MaximumCuddles
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User ID: 58
MaximumCuddles
11mo ago
My small children love listening to Daft Punk - Discovery, they listen to the whole album and dance to it almost every day. They’ve been doing so for a couple years now.
It came up basically by accident, as I’m a fan of the music and just popped it on one day during the early COVID year, and they instantly connected to it. Hell it even has its own album length animated music video that you can find online.
I’ve been poking around trying to find another classic electronic / pop album to introduce to them but I’m falling flat. Closest thing to a success I’ve gotten to is ABBA.
They love listening to full symphonies and enjoy classical music but it’s not the same as a danceable full album.
Anyone have suggestions? I think they like it because it’s fun, bright, easy to follow while still complicated enough to be interesting, and infinitely danceable.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
I’m also quite baffled at the assumption that the burden of proof is on omnivores to defend their diet.
It’s honestly incredibly arrogant. there’s so much stacked against it I think it takes a very fanatical type of person to have that level of hubris.
I mean, just off the top of my head:
1.) Humans are omnivores. That’s how our bodies and brains evolved, and that’s the type of diet that interfaces most completely with us.
2.) Not everyone is a utilitarian, in fact I’d be amazed if even 10% of the population subscribe to beliefs that can be considered fully utilitarian. Outside of that belief system, suffering is often complicated to define and also is often considered morally neutral without greater context.
3.) Even if you are a utilitarian, the state of Nature most animals, including ancestral humans, existed in is incredibly rough and brutal and full of pain and suffering. It’s not a given that domesticated animals, even ones with very sad & short lives, would be better off without human intervention. Or that ending animal domestication will lower total suffering in the world. It’s not even close to a given. There’s a sanitized “Disney channel” version of animals’ lives that I feel that animal lovers sort of unconsciously project on a low level, but the truth is staggeringly cruel.
I could go on and on for hours about this. This is one of the few subjects I’ll likely never budge an inch on, I fully understand the other side of this issue and particularly the instinct not cause unneeded pain and suffering.
But whenever I hear hardcore vegans, which is to say any vegan at all, talk about this all I can think is “This ain’t it, chief”.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
How is it reverent? It’s literally the baseline for consideration of wether or not animal welfare is important or not in the first place.
Because the question isn’t “will animals suffer?”, that’s a total given. Animals rip each other to shreds, stalk each other in the middle of night, devour the sick and helpless, gorge on each others entrails while they are still alive, and on and on and on forever and ever.
Inhumane conditions? The whole goddamn universe is an unending inhumane condition for them.
So the question isn’t “how much will animals suffer” it’s “what type of suffering will animals be subjected to” and “to what end?”.
That’s where you all lose the plot. Even if you were totally right on animals being worthy of moral consideration on the level of humans, you would additionally have to prove that domesticated animals would be better off not existing at all, and that by ending animal domestication you have managed to somehow lower the amount of animal suffering occurring in the world, while simultaneously outweighing the positive utility animal consumption has for humanity.
Which is from where I’m sitting is an utterly ludicrous claim.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
For fucks sake, you can’t rely on 100% of people to enjoy a delicious free meal that they pick out themselves, or sex with an extremely attractive and willing partner.
Unless these voting districts consist of approximately 25 voting people, any district reporting 100% one way voting is like Soviet level bullshit.
MaximumCuddles
11mo ago
Allow me to dissent from the group, this whole thread is kind of a fun reminder how self selected this group is.
It’s a red flag in the sense that it’s an incredibly low bar to clear for domestic organization, similar to making your bed in the morning or keeping your sink clean.
I’m a man, but I’d still take it as a sign someone doesn’t have their shit together if they didn’t go trough the rather minimal effort to bundle their socks together.
The lack of having this done signals a bunch of clustered psychological/emotional problems including but not limited to being on the spectrum, suffering depression, having poor hygiene, having poor time management skills, lack of social skills, oppositional defiance disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and on and on.
I learned to do this as a bachelor, along with folding clothes, ironing shirts, learning to cook, keeping my bathroom clean, etc, etc.
Y’all mfers need some Dr. Peterson in your life it seems to me.
MaximumCuddles
4mo ago
I know it’s totally anecdata but it’s significant to me that I’ve never, ever met a vegan who is healthier than me.
Because of my social and professional circles I’d bet a mint that I’ve met and interacted regularly with a lot more vegans than the modal person. So it’s not a sample size issue.
I’m not the perfect picture of health but I’m certainly “robust” in more than one way. I have a lifetime of on again off again strength training, extreme sports, endurance sports, outdoorsmanship, martial arts and manual labor . But I’m too poor and too busy to be a consistent athlete, and probably too undisciplined to boot.
But still, every vegan I’ve ever met I could almost literally break them into pieces.
To wit, I believe the poster in question said he was six feet tall and 150lbs, which to me even if you are endurance athlete is not “healthy”. I’m the same height and in my best shape I had almost a hundred pounds on him, even with literally zero body fat I’d weigh more.
I know it’s a joke on the whole ‘sigma grindset’ to say “If you can’t physically overpower me I don’t have to listen to you” but when it comes to diet & excercise, I’ll say “This but unironically.”.
MaximumCuddles
9mo ago
Wouldn’t therapeutics to simply cure gender Dysphoria or any underlying conditions be the straighter line from A to B from a technological point of view?
The idea of an “anti-Dysphoria” vaccine makes more sense than a totally lossless surgical gender swap.
I swear, bringing this up in the debate makes TRAs and their ilk more incensed than anything than anything I’ve ever written. I’ve gotten banned and sent viscous DMs for even suggesting it.
But in this theoretical, transhumanist future with shiny happy people is it not simpler and more likely that no one feels the need to transition at all due to high quality therapeutics than the 24/7 all you can eat Barbie doll body part swap meet that the medicalists seem to assume is going to pass?
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
Eight years later, the “crackhead taxi driver” analogy still holds.
Imagine you have a destination in mind. You hail an Uber, 4.9 stars, great vehicle, clean. You tell them where you want to go and they look at you like you have three heads. And after realizing you’re serious, they flat out refuse to take you there. No matter how much you beg or attempt to reason with them or bribe them.
So you call up a Lyft. 4.6 stars, nice vehicle. Same outcome, first they think you’re joking, then you’re crazy, and finally an idiot.
On and on it goes. Seven vehicles later, you hail an unlicensed taxi cab. The driver opens the door, it smells like piss inside. There are empty beer cans and takeout containers strewn around the vehicle. You tell him where you want to go, the driver looks at you for a minute with his cigarette still in his mouth and says “Fuck it, let’s go. Hop in.”
If you’re a Trump supporter, hearing that you just jump in. So far it’s you’re only shot to get where you’re going, it’s getting late and you’re getting desperate.
Honestly? Don’t blame anyone who chose that way. With the benefit of hindsight, I think they were absolutely right.
MaximumCuddles
3mo ago
My suggestion? Choose violence.
There’s almost nothing more empowering than learning how to turn your body into a weapon, pick a martial art and start learning it, join a training gym and get good enough to spar on a regular basis. Nothing fancy, I recommend good old western boxing to start.
“b-but MaximumCuddles, I’m a lover not a fighter / I’m gentle at heart / I don’t like fighting / blah blah blah”
Good news! If you’re an adult man*, you’re almost certainly wrong about yourself. You come from a long line of sex-havers of which some portion had to resort, sometimes multiple times, to extreme violence to live long enough to bust a nut. It’s quite literally in your blood.
So, you want to feel empowered? You can quite directly empower yourself physically, with time and luck the mind will likely follow.
You want to feel driven? Avoidance of pain and the pleasures of adrenaline, physical power and mastery are incredible motivators. It’s very easy to motivate yourself not to get punched in the face.
It’s important to remember that you are, in fact, still a wild animal and that all the guardrails you perceive aren’t actually real. And, more importantly that your body means something, it’s just through the modern way of life that most people have forgotten why they have a body at all. Nothing brings it back into clear focus like violent physical struggle.
I saw somewhere else a suggestion of travel while slumming to drum up that feeling of total freedom, and while it’s not a bad idea, the discipline and pleasure of building a physical skill that strengthens your body far outstrips the quintessential “backpacking through Europe to like, find yourself man”.
That guy who hung around here who is probably dead in the Alaskan wilderness wasn’t wrong, he was dead right about needing physical struggle to have a full life and get laid on the regular. He just went way to far, it’s pretty easy to toughen yourself up, you just need regular access to mock battle with real, but mild consequences.
So what are you waiting for? Chop chop! Blood for the blood god!
*(If you’re adult woman, also good news, you’re probably wrong about yourself as well. It’s just not likely as cut and dried.)
Ps- I say this as someone who has fully diagnosed ADHD out the ass and dropped the stimmies a long time ago, and my life is pretty good! So I feel like we have an overlap of experience.
235 at 20% body fat is not obese, I had a ton of musculature and a tiny belly. I looked like a gorilla. I was doing 10 mile runs in the mountains on the regular and could deadlift almost three times my body weight.
If I had bird bones I’d be obese but I’ve never had a problem with getting enough calcium or putting enough eustress on my body.
150lbs at 6 feet tall you’d look like you just been interrupted halfway through your stay at Auschwitz.
MaximumCuddles
11mo ago
Yeah I’ve long felt the whole “What’s the matter with Kansas?” Hypothesis is incredibly brain dead and even downright insulting.
MaximumCuddles
1mo ago
I think if Hlynka should be unbanned if he does “The Hock”, with photographic evidence to back up his claim. Trial by ordeal.
I’m not even remotely kidding.
That might be the funniest deep cut mashup of internet niche humor ever produced. It would be a scream come true.
[A musical mystery]
There’s a pair of artists I love that I discovered on Spotify a ways back, and both have entirely opaque un-googleable names.
I have some guesses as to who they actually are, mostly based on their “related artists” but I can’t find anything concrete.
Rather than let it stew I figured I’d ask around at my favorite online hangout for people with “special” brains, so to speak.
Also I’m very interested as to two aspects of these artists;
1.) These songs are very highly streamed, with more than a million streams on their biggest hits. they aren’t exactly obscure, how have they gotten so much attention if you literally can’t search them anywhere?
2.) What compels an artist to produce art under a name so utterly baffling and incomprehensible? There’s at least a dozen more artists that I’ve run into on Spotify that have the same schtick going on, and they seem popular.
MaximumCuddles
8mo ago
I think the idea of “Voting Gangs” by Moldbug largely accomplishes something similar without explicitly being gendered.
The idea is that your vote, like a share in a company, is 100% your property and completely transferable. So people would naturally transfer their voting power to interested parties they feel aligned with.
The simplest example is my wife simply allowing me to add her vote to mine in the interest of time since I follow politics more closely than her and she trusts my judgement and ability to represent her.
And if I have friends or family who trust my judgement or vice versa I could sign my vote off to them, or them to me, etc etc.
This would also allow households to vote together, one good thing from a pro-natalist perspective would be to give children the vote but in the stewardship of their legal guardian until they come of age. If a household had two adults and two children they would have four votes in total.
I suppose the effect over time is that it concentrates political power in those interested in wielding it in a transparent, traceable way. Many people want their interests protected but find politics incredibly dull or simply unfathomable. Some dude wants to sell me his vote for an ice cream? That’s fine, he clearly wasn’t interested in it, and I am.
This creates a natural, scalable democracy with basically infinite parties joined together.
It sounds like a radical pipe dream but I’m becoming less convinced it’s unrealistic over time, and I’m becoming more convinced it’s the natural evolution of a liberal democracy if it seeks to survive and overcome it’s obvious deficits.
I think the “identity bits” is where, from my perspective, an alien morality gets smuggled in.
No one suggests that if you give someone suffering from eczema a lotion that they are committing “genocide” against the “eczema community”. But wave the magic identity wand around and everything becomes moralized.
If we could make gender Dysphoria disappear tomorrow, from the perspective of alleviating real suffering the answer should be a no brainer. The fact that answering this question causes any consternation is indicative of a bait and switch.
I’ve suffered and continue to suffer mental illness in my life, if I could make it go away and restore my brain to full function I wouldn’t hesitate. I’m not part of a “community”, I just have a condition. The fact that people build a wall called “identity” around their maladies is at best an understandable cope, at worse adding fuel to the fire.
I think the primary mission of medicine should be the restoration of natural function of a person. Much like “Free Speech” has a strict legal definition but also heavily implies a cultural attitude, same with the Hippocratic Oath; “First, do no harm.”
Helping people take care, love and accept their bodies should take complete priority over modifying a healthy, functioning body. If you have to modify, do so only with the goal to restore healthy, natural function.
To me that’s the expansive vision of the Hippocratic oath as regards to body modification, and I find it goes into direct conflict with the transhumanist / cyborg vision of (un?)humanity that to my mind, includes transgenderism.
Someone out there coined the term “trad-humanism” and that more or less seems accurate to describe my view on this.
MaximumCuddles
11mo ago
For myself, I own 3 suits plus a handful of dress shirts / pants / jackets that are not paired together, just mixed items.
I also own a handful of Guyaberas which I use as business wear during the warmest months.
I wear these basically every work day, sometimes on the weekends if I have a party, and I wear a jacket during the cool months and if the occasion requires.
I don’t know much about Canadian politics but as an outsider, I think I came to that realization with that viral video clip of the two MPs going at it a while back.
One, a conservative, asked a very simple question; “How much does the average house in the Ottowa area cost?”.
The other, a liberal I assume, simply replied with a random accomplishment of the liberal government, completely ignoring the line of questioning.
The conservative asked the same question, and the liberal breathlessly did it again, just blurting out some non-sequitor factoid about the supposed accomplishments of the liberal government.
This went on and on for maybe like ten minutes straight, like literally 25 times.
It was so incredibly baldly dishonest I almost admired it.
Edit: Found it.
MaximumCuddles
5mo ago
From my own perspective, as someone rabidly anti woke and very ready to criticize “cape-shit” and every opportunity, it’s definitely not that.
Because all that being said, I absolutely adored the last two animated Sony Spider-Man movies, “Into the Spider-Verse” and “Across the Spider-Verse”.
We’re they “woke”? Oh absolutely, noticeably so.
But they were extremely high quality, clearly made with passion and drive, absolutely gorgeous, creative almost to a fault, stylish, full of interesting characters with tons of personality, compelling, and often hilarious.
I watched them both with my kids multiple times. No regrets.
MaximumCuddles
11mo ago
Sure, but woke / pink corporatism is absolutely in the PMC’s class interest, which now seems to be the core class supporting the Democratic Party.
MaximumCuddles
11mo ago
I’ve also had the distinct pleasure of working in the city you referenced.
The homeless there are awful, but to me they weren’t the worst of it.
I spent a lot of time around rich and powerful people there, and I’d be amazed if they didn’t have the highest number of psychopaths per capita. The whole place seethed with demonic energy, and I routinely saw extremely depraved behavior from supposedly high class people.
Who knew a collective obsession with acquiring and wielding power and secrecy whilst leveraging it to enrich yourself would produce a whole class of devilspawn?
It was a relief to leave that place behind.
Might be old hat at this point Starting Strength is a classic for a reason.
It’s very practical. Took me from an utter rookie to being able to do 500lb deadlifts regularly in about 2.5 years.
Between that, learning Muay Thai, regularly practicing meditation, and a handful of genetic gifts, I don’t think it’s even a slight exaggeration to say I’m probably physically capable of defending myself against 99.9% of people I’ve ever met or will meet.
MaximumCuddles
1mo ago
Having been an aggressive mostly-lurker since the beginning of TheMotte on Reddit, I was absolutely surprised to see my name pop up for this.
I’d like to thank the academy etc etc etc… gets played off stage
MaximumCuddles
4mo ago
To me this gives away the whole game. When someone says “This is cruel and inhumane!” The natural follow up question for someone interested in actually understanding the truth of the matter is “Compared to what?”
For actions between humans it’s incredibly easy to find alternative contexts and thus possible to make judgements about what’s moral and what is not.
But the life of animals, with or without human intervention, is just one rolling atrocity after another, forever and ever, without end.
I think it’s no accident this ideology only came into being after it became possible for people to live lives so alienated from wild nature that their only real experience of it is through a Disney-fied, highly sanitized lens.
MaximumCuddles
5mo ago
Master and Commander is so effortlessly high quality it makes me weep remembering it was basically an “average” excellent movie that we simply took for granted that we would be treated to up to a dozen times a year for like basically 15 years between 1993 - 2008.
It’s also, hilariously, completely bereft of female dialogue. I find it to be a very funny coincidence but frog twitter and their world see it as a sign akin to a burning bush.
It’s fucking rad, A+ would recommend.
I’d like to put forward a very informal survey, as I’m curious about one aspect about the demographics here.
I’d like to know how many people who post here;
1.) Own one set of formal wear or something considered appropriate for business or formal social occasions. IE A suit, a tuxedo, dress pants combined with a Hawaiian shirt, a Guyabara / Yucatán shirt, a thawb & keffiyeh, etc.
2.) Wear it at least once a quarter, or at least four times a year.
I think I got my greatest pushback here & in the old place and it was specifically about a fashion related issue, so my sociology sense is tingling. I’d like to know how much of an outlier I am here.
Show of hands, please.
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