FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
User ID: 195
What Car Should I Buy?
I'm beginning the process of shopping for a new car. I will beat this decision to death, I expect it will be several months until I actually make a purchase, including many test drives of different models and digging deep into Consumer Reports and Car and Driver's archives. Figured I'd throw the question out to theMotte and see if there are any models I'm not thinking of or should give more consideration to. As I write so much word vomit, I realize this is also an exercise for me in writing out what I'm looking for.
Strictly speaking, I don't need to buy a car and if I don't end up finding one I like, I won't buy one. I'm in kind of a unique situation for a variety of reasons, I have a work vehicle (crew cab 4wd pickup) that is low mileage and that I will continue to use to regardless of any other purchase; I also maintain my dad's car collection with him, so I have no desire for a crazy sports car because if I want to drive a convertible that gets to 60 in 4 seconds I can just head over to his house and borrow it. But I set this date on my calendar a couple years back, and I'm seeing evidence of it all around me, it seems like now might be the time to pull the trigger on a new car. As I stated in a previous post, my early teen years the industry was just emerging from a nadir for the American car market, things have gotten better pretty much every year since. But lately the tech in cars is becomingly increasingly baroque, and the features are becoming harder to avoid or turn off, I'm worried that if I wait another year or two until I need a car I might be forced to endure features I don't want and unable to find a car that has what I do want. Increasing government targets on fuel economy etc are also a threat. My theory being that I'd rather buy a new or low mileage car now and not have to worry about this again until I'm 40 or so (pending accidents or whatnot).
For starters, located in the USA, so sadly no GR Yaris' or Renault Meganes around. Northeast, so AWD has always been a preference of mine, but FWD will work, RWD is probably a no go but I could be persuaded for the right car since I still have the 4x4 or my wife's car for bad storms. Looking for a four door, but it doesn't need an adult sized big back seat. My wife has and will continue to have a bigger car for comfortably transporting multiple adults, so this one just needs to be theoretically capable of doing so more than actually needing to regularly. But with carseats, I probably don't want to bother trying a 2+2. Cargo space isn't a huge concern, but I do like hatchbacks. I want to avoid SUVs, I just don't like driving them as much, really looking for a sedan or small hatchback (though I am kinda pondering the Kona N as factually more hot hatch than SUV). I want something reasonably quick with good driving dynamics, but I don't need a ton of horsepower (I'm basically looking at stuff between 200-300) and I'm unlikely to take it to a track day beyond fooling around at a local autocross on street tires. I could talk myself into a manual, but I'm fine with a conventional auto, CVT I'm iffy on. I'm probably leaning gas engine, but I feel like I should cross-shop a few EVs because they are the new hot thing.
I'm looking mainly at the Asian carmakers. Toyota, Honda, and Subaru all seem to make vehicles that simply run better longer and are much easier/cheaper to fix than the German carmakers; I'd be open to an American car but there aren't many out there that really appeal to me right now. I've had BMWs, Audis, and MBs for years now; it's not so much that they break down all the time, though I am under the impression that they do, it's that when they break down I need to special order the fan belt from the single nunnery in the Alps that makes them for thousands, while when Japanese or American cars break down I can choose between $50 in stock at the dealer or $35 at the local Autozone. I'm tired of it, I'll probably look at a few Audis and BMWs just to cross shop but idk that I'd pull the trigger on one. I'm open to buying a used car, hell I buy used shoes, but I like the idea of having something under warranty for at least a few years. Also the used car market for most of the cars I'm looking at is so out of whack, I see two year old and 30k miles on Subarus that are less than $2k off what I could buy a brand new one for at the dealer. I'm not in a hurry, so needing to order one from the factory and wait a couple months is nbd to me. Budget is realistically somewhere between $30-50k; I could afford more but I don't see a lot of cars that make me want to reach out of that range, and I want a car cheap enough that I don't worry about it when I use it, which I don't think I could do with a $60k+ car.
Prior cars I've daily'd: 1991 Ford Bronco, 1996 Ford Explorer XLT V8, 2000 Subaru Outback Wagon XT Manual, 2000 BMW 323ci Manual, 2004 Audi A6 Quattro 2.7t, 2003 Mercedes-Benz C230 Wagon, 2005 Audi A4 3.0t Quattro Cabrio, 2005 Toyota Camry. I currently drive a 2008 Chevrolet Avalanche LTZ most days, it just crossed 60k miles so I expect to have it for the foreseeable future and honestly I expect to have it until it is illegal to drive it in the city. My wife drives a Lexus RX, which we will trade in the near future on a new Subaru Outback.
Current Contenders:
Acura Integra. Pros: Small, hatchback, Honda guts, great MPG, luxury badge, drives well, strong CPO warranty and availability near me. Cons: CVT unless you go with an up-charge package, weakest engine of the cars I'm looking at, expensive for what is ultimately a civic in a sport coat, FWD.
Subaru WRX. Pros: Fun to drive, manual, great AWD, resale price, Subaru around me is kind of the perfect stealth luxury brand among PMC types, I got into a horrible accident in my prior subaru and survived so I have good vibes towards it. Cons: Not designed for comfort, boy racer looks are a little heavy handed, need to get the manual because the CVT is right out for this car I'd think.
Hyundai Elantra N. Pros: Performance monster for the price, hilariously long powertrain warranty, customizable settings galore, polarizing looks but honestly I love them when I see them. Cons: Hyundai badge carries no weight, reliability may not be there so even with the warranty I don't actually get to drive it, FWD.
Mazda3 Turbo Hatch AWD. Pros: Hatchback, AWD, good speed, gorgeous design, actual automatic gearbox offered. Cons: Small.
I'm kicking around other ideas from trying to find a GR Corolla to a Toyota Crown to going Tesla 3 or Ford Mach E, and like I said I'll cross shop things like BMW or Audi but may not go for that. Leaving aside budget, I'd probably get something like a Tesla S or high end 3, higher end Mach E, or a Rivian or GMC Hummer EV, just because I think they're the coolest fucking things on the road right now.
What are your thoughts? Anything I'm missing that I should consider? Any experiences that you'd like to share with some of the cars I've listed?
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
What's the strangest thing that someone has ever told you was attractive about you? The strangest thing you've found yourself attracted to in someone else?
Once someone was immensely impressed by the fact that I carried a phone without a case.
As for me, big dark frame glasses raise anyone 2 whole points for me, gets me every time. Blame Mrs FiveHour.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
4mo ago
my favorite anecdote - a friend paid for 4 years of his wife's post-grad degree as a full-time student to the tune of $150,000. She sucked her professor's dick at her graduation party, then ground out the extraction of his credit card points before the end of the divorce! Also received massive alimony payments since she delayed actually starting a job with her nice degree
I've worked enough in divorce law to say straightforwardly: this is retarded. The fact that your friend couldn't argue his way out of a wet paper bag is not an indictment of the adversarial legal system. Literally every aspect of that should have gone differently, and routinely does.
The majority of stories like this are the result of one party or another failing completely to argue their case, or walking into court totally unprepared to argue, or blowing off the court and being subject to a default judgment. These things just don't happen if you don't fuck up somewhere.
I've literally heard the same beer-rants of guys who claimed they'd been divorce raped in cases I knew intimately enough to know what he was leaving out.
For reference, here is a common trick where men who "got fucked in the divorce" fumbled the ball.
Wife's Attorney: You have three children, correct?
Husband: Yes.
WA: What are their names?
H: Kaylee, Kayleigh, and KaeLieh
WA: What are their ages?
H: Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
I'm serious. This happens all the time.
I always found the decision to write the Slate article rather weird. It felt like grabbing the spotlight for herself. If I were her*, if the story features the guy as a creep, then it clearly isn't my story. After all, he wasn't a creep. It's a weird reflex insecure people carry to show their whole ass under broad accusations, like people getting upset at someone being called dumb or ugly because it is mean to dumb or ugly people, as though anyone who isn't wildly insecure would group themselves under the categories "dumb" or "ugly."
In the final analysis it's a fairly innocuous story structure, the kind of thing that happens every day on every college campus across the country. While certain details made it identifiable to those close with Nowicki, Roupenien did change many details; Nowicki's argument is that Roupenien did not change enough of them. The interesting thing about the story is the internal monologue of the hypo-agentic and anhedonic protagonist, not any particular plot point lifted from Nowicki's life or not, which most anyone would understand bore only a vague similarity to any real person. She could easily have said to the handful of people who would have identified her "Hey that's not how I remember it, I've never even met this writer" and moved on with her life. Instead she chose to make the whole incident the first Google result under her name, taking it to the whole public, not just to those who knew her then and remembered these details, but to everyone she would meet in the future. That's an...odd...response to the supposed invasion of your privacy. Taking what would have been a private fun fact and making it into the first thing any new employer, romantic partner, etc will learn about you.
To me it is perfectly legitimate to write a story like Cat Person, in which you hear about a scenario and then imagine how you would feel if you were in that scenario. I'd imagine that is one of the most common ways that authors create stories, they hear about a scenario and then they insert themselves into it, how would I feel how would I react what would have made me do something like that. From Lord of the Flies to For Whom the Bell Tolls to The Killer Angels. It's.a long tradition. Jean Ross' Family still takes the time to critique the classic musical Cabaret every time there is a big production of it, "Our Grandmother Wasn't a Whore!" is always good for one or two headlines in a few midwit newspapers; the controversy is the primary reason anyone ever talks about Jean Ross anymore, which lead me to read more about her fascinating life. Seizing the controversy for oneself is seizing a slice of fame from a great work for oneself.
For what it's worth, regardless of the (dead) author's or most people's interpretation of Cat Person, I found it a very strong and interesting work of fiction. Not so much as a critique of men along the lines of "the guy was a creep all along" or whatever, but as a critique of the female protagonist's mindset. The way she drifts in and out of wanting to be involved in any of this, but lets herself get swept along for lack of any better ideas, the way she gets distanced from her friends and peer group by her relationship with this older man, is a genuine warning to girls. The kind of warning my mother gave to both me and my sister when we reached early teenage years: Never Go On A Mercy Date. Don't date people who you aren't super into. If you end up doing too much with them, that will be upsetting; if you reject them anyway you are only making it worse after stringing them further along. You think you are doing them a favor by giving them a little bit of you, but this will only make them angrier when they can't have all of you. You think they should be happy you spent time with them at all, they get angry that you won't spend more time with them. "Whore" is how that transaction inevitably ends. ((I mostly followed this advice, but not always as well as I should have.))
It comes back to the generalized advice I give to all young people: the optimal relationship states are Happily Married, and Slutting it Up. You should always be aiming to remain at one of those poles, the spots in the middle are hazardous, that's where people get hurt because they are emotionally depending on something that has no substance to it. If you're not married, or on the path to getting married, no commitment, no dependency, you don't make any decisions in your life with them in mind.
*I can't, of course, speak to what the viral story about your life experience must actually be like. The largest audience a short story or poem written by a former love ever found was a creative writing class; I'm lucky to have avoided sleeping with good writers, or I'm lucky to be so boring my story would never catch on.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
Great piece.
I've found I prefer older translations of the classics to newer translations. I've read both Garth's Ovid and Mandelbaum's, the latter in class the former for pleasure. I got so much more out of the former, even though the latter is (according to the academics I know who could actually read it in the original) far more accurate to the original meaning. This piece from the Paris Review actually asks a lot of the same questions comparing different verse translations to a different modern prose translation
Modern Prose:
Some tried to escape by climbing to the hilltops, others, sitting in their curved boats, plied the oars where lately they had been ploughing; some sailed over cornlands, over the submerged roofs of their homes, while some found fish in the topmost branches of the elms. At times it happened that they dropped anchor in green meadows, sometimes the curved keels grazed vineyards that lay beneath them. Where lately sinewy goats cropped the grass, now ugly seals disported themselves. The Nereids wondered to see groves and towns and houses under the water; dolphins took possession of the woods, and dashed against high branches, shaking the oak trees as they knocked against them. Wolves swam among the flocks, and the waves supported tawny lions, and tigers too. The lightning stroke of his strong tusk was of no use, then, to the wild boar, nor his swift legs to the stag—both alike were swept away. Wandering birds searched long for some land where they might rest, till their wings grew weary and they fell into the sea.
Old Verse, by Dryden:
One climbs a cliff; one in his boat is borne,
and ploughs above, where late he sowed his corn.
Others o’er chimney tops and turrets row,
and drop their anchors on the meads below:
or downward driv’n, they bruise the tender vine,
or tossed aloft, are knocked against a pine.
And where of late the kids had cropped the grass,
t>he monsters of the deep now take their place.
Insulting Nereids on the cities ride,
and wond’ring dolphins o’er the palace glide.
On leaves and masts of mighty oaks they browse,
and their broad fins entangle in the boughs.
The frighted wolf now swims among the sheep;
the yellow lion wanders in the deep.
His rapid force no longer helps the boar;
the stag swims faster than he ran before.
The fowls, long beating on their wings in vain,
despair of land and drop into the main.
Ditto the Iliad. Pope's verse translation:
Then thus the hero of Anchises’ strain:
“To meet Pelides you persuade in vain:
Already have I met, nor void of fear
Observed the fury of his flying spear;
From Ida’s woods he chased us to the field,
Our force he scattered, and our herds he kill’d;
Lyrnessus, Pedasus in ashes lay;
But (Jove assisting) I survived the day:
Else had I sunk oppress’d in fatal fight
By fierce Achilles and Minerva’s might.
Where’er he moved, the goddess shone before,
And bathed his brazen lance in hostile gore.
What mortal man Achilles can sustain?
The immortals guard him through the dreadful plain,
And suffer not his dart to fall in vain.
Were God my aid, this arm should check his power,
Though strong in battle as a brazen tower.”
And a more modern prose translation by Kline:
‘Lycaon,’ Aeneas replied, ‘why urge me to fight the brave son of Peleus, when I reject any such idea? It would not be the first time I confronted swift-footed Achilles. He chased me from Ida with his spear, when he raided our herds and sacked Lyrnessus and Pedasus. Zeus saved me then, giving me strength and speed, or I would surely have fallen to Achilles and Athene. She went before him, a saving light, rousing him to kill the Leleges and Trojans with his spear. No warrior can face Achilles in combat: some immortal always goes by his side to ward off danger. His spear is true and never falls to earth without piercing human flesh. Yet if the gods allowed fair play, he would not beat me easily, even though he thinks himself a man of bronze.’
I understand the value of accuracy in modern academic translations*, that they better capture the word-for-word meaning of the original text. But so much of the spirit is lost when the translator clearly does not believe in the text in the way the original writer did. The modern translator of Homer does not believe in the glory of battle, the modern translator of Ovid does not understand the playfulness of the gods to be a thing of beauty. The modern translations are drab, or they view the events of the stories as horrors. Homer and Ovid did not view their stories that way, and that meaning is more important than the syntax.
The spirit of the work is an unbroken chain of interpretation from Homer and Ovid to Pope and Dryden, but it is lost in a modern Classics department. I was lucky enough that my professors in undergrad at least had a hint of that, at least understood enough of it from their professors to be able to give a taste of it before returning to questions of "Queering the authorship" or whatever the fuck. The next generation of Classics students may not even get that. They may be taught by Postmodernists who were taught by Postmodernists, they will know no other way to look at the Iliad than through a queer Feminist of Color lens, and something will be lost. I recently completed this lecture course on the Early Middle Ages, at one point when discussing the discursive concept of The Dark Ages, professor Freedman suggests that we are reentering a new dark ages if we define a dark age by knowledge of Homer. The Greeks and Romans knew Homer, the dark ages lost that knowledge, the Renaissance and Enlightenment regained it, we are losing it once again.
*A second, equally facile, argument is made that the archaisms of the old translations hold them back, make it difficult for ordinary readers to enjoy them. This is often used as a reason why the Bible must be endlessly retranslated and updated. It's enough to make one wish to return to the Latin Mass, perhaps I should finally learn it in full. It is precisely classic literature that grounds a language, whether it is the Greeks and Homer, or the English and Shakespeare. We should reach back for these works while we can still read them with only a minimum of effort, and preserve them so that our heritage as modern English speakers can stretch from the Elizabethan to today. If we let our ability to read the Classics slip away, if we need translations of Shakespeare and Milton and Pope, we will lose that unbroken heritage, our children will be unable to regain it.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
"X should be cooler than this" is a summary of Kulak's philosophy right?
I can recall reading "War should be cooler than this," "Cops should be cooler than this," fifteen or so "Healthcare should be cooler than this," "Jobs should be cooler than this," etc.
It's an aesthetic approach to right and wrong.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
Give me your best wild scam ideas.
Inspiration: My very elderly grandmother with pretty bad dementia got a wedding invitation from a very distant relation of her second husband. We had no idea who they were, not even vaguely, and she obviously didn't remember because there are days she doesn't remember my brother-in-law. My grandmother decided to send a check for $50 because that's what you do when you're invited to a wedding. My mother ultimately did figure out who they were, but in the meantime I thought to myself: this is a gold mine!
Send wedding invitations with fake first names (no last names) and pictures of nice young white couples to random nursing home residents. Don't send the same one to more than one resident at the same nursing home, mix it up, but there are 15,000 nursing homes with almost two million beds in the USA so you've got options. Not to mention active living retirement homes you could send to! Always set the wedding at a destination that is far and inconvenient, to prevent anyone from RSVPing yes, but most old people won't travel anyway. Old people with memory loss will be quite likely to say "Well, I don't remember them, but what if I do know them and then I stiff them and they're offended? I should just send them $50 to make sure I'm not rude. Didn't my dead friend/business partner/cousin/whatever have a daughter named something like that? Maybe it's her! I should just send $50."
If you got $20 out of 1/15 of the nursing homes in the country five times a year, you'd be hitting six figures.
Ongoing controversies as Secretary of Defense Austin and DoD clique concealed the SecDef's cancer diagnosis from White House. Austin received treatment for cancer in late December just before Xmas, and then was hospitalized January 1st for complications from the treatment.
Despite the fact that he was hospitalized on Jan. 1, Austin’s top staffers didn’t learn of the problem until the next day. Biden and national security adviser Jake Sullivan were notified on Jan. 4, and the next day, the Pentagon told members of Congress and released a statement to the media.
Biden reportedly has no intention of firing Austin, with officials stating that they will "learn from the experience."
While I think the WWIII crowd in the peanut gallery are mostly exaggerating the state of the world today, I can't deny the existence of numerous crises in which the US military might need to act or react at a moment's notice. And while I have an incredible disdain for the efforts of the DoD over the past two decades, the SecDef's whole job is to be on hand for those situations, to coordinate responses to threats to the United States and its allies.
There is very little clarity on what the SecDef's capabilities were at any given time. He was under general anesthetic during his treatment in December for some period of time, and needed to be hospitalized on the 1st. DoD spokespeople claim that he has access to everything he needs to do his job, in the way of secure communications equipment. But there is no argument that 1) People going through cancer treatment are not at 100% ability, 2) 70 year old men who need to be hospitalized are not at 100% of their ability, 3) we presumably put all that money into building the Pentagon for the purpose of creating the ideal situation for him to respond to any crisis and to do his job, 4) a hospital bed will be less optimal. There is no argument that when Austin is undergoing cancer treatment in the hospital, he will be performing his duties as SecDef at a suboptimal level.
Given the possibility of a Russian push or a Ukrainian collapse, of an outbreak of Genocide in southern Israel, or of a Houthi strike on who-knows-what, to say nothing of a wild-card in Korea or Taiwan or Guyana...are we really ok with the SecDef operating at 50% and not telling the president? How clear were chains of command and authority in case of a crisis at time that Austin was incapacitated? Would Biden have been looking for Austin when he got the famous 2am phone call and been unable to find him? Who would have given orders in such a case?
This is terrible optics for the administration, and constitutes the strongest public evidence for the theory that "Joe Biden is President Grandpa, given a warm glass of milk and sent to bed before the real meetings between the bureaucrats happens." While other presidents have had conflicts with the DoD (Obama famously feuded with "The Generals" about pulling out of Afghanistan, while it appears that Trump was directly lied to about the presence of US troops in Syria to prevent them from being pulled out), this is a serious escalation. Civilian control of the military has been undermined by the appointment of former career generals to head the DoD, it is destroyed if the former generals don't even report to the president, if POTUS doesn't know who is actually giving the orders over there.
How involved can the President be in DoD decision making around NatSec if he didn't even know the SecDef was out of commission? How much interagency rivalry exists that DoD subordinates would agree to hide what was going on from the President? How low-trust is the relationship between SecDef and POTUS that he wouldn't simply disclose the diagnosis and appoint an acting interim chief, clearly Austin felt that if he stepped away for a second he would be ousted? How weak is this president if he is scared to punish Austin for his clear dereliction of duty and deceit? How much is the president kept out of things if no one else (say, the CIA or FBI?) informed him of what was going on for FOUR DAYS?
I'm left with more questions than answers.
My wife asked one of her typical "Long drive stuck in traffic" questions the other day, and I want to pose it to theMotte: What pop song written this century would you propose as the new national anthem for the United States of America?
I settled on Taylor Swift's You Belong With Me. It perfectly captures the modern American middle-class self-conceit. It's got a little twang to it without being Morgan Wallen, a dash of country but not too much, reflecting a people that still thinks of themselves as descendants of frontier farmers but really drive a lawn tractor around a suburban three-quarters of an acre; a driving rock beat but not heavy metal, a cultural artifact that honors rock music's past but neither pushes it forward into avant garde strangeness nor slavishly imitates what went before.
The femcel narrator's view of herself as the putative underdog ("She wears short-skirts I wear T Shirts, she's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers") is the kind of self-view every American takes of themselves. We Americans all think of ourselves like that, we're all middle-class or working class underdogs striving against the "system" and its head honchos. We think that about ourselves, even when we're billionaires who have been elected president, superstar athletes who pushed other superstar athletes out of the sport that we already dominated, or the literal richest man in the world. Americans picture themselves as the underdog when they fight wars against impoverished tribesmen across the globe, when they play sports we barely care about against tiny countries. How better to capture that than a song by a thin, young, rich blonde about how she just can't get a guy to notice her. The video presentation adds to the hilarity: she's the only one who really understands the (checks notes) star wide receiver on the football team, they're the most conventionally attractive high school couple imaginable, but they're so unique because she unlike his current girlfriend "listen[s] to the kind of music she doesn't like, And she'll never know your story like I do."
The conclusion of the song ("Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find, That what you're looking for has been here the whole time, If you could see that I'm the one, Who understands you, Been here all along, So, why can't you see?, You belong with me") reflects America's inherent hopefulness and future-orientation. We all think that one day the world will wake up and realize what we have. If we just stay in Iraq long enough, if we just really make the case for democracy in China, if we get antidiscrimination right this time, if we create a path to good jobs for the working class...Americans believe in so many impossible plans it is hard to keep track.
What's your pick and your justification?
INTUITION ESSAY FINAL
My Intuition Essay contest, is concluded. Thank you to everyone who participated, I really enjoyed reading every entry! Voting is concluded. The winner is: @Pitt19802 with This Untitled Piece Comparing Statistical and Intuitive Approaches in Baseball and Politics. Mr. Pitt selected Stage Right Greensburg, a small local theater company in my home state of PA, to receive the $300 in prize money (I tossed in a little to cover fees). Mr. Pitt only threw his work in at the last moment, so let that be a lesson: never be discouraged, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, shoot for the moon even if you miss you'll land among the stars, man in the arena, every dog has his day, gods stand up for bastards, even a blind squirrel finds a nut, etc. etc. ditto ditto.
Thank you to all of our participants, and I want to take one more opportunity to highlight their excellent work.
@TheDag entered Intuition in a Scientific Age
@f3zinker entered A Case For/Against Education, Intuition
@felipec entered My Intuition About Intuition
@Gaashk on a Jungian View of Intuition
and
@ryandv on Forming Connections via Similarity of Mental Models
@DaseindustriesLtd also wrote this piece on the topic but explicitly asked to be excluded from the competition, hoping to leave the field to the rest of us.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
I've written extensively on the recent gubernatorial election in my home state, the state in which three generations of my family have been born and where my wife and I own a house up the street from where I grew up, where I've been registered as a Republican since the day I turned 18. Between Mastriano and Shapiro Shapiro, the Democrat, was the one who would conserve the state I grew up in.
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Mastriano planned to cut public school staffing by 2/3. I attended public schools throughout, and got a great education in my local school district, I graduated with 30 college credits and my classmates wound up at a variety of ivy league schools. Houses in my school district, like mine, routinely demand a 20+% premium for the schools. Mastriano and his plan would have reduced my largest assets value, and destroyed a local institution I loved. Not conservative. Shapiro pledged to introduce vouchers for those who wanted them in failing school districts. Great! Compromise!
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Mastriano stated repeatedly and clearly that abortion should be banned with no exceptions. So while, yes, abortion is under no immediate threat in my state, that is a result of the R candidate losing last November. If he had won, he would be seeking legislation banning abortion while doing everything in his executive power to make it difficult. My dating life would have been different had it been as high stakes as Mastriano desired. Shapiro wanted to keep things the same.
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Mastriano stated that gay marriage should be illegal in all cases, and hinted at sodomy laws being reintroduced. Once again, on the ballot, do uncle James and uncle Craig get to stay legitimately married in their home state, a wedding I went to in Jersey when I was 12.
So, explain to me why the GOP can't be identified with their candidate for the highest office in the fifth most populous state? A purple state with a deep Republican bench in the state Senate and local executives, a state where moderates should do well everywhere but inner city Phillie and Pittsburgh.
I desperately want to vote for competent conservative candidates! I don't want a single day in my kid's school wasted on trans ideology! But my life is basically pretty good, I don't want to turn the world upside down. If all the R on the ballot offers is revolution, it's gonna be tough to vote for him.
I remember this story vaguely but haven't thought about it since. Alternative unhinged theory explaining this:
At the time, it was speculated that Reddit wanted to cover this up, as it would be embarrassing if it was revealed that one of their most influential users was an international child trafficker.
Much, much more embarrassing: if an international child trafficker used Reddit to recruit underage prostitutes. That's not just a bad story in the press, it's a potentially fatal dagger to the heart of a company cleaning itself up for an IPO. While conspiracy theories around this tended towards the bemused "Oh, isn't that funny, a billionaire hanger-on also just loved karma-whoring on default subs posting Trump Derangement Syndrome bullshit, she's just like the rest of us!" I think a much darker theory makes more sense of why she would spend this much time on this particular project. Theoretical support:
-- Reddit's userbase is majority male, somewhere between 61% and 75% depending which shitty survey you use, but the nested nature of Reddit makes that number play differently. There are tons of subreddits that are supermajority female, though ironically the female focused defaults like twoxchromosomes and actuallesbians probably aren't among them; if I go on /r/thebachelor I'm nearly guaranteed to be talking to actual women. And with 50 million daily active users at last guess, that would give us somewhere between 10 and 15 million female daily users. Age was harder to pin down from casual googling, the numbers all came up weird, and underaged users probably tend to lie about being 18 rather than admit to being 14 anyway. /r/teenagers has ~3,000,000 subs and 6,000 users browsing as of this writing, so that gives us a lower bound, then again who knows how many are real teenagers? We can probably guess that several million teenage girls use Reddit on a daily basis if we assume a kind of bell curve around the ages of users.
-- A well-used reddit account is a great source of credibility. I buy vintage watches off /r/watchexchange in a trusting way that I really wouldn't off any other internet site, even ebay or other retail sites, because I can look at the seller's profile and go through his old comments and determine if he seems "real" in a way I can't anywhere else. I bought a vintage Omega Seamaster as a graduation gift for my wife off /r/watchexchange, and I gave the guy credibility because there were so many comments in /r/dickstretching (or something like that, I might have the name wrong years later) where he talked about trying to lengthen his dick/restore his foreskin. And, look I know GPT has improved since then, but it's tough to fake that kind of weirdness sprinkled in among stuff about watches and sports teams. I know with a great deal of certainty that's a real guy, and the transaction worked out perfectly, great bargain. Because the trust problem can be solved on Reddit in a way that it can't on other transaction sites, I'm more willing to make risky real life transactions with Reddit users than I would be with any other internet population.
-- As a sub-conclusion from the above, Reddit is the best dating app on the internet. it is astonishingly easy to get laid on Reddit if you try.* Because reddit allows you to very easily produce a curated and credible profile. Make a new account where you only comment in fitness subs, high-status hobby subs, subs for female interests, probably not dickstretching, get above 1k comment karma. Tell the truth, but only the truth that shows your good sides, stay positive, probably don't do culture war stuff. Now you can use this account to message women on r4r subs, or start pm convos with women on associated interest subs and see where they go. They look at your profile, they see your post in /r/weightroom about your recent Smolov Jr for OHP run, they see you post in /r/longboys about your rescue greyhound, in /r/books about your thoughts on The Committed, you seem like a real well-rounded person in a way that can't be achieved on any other dating app.**
-- Reddit already has a sex worker problem. /r/gonewild girls probably don't stop at pics for the right fees, and I'd imagine the subreddits just go down like nesting dolls from there. I'm not that familiar with this end of reddit and idk how to find out about it, anyone here know more on the topic? But I'd guess that there are escorts on the site, and reddit doesn't really age verify so...
-- The MaxwellHill account accumulated millions in karma from posting banal articles in default subs. The kind of milquetoast blue tribe stuff that gets upvotes, but that I can't imagine why one would bother doing it over and over. Unless one is collecting karma. Probably because the user is a weird basement autist, possibly because the user was trying to accumulate massive karma as massive credibility.
So, unhinged conspiracy theory concluded from the above: Ghislaine Maxwell used her Reddit account to recruit young girls into the Epstein scheme. Or at least attempted to, it would probably be just as damaging to reddit to have evidence she tried as to have evidence she succeeded. Slide into their PMs about a comment they made in /r/environment, after a bit drop that she is actually on the board of several environmental charities (Maxwell was) and would love to fly a bright young girl like you out for a conference, we love to hear young voices, oh don't worry we can pay for everything, we can even get you a job...
Reddit is letting the story die silently, wisely, rather than offering anything to address it such that problems might result with the story given.
*YMMV, and before anyone asks, No, absolutely not, I have no idea how this would project downward to underage girls. But I see no principled reason to think it wouldn't.
**Insta, TikTok et al can achieve something similar, but only via photos/videos, and they're known to be more curated and fake, so less credible. Reddit is known, even amongst its own users, as a dirty little secret and thus the "real" you. Twitter could probably achieve something similar, but while I'm not a power user I feel like it's harder to navigate Twitter in such a way as to produce the same effect, and it typically is less pseudonymous. Regardless, none would offer Maxwell the mix of normal pseudonymity and extensive credibility that Reddit can give. A well used Reddit account is unique in giving something approaching old-style bluecheck credibility without ever posting your real name or face.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
What was your good turn for the week? In the past seven days, what was the nicest/most interesting nice thing you did for someone else? The boy scouts taught me to do a good turn daily, but I'll give us a week to make it easy.
Helped a friend move? Helped an old lady carry her groceries? Gave money to a homeless man after walking home from the strip club? Pulled a drowning dog out of a pond? Tell me about it. Tell me what minor altruism you did this week.
For me, some jackass dumped a pile of old mattresses down a steep bank along a road at the old church near me. It was upsetting to see them sit there every day, and the church's waste hauler wanted extra to take them, so I scheduled bulk pick up at 3 of our rental houses nearby, drove over and dragged them up the hill and into my truck, bagged them and put them out for collection. Now the neighborhood is a little cleaner.
But really? Littering on church property? Homeboy is headed straight to hell. That's a tough one to justify in the end.
I'm going to throw out a related hypothetical that I originally argued about in 1L Crim Law, during the pointless* two weeks we spent learning the law around rape and sexual assault.
I'm on my way home from collecting rent at different properties, I stop at a bar, I meet a woman, we talk, we hit it off, we don't talk about politics because that would be weird, she invites me back to her place for another drink. She's into me, but not super into me, she's not sure if she really wants to sleep with me tonight or just wants to make out a bit then send me home. I'm into her, I'm going to take a shot at getting into her pants while I'm here, but if she pushed my hand back I'd accept it with grace and maybe try again on the weekend, life is long and we'll have many chances to do this.
We get to her place, she goes to get a bottle of wine after settling me down on her couch and tells me to make myself comfortable. I take my jacket off, and then take my shoulder holster off and put my pistol on the coffee table next to my jacket. I always carry when I collect rent, and obviously I'm not about to make out with her with a revolver poking me in the ribs.
She returns with the wine, and sees the gun. Unbeknownst to me, she's very very blue tribe suburban Connecticut, this is the closest she's ever been to a gun, and she's very anxious and easily frightened by nature (made worse by constant exposure to blue tribe propaganda equating guns and gunowners with violence and a steady diet of true crime podcasts). She can only assume that I carry a gun because I'm a violent man, that I put it on her coffee table as an implicit threat to her, that I went to the bar that night with the intention of finding a woman to rape or murder, that my current calm and natural friendly demeanor means that I'm not just a violent man but a total sociopath who enjoys violence, she calculates quickly that her best chance of getting out of this alive is to do whatever I want, to overperform and hope I spare her life.
I know none of this, I just see her return with the wine. She pours two glasses and sits down, slightly stiff but still smiling nervously. We drink the wine, I compliment her taste (which she interprets as more evidence of sociopathy), I begin kissing her and she does not pull away, as my hands wander she kisses me harder hoping that if she cooperates I won't kill her, I just think I'm getting lucky. We make love, several times, I say goodbye and pick up my jacket and my gun and kiss her once more before I leave. I get in my truck thinking I've just made a lovely new friend.
She calls 911 to report that she's just been raped by a stranger who threatened her with a gun.
Now, for those of you keeping score at home, by modern rape law (assuming all the above text could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt in court) I did not commit rape, I lacked the requisite Mens Rea for the crime because I had no intent to force her to fuck me, even if she did fuck me because she felt forced to do so by a threat of violence. One can argue about whether putting my gun on the coffee table is merely gauche or irrationally and unusually stupid enough thata reasonable person would know that by doing so I am communicating a threat, but it isn't clear that would affect the legal analysis.
On the other hand, she one hundred percent mentally experienced what happened as a rape, as sex she had while under a threat of violence against her life.
Obviously this is an extreme example, but consider that in outline it resembles the way many women experience subway harassment vs how men perceive it. Women (and many men) often experience threats more vividly than I do, being by nature much more concerned about physical security and much less confident in their ability to deal with a situation. Not only will women pick up on threats that you would brush off, they probably pick up on threats from you that you don't think you're putting out. You don't even notice the other people getting off at your stop, she says a dude stalked her. You brush up against people, she gets groped. You look at her for a few seconds because you think you recognize the patch on her jacket, she gets ogled. That's just how it works.**
*Pointless because everyone knew the prof wouldn't put rape on the final, too much risk of some girl saying it was traumatic for her because it was too close to her own experience, and too culture war-y if you start getting into tough legal analysis of consent, so during that two weeks there was no real accountability if you didn't get cold called. Of course, I chose to do all the reading and argue about it in class anyway.
**Or, a less wholesome explanation more in line with what you're saying, consider that women might be aware of a general meme that women get harassed on the trolly, and some women that do not get harassed on the trolly worry that it would say something negative about them, their attractiveness or their femininity, to say they don't get harassed on the trolly. So they desire to amplify any experience of threat to avoid the idea that they are too ugly to harass or too bitchy to bother with. To quote an old econ professor of mine, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
2mo ago
I've definitely heard a lot of it. "God give me the confidence of a mediocre white man" "What I could achieve if I were a white man" "It must be so easy being a white man" "I had to twice as much to get half as much recognition as I would get if I were a white man."
These are stock memes. It beggars belief that you've never heard anything like that, so I'd tend to suggest you weren't listening "right." You might have heard a more subtle variation than the rather extreme example in OP. Though I also tend to feel sometimes like I move in significantly less SJW heavy circles.
And of course I hear the inverse quite often. "I coulda been a contenda if only it hadn't been for [affirmative action/the Conspiracy/women/Jews]."
Neither Tribe has a monopoly on the external locus of control. It's a trait of identity politics, and one of the reasons I decry the rise of identity politics on the Right, it's ineffective.
Is this a full blown victim blaming in the most influential printed medium by decorated feminist? Or am I overreacting?
The motte of the feminist complaint about "Victim Blaming" type methods as a rape-prevention strategy for women, is that they are being asked to not do very basic things. People accused of Victim Blaming are often telling women not to dress in such and such a way, to go to such and such a place, to never drink to excess, to never trust a strange man, to never trust her boss, to never put herself in a position where a man might have leverage over her, at some point to never leave the house without male escort.
Men, here, are being asked to not fuck crazy, drunk, sluts. There are plenty of happy, relatively sober sluts to fuck instead.
To be fair, I cosign both forms of advice, within reason.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
I cannot escape the impression that these people - mostly women, but not entirely - just never really recovered from the petty traumas of middle school. The jocky white boys were all attracted to the slim white girls with the straight hair, and not to the chubby girls, especially the black ones. And I’m not just taking potshots at my outgroup here; I’m guilty as hell of this in my own life as well. (“We must reimagine masculinity to de-center violence and the domination of others,” says the noodle-armed kid with low testosterone, certain that in the Glorious Future, women will prefer guys like him.)
Have you heard of the Amish concept of Rumspringa? It's a traditional period when Amish youth "hop around" getting into a little bit of trouble, ordinary rules are suspended all together or only lightly enforced, after which the young Amish can choose to be baptized into the community as adults, when rules will be enforced.
That's high school and college for middle-upper-class Americans. Ordinary social and even legal rules aren't enforced, some activities can be done in high school and college that can never be done (for most people) in later life. If you're a 1/500 athlete at 16, you're a star on your high school team and a big deal on campus; if you're a 1/500 athlete at 36, you might have a hobby that you're pretty good at but most people don't care about. If you're a 1/1000 musician at 16, you're in the school band and playing lead roles, or you're in your own band and you're a big deal at parties; if you're a 1/1000 musician at 36 no one cares about your soundcloud.
In college if you're a bright kid, you can spend all night discussing philosophy or history with other bright kids, if you're the brightest you can hold a little court at the Algonquin in your dorm room; if you're a bright guy in your 30s, unless you're bright enough to have a substack no one cares except the other dorks on your message board. In college all I needed for a girl to think I was a romantic was a DVD of Midnight in Paris and a bottle of cheap wine; in my 30s well, I'm married anyway, but if I wanted to impress women it would take time, effort, money. And worst of all, if I wanted any of those things now, I would have to go find actual people. And finding actual people after college is harder for most people: as the quote ran around Twitter "Half the reason folks romanticize college is because it's the last time most folks lived in dense, walkable neighborhoods focused on providing community during plentiful off-hours." When you're in college single women your age are everywhere, other pseudo intellectuals are everywhere, your friends are a short walk away.
You don't get to be an athlete, an intellectual, or a lover after college; not in the same way you do in school, not unless you're really talented. There's room to be above average and feel extraordinary, do extraordinary things. In adult life, for most people, those opportunities are lacking.
In his excellent, and now both old and prescient, Coming Apart Murray argues that Upper and Lower class white Americans are becoming more and more stratified, with upper class Americans being more likely to preach left-wing tolerance while practicing traditional middle class morality; while lower class Americans are more likely to believe in solid family values while practicing dissolute and self-destructive lifestyles. His core thesis isn't as interesting to this argument as his theory that Upper Class/Blue Tribe/PMC Americans basically fail to practice what they preach: marriage is more common among white upper class college educated Blue Tribers than it is among working class white people, yet college is synonymous with hook-up culture and dissolution.
I propose that we can think of high school and college as a kind of Rumspringa in Blue Tribe culture, a period in which ordinary rules are suspended. You can't do the things you do in high school and college after you graduate, when you have to be a good and respectable member of the community. So of course the jealousies of high school and college run deep, run forever, scabs that keep getting torn off again and again. Because it's not that they missed the opportunity to do X in college because of those damn bullies; it's that for some people, rule following people, your hall monitors, they now missed their entire opportunity to do those things. They missed out on the easy parties, fun hook ups, the intellectual and athletic honors, their whole share for their entire lives. They'll never get over that, because they don't have the spirit and agency to do them later.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
2.4% of US businesses are black owned, even accounting for significant fibbing on those surveys by businesses trying to claim to be black owned.
This just doesn't matter. It isn't going to hurt anyone, it probably won't really help anyone either. It is not at all comparable to a boycott of white owned businesses, let alone a boycott of Jewish owned businesses.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
What are your picks for words/idioms that ought to be retired this year?
My pick is LARP, which used to mean something, but now just means "people I don't like are doing something." When both 4chan and the Azov are "Nazi LARPers;" the phrase just has no meaning, they seem to lack the live action on the one hand and the role playing on the other. I think it also overprivileges nostalgia for an imagined past when people were "real" and ideologies were "serious;" read about them and real successful revolutions and wars were just as filled with dilettantes, misfits, personal drama, and nonsense on their way to changing the world. Failure to recognize this starves our knowledge of history.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1mo ago
I've got a good quantity of thoughts on it, in that I've listened to a ton of Huberman stuff, bought supplements from Momentous, etc. and was sent the article by a ton of friends.
-- DeBoer wrote on it. He commented that the article feels five years out of date, in that it presents itself as a hit piece but fails to deliver the goods. At the height of #metoo it might have hurt Huberman's business, and tbh I'm considering downloading some episodes in case content disappears, but post Tara Reid it mostly gets a yawn except among fans and the bitter-end-feminists
-- This is a case where understanding Sexual Market Value and basic economics makes things a lot clearer. I mostly agree with @2rafa (as usual) on the normal ranking of male relationship states, though it needs a 6 or a 4.5 depending on the man: Never getting laid at all. What we're seeing here is largely Hubes in his 40s going from "Kinda lumpy looking Stanford professor" to "moderate internet celebrity" and that changed his dating options. He went from a guy who could get a normie girl at a 4 or a 3 on @2rafa's scale, to a guy who could get multiple internet hotties to work toward a 2 or a 1. I've never experienced anything like Huberman's level of celebrity, but his behavior largely mirrors at a larger scale my brief fuckboi phase at 18-19, when I realized that girls might actually want to sleep with me. There's a mix of suddenly feeling like a kid in a candy store, and a scarcity poverty mindset of feeling like you need to warehouse as many of these girls as you can because surely they're going to reject you any second now, a sort of sexual imposter syndrome where you can't let go of your old assessment of yourself. I've noticed this with a lot of men over my life, when they suddenly get rich or lose the weight or otherwise experience a glow-up. They fuck around, because they have the option to do so, and because it is novel and fun, and because they feel like the opportunity is fleeting.
-- This all clearly relates back to @Walterodim's post in the main thread about the urge to label fitness as fascist. They keep trying to hint darkly at Huberman's pipeline of "optimizers" and their weird habits. Given, I have a meathead tendency to want to know the bench press of everyone complaining about him, I really do think a lot of hatred towards Hubes and his Optimizers is simple jealousy. Fat out of shape slobs want the guys who wake up at 430am, meditate, lift weights, and take a cold shower to be losers for some other reason. Because to accept that Huberman is just doing things better than you are is a deep psychic injury, his actions must be evil for some unseen reason.
-- It's amazing how weaksauce their accusations of Charlatan-ry against Hubes are. Athletic Greens probably isn't as good as they say it is, but it isn't harmful either. And they didn't even touch Momentous in any detail, probably because they couldn't come up with anything. They couldn't point to any of his content that was really harmful. Either they didn't do any research, or he really is that whistle-clean. I do think that Huberman's podcast suffers from needing to put out content, though less so than most fitness influencers, with a constant stream of things you should be doing. Huberman, at least by his own account, actually does follow too many confusing protocols, claiming for example that he saunas regularly but puts an ice pack in his shorts to keep his balls chilly, which is just colossal levels of weird. Any given episode may be great, but trying to do it all at once will end in nonsense for most people.
-- There's this weird strain of thought among some extremely online femcels that a man who talks with emotional competence is actually a crypto-abuser using therapy-talk to manipulate women. I noticed this a lot on podcasts for the current season of The Bachelor, with Joey being regarded skeptically for trying to listen to girls play their Personal Trauma Cards and gas them up about how strong they are, with some women praising him and others engaging in Backlash because he's surely secretly evil. And for the most part I think what we're seeing with both Joey and Hubes is: they were being a good boyfriend, but they didn't pick you and that's upsetting because they were a good boyfriend. I got the feeling from the little we heard from these women that they would have been perfectly happy with Hubes if he had picked them.
-- Everybody, if you don't want shit like this to happen, don't commit and don't expect commitment until you get married, or at the very least are on a glide path to a definite date of marriage. Don't move in with a boy/girl-friend, for Christ's sake don't do IVF without a ring. If you like it than you should have (made him) put a ring on it. I have very limited sympathy for "cheating" in an LTR that seems to have no plans for marriage. You get what you put up with.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
4mo ago
Bill Ackman is going to manage to turn and burn academia to the ground. We're seeing a confluence of factors:
-- Plagiarism has become such a complex and overinclusive concept that it's impossible to actually do academic work at volume without either committing plagiarism or specifically acting to avoid plagiarism while still technically doing the same thing (ie, carefully rephrasing the same thought to avoid copy-paste). The best comparison I can think of is NFL football: the definition of what constitutes a "catch" a "fumble" or being "in bounds" is obvious at human speeds, slow everything down to frame-by-frame from four angles and it suddenly gets really complicated, to the point where I have no earthly idea what pass interference is, and the review officials have to impute intent into micro-gestures during intense physical violence. Plagiarism rules simply weren't designed for a world where powerful computers instantaneously compare every combination of words used in a 500 page work to every other combination of words ever combined in human history. God forbid we get to the point where HallMonitorGPT can interpret meanings and compare and cite them. Everyone is committing plagiarism all the time, if anyone has the energy to look into it.
-- Culture War has created a real team effort at destroying random people on each "side."
-- Bill Ackman's wife had Academia as her rich lady hobby. Which, on the grand scale of rich lady hobbies, is actually pretty admirable. But she got got. And Bill Ackman is showing his whole ass on Twitter and live interviewed on CNBC about it. He's hopping mad and going on the warpath to defend his wife and expose those attacking her.
-- Claudine Gay got got on plagiarism to avoid firing her for racism. That incentivizes the other team to get some of their opps.
Expect a ton of attacks on academics at every level for the next few months.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
8mo ago
Someone who fails at being a salesman, or a business owner, or even at playing basketball worth a damn...doesn't get that. "I'm a nice, decent, hardworking guy...but I can't sell shoes at Nordstrom, I've been working hard to do this and have dreamt of being a salesman since I was 12" is a kind of absurd complaint. He might be a fine human being and maybe he'd make a great heavy equipment operator, but he just doesn't have the talent for sales.
Because your metaphor is severely retarded. Failing to get laid isn't like failing at basketball, or failing at selling shoes, or failing at running a restaurant; it's like being unemployed. Failing at being a lawyer is like failing at sleeping with some particular girl, or some particular genre of girl perhaps. One criticizes a guy who fails at starting his business the same way one criticizes a guy who strikes out with the sorority girls at a party: for lack of skill and ability. One criticizes a guy who sucks at golf the same way one criticizes a guy who can't score with Asian chicks, for lacking some particular talent.
But we ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY criticize men who fail at every single job they try for being lazy, useless, morally worthless, losers, wastes, effeminate, overgrown boys, the cause of the downfall of Western Civ. Men who are unemployed at 30, who don't have or have never had a real job, come in for exactly the same kind of moral criticism we level at incels. When they whine that no one would hire them, we gesture at the want ads. When they whine that the jobs they can get suck, we tell them beggars can't be choosers. When they whine about the Capitalist System, maaaan, that forces them to work to live...we tell them everyone else has to work too. When they really piss us off, we bring up Second Thessalonians.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
9mo ago
To add complications, the 30 something millennial woman is the target audience Mattel was missing when selling Barbies, because they might refuse to buy Barbies for their daughter.
Turning Barbie into a vaguely feminist hobby horse, and neutralizing the old knocks on her, helps sell the dolls to parents who want to buy them for their kids. Barbie was in danger of becoming low status.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
10mo ago
Or people who publicly flipflop on serious ideological issues seem more like psychotics than they do like fair minded thinkers. It often strikes me as arrogance rather than humility.
Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs just seem to have something off in their brains to me.
And I'm old enough to have friends who were complete shitbirds when we were 19 and who found Jesus at 30 and now won't shut up about it. And while I respect them for their change, I kind of reject their lectures. I stayed at a 5 (semi open relationship with the same girl) all along, you were at a 0 (lie to girls about your career and family to try to trick them into sex) and now you're at a 10 (premarital sex will lead to hell). Maybe take a chill pill, a touch of humility, if you were wrong then you might be wrong now.
Taggin @PutAHelmetOn as well, because this relates to his point about the "sacredness of race."
In Vino Veritas.
For a bigger exploration see several chapters of Slingerland's Drunk or listen to him on Rogan, but at core alcohol weakens your ability to suppress impulses you had already. It does not create whole-ass new impulses.
An analogy:
I might get drunk at a party with my wife and hit on one of her female friends (or worse, one of her female enemies!). I might do 8 shots and tell her friend Brittany that she has great tits and we should hang out some time. Afterward, when my wife and/or Brittany's boyfriend confront me, I might say "I'm sorry, I was really drunk, I never would have done that sober." And everyone will understand that what I'm saying is that I wouldn't tell Brittany that I wanted to fuck her if I were sober; it's understood that my urge/impulse/desire to fuck Brittany exists when I'm sober (I'm a straight man after all!) but that absent alcohol I am capable of suppressing that urge in polite society. No one would think that meant that when I'm sober I don't think Brittany has great tits, that would be stupid.
On the other hand, if I get drunk at a party with my wife and I hit on one of her male friends, if I did 12 shots and walked up to Craig and said that I wanted to take him home and bend him over my Eames lounge chair, no amount of pleading about the top shelf tequila would convince them that I'm heterosexual. I might once again plead that I wouldn't have tried to hit on Craig if I were sober because I would suppress the urge to fuck Craig with my full-powered prefrontal cortex, but I couldn't argue that the bourbon created the urge to fuck Craig and I wouldn't have any homosexual impulses if I were sober. That homosexual urge necessarily already existed, before I started drinking, the drinking merely brought it out, suppressed my ability to suppress my urges.
Alcohol causes you to pursue your desires, it does not create those desires.
Same with any other urge I might or might not have. Alcohol doesn't produce new thoughts, just reveals old ones.
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