KingOfTheBailey
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User ID: 1089
KingOfTheBailey
11mo ago
I appreciate the link and the implicit "are you sure you want to go down this road?" it contains. A couple of years ago, it felt like unbreakable blue-tribe consensus forever, which I found horrifying. Now that things have cracked, and it only took a failed assassination attempt to do it, what is team red supposed to do otherwise? The rhetoric is still that Trump is the most dangerous Threat to Democracy who must be stopped, from the side that usually makes arguments about stochastic terrorism. I see two broad types of strategic response, both awful:
- Claim "principles". This feels like trying to co-operate with defectbot, and seems to bring things further away from balanced, healthy discussion.
- Seek vengeance. This feels really good but escalates the culture war, and seems to bring things further away from balanced, healthy discussion.
I really don't know what culture war disarmament looks like. There needs to be some cross-tribe elite consensus that we stop doing these sort of things, and I don't know how you get there without first putting the shoe on the other foot for a while. The pendulum needs to swing back a little bit, then it needs to be caught.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Is everyone on this board handsome?
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Was the government supposed to tell gay men to stop having sex?
If you take the COVID response as yardstick, which many on the left still endorse, then the answer should be unequivocally "yes". While not the same as HIV/AIDS, I found the contrast between the "stay indoors/wear a mask/etc" response to COVID and the soft-touch response to monkeypox incredibly jarring. After large parts of the country were imprisoned in their own homes and dissent suppressed in response to a novel disease, the message to the gay community dealing with its own novel disease was more like "please consider at least getting the names of the men you have unprotected sex with, so that we can actually attempt some contact tracing". I wish I'd saved some tweets from that era, which feels like another lifetime ago, but my browser history is being uncooperative.
That said, it all seems to have died down, so maybe the monkeypox response worked, which is more than can be said for the COVID response. And perhaps that soft response was necessary to get enough gay men to come forward and get vaccinated, which cut off the transmission chains.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?
Almost certainly, in the same way that they capital-D deaf community can be prickly about things like cochlear implants.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Why should society's failure to reify the pretenses it currently has about teenagers, or parents failing to parent, ever be my fucking problem?
It seems self-evident to me that a citizen should have an interest in the direction of the society in which he lives. As part of that, a citizen should also be interested in the way future adult citizens are likely to turn out.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr 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
2yr ago
One model I've seen activists use is the spectrum of allies: classify people/organizations into "active ally", "passive ally", "neutral", "passive opposition", "active opposition". Other presentations I've seen on this also advise activists to try and move target groups only one step at a time.
Most people who object to the LGBTification of everything have been cowed into "neutral", or at best "passive opposition", but serious right-wing culture warriors (e.g., Rufo) have been able to bring back some "active allies" on the right. OP's friend's company seems to have been moved from the left's "active ally" to "passive ally", at least in its public-facing stance in the US. The spectrum of allies model does not distinguish between true believers and greengrocers, but I don't think that matters too much: the page also quotes that "movements seldom win by overpowering the opposition; they win by shifting the support out from under them." If the non-grifter right wants to stop losing, I think that's a sign they are starting to make some headway.
KingOfTheBailey
2yr ago
You sound completely unhinged, and while I agree that getting off the internet will do you a lot of good (as in, getting out of your own head, getting away from the hope-crushing discourse around dating/relationships/attractiveness, etc), getting that far off the internet will probably kill you. Find something directionally similiar but maybe 1/10,000th the magnitude and do that first.
KingOfTheBailey
2yr ago
The linked photograph doesn't do anything to dispel that notion either — the woman is shot to be functionally anonymous, an interchangeable rent-a-womb in the background. You get the feeling that as soon as she gives birth, she'd be shoved out of the picture entirely, possibly before she's fully recovered. But she's the most important part of the whole thing! None of this happens without her, and so instead I see a celebration of two men's narcissism, and have the uneasy feeling that the impending new life is going to be treated like a teacup dog or other fashionable accessory.
And there are enough examples of pairs of gay paedophiles adopting children to abuse them or rent them back out that it pattern-matches in unfortunate ways. Example 1, example 2. This is culture war red meat and Chinese Cardiologist stuff, so it's hard to draw well-founded conclusions in either direction. However, it is interesting that the couple in the second example were written up by Australia's national public broadcaster in a very flattering article on gay parenthood-by-surrogacy and "can you believe it's this hard for them to be parents"? (The author of the Quadrant article in example 2 was unaware of the wayback machine — archived ABC link.) When the "happy dads" who get the fawning news article turn out to be child abusers, you can see why some people jump to conclusions.
KingOfTheBailey
2yr ago
Scott had an old LiveJournal post about this, where he likened dating to Russian spies trying to identify each other while undercover in the US. On the one-hand, Scott is a pretty neurotic and anxious person who has stared too long into the CW; on the other, it's not exactly wrong. Anyone else remember this? I couldn't find it in the best archive of squid314 that I was able to unearth.
KingOfTheBailey
2yr ago
Because they would consider it an act of submission to the patriarchy, as evidenced by neologisms like "womxn", "herstory", etc.
KingOfTheBailey
3mo ago
TracingWoodgrains once likened him to Nikocado Avocado, a man (or catgirl?) made ever more grotesque by the vehicle that brought money and fame. I cannot unsee it, despite enjoying some of Kulak's earlier writing (like the Alex Jones/WWF piece).
KingOfTheBailey
4mo ago
Fauci, along with the US Surgeon General, lied about the efficacy of masks to manage supply. Fauci also deliberately moved the goalposts on population percentage targets for herd immunity. Those weren't "bad messaging", they were deliberate falsehoods pushed out onto the public.
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
By the way, it's "copyright", not "copywrite" because it's about who has the right to make copies of a work.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
That's the motte. The bailey is that it's one side of a strategic asymmetric rule similar to Dreher's law of merited impossibility ("that's not happening and it's good that it is"). Not a big deal if you comply, but a massive deal if you push back. @WhiningCoil had a great post about it in the why-is-it-always-vidya arena, talking about game mods which remove current-year stuff:
... all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.
I haven't seen a pithy summary of this strategy. It doesn't really fit under кто кого. Maybe "it's not a big deal except that it is"?
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
That's a bit of an over-simplification, isn't it? Mercenaries have been a thing all through history, but it's an economic zone isn't going to inspire a volunteer army.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
You got there, apologized, and worked hard; a sincere apology does a lot to defuse anger. I remember reading an anecdote about martial arts classes. Often, when someone is late, they get told to warm themselves up and are given some number of pushups "as punishment". But the important thing about the pushups is once they're done, they're done. The student is to let go of the shame of being late, and the instructor is to let go of any frustration towards the tardy student.
You probably feel like shit right now. While it is correct to be ashamed of getting smashed and missing work, it is not correct to blow that all out of proportion. You've apologised, and you've done your pushups. Let it go, and be on time from now on. Work hard and work well, but don't flog yourself into further slip-ups. That's better than carrying around anxiety over this.
Back then, I don't remember there being any sort of centralized modding sites.
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames ?
KingOfTheBailey
1yr 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.
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
2yr ago
Some follow-ups, now that I've had the chance to read some of the books. Much of "The Problem of Susan" seems to collapse if its author had read more of the series, instead of considering that final scene in isolation. This locks your counter-analysis into working from scraps, when there's stuff about Susan's attitude in the other books. Even in Prince Caspian, Susan starts to turn away from Aslan and deny what she sees:
"But I've been far worse than you know. I really believed it was him— [Aslan], I mean — yesterday. When he warned us not to go down to the fir wood. And I really believed it was him tonight, when you woke us up. I mean, deep down inside. Or I could have, if I'd let myself. But I just wanted to get out of the woods and — and — oh, I don't know. And what ever am I to say to him?"
At the start of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there's something which looks like the first signs of the invitation-chasing Susan you've been discussing:
It would have cost too much money to take the other three all to America, and Susan had gone. Grown-ups thought her the pretty one of the family and she was no good at school work (though otherwise very old for her age) and Mother said she "would get far more out of a trip to America than the youngsters".
At the end of your post, you write:
There’s no harm in Susan either, even as she is no longer a friend of Narnia. She can always come back.
But at the end of Prince Caspian, Peter tells Edmund and Lucy that it's probably his last time in Narnia: "At least, from what he said, I'm pretty sure he means you to get back some day. But not Su and me. He says we're getting too old." I'm still working through the books so I don't know if that's the last word on the matter, or whether "too old" means something other than chronological age.
KingOfTheBailey
2yr ago
I think your reading is correct because it matches a theme that Lewis revisits in other forms. The Inner Ring is a short essay about it:
I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.
And one of his novels, That Hideous Strength, is in large part about a man almost completely unmaking himself by trying to get into the inner rings:
In his homily “The Inner Ring,” Lewis warned about people who become scoundrels by degrees, making increasingly serious compromises of their integrity and values in order to make their way into an exclusive inner circle. Mark Studdock is quite clearly a victim of the inner-ring syndrome as he tries to gain acceptance at N.I.C.E.
KingOfTheBailey
2yr ago
Can we talk online dating strategy? I've been away from it for a while, but the rest of my life has been running well for a while, I have recent pictures of me doing cool things, and it's probably time to re-add it to the ways I try to meet people.
First up: goals. I'm male, late 30s, never married, no kids, would like to change the last two of those. Had a few short-term relationships over the years, most from various partner dance scenes. You can probably infer a lot of my hobbies from the fact that I post here: nerdy, wordy, techy. Which platforms are doing the best for relationship-minded people these days? Last time around I signed up for Bumble, Hinge, and Tinder; and had the most luck with Hinge, then Tinder, then Bumble.
I've seen a lot of advice about tailoring a profile to specific sections of the dating market, so that the women you want to be into you are more likely to want to start a chat. For those of you who have had success online, how did you decide who to tailor for? There are a few different sides to myself that I could see myself enjoyably sharing with the right woman: I could enjoy camping/climbing/bouldering/etc with an adventurous outdoorsy woman, sharing a table with a nerdy boardgames type, etc. I feel that if I try to list everything, I make a profile that stands for nothing, and doesn't really excite anyone. But I feel also that trying to present one narrow side is inauthentic and makes it more likely that the profile's Elo will tank (more women will dislike it).
Second: I've become pretty right-leaning over the past few years. Not as far as some of our especially based posters here, but probably near the edge of my city's Overton Window. Is it correct to assume that answering "conservative" or even "moderate" for the "politics" question is a kiss of death? There was an interesting thread the other week about political compatibility between partners, and the extent to which people are tolerant of heterodoxy with an established partner. That made me think it might be better to omit it in the initial profile but also not hide it from the women I do meet when it comes up. I don't want to give up my principles for a shot at a relationship (that way leads to lies and ruin), but I also don't want to screen off people who I could actually get along with, had we spent some time learning about each other before diving into politics.
Third: Has all the language model/image generation stuff further warped the dating app landscape yet? I can imagine the bot problem being a lot worse now. Alternatively, have you used it to tune your profile/messages? If so, how did that work out?
I'm very interested in other people's success/failure stories (on-app or off), as well as suggestions for IRL places to meet people.
KingOfTheBailey
2yr ago
I don't quite get this one-- is the post quoting an extreme tweet and then providing commentary?
Yes, that's exactly it. I have personally left (and feel driven out of) many hobbyist spaces thanks to coordinated groups of queer people of some type or other showing up and being aggressively sexual. I don't want to hear about how their hormones make them feel euphoric, I don't want to hear about "lol sex act joke", I want to go back to talking about X.
Did you see @gattsuru's megapost? The bottom chunk has a very thorough answer to the "which distro?" question, though not so much on the "noob manual" side.
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