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.
3d ago
An army-navy surplus store jacket is fine because it's not indicative of going out of your way to find a particular article of clothing. You're an outdoorsy or vaguely military-style-ish kind of guy. Rolling down to your local surplus store happens in the same trip as buying a drill at Loews / Home Depot.
But if you're rocking Crye Precision gear at the local fudd Rod and Hunt club firing range, you're fucking up. Patel didn't go full autist and like, render a salute and call for 'present arms', but his valhall-ing is pretty the same as the guy who shows you his 6.5 creedmoor while saying, "Yeah, it's actually the only round SEAL snipers use now. The rest just don't cut it"
Then I suppose a tie has lost all association with Croatian mercenary light cavalry from the thirty years war.
Do go on!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
I think your spot on. And, like all fashion, the user / wearers have to have some level of self-awareness. It's one thing to wear some digital camo pullover with a sports logo over it or something. It's quite another to show up all tactical gear'ed out to go on a cub scout 3 mile hike (ask me if I'm referring to personal experience here :-) ).
Charitably, I think patel probably had decent intent. But he seems like kind of spaz and may be one of those guys who kind of gets military / law enforcement / bro culture but is also not quite adept with it. If he had stopped with "Rest in peace, we have the watch." It comes across as salutary perhaps a little overwrought, but mostly fine. Throwing in "Valhalla" is deciding to unironically wear some of the shirts you see on /r/iamverybadass.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
The Charlie Kirk shooting has also given us a truly cringe moment:
Kash Patel: "To my friend Charlie Kirk. Rest now, brother. We have the watch. And I'll see you at Valhalla"
To provide some context, "we have the watch" or "end of watch" is often used in police or military organizations when someone is killed in the line of duty. The "Valhalla" part emerged in some but not all GWOT veteran circles who would invoke that element of Norse mythology after the death of a comrade.
Obviously, the first layer of cringe is that Charlie Kirk was an outspoken Christian who would probably want to be assumed to have gone to a, you know, Christian concept of the afterlife. Second, neither Kirk nor Patel have any military or law enforcement experience, so there's also the cringe multiplier of framing yourself as a kind of very online wannabee badass.
But, Friday's gonna Fun, and Some of the memes are chuckle worthy.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
(Because it's the friday fun thread)
Dirtbag upper class? Details shaky for doxx-paranoia reasons, but I made some money in a tech-adjacent thing over the past ten years. Not "own a helicopter fuck you money" but "I can take ubers while my Hyundai Sonata is in the shop for a few days and not care about it" money.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
Weird how worlds collide.
Towards the end of Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton, there's an extended section on the realities of monastics who have spent a long time in the practice - and they feel quite similar to this.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
This is very insightful, thank you.
I am reminded of listening to Rafael Mangual on Coleman Hughes' podcast. The stat he related (which made me literally rewind the podcast) was that the average state / federal prison inmate (not jail) already has over six felony convictions before they are incarcerated. They went on to discuss how this is a direct result of more lenient probation and deferred sentencing / alternative sentencing "reform."
But, as your article points out, think of the incentive and messaging we're sending to criminals. You can learn the robes of armed robbery, drug dealing, even assault, and you get to play on easy mode the first half dozen times. Of course this is going to backfire.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
I think you're wrong because of one very specific and personal reason. Charlie Kirk was a personal friend with most or all of the conservative and right wing pundits. The video of Megyn Kelly and Glenn Beck both getting emotional when they're live streaming and learn that Kirk died is all over the place. A ton of others - Ben Shapiro and the DailyWire gang, Benny Johnson, etc. also had really personal stories to share about Kirk.
So, a year from now, right before midterms, these people aren't going to make the cold journalistic calculation of what the remaining salience of Kirk is for their viewers. They're going to remember their friend and talk about him.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
I know that you would almost certainly not publicize a video of right-wingers cheering the death of some leftist figure,
Forecasting future behavior of a fellow internet rando is now ... evidence?
@WhiningCoil is definitely dancing with the mod tiger these past few days, but his post of the TMZ video is more than a bare-link and it is important and topical --- half of the replies in this thread are "it's not about the shooting itself, it's about the reactions."
Your comment asserting tribalism is tribalism itself. Or maybe just lower level general antagonism?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
subfora
Bro, I'm pumped you got to use this word in a sentence.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
I don't think we're actually disagreeing.
For instance, in the past the Church and various monarchies relied on the fact that information flow was far more easily controlled amongst the peoples they governed, and indeed in history itself. With modern technology, that is no longer the case. Or even if you can re institute that picture, it would be far less secure and stable than it was in the past.
I agree with this and readily assert that informational flow is far less controlled, far less stable, and far less secure than in the past.
but that does not mean that overall social stability or status hierarchies can simply be reimposed with a trivial change in values.
I also agree with this. The change in values isn't trivial, it takes a huge amount of personal and local community / family effort.
This type of response, blithely asserting that a return to traditional values with modern technology without a serious understanding (or at least discussion around) the history and the ways societal configuration has dramatically changed, is a large part of what makes me frustrated with the RETVRN movement as a whole.
This makes me feel bad. I think I have at least a semi-serious understanding of how technology has "dramatically changed societal configuration." And, if I'm parsing your complex sentence correctly, you're saying that my lack of understanding frustrates you? That's a rough place to be in. If stupid people (i.e. me) aggravate you, life is going to be pretty heated.
I think what you're saying is that I'm kind of hand waving away the massive effects technology has had on society. That's not my intention. My intention is to say that a lot of these impacts on society are due to very loosely held and quickly abandoned values and that a far more rigid adherence to traditional values may have get some of the more drastically negative impacts of technology in check. That's an assertion about counterfacturals, so I'm not saying it's a particularly strong argument, but it is an assertion.
I don't think being trad and not reflexively anti-tech is easy. I think it is a constant battle to figure out how to use technology appropriately while maintaining timeless values. There's a lot of failure involved. But I think throwing out the entire paradigm is foolhardy. Even more, I think that discarding traditional values because of the "overwhelming force" of technology is exactly how we got to modernism and progressivism - which we both agree are failing to live up to their promises!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
They got to a federal death penalty charge via transit terrorism, which seems like a bit of a stretch.
Definitely a stretch in the raw legal terms of it, but I like the idea.
Murder in the US is overwhelmingly the result of strained interactions between males 18 - 34. If a man gets murdered, they're very likely to have known their killer and to have had a recent dispute around drugs, money, respect / social esteem, or a woman via love triangle. For women who get killed, the stats are even crazier - something around a 90% chance their killer was a previous or current romantic partner.
Random acts of lethal violence like this one truly are rare and shocking. I like the idea that, for such cases, we ratchet the punishment up to eleven. This isn't to say that we should shrug at "normal" murders. "Murder stay murder," to quote the Wire. But I like throwing a terrorism or federal level hate crime charge in there. I know deterrence theory for criminal punishment is one of the wobbliest concepts out there in terms of efficacy, but if a random act of violence gets a no-buts-about-it life sentence with no parole, I have to imagine that would have an effect...For those in control of their faculties.
Which brings up the point about the culpability of schizophrenics, drug addicts etc. There's a lot of landmines here in terms of personal liberties and the slippery slope power of the State to lock people up for being cooky, but the alternative (and current) situation is that sane society carries around this socialized risk of literal death that is also quite obvious and easy to mitigate; DeCarlos Brown had a decade long rap sheet, which included prior armed robbery and assault. Jordan Neely (of the Daniel Penny incident), IIRC, had been arrested over 100 times in NYC. The stats are almost a pareto distribution; "top" 1% of criminals are responsible for 63% of convictions per NIH - it's darkly ironic that that's being published by the National Institute for Health. When these big red alarms keep going off, eventually it rises to the level of a literal public health issue to not intervene with these individuals.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
So, in general what do you think is a more positive vision of merging traditional society with modern technology? To me there are obvious problems, and there's also the problem of the cratering of ecclesiastic authority. Which incidentally, I don't see as a theological problem as it has happened many times before. But how do we square these issues?
Don't make the category error of necessarily placing modern technology within modern society and values. This is actually another sleight of hand that I see a lot of people unintentionally falling into.
"Well, without the enlightenment, we would all still be living in mud huts!" Yes, without the science and technology from the enlightenment, that would be true. But that science and tech can be unbundled from modern ethical / moral / political / social values.
To more directly answer your question, technology on its own isn't inherently good or bad. People are. The same fundamental technology that vaporized tens of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki could pretty much solve most of the energy "crisis" over night - but some very modern emotionalism and cultish environmental "ethics" prevent that from happening. So, the trad view is "use technology in ways that align with traditional values."
I go to a Latin Mass - they use FlockNote for parish communications. I drive my very modern F-250 to get to the church on Sundays. I text - with my cell phone - my friends there to semi-organize stuff for the socials that usually follow. I listen to numerous catholic content podcasts - which are ... podcasts ... on the internet.
I don't use my phone to watch porn. I don't drive my truck to buy drugs and hire prostitutes. I don't use the internet to consume or spread weird gender-fluid ideologies.
Yes, I do believe it really is that simple. "Values" are beliefs one holds that directly inform their behavior. You get to control your behavior, regardless of technology, however you want. No, I do not accept the idea that a fully functioning adult has zero defense against the brain cancer of social media and woke digital marketing -- 90% of the posters on the Motte are evidence of this.
I'd also go further and say that, precisely because of telecommunication technology, it is easier to collect resources on living a trad lifestyle. The entire resurgence of attendance at the Latin Mass - at least in the US - is almost certainly due in large part to people being able to organize and share locations and mass times online. Hell, there are people who didn't even know the Latin Mass still existed who get into it because they watch a few episodes of Pints With Aquinas. In a non-religious context, YouTube is full of endless videos on homesteading and homeschooling, which are two pretty strong indicators of a trad lifestyle. If you rewind to before the mass proliferation of the internet, one's ability to simply investigate different ways of living was far more constrained. Books were helpful but noone had access to the raw volume of information that now exists in everyone's pocket. Largely, you simply replicated the "culture" your parents and other family members and social circle presented. Or, you uprooted and went for a hard reset (cue California Dreamin') - but maybe only for a few years before coming back to Wisconsin and marrying that odd, shy fellow.
In my original comment, I concluded by saying that part of "being trad" (whatever you take that to mean) is rejecting the notion that "the personal is political." I'll add to that here by saying that being trad also means rejecting the naieve premise that "technology is turnin' all the kids gay!" or, to be a little more professional about it, that technological progress is inherently a threat to traditional values. I'd say, in general, technological progress simply creates more possible outcomes - some of them will / could be horrible from a trad values perspective, while others will / could be wonderful. It's in the application by a society or sub-society. Which means its in the behavior of a society / sub-society.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
(Also @HereAndGone and @MadMonzer)
That whooshing sound you heard was the point going over your head.
Understand that I used that illustrative anecdote to make the point that this girl, who "talked the talk" of traditionalism, immediately balked upon the first real imperative to walk the walk. Of course a couple should have these conversations about household finances before they get married. And, yes, I am aware that, in the trad view, women were often expected to manage the money that the men made for a whole host of excellent reasons.
The point is that instead of this "trad" woman taking a breath and working with her fiancee and priest to develop a mutually acceptable, yet doctrinally sound, arrangement, she immediately over reacted in a way that betrayed a lot of very modern feminist thinking. This is why I used the "living in the matrix" imagery earlier. I agree that a lot of "trads" are actually just thoroughly modern people who decided to buy the TradCath / Christian Patriarchy / OrthoBro player Skin from the DLC loot box.
So, please attempt to modulate the 'tism a little and realize that I wasn't trying to offer an underdeveloped thesis on marital finances.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7d ago
Unfortunately, I think your is doing a lot of projecting.
When he (he?) says;
It’s a lie. We don’t believe it. I certainly don’t, and I don’t think anyone else really does either.
I think he's giving up the game a little bit. Simply saying, "C'mon, Man! You can't be serious" is a great way to get YesChad.jpeg'ed (I love that I keep getting to use that).
We are all still moderns. Our instincts are modern. Our instincts are, by any reasonable description, liberal.
Well, No.
Our instincts are base and crude. We all want the basics; sex, salt (broadly;food), and shelter. Any human who lives in a group larger than a 40 person extended family is also going to have a general interest in social esteem. Satisfying only these base instincts is actually the enemy of both the traditionalists and liberals.
For traditionalists, it's direct and obvious. The more you seek after yourself, the more egotistical you become, the more you reject God's laws to subdue your base impulses and live a life of virtue. Even the proto-monotheism of the Platonic philosophers pretty much agrees with this. Easy.
For liberals, it's a little harder. They want you to be able to enjoy your basic urges to an extent and with the precondition of some sort of consent; personal in the sexual realm, and societal in the everything else realm. Eat as much as you want! But, oh, wouldn't it be good if we were all healthy too? You can make a ton of money and be a famous rich guy! But, oh, shouldn't some of what you make go to the less fortunate? You can have sex with anyone you want! Who consents ... now and forever after. And, oh, maybe don't be a sex pest even though that kind of lines up with sexually libertine attitudes. I guess what I'm saying is be attractive and charming if you want to have sex - and then you can have as much as you want. Until we (who?) decide you can't.
You can tell which side I'm on, but I think it's a fair claim to say that liberals believe in liberalism until trade-offs enter the frame. Then, they sidestep the need for individual sacrifice for the sake of social stability, let alone metaphysical virtue. So we get this weird kind of social communism - do what you want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, where "hurt" is never clearly defined and can change subjectively. This is how liberalism ultimately leads to progressivism. Too many people start to do what they want, and society suffers. Now, there's an need to "Do somEthinG!" Cue whatever moral panic is in vogue at the moment.
A lot of this goes back to the sleight of hand that took place during the enlightenment. Enlightenment thinking was first about science and the scientific method (note: not "the science"). The trick was that political and philosophical thinkers bamboozled folks into believing the same thing could be applied to, well, politics, philosophy, and morality. We could "investigate" our beliefs and through some sort of evidentiary "thinking" determine what was ultimately good or bad. There are still practitioners of this today - dedicated ones. Sam Harris' tedious podcasts are all actually honest attempts to define "good" and "bad" without a single shred of the Divine. It takes six hours and he ends up with the most wishy-washy definition you could imagine; "whatever promotes human flourishing." Wow, six hours to hit one level of recursion.
One of the best arguments for traditionalism is that it confronts categorization error head on. This is what the state does. This is what the church does. This is what the family does. There are some levels of interdependence, sure, but, to the extent that they exist, they're mostly fixed (or, at least, there's some tradition in their definitions). What is "good" and "bad." God told us. We can absolutely puzzle over why He determined they are good and bad but, in the meantime and, actually, for all of time, we should OBEY (to quote a cool hat I saw once).
I'll agree that there is some LARPing. Even worse, there's a lot of admiring the problem while only offering the most sketchy of solutions. Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option isn't much more than "Go to church a lot, only hang out with other people who go to your church, homeschool your kids." It isn't bad advice, but it also isn't some sort of systemic gameplan to RETVRN. There are also, yes, trads of all types who are still living in the matrix. I can remember a conversation with a young woman whom I befriended while temporarily living in DC. She was going through pre-marriage counseling with her local Catholic priest. She was bemoaing the fact that, on a questionnaire she had her fiancee had to fill out, it asked "who will be handling the household finances?" "Tollbooth!" She steamed, "What am I supposed to do? Just stand barefoot in the kitchen all day with a baby on my hip?"
Say it with me; YesChad.jpeg.
This was not a secular woman. This was a woman who went to the Latin Mass regularly, dressed drastically modestly (long skirts and high necklines in August DC heat - props, girl!) and was very interested in having lots of babies with her husband. Or was she? Even an innocuous pre-marriage questionnaire was enough to hit the "THEY'RE TAKING MAH RIGHTS" nerve in her (thoroughly modern?) brain.
On the male side, there are tons of LARPing trad daddies who aren't ready for the reality that when the bible says that a wife must submit to her husband, the context isn't clear -- it may mean that the submission occurs only after DaddyCath has gotten into full guard and worked a triangle choke .... metaphorically, y'all. These are young men in tweed jackets who don't have enough social awareness to STFU when the 60 year old with 35 years of marriage and 7 kids is giving actual marital advice. They are hopeless if they think they can manage a new bride behind closed doors.
So how rad can we trade without living a lie? On a personal or family level, I think it's pretty easy. I live in a weird rural spot now where the downtown of the "town" near me has pride flags everywhere. I drink in those bars often. When my drinking buddies - purple haired and all - find out I'm a young jedi in training novice trad cath, they've all hit me with some version of "So you think a woman doesn't have a right to choose?!" to which I will reply "The laws (depending on state) say she can. In my eyes, it's murder and she'll have a lot to answer for. I'd never advise it" The follow up is usually some version of "well, but like, I mean ... politically, though..."
And that's the slogan I'll conclude with - To be trad, you reject the premise that "the personal is political" (or however it's phrased). I get to act out and live my beliefs the way I want. When the state says I can't do that then, yes, there are issues. That's not (quite) the battle we're fighting today. Unfortunately, however, the front lines are definitely impacting kids. Some of @WhiningCoil's stories are truly terrifying.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12d ago
Everything ebbs and flows. Lenny Bruce made a career on censorship and now far worse things are being actively promoted by the large media networks.
The next frontier for pure computing is crypto. I don't mean the financial instruments like bitcoin, but all of the superscale distributed information sharing protocols. Interplantery Filesystem comes to mind.
This will, like everything in life, be both good and bad. Good in that actually free, I-control-all-of-my-own-shit computing plus actual anonymity (until quantum is a thing). It will also be bad in that the bad people will have access to all of this too - there's already cheese pizza on the main crypto blockchain for instance. But how new is this? Modulo math and cryptography have been around long enough that anybody who really truly wants to send out "bad" data (bad in a moral or ethical sense or w/e) has been able to.
There will be a period of transition. I think we're already in it. People who have to learn how to use computers again, at a lower level. It is amazing the number of college undergrads who begin a compsci class and have literally never heard of a "directory structure" before and have never, ever popped open a terminal of any type.
And that last part is the real shame of it. The gamification / subscriptionification of personal computing has destroyed what was (and will be, eventually) a fundamentally liberating technology. A few weeks ago, my Dad (late 70s) bought a new laptop with Windows 11. He was an early user of COBOL (!) back in the day. To see - and help - him trudge through all of the surveillance-ware screens was deeply sad. It was like watching a delta blues musician see Mick Jagger shimmy to "Brown Sugar" at some chintzy Las Vegas mega venue. His simple comment was succinct; "computers aren't fun anymore."
But I remain an optimist, although not one that believes "the good" comes for free or without some metaphysical combat. The bifurcation, I think, will be people who are content to let Corporate BigAI into the very depths of their minds and hearts simply in exchange for a daily (hourly?) dose of DOPEamine. On the other side of that line will be folks who value the human spirits role in intellect, epistemology, and information / knowledge / wisdom cultivation. I think this later group will engage in some sort of "dark-techno-renaissance" where some really hardcore but compelling Linux distros pop up. Perhaps to the point that a crypto-first layer of the internet emerges. A kind of BBS / IRC version .... 2030.0?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
his telling of the doomed airline passenger.
Aged like Milk.
"Democracy is over. January 6th was the last stand. The progs have won." Then, in 2024, Joe Biden dies in the middle of the campaign and Trump 2.0 defeats DEI personified.
This is why "no fucking blackpilling" is a constant refrain for me. Losers gonna talk loser shit and, more embarrassingly, wind up with egg all over their face.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
Memetic learning in all things.
A lot of guys grunt because they saw some "famous" lifter grunt on youtube. I think the rhythmic nature of it is a dead giveaway. Your bench-n-leg-curl aficionado probably saw at some point, perhaps even in real life, a lifter he considered "elite" doing something similar and decided to adopt it.
So this would naturally lead to the question "is there a reason for grunting that has validity." Yes but no. Yet in that intermediate to advanced lifters learn how to use held breath and abdominal contraction to stabilize their core which can be very beneficial for compound lifts. If you've ever seen lifting belts, they aren't there to "reinforce" the back on their own, they are there to aid with roprioception (the body's own sense of where it is) during the lift. Lifters combine breath techniques and their lifting belts to create a very stabilized core momentarily. To prevent blackouts and other bad things, they might "force exhale" in intervals. You'll recognize this as a kind of "hiss" through the teeth. Over time, or with decreasing emphasis on technique, these hisses can get grunt-ified.
There's also just guys (both novice and experienced) who grunt as a psychological tool for themselves. It can work or it can't. It is highly correlated with ego lifting.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
Within the "redpill" ideology, a field report is a document or post in which a follower details their personal experiences and interactions, typically with women, to test and validate redpill beliefs. The core idea is to apply the movement's theories and then report the results to the online community for feedback and accountability
Rules of the Motte include being charitable and being no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary to make your point.
To that end, I will try to be charitable here and suggests that, at least for my vote, these semi-blog posts are getting a little tedious and I don't see how they fit into the friday fun thread or the low stakes sunday thread.
Again, being charitable, if you did something like turn them into a shorter 4chan style greentext, or a haiku or something I could see that being a good kitschy match for the off-topic threads. But a lot of this is, again n=1, tedious and irrelevant.
I'll curtail my comment here. Mods, I'm trying to be both sincere and charitable (did I mention charitable) here, but want to log my negativity publicly.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
just standard rural/semirural Cajuns
I'd love to hear hydroacetylene's line of demarcation for a rural vs semi-rural Cajun.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17d ago
(Mods: Not exactly a "fun" thread but I'm also purposefully not trying to make this CW material. Do what you will!)
Today is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
The alleged horros of the Superdome are an interesting epistemic time capsule. 2005 was before real smartphones existed (iPhone came out in 07, IIRC) and cell phones in general weren't necessarily everywhere. A lot of the game of telephone occurred because the storm utterly blanked cell service in South Louisiana for days (weeks?). A lot of breathless reports went out that weren't anything more than third hand rumors published by reporters who had no way to even begin corroboration on the ground at the Superdome. It was a more innocent time, is what I'm trying to say.
Instead of retroactively CWing this, I'm mostly interested if any Mottizens had any direct experience with Katrina in the Louisiana / Mississippi / East Texas areas. Additionally, I feel like there are enough prepper-adjacent types here to offer some interesting perspectives on how to think about, plan for, and operate in a literal "shit hit the fan" scenario such as Katrina.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
18d ago
As a little bit of a palate cleanser for the Annunciation shooting and Scotland All Female Braveheart Remake children-with-knives fracas, I thought we could talk about the financial state of internet whoredom:
Matthew Ball Xwitter Thread on OnlyFans Financials
(Mod question: If linking to a Xwitter thread, are there any standard operating procedures considering some people don't have it?)
Big 3 Takeaways:
- Subscription revenue is down, but transactional revenue is up 95%. This means that OF "creators" are making their money, now, on actually bartering pseduo-social-sexual relationships with buyers. You can't just blast out nudes and collect rent, you have to engage with the audience. This, to me, seems like an actually defensible moat vis-a-vis AI OF alternatives.
- Gross creator revenue surpasses the total league payroll of ALL SPORTS LEAGUES EXCEPT THE NFL. Culture War angle: The market value of female sexuality is greater than everything except the most intensively financialized male performance sport.
- One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million. This puts her at the same level as the highest paid pro athletes, the managers of the largest hedge funds, banks, and private equity firms. The only people out earning her are founder-shareholders of giant public behemoths (Zuckerburg etc.) and this is through wealth appreciation rather than "straight cash homie!" income.
What actually got me to take the time to write this up was seeing this article on sports betting.
Sports betting, OnlyFans (etc.), and addiction level of marijuana use are, to me, the three horsemen of tolerated social degeneration. That these all disproportionately impact (there, I said it!) young males is all the more revealing -- society is still okay with disposing the disposables and is now more than happy to turn it into a multi-billion dollar industry.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21d ago
Maybe it shouldn't be called "mental health"
That's my point, and that's why I caveated my post with "Tangent"
but what would you prefer for such a reasonable ask?
Nothing. It is, in fact, a reasonable ask. It's not a mental health question. "Patient comfort" sure, "procedural professionalism" whatever.
I don't think it was your intention, but please try to avoid conflating the points I'm making.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21d ago
So, in an unexpected instance of "the system works" would this imply that the frequent flyer hypochondriac who asks the doctor dozens of follow up questions, thereby turning a 15 min consultation into a 45 minute one, will actually end up paying (either directly, or via their insurer) more?
Hospitals have entire departments whose job it is to comb through notes.
Fuck. That. Noise. So, an army of functionaries use their best judgement to try to translate a doctor's notes into one or more of a series of codes to reconstruct the exact service provided? I thought lawyers billing me in 15 minute increments was bullshit. After the fact reconstruction of what happened layered with overly hierarchical categorization is a new level of theft.
Thank you. This was wonderful.
I will now do my utmost to somehow PsyOp Highly Online Navy SEAL bros into wearing ascots.
Perish the thought! The wealthy should be straight as hell or asexual lizard people, the way God intended!
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