2rafa
5hr ago
and i can never get that back, they're always going to resent not getting it back then
I don’t mind you linking back to this post since it is one of your best and I very much agree with it, but to some extent this is just cope.
The very same people who are upset they missed out on high school are - as you point out - also the people who:
“don’t have the spirit and agency to do them later.”
True enough, but those people often missed out on having fun in high school for exactly the same reason they aren’t capable of ‘catching up’ today.
It gets rare with age, but certainly in every major metropolitan area there is a substantial minority of adults well into middle age hooking up, partying and living a low responsibility lifestyle. Sure, it may be worse of more cringe than 18 year olds doing it, but that isn’t the primary issue these people have.
The core emotion is inward, it’s self hatred not because they never did, but because they never could have. If they went back to being 16 now with their current personality, they’d end in the same place in the social stack. “I regret not partying in high school” should actually be “I regret not being the kind of person who would have partied in high school”.
This isn’t coming from a popular person sneering at nerds perspective either, since (possibly like yourself) I led a largely dull and chaste high school life. But that’s because of who I am, not because of what happened to me.
2rafa
5hr ago
Figures in the UK and US are skewed by immigration. In upper-middle class circles the average height of a man of European descent is 6’ or taller.
2rafa
10hr ago
Most Iranian proxy forces have to contend with complex domestic politics of their own, the Shia militias in Iraq, the SAA, to some extent even Hezbollah can’t abandon their current positions to march toward Israel without risking eroding their control at home; they’re not expeditionary forces like Western armies, you can’t redeploy a lot of Iranian proxy forces without the local Sunni militias and other opposition groups taking advantage very quickly, even if you’re serving the ummah by going jihad against Israel.
Seems part of the theatrical tit for tat that’s been ongoing for a few days now. Everyone recognizes that taking out the IRGC general directly involved in funding and planning October 7 was a legitimate military act. Iran needed to save face, now Israel does.
Israel can’t destroy Iran’s nuclear program from the air. Iran’s nuclear facilities are specifically designed to be resistant to US or allied air strikes. They’re deep underground, fortified and highly dispersed.
Right now it’s still a nothingburger, neither side is capable of destroying the enemy’s government. Neither side is capable of fielding a viable ground invasion for now. All they can do is kill a few of the enemy’s civilians by air, and possibly some performative strikes on military targets.
2rafa
1d ago
Look up medical concierge services, find out who’s best if money is no concern. You pay them, they find the specialists.
2rafa
1d ago
the lack of consequences for the grooming gangs
I mean hundreds, if not thousands, of people in those gangs have been arrested over the last 5 years. They just get sentenced to relatively short sentences because that’s what the sentencing guidelines say is owed for their offenses.
2rafa
1d ago
If you like food (and I do) it is easy to get resentful of someone eating 50% more than you for every meal. It doesn’t make sense but I know how you feel. I do reframe it as just an unfortunate reality, if I happened to be ultra short like 4’10 or something I wouldn’t accept getting fat just because I wanted to eat the same 2,000 calories a day as much taller people.
Another thing that helps is intermittent fasting, I’ve partially stopped eating lunch and eat no breakfast, so I can eat a large dinner and it’s chill from a caloric perspective.
Hyperpalatable cheap food means staying fit often requires active decision.
There are people to stay fit to be hot to the opposite sex, and there are people who do it to stunt on them hoes (ie primarily for status among the same sex).
Generally people in the former category are much more likely to get fat after marriage, because they’ve got their person. Of course some people think that staying hot for your partner is an important part of marriage, but that’s not a universal position. While some people are more vain than others, our vanity tends to vary across a lifetime and often declines with age.
By contrast, someone whose primary objective in staying fit is status within largely same-sex platonic communities and relationships (your gym bros, your group of girlfriends) is more likely to stay fit. The people with the best bodies at 50 usually aren’t doing it to get laid.
Middle aged women who take the best care of themselves are typically more status-conscious in my opinion. Your wife is probably more likely to lose weight for status with other women for her own reasons than she is for you.
Women are generally fearful of men’s vanity, and as ever that fear can lead to resentment. I stay skinny because I like the way people treat me better when I am. I don’t know if there’s a way to make someone more self-conscious, care more about what others think.
2rafa
1d ago
muscular guy-fat chick
Idk I think you do see this at least sometimes. A larger proportion of black couples are like this, but some white and Hispanic ones are too.
Maher as a name is Irish; Bill Maher came to mind as a Jewish Maher, but his last name is obviously his father’s, who was an Irish-American Catholic. The New York Times says Katherine met her (Indian New Zealander) husband at “a friend’s Seder”, which could be mild evidence in favor, but then it’s clear she had no Jewish elements to her wedding (while her husband’s Hindu contribution is mentioned) and she was married by a friend who got a marriage license, which again tilts against. Katherine is also a relatively uncommon Jewish name; not to the extent of something like Christina or Christian, but it’s unusual.
2rafa
2d ago
It’s the successor to Radio Free Europe/Asia, part of the funding deal is that they’re not allowed to broadcast to Americans.
2rafa
2d ago
The Baltic offensive theory isn’t watertight. For example, CIA and MI6 intelligence is clearly good enough inside Russia to have been able to predict the Ukraine invasion several months in advance. We can only assume investment (both in covert sources and hacking/signals intelligence) has been strengthened since then.
At very short notice NATO could send an expeditionary force to the Baltics of at least 150,000 men. Even the European Union + UK, if America decided not to participate, could field at very short notice perhaps 75-80,000 men (UK 10-15k, France 20-25k etc). Given how much elite Russian military experience was killed in the first few months of Ukraine that’s a relatively tough foe for Russia.
The ‘Baltic Blitzkrieg’ scenario therefore only works if either Russia is able to plan, stage and execute the operation without any signs being intercepted by the West, or if NATO countries don’t even care to send forces to the Baltics to scare Putin off, which seems unlikely given it’s already happening.
I have to say that I used to consider NPR’s bias much more egregious than I do now.
I had assumed that like most public broadcasting networks (which one would imagine that ‘National Public Radio’ was) it was entirely an organ of the government, like the BBC or CBC or (Australian) ABC and so on. But it turns out that NPR is essentially just a charity radio station that gets like 10% or maybe less of its funds from the government. The US’s actual state broadcasting network (VoA) doesn’t really have any media presence domestically, and while it is broadly globalist liberal, as one would expect from the State Department, it isn’t really close to NPR anyway.
2rafa
2d ago
Edited my comment to add another observation, but yeah, it’s an interesting topic. You can’t be a woman in these places without at least observing the dynamics here. My guess is that Slavs have almost single handedly made prostitution non-viable in a lot of these wealthier EM cities for American and Western European women since they absorb pretty much all the demand for blonde white women, and it’s not like the average Chinese or Qatari businessman cares much about whether his blondes are Belarusian or, like, Scottish or something. At the top top end the sheikhs and billionaires might order models or OnlyFans girls, but in terms of who you see around, pretty much all white prostitutes are from the Slavic world.
The kind of Ukrainian woman who wanted to make quick money or find a rich Arab/Chinese/etc man to be a mistress to would have left as easily in 2019 as in 2023. And of course the Belarusian contingent is still substantial despite no official involvement in the war from that country. And the same is true on a proportional basis for other countries like Moldova and so on.
Again I think these cultures are just more tolerant of what is effectively prostitution. Perhaps not openly but on some level. I spend time regularly in the cities you mention (Dubai, KL, Singapore, Bangkok) where hookers are extremely noticeable (30-40% of the female customers at Nobu KL lol) and even at the most expensive places it’s very rare to find white English or American prostitutes. I once had breakfast next to an African American woman I strongly suspect was a working girl in Singapore, but that’s an edge case.
2rafa
2d ago
The ‘facts’ here seem obvious, and don’t necessarily favor either side’s story:
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The ‘West’ is bleeding Russia for cheap and with no military or civilian casualties, but military experience is useful for an army and the Russian conscripts are largely Central Asian peasants, not higher IQ Muscovites and Peterburgians whose loss would actually damage Russia’s long term prospects. On the other hand, many high IQ Russians in tech and other industries have fled, there has been a brain drain (which was already happening before the war and has now accelerated). Russia has no good long term prospects. The birth rate is shit, demographically the Muslims from Central Asia are ascendant, the culture certainly isn’t ’based and trad’, and were still talking about a relatively poor country (certainly by Western standards) on every indicator.
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Russia’s industrial capacity has improved, and as someone here said last week re. Wirecard, if desperation even slightly reduces Russian corruption, that’s a very bad thing for the West in the long term since elite Russians are very competent when not hamstrung by their own corrupt tendencies. On the other hand, Russia’s defense export business has declined while that of core Western provinces like France and South Korea has increased, which is good for the West both economically and in terms of building up production capacity for future conflict.
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While the lack of munitions production capacity in the US, UK and much of Western Europe has been noted, it is slowly starting to be rectified. Consider the counterfactual where we don’t ‘realize’ this until we’re about to fight China. 10 or 15 years from now the Ukraine war will have led to a major increase in Western defense production capacity, which is more useful against the primary threat. Better to find out the stores are empty in a largely irrelevant little post-Soviet proxy conflict with Putin than in the big war everyone knows could be coming.
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While fighting this war is genuinely disastrous for the Ukrainian people for the many reasons raised in this thread, they seem to want to do it. This can’t merely be dismissed or ignored, there seems to be a genuinely popular will to resist the Russians. The West predicted Kiev would fall in 3 days, literally pulling out embassy staff temporarily so they didn’t accidentally die and cause a diplomatic incident with Russia as new landlord. The Ukrainian army didn’t collapse. Therefore game theoretic reasons why they’re retarded are manifestly subjugated to romantic or other desires for nationalism (a useful lesson in any case).
My opinion? Thy shall know them by their fruits. Russia is a shithole that most intelligent and wealthy people are fleeing, at least in part. It simply isn’t a good place to live, it has no glorious civilizational trajectory, and it’s an afterthought in the broader geopolitical conflict with China. Ukraine is a failed country with a sublevel tier GDP (one of the worst IQ to GDP/capita ratios in the entire world) that has no future. But, they want to fight and to die, so I don’t think giving them some old munitions is really disastrous for the West.
2rafa
2d ago
The CIA had good advance intelligence of the Ukraine War. In the event similar intelligence emerged indicating an invasion of the Baltics, NATO would station 50-100,000 troops there and be capable of repelling the invasion. It’s not a realistic scenario.
2rafa
2d ago
Boris was grandstanding because he had a Churchill complex, it had nothing to do with the US at all.
2rafa
2d ago
The actual reason is that the air defense systems won’t really work well or efficiently for Ukraine. Air defense is uniquely viable in Israel because Israel is extremely small and quite rich, and so a density of systems is possible that wouldn’t even be viable somewhere like Germany or France, let alone a more sparsely populated Western country like the US, let alone a poor and sparsely populated country like Ukraine. Also, Russians aren’t firing homemade Hamas dumb rockets vaguely targeted toward Israel; defending against more modern missiles is harder and even in the recent attack a few Iranian missiles seem to have gotten through into Israel.
But again, that was true of Ukrainians and Russians in every expensive bar in Dubai or Hong Kong for decades before this war. These are some of the top exporters of working girls. Some of the stories about 90s Moscow are also wild.
Prostitution or extreme hypergamy just seems to be more socially acceptable in these Slavic cultures than in others.
2rafa
2d ago
Not necessarily. The Bannon plan only called for Republicans to win 40% of Hispanics. In time limited assimilation converts some Hispanics to the ‘white’ category, so as long as the GOP wins increasing voteshare among whites demographics isn’t necessarily guaranteed to go against them.
2rafa
3d ago
smart americans work with insurance, investment banking and Netflix while Russians work in a tractor factory
Hate to tell you this but smart Russians also work in insurance, investment banking and tech companies, whether at home or (increasingly, as the brain drain accelerates) abroad.
The very fact that she’s not fat surely puts her in the top half for women her age.
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