Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
15hr ago
I recall dealing with both that and the $2 bill a lot in college. The ticket machines for the train didn't take cards, and for some reason gave dollar coins as change, so if I only had $20s I now had 18 Susan B. Anthonys in my pocket. Then one of the officers in my frat had the bright idea of giving $2s as change at our parties, so people would associate us with those and I guess come to parties more. Must have annoyed the hell out of cashiers.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Plutarch’s Athenian Lives: if you have any interest in history, human nature, or human greatness, you owe it to yourself to read Plutarch.
Walter Ong, Fighting For Life: picked this up because I wanted a different perspective on some of the stuff in The Mountain. The first 40% or so of the book is awful, one of the worst attempts at psychoanalytic writing I’ve ever read, and I’ve read some stinkers. It’s just starting to get good now as he dives into a field he’s qualified on - agonistic competition in academic and intellectual history. Cautiously excited to see if he can turn it around, since I’ve greatly enjoyed his other work.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: well, the section on linguistics drags, but now it’s heating up again. I’m frustrated at times, cruising at times, mindblown at times, but it’s a hell of a ride.
Machiavelli, The Prince: like Plutarch, a re-read, but very interesting to compare the two directly. Machiavelli has this very incisive, diagrammatic way of analysis that, now that I say it, reminds me of some stuff Deleuze says. He writes in a very “arborescent”, binary-tree way, but the cumulative effect is a tremendous deterritorialization that rips the prince from the feudal order. I don’t think Strauss’s claim that Machiavelli and Bacon are the beginning of modernity is at all a stretch.
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
There seems to be some kind of quality of 'general alignedness' which breaks across low-pressure generations. I just wrote a more technical post about this here though it's speculative.
Yeah, and this quality of 'general alignedness' would not be any particular trait, but a group of traits which are either necessary themselves or in combination for fitness in a given selection environment, and are very difficult to improve on and easy to fall away from (because different is generally worse). One way to think of it is that we have G as a general factor of intelligence, but that can be reasonably approximated by tests, and so a lot of people mistake it for a single trait rather than a general factor because it can be determined by tests, whereas a general alignedness factor can only be determined by contact with the environment, or approximated by someone who knows the environment well. It's something that's over and above traits and is determined by the relationship between phenotype and environment, until that environment changes. To take an extreme example in humans, extreme physical bravery in young men suddenly became much less selectively advantageous in August 1914. It seems to hang together well conceptually as long as one can see it as a kind of overlying factor composed of many traits instead of a single trait in itself.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
Can't speak for Earendil, but the way I read his theory:
On the height example, this isn't a single trait, but a bunch of traits that all have to be above a certain threshold to have a good shot at surviving and reproducing in a tough wild selection environment. So you can lose a large amount of fitness without massive regression on any single trait, just by minor regressions or variations on multiple traits, which aren't inherently linked but are selected for together in a wild environment. So for instance the average pigeon, whose parents had survived in some tough pigeon environment which was culling a large % of pigeons each generation, regresses or varies just a bit on metabolic efficiency, wingspan, reaction time, uh, beak pointiness, etc., etc., and with the cumulative impact you end up with one that would be fox chow in the wild. That's what I think Earendil means by "general alignment", a basket of traits which are not inherently linked on the genome but are maintained together by selection pressure.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
Well this is quite a can of worms to open so I'll just make a simple correction here: The biggest problem with Austria's response to Franz Ferdinand's assassination was that it wasn't fast or emotionally compelling enough. Because of a combination of diplomatic and military incompetence (the army was on harvest leave), Austria dragged their feet (despite telling Germany they would move quickly while the diplomatic situation was in favour). Europe in the first moments after the assassination was largely wondering why Austria wasn't doing anything. By the time she finally lumbered to war, the opportunity for a lightning strike had gone, it had become clear that the war was about subjugating Serbia rather than avenging Franz Ferdinand, and Serbia had had time to get Russia aligned behind her and Russia the chance to line up France. Russia herself was extremely sensitive to the issue of assassinations and, while she demanded guarantees, postwar mediation, etc., would not have gone to war if the situation hadn't had so long to fester.
But this isn't really applicable to the Kirk point so I'll leave it at that. "Why don't people just stop caring about political leaders' lives, they occupy the same number of spreadsheet cells as anyone else" is an argument better addressed in Earendil's latest chapter.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
Some of the actual wignats like Spencer, Hanania, etc. did do the 180 zeal-of-the-convert flip to Racist Liberalism, but I mean that the guys who were talking about migrant crisis, great replacement, crime stats, etc., but weren't full 1488, largely merged into right-wing populist discourse rather than staying on the fringes and radicalizing themselves further.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
Oh I don't mean the violence, that's very real, I mean that going around in tacticool outfits v&ing guatemalans is theatre. Obviously arresting criminals is great but as a political spectacle it's not really something that builds power.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
"Sure, Franz Ferdinand just got shot, but how many people get shot in Bosnia every year?"
Political violence does matter more. Every life counts, sure, but not equally. This should be obvious - a political figure is a stand-in or totem for the group they represent, and political figures being killed over politics is seen, rationally and sensibly, as a harbinger of much greater violence to come. The people who are going DEFCON over political murders right now are doing it out of the instinctive but correct knowledge that political murders now mean many, many more deaths down the line.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
I mostly mean stuff like the movies about "BASED NOT-JOHN-WICK MURDERS THE SH*T OUT OF CHILD TRAFFICKERS", or whatever the Red Tribe equivalent to soyjacking over marvel/star wars/streamslop would be. I see occasional attempts to right-wing-code the same media as redditors but pretty rarely.
I'm sorry, but Stormtroopers vs Rebels comparisons are not going to move me, or probably many people here. It makes me think the differences are irreconcilable, not in the sense of "the Left are so evil civil war is inevitable" but in the sense of "people who process the problems of the law through the lense of movies for children and adult children simply do not deserve input into the political process, and should be excluded in some peaceful way while the grown-ups sort things out." I feel similarly about such people on the right, but they are thankfully much less vocal than the reddit left.
I mean, when I think about it, I largely agree with Yarvin's take that this is counterproductive theatre to look tough for the plebs, but there's also the fact that the sort of guys ICE is gunning for are not exactly sophisticated ironists, they're largely coming from cultures where tough guys in masks with rifles is what power looks like. The westoid media-soaked response is just the main aspect that really seems too ridiculous to credit.
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
2015-20 was the high-water mark of a particular kind of hard-right white-nationalist politics that gave us those three shootings (and Charlottesville, to some extent). Think of it as a continuation from the kind of subculture that created Breivik. In part because of the internet hard-right meming Trump, and in part from all the anti-nazi rhetoric, they thought that Trump was really their chance, and some of them decided to go killing for it. That movement fell apart for multiple reasons - they realized Trump wasn't in fact Hitler II, many of their groups flamed out, less radical types ended up synthesizing themselves into more normie conservatism, and finally covid distracted a lot of the more radical personality types (I also wonder if 09A and other less political, more nihilistic Nazi-affiliated sects started siphoning off people who would otherwise be Dylan Rooffs to become school shooters). It was a relatively very small memeplex but one disproportionately good at creating spree killers. Libs/leftists didn't feel much of a need to go postal because they could identify with Resistance within the government.
2020-24 I suspect was quite peaceful because normiecons get hopping mad at stuff and post about gitmo trials but don't actually go shoot people (partly out of personal inclination, partly because they're more familiar with actual violence than an internet shut-in, and partly because their demographics don't tend towards violent self-annihilation, you don't see pot-bellied fiftysomethings with Oakleys shooting up synagogues). And, also, who could really bring themselves to destroy their lives and kill their fellow humans over... Joe Biden? To be fair this first changed with Israel/Palestine, where we did have some killings.
In the current moment libs/leftists feel themselves losing harder than they ever have in living memory, even if the rhetoric was sometimes crazier in 2017. The dynamic of violence is different imo from 2015-20, in that hardline white nationalism was a very small movement that was oriented towards and somewhat effective at creating violent lone wolves, whereas the current attackers seem to have beliefs that are not particularly out of the overton window in the movement left, but have individually snapped and decided that those beliefs in the current situation now demand violence. It would also go some distance to explaining why these are coming in a spasm - the heightened emotional tension created by one attack causes others to snap, and in some cases like today's shooter even copycat the method.
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
I recall Darwin used to bang the drum, and ymeskhout got really into it later (mostly, I believe, after he stopped posting here).
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
Sure, though there's something about Trump that makes me think he'll keep going fairly strong and entirely Trumply until he keels over one day. But he's always had cycles of energy running along with his political life - you can see that every election cycle Trump fans get a little nervous about his energy the first couple rallies until he hits his stride and we have the campaign trail Trump back - so I don't think that trying to gauge Trump's energy or age based off a couple news cycles is particularly useful.
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
The mottizen Objectively Rational Classical Liberal cope is always that Trump is going senile and has one foot in the grave - I'm told by reputable posters he's been a couple months from Bidening out for almost a decade. For anyone who remembers the details of Trump's first term and the 2020-24 interregnum, though, it seems pretty clear that Trump is energized whenever he's on the campaign trail ahead of an election, or, sometimes, fighting a very particular fight like the early covid-era daily press conferences, and outside of that he doesn't bring the full stadium rally energy, plays a lot of golf. If previous election cycles are a guide, libs will be perfomatively worried about this for about six months, then right-wingers will be nail-biting worried about him not doing enough for the midterm elections for about six months, then the Trump rally machine will kick in and conservatives will cheer and libs will goldfish.
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
I can't speak for your personal circumstances, but you were attacked with an axe. What did you think "Punch Nazis" means? If you didn't want to be attacked with an axe, you shouldn't have been a white supremacist.
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
The west side of Chicago is bristling with brainwormed progs stuck in 2020. If you're deep in social circles with them where you're dependent on them for anything, you're just fucked until you get out and find better people, they'll put you through seven circles of hell just because it lets them feel better for a moment about their own psychosocial dysfunction. The only good way I've found to deal with social conflict with them is to give off the vibe of "I'm chill and don't want to escalate anything, but don't push me, if your implicit threats of force become explicit I will win the fight."
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
Well, for instance, from a male perspective, some women can orgasm easily, some it's yeoman's work to get them there if they even can. Some women love giving head, some will never enjoy it. Some women have a death-by-dehydration sex drive and some have a big fat zero. I'm sure they have similar questions about us. It might seem nice to say that you'll just figure it out (figuring out a woman in bed is also a skill that can be learned), but you're basically rolling dice on not ending up in an /r/deadbedrooms situation.
Based off the testimony of friends, I do think that religious courtship, where you're expected to be overwhelmingly horny for each other but restrain it out of belief in moral duty, can establish that without going all the way. However, if you're doing it out of hangups over sex, she has a pretty good reason to suspect something might turn out wrong, and women are extremely risk-avoidant in these things for obvious evolutionary and pragmatic reasons.
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
Oh yeah that's a bad spot for those types lately. You've got to get good at giving off the "I'm nice but don't fuck with me" vibe, and that doesn't really work if you were enmeshed in those social circles before they went all the way off the deep end.
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
Actually, it would be better if we didn't have sex at all until we were engaged at least, but is there even any place for my sensibilities in today's sexual marketplace?
Church. That's it. Otherwise you should expect that waiting for engagement/marriage will weird a woman out and make her concerned about your sexual compatibility.
The advice I gave on "getting a life" as a distinct skill that needs to be considered and practiced is the most important thing. Xenophon's Socrates speaks often of the art of making friends (and of making good friends) as the most important of the arts, and he's right. It will serve you with women, but it will also improve everything else about your life. You will get a great deal for yourself out of it, and you'll also get the satisfaction of altruism. Once you let go of your hangups about it being a skill, you can apply yourself to it with the diligence people use to learn to code, and you'll likely find that the people around you are excited to have someone with that skill in their lives. 28 is a fine age to start, you can learn faster than a younger man. But you have to be pragmatic, reflective, and focused on improvement, just as with any other skill.
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
You will become notably more attractive to women and up your social vibe if you do yoga/pilates/some other form of posture work. Broader shoulders, an extra inch/half-inch or so of height, not slouching, and just the good vibes of not being in subtle pain all the time from working at a keyboard.
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
I agree with 99% of this, great advice.
Fast forwarding the tape, eventually you will have a circle of friends who do things and (social things).
The fast-forwarded bit is actually really important. Turning people from activity acquaintances into contacts and casual friends is a skill that should be consciously considered and practiced. Become the guy who proactively gets people's contacts, the guy who creates the groupchats, the guy who says "let's do X", the guy who picks the bar when people are vacillating. If you want to go to the next level, become the guy who founds things and runs events (I've had multiple women get very interested in me after watching me in charge of an event, even though there were no-shit movie star handsome guys there too).
If you try to setup such a system, you may be successful in "getting laid" and you'll be successful directly in proportion to your anti-social capabilities and the emotional frailty of the other party.
This is good advice to a new guy who doesn't have the radar, but if you're looking to stay casual you can also just pick the girls who aren't emotionally frail and refrain from sleeping with the ones who are.
Re: Part 3, I just don't believe in those "day game" style meet-cutes at all. They probably work pretty okay if you're confident and play the numbers, but not enough to convince me to broil myself at a summer farmer's market talking to innumerable women in the hope that one is single, into me, and not a pain in the ass when we properly meet. If you want the dark arts to getting laid, it's very simple: find the right bars, learn to stay up till 2am without nuking your sleep cycle, and learn how to stay in a bar till then without getting too drunk (and, obviously, do not take advantage of girls who are way too drunk, you're looking for the ones who are there for the same reason you are). If you don't want to do that, stick to the apps or, I would suggest, serious dating via the social circle you're building.
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
I'm sure that's true, also among older conservatives in red states. I've only known big-city cops, who generally take a somewhat cynical attitude to their department and a relaxed attitude to common-sense violations of regulation because both are necessary for their job.
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
It's not cynical from a Christian perspective, to my knowledge of Christianity. You, as a person, are enjoined to forgive on a spiritual level, but that has very little to do with the state executing temporal justice. Executioners in the Middle Ages used to have swords with prayers for the victim's soul engraved on them. A lot of people in this thread seem to be running on some sort of behaviourist model where Christians can't actually believe what they claim to believe, but in my experience they actually often do.
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
Shouldn’t conservatives, i.e. the party of law and order, be a fan of measures which promote public safety?
I'll try to explain this cultural gap as someone with a bit of familiarity with both American and European (I assume that's where you're from) conservative culture. To massively generalize, for American conservatives, the purpose of law and order is to enable the liberty of law-abiding people. Strong law enforcement, yes, but of laws written to be relatively minimal and with a common-sense focus on "real crime", with the goal to enable people to freely live a "normal" (i.e. productively employed, not using drugs, etc.) life. Red Tribers are often happy to break laws they see as unnecessary government overreach if they can get away with it. They're concerned about the breakdown of law and order, but just as concerned that abuses of state power will crush that freedom to live one's American life. Covid measures were a question of the latter issue to American conservatives. They don't see what MAGA is doing in terms of law and order, like ICE raids, as authoritarian because it's going after people who have broken what they consider just and reasonable laws, but lockdowns were unjust.
As for MAGA's populist economics, yeah, in many ways it's no longer a movement of 80s free-market economics. The more hardline economic populists will tell you that the left-wingers advocating those policies a hundred years ago were the real populists back then, and they were wrong to give up economic populism in the 20th Century in order to fight over culture and long march through institutions - they'll even be gleeful when leftists point that out.
Very Roman of you!
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