KingOfTheBailey
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User ID: 1089
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
John Carter: The Bud Light Military
(Or, to use the better title from the comments: "Achilles Shrugged")
I'm not familiar with the author, who seems to be yet another online right substackker. He asserts that America's military capabilities are being stretched increasingly thin (Ukraine, possibly Israel, potentially Taiwan) while the armed forces are missing their recruiting targets. This is the background to his main claim: that the core demographics of America's fighting force ("the Scots-Irish of the Appalachian regions, the good ol’ boys of the South, and the farm boys of the Midwest. Hillbillies and rednecks") have become so sick of the sneering racist abuse that they aren't signing up to fight any more, and while the US Army has tried to go back to a more "traditional" style of ad where white men parachute out of a helicopter, it's failed to bring back the volunteers. Carter compares a previous ad for the US Army ("Emma", the girl with two moms who operates Patriot missile defense systems, roundly mocked at the time by comparisons to a Russian recruiting ad) to the new ad that dropped on 11/6, "Jump" (Twitter, YouTube). Carter parallels it with the attempt at brand rehabilitation like the one Bud Light tried after the Dylan Mulvaney boycott, and if the comment sections of Twitter, YouTube, and his article are anything to go by, it's not going to work either.
KingOfTheBailey
5mo 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
10mo 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
27d ago
If you assume these are pathologically controlling busy bodies, which I think you are right to assume, the fact that anybody can program anything probably terrifies them. They barely understand technology to begin with.
It's worse than that. "SJW's can't code" is a dead meme from 2014 or so. The existence of the Rust community proves that there's now a technical community of true believers, not just entryists writing Codes of Conduct.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
I stumbled upon some parodies of CEO Morgan from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, and you lot are the only people I can share 'em with. Nobody else I know is both sufficiently unhinged and has enough appreciation for the classics:
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
1mo 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
9mo 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!
KingOfTheBailey
12d ago
Have you considered the Alaskan wilderness?
Obviously it's not the most appealing place, but as @George_E_Hale says, you shouldn't just be thinking about yourself.
Choosing where your children grow up is a big influence on their development, so it's worth considering all options.
Kids are resilient, and if they make it to adulthood, the hardship will make them infinitely attractive and set them up for a good life.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
The problem is that the entire point of EA is to stop making decisions using base human impulses and think for a second or two about what's actually going to do the most good. Hence bednets, hence deworming, hence "I care about the suffering of shrimp", hence "annihilate all existence so there's no possibility of suffering", etc. This is a movement that via memes such as "80,000 hours", "the giving what we can pledge", and "earning to give" asks people to redirect nontrivial chunks of their lifetime earning capacity, which those people could have instead used to improve their own lives, or the lives of their families, friends and local communities.
Any redirection of the movement away from this mission is waste by its own definition. That its elites have decided to screw around with polyamory instead of doing the maximally-effective thing in the world reminds me more of a new-age religious sex cult than a movement genuinely interested in improving the world.
KingOfTheBailey
3mo 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
How did you come to this level of faith? I admire that, but I have no idea how to find it. Every church I look at seems to be institutionally sick, or worse. For example: Catholicism is the (lapsed) faith of my family, but all I see of the Catholic Church is a deeply sick organization more interested in suppressing the one area of growth among young people (Latin Mass), deeply divided about how to worship. The Anglicans (or maybe only the English Anglicans?) are navel-gazing about whether God the Father is actually God the Non-Binary, and so on.
I'm also interested in hearing from Catholics (particular TLM Catholics) about how they reconcile belonging to a church that seems to hate its own faithful so much. I can't figure it out.
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
After seeing the general pattern of "no limiting principle" coming from the blue side (on at least trans issues, abortion, and assisted euthanasia), my views have swung towards the pro-life side but in a way that isn't really backed by the traditional axiom of fetal personhood. Instead, it is backed by the revulsion I feel towards people who gleefully abort instead of using birth control, and my view that sex is a serious thing with serious consequences that you do not frivolously engage with. I also strongly believe that humanity needs its best and brightest to reproduce if we want to pass the great filter, and am much more in favor of good people having kids than I was even three years ago. Unlike the traditional red-tribe view, I am somewhat okay with people aborting severely disabled or nonviable fetuses. But that road leads to dark places unless stopped with a limiting principle of its own, and so I cannot endorse it unreservedly either.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
You seem to be a little aggravated that the government got COVID wrong but you are.. also a little mad that they got monkeypox right.. because it feels unequal?
Something like that, because it shows that the correct thoughts were in people's heads and yet they still managed to get COVID so wrong.
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
Well, I buy into it, but then again, I would.
That's the thing, isn't it? When the author equates Briseis with (waves hands) everything: the economy, housing unaffordability (including BlackRock namedrop), the degeneration of The American Woman, the lack of respect from all of society including the command hierarchy, it'll either resonate with a reader as a summary of all the wrongs that have happened lately, or be an unconvincing gish-gallop of vibes. It's not clear to me how much traction articles like this one will gain outside of the online twitter right. Is there any way to know?
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
As we learned from the sudden banning of Dr. Seuss from every mainstream online marketplace, there won't be any integrity. These will be treated as the only versions that ever existed, and we have always been at war with Eastasia.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
I hoped for that in 2016, but nobody seemed interested in reflection then. Six years of TDS later, do you have a reason to believe that this time will be any better?
KingOfTheBailey
5mo 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
11mo ago
Meta: I hope these effortposts are realized, and I hope they're not posted in the main CW thread.
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
2mo 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
2mo ago
Saw this link going around Twitter/X:
https://theccf.ca/emergencies-act-use-unconstitutional/
OTTAWA: The Canadian Constitution Foundation (the “CCF”) is thrilled that Justice Mosley of the Federal Court of Canada has accepted the CCF’s arguments that the invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the Freedom Convoy protests was unreasonable and violated the Charter rights to expression and security against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The government has indicated that it will appeal, so this isn't final. Regardless: what are the actual effects of such a finding? Will the government have to pay any penalty? Can people whose bank accounts were frozen sue the government? Will it cause a significant loss of political capital for Trudeau and his government? Or is it just a slap on the wrist with no real consequences?
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
You've posted that ornery orrery hat again.
I want to identify and discuss a stealth-CW trick that I find particularly irritating: the use of (predominately left-leaning) CW positions used as examples in some other piece of work. I mostly notice this in technical articles: you might be reading an article about writing a program that prints to the console, and the example code will say something like:
I find this quite insidious: it normalizes left viewpoints in a way that's hard to argue against. If you try to say anything, you risk being accused of derailing the discussion with irrelevant politics or otherwise being a Bad Person who violates the norms of a forum. Has anyone seen any examples of this and/or successful arguments deployed against it?
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