war, it follows that we're fighting the war just to survive and get back home. But then the question becomes "what the hell is home?" There's no 40 acres and a Good Wife (TM) to walk with into the sunset. The HOA has problems with our lifestock and Wifey is at therapy and thinks we need to have a conversation about emotional labor. Or, for my progressive friends, the need to return that 40 acres to the indigenous rightful owners is really getting difficult because of the tax implications of the real estate sale and my polycule keeps breaking up while I'm talking to my lawyer.
Of course I'm having a little fun here, but the point stands; the political dream of the West post World War 2 was that a mix of economic and political liberality could ultimately result in an appreciable degree of autonomy for, at least, an individual if not a family. That no longer seems the case and there's been no real alternative identified. On the left, it's a kind of utopic socialism that can't ever actually work. On the right it's a very vibes based "RETVRN" ethos with some nihilstic streaks.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
One of the tells is in perspective towards the protagonist.
Read "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Hemingway. It's written in the third person, technically, but the omniscient narrator is really just talking about himself - the protagonist. It's about as first person as the third person can get. The "camera," as it were, would be POV. The protagonist (and author) are mostly relating their perspective on and actions within the world. The reflection back to the character himself is minimal, even during passages that are deliberately supposed to be so.
Female authors tend to have the "camera" pointed back at the protagonist in an outside in situation. We see the protagonist in constant relation to the world and the perceptions of others. A common meta-pattern is a paragraph about the protagonist dealing with another character in order to reveal their own traits. A (made up on the spot example); "She had always been independent to a fault. She could remember her own mother saying 'if you always walk alone, you're gonna end up alone!'" I see things like this dropped in all over the place in female writing. A trait, belief, or aspect of a character is only tangible if it came from some sort of interaction with another character or with a kind of "characterization" of the world at large (again, little things -- "She knew men looked at her with a mix of awe and ...") There's no self-directed volition. There has to be an external instantiation first.
And I do think that this reveals some deeper truth about male versus female sense-making. Even when it comes to personal self-knowledge, women place more (though not total) weight on consensus mechanisms. Men can self-define on their own better, however, this can create its own failure mode in terms of failing to appreciate social feedback.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
Not Exactly Fun, but Not a Culture War Item
I recently had a negative experience in life that was totally my fault. I did something that made me feel guilty. More severe than, I don't know, "laughing at a fat person falling down" but not at the level of "swindled a business partner." It's something that swam in my head for about a week. I've gotten over it but wanted to share what is to me a fundamentally new feeling that exists, now, because of about three to four solid years of taking faith seriously (in my case, that is the Catholic faith with distinctly Latin Mass features, though not the hardcore RadTrad life).
For all of my young adult and adult life, I understood what guilt was in a very humanist, worldly way. The manner in which I felt guilty when I did certain bad things was to adopt the mindset of the party I had offended. As a toy example, think about spreading a rumor in school. If I did this, "guilt" was the thought experiment of putting myself in the shoes of the subject of the rumor and then going through the (imagined) emotional process of being embarrassed and angry. Would I want that to happen to me? No. A-ha, emotional maturity! I felt guilt as a means of emotive fellow-feeling and a kind of imagined solidarity with the other party.
This is somewhat of a smuggled in consequentialist argument. You can see where it can break down. What if, doing my imagining of the other person, I come to the conclusion that they shouldn't be that embarrassed or that my own culpability is mitigated because, well, everyone else was in on the rumor too? Egotism and self-serving confirmation bias can go a long way towards mitigating those guilty feelings.
An upgrade is the "honor" mode of virtue ethics thinking (not an academic philosopher, but I believe the term deontological describes this? not sure.) I feel guilty because I've broken a code (my virtue ethics) regardless of the pain realized by the other party. Maybe Timmy didn't care that I told everyone he was born with a tail. That's actually secondary to me having violated a permanent, fixed code. This kind of "guilt feeling" expands all the way up to religious rules; the Ten Commandments and so forth.
In my recent experience, however, the feeling of guilt was distinct in kind from both of the previous examples. I felt the guilt in the sense of a wound to something both greater than me yet wholly inclusive of me. That description is a bit wishy washy and abstract, and I certainly wish I had the writing ability to do a better job. As a second attempt, maybe I could say I felt like I had hurt myself in the past, the present, and the future. What I'm getting at without being too trite is to say that I felt like I hurt my soul.
An accurate and artful description of the perception of guilt isn't the point. The point is that I feel like I have a new category of feeling because of (going on) four years of deliberate spiritual practice.
For people who are converting to a formal religion with established prayer practices, there's a lot of repeating of the words and rituals without any perceptible change in things. Just because you say a few rosaries doesn't mean your anxiety goes way. Regular attendance at Mass probably helps you hew closer to the Straight and Narrow path, but you don't get magical peace-and-love powers. Life is still hard. And so a lot of faith practice can atrophy if you're looking for tangible outcomes within your preexisting channels of sense making.
This is one of the first tangible milestones that deliberate faith practice has created a novel change in my overall personal disposition. I can't emphasize enough how this feels like I just discovered color TV or contact lenses. My relationship to the entire nature of this life has a new vector. And for that I am profoundly grateful.
The question to the Motte would be what kind of other practices in life have led to something like this? One that jumps to mind is that people I know who have the brain to do truly high level math (later undergrad level stuff but really grad level math) talk about seeing the world with an added layer. Not that they "know the answer" to things beyond us puny humans, but that there's this added detail and feature to everything. They're excited by even the most banal occurrences.
A more common one is people who develop an advanced capability with foreign languages. They dream in these other languages and also end up having an inner monologue that can "switch" between various languages to some extent. These people sometimes report being able to more specifically appreciate the nuance and details of life.
Curious for shared thoughts.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7d ago
Good questions laid out with intellectual honesty. I applaud you.
I can't respond to everything due to time constraints. There's a lot here. So, I'll choose one thing -
(1)? Does God have a an array of potential actions, any of which he can actualize? Yet this runs the risk of these potential actions being "outside" God.
To me this is a classic mental trap that afflicts a lot of "hard" logic thinkers and rationalists. Note, I'm not saying you're a rationalist here, just pointing it out in general.
By compressing the omnipotence of God to be a kind of first order set theory problem, this argument fails to appreciate the deeper truth. God cannot deceive not be deceived. Well, logically, wouldn't that mean He lacks total omnipotent ability? The answer is no because a deceptive action or will or intent is intrinsically faulty. If you aren't seeking the ultimate Good (God), True (God), and Beautiful (God), you haven't actually committed any action (or will, or intent), you've simple succeeded in deceiving yourself and potentially others (i.e. assisting in sin).
Phrased a little differently, God's apparently "lack" of the ability to deceive is a deception itself - he has total ability to do any and all things. Anything that could be pointed out "outside" of His isn't actual real, doesn't actually exist.
Squaring this circle requires a metaphysical engagement. Staying at the level of propositional logic means trying to use an item within a larger system to explain the system in totality. The analogy I like is "we're a thought inside the brain trying to explain what the mind is."
This is why so many attempts to over "logical-ize" God end up in paradox. "Could God make a boulder so big that even he couldn't move it?" answer: "Yes and no." A paradox! Well, yes, a paradox within the bounded system of logic.
I think this is also why certain theological texts have their own flavor of language. The world "Grace", for example, is tricky to define in a secular vocabulary (and, I'd argue, within the theology of Judaism). Whatever system that language is part of is a better system for analyzing the nature of God. As you've said a few times, however, even the "best" human systems fail to totally conceptualize God. That's dogmatic - we have imperfect knowledge of human which, itself, is a means for us to profess faith and, thus, create the opportunity to experience grace.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
It's incredibly telling that this years Nobel prizes for literature and physics both went to career academics who started teaching in the 1970s.
The award has now become a lifetime participation medal for those most committed to ivory tower PMC careers with zero innovation or risk.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
I appreciate the common ground effortpost. And I sincerely wish you good fortune and sustained perseverance in your life.
But your sentence structure makes me quite certain we would not like each other. You aren't cool enough to use that many independent clauses.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10d ago
I had internalized
What does this actually mean?
This is a genuine question, however, I will admit to having a strong bias in place as well.
I think when people say "internalized" they mean that they've adopted a belief, behavior, pathology, what have you to such an extent that they aren't aware that they have it. It's "baked in" or "embedded in the subconscious." First, (again), what does that mean? Are you saying that there is a brain-within-the-brain that holds these "internalized" features?
Regardless, however, it surfaces a logical problem -- if something is "internalized" how does it every surface to the level where introspection can occur again? Your comment states that that you "[saw] them again" (meaning the internalized attitudes and behaviors) and were able to deal with them. How did this happen? Is something internalized until a new, different external stimuli bubbles it back up to the aware-brain?
My bias; I think this is all self-serving bullshit and that when people say "internalized" anything what they really mean is "I decided to just believe x for many years and now I'm kind of laundering my past behavior based on that very conscious decision." Think about it. If a guy says "I really internalized a lot of toxic behaviors" in reference to cheating on his wife / girlfriend (or hitting her), what is he actually saying? "It wasn't my fault because it was my double-secret-brain doing the thing .... but now I totally found a way to delete that firmware. I swear I'm totally fixed." How can such an assertion be taken seriously, let alone demonstrated?
There's nothing wrong with improving as a person. There's nothing wrong with changing a belief and maturing. I actively encourage this in all people regardless of life stage (something...something...catholic...love...the...sinner...something). But you have to start from a place of honesty where you admit "yeah .... I used to be a piece of shit" first and not side-step that responsibility with .... "internalization."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
Something that has always stuck with my about Scott is that he had a rough time in High School, especially with bullying, and, from time to time, this bursts forth in his posts. He's open about his bad experiences back then.
I think it's odd that any person over 35 would still have that much emotional resonance with anything short of real-deal physical / sexual abuse from childhood and adolescence. To my knowledge, Scott doesn't claim anything to that level. Charitably, it seems like he was truly a very bad fit for traditional classroom schooling. Lump extra bullying on top and that's a hard way for a Sensitive Young Man to be.
But life turned out pretty good for Scott.
Full emotional maturation is probably a rare occurrence in any given lifetime. We all have a thing that will set us off even if we can placidly endure nearly everything else. I consider my father to be perhaps the most patient man I've ever personally known. When traffic of any level is present, he turns into a howling college football coach ("ARE YOU KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW WITH THAT FUCKING LANE CHANGE!").
But Scott's "thing" puzzles me because it appears that he press his own button most of the time. This tiff with Pinker comes across like a dressed up schoolyard spat. I mean, Scott literally brings up dueling. It's like the nerdy kid finally getting his dander up with the bullying and leveling the challenge; "You and me! Basketball court at 3:30." Somewhere in the background, Aella looks at Scott in a new way, holds eye contact, and gives a shy smile while she tucks her hair behind her ear.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
I should've phrased it differently.
I'm not attempting to by Dr. Freud here. I don't think that "deep down" you or the passport bros are all fetishists. It's that I think about 50% of passport bros and would be TradHusbands already absolutely know they're fetishists and try to wrap it up in disguise as "just looking for a tradwife! It has nothing to do with my kink for asian/latina/etc. women."
It's a bit of the inverse of that old saying that if you think you might be a psychopath, you aren't one. If you are simply at the level of "I want trad values in a woman" no problem. I just think it's a close split between that and guys gooning after a real life anime girl whilst saying "trad-daddy for life"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
This is one of the more interesting comments because it points to something real from the past; the ethical treatment of sluts.
(Minor Peaky Blinders spoilers below)
In Peaky Blinders, one of the later seasons, Tommy Shelby ends up marrying a literal whore. Her name is Lizzie. Everyone knows Lizzie is a whore. I think there's some subplot about one of the other Peaky Blinder guys falling in love with her before Tommy. I can't remember (I started to lost interest in that series pretty early on).
One of the reoccurring tropes is that nobody is every allowed to call Lizzie out on her whoredom. Of course, again, everyone knows. Lizzie is completely unmarriageable and Tommy marries her for some convoluted plot reasons and because the true love of his life died in Season 1 or something. Tommy essentially transfers his own social status onto Lizzie out of a kind of charitable cause.
A more succinct version of this comes from a passing line in the movie Bull Durham. One of the baseball players is marrying Millie, a notorious female fan of the team who sleeps with all of the players. One of the other players makes a quip about Millie's promiscuity which prompts the protagonist, Crash Davis (played by Kevin Costner), to harshly respond, "Anybody talks bad about Millie, I break his neck."
One of the features of the kind of late-traditional gender role structure is a handbook for treating sluts. They don't get to operate incognito, and they're kind of unmarriagable but 1. You don't call them out on the sluttery and 2. If they do get married, it's kind of a sexual carwash for them.
This helped things work. Now, with "ethical slut" / "ethical non-monogamy" being a "thing" (as the kids say), people are forced to look at this directly and the reaction is what it has always been - sluttery is bad.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
The men are the parties that did the greater wrong, here, and it has nothing to do with the details of her consent or non-consent.
You understand that directly downstream of this would be an explicitly patriarchal society with realities as extreme as the removal of the franchise from women and re-institution of dowries and male-relative escorts at all times.
If we remove agency from women, we obligate ourselves to revert to treating them as a special class of chattel.
It's certainly a position you can take, but just be aware that you are.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
The whole other issue with passport bro-ing
The other, other issue with passport bro-ing is that it is > 50% of the time a very fetishistic orientalism.
There's nothing wrong with preferring asian / latina / africa / caribbean women, but a lot of the passport bros get off, I think, on the "wealthy" western man "domesticating" a third world woman. It's, well, icky. The female equivalent is women who really fetishize, among other things, black men. It isn't a preference or even a strong preference so much as a pathology around a mix of status and physical characteristics.
I actually think the owner of the 49ers may be in the same boat. (Back story: the billionaire owner of the San Francisco 49ers was caught in a prostitution sting in a trailer park in Ohio seeking, allegedly, a $150 prostitute). People all over the internet were posting various forms of "um, can't this guy get a $5000 / hr hooker flown to a private suite?!" Yes, he can. But the "kink" is being a billionaire who's exploiting the destitute in middle America.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16d ago
He also broke rules one and two:
- Be attractive
- Don't be unattractive
He is a balding Jabba The Hutt. When a man like that gets accused of a sex related offense, the coefficient for "throw the book at him" is 10x.
If you follow rules 1 and 2, you can do all sorts of crazy shit and people will call you "one of the gems."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16d ago
The problem is there are not enough intelligent women who would make good partners to go around.
Pair this with your (very good) intro statement:
"Women" as a collective are more monolithic than men. That is, they are more likely to cluster around certain values or ideas or, similarly people on pure instinct than men are.
And then a big problem emerges:
It is not enough to find a "traditionally" minded (however one defines it) intelligent woman because her attitudes on various things will be defined in the majority by the other women she socializes with. 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."
But then you have the eternal problem of socialization; defection. It's classic Prisoner's Dilemma with more than two parties and over repeated games; if all of the women in a social setting decide to abide by certain social rules but one or two defect from them, those defectors can gain outsized advantage to whatever their goal condition is. The classic example here is age old sluttery and slut shaming; one promiscuous woman in a group can be handled by the rest via slut-shaming. But if everyone defects into sluttery - sorry, "sexual autonomy" - no one can slut-shame anyone else but then everyone has a worse off situation.
In a "trad" marriage, the wife probably isn't going to turn into the village bicycle, but, with social media, will she slowly begin to move towards that very online style of contemporary feminism that led to the Friends of Lindsay Clancy movement (yikes!). Will she begin to think that you, yes You, husband!, are actually problematic because of your patriarchy (...that she willingly signed up for).
So to "go find a good one" is to find a create a parallel society that has reverted to rigid social structure. Some of you are nodding "Yes" and thinking of Amish communities and/or RadTrad Catholic communities in Idaho. But where do those roads lead? This is the Benedict Option redux and the conclusion is still the same; cultural amputation, however noble, doesn't actually work.
Ultimately, I don't think this changes because of policy or wishy-washy "we need to change the culture" think pieces. You could make every college in America sex segregated again, but the genie is already out of the bottle. I see a potential change coming from the active choice of certain segments of women; pro-social moms who are willing to publicly state that motherhood beats the hell out of careerism and that finding a man interested in supplying that life for you should be the point of your early 20s. That's both a radical and accessible statement for women in 2026.
LARPing TradeWife-ery on TikTok isn't going to land. Esoteric Catholic theology on the role of women bandied about by tweed-clad Catholic Neckbeards (Pints With Aquinas, looking at you) gives the ladies the "ick" because those guys look like and often truly are weirdo dorks. Even if every giga-chad on earth started to vow pure monogamy, it wouldn't matter because of the monolithic nature of women in determining social value hierarchies. 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.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
28d ago
(and there's a problem where the kids have a legal right to an education and can't be left out of school permanently)
Y tho?
Universal K-12 education is, in the West, only a reality since the end of World War 2 at the earliest. Even still, my parents (late 1940s births) easily recall multiple classmates dropping out at various times in high school to start working (usually a family small business like a restaurant).
Articles like this one also show that somewhere between 25-50% of kids who are "graduating" aren't anywhere near where a High School Graduate of, say, 1965 would be in terms of ability across all subjects.
So why the continued farce and the presumption that there is some sort of "right" to ~12-14 years of education on the state's dime?
One of the more common arguments I hear is that "I don't want to live around stupid people." But, again, everyone already does unless you're smart and financially productive enough to buy your way into a non-stupids-allowed community. A HS diploma (or, for that matter, a bachelors, masters, or PhD) doesn't mean a person is somehow immune to making bad personal choices and/or horrific anti-social choices. "moRe EduCaySHun!" Is one of those meaningless battle shouts of the emotion-first sort who earnestly meant "black lives matter!" during 2020 and "trust the science!" .... also in 2020.
Related, most of the meta-studies on educational outcomes I've read boil down to the idea that once a school is past a basic threshold of quality (i.e. no metal detectors, not a common location for police calls etc.) that most of the difference in outcomes is explained by parental involvement in a child's education. Again, the NHJ story does a great job of pointing out that NHJ checked out of her own child's education for a decade. Contrast that to the cosmopolitan PMC class common meme experience of "Dad would yell at me over Algebra homework every night in 8th grade, lulz."
Most "right to education" arguments, imho, boil down to the same logical fallacy - no one is preventing you from educating your own child. The "right to education" people ask for is "the right to outsource educating my child to the state (which, by extension, means socializing the bill for it as well)." Throw in the truly evil organizations that are Teachers Unions and you have the recipe for a perverted race to the bottom.
A return to homes-school-plus style education has knock on effects for society as well. Historically, a lot of the "one room schoolhouse" establishments were provided out of necessity through collective action of the locals. It gave the kids an education, and the parents a day care center while they focused on the arduous labor of an agrarian life. Furthermore, the social stakes were much higher. The children were going to school with the children of their neighbors. If a kid was being disruptive, the whole town would know and the parenting abilities of the family would be drawn into question. The kids knew, explicitly, that behaving well around their peers was necessary for social and even physical survival in the future. If Little Timmy was a terror in the 5th grade, he might not find the loan waiting for him after a bad harvest.
While I'm not advocating for such a harsh RETVRN to highly constrained social systems I am, as always, advocating for a much more explicit and consequence heavy form of pro-social behavioral forming. This is why, elsewhere, I've advocated for a soft return to bullying. When we don't shape the behavior of kids, we do them no favors. They grow up maladjusted and end up dead or incarcerated. Not kicking a kid out of 6th grade for being out of control isn't a tender mercy, it's just a rolling forward of social debt that gets paid out on the floor of a NYC subway car (Daniel Penny reference, too lazy to direct link).
A "basic right" to education creates the incentive to lie to children, the same way a "basic right" to healthcare creates the incentive to lie to the unhealthy. As soon as you guarantee something, taking it away becomes an injustice. Better to have an earned-reward system, even if that earning is such a basic threshold that not clearing it is an obvious sign of social malignancy.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
A personal anecdote that lines up with the timing.
As part of a contract I'm on, I had to do some interviews with various CEOs of small / mid-size businesses. Several were Indian-American and one was very much an Indian-Who-Now-Lives-In-America.
The Indian-American CEOs were very much like all of the other CEOs (largely white, a few asian-americans, none block, one mixed white-hispanic. Probably 70/30 male-female).
The Indian-Who-Now-Lives-In-America CEO was repeatedly lying about all of his financials. I know this because as part of this contract, we get to review the financials of all these companies. That's how fucking strange this experience was. We're not at the beginning of the engagement. We've been around for a little more than a month. The NDAs and statements of work were signed, sealed, delivered way before all of that. This CEO - all of the CEOs - know that we've been reviewing financials and other docs and now it's interviews.
And he would just make shit up.
"Yes, that client will deliver us between $350,000 and $500,000 this year"
Billed services thus far in 2026: $64k
"We've got a 100% renewal rate on contracts. No cancellations."
25% annual customer churn. It's a problem
"[Redacted large corp] Is a client. Yes"
Fucking NOPE.
We confronted him about this, gently, during the interview process. We'd point to printouts and highlight that what he was saying didn't match their documented (and audited) numbers.
"Yes, well, I think maybe these are outdated reports"
Just a constant denial of reality.
The company is a little shaky, but is making real money. Like, somehow, this CEO was doing more or less ok. *
This is "Izzat." The Motte had a discussion about it a while ago and there's a bunch of online discourse about it. This CEO was going to say whatever he needed to say in the moment to "win" the interview. Presenting your company as amazingly awesome is the whole point, the facts be damned.
And this is what, I think, the online racists Heritage Americans are reacting to so viscerally. It's not the skin tone or melanin content, but the signaling of a culture (not the whole culture, of course) that is so incompatible with western judeo-christian social ethics. You don't see the same hate (or, do you?) for Asians in, say, the Bay Area because those ancient Confucian-influenced ethics line up a lot better with western ones.
It's not "the thing" that's being despised, but the the other thing that "the thing" points to. Hyderbad, Texas isn't bad because Texas should be only be white, it's bad because Hyderabad is awful because of these cultural specifics.
- Note: The actual exchange was, admittedly, far more nuanced. I didn't want to write it all out to risk losing the illustrative point. The actual fabrications were much more sly and he could - and did - "save face" by throwing together some shaky psuedo-logic on why the numbers weren't matching, but, the point remains. Interestingly, he asked us, randomly, for an "all in" valuation of his company so he could "test the markets appetite for a buy" (by which I think he meant acquisition). That was, in many ways, the craziest thing he said because it revealed he had zero understanding of what we're doing and why.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2mo ago
turboautist
Please refrain from using slurs
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2mo ago
Also unironically -
A big part of the "founding situation" of The Motte was over-modding / policing of even the lightest of slurs. "Foid" is exactly one of those. It's not even a slur so much as a derogatory Very Online meme / shorthand.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2mo ago
They want to apply to live in cool apartments in hip neighborhoods and receive heavily discounted rent because they’re awesome.
The two necessary elements of a new, hip neighorhood are 1. Fake laptop job young women 2. Just slightly older men (with or without fake job, but with job) that can afford to take them out on dates to the hip new spots in the hip new neighborhood.
Gentrification is a market based collective action method of filtering for mate fitness. Trendy NYC/LA/Chicago/Dallas is the Serengeti.
San Francisco is disqualified. Because of the gayness.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2mo ago
labia hypertrophy
These burning man synthwave bands are getting a little out of pocket with their names.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2mo ago
That shit already free, nigga.
I lol'ed.
And I agree, which brings up kind of a bigger, spookier question;
What does the DSA actually want if the shit already free?
And this is where I take them at face value. I think they truly do want heavy handed gov't redistribution. Does your brokerage account have more than $1mm in it? Great, every dollar over $1mm goes into someone else's account directly until we all "balance" out.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2mo ago
I didn't realise we were running a DEI program to increase right-wing representation in tribal brainrot here.
This is just such a reddit-y thing to say. The sarcastic, passive voice phrasing flowing into the boo outgroup "brainrot" / "muslce mommy" comment.
I'd encourage you to say what you mean. If I had to take a shot at it, I think it's something like:
"Using terms like 'foid' doesn't help with discourse because they come pre-loaded with a heavily meme'd and polemic connotation. It makes the point any author is trying to make more difficult to honestly engage with because readers who are predisposed to agree will chuckle at the terminology and let shaky analysis slide, while those predisposed to disagree will discount perhaps valid evidence too quickly."
But maybe I'm wrong here?
I mean, I don't disagree with your diagnosis.
I am eternal optimist. Which makes me a fool, probably. I suppose I'll die smiling.
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