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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
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User ID: 355
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
7d ago
I think your implicit line of argument/theory about the relationship between articulating differences and policing boundaries fails generalisation to the usual counterexamples. Take a boundary that is still policed by most Americans, progressive and traditionalist alike - how do you explain to the autist the difference between black people and white people? You can't take something silly like the one-drop rule, because everyone knows Donald Trump would not enjoy a late bestowal of the n-word pass if it now turned out some great grandmother of his was a castaway African slave, any more than in the discerning conservative's eye anything about the femininity of the serial West Coast testicle shaver would change if it turned out that he did actually have XX chromosomes plus some weird novel genetic abnormality producing the phenotype.
In other words, there is something going on in your post that is similar to "proving too much".
I expect any breakthroughs in the physical domain to lag significantly - customer service, contracts, sales and coding will be automated, but no self-driving cars and humanoid robots*, and the humans that were formerly in those jobs will be pushed into somewhat less cushy replacements that make use of their skills but also involve some hard-to-automate real-world component - assembling and maintaining bespoke machinery, driving cars, installing cabling, etc. There is a certain possibility that this correlates closely with the jobs that have already been bullshittified, to an extent that the metrics of success in them are now also bullshit - ChatGPT may be a 100x more productive legal brief writer than the human it replaces, but more and better legal briefs could amount to somewhere between a little more and infinitely less productivity. Meanwhile, the humans freed up by this to do more productive work like driving deliveries may not actually be that great at those jobs, so you get something between a slight improvement and a net negative change to baseline productivity while also having to contend with an overall productivity tax from social upheaval (as large strata of the population curb their consumption due to uncertainty or personal socioeconomic drop).
* Always seemed obvious to me once you take away human conceit. In the former domain, you are fighting to outperform maybe 40000 years of evolution; in the latter, some tens or hundreds of millions.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
8d ago
No, at this point you can like Coke and McDonalds without feeling kinship to the US for it, see CN/RU(sort of). Relatedly, the leading "anti-US" countries have made anti-LGBT a pretty prominent part of their brand, and not anti-fastfood.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
8d ago
The case that trans operas in Latin America are useless to American interests has not been made. Whatever you think of trans operas in the abstract, it seems quite likely that transing a neutral country will bring it culturally closer to the American universal culture fold. This makes it less likely that it will randomly kick out or tax American businesses, thumb its nose at American products, back Russia or China in some international affairs matter or even host a Chinese military base. The trans operas might well be the by far most cost-effective way to reap those benefits, and it's not even clear if they benefit the trans agenda at home all that much.
If South Korea had a nationalist faction that opposed k-drama on aesthetic grounds, would it make sense for it to prioritise going after its foreign distribution?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
10d ago
What happened with your post? I found it kind of hard to read in an "am I getting a stroke or is sleep deprivation finally getting to me" way from the start, but then halfway in it seems to reach the point where words are actually unambiguously rearranged out of their proper places, like in
The interpersonal exit veto (I won't be dissuaded) has a lower barrier to execute than Move to Canada. Lana's collection of ideas, beliefs, ailments, and suffering in were normalized, grown, and reinforced in she spaces sought out.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
10d ago
It's funny that you say HBD, because, uh, what exactly do you figure is the group of people that should have been marginalized and contained to prevent these outcomes?
I continue being a big fan of the theory that almost all the stereotypical "SJW" behaviours we are seeing are the result of (at least partially heritable) conservative temperaments grown on a liberal cultural substrate that was made by and for people who are disposed quite differently. "Lana" coming from a committed evangelical background clicks with this theory just as well as Puritan Harvard of all places being considered the main cathedral of the capital-c Cathedral, and I can't help but notice the overrepresentation of various priestly castes and theocratic cultures (Brahmins, Ethiopians, ...) in SJ activism. Leftism seems to simply have choked on its own success - much like England would probably have been spared Rotherham if their ancestors had been a little worse at subjugating Pakistan, the Left probably could have avoided getting taken over by people building a sacred hierarchy full of arcane behavioural rules around their ideology of toppling sacred hierarchies and arcane behavioural rules if they (we?) had resisted the urge to assume suzerainty of places full of people thus inclined.
(Are people like naraburns the rarer opposite example of temperamental liberals running on conservative memes?)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
10d ago
Atheists of a certain sort simply do not see humility in religion but the opposite so this point never lands with them. But it should raise an interesting question: Christians are tyrannical, know-it-all busybodies, how bad do the consequences of a lack of humility have to be that even their book warns against it?
Often, Christian emphasis on humility registers simply as a way to self-license to be as unhumble as one can be, as long as the arrogance can be rationalised as being in the service of Christianity (or more bluntly divorced from the meaning of words, something that amounts to "I am clearly more humble and therefore superior"). This pattern is by no means exclusive to it - consider the tropes associated with countries that have "Democratic" in their name, or the reactions of "tolerant" left-wingers when asked to tolerate something outside of the standard bag of things to be tolerated.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
12d ago
Word on the street (who knows if true) is that the drone containers were assembled inside Russia by Ukrainian sleeper agents. There's a photo circulating claiming to depict the interior of the same warehouse in Chelyabinsk (I think) that was in the Ukrainian propaganda release depicting the assembly process.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
15d ago
The thing you are talking about seems separate to me - in Germany, "anti-authoritarian parenting" is associated with the '68er/local echo of the summer-of-love hippie movement, and was satirised by stodgy bourgeois types like Loriot since the '80s if not earlier. "Free-range parenting" is at least two fashion cycles down: tiger-mom helicopter parenting rose just as public criticism of anti-authoritarian parenting peaked, and the free-range movement now is a backlash to that.
If those Chinese geniuses are making such great contributions, they wouldn't have been let out of the country
Consider that countries are subject to pressures other than maximising innovation. Letting internationally-minded high-openness intellectuals out could be a win-win proposition for China and the recipient: the target country gets to capture their intellectual output, while China is rid of someone who would make trouble/destabilise the system/gets to evaporatively cool its citizenry into relative complacency.
There are twice as many whites in this country now, so we can also confidently say that just given a larger population there must be far more geniuses and far more overlooked geniuses. This relates to the alternative explanation, which is China does sequester their best and brightest, but they let the lessers attend school in the US because of the most fortuitous consequence of reducing opportunities for Americans.
What is the mechanism by which a Chinese student at a US university (who pays higher tuition than the average native, especially the average native at risk of being "overlooked") reduces opportunities for Americans? From what I have seen, the default seems to be that in STEM, without being subsidised by Chinese non-research MA students, the programmes from BA through PhD would be untenable at their current cost/expense level.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
17d ago
Sorry about that, but I'm a bit jaded about the pretense of rationality in these discussions. They never have been, and I doubt they even can be.
What are examples of irrationality in these discussions to you?
Ban porn sites, dating sites, smartphones, and civilian wireless internet.
Usual objection: coordination problem. Assuming you can even create a strong enough dictatorship in one country or several to implement all of these, how do you stop people from defecting to a country that doesn't participate in the bans, and that country subsequently curbstomping yours?
I might be missing something, but it sounds like the opposite of a solution.
Uh, it depends on what exactly you define the problem to be. Do you want people to report happiness/satisfaction of a cluster of needs that could be summarised as "companionship", or do you want people to pair up? It's obviously a solution for deficiences in the former but not in the latter, but if you consider the latter to be the only problem you want to solve, you run the risk of winding up in a world where nobody even agrees with you that there is a problem.
To a skeptic, this exchange may be isomorphic to something like:
Tribal elder: It is a problem that nobody sacrifices to the grain gods anymore, but you progressives will never acknowledge that there might be a problem there because there is no progressive solution to it.
Progressive(?): Well, there's a perfectly progressive solution. We just have to build up a fertiliser industry and develop industrial farming, so there will never be a shortage of grain again.
Tribal elder: This sounds like the opposite of a solution.
Who is right? On the surface, the progressive really did propose something close to the opposite of a solution to the Elder's problem as stated, but on the other hand it seems quite reasonable to treat the prospect of a grain shortage as the problem the Elder was actually talking about. Certainly, the Elder's authority would have suffered if he had been forced to make explicit from the outset that he doesn't care whether there is grain or not, but just wants people to sacrifice to the Gods regardless. His position depends upon being able to lean on an implicit assumption that sacrificing to the Gods is good (whether for the stated purpose of improving grain yield, or some other unnamed good), without having to explain or defend this.
Like I said, not a rational conversation. This argument would be immediately dismissed if it was used to argue for something you disagree with, and you know it.
Instead of talking about a hypothetical dismissal, please actually explain the grounds on which you want to dismiss it yourself. I don't see anything obviously wrong with it - variants like "$country will be majority-Muslim in a few years even if we stop immigration now" are structurally exactly the same thing deployed to right-wing ends. Do you think that one can be dismissed too, or are Muslims uniquely capable of receiving the boons of natural selection?
Why bend over backwards to dunk on the forum, instead of proposing solutions yourself? There is an obvious 50-Stalins solution to the "romance recession", which is waifu/husbando tech/ever-improving AI partners. The obvious endpoint for a society of individuals whose standards have them demand ever more while providing ever less is to put everyone in their personal lotus-eater simulation hugbox, anyway.
That being said, if we make it past all the impending Great Filters at all, I'm not too concerned about these lesser problems in the long run. In my entire social bubble, tracking from early graduate school if not earlier, there are few signs of "romance recession" - most everyone has organically paired up, whether it is from in-person matching or online dating or circulating date-me docs, and I guess we'll see in the next 5-10 years what will happen with birth rates although some are already starting to have ~2 kids, maximum observed 4. There clearly are subclusters of more sustainable norms in the waiting; given that feedback length is on the order of one lifetime, I would expect natural selection to spread them fast, and the (particular) problems we are observing to only be this one wretched generation's cross to bear.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
20d ago
Less than $50,000 in student loan debt.
Maybe it's because of my particular bubble, but this is the one requirement in your list that seems completely unreasonable. My understanding is that (1) 40% of US citizens in the relevant age bracket get at least a BA, tendency rising; (2) it is very hard to get a well-paying white-collar job without one; (3) US tuition fees now run on the order of magnitude of that figure per year, more for good universities. Together, this is starting to look like six-figure student loan debt is something like the standard path into the US middle-class - asking for a person in their late 30s without it is somewhat similar to asking for someone at age 40 without a mortgage, that is, you are strongly going to bias for either unusually rich or just not a homeowner.
Also, regarding
Single and looking (of course).
Wasn't there a redpill-adjacent term like "monkey-branching"? As in, the idea that women's dating strategy involves remaining formally "attached" to the best option available all the way until a better option comes along (as opposed to breaking up and then spending some unknown amount of time looking while identifying as single). In such a setting, you could have a perfectly liquid dating market in which everyone gets matched up just fine, but your way of counting registers approximately zero "marriageable" women.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
23d ago
I've been wondering if the reason the media aren't pushing footage from places like Vo(v/l)chansk (where the rubble is still being made to bounce) more prominently nowadays is because of saturation/fatigue or because they always invite awkward comparisons to Gaza where we are on the attacker's side.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
23d ago
At best it wouldn't have been a civil war, just a decade or two of people deciding it's ok to shoot politicians they don't like and all the impacts of that norm.
What do you think would be they impacts of that norm? I have always had the suspicion that in a sufficiently polarised setting, it might actually result in better leadership if the leaders had to not only optimise for getting reelected (make their ingroup happy) but also for not getting assassinated (don't make their outgroup too unhappy).
It's unfortunate that this is rarely stated clearly, but I figure the crux is that COVID was a watershed moment for governments, with the backing of a technocratic expert caste, imposing novel restrictions on personal and social freedoms. The narrative the globalist-technocratic complex and its supporters want to prevail is that this was good and necessary - the freedoms are a relic of a more innocent age, somewhere in the class of letting gentlemen scientists enrich uranium in their bedrooms, and in our age of global networks and megacities it is important to endow experts and elected representatives with emergency powers to restrict them according to their superior judgement to protect the people from danger.
This narrative is a lot more compelling if COVID was a natural catastrophe and the official response at least constituted a reasonable attempt to minimise the risk of bad outcomes, than if COVID was a result of irresponsible actions by the same technocrat clique that wants to arrogate itself emergency powers to immanentize its "superior judgement". (See: the old pattern of creating a problem and selling the solution)
Underlying this all is a quiet disagreement about what was even the "problem" - one group of people sees a dangerous disease that society was worryingly incompetent in containing and wonders why it even matters where exactly it came from, while the other sees "free" societies happily going on the North Korea spectrum overnight over a cold and wonders why it even matters how bad the cold was.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
24d ago
Sweden did do a soft lockdown in the sense that businesses had reduced hours/density or encouraged people to work from home, and restricted the occupancy of certain public facilities like swimming pools. That, and I got the subjective sense that they have much less of a contingent of people who are young and severely unhealthy even compared to countries like Germany.
Yeah, I don't care about these considerations. Whether or not they are a majority is a question that remains hard to judge, but I would maintain that at the very least they are unevenly distributed - I think I have an abundance of data on male preferences in my immediate environment, including both real targets and fictional characters, and the alleged tendency just isn't there. Would you want to posit that everything ranging from the crushes of German school boys to gacha-playing waifu collector degenerate whaling is preference falsification due to a desire to signal a common notion of high status?
To be clear, I don't doubt that there are significant subcultures/subcommunities of people where the majority preference is as stated in the blog. It's just that I suspect that those subcultures select on something that correlates with that preference, and/or induce that preference in their members. As a matter of fact, in the context of gacha communities, they like making their presence known - among others, a favourite pastime of theirs is to develop and use mods that give characters balloon tits and skimpy outfits, which they then post screenshots of in discussion threads without comment. It is evident that the message of the screenshot posting is intended to be somewhere between "I'm sticking it to Chinese censors" and "everyone actually thinks this is hotter, and I am getting to enjoy good things while you cucks are not", but even on 4chan (hardly a land of prosocial preference falsification), a majority of posters appears to find them obnoxious and have little interest in the mods.
For whatever reason, the "tit men" always seem to be desperate to assure themselves that everyone secretly shares their preferences, and they are just the only ones being honest about it, as opposed to them having a niche interest - there does not seem to be a counterpart to this among the "tit-indifferent men". This reminds me a little of the old AROOO lesbian separatist belief that women actually do not naturally enjoy sex with men, and the ones who do have just been brainwashed into it by society or the patriarchy, so I wonder if this is just a natural shape of cope that emerges among people with socially shunned sexual preferences.
That the median man would prefer C- or D-cups to the blog's and the swimsuit models' much larger sizes (even if we assumed anime levels of sci-fi connective tissue), (edit) but either way, that the median man's preferences do not put nearly as much weight on cup size as the blog and some of the parent posts make the out to.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
28d ago
I looked for pictures of both, and neither seems to be anywhere near the swimsuit models or the original blog's purported ideal in terms of size? Eyeballing from the photos I found and a reference chart, they look like maybe D-cups to me.
In any case, are we trying to argue that Keira Knightley, poor thing, has more attractive boobs than a
What a strange choice of topic to break the rule against consensus-building on! Are you asking about my opinion or what I think the general population's opinion is? I genuinely don't have strong preferences (and thus apparently have something wrong with me in your estimation?), but maybe very weakly, in the sense of how I would set sliders in an MMO character designer where I have to express an opinion, they are about equal degrees of too small and too large respectively. If I had to guess the general public's preferences, I would guess they would prefer the swimsuit models, but only because they have less tolerance for the almost completely flat, which is not actually what the thesis is about - if you compared someone with genuinely average or somewhat-below-average cup size, like, idk, Liv Tyler?, I would expect the results to be much more of a wash, and if I weren't on my phone in public I would find pictures of some C-cup swimsuit model I would expect to win.
People are very performative about this, to the point that any public statement about it should be just ignored.
Sure they are, but your sample having to ignore peer pressure is also a confounder. I'm not saying "AI art goes against the tastes of most", but "those who engage positively with AI art are not representative", which is a subtle but important distinction. It's entirely consistent (and similar in shape to what I think is most likely to be the real state of affairs) if: (1) AI art would get an objective average rating of 5/10 from the general population; (2) there is peer pressure to pretend AI art is 1/10 and you are a crass rube if you disagree; (3) 10% of people don't care about being considered crass rubes; (4) those 10% love big tits and to them AI art 9/10 on average because it is an infinite wellspring of them.
pixiv ranking
Funny enough, right now the top 2 pictures are gacha game characters that are completely flat-chested (Genshin's Furina, Blue Archive's shupogaki duo). The third one is also huge, #4 is medium... looking further down the list, similar ratio to my danbooru check. Yeah, I think some cherries were being picked.
All the anime pictures I saw with a cursory look were AI-generated, though. You could make a more persuasive argument that people looking at anime-style erotic art in general have somewhat representative preferences in that department (though even there I would not be sure), but AI art is definitively only appreciated by a niche subgroup, with the modal anime erotica enjoyer being highly dismissive of it.
edit: I performed the most basic of experiments and searched danbooru with tags 1girl standing. The first page had several images that clearly belonged to series depicting the same character by the same artist, but the second page were all singletons. Of the 20 images there, 7 looked to be in the blog's "E cup or above" category, with the remaining ranging from flat to what looks like a realistic average.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
28d ago
Yes, how dare Estonia... attempt to inspect a tanker, possibly one traveling in its territorial waters?
Well, was it in its territorial waters or not? This seems like it's the deciding question, since ostensibly all actors involved more or less agree on the underlying conventions. There is a corridor of international waters along the centreline of the Finnish Gulf. The version I've read suggests that the tanker was following it (indeed, why would it not?), though some insinuate that it might have veered narrowly into Estonian waters at some point during the incident? It's pretty hard to discern the facts in a conflict where so many consider it their patriotic duty to lie if it makes their side look better.
I don't see anything wrong with Estonia attempting to enforce the sanctions the West has imposed on Russia, and trusting in its alliance with the West to then back it up when it attempts to enforce them.
Well, it all depends on what in fact happened, and what the sanctions really say. Are they in fact an explicit guarantee to participating state that amounts to "we will give you military cover to seize Russian ships in international waters"? Are they ambiguous, or in fact explicitly not saying that much? It's known that the Estonian state has a white-glowing hatred for Russia, and if they could press a button that made the US and Western Europe fight a hot war against it, they probably would (regardless of how the would-be belligerents feel about it). I could easily imagine a situation where whoever formulated the sanctions did not anticipate such a situation, but left enough ambiguity and lack of clear public information that Estonia saw something that to them looked like the aforementioned button and decided to press it.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
28d ago
Why would you assume that the customer base of online sex doll retailers or the set of AI slop producers is at all representative of "average guys"? It's easy to come up with a model where both strongly select on a criterion that could be glossed as "preference for quantity over quality".
In general, that whole blog seems to be in the old genre of "everyone who disagrees with my tastes is falsifying their preferences or a degenerate, and here is some cherrypicked evidence".
I don't follow this line of argument. Imagine a world in which progressives could not distinguish between ciswomen and transwomen at all, ever. In this world, what progressives would see is essentially that there is a subset of women that a large part of their outgroup inexplicably asserts are not real women, and wants to treat badly. Assuming that progressives have no issue adopting the term "trans" for this subset that the outgroup inexplicably discriminates against, how would this not be fertile ground for a "trans movement"?
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