Gugabe
1yr ago
Honestly it's shocking how sticky some of this stuff is, even if the vast majority of people have just moved on with their lives.
Got asked to take a RAT test to attend a 29th birthday celebration in which nobody is immunocompromised or over 30. Some people just seem to want to live in COVID zero mode forever.
Gugabe
1yr ago
The ending beat of the movie where Wakanda puts resources into fucking Compton after casually ignoring centuries of African issues in Africa is high comedy, though.
In my dating apps experience, putting anything other than 'left' in politics was putting the difficulty on Very Hard.
Which is funny since like 99% of the time in actually matching/talking/meeting girls their own political beliefs were like 60th percentile Left or it just didn't come up.
I feel like on dating apps there's a certain Strawmanization of political spectrum where 'Right = Super fascist' and 'Moderate/Apolitical/whatever = Hiding Super Fascist'. Like how hard is it to just avoid talking about politics for a couple dates until there's enough of a rapport to actually countenance a conversation.
Gugabe
1yr ago
you're so right wing that you can't possibly stay in the closet about it, it would be too obvious, which regardless of your politics isn't a good look, and quite likely maps onto something like "superfascist" anyway.
Agreed the more I think about it. Having enough social awareness to just tick 'Left' on the politics box and 'hide your power level' is a key stumbling block, and also confirms that you're less likely to be a complete pastiche of a raving QAnon-type or whatever overtly, regardless of what your true beliefs are.
Gugabe
1yr ago
Yeah but question becomes exactly what the associated cultural rituals were.
It's one thing if the person opted into it of their own freewill/preference, but there's sufficient quasi-Eunuch 'trans' traditions that I wouldn't really consider to be anything like modern conceptions of free sexual identification
Gugabe
1yr ago
British productions, AFAIK, get skewed a lot by the 'London is the whole of the UK' attitude you frequently see from the BBC so it's far more representative of the % of London with African backgrounds than any sort of a reasonable breakdown of the whole country. Combine that with imported American idpol and it explains why every historical show is so skewed.
Gugabe
1yr ago
The issue is more the healthcare system than retirement itself. Spending obscene amounts of money to tack on an extra year or two of life at the end, generally with awful quality, is what's really contributing to unsustainability.
Gugabe
1yr ago
Israeli identity a bit weird since the nature of their citizenship means that it's relatively easy to flip between being Israeli foremost & being a citizen of another state foremost depending on your advantage.
Also large population of ultra-orthodox who don't really do anything productive economically.
Gugabe
1yr ago
I mean it's hard to phrase it palatably, especially when the majority of democracies have huge, strong voting blocs of the elderly... but modern conceptions of state-funded retirement just don't really mesh with any economic or societal sensibility.
Retiring at 60 from a life of hard labor when you had a life expectancy of 70ish and end-of-life care was more palliative and less 'here is 98% of your lifetime healthcare spending in order to eke out another 6 months of nil life quality' combine it with the majority of jobs becoming increasingly vague laptop sinecures with little-to-no coherent output and the whole 'I earned my retirement on the public purse' thing is also getting odd.
Gugabe
1yr ago
Then again, we don't have anything like the Villages, so perhaps there is a much shorter distance to fall.
Arguably parts of Spain & Portugal were essentially the Villages pre-Brexit
Gugabe
1yr ago
Yeah. I mean worse players have managed to ride the pine for a couple seasons, but a combination of him being super-specialized and outspoken meant that he probably lost out on that kind of role.
Gugabe
1yr ago
I'll be fairly surprised if the monarchy survives the decade. Charles nowhere near as endearing/feature of everybody's lives.
Gugabe
1yr ago
Autism cures are a weird subject in my view, since it depends where exactly you sit on the spectrum.
Which of the following needs a cure?
Somebody with severe life-impacting autism who is happy day-to-day as a result of simply not comprehending their condition and having relatively simple needs & wants. Their perceived quality of life might actually drop if 'cured' from a POV of pure day-to-day happiness.
Somebody with largely high-functioning autism who's prone to depressive episodes due to their social difficulties but can nonetheless fundamentally function in society. Probably most people in the Motte with a diagnosis.
Somebody who's a borderline genius savant, who's accomplished great feats in their preferred discipline, but who is nonetheless incapable of functioning in broader society. Your Paul Erdos or whatever.
Especially acknowledging the spectrum is broad and that there's tons of points between these three. My experience of most 'cure autism' groups is that they're focused expressly on reducing the incidence of the first group of people who are totally unfit for society. Meanwhile as somebody in the second group, who comes from a lineage of other people in the second group, it does feel like a peculiar form of erasure. I've been able to parlay the trade-offs from being high-functioning autistic into professional and personal success, and whilst I'd love some sort of 'everything remains the exact same in terms of intellect and skills but suddenly my brain parses social cues intuitively' trade-off, I suspect that wouldn't be the case. Without even getting into the societal level trade-offs of 'alright we've cured autism, but suddenly we're running low on iconoclastic disagreeable genius inventors'.
I can't really remark on Deafness, and I'm sure there'd be similar arguments to be made that whilst Deafness is clearly a disability, there's a certain attachment to the culture of Deafness that exists, but I feel that Autism is fundamentally different since there's more of an associated trade-off than with most conditions.
Gugabe
1yr ago
refuge for right-wingers
I mean it kind of inherently is, due to the overton window for most of Reddit being like 90th percentile Left to 40th percentile Left, which also produces a lot of the 'I was kicked out of the Motte for speaking truth to grotty Right Wingers, but can't possibly be wrong since the rest of Reddit agrees with me' dynamics.
Gugabe
1yr ago
He's already 73 and it's a largely ceremonial role. I'm sure he'll be a bit more outspoken, but can't really see it turning into much in practice.
Gugabe
1yr ago
Gender dysphoric individuals exist, but it's fairly arbitrary how the rest of society chooses to class them. 'There are people who feel that they are a different gender to their birth gender' is factual, everything beyond that is open to interpretation.
Gugabe
1yr ago
Yes but the political events are sufficiently spaced & he's now got sufficient capture of the audience that there's no real advantage to him in putting his status to any real test.
Gugabe
1yr ago
covid was a very minor plague in comparison
As an actual disease, sure. In terms of economic, lifestyle and cultural consequences I'd argue it got inflated into one of the biggest ever
Gugabe
1yr ago
The teacher example's got a lot to do with the proximity to the age of consent, though?
Then again I'd feel differently about like 3 different hypothetical situations of
50-something CEO sleeping with fresh, 20 year old Intern in first real job
30-something middle manager sleeping with mid-twenties graduate who is their direct report
40-something senior middle manager sleeping with middler middle manager who's also in their 40s.
Gugabe
1yr ago
Oh I'm gonna take the RAT test as a respect to their cultural beliefs but the fact that it's even a conversation is amazing to me.
Gugabe
1yr ago
Still by virtue of it being a very small number, you'd imagine it'd have changed hands a bunch unless he's literally only the 7th person to hold the post since the secret service debuted.
Gugabe
1yr ago
Amusingly there were some critical articles released around the last season claiming that the show was ‘whitewashing’ the British Empire. I suppose it kind of does, in that if you were a random western teenager with little knowledge of history the Empire portrayed and suggested at on the show seems like a much more modern, tolerant and DEI-affirming multicultural polity (at least from the perspective of the metropole) than it actually was.
I mean how can they simultaneously diversity-cast historically-set media whilst not whitewashing the lack of diversity?
Gugabe
1yr ago
Different optics on the justice system just failing to do its job initially versus actively pardoning people, IMO.
Gugabe
1yr ago
It generally makes it difficult lines to tread. I'm in a management position, and feel like I can be a lot more hands-on and mentoring with my male graduates/juniors than I can with females. Not that there's anything wrong with the latter, but even a small % chance of it being a career/financial/reputational landmine means I've gotta be cautious.
My take on this has always been that there'll be some skewering movie that comes out in 5-10 years about this period, and it'll mark the quiet transition of intelligentsia opinion into a 'Iraq WMDs' kind of an issue in which everybody pretends they secretly didn't believe all along.
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