RenOS
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
something is wrong
4d ago
Don't know the guy, but just looked up the linked channel and yeah, that kind of beard always makes you look really old. And it's also really popular among the orthodox for some reason. I'm even sometimes surprised myself when I shave down how young I still look, and I never let it get that long.
RenOS
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9d ago
Short story is, me and my wife are both PhDs (me applied math, her psychology), so we have both met quite a few different varieties of nonbinary and trans individuals. Even back when studying we noticed that it's my spaces and in particular Computer Science that has several MtFs (and I've made the same observation in ultra-male online spaces such as mech-themed games or esoteric linux open source projects; they may be 10% female, but it's all G.I.R.L.s), while FtMs are mostly in her circles, particularly the social sciences. Standard gender theory would predict the opposite; And further, my wife (who is, ironically, one of the least feminine woman personality-wise I know) noticed in her interactions in her circle of friends that the majority of FtMs and nonbinaries have virtually no male hobbies, no masculine behaviour patterns, nothing.
When asked how they knew, they talk about how they disliked their growing breasts and how cumbersome they are (my wife does as well), how unpleasant the period is (duh), how scary the thought of pregnancy is (again, duh) how they don't want to be pressured into caring for kids and having to abandon their career (my wife, too), sometimes even how cismen are dirty and gross and they don't want to have sex with them (literally every women ever). It's basically a laundry list of all realisations and fears that many if not all girls get during puberty or slightly later, but instead of having to come to terms with it, they took the easy way out: Just reject it all. Their male identity, meanwhile, consists of superficialities, such as literally wearing lumberjack shirts, or even doing female-coded hobbies but with a male twist, such as really liking to cook, but they cook steaks. They're basically what women think men should be like, not what real men are actually like. Not rarely, they downright detest almost everything about real men as "toxic masculinity", such as competitiveness, dominance, playful insults, not talking about feelings, hierarchies, etc.
The same goes for students I'm teaching now, although it's obviously more distanced so I'm less confident here, but as far as I can see there is virtually no connection between their outward presentation of male-ness and actual masculine behaviour (or vice versa for MtFs).
RenOS
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10d ago
I don't think that's true. I think it failed because as bad as the US establishment bureaucrats are, the EU is just way, way worse. Where the former has a overrepresentation of progressives, the latter has an absolute chokehold.
RenOS
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10d ago
The problem is that by this logic, as far as I can see, every law is a "power that can be abused". The le pen conviction was based on fairly straightforward anti-corruption laws that disallow using EU funded workers to also work nationally. This is a reasonable limitation and does not seem unduly far-reaching in principle.
The problem is that the law effectively unenforced on the rest of the EU apparatus, especially the most left-leaning parts. A former green EU staffer has already gone ahead and publicly declared that he himself, as well as the entire rest of his office, has engaged in exactly the same behaviour Le Pen has. Crickets.
So the real issue is, as @wlxd points out, is a legislative dedicated to stretching and/or ignoring the law in any way they like, to further the goals they like. You can't write laws good enough to combat this mindset.
RenOS
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10d ago
I also want to add, I can't remember any atheism rants in DCC (not saying there are literally none, but if there are, they are extremely easy to forget). Carl does have regular (mostly internal) rants against the aliens running the show, but they're really a very small part of the overall story, and for the most part are perfectly understandable for someone being thrown into a gladiator deathmatch against his will. Religion inside the show is transparently fake and gay, but everything inside the show is deliberately set up in mockery. Outside of the show, the alien antagonist are mostly non-religious, and even if they have a religion, their evilness has usually nothing to do with it.
Which ones do you mean? FtM asexuals are, in my experience, mostly very average women with feminine personalities, who first mistake the normal & expected unpleasantness of puberty as gender dysphoria, and then it's easy to further mistake the normal low feminine sex drive as anomalous, both due to being consistently misinformed about the nature of sex and sexual development.
MtFs, similar to furry asexuals, posting habits and behaviour clearly seem to imply them deriving sexual pleasure from their interactions, it's merely that they don't like the act of sex itself. Which is not unusual for strong fetishes, think findom or other variants of the more elaborate sub-dom relationships. Excluding the cases that simply lie about or downplay their impulses, of course, which also isn't particularly rare.
Edit: Also, there additionally is the increasingly large number of people who treat their LGBT+ identity as a social club offering them a safe space, affirmation and simple slogans to live by in a world that only gets more complicated. From this PoV, it just means they want to belong to both these social clubs instead of only one.
RenOS
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10d ago
Ha. Me and my wife are one of the few people in our circle of acquantainces who don't own a car, and quite a few of them (themselves owning cars!) instantly started treating us like green compatriots. Led to a few awkward moments when they became aware that we're not only doing it out of money concerns (work, daycare and shopping is all easily reachable by bike in less than 10 minutes for us, and we don't travel that much) but that we are ideologically most aligned with pragmatist center-libertarian views. And that's despite hiding our power levels.
RenOS
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11d ago
Isn't this a case of who, whom yet again? Depending on how you answer the question of the personhood of the fetus, it's either the right to a simple medical procedure removing some cells, or it's superseded by the right to life for a developing human being.
In general, the curated lists as well as the GoI-Hubs are a good place to start since they give some info, so you can judge better whether it's the kind of story you like. But the top-rated ones are almost all great, and going in blind is just more effective for many of them. Btw, it's no coincidence that almost all highly-rated stories are older.
For some of my own recommendations, to keep with the Lovecraftian (meaning grand-scale horror tied into smaller exploration stories):
-the Daevite stories. There's quite a lot of content so there is bound to be some hit and miss, but the core idea is solid and a nice twist on Lovecraft.
-SCP-2935, aka the dead planet
-SCP-093, aka the red sea object.
And some other personal favorites:
-SCP-3008, aka the IKEA dimension
-SCP-1689, aka the holding bag of potatoes
-SCP-2718, aka what happens after?
-SCP-1562, aka the tunnel slide
-SCP-3003, aka the end of history
-SCP-3673, aka the ballet room
-Parawatch Hub. Just some honest, small scale mystery/horror.
"The Rats in the Walls" "Shadow over Innsmouth", "The Shadow Out of Time" and "At the Mountains of Madness" are probably among the most widely acclaimed. I own & really enjoyed the Necronomicon, nice hardcover and quite comprehensive collection of tales, so as a completionist that might be your thing.
Edit: Also, dunno how much you already know that, but the SCP Foundation is in many ways the modern equivalent of part-weird part-(eldritch)-horror of lovecraftian stories. Also definitely worth checking out.
RenOS
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12d ago
He is a pragmatist through-and-through. Old-school worker's left, though nowadays he dislikes unions as much as management. As far as I know he has never read any philosophical text, and he generally abhors big idea conceptualism as a whole. Either you have specific ideas for specific improvements, or he doesn't want to hear about it.
RenOS
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12d ago
Yeah. My eternally optimistic boomer dad likes to tell me that many of the problems I'm complaining about today are just the pendulum swinging a bit too hard in the other direction due to the real problems of the surprisingly close past (parental abandonment > helicopter parenting, deaths and accidents are common > oppressive safetyist protocols, racism > wokism, etc.) and that, having experienced both, he takes modernity over the past any day, and that we will move past this, too. I guess I agree with everything except that the last part needs its champions to happen, and nobody seems to really want to volunteer.
RenOS
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12d ago
Fuck. Forget LLMs, if this develops further (and I see little reason why it shouldn't), there is a very real risk war and terror becomes generally commodified and ubiquitous.
RenOS
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17d ago
Only one biological child - a daughter - and gives the empire to his stepsons? Cuck.
RenOS
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17d ago
Mandatory reminder that David Graeber is an activist hack.
RenOS
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17d ago
To be fair, women just generally avoid compliments on male looks unless they're already very much into the guy. It's just too risky. What you need to look out for is staring when they think you're not looking, giggling/sheepish smile when you look at them, etc. It's probably also mediated by cultural factors I can't judge too well for India, but in general I'd say being complimented on your looks as guy would require one to be a rather extreme outlier, and a specific kind of hotness to boot (basically bishounen).
RenOS
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23d ago
I didn't mind books 1-2 dystopian dark comedy style at all - quite the opposite, that is one of my favorite settings. I think that all ultra-large/monopolist organizations can easily go down terrible paths, and that obviously includes megacorps. Even in book 3, it started to become obvious to me that the author really hates capitalism in general, but it was still somewhat easy to ignore. But in book 5 the core plot itself is very much about how amazing the feminist environmentalist communist etc. preservation alliance is, how everything bad in the world is because of evil profit-maximizing companies, and how SecUnit just has to join the Klassenkampf to bring forward the great revolution and everything will be great. Also, I'd say that SecUnit is if anything somewhat constrained, it's the humans from the alliance who are worst.
Also, the author herself is openly very far left and has in interviews quite clearly talked about the anti-capitalist messages in the murderbot series.
RenOS
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23d ago
I agree - but to them, the situation in Gaza was sufficiently bad that it doesn't count. It's just a fairly simplistic moralistic view that doesn't really account for agency on the alleged victims side or pragmatic solutions.
RenOS
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25d ago
The place where safetyist paperwork requirements have driven out the volunteers is youth activities. Lots of adults want to coach youth sports/lead Scout troops. Not that many want to fill out forms to prove they are not a paedophile.
Can confirm this. Though here it's more like a race to the safetyist bottom where everyone tries to be slightly more safetyist than everyone else on the logic that, if an injury happens (even if it the clearly was the kid's own damn fault, and it wasn't even that young), they can avoid blame by pointing to the fact that they've done everything they could. It's not helped by the fact that there have been some really silly lawsuit settlements the last few years.
RenOS
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25d ago
Reddit is certainly crazier, but among my university educated friends it's not rare at all to claim that the murderous hatred will vanish once the oppression is lifted and besides, it's exaggerated anyway. I usually don't prod further, but when I confronted a friend who is unusually tolerant of different opinions with well, imagine yourself to be an Israeli: What if you're wrong? What if you let them in, and the murderous hatred does not immediately vanish? He just retreated to the motte that Israels' behaviour is immoral either way. At least I could get him to agree that maybe a slower process that doesn't have catastrophical fail states is better.
RenOS
something is wrong
25d ago
Didn't you get tired of the politics? The first two stories or so were okay, but at some point it became abundantly clear to me that it isn't just a dark satirical setting, the author genuinely just thinks that capitalism is that terrible, and that everything would be better in communist feminist utopia.
You look at pro-natalism from the PoV of an aristocrat (edit: not implying whether you yourself are one or not). I'm not an aristocrat; I want a pro-natalist vision for the general public. I'm already trying to live it, to some degree, and plan to carry on. Caplan's book gives off the impression that he does so, too, but in reality, he lives it in a way that is not generally attainable. He is not a good role model for such a vision. That is fine, I don't begrudge him his privilege in itself and I'm not at all against rich people having nannies. But it also means I have to look elsewhere, and I do dislike the wrong impression he gives.
RenOS
something is wrong
25d ago
It seems this wasn't my best post. A lot of people concentrate on my negative sentiment towards Scott, which isn't that strong. It's particularly Caplan who comes off poorly, since he literally wrote a book on it. But it's my fault, I clearly wrote as if I judge them equally. And I don't really begrudge either their privilege in particular; That has never much been my thing.
But it's still fine, because it made me think again about what I am unhappy about. And that is the (lack of a) positive vision of a secular, sustainable, fertile future for the general public. I grew up conservative religious, and while it's still among the most fertile regions in germany, even there is now below replacement. And besides - no offense - while I'd love to be capable of believing, pretty much all spirituality strikes me as deeply silly at worst, and obvious motivated reasoning at best. If that is what is needed to get people to have kids, that's how it'll be. But I'd like for us to at least try.
Any social movement needs someone showing the way, not just pointing out the theory, but actually living it. In physics, "you haven't done any experimental verification" is a valid criticism, so it should be the same here.
And Caplan is not that. Yes he at least has kids, but the broader population can't just "hire more nannies". The greater family, or a teenager occasionally, or older siblings or a cleaning lady once a week. But it's striking that this isn't what comes to mind for Caplan; It's nannies, because he can easily afford them. And the family also isn't always regularly available in the modern mobile world. So we need a vision that can make do with the "nuclear family" + occasional minor helpers. Without ruining your work prospects. So who does this leave us with? @ProfQuirrell ? Certainly not Elon, as much as I respect his business sense, he seems like an awful father. Not me, at least not yet, I only have two so far. The Collins don't seem to have official nannies, though renting out an apartment for free in exchange for childcare doesn't strike me as very generalizable, either.
Tbh this is just as bad a take imo as the fanatics wanting to get rid of cars in the countryside said bc they "just need better public infrastructure". Yes, cars are superior for rural regions and public infrastucture is just not feasible there, but for well-designed suburbia and especially for smaller cities, bikes are also just better in many circumstances. It has nothing to with hobbies, hippies or fitness fanatics (though regular exercise is one of the benefits of bikes!). They need so much less space, they're cheaper, more flexible, less dangerous for pedestrians, etc.
Reducing cars in the suburbs to pedestrian speed and giving them the blame for any accident is great, it means even smaller kids can run, play, and bike through the suburbs without me needing to worry much, It means I can walk and bike there without having to be attentive all the time, and as long as it is properly designed even if I need to drive through it's just a minute or so of slow driving.
In cities car culture is also awful, the smell got better but everything is just so clogged and noisy. Worse, the danger means that even if you want to bike, it makes you choose the car bc a single idiot can cost your life. When I was living in London, almost everyone biked for a while, and those who stopped always had an incident with a crazy car driver. I myself also had several such situations. The counter here is usually crazy cyclist, but crazy cyclists are merely annoying, even a collision will usually not even seriously hurt you (though I get very pissed when small kids are involved, but even there I can literally just jump in front & stop the bike if needed); Crazy drivers can kill you with frightening ease, and there is absolutely nothing you can do. There's a lot to dislike in the EU, but well-targeted car bans are great.
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