RenOS
Dadder than dad
No bio...
User ID: 2051
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2mo 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
2mo 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".
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2mo 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
2mo ago
Ah, schizophrenia it is. That's certainly harsh. In this case I admit that changing countries is questionable independent of legalities and finances - even the most functional schizophrenics I know have had issues that required assistance by family, friends and/or the state. You don't want to become a crazy homeless guy in latin america. I guess you've already been to different places inside the US itself? I've heard about a similar dynamic in southern US, where it can be a lot easier to find a hispanic wife, and they often are surprisingly right-leaning and becoming more so with time. Sure you might have some ... disputes on immigration law, but agreeing on everything is boring anyway.
SSI forbids this — it is, in fact, a big part of the issues I've been having with Social Security for the past year thanks to the Covid lockdown times. I'm forbidden from having more than $2000 total assets at any one time — if I go over that, my SSI drops to zero each month until it's back under.
Oh man do I hate SSI laws that are structured like this. But you can subvert this, depending on the way the law is written - in the most benign way if you're owing debt to your parents anyway, you can just pay them whatever you earn extra, and then ask for money again once you need it. Depends on the relationship with your parents and their attitude, but if I was them I'd be more than happy with such an arrangement. Next on the list would be to spend your money on easy-to-claim-worthless assets, such as trading cards (also a good source of companionship for losers, though you probably should avoid talking politics with them). This is technically breaking the law, but extremely unlikely to be caught (how many policemen care to look at your trading card collection?) and very plausibly deniable - you can just claim you thought of it as consumption. Further is just good ol' working black labor and keeping everything in hard cash - at least in my country, as long as you're just doing some odd jobs here and there for like 200$ a month, not a full-blown employment, nobody really gives a shit in practice. Private tutoring is ideal and very common for this in particular. But I guess you've probably considered this last one already.
Not great at video games, and my internet is too lousy for that.
I guess Alaska in general does probably not have the greatest ping even if the connection might be good otherwise. I'd consider it anyway, looking at my acquaintances who are very much losers it seems to be one of the most reliable ways to find companionship and even some respect for them. And to be frank they often also weren't actually very good, plenty of online games are structured so that the time you put in is more important than the skill you have (though it obviously is beneficial). In general given your age it's not unlikely that you're primarily bad since you never got into the habit. There is plenty of right-leaning spaces in gaming also, especially if you just stay in modding/clan discords and choose games appropriately (who would think that a WW2 tank warfare game where most of the best tanks are german would be absolutely dominated by right wingers? pikachu face). There is a decent number of games that do not require a good internet connection, such as turn-based games.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2mo 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
2mo ago
Again, it's not a lack of interest, it's that as a 42-year-old virgin loser, my prospects are non-existent — unless you've got some some sort of new advice how to remedy that?
That's certainly problematic, but imo not as bad as you think it is. As a man it's easy to fall into a life where your contact with the fairer sex is minimal, and dating events/apps do not suit everyone. But to turn it around, you're basically dating on hard mode. Alaska does not have as bad of a sex ratio as I remembered, but it's still pretty lopsided, it's not exactly known to be full of extroverts and depending on where exactly you are there might not even be that many people in total in the area. As a (presumably white?) US citizen there's a long list of countries where it's extremely easy to find a partner even if you're arguably a loser. Latin america & eastern europe are good options, and asian countries are amazing bc asian women are really, really into white guys.
Financial reasons and what little family I have prevent this
You don't need to stay there forever, nor do you need to go there as a tourist. Unless you're the only carer for someone close, in which case I truly feel bad for you; I've seen a few cases where someone was stuck in a place they hated with no way out for 10+ years because they were the only one giving a shit about their sick mother/dad/grandparent/whatever.
Given that you're clearly reasonably intelligent, and even assuming that you're unreliable, lazy and/or physically disabled, I admittedly have a hard time believing that you can't find some (no matter how marginal!) employment to save up some money. In the worst case Mechanical Turk or such. Plenty of countries are ridiculously cheap in terms of both getting there and in living expenses if you're a childless western single eating regular supermarket food and staying in private accomodation. I read that you have some debt to your parents, but as a parent myself I can confidently say that if my chronically depressed son suddenly tried to get his act together and save up money to life somewhere else bc this place is killing him, I wouldn't mind just writing that debt off. Not claiming that any of this is easy or guaranteed to work, but remember, if you end up offing yourself you'll hurt your parents by far the most compared to any other option.
On the other hand, if you think you're incapable of living on our own due to mental issues and the government agrees, are there any options at all for shared living arrangements in your area? I know it's not ideal - even if you get a spot most people there will be noticeably mentally handicapped, which can be frustrating for someone who isn't - but it gives you a community, which is imo critical, and there is a good chance that you can help the others there to some degree as well, and they also often offer government-supported employment for people who are normally difficult to employ.
Lastly, have you ever tried online gaming guilds and similar? Again it's not ideal - you don't even attempt to be a productive member of society in that case - but it's another good way of finding community for the struggling. Also, it can be an OK-ish source of untaxed, albeit usually very marginal, income depending on the game.
I've been on meds since my first suicide attempt back in 2004. This is me on meds.
Yeah, that sucks. Depression meds are notoriously unreliable, with a side dish of occasionally making people suddenly kill themselves even if their depression hadn't been that bad beforehand. @self_made_human is of course correct that you sometimes have to cycle through a lot of meds until you find something that works for you, but I can understand wanting to stick with a med that is at least tolerable.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2mo 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
3mo ago
Admittedly I'm still on my first career of BTA itself and haven't gotten there, started near Terra with the Blakists and mostly stayed there except for a little bit of Clan action. But I'm in general a slow player for this stuff bc I spend way too much time in the mech bay.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo ago
I'm currently playing BTA3062, a full overhaul mod for Battletech. It's also in the full murderhobo tradition of games, but ultimately these usually keep my interest longer than story-based games. I liked Cyberpunk 2077's atmosphere quite a lot and it has plenty of interesting characters and sidequests, but in terms of gameplay it's utterly trivial, so in raw hours I have less than BTA on it. More extreme was Disco Elysium, it was fun for a single playthrough (which for DE is very short to boot), but once I get what it's attempting to say it's not really that interesting anymore. In CP2077 even just wandering the city is surprisingly fun though. I was for example very impressed when I stumbled over a museum to a tragic past event by pure accident, it was well made and afaik you would never find it if you just followed the main and larger side quests.
On BTA itself, it's fun, and both the mech bay and the tactics are significantly enhanced. But it also didn't even attempt to fix the issues with the base game, such as an atrocious AI and a really slow and buggy engine. Nevertheless I spend hours over hours designing my team, such as the perfect light mech scout, or heavy mech artillery platform, or a medium mech generalist/brawler, etc. and blowing up teams that on paper are far stronger than me through a strong, consistent tactic with a team deliberately designed for that purpose is very satisfying. Also, the game has enough of an element of getting random stuff that you have to make work so that it stays somewhat fresh.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo ago
The simple story is afaik that covid was very good for gaming so they hired a lot and now it has normalized again, so they have to lay people off again. This is compounded by loans/financing being much less available currently than expected. Whether it was a mistake or just calculation is hard to tell, though I lean towards something like they knew it'll probably normalize again at some point but didn't know when so it would have been irrational to not hire more people for the time being when there's money to be made now. And as usual, there's probably a spectrum ranging from savvy experts hiring deliberately in a way that firing them later down to road wouldn't hurt the core business on one end and naive idiots hearing that everyone else is hiring a lot and business is booming so they just buy studios and hire like crazy on the other.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo ago
At least for me, there's three problems with this perspective: 1. Circumcision is not really a thing in my country except for a tiny jewish minority, and there is no movement to spread it whatsoever 2. The evidence is quite strong that circumcision or not just doesn't matter much for any important life outcomes 3. As far as I can judge, even in places where circumcision is common, it's perfectly acceptable to just not do it.
Now compare the trans (and to a lesser degree other LGBTA) movement: 1. It's rarer here than in the US, but there is a dedicated lobby pushing it and similar things have spread here in the same manner 2. The evidence is quite strong that being trans is very bad for most important life outcomes, especially once you actually read the studies in more detail and notice that trans individuals are far worse off irrespective of the support they're getting, and that the studies are often deliberately designed to obfuscate this distinction 3. Saying "my daughter identified as a cat last week and as a princess the week before and has been consistently been very feminine all her life, I don't think we should overinterpret her saying she is a boy" already outs you in certain circles as "conservative"
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo ago
I first wanted to write "It's like this with almost everything in EU vs America" but actually, it's like this with absolutely everything. People just want to take the parts they like and ignore those they don't, even if they work together or worse, the latter are the ones keeping the society running. Schools yes please, but requiring kids to go is mean; Universities yes please, but testing aptitude is mean; Generous welfare yes please, but having to look for work as a requirement is mean, and so on.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo ago
Pit bulls were a popular breed of dog in the 1900s and earlier. It doesn't make sense that they would be popular if they were an inherently bad breed.
Bad for what is the question. Violence may be maladaptive today, but the past is a different country; Dangerous and aggressive to others with a small risk of attacking you was a decent deal in the past for many, but nowadays the upside is worthless (how often do you need to fight?) and the downside is amplified (society is ridiculously safe otherwise).
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo ago
Happy to hear that. Do they actually tend to postpone the scheduling quite a lot, or do they just not want to be bothered by nagging worried first-timers? On the blood, you can get a surprising amount of information just from the mother's blood, so that seems reasonable to me. Though it's weird they don't mention it, we usually got told explicitly that the blood values look good/not good, but presumably that means everything is fine for you. My wife has chronic low iron values unless she eats way more meat than she likes to.
We recently had the big checkup ultrasound (around 14-16 weeks, dunno how it varies by country, I presume not much?) for our second and everything came out fine which was a great relieve. My wife got cortisone in the first few weeks of the pregnancy when we didn't know, which increases the chance of lip/facial clefts + I have a minor facial cleft myself, so we were worried about that - genetic and environmental risks generally add up quite well unfortunately. We're also moving into the age bracket where major disabilities become frighteningly common.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo ago
Where do you have the information from that this is the most common case? Afaik, the stats are pretty clear that the majority of companies aren't publicly traded, even in the US it's only something like 10%. If I go by my - admittedly very biased - german sample, founder=owner=CEO is quite common for smaller companies, and afaik the stats here are even worse in percentage terms.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo ago
Dunno, I have the impression that by and large, politicians try to emphasize exactly the things that motivates voters; As you can also see in the media the average person consumes, people want to support someone who:
a) Is successful despite...
b) Having difficult external pressures to overcome (poor family, discrimination, etc) because ...
c) They have great internal qualities (charismatic, smart, conscientious, etc)
Obviously what counts for what differs between groups, but almost all try to emphasize this basic archetype. Likewise, in the opponents they emphasize the opposite. And I think for pure turn-out purposes, the most important thing is to convince people that the opponent is outright dangerous; They will vote even if their favored candidate is polling well just to be safe and to make a stand against evil! It feels good if the candidate you already feel self-righteous about also wins in a landside. On the other hand, if you're unsure whether the other candidate really is that much worse, emphasizing how close the race is doesn't really do much. There's also the problem of reading between the lines; Good messaging is consistently talking about your strong points, if you talk too much about polling badly, people will (often correctly) infer that you have nothing better to say.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo 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.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo ago
It's depression and suicidal ideations first, rationalisations later.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo ago
I think the problem is that people react differently to alcohol/drugs in general. I, for example, tend to get sleepy very fast from alcohol but never outright passed out, likewise I only threw up quite rarely, and by my own recollection and those of my friends I also never did anything I substantially regretted (and being religious country-side hicks, we drank A LOT). Which reflects my admittedly overall bias towards inaction. Other people seem to not get sleepy but quickly do stupid things they regret later, yet others seem mostly fine but throw up relatively quickly, and so on.
Though in agreement, I've seen quite a few cases where someone did something very much out of their own volition they later regretted, but being blackout drunk as well, they instead attributed it to another person taking advantage of them (it's a good way to conserve your own self-image, I admit).
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo 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
3mo 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.
Your post is indeed incredibly ironic; In the beginning of the post you try to obfuscate an unfavored finding by claiming it's just too complex to understand, and then in the last paragraph you reduce everything to a single incredibly convenient theory, namely that it's all just stress levels and if we just fix that, everything else will fix itself as well! Very nice, if true.
Stress levels probably have some minor effect, but most of the research in this field doesn't even attempt to control for genetics or causality in the other direction. I happen to be a postdoc in biomedical research, so I just took a glance at the study your article is referring to (which wasn't even linked in the article, lol), for anyone interested: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/1761544
It's... not good. Or to be more specific, it's designed to be incapable of resolving the question you want it to resolve. They test a single theory, namely that income directionally causes everything. They don't even attempt to test the alternative, they only test against the null hypothesis, that income is unrelated to everything. Something nobody thinks anyway. Not that I'm surprised, this is just par for the course of the field.
Your other paper is well-known, but mostly very misleading. It's pretty much on the same level as the paper that found that men and women don't differ significantly if you take a list of 100 random biomedical traits, and therefore men and women are mostly the same; Sure, the former is obviously true, but nobody disputes that and the latter is just a complete non-sequitor. It's misleading on three levels:
First, his investigated measure ω merely tells us that two population are somewhat overlapping. It tells us very little about difference in means, which is what we're usually interested in. In fact, his finding of ω = 0.2 for Sub-Saharan vs European is absolutely compatible with large average differences between the groups.
Second, it's again just an assortment of random genes, but we usually care about specific sets of genes relating to known phenotypic traits. For a particularly simple example, you can't counter "they have phenotypically different skin colors, and we can show that these relate to differences in genes A and B" with "well we can show that over all genes in aggregate the differences are pretty small, so DEBUNKED". But obviously this is only ever applied if people dislike a particular gene/phenotype interaction.
Third, the most damning by far, and I'll just quote the paper itself:
To assess claim c, we define ω as the frequency with which a pair of individuals from different populations is genetically more similar than a pair from the same population. We show that claim c, the observation of high ω, holds with small collections of loci. It holds even with hundreds of loci, especially if the populations sampled have not been isolated from each other for long. It breaks down, however, with data sets comprising thousands of loci genotyped in geographically distinct populations: In such cases, ω becomes zero.
"Claim c" is, for the understanding of the interested reader:
(c) pairs of individuals from different populations are often more similar than pairs from the same population.
So he finds that this core claim, the claim why you're quoting the entire paper in the first place, only holds for closely related populations (duh) or if you wilfully ignore the majority of the genome. His example of ω = 0.2 for Sub-Saharan vs European, do you want to take a guess how many loci he used? 10.000? 1000? Nope, it's, wait for it, ... 50! I guess he himself is excused bc this was 2007, he probably would have wanted to do 100 loci but his Prof told him they only have money for 50, hah.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo ago
I'd be fine if the left would, in fact, show some humility on this question. Pretty much all traits that we have looked at are ~30-70% genetic, and vary accordingly along ethnic lines, so the humble HBD position is just that. And nobody generally has a problem with this finding on any other trait, it's just the moment intelligence is involved people go crazy.
And if anything it's the other way around; Most HBD advocates I'm aware of don't claim it's all genetics, just merely that genetics is involved. On the other hand it's the left that wants to claim it's 100% environmental or that it's a magical kind of genetics that doesn't vary along ethnic lines. This post is a perfect example, he tries to reduce everything to his own pet theory, stress levels.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo ago
Sounds good, just continue what you're doing honestly. In general I wouldn't worry too much about this. Aside from probably overestimating the effect of a single movie, Nihilism is not only not very appealing to begin with for the great majority of people, the larger current media landscape just doesn't lend itself very well to Nihilism. I'd be more worried about Idealism, Escapism, Hedonism and Moralism given both people's natural inclinations and the general contemporary climate.
Knife so, so much. If you protect your face/body with one arm up and just move in then you'll most likely kill the other guy with just a broken arm and maybe a broken nose or rip. Stabbing wounds are way more serious and can be inflicted much more easily.
From a simple practical pov, there is a reason why ancient armies almost universally used edged weapons, and short knife-like swords were quite popular even when other options were available. I'd trust them to know better than us.
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