@Ex_Nihilo's banner p

Ex_Nihilo


				

				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 September 05 23:55:21 UTC

				

User ID: 763

Ex_Nihilo


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 23:55:21 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 763

Great post.

“Thot,” in my understanding, is much more complex than “slut” or “easy” or “loose” - it carries a subtle gentlemanly warning that the woman in question is a honey-/thirst-trap whose attractiveness and/or complexity (and/or complexion) is only profile-deep.

It’s a good video, but it unexpectedly reminded of the sad ways some of my past girlfriends were “gravely funny,” like they could come up with funny things and recognized when something was stupidly hilarious, but wouldn’t actually laugh at any of it… they were clever enough to see the opportunity for a joke but couldn’t enjoy the delivery, as if they had to be “corporate” or “grown up” all the time but still wanted to ensure they had a humor slider setting.

sure.jpg

It's interesting; despite the "Sophia Loren" reputation attached to Italian women, imo most have the much more nuanced attractiveness of the girl in the video. While Eastern European and Scandinavian women have major surface appeal with relatively uninteresting/utilitarian minds, Italians are truly wild... manipulative, creative, unpredictable, and worldly-wise. The tradeoff occurs in their design - rarely gifted with golden-ratio faces and generally ambivalent to cosmetic surgery, with extreme ranges based on their ancestry (north vs. south vs. Sicily/Sardinia). In total, they're extraordinarily interesting but difficult to ever pin down (leading to the Italian society we see today - committed, married couples routinely engaging in "side quests").

the issue wasn’t politicized at all

Quixotically LARPing the American Culture War is Canada’s national pastime.

A great story; I appreciate you recollecting it here.

A Christian-specific invocation is definitely a surprise (and, I imagine, will be “prepared for” in the future by the admins who were in attendance), even if it shouldn’t be given the fanbases and location. One of the most interesting dichotomies of the modern culture war is the differing reactions to public displays of Christianity based on whether the zealot in question is black or white.

Black Christianity, despite being far more charismatic, superstitious, and money-grubbing, gets a pass in the public sphere for two reasons: 1) soft bigotry of low expectations and 2) its platform elevates Blue Tribe politicians rather than Red ones (I’m reminded of Barack Obama putting on an AAVE affect on the few occasions when he discussed Christianity in a non-academic way).

But even the congregates of American Christianity seem to understand this dichotomy without the framework of PMC/Media Culture; Sunday mornings are one of the last remaining public displays of (voluntary) racial segregation. Indeed, I wonder if the Black Church (perhaps along with the leftist safeguarding of Islam) is the one poison pill guaranteeing the survival of White Christianity in a progressive society… at least until the day that the bold partisanship seen in the last week in the courts of Maine and Colorado finally feels confident enough to openly enforce racist practices limiting constitutionally-protected exercises of faith.

I give it a year.

Probably not the answer you're looking for, but I'm reminded of the great Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton. Payton was notorious for a stubborn, enduring discipline rooted in sky-high self-determination and -esteem, even refusing medical treatment in the face of life-threatening cancer and all the little problems that led up to it (he died at 46); there are definitely continent-sized holes in that methodology. All the same, seeing as you're past the "accepting the legitimacy of modern medicine" phase and into the "mindset and self-discipline" phase, there might be something of use to you in a "fuck it" attitude toward your own capacity for feeling "up for it" or not. Here's how Payton summed up his mantra:

Never die easy. Why run out of bounds and die easy? Make that linebacker pay. It carries into all facets of your life. It’s okay to lose, to die, but don’t die without trying, without giving it your best.

Substitute the football terms for just getting yourself to the office and sitting in your chair, even if that's all that happens. I'm also reminded of a (perhaps more apropos) quote from Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick:

Inspiration is the act of drawing up the chair to the writing desk.

And if all else fails, there's no shame in stocking 24-packs of Monster in the fridge. Do whatever you have to do to "get yourself there," then start critically analyzing what's necessary to maintain that level of focus and what's superfluous or harmful.

The degradation of Harvard won't begin on the side of the applicants, but with elite employers and the families who run them. Whether or not this week's scandal has any permanent effect, the headlines have absolutely put a microscopic chip in the edifice of Harvard's reputation. The failing is ultimately not the president herself nor the answers she gave, but instead the amount of criticism that has been able to exist without loud pushback from the Left. The fact that Progressive mouthpieces haven't gone full Propaganda Mode to defend the integrity of the Ivy League at all costs indicates something has already started to crumble in the Ivies-as-Progressive-Temples mindset. If any of this has long-term implications, it's likely toward the end of the current top post in this CWRoundup: to shave the wildest edges off of Wokeism in the interest of waterproofing Progressive positions (both professional and ideological) for the long haul.

Observations from a Visit to Walt Disney World

  1. I was aware of the "Disney Girl" stereotype; I wasn't aware how many middle-aged women treat Disney and its merchandise with a quasi-religious fervor. This seems to inhabit a different space from the mid-life-crisis buying frenzy in men, where guys purchase all the things they coveted in their youth but didn't have the means or freedom to buy then - with the ladies, it looks more like a deeper and deeper retreat into childish escapism, a desire to return to what the world - and the Disney company - once represented for them and no longer does: possibility and wonder. Whatever the reason, I couldn't help but look on these women as "failure to launch" types, and I wonder if this is the first generation appearing that way in the Disney parks - surely there weren't 40-year-old fanatical Disney moms in the 1980s or 90s.

  2. I had last visited WDW in 2006 and, by the look of things, that was also the last time the park had been properly maintained. Visiting the parks today as an admirer of Walt Disney The Man (TM) seems about as connected as watching modern-day Manchester United as a fan of Matt Busby - everything is a little more pathetic, a lot more expensive, and completely lost from its original intent. It's incredible how the parks had a reputation - not even twenty years ago - of being impeccably maintained experiences so detail-obsessed that even the smells were pumped in. Maybe I'm just older and seeing the things I couldn't have seen as a teenager, but the Disney World of today is about as magical as a Rainforest Café... "okay, I can see that this was probably cool when it actually worked and had a fresh coat of paint."

  3. It was nice to see the world coming together among the attendees and their many accents, but it only made more obvious that the Mexican Spanish accent really is the most annoying sound the human voice can produce. How did that nasal, reedy, words-strung-together-without-a-breath-for-not-even-exaggerating-five-minutes-or-more dialect come to exist? This must be how British people feel about my accent.

  4. With all of the... "cleansing"... the parks have undergone in recent years, I was surprised to still see a performing African "tribal band" in Animal Kingdom, complete with animal skins, grass anklets, and face paint. For what it's worth, they did appear to be real Africans and had a fantastic ensemble sound.

  5. Of Walt's many ambitions for his parks, most hit a high point in the 1990s under Eisner and have been in freefall ever since - the "escapist fantasy," the unrivaled excellence, the obsession with details. The one remaining quality is the melting pot; the mix of the richest and poorest demographics in one place (even if money gets you an "improved" experience). Though I had lost the magical curiosity once felt in Disney World, I did gaze in wonder at near-aristocratic families from Istanbul and Madrid stuck in line behind a family of 400-pound wheelchair-bound Floridians stained with turkey grease. And there are tons - let me make this clear - tons of wheelchairs in the park - like, to the point where the whole place now seems primarily built for the handicapped customer.

  6. You know that saying about Japan - that they've been stuck in the year 2000 for the last 40 years? There's something of that in Disney World too - they've been stuck in 1990 since 1970. For all their "innoventions" of the last thirty years, the greatest rides are still the original ones - It's a Small World, Space Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean - really all the dark rides still have a magical quality about them.

  7. The biggest detrimental change to Disney World (and the company at large) since my last visit in 2006 is the loss of the "Disney identity" or the "Disney feel" due to their acquisitions - and obsessive marketing - of Marvel and Star Wars. Those brands feel so cheap in Disney's hands when compared with what "Disney" used to represent - Mickey and friends, the idealism of a better tomorrow, the wonder of childhood. Every area, every store, every restaurant that used to have a magical aura about it now seems weighed down with sad Marvel gimmicks or flimsy Star Wars plasticware, and the homogeneity of the parks - a homogeneity that used to be so strong as to make Tower of Terror and Toontown both feel like two places in the same universe - is completely gone.

  8. One thing I was surprised to see thriving at Disney, given the changes in both the parks and the world over the years, was an excellent model of early fatherhood. Many new families still gravitate to the parks, and maybe it's just the now-higher ticket prices, but it seemed a majority of these had a two-parent model with fathers who were sincerely invested in their child's experience - and the wonder of a child at Disney World is really something to behold. I met and got to know a few of these families - many of the fathers were recent military veterans; maybe that has something to do with the demographic being represented.

  9. Finally, I understand that the Disney company of today is essentially a for-profit entertainment arm of the Democratic Party inhabiting the skin of a once-neutral (okay, right-leaning) organization, and therefore has felt it necessary to purge the shadows of the past. Even so, it was frustrating to me as a fan of Walt Disney The Man (TM) that there is no archival or historical experience within the parks as relates to the company itself. Surely there must be acres of warehouses with artifacts and curios and documents from the past 100 years of the company's existence - how is nothing exhibited in the parks? This is yet another area where I've likely completely misunderstood what the Disney experience is to the modern world.

In summary, a disappointing experience only in the sense that yet another thing that was awesome in my youth - that had the potential to only grow more awesome year-on-year - has instead disintegrated into a bland, sanitized, "globohomo" experience with nothing particularly special about it. If you find yourself in the Central Florida area, I highly recommend making the trip to see some of the real, unsanitized history in the region - Kennedy Space Center, the Spanish Forts, the Dali Museum, the Circus tributes in Sarasota - and to avoid that which was once-great.

I'll mention Thomas Merton as a (sort of unexpected) voice of spiritual clarity for the modern world. While a committed Catholic monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he pursued intellectual and theological connections with the world of Buddhism, spawning new ideas about both religions in the process. He's very candid and "human" in his writings (two qualities largely absent in theological treatises); while The Seven Storey Mountain is his best-known work (and his "official" autobiography), I prefer his smaller collections of essays titled Love and Living and Contemplative Prayer - they each approach the paradox of belief with honesty and open questions.

As @ulyssesword suggests, this is a common trope in country music of the 20th century, with a few new entries still popping up from time to time. From the oldest songs like “Knoxville Girl,” “Long Black Veil,” and “Under the Weeping Willow” to relatively modern entries like “You Can Let Go Now, Daddy,” “Wasted,” and even Taylor Swift’s “Love Story;” I imagine that country, as America’s only commercial genre with direct ties to folk song, produced these “twist” ballads in a continued tradition of the European songs you mention.

As an aside, Contemporary Christian Music (as a frequent imitator and proximate neighbor of country music) also produces twist ballads with songs like Steven Curtis Chapman’s “Cinderella,” Michael W. Smith’s “This Is Your Time,” and the mega-hit “Butterfly Kisses” (which contains the common “daughter song” trope of Verse 1 - Birth/Childhood, Verse 2 - Adulthood/College, Verse 3 - Wedding… the trope occasionally branches into Verse 4 - Death).

I’ll throw in “Joey Freshwater,” Ole Miss HC Lane Kiffin’s coed-chasing alter ego.

Welcome to the Venn crossing of sports and venerated subclasses; the scandals are made up and the truth doesn't matter. For additional interest, see this week's story of the Bay Area sports media losing their minds over a laughably overrated YoungBlackMan getting replaced at quarterback by a White dude working his ass off.

Mouth-to-mouth is unusual, but cheek kisses are very common in Southern European countries when a player is substituted off after an extraordinary performance, not unlike the ass slapping on the sidelines of NFL games.

Fake Outrage for a Fake Crisis

In one of the most annoyingly misguided media crusades in recent memory, the soccer world (read: Reddit, PMC, sports media, and virtue-signaling athletes who are delighted to be out of the Sauronic Eye for once) has fixed its laser gaze on Luis Rubiales, head of the Spanish FA (the top soccer organization in Spain; representing all club and national teams in the country). His crime, for which he is demanded to give up everything he now has and ever had, was a kiss.

After the Spanish National Team won the Women's World Cup last week, a traditional trophy presentation was held. In his jubilation, Rubiales kissed player Jenni Hermoso, just as thousands of soccer personnel have done thousands of times in moments of great triumph. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath, Hermoso laughed it off on camera as a passing awkward moment. In the days following that recording, I assume Hermoso has come to see that one moment of blasé honesty as a crucial tactical mistake (not that it matters; the original video of her has yet to make an appearance in any of the numerous "j'accuse" incendiary articles).

What Hermoso failed to realize in that moment (but has very much seized upon since) is that she had been granted the gift of victimhood. Not just as a woman, not just as a woman at the hand of a man, but as a woman footballer (one of the venerated subclasses, as elaborated upon in one of my past comments) at the hands of T H E P A T R I A R C H Y.

This one meaningless moment flashed overnight into an international dogpile, with consequences as wild as Rubiales' mother enduring a hunger strike. Unfortunately, Rubiales is experiencing firsthand that racism is not the only demand in excess of its supply, and that even a hint of raw meat, especially in the entirely invented space of "women's sports" "inequality," will be devoured, even if it was just shoe leather all along.

I’ll answer not just for the US, but for the world:

The FIFA WWC, like professional women’s leagues and the Paralympics, is an exercise in charity and post-Christian generosity.

If the question is the magnitude of the WWC on a financial scale:

While there are indeed some supporters of female athletes, none of them watch for the quality of the game. Some are interested in the few celebrity athletes like Marta, Rapinoe, Morgan, etc.; some are interested in the teams because the badge on their shirt matches that worn by great male athletes; some enjoy watching their respective national teams in everything from table tennis to water polo. The sum total of those viewership demographics doesn’t even justify FIFA’s broadcasting fees and advertiser dollars; add to that the many women footballers who wish to self-identify as millionaires and there’s a negative value in the pot. But the men’s game makes money on such an exponential scale that FIFA can rob Peter to pay Pauline without anyone raising an eyebrow.

If the question is the magnitude of the WWC on a sporting scale:

The only reason anyone is genuinely interested in a women’s football team is because the great men of history got them interested by playing the game at a superhuman level, and virtually no one is genuinely interested… especially women.

If I take an interest in my club or my nation’s U21 or B Team, there is at least a cohesive interest there: one of those seemingly unimportant names could one day become a legend. If I take an interest in my club or my nation’s women’s team, I’m cheering for the badge and supporting the name only because the men's badge is upon them, just as I might look more fondly on Miller Lite because they put the badge on their can… “well, it doesn’t really mean anything, but I like the men’s team and want to incentivize great things coming to them in any way, shape, or form.”

Indeed, it seems the women footballers themselves don’t care about the quality of the game… just a few hours ago the USWNT were laughing and enjoying themselves after embarrassing their national colors on a (paltry; see above) global scale. They know the real issue is the culture war, and they’ve already won a bigger prize than any silly gold cup in that arena… they forced the hand of their national federation, stole money from the men’s team, and persuaded PMC women that the boys were being big meanies… all over a completely fabricated issue in which they were the liars and the men were the victims.

And that’s the bigger point. Most “supporters” (can you be a supporter if you never watch the thing you support?) of women’s football support the idea of women’s football rather than the game itself, as part of the timeless playground tug of war between boys and girls (and, on the girls’ side, the white knights). In light of that tug of war, the WWC even existing is such a victory that the argument could have ended right there, except that, of course, there will never be an end and we will always be expected to give up more and more resources into the bottomless pit of women’s sports because it makes the people whose hands grasp the wrists of those in power feel good.

Completely agree. He revolutionized his and all other - by way of gesamtkunstwerk - art forms. He was as much a renaissance man as there’s ever been, and the power of his vision (and his ability to execute that vision) is rivaled by a sparing handful of aspirational entrepreneurs: Ford, Disney, Jobs/Gates, Musk. His pamphlet on Jewish Music is an overblown non-scandal due to its later admirers; his views were absolutely standard for his day - more charitable even, in parts.

This is still the case for me in my thirties. The idea of being 55 and well-established, or 70 and retired, or 80 and physically worn, are impossible to tangibly imagine.

You're right; that's a misleading sentence. I've edited it.

People (especially women being egged on by their friends) have easily-altered memories when they are either 1) socially pressured or 2) socially incentivized to reinterpret events they barely recall and barely care about outside of group status. Majors’ accusers, like many cascades of catty copyists before them, all suddenly remembered him being a very bad boy the second they saw another woman gain social status and the potential for a financial windfall from doing so. Majors’ “long-standing reputation” did not exist at all until our “dancer”* movement coach decided to create it, after which many women who had most likely bragged to their friends about having once known him (probably some, to be fair, in the biblical sense) turned toward the other endzone and joined the dogpile.

*see top post

A literally incredible turn of events in the Jonathan Majors case.

His accuser, no doubt taking note from her many predecessors, had attempted a tamed rewrite of her accusations, reducing battery and restraint to Majors having “pushed her into a taxi” and “pulled her middle finger.”

Predictably, the NYPD soon thereafter uncovered solid evidence that she was, in fact, not only the perpetrator of the abuse, but a kleptomaniac to boot, taking souvenirs from Majors’ apartment after he had enjoyed her services as a (ahem) “dancer”* movement coaching.

One wonders if, among the few patches of the populace where the light of this truth will break through, there might be a few unexpected corners noticing (weaponized term intentionally deployed) this cascade of catty copyists. But the chances of even a hundred more such cases causing so much as a hint of open skepticism in the Dominant Cultural Ideology? Methinks the lady doth be wonderful too much.

*@ecgtheow rightly points out that this is the rare tabloid case where The New York Times is obligated to use a favorite euphemism for its literal definition.

When the President of the United States can hire a public employee to the highest court in the land with a brazen declaration that Progressive Racism will be followed to the exclusion of the majority of qualified candidates, it’s probably quixotic to imagine change in your local workplace. Consider Biden the alt-Woodrow Wilson and yourself the alt-target of Wilsonian federalized bigotry. Going by the original timeline, we’re 50 years off from civil rights.

Most of what just about everyone does is just a thought inside their head and other people's heads.

But this phrase is not true of video games, specifically the thoughts in "other people's heads". Politics and sports and news are shared human experiences, and while many people have the shared experience of playing a game, they do not have the same experience of the game itself - that is the whole appeal of player-led video games. Even an unhealthy fixation on any of your three examples will still produce opinions and actions based on shared human experiences. They incentivize interaction with other human beings, whether positive (people who agree with you) or negative (people who can argue with you). Ultimately, the many adventures, lessons, trials, and triumphs of video games are solitary experiences curated for the player in a controlled environment in which even one's greatest accomplishments will always carry the tinge of having occurred on artificially fixed terms.

I don't see the relation between your first assertion and the quoted text. The quotation is referring to activities which have demonstrable benefits, and the author takes issue not with the idea that they're forms of leisure, but that they're unproductive forms of leisure, which they assume "hobby" to insinuate. Video games are absolutely unproductive in any real-world sense; music and reading are real-world activities in the actual, non-simulated world. The question is whether activities in the simulated world have any worth in our real one.

Not sarcasm; I really do think your response was fantastic. I tend to overenthusiastically react to good points that I hadn't considered before.

That thought was not to say that cocaine is a viable, more productive alternative to gaming, but simply that, if even one of the most dangerously addictive substances on Earth has the potential to leave more of a positive impact on the progress of one's work, that's a pretty good indicator of where video games should sit on the hierarchy.

What a brilliant response. Your takedowns of the common "cop-outs" are of such an undeniable verity that, I think, you sufficiently lance any notion of video games as worthy of inclusion at all in a life not be wasted. Even cocaine seems to confer greater benefits - real productivity in the real world - albeit with much greater costs. Your hours-spent thesis is a fatal blow to simulated productivity, as even one minute of real productivity in those 50 hours is infinitely greater than the faux-accomplishments of a simulated world. Your last paragraph is a very clever retort to a common excuse that I'd neither heard nor considered before.