Mewis
6mo ago
Tbh, I find the 'is he natty' debate to be pretty uninteresting. Does it actually change the ground reality of what he's doing or what he's saying?
Also though steroid use is more widespread than ever, it's still, like, illegal. I don't know how strict things are in the US, but I think people are reasonable to choose not to talk openly about it, if you could get arrested, lose your job or your place at college over it. Sulek has never claimed to be natty, and at the end of the day isn't selling training programs or boutique supplements or diet plans under the promise that others can get the same results. He's not selling anything except himself... But it's worth asking if that makes it better. The pressure to look good, to be big and strong, to earn the respect of other men, to be accomplished and confident and popular are still there.
Mewis
7mo ago
Well, that doesn't solve the problem - the emergence of a semi permanent rentier/leisure aristocracy. Personally I'm inclined to say that this sort of thing is possibly unavoidable in any kind of complex economy with a free market and for various reasons our economy wouldn't allow too many people to do this.
Mewis
8mo ago
If you're low functioning enough to struggle to maintain housing/job, that makes it easier to move, not harder. We're not talking about people who have an established career path or a mortgage or are pillars of their community. If you just lost your burger flipping job and are getting evicted and don't have any friends... Nothing is keeping you anywhere, other than inertia! Pack a suitcase and get on a bus.
(This is, of course, how a lot of people end up in California in the first place.)
Mewis
10mo ago
I mean, there is a pretty obvious principled line between adult homosexuality and pederasty. I'll give you a hint - it's the same one straight people use.
Mewis
1yr ago
This is meant to be taken as a thesis, and as a start of a discussion of what conservatives actually want to achieve rather than soap-boxing.
As I've pointed out here in the past, conservatives do not actually want to achieve anything - they don't have a grand utopian vision that they want to realize. They are perfectly happy to do nothing, so long as nobody else gets to do anything either.
Mewis
1yr ago
I don't really see what's weird about this. Of course you dress conservatively when you're in court.
Mewis
1yr ago
Because it became easy to do. If your phone dispensed cocaine we'd probably see a lot more addiction to that as well.
Mewis
3mo ago
Did he pour the drinks down her gullet? Yes, alcohol impairs your judgement. And yet you are still responsible for the choices you make, wise or foolish they might be.
Mewis
4mo ago
Because it's far more appealing to join the western sphere of influence than to remain in Russia's. NATO and the EU offer Ukraine a powerful security guarantee, prosperity and liberty.
Mewis
4mo ago
Moral considerations aside, a large number of commentators thought that it would be foolish to sue for peace under pretty much any circumstances because Putin wouldn’t keep to it.
People believe what they want to believe - warmongers like to believe war is inevitable because it relieves them from having to seek peace. So now any number of Ukrainians and Russians can be fed into meatgrinders because there's no alternative.
Mewis
5mo ago
It's not really obvious to me that the latter is healthier than the former. Responding to all things with serene indifference seems like a pretty shitty and even self-centred way to proceed through life. I guess it's just part and parcel of the way that people tend to pathologize negative thoughts and negativity as being 'unhealthy'.
Plus, I personally find as a negative self-talker that acknowledging my negative self-talk reflexes just makes it worse. Now instead of thinking about whatever bad event set me off, I'm thinking about how stupid and irrational and unhealthy and undisciplined I am for engaging in negative self-talk.
Mewis
5mo ago
If that care is almost certain to be ineffective, then it's not, regardless of the good intentions of the would be saviour. Suppose my baby was dying and a charlatan offered to exorcise it of the demon that was surely killing it. It would not be murder for me to ignore this claim, or the claims of anyone else who proffered some dubious miracle cure.
Mewis
6mo ago
If the going rate for one sex with a 14 year old is ten million dollars and consent of the parents, then I think it highly unlikely that such a practice would be widespread. If anything it would probably be less widespread than it is nowadays.
Women who sell their bodies for money have rarely been treated more than 2nd, or 3rd class people and do it at the cost of having a successful long term relationship.
Yes, because they don't sell their bodies for enough money. If they sold their body for ten million dollars, they would not end up as 2nd class people.
Mewis
1yr ago
Is it actually productive to try and understand Russian motivations? Regardless of their motivations, they're trying to use force to conquer an independent nation, one that was attempting to align itself with the West. The fact that they might see this as part of a broader conflict with the West isn't news, and it doesn't change matters on the ground.
In addition, it seems like most people in Western countries, including many people here, come at the issue of trying to understand Russia from the perspective of trying to justify war - the Russians are inherently authoritarian/imperialistic/belligerent/orcish, and therefore must be destroyed. I don't think this attitude is helpful or should be encouraged.
Mewis
1yr ago
I'm not sure why it can't be a mixture of skill and chops, or why chops in rocket building would necessarily transfer to social media, or why a talented person can't make big mistakes. It's equally plausible to me that Elon Musk's ego has swollen to the point where he thinks he can run Twitter with him +50 people, as it is that he really can run Twitter with him +50 people.
Mewis
1yr ago
Well said - whether it's spun as 'face' or 'prestige' or 'credibility', ultimately what matters is power and money. China is constantly embarrassing themselves with ludicrous overblown rhetoric and saber-rattling - their envoys still get received gratefully in the courts of the world, because they have money.
The thing is that a talented wordcel can always spin any course of action as being somehow conducive to 'credibility'. The Iraq War was originally intended not as nation building, but as a muscular demonstration of American military power and willingness to use it unilaterally against their enemies. Such a demonstration was hardly necessary - the destruction of two skyscrapers, though tragic, was not read by anyone as proof of imminent collapse of American hegemony. Once the war was concluded, the Credibility Fans simply shifted their reasoning. Now, rebuilding Iraq was necessary to restore American cred in the wake of disaster.
Meanwhile, Russia's efforts to gain credibility appear to be losing it credibility.
Would allowing Ukraine to join NATO without a peep have restored credibility? No, I think not. Rather, Russia is being exposed as weaker and more fragile than anyone supposed.
Mewis
1mo ago
This sort of romantic neo-nazi image is ridiculous. The Nazis were not high trust. In fact they were the total opposite, a heap of the most venal, odious, dishonourable bandits to ever come out of Germany (which is saying something). They had no concerns for honour or trust or mercy, no respect for the traditional religion of Europe, no respect for the ancient peoples of Europe. They started vast wars over money and land, lied habitually, ran a horribly corrupt state built on exploitation and outright slavery, and slaughtered millions.
Nor was their state really ever intended to be self sufficient. From the start, the intention was to loot, conquer and subjugate their neighbours. Indeed, the German nationalist project was mostly complete by 1938 with the annexations of Austria and the Germanized regions of Czechoslovakia, and scarcely a peep from the Allies. But the Nazis dreamed of imperial domination and glory, not self sufficiency. Instead of rallying the nations of Europe against Bolshevism ( an easy task), Hitler squandered his credibility. By the end of WWII even anti communists like Churchill were drinking with Stalin, and it was left to the US to establish an anti communist front in Europe - well, the half of it that was left.
It's interesting because we have a much better example of reactionary "we don't do globalism here"autarky from the 1940s - Franco, who carefully avoided entanglement in either WWII or the postwar international order. That didn't work either, but he failed with more grace and less bloodshed than Hitler.
Mewis
2mo ago
I don't really know much about finance, but why couldn't Satoshi use his bitcoins as collateral to borrow money, just as super wealthy people whose money is tied up in stocks do?
Mewis
2mo ago
I can't speak for others. But in my experience, blaming myself for my problems makes me very depressed.
Mewis
5mo ago
It's my own impression that the fiercest advocates for generous asylum policies or even open borders aren't deontologists (who generally have a lot of respect for rules around borders and citizenship), but utilitarians (who are willing to compromise because they value the utility of asylum seekers over maintaining strong borders). It's also my own impression that utilitarians are more vulnerable to charisma and arguments - theoretically a utilitarian is capable of endorsing any behavior if they're persuaded of it's utility, whereas it's much harder to argue a deontologist into bending his own rules.
Mewis
6mo ago
I've heard that someone who doesn't even lift yet takes tren gains more muscle over a period of time than a natty person working out.
That statement is a little bit suspect, I think. I don't think I really believe it myself. I've yet to meet a really big, muscular guy who didn't go to the gym, or at least train calisthenics hard,
Mewis
6mo ago
Fundamentally, conservatism and reaction are not really very appealing to intellectual and creative types. People with an inclination towards thinking, ideals, criticism, reform, improvement, progress, solving Big Problems will naturally gravitate towards a movement that embraces those things.
It's come up before here that the Right often struggles to articulate a positive vision for the future. This is, of course, true. Conservatives are not visionaries or imagineers, their goals are articulated in terms of things that actually exist and are possible. Maybe recreating the social and economic conditions of the 50s or 00s wouldn't be ideal, but at least it's something that was actually done before and could actually exist again. And to many conservatives, the lack of Big Crazy Radical ideas is precisely the appeal of the movement, though they might not phrase things in those terms.
Mewis
8mo ago
That's exactly what the person I'm responding to is saying. He said that if America ever credibly adopts America First as a doctrine, Taiwan will fall that every moment!
I remember reading some accounts that Bill Clinton had an uncanny level of personal charisma that people who hadn't met him just didn't get. I think it's probably a more general quality of today's rigorously competitive political world. Maybe that's why politicians so often come off as incompetent or fake, that they're selected so strongly for personal charisma it leaves no room for other qualities.
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