BANNED USER: /comment/212921
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JTarrou
11B2O/IDPAM/USPSAA/BJJB
User ID: 196
Banned by: @naraburns
JTarrou
6mo ago
I smell statistical bullshit.
My normal standard of living has taken a noticeable if not disastrous turn. My pay is roughly the same, my costs are a third higher to double on most normal expenses (energy, groceries etc.). My rent is up 30%, the value of my savings is down 20%, and the cost of buying a house is up 50%.
Three years ago I had a lot more disposable income. Now, all that might fit fine within the "economy is doing fine" narrative, but it doesn't feel fine to me. What I hear from posts like this is "economic metrics are bullshit statistical lies". I am noticeably poorer today than I was in 2020. All the statistics in the world aren't going to change that.
JTarrou
1mo ago
If by "high IQ" you mean an SD or two above average, I absolutely agree. Being smarter than the average bear is a big advantage. If by "high IQ" you mean "higher IQ means more success", then it's obviously wrong. There's a bell curve to functionality for IQ too. Everyone who runs an institution is probably above average IQ. But virtually none of the smartest people in the world are in charge of much of anything. Leaders are also all high in ambition, social dominance, that sort of thing as well.
Intelligence is hyper-optimized. Like, for instance, physical skills. Good athletes are not necessarily smart, but they tend to be above average, and at the top of any sport, they are usually quite smart. But at the top end, say, bodybuilding, the proxies being chased are so remote from reality that it ceases to be functional. People who wind up in charge of things disproportionately have some athletic background or pursuit, although not necessarily a high-level one. Does being athletic predict success? Yeah, kinda. Does that mean the strongest person is always in charge? Not even a little. If you could invent a test that would score athleticism, you'd see a good correlation with both sporting success and with life achievement. Should we re-orient society to min-max this AQ?
I'm not bagging on IQ so much as urging people to consider other factors and a wider context. Yes, intelligence is important for a whole lot of things. So is everything else.
JTarrou
2mo ago
Well, this is the previous "sex dolls" from PD2
Sounds to me like projection
JTarrou
8mo ago
This sensible advice will always founder on the rocks of female sexuality. Women do not want to be safe, they do not want safe men, and if the literature they consume is any clue, practically every "romance" novel has a positively described rape scene in it. Rape is simultaneously a hideous crime and the central sexual fantasy.
Gay guys don't want to catch HIV, but they want to do all the stuff that produces that outcome. Straight dudes don't want to get stabbed by a crazy girlfriend, but they definitely want all the stuff that produces that outcome. We are all enslaved by our own sexuality to a greater or lesser degree. Some people don't have much trouble with it, but it's a reliable failure mode of humanity.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Thanks for the sympathy.
I am lucky, in many ways. I could think of it all as bad luck, but that ignores the full range of possibilities. I know how bad things can actually get, and complaining about my relationships on the internet from my climate-controlled townhouse is far from the worst possible outcome.
JTarrou
1mo ago
I disagree. Value can only come from within.
My philosophy is that value is created by sacrifice.
Things, people, institutions, are only worth what people give up to get them.
To become a better man, a greater man, you must find more to sacrifice. This is why the ancients burned their children, the ultimate evolutionary sacrifice.
There is no objective value in the Universe. The universe does not care.
Only our subjective experience imputes value to the randomness of nature.
And our subjective experience grants value to those things we give the most to get. By definition. That which is easily attainable is not valuable. Value is scarcity. Suffering is cheap. Making it produce something positive is hard.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Is it too late to save your marriage? Do you even want to?
Barring some highly unlikely miracle scenarios involving lightning strikes, brain tumors or religious conversion, I think so. And yes, yes I would. I would and have given damn near anything to make it work. We don't control other people. We can only control what we do in response.
JTarrou
6mo ago
People don't change. Despite every generation thinking they're the first ones to ever apply intelligence and morality to the problems of the world, they are not. The people who live today are the exact moral equivalents of Salem, or Mao's China, or interwar Germany. They're just pushing their bigotries, hatreds and moral panics along different channels. It has always been this way and always will be. We cannot predict which issues will rise to salience, but we can predict with absolute certainty the psychology and behavior of the people in aggregate.
I believe the current mishmash is a religious void being filled by various cults, one of which will eventually rise to prominence and challenge "traditional" (whatever that means) christianity for the default belief system of western civilization. The "In this house, we believe...." posters are the early adherents.
Re-read your Hoffer if you want to know how it's going to play out.
JTarrou
2mo ago
The vest, properly set up. There's a heirarchy of clubs, insignia, arrangement, patches etc.
JTarrou
6mo ago
I doubt you can extrapolate much from a year or so of missed recruiting goals in a strong job market.
But there might be a kernel of truth that the sort of people who generally staff the pointy bits of the military are increasingly skeptical of their role as the enforcers of a world order that is explicitly hostile to them, their families, states, politics and demographics.
We know very little directly, but what we do have from the bronze age in terms of written inscriptions is mostly kings boasting about how many thousands of people they killed in various inventive and horrifying ways, how many they carried off into slavery and how many they sacrificed to various deities. This was the propaganda being put out to impress the populace, which says something about the public morals of the day. And the fact that there were several empires maintaining major standing armies, all our evidence points to a time of significant, regular state violence on a mass scale. Many of our remaining bronze age-era human remains were killed, and many of the ones that weren't have healed wounds from repeated violence. Even Pharaohs were sometimes bashed in the head with a mace.
It may be the case that in the smaller societies which left much less historical footprint, violence was less than in settled cities. No way to really tell for sure. What we have says that these people were far more violent than most modern states before the collapse. Then things got worse.
A sample inscription from an Assyrian king:
In strife and conflict I besieged and conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I captured many troops alive: I cut off of some their arms and hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears, and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of the heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city.
JTarrou
4mo ago
are we all ok with calling BAP a racist, after posts like this?
I'm ok with calling both you and BAP racists. After all, isn't everyone?
JTarrou
4mo ago
Veganizm can't be argued with because it is an ascetic religious belief, not a material one.
Dietary restriction is as old as superstition. The "holy" will always try to display their moral superiority through dietary restriction, dress, and conspicuous consumption.
As a belief, it is an incoherent heresy of Jainism, which the modern vegan is by far too much of a pussy to take to the proper conclusion. If they believed truly, and were consistent, they'd be filtering their water to avoid swallowing a gnat, sweeping the ground gently in front of them to avoid stepping on an ant and starving themselves to death. Make Veganism Great Again.
JTarrou
6mo ago
Lot of projection going on here.
Perhaps you'd like to hear it from the Hamas spokesman in an official interview with the NYT?
I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times
From a member of their Politburo (an apt name, I might add)
“Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such,” said Mr. al-Hayya, the politburo member. “Hamas, the Qassam and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table.”
“This battle was not because we wanted fuel or laborers,” he added. “It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.”
JTarrou
8mo ago
I think you've hit on one leg of a very important elephant.
I've noticed similar phenomena from gun clubs to veterans organizations to churches to beer-league sports. Commonly there is a life cycle, and if the initial stages are strong enough, the legacy can live on a while. But ultimately, unless external conditions are producing more of whatever fed that cause, it dies. I've noped out of a few organizations just because I didn't want to be the last guy holding the bag. When they start canvassing for board members, I'm done.
Some of it is just failing to adapt to the times, but if you adapt to the times too much, you can also crater your organization as it loses focus and splits. For example, if your Street Rod org started taking roller skates, it probably wouldn't help.
Another issue is that almost all organizations eventually end up being run by the people who can be assed to show up and do the clerical work necessary. This naturally concentrates power in the hands of a small minority who can steer the organization along their personal preferences. Occasionally this is done well, but that's a rarity.
A third is that any successful organization is going to generate good will and money, which are natural targets for idiots, grifters, con men, politicians and degenerates everywhere.
FC has it mostly covered, but I thought I'd weigh in about one specific little bit, the "high powered rifle and scope". People who don't shoot guns often think hitting a target at even close distance is easy, but it is anything but. The technical skill needed is relatively high and unlikely to be present in teh sort of people who need to take out opposing drug gangs. But let's say you got a guy who grew up rural and knows how to hunt.
Ok, you go buy a hunting rifle. If you get a scope package, this whole thing becomes harder because the scopes most companies sell on their guns are trash. Or you do your research, buy a decent rifle, get some recommendations for scopes, get good rings etc. Already this is requiring a fair bit of knowledge and around a thousand dollars. You get it all put together and you go zero the gun. Here you need a range of some distance, and at least twenty rounds of ammunition, maybe more. Not a lot of shooting ranges hood adjacent, so you drive out to the country to go to a commercial range and try to keep the staff from reporting on the thugged out hood rats now practicing their marksmanship with brand new rifles. You get zeroed. Then you pack all your shit back to the hood. We're going to assume short ranges of maybe thirty to a couple hundred yards, but if you want to set up "on rooftops", the height of the roof becomes very important. Shooting at steep angles is difficult, and requires specific training to do well. It changes the range math. But let's say the range is short enough it doesn't matter.
So you pop the guy, and now there's a .308 (or comparable caliber) slug somewhere and not many people get killed with long guns. Not a lot of long guns sold in a city. Not a lot of bangers with a bolt gun. You could destroy the gun, but would you rather destroy a two hundred dollar pistol or a thousand dollar rifle? It's hard to hide, the thing is four feet long. If you use it again, the police are going to link those crimes very early. Multiple bangers ambushed with a hunting rifle? A sniper serial killer? Gonna attract attention. Unlike handguns, some 70% of which are the same caliber, hunting rifles come in a staggering array of chamberings, making whichever one you choose relatively much easier to find even without a ballistic match.
Or, you could hand a fourteen-year-old a stolen pistol that retailed for $200 and have him walk up on a motherfucker.
JTarrou
6mo ago
This is a real key issue that I haven't been able to get anyone to bite on when I raised it before. Exactly what are the features of a group with the right to claim territory and "self-determination"? Is it races? Ethnic groups? Language groups? Any group with the military muscle to make it stick? How long does how much of a group have to live in an area before they have a "right" to the land? How long does that "right" last after they leave?
Everyone acts like there is a set of good definitions and well-established international law here, but there just isn't.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Doesn't it?
No. The materialist world is where we live, but we humans are sentient. Meaning we don't live solely in the materialist world, we interface with it through our brains, which are full of delusion and fantasy. Delusion and fantasy are how we overcome the randomness of the universe.
This is all old existentialist philosophy, with roots in stoicism. Camus said that the whole point of life was the revolt against death. To live and experience is to deny death for one more day. Through our offspring (genetic, artistic, ideological, political) we live beyond our own lives, and deny death into the future. It is our task to live our lives as seems best to us, to enjoy what we can, overcome what we cannot, and fight it out to the last.
The last act is bloody, however brave be all the rest of the play. But our own personal experiences are tiny, insignificant things, important only to us. There's six billion people breeding and fighting, all trying to get to the next stage, the next generation, into the future.
JTarrou
2mo ago
As a first order effect, this is just internal political elbows.
From Michigan, there's a scenario where this could matter a lot in the fall, but it's pretty context dependent. Here in Michigan, the south of the state is essentially Democratic, it's where all the big cities are etc. But within the Democratic party, the battle is between the huge, corrupt, ancient racial regimes of the rust belt cities, the 75 corridor, and the more radical university-centered wing of the party headquartered in Ann Arbor and Lansing. Geographically and socially, the muslim community sort of connects these two groups.
Dearborn is at the conjunction of all the highways from Ann Arbor to Detroit. The heavily muslim community is strung out along the 94. The newer or poorer ones work on the Detroit side around the 95% black population, and the older families, with kids at the universities maybe, move toward the lilly-white suburbs of academia.
Same thing my ancestors did, only mine went north, along the 75 to the border with The North, where Republicans live.
You're concentrating so much on the pain and so little on the life.
Life is pain.
Everyone is in pain, but not everyone is using it well. Exercise and getting fat both hurt. When you understand the Myth of Sisyphus, you understand the universe.
As to plans, I figure it will probably take me a few months to get everything in order for a clean break. It's a lot of work, especially in secret. I expect to be ready to file mid-summer.
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