RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
While the conflict is unsightly, the economic policy of 'lets continuously cut taxes and raise spending' is Zimbabwe-tier. America cannot afford to treat the rest of the world like retarded clowns forever, no matter how stupid and foolish other countries are. They're not going to keep buying these little bits of paper at a high price. Bond rates have been and will continue to rise.
A trillion dollars borrowed every 180 days? Inflation will inevitably spike and then interest rates will need to be raised, with serious consequences for refinancing. US is already at 124% debt to GDP, there's not much more room to borrow.
There are lots of people on the MAGA-right who don't seem to care about this at all, just the political impossibility of cutting spending. Being bankrupt isn't great politically either. Inflationary spirals aren't great either. Schizo tariff wars with the rest of the world... aren't great either. Trump and some of his key advisors have basically no concept of what it means to run the economy, they are not economically literate. It's like Soviet politburo members in the 1980s who had no idea how the Soviet economy actually ran, the complex dual-currency system that existed to prevent inflation. They had no concept of inflation. The Biden administration was little better, they did much the same thing. But one fundamentally can't expect loyalty from others if one flails around breaking things constantly in a position of power.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
if the position is that all US interests are subordinate to Israeli interests
Israel doesn't own the US government but they have enormous influence especially in foreign policy and anything pertaining to Israel. Occasionally the US tries to do something that actually prioritizes American interests over Israel's, the Israel lobby usually nixes this in the end: the Iran deal for instance. Now the US does have huge leverage over Israel in terms of capabilities. Merely shutting off aid would be catastrophic for their military, who relies on US provided weapons, satellites, communications and USAF for air defence. I've said before that the US could annihilate Israel at will with sanctions alone, the state would quickly disintegrate.
But in terms of mental, political, lobbying power, Israel enjoys a huge advantage. The warrior can easily demolish a succubus in battle but it's irrelevant if she has her charm spell running.
I'm not dogmatic on whether it's arm-twisting or owning hearts and minds, there's a mix of both going on. Nor can I give you a date where it suddenly happened, it's not a switch that was flipped on but a gradual process peaking around the 2000s.
But something, surely, has to be off when you've got big figures like Ted Cruz going on interviews about how the Bible says God will bless those who bless Israel, curse those who curse Israel, how he got into politics aiming to be the biggest defender of Israel. Some of this is Adelson money and other Israel lobby cash/threats, some of it is weird Christianity, nevertheless it's unusual and indicates powerful influence.
I think political solutions can encourage personal/political virtue. Imagine a really intense anti-corruption campaign, where high ranking people were actually given long prison sentences or executed for corruption? Wouldn't that work on the simple, clear level of 'cant commit crime if dead'? China has become less corrupt since the mid 2000s after pursuing this approach.
How does a culture become virtuous in the first place if not severe punishment crushing the bad elements? If the bottom-up anti-corruption from virtue angle isn't working, then one may as well try top-down. In the US this kind of approach is complicated because there are certain groups that are innately clannish and corrupt or so inclined in that direction that it's nigh-impossible to correct. I don't know why anyone expects West Africans to perform well in anything. You can look at West Africans in West Africa and uniformly it's a mess, regardless of history or laws (Liberia stands out here). You can look at West Africans in Haiti - standard West African demographics and outcomes but in the Western Hemisphere instead. And you can look at West Africans with a non-trivial amount of white admixture in the US, plus a constant inflow of white money - much less of a mess but still a mess. Certain parts of Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, even areas of Washington DC... these are not places one wants to be!
If you don't want a bloated, grossly inefficient, corrupt government, don't let them have any political power.
A median porn video teaches a teenage male that of course a woman will be enflamed with desire as soon as you touch her, enthusiastically give you oral sex for a while, then be ready to get fucked however hard you want to fuck her, then happily switch to anal and finally let you cum on her face. Communication about consent, boundaries, or birth control?
Surely people are aware that there's a difference between reality and fantasy? Movies teach me that with the power of friendship and snarky quips I can overthrow giant conspiracies and evil empires. But I don't try that IRL because the evil empire is actually very strong.
I guess there are a bunch of retarded people like the guys who openly masturbate to lingerie adverts on the street or try to rape girls in the park who don't appreciate this fine point. But they're not going to get the message 'don't be creepy and rapey' since they're already locked in on the creepy, rapey lifestyle. 'Why would I not rape when I can, how am I supposed to fuck' they might say and be right, since surely nobody consents to sex with ugly, poor, retarded men. The answer here is using force, not education.
Also, anything teachers or the state try to do will be extremely uncool and cringe. It'll be just like the 'informed consent, no means no' training that nearly every institution has but worse. Can you even imagine how groan-inducingly awful official state-sponsored pornography will be? How woke and diverse and uncool and stilted the dialogue is?
All this would do is teach the more autistic men insanely uncharismatic bedroom talk and make them more nervous. Anyone who wants to actually get off will go to real porn, or hentai, or impossible AI girls. I think it would actually make girls more pressured too, they don't want to be an uncool, frigid, lame bitch like that girl in Safe and Respectful Physical Connection Part 4, do they?
A better solution would be punitively obliterating Pornhub and co with massive fines and lawsuits so they stop profiting off people trafficking and child rape.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Despite every war being started by the Arabs
Fake history. The Six-Day War was started by Israel and they were the aggressor in Suez.
More recently, (Sharon) acted with generosity by withdrawing from Gaza in 05.
He did that because he concluded it wasn't demographically practical to settle, demolish Palestinian houses and do the standard divide-and-conquer tactics in Gaza. Sharon was not a generous man in any reasonable sense. His military career included war crimes, he founded Unit 101 and is responsible for the Qibya Massacre amongst other things.
Ariel Sharon wrote in his diary that "Qibya was to be an example for everyone," and that he ordered "maximal killing and damage to property". Post-operational reports speak of breaking into houses and clearing them with grenades and shooting.
JCPoA (Iran Nuclear deal) was signed
The US reneged on this when Trump got into office, Trump being heavily backed by Israeli lobbyists who got what they were paying for.
Imagine if your daughter got raped and murdered. Then your friend says "she had it coming".
It really isn't this simple. The Israelis have a habit of shooting Palestinian children in the back, along with unarmed protestors. There's a lot of bad blood on both sides. The Arabs are not nice people either. Wars are unpleasant, borders are formed by bloodshed. However, it is inappropriate and ahistorical to valorize Israel as though they're pure good facing pure evil.
Where is the outrage over all the Palestinians who get sodomized or tortured in Israeli prisons? Israeli parliamentarians have said, on camera, 'oh they had it coming, they're Hamas, we can do anything we like!' The Muslim world are the ones who get upset about this, along with people who read various UN or Human rights reports on the subject. The 'free palestine' leftists are doing the same thing as you, seeing both real and imagined evils of one party, siding with the other and then ignoring their own flaws. This kind of skewed perspective eventually creates support for unsound policies, rousing excessive passions about other people's wars.
If Iran's nuclearization is inevitable
They've been six months away from nukes for 30 years now, according to Israeli intelligence. How is this line of argument evergreen?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
I think back in the day it was so manifestly obvious that swearing an oath meant you had to stand by it they never encoded such a section. In any event she could say 'i take this obligation freely and sincerely' in her usual overtly insincere and obnoxious manner. Root problem isn't solved. In the 1930s a fair few Wehrmacht officers felt restricted from plotting against Hitler because they swore an oath to him. It was not on! People would go around saying 'my word is my bond'.
In any event she did sign the paper so she formally ticked the box. Oaths are just box-ticking these days, no more meaningful than terms and conditions for free software, no more meaningful than the King's Champion who used to ride up, throw down a gauntlet and challenge anyone who disputed the new monarch's right to rule in single combat. He's still there of course, just holds a standard now.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
He has a space program, I don't believe it's beyond his power to get someone to manage dinner parties easily, or at least more easily than a massive 80 million dollar wedding. If anyone is elite human capital, it's bezos. He can learn!
Nobody goes that far as a matter of convenience. Bezos is not marrying out of convenience, there must be some deeper reason.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Anyone else reading that excerpt and thinking 'Based'? Wouldn't it be excellent to carve out a new artificial world, make better animals and plants according to one's wishes? Live as long as one likes without regard for age?
Not the specifics of perfectly cleaning the world, that could take many angles. One might make a jungle of talking animals, or an endless lived-in leafy suburbia or a Willy Wonka wonderland or all of those things simulated within a ball of computronium. But isn't that the logical endpoint of ever increasing mastery and control of the world? What's the alternative, stasis?
I can sense that many people don't like this vision but isn't this what we're doing, irregardless of objections? Unless you think 'no people mustn't live forever' or 'we mustn't have children' or 'technological advancement must stop' then you endorse indefinite growth in numbers and in power of worldshaping and knowledge ("All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control"), so eventually something like this will happen.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
less than 1% of Israel's GDP
Forget GDP, GDP is just a number. You can't just go out and buy large numbers of artillery shells, JDAMs, advanced missile defence, spare parts. It's not a liquid market, buying more can just make the price go up. Few countries make these things. Israel can't produce munitions at scale because they're a small country, they don't even have a domestic steel industry. They rely on the US for this because America is actually large and has huge stockpiles that are reliably used to replenish the Israeli arsenal. Otherwise they'd just run out of munitions or Israel would have to wait ages to restock, inhibiting their military capacity.
Furthermore, military aid always roars up whenever Israel actually needs it, it went up to about $22 billion in the year after October 7th. See here: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/USspendingIsrael
Technically speaking, the there is a law against America giving any military aid to nuclear powers who haven't signed the non-proliferation treaty like Israel but they just pretend it's fine.
Was this last bit about the USAF some sort of typo?
No, the USAF and RAF literally, directly, provide air defence for Israel directly. US F-16s shot down Iranian missiles attacking Israel. Plus US warships nearby fire their expensive ABMs to defend Israel.
the US has never invested ground forces in taking out any military group directly opposing Israel
Saddam's Iraq was an anti-Israel force. Israel bombed their nuclear reactor in the 80s. In the Gulf War Iraq Scudded Israel. In 2003, the US invaded Iraq, in large part due to false intelligence about WMDs which the Israelis contributed. Plus a bunch of US policymakers talked about how the real reasoning was that Iraq was a threat to Israel. See my comment here: https://www.themotte.org/post/765/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/162796?context=8#context
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19d ago
I refuse to believe that the human suffering cost of being fat-shamed, over and above just being unnecessarily ugly and physically weak, is worse than millions and millions of deaths.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
I thought bartender or stand-up was being interpreted as 'poor'. Like how sometimes people say self-employed when they mean unemployed. Or how women are plus-size, curvy, big-boned rather than fat.
Iran has demonstrated that it has the intent to strike the west and US if it can. They are working on the capability, and once that's done, an active nuclear arsenal presents them the opportunity at any time.
The West? What Western country has Iran struck? France? Germany? Japan? Canada? They could bring out a bunch of drones from a shipping container and cause mayhem in any major city if they wanted.
Iran only strikes Israel and US bases right on its borders, with the US launching strikes on Iran and generally acting in a hostile fashion (sanctions, cyberattacks, proxy wars, assassinations, open threats to invade). The Houthis attacked a bunch of shipping as part of a campaign against Israel.
Iran is an American foe. But it doesn't necessarily have to be this way. It could be less of a US foe, like Venezuela for instance. Or it could be a friend. The US's biggest victory in the Cold War was swaying Maoist China away from the Soviet Union. Maoist China had actively fought and killed thousands, maybe tens of thousands of US troops in a major war. Total ideological incompatibility. They hated America and were super, duper crazy. Iran is much less of a foe than China was in the 1960s. Yet the US was able to work constructively with China and shift 1/3 or so of the Red Army into the far east, facing their former ally. Suddenly the US stopped needing to fight wars in East Asia! Diplomacy is really powerful!
There were opportunities to reopen relations with Iran during the 1990s but the US pursued an unhelpful strategy of 'dual containment' of both Iran and Iraq since neither were friendly towards Israel. Obama tried to improve relations with Iran but Trump then nixed this initiative.
Now the US is involved in yet another Middle East conflict. This is strategically foolish - China and Iran were the biggest winner of the Iraq War. China got much of the liberated oilfields and the US navy defending their shipping lanes for free! Iran got most of the country of Iraq. Terraforming the Middle East to be friendly towards Israel is extremely costly and dangerous and doesn't work. It should be much less of a priority than the primary theatre of conflict, with the great powers.
Iranian militias in Iraq wouldn't exist if the Iraqi government hadn't been demolished by America. No US troops would die if they weren't there. There's no need for them to be present, the damage is already done. Iraq has been pushed into Iran's sphere of influence (about 40% of the way to puppet state), at US/Coalition expense. It's time to take the L and depart.
China will be a winner of this war too. There is little they want to see more than US air defence stockpiles depleted by Iranian missiles, carrier groups redeployed from the Pacific to the Middle East. Russia is another winner if oil prices rise, though it's bad for China, probably evens out. There is no reason to face Russia, China and Iran at the same time when Iran could've been turned. Too late now but don't double down further on an error!
A better strategy would be to tell Israel to shut up about Iran and move on. Iran hasn't nuclearized in the last 30 years when the Israelis continuously shrieked it was going to happen in a few months or so. Barring a major shock like this attempted disarming strike, they're unlikely to nuclearize, there's a fatwa against it. Iran didn't retaliate with chemical weapons after Iraq gassed 20,000 of them to death, a more than reasonable provocation! Putting more pressure on Iran is the exact way to get them to undo the fatwa and nuclearize.
More than that, North Korea is an extremely poor country which has continuously struggled to develop a missile program. I don't think that it's outside the realm of possibility that they do, but again, at least there's some reason as to why we all sat around on it.
They already have ICBMs that can hit the US. North Korea is another example of the danger of the 'I can't even spell diplomacy' trend in DC. Sanctions and threats don't result in compliant denuclearization (certainly not after going in on Iraq and Libya when they'd complied), they end up with tens of thousands of North Korean troops fighting on Russia's side in Ukraine.
I think they could've made a better Snow White film than the original, it's just that they didn't want to. They wanted to make a bad film and did so.
Mastery isn't the problem, it's bad people using great resources to achieve bad goals. Now I see it, there's a pleasing symmetry in our tags "Just build nuclear plants" and "nuclear levels of sour" and what we're saying.
However I do agree that there are serious risks with progress and power concentration, it will probably end in tears for the vast majority for us for the same fundamental reason, bad people wanting bad things.
I don't see a collapse pathway though, only greater acceleration. Technology forms society. Writing and agriculture enabled settled states, steam engines enabled modern society. Powerful AI will enable transhuman or posthuman society. Maybe that does look more like an oligarchy where a few enjoy limitless technological power and can suppress everyone else. It may well be bad for those who aren't a chosen few or a singular one. Nevertheless I expect that it'd be much more highly developed than modern civilization in technological sophistication and scale.
Even if there's a full nuclear exchange induced by destabilizing technology, would the survivors really give up on securing more wealth, more power, more security through technological superiority? I believe they'd think 'damn, we should've struck first' or 'this time let's hide our schemes more effectively' or 'at least we've got the most remaining resources, we can try again'. They'd still know all the things we'd know, they'd be back at it again sooner or later, probably sooner and with a more ferocious sense of determination. A full nuclear exchange isn't certain either, it's hard to foresee what happens. I agree that there will be ever-greater instability and disruptions but that's just part of the transition from one kind of society to the next. The general trend is that even occasional setbacks (using rooted in social decline) are overcome - the Bronze Age Collapse, the fall of Rome and the Black Death only temporarily inhibited a larger trend of acceleration. Ideally acceleration should be channelled in a more pro-social way than it is but it seems an irresistible trend. Only if this time is different should we expect it to fail.
I like this reply since it has a little edge to it, but I am left wondering, to what extent does empathizing with young men just translate to validating their crippling anxiety and fear over interacting with the opposite sex? Does that do them any good? To me a lot of the replies about fear of getting 'cancelled' just seem like an overblown and hyperbolic expression of that anxiety and fear.
I think it's about cost-benefit ratios. Suppose you're an adventurer going out to slay a monster. Maybe you'll go for a band of goblins for 40 gold pieces, or a dragon for 1000 gold pieces, a knighthood and universal fame. You wouldn't go out to slay a dragon for 40 gold pieces not because you're cowardly but because the risks and dangers aren't worth the reward.
Young men are notorious for being the bravest and most fearless. Young men do the fighting and dying in war and crime, they found startups and create new things for good or ill. So long as the incentives match up, young men are perfectly prepared to take risks.
I think the incentives don't match up for the bulk of young men to go out wooing girls like they used to. The status of being a boyfriend is fairly low, there are semi-common complaints about going out on a date being like a job interview (in other words a humiliation ritual/interrogation). There are significant financial costs maintaining relationships. There are cultural expectations that the man mustn't do anything wrong like sleeping with a drunk girl while drunk or approaching in the wrong ways and these are strong expectations, a huge amount of power is going into 'don't be a creep/sex pest'. There's a huge political divide between the sexes these days, it's semi-commonly expected for the man to lie about his true beliefs.
Moving on to marriage, again the status of the husband is not very high. He is not really the man of the house unless there's a burglar or something. Marriage is not 'till death do us part'. There is not really much he can do about nagging or a dead bedroom except an expensive divorce. As far as the legal system is concerned, he is clearly the second parent when it comes to raising (incredibly expensive if done the high-status way) children. Possibly the third parent, behind the state education system. And there's all kinds of media that presents the husband as a loser/fool while the wife is strong and wise.
My point isn't so much the classic 'porn cheaper' discourse so much as it's a matter of status and respect manipulation. Of course it's easier and safer to stay at home and not go out to war. But the status of warriors used to be kept very high, people would sing songs about the glory and valour of these proud defenders of the fatherland. And once he reached the front, there was cameraderie and morale, a mission to achieve that kept him fighting even through death and disease. Militaries are underrated as social institutions, they did an amazing job getting people to do things one would naively imagine to be impossible.
It's not just "Why looks-max, develop game, get fit at the gym, develop hobbies that bring one into contact with women without actively seeming lecherous, learn to interpret these complex semi-passive signals, woo a woman, take her out on appropriate dates and wield good sexual skills... when I have Biggus Tittus from anime, custom-tailored to appeal to me for free?"
The key thing is status here. Many would do all those costly things to end up in a high-status position. Look at South Korea, they exam-max super hard to get into Samsung and the opportunity to work even harder competing with the other elite rat-race enthusiasts. Then there are the gigachads who sleep with hundreds of women, that's a high status position in our culture. Of the looksmaxxing high-effort young men, I expect that's more their goal than the socially desirable 'loyal productive monogamous husband'. They're not going to do all that for a low-status position. Incels aren't satisfied with Biggus Tittus the anime girl or even a prostitute, they want status and respect.
Obviously there are many exceptions and many people who are perfectly happy in relationships. However, I think more effort needs to go into nerfing the dragon (making relations between the sexes less tense) and/or buffing the reward (making married men higher status, not just in cheap words of conservative speeches but real privileges).
"Don't be such a pussy, go kill that dragon on minimum wage" isn't going to cut it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19d ago
Well we can be pretty sure genetics is the substance behind heredity. I see no reason to give up on mechanistic models when good progress has been made. It's just difficult. Certainly not helped by the amount of fear and politics involved. Gene-editing is functionally illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui
Reading the above wikipedia article is soul-destroying given the context of what we now know about other genetic bioresearch in China in the late 2010s.
To me, this assertion is evidence of the glaring blindspot which materialist rationalists such as Alexander have - they assume that materialism / genetic determinism is right, and then reason backward in order to make their fundamental assumptions fit the data. While the genetic framework is clearly helpful and has had some limited success in new medical breakthroughs, it's beyond obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense that compared to the hype in the early 2000s, the new branches of genetic science have been a massive let down.
Just because the train is late, it doesn't follow that it will never come or that trains don't work at all. There is a lot of trackwork and bad weather plus the conductor has been derailing it!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21d ago
Sucks so much when people you have normal relationships come up with the most basic, one-sided, emotionally driven opinions about politics.
I had a friend, a serious thinker, works close with govt and has seen/worked in the sausage factory with politicians and really ought to be credulous, come up to me and talk about how she read about how Kamala was just really smart and incisive and kept everyone on their toes with her reading of documents and questions to staffers... You can (and my friend certainly does) hate Donald Trump with a burning passion but this is a bridge too far.
Neither of us are American! Where is this stuff even coming from? So many are living in a totally closed media environment.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Well if you assume that all Musk's projects will fail, then yes I would agree that he's a dead man warning.
Sometimes Musk succeeds and other times he fails. His attempt to make his own Dojo AI chip failed. But he's doing pretty well on AI with Nvidia chips, Grok 3 is better than anything Facebook, Microsoft or Amazon has come up with.
Maybe Starship fails, maybe it succeeds. If there was no Starship wouldn't you say something like 'oh the competition is catching up, how is he going to stay ahead, there's no product on the horizon'? Developing new products isn't easy, rockets have been known to fail. Who even is the competition? The entire Chinese state and private sector? Bezos who just got into orbit in 2025? ULA? ESA? SpaceX makes them all look puny.
What are the odds that all Musk's upcoming products fail? Robotaxis and Optimus will fail? Well then Tesla would be in a bad place. But how do you know that?
What is the track record of 'everything Musk does fails' in the grand scheme of things? I'm pretty sure you don't fail your way into hundreds of billions of dollars. The media has a skewed perspective on Musk. Whenever Tesla stock goes down we get a morality tale of 'evil never prospers' where you can just sense their glee, yet when Tesla stock goes up (up by 50% since March) there's a mysterious silence.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
Having big muscles does change people's perceptions of you. I doubt he would've gotten this banger song made about him if he looked like a nerd: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vTyeZjo7n_M
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
Shame sure can enforce anti-social norms but the problem then is the norms, not the shaming. Every society does shaming in one way or another.
For instance, consider the complex built up in Britain that it was racist to look too closely into Pakistani grooming gangs or consider what exactly was going on with these naked, drunk 12-13 year old girl 'prostitutes' spending all this time with much older men, despite an otherwise powerful feminist apparatus. Shame works both ways. It can support cover-ups and abuse just as it can produce clean, cities full of orderly and considerate people.
Easy paths are all well and good but sometimes one has to do things that are hard, that's where shame comes in. 'Hard' can be doing very good or very bad deeds.
Because they're a tiny, weak country pretending to be a major power. 10 million people, 7 million of them Jews, cannot sustain significant long-term military capacity against even low-medium strength foes if they lose the support of the US. Israel's Gaza campaign is dependent upon US munitions and US support. They aren't even able to raze Gaza without US munitions 'forward-based' in Israel, de facto there for them to use.
US sanctions? They're done. Israel's high-tech economy goes straight to zero and the country disintegrates. How do you sanction-proof with such a small country? F-35s probably wouldn't last 6 months without the gigantic global supply chain of parts.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
What consistent moral traits has the US had over the last 100 years?
The US used to be a racially segregated, eugenicist, male-dominated, highly industrialized, colonial power with a small state apparatus. Sodomy was banned, along with miscegenation and pornography. In all reasonable senses America has changed hugely.
And yet elements of the US character are preserved over the centuries due to the people that make it up, though this is changing. There's a certain level of non-conformism, religiosity, optimism, innovativeness, individualism...
It's the same with Germany. There are certain German traits that remained consistent over the century. The high status of technical research for one thing, prestige going more towards engineering and hard sciences compared to (in the UK) classics. Even that is a relatively surface-level cultural difference, compared to underlying matters like relationship between citizen and state, class v meritocracy, systematic thinking...
It's extremely reductive to view a state's character solely by the most obvious features of its government.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
I discussed it with a judge doing more advanced judgey things (abstract legal analysis of a case judgement as if presenting a paper at a conference) and he thought Sonnet 3.6 was a pretty decent law student, so presumably Opus 4 or indeed o3 would be lots better.
There wasn't much romance in the new Top Gun movie either, Cruise spent much of the non-jet parts being dressed down by former lovers which I found a bit irritating and unnecessary. Quite different to the old one.
In either of the Mission Impossible 'Dead Reckoning' movies there wasn't much romance.
Not sure how you can have romance in the modern era where there seems to be so much emphasis on men being denigrated. Traditional James Bond style romance is too rapey, Roger Moore's Bond is right out. Even soft wooing can still give the ick to some extent. The male can't pursue the female without being humiliated it seems,. And if the female is pursuing the man it seems like male wish fulfillment fantasy, the Japanese trope where a very passive guy ends up with a harem of 10/10s because he's 'nice'.
So how do you have a romance then if neither party can pursue? Ironically, lots of women want Roger Moore x10, they want a billionaire werewolf lumberjack cowboy with a massive cock. The 50 shades of grey movie made 570 million on a budget of 40 million, it's a clear success. As in my previous post, many many women want the alpha male version of Malfoy: https://www.themotte.org/post/877/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/187490?context=8#context
But directors and high society/PMC feminists absolutely refuses to permit the alpha male version of Malfoy, Rowling wrote him to be a wimp and a loser. I saw a funny thread on /gif/ the other day where the premise was 'feminists/liberals fucked hard' and so naturally all these commenters joined in a pointless political debate on 4chan's third most degen pornography board: 'you guys are incels posting this garbage', 'its so cringe, trump supporters don't have sex' and nobody realized that the clips were all from the reddit forum, fuckingfascists. It was leftwing and liberal women who were into this stuff, getting fucked by trump supporters, getting turned into tradwives. Femgooners were to blame. You can tell this instantly because none of it or the stuff from fuckingfascists was anime. Clearly it wasn't authentic right-wing content. There's a huge gap between the roles and expectations that society tries to project and what's actually happening, at least in terms of masturbation fantasies.
I'd like a movie where some gigachad Sean Connery secret agent from the 1950s comes forward in time and has to deal with modern norms and lame gadgets, shows all the paper-pushers and pencilnecks what real racism and sexism looks like. The femgooners can have their dangerous alpha male. I can have an antiwoke, fun, action movie. Everybody wins except the directorial class who've been pumping out all these terrible marvel movies.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
Exactly. Korean tests are, by their very nature, actually not good at assessing intelligence. It's all multiple choice. You can't do writing as multiple choice, you need an essay response to assess real comprehension. But if there's an essay then it becomes subjective and open to endless appeals and lawyering, whereas multiple choice is consistent, uniform and totally fair. Just get the right answer loser!
I remember having to study the 'theme' of 'belonging' in some awful book English teachers probably think is profound. That did not help me understand or wield English any better. The only way to get better is to read and write widely, not obsessively study a single text at 10x the intensity of what I was doing just because it's on the test.
The cost of obesity is enormously high economically, medically and aesthetically. Investing in shaming might well pay great dividends. Japan has quite strong shaming of the fat and the country is very thin. Diet also plays a part in this but the shaming likely has a strong effect.
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