BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
No bio...
User ID: 582
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
2d ago
As an aside, here are some works in other media that might be considered postmodern, which I consider to be very good:
- Undertale
- Portal
- Inscryption
- Magic the Gathering's Time Spiral block
- Dragon Ball Z Abridged
- Tubular Bells, Tubular Bells II
- Most of Edgar Wright's and Wes Anderson's films
- Fight Club
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
2d ago
My guesses, in order of assigned probability, would be:
- "Safe horny" - wanting to signal that they're not The Wrong King of Objectifying Male, so they're expressing their attraction towards women who're not all conventionally attractive in at least one way - fat, old, sometimes male, dominating... See "mommy? I mean, mommy? I mean..." "step on me" etc. etc.
- Actual safety - as the gender relation slouch towards South Korea's, the younger people will be on the forefront of change. Hence, they have much more to lose flirting with zoomettes their age. Older women will be less prone to mock them, be performatively petty, post online about them being a bad flirt.
- There's just more of them - inverted population pyramid. Probably exacerbated by gender-selective abortions in China.
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
2d ago
I guess it depends wildly on who you mean by "elite", but I don't find this accurate at all. The way I see it, the broad left considers us a less bad version of Hungary for failing to bend the knee on various progressive causes. the right, honestly, hard to say, maybe the do see us as rubes, but I don't think it's as calculated as you present it, we're merely a weak, still unestablished player for them.
There is not a shred of inferiority complex in a typical Pole; he is cynical, a pessimist.
Guess I am imagining it then, when every single goddamn time, multiple times a week, when something bad happens, somebody from my friends or family is compelled to chime in saying that what occurred is so "typically Polish". When I hear people wishing that our country wouldn't exist, that the Germans should just annex us and bring civilization here. Etc. etc. The complex of Z A G R A N I C O may be less pronounced than it was 20 years ago, but it's alive and kicking.
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
3d ago
I really don't think you can be "absolutely" certain about this one. I.e. you don't and can't know how worse your life could've been if you weren't tall.
I remember reading a chart a long time ago, probably in /r/blackpillscience, from some dating page, that showed ratings of men sorted by their and the woman raters. The was a mild positive correlation, but the important part was that the ratings fell catastrophically if the woman was taller. Basically the entire half below the diagonal was red. There's some pretty demonstrable assortative mating going on, the number of couples where man is the shorter one is much smaller than what you'd expect is people paired up regardless of height.
Anecdotally, I know a guy who successfully scored himself at least one girlfriend basically by towering over near her at a concert, then bending down to ask her something face to face. He didn't even mean to hit on her :D It helps that he also has a striking face, I don't want to doxx him but he looks very much like Yuya Fungami from JoJo part 4 anime, minus the tattoos.
(Also he was a founder of /r/UNBGBBIIVCHIDCTIICBG/. Small world.)
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
4d ago
Well I know of at least one study which demonstrates that exposure to socialist ideology results in (materially) worse life outcomes. They note that it doesn't affect the underlying personality traits, so to me looks a bit like merely externalizing your locus of control ("bad things happen to me because of my social class and the existence of The Rich, only The Revolution can help me and others") can screw you up for life, ceteris paribus. Which in turn means that not externalizing it leads to if not better, then at least not worse results.
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
4d ago
Idk, pointing at somewhat extreme outliers but there seems to be no male Amoranth (spelling?) or female West Elm Caleb, zoomer culture may be dysfunctional in many ways but it's not not gendered.
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
4d ago
If I say in public today "some people are morally better than other people", nobody will dispute that at all.
IME this get an immediate retort of "yes, for example people making such claims are morally inferior".
The best you can hope for is that people will "agree", but their idea of who's better and who's not will be completely out of whack. Hell, when I brought up Rotherham et al on reddit, I got people saying to me that the real problem in the UK is billionaires. If people can't bring themselves to condemn unrepentant serial rapists, and would rather use them as a prop to tear into their Favored Enemy, you can have no hope of establishing any consensus morality.
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
4d ago
Huh, for me the
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
5d ago
In addition to the other comments, the se-inter-quel also very much has a plot that goes absolutely nowhere. At least that's how I remember it, I read it in 2008 so some time has passed. Still, I do remember much more from other books I've read that year, so that might be a condemnation of its own.
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
5d ago
Last year, I did a movie watching challenge: 50 movies that I haven't seen before, from 50 years, 1975 through 2024. From the outset I knew that the selection of older titles on streaming services is abysmal, especially when you're not in the US, so my plan always was to plan the movies first, assume I'll need to pirate most, only watch on streaming if it's available. What I'm trying to say is that my expectations for streaming sites are very, very low, and yet I can't help but be surprised how bad the actual situation is. You really live like this?
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
7d ago
See also: me being somewhat terrified by my normielib friends who seem to have lots of latent violent cruel nationalism suddenly unlocked after Russia invaded our neighbor. No, I don't want to watch the video of a man failing to run for his life from a drone, or getting blown up by a grenade in a trench, I don't find it exhilarating.
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
10d ago
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I'm happy to announce that my first PR was merged into TheMotte's codebase - link formatting buttons are now available in the comment editors. I plan to take on a few of the outstanding issues in the following weeks :)
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Does anyone know which image generation models have reliable inpainting? Gemini claims to have it in Nano Banana, but the results look... less than stellar. Specifically, (by request of a family member, ah the curse of being "good with computers") I have a group photo of people + one person separately, and I want to compose the one person onto the group photo, and change everyone's clothes into magnate garb. Everything I've tried so far fucks up the faces at least a little bit, making one or more people unrecognizable. Which again, wouldn't be a problem if I had access to inpainting, because then I could just add the original face to the intermediate result, but the generation then changes and screws up some other part in turn.
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
13d ago
Notably, Chuck Norris facts were a more popular variation of earlier Vin Diesel facts.
- The anagram of "Vin Diesel" is "I end lives"
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
14d ago
Right, so it seems to me like Marx describes a basic feature of any society more complex than an anprim one, and goes "A ha! This is an inherent problem with capitalism!". How would that follow? It's like the apocryphal story about Euler and Diderot.
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
14d ago
Noted. Although now I'm interested in how the industrial revolution would look like if the inclosures never happened. Theoretically, less available workforce would put a premium on labor, which could drive innovations in labor efficiency faster, otoh there could've been not enough "critical mass" to make the early industry feasible.
If the two values were equal you wouldn’t participate in the exchange market because you would just use your commodity.
Am I missing something obvious here, or is this immediately debunked by the word "specialization"? The only people who could "just use their commodity" for the entirety of their needs are subsistence farmers, who I guess still existed when the book was written, but were on the way out already. And even that's only if you squint heavily, because they would need to also miraculously have every construction material they ever need in the surrounding area, which at this point moves us further back to the hunter-gathers, more or less.
He does this in the context of what he calls the commodity, an item like wheat, or coats, or coal that has both a use-value (how useful it is) and an exchange-value (how much it’s worth on the market). These two things can obviously be different, and according to Marx almost always have to be.
I'd argue that access to information flattens the variance here, and prices are asymptotically approaching some kind of equilibrium, as exemplified by the The Digital Provide paper (see graphs at page 21). Obviously, such equilibrium would include some amount of profit for the fishermen - steelmanning the first thing I've quoted, certainly you have to get more from your work that you put in it, otherwise why work at all? Other than mere survival, but that brings us back to the subsistence farmers, which we're not, and revealed preferences even at Marx's time show that people would rather work at Dark Satanic Mills than farm.
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
18d ago
If you're cynical enough, the purpose of organized politics is pork barrel spending. Thus, the optimal amounts of votes to get is 50% plus the tiniest epsilon - it allows you to control the flow of money, with the smallest possible clientele to spend it on. Anything more, and you're spreading the profits thinner.
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
22d ago
Do you think that mathematical theorems are discovered or invented? I have a segue I want to make from this question (it involves a book that was popular w few years ago), but first I'd like to hear your opinions on that.
I have his name blocked on twitter so that not only do I not see him, I don't even want to see any mention of him. Much like with Tate or Candace, every single piece of information I get about this person is against my will.
Why would you care about statements like this? He's a troll, expecting a coherent action to follow from it is a fool's errand. He's not stating it as a serious policy, he's making mouth sounds (well, pixels on a screen) to get a rise out of people. In which, mission accomplished I guess, 3/10 made me respond.
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
30d ago
I've recently come up with an even more biting definition that's guaranteed to please no one, yet I think fits most actual "use cases": fascism is using communist means to achieve non-communist ends.
(Paramilitary youth groups, mass surveillance, centralization of power, expropriation of private enterprises, media censorship, etc.)
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
1mo ago
Huh, I haven't heard of that one before, and up till this point, I thought I'd read pretty much everything he's ever written.
It contains nothing new, it's just a compilation of some of his short stories, in a chronological order.
The one good thing I can say about it is that it made me dislike Charles Stross less, because up until that point I had them mixed up and I thought Incorruptible was Stross'. About two stories in that compilation I thought to myself "wait, I recognize that brand of misanthropy" and the mixup resolved itself. If anything, this proves that this voice is strong enough to be recognizable across translation, as I read the linked story in original English. Btw, in mind mind that story kinda rhymes with The Giving Plague, only more edgy and worse.
Anyways, to Watts and people like him I'd like to present the following question: suppose you get what you want materially - the environmental issues get reversed and healed - but nobody get hurt and punished. Would you take the deal? Or is, as the kids say, the cruelty the point?
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
1mo ago
I've read a compilation of his short stories, aptly titled An Antidote to Optimism in Polish. I don't think your "mostly a joke" is actually a joke, at least for me.
BarryOgg
a.k.a. comicsansstein
4mo ago
Well, last week has certainly been busy when it comes to Polish-German relations.
A few days ago, it has come to the public's attention that Felzmann auction house was planning to auction off items looted from concentration and death camp victims: letters, documents, things like that. 623 items in total if I got it right. There's been an outcry, and the auctions have been removed. Now, some people are talking about forcing the auction house, or the "owners" it was acting on behalf of, to restitute the items back to Poland, but I wouldn't expect it to happen.
In general, there's a rather poor track record when it comes to returning art and historical artefacts looted by the Nazi Germany. The Germans established a new arbitration tribunal for that cause this year, and they (non-bindingly) endorse the Washington Principles, but in practice the federal government is trying to stonewall any claims by Poland.
Also, there's a bit of misdirection in the Western media when discussing the situation with the auction house: the items are being described as belonging to "Holocaust victims" and Jewish organizations are quoted (see e.g. CNN). While most of the auctoined items were indeed recovered from the Auschwitz and Majdanek camps, among the 600+ there were some also belonging to, or regarding, Poles (and I mean not even Polish Jews, ethnic Poles). Which brings me to my second point: history policy.
Broadly speaking, the German historical policy is to portray Nazi aggression as uniquely affecting the Jewish population, and to downplay the megadeaths suffered by the Polish one, to better insulate from possible claims by the Polish gov this way. The Polish historical policy is basically nonexistent. While the Germans managed to successfully control the frame and try to slowly absolve themselves generation after generation (see e.g. some German politician telling Trump that "Germans were the first victims of national socialism"), there is no one enforcing such frame control here, so self-hating Polish libs and progressives are eager to employ WWII both-sideism and try and drag as much responsibility for the holocaust on Poland as possible.
And that drive to self-debasement sometimes results in a very (darkly) funny situations: also last week, a film appeared on Polish state TV's VOD service. Among Neigbhors, a documentary from last year, where in WWII animated flashback scenes demonic Poles with glowing red eyes hunt down the hiding Jews, and in the ruins of 1944 Warsaw heroic German soldiers aid them. Twenty years ago, this reversal was being mocked in a satirical strip ("Herr German, strike the Jew, now!"), and now 2025 discourse is finally approaching 2006 satire.
(Also this week, I've learned that in 1991, Helmut Kohl's government was opposing Polish access to NATO, for reasons that largely echo current Ukraine's - that it would be "taunting" Russia. Plus ca change.)
Presumably we would be getting similar amount of support that Ukraine is getting now.
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