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ActuallyATleilaxuGhola

Axolotl Tank Class of '21

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joined 2022 September 08 09:59:22 UTC 

				
User ID: 1012


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Axolotl Tank Class of '21

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 08 09:59:22 UTC
				


				
					

					
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User ID: 1012


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Wellness Wednesday for June 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Man, I felt this post deeply.  This describes my experience and feelings to a tee.  I've never been a big name around here, but I've been around since we lived on the SSC subreddit and I've enjoyed the years of effort posting.  But I too feel that nowadays I often come here to hate read or consensus build rather than to engage.  Similarly to you, some of this is because there is just less charity all around, but a large part of it is also that I feel that I've seen the "other side" of most issues and that my mind is more or less made up.  And so it's probably time for me to stop posting.


The most valuable takeaway for me has been reading the writings of the progressive-adjacent posters who patiently stick around and explain blue tribe ideals despite the increasingly frequently dogpiles.  They helped me discover some blind spots I have and have gotten me closer to passing the Ideological Turing Test.  I am indebted to them and wish them all the best.


Big thanks to @ZorbaTHut for putting a ton of effort in to this community over the years, it couldn't have happened without you.


See you space cowboy...


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thank you.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I accept that point and agree with you.  Regardless of whether or not it's actual "kidnapping," it is is surely very bad for the future of an independent Ukrainian nation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Oops, good catch, my wording was completely wrong. I meant that if two black men abused and killed a white child, I wouldn't be surprised for them to get away with a relatively light sentence.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Russia has apparently been abducting tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Children. The prospects of getting these kids BACK even if Ukraine wins are slim-to-none.




I'm no Russia apologist but this seems like maximally uncharitable framing, and I'm extremely skeptical of that wiki article since it seems like blue tribe has thrown in completely with Zelensky.  Having never heard of that, I assumed that Russians were literally driving around in vans and snagging kids to send them back to the motherland to process into Soylent Green or something since I can't imagine why they would bother rounding up kids in a war zone.  But apparently they're just collecting war orphans, kids who were stuck in government institutions, and kids who were orphans before  the war broke out, and trying to place them in Russian homes.


I'm not really sure what the alternative is.  Send them across a chaotic active military front?  Leave them to scrounge for rats to eat in bombed out apartment blocks?  Having read the AP news article cited in the wiki (NYT one is paywalled), the biggest complaints are that the kids aren't being sent to the other side of Ukraine (which makes sense since as far as Russia is concerned eastern Ukraine is part of Russia now) and that the kids are being taught Russian which apparently counts as "genocide."  From the kids' perspectives, western Ukraine and Russia are probably both very foreign, and wherever they get sent in Russia will almost certainly be farther away from the warzone then wherever they'd end up in Ukraine.


This is as bad as "kids in cages," and it makes it really hard for me to take seriously any claims of Russian war crimes (of which I'm sure there are many real examples) since western media is so eager to exaggerate to push an image of Russians as sadistic child-stealing orcs.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That was always strange to me.  Who are the real Masters if Slave Morality is strong enough to subdue Master Morality?  It reminds me of the JQ paradox, that Jews are simultaneously weak, cowardly, dissolute, and pathetic, and also somehow powerful, full of chutzpah, fanatical, and fearsome.  Does Nietzsche ever address why Master Morality is not naturally dominant since it's apparently so awesome and life-affirming?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My reactions to reading your synopsis:


    

  • 

    This sounds like a social justice fantasy so outrageous that it borders on pornographic
    

    • 

  • 

    This sounds like what might actually happen today if the races were swapped (and sure enough @Folamh3 says it was; do you have a link to the case?)
    

    • 



To your prompts:


    

  1. 

    "No" to all those questions.  Alabama in 1996 is much closer to Alabama in 2023 than to Alabama in 1926.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Not very differently.  Which is to say, both back then and today the jury would have been quite fair and just, unlike the ridiculous civil rights fantasy the movie portrays.  Alabama today might actually be slightly less tolerant than Alabamians in 1996, since back then they were on board with "colorblind" race relations as a sort of truce.  Now, racial identity politics and tribalism are on the rise, but I still don't think it would be enough to change how the trial would be handled.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    Light sentence for the murders of the two scumbags, and whatever the standard sentence is for unintentionally shooting someone.
    

    4. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


How can so many people be publishing stuff with this quote in it, and none of them paused long enough to check their source?




As an average Joe and non-academic, I just assume that a sizeable chunk of papers and citations are just made up and I look on requests for "source?" and quasi-religious appeals to "peer review" with an increasingly jaundiced eye.  I think that a lot of this is probably not malicious, since I too have copied quotations from second or third hand sources without checking the original when writing undergrad papers, but that doesn't make this any less of a problem.


The usual retort is along the lines of "it might not be the perfect system, but it's the best one we've got."  I'm not sure I agree.  A tabloid magazine article claiming something outrageous is easy for people to evaluate and accept, reject, or suspend judgment.  In contrast, a published study filled with impressive sounding words and using complicated statistical methods appears cloaked in a mantle of authority, expertise, and erudition has much more power to simply overawe plebs into accepting its conclusion.


This sloppy, lazy, or ideologically motivated science has the potential to be very harmful to a person's project of building a useful and accurate model of their world because when it's wrong, it's wrong in cleverer , deeper, more subtle ways than, say, the tabloid example above.  A great analogy is "The Book" from Anathem:




Since the sole purpose of the Book was to punish its readers, the less said of it the better. To study it, to copy it out, and to memorize it was an extraordinary form of penance.






[...]






There was no point at all to the Book, which is what made it an especially dreaded form of penance. It contained twelve chapters. Like the scale used to measure earthquakes, these got exponentially worse as they went on, so Chapter Six was ten times as bad as Chapter Five, and so on. Chapter One was just a taste, meted out to delinquent children, and usually completed in an hour or two. Two meant at least one overnight stay, though any self-respecting troublemaker could bang it out in a day. Five typically meant a stay of several weeks. Any sentence of Chapter Six or higher could be appealed to the Primate and then to the Inquisition. Chapter Twelve amounted to a sentence of life at hard labor in solitary confinement; only three avout had finished it in 3690 years, and all of them were profoundly insane.






Beyond about Six, the punishment could span years. Many chose to leave the concent rather than endure it. Those who stuck it out were changed when they emerged: subdued, and notably diminished. Which might sound crazy, because there was nothing to it other than copying out the required chapters, memorizing them, and then answering questions about them before a panel of hierarchs. But the contents of the Book had been crafted and refined over many centuries to be nonsensical, maddening, and pointless: flagrantly at first, more subtly as the chapters progressed. It was a maze without an exit, an equation that after weeks of toil reduced to 2 = 3. Chapter One was a page of nursery-rhymes salted with nonsense-words that almost rhymed-but not quite. Chapter Four was five pages of the digits of pi. Beyond that, however, there was no further randomness in the Book, since it was easy to memorize truly random things once you taught yourself a few tricks-and everyone who’d made it through Chapter Four knew the tricks. Much harder to memorize and to answer questions about were writings that almost but did not quite make sense; that had internal logic, but only to a point. Such things cropped up naturally in the mathic world from time to time-after all, not everyone had what it took to be a Saunt. After their authors had been humiliated and Thrown Back, these writings would be gone over by the Inquisition, and, if they were found to be the right kind of awful, made even more so, and folded into later and more wicked editions of the Book. To complete your sentence and be granted permission to walk out of your cell, you had to master them just as thoroughly as, say, a student of quantum mechanics must know group theory. The punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all of that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison infiltrate your brain to its very roots. It was more humiliating than you might imagine, and after I’d been toiling on Chapter Five for a couple of weeks I had no difficulty in seeing how one who completed a sentence of, say, Chapter 9 would emerge permanently damaged.




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Where do you go on the internet to have fun in 2023?


I used to frequent the chans back when there were many small ones, read a lot of SA, Fugly, iMockery, even early Cracked and some Maddox, among dozens of other small sites.  Then there was Stumbleupon which was like magic to me when it came out, and I came across all kinds of weird and interesting sites while using it.


I've outgrown a lot of those sites now -- they were a lot funnier when I was 15 -- but I haven't really found any new sites or communities that scratch the same itch.  I usually check this place first for interesting bathroom reading, then if there's nothing new I check a few subreddits, and if I'm truly desperate I'll open 4chan, although the noise/bots/spam seem to finally have killed any originality that was still lingering (except for during the rare major Happening).


Help me avoid reading books and going outside by recommending a few fun, funny, and/or interesting sites to read.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Wasn't it applied to fans of "The Man Show?"  So it's probably around 20 years old.  Maybe it (or a sanitized version of it) started offline?


Edit: Since people seem unfamiliar with the term -- my understanding is "person (usually a guy) who leans left not out of pure devotion to the progressive cause, but because he enjoys fun deviant stuff like booze and porn that the prudish Christian Right would try to restrict or ban."


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Did anyone archive the post or the link?


Edit: Was it this one?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Japanese crows.  They're huge and really clever.  There are crow fanzines and crow pet owner societies in Japan.  Sometimes they even have live crow pop-up cafes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If you've got the right sort of sand, you can make a Sagrada Familia sandcastle.  My daughter enjoyed this when she was about 4 or 5.  Otherwise just crack a beer and let 'em run around, they make their own fun at that age.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Definitely take them when they're a bit older.  My dad took me to Normandy when I was 8 or 9, and decades later those are still some of my most vivid memories.  Extremely cool and interesting.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The porn and headlock thing sounds like a fantasy more than anyone I met in real life




I think this sort of touches on what I find strange about the meme.  It's an imaginary version of a tomboy that is basically a bro.  Tomboyish girls (that I have known) aren't like that, they're just girls who are a bit more masculine in a few areas, or even just girls who are confident.




But I wouldn't say any of these means you're pretending to be a man




Yeah, that was too broad a statement. That other poster just got under my skin.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks, done.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
No, I think you may very well be a principled person.  But you are probably surrounded by a large majority who are arguing for unprincipled exceptions who will use your principled stance to cynically further their goals.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You're arguing in favor of a broad definition of tomboy, while I'm talking about something rather narrow.  From the linked meme in the OP:


    

  • 

    Thinks makeup is stupid
    

    • 

  • 

    Likes porn
    

    • 

  • 

    Likes video games
    

    • 

  • 

    Rough speech like "I'm gonna kick your ass/suck my dick/fag"
    

    • 

  • 

    Gets mistaken for a boy
    

    • 

  • 

    Puts you in headlocks
    

    • 



Sounds like a boy or young man to me.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


My wife is pretty tomboyish, and we have a pretty normal relationship minus the occasionally flipped gender roles.




This is actually how my relationship is, but I wouldn't call my wife a tomboy.  Maybe we need more shades of meaning than "wheat field tradwife" and "tomboy."




And since we're pathologizing each other's preferences,




I don't think you're the sort of person I'm talking about in the OP, but thanks I guess.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Would you rather have sex with your buddy or your kid?




An adult woman who doesn't pretend to be a man is a kid?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I guess I don't think it is one, but there are a lot of smart people on here who sometimes are able to help me see things from a different angle so I suppose I was hoping for that.  If I could tell you what kind of answer I wanted, if I could steelman this in my head, I probably wouldn't ask here.


If I had to imagine a well-adjusted and over 25 who was into tomboys, I suppose I would imagine a guy with traditionally feminine personality traits who enjoyed taking on traditionally female aspects of a male-female relationship.  But I don't think that's what I'm seeing on the internet, instead it just seems like emotional immaturity.  Are there mature, feminine men who are into tomboys in any significant number? Or are men who like tomboys a totally different breed? Or something else I haven't imagined?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
No, it's not enough, because you and I both know that these cases will never be reopened so it costs you absolutely nothing to take that stance.  Very principled and also very convenient.


As someone above posted, the only way to deescalate this sort of partisan spiral is for your side to willingly take an L.  If the Dems showed that they had Trump dead to rights but then loudly proclaimed that they refused to stoop to politically motivated prosecution, I would be impressed.  Or, if they prosecuted Trump and then also began looking into Hunter Biden, I would be impressed.  But until then, if it looks/walks/smells like political partisanship then it probably is, and all the self-righteous throat clearing in the world isn't going to change anyone's mind.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is essentially what I believe.  As long as he remains active in politics, and quite possibly even if he doesn't, the investigations will continue until they get him or he dies.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Now I’ve got an urge to map the exact route by which he moved the goalposts, but I’m trying to cool down a bit before posting.




I'd be interested in reading this as I'm often baffled and fascinated at my boomer relatives' logic.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is the real problem.  I don't know or really care if Trump is guilty of mishandling documents, but I do care about setting a precedent for using the bureaucracy to endlessly hound and destroy a political rival.  I thought his "lock her up" rhetoric was stupid and irresponsible in 2016, and I think this much more serious escalation is stupid now.


Trump was over after 2020, the Dems could have just taken the high road, ignored Trump, and watched as the GOP tore itself apart three ways between the Trump fanatics, the Nevertrumpers, and the demoralized group in-between (including me).  Instead there's a faction determined to make an example of him in order to... what? Certainly it's not because they love justice or else they would've been prosecuting the legions of other corrupt American politicians who do worse things.  Presumably this is ideologically motivated but again -- to what strategic end? Letting Trump beclown himself on social media as he and his partisans slip into irrelevance would have much more effectively destroyed his movement than giving him a bunch of attention and riling up his fans.  It seems then to be motivated by short sighted vengeance, or is there a steelman I'm not seeing?