Iconochasm
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Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
4d ago
An important ingredient here is that the overwhelming majority of tattoos are just hideous. Aesthetic harm. Visual downgrade. I know of a grand total of one person whose tattoos actually look good, and I think the secret sauce is that he has only a few, and they're perfectly sized to be clearly visible and framed on his body as you would normally look at them. Most people look like either a toddler slapped stickers on them, or like a derelict wall in a shit part of down.
Iconochasm
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3d ago
So far the only theory I've heard that makes sense is that important US interests are presently depending on the kompromat and none of this can see the light of day for reasons Trump wasn't privy to when campaigning or when he was president.
I'm leaning towards "any relevant evidence was destroyed by someone years ago". If there was damning evidence about Trump, I'm 99.999% certain it would have been "leaked". And if there still existed any damning evidence, I don't think Team Trump has the unified discipline to not have any actual leaks.
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3d ago
The "Grok wants to rape Will Stancil" thing is still ongoing. Will even went on the local news about it. The memes and jokes are just spectacular. This is the funniest fucking thing that's happened on the internet since Trump put all the libtards in crystals.
But the thing that pushed me to share the unhinged, surrealist joy of the Dankest Timeline was this absolute bunker-buster of a post from Big Yud himself.
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3d ago
So, does that mean the lack of broad, vocal denounciations of Newsome's take here means that the Democrats support illegal immigrant child slavery on drug farms?
Have any Democrats spoken up about the dozen antifa who organized that pathetic mass murder attempt on ICE agents?
How many of these questions could I throw at you before you reject the premise?
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3d ago
I often see right-wingers online virtue signalling about women with tattoos. They'll see a photo of a hot woman who has tattoos and start posting stuff like "eww disgusting" or "why did she ruin her body with that". I am convinced that 99% of these guys would fuck the hot woman without any hesitation if they had a chance, tattoos or not. It's just a big virtue signalling LARP to pretend to other guys that they care more about tattoos than they actually do.
"Ugly" doesn't mean "total deal-breaker". I've been in relationships when the woman got a thing for tats. I didn't care for them, but I wasn't going to end a relationship over it. The associated decline in decision-making quality... not that was something to walk away over.
I took my daughter to a concert this weekend, and there were a ton of women with tattoos. The daughter has been expressing some interest, and I got to point out to how crappy almost all of them looked, even using the "like a toddler slapped stickers all over you" line. We had some good laughs on the way home about some of the... bold fashion choices on display.
Iconochasm
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3d ago
I'm not concerned that these Guatemalans coming across the border are going to out-compete whites because they have a "better" culture.
There are many grounds on which a person can compete. "I'm cheaper because I ignore all employment, construction and safety laws and regulations" is certainly a niche, but it's not a given that it's a niche we ought to tolerate.
Seems mostly fine. It's hard to tell what, if anything, might be actually objectionable. Most of the articles I've seen criticizing it are of the "outrageously stupid and blatant fearmongering propaganda" type, that actively doesn't want you to understand anything at all except Blue Team Good Red Team Bad.
For example, the increase to the deficit seems to be mostly the extension of the 2017 tax cuts? The ones where, after they passed them, tax revenues went up? I feel like I need to see a homework essay about the Laffer Curve and the limits and gameabillity of CBO scoring before anyone complaining about this deserves to be taken seriously.
Same with the Medicaid thing. When this was first being proposed months ago, progressives crashed out about it, and the actual numbers were "lower rate of increase" rather than anything a mentally healthy person would call a "cut". And again, all of the articles look like unhinged fearmongering from wordcels who don't understand calculus, and aren't even trying to understand what is even actually happening.
17 million people losing Medicaid... do you mean illegal immigrants? 14 states openly give Medicaid to illegal immigrants. And that's not counting however many more are getting it on fake SSNs. Some people might lose access due to the 20 hour per week work requirement for healthy people, but let me give you an example.
My employees at MegaCorp are generally hired for full time positions. The starting pay is... not great. Hourly wages, works out to around 75% of the median salary in the state. If you're working full time.
One of my employees has been slowly getting her hours cut back. She's continually late. Frequently calls out. Zero interest in learning the position better, or working towards a promotion. At this point she's working 15-25 hours per week. Her finances baffle me, because I know she had two kids and lives in an apartment by herself. Not only does the math somehow work out, but she takes 2+ vacations a year, one usually international.
But she gets a ton of government benefits. Section 8 housing. Medicaid. Tons of other stuff. My own boss, a woman who varies oddly between pragmatic and bleeding heart, has pulled me aside to express concern about changes to the Section 8 rules. The two of them actually live in the same apartment complex, and my boss pays ~5x as much for a 1BR as the employee does for a 2BR. But her concern was that "they" were going to tighten the rules so that the employee (a perfectly healthy 30yo woman) would have to work more (possibly getting a second job), or pay more, to qualify, because it was absurd that a person like that was barely bothering themselves to show up for part time hours at a single job.
And yet that employee, who is probably subsidized by the state to the tune of something like $50k per year, would still pass the threshold to keep receiving Medicaid.
Also, I'm stoked about the ICE stuff. Democrats are mad about it because if mass deportations happen (or we just stop counting illegals for apportionment in the census), they are going to lose 20-40 House seats and electoral votes, and be relegated to minor league status until they thoroughly reform their extremist ideology.
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3d ago
I may agree, but every study has found tattoos correlate with an increased number of sexual partners in men, so clearly it isn't a widely shared belief.
It takes a deal of decisive confidence to permanently paint some cliched bullshit on your own body where everyone will see it. Also, violence is attractive in men, and as you said, the categories most likely to have personal experience with violence all have tattoos. In a way, the upper class Brooklyn hipster with a sleeve is almost doing Stolen Valor.
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12d ago
It gets thrown around by goblinoids like Richard Hanania to explain why they viscerally hate regular people and instead offer unlimited, unjustified consideration for people with proper credentials, in spite of their decades of total incompetence and failure. It's a sad effort by the untalented to ingratiate themselves into the popular kids table, even as the popular kids are having their lives fall apart.
Iconochasm
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13d ago
distasteful comments
Speaking as a millennial who was raised to genuine colorblindness, complete with black and Jewish cousins... have you ever heard anyone else talk about anyone else?
Iconochasm
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12d ago
Your first two links are both thoroughly articulated arguments in defense of specific positions. They broke no rules. Every one else is free to marshal arguments against them - as I see that you did, terribly, for the first. The second still got a mod warning. The third one is perhaps more openly insulting (if you fall into the exaggerated position it's attacking), but it has always been the case that statements prefaced with "I think" and the like get a lot more leeway. And oh, there you are downthread, completely missing the point of that comment.
Meanwhile, the routine criticism of Turok is that he never actually stakes a position in the first place, but just engages in borderline incoherent, miserable performance art.
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9d ago
I don't know enough about what the names I see look like to tell in a general case. For the specific examples at play, my gut reaction is that the four example leftists all look less healthy and vigorous than my mental model of an average man, getting worse as you go left to right. Drug use, or malnourishment. Maybe a low-T correlation?
For comparison, I think "random Connecticut blue tribe middle class dad" looks healthier and more vigorous than any of them, so it's not just a politics thing.
The conservative examples look marginally better. I'd choose them as teammates in Survivor over the leftists, possible exempting Leftist 1, who looks like he might seriously outperform until the withdrawal kicks in. I'd probably pick a median dude in my community over any of them. Sort of relatedly, but I've heard women complain that dating in DC is a nightmare because so many of the men (all the Dems, but even most of the MAGA policy dorks) are so gay-coded.
But the online right also has it's bodybuilding contingent, and the online left has people like Hasan Piker, who whatever his other flaws, is in shape and good looking.
I do think there are certain types, especially among men, who heavily lean one way or another, and there's likely a biological basis for that, hormone loads affecting (dis)aggreability, independence, confidence, etc.
Iconochasm
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1mo ago
Lol. The only reason anyone knows that basic bitch's name is because she's a naked whore who preys on quokkas. If she were anon, she'd be Substacker #4000. Aella is an object lesson, because she doesn't have the self-awareness to do better. The woman literally pre-plans to have people pin her down and force her to continue with her birthday gangbang while she's - per her own description - screaming in horror. This is probably not someone who should have been left free to run her own life. But if we're going to permit people to make terrible, self-destructive, delusional decisions and also to proselytize them, then we have an obligation to counter that advocacy with scathing rebukes. And, because a large portion of the population is actually not that smart (half are below average!), then we also need to acid-treat those memes into a more easily digestible format (this is what conservatism is, generally speaking).
All of which is to say that the discomfort from being shamed is literally the entire point. If Aella having a crying breakdown because people called her a dumb, dirty whore saves 5 other girls from trying that life path, then from a utilitarian perspective the bullying is an objectively good behavior. If being less mean about it means only 2 girls are swayed, then being kind was the evil option.
And if she doesn't care for that framing, then I would encourage her to consider the entire world of philosophy besides dipshit utilitarianism - probably with some sort of suicide watch on standby.
Iconochasm
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12d ago
Nah, there's a middle ground. "Trad with liberal characteristics" or whatever, where you acknowledge that some people are gonna do what they want and have it mostly work out for them, and encourage them to do it in isolated enclaves like SF, while still discouraging it in the general case.
What we instead got is this monstrous inversion where our successful people generally act conservative in their personal lives while encouraging self-destructive libertinism and emotional disregulation in the rest of the population. This helps those individuals, by hamstringing their competition, but it is virulently anti-social.
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23d ago
I was recently at a Faire type event and briefly saw a family I've known for a long time. The mother was a part of my college-aged social circle, and the older daughter is my son's age. They live down the street, and we have little contact for reasons that will be made abundantly clear.
The younger child, chronologically 5, biologically a son, was clad in a full Faire style Faerie Princess regalia, complete with wings. His long hair was plaited, and every article of clothing was not even unisex, but just straight up girl's clothing and sandals. Anyone seeing a picture of the lad would have thought him a girl, and anyone seeing him as I did, in the minute before I made hurried excuses and fled, would have suspected he was a boy by the way he reached insistantly for an ornate foam weapon, like the song in his blood knew his hand was made to grip a sword. He was stymied in his efforts by the gentle chiding of his blue-haired pussy cuck "father" (I use the scare quotes because I'd bet 5:1 odds that the kid is literally not his).
In the time I've known them, in all my observations, I've never seen the boy hold a ball. Pick up a stick. Have a single instant of non-supervised or mildly rambunctious fun.
I feel so bad for that boy, and so angry at his Devouring Mother, who homeschools both children because our Blue State curriculum isn't woke enough. That situation seems at least as bad as gay conversion camp, and I would call it flatly worse if and when it progresses to medical interventions.
And yet.
I'm not going to violently free the poor oppressed child. I'm not even going to call out his mother. I might say something to the daughter's father, a close friend. I feel a deep aversion to so overtly criticizing the way other people raise their kids, even when I find it abhorent. I might try to slip the kid some ball games, and maybe leave a few High Quality Sticks in his yard, but I probably wouldn't even risk a socially awkward conversation for the sake of it.
Where do you all draw the line? At what point would you intervene? When should the State intervene?
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1mo ago
What is a woman?
I had an epiphany a while back and it's so obvious in retrospect that I'm mad about it. And I don't have anyone else to talk about it with, so you people can suffer this.
They actually don't know what a woman is.
Not everyone. I'm not saying there aren't any AGPs, or bad actors, or just people with extreme dysphoria. But a significant subset, including among the supporters? They actually just don't know.
Like, literally. They are not dissembling. They are not fucking with you. It's not Kolmgorov Complicity. They actually do not have a mental construct for "woman" that is a distinct referent class from a mental construct labeled "man".
I think this is the intersection of a couple of different things.
First, if a core conservative flaw is Othering, perhaps the core progressive flaw is the Typical Mind Fallacy. Think of the guy who can't even pretend to believe that fetuses have souls. Or the dude who looks at a religious extremist screaming "I love killing women and children in the name of my God!", and thinks "This person would adopt all of my beliefs about queer theory if they were just a bit less poor and uneducated and oppressed." Why on earth would that provincial fool do any better at understanding the alien category of "women"?
Especially with the elephant in the room, feminism, insisting that there are no meaningful between men and women that could justify any discrepancy in representation in any professional field. Women are just like men and want the exact same things, right? So, what exactly are the differences you're allowed to talk about?
(Writing prompt: explain gender variances in readership between romantasy and milscifi... to HR.)
And the cruel irony is that a lot of progressive men can traverse that minefield. Just blame the other men for gatekeeping and emotional immaturity. It's not a fair answer. It's not a true answer. But it threads the needle. There are plenty of people who can accomplish that task, because they have the mental agility and verbal IQ to mouth the platitudes while internally running logic straight out of a Hoe Math video.
It creates this doublethink world where everyone is supposed to know what a woman is and how to treat them differently, but never acknowledge the source of that knowledge, or openly admit to any real world implications. In fact, they have to actually deny that knowledge in a mass gaslighting. Remember Darwin? He was doing that all the time. A critical precursor to this epiphany was that time he pulled the mask down a little bit, and expressed his annoyed bewilderment that the rest of us spectrum-y nerds were taking progressive politics literally, instead of understanding it as a cynical exercise in tricking other men into acting like dumbasses.
Now what about the guys who aren't that mercenary cynical socially adroit? What happens when we combine the preceding socially-required doublethink with the common autistic struggle to model other minds? Remember that autistic-to-trans pipeline? Yeah.
So what the hell even is a woman, if you struggle to understand other people in general, and you don't think you're allowed to notice any impactful differences between men and women and all of the smart and successful people in your (blue) tribe sneer at the idea of any meaningful differences? The resulting rationalization is like a pastiche of the Jack Nicholson line: "I think of a man, and then add some cuteness and whimsey".
Which is, I observe, is exactly what it looks like when a pro-T prog guy tries to write women characters. They write women as men with some shallow "loli Dylan Mulanney" cuteness, because they don't actually have a mental model of "women" as having any differences in mentality, life experiences, preferences, traits, qualities or viewpoints compared to men. "A woman is a dude who spends 12 hours writing spreadsheets about Warhammer 40k battleships and then adds a heart emoji and a tee hee at the end. Don't deadname her, bigot."
And terfy ladies, you didn't just sow the seeds here. You plowed the fields, fertilized them, then set up aggressive arrangements of killbot scarecrows to fend off any threats to the seeds. I'm not sure how you can recover from that without rewriting a significant portion of third wave feminism, but maybe that's a me problem.
How would you explain to an autistic teenage boy the differences between boy people and girl people? In a way that provides useful guidance and doesn't make T seem like a normal thing for any boy who isn't obsessed with sports? In a way that let's them successfully navigate the differences?
How do you teach them to actually understand the difference?
Iconochasm
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22d ago
No, that's just how human psychology works. Earnestly keeping in mind the pain suffered by the innocent in the prosecution of a just/necessary/Good war is just asking for your enemies to act like puppy-killing utility demons. That's what dehumanization is for, so you can fight and win without being hobbled and cripped (and eventually, raped, murdered and genocided) by your own suicidal empathy.
It's the same reason conservatives post Ghibli memes about crying deportees. They are no longer willing to give a shred of concern or credibility for crocodile tears of the people who caused the situation on purpose. Accusations of cruelty are met with mockery, because if you give an inch they'll let in another 50 million unvetted randos.
It's the same reason progressives never, ever, ever express any concern about the feelings and harm they may cause to their outgroup. It's the same reason no one is even bothering to try to use anything like this argument on Hamas or Iran, or their supporters in the US.
Just round the situation off to "blame goes to the aggressor" and win the damn war.
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20d ago
There are some talks going around how if we look at the geographical breakdown, it's a separation between transplants (Manhattan LES, Brooklyn Williamsburg, etc.) vs natives (Bronx, deep Brooklyn, deep Queens). I still want to wait for the full numbers though before more speculation.
When those transplants eventually flee the consequences of their votes, what color and letter should they be forced to wear to let everyone know that they are dangerous idiots?
I wonder if Zohran would be open to, say, a 50% wealth tax on people who leave NYC?
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20d ago
Bezos' Addendum to Goodhart's Law: If your anecdotal evidence flies in the face of your data, you are probably measuring the data wrong.
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1mo ago
Worth noting that "all the coworkers are illegal immigrants" is a major disincentive to taking a particular job. Even aside from status stuff, just being able to shoot the shit in a common language vs being the only gringo is a big deal.
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12d ago
Any advice for recovery from serious fatigue?
My new favorite thing is to go to the gym, do arms for 60-90 minutes, and then go hiking with a 40lb backpack for another 1-2 hours.
Unfortunately, afterwards I am kind of obliterated for a few more hours. Obviously some turndown is going to be necessary after expending that much energy, but I'd like to get a higher resting state than "staring blankly at Youtube", and/or a duration shorter than "as long as I was just working out".
And I guess I might specify that I'm hoping for suggestions more like "cold shower" or "hydrate with X" rather than "steroids or meth".
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20d ago
Yes, and they too would be alienated by the tradcon message that puts 100% of the blame for the decline in marriage on men.
"100%" is doing a lot of work there. I see a lot of "Women often suck, but you can only work on yourself, so fix that first", and it seems like it's resonating fairly well. There's a reason Peterson blew up with "Clean your room". "Get good" is a message young men are primed to be ready for.
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1mo ago
The actual best comparison is the 2011 Wisconsin statehouse takeover, wherein a large mass of hostile protestors Occupied the legislature building for the express purpose of preventing legislation from being passed, while openly calling for the deaths of the Republican legislators and governor.
But leftists disrupting legislative proceedings in DC is so common it's banal. There's procedures, where the "rioters" wait in line for their turn to get into the room, make a scene, get "arrested" and then released to go brag about it to their friends.
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1mo ago
Newsome is trying to pivot to look like a moderate in preparation for a presidential run. He needed a Sista Soulja moment here, and instead he's whining on Twitter about how Law and Order will only make things worse. Meanwhile protestors, his constituents, are slashing tires, breaking into federal buildings, and assaulting federal officers while they carry out their duties.
He's the kind of guy who spent his life regurgitating official stats without a hint of critical thinking, because that's what a good student / smart person does, right? But when he gets pushed back, he shows the black heart of a concentration camp guard, just, you know, impotent and sad.
Like a year and a half ago, he got into it with Steve Sailer on HBD. Sailer was polite, but the pile-ons were like watching a herd of lions toy with a sickly gazelle. And Will just did not seem to have the slightest idea how to actually mount an argument when he had to think for himself instead of just repeating the NYT or government stats and he quickly devolved into Downfall, Hitler-In-The-Bunker tier scitzo-ranting about how everyone who disagreed with him were "vermin" who needed to be "expunged", mixed with plaintive cries begging to know why no one else in his tribe was helping him. Why did he argue against the hordes of darkness alone?
And the hordes just spammed him with lines like "Because they know how this ends" and "NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE YOU, WILL".
He's just kind of the biggest, most easily riled dork on the internet, and he can't help himself but enagage every time.
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