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100ProofTollBooth


				

				

				
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joined 2023 January 03 23:53:57 UTC

				

User ID: 2039

100ProofTollBooth


				
				
				

				
1 follower   follows 0 users   joined 2023 January 03 23:53:57 UTC

					

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User ID: 2039

Non-consensual mind control is a capital crime, at least if you're not on a leash by a state.

So, uh, asking for a friend (that friend is the Culture War Thread)

What are your thoughts on social media and porn?

Best books (including audio books) on serial killers?

True crime, fiction, non-fiction are all fine. Doesn't need to be haute lit-ra-ture ... can be a dime store novel as long as it good.

Please and thank you.

Unlike what you're saying I eat many more vegetables now, as well as fruit.

Wait, I think this is what I am saying?

  1. Why did you fail? Make a list of reasons. Pick one or two to try and improve on.
  2. Pick a different project. Maybe make it related to your failed website.
  3. Project plan --> execution --> log and journal --> repeat.

There's no shortcut here and part of the only way to progress is to encounter and then surpass failure. This is a short comment because all of the content you actually need is in it.

This is the same content density of 98% of all self-help books.

Saying one party is the party of the working class because slightly more than half of voters go for the other party while slightly less than half go for the same seems like it's drawing too strong a conclusion from too little evidence. Whichever poll you reference, characterizing the conflict as one of pure class comes across as slightly farcial. It is, however, consistent with my theory that the liberal-conservative conflict is sectoral (in particular, merchants and gentry versus professionals) and normative.

There's some parts of this that I might try to nitpick or reframe, but, broadly, I think this is well argued and an astute analysis.

  1. Simply watching one's weight is sufficient to lose weight
  2. Survivorship bias: only the people who lost weight report it

Pretty much these two things. Most diets fail because the diet-er just stops.

a higher fraction of socially conservative tradcaths.

I have been summoned.

This just makes me want to start sponsoring Knight of Columbus Taverns all across the country. Bolt 'em on to the local parish. Have to be a local or sponsored by one to attend.

Perhaps the Holy Spirit - in the form of the fully alcoholic blood of Christ and its various Irish and Scottish cousins - can move the younguns to form holy unions.

I really like this response, I just want to pull out some more details.

"The missing step A" -- Is this the initial meeting between two young people? From what I can gather, it looks like you're saying that tradcath communities are great for getting a young couple on rails into a marriage, but bad at getting Harry to meet Sally at the dance. Is this accurate?

Awesome. Thank you for the well articulated reply.

One more piece of anec-data to take or leave; It seems to me that my strength training (heavy compound lifts, think Starting Strength protocols) directly improve my runs as well. I'm sure there's a frontier to these when additional weight starts to retard progress. However, as of now, it feels like a free lunch.

Korwa.

The vast majority of kids don't abuse knives. Why can't it be the same with recreational drugs?

The intent of recreational drugs is to "use it on yourself."

The intent of a knife is never to "use it on yourself" except for exceedingly rare medical emergency situations or incidents of self-harm that are universally recognized as bad.

I think that porn has helped me to become more comfortable with my sexuality.

Bully for you.

I don't think that there is anything shameful whatsoever about watching porn.

Would you be alright with a stranger watching porn next to you on an airline flight? Or in a library? Or around children?

If you're in a powerlifting cycle of any sort, you've already move past the beginner lifter phase which, I believe, was OP's situation. We're talking about two different things.

entering the shadow realm

Peace be upon you, fellow gym-meme brother/sister.

Re: "20 pullups, but no deadlift?" The case that comes to mind was a long distance runner who I saw doing a PFT. Rail skinny, but did kill his pullups. By sheer insane coincidence, ran into him at the post gym later that day. 2 plate deadlift, had to cat-back it by the third rep. My theory is that the hyper-specifically trained for his pullups on the PFT by doing .... a shit ton of pullups for several months. I can see how that would over emphasize biceps-to-lats but not actually develop the full posterior chain through the glutes and hamstrings. I think you're also probably correct in the "form" argument - he had no conception of how to use his legs to start the rep.

Now, would've been able to rack pull 225? Hey, maybe.

I apologize if this is better suited to a Sunday thread, but it's top of mind for me right now.

Any recommendations for reactionary reading? I want to be specific that I have no interest in the "Dark Enlightenment" Yarvin/Land side of things as I've read enough of that to know it really is permanently-online neo-reddit-Edge-Lord content.

To maybe give a bit of a Customers Also Liked vibe; I'm moving through the works of James Burnham and have read a lot of Russell Kirk and Willmoore Kendall. I know these folks would be more in the traditionalist conservative camp, which I have enjoyed. Wondering if there's anything beyond them that doesn't actually drop into out-and-proud monarchism / theocracy.

I can't say with a lot of specific certainty as I don't know those policing systems much at all.

I know that the concept of civil liberties and privacy are fundamentally weaker. For instance, I know that there has been at least an official police visit to folks who have posted offensive language on twitter. Not an arrest, per se, but an official sanctioned visit to the domicile. The threshold for what would take a warrant in the USA is much lower. I believe the language is "vital to an ongoing investigation" at the discretion of the police themselves - no judge needed.

So, assuming I'm not wildly off base with my statements above (which are, admittedly, fuzzy at best) ... A constable in the UK would hear that Leroy Brown is a bad dude from the local toughs and then, presumably, launch and official investigation. This would allow Constable Fish-N-Chips to surveil Mr. Brown and search his domicile (again, I think) with near impunity. No such thing as off-limits or 'non-pertinent' information. It's a 24/7 (or as much time as the cops feel like) surveillance and waiting game until Mr. Brown somehow commits a crime with prosecuting.

Largely, yes. The bright side, however, is that there is more than enough good stuff that you'll never have to fall back to the personal novellas.

I'd personally recommend jumping in the deep end: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Remember it was published in the 1980s and probably penned throughout the 1970s. I wonder if any editor at a publishing house today would even read draft chapter nowadays.

This is a great point. Also love the phrasing. Bravo.

I also think that women, in particular, when they've grown up being showered with male attention, and the had their pick of suitors, they expect that they'll still be a hot commodity once they're out of their marriage. They have been out of the game so long that they don't realize that a 30+ woman, possibly with kids, is simply not going to command the same sort of attention, especially with newer models on the showroom floor.

A buddy has a theory that this is how the "Karen" archetype comes into being. A former hot girl abruptly stops getting heretofore assumed male attention because of the tyranny of age and gravity. For some subset (the Karens) their brain cannot process how or why this might be. They cannot shift to a "graceful" aging. Instead, they turn up the volume and demands as they simply believe the world doesn't realize what a hot commodity they have in front of them.

I've never been one for armchair psychology, but this theory is, at least, sort of fun?

Did the social revolution of the 60s make everybody unhappy and miserable?

I don't care about individual level self-reported happiness. You agree with this later in your post. I care about generative social functioning in a free society.

This is often used by social conservatives to argue that women were happier as wives and mothers and that forcing them out of their ‘natural’ roles and into competition with men was a mistake.

(First of many "don't put words in a conservative's mouth" notes). No, it's not that "women belong in the kitchen." It's that life is about tradeoffs and with ability comes responsibility. Women are more than free to work the demanding careers they chose. If they find themselves in male dominated fields, they have to compete. They cannot ask for a separate set of rules. As a society, we shouldn't trade new options for old ones; being a stay at home Mom should be viewed as well as it was before, not as a traitors action to the Boss Babe lifestyle.

The problem with the “everyone is depressed and killing themselves because we aren’t based and trad anymore” story is that it doesn’t hold internationally....It’s pretty undeniable that Western Europe underwent the same social revolution as the US. On many metrics like irreligion, illegitimacy, and rates of people identifying as LGBT, what a social conservative would probably call ‘the decay’ is actually significantly more advanced than it is in the US....Yet over the past several decades in Europe, self-reported happiness has tended to either hold steady, or increase.

Apples and oranges. Europe, until the last decade, was still interconnected pockets of monocultures. The U.S. was not. Which leads me to....

What about the dreaded epidemic of single motherhood? Well, as noted above, multiple European countries have single-parenthood rates (and as in the US, the vast majority being single mothers) equivalent or greater than those of the US, without the associated social dysfunction.

Yes, because in a monoculture with massive social safety nets, it's a lot easier to comfortably raise a child as a single parent. Before the knee-jerk "well maybe american social safety nets should get larger!" Please look at real European growth rates. Socially, look at the social-mobility history of Europe vis-a-vis U.S. since end WW2. Social dysfunction is, indeed, rare when social authoritarianism and stagnancy are the rule of the day.

There’s not as much research as one would like, but from what I have found, the children of widowed mothers do not tend to differ much on outcomes from the children of biological, two-parent households, so “growing up without a father” doesn’t seem to be that important net of other factors.

APPLES AND URRNGES. Massive difference between a woman who loses her husband to unexpected death versus a woman (or man) who makes a bad mate-pairing decision early on. It's about choices, risk, and commitment.

What about the supposedly meteor-tier impact on the ‘sexual marketplace’? This is honestly worthy of its own post, but the short answer. Is, no, the idea that the upper 20% (or 10% or 5% or 1% depending on how blackpilled your interlocutor is) of Chads hoarding all the woman while ordinary guys starve is very thinly supported on the ground.

I would argue that this is a point in favor of pre-SR norms. The entire concept of permanent monogamy in marriage is that it moves past the natural order of one male impregnating a whole bunch of females. It prevents the Hobbesian state of the sexual marketplace from occurring. This stabilizes society. It is impossible (as your own statistic clearly state) to deny that the number of sexless and single men has gone up since approx 1980. I see this as a slow regression back to the wild and brutal state of the sexual marketplace.

Last year a headline proclaiming “most young men are single. Most young women are not.” went viral. Specifically, GSS data showed that 63% of young men reported themselves as single while only 34% of young women did. This was of course immediately seized upon as proof that a huge proportion of girls are in “chad harems.” Since nobody bothers to read beyond a sensationalist headline, not many dug deep enough to discover that this proportion has been roughly the same for over thirty years, so if the chadopoly is real, it’s been going on for a long time.

It has, was, and always will be real. The whole point is to minimize it.

As for the “divorce rape” the manosphere has spent the last fifteen years insisting is endemic under our gynocracy, only 10% of divorces actually result in any actual alimony paid.

Difference alimony being paid and judgement rendered. "Actually, too many dudes are too poor to pay anything. They're getting off scott free!" Isn't the counterpoint you want to lead with.

I add this cautiously, because it’s the only study I could find to treat the question, and it’s about the UK, and it’s about twenty years old, but there is at least some evidence that men actually end up richer long term post-divorce. Which makes intuitive sense to me. Most men are breadwinners, so naturally when you don’t have to support a whole other human being, you’re going to have more disposable income on hand.

I appreciate you stating your caution upfront. Single study, old etc.

If you’re a conservative, then you think single motherhood, divorce ... and promiscuity, are bad in and of themselves.

Sure do.

people being gay

("don't put words in my mouth" volume 2) Sure don't. Small-c conservatives don't care about sexual orientation at all. Sexual behavior is different, and that's independent from orientation.

the social revolution of the 60s was tautologically a bad thing since that revolution was explicitly an anti-conservative one.

Yup.

But that is not likely to convince anyone who is not already a conservative.

The SR itself, no. The 40+ years of obivous societal decay ... I'd say that's more .... convincing.

but I also don’t think there’s much evidence for “everything would be better if we RETVRNED” thesis.

Agree! Which is why I'm not actually a reactionary (despite their often above average memes). Anyone who recommends a direct, linear, return back to the actions, rituals, even dress of traditional pre-SR society is looking to break-off to start their own communitarian organization. The Amish have been owning the game on that from the jump (play on, players). What conservatives / tradtionalists today are trying to do is (1) Get people to admit that the SR was on-net bad and (2) Devise ways of using traditional / conservative values to devise ways of change for a more stable society. (In the American context, this has to respect individual liberties etc. which is why I'm nowhere near the pseudo-fascist American torysits etc.)

This is all besides the fact that I don't think it's POSSIBLE to retvrn because I think the massive social changes of the past two centuries are down less to the Frankfurt School indoctrinating everyone with Cultural Marxism.

Yep. It isn't possible to "retvrn."

...and more to the seismic shifts in the actual underlying material basis of society, which could not be undone short of some kind of totalitarian anti-technological world dictatorship (which of course would have to make significant use of modern technology to impose itself) enforcing the law of Ted Kaczynski upon the earth, but that is another story and I am tired of writing.

Conservatives / traditionalists have not provided an adequate response to technology. I will grant that. It is interesting, however, that most of the breathless "social media is the devil, tech companies are the new overlords, AGI needs to be hyperregulated right NOW!" comments find their origin the the modern liberal/progressive left.

I absolutely agree.

Direct quote from Singer: "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living".

This is why contemporary academic philosophy is bankrupt. The most influential living ethicist has concocted a pseudo-formal structure that result in infanticide being on the table, and no one has stopped to say, "Hey, that's fucking bananas."

I'm a big fan of engaging with potentially "dangerous" ideas. Not to try and figure out how to prove them actually valid, but as a means of understand the limits, logical extremes, and unforseen weaknesses in one's own argument or viewpoint. When you end up holding one of these crazy ideas, however, that's when you have to go back to the first draft and try to unravel the bad thread.

Singer, instead, sits in supreme comfort in his abstracted-away EA fantasy world where an affair isn't an affair per se and when a living human isn't really human-y enough.

My family's background is roughly speaking confederate descendants who roamed around after the war with about three separate main branches settling between Appalachia and Texas.

As other comments have pointed out "whiny"-ness, let me double down that - this song continues a long tradition of folk/country/bluegrass fatalism that I have little tolerance for. "My daddy grew up here and lived as a poor man, and so did my grandaddy, and so did his daddy...but we all grew up right, and I'm gonna stay here and be just like them!" .... Why / how is inter-generational poverty a virtue? If it's the case that your in such an awful economic situation that you can't advance your lot in life more than several generations before you, you have all of my sympathy. And that same sympathy disappears the second you turn that situation into some sort of battle cry of authenticity or moral superiority.

There's something to be said here about crabs in a bucket, and how it seems like - for more than a few cultures inspired by Southern Clanish / Honor cultures - the only way to prove authenticity and adherence to "traditional" (and, therefore, right) cultural norms is through demonstrated poverty and dysfunction.

Why is that the goal? Sure, I have a deep appreciation for stories about the dust bowl I heard growing up, but I have more appreciation that my Dad and Uncles used the G.I. bill to get STEM degrees and were also willing to move the family around for job opportunities. Law obeying, studious, industrious, and economically astute seems like a good rubric for "Rasied 'Em Right!" when compared with impulsive, prone to violence, substance abuse, obsessed with vague notions of honor but .... geographically consistent?

The unfortunate fact is that your suffering alone yields no accolade or social currency. No one cares. The best you can do, as this song tries to, is whip up some strong emotionalism and try to trade-the-currency for moral deference. But that exchange rate is never strong and that commodity expiry is measured in hours.

I hope this doesn't violate any rules, but I want to slide in with a big old "consider the source." Hersh used to be the pinnacle of deep investigative journalism ... and then something happened? His coverage of the Bin Laden raid was the marker for me of him really falling off.

just that one must be careful that it may not apply to everyone,

Then let me be explicit; my advice may not apply to everyone

and if it doesn't work for somebody, it doesn't mean they are even more of a loser than they thought

Nowhere did I say this. You did. My introductory "loser" comments were caveated upfront.

but that there are other ways that would be better for them.

How can I possibly know this about another person who I have never met?

Like, for example, find communities online where once could practice talking with various people.

This. Isn't. Talking. To. People.

Maybe even with people of female persuasion without trying to score with them ;)

OP is literally asking for ways to get better at dating

just maybe not jump right into that if that's not what you're comfortable doing.

What is more important to OP? Developing comfort with current situation, or seeking to change current situation? I suppose that's a question for him.

That depends a lot of what you mean by "said".

Dude.

What was the first thing for which you used your face hole to send sonic vibrations to her?


Whenever there's a line-by-line quote-response breakdown in the replies, it's always because someone (in this case, me) has taken issue with what they feel to be a very bad argument. I freely admit this is the case.

None of what you have said is in anyway wrong, debased, or could be considered offensive. But I think literally all of it is ineffective based on what I believe OP's goals to be. I know I'm getting close to Jordan Peterson territory here and I'll resist the urge to start shouting "MAKE YER BED." But I think that most gradualist self-improvement advice is ineffective and is ultimately a road to developing new and fun copes for bad situations. All good self-improvement advice is a variant of "you're going to have to do things that aren't comfortable, but then things will improve for you." So, that's what I'm offering OP. That it may not be comfortable for him is precisely the point. Now, to try an find some middleground, if OP really does believe my advice will also be ineffective, he's more than free to ignore it.

I believe you haven't offered any advice that is more effective. I believe you had only offered advice that is ineffective. I believe you have prioritized comfort relative to the current state over absolutely improved future state.

I will await your reply wherein you tell me "Well it must've worked! - I'm married!"

What was the first thing you said to your wife?

"I don't think your advice will work for me," Is a valid thing to say. I offered my best possible advice with genuine intent.