KingOfTheBailey
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User ID: 1089
KingOfTheBailey
10mo 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
10mo 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
11mo 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
1yr 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.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
The exact same argument applies when performing important government duties, doesn't it? Don't burn your weirdness points on clothing and presentation, when you can spend them moving the status quo somewhere better.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
I think it came from this 4chan thread.
P.S.: I couldn't find this post using DDG, Google, or even Bing. I had to go to Yandex to dig it up, where I found it straight away.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
One of the great blackpills about the whole GamerGate thing was the realization that "if they're going to do this just for vidya, how corrupt is Serious Journalism?" Then 2016 happened, then 2020, and you know all the rest.
KingOfTheBailey
2d ago
What is the best way to harden a free software community against the sort of drama which recently engulfed the Nix community? Preemptive bans seem like a recipe for getting called an x-phobe, but letting these people stay and build up numbers results in takeovers. Has anyone seen a free software project's community successfully resist the tactics of the woke left?
KingOfTheBailey
4mo 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
5mo ago
The steak is completely immaterial. They wanted a pretext and anything would do. If you'd set no header image and left it as a white background, they'd still find a way to get mad about it. Picking the fight alone is asking to be squashed - a better play would be to build useful parallel infrastructure and a network of supporters, then defend it from being taken over in a plausibly-deniable way (like how some establishments have dress codes because that's a legal proxy for excluding the riff-raff they want to keep out).
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.
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
1yr ago
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is a sci-fi masterpiece hiding inside Civilization 2.5 IN SPACE and some pretty clunky UI. But it is well worth the price of admission, especially now there are fan patches. When a 2000s video game can make a Christian fundamentalist into a sympathetic character, you know it's doing something right.
From the mouth of one of the game's seven leaders:
“As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth’s final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”
— Commissioner Pravin Lal, “U.N. Declaration of Rights”
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
I think you might be ahead of the curve. Over the past few years the right has taken the first stumbling steps towards a culture that might actually stand for something, but none of it is in the "respectable world" where people have faces. (I'll ignore the Right Inc. grifters.) My read is that it started in the chans (maybe for the last time), then went to pseudonymous poasters on reddit and twitter, but it's still at the level of books, where a) the author can publish under a pseudonym (pen names being a thing for a long time) and b) the marginal benefit to the author vastly exceeds the marginal benefit to the megaplatform hosting his work. Whereas in theatre, you're putting your identity on the line. I imagine many of the problems you see in theatre are also repeated in Hollywood; either you stick your head down or you go full Daily Wire or whatever. But theatre doesn't yet seem to have a Daily Wire to shelter people and bootstrapping it seems like a hard problem.
A great rewrite of that conversation from MGS2, voiced by and all about generative AIs. How do you combat disinformation when anyone can generate infinite amounts of it? https://youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
It may not have been a general puritanical thing, and my memory is fuzzy when it comes to the precise ordering of 201x socjus scandals, but it could well have been the accidental prototype that people picked up and ran with. Scott wrote his meditations on livejournal in ~2012, and the elevator incident became the type specimen of "If you ask her out, what's the worst that can happen? She says no?".
And despite being warned about the dangers of superweapon-builders, here we are. Confined to an obscure internet forum because it turns out that superweapons are pretty powerful.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
When I was in High School, I thought the Aes Sedai were oh-so-clever, but making the truth dance is still immoral even if you don't speak literal falsehoods. That journalists of all stripes continue playing this game is partly why I consider their moral development on par with teenagers'.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
It sure broke my trust in the people around me. I now know:
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That people can turn to spying on their neighbors and snitching to the government in the space of a couple of weeks, convinced that they're the good ones.
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That those high-minded statements about human rights to privacy, bodily integrity etc. are all bullshit.
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That any official outlet talking about anything should be assumed to be lying until proven otherwise.
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That not even "once-in-a-generation-pandemic" is a good enough reason to keep people's data private; contact tracing was used to expand the surveillance state all over the world.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Who actually killed this poor girl? The fact that her death was through euthanasia decouples her death from its actual cause, and I think it is important to re-link the two. If the girl had been struck by shrapnel and killed instantly, I would say that ISIS killed her. If the girl had been struck by shrapnel and bled out a week later, I would say that ISIS killed her. If the girl had been struck by shrapnel and lived, but the shrapnel couldn't be removed and five years later, she dies from shrapnel migrating to her vital organs, would I say that ISIS killed her? Probably. What if she was not struck by shrapnel, suffered for five years and died by her government's hand? Did ISIS still kill her?
Or, you could push the responsibility back the other way, drawing on an idea I saw back on Reddit (posted by @KulakRevolt, maybe?) about the monopoly on violence: if the state claims the monopoly on violence, then it becomes responsible for all violence that it allows to happen within its borders, whether through neglect or incompetence. Under this view, the government killed her by allowing ISIS to perform terror attacks within its borders.
Now I think I've just set up one of those bell curve memes, and I don't know which segment I agree with.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
The Time Magazine Piece about the coordination after the 2020 election makes me think this is false, and that there is a lot of coordination.
KingOfTheBailey
2mo ago
I disagree that poly is not victimless. I briefly dated a poly girl, and I hated being put in the double-bind of either not pursuing other women or having to have "the poly/ENM conversation" with them, and the latter made me feel like I was leaking bad memes into the groundwater. Missed out on a possible relationship with a lovely mainstream girl that way because my ethics wouldn't allow me to hook up under those circumstances. I've said this before, but a world where poly is more normalized is a world where it's more acceptable to proposition other people's partners because "they might be poly, you never know these days, she can just say no". And then you have a world where the baseline temptation to cheat is raised, making monogamous life harder for those that want it.
KingOfTheBailey
3mo ago
He is full of confidence that he has but to seek and he will find. And he feels that way (which isn't a bad way to feel, of course) because he is puffed up with sexual confidence. Nevermind that he gained this confidence because he has a stable, supportive relationship.
Bang-on. When I was younger and stupider, and closer to OP's age, I'd stumble into relationships that felt so easy and natural. And then I'd expect to be able to do that all the time, and the grass beyond the fence would start looking pretty damn green. Of course it wouldn't work like that, and I spent a lot of time single.
KingOfTheBailey
3mo ago
desire to try and have casual sex.
I felt similar feelings digging up the Tinder advice pages for whoever it was a couple of weeks back. I'm not as far along these roads as you (either relationship length or intensity of the casual-sex-desire), but I definitely felt it. I sometimes also feel it social dancing: we go out together and have a great time, but of course we dance with other partners, and I feel it dancing with pretty young women who really know how to move and to respond to my lead.
In my case I've finally found someone that I could see things going long with, after years of short-term relationships with (largely) decent women that just didn't work out, a whole lot of heartbreak on the apps, and years of lonely posts to various advice threads across the internet and manosphere. We've been together for a much shorter time than you and Syreen, and while we haven't yet had the exclusivity conversation, it looks pretty close and I find myself excited when I think of her.
Because we haven't had the exclusivity conversation, I'm in this weird position where I have the apps installed, but I don't need to interact with them. I haven't touched Tinder or Bumble for nearly a couple of months, despite them sending increasingly desperate notifications and promotions trying to lure me back. And on Hinge, while I haven't sent a single like, I sometimes open Hinge's "standouts" page and find myself so uninspired. Another one who likes wine and picnics with her dog? Be still, my beating heart! This is the best that the algorithms can find for me?
The grass is nowhere near as green as you think, unless you're a rare specimen. And you're probably not. Pursue novelty within the relationship, or direct that sexual energy into something else which isn't going to blow up one of the best things to have happened to you. Because you're a man, which means you're meant to have a layer of reason and virtue on top of the bag of random impulses.
Another thing to consider, if the anecdote and admonition doesn't help: are you scared of the relationship going well and leading, nearly inevitably, towards the "end state" of marriage? As others have said, it is not a static state, but meant to be a state where new kinds of growth become possible. Kids, yes, but also that you've taken all this bullshit off the table and committed fully to each other.
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
I don't have any good examples. Graham and Determinate Systems seem to be trying to do this with their custom Nix installer, FlakeHub, etc. If they succeed in making a better user experience, then the default Nix experience becomes de facto controlled by a corporate entity instead of the Nix project and Foundation.
Declaring an explicitly antiwoke project will not work: it provokes a reaction and gets taken down before it becomes entrenched, and attracts witches more than contributors. Someone wanting to do something like this would hide his power level, build things that people depended upon, and make damn sure those projects don't get subverted, and work towards positions of community power and influence. I don't know how you defend against hostile forks.
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.
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