RenOS
Dadder than dad
No bio...
User ID: 2051
FWIW, a large part, possibly majority but at least close to 50%, of our college-educated left-leaning friends (and it's not even unpopular among our non-college-educated friends) is some kind of vegetarian. Among those who aren't, the majority is constantly stressing how little meat they're eating. The line between them is pretty fuzzy, since there's a decent number of people who claim to not eat meat at home, but sometimes outside when there's no other option, and these people will sometimes consider themselves vegetarian anyway, sometimes not. Almost nobody is an unabashed meat eater. As justifications go, animal sympathy is at the top for the stricter vegetarians, health benefits for the less strict (this actually includes myself), climate considerations are generally second line ("and btw it's also good for the climate I've heard").
Surprisingly, this did not greatly change when we became parents; Yes there's very few super-militant vegetarian parents, but we know multiple families where only the children eat meat, not the parents, and eating relatively little meat is actually the norm.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
If you want to know, my last vote went to the FDP, which is the german libertarian party. Unlike the US, the FDP is not consistently on either side, but has coalitioned with both sides (currently it's in fact part of a broad left-leaning government). Myself I'm not even a straight-ticket FDP voter, I've considered the CDU (originally center right, though nowadays probably just pure centrist), due to their family-first focus which I find appealing, and the SPD (center left), since I'm in favour of broad redistributive policies if done right. My vote ultimately went to the FDP however since it's the closest thing to free-speech absolutism on the menu and because they currently appear to be the party most concerned with imo common-sense concepts such as "having a functioning economy".
Privately, at work, and online, I primarily push back against left-wing orthodoxy since it's quite common among my acquintances.
Nevertheless, and yes this is precisely what I mean, if you try to force me into a binary left-wing orthodoxy vs right-wing orthodoxy, both enforced equally, I'll choose the left everytime. The right needs to be significantly less orthodox for me to consider it.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
"Pornography: Harmless Enjoyment That Prevents Rape, or Degradation of Women And Should Be Banned"
For some reason I read this as ""Pornography: Harmless Enjoyment That Prevents Rape or Degradation of Women - And Should Be Banned".
On the main point, hasn't it been pointed out that the lower classes generally tend to have more real sex in general, while the higher classes are too busy studying for the real thing, so they cope through porn? Also, as usual I see no way to properly control for the direction of causality with this kind of study, and almost any negative claim here can just be turned around - of course someone who is unhappier and has poorer wellbeing (maybe due to lack of sex?) is more likely to use porn. They don't even argue chronologically ("Men who have used pornography in the past now are X"), they argue concurrently ("Men who use pornography have higher X"). The former has at least a little bit of a claim for causality in the direction of chronologicity (is that a word in english? I guess you get what I mean), the latter not so much.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
It's a fairly unusual post in many ways. If you really don't know Hlynka, "just ignore & minimize" honestly seems like the best advice. For those of us who've been here literal years, he was like part of the furniture; It's a nice courtesy of the mods to let us know and start a dedicated thread on his ban.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
Yes, this is the point. The archetypical male tyrant rules with an iron fist and emphasizes his own power. He is a major douchebag and his rule is only stable through the excessive application of force to make the opposition cower in fear.
The archetypical female tyrant rules through deception and manipulation. She rules by pitting everyone against everyone else, and then playing the "neutral" arbiter who just wants everyone to get along, you know? She sets up a moralist framework that just-so happens to benefit her (ideally with some mystical source of knowledge that only she has access to), and that is vague enough so that she can switch positions whenever it suits her. She avoids formal positions of power and rules by committee, and so on. The Oppressor/Opressed framework is basically tailor-made for this purpose. The same guy can be an oppressed black body if he is on your side, or a toxic male oppressor if he isn't.
Of course, both of these are a bit too extreme to be practical, real life stable systems seem to mostly coalesce into a small elite group of men wielding the highest explicit/formal power backed up by a moralist framework that is primarily enforced through a much larger group of women, with both of these groups worst tendencies being kept in check by the other. Without that enforced moralist framework societies tend to devolve into chaos and warlordism, while societies without the men tend to simply get conquered by foreign men. But the locus of power can move between these two groups, and currently almost nobody is disputing that women are more powerful than they've ever been - the main discussion is on whether we've not gone far enough on one side or that the pendulum has swung in the other direction on the other side.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
30d ago
Coolness or fuckability seems like a simpler and better classification, though. Rockstars are cool/very fuckable, but generally aren't considered jocks or class clowns, see David Bowie for example.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
What you call milquetoast false-centrism, I'd call regular centrism. I know Corona is your hobbyhorse, but the FDP was if anything overly critical compared to the center (which suits me, since I also was on the critical side).
On the AFD, the FDP is explicitly on the record as being against the Verbotsverfahren. Privately, I've argued multiple times that the AFD has a point, and that as long as the german political establishment is unwilling to tackle the dysfunctional, barely existent border and immigration politics, they will only get stronger. This is reasonably close to the stated position of the FDP, though I suspect that being libertarians they're more in favor of open borders than I'd like, but unfortunately we don't have a topic-based voting law.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
Looking at it, it's imo clearly in the tradition of Fire Emblem and Advance Wars, not XCOM. Though the artstyle is still a bit overly cute for my taste, it seems not as bad as some other games.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
You sound real fucking depressed. Normally I'd say try to be more active, but as far as I understand you, you're already not terribly inactive. I'm a big proponent of building a family, but you specifically mentioned this is off the list (though I'd strongly urge you to reconsider).
Next on the list is imo leaving Alaska - northern regions are notorious for causing depression, try living in the south for an extended time span, at least several months, and spent as much time outside as possible while there. This is not easy depending on your monetary situation, but as a single guy you can almost certainly make it work.
If that doesn't work, try meds. I know it sounds stupid, depression always feels like a true fact of life when you're in it, but imo it's primarily a chemical imbalance. Problem is that most meds have serious side effects, so I'd try to avoid this if there's other options.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
I consider myself primarily a pragmatist, not ideologist, so I can see myself allying with a broader right coalition in principle, if I had the impression that I can fit in under a live and let live paradigm. In particular I'm probably more center than left, so it's not even inconceivable that I'll someday identify as center-right. But nevertheless, I just do not have the impression that free speech absolutism is really something the right is dedicated on (nor the left, which is key to my frustration with them, but at least I agree with them on more other things). Currently I do push hardest against left-wing orthodoxy because it's the only realistic threat to me at the moment since the right-wing has no power whatsoever in science, but I have no illusions that life would be better under the thumb of the right.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2mo ago
I think there is a simple explanation for this dynamic. Imagine you're big media conglomerate such as Disney, and you own an innumerable number of IPs. If you try to do a "full revival" of a reasonably old show with not only all/most of the cast but also all/most of the original creative team, you'll run into the problem that media has not only a particularly extreme rate of turnover and both mobility and stickiness at different points in the career. Some people will not even be in Showbiz anymore and you will have to hunt them down, some will have become so sucessful that they're exceptionally well-paid, some will have carved out a comfortable main role in a mediocre but long-running TV show that they flat-out refuse to join the revival no matter what. It's tedious, it's expensive, and you might still just end up with a few anyway since the others refuse. So you ONLY attempt this if you're really, really confident about its success.
Now imagine you want to do a fully new IP. It has no old fans that you can appeal to, it has no basic structure that you know to work. So it's inherently risky.
On the other hand, a "lazy revival" is easy & cheap . It's basically all the upsides of a new IP, but much safer; You're almost guaranteed to have a lucrative first season, and if the viewer numbers are visibly crashing on the later episodes than you just discontinue it right there. And it costs you nothing extra as you're already owning the old IP anyway. You just send a call out to a small number of original cast members that seem likely to join and add to the recognisability. You hire a bunch of cheap, new creative members who get a chance to show their chops or get the cut. And the woke/SJW worldview lends itself very well to replacing most of the cast, so you use that as the cover ("we're just updating this old, beloved western classic to be more in-line with modern global viewer preferences"). Not that people don't believe that worldview, but the other way around, people tend to believe worldviews that are convenient for them.
Obviously, there is always some cases where it seems to be just dumb; Buying an expensive IP and then ruining it with a bad new cast & creative team. But I think it has become an almost industry-standard because of the former. And in some cases, such as Star Wars, they arguably did put in a lot of work; They got decent parts of the original cast, J.J. Abrams, whatever your opinion of him, is a sucessful movie director and they clearly tried to replicate the structure of the old movies (and too much so, in my opinion).
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2mo ago
I agree with this perspective. Imo, the core problem is that there is no positive vision people can agree on that isn't the SJW/woke worldview, and part of the reason for this is that there is no good public forum where we can hash out our differences, only "secret" places like this. The GMU should offer courses like this, but with a much more explicitly open-minded focus than the average university course. Just ceding the entire concept of talking about how to make a just society to SJWs is merely a different flavour of rolling over and dying. Though admittedly a big problem is that you simply can't trust the current faculty (and the administration even less) at most universities to not just turn these classes into loyalty tests no matter how much explicit directions to the opposite you give them, or good ol' malicious compliance. Similar to the problems many states have with their teachers.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
Kind of, but women overall seem to fail more gently. For example, even if a women does not have a lot of raw talent to become an actually good artist, she will often be good enough at navigating social environments that she will find some kind of safety net, such as becoming an art teacher, working in some sort of subsidized gallery, or the archetypical husband paying the bills. A guy in the same situation is much more likely to be a complete trainwreck imo. Partially this is just a result of the expected higher male variability.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
Yes, Narnia has always been a bit too much of an obviously christian setting with a christian message for me to really enjoy. I wouldn't feel awkward calling it "christian propaganda", I guess. I'm not full on death-of-the-author, but authorial intent is not very high in my book and so I only marginally distinguish between "explicitly intended for propaganda" and "the author is so steeped in a certain ideology that his entire writing is indistinguishable from propaganda, even if he does not intend to do that".
I've never been super invested in this debate, but to me one of the most striking features is that almost all the evidence we have available is filtered through people who have a strong incentive for bias in favour of the zoonosis side. The chinese establishment seems to favour a variant of zoonosis with a heavy implication of coming from somewhere abroad, the local chinese lab favors zoonosis for obvious reasons, and even the global biomedical establishment is hardly unbiased on the matter. Further, I find the justifications on the biggest coincidence, the failed grant for a similar furin-cleavage site, very poor - I'm literally currently working on a project which I failed a grant on. I know how labs operate in the west and almost all of the claims that they would never do this or that are ... just BS, honestly. And chinese labs have a well-deserved reputation to be even worse.
I also agree with the rootclaim guy that the wild overconfidence of the zoonosis side is a very poor look. I really don't get how many people apparently got convinced by this debate, though I only read Scott's textual account, not the full video debate.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
That's my point though. Universities should strive for academic excellence and political independence. However, it got increasingly taken over by leftist politics, got (mostly correctly, then) labeled an enemy by the right, and is correspondingly now a target. I've been a critic of this process from the start, precisely because this was the only logical outcome. Nevertheless, as far as I can see the right has always been more interested in using the same tactics of silencing and outlawing disagreements, just now for their position, than in restoring some semblance of academic excellence.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
22d ago
This ties in with another argument :re poverty-as-a-cause-of-crime. If you actually do some ballpark estimates for the average criminal, you'll frequently find out that they make money barely on par with a regular minimum wage job, often worse, with the added risk of ending up in jail. This goes against the claims of significant parts of both left and right; The left often thinks that people turn to crime since minimum wage jobs aren't enough to get by, but as it turns out crime isn't actually better so that argument is kinda moot; Many on the right think that criminals are self-serving egoists taking advantage of a well-meaning system for their own gain. As it turns out, the majority of criminals are probably just idiots who are screwing themselves over and others. And at least for me a lot of things clicked into place upon that realisation; For example you'll notice that many people who just barely get by have a certain degree of self-destructive behaviour that holds them back significantly, they just also have some admirable (or at least tolerable) qualities in addition. Your contractor seems like a good example.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2mo ago
You have already successfully inoculated him. If he had found Nihilism on his own, it might have intrigued him. But now it's just 'that boring movie my uncle made me watch'.
On a more serious note, the hero's journey is inherently life-affirming, so there's plenty of media to go around. Most Shounen, for example. Lord of the Rings also manages to be quite dark and somber at times while still fundamentally being about hope and progress.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
Admittedly you almost surely have a better personal insight into the upper echelons of western society than most of us do, including me.
But at least in academia I get the the impression that there's plenty (obv not everyone, but a lot) of women who just flat-out refuse to marry down, and most statistics on the topic I can find seem to imply the same. It might have to do with that for jobs that are considered status-equivalent, academia pays pretty bad, while banking is at the other end of that spectrum.
Afaik, the usual claim is that the hugo awards have always been left-leaning, but tolerated right-wing authors and would occasionally even give awards to them. But then in the last 20 years it veered hard off the lefty deep end and the awards are now pretty much exclusively given to left-wing authors. See the sadpuppy controversy. So your description is pretty much perfectly in line with this.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2mo ago
If they're already doing IVF I strongly advice it. The cost and risks of the IVF itself are a much higher barrier, so I generally don't advice healthy couples to do IVF just for the genetic testing, but the tests themselves are basically all upside with almost no risk.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
Admittedly I mostly play murderhobo games nowadays bc I consider many stories so bad that not having one is an improvement over the average in my book, but there is a large difference between catering to your audience and catering to something else. The first creates bad writing in a general sense, but as long as it's in a way your target audience wants you're fine. In the latter case - and catering to DEI is just a subtype here - you're just obliterating all goodwill for no goddamn reason. And DEI people have a particular knack for outright insulting the main userbase of beloved franchises to boot.
Though I guess we agree overall. I'm just pissed by my niche interest games always eventually getting captured by casualization in terms of game mechanics on one hand, and by wokification in terms of the story on the other, and it always seems to go this particular direction, never the other. I even agree on DE, while I think 'bordering on political propanganda' is an understatement, he tailor-made the entire setting to suit his political beliefs, but I did genuinely enjoy most of the story and he skillfully just barely dunks enough on marxists and unionists.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
25d ago
I think you're greatly overstating hostility to #4 here. This is my field and I'd say the majority of biologists is not only fine with it, but even frequently colloquially uses the language indicating #4 as the primary reason. Me included. Yes, it's more complicated overall, but "genetic variants associated with sharper front tooth developed because it allowed specimen to sever meat better and so they had more offspring" is more or less correct in my view.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2mo ago
I do think you underestimate the effect in your last paragraph. Both from my own impressions on dealmaking between employers and employees and basic investment vs return thinking, the employee has significant leverage in that if the company fails, he can just go to another with at most a small pay cut, while the business owner will lose everything he has build up so far. It seems to me that being rich in general gives you more leverage, but being more invested in the thing under discussion gives you less leverage. So everything else being equal, an independently rich employee has the most leverage, while a small-scale business owner with no other large investments has the least leverage.
Tbh if you're at that level, the answer is probably "Please don't buy stocks, you're gonna get ripped to shreds by the professionals'. There's basically just two reasons why I'd say it's a good idea to buy specific stocks by yourself:
You're a professional who knows the ins-and-outs on how everyone else does their stock picks, where they get their information from, and generally plays on an equal footing with them
You're a domain-specific expert who is extremely bullish/bearish on a certain technology by a specific company due to deep knowledge that traders can't reasonable have
In the first you already know where to look, in the second you only want to trade on a short list of companies you know well anyway.
Disclaimer: Not a trader precisely for this reason
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