MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
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User ID: 58
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
7d ago
It hasn’t been quite that long since I’ve deleted my account, only a few years, but I’d put the probability of me using Reddit again on any substantial level again around 5%. It would take a miracle to get me to use it again even on a weekly basis.
It’s joined a bunch of other sites in the dustbin of things I don’t use. Might as well be Friendster or Snapchat at this point.
I’m as much a redditor as I am a Digg user, or a 4chan User, or a SometingAwful user (goon), or a MySpace user, or a Facebook user.
Which is to say, not at all. I don’t use any of those things much at all anymore, even if I have a still active account.
You’re projecting since you’re still using Reddit. I probably spend less than an hour a month on Reddit, only reading it when shared in some other context on some other site. Or when I do a search and the other results are Reddit. Been that way for 3 years at this point.
It got boring. I appealed my ban in a sort of weary indifference, mostly out of curiosity. I knew it wouldn’t work, the site was too far gone and had been that way for years.
When I finally copped the ban I was using it maybe 2hrs a week when I was very bored, I simply didn’t enjoy it much anymore and most of the good communities had long ago gotten zapped by the eye of Sauron. I knew it was just a matter of time before there was literally nothing of value left so I pulled the plug early.
Just like Digg; not with a bang, but a whimper.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
7d ago
Maybe in general, but not in my case. A few years back, after a long downward pattern of less & less use, I copped a permanent ban on absurd grounds, and had my appeal rejected.
I had been for many years, as early as 2016, been slowly enjoying the app less and less. Just took it as a sign that my time was done, deleted my profile, deleted the app, never reinstalled it again.
Every once in a while I’d get a link from somewhere else and just reading the comments for a minute before I inevitably closed it, I’d felt like I’d roll my eyes so hard they were about to pop out of my skull.
We are having this conversation at TheMotte.Org , whose very existence is proof of how shitty Reddit is and has been for a long time.
It’s been clear to me for years that Reddit is mostly just a botnet & super astroturfed influence peddling platform that’s been shrinking itself into an irrelevant echo chamber. It’s honestly incredibly boring.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
7d ago
I’m in sales. Apparently, I’m very good at it.
Much like the modal mottezin I imagine, I grew up a pretty nerdy & introverted male with a high IQ. I would have never guessed I’d make my way in the world in possibly the most common high extroversion / competition/ charisma based job there is.
My Rolodex is filled with literally hundreds of individual people who represent business relationships which all are different, all have to be managed differently, whose individual idiosyncrasies have to be understood and handled, from the most humble little shop owner with a 3 person crew, to corporate structures of thousands of people.
Although I’m a very genuine & straightforward person by nature, getting people to like you is part of the job. I’ve found consistently finding the area of minimum tension between full honesty and being diplomatic is the key.
My whole job, other than the technical know-how which I have and is very important as a baseline, is managing and nurturing relationships.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
8d ago
We could do a Mr Glass / Unbreakable cosplay lol
True story; in college me and my buddies were fucking around in the park at night and my friend jumped out of a tree and accidentally did a flying knee with his full weight right to my collarbone from 10ft up, hurt like shit but I got up and we kept messing around, went and got beers.
Next morning I went to class and then went to work. My shoulder was killing me but I just kept working.
Finally after a week without it getting better I went to the doctor after my girlfriend wouldn’t let up.
Turns out I had a hairline fracture and I had been just walking around like it was nothing. Only time I’ve ever “broken” something.
Both my girls are built like tanks too, so it’s definitely genetic.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
8d ago
That’s got to be it; I think I might have given you or someone else here a hard time about being 6’0” & 160 as when I’m the same height and the last time I was that weight I was a cross country runner in high school and super skinny. I was in good cardiovascular shape but I had essentially no upper body strength.
The difference for me is that I have never broken a bone, I’m likely a true outlier in bone density. During college I gained a lot of weight but started lifting heavy and my best health I was like 225 & 20% body fat which means even with literally no fat I’d be heavier than 160lbs.
I wasn’t even that jacked, but I’m also primarily German / Nordic with significant west African admixture and I’d been athletic my whole life so I think I’m just genetically very dense both in terms of musculature & bone.
Funny enough when I gained all that weight I did it by cutting out all land based meat entirely; it was all fish, eggs, beans, and rice which got me in the best shape of my life.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
8d ago
I think your instinct is correct in general with regards to how much the game is up in terms of being able to “hide your power level”, I’m just an extreme outlier living in an extreme outlier environment.
I have a very social job that requires me to be everyone’s buddy and have an “always on” personality. Disagreements, even polite ones, are not tolerated and heavily punished.
The area I live in is not only deep blue like the Pacific Ocean, it’s extremely isolated from trends that are obvious to outsiders.
I live in the DMV area and close enough to the dark heart of the stay-behind operation of Obama’s America that I’m dealing everyday with maximum ideologically motivated reasoning. I call it the “Iron Bubble”, people are extremely out of touch and in denial with what’s been shifting underneath their feet in the culture at large. Ironically, it’s very “Hitler & his closest associates in the Bunker” vibe, or reminiscent of “Baghdad Bob”.
It’s not surprising, there’s real money and power at stake here with the fall of the old order. Things like DOGE & the fall of DEI broadly have extreme direct consequences to these people. I’d love nothing more than to loosen up and be sincere as is my nature, but it’s like being in a squad of Japanese soldiers who are holed up in an island and don’t know the war is over.
While I don’t doubt your take on your friends is correct, there’s a much misunderstood rise of the “right wing hippie” over the last ten years.
The biggest crunchy hippie I know, who’s a huge enthusiast of yoga and has been on the wellness & spirituality kick as long as I’ve known her, is pregnant with her third child in three years, raises chickens in her rural town that she escaped to during covid, and owns several firearms. She 100% voted for Trump and loathes democrats and you’d likely never suspect a thing if you met her.
Same with me; I assume most people just assume I’m a grown up ex-hipster elder millennial who loves slamming craft brews and is somewhat Reddit-coded (barf).
But I am straight up to the right of Franco, 100% Bukele-pilled gringo.
A lot of people got very good at hiding their power level. Basically no one outside my closest friends know anything in detail about my personal & political beliefs, hiding them became second nature during the great awokening.
Almost every person in my wider social circle would be absolutely scandalized if they knew what I believed in. People just assume because I’m smart, courteous and well spoke and I keep my cards close to my best that I agree with them.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
8d ago
first they came for the tumblr users, and I did not speak for I was not a tumblr user.
Then they came for the redditors, and I said “Hey, make sure you get all the redditors.”
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
8d ago
I saw a post on X saying there’s a subgroup of elder right wing millennials raising children as unreliant on digital consumer tech as possible with the implicit goal of preparing them for Butlerian Jihad.
I laughed aloud when I saw that, I hadn’t thought of it exactly that way but I instantly recognized it as right. As far as I know from my peer group growing up I’m only one of 15% of them that currently has multiple children, and of that 15% I’m clearly in the top 5% or so of how anti-tech I am and I’m obviously the most right wing.
My children don’t have tablets, or smartphones, tv time is very limited and monitored with an eye towards classic movies and long form YouTube content that’s purposely less bombastic. The only time they play video games is when we are all together and we play couch party games, and we have one laptop that is mostly used for my work. There’s no unsupervised internet access whatsoever. My eldest just got a basic music play that they have their own restricted Spotify account on.
They mostly draw and read from a big library, play imagination games and build things. We hike regularly, and spend lots of time outdoors in rivers and mountains and the beach.
It’s not necessarily a reactionary thing; really for me the goal is helping prepare them for an increasingly hostile environment by helping them learn to love being human, love their bodies, tolerate boredom, generate their own fun, act without being prompted, etc, etc, etc. they’ll need it.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
8d ago
”We’ve won, but at what cost?”
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
8d ago
As funny as this response is, that’s actually the most shocking thing he stated about Grok 4’s new capabilities.
Amongst the most sex positive / pro porn coomers who are almost all deep blue tribe, it’s one of the last great sexual taboos as it is politically verboten to treat with.
I’ll cop to spending some time in NSFW chatbot sites, and other than things that were explicitly against the rules for legal purposes, ie minor characters & blood relation incest, the only thing that seemed to really rile up the sex pests to demand bans & blood was people taking a lesbian bot and roleplaying a straight man and having sex with her. Or making a canonically gay character or one with a big gay fanbase that assumes they’re LGBTQ and making them straight.
People got big mad about that and demanded bannings, black listed people, etc.
If Grok 4 is willing to do that with no real pushback it really is a sign that it’s less ideologically compromised or censored.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
8d ago
I once said, here or at the old place, that if legit cyborg waifus become a thing I’m moving myself and my family to a compound in Utah to join the Mormon mujahideen that will no doubt inevitably develop.
Unfortunately, I meant it. Timeline seems to be moving up, better start making some concrete plans.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
17d ago
1.) 20mi / 32km
2.) 20mi / 32km
3.) If you count horses, or wine grapes, less than 5mi / 12km. Otherwise like double that, I have lots of produce, hay, corn, soybeans in the area.
4.) 12mi / 20km
5.) 12mi / 20km
6.) 12mi / 20km
The place I live is suburban but right on the edge of a rural & agricultural area.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
1mo ago
Where are you getting this? I’ve seen zero conservatives squarely blaming men for not getting married.
Low employment rate by itself doesn’t actually achieve much in terms of upward economic mobility for working class young men, which I do believe has a serious effect on family formation.
For that you need to end the wage stagnation / decline as it relates to the biggest expenses for young people dating, forming relationships and attempting to start a family; housing costs.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
1mo ago
Agreed, although the old adage comes to mind; “When you’re in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging.”
Fixing or at least freezing the decline of the economy for young men without advanced education is the “stop digging” part by at least making the economic landscape not maximally hostile to family formation.
If you’re able to get housing costs to stop rising or even fall, do the same with the asset bubble, and put upward pressure on the lowest quintile or two of wages by creating a tight labor market, and you’re in for a good start.
Deportations, crackdowns on illegal immigration, a robust industrial policy, Reindustrialization, tariffs on China, checking the power of the academy, renegotiating trade deals, all this gestures in the direction of not celebrating open hostility to young working class men.
I live in a deep blue state and I can tell you personally that the accumulated effects of standard deep blue policy preferences on my life has decreased the amount of children I will have had in my life by at least one. And I’m one of the lucky ones; intelligent, healthy, strong, no criminal record, no significant addictions, came from an intact family.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
1mo ago
And are you certain that young men will be turned off by that message?
In my experience a lot of young men would actually like to get married, and recognition that excessive porn use or video games are actively emasculating them is pretty common.
They rely on cheap dopamine fixes and are stuck in perpetual adolescence because of structural problems in the economy and the education system, which republicans are the only party actually trying to address.
It’s a key psychological difference between young men & women; addressing these issues are more likely to actually feel supportive & empowering rather than making them feel “under attack”.
Talking to you young men like defective young women is how the Democratic Party got in this mess to begin with.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
1mo ago
For example, him talking about other nations spying on the US was completely correct and very honest; everyone spies on everyone, including allies, especially allies. It’s just a truth of the world, there’s nothing good or bad about it.
People getting their panties in a twist about it seems either performative or worse, incredibly naive.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
2mo ago
I disagree. Institutions and memeplexes exist in a positive or negative feedback loop in relation to its constituents, it’s not unidirectional like an impossibly neat organizational chart; not only is the whole more than the sum of its parts, but the sum of the parts are a function of the sum of the whole.
Individuals and institutions push and mold each other and they have values independent of each other but separately the whole equation shifts.
When I was younger I saw as criticism of globalism & neoliberal economics a term; “Autistic economics”. I laughed when I saw it at first but I think there was a there there in the criticism.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
2mo ago
The difference between those things you’ve described as historically common, which I agree is accurate, and a more generic “deliberate cruelty as deterrent for mass illegal migration” is that the latter has not been supplanted by anything clearly superior.
The Industrial Revolution killed chattel slavery & most extreme institutional types of patriarchy. It substituted a physical technology in place of a social one; it was made possible to permanently discard old ways through sheer power of technology.
The same cannot be said about of the problem of mass migration and the erosion of the hosts’ social environment that it causes.
As I’ve stated before, the only possible way this can be completely ignored is if the framing simply doesn’t acknowledge or value the social solidarity provided by the nation at all; it requires a wholesale denial or blindness to the glue that binds various societies together since time immemorial.
As a former libertarian, I’m frankly embarrassed by how blind I was to these basic social truths. On X, a pithy little tweet described libertarianism as “truly the only equivalent of feminism for men.” Which made me chuckle; the theory only works if you’re willingly or unknowingly blind to social forces which make the political possible in the first place.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
2mo ago
I suspect his list of “countries worth defending” is paper thin in both time and space, as if political morality only started 70 years ago.
Liberal internationalists are almost all like this. It’s terminal recency bias.
It’s like that meme about liberals lecturing Christians about Jesus; “No, I don’t believe in your backwards ideas, but if I say the right things you might do what I want.”
Substitute The Nation for Jesus and you’ve got it pegged; in reality they don’t think any nation is really worth defending on its own terms, they never have, and they never will. It’s total anathema to them. When pressed, they don’t even think The Nation exists or should exist, or they believe in it in only the vaguest, wishy washy terms.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
2mo ago
That’s not true, if you’ve lived in or near a beach town or ski town there’s plenty of serving staff who only work in a restaurant a portion of the year, every year.
They just work like crazy to make enough money to support themselves on a part time job or unemployed for the remainder for the year.
It’s like a tour of duty. There’s lots of industries that are hyper seasonal and / or are intensive for short amounts of time.
Oil workers are like that, for example. Fisherman, cowboys, that’s just off the top of my head.
Some people really love the freedom of working extremely hard for part of the year and consequently fucking off for the rest of the year.
So, most of the countries that have existed in the entirety of human history are not worth defending?
Inter-ethnic conflict that expresses itself in “cruelty as deterrent” is as historically common as the summer rain. It’s currently happening in multiple places, and depending on where you live, it’s happened in the recent past. In your backyard.
I find it rather hubristic to tell someone from the baltics, the balkans, the eastern Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, or Southeast Asia that their country isn’t worth defending.
This is very “rootless cosmopolitan” coded.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
2mo ago
Easily one of the most important and immediately impactful business decisions of my lifetime.
I’m amazed at people’s ability to forget how bad things were in 2020 / 2021 on the internet.
I suppose it’s easy to forget the constant fear /r/TheMotte was living under for years if you were always willing to jump ship to /r/TheSchism or some other wasteland full of doe-eyed quokkas ever willing to castrate themselves to placate the eye of Sauron
Did Kulak eat a ban? I must have missed that, I just thought he got really involved on X / Substack and drifted away.
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