Mewis
8mo ago
Risking your life is a great way to gain respect... from men. In which case it might work, if what he needs is more self-respect
Mewis
11mo ago
I don't really find this account compelling. The Roman Empire was damaged heavily by the efforts of popular military leaders to seize power, but this pattern started long before the use of foederati in the army. Far from decadence and complacency, Rome was damaged by the irrepressible ambition and ruthlessness of generals and soldiers.
But I would expect people on the right - and I mean all those talking heads, think tanks and high-flying politicians - be interested in figuring out whether DIE actually makes the army stronger - and if not, pushing that fact hard.
Does it matter? If foreign wars are pointless, and America should turn away from military adventurism, does the strength of the army actually matter that much? Is the army naught but an appendage of the state - in which case, it hardly matters what the people in it believe? Or is the expectation that the army could provide a bulwark against leftism - in which case, the army is now interfering in politics? Is it wise to invite interference from an institution that is vulnerable to capture by your opponents?
I think it's worth asking exactly what people want from the military before they treat it as a political battlefield. Because it doesn't seem to me like Americans really have a consensus there.
Mewis
11mo ago
If you are choked, you will stop breathing, and if you stop breathing for a duration, you will suffer brain damage. If your breathing does not restart, you die. It may have been that after the choke ended, Neely was too brain damaged to be resuscitated, which makes sense since most accounts indicate he was choked for a pretty long period of time (10 mins, definitely enough to kill someone).
Mewis
24d ago
"recording a video in public while being Palestinian" is not a crime, last I checked.
There is no way to "passively" prevent someone from going where they please, and if that place is a public place, you have no right to do so. You also have no right to claim a public place, and in doing so deny it to your ethnic, religious or political enemies.
Mewis
1mo ago
Why not simply bring down the force of law on these petty criminals for the crimes they are actually committing, rather than this chicanery about nudging social media?
Mewis
2mo ago
The referendum didn't fail because of some ultra catholic silent majority - it comes on the heels of large wins for abortion and gay marriage in referenda. Most people are still good liberals. The fact is that these amendments were half baked from the start.
Mewis
3mo ago
Somehow the richest and most powerful society in the world, one that executes a hundred million cows a year, can't figure out how to execute humans because uh, it's messy.
Mewis
4mo ago
Some things are nearly identical (I couldn't identify the difference between store brand and Uncle Ben's rice, for example) but other things, particularly processed foods, do have a noticeable gap. Offbrand cola is disgusting, for example.
Mewis
6mo ago
My take is that though 'tough talk' is in vogue these days, the usual bromides of 'just self improve' or 'don't be a pussy' or whatever are not necessarily a spur to change. They may, in fact, serve as a defense against change. And I suspect that the change you are defending against is actually getting a girlfriend, and you use these horrible events like your friend getting stabbed or your own feels of unworthiness to avoid doing it. And of course, it is not hard to find unpleasant people on the internet who will join in on this. It's human nature to seek to identify others as inferior, and to hate them for it. I guess I understand this kind of behavior because I engage in it myself. It's easier to tell myself that I'm lazy, small, weak, unattractive and disgusting than it is for me to go out and talk to other men. And I sometimes seek out negative reinforcement on the internet, which is never in short supply in places like Reddit.
I don't really have a solution. But I don't really believe that tragedy and ambulances are inevitable features of having a relationship.
Mewis
8mo ago
Smallpox has been extremely important throughout history, but I neither respect it or would welcome it's return to relevance.
Mewis
11mo ago
It can very faithfully copy the style and such details, but it has no understanding that making shit up is not what is wanted, because it's not intelligent.
That's really not accurate. ChatGPT knows when it's outputting a low-probability response, it just understands it as being the best response available given an impossible demand, because it's been trained to prefer full but false responses over honestly admitting ignorance. And it's been trained to do that by us. If I tortured a human being and demanded that he tell me about caselaw that could help me win my injury lawsuit, he might well just start making plausible nonsense up in order to placate me too - not because he doesn't understand the difference between reality and fiction, but because he's trying to give me what I want.
Mewis
2mo ago
Why is there no in between?
I've noticed a pretty big pattern these days among fitness YouTubers. More clickbaity videos, more collabs with other creators that are popular, more shilling of exercise apps and products. It's not necessarily bad content, and a lot of it comes from people who are genuine and respected. I just think that's the ecosystem they live in now. And I couldn't say on the back end exactly how they're financially incentivised and rewarded, but clearly they are being pushed in this direction.
Mewis
2mo ago
I mean, having friends and family that can give you a room is doing a lot of the work here.
Mewis
3mo ago
There's a very good Tanner Greer post about this. Wang Huning identified the defining feature of the US in the 80s as techno-optimism, not liberty or democracy. But that's a quality that has been lost and inherited by the Chinese. If someone proposed building a bridge over the Pacific today, it would be China, not America.
Mewis
7mo ago
The issue is that money serves as both input and output in the system. The reward for providing goods and services to others is money to demand goods and services from others - those that get ahead in the market gain the power to distort the market in favor of their own preferences. It mostly works, but sometimes it doesn't. In the end, capitalists don't want to be capitalists, because it's hard - they want to be feudal lords, collecting rents from others.
Mewis
7mo ago
It's that nature of Americans to strive and struggle even when everything is handed to them that makes them such a force to be reckoned with. Isn't that amazing? The ability to never be happy, to be so totally indifferent to success AND failure, to possess such an invincible armor of narcissism.
she's the only one who really understands the (checks notes) star wide receiver on the football team
As Gone Girl (a contender for National Book of 21st Century America) put it - what's the point of being together if you're not the happiest?
Mewis
8mo ago
Sure, in the same way that criticizing the Emperor is not a free speech issue.
Mewis
6mo ago
The latest craze on Youtube? A guy called Sam Sulek. Sam Sulek is a 21 year old bodybuilder and mech eng. student from Ohio who has, over the past six months, gone from about 50,000 to over 1.7 million subscribers. I've heard dudes at work that don't lift mention him, either. He is, for his age, ridiculously large, and has already attracted accusations of not being 'natty' (i.e. he's using PEDs). Regardless of how he gets his gains, his appeal, however, seems pretty genuine. Unlike the deluge of overedited, attention-grabbing garbage on Youtube, Sulek's videos are lightly edited and mostly show him driving to, working out in, and then driving back to the gym with occasional meals, while he provides a kind of stream-of-consciousness of his thoughts on training and diet. There's very little groundbreaking stuff here, his videos are nearly entirely unscripted (like his workouts themselves) and Sulek saves all his intensity for his lifting. In fact he comes off as a fairly charismatic, positive, intelligent student. More than that, though, his videos scratch a desire for society and friendship. Commenters describe them as relaxing, and Sulek as authentic, but really what they are is parasocial. Sulek isn't acting as a coach or source of information or salesman (though he does have a deal with Hosstile), but more as the lifting buddy that millions of people wish they had. And though it can hardly be any good for my very poor self-esteem and body image issues, it's difficult to stop watching.
Mewis
9mo ago
Suppose that we take an extreme example of this. If one person votes Blue, he dies. But if even one person joins him, nobody dies. I think even the most hardened Red would concede the case for picking Blue. After all, your risk is very low, since there's a very high chance someone else will join you.
Consider the opposite case. If there is even a single Red voter, all Blues die. Well, even the softest of heart might concede that it's justified to vote Red than to throw your life away for the extremely small chance of total Blue unanimity.
But then, I don't vote.
Mewis
9mo ago
You say it's a character issue, but it's difficult for me to credit the modern phenomenon of mass obesity to sudden onset degeneracy rather than the mass availability of Oreo biscuits. Maybe we were always gluttons in search of a buffet big enough to kill us.
Mewis
9mo ago
Visiting banks? Desiring money? Owning an extremely common item like cable ties? This sounds like it could cover literally millions of people.
Mewis
9mo ago
I've decided to move to the other side of the planet. Specifically, I'm applying for a two year working holiday visa in New Zealand, and hoping to leave at the end of this year.
For some time, I've been pretty depressed. Depressed with myself, my life, and lacking any kind of real drive, even finding it difficult to generate desires. It's been particularly bad over the past month and I've struggled even to go to the gym, which is unusual for me. I don't know if moving to another country is going to fix me, but it might change me. I find myself wanting this, actually excited or hopeful about the future. It's a little bit scary, though. I've never travelled alone, far out of Europe, or for a significant period of time before, and this is all three.
Mewis
11mo ago
ChatGPT is designed to be helpful - saying 'I don't know' or 'there are no such relevant quotations' aren't helpful, or at least, it's been trained to think that those aren't helpful responses. Consider the average ChatGPT user who wants to know what Martin Luther King thought about trans rights. When the HelpfulBot says 'gee, I don't really know', the user is just going to click the 'you are a bad robot and this wasn't helpful', and HelpfulBot learns that.
Europe has a bigger economy in the sense that we produce luxury goods that are much more appealing and valuable. It doesn't mean that we just produce more of everything. This is particularly true in cost disease vulnerable sectors... Like defense. French winemakers are maybe more productive than Russian factory workers... But unlikely to win a war.
This isn't to say that Russia has the upper hand, but it's closer than the economic data gives credit for. That's how North Korea can be a threat to South Korea despite the economic imbalance.
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