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.
17hr ago
but it was basically an order of magnitude bigger than 9/11 and the LA riots combined.
The Soleimani raid or COVID?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21hr ago
Well, No.
Trump has a natural, intuitive understanding of the American electorate, but he's always been rather incompetent at foreign policy personally. He clearly realized this after his first term and it has been plain to see that he's outsourced different problems to different people;
- Ukraine - Witkoff
- Gaza/Israel - Kushner
- Central / South America - Marco Rubio
This operation, and Venezuelan "policy" in general, has Rubio's pawprints all over it. Remember, Rubio is a Cuban-American from South Florida. Venezuela, being Western Hemisphere public enemy number one after Cuba, has always been in his crosshairs. Here's an article about Rubio, in 2020, meeting with the Venezuela opposition leader for instance. Also, here's a 2020 Politico article calling this out specifically.
Trump is still a lame duck. The midterms, which are ten months away, are not going to be full of campaigning on "Caracas Hawk Down!" For a bizarrely chronologically similar parallel, reference the Soleimani raid over New Years in 2020. How did that go for Trump's re-election? The economy is probably already down bad but some creative accounting and a flaccid rate cut are plugging the dam for now. The Special elections this november in VA and elsewhere ... didn't go well. And, to find whatever the opposite of the silver lining is, this strike on Venezuela has some pretty not fun open questions regarding AUMFs and War Powers.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21hr ago
?
Is this a reference I'm not picking up? Genuinely confused here.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21hr ago
What if it was an "invitation to resign" when the Americans were right outside his door, so to speak.
"Hey, surrender now and get extradited to New York, or we're going to yeet you into the hereafter" type deal
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21hr ago
Good point.
Does it kill webcam girls and the parasocially heavy OnlyFans accounts?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
the twitter account @s2_underground (which had some good stuff on UKR war) is claiming that Maduro cut a deal with the US and the "raid" was mostly him waiting for a sweet 160th SOAR Uber Ride. I hate to "big if true" this, but @s2_underground is usually better-than-not on bre-confirmed breaks like this.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
I'm going to assume CAG/DEVGRU made this happen. That he was a) a current head of state and b) taken alive ranks this as the new GOAT raid ahead of Bin Laden - at least as far as my money goes.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Why is that better?
Makes pre-marriage discernment of true compatibility more important. Both parties have to be thorough and sober in thinking about the future together.
Why would shifting to this arrangement make women more inclined to marry?
It wouldn't. But it would boost the initial social value of getting married and seriously boost the social value of staying married to a good man. Downstream, cadding and slutting would be socially de-valued. People admire people who can do hard things. If marriage is (somewhat) harder, it becomes more admired.
Less likely to be concerned about their ability to support themselves?
Again, because of the social esteem of having a stable marriage, men with the ability (and _stability) to support a wife and children would be valued higher relative to face tattoo bad boys who are "fun" but can't hold a job.
I think framing it solely as "shouldn't women in bad situations be able to get out of them?" is a kind of false choice. Because, upstream of this, you could reframe it as "we shouldn't let women get into bad situations so easily." Which is exactly what I am saying. I'll admit this actually runs against my usual stance of "let people do things." But, the society level costs of shitty marriage culture is self-evident. THE number one predictor of poor life outcomes for kids is a single parent household.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Wow, that's depressing. I understand the physical limitations through the 1940s,50s,60s,70s (in some parts of the country). Nowadays, however, this should be able to solved for a small amount of money. However, I can already imagine how "School upgrades" plus union labor plus public procurement of goods and services means installing 10 A/C units on the roof equals a $10 million contract that takes place over four years.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Correct. Perfect is impossible and also the enemy of the good.
The solution is eliminating no-fault divorce and actually requiring some sort of proof beyond a threshold for divorce. "I don't think he cares about my problems" doesn't cut it. "He routinely screams at me and berates me, the cops have been involved a few times" checks out. That precise rubric doesn't matter so much as having one and sticking to it.
Still, there will be edge-of-edge cases. This is precisely where I don't want to over-engineer a policy. That is because policy surgically targeted at hyper edge cases usually has a bunch of unintended consequences for the median case.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
when billionaires steal more from all of us everyday?
This is a reddit level trope.
Please, please, please tell me, specifically, how billionaires are committing massive theft every day. My opinion and prediction is that you can't because you don't actually mean what you've written. What you mean is that "billionaires make lots of money, I don't, and that's bad." Which, if you want to say it, is actually an argument you could make!
But instead we get to this righteous indignation based on personal emotion and now, suddenly, billionaires are repeat mega felons. Come on.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
even if I mess them up, I’ll go to jail.
Nitpick. But this isn't true unless you're just being repeatedly careless with corporate taxes. If there isn't a clear intent to not pay or to avoid tax, the IRS wants you to pay far more than they want to prosecute you.
Where you are 1000% correct, however, is that if you mess them up because of a totally indecipherable tax code, you may have to pay all sorts of penalties, which does seem, to me, to be outrageous.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
I know what you mean, and it is a thorny problem when it is a unforeseeable circumstance. People change and get strange. Marriage and children do change husband and wife.
But, I am also now thinking of a friend's cousin who matched with a guy on tinder, found out on the first date that he was fresh out of a 7 year prison sentence for armed robbery .... and will be celebrating her 2 year anniversary with him, I believe, in February.
Mate selection is important. "Follow your heart" has to be one of the most catastrophic psyops of all time, for men and women but, again, especially, for women. If you can envision that idea that the man you are marrying will use his provision of resources as a way to trap you in a non-consensual relationship, perhaps you shouldn't marry that guy. If your friends and family voice hesitation in their approval of a mate, you should probably listen to them. That actually makes me think of another psyop - the young woman (usually an aristocrat) who doesn't want to marry the man she is "supposed" to (usually a very eligible and stable male aristocrat) and, instead, follows her hear (see above) to marry the black sheep / sad boi / romantic poet that she really loves. They always end up happily ever after, and, suspiciously, he's often some sort of hidden prince who is absolutely loaded.
I've never seen this happen in real life, and, far more frequently, I've seen mothers desperately tell their daughters, "hey don't marry this deadbeat!" But, following the heart, they sometimes do and the consequences are disastrously predictable.
I'll de-genderize all of this. The problem is in the assumed pure autonomy of the individual to know what is best for themselves in all circumstances. "Live your best life" and all of that. But that's a recipe for consistent cycle of FAFO learning. I ask my friends and business partners for advice constantly and they do the same with me. There's not necessarily a hierarchy or approval mechanism to it, but its a fantastic way to interrogate different opinions from people who care about you and who have different mental models of how things work. As a society, however, we've carved out this weird exception for literally the most consequential decision you will ever make. Marriage.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
But we do our best to prevent it from operating.
Exactly. But the cost of that prevention is passed on to people who make good decisions. That's the whole perversion of it. "Suicidal empathy" is one of the great bon mots of culture war discourse. It is possible to love-your-neighbor-to-(mutual)-death
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Think of a goodbrained version of "never meet your heroes." If a goon actually pays for a prostitute or companion of some sort, he has to fully interact with a person for some length of time. That could go wrong. It could make him feel bad. The distance created by a screen creates a perception of control and the ability to "Rage quit" if things go south. But they still want the knowledge that there's someone real over there.
Don't get me wrong, a portion of the "real people" online sex market will be taken by AI. Perhaps a pretty large portion of it. But there's going to remain these other niches. If online porn and COVID didn't kill stripclubs (and it didn't), I don't see how they every really go away.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
This would already be the natural course of things if we got rid of the fully retarded summer break. I don't know the origin of this practice (farming?) but the longitudinal data is indisputable; backsliding occurs in the summer, child abuse goes up, crime also goes up.
Furthermore, we have this horrible discontinuity where, from ages 6 - 22, people develop a "I have a long break to look forward to" mentality and then, upon entering the workforce, realize that isn't the case.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Phrased differently, this is just a massive tax cut for married couples that have kids. Which is has been a big part of mostly Republican tax ideas for decades now.
If I'm a guy making $100,000 at my job, and I'm paying 20% of my income in taxes each year but, if I get married and have a kid, that goes to 5% for the life of the kid, that's about $1,200 per month that could go to the kid. A 5 second google indicates that this is actually close to bang on for childcare monthly costs. Making up the difference would be mom having a part time job, or just coasting on savings for a year or two before getting a raise to say $125,000.
If we could get this massive tax advantage, we'd be set, right? Probably not. I am quite convinced that the deeper issue is in women having a totally irrational fear of being "trapped" because they aren't making their own money. It's almost a Jekyll and Hyde monster tale. They marry a guy because he's nice, funny, smart, and a good provider. They have a child because they both want to and love each other. Then, suddenly, he's demanding sex after dinner every night, beating her, and neglecting the child. The heroine can't leave because she's a helpless woman with no recourse (nevermind family, friends, or just a community that wouldn't tolerate spousal abuse). It just doesn't track. I'm not blaming women here, either. I think a combination of feminism-consumerism-hyperindividualism has convinced both men and women, but, especially women, that not having the means to support yourself (even within the context of a family) makes your morally reprehensible.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
The blackpill moment for me came about five or six Christmases ago.
I was came home to see mom, dad, and my siblings a few days before Christmas. At this time of year, every year, my dad finalizes his books. He has always run the household finances top to bottom, even though my mom had her own entrepreneurial career since I was little. This year, however, dad had extra time on his hands because, well, he'd been retired for the full year. Probably to keep busy, he was self-auditing the family's entire financial history since my oldest sibling was born (if you haven't figured it out by now, my dad was a finance nerd).
Coming into his office to greet him after, of course, hugging my mom first and learning about all the amazing Christmas cookie recipes she had shared with the other church ladies, I found my dad looking a bit sullen. Nothing catastrophic, but definitely something there. I perked up at once. Had he miscalculated their retirement forecast? Impossible, he'd been thinking about that daily for over a decade before he retired. What was it? Had mom started splurging on fur coats or trinkets for the grandkids?
I asked him what the matter was and his response was direct, "We should've never paid for heath insurance. We came out behind."
This was beyond stunning to hear. It was like finding out that I was adopted all these years later. Why? Because one of my siblings, in her teenage years, had had five major surgeries that required; A specialist-of-specialist surgeon to actually do each one, multi week hospital stays each time, weekly (later monthly) checkups locally, and prescriptions for all sorts of exotic medications. The whole saga actually played out over 4 years. Complications, poor recovery, etc. I was fairly young so I don't remember the worse of it, but this has always been cited as why my mother went prematurely grey.
I asked my father to explain. Pulling up the World's Greatest Excel Spreadsheet, he walked me through historical premiums, deductibles, out of pocket expenses. At the end, the =SUM() function told the tale; had mom and dad paid out of pocket instead for all that time, they would've saved money.
Two important caveats
- This does include family premiums my dad was paying across multiple employers both before and after my sister had her issues. I guess you could call this a bit of an apple-and-oranges situation. I'd be open to arguments.
- In order to pay at the time for all my sisters surgeries and hospital stays, my folks would've probably needed to take out a second mortgage. Dad had thought of this and done some analysis using the prevailing rates of the time -- he still believes it would've netted out in their advantage. I believe him on the raw numbers level, but the mental toll of having hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt overhanging for years may have "cost" more than the spreadsheet captured. Again, you be the judge.
Still in all, this was my helathcare blackpill moment. The normie narrative around healthcare is "yeah, it's too damn expensive, but if you really need it it's worth it." Well, like, no. My sister's bills probably put us into about the top 5% of expenditure for the years she was in the middle of everything. And yet, the numbers still didn't crunch.
Since then, I've learned that the top 1% of healthcare "users" (that is, people who are consuming care) represent about 50% of overall healthcare spending. It's a crazy power law. But that actually isn't the problem. As others have pointed out, it's all of the off book spending that gets done for defectors. This then gets passed up the chain to the middle and top. For every deadbeat who uses the ER as his or her primary care physician, many of them as "frequent fliers", that's thousands to tens of thousands of unpaid costs that have to get paid somewhere. And that somewhere is you, the dutiful policy holder. It is the ponzi schemes of ponzi schemes because the pyramid is upside down -- the people at the top aren't actually capturing a bunch of value and then playing slight of hand with those lower, it's that those at the very bottom are pushing all the cost up.
This is one of the moral dilemmas I actually think about most. If I, god forbid, ever need some sort of major procedure done, do I just defect and refuse to pay? They can't send me to jail. Maybe my credit score goes to shit forever, maybe I even go bankrupt. Eh, but then I'm just going to be a cash-only vagabond and live as free as I please.
But it would be wrong and immoral. As much as it is a totally rigged game, I see the only hope for society to be to continue to at least observe the rules of the game. Defecting in a collective action problem shifts immediate personal cost to prolonged socialized cost. It's inherently anti-social.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
This got nuked when it became illegal to deny people for preexisting conditions. It's doubly fucked when something like half all all chronic conditions can be traced to poor lifestyle management; diet, exercise, and substance misuse/abuse both legal and otherwise.
To extend the "most ships don't sink, most mail doesn't get lost" metaphor; most people want to drive their cars forever without hitting anyone or being hit by anyone. People who drink too much, smoke, don't exercise, and eat pseudo-food might not desire to see the doctor in a philosophical sense, but they're loudly ignoring the reality that they will need to in short order. It's the equivalent of driving blindfolded with your feet and, after hitting a lightpost, proclaiming, "_of course I didn't want to do that!"
In the west, we're actually pretty good at solving the big problems of actual healthcare (not health insurance) through good old fashioned innovation and market incentives. Diabetes used to mean losing a foot, and insulin changed that. Antibiotics going back to penicillin mean that you can literally get your can now body cavity opened up in ways that, in yesteryear, would've been a slow and agonizing death by infection. I contend that the greatest medicinal invention ever was functional public sewage and waste disposal paired with ubiquitous flush toilets and showers.
We're very bad at dealing with repeated objectively horrible decision making at the individual level. This is the thread that ties together not only healthcare but also welfare, criminal punishment, and abortion (to name the a few off the top of my head). If a given person wants to keep making awful decision, a free society has to tolerate that to some extent. The alternative is tyranny. What a free society should not do, in my opinion, and cannot do perpetually, is actively subsidize these bad decisions and/or the consequences arising from them.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Ultimately this is also why I don't see how Onlyfans continues to exist as a business model for flesh-and-blood women after this year.
That one is easy.
Ultimately, it'll become an even more premium service. Gooners will pay extra for some sort of cryptographically verifiable proof of realness. Setting up a digital chain of custody from a digital camera to actual final presentation on OnlyFans or another site wouldn't be too arduous and (markets in everything) someone will create a service to do just that.
Saying that AI porn will destroy "regular" porn fails because it relies on the same logic as "porn will destroy the market for webcam girls / strip clubs / prostitutes." It isn't all about the simple visual arousal, but about a parasocial/pararomantic/paraintimate relationship.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
And while both the boy generating the deepfakes and those passing it around (or even receiving it) could probably charged with federal CSAM stuff, that's such a nuclear option it's extremely unlikely anyone would seriously even threaten it here.
Thought experiment, what if one of the boys shows it to his creepy uncle and then snapchats it to his creepy uncle? Then creepy uncle is in possession of CSAM - even worse if he then darkwebs it to all of his other chomo friends.
Obviously, probably not going to charge the minor male with accessory, right? But this is the "break containment" mega problem for cases exactly like this. Call it "deepfake laundering"; kids unwittingly doing stuff that, in the realm of adults, would be 100% illegal.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
The basic problem is that our civilization is emotionally allergic to a key active ingredient of the medicine, and that's not something any amount of sugar-coating can help. Take the religious shell away and put it in a container that's as secular and facelessly bureaucratic as we are, and I don't think it makes a difference to the overall reaction.
I like this sentiment and I'm going to use it to comment more broadly on what I see as an aggravating tension between Tradition and Traditionalism. I'm use those two words so I can play off the "all -isms are bad" meme.
Tradition is a set of beliefs, values, and, importantly, ongoing or repeated behaviors that are inherited from the past with the goal to preserve the present and pass on to the future.
Traditionalism is vibe based gesturing at "how it used to be" with the implication that "it" used to be better. There's going to be some kind of attempt at vaguely repeating the behavior of the past - often incomplete - and a lot of rhetoric about the past. There will be close to zero deeply held beliefs and values under the surface. As Rob Henderson might say, it's mostly about signalling. These are the RETVRN people. I mentioned a young woman like this in previous post.
I think these are your "neotraditionalism" people (all -isms are bad!). And I agree with you that these very "neo-trads" would never vote for some of the ideas you have laid out. Why? Because it would be bad for them, personally, as individuals. And thus I trace this back to the rise of hyperindividualism (isms! isms! isms!).
I'm not advocating for actual collectivism the way Mamdani did in his inaugural speech today. I'm advocating for the idea that there was a society before that gave us what we have to day and our job is to sustain it and then pass it on. That's the chain of real capital-T Tradition that did sustain so many different human societies up until about the 20th century. The proto-causes are still up for debate; was it the industrial revolution? global financialization of capitalism? the "trauma" of WW1/2? I can't weigh in with authority here, but I can point to one thing that I think is key:
The Baby Boomers broke that chain of real capital-T Tradition. In both directions. They looked at their parents with their going to church and waiting for matrimony and not smokin the wacky-tobaccy and said "Peace and Love, Man!" before inventing the pill, porn, no-fault divorce, equality, feminism, and affirmative action. Next, wanting to enjoy the prosperity of a post WW2 America (that they, the boomers, totally earned on their own and didn't inherit from the Greatest Generation) voted for Social Security, Medicare/caid, and home mortgage subsidy. This created a massive debt burden that they would never pay because their children and grandchildren will.
Gen-X kind of got caught in the crossfire, but when you could work at a coffee shop in Manhattan, smoke cigarettes, and date a quirky mid in the 1990s, it was kind of ... whatever, cool, I guess.
Millienials woke up to the grift and Gen-Z seems to have been born nihilistic. They know the boomers looted the store and then stuck everyone else with the bill. They, rightfully, are enraged by this but only a small fraction has eaten the bitter medicine and realized "ah, shit, we're going to have to fix this ... and it's going to be hard for a while." Instead, 90% + of Mil-Z-enials are somewhere between "Government provided everything, tax the rich" and "Fuck it, Imma get mine. Let's hit some crypto scams, bruh" Both of these are anti-social and, of course, non Traditional. I agree heartily with you that only a hyper minority of mostly religious or strongly philosophically disciplined / metaphysically driven people in these two generations are seriously committing to "we can rebuild, and our kids will benefit."
How this all plays out is that we're going to see a slow motion culling of the population where we can afford it most - young men. We know this because it has already happened. I don't even need to quote the stats anymore. Opioid epidemic, 6 - 8 million prime age males out of the workforce, incels, no friends etc. A great way to sidestep demographic gravity is to led some deadweight drop. That's bleak and I know it. It's also what's happening.
The next necessary ingredient is peeling back the feminist lie of fulfillment in a career alone. This is already starting. When TradWife tiktoks trend for a while and then we get backlask like "is having a boyfriend cringe?" articles, it means the ideas are now circulating and its just a matter of time before some percentage of women decides "fuck a job, I want babies." It doesn't have to be that great a number, it just has to be present outside of the semi-sequestered religious communities (Amish, FLDS, etc.)
The thing that keeps me up at night is how long all of this could take. Returning to my original framing, the people who buy into Traditionalism aren't actually willing to do what needs doing to fix things because it will probably mean accepting a slightly materially less comfortable quality of life for some time and an absolutely lower social quality of life as well (i.e. getting branded as a kind of weirdo). But they will gesture vaguely to things like "encouraging earlier marriage" and "keeping a family together." But will they endorse women not going to college? Will they endorse no-fault divorce? Of course not. And I wonder how long this will draw the pain out, especially when the other side (progressives) are offering sprinting into oblivion. The Traditionalism-ists don't need to really dig deep to retain political and social sway when their opponents are literally recommending self-castration, baby murder, and neo-surfdom.
As I've said before in this thread and as Amadan said below, I don't want to control women (or men) from a State perspective. If a woman wants to get three PhDs and never marry, that's on her - just as it would be on a man. But, right now, we're actively subsidizing those decisions socially, culturally, and even financially whereas were suppressing capital-T tradition socially and culturally. This isn't "boo hoo unfair!" this is drawing out the agony for society.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
making marriage even more exclusive and difficult is going to collapse it further.
Yes, probably, but people will adapt.
Think about the way it worked in the past. If you wanted to have sex, marriage was the only way for most people. In fact, the whole trope of a man promising he loves a woman only to flee the morning after coitus is illustrative of this. If you were sleeping around a lot, as a man or a woman, you were circling the drain, so to speak. After a while, the only people you could have sexual congress with were just as on the margin of society as you were. The obvious exception here is, of course, wealthy / elite men who could engage the services of discreet prostitutes or employ some sort of concubinage on the side.
Then, during the sexual revolution in the west, this changed. You didn't have to promise yourself to your high school sweetheart. You could kind of dog around for at least college, but maybe get wifed/husbanded up right around graduation. But, if we play the tape forward another 50,60 years, we have what we have today; perpetual fuckery (or an utter lack thereof) well into one's 30s.
If we flip the switch back, you'll see a dip in the marriage rate for some time. Then, as a planned and stable marriage becomes more rare it will regain social currency and people will begin to orient themselves towards it. Situationships, polyamory, etc. will be seen as weirdo fringe stuff.
Then I don't understand your original comment at all.
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