Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Pajeet was an Indian name that happened to be used in a 4chan meme about "designated shitting streets" (itself a variation of a comic making fun of Turkish claims to steppe nomad heritage), and the name just stuck.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Spoiler for the big twist of the first season:
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
My understanding is that Russian and Chinese submarines are intended to operate in very different waters and for different purposes. Chinese subs are intended to operate in the South China Sea and within the first island chain, so it makes sense for them to focus on smaller submarines with much less need for nuclear subs. Could they catch up to Russian capabilities? With time, I'm sure, but they don't really have a need to until they take Taiwan and start playing force projection games.
Bartender_Venator
20d ago
Perhaps we need a new version of Aristotle's Four Causes for systems analysis...
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
I make a lot of shredded chicken, beef, pork, etc. What's a better solution than shredding it with two forks? Gets a little tiring when you're doing multiple Instant Pots' worth.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Thanks, was hoping you would comment on this for the medical perspective. I take them a couple times a year for heart stuff, so never really had a chance to notice side effects, and my friends who use them off-label also do it very infrequently.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
You can get CBD-infused green tea from Harney and Sons' Hemp Division, and I'm sure other providers. CBD doesn't seem to have notable cognitive effects, but does take the edge off.
You may also consider talking to your doctor about beta blockers. They focus on the sympathetic nervous system, with minimal if any cognitive effects, and aren't habit-forming. They're essentially an off switch for the physical symptoms of anxiety, from what I've heard and experienced (some people use them for public speaking, dating, etc.), so if that's a major component of your stress they may help.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Really 1948. It was the Apartheid government that facilitated mass movement of people between black and white areas of SA, because they believed they could keep blacks on the pass system forever.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Apartheid was originally supposed to genuinely divide SA into separate countries, but the white areas wanted the cheap labour to keep flowing. The current momentum for that, such as it exists, is around Cape secession, which would create a plurality Cape Coloured state (mixed-race, Khoisan/White/Indonesian/Xhosa ancestry - also, the official term, none of the connotations of 'coloured' in the US). Generally Cape Coloureds get along with whites, vote for the white liberal party, and local governance is much better, still a fair bit of corruption but more skimming off the top than ruining everything. Huge problems with drugs (mostly methamphetamine and meth cocktails) and gangs in the Coloured community, but more as street crime rather than controlling officials. South African ethnic and political divides can't be fitted into a neat black/white divide, even if it looks that way from the outside.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Booby traps used to be very common in South Africa. Now they're pretty strictly outlawed (by SA standards of law enforcement) after enough cases of guys getting into their car, forgetting to press the right button, and decapitating themselves with their own shotgun trap.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
The best book I've found for brevity/pithiness in non-fiction writing is William Zinsser's On Writing Well, if that's of any help.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
Which is understandable, given that back then a doctor was a bloke with leeches and a hacksaw. Back in my academic days we occasionally used to joke about how the students in other disciplines getting their PhDs was proof they were jealous of us in the philosophy department.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
Politeness requires judgment. If I were to see a doctor in their office, I'd call them "Doctor" because I respect them and the social role they occupy. If I were, by some staggering coincidence, to meet Kim Jong Un in a bar, I wouldn't call him "Respected Comrade General Secretary", because I don't owe respect to that social role. It makes perfect sense to call a trans friend "her" and to call Chris-Chan "him", because I see one has a legitimate claim to my politeness and the other does not. (For an additional analogy, you can go deeper into who deserves to be called "Doctor". Everyone agrees on physicians, I would be happy to call a sufficiently respectable hard scientist "Doctor", but humanities/education/etc. PhDs should be laughed out of the room for asking)
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
People have mentioned extremely high rates of promiscuity in Africa - cheating, prostitution, men with multiple families, etc. - and dry sex, which is overrated because of its surprising nature. The main reason for high heterosexual HIV transmission rates is both more pedestrian and more unpleasant. Few African women, particularly in urban slums and to some extent in rural areas, have access to appropriate feminine hygiene stuff (period products, vaginal healthcare, etc.), and as a result many develop long-running vaginal infections, UTIs, or other issues. Because HIV is blood-borne, women with infections or open wounds in their vagina are much more likely to pick it up from sex, and similarly for men having sex with HIV-positive women and contacting their blood. Unfortunately, this is a more difficult problem to solve than anti-retrovirals, and I don't really foresee a similar program to PEPFAR creating much improvement in that respect.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
I'm told by someone in that world that politicians, particularly Republicans, get specific media training on how to avoid making gestures that look like a Nazi salute (or can look like one with a cherry-picked angle). Elon, presumably, didn't.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
This same passage comes up in one of Yarvin's best-known pieces, Technology, Communism, and the Brown Scare.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
An organization like the Tony Blair Institute has a presence in over 150 nations with over a thousand employees worldwide. What do they do?
According to NGO-world gossip, large amounts of cocaine. Known for being something of a "party shop" by industry standards.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
If you want a really interesting comparison to fit in with those three (particularly assuming you've read the Iliad), I would recommend adding The Song of Roland.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
I would say that these hobbies aren't just high-status because they signal wealth, but because they can be used to signal taste, and taste is the virtue of the haute-bourgeois. There are better and worse ways to do each of those, and failing is obviously tacky (e.g. reading Harlequin smut/Star Wars novels, gushing about your holiday to Ibiza/Pattaya/Vegas, idk maybe taylor swift).
I have to admit that I find myself reflexively on guard when I meet someone who makes how many books they read, how many countries they've been to or how many live shows they've seen the center of their personality.
This is your tackiness detector going off.
The alternatives to the high-status pursuits you list are noticeably less legible in terms of taste. Partly this is because they do not, in fact, have the high highs that the people engaging in those high-status activities are seeking. No blog is comparable to a Great Book, etc. But, also, it's because they basically require you to already have deep knowledge about the blogosphere or your local area in order to judge whether or not someone has good taste in those hobbies (TV shows are something of a different matter in the HBO era).
Yes, it's a sign that somebody doesn't read literary fiction, history, or serious philosophy. It's also a result of a culture where serious engagement with text isn't valued in education (or in wider discourse). Even a typical university education will have a lot of surveying intended to give you a paragraph-length summary of some great work in your head, and the problem is worsened for autodidacts who aren't forced to spend serious time with any texts, unless they get obsessed with one. Needless to say, this results in a wider culture where people think what matters is getting a lot of summarized versions of other thinkers in their heads, then bouncing those legible, easily-digested summaries off each other in blog posts and podcasts. It's particularly amusing in philosophy when people try to summarize thinkers who really can't be boiled down into a paragraph-length take, ending up in a sort of Existential Comics-esque collection of caricatures.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
This is in large part true re: South African sexual preferences. However, poor urban South Africans eat an extremely unhealthy and fattening diet, consisting mostly of the cheapest carbs available fried in the cheapest oil. Township food will fatten you up fast if you can afford it, and it's so nutritionally unsatisfying I'd guess even those with a little cash eat a lot of it. I suspect the men are significantly likely to do high-calorie-burning manual labour or be alcoholics/drug addicts, which probably explains a lot of the obesity gap in the urban poor.
For anyone inspired by @MaiqTheTrue's AAQC, I can vouch for my friends' tshirts at High Gothic Casual. I'm not even Christian, but they gifted me one (which they did not ask me to shill, I'm doing this because the shirts are good and they're super nice). It looked so good I immediately bought three more. The gold in particular really pops (but shouldn't go through the dryer, in my experience), and the men's fit is very flattering if you're an athletic type. NB that they are all-polyester if you don't like that, something to do with how all-over printing works.
Bartender_Venator
4mo ago
For both 1 and 3 of your augmentation question, you will get excellent returns far quicker by working on your posture and flexibility. Do yoga/pilates, buy a massage gun and use it regularly (particularly on shoulders and hips). You can expect to gain at least an inch of effective height and much broader shoulders, and it will probably do more for your confidence than either.
I also notice you didn't mention fashion and dress. Particularly in the NYC area, and if you're making good money, this will take you a long way. Follow some tasteful instagram accounts or lurk styleforum to ensure you aren't unintentionally making yourself look ridiculous, though.
If by non-sweet tea you mean the pre-made Southern kind, yeah I enjoy it as a Southern thing but it's low-quality, industrially processed tea and it's not going to be good on its own. If you'd like a neat little hobby, try getting into brewing your own iced tea with high-quality ingredients - tons of variety as well as better taste.
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