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.
2hr ago
I'll respond in more detail later
I await your thoughts, not a copypasta of a chinese forum.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2hr ago
Okay, so we actually agree on more than we disagree on. And we're probably 99.9999% aligned on the current state of affairs.
The difference is just in the prognosis of the outcome.
I'll combine these three things from your last post:
Yes, that's why I said it's the "training montage" part. They're not there yet, but they're fucking grinding to get there. They have a CATOBAR carrier to git gud on, they'll soon have more. Eventually they'll have nuclear powered ones so they can learn that too. There in the middle of the "decades of trial and error" part,
while the Chinese are hitting new deadlift PRs every month (still smaller than us, but growing!) and drinking a river of creatine.
They're slowly expanding their global base network. Their recent "totally not practicing to cut Taiwan off" drills continue to expand.
Time and timing are the big issues here. We've all heard the 2027 deadline / prediction for shit popping off. I don't really think it matters if that's actually 2026, 2028, 2030. But I think it's true that the CCP has a closing window of opportunity before (a) They experience something live COVID again (b) Power struggle at the top after Xi dies or (c) The demographic wave breaks and they actually HARD lose for another century. Truly, I think it's no later than 2035 (that's stretching it) before CCP has to shit or get off the planet.
Will their eye of the tiger training montage be complete in that amount of time? I'd argue no. Again, multiple decades of naval experience really are necessary. Maybe you can shave it down to 20 years starting from .... 2009? 2013? But I don't think you can just fuck around and find out how to do large scale amphibious work in 5 - 10 years.
Note to the Mods (@amadan, just tagging you off the top of my head) -- can we self-submit this as a "understanding actually developed out of some initial rounds of shouting" award?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14hr ago
There's a pretty large difference between production of new combat systems and experiencing in highly complex naval operations in combat.
China hasn't done the latter since 1979. Even basic seamanship atrophies quickly without constant training and re-training. Ask the U.S. Navy's 7th fleet.
Put another way, why do you think basically every INDOPACOM leader sounds like they're shitting their pants in interviews and press releases?
Aquilino and Paparo - both aviators, by the way - mostly make noise about the issues of sustainment in the event of a crisis with taiwan. Amateurs talk about strategy, professional talk about logistics. The biggest issue is that China is like, really far away and shit. Our sealift capabilities plus ammunition, refit, maintenance, repair in theatre isn't enough to keep pace when PLAN has all of their naval industry right there. In strict force-on-force, the US is still winning, hands down. The problem, again, is when timetables stretch.
But that's just talking about a hypothetical right off the coast of mainland China. In terms of true ocean going naval fore projection, what has China done more than park a flotilla in the Gulf of Aden (after getting lost one time, lol) and then doing weird joint floats with the Russians sorta-kinda near Japan?
Running a truly global Naval force is shit crazy expensive, hyper complex, and requires a training pipeline and practice that you have to develop through decades of trial and error. Human capital, culture, and experience still matter far more than sleek new hulls and neato weapons.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17hr ago
Yeah, I'm not going to bite.
"But muh state capacity!" is just another variety of cope that technocrat loving Lee Kuan Yew fanboys use to hand wave away pesky little things like civil liberties, the concept of federalism, and actual free markets. "State direct capitalism can totally work, man." There's a joke in here about how just a little, teeny bit of authoritarianism will be really good for us, like a teaspoon of arsenic to boost the immune system.
Even when the government directly orders something, it's just broadcasting goals which many smaller governments try to reach in many different ways. Once an effective method is found, the people behind the effective method are promoted to try to implement it elsewhere while new competitions are started.
I wonder if this leads to gamification of easy to quantify objectives like GDP, but fails for other things, like, I don't know, food safety.
From this article and interview:
Tension between central and local governments always exists, and there’s really never been a coherent plan to address these issues. In that sense, food safety is a bellwether for policy in China: If they can solve the coordination issues there, they’ll be able to deal with other problems like environmental protection, because they all boil down to this central/local divide and how to bridge it.
Coordination problems! Ah, so easy to fix, those.
Chinese demographics don't matter
All lives demographics matter. As does geography. My geopolitical worldview and formula is pretty much demographics + geographic determinism / naval warfighting and sustainment ability. China's prospects in all three of those are ... suboptimal.
Also from the article I linked to above:
That comes down to how food is produced in China. You have somewhere between 200 million and 300 million farmers, each operating on small farms, say half a hectare. By the time a food gets to a processing center, or by the time of its manufacture, it’s already gone through multiple levels: from farm to trader, from small trader to a larger firm with complicated logistics, up to major provincial wholesale markets, and from there across the entire country.
200 to 300 million small scale farmers who haven't leveled up meaningfully since maybe the 1950s.
Hey, but they do have cool lookin' EVs.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
An addendum:
White, appalachian young men and women date, have children, and even sometimes marry latino / black spouses with enough regularity that nobody outside of the deepest hollers really cares (although, strangely, they'll still use racial slurs).
This is not the case with Indians. Furthermore, this isn't just an availability bias. The small cities on the edges of Appalachia are starting to see Indian transplants.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
They have a much more potent economic model
Define "potent"? GDP growth? Per Capita / PPP? If we're talking economics, your terms should be defined and quantitative.
They then hyper focus that pooled capital towards very unprofitable ventures
So they're more "potent" (however that is defined) by generating a negative return on investment? That doesn't make any sense. To be as charitable as possible, perhaps you mean the investments are high CAPEX and have long cycles towards net ROI benefit? If they are by definition unprofitable, they are by definition bad investments that will guarantee that the given industry fails.
While this model is not particularly pleasant for the individuals involved, it is highly competitive on the national scale.
You have to mean international scale, right?
This post is so poorly written and argument by assertion that I debated even posting a reply. But, I think the spirit of the Motte is often best exemplified by being hyper charitable to the other side, steelmaning poor arguments, and then presenting the opposite view.
My argument against China is the theses in The Great Demographic Reversal combined with an obvious failure mode of the Chinese tech innovation system.
The TLDR, for brevity:
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China's demographics SUCK. They're going to have more olds than they know what to do with. The one child policy was a disaster. People aren't having children together now. And there's a semi-nomadic horde of about 50 - 100 million men who work seasonal migrant jobs from place to place. Their middle class isn't nearly large enough.
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This means that China has no choice but to rigidly control their population. But at their scale, that's incredibly expensive to do. The social credit score system is an experiment; can we pay one half of our population to spy on the other half, and then use computers to spy on the first half? In a perverse irony, China, that does not have nearly the same social security safety net that the US does, is perhaps (the budgets are secret) spending more to not have one!
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Technology wise, the Chinese model has been to find / steal western tech, reverse engineer it to the best of their ability, and re-deploy. People can quibble over if this is real innovation or not, the extent to which China has produced any new and meaningful "inventions" but it doesn't matter. This style of technological management eschews what has been the real engine of tech development over millenia; lots of compounding, happy accidents shared across a large population. An interesting quirk of history is that from about 800 - 1200, the Muslim world of MENA was the most scientifically advanced on the planet. But they fell behind technologically; they knew how stuffed worked and were very smart, but lacked the infrastructure to actually build and disperse scientific knowledge into material things that normies could use to improve their life. Starting at about 1200, Europe starts to overtake in both science and tech because they deploy tech more broadly, and science and tech have a mutually re-inforcing feedback structure.
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Chinese GDP per capita is about $15k. Even with the CCP trying to shit out new tech as fast as it can, most of their own people can't really afford it. Secondly, most of their people don't have a cultural aptitude for tinkering, exploring, developing in a truly creative sense. When the high esteem strategy in life is to grind 996, be an excellent bureaucrat, and a cold bug person, you're not going to get weirdo genius inventors and you're especially not going to get weird genuis asshole corporate leaders --- Jobs, Musk, Bezos, Gates et al would've been hammered into shit in childhood in China because they're non-conformity is off the charts. Jack Ma is the only homegrown Chinese "visionary" who didn't leave, and he was either some sort of plant by the CCP or became a permanent political prisoner because he did a good job and built a compelling tech company.
The tension at the core of all Chinese history is balancing a pathological need for control of a giant population and a giant geography against the economic growth potential of ceding some control. If the CCP let their people just do their thing, I would be a lot more worried about a Chinese Century because of the sheer numbers. But the CCP has not only chosen, but accelerated toward clamping down harder and "controlling" more.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
haven't seen either, but even watching this clip from the latter
Whoa! Yeah. I can't exactly put it into words but it's very palpable. I feel like I'm watching something that hasn't been fully mastered or edited yet. There isn't that Cinema "filter" on it that makes my brain go "Oh, cool, movies!"
It's a good culture war post because it demands a better answer than "This is why we need shame back in society!"
First, let's look at the opposite side of the coin; Men. The equivalent of sex work for men is violence. The Bonnie Blue equivalent is probably a professional athlete but, as many posters downthread pointed out, Bonnie Blue is the top 0.0001%. The median is truck stop stripper, part-times OnlyFans'er, club bottle girl who gets groped every weekend. For men? That's something like strip club bouncer, semipro MMA fighter, and Marine Corps Infantry Lance Corporal (no I am not joking). They're paid something like 40% of the median wage (often less) to risk maiming and death. Society views them mostly as disposable and, in cases like the MMA fighter, perhaps, kind of a weirdo. The USMC infantry vet gets some "thank you for your service!" awkwardness at times, the free breakfasts on veterans day, and a good rate from USAA, but then has to deal with the VA for his horrible migraines, busted knees and hips, and/or panic attacks.
And yet I, and many others like me, absolutely still see military service as a great job choice, be it temporary or career. And I see being a semi-pro MMA fighter as probably not something you should bank on working out (like NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB) but, if you want to do it for some time because you love it, go right ahead. Strip club bouncer, eh, I've got some personal issues with that (related: Today is a Holy Day of Obligation, everyone make to get to mass). But let's just smooth out that rough edge and say bouncer at a nightclub. From me, you get a shrug - probably not a career, but if the cash is good for now, take it. Work on a plan to build a different and better career.
The point is is that male violence as a "method of employ" is absolutely permissible (so long as the employ itself isn't illegal; gangs, mafia, etc.) And sex work as a method of employ is not. Because sex is a special category of activity that is 1) at the core of the basic political unit, the family and b) the only thing (for now, sigh) that results in the continuation of the species. It's too socially valuable to be commoditized. That's my argument against sex work. You, a young woman, are selling yourself short and also engaging in some seriously anti-social and socially damaging activities even if it's just pictures of your unclad self on OnlyFans. And this is, in no small part, because of the power law issue other commentators posted.
If Bonnie Blue wants to go out do all of these disgusting things for money, that's really up to her. She isn't forcing these men to do it with (to?) her. They are also making their own slimeball choices. But then you have the literally millions of young girls who get into stripping, porn (traditional), and onlyfans. They do it because "sex is fun!" (TM) and "no one should judge you!" It's a bill of goods underneath a bridge I have for sale. Soon enough, these totally normal girls realize holy shit this is not for me, and nope out of there. But there's a long distance between how those girls are going to feel versus how the guy who got into his first bouncer-fight at the club felt. To me, there is an intrinsic, basic human reason for that (see above). And those that promote "sexual self-expression" (what in the hell is even that?) are promoting a kind of spirital semi-suicide under the satanic word -"fun."
Addendum - to close the loop on male violence jobs.
These kind of jobs aren't good for the long term. Even the most badass Navy SEAL is retired by 45 at the latest, and that's an outlier. Unlike sex work, as well, they can all be done - even as a FULL career - without getting to the point of interpersonal violence. A lot of bouncing is standing around looking intimidating (and vomiting girls). If you joined the military in 1980, there was a not so bad shot you could've done 20 years without ever actually being in combat (deploying is different than combat, remember).
Sports, especially MMA, I will admit, are a little different. The NFL CTE "scandal" revealed how a lot of guys were actually destroying themselves, unknowingly, for decades. I suppose my argument might fall down a little here but I'll weasel out of it a little by saying that in sports no one is actually trying to kill the other person.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
The original "fake flub" was the infamous Janet Jackson boob slip at the superbowl.
- Timberlake very clearly is on a cue to reach-over-and-pull. There's no other action (he wasn't turning to, like, dip her or something).
- She had on nipple jewelry so that it wasn't too much as literally millions of children would be watching.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
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It is wild that vinyl, tapes, and CDs were physical artifacts that still had "git branching hell" syndrome. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I suppose.
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I have a 4k TV and sometimes "4k" really does look better, and other times it doesn't. For a while, I was assuming that some sort of compression algorithm behind YouTube was the culprit. A friend suggests that the 60 FPS versions are what I see as better, not the resolution. I am not an A/V-phile. What's "real" 4k versus not? Do I really get more if its 60 FPS. Are there .... more FPS out there?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
How much, and I'm requesting you express it quantitatively, more happy does this make you in terms of whole of life satisfaction than an ipod with an aux cord, or a collection of CDs?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
I think you're right.
This sets up a whole other piece about how they were hoodwinked into it. Probably something about the false promises being hard to see before 2008, as well as a lot more social pressure from Boomers to conform.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
The entire idea of "disposable" income is, to me, the biggest mismatch between Boomers and today. We all agree on the "necessary" expenditures; housing, food, basic clothing, and utilities. Then, we have the modern additions to utilities; internet and cell service. It is not even possible for me to even search for a job if I don't have one or both of these things. Yes, yes, economists will tell you that the relative value or marginal utility or whatever of a cell phone is so much better than land line service in the 1970s. But I'm paying for it because I have to.
Then, however, we have things like clothing, consumer electronics, restaurants, and "cheap" entertainment (subscriptions). These seem basic but stack up and stack up in recursive ways (like I mentioned above) that aren't captured in traditional methods of inflation. Are these truly optional goods that I am choosing to spend on?
"Well sorry, snowflake" Bruno the Boomer says, "Maybe in stead of watching your TikyToks and Netflixes, you should just read a book!"
And Bruno the Boomer is right in that specific circumstance. These are, purely speaking, "optional" purchases. But it leads to much trickier problem: What am I supposed to do with my time if the jump between "basic" living and comfortable spending is so high? Incentives matter. You can find many interesting graphs out there that show how, in some cities in the US and many countries in Europe, there exist harsh tax cliffs that _DIS_incentivize making more money. If I lose $10,000 in benefits after increasing my income by less than $10,000, I've given myself a pay cut by earning more (yes that sentence is valid).
This same logic applies to marginal consumption and disposable income. If I can pay for all of my basic necessities, but leveling up to dinner out once or twice a week, guilt free streaming service subscriptions, a new-ish but not top of the line car, and a couple home goods (big couch, whatever) necessitates another $15,000k in annual income (on which I will be taxed substantially) .... then why even bother? Cheap beer, free or pirated porn movies and YouTube clips can sustain my entertainment needs and living in a shitty apartment is .... what all of my friends do. People are being asked not to take the next step on a steep trail, but to leap across a valley of income for ... marginal benefit.
And I think this is the common cause behind things like quiet quitting, the massive rise in the permanently non-working (disabled and NEETs etc.), inceldom, and the various flavors of nomadic forever-festival going weirdos, permanent expats, and semi-grifter YouTubers. It's interesting that I posted a top level comment on Shagbark earlier this week. Being a semi-bum in 2025 does seem to have roughly the same life satisfaction of every group up to about the top 20% income. And this is because we've eliminated real poverty -- not having enough to eat, being so unstable in housing that death from exposure might actually be on the menu.
Was consumerism really so different in years past? YesChad.jpeg. People forget that real, true poverty did exist, at least in pockets of the US, well into the 1970s. In extremely infrastructure-isolated places, it persisted even longer. After WW2, the consumer economy actually functioned as a compounding system for people to get out of poverty. Buying an electric oven meant a household was saving meaningful time and effort. The ever increasing reliability of cars (while maintaining price relative to inflation) meant people could get to and from work with high confidence - and, therefore, earn more. A television meant actual awareness of the outside world and a source of information that could lead to better decision making. A telephone allowed for the creation and sustainment of social relationships and communities outside of face to face interaction, which also meant the ability to generate more business relationships (i.e. find new jobs, find local customers etc.).
Today, my new oven has fun little chimes when it pre-heats. It's also more energy efficient (so I am told). New trucks are less reliable because of fuel emission fuckery and mostly cost more because the seats are heated and my phone connects to the radio for some fucking reason. My TV has a resolution I can't comprehend, with unlimited semi-AI slop available for consumption. It stays off unless sports are on. And my telephone, which lives in my pocket, mostly harasses me with beeps and dings to remind me to interact with apps so that my data can be sold to hedge funds.
Consumerism, today, has inverted its relationship with consumers. Before, consumer level products really did make your life better. Today, consumer products are like carnival rides; it's fun for a while and only costs a few dollars. It doesn't improve my life.
The Vibecession, to me, is a reaction to some harsh nonlinearities that have developed over the past 40 years. Before, you might never get into the upper class, but you could see your life improve just a bit almost every year. Now, we're asking kids exiting college (which didn't teach them anything and saddled them with debt) to live like a monk for 10 - 15 years so that, on the other side, they can move into a home they still can't afford. In the interim, they can enjoy consumer products that help dull this drudgery, but don't act as compounders. Who in the hell would take this deal?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7d ago
And I can see where people may be coming from on that, in that the downsides of discipline - the consequences of overdiscipline - are dramatic and immediate. Too much harshness leaves people shattered on the spot. The downsides of nurturing, though - the consequences of overnurturing - are comparatively dull and delayed.
I like this framing because I think it highlights just how pernicious overnurturing is.
Overdiscipline is easy to spot. We call it abuse. If I steal from the cookie jar and my mother gives me a sharp crack about the ear, that's discipline - perhaps harsh and a bit pre-1972, but still within the acceptable definition of discipline. If, however, she wails on me with a wooden spoon for 10 minutes, that's abuse.
Grown up abuse is often called hazing. If I am at Marine Corps boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina and I screw up my locker inspection, the Senior Drill Instructor may respond by making me do pushups for some amount of time or repetitions. Discipline. If he throws the locker at me, that's hazing (if it seriously injures me, that's actually illegal, but it'll be covered up.)
Abuse or hazing, that it is fairly easy to draw the line makes it easier to manage, imho.
Not so with the over-nurturing. Returning to the cookie jar example, after my mother has caught me red handed, she takes 15 minutes to "gentle parent" me about how stealing is wrong because it makes other people sad and that too many cookies might make my tummy hurt and she knows I just like cookies, which is great, but right now we (why are we using the plural all of a sudden?) just can't have any cookies. Now, I don't even know if I did anything wrong. I don't know if I was just subjected to that ... event ... arbitrarily or in response to something I did directly.
Fast forward the tape and now I'm being arrested because I stole a couple doze iPhones with my friends from the mall. The cop is placing me into the back of his squad car because ... why? I wanted the iPhones so I took them. I'm not thinking about Apple, Inc. or the employees at the store because nobody (like, for instance, my mother) ever told me to do that much less associated direct consequences with the failure to do that. It's as if the entire concept of causality has been so watered down in my brain that I am an observer of my own actions instead of their source.
Sound familiar?
Every police interaction video online where the person who is obviously resisting arrest shouts "I didn't no nothin!" is, perhaps, a person who literally cannot associate their actions through time with a chain of causality. If it weren't so socially destructive, I'd feel bad for them -- like they're forced to watch a movie of their own life that's nothing but jump cuts.
Overdiscipline can lead to a damage deficit that may take years for a person to overcome. Extreme enough and it may never be totally overcome. But there is still the potential to overcome it and people will have the ability to work to do that. With overnurturing, it seems to me, they are utterly robbed of that ability to overcome. It's a complete short-changing of some core developmental pathways that turn children into adolescents into young adults that lack even the vague concept that they have control over their own actions which then influence the outcome of life and circumstance around them. If I drop you into the middle of a Japanese accounting firm and tell you to reconcile the balance sheet of Hashimori Corp in 90 minutes, you're going to laugh, throw up your hands, and just kind of let the world roll over you. You don't even have a sense for where or how to begin because you have zero contextual history or familiarity with this environment.
And that's a non-trivial part of younger millenials, Gen-Z, and whatever laboratory goo babies follow after them.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8d ago
I'd pay good American greenbacks for that effortpost! (Not really, but I still encourage you to write it)
In your mind, what are the things people miss when thinking specifically about the "full remote white collar work, live rural" fantasy. I've had a number of friends who've done this but only to the fringes of exurbs or small cities (10k - 50k population). I don't yet know someone who is literally living the rural J.D. Salinger life way off in remote West Virginia, Montana, West Texas.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8d ago
You're breaking your back tilling a field that will not bring forth the harvest.
You must understand that I am directly disagreeing with this. "The harvest" is that you will experience the joy of parenthood even in such trying circumstances. You will experience profound love. That's it. That's the point.
You don't believe that people who are already bad parents, and are only made more resentful when saddled with a child who will remain a toddler for decades, exist?
I do believe they exist. I also believe there are awful parents of amazing children who go on to do wonderful things for all of society. Why should parents being bad only come into play when talking about a disabled child? Bad parents are bad parents period and should be called out as such. Think about what you're saying here; "Oh, these parents are so bad that we should kill a child so that they don't have a tough time of it."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
Even the online world is a very, very small place.
Any interest in nudging him towards looking at The Motte? If nothing else, he's going to have an interesting perspective on, well, everything.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
Unfortunately, I think Shagbark's threshold for "high rent" is quite extreme. It seems like anything over about $600 / month is out of the question.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
-- certainly not the scolding types gloating about talking down to their transphobic uncle at thanksgiving.
This made the rounds on my Xwitter feed. I was wondering if it was going to show up here as well.
This can't be earnest, right? Like, this is some sort of meta-trolling post-irony in-joke account. Pepe The Frog but for weirdo progressive women to chortle about while wearing Pussy hats, right?
If you spoke to another adult like this in a corporate setting, even the most blue-haired of HR reps would have a meeting invite waiting for you by the time you got back to your desk. In a social setting, this would be suicidal, unless, as I said, you're actually just trolling a person in your outgroup for the lulz.
Alright, I found her on the White Women for Kamala Zoom Call. Here, she comes across a lot more normal - though still grating - HR style corpo speak. Healthy doses of progressive self-flagellation but nothing beyond the pale. This makes me think her gentle parenting schtick is just that; schtick.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
productive lives
Small to zero.
enriching
Anywhere from colossal to infinite.
Actual true story: my first best friend in childhood had something like severe downs syndrome. It wasn't actually downs but something very specific and rare. Her verbal ability was close to zero but because of kid brain plasticity or whatever, I could figure her out better than anyone besides her parents. We didn't have conversations per se, but we emoted, we played, we had a friendship. Around the time I was 12 or so, she and her family moved away.
I kept in touch with her and her family for 20+ years until she died very tragically and unexpectedly. My entire life was made better by knowing her and being her friend.
This is a common story for all special needs / developmentally disabled / retarded kids' family and friends. While measuring life quality in net GDP contribution is, charitably, overly metric based, imho, many to all of these kind of people have outsized contribution in terms of joy, fellow felling, and the nurturing of higher virtue emotions in others.
"But, but, but!" some will say, "Raising special needs kids is actually so fucking hard on the parents! You got to go home every day and didn't have to deal with the screaming fits and toilet mishaps etc." The challenges are indeed unique (and, on a practical level, I believe in generous subsidies for families dealing with them), I believe that any family who puts in the effort will find the rewards substantial. And the families who decide to murder cancel the body and soul in utero will, maybe, have a somewhat materially more pleasant life at the expense of another human's entire existence.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
Good recommendations for an Einstein biography?
I realized, over Thanksgiving, that all I know about Einstein is second order stuff and, even that, vaguely. General vs special relativity. The atom bomb. He has bad at math in grade school (allegedly).
So, Mottizens, can you point me in the direction of a biography that does a good job and not a hagiography of "the smartest dude who ever smarted?"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10d ago
Was 100% thinking of the island.
Also you might like this ArcGis story map about the Mon Valley @Rov_Scam
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10d ago
Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die
"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."
Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I'm going to try to combine a culture war style post and an "interesting
person" post. We've had a few of these "interesting person" posts, with this
one
being one of the most upvoted posts all time. Hat tip to @naraburns. The good
news is that I'll be using a real, live very online person that we can all
directly reference instead of an example from my own life.
And that person is Shagbark.
Shagbark is a twitter personality I stumbled across several years ago by accident. Sometimes, you gotta love the algo. In about the last year, he's developed a legitimate following. 52,000 followers as of this morning. I believe 50k is the "famous on twitter" threshold.
Shagbark is eclectic to say the least. I could try to spin a narrative, but I think it's more impactful to go with the bullets:
- Early to mid 30s
- Coast Guard Veteran
- Homeless for, IIRC, 8 years - by choice.
- Devout Catholic (is he a Trad though? This is a point of controversy)
- More or less a self-confessed luddite or neo-luddite. Hates not only AI, smartphones, and the usual list of "bad" modern technology, but also airplanes, cars, and objectively good modern building advancements like air conditioning.
- A New York State hypernationalist. Specifically, very far upstate New York around areas like Plattsburgh and Messina. See this tweet about upstate NY
- (Related to the above) Has a penchant for desolation. Often writes poetically about the harsh beauty of derelict old steel towns (Utica) and little, out of the way villages no one has a reason to go to (Elko, Nevada).
- Is married to a woman and, of late, has a child. The woman has her own twitter and is proudly undocumented. Note that she is not an immigrant, but, from what I can tell, part of a line of weird conservo-hippie-anarchists. Her parents never got her a social security card.
Part of Shagbark's rise was due to his wife. I searched for, briefly, but cannot find the tweet exchange where in an young(ish) Asian woman from San Francisco made fun of Shagbark's wife's appearance. Paraphrasing, she said something along the lines of "Good news if you're a weirdo NEET; you can still get married if you're okay with your wife looking like this." Shagbark demonstrated some knowledge of the game by not directly replying and letting his defenders go after the bug lady. Not only did it work, but some rather large accounts came out of the woodwork to do it. Shagbark's signal was boosted and he now, by his own account, makes most of his money off of twitter monetization. On this last point, I am a bit skeptical; as a USCG vet, he's entitled to a pretty hefty basket of goodies that can go a long ways to supporting his bohemian lifestyle.
In sum, Shagbark is a technology hating somewhat-trad Catholic who LARPs as a kind of beatnik nomad / homesteader / flaneur / dirtbag entrepreneur and ... makes most of his income writing on Twitter and Substack. Contradictions abound, yet I cannot help think he does have genuine intent. This is not some multi-levels of irony deep parody or satire account. This is a real human, with real emotions, and many of them are unsupervised.
The Culture War Angle
Recently, Shagbark has been going through a bit of a crisis. After having his child, he realized that he couldn't actually raise her in a dilapidated shack in the New York hinterlands. He's now considering a move elsewhere. The suburbs are a non-starter (cars and soullessness) but any major metro is too expensive both in terms of money and ideological selling-out. So, he's started to look at old busted up cities that could be cheap to live in. His list, from this tweet is:
Utica, Las Vegas, El Paso, STL, Montreal, St John's NL, Brownsville, Yuma, Barstow, Ojinaga, Fargo, Houma, Wheeling, Atlantic City.
Personally, I'm hoping he ends up in Wheeling, WV. I've lived close enough to it to know that parts of it are truly hellscapes. I'm looking forward to the plot arc where Shagbark becomes a bizzaro Catholic-Luddite Harvey Milk advocating for the return of coal burning fireplaces to Wheeling.
Stemming from this look at cities, Shagbark wrote this tweet. The primary point of it is covered well in the second paragraph:
There is nowhere for a Thinking Man to "land" anymore. Even the cities are largely voids of anything resembling satisfying discourse -- largely because in those cities, rents are so high people now have to WORK more than they READ. You simply cannot live as a "starving artist" in cities where the median rent is $2k-3k/mo.
Shagbark bemoans that a bunch of pseudo intellectuals cannot find a cheap
neighborhood to be unemployed in yet still meet up for beer, cigarettes, and
High Quality Discourse About Subjects of Great Import. Now, I've been in enough
bars around the country in all kinds of different cities and towns to know
, sadly, exactly what Shagbark is envisioning. A bunch of weirdos sit around,
nursing beers and cheap cocktails, shooting off their malformed opinions about
random topics and letting the alcohol smooth out the edges. When you first
encounter this in your 20s, as a brainy nerd, you think it's the coolest thing
ever. After you round the corner into your 30s, you realize that it's a lot of
talking in circles and well disguised emotional commiseration. Real
intellectual work is done via writing because it forces you to state what you
mean and the build an argument and evidence around it. You discover your own
weaknesses, assumptions, holes. You often end up writing a totally different
thing that you set out to, which, just as often, is a good thing. You've dug
through the dirt and mud and found gold.
Pontificating in a bar is not this. It feels like it the way that LLMs feel like you're chatting with a human. But even a momentary bout of self-awareness dispels the idea that you're really doing the thing. We get drunk and debate in bars to form and sustain relationships of various sorts. We're not there to write the next Tractatus.
Obviously, you can tell I'm thinking of The Motte now. Part of what sustains this site is a culture of effortposts and even effortful comments. I believe most of our AAQCs are responses to topline posts, not the original screeds themselves. If you want to spout off about something random, that's what the Sunday thread is for. Mostly, I think, it works. As the holder of both several AAQCs and multiple temporary bans, I can say that most of the time if there is a "break down" it's because of the personal irresponsibility of individual posters, not something systemic or cultural.
The question I am left with is, however, what if Shagbark got his wish and found a cheap, "beautifully depressed" minor city with a magical bar full of ... Mottizens! Would this actually work or would most of us, being Turbo Autists, shut down in public and let this drunken HippyCath dominate the space? Would there be verbal equivalents of AAQCs or would it all devolve into drunken shouting before anyone got to their second section heading?
Stated plainly; is verbal discussion about any topic actually a road to productive work on that topic, or is writing absolutely better? The obvious exception is when the subject is a specific interpersonal relationship. You talk to your wife/husband/*-friend about your relationship, you don't write markdown formatted posts about it.
Following on that, is Shagbark a greek hero; doomed to horrific failure specifically in the case that he wins. If Shagbark's Booze Lair opens in Houma or St. Louis or Utica, will he find out he's simply created a flophouse for bums instead of a watering hole for this generations Sartres and Hans Uns Von Balthasars?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23d ago
Modern American commentators(like most of this forum) tend to forget how heavily Catholic American religiosity would have been in the 50’s
Yup. It definitely tripped me out when, several years ago, my Dad told me about Fulton Sheen's radio show and how you could find a national broadcast of the rosary at least once a week.
I have also heard anecdotes that some of the midwest catholic strongholds (Cincinnati in particular) had things like fish in public schools on Fridays in Lent. Imagine the blowup that would have today.
Mostly this falls into the category of "You can't hate journalists enough."
Bruh.
There's plenty to disagree with with Hanania, but jumping straight to "literal [kid fucker] hitler!" isn't a bad faith argument, it's a ham fisted way to brute force The Narrative (TM).
Things like this blackpill me a little. I have a bunch of blogs and twitter feeds bookmarked of people and ideas I don't agree with at all, agree with somewhat but with hard barriers, or simply find the ideas wacky but interesting. This is the "drafts" section of some of my online information diet. I know some of it is Totally-Not-Ok. I also have enough confidence in my own epistemic health that I won't turn into "literally hitler" just by reading it. But can I even try to discuss and play with any of these ideas outside of a totally anonymous forum? The answer is probably no specifically because the actually intellectually bankrupt (the journalists above) would simply outright lie to cancel me -- if I was anyone of note. Which I, thankfully, am not.
It really is a new puritanism. It's the midwest mom finding a hidden KISS or Judas Priest vinyl in her son's bedroom and then calling the priest to perform an exorcism. And all it does is breed brittleness in thinking and truth seeking. They're optimizing for a system that will lead to their own demise, and taking a lot of bystanders down with them.
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