ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
No bio...
User ID: 1012
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
6mo ago
Because if my salary is 90k before I learn AWS, it will be 91k after I learn AWS and get my annual 1% raise. But $COMPETITOR is looking for AWS skill and is paying 105k. I'd probably stay at your company and take 100k, but I'm sure that asking a raise will either get me laughed at, or I will be successful but will get marked as "greedy"/"not a team player"/. So instead of dealing with the drama and politics, I'll just jump ship. Why did you make me do this? I would have been happy to continue working at your company if you had only been willing to recognize my increased value as an employee.
FWIW, I'm a manager and I deal with this issue all the time. I actually push to pay ambitious engineers more and do my best to make their work lives rewarding. It's a lot more expensive (in money and time) to replace a skilled employee than to simply give an existing employee a 10% raise. But alas, not everyone realizes this.
I could have written this post, I feel the exact same, the whole thing made me even more cynical about the average person. But what creeps me out the most is
Turn the switch on, and people who are ordinarily perfectly reasonable are frothing at the mouth saying you're killing grandma, you're a menace to society, you're a dirty plague rat. Turn the switch off and it's all forgotten. Like it never even happened. They don't even think about it anymore.
What does this phenomenon really tell us? To me, the implications are quite disturbing.
When I've gone around loudly proclaiming to be right about something (online or IRL) and then turn out to be wrong, I feel highly embarrassed when I get called out after the fact. In my better moments I respond with humility, and in my worse moments I respond with rage or misdirection. But the point is that I respond somehow, I feel something.
But a lot of the covid fanatics seem to simply not care at all that they were wrong. When you call them on it, you might get a shrug and a "things were different then," or even just a vague confused stare -- why are you still talking about that? Don't you know it's $currentyear? Haven't you heard about Putin?
When they were shouting about killing grandma or plague rats, I had understood those utterances as words that containing meaning or argument. But was I wrong? Were the vast majority of people literally just making mouth noises that simply signalled their alignment with the current Correct Opinion? I'm not being metaphorical here -- the Covid hysteria makes me wonder whether a large majority of our population just parrots slogans to jockey for status without engaging their thinking brains at all (outside of status calculation I guess)? If so, this would explain their apathy about their argument being wrong. "What argument?" they might respond.
Yes, it's not news that the average person is not a deep thinker. Everyone here is aware of that. But to me, the above implies that many people are not just "not deep thinkers." If they were, that wouldn't bother me much -- they and myself would be essentially the same in that we both think, just to different degrees.
But maybe these people are not just shallow thinkers, but non-thinkers. The difference between thinkers and non-thinkers is huge, and I am weirded out by the idea. It almost feels like sharing a society with a bunch of p-zombies (EDIT: to be clear, I don't actually think these people are literal p-zombies). Recent memes about internal monologues and "The Breakfast Question" come to mind. If this model is closer to the truth, it changes my outlook on many things.
People would probably listen more if the leftists hadn't been crying wolf for the last 8 years. At this point, I assume that any statements like the above are just crybullying in the vein of "I feel unsafe" designed to scare or shame non-leftists into letting down their guard so that leftists can abuse their dominance of the media and deep state to undermine and destroy literally anything my side tries to do. So, too bad. I guess we'll just have to suffer some corruption and incompetence as a country. You kept distracting us and nudging our arm when we tried to use the scalpel, so now we're using the chainsaw, because we've got to do something soon.
ETA: Is this guy just a troll? He made a few other posts recently that boiled down to "things are terrible now" without any effort to convince and keeps deleting posts. This post seems tailor-made to push buttons.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2yr ago
Your general point is lost on many people. I was talking to my boomer mom about Kanye getting blacklisted for alleged anti-Semitism and her response was basically "I don't see why him getting punished is a big deal, everyone knows the Jews run Hollywood and finance, but everyone also knows it's just not something you're supposed to say in polite company because it's un-PC, so he's an idiot." Except that a lot of my fellow millennials seem to thinking that Jewish overrepresentation is an evil conspiracy theory spread by evil people (I would know, I was one of them). Same goes for the "days of rage" in the 70s.
What "everyone knows" in one generation is often seen as "false" by later generations if it's not allowed to be discussed. I ran into the same things when speaking to Chinese people about the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square. The older folks who were around for those events had nuanced opinions, even the nationalists, while younger people either believe that it "wasn't really that bad, certainly nowhere near as bad as Western propaganda makes it out to be" or they have no opinion at all.
Enforced silence on a topic can be more effective than enforced orthodoxy, since it's so much more subtle.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2yr ago
As one of the few dyed-in-the-wool, practicing rightists on here (in that I have multiple kids and had my first in my mid 20s, come from a red tribe family, have been a practicing orthodox Catholic since a young age, never considered myself a leftist or "liberal" even in high school or college, etc) I don't think this place is "right-wing" in the way that normies would usually use the word. I know this because in the past I've gotten into tedious arguments with people about whether god exists, or why the family is important, the intrinsic value of human life, the existence of only two sexes/genders etc, all issues that most normal right-wing folks (i.e. not Twitter monarchists or whatever) would just consider self evident or settled. That would happen if everyone here were run of the mill right wingers.
There's a large majority of anti-progressives here that includes libertarians/Grey tribe people, transhumanists, and disillusioned leftists who just want to go back to "tits and beer" leftism. They all have way more in common with each other than they do with me in that they think that a lot of recent "progress" is good but there are just some problematic bits that have recently popped up, and they especially dislike the rise of the evangical Woke religion since it is an exclusive faith that refuses to make common cause with heretics. That's why there's so much bitching about woke stuff.
My impression of historical US-Euro relations is that while realpolitik was always an important component, there was a sense of shared ideology (liberal democracy) and cultural history that strengthened the bond relative to, say, US-Egyptian or US-Indonesian relations. We were the "free countries," we were the "Western nations," and until recently, we were "Christian nations." However, mass immigration, multiculturalism and its consequent curtailing of civil liberties, and militant secularism and progressivism seem to have severely weakened those identies in Europe and made room new identities to assert themselves.
I see US-Euro relations decaying to the more transactional relations that the U.S. has with culturally alien countries. European countries making noises about cozying up to China sounds bizarre when operating under the assumption that the old identities hold, but it actually makes sense if Europeans now simply view China and America as two ideologically-alien superpowers who offer different sets of incentives and obligations and who can be played off one another for benefit.
I think a lot of the outrage about "European ingratitude" from the American right is caused by right wingers failing to realize that European 2025 is not the Europe of 1950, or even 1990. Many Europeans seem to already view America as ideologically alien and thus view the relationship as totally transactional. It would be like expressing gratitude to your ISP for providing internet service after you sign a contract and pay your bill. Trump's more transactional approach aligns with this new reality, and so it's probably a good thing -- unless you're an American progressive, in which case, since you hold religious beliefs in common with European progressives, you probably view this development as needless division and infighting amongst enlightened nations that diverts time and energy away from pushing back the ever-encroaching forces of ignorance and oppression. That said, I sense a rift between American and European progressives as well, mostly in complaints from more traditional European socialists who see American "woke" progressivism as an irrelevant distraction from material problems and/or a form of American political and cultural imperialism. So perhaps even the bonds between progressives on either sides of the Atlantic are fraying and will not be strong enough to maintain a US-Euro relationship beyond the merely transactional.
This explanation is certainly too pat, and there's more nuance to be explored, but do you think this is more or less the direction in which things are heading?
Please explain how the remnant culture left over at that point avoids being outcompeted, crushed, and enslaved by one that still values objective thinking and hard work. What, you just put the sassiest guys you can find in charge of military R&D and hope you maintain a technological edge based on chutzpah? Fill your logistical chain with guys who don't adhere to schedules but have a lot of swag?
My impression is that woke activitists assume that there is functionally infinite seedcorn and that they can complete the worldwide revolution before people begin (literally and metaphorically) starving and they themselves get eaten. That things like a healthy social fabric and functioning economy and strong military just spring out of the ground, or at least America's versions of those things are resilient enough to never fail.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2yr ago
In doing so, Zilly issued a blistering order that leveled crippling sanctions against the city
I'm imagining the judge as some sort of Godzilla-sized ant creature spewing jets of hot acid across Pioneer Square, BLISTERING hundreds of bystanders! And permanently CRIPPLING many more! Disfigured and mamed for life! Let's hope the judge doesn't start SLAMMING people into the pavement, EVISCERATING and GUTTING them with his mandibles, or BLASTING them with additional acid streams.
The absolute state of modern journalism.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2yr ago
Definitely aimed at the hegemonic ideology and not me, since I relate intensely to this paragraph:
If I had had to suffer through a few more skeptics calling me racist because I wanted to know why there were giant underwater pyramids, I probably would have believed in Atlantis even harder, out of spite, and never talked myself out of it. And then when ivermectin came along, I would have thought “Scientists? Experts? They’re the guys who are so dumb they can’t even figure out Atlantis existed when there are giant underwater pyramids right in front of their eyes. Screw them, I’m listening to Bret Weinstein."
I often find myself leaning into weird or unsubstantiated beliefs due solely to resentment at how much scorn is poured on people who dare question the relevant orthodoxy. I'm probably a lot more willing to entertain HBD or even JQ stuff simply because asking a good faith question about either topic (and others like them) gets you shouted down, ostracized, blacklisted etc.
It's actually worse than Scott's example, because unlike the the guy Scott is beefing with, who apparently knows something about ivermectin, most people aren't even capable of arguing the "orthodox" positiom but still wouldn't hesitate to puff up and self-righteously shout some string of load catchphrases at you to score social points for being a Doubleplus Goodthinker "LMAO HORSE DEWORMER INJECTING BLEACH LOL" It's all so tiresome.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2yr ago
Thanks for sharing. But I'm nearly as tired of Holocaust-themed morality plays as I am of the Civil Rights Era-flavored ones. Has anyone under age 70 not been bludgeoned through their entire lives with "Prejudice is bad!" and "The banality of evil!" and "Never again!" etc?
I don't understand people who write books on these themes in 2014. Is there even the thinnest residue of stunning bravery to be mined and exploited by speaking truth to a (long vanquished) power? I have to imagine that even blue tribers would yawn at yet another Holocaust tear jerker or To Kill a Mockingbird clone, "don't they know trans persecution or MAGA terrorism are where the points are scored in 2023?" And even dispensing with the cynicism, is there really anything interesting left to say on these topics? I'd wager that nearly any book you could write on them has already been written.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2yr ago
I dislike jaded contrarian posts in the vein of "oh sweet summer child," but I guess it's my turn to wear that hat
The biggest surprise in my opinion is that Tallarico managed to get away with this for so long, despite regularly interacting with a nerdy demographic I would assume would be especially fastidious about video game history claims.
I'm not surprised at all by this. The older I get and the further I progress in my career, the more I find that sheet brazeness and confidence are 80% of the game. It's an eye opening discovery. Hard workers don't always win, honesty doesn't pay. Casual cheaters never prosper, but calculated and/or shameless cheaters often prosper mightily. Stated thus it sounds like I was hopefully naïve, but I'd wager that most Mottizens reading this post subconsciously subscribe to this flavor of the just world fallacy at least a bit.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2yr ago
In Japan, it's simple: it's because everything is like that there. Normie Japanese people take a certain pride in being "normal," i.e. following all the spoken and unspoken rules. There's no real democratic tradition over here, no concept of "consent of the governed," and certainly no American-style anti-government/anti-establishment sentiment. If this sounds like I'm being uncharitable, consider that Japanese people IME mostly see this as a good thing. They seem to see the U.S. as violent, dangerous, unpredictable, and atomized, the same way an American might think of, say, a Brazilian slum.
Chinese people (in my now somewhet dated experience) tend to follow the letter of the law while unspeakably violating the spirit of the law whenever it suits them. So any significant mask wearing there is probably only done in places where people are getting filmed or watched. There are probably a significant number of Chinese people who mask up because they believe that corona will kill them, their mom, and their dog if they get it, similar to leftist hypochondriacs and tinfoil hatters in the U.S. I met many otherwise normal, sometimes well-educated Chinese folks who had normal beliefs about most things but insane paranoid beliefs about one or two things because the CCP/Global Western Conspiracy (depending on their political leaning) was covering up the truth.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2yr ago
Sounds like the policy is working exactly as designed. When woke priorities are enshrined as foundational legal principles , their directives become another lever for bureaucrats to pull in order to get a job done. The incentive to, say, eliminate all straight white able bodied men from a candidate pool now exists, and it will influence everyone under the sway of these legal principles -- regardless of the actual ideological bent of the person taking the action!
That is to say, I think it's quite possible that the person who made the decision you describe in your post might have been completely non-ideological. They may truly have just been trying to make their job easier by pulling a lever that had recently been made available to them without much caring whether it was fair. And that IMO is the effect these laws are meant to have.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
20d ago
Brother, you do not interfere in the affairs of a neighboring tribe unless you want to start a blood feud. It's a shame for the boy, but the world is full of such evils, and there is no state powerful enough to root them all out. That tribe has their customs, we have ours. They have their rituals, we have ours. They have their god, and we have ours. The best course of action is to interact with them as little as possible, only to trade goods and reach agreements about territory. With the passage of time, we will see whose tribe flourishes and whose tribe withers.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
7mo ago
This doesn't seem to be the case in China. Even today, there are people who can trace direct male lineage to Confucius who lived around 500 BC.
I saw one of these guys in Qufu when I was a student. He was writing and selling calligraphic scrolls on the side of the road. He had a sign with his portrait on it and some official-looking, diploma-like certificate stapled to his sign. "Wow, is he really an actual descendent of Confucius?" I asked my professor, who was born and raised not far away. "Probably, I don't know. There are a lot of them." she replied. She seemed completely unimpressed. And that was when I began to wonder if I was a bit naïve.
Westerners often credulously believe claims like this because (1) Chinese have a radically different view of "lying" that Westerners don't have natural defenses against unless they've lived in China or a similar third world country, (2) Chinese (individuals too, not just the government) find it in their interest to promote stories that prove China's equality or superiority to the West, (3) all the sources that would debunk nonsense claims like this are written in Chinese and this unable to diffuse into the Western consciousness.
"China" does not have 5,000 years of history any more than "France" has 3,000 years of history.
Chinese did not invent soccer, or sashimi, or beer, or the seismograph.
Chinese cannot trace descent from antiquity with a level of confidence that would be taken seriously in the West.
"Truth" in China is not the same as "Truth" in the West.
I may be overgeneralizing my own experience, but IMHO it's at least in part because while many people came together to discuss their apparently irreconcilable differences over the last 10-15 years, ultimately they found that their differences were indeed irreconcilable, and left disappointed and/or righteously angry. Most Mottizens, and I'd argue truth-seeking netizens in general, are now very familiar with the basic shapes of both sides' arguments, and so when CW issue de jour #2567 pops up they can usually predict with some accuracy what each side will say. The conversation is therefore mostly no longer interesting. Battle lines have been drawn in the wider culture, and now we're all just waiting for (or actively working towards) one of the factions to emerge victorious.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
13d ago
I used to accept this opinionoid, but I've come to believe that shared experience matters much more than age. Sure, if you're 40, your 18 year old gf might be a bit boring at first, but after you've been together 5 years, experienced the ups and downs of marriage, and maybe had a kid or two, there will be plenty to talk about and bond over.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1mo ago
As long as the discussion is respectful and aimed at understanding each other’s different views, it should be tolerable.
As I get older, I increasingly find mindkilled flag-waving from my own camp just as distasteful. I don't want to be friends with someone whose Prius sports an "8647" bumper sticker, but nor do I want to be friends with someone with "Liberal Tears are Delicious" on the back of their truck.
I've never dealt with online dating, but I always imagined that the "no MAGA" is a blessing in disguise. It outs people as shallow thinkers or deranged partisans and makes it easier to sift them out of the pool. It would be much worse to go on several dates before finding out the truth.
But after filtering them out, is there much of a pool left? My gut feeling is that the answer might be no, because I'd guess that stable, happy, conservative or grill-pilled single women probably get enough attention IRL that they don't need to use apps. And that any woman who apparently fits that profile might be playing a character (wheat field tradwife) or have some baggage. Is that the case?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2mo ago
I'm disappointed that I missed @coffee_enjoyer 's post on audience manipulation in Adolescence. It vindicates an intuition that I've long held (since high school at least) that the average person is completely defenseless and unaware of the psychological damage that is being done to them by popular media. It's the mental equivalent of being a radium dial painter or a pre-modern lead smelter.
Another poster in that thread asked you for your research notes. Do you know of any accessible articles or books on this subject that I could share with normie friends and family?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
11mo ago
Only when they're paying $5.99 a minute.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2yr ago
It wouldn't work. What constitutes "prejudice" or "discrimination" doesn't in practice follow coherent principles, it's merely "who, whom" because anti-Catholics (in a broad sense) control all media by which the message would be delivered and can thus mute o, even better, skew or taint the message.
It is a highly effective strategy. When I think of someone on TV complaining about anti-Catholicism, I think of some crackpot or blowhard that has been brought on as a slow news day sideshow, and I'm a practicing Catholic who believes anti-Catholicism is a serious problem! I know for a fact that there are many highly articulate priests and professors who could give an excellent rundown of anti-Catholicism on TV, I've personally seen many of them speak. But they would never be allowed on air for fear that they might actually sway some folks (look up Fr. Coughlin), so instead you get Bill Donahue.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2yr ago
I'm increasingly against the concept of "asylum" in general. A lot of discussions about immigration seem to take it for granted that we must let in a nonzero percentage of "asylum seekers," that this is just some sort of given, or law of physics or something. It's not. The number of asylum seekers we have to take in is zero.
It must suck to live in a place controlled by warlords and gangs. But life sucks in a lot of place and in a lot of time periods. Sometimes it even sucks within the borders of the U.S. I don't believe I or my countrymen have a special moral duty to shelter every single person who shows up at the border with some unverifiable story of persecution. The idea sounds good in theory, but in practice it is one of those ideas that seems unstable in its theoretical limited form and which inevitably decays into its more stable degraded, excessive, unlimited form (see also college financial aid).
Even a midwit like me can tell that there are simply too many people in LatAm and the 3rd world for the U.S. to absorb without impacting the living standards of Americans, so I have to suspect that "taking care of asylum seekers" is really a pretext for serving some other ideological belief, like "increasing diversity" or "destroying white hegemony" or "free market absolutism." I guess there are a few true believers among the suicidally altruistic (religious charities come to mind) but I wager that they're a minority and are mostly the "useful idiots" that the ideologues in power use to further their ideologies.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2yr ago
And it only gets worse when you get married and have kids. I briefly had to bike to the supermarket almost daily to buy meat and vegetables and other sundries for our family of five. It was a short bike ride, but the sheer amount of stuff required ghetto engineering to get home. Several time I had to lash a box of diapers to the back of my bike because my basket and backpack were full. First world problem, perhaps, but simply living close isn't always enough to make walking or biking convenient. We have a car now and life is way easier.
I just can't sympathize with the complaints in this vein:
This just sounds like someone who belongs to the dominant ideology and has never experienced people unapologetically stating non-mainstream views before. As a reactionary conservative Catholic for the last 20 years, the overwhelming majority of opinions I've read have been counter to my beliefs, to put it mildly. There are people on this site who think I'm a net negative to the human race. And that's just fine. I'm hear to read what they say because it's interesting and because I can handle it. If it's standard prog/transhumanist/libertarian argument #2,547 I might skim it, but there's still a good number of novel (to me) ideas in the posts here.
I really think this describes the majority of the left wing burnouts. "It's too hostile! Everyone's always pushing back on what I say!" Maybe that's because your own ideas are soft because your rarely receive pushback. No, your Thanksgiving dinner table argument with your redneck dad doesn't count even though it probably made you feel like Rosa Parks. The right wingers here are more tenacious and educated then average, so their criticisms and argument sting more. Welcome to The Motte, that's what this place is for.
To be clear, I'm not trying to dump on those folks. I'm sure it's a legitimately challenging and shocking experience. And I want to give special thanks to the left of center folks who stick around on The Motte. Without y'all this place wouldn't work, and I hope you stick around to keep the right wingers on their toes.
(Also one of the other posts successfully guilted me into resuming janny duty. Forgive me Zorba for I have sinned.)
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