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
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
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
10mo 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
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
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
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
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
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
11mo ago
What bothers me about this point is - who in this whole thread said anything about caring about skin color? Hoffmeister25 didn't, neither did I, nor as far as I can tell did anyone else in this thread.
I think any of us would say, if you're white and regularly using hard drugs, sleeping on the street in filthy rags, harassing and violent towards ordinary citizens, and completely uninterested in getting help or changing, then you go in the truck too, and I'll wave goodbye. If you're black and live a responsible life, keep a reasonably tidy home, work some sort of regular job, treat others around you with respect, and deal with problems in an adult manner, then I'm happy to have you as my neighbor and would in fact protest if somebody wanted to drag you off because of your skin color.
If anything out there makes me a little bit skeptical of black people generally, it's not the 13/52 crime statistics, the HBD IQ gap that may or may not actually exist, or any other such statistics; it's the way quite a lot of black people who are in fact leading normal and respectable lives are so quick to assume all white people want to ship them off to some horrible fate due to their skin color when they've never suggested or implied any such thing. As well as a lot of white liberals. If they're never going to trust me no matter what I do, why should I trust them?
JulianRota
9mo ago
I'm still reading And The Band Played On. Probably want to hold more extended commentary until after I finish it, but I am pleasantly surprised so far that it's not at all a dunk against Reaganist budget thriftiness specifically. Nobody looks particularly good in this story, and it seems that the gay community itself and the Federal administrators behaved far more irresponsibly. It's definitely interesting to compare the reaction to the rabid panic associated with Covid-19.
JulianRota
10mo ago
I've tended to be skeptical of the idea, primarily because it's only protection against a very specific type of economic collapse. The kind where something has gone sufficiently seriously wrong with conventional fiat currency that it's dramatically lower value, but there are still sufficient goods available on the market to purchase from people who actually are willing to sell them, and those people are willing to accept precious metals in exchange for them. And have infrastructure to do so, including to weigh and value those metals and store them in such a way that they can't be easily stolen.
If I was going to hoard anything, I'd store primarily actually useful goods, such as non-perishable food, water filters, soap, medical supplies, tools, ammunition, fuel, etc. Those are extremely useful in any type of collapse or catastrophe. If it's one where people actually are exchanging precious metals, you will soon have all you could ever want when all of those people come to buy actually useful things from you with chunks of precious metal. Assuming you think the future is bright enough to actually accept such trades.
Cash is probably also more useful. In any of the much more plausible types of short-term disasters that have happened semi-recently, having at least a few thousand in cash lying around would likely prove very useful, because virtually everyone you might find selling things will be willing to accept it. Most of them probably wouldn't have much idea what to do with precious metals.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I'd note that that incident wasn't exactly randos - it was the work of Red Army Faction, which was backed by the KGB and likely receiving training and materials from them. I don't think any randos are going to be constructing a precisely timed shaped charge IED to take out a target in an armored car.
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
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
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.
JulianRota
8mo ago
FWIW, usually the justification has been that the margin of victory of the winning candidate in most races is much higher than the total volume of mail-in votes, so it doesn't actually matter. At least besides the pseudo-religious justification of having those mail-in voters believe that their vote "counted".
It remains to be seen just how many more mail-in votes (legitimate or questionable...) will take place in this election.
JulianRota
10mo ago
Still reading The Devil's Chessboard. It's mostly a tour through all of the dirty deeds that the CIA did and/or was accused of doing during the Dulles regime during the Cold War.
It's interesting, but it's sufficiently preachy that I feel a little dubious about it's takes on many of these events. I wonder what other takes are out there on these events, if they were really as bad or as unjustified as portrayed.
I perceive a good amount of what I see as two-facedness about the Cold War. During it, it was claimed that the Soviet Union was impossible to beat, we had to learn to live with them, many were quite justifiably worried about the influence they wielded around the world and took broad measures to counter them. Then suddenly they just collapsed one day. After that, magically, everybody always knew they were a house of cards, all the stuff we did to counter them was totally unnecessary and unjustified, and we're a bunch of big stupid jerks for doing it.
I think the truth is more like, yes they absolutely were a grave threat to liberty around the world. We were correct to counter them at every turn. Maybe not every single thing we did in service of that goal contributed to their downfall, but a lot of it did, and there was no way to know for sure at the time what would and what wouldn't. In the grand scheme of things, it was all justified and it did in fact work, and the world is a better place without their regime, even if the process of getting there wasn't the prettiest thing around.
JulianRota
11mo ago
Probably the best reason is that I honestly wasn't sure until I got to your third paragraph whether you were arguing that it's definitely 100% obvious that Biden will or will not be replaced before or at the Democrat convention.
JulianRota
4d ago
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?
JulianRota
2mo 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
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
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
I think focusing on deportation number is missing the point. AFAIK, all realistic plans include most illegal aliens leaving on their own, because driving your own car with your own stuff back is better than being snatched up at random with whatever you have on you at the time and dumped back in Mexico or wherever.
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.
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