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Folamh3


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 13 13:37:36 UTC

https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/


				

User ID: 1175

Folamh3


				
				
				

				
5 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 13 13:37:36 UTC

					
				

				

				

				

				

					

User ID: 1175

also, participation in endurance sport is exceptionally white-coded, and indeed competition at the highest levels is dominated by whites outside of running at marathon distance and below.).

Do you mean anything longer than a marathon is dominated by whites?

This strikes me as a great example of something passing the intellectual Turing test. I think this is exactly how a woke person would justify their opinion. Their opinion is misguided because it's based on an inappropriate generalisation, but I think a woke person would read the description above and think "yes, that's what I'm getting at". And of course, you're right to point out that the opinion contains a grain of truth: competency really isn't a core requirement for some jobs. and many jobs really are sinecures.

God damn, those boys do not miss.

possibly the gayest sport ever

I know BJJ stands for "Brazilian jiu-jitsu". I've known that fact for at least a decade.

But every time I read it, my mind instantly goes to "blowjob-job".

While I am not a particularly big guy, I will self-report that I do believe my work as an endurance athlete has substantially shifted my views against egalitarian perspectives and more towards personal responsibility.

In this post, I argued that support for authoritarianism could be tied to internal vs. external locus of control, and specifically a person's belief that they are capable of protecting themselves from harm (or lack thereof). All things being equal, a gymrat is probably more likely to think he's capable of defending himself from a mugger than someone who rarely exercises. Even a physically fit person will tend to be more confident in their ability to flee from someone who comes at them with a knife, when compared to an obese person who gets winded walking up a flight of stairs. If you don't think you can protect yourself from harm, the natural assumption is that it's the government's job.

This theory would predict that men will generally tend to be more libertarian than women, that gun owners will be more libertarian than non-gun owners (e.g.), that women with husbands will tend to be more libertarian than single women ("I can't defend myself from a home invader, but my husband can protect me"), that younger people will tend to be more libertarian than older people (particularly pronounced in men as their body stops producing as much testosterone).

There was a lot of pushback on my theory at first brush, and the way I phrased it made it sound a bit like I was saying all Democrats are effeminate weaklings and all Republicans are ripped alpha males (obviously neither is remotely true). I think the internal vs. external locus of control might be a more productive framing: an authoritarian believes that it's the government's responsibility to protect him from various kinds of harm (whether that means criminals, Covid or mean words on the Internet), whereas a libertarian believes that it's his own responsibility to protect himself from most kinds of harm. For most people, if you can't do something (and don't want to put the effort into learning), it's only a hop, skip and a jump away from thinking that you shouldn't be expected to do it, that it isn't your responsibility to do it - because otherwise you've admitted that you have responsibilities which you're shirking. From this perspective, support for authoritarianism is sort of like weaponised incompetence on a societal level: much like your annoying colleague who insists that they can't do some trivial task in Excel because they're "not good with computers", authoritarians are people who are unable to protect themselves from harm, refuse to learn (or even change their behaviour in order to make harm less likely) and demand that someone else do it for them. And that belief doesn't sit in isolation: if you think it's the government's responsibility to protect you from a range of harms (up to and including nasty words on the Internet), that necessitates the creation or expansion of governmental bodies to carry out said protection, which means raising taxes. Conversely, if Joe (believes that he) can protect himself from certain kinds of harm, and the people who think it's the government's responsibility to protect them from that harm want to raise Joe's taxes to fund it, Joe will quite reasonably retort: "I can do this myself and don't need the government's help - why can't you?"

It's also worth reiterating that a person's assessment of their ability to protect themselves from harm can be flat wrong: there are plenty of physically fit Zoomers who are made of glass and thinking that catching Covid is a death sentence, and plenty of Red men in their seventies who refuse to get vaccinated, stop smoking or wear a seatbelt. But there's probaby some kind of middling-strength correlation between one's actual ability to protect oneself and one's personal assessment of one's ability to protect oneself from harm. To reiterate, a man who goes to the gym three times a week is more likely to believe that he can protect himself than a man who doesn't. A man who owns a gun is more likely to believe that he can protect himself than a man who doesn't, even if he's a clumsy oaf who's more likely to literally shoot himself in the foot than shoot a home invader.

Nonetheless, when Hovde says that fat people are responsible for their own bodies, it seems to me that most Red Tribers basically agree and accept that they’re fat because they like burgers and beer a little too much

As I pointed out here, it's fascinating to note how recently mocking obese people for refusing to take responsibility for their condition was a left-coded belief. Consider this meme, or this one, or this one. Post these on left-leaning subreddits ten years ago and you'll be showered with upvotes; post them today and you'll be accused of being fatphobic, unless the subject of the meme is clearly a member of the Red tribe (prominent MAGA hat).

I'd be curious to see research regarding whether obese conservatives are more likely to hold themselves responsible for the size of their bodies than obese liberals. My gut feeling is that, the higher a person's BMI gets, the probability of blaming their condition on factors outside their control approaches 1, regardless of political alignment.

As much as we'd like to claim that Red Tribers have internal locus of control and Blue Tribers external, I don't think it's quite that simple. I think the real difference is between people with high life satisfaction and low life satisfaction, or high-status vs. low-status. If you're a Blue loser who can't hold down a steady job, the reflexive cope is to blame the patriarchy or Amerikkka or say that you can't work because of your depression or fibromyalgia. If you're a Red loser who can't hold down a steady job, the reflexive cope is to blame it on Biden flooding your county with Mexicans who'll work for peanuts. Successful people, whether Red or Blue, are bound to attribute their success to personal traits and hard work: the "nepo baby" accusation stings even if (especially if!) you self-identify as a woke person who acknowledges that society is set up in such a way that numerous people are afforded all sorts of hereditary unearned privileges. A successful woke person placing their hand on their heart and saying, unprompted, "I acknowledge that my success is partly a result of my unearned white privilege" is effectively a kind of humblebrag, because the category includes hundreds of millions of white people who are nowhere as successful as them. Good luck finding a successful woke person placing their hand on their heart and saying "I acknowledge that my success is partly a result of my dad buying me a house when I was 21 and getting me an internship in Lockheed Martin because the CEO is his golfing buddy."

the Scag

He called it the Hock.

Then it occurred to me that my surprise isn't warranted, as it's natural that the people most likely to fantasize about true crime are the ones most secluded from its reality.

This theory would predict that middle- to upper-class men would consume true crime content at about the same rate as middle- to upper-class women (its natural demographic). Middle- to upper-class men may be slightly more likely to be victims of crime than middle- to upper-class women, but I can't imagine the relative crime victimisation rates are distinct enough to explain the differing rates at which they consume true crime content.

I think true crime content is rather ghoulish and exploitative, and the people who consume it are morbidly fascinated by death and violence. But because they're mostly women, a woke just-so story must be contrived to explain why they consume this content without casting them in an unfavourable light. Hence "women are so scared of being raped or murdered that they consume true crime content as a coping strategy" or whatever. If it was mostly men consuming this content, people would correctly be calling them out for being ghoulish.

https://reason.com/2023/09/23/true-crime-distorts-the-truth-about-crime/ an article I found interesting about why the gender balance skews the way it does.

I understand where you're coming from, and obviously you shouldn't be trying to get a book published if you don't believe it's any good. I'd just caution you against assuming that what feels like your "best work" to you will necessarily inspire that reaction in the people who read it. I think you might be surprised by how many books you've enjoyed were written by people who only wrote them to make rent. The example of Melville is well taken, but Dickens and Hugo were paid by the word. On the other end of the spectrum, Kafka was so embarrassed by his novels that he requested they be destroyed posthumously - and isn't the literary world richer that that request was ignored? Think of how much poorer we'd be if we'd trusted his assessment of his own writing ability.

In my view, literature is often boring because writers force themselves to write when they're not inspired.

I once read this book called 31 Songs by the novelist and music critic Nick Hornby. It features an anecdote where he watches Patti Smith performing live, and he thinks to himself that he wishes music would only be performed by people who are as obviously passionate about their music as Smith is. But then he thinks about this for five minutes, and realises that some of his favourite songs ever were written by people for whom songwriting was a day job; and also there are millions of musicians who are incredibly passionate about their music, but their music sucks. A subjective feeling of "inspiration" on the part of the author doesn't necessarily translate into a work of art which is engaging and compelling for the listener/reader/viewer.

It's very romantic, this idea of great books only being written by people who are extremely emotionally invested in their Art™, but I'm not sure if it describes the reality of the situation. I suspect the average author of Sonic fan fiction is far more emotionally invested in the spiritual journey of his Original Character Do Not Steal than, say, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who pretty much openly stated that the craft of making believable fictional characters is a highly artificial process and no different, really, to what LLMs do. History is littered with examples of authors whose generally-considered magnum opus was written to put food on the table or fulfil a contractual obligation, while the book they poured their heart and soul into is generally considered pretentious, indulgent or masturbatory.

I guess I have in mind writers like Melville or Hemingway, who wrote their masterpieces in a very short window of time.

My understanding is that Melville spent at least a year writing Moby-Dick. Sure that's short considering its word count, but I'd hardly call it short in absolute terms.

Overall I'm a mediocre writer, but in rare moods everything flows out beautifully.

I think this is a misconception of how writing works. Very few writers only write when they feel "inspired", and those that do almost never make a living from their writing.

Writing is a discipline: it's pre-committing to writing 1,000 words a day whether you feel like it or not, whether it feels like pulling teeth. Most writers I've spoken to (or writers who've written about the craft of writing) have generally made peace with the idea that the first draft sucks. As my cousin said "the first draft is you telling the story to yourself".

If you think that in order to be a successful writer, the prose needs to "flow out beautifully" on the first try (at least most of the time) - you're setting yourself up for failure. I imagine the number of successful writers who would describe their writing process like this is vanishingly small.

I bought a pair of Izipizi sunglasses for ~€50 a few months back. I now like them more than my secondhand Ray-Bans, which would have been €250 new.

Congratulations!

I think I'm losing my hair.

How do I stop this from happening.

I just finished reading Orwell's long essay "Inside the Whale" and I'm once again struck by how relevant his political writing still is. He was describing what we now refer to as "the God-shaped hole" in 1940.

With various cod-evo psych theories about how it's a facial expression meant to convey submissiveness.

He describes himself as such. Other people have referred to him as "post-Marxist" or similar. I don't know enough about Marxism or socialism to know which characterisation is accurate.

I think "quokka" is usually disparaging, as it's meant to imply naïveté.

An online image of an emasculate man, often with an excited expression, with an art style based upon the original wojak.

It's derived from the term "soy boy", which refers to the idea that soy products are rich in estrogen (don't ask me if this is true, I've no idea) and that men who consume them are hence low in testosterone.

Some other terms I see a lot which might be confusing to outsiders:

  • motte-and-bailey
  • toxoplasma
  • Moloch
  • scissor statements
  • NPC

Delighted this exists, great idea.

I'm not sure in which context you've encountered "Varg", but it may be a reference to Varg Vikernes, a neo-Nazi paganist metal musician from Norway, who records music under the name Burzum and was convicted for murdering a bandmate and burning down multiple churches in the early 90s.

These were self-identified anarchists protesting in favour of a public mask mandate enforced by the state, not a commune.

the sheer weirdness of the idea that being a revolutionary is congruent with following public health theater

Freddie deBoer referred to the strange phenomenon of self-professed anarchists protesting in favour of mask mandates as "definitional collapse". See also all the stick that Rage Against the Machine got for requiring proof of vaccination to attend their shows. "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" indeed.

Only two words wrong 😅