Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
Devereaux is excellent at finding some idiotic thesis a couple guys (he would say "bros") on Twitter hold, claiming it's the bailey to a sensible motte, burning down the bailey, and claiming he's destroyed the motte.
You know who's actually really good on this particular historical topic?
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
It's also intellectually sanitized.
This etymological complexity has been largely lost in the term's contemporary internet usage, which has reduced "simp" to a simple insult for male emotional availability or respect toward women.
Does this reflect the author's actual views on the modern use of the word "simp", or just RLHF giving the Generic California Ideology interpretation of the terms he's prompted it with? Impossible to know.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
Don't forget his "REAL Historian Reacts to Paradox Games?!" posts.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
If you like Margiela Replicas I would recommend CB I Hate Perfume, as well.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
So you're sold the story that it'll always be your family foundation. You're in control, you set the mission statement, you pick the board, your kids will be on it. But, over time, there's a lot of social pressure to let the right people on the board (if you have other big donors, they'll insist on putting their people on the board, that's "just how it's done"). And then, all of a sudden, the board has total control of "interpreting" your "mission", goodbye and don't forget to wipe the urine off grandpa's grave on the way out. Rich people are infinitely more naïve about using their money than you'd think. If you want to avoid that, you have to make the 501c3 a disposable entity so that you can dispose of the board with it.
It's actually far harder to spend that much money than one would assume, too. You have to hire experienced finance guys just to get it out the door on a reasonable schedule, and that's probably one reason these things swing so hard to the left. The institutional left is a gaping maw for money. They have an infinite recruiting pool for potential salaries, or at least as infinite as there are underemployed kids with fake majors, and you rarely have to worry about them actually achieving their goals because reality is in the way. I have no idea the extent to which the tax code was written for that purpose, but it sure did serve the long-term goals of the various people who made 501c3s what they are today (including the dearly beloved then-Speaker Johnson, known as an idealist who would never twist public policy for personal ends).
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
I can recommend that. I recall thinking while I read it that, if my son could end up reading Fermor's books without having to stop and look up an historical reference every page or two, I'd consider him a cultured man. I'd also recommend Fitzroy MacLean's Eastern Approaches.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
Depends on the restaurant. A lot of higher-tier restaurants have unattractive waitresses/waiters who are clearly food/cocktail nerds and ostentatiously good at their job. The hipster food revolution has put quite a bit more emphasis on appearing knowledgeable rather than svelte.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
Even today I doubt the majority of the women of that class are "ambitious girlboss" as opposed to "MRS degree". This discussion is trying to draw a false dichotomy between waitress and girlboss, when there is in fact a secret third thing, which is naturally upper-class women who want to get married, have kids, and probably run a nonprofit/vanity business to stave off the boredom of having the help do everything.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
Ironically Timothy Mellon is a big fan of Trump, he helped pay salaries for the US military during the shutdown and donated to Trump's campaigns. It seems he is not in control of the foundation, however. A certain Elizabeth Alexander runs the show.
This is WAD. Unless you've explicitly set up a structure to avoid it, it's basically impossible to keep family control of nonprofit foundations on a multi-decade timescale, let alone a multi-generation timescale, so you should expect that any megarich family's tax-exempt money is eventually going to go to an Elizabeth Alexander (though divorcing your wife or dying before her is a quicker route to that).
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
Huh. Surprised that it's so broad rather than just not T&A-priority, but would explain a bit.
Women naturally have higher bodyfat% than men, even before modern obesity, and so women with abs are rare enough that most guys will never encounter one in their intimate life or even their crushes. You've got to be a real connoisseur.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
Leviathan is a great read but it's weird. Don't expect a straightforward work of modern political theory.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
The thing about the sort of Academic Experts who would have talked to or gotten money from Epstein is that due diligence just does not exist in that world. If Epstein had been tried for chopping up puppies with an axe, and it was national news, probably fewer than 10% of the professors etc. that he talked to would have thought to google him and respond with some condemnation of axe murder. It's a bit different for CEOs and university presidents, because their PA is supposed to do that, but I doubt many of their PAs actually do due diligence on routine meetings either.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
I forget the comic who said it, but I recall a line that went "you know, being an ugly woman is a lot like being a man. You're gonna have to get a job."
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
The Hill Country, Fredericksburg, etc. are like that because they're affluent second home/tourist traps. Stay out late in a small town and you'll see the frontiersman admixture - or, as Mann's Satan quoted Bismarck, that "the German is never himself until he has half a bottle of champagne in him".
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
Taleb calls it "dictatorship of the most intolerant" (never say he doesn't learn from his own ideas).
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
I can't imagine any charity in Scotland that isn't utterly full of quangocrat shite, but Scottish Sports Futures at least does nice things for kids her age sometimes.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
I find this argument generally compelling - although there's never a single determining factor in this stuff, you've done a good job isolating and naming a concept most people have trouble discussing. It does remind me of Nietzsche, who discusses this process extensively in The Genealogy of Morals, and shares an emphasis on individual character over rationalizing moral systems. I'd recommend taking a look at it for inspiration (Kaufmann or Del Caro translations).
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
>mfw Germans will literally have entire revolutions just so they can find an ideology that lets them be even more conformist
>mfw they did this like eight times
Though, to be fair, there was a properly independent-minded strand of German society that did emigrate here. You can see it in Texas, the Mountain West, rural Wisconsin, etc. In Minnesota it's drowned out by Sw*des and other Scandis, who are now the world's poster boy for "very nice but mildly stifling high-trust society that falls apart catastrophically the moment someone comes along and starts defecting."
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
Most simply, Germans/Scandinavians are hysterical conformists with a tendency to go Way Too Far on whatever the current dominant ideology is. Luckily this one doesn't seem to involve any panzers yet. The Midwest more generally is always about 5-10 years behind the coasts culturally (5 in big cities, closer to 10 elsewhere), so the Great Awokening is really hitting them now.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
His social media handle was something along the lines of "gypsy gangster". I'd assume there's something in Bulgarian yob culture (I suppose I could ask Bulgarian friends, but that feels rather embarrassing) where Muslims/Gypsies are seen as harder.
Gaines County
Mohave County
Spartanburg County
centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor
Come on, man. You should know better than this. At least do the 30-second google research instead of jumping to the convenient correlation. I recall you being not so far away from this field professionally, and I've spent some time at the coalface on this, and when it comes to outbreaks of easily-avoidable communicable disease it's pretty much always oddball religious sects or low-trust immigrant communities or, in the latter case, apparently both. I'm totally happy to make the argument that "a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor", because it's right.
Feel free to cite this post smugly in a couple years if the possible trend continues and normie republicans do get memed into antivaxxing below herd immunity, or just down to the level of granola moms that have caused minor outbreaks in the past. Until then,
Edit: CPAR has mea culpa'd elsewhere in the thread - good on him.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
Redditors aren't normies. They're barely even people. Prediction market rationalists did entirely fail to realize that the most compelling consumer use case was circumventing restrictions on ultra-degenerate gambling, but, eh, there are a lot more people gambling on Kalshi than there are seething on "r/nba".
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
I do think the Trump administration would have initiated more investigations and likely secured more arrests.
Oh, you sweet summer child...
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
For trivia night, show up early and ask the organizers/random people if there's a team you can join. Great way to make friends, just don't get too drunk or reveal any power levels.
Look, I get that Sparta hecking sucks and Lysander was a freaking pissbaby chud. But Devereaux just can't accept that the ancient world had fundamentally different values from ours, and their best men admired Sparta for reasons which would get them instantly banned from /r/Hellas.
Sorry bro the agoge was metal. As for battles, there are three aspects to this. The first is the battle of Sardis, if you need an answer to your quiz. The second is that asking for a Spartan victory, or even battle, not involving Persia is like asking for a French battle not involving England (actually, to torture the metaphor, the typical relationship was something closer to Persia's Britain and Sparta's Prussia. Persia had fingers in every pie, and even victories against them usually had some element of deal-making. The third is that the whole neatly-counterintuitive anti-Spartan reading of the Peloponnesian War fundamentally misunderstands Spartan strategy. Sparta had a high-quality army that they knew was very difficult to replace. This led them to essentially adopt a sea command/fleet-in-being strategy on land. The Spartan army could go where it wanted and do what it wanted as long as it didn't commit to a protracted siege or risky battle, and, since they didn't want to give battle either, the Athenians were reduced to a naval strategy which ended up overextending and destroying them at Syracuse and Aegospotami. Devereaux is on firm ground when he claims that Spartan society is unacceptable to modern sensibilities, and that the Spartan setup was fundamentally unsustainable because of their inability to absorb casualties in pitched battles, but he'd have to be a much better historian to "well ackshually" Thucydides and Xenophon.
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