100ProofTollBooth
No bio...
User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
It's to fleece people that @jeroboam is "helping" with this "it's EZ to buy a business" nonsense.
The macro theory that retiring Boomer's are selling profitable businesses is true. But the devil is always in the details. There are toxic pills in so many of these businesses and, because markets eventually optimize to information, there are emerging small / micro PE firms that will blow you out of the water because they don't need to finance the way a solo-preneur does. It's a similar formula to what has happened in housing - it's not that you're competing on buying a house with another young couple, it's that BlackRock is coming to town with all cash offers sight unseen 10% above asking.
Again, it's about risk and number of opportunities. There are numbers aplenty for "1 out of every 10 startups" makes it. Fine. I want to see numbers for "of people who started a business 1/2/3/4+ times, here's how they make out"
We shouldn't shy away from risk and failure as a country. We should encourage it. The real evil of MegaCorp jobs is they slow feed you a median outcome when, if it were possible to weather some storms a little better, you might eventually catch a wave.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
Being hard-drinking in the 19th century was not a negative quality for a man
Never forget what They took from us!
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
I broadly agree with this, but want to add a sort of different framing option.
Instead of just looking at general "luck", I like to look at it as shots on goal or number of at bats. Those middle class strivers operate with the background knowledge that if their big risk doesn't pay off, they can bounce back to "just" a boring middle manager job and, maybe, try again.
I contrast this to an ex-girlfriend's cousin who, upon saving up $500 for his own power washer, agonized over actually pulling the trigger to start his pressure washing business because he wasn't sure if the garage he was working out would re-hire him if he quit.
Risking everything you have (right now) on one bet knowing you can rebuilt that "Everything" in a few years is one version of "luck." Risking everything you have right now and also everything you would have had over several years is another. "Opportunity cost" means something really different based on class.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
Couldn't agree more.
What is off handedly dismissed as "domestic female labor" is really "the construction and maintenance of basic pro-social behavior patterns that enable society to function."
Outsourcing those duties to the state has been a disaster. This is as obvious a fact as one can summon. The state does not care about you and never has. The level of involvement and personal sacrifice necessary for humans to raise their young is bananas. No other mammal comes close. It requires an emotional bond that is nearly transcendent. Some of us would call this a "holy" connection and duty.
But others would say "just add water" to make the family.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
I think this is a very valuable truth to highlight. Boomer's (and analyses of their life paths) tend to forget how easy it was to fuck around and NOT find out. I had an uncle who ended up in his 50s and 60s doing a very pleated khaki finance job who spent his 20s and 30s doing his best Jack Kerouac - bumming around the Western US, taking odd jobs to get from town to town, drinking, and drugging. He never had a rock bottom or come-to-Jesus moment, he literally just decided at about 35 "eh, better get on the straight and narrow" and more or less walked into a management job (insert something here about white male privilege if you like, but I think it's still a red herring). The point is a hop-on-hop-off respectable life was possible.
Now, you have kids who start out at 22 with $100k in worthless degree debt. You can't work at the grain elevator and scrape together a few hundred bucks to get closer to California when the service on your debt alone is $1,500 a month. The PMC has made hiring and firing such a bureaucratic nightmare that the interview-to-fully-onboarded process is benchmarked at 4 - 5 months. I think this is so that PMC HR types can then brag about themselves reducing it to three months when thirty years ago that timeline was probably three days.
All of this is to say that I don't think "The Path" is much different than it was. To @FarNearEverywhere's point, it's definitely more narrow because of PMC rent seeking and vampiric "I don't do the work but I help enable the work" grifting. More than that, however, we've setup these weird fundamental barriers to overcome that used to not exist. That's the real tragedy. It's important to remember that GDP and GDP per capita is still higher than its ever been (in a decade over decade sense, annual fluctuations notwithstanding) but the overall fluidity and flexibility of the system is greatly atrophied. There's a reason Andreesen-Horowitz (this is a mega VC firm that is the epitome of PMC not-actually-working-but-actuall-fucking-rich careerists) has a whole thrust for "American Dynamism." We've become the mass monster powerlifter who can still move a ton of weight, but takes 15 minutes to get out of the shower.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
I've been using Obsidian since it was in beta.
I probably have another 40 years of life.
I am highly confident I will leave behind a finely tuned LLM of myself for my family.
This is my favorite comment I've ever put on the Motte.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
How do you say where one color ends and another begins if there's a smooth transition between them, how do you draw precise boundaries two races or two languages?
You can't / it's really hard. But this is why my post began with the intent to avoid a semantic argument which eventually gets where it starts; nowhere.
How do you come up with precise criteria ...
In this context, I would say the line of demarcation is "was this content produced with the intent to serve a market demand of consumers using the previous demand signals of those very consumers to design it (the content)?" If yes, then Porn.
I put "art" as a meta-concept closely related to "truth." Anything that earnestly tries to reveal the truth of something could be called art (but could also be called something else - "analysis", "philosophy" what have you. I'm just saying "art" is one possible label). But something that is designed, constructed, and broadcast solely to cater to the consumerist preferences of a group of people fails this test. To give an example; I love sports and love the emblems of certain sports teams. I think the crossed "NY" of the Yankees is almost like the Coke logo in terms of human universal recognition. Yet, I wouldn't quite call it art. Another post in the thread discussed Warhol and Campbell's soup. Although I think it was self-indulgent and eye-rollingly "hip," I can at least contemplate the argument that it was an attempt to reveal some truth about mid 20th century consumerism.
I don't even trust myself to be able to make the distinction
Combined with the intro sentence of that same paragraph, it appears you are close to saying "I don't trust anyone to make a distinction besides those who call themselves pro-porn and art experts?" Perhaps that's not charitable, but that's how I'm reading it. Regardless, I've set forth to you my explicit criteria (above). Also saying something like "I don't trust myself on x, but I can also spot other folks who can't be trusted" seems to be a little bit of a double-reverse. I can't quite put a finger on it, but I think this is rhetorical sleight of hand.
Although we must of necessity classify various works as superior and inferior, such judgements are always in the last instance provisional; it is impossible to guarantee that you have exhausted all the possibilities inherent in any given work, and all judgements may be overturned by new evidence or future developments and recontextualizations.
Yes, the future may change how we look at the past and we cannot predict the future. I don't know what point this proves other than to retreat to a milquetoast "who's to say?" Nevertheless, I do actually think it is, has, and always will be easy to designate something as porn / filth (though I don't believe we should ban it). Take James Joyce's infamous letters to his wife (or maybe mistress, I can't remember). Even when you're one of the greatest writers in 100 years, when you talk about fucking the farts out of you "shitting like a pig" girlfriend, you're getting fuckin' gross, dude. Ditto for Lord Byron and his frat house "So, I was banging this one chick, right?" poems.
I would also say that I believe that a certain wellspring of unrestrained sexual energy is necessary to counterbalance the encroaching technocratic, hyper-rational global order.
The technocrats pretend to believe in that so that they can trick normies into hypersexual practices that obliterate communities. This is exactly the objective and outcome of feminism - It says young women should "express themselves" and "have fun" .... so that they then end up bitter, unmarried, childless, and neurotic at 35. It ruins souls and beauty.
What's needed is a fundamental respect for the human body across all of its dimensions, including the sexual. That's the whole point. That's what everyone anti-porn is arguing. Pornography is not only demonstrably extrinsically bad because, as the Irish study says, it turns people generally and broadly unhappy, it is intrinsically bad because its production constitutes a fundamental disrespect for human beauty and authentic sexuality or what would may be called eros. This is a little too meta to be a serious demarcation criteria, but that's what I would submit for the porn/art distinct even outside of the modern internet hyperscale context.
It is bewildering to me that so much explicit sexual content in society is broadcast out to people of all ages, without their informed consent, and then mass reaction to it is sort of a squirm-and-look-away at best. This is bad for everyone involved and everyone watching.
the left - they are deeply mistrustful of sexuality
Couldn't agree more.
Well not with that attitude it won't.
I laughed.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
I think this really quickly devolves into a semantic argument on the definition of pornography. So, let's avoid that and take it to the level of use or consumption.
If, like you, people are reading obscure Japanese doujin sites to try to explore the new depths / heights of frontier fiction, that's all well and good. I definitely don't subscribe to the idea that "Art" is only what The New Yorker deems worthy.
But hyperscale internet porn is not being used as an exploratory medium. It's an utterly cheap consumptive good that users mainline to meet base biological urges. The best comparison is absolutely processed sugar. It's such an overwhelming stimulant to the "yes, good, more!" part of the brain that it creates an almost addict like behavior pattern. When you're hyper-circuiting your brain by overcharging your endocrine system, there are no cycles left to devote to metaphysical pondering of the high concepts of art. My 3 hour jerk-fest to Backdoor Sluts 9 does not conclude with a new appreciation for the masculine-feminine dynamic.
So, this leaves us with the question of is it possible to separate and independently evaluate the medium from its most common consumption pattern? Can we look at "tasteful" amateur porn and draw some interesting conclusions about art and sexual behavior while casting away the comments section with such profound gems as "tits are meh. good bj"
I'd argue no - because the feedback loop in internet porn is inherently based on the consumption patterns of the users. PornHub makes money through data mining and algorithm building. Content creators there surf trends just as much as YouTube content creators. Indirectly, the consuming user today is the trend-setter for tomorrow. Operating at the speed and scale of the internet, this creates the insane feedback loops that lead to weird niches suddenly bubbling to the top. (faux-cest etc.)
So, is porn bad and are people who call themselves anti-porn worth taking seriously? Yes. Because they're not talking about the content in isolation, they're talking about the larger patterns, systems, and societal outcomes surrounding it. The Irish study presented above literally ends by saying "people who use porn a lot have bad lives. We don't like that they have bad lives." This is a far, far cry from the trope of a Nancy Reagan look alike waggling her finger at a few playboys found under a mattress. This is not a rejection of the primacy of human sexuality in culture. This is not puritanical rejection of the body. This is a principled stand against the degradation of beauty, intimacy, and pro-social functioning.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
Related related:
"It's hard to analyze which guys are spies; be advised, people.
We recognize who lies, it's all in the eyes, chico."
-- Big Pun, "You Ain't a Killer"
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
I know this is an excellent appraisal because I had never thought of it before yet it's so obvious once spelled out. This tracks fluidly with the fact that all people, when asked to give advice, often give advice calibrated to themselves, their circumstances, and their experiences. It's why billionaire tech bros say "take big risks and skip college", supreme court justices say "be diligent and patient in your studies", and broke boomer beach bums say "just keep on living, man."
This also tracks with something I've noticed over the past five years - young women today have ZERO game. I won't speculate on causes. I would state firmly, however, that mid 20s - 30s women of 10 years ago knew how to flirt (i.e. express interest in a masked way so as to promote escalation while mitigating the possibility of direct rejection) and otherwise be a complement to the strategies that men used to pursue them (if they were, in fact, willing participants in the seduction).
In fact, a lack of flirting was a pretty good signal to perceptive men that she wasn't interested. Nowadays, apparently, a blank stare and monosyllabic responses can mean everything from "you are the most repulsive creature in the galaxy" to "please take me away to the magical love castle on your sex unicorn now."
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
I think a rising one could be Mike Gallagher:
- Former Marine Officer
- Has a PhD, but in intelligence studies, not weird university nonsense
- Congressman before 40
- Wife and kids
What sets it over the top is that he announced he's not going to seek reelection because "being a full time politician isn't what the founding fathers intended." That sets him pretty distinctly apart from conservative politicians who talk the talk and do vote the vote ... yet have only ever had the job of "man who talks in front of cameras about politics and stuff" so they come across as disingenuous. See, for instance, Josh Hawley - he's trying to lead their weird masculinity revival ... but he's wholly from the path of Harvard-Yale-Lawyer-Congress.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
During the height of MeToo, >50% of men working normie corporate jobs implemented the Mike Pence rule, even if they didn't announce it.
For male managers / any position with real authority (hire/fire, performance reviews, etc.) this was >80%.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
Mostly pretty young women crying very loudly.
Or their male counterparts who vociferously swear allegiance to whatever is the object of that crying or, on the other political extreme, high volume chauvinists who trade content and persuasion for volume and repetition. #I'm-With-The-Orange-Man-All-Women
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
Wow, yeah, that's quite the look for the daughter of Dr. Kermit Make Your Bed.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
WW2 got it to as high as one in three military aged males, I believe.
Now, it's less than 1%.
But even thinking in terms of the 20th century and citizen-solider military is too late. I'm talking about the 19th century and prior where the martial structure was far more local.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
Excellent. You're correct and I hadn't thought of that.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
Did Peterson ever come out and directly address his daughter and Tate?
That subplot always seemed incredibly wild to me.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
Selecting "role models" from within the system just continues the current system. The flavors change like all seasonal consumer goods.
I've written before about the cartoonish man-boy masculinity in current marketing. (I mean, Jesus, they literally have a boy with a beard in the first 20 seconds of the clip. This is what the marketers think of you). What is marketed and allowed is a no-consequence, no-potency masculinity that's safe and fun for all ages. There are uncountable YouTube clips that draw the obvious parallel between a boy at toy shop and a Dad at Home Depot / Fleet Farm. Adult manhood in the west is a cute "awww, look at them play!" trope.
Even within the current system, you hear complaint about prolonged boyhood and doughy soft man boys. SNL keeps almost pointing at it. For the greatest example; Seth Rogen's entire existence and career. In fact, this is also where clowns like Tate fall short. Tate was a kickboxer - not a soldier. His "manly" development was in a tightly controlled professional sport. I will always remember the time when I got into a scuffle with a fraternity brother who was a Division-1 Wrestler. He handily stomped my drunk ass but I was surprised to see him obviously shaken up after the fight. In our drunken bro-hug reconciliation, he let me know that "that was the first time I've been in a fight, man!"
I think the crux of it lies in the fact that a society wide ritual of real consequence to mark the transition from boy to man has been effectively eliminated.
Through the 20th century, the transition I'm talking about was when boys banded together for a hunt or tribal level military service. Consequences were real, people got hurt, women weren't only not "allowed" - it would've been actively detrimental to have them involved. Thus, you also had real and meaningful identification of a fundamentally male activity (hunting / war). While that no longer exists, women still absolutely have their sacred capability and activity; motherhood (or, at least, the ability to be a mother even if not chosen). (For a different post, but I also think that moterhood is under systemic attack as well.)
In another post (which I'm too lazy to link to) I pondered about how to get something like this back up and running today. It's hard for a few reasons; 1) Hunting isn't at all "necessary" the way it was in societies past, so the social honor / social proof reward would be absent for some sort of rec-league hunting team 2) War is a contest of human-techno-logistical systems now and you need committed professionals. As much as I love my Marines, the "warrior spirit" can't help you against guided munitions 3) I can't actually bring myself to be okay with something on the order of 1-2 in 10 young men being permanently maimed / killed for no other reason than to help generally promote good society wide models of masculinity. The closest approximation I came up with is a re-worked National Guard program (male only) that would start at the end of High School with something like quarterly musters until the age of 50. So many legal / logistic problems with that and I don't know if it would actually result in much more than a federally subsidized "guns and bowling" league.
In short - I just don't have any good ideas for this one, but I know it's a massive problem.
Until we figure out that idea, modern secular man will be one version or another of perma-boyhood --- the "giggling at my own farts" of Seth Rogen or the "pussy and punching" paper Tiger of Andrew Tate.
Quick side note: I believe there are viable traditional religious solutions to this (surprise!) but those simply aren't broadly implementable without sprinting towards a theocracy.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
No comment on the permaban decision.
I'm surprised at some of the reactions to the "oddness" of Hlynka's views.
They're pretty common classical conservatism (FiveHourMarathon highlighted the "Hobessian" nature of it all) mixed with Gen-X / Millenial combat veteran comedic-fatalism. @JTarrou - think I've missed the mark here?
I understand that some of the drive-by insults were against the rules - and should be. I wonder how much, in Hlynka's mind, they were 40-layer deep irony / edgelord pills. Google the "November Juliet" scene from Generation Kill. Or "Whopper Junior."
Again, as this comment started out, no opinion being offered on the ban decision. I'm just pondering Hlynka's nature.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
What good does it do to have an answer to "What do you want the world to be like 100 years after you die," if it doesn't give you an actionable goal?
You will start to move towards better things that may reveal not only a single, but multiple goals. The pursuit of truth isn't a single path. There are many branches to it and finding the one or the several that best accommodate you is an important part of the process. It's what some of us would call "discernment." If you're waiting around to discover not only (1) THE big goal and (2) a perfectly linear prescriptive algorithm to accomplish it ... you're waiting for revelation. If so, prepare for even more doubt and feelings of existential dread.
What does it matter to have such a picture, if there's nothing you can do to affect whether or not it comes to pass?
Sorry to be trite, but; have faith.
Or maybe you just can't see any such actions.
There you go!
As long as it takes until what, exactly?
Exactly.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
The worst thing that happened in the 90s was literally Limp Bizkit.
Alright, I get it, you won't be following my Limp/Creed/Nickelback playlist on Spotify. Whatever, that's just like, your opinion, man.
blowjobs became mandatory acts in private,
(nervous Catholic laughter)
Also - from my observations there is an absurd disheartening and nihilism ( and not the fun kind) that moves trough western society youth.
Hard agree - and this is where alarm bells go off for me. Every generation gets to a point in their 30s where they start uttering their first "kids these days!" I saw it when the Gen Z slang began to pop up in mainstream adds. There were literally sentences I could not follow. No cap. Okay, I guess I'm no longer "with it" (cure Grandpa Simpson meme).
Then I started listening to some SuicideBoys and BONES. The messages there are beyond dark. This isn't hardcore gangster rap that glorified ultra violence. As terrible as the values implicit to that are, at least there's some message of group solidarity, competition but possible victory with rivals, and a celebration of demonstrated capability ("me and my homies will murder all of the people who don't like us and then drink alcoholic beverages and consume schedule 1 substances while discussing those incidents of homicide in jovial terms. Also, copulation with curvaceous women is probable") Gen Z dark/emo rap is screaming into the void while simultaneously accepting the inevitability of it all. It isn't learned helplessness, it is unshakable faith in a tangible helplessness [^1]. The description of drug use is worth highlighting; across many genres of music since Rock 'n Roll in the 1960s, drug / alcohol use and abuse has been shorthand for "look at my amazing crazy life." You do have songs here and there about the dangers of that kind of life etc. Grunge takes it to talking about the horrible feedback loop of addiction but also, sometimes, recovery. Gen Z talks about substance abuse a desperate sprint to oblivion. Far from "I love to party!" or "Damn, I wish I could shed this ball and chain" it's pretty much "Get fucked up in a big way as often as possible. Just fucking do it." Suicide by another name.
All of this is set against the backdrop of a society where material conditions have never been better, yet there is constant cultural strife.
It reminds me of some of the documentaries on Norwegian Black Metal in the 90s. There's a couple of former artists and journalists from that scene who said some version of, "Living in Norway in the 90s was so fucking easy that it became meaningless." You can point to secularism, you can point to the removal of the Russian threat, you can point to the start of pan-Europeanism and the homogenization of already incredibly homogeneous societies. The cause is irrelevant, the outcomes are more stark; brief and constrained as it was, Norwegian black metal resulted in real damage, death, and murder (look up the Church Burnings and Varg vs Euronymous).
Panning back to American Gen Z, the elevated suicide rate is component 1 of their brand of nihilism. I wonder if we aren't already seeing component 2: nihilistic murder. The Parkland High School shooter was Gen Z and had a grocery list of nihilistic / degenerate / isolated life circumstances. More culture-war-y, the Covenant School shooter was a Trans Gen Z'er. I think it's undeniable that some portion of the hardcore Trans Cult is essentially nihilist in that they relish denying basic biology as well as using conversation as a panacea for any and all mental health issues.
So, while I am confident that a lot of the Millenial / Gen X anguish over Gen Z is simply "Kids-These-Days"-ism, there is some level of nihilism that will not be assuaged by Hot Topic stickers and baggy jeans. It will express itself through an ultraviolence directed both internally and externally. I'm not sure how to solve that, and I'm not sure there's been a post-WW2 generation anywhere that is this predisposed to lack of respect for human life.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
My Catholic instinct is to tell you to Jesus up your Jesus meter until you get a sick Jesus turbo boost.
But, I'm aware that, on the Motte, the kids would say that's "sus" and I may even be accused of "cappin'"
Thus, allow me to perform a sinful heresy on your behalf and secularize what's basically a Christian imperative.
-
Ask yourself the question "What would you want to have happen in the world even if you were dead?" paired with "What do you want the world to be like 100 years after you die". I'd recommend doing the old trick of asking this question, going on a walk wherein you don't try to direct your thoughts, and then come back home to write no more than a single page (maybe 300 words at the most) to capture your thoughts. Do this once or twice a week for .... as long as it takes!
-
A little more prescriptive; read Infinite and Finite games by James P. Carse. And then find an infinite game to play.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
Part of me wants to report this for being incendiary.
But, a larger part of me just sort of likes to contemplate it as a kind of internet modern art.
I am now Cameron from Ferris Bueller at the museum.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
Korwa.
Yes to all of this.
The dirty secret in banking is that it is a fantastically boring job with close to zero intellectual stimulation. It's a sales gig that also makes you work 60+ hours a week on busy work. The military analogies and military-like culture makes sense - the guys (and gals) who make it are 10-20% above average sales people and 80-90% "I can take relentless shit for years on end" tough.
The best hustle in the finance world is high-net worth / ultra-high net worth individual wealth management. If ever there was a job that was literally "I get paid to golf and go to cocktail parties" this is it. The hours are sane to luxurious (anywhere from 20 - 40 a week). The money can be seven figures easily. The rub - your first five years are often poverty wages, it is 110% networking (meaning that if your network is bad at networking, you pay the price), and everyone has their "lucky break" story. No one makes it through grinding alone.
More options
Context Copy link