George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
The things you lean on / are things that don't last
User ID: 107
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2d ago
It's surreal watching Anwar Congo sort of reenact how he would cut people's throats with wire in the chairs they had rigged up. I was also not particularly moved by what some viewers say was his epiphany of the brutality of his own behavior.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2d ago
Similar to be sure, but in practice quite different..This seems obvious to me. I'm typing while walking so forgive the short reply.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2d ago
Well, there's the Dale Carnegie how to win friends and influence people, and then there's the Machiavellian exploitation of others for one's own benefit, or to get one's rocks off. I see a difference.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3d ago
...which makes sense, because the PUA/Game materials are overwhelmingly not about self-improvement, betterment, wellbeing or personal growth as much as grimoires teaching manipulation, deceit, and an approach of smoke and mirrors to get up the skirts (or down the pants, for Americans) of women.
I remember Neil Strauss's book back in the day had its share of how to be "your best self" segments (it was very readable) but his original strain of PUA seems to have been subsumed by the more opportunistic, commodified variety schooling young men to use, for lack of a better word, trickery. Guys who buy into that schtick (literally spending money) deserve a certain amount of sympathy, but then feeling pity for them is the aphrodisiacal equivalent of tarring them with feces.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4d ago
I didn't realize when responding how long the discussion was. Apparently no one else had my impression, in any case.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4d ago
I think in your scenario you're conflating promiscuity (willingness to engage in sex with multiple partners, even multiple partners who are strangers or are relative strangers) and being DTF one's significant other. In my experience (sudden screech of mic feedback) once in a committed relationship, women are DTF almost as much as men, if not moreso (in marriage I'd say moreso, though YMMV, and it's true I married well past my excruciatingly lustful late teens and twenties.)
Now times may have a' changed, it's true, I guess, at least one reads that no one's having sex anymore. They say that about Japan as well but I am convinced that's just bad data.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5d ago
I'll try to make an effort post at some point, thanks for the interest.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5d ago
Are you saying you don't nuzzle up to your ChatGPT?
Regarding tarantulas and cockroaches, kill them with fire. We used to have quite large (big-ass) cockroaches in Alabama, and once I felt the hair on my neck stand up when I saw one launch itself from a high wall and flutter its infernal wings as it glided to the floor. As for spiders I am a lifelong arachnophobe. The camel spiders of the Kalahari (yes yes not arachnids) compounded that trauma tenfold.
In Botswana there were many stray dogs. Probably some mix of Rhodesian Ridgebacks and whatever other feral dogs roamed the Kalahari. They were docile enough when alone and well fed, but wild enough that I wouldn't want to encounter a pack of them in the bush. There was an Afrikaner phrase which basically meant Get out of here which was, if I recall correctly, Vootsak! This--or ar least this was how it was explained to me--was a reduction of the sentence Voort se ek which meant "Forward, I say."
If you shouted "Vootsak" at a dog it seemed to get your meaning, and would fuck itself off. A hand gesture as if flinging seed like someone in a Van Gogh painting helped the message, if you were willing.
I only learned this term because Vootsak, if said to a human, was considered very much fighting words. Unless the human also fucked off, in which case job done, if rather rudely.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5d ago
It's not the cat or even the dander you're allergic to. It's the protein Fel d 1 in the cat's saliva that is transferred to their fur/skin when they groom themselves. Some cat food companies claim to make a kibble that supposedly has anti Fel D 1 antibodies, creating hypoallergenic cats. I have no idea to what degree this works. This won't help with the shit removal or improve the conversation. (Though my black cat will talk to me if I cough.)
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5d ago
This is the most Motte post I've read all week. It's also the first thread I've read so there's that.
I grew up with dogs, but mostly very well-trained dogs. I get your intolerance for dogs, or at least I get your intolerance for dogs that run amok. Dog people (a term I use loosely) often think if they have you over you'll be fine with the dog nuzzling up against you as you're trying to eat the bean burrito. Isn't Buster cute? Look he's hungry. There is also an unquestionable smell of dog in most every indoor dog house. Not necessarily feces, but definitely dog.
I do like dogs and I get that, too. Except most of the dogs in Japan, which I consider odd mutations of what may have once been noble strong breeds but are now tiny, yappy, dew-eyed over-coiffed and overdressed trip hazards. As in you'll trip over them.
We have cats now. Entire different animal type requiring an entirely different mindset. I won't belabor the obvious that everyone already knows when I write that.
I do get your impatience for dogs, though. Though yours is more a hatred and disgust. My own impatience is mostly for the owners. One of the many reasons I quit reddit was the fawning subculture of cat people who would post what they imagined were adorable videos of their cats innocently destroying some expensive tchothcke, or grabbing their McDonald's nugget or whatever embarrassing fast food they were eating, usually in bed. I would typically bite my tongue/typing fingers regarding their questionable hygiene, and instead post a benign "Train your animal, please" and be downvoted to kitty hell. Ok maybe once I said "WTF Train your fucking cat."
I feel as if you were in the wilderness or countryside and had a loyal dog you might change your mind. I could be wrong, though.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
6d ago
There may be a tendency, in such reviews (and I know less about games I suspect than you even claim to know) is that we are captured/limited by our own experiences of the era. I received (and gave away) many mixtapes in the early nineties. You'd write clever titles on the sticker and click out the tab so it couldn't be accidentally erased. I received some really good ones that introduced me to music to which I wouldn't normally have been exposed. You used a pencil also if the tape was particularly stiff or tightly wound, for whatever reason. It wasn't cool. It was just something you did. I can't comment on how 90s teens would have acted as I was mid to late twenties in the 90s. I generally agree with your larger point that film and media people don't get eras right when it's trivially easy to triangulate actual human perspectives of people who lived through them. Don't get me started on how the South is represented (or southern accents).
Carnegie, at least that book, did not strike me as manipulative. It was more like "Be the kind of person that is likeable" and can actually effect change in someone else's view (possibly a naive hope in today's online climate where everything is rhetoric).
To answer, to me it seems like a difference in kind, though I could probably be argued into agreeing that it's actually a difference in degree. The goals of PUA (in practical terms, and as it is often presented in the forms I've seen it) seem more crass and selfish. Again, in The Game I believe Strauss was proposing more of a make yourself a better man philosophy, but that's been corrupted, in my view. To me it's not even the commodifying of the practice (which Carnegie also did, via lectures etc.) it's the purported goals.
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