JulianRota
5d ago
What I haven't seen much commentary on yet is, will Adams and/or Cuomo run against him as an independent? I figure, winning the Democrat nomination makes Mamdani a shoo-in by default in the general. To have a shot at defeating him would probably require a temporary alliance between a very substantial number of more centrist Democrats and pretty much all of the Republicans to all vote for one particular alternate Democrat running as independent. Having a shot at that actually working seems much less likely if both Adams and Cuomo run, especially if they start openly attacking each other.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Some people are just crazy, or, to be a bit more charitable, have vastly different preferences and styles from you in life and relationships.
When meeting people IRL, there's a lot of screening that happens before the conversation, like being at whatever place you met at all, seeing the other person's appearance and behavior before you actually talk, etc. Online dating exposes you to a lot of people who wouldn't have passed those filters at all. So you've got to learn to do that filtering yourself.
In other words, keep firmly in mind what kind of woman you actually want and what kind of relationship you want with her, and reject women who don't seem to match that. Nobody is going to give you a pile of gold stars for going on the most dates. If you're already feeling like you're tiptoeing around and weirded out over text conversation, reject and move on, as an in-person date is likely to be a waste of your time. I'd definitely put being excessively complimentary and sexual before you've met at all in that category.
JulianRota
1mo ago
As a adult man with no kids, I don't think there really are any hard and fast rules, only preferences.
My preference is already to pee in bathrooms. If that's impractical for some reason and I really need to, then I'll do it somewhere else. I would also prefer to do things like only on nature, at least a few yards into some woods, reasonably hard for others to see, etc, but then necessity and lack of availability of good options can override that.
Best recent example was during Covid times in NYC. For a while, it was legal for bars to serve drinks to pedestrians, but not to let anyone inside, so my friends and I would all walk around drinking. No bathrooms open anywhere means when you need to pee, you try to find somewhere reasonably low-traffic and discrete and do it. If you think this doesn't make a lot of sense, I agree, but I didn't make the rules. I guess that's the price for temporarily sort of containing a disease with a 99.9% survival rate (/s).
JulianRota
1mo ago
Are you talking about the "Home" screen recommendations? I agree that it's an annoying layout, but don't you have the "Library" page too? On mine, that shows only your books, with a bunch of layout options. Mine also never actually goes to the "Home" screen unless I actually tap on Home to go there, so I only really ever see the "Library" page. So it doesn't really seem like that big of a deal to me.
Agreeing to pay less than the normal price in exchange for seeing ads is one thing, but it does bug me when the big providers pull a "we are changing the deal", like Amazon Prime video's apparent stance that they will actually start showing ads unless you agree to pay them even more. Fortunately, for now at least, uBlock Origin Lite, which is Manifest V3 compatible, works fine at blocking them, and YouTube ads too.
JulianRota
1mo ago
What ads are you talking about? I just got a new Kindle, and I don't see any ads at all. Just go to Library on the front page, it stays there, and you only see your actual books and their contents. If you go to the Home page, you see some recommendations, which I suppose you could consider ads, but it doesn't ever seem to switch over to that from Library by itself.
Of course, there is the option to save a few bucks on the purchase price in exchange for seeing ads. I hate ads as much as anyone, but I don't have a lot of sympathy if somebody takes the $20 cheaper option for ads and then complains about the ads.
JulianRota
2mo ago
Finished War at Every Door. It seems to me to be more of an overview of guerilla resistance practiced by both sides in East Tennessee in the American Civil War. A little light on the details of what motivated each particular person and how they came to their views, but I suppose that's a bit difficult to know. It's more of a high-school history class level overview of people, places, incidents, and times, but at a high enough level that I found it interesting and easy to keep up with reading.
What I'm more interested in is any evidence to support or refute the theory that the Borderer elements of the American South were never all that into slavery, secession, etc, and it was all a Cavalier thing. After reading this book, I don't think that theory is specifically proven or refuted, but remains a possibility. It does seem to have some possible jumping-off points for further research on the subject, which I may or may not try my hand at at some point.
The book does seem to have a "both sides" view. Both the Confederate and Union armies experienced guerilla resistance and tried various methods to deal with it, some working better than others. The guerilla resistors mostly hassled civilians supporting the other side and small groups of soldiers and civilian Government representatives from the side they were against. They sometimes tried more direct interference with larger-scale military operations, which was mostly of very limited effectiveness and brought down harsh reprisals - the most direct example is the Unionist attempt to burn several bridges early on in the war, which would have impeded the movement of the Confederate armies northward to defend against a then-planned Union invasion (Wikipedia summary). This did not go well and mostly lead to a number of executions by hanging after court-martial.
JulianRota
3mo ago
It is possible to meet girls in a bar. Having any success at doing so is all about stuff like your looks, how they're feeling that night, how funny and interesting you are to them, etc. Offering to buy her or her whole group a drink only works against you, as it makes you seem like a sucker who's too boring to just have a conversation with somebody, and will make you waste the critical first few minutes on boring stuff like figuring out what they want, getting the bartender's attention, placing the order, etc.
If they ask you to buy them a drink, 90% it's this guy is lame, let's see if we can milk him for a free round before we ditch him, and the other 10% is a shit test. It's never in your interest to go along with it.
The bottom line is always, only go to a bar and drink there if it's actually fun for you, regardless of whether there are any girls there or you might stand a chance of getting with them.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Not at all, in fact it's fantastically rare. I think it's just another example of the thing where only ridiculous and outrageous stories of misbehavior get written, upvoted, and shared. The vast majority of them work perfectly fine basically all the time, but nobody tells stories about that.
I live in a decently nice condo building with a board that does maintenance, upkeep, and upgrade of common areas. They all seem perfectly reasonable and competent, and nothing dramatic has ever happened as far as I know. They're all up for re-election every year, but board meeting attendance is fairly low and virtually nobody ever runs to challenge any of the existing officeholders. They seem more barely able to muster enough man-hours to take care of all the things that they ought to than to have a ton of extra time to hassle people over random stupid stuff.
It's been my experience in real life that nobody I've ever met in person had this sort of thing happen to them. Basically everybody in real life will look at you like you're crazy if you express an opinion that it's likely enough to happen to take precautions against. I think that's a much more reliable measure about how much of a risk something actually is than how often you see stories about things on the internet or in the news.
JulianRota
4mo ago
I think that might be true, but is more of a story about how terrible the rest of Europe is than how awesome the Ukraine Army is.
I would expect at least some units are these days excellent at things like holding off a large-scale offensive with a hodgepodge of improvised equipment and donated castoffs. They might now be among the best in the world at modern drone warfare.
On the other hand, they still seem terrible at putting together a solid combined-arms offensive of the type that would be necessary to actually drive the Russians out of their country.
JulianRota
3mo ago
Finished Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles. Found it interesting and a sufficiently unique perspective. Goes on a lot about how a core problem was the refusal of the British Army to really take action against Loyalist militias due to lack of resources and competing demands from height of the Cold War NATO to keep sufficient troops in Europe to counter any possible Soviet large-scale invasion. In addition to all of the usual problems often seen in COIN operations. The British Army didn't seem to spend too much effort on the problem-class of, unit builds up some local relationships, then rotates out after 6 months, new unit rotates in and has to start the relationship-building thing from scratch. Possibly inter-linked with the issue of apparently British Army divisions having their own independent identities and cultures not necessarily tightly linked with any other Army Division.
Also started and finished Blue Dawn which I found from the thread 2 weeks ago. I think I generally like the genre of Red-team action fiction, and I liked the Kelly Turnbull books, but this one just didn't seem that appealing to me. It seemed kind of cringe at times, the premise a little too farfetched. It's not like the Turnbull series isn't farfetched, but it seems to have the vibe of being deliberately and un-self-consciously absurd in a way that I find entertaining and funny.
Now reading War at Every Door, on the splits within the Confederacy in the American Civil War, which I found from this response to one of my older comments (I do get around to this sort of thing eventually, if not always right away). Just started it, but it seems there was a lot more internal dissent and resistance on both the Confederate and Union side than most popular summaries of the war pay attention to.
JulianRota
4mo ago
Pucker up and start kissing some asses!
There's a thing where large hierarchical organizations may have "clans". One or more lower-level workers are loyal to a higher-level patron. They back all of their patron's plays, let them take credit for everything good, deflect blame for anything bad, rat on any other subordinates who aren't with the program, etc. In return, the patron promotes his loyalists with him, gives them plum assignments, protects them from poor reviews and layoffs etc, if only so they can keep on backing him. Pick somebody who seems like they might be such a patron and start kissing some ass.
Just be clear all around, you're looking for somebody prepared to promote for loyalty, not competence. Don't ever display enough independent competence that you're at risk of being promoted without your patron. Swallow your pride and your ego. You're not gonna be buddies with your co-workers either, you need to be selling them out at any opportunity. And obviously, get away from any potential patron who fails to hold up their side of the bargain. With a little bit of luck and skill, you can eventually rise pretty high like this without ever being particularly competent or qualified at anything.
JulianRota
7mo ago
Finished reading And The Band Played On. It didn't really change my views about anything, but it revealed a few aspects that I find interesting.
When I got to the last quarter or so of the book, it started to feel to me like it was an excessively negative or doomer take on the situation. Like, okay, things were pretty bad early on, but we're finally making some real progress, can't we acknowledge that? But nope, it's just negative takes, so we'll just blow by the actual progress and find some new negative aspect to focus on.
Were they correct to slow-walk the response at first? If you look at the actual death toll over the first few years after it was recognized that AIDS exists and is a communicable disease caused by a pathogen, it's pretty low. Only 618 deaths in 1982. 5596 in 1984. It wasn't until 1983 that somebody first calculated that the mean incubation period was likely to be in the neighborhood of 5.5 years, which would infact imply a tremendously increasing death toll over the next decade, which did in fact come to pass. And that of course is just one statician's opinion. How long for that to be accepted to be true by the whole scientific community? How many times has a single or small handful of scientists claimed that something they were working on would be super terrible in the future, so we should invest a ton in it now, which would incidentally be very good for them personally, but turned out to be overblown? I bet it's more than a few. Note that Covid-19, which we responded to far more vigorously, blew right by those early-1980s AIDS death counts in a matter of weeks. The fact that homosexuality was so broadly disliked didn't exactly help, but it doesn't seem super unreasonable that society as a whole didn't jump instantly to fight a disease that doesn't seem to hit all that many people.
It seems likely that a lot of the spreading took place long before there was any recognition that AIDS existed at all. This makes it pretty tough to construct an even vaguely plausibe counter-factual where AIDS is stopped from spreading.
The book seems to poo-poo the idea that it isn't necessary for the Federal Government to allocate extra money to AIDS research, these Federal medical institutes already have plenty of money and are already free to allocate as much of it as they want to anything their scientists find interesting. I think this idea seems pretty reasonable. If AIDS is so important and so dangerous, why can't they infact reallocate money away from other things and into AIDS research? Why does everything need even more of our tax dollars thrown at it? Yeah some scientists will bitch and moan that their pet projects are no longer high enough priority to get funded, but so what. As far as I know, the corporate world cuts off lines of research that aren't sufficiently promising all the time and tells the affected scientists to suck it up. I don't think it's all that terrible for the Government to do the same.
Another aspect that seemed interesting was just how wildly promiscuous at least some members of the gay community are and how opposed many of them are to any suggestion or attempt to cut down on that lifestyle. There was tremendous pushback against things like closing down bathhouses and discouraging gay orgies. It's interesting how all of the poor arguments we complain about today about how doing anything at all mildly negative for any "oppressed group" for any reason, including to try to prevent those people from spreading and dying of an actually lethal disease, is obviously a step on the road to genocide against them. I guess the internet isn't actually that special and there's nothing new under the sun.
JulianRota
4mo ago
Exactly which part is awful? Keeping in mind the order in which these things have been done.
I'm willing to agree that local jurisdictions actively obstructing enforcement of immigration law is awful. Lots of left-leaning jurisdictions have been doing that for decades though.
Dismissing criminal indictments is pretty bad too. But if it's the only stick they've got that's big enough to get them to stop obstructing immigration enforcement, I can live with it. I don't exactly love it, but if that's where we're at now, well then okay I guess.
JulianRota
7mo ago
Finished JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. The second half is more about his experience at Yale Law and how the social connections he made there provided him tremendous opportunity for advancement, along with various musings on what societal and/or policy shifts might be beneficial for his "hillbilly" communities. Nothing super innovative I suppose, but it is interesting to see the issues these communities have getting more attention.
It could also be considered interesting for what isn't in it. There's hardly a word about any sort of substance abuse by Vance himself, not any drug use or heavy drinking, aside from a brief mention that his urine might not pass a drug test when his mother tries to get some clean urine from him to pass her own drug test. Nothing about any sorts of petty crime either. Also nothing about any romantic or sexual interest or behavior aside from meeting and getting with his now-wife.
The positive and charitable take on this is that it's a book that's supposed to be about the economic and social problems of his community and how he overcame them, not a dramatic tell-all. There's also the cynical take that it was written with at least a hope, if not expectation, that it would lead to a bigger career in politics and so anything that anyone might find offensive or scandalous was left out. He does write a lot about how the social contacts and advice he received at Yale opened a lot of doors for him, so it seems pretty reasonable to assume they continued opening doors to making contact with high-level conservative political influencers and launching a skyrocketing political career.
JulianRota
9mo ago
Lately I've tended to think that your vote for President not mattering due to being in a solid Red or Blue state shouldn't make you actually not vote for President because, even though it doesn't actually matter legally, people do pay attention to the National Popular Vote. It can and probably does affect the extent to which a candidate feels they have a mandate from the people to perform bold actions and the extent to which individuals complain that somebody "didn't really win" because they didn't win the NPV.
And so, I will vote for Trump despite being in a deep blue district (Manhattan) that has no chance of him winning.
JulianRota
8mo ago
I think it's mostly the former. Possibly there are a few creative writing exercises on there, but I'm doubtful there's anything organized like that going on about it.
Nobody is going to go to that much effort to spin up male attention just for kicks. If somebody was doing something like that, it'd be for money, and there would be pretty clear tells. Links to OnlyFans accounts or other paid fetish porn sites easy to find, use of accounts that were purchased for higher karma or otherwise artificially karma-boosted by lots of unrelated low-effort posts in mainstream subs, lots more active engagement with male "fans". Not to mention being quarantined by Reddit would be a death-knell for such an operation, to be avoided at all costs or abandoned if unavoidable, rather than a mild inconvenience with some upsides, which is how it seems to be treated. Plus, people doing marketing-like things mostly just aren't all that creative. Go on any porn sub on Reddit, you'll find OnlyFans links behind almost every profile. That's what spinning up male attention looks like.
It smells to me a lot more like a group of fantastically weird people who are mostly self-aware about how weird they are who have built a small and out-of-the-way community to discuss their weird thing than some kind of artificial operation. Perhaps not all that different from this forum here infact.
JulianRota
9mo ago
This seems more like a shallow dunk than an attempt to acknowledge the terrible job pretty much every Westernized government did at responsibly balancing the right of ordinary people to go about their lives versus the actual increased risk to the actually significantly more vulnerable population, rather than pandering to overblown fears stoked by social media culture and letting a bunch of low-information healthcare officials with no accountability to the actual population play tin-pot dictator.
I'd also like to know - many people have stoked fears about supposed healthcare "collapse", but did any healthcare systems anywhere actually do anything that could be described as collapse during the entire Covid era? Exactly what does a "collapse" look like, what are the real consequences of it? I mean things that actually happened, not somebody speculating about what could happen. I think this is a "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" thing - if no healthcare system anywhere actually "collapses", then we're being too restrictive and over-cautious, and we should ease up until there are a few.
JulianRota
2mo ago
Gonna +1 on hire a lawyer to write your will. I gotta figure, if you have enough money to actually care about where it goes when you die, paying a tiny bit for an actual lawyer to do it is a no-brainer.
JulianRota
11mo ago
FWIW, I regard the whole idea of assassination by medium-long range gunshot at a well-known public event to indicate a crazy rando. Someone seriously experienced or some sort of elite intelligence operative would work on acquiring and leveraging specialized intelligence for a much simpler and more certain kill, and good chance of the assassin surviving and escaping.
Especially for someone with a little less protection like a former president and candidate, it's likely that at least a dozen times a week he's just walking around in some random public place with a bunch of random people nearby who haven't been checked for weapons or inclination, with a few USSS bodyguards around. This is mostly reasonably safe since it's highly secret and hard to predict exactly when those encounters will be. If you were super-elite, you'd try to learn about some of these ahead of time, choose one where you're reasonably likely to be able to get away clean after you shoot, and take the shot. Get away clean, and it's a super-mysterious event. It'd be hard to prove afterwards whether it was a crazy rando that just got lucky or really was some kind of elite operative acting on masterfully-obtained evidence.
JulianRota
8mo ago
Yes, there are whole subreddits full of them. /r/Rapekink for example. Yeah I have a thing for digging up weird corners of the internet where utterly bizarre stuff happens.
Evidently, there is such a thing as "rape baiting", where women who actually want to be raped, for whom role-playing isn't enough, go out seeking to be raped. They have a whole FAQ on it, trade tips on how to do it most effectively, and share stories of their most successful attempts!
There's also a lot of women posting there about what happened to them and how they feel about it. Many seem to be struggling, not quite sure how to feel about it. Things like, not liking it, but also not wanting to think of themselves as victims, not seeing it as the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone. I can see going to a place like that when you don't really want the fawning sympathy treatment but aren't quite sure what you actually think about it.
I have no clue what percentage of women overall think or feel along these lines. Even coming up with a way to measure it accurately seems difficult. But there's enough written about it that I don't think it's all fake or like 0.1% or anything like that.
JulianRota
9mo ago
Short version: CWR is dead, yo.
I was a regular there as well as TheMotte on Reddit. Like it says on the tin, their weekly thread is the "Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread". Mostly for rationalist-aligned or adjacent people who were firmly Red Team to post kind of Motte-ish stuff, but with substantially more low-effort ridicule of Blue Team. Fun place to let the hair down a bit, as they say, and talk a little trash without worrying about needing to coddle the other side. I do miss it a bit, but I also enjoy The Motte for what it is.
A decent number of the regulars moved on to a Matrix chat room. It's invite-only, you'll have to show post history that can convince the regulars that you'd fit in. I haven't posted there in a while; I have limited tolerance for chat rooms with people I don't actually hang out with in-person and drink with regularly. I don't know of anywhere you can find that kind of discussion on a public-ish threaded web forum now.
JulianRota
5mo ago
I'm not sure if we've talked about this lately, but do we have any thoughts on what should be done with the Russia-Ukraine war at this point? Seems like as good a time as any to consider grand strategy, with Trump soon to take office in the US.
It's a little surprising that it's still going. It seems pretty clear to me at this point that Russia / Putin has no intention of stopping anytime soon. The sanctions regime that has been put in place seems to have caused them to return to self-sufficiency as much as it has hurt them. I'm doubtful that further attempts to sanction them harder will have any greater effect. The Ukrainians seem to have had impressive determination, especially during the first few months, but they don't seem to have the practical ability to eject the Russian troops, even with extremely generous donations of Western arms. I'm doubtful that's possible at all without large-scale Western intervention. There's also the possibility of allowing them to make more deep strikes into Russia with longer-ranged weapons, but I'm doubtful that anything along those lines can hit hard enough to either seriously disrupt their logistics or their will to fight, at least not without, or maybe even with, so many high-end western arms that it's basically obvious it's the US striking them directly, with all of the potential consequences that could entail.
From the perspective of an American, it's felt for a while like maybe it's time to wind down this conflict, or at least our involvement in it, as far as providing arms and assistance. Are we really accomplishing anything but getting more Ukrainians killed to little effect? And okay yeah, Russia is not our friend, but it's probably only to the United States' benefit to push them so far.
Does anyone have any different opinions? Does anyone see any realistic potential of forcing Russia back without a large-scale escalation that I'm doubtful Americans will accept? The European powers may be more determined to push Russia back, but do they have much practical ability without the US?
JulianRota
6mo ago
Still reading Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.
Curious thing - I often try to guess what's going to happen next in books or movies based on how far through them I am. It's usually pretty effective, even for non-fiction books. But here I am 45% through the book based on my Kindle, and I don't really know where this book is going for the next half of it. They've already covered the Good Friday agreement, where most such books end, and have been going on a while about post-GFA issues, agreements and legal battles regarding how to handle people who were "disappeared" and people who may or may not have been involved in such acts. Apparently, despite the amnesty provisions, you can still be prosecuted for at least some crimes committed during the Troubles years, including for being confirmed to be a member of illegal organizations like the IRA.
It's also rather curious that apparently they still to this day can't figure out for sure what the deal was with poor Jean McConville. It's confirmed that the IRA murdered her and "disappeared" her, but they still to this day claim she was an informant working for the Brits, with radio equipment found in her apartment, who was warned once to stop collaborating before being murdered. Meanwhile, the authorities still claim they don't know anything about here being any kind of informant. But nobody can confirm for sure which one is true.
JulianRota
7mo ago
On 1, not to be too much of a downer, but to at least temper expectations, IME it's been extremely rare to nonexistent to have groups of friends based around an apartment complex. It might happen if the majority of people there are all in some new life situation, like just got to college, or just moved to a new city for their first professional job. If everyone is in very different life situations and already has their own group of friends and family, it's pretty much not happening.
IME, you can't form and sustain an actual group of friends by any individual's sheer will. Everybody who would be in the group has to actually want to be in a new group and make at least some active effort to keep it going. I've seen more than a few "groups" that one or two people seemed really invested in fade into nothing because nobody else was really that into it.
By all means try to be social to those around you. But probably a more realistic expectation is to maybe make one or two actual friends. Try a bunch of other activities as well. You may either find an already-existing group you might be accepted into, or maybe make one or two individual friends at several things and convince some of them to all get together regularly. And don't be too surprised if nobody you meet in many such activities seems to have much interest in being actual friends with anybody else there, including you.
On your 1, I have had some related thoughts that I posted on at greater length here. What mean is I think saying basically "the South should have industrialized more in the 1850s" is a hindsight thing that wouldn't and couldn't have occurred to anyone at the time.
"Couldn't" because at the time of the leadup to the ACW, warfare was, I don't know if this is the best term exactly, but stuck in the pre-industrial ways of war. Winning the day was much more dependent on individual courage, daring, and clever maneuvering of units. The South was actually pretty well-equipped to fight this sort of war against the North already. Industrialized warfare basically hadn't been invented yet at all. The Union stumbled through making it up as they went, eventually figured it out, and proceeded to crush the Confederacy under a mountain of manufactured goods, as all future wars would entail up to the Nuclear age. I don't think anybody had sufficient foresight, or confidence in any such person's foresight, to attempt to optimize for industrial war in advance before it had ever been tried.
"Wouldn't" because, even if we granted the proto-Confederates perfect foresight, to admit a need to optimize for industrial war leads to an inevitable conclusion that plantation slavery is already obsolete and will go onto the old ash-heap of history one way or another before long. In which case, why bother fighting a war for it at all?
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