07mk
4hr ago
I remember 2014 being the year of Gamergate and Ferguson, but I don't recall anything about ants.
(Emphasis added) Evidently, you do.
07mk
4hr ago
According to the Wikipedia article, it seems that there was a "Cecil Effect" in Zimbabwe after the affair, where westerners hunting lions there became less common than otherwise would have been expected, resulting in less pleasant lives for the locals due to more lions and less money. I don't know much about the trophy hunting business, but what little I know about it from podcasts and radio shows makes me not surprised; it always seemed to me that westerners paying huge sums of money to hunt exotic animals in Africa was almost an unalloyed good, with the only significant downsides being for the individual animals themselves and other westerners who care more about optics or suffering of animals than about the suffering of other humans. The "I consent! I consent! I don't!" meme comes to mind.
07mk
5hr ago
Anyone remember the affair of Cecil the Lion that was also around that time (seems like about a year before the affair of Harambe)? I recalled that it caused a bunch of drama online similar to Harambe, and then suddenly no one ever talked about it again. I'm always reminded of it when I run into Jimmy Kimmel on the news or social media, because he famously shed tears on his show while talking about the affair. I think these and Kony, referenced in another comment, stick to memories for being some of the earlier examples of social media hot flashes that tore through the internets and then went away, which became very common and even the default in the past decade.
With 2014 online drama being defined by the affair of reproductively viable worker ants, I wonder if future historians will think we just had a really strange animal-loving phase in the mid-2010s.
07mk
19hr ago
usual unsavory types that caused the original high denomination bills to go out of circulation, I don't imagine the average American would have much use for these.
I feel like this might be part of the point. Because the USD is so popular and the 100 dollar bill is the highest value denomination, it has become one of the de facto standards for criminal financial transactions and thus featured heavily in films and TV shows and music. As a result, Benjamin Franklin has become even more immortalized, to the point that his first name is used interchangeably with $100 in some contexts. The $250 bill would likely supplant that, and thus Donald Trump's face would be featured heavily in future films and shows about crime, and perhaps there would even be a song called "All About the Donalds." All of which would probably make Trump's ego very happy.
07mk
1d ago
Fair point on the chuddiness and the lack of requirement of instantiation. That's a level of postmodernism than even I thought possible.
But for the other point, there's arbitrarily often and there's arbitrarily often. Given the limits of biology, I don't think it's possible for a human to change genders in a literally infinitely small amount of time, and, as such, however often a human were to change their/xir/zir/etc gender in their/xir/zir/etc finite lifespan, it would only sum up to a finite number. As such, all that does is to have another finite number to be multiplied by, which means the result is still finite.
07mk
1d ago
A lot of people seem to have this mythical idea about "attractiveness" or "good looks" or "being pretty" or "beauty" or etc. that exists as a concept outside of human judgment, as if how "attractive" someone is isn't defined by how many and how hard other people actually are "attracted" to them. I think this sort of thinking is especially encouraged in women, which is why the idea that "all women are 10s" is so common among women. And why the idea "straight men will judge you, a straight woman, as less attractive" registers as something different from "you, a straight woman, is less attractive."
07mk
1d ago
The twist is that Male Lead is the monster, and the climax is his grotesquely personified id rapaciously chasing Female Lead through a hellscape maze of his own creation. A surface-level analysis might fault the film for once again portraying male sexual frustration in a negative light, and yeah, that element is certainly there, but film (at least indie film) like all modern art is meant to challenge the viewer. On some level, one ought to reflect on how much of a monster one becomes on the inside when Stacy rejects you. I think the film earns it.
I'm reminded of a Spongebob meme I saw a while ago, a comic made up of screenshots where, IIRC, Spongebob is ordering from Squidward, with alternating frames, saying, "In my medieval fantasy story, it turns out that the church is actually evil," "How original," "And the demons are actually the good guys!" "Daring, are we?" It's quite possible and even likely that there's some valuable insight and even challenge there, but this is such well-trod ground that comports with the general thrust of basically all media in the mainstream that this description, in itself, makes it sound boring, if not tiresome. That said, it all comes down to the execution, of course.
07mk
1d ago
I'm reminded of some sort of social justice guideline for gender inclusivity in forms that I read in the mid 2010s that said that it was a harmful bias or something to imply that there was only a finite number of genders. This, of course, is a statement of fact that there exists at least one human who has infinite genders, since there are only a finite number of humans who exist, and if each one only has a finite number of genders, then the number of genders is, at most, the sum of products of only finite numbers, which is also finite. I'm not sure if I've run into this mythical being yet, though there have been candidates.
07mk
1d ago
One of each. Kettlebells are generally not used two at a time like dumbbells often are. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a kettlebell exercise that involves using two at a time.
07mk
1d ago
I would argue that it is better for all involved when abusers are punished, and someone tries to burn it all down because they didn't get thier way we'll punish them for that to.
You say "we'll punish them for that," and I'm assuming that "are punished" before that has an implicit "by us." I agree that, in a fictional world where "we" accomplished such a thing, that it would be better for all involved. Unfortunately, accomplishing such a thing is Very Hard. Doesn't mean it's impossible, but I'm too cowardly to be willing to throw myself on the barbed wire so that my comrades behind me can walk over my body in the tiny chance that we actually do accomplish this. And, as such, I can't begrudge anyone else for being so cowardly.
07mk
2d ago
It could be both. The Shake-Weight was often compared to one, so why not actually go all the way? I'm sure there are advantages to a sex toy that can make 5 seconds feel like 5 minutes, or even longer.
07mk
3d ago
With the caveat that there's very little empirical support for any of this, I'd say that this sort of advice is generally wrongheaded. Scott Alexander wrote on SlateStarCodex, IIRC, a very long time ago about how some cognitive behavioral therapy techniques seemed to have metaphorically "gotten into the water supply," such that using them on people actually in therapy became less effective, because they had already gotten the vast majority of the benefits that come from using them. I'd guess, for the vast majority of the populace, especially among the male and romantically unsuccessful, this basic advice is something they've heard and implemented plenty.
I'd guess I interact more with incels than most people by nature of being a nerd who interacts with anime/video game fans, and the vast majority of them simply don't lack the types of social skills that get developed from engaging in social activities all the time (some certainly do, though - though in those cases, I'd guess that they're intrinsically resistant to the technique). They dress well, are well-groomed, can hold good conversation without going into autistic ramblings, make decent money, and are usually not awful-looking (though probably somewhat below average?). They can barely even get matches, much less first dates, much even less second ones. There's something else they're missing.
07mk
3d ago
Because if we don't privilege them, then they will cause us harm. At some point, the harm that would be prevented by not privileging them could outweigh the harm they would cause and, as such, be worth it, but it's hard to tell where that threshold is and if we've crossed it. In the long run, we can strip them of their ability to cause us harm, but that's one of those Very Hard Problems, and in the long run, we're all dead anyway.
07mk
3d ago
My guess is that horror movies are in the sweet spot of being not too high budget while also being a significantly better experience when watched in one shot on a large screen in a dark room with a crowd compared to watching alone at home. Spectacle movies like Star Wars fit the latter but not the former, while comedies fit the former but only a little of the latter.
07mk
3d ago
I really like kettlebells over dumbbells for allowing a variety of exercises. I have just 2 kettlebells at home, at 20 lbs and 45 lbs, which I think is enough for a very low level amateur hobbyist athlete like myself.
07mk
3d ago
If that falls under "promiscuous," then I'd posit that it is true that men do prefer women to be a certain type of promiscuous woman over not promiscuous. The certain type being that she considers it a high-priority activity with low activation cost when with him and only him and the exact opposite when it comes to any other man. But I don't think that means it'd be accurate to say that men prefer promiscuous women over not promiscuous women, since "promiscuous" without qualifiers covers a much wider ground.
07mk
3d ago
I've read this hypothesis thrown about a bunch, but I don't think I've seen it actually substantiated empirically. We'd need at least like 3 fMRI studies done by 3 different institutions all trying to prove each other wrong having no choice but to publish that they found evidence of some sort of this cross-wiring that was different in people with foot fetishes versus those who didn't before we could conclude anything like this.
07mk
3d ago
I don't know about gun crime specifically, but I've seen analysis that concludes that, according to the FBI, black women commit violent crimes at a rate greater than white men. Which is certainly counterintuitive to me but also doesn't seem completely absurd.
07mk
3d ago
My preference as a heterodox libertarian would be for a race blind system that actually punished people where appropriate. If that means a higher percentage of black people end up in prison, so be it. So yes, I like the theoretical idea of race-blind liberalism, more or less.
This is my preference as well as a leftist liberal. One major problem is that anyone who has this opinion of "so be it" is deemed to be ideologically indistinguishable from Nathan Bedford Forrest by mainstream liberals who disproportionately influence public conversation about this, if not actual public policy. I haven't been able to figure out a way to fix this.
07mk
3d ago
This sounds interesting but I'm not sure I grok your idea. Please say more?
Everyone likes to believe themselves high status, despite the fact that, definitionally, only a small fraction of everyone can be high status. Conveniently, there's no simple metric that we can measure in any human by which we can determine their status. There's not even a set of metrics that we can input into a formula. But there are some metrics that are better than others, and money and looks are two of the better ones. They're gendered, but also, we've been taking that gendered-ness away for quite a few decades by now.
One's savings is obviously related to money, and weight is obviously related to looks. Managing either well tends to require learning a lot about the underlying systems in which these things exist, which inevitably also comes with it realization of one's own place in that system relative to others. Which translates to knowing more about one's own status. Which means risking learning that one is lower status than one believes oneself to be. Which is really unpleasant. So many people opt not to take the risk.
Managing my own weight was one of the harsher examples of this in my life. I was easily intelligent enough and educated enough about biology to know how to do so, but I didn't do so until my early 20s, when the simple painful physical reality of living as a big fat fatty person of obesity was too overwhelming for me to ignore anymore. I believe that my avoidance of doing the basic research on this topic was primarily due to trying to minimize my own knowledge about how ugly and low-status I was turning myself through my decisions about diet and exercise.
There's also the more generic "people hate taking responsibility for their own future" that's just common among everyone in every context, which I think is synergistic to this. If you learn more about how to properly manage your savings, you might learn that you have more control over it than you thought. And with control comes responsibility. And who likes the idea of failing and then having no one to blame but oneself? So why risk thinking that way, when you can just use your ignorance to blame [the system] for your failures?
07mk
4d ago
I'm more a friend in need is a friend in deed [sic]. Though I don't actually know what the hell that means.
The phrase, as I understand it, is "A friend in need is a friend indeed." The way I always understood it is that friendship isn't a transactional relationship where you log who did what for whom and try to even it out; it's one where you support each other because you love each other as friends. So it's only when a friend is in need that you can truly be their friend, by sacrificing something to help him out of that need; otherwise, you could just be leeching off of them. I'll also add that, I thought a line from John Wick 4 captured the same idea pretty well, when Wick, chased around by assassins, turns to one of his old friends for protection and apologizes, and his friend just responds, "Friendship means little when it's convenient."
07mk
4d ago
I heard that one of the major problems with 21 was that 18-20 year old males are really really useful in war, and so drafting them was too useful to get rid of. And it seemed rather unfair to them that they don't have all the same rights as those of majority age. Perhaps they could get the rights but not the responsibilities? Perhaps 18-20 year olds should have the option of of opting out of selective service but then they lose the adulthood rights until 21?
Of course, the fact that the US still limits alcohol consumption to 21+ is another quirk. Then there's also the fact that 18 is likely not the lowest age at which males become really really useful in war; would 16 be more reasonable? What about 14? 10-year-olds have smaller fingers which could be really useful for some things in life-or-death situations involving machinery, and not to mention much lower calorie needs, and they could probably follow orders well enough...
07mk
4d ago
This is an instantiation of a generic problem I see on the left, which is that, in practice, there appears to be no real way to repudiate or police the most extreme parts of the ideology. I think there are many causes of this problem, including the overarching one that the left has an orientation towards breaking boundaries, which cashes out in refusing to have standards*. So imposing things like "reasonableness" or "checking if the consequences of following through on such things leads to desirable outcomes" is deemed as oppressive and appropriately censured/censored. Associated with this is that the modern left has gone all-in on identity politics, which is definitionally a rejection of valuing ideas based on how they interact with objective reality but rather based on the identities of whose mouths those ideas came from. Thus, as long as one can find individuals with the right melanin content and gender identity and sexual attractions to deem some idea as true or even sacrosanct, then It Is Known.
I've said before that, when gay marriage was actually controversial, I scoffed at the notion that this was a "slippery slope" that would lead to [horrors beyond comprehension], and that I've learned since that I was completely wrong. Any push for a meaningful change to society that doesn't also have twice as much focus on determining and executing on how to stop that push seems likely to inevitably lead to a fall down the slippery slope.
* In practice, de facto standards inevitably form, of course. To be more detailed, it's that any imposed standards can be effectively argued against in a way that is orthogonal to actual truth or reality or usefulness.
Independence Day was 1996, not 1986. For a really good underrated McTiernan film closet to that, I recommend Last Action Hero from 93, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger with middle-aged Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones) as the villain. It was overshadowed by the Jurassic Park juggernaut, but it's a fantastic meta comedy action film parody. Feels a decade or two ahead of its time, as this kind of self-referential satires became far more common in this century than the last.
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