Mewis
9mo ago
There is a small coterie of fat acceptance activists that is occasionally wheeled out like the Washington Generals or the Libertarian Party to be laughed at, but for the most part, no. That's why 600lbs Life even exists in the first place, it's a show that as we have just discussed in this thread, make fat people look even worse. Why does such a show exist? So people can watch it and feel justified in hating fat people. Which is to say, it makes them feel better about something they were already doing. It's not by accident that you are, yet again here, casually mentioning how easy* it is for you to gain fifty pounds of muscle or lose fifty pounds of fat on a dime. It's not because you're embarrassed.
- It comes and goes, but it was once the fashion for people to brag about how hard they trained or how strictly they didn't. In the year 2024 it seems the opposite - fitness models take pictures of themselves eating donuts, and now people seem to brag about how little they need to train.
Mewis
11mo ago
The revenge is petty in that, by your own admission, it is insufficient. It is like Dostoevsky's mouse:
"To come at last to the deed itself, to the very act of revenge. Apart from the one fundamental nastiness the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses in the form of doubts and questions, adds to the one question so many unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it till their healthy sides ache. Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite. For forty years together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious details, and every time will add, of itself, details still more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings, but yet it will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things might happen, and will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to vengeance, or in the success of its revenge, knowing that from all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom it revenges itself, while he, I daresay, will not even scratch himself. On its deathbed it will recall it all over again, with interest accumulated over all the years and ..."
Again, it's one thing to be cruel. It's another to be petty, or to seek revenge without even really believing in the justice or satisfaction of it.
Mewis
1yr ago
Lifting weights to build muscle is probably detrimental to long term longevity, particularly coupled with a high BW. If you care about that sort of thing.
Mewis
1yr ago
It was always dumb of DeSantis to try and beat Trump. Trump is like 90 years old, just wait for him to die.
Mewis
1yr ago
Distrust is not what is at issue here. Distrusting Putin is rational. Claiming to be able to read his mind and predict what he might do in five years is not rational.
Mewis
1yr ago
You literally linked to such evidence in your post, just to dismiss it because it didn't fit your prior.
Plus, the whole point of Bayesianism is that there is no 'ironclad evidence'. You accumulate a lot of little bits of evidence that revise your opinion one way or another. That evidence can be anecdotes or case studies, or it can be more robust scientific meta-analyses.
Mewis
1yr 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
2yr ago
What does this have to do with big heroes? Prioritizing the safety of your 2 year old child over abstract principles is not an eccentricity - it is entirely normal, predictable human behavior.
Mewis
2yr ago
He and She are words already in my lexicon, as is they - they're not particularly loaded down with baggage in the same way that Gloomraven is.
Mewis
2yr ago
That's not what NATO has said in the past (I believe the United States said that Ukraine would be allowed to join a few years ago) and it's not what Ukraine is saying now.
But you know, commentators like you would have told us that of course Poland or the Baltics or Finland would never be allowed to join NATO in the mid-90s. A commitment, like others, that the United States reneged upon. Funny how doing stuff like that isn't damaging to 'credibility' - almost like the only thing that matters in international relations is power and money. Russia's mistake was being weak and poor, and now all that's left is to decide whether they want to lose now or later.
Mewis
1yr ago
Maybe not in so many words, but the line of logic of "we need to show the world that we are maximally willing to engage in war" can excuse literally any level of escalation, and used to reject any effort of diplomacy - which is what you're doing, here, with the by this point very predictable accusation of appeasement, since your history book ended at 1945.
Mewis
1yr ago
My inclination is that if anything, strict drug laws make events like this more likely, because even very rich people end up getting drugs from underground sources. who knows where this batch of fentanyl originated? Where if drugs were legal, this kid would probably have gotten top-brand shit.
Mewis
1yr ago
Like I said about conservatism, it's not constructive to try and identify a goal for white nationalism. Ultimately, these guys are moving according to particular values and drives and according to a particular theory of the world, not to try and reach a particular destination.
Shutting down legal immigration entirely? Fair enough, but most Western countries have already been so "demographically transformed" such that a white ethnostate is impossible to achieve through immigration reform alone.
As the saying goes, when in a hole, quit digging.
Most people nowadays have a non-white friend, family member, partner, or work colleague. White nationalism would mean severing these important relationships. In sum, white nationalism is dead on arrival as a political movement.
Many people nowadays are willing to sever important relationships in the name of politics. Divisiveness might be a obstacle, but I don't think it's what kills the movement. If cutting off a friend over race seems ridiculous but pronoun use does not, that simply seems to be because we've absorbed liberal norms around colour-blindness.
Mewis
1yr ago
I've never quite believed this kind of pat 'if you don't cuddle your baby hard enough they will definitely become a traumatized psychopath' explanation. Children these days receive a vast amount of stimulation and social engagement, far more than in premodern society, but we still have rapists and murderers among us. Not do I see how this is an increasing problem. Parents spend more time with their children than ever. And of course, the 'blame the nuclear family' trick, the latest fashion. We've been loving in nuclear families for oh, only about four hundred years now. How is this a new problem?
Mewis
1yr ago
Sure, on the level of individuals, group differences are hard to Notice. That doesn't mean they don't exist, or aren't meaningful, or that they don't have implications for the future. Individual trees do not a forest make, but forests are still real and you can get lost in them.
Mewis
1yr ago
I'm not sure how relevant it is that some people are making very good money off of HIV retrovirals. Whether or not homosexuality is healthy or not would, ultimately, be the result of some interaction with society and technology, just as with anything else. For those of us fortunate to live in developed western countries, many things are safe that would otherwise not be - like drinking tap water or sleeping without a mosquito net. That's true whether or not Big Mosquito Net is making a lot of money.
I mean, really, what percentage of women died in childbirth before modern medicine? Enough that we could say that pregnancy is unhealthy?
Mewis
2yr ago
I mean, this isn't really that unusual. Horror movies are low-status even compared to schlock like Indiana Jones, but they always make very good box office returns for low budgets, which is why there are like ten Insidious movies.
It's not really obvious to me that the failure of this latest offering really has anything to do with Woke, either. Crystal Skull didn't flop, but it wasn't a smash hit and it burned a lot of the goodwill the series had. And now? Most young people don't know Indiana Jones or care about him.
Mewis
2yr ago
Why would I? The notion of having sex with women is totally repellent to me, and likely most women would find me equally repellent, since I lack any positive qualities. To be honest I don't really even like having sex with men, but I do find them very attractive.
Mewis
10mo ago
You make it sound like a failure but this all sounds like a success from the perspective of US policymakers. Europe is the way they want them - poor, dependent. Russians are dying. They get to spend lots of money. What exactly is the problem?
Mewis
10mo ago
You don't understand the US government - they like spending money. The prospect of pouring ten trillion dollars into a Ukraine-shaped hole in the ground gives them unimaginable pleasure, just as it pleases them to squander billions of dollars on missiles to destroy antique Russian tanks. Americans don't want to be rich, though they are - they want to feel rich.
Why not? I think it would be better for cars to be controlled by say, families, or people with long commutes, as opposed to students or people living in cities, who would get less use out of them. This isn't a hard principle - I'm sure there are plenty of individuals in either situation who might get more or less value out of owning a car, depending on their circumstances.
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