ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
No bio...
User ID: 1012
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
Being Catholic is a choice in a way that being black or ethnic Jewish is not.
No, it's not. There's a difference but it's much smaller than people imagine. Is being "atheist" a choice? People don't choose their convictions the same way they choose their clothes. I'm a Christian. Sometimes I wished I weren't, because Christianity is very demanding and because it's low status among my peers. But I'm convinced of its truth for the time being, so whether I like it or not I remain Christian.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
Most migrants aren't committing violence, and it does seem cruel to kick out people who have been living somewhere for years or even decades.
As someone on a work visa, no, not really. They knew what they were getting into. I've been living in this country for many years with my wife and kids and the.government of this country could tell us to fuck off at any time, as is their right. It's a risk a I consciously take. If I decide I no longer want to take that risk, I can just go back where I came from.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
10mo ago
Is it fear, or is it just business sense? Toy Story was a hit in part because it used a setting and characters familiar to an American audience (suburban childhood life, old fashioned cowboy toy, newfangled spaceman toy, slinky, green army men, Mr potato head). Ghibli movies are universally loved it Japan because of all the very-Japanese details and cultural references woven into them (likely both intentionally and unintentionally) -- see Totoro, Pom Poko, Spirited Away, or My Neighbors The Yamadas. I think the term "love letter" is trite when describing a movie, but these films are love letters to the childhoods and shared experiences of their respective audiences. They target a specific culture and a specific slice of space and time.
Modern family films don't really seem to do that anymore. Everything is either engineered to appeal to the widest possible audience (gotta appeal to the East Asian market) or, when they do try to set a film in a specific culture, it's a theme park version created by outsiders (Coco, Moana, new Mulan) that is still designed to be widely palatable. In both cases the end product is sometimes entertaining but never beloved as it doesn't connect with our own memories or experiences on more than a superficial level.
If you're not convinced, try this -- imagine a 2024 Disney remake of Totoro, complete with the newfangled 3D animation, the gender roles updated, the clothing modernized, interiors of the homes genericized, still vaguely Japanese (in the way a Japanese-American from California might imagine "Japanese") but mostly just anodyne and inoffensive, Totoro's wood has been expanded to cover a huge expanse of land and Catbus has a new origin story, and now Mei has a cute comic relief Makurokurosuke sidekick that hangs out on her shoulder (merchandising!). It would probably make a good trailer or two and I bet it would make some money at the box office, but a lot of the themes, images, and dare I say SOVL would have been lost in the quest to broaden appeal.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
Housing in Japan isn't affordable. Houses are small, probably roughly half of the sqft you'd get in most of the U.S. for the same dollars (my "huge" house in the countryside that shocked my co-workers was just over 1400sqft and it had 4BR, lol). The construction quality is shit, very poor insulation, crappy building materials that degrade significantly in the first 10-20 years. And all this for the low prices of 30,000,000 to 45,000,000 JPY if you want something new, or 25,000,000 to 35,000,000 if you want something used. And get ready to live in a 1000sqft "house" with maybe 1-2 meters of "land" surrounding your house, if that. (Yes, even in the countryside -- they build houses 1 meter apart even in the midst of massive open spaces.) AND! You get to pay for it with your Japanese salary, which PPP-adjusted is worth about half of an American salary.
As for why this is, the most plausible reasons seem to be that
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Brain drain to the cities is extreme and WFH hasn't taken off nearly as much -- most people are still trying to cram themselves into Tokyo
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Home construction is a racket -- There are a handful of massive national level builders that sit on top of a truly insane byzantine network of contractors, sub contractors, and sub sub sub contractors so that building even with shitty materials becomes horribly expensive due to the sheer number of parties taking their cut. This also makes QC'ing your house nearly impossible because there's no single "contractor" to hold accountable, it's buck-passing all the way down
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Penalties for sitting on land are very low -- the attitude towards owning property here seems to be "sit on it and hope you win the lottery." I personally know people who own land in the countryside and who have zero plans for it -- it's just there, it's costing almost nothing, and maybe someday someone will want to buy it, who knows? And of course there's the famous inheritance/ownership problem, where a piece of land gets passed down to half a dozen grandchildren, only some of them cannot be located (and might even be purposely avoiding being located in order to dodge taxes) so nothing can ever be legally done with the land and it just sits in limbo forever.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
I don't come to The Motte for wiki links and one liners. That's Reddit-tier discourse. If someone has a point to make, they should state it explicitly so the countours of the argument are plain.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr 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 '21
10mo ago
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.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Not trying to single you out here, but I hate the word "obstructing" in politics. Its use is a motte-and-bailey. The motte is "blocking a thing from happening." As you say, the holdouts are "objectively" blocking the election of a speaker. But the bailey (which I'm not accusing you of using here) is "blocking my team from doing what we want without compromise," which was how the term was used through most of the Obama administration.
Why should it be Democrats’ responsibility to pick up after the toddlers?
I also really loathe the use of child-related words to describe politicians' actions. "Petulant," "childish," "toddlers," "tantrum," and of course the bizarre flash in the pan from a few years ago that was "pissbaby." Nobody in any of the three branches of government is a "toddler" (though I'll make allowances for Trump). This sort of language smuggles in the idea that the other team are the "adults" who are mature, responsible, serious, reliable, and more deserving of power. Assuming it's not being used cynically, it represents a failure to fully grok one's outgroup's motivations.
For example, Gaetz casting a vote for Trump isn't being a "toddler" or "having a tantrum," it's a middle finger to the establishment GOP. You might think it's an ineffectual or tasteless gesture, and it may well be, but there's a serious intent behind it. It's not the act of an irrational "toddler."
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
10mo ago
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.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
I would guess** that his idea is that yes, ironically enough, they want to overthrow society to create a Just World where rule followers and Hall monitors gets justly rewarded for their superior virtue. This idea has echos of "Wokism as mutant, cancerous Christianity." In the Christian age you suffered the indignity and injustice of being a rule follower in this life in exchange for treasure in the next. But if there's no afterlife, you need to create your utopia on earth so that you can collect your reward before you bite the dust. There are vague parallels in a lot of Enlightenment-descended ideologies actually.
**I'm not sure if I'm fully convinced of the above myself.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
So interesting how "problematic" has subtly completed the shift from "online activist jargon" to "well established and understood descriptive term." No matter what side of the CW one is on, it's crystal clear which types of content are implied by the adjective "problematic."
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
10mo ago
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...
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Being partly descended from people who lived in America before there was an America, my attitude toward native American grievances is: "Sucks to suck, git gud, gg no re." Black and brown BIPOC bodies of color can get in line right behind every other conquered/defeated people with a sob story. This is the Law of the Jungle. And this slimy conniving chipping away at the edges to guilt your oppressors into give you free shit is just pathetic. We need more Geronimos and fewer Charlene Red Bird Lovitz-Smiths, at least that sort of direct action is heroic and inspiring.
So I feel zero guilt about First Peoples (who were First, except for you know those other tribes that were First-er but got genocided before the white man made it ashore) and their ridiculous revanchism. You lost, get over it. And you're welcome for building one of the greatest nations the world has ever seen using the land we wrested from your ancestors so that we can today provide for their descendents. Would Imperial China or Czarist Russia have been so generous had they arrived first? I doubt it.
And yeah, one day, after the U.S. fractures and gets invaded by Greater North Korea or the Second Mexican Empire or the People's Republic of Canada, well, sucks to suck, we lost, that's the way of the world. Turn about's fair play, nothing lasts forever nor does it have a right to.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
This is why we only have classic little golden books and some innocuous stuff from the 80s and 90s on our bookshelf. Also Roald Dahl, he's great. As others have said, there's no reason to buy modern propaganda children's books. Not only are they proselytizing, but they're mostly objectively ugly.
I would also recommend checking out some Catholic publishers. They often stock children's book that have a classic aesthetic and pro-family messages, and they don't always even have overt pro-Christian messaging.
Also FWIW I appreciate your posts on this topic. I'm also concerned and vigilant about this sort of subtle messaging, but very few around me are, and reading posts like these assures me that I'm not (entirely) crazy.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
10mo ago
Are there synonyms for international or global that start with “T”?
Transnational?
Thank you. I would argue that they would have been fully justified in not fighting for a state that had been actively persecuting them. In hindsight they seem virtuous and heroic because public opinion ended up reversing course on Japanese internment, but they couldn't be sure that that would happen two decades before the Civil Rights Act. They would have seemed foolish in a different timeline where the U.S. had remained a country where Japanese were seen as un-American and alien.
Same goes for black soldiers in WW2. Why volunteer to fight for a country that sees you as a subhuman? I think black draft dodgers during WW2 would also have been on solid moral ground.
I'm not denying that they were courageous, optimistic, and virtuous, but simply that their virtue was beyond what could be reasonably demanded in the circumstances. And so I think a young white British man would be perfectly justified in giving the finger to a system that apparently actively dislikes and seeks to diminish his kind. Pinging @Gdanning.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
Learning that universal suffrage was universally regarded as insane prior to the mid-19th century (and even then, the only change was in the U.S.!) is one of those things I can't "unsee." It just explains so many liberal democratic dysfunctions (see Legutko's book).
Fair point about not being able to read minds. I don't want to take my original point too far; I don't think that the people I'm talking about are literal p-zombies. Of course they have an inner life and (IMO) share with me the inherent dignity (in the old sense of "honor and duty") of being made in the image and likeness of God. But maybe they shouldn't be involved in the political decision making process.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
I took would like more examples of "hostile occupation of conservate Christians." I agree with FC that this just sounds like people being mad that their parents raised them in a religious tradition that they no longer believe in (likely because mass media and public education converted them to a rival religious tradition).
"Hostile occupation" sounds to me more like Francoist Spain where you needed letters of recommendation from your parish priest for a government position, or where the school curriculum is designed and monitored by the Church, or where major retailers wouldn't even consider a "Pride Month display" for fear of boycotts or falling afoul of the law.
Conservative parts of America have Pride displays at big box and book stores, their school curriculums are implemented by a body of teachers who are as a group quite woke, and although you don't yet need a letter vouching for your good character from your local DEIB commissar, if enough people learn that you're a heretic who opposes woke teachings you will be blacklisted from many government institutions and powerful corporations.
Given the above I have a really hard taking people seriously when they claim to have escaped a conservative hellhole because their parents made them go to church on Sunday and disapproved of their gender identity and oh yeah one time at a bar a drunk guy called them a faggot.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
10mo ago
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.
I sometimes decide not to post just because I don't want to get Gish galloped or have to litigate my entire argument from first principles. Usually it has something to do with a belief based on Catholic theology which most people here don't have a background in and (more importantly) seem to look down on as inferior to modern materialism/atheism/utilitarianism (maybe we just all have PTSD from the Great Internet Atheism Wars).
It's not that I don't like explaining or getting pushback, it's mostly just the shitty, condescending, or dismissive tone people sometimes use when responding. Interestingly, the worst offenders are often members fellow right-wingers (edgy Nietzscheans, mostly) or centrist liberals. The leftists who post here are often really charitable and succeed in making me sympathetic to their views (shout-outs to @Hoffmeister25, @gemmaem, and @chrisprattalpharaptr).
As much as I like TheMotte, I'm really busy and responding to rude or derisive people on the internet just doesn't seem worth my time. If you pride yourself on "telling it like it is" or "being blunt" you're probably one of these people. Letting go of your righteous outrage and using a little tact and empathy goes a long way towards sparking good conversation and making this place more interesting and productive.
Here are my uncharitable unfiltered thoughts on the matter: something is seriously wrong with you and other people like you, and you're either unaware of it or willfully ignoring it. Maybe your standards are too high, maybe you lack social skills and weird people out, maybe you're fatter than you think, I don't know. But something isn't right.
I'm not really singling out you specifically, but I just don't understand where these posts come from. I'm a barely above average person. I'm 5'7"/170cm (!!!), face is maybe a 7/10 though under age 25 or so I often got called "cute" (never handsome or hot), body is... I dunno, 6/10? I'm not fat and not ripped, just "normal" I guess. I come from rural nowhere America from a middle-middle class family, went to an average college in a rural state, and prior to marriage made a below average salary. I'm not particularly witty or suave, though I am friendly and genuine and perceived as non-threatening. Never was athletic or played sports, but was also never overweight (until my mid 20s). I'm definitely less intelligent than many people on this board and I only did reasonably well in school, definitely wasn't near the top of my class. I majored in an uncool liberal arts subject and currently work in an unsexy part of tech and make a meh salary for a tech worker.
My point is that my stats are thoroughly mediocre except for some minor strengths here and there (and one big weakness). And yet, after turning 18 I dated continuously for 8 years (4 different women) until getting married at 26. I never had trouble finding a girlfriend, there was always someone in my social circle who I thought was cute and vice versa. I'd rate these women as 7/5/6/8, so I want knocking it out of the park looks-wise, but it was better than being alone and thirsty. I'm only in my early 30s, so this isn't advice in the vein of "just ask to speak to the manager and give him a firm handshake." Perhaps your standards are just too high?
tl;dr as a mediocre person I was able to pull it off, so anyone should be able to pull it off barring serious handicaps.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
I love my kids and Iove being a dad, so I'm glad we had a third (and I'm actually hoping for a fourth). We have a huge SUV, but I like huge SUVs. We might end up in a 4BR house, but not due to the number of kids. We're just going to stick all the girls in one room and all the boys in another; that's how my siblings and I were raised and we were all fine with it.
My wife is a SAHM who does freelance work. I'd say it's impacted both of our careers. I've had to work harder and at a more stable line of work, and she's had to pass up some larger projects.
But overall there's never been a single moment where we've regretted having our third kid. He's awesome.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
Bonus quote regarding "the Raft," a mass of floating trash and boats inhabited by millions that circulates on the Pacific current, picking up the global poor as it passes Asia and dumping them by the hundreds of thousands on the shore of California (cf. migrant boats/caravans):
"So you're creating your own news event to make money off the information flow that it creates?" says the journalist, desperately trying to follow. His tone of voice says that this is all a waste of videotape. His weary attitude suggests that this is not the first time Rife has flown off on a bizarre tangent.
"Partly. But that's only a very crude explanation. It really goes a lot deeper than that. You've probably heard the expression that the Industry feeds off of biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean."
"I've heard the expression, yes."
“That’s my expression. I made it up. An expression like that is just like a virus, you know–it’s a piece of information–data–that spreads from one person to the next. Well, the function of the Raft is to bring more biomass. To renew America. Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America’s like this big old clanking, smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. Leaves behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always needs more fuel.”
"Now I have a different perspective on it. America must look, to those poor little buggers down there, about the same as Crete looked to those poor Greek suckers. Except that there's no coercion involved. Those people down there give up their children willingly. Send them into the labyrinth by the millions to be eaten up. The Industry feeds on them and spits back images, sends out movies and TV programs, over my networks, images of wealth and exotic things beyond their wildest dreams, back to those people, and it gives them something to dream about, something to aspire to. And that is the function of the Raft. It's just a big old krill carrier."
Finally the journalist gives up on being a journalist, just starts to slag L. Bob Rife openly. He's had it with this guy.
"That's disgusting. I can't believe you can think about people that way."
"Shit, boy, get down off your high horse. Nobody really gets eaten. It's just a figure of speech. They come here, they get decent jobs, find Christ, buy a Weber grill, and live happily ever after. What's wrong with that?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
I don't really understand the concerns scattered throughout this thread about Musk suppressing criticism of his companies. The problem with pre-Musk Twitter censorship was that it was aligned with most other large platforms censorship policies, making it genuinely difficult to discuss or mention and handful of tabooed topics with more than a small audience. I don't think Google or Reddit employees (or for that matter, the employees of Twitter itself) have the same zealous ideological commitment to defending Musk's business interests that they do for Stopping Hate and Protecting Trans Kids and Black Bodies, and in fact many seem hostile to Musk. So I doubt he would be able to censor criticism successfully even if he wanted to.
And secondly, why would he want to? People have been shitting on him and his companies for years and it doesn't really seem to have mattered. He's recently positioned himself as pro free speech. Why would he (1) contradict his stances and lose a bit of moral high ground in order to (2) censor criticism that doesn't really affect him, only to (3) fail at censorship because his underlings hate or are apathetic toward him? None of that makes sense.
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.
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