GBRK
1mo ago
You briefly alluded to a system of culture classification i haven't heard of (cavellier, border). Where does it come from?
GBRK
1mo ago
My girlfriend read a lot of werewolf romance when she was younger and in describing it I'm always struck by how she focuses on the fact that the main girl is always chosen by destiny, or outcast for being a runt and later discovered to be extra special, or fated to be the alpha's mate, or whatever. She spends virtually no time describing the werewolf himself. Probably she likes werewolves-qua-werewolves too, but the literary genre serves as more of a promise about what kind of main character you're getting and what story they go through than as a promise to feature long descriptions of buff, hairy men. (Even if they also include those.)
As pertains to marvel movies, marvel movies make a specific promise about what kind of plucky heroes will be on-screen for the audience to identify with. If those heroes then get into romances the audience doesn't care about they actually become less identifiable. So unless a romance is well justified by the characters and plot, it's more of a risk to include them then to not include them.
GBRK
1mo ago
It's worth understanding that werewolf romance isn't about the werewolf-- it's about the girl. The werewolf is just backdrop for a fantasy about becoming materially wealthy and high-status through the interest of a suitor despite the attempts of rivals to interfere. It's the story older women have told younger women for the past hundred thousand years, with only modest embellishments for cultural fit. The distaff counterpart is the story of a young man getting mentored into performing a visible and socially valuable task and being rewarded with wealth and high status as a result.
As pertains to movies, and specifically thunderbolts, tentpole blockbusters typically attempt to have a variety of characters such that everyone in the audience has someone to identify with and follow the movie for. And in eras where characters (and audiences) fit into more traditional gender roles, having a romance was a space-efficient way to simultaneously satisfy the fantasy of the viewers who identified with the male and female characters. But in a movie like thunderbolts, the wealth and status fantasies of women are already intrinsically satisfied by the progression of the plot, and the wealth and status fantasies of men are satisfied by bucky barnes, buff asskicking congressman. A romance wouldn't necessarily detract from that, but the movie would need additional runtime to set one up, and a snappy action movie is very limited by runtime. That extends to a lot of marvel movies-- given that the plot of the movie itself already satisfied most status, wealth, and power fantasies, additionally having a romantic fantasy ends up just not being particularly necessary.
GBRK
1mo ago
Women are more left leaning than men because they're more likely to benefit from government services (healthcare during pregnancy, support for children, longer lives meaning social security and medicare, etc.) There's no need to point to indoctrination when self-interest is already more than explanatory. In the same vein, most people go to college to become professionals in dense urban centers, which also happen to be where government administration and benefits tend to be the most concentrated. There's culture war stuff going on too, but that's basically a proxy for self-interest. It's a mirror of how conservative denial of climate change and performative love of big trucks is downstream of the fact they're more likely to be involved in primary industries, and that people who drive big vehicles long distances are more affected by the price of gas. Throw in people making costly signals of ingroup affiliation and we have the modern situation.
GBRK
1mo ago
They have such little force projection that even terrorism would likely be kept within Democrat strongholds.
It's worth remembering that from the democratic perspective, they only actually need to control the democratic strongholds. That's where the preponderance of the nation's money and services are generated. Primary and manufactured goods are a different matter, but between the coasts, border with mexico, and great lakes, leftists can plausibly trade for those.
The federal government derives the legitimacy it uses to bolster its tax-collecting authority from being broadly popular in blue areas. If that stops being the case, blue areas can still ensure that their citizens receive welfare and medical care, but red areas can't ensure that blue areas will contribute to their economies or enforce their morality. The sanctuary city stuff is a clear-cut example of that. Blue areas wanted a cheap labor force, so they got one, regardless of red areas thought about being undercut.
GBRK
1mo ago
They do this really really slowly and at a projected cost of billions of dollars.
And I'm going to guess that the vast majority of that money goes into the pockets of people who were educated as lawyers. The people working to block or enable it, the politicians pushing or decrying the project, the lobbying groups, the justices who review each project...
The real blackpill is that any society with laws will ultimately be put to the service of those who have the right to argue them. Retvrn to kritarchy; abandon ALL laws except those decided on by the arbitrary whims of respected community members.
GBRK
2mo ago
...because syria and afghanistan are illiberal shitholes and we should jump at the chance to strengthen ourselves while weakening them?
That's because migrants shouldn't get government welfare besides essential services (e.g., police, fire) and programs know to have a positive rate of return (e.g. childhood education) unless their host country admitted them specifically because they have an attractive skillset justifying recruitment and retention efforts. America is better than europe because most of our immigrants are illegal so we don't need to pay for their medicare or social security. Illegal immigration is better than regular immigration.
GBRK
2mo ago
-- It's not clear how accepting white south africans who want to leave South Africa into the United States can possibly be a bad thing for South Africa.
But it is? I'm extremely pro-immigration because immigration is imperialism. It hoovers up people self-selected for being ambitious and hardworking from other countries, thereby strengthening our nation and weakening our rivals at the exact same time. Academia might claim that immigration claim actually benefits both countries because of remittances, but that's just a classic case of privileging legible measures of contribution (in this case, the accounting value of remittances) over real, but illegible benefits (all the ways people improve their communities my living in them.)
To be clear, this church is full of racists and hypocrites. To believe only white people emigration hurts source countries indicates a massive level of paternalism and contempt for nonwhite peoples, while at the same time believing Afrikaners aren't deserving of humanitarian treatment is of course just pro facie racist against Afrikaners. But the specific argument they're making here isn't entirely wrong.
GBRK
2mo ago
Are you Catholic? And if so: were you raised by and around other Catholics?
Yes. Yes.
The performative outrage by my non-religious ingroup (liberals) is unnecessary and overblown, and I'm not super offended, but I think Trump's post was stupid, and annoying, and I didn't like it.
GBRK
2mo ago
In a post Sunday night on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he has authorized the Department of Commerce and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to slap a 100% tariff “on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”
Well I was never going to pay for the anime I watch anyways lmao.
I remember saying something that if trump actually wanted us to re-industrialize he'd say something like, "china doesn't respect our IP, so we won't respect theirs." I said that not expecting it would ever actually happen because I don't like him, but this could escalate in a really hilarious way. Actually, you know what? I'll make that my official position. If trump gets rid of american respect for foreign IP I will start unironically liking the guy.
GBRK
2mo ago
it's not about sexy new partners but a support system
That's it. That's the whole thing. Romantic involvement and religion are the only part of society modern technology and economics have yet to fully atomize. Polyamory offers both, in a way, to a certain kind of atheist. Polyamory forms a community and ideology at the same time. Of the rat/poly/atheist people I know IRL, two of them single mothers with apparently little to lose, and one of them actually tried Protestantism at an earlier point but couldn't manage to swing the "belief in god" part.
GBRK
2mo ago
It's funny when the ingroup jokes about the ingroup. It's disrespectful when the outgroup jokes about the ingroup. Simple as. Trump isn't catholic, so I don't want him making even relatively harmless jokes about my religion.
GBRK
2mo ago
Have you never seen the word "democratic" defined before? Google says:
a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.
Democracy is about how choices are made, not what those choices are. Nothing precludes a democracy from using force-- either externally or against its own citizens. In particular, the majority overriding a minority and imposing their will by force is so inextricably linked with the nature of democracy that the founders intentionally tried to temper it with anti-democratic republicanism. Argue against democracy itself if you want, but don't argue that sending the 101st to end segregation was anti-democratic.
GBRK
2mo ago
A woman who is genuinely worse off by all possible metrics has no option but to simply settle for less (or not settle at all.) Same logic as profoundly ugly men. But most people have at least something they're exceptional in, and can derive comparative advantage from. Maximize whatever that is. It doesn't matter if you're competing against X other women for X-Y men that care about that trait, it's better than competing against every other woman for traits everyone is looking and optimizing for.
(All of this logic works the same way swapping "women" and "men." It's what I consciously applied to find my current girlfriend.)
Depending on one's view of the soviet union, it could be categorized as either a hostile jungle or a laboratory, but in any case it is not a laboratory of democracy. America's special status, and special success, comes from the fact that both the experiments and the laboratory at large are managed under democratic principles.
GBRK
2mo ago
The difference is that the actions of the 101st were mediated by a democratically elected president rather than an unelected autocrat. The soviet union's member states were a laboratory, just not of democracy.
GBRK
2mo ago
The 101st is an internal force relative to the united states. So long as its application is democratic, the united states remains a laboratory of democracy.
Remember: everything the state does is backed by acts of violence. Whether or not the 101st is an actual, literal presence within a state, the existence of the power to deploy units like the 101st backstops every federal declaration to the states. Demanding "no violence whatsoever" is just the end of the american experiment period.
GBRK
2mo ago
I think this analysis is interesting but fundamentally off the mark. "Jocks" and "nerds" aren't real, except in a descriptive sense. They're polyphyletic groups. There are jock and nerd behaviors, by which we assign the labels, but no jock or nerd etiology. There are multiple causes that might cause a person to externally present as either, and no cause common to either party. It may or may not be correct to say that kids nowadays want to be more like nerds, but trying to attribute deep social changes to that is fundamentally futile. Even if it's true, these kids don't want to be more anxious, or more socially awkward, or pastier-- they just want the positive attributes associated with nerdity... intelligence, education, high-paying jobs. But they aren't copying the monomaniacal focus on studying that creates the "true" nerds and their social problems.
Now, I think you're onto something about the impact of 2008-- but you're missing the root cause. It wasn't the GFC, it was facebook, youtube, and the iphone. Modern kids don't idolize tech founders, they idolize influencers! (Streamers, youtubers, social media stars, etc.) Think about the dynamics of that. From their own perspective, an influencer is just a person-- they're constantly concerned with social approval, and constantly afraid of failing. But from the perspective of an impressionable media-consumer, every influencer is constantly succeeding, because failing or quitting just means means they're seamlessly replaced with another aspirational influencer selling the same vision of success. So the narrative they're fed is: all the most successful people in the world are hyper-vigilant about social consequences and also glued at all times to the drama-and-suffering machines we all have in our pockets.
GBRK
2mo ago
Can you give an example of a system that's not a "laboratory of democracy" then? By that logic Soviet tanks rolling into Prague just shows how the Eastern Block was a "laboratory of democracy".
A laboratory allows for safety equipment and controlled experiments. An external force coming in and wrecking your shit, in contrast, is the law of the jungle. Both lab experiments and warfare let you discover interesting new things about governance, but there's a big difference between your PI coming in and telling you to quit being an incompetent waste of grant funding vs. getting invaded by soviet tanks.
GBRK
2mo ago
What exactly are you referring to? I don't recall any test followed by failure, I only recall a test that was stopped by the federal government through force.
Jim crow laws lead to massive out-migration and a loss of economic and therefore political power. Exactly the same as what's happening to california now. The fact that the feds stopped them by force is exactly the point-- it's the tangible proof that those states lost the ability to contest outside control over their cultures. Now the feds are targeting california discrimination with anti-DEI measures. Seeing the parallels yet?
GBRK
2mo ago
Plenty of states tested exactly that until very recently and failed. Now some states are performing a replication test in the other direction and also failing. What more do you want out of a laboratory? It's enough to test"shooting people is bad for them" and "getting shot by people is bad for you" in separate studies, you don't need to check both hypothesis at the exact same time.
GBRK
2mo ago
I think you're right that the effects of this will be felt years from now, bit that you're completely wrong about the form that will take. Trump's actions are what I'll call "concentric escalation". They fully encapsulate previous democrat tactics re: ignoring administrative norms to enforce control (a conservative would point to "lawfare) which in in term encapsulate previous republican tactics that did essentially the same thing (re: "starve the beast" government shutdown brinksmanship) and so on and so forth since the whighs fought the federalists.
The next step won't just be the democrats trying and failing to assert control over an altered federal bureaucracy, it will be another concentric escalation-- another attempt to make the previous cycle of escalation totally moot. Republicans sidestepped democratic control ofer the courts and agencies by ignoring the courts and agencies. Democrats will sidestep republican control over the budget and military by sidestepping the budget and military. I don't think we'll be at outright vanguardism just yet... But property rights are not a natural law. The government provides them as a service, and services can be cut. Republicans have made an effective bulwark against redistributive taxation, but taxes are not the only means by which property can be redistributed. It doesn't particularly matter if people actually succeed at at adversely posessing or controlling property... raising security requirements alone becomes de-facto redistribution toward the prospect-less young men most likely to get hired for security work.every night watchman, every gated community guard, is a win for the democratic base.
Evs are already superior than gas vehicles for a small but growing proportion of use cases. Fully 2/3rds of my trips happen by electric unicycle these days, and once i hit that my mileage goal (2000 miles, enough to pay for the uni by counting avoided gas spending and depreciation on my car) I'll upgrade to a faster suspension wheel and interested that proportion even further.
For a single person (or pair of adults) in an urban area, EVs and PEVs are great and getting better.
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