KingOfTheBailey
No bio...
User ID: 1089
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Cryptocurrencies marry the reliability and predictability of modern computing with your hard-earned cash. For normies especially, that means machines which mysteriously do different things from day to day, sometimes turn on with totally different user interfaces, sometimes disappear your work, fail with inscrutable error messages, and generally annoy the crap out of you at all times. It is no surprise to me that crypto is not adopted by normies unless they've lost total trust in fiat.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
In case it helps, here's my experience as an online rightish guy who's become interested in Catholicism, though I don't go around posting le epic Deus Vult memes. Would I feel the truth of it? No, and I worry about that sometimes. Currently, I consider conservative Christianity good, in that it binds families together, brings people together across generations, and have definitely noticed that the Christians I know lead better lives, etc. But I don't know if I can (or will ever) consider it true, which is a source of concern and some despair to me, because if I can't get to that, then I feel like I'm damaging their group by being there. As for the wilder stuff like sedevacantism, I was lucky enough that the group I found seems to have its head screwed on. I spoke to one of the lay Brothers about the Church leadership, and he said that they respect and obey the Pope while disagreeing with him, pray for him a lot to help him make better decisions, hold out hope that things will change, and believe they get the Popes they deserve.
But even from the secular pit I've dug myself into, there's been some interesting moments. Sitting and contemplating the quiet and stillness before Mass has been beautiful, and while I can't say I've felt presence there, it's been wonderful to enjoy the absence of outside noise and chatter. It's also been interesting to have spent a lot of time reading about and working on psychological integration and then have another parishioner just casually mention that "sin divides man from God, but it also divides man from himself". Duh! No wonder we're all such messes!
Became an annoying internet atheist during college. Started drifting back towards it due to the culture war, really started being pulled back largely due to Jordan Petersons biblical series lectures.
This part is extremely relatable. That was the biggest thing that made me curious about religion as a tool to organize societies. I had heard about Chesterton's Fence from Scott, become curious about the man behind it and stumbled onto Orthodoxy. Then I looked at some of Bishop Barron's stuff and began irregularly attending local Masses. Started reading Lewis, and discovered many echoes of 2020 in his novel That Hideous Strength. And the more I read, the more interested I become, though I struggle with the actual faith bit and the idea of trusting the men right at the top.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
expect Christianity to make your life worse
This is very interesting, and I hadn't thought about it before. Yes, there's the persecution and all that, but I think there's some kind of "don't defect" at play here: teaching people to delay gratification until even after their death means that their communities can have very low time preference, and if you have few defectors you can possibly even get better immediate results than if you actively sacrificed the future for today.
Jesus doesn't offer heroism, adventure, wives, or children in this life; he offers pain, service, trial, and tears.
I read an article a few months back about the cult popularity of Master and Commander, and how many young men love that movie. Not because they want to be Capt. Aubrey, but because they want to be in his crew and to sacrifice for each other and for a great cause. I'm also reminded of a video by Bishop Barron where he talks about how he thinks the interest in traditional liturgies has been specifically because it's hard: it's the call to sacrifice and spiritual challenge which seems to make people interested. (There's probably a big diversion about Vatican II here too that I'm not qualified to write.)
we were taught that our job as Christians was not to make Christianity attractive to anyone
The people who did the most to attract me to Christianity never proselytized; they quietly lived their lives of faith, and I happened to notice. Whether that's because the Christian life does better in this world because God looks after his own, or because there are good memes baked into the religion, I don't know.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
There's also the "TikTok-induced Tourette's" thing. It makes me wonder how much mental illness in general could be induced by awareness-raising.
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
The unfortunate irony of this is it's probably his conviction that this is true, more than anything else, that makes it so.
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
I wonder if doing a synchronized launch Oppen Barbie Style was an attempt to repeat the Animal Crossing/Doom Eternal launch date crossover stuff, where two extremely different properties had simultaneous and successful launches.
Less about rationality concepts themselves and more about my perception of the community. A feeling like watching my intellectual heroes not just stumble, but faceplant: first, a sense of enthusiasm and a sort of pride that there were people (dare I say, "my people"?) looking to transcend their flaws and start looking seriously at the hardest, most important problem in history — how to align a superintelligence. HMPOR is one of the most engaging works I've ever read; despite EY's often odd prose and the weirdness of the characters, it rewards close reading and sets out both a vision and a warning. And with the sequences (not just EY's, but other writers as well), you get a pretty inspiring offer: learn all this stuff, it will teach you how to win, and then deploy that to win the most important problem in history. Then dismay and disappointment as I learned that even these hardened epistemic defenses were no match for Berkeley, that rationalists ended up more interested in polyamorous group houses than solving the most important problem in history, and only slightly less vulnerable to the woke mind virus than the average normie. @zackmdavis' writing on the trans question takes a long time to get to the point, but it's an important one: there is a reality, and even the most ingroup members of what's meant to be the most reality-connected community threw out all of their epistemic standards just to let their friends claim an alternate sex. This seems to me to mean that even if we succeed at AI-don't-kill-everyone, any AGIs/ASIs we do get will be unacceptably decoupled from reality on at least the woke and trans questions, and anything connected to those. Since if you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy, solving the "AI-don't-kill-everyone" problem becomes harder if you don't even allow yourself to see reality while you're solving it.
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
I remember it from my schooling, and thinking that it was stupid. And then discovering the Jargon File and realizing that there were other sensible people in the world.
KingOfTheBailey
8mo ago
I'm mostly here for Wellness Wednesday and Friday Fun now, and I can't really say that I mind. I haven't seen any CW developments for a while that are genuinely of a new kind.
KingOfTheBailey
8mo ago
The suppression of the Hunter Biden story and the plans outlined in in the TIME Magazine article show that the blob doesn't need to stuff ballots or change totals; they have (had?) enough power over the inputs to the voting system that such crass measures were unnecessary.
Back then, I don't remember there being any sort of centralized modding sites.
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames ?
KingOfTheBailey
7mo ago
It's Skookum, that's just one of his axioms. It seems that his goal is to create a pill so black that light cannot bounce off it at all, and then force himself to swallow it. Why? I cannot tell.
KingOfTheBailey
7mo ago
MTG did have a rule like that initially. It was called "ante", but didn't last very long. From a wiki:
The last card to mention ante was Timmerian Fiends, printed in the 1995 Homelands expansion. Ante is strictly forbidden in DCI-sanctioned play and is only allowed in unsanctioned games where not forbidden by law.
KingOfTheBailey
7mo ago
My god feminine agency is hot. I hope your wife is teaching this behaviour to the next generation.
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
Dancing is a meme recommendation for a reason, and conspicuously missing from your list. When I look over my dating history, almost all the women I've dated came from social dancing. The trick is to do it for long enough that you don't look like you're only there to bring someone home, and to have enough skill that it's enjoyable for the ladies to dance with you. Bonus: this is also around the time it starts to become really fun. If you choose a closer/more intimate style of dance, there are all sorts of subtle escalations, you can see how you react to each other's touch, and so on. But any style in your town with a passable (and, if important to you, a not politically-converged) scene lets you move between dancing and talking when you run out of steam for either.
How does it actually work?
The social night where I met my last ex:
- The night was a social with a "warm-up class" before-hand, before the lights went down and the music really got going.
- I was running late to the class but was able to slot in and do a decent-enough job. I'd been away for ages so there was a bit of "who's this guy?", maybe?
- Once the night shifted from "class" to "party", we had a few dances together. The usual etiquette in this scene was to dance maybe two songs with someone. More is a bit possessive, and less is a bit "I'm not really feeling this". This means that there's a decent rate of churn between partners, and people move on/off the floor pretty regularly. (Different cities and styles will vary here.)
- We'd chatted and danced on-and-off through most of the night, and I also noticed that she was starting to blow off other people's invitations to dance in favor of talking with me. (I'd say it's usually pretty rare to dance with the same person more than twice in a night. We danced two or three times during the night, and then shared the last song.)
- The way we danced as the night wore on became much closer and more and more comfortable. This is hard to describe in words, but it was much more comfortable than the usual "ok you're not a creep so let's dance properly".
- We ended up dancing the final song of the night with each other. I was feeling good about how things were going, and we'd fallen into dancing close again, so I moved her arms from the usual frame to having her elbows behind my neck. (She later told me specifically that she really liked how confidently I did this. I was just having a good time.)
- We ended up talking more once the lights came up, swapped numbers, helped with pack-up, etc. Teed up a date over the phone and took it from there.
I met another of my exes at a class (but I think the social environment is a lot better):
- We'd been going to the same classes for a little while
- The classes tend to have people rotate partners during the lesson, which is great for practice as everyone dances a little differently
- This girl started lingering longer with me when we were practicing, and didn't linger nearly as much with other partners
- Classes often had a "mini-social" at the end, and we'd often find ourselves dancing together after class, maybe a little longer or a little more flirtatiously than strictly necessary.
- So I asked her after class one week, if I "could take her out on a date next week". I like saying "date" because it's absolutely clear. If you give off "secure" vibes, like you're not going to go to pieces or turn into a stalker if she says "no", then at worst she'll just be flattered.
- I have seen other dudes get numbers after classes, so it's definitely a thing people do. But spend a good few weeks building up your skills so you're not "that guy who wants only one thing".
I see a decent number of women on the apps writing things like "I'd rather be approached in person, but that doesn't happen, so here I am". So consider that permission to do so?
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
That's exactly the point of classes. I'm not great, but I got to the point where people started seeking me out to dance, and it's been said that my entire bloodline has two left feet. Just give it a go - worst that can happen is you burn about 8 evenings and still hate it.
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
Yeah I used to dance a Latin style. I found Latin scenes more politically compatible with my views than something like Lindy Hop.
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
Almost certainly not, because real people aren't always online.
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
Go see a therapist and get your mind off of these rails: you have the kind of fixation on an idea that is actually rather common among online autists, only instead of falling into something traditional like trains or gender ideology, you've locked onto this particular idea which will end in its own unique flavor of train wreck.
Registering the prediction now: conditional on you even completing this insane quest, it's not going to make you any more attractive to women. Why? Because you've only doing it to attract women, and that inauthenticity reeks. This is why @screye bangs on about his self-delusion practice to enter female-dominated hobbies, and why men with an honest-to-God mission are attractive: because they are complete in themselves, and aren't forever seeking approval.
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
Do I need to post proof that I am in possession of a one-way plane ticket to Fairbanks?
Yes. Tix or GTFO.
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
You don't happen to have links to those annotated conversations, do you? I tend to struggle online.
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy:
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
That's probably the best hope OP has: joining or establishing a well-run group with strong traditions. You might not be able to create a perpetuity, but you could at least establish a corporation staffed by people who share your values.
Other than that, I guess your best bet is to convert as much of your wealth as possible into physical precious metals and go bury it somewhere.
They piss me off too, but the only way I can productively deal with it is to play the ball as it lies.
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