QuinoaHawkDude
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User ID: 1789
Here's a Patton Oswalt stand-up bit from 2011 (NSFW!) where he talks about being asked to audition for the role of "Gay best friend" in a romcom and him saying that he would only do it if he was allowed to play the character as really, really dumb, because he was tired of seeing all gay characters in media being portrayed as impossibly awesome and flawless.
The flip side of this is Weak Men are Superweapons. I've definitely started noticing recently that, at least in the media I consume, fundamentalist Christians (or deeply religious people in general) are never depicted as anything other than evil. Examples: the "Crackstone" character in Wednesday, the antagonists in Devil in Ohio (well, those were actually Satanists, but they sure looked like a standin for Puritans or Amish people). Can anybody think of an example of an important (main character or recurring supporting character) character in recent mainstream media that is depicted as a good person who does good things, but who is also explicitly a fundamentalist Christian?
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
The obvious difference between colonialism and immigration (as these two concepts are generally understood by average modern Westerners) is that colonists tend to primarily be interested in exploiting and expropriating a nation's resources (natural and human) for the benefit of the colonist's home country (even if they do temporarily move to the colony in question to run a business, they aren't intending to make it their home, nor do they expect their children to be natives of the colony). Immigrants, even if they do end up changing the culture of the nation they move to, are invested in the success of their new home country, and the value they create stays in that country, modulo a few small cash transfers back to their relatives in their native country.
I expect, however, if you were to bring up any counterfactuals to this way of thinking to your bog-standard progressive, they would fall back on "Who, whom?" (or, as you put it, intersectionality). The mass migration of British people to its colonies (e.g. Australia and the USA before 1776), replacing the native culture with their own? Bad, because it was bad for non-whites. Mass migration of natives of former and current British colonies (e.g. India and Jamaica) to the UK, changing the culture of the UK? Good, because it's good for non-whites. (Also, curry and kebabs are better than steak-and-kidney pie.)
Even without considering the racial aspect of things, a simple rule might be "If a person moves from country A to country B and is immediately wealthier and more powerful than natives of country B, that's colonialism and that's bad. If a person moves from country B to country A and is immediately a member of the poor working classes, that's immigration and that's good."
As a sidebar, one of the things that fans of immigration might need to come to grips with is that the modern world of cheap air travel, global telecommunications and electronic banking makes it much, much easier for immigrants to avoid assimilating into their new country and put down roots there. They can still talk to their friends and family back home every day, travel back home once a year at least, and send them whatever is left of their income after covering their living expenses, invalidating my claim in the first paragraph about immigrants being invested in and benefiting their new country of residence. This is radically different from the immigration of the 1800s that American history textbooks look back upon so favorably.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
My reason for disliking Carter is that even though he (a Navy-trained nuclear engineer) understood what was going on during the Three Mile Island accident and could have told the nation that there was nothing to worry about, he apparently didn't want to upset anti-nuclear activists in his own party. While that was only a small part of the PR disaster that TMI was, in my mind that makes him partially to blame for why the US abandoned the adoption of nuclear power for electrical generation, which in turns make him partially responsible for global warming (very partially - it's not like Carter is responsible for what China and India have been doing or will continue to do in the next century).
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
For what it's worth, I'm in my 40s and I'm just now becoming aware, sometimes, that the reason I think a woman is really pretty is because she's done a really good job with her makeup. Lot of obvious makeup is unattractive to me, but probably because I associate it with lower-class women. But no makeup is definitely less attractive than well-done subtle makeup. I think the same thing happens in reverse with more educated, higher-class women finding jacked guys in muscle shirts less attractive than a man who manages to signal strength/fitness and masculinity more subtly, but also don't find completely unfit, weak men attractive at all.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
"Whole-language" might be a bad technique for trying to teach illiterate kids to read in a classroom setting, but I think the insight that it's better for readers to parse written language as whole words as opposed to a stream of phonemes is correct. I remember sitting in elementary school reading classes, where kids would be randomly picked to read some passage out of a book, and it was painfully obvious which of my fellow students could only read by sounding out syllables based on the spelling of words; they had absolutely no idea what the semantic content of what they just read actually was.
I was privileged to have parents who made teaching me how to read a priority, by reading to me/with me as a toddler, and before I ever set foot in a public school classroom I was already reading books by myself. At this point it feels like they gave me a superpower. Maybe not every kid is capable of learning to read this way. I have no memory of how much or little my parents may have been teaching me about how the spelling of written words mapped to the phonemes that make up spoken words.
Anyway, I think learning to read is far too foundational a skill for any parent who cares about their child's success in life to leave up to schools, no matter how elite. I'm kind of baffled by some of the other comments in this thread about parents who spend the money to send their kids to private schools having the clout to demand that the schools adequately teach their kids to read; I would really assume that anybody who has that kind of money would understand that it's their job to teach their kid basic reading skills, just as it's their job to teach their kid how to speak, and other things like hygiene and how to dress themselves. Like, you wouldn't send your kid off to their first day at kindergarten without being potty trained; why are you sending them there without being able to read at least, like, Thomas the Tank Engine, if not Charlotte's Web? Oh, and if the parents really are too busy with their elite careers to read to their kids at night, hire an au pair/nanny/governess/tutor/whatever.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Before I moved to a state with universal vote-by-mail, I pretty much only ever voted in Presidential and (maybe) midterm elections. Since moving, I've voted in every single election I get a ballot for. Being able to vote by mail, without having to ask for the privilege, removes a lot of friction from the voting process. You might say it's not that big of a deal to go vote in person, but where I was living, even if I did early voting it was going to mean about an hour standing in line (either because I got there way before the polling location opened to be first in line, or because I didn't do that and had to queue behind everybody else who did).
For those concerned about fraud, it's perhaps worth noting that I was kind of casual about my signature on a recent ballot, and my ballot got challenged because the signature didn't match my driver's license signature, and I had to go re-sign in person.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
If we're going to start counting "media conspires to suppress stories harmful to their favored candidates during an election cycle" as "stolen elections" then every major election since the invention of democracy has probably been stolen.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
99%+ of AR-15 owners don't commit mass shootings; it doesn't stop the half of the country that doesn't understand gun culture from finding all AR-15 owners at best suspicious and at worst actively threatening.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Consider this analogy: laws mandating wearing of seatbelts in cars don't prevent 100% of automotive fatalities. Sometimes this is because people aren't wearing their seatbelts properly. Sometimes this is because people just ignore the law and don't wear them. Sometimes this is because the specific type of accident caused trauma that seatbelts can't mitigate.
Would you therefore conclude "seatbelt mandates don't work"? Would you think it reasonable for the highway department (or whomever) to stop encouraging the wearing of seatbelts because they're not 100% effective?
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Re: iconic buildings in India built built by the British: the fact that all the buildings you provided as examples were built in a British/Western architectural style, and the Cathedral being specifically a house of worship for the West's dominant religion rather than that of the natives, kind of diminishes the claim that these are investments in "India".
Let's say that the United States becomes a Chinese colony, and the Chinese build several large buildings in America that look like this. Would you consider that an investment in America, its people and its culture? Or would you consider it a massive "fuck you, we own this place now"?
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
I remember listening to an econ podcast (I want to say either Freakonomics or Planet Money) that was exploring some things about how restaurant menus and pricing work, probably centered around how they work in the US. The big question was "what's up with free bread or chips and salsa? Why are restaurants giving away free product that just fills you up and keeps you from spending more money?" The answer was "so you don't order dessert". What restaurants (particularly large American restaurant chains) want is to turn tables over as fast as possible. They really don't want you spending two hours at a table ordering an appetizer and an entree and a dessert (which is kind of a stark contrast with my personal experience of dining in the UK, where restaurant table reservations are for fixed time spans, usually 90 minutes, and they seem to get offended if each person doesn't order three courses). Most restaurants really can't make desserts profitable, they can't sell them for what it costs to make them and keep them around, plus you're occupying the table that could instead by used by people who are going to order a main course that they can charge 3-4 times as much for but ultimately probably costs the same to make and serve. However, most sit-down restaurants feel like they have to have desserts on the menu because it's just expected of them. They just don't feel any real incentive to make them spectacular.
A few other things that could be at play, just off the top of my head:
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Sugar and fat could just be so great at being superstimuli that you don't really need to make them all that great to satisfy most people.
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Regarding the lack of variety, I can at least personally attest that on the rare occasions that I do decide to order dessert at a restaurant, I want to make sure I'm going to actually like it, so I'm less likely to go for something I don't recognize.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Yet our society does treat these behaviors as being "choices" and hold the people carrying these out as agents responsible for the consequences of these "choices."
Actually, I've recently noticed that whenever a mass shooting occurs, very little time is spent blaming the shooter, and much more ink and airtime is spent on blaming guns, gun stores, gun manufacturers, toxic masculinity, racism, sexism, inadequate mental health care, inadequate school security, cowardly cops that refuse to attempt to intervene, etc., etc., etc.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
This seems completely opposed to Yarvin's pleas for "formalism" where he says we should stop trying to figure out which people ought to be in charge of what land ("It is very hard to come up with a rule that explains why the Palestinians should get Haifa back, and doesn’t explain why the Welsh should get London back"), simply accept current borders as correct and stop fighting over them: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted/
I mean, he did write that back in 2007, so maybe he's changed his mind in the subsequent 15+ years.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Companies, brands and individuals can face substantial PR backlash when they charge a true market price for something in exceptionally high demand. For example, in your airline-and-hotel-prices-around-the-holidays example, it's possible that the airlines could charge even more of a premium for that Wednesday-before-Thanksgiving ticket than they do, but they figure the extra profit for one day isn't worth the negative publicity.
In Taylor Swift's case, I'm assuming that it's easier to let her fans be pissed off at scalpers than at her, if she was the one charging $20k or whatever for a ticket to one of her shows. She's already rich as Croesus and will make plenty of bank of this tour as it is. She probably craves public adoration more than money at this point.
As far as "why does much of the public feel strongly entitled to below-market pricing for certain luxury goods and services" goes, another commenter already pointed out that it's as simple as "I want this thing I can't afford so badly that I've convinced myself it's somehow an injustice that I'm not getting it". It's the same vibe you get from certain self-described incels when they're in "bailey" mode ("oh, why won't that beautiful girl who works out every day and spends an hour a night on her skin care routine date me even though I don't put any effort into my own physical appearance because that's for losers").
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Yes, it is useful to challenge your basic assumptions about our reality. For example, did you know that Earth has a four corner simultaneous 4-day time cube?
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
but then the median viewer's going to be muttering at her TV something along the lines of "Oi wot's all this shite made outta rattlesnake meat, I 'fort it's Mexican week? Where's the bloody tacos?"
I really don't know what GBBO viewership demographics are like in the UK. However, the way you phrased and spelled your imaginary median viewer's quote implies that they would be lower class British, the equivalent of a southern/hick/redneck accent in the US. And as a American fan of The Great British Baking Show, I can confidently say that the American fanbase is solidly Blue Tribe, educated, urban, PMC, etc. And I certainly don't react that way ("Yo, I thought this was supposed to be British, where's the steak and kidney pie?") whenever they pull out some obscure European cake or bread or pudding I've never heard of for a technical challenge. I Google it and go "huh, that's interesting". I agree that GBBO/S doesn't have a requirement to teach anybody anything, but one of the reasons I do enjoy it is the opportunity to learn about baked goods I'm unfamiliar with.
For what it's worth, the only commentary I've seen on Mexican week online was a bunch of TikTok videos making fun of Brits inability to pronounce "avocado" and "guacamole".
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
While the orgasm gap definitely goes a long way to explaining why women are less radically DTF than men, I think that male sexual desire is also more complicated than "I am having sex and sex is awesome." Yassine put it well in the latest Bailey podcast when he said that the straight male desire for sex is mostly about status. Men want to have sex with the most physically attractive woman they can find willing to have sex with them, because of the status/ego boost. "She's so hot, she could bang literally any guy she wants, and she chose to bang ME!" This explains the disconnect in some of the other discussions in this thread around "incels should stop complaining about how hard it is to get laid, it's really not that hard, all you have to do is X" where X is a list of things like going to bars all the time, learning how to chat up women, learn how to dress better, etc. And at that point it starts to sound like a lot of work. And if you have to put a lot of work into getting laid, suddenly it's not such a status boost, is it? Now she's not banging me because she chose me out of all these other guys, she's banging me because I was the only guy who was willing to flatter her for long enough.
There's certainly an equivalent for straight women but it's the commitment after the sex that is important, not the sex itself. "He's so smart and successful, he could choose to commit to any chick he wants, and he's committing to me!" And I think "can't afford to be that profligate with their scarce reproductive resources" translates to "can't afford to hoe around too much or it will be impossible to get any high-status male to commit to me" in modern times.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Fast forward through satanism, open findom relationships, antifa friends, trans rights and racist jokes, if you care about 'ethical consumerism' like is clearly done by Karl and friends, why should any right of center person support or tolerate someone like Karl?
Do you ever get upset when progressives refuse to tolerate somebody because they expressed right-of-center views that aren't central to what that person is primarily known for? Do you ever feel like, you know, it's kind of unfair for somebody who's really good at something like acting or writing or programming or making cool YouTube videos to suddenly have no platform to do those things because they said something completely unrelated to any of those things that progressives happened to disagree with? If so, then why would you think it's okay to do that when the shoe is on the other foot?
FWIW, I have enjoyed owning, shooting and maintaining guns for years, but I find it increasingly hard to enjoy the hobby as somebody who's culturally blue tribe because of exactly the attitude you just expressed, and the fear that in order to be a "gun guy" you also have to hate non-whites and LGBTQ people or you won't fit in.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
To perhaps offer a steelman, there are certain cultural practices and norms tied to gender that are essentially arbitrary in the modern environment. There's no inherent reason that women should be forced to shave their legs/armpits to be considered attractive, for instance, or that men shouldn't do the same. There's no biological imperative that men shouldn't be allowed to wear dresses, or makeup, or be considered submissive or cute.
Absolutely.
That still doesn't imply that I should be forced to affirm that somebody with a penis is a woman just because they don't like traditionally masculine behaviors or prefer traditionally feminine behaviors.
This feels like beating a dead horse at this point, but it really all boils down to what information people expect the words "man/male/he/him/his" and "woman/female/she/her/hers" to convey. I want "woman" to mean "a biologically female human being with two X chromosomes and a vajayjay", and "man" to mean "a biologically male human being with XY chromosomes and a dong". Hermaphrodites and people with oddball chromosome configurations are so rare that our language doesn't need to account for them, and as far as I can tell they're not the ones at the forefront of the campaign to redefine those word clusters.
I have no problem if a man wants to wear clothing that is traditionally feminine and prefer knitting to video games as a hobby, or vice versa. Men who have more feminine interests and expressions and women with more masculine interests and expressions have always existed. Like, I see what you're doing there, girl with short hair and baggy clothes. You're de-emphasizing your femininity for whatever reason. I can still tell you're a girl. You're not fooling anybody. You also don't need to put "enby/they/them" in your Twitter bio or change your name to a gender-neutral or male one for me to figure out what your deal is. You can dress and groom yourself however you like, and nobody should harass you for it, and they should treat you the same as they treat anybody else in public-sphere interactions (teacher-student, employer-employee, customer-server, etc.). None of that means that you're not female.
Now, I feel like I have to acknowledge that there are definitely cultures, both past and present, that are much less tolerant of "deviant" behavior along these lines. Parents yelling at their boys for playing with dolls instead of army men, and vice versa. I feel like that is just a specific case of intolerance for misfits, which I believe is wrong and should be prevented. But the solution to "men who like to knit get made fun of" isn't "okay, then change your name to a female name and start insisting that the world treat you like an actual woman".
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
It feels like a while since the term "reality-based community" was in vogue, but I remember wondering how support for trans rights could possibly fit well with that back when I first saw progressives using it, without realizing it was just a shorthand for "we believe in The Cathedral, not The Church".
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
As one of Freddie's subscribers and occasional commenters, prior to his "talking about trans people in the comments of one of my posts about an unrelated subject = instant ban" policy, it really was common for at least one comment thread on all of his posts to end up centering on trans issues, no matter how unrelated the post's subject matter. It was annoying.
I believe that this community experimented with a ban on the HBD topic for a while for similar reasons, and I don't think it was because the mods were anti-HBD per se, they were just tired of it being the only goddamn thing we talked about. That's my memory, anyway.
About the least charitable take I have on Freddie's banning commenting on about trans issues is that he may realize just how badly the social justice left has shot itself in the foot in the last five years with the trans issue, and is tired of having people using it as a generic gotcha attack on social justice politics in general.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Money (as in "a countable medium of economic exchange") is great and pretty foundational to human civilization, but it does tend to distort people's thinking once the scale of the numbers, and thus the corresponding impact on the real world allocation and distribution of scarce resources, gets several orders of magnitude beyond what they're used to thinking about in their daily lives.
Like, it's clear that if a man is spending $1000 a month on booze and gambling while his kids are starving, he is being evil. He could very easily spend $1000/mo on food for his kids instead of on his own enjoyment. $1000 of food per month is a tiny fraction of your local food economy.
It's less clear to me that Bezos could end world hunger overnight by putting his billions of dollars towards that goal instead of building rockets. What real-world resources are the two different projects competing over? Food production is mostly about arable land and physical labor; rockets use very little of the former and relatively modest amounts of the latter. The main resource that space project money goes towards is smart and skilled people's time and creativity. Whether you think world hunger could be solved by Bezos would seem to hinge on whether or not you think that if all those smart rocket scientists were put to work figuring out how to grow more food (or, realistically, how to distribute it better - I've never heard anybody gainsay the conventional wisdom that the world grows enough food to feed everybody, it just doesn't get it into everybody's hands efficiently enough before it spoils) it would make a sustainable impact.
There's also a separate issue of the difference between a one-time investment in developing a technology that you expect to eventually turn a profit (as far as I know, SpaceX, Blue Origin and all the other private space companies definitely expect to get their money back down the line once their rockets are developed) versus sustaining a charitable non-profit (if "solving world hunger" simply means "give money to everybody who can't afford to feed themselves, from now until eternity if necessary") which has no financial upside (except perhaps in a macro sense, i.e. people who aren't starving will be more productive and the economy as a whole benefits, but that's the government's job, not Bezos's). Leftists would still claim it's the right thing to do with that money, but approximately none of them have built billion-dollar businesses by spending their money on things that will eventually make more money, etc., so they really have no clue what it takes to get those resources in the first place.
And let's not forget just how effective poor people are at ruining the best-laid plans to help them.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
It's impossible to know for sure, but I think if President Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, the US would not have put men on the moon in the 1960s. Or 1970s. Perhaps not ever (so far).
Kennedy's martyrdom made the Apollo program a political third rail, so pretty much anybody with the potential power to cut its funding kept their mouth shut until the first successful landing. But nobody spends hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars without a lot of people wanting that money to be spent on something else that they think is more important.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Attempting to point out the hypocrisy of a social justice movement that simultaneously argues that a) it's horribly racist for white people to be frightened by black people on account of the actions of a very small subset of black people and b) it makes perfect sense for people to be frightened by guns on account of the actions of a very small subset of gun owners.
So, Curtis Yarvin just dropped a long essay about why he doesn't like the West's support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/ukraine-the-tomb-of-liberal-nationalism
Or, at least, that's what I think his point is. As usual with his writings, it can be hard to tell.
FWIW, reading Unqualified Reservations was probably the single most important event in my journey to this weird part of the internet that we call the Ratsphere, even though Yarvin probably doesn't consider himself a rationalist (and I neither do I, really).
However, on this particular point (Ukraine), I find myself quite frustrated. All those words, and he never once (as far as I can tell - I admit that I only had time to skim the article) addressed what I would think would be the most obvious point if you're trying to convince a bog-standard Westerner why they shouldn't support Ukraine: Ukraine was invaded by Russia. Not a "regime change" type invasion, a la USA vs. Iraq '03, not a "peacekeeping" invasion. A "Russia wants some of the land currently controlled by Ukraine to be controlled by Russia instead" invasion. A good, old-fashioned war of conquest for resources. The kind of war that, since 1945, the industrialized West (or "first world") has tried very hard to make sure nobody is allowed to wage, especially not in Europe. And therefore, the West's support for Ukraine is entirely justified by the desire to make sure nobody is allowed to get away with just seizing territory because they want it.
Like I said, maybe he does try to convince the reader why this policy is wrong, but in true Moldbuggian fashion, he uses 10,000 words to say what would be better said with 100.
Or maybe he assumes that anybody paying attention knows why the standard narrative is wrong. Maybe I'm wrong about how and why Russia invaded Ukraine.
As a side note, I do think it's interesting that the both the most radically right-wing Substack author I follow (Yarvin) and the most radically left-wing Substack author I follow (Freddie DeBoer) both think the West's support for Ukraine is bad. Is this just horseshoe theory? They both hate the United States for different reasons and anything it does is wrong by default?
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