Rex
11mo ago
As an aside, this kind of aloofness in matters of sex necessary to use an app like this strikes me as the opposite of emotional maturity...it's just emotionally avoidant, no?
Yea. They’re dressing up post-wall hookup culture with a lot of modern psychology. They’re lying to themselves. No normal men their age want a 39 year old poor journalist. They just acquiesced to the fact that their only options at this point for easy sex are people with abnormal sexual preferences
Rex
5mo ago
He’s been allegedly walking around NYC for the past 6 months harassing Russians as well. This dude literally lost his mind over The Current Thing. I wonder if we’ll be having a conversation about how the MSM encourages stochastic hate crimes?
Rex
9mo ago
I may be bringing my own personal baggage but I think the movie has a very cynical take on scientists, Oppenheimer, and the US government. Literally half the movie is about some deep state worm “manipulating procedural outcomes” to fuck over Oppenheimer due to a disagreement on policy/personality. If there is a villain, it’s the USG. My takeaway is that the rot we see today was fully functioning as early as the 60s. Likely well before that. It’s a bitter pill to swallow for the “IFL SCIENCE” crowd and I think it explains a lot of the mid reviews.
Rex
6mo ago
Reading your post, I gave it maybe 50:50 odds of being true. Reading the cspan source below, I’m adjusting that to 99:1 odds of being untrue.
Aside from the reference to the current battle in the first sentence, this has every buzzword from the standard Ukrainian narrative I’ve read a thousand times over the past two years. Russians executing their own soldiers. Human wave. Untrained. Under equipped. Massive RU casualties. Etc. I see nothing of value here.
Rex
9mo ago
When you eat nutritious foods for a long time, your body starts to crave nutritious foods. Your appetite changes. If you go on a low carb high protein/fat diet for long enough, cake starts to taste disgustingly sweet. Most people dont commit to it long enough to notice this. Or they are following bad diet advice (e.g. egg whites, skim milk, etc)
Rex
11mo ago
The almost inescapable conclusion is that if you're an American guy who is entering his thirties and is single, if you limit your dating options to women who are in your peer group in terms of age, nationality, and education you'll find exceedingly slim pickings. The best partners will have been snagged early and those that remain will have high standards and shitty attitudes to go with it. So finding a woman who isn't a ticking divorce bomb almost certainly does require broadening the search.
Well said. This was the conclusion that I came to. You should re-post this next time we have a thread on relationships.
Rex
11mo ago
If anyone is interested. I liked this episode. https://youtube.com/watch?v=GEERYEkhpeE
Rex
7mo ago
No. But it allows the NYT, “the paper of record”, to publish:
The guilty plea entered by Mr. Epps showed that he was being held accountable for his crimes and undercut the narrative that he was being protected by the federal government.
No doubt the DoJ or some other government organ explicitly directed them to publish this. We just saw last week that this is exactly how it works. No doubt some federal official will now quote the NYT saying that this clears up the Epps saga. It’s the same playbook from the Iraq War, Russiagate, and I’m sure many other examples.
Rex
10mo ago
It's more than litigation issues in the U.S. The EPC (general contractors) that build nuclear power plants in the U.S. have generally lost the technical ability to build such complex engineering projects. The major contractors and subcontractors (CB&I, S&W, Westinghouse, etc) have all gone bankrupt and the people who built our original fleet never properly transferred their knowledge to the next generation of workers. We should all be embarrassed by this. We likely would be bot embarrassed and angry if it was even acknowledged as a problem. Instead we hear about nebulous "legislation and regulation". Those are certainly part of the problem, but only one part.
I wonder if Canada fares better. I kind of doubt it. It seems like the Chinese and maybe the French are the only ones left who can handle these types of projects.
Rex
9mo ago
I mean the youtube critics I follow. RedLetterMedia, Critical Drinker, etc. I generally have contempt for anyone who gets listed as a critic on RottenTomatos. Audience reviews are a mixed bag but increasingly manipulated such that i dont put much weight on them. The YT shows are generally entertaining for me, however their take on Oppenheimer reveals that they have been so habituated to superhero movies that they are unable to really judge a movie that outside of a particular genre.
Rex
11mo ago
Rex
11mo ago
Try the developing world. India, Philippines, Laos. And get out of the capitals. I hear Africa is still pretty wild.
I think your thesis is largely correct. I used to to travel for work extensively before Covid and was noticing the same thing. There are still parts of the world that are not completely homogenized, but their days are numbered. This might be your last chance if it’s not already gone.
I knew it was final call when I met a Bulgarian hipster that was indistinguishable from my local variety 5 miles away.
Rex
7mo ago
I’m no expert, but I heard Jocko’s take today and it seems he was more surprised at the overall coordination of the attack as opposed to individual tactics. Multiple teams attacking by truck, gliders, and boats across a decently wide area. All hitting their targets within a few hours. It seems like that level of military sophistication and coordination is beyond what many thought Hamas was able to achieve.
He also suggested they may have some more heavy weaponry such as AA guns and rockets.
Rex
8mo ago
Rex
5mo ago
First, there are reports that certain Republican orgs have been doing the work to assemble a large list of mid level staffers to install in the federal government for the next president. See NYT article. https://archive.ph/0uVQq
This should have existed in 2016, but clearly that was not the case.
Second, trump has an EO ready to go to reclass a huge percentage of federal enployees as contractors, making them much easier to fire. https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2022/07/trump-reelected-aides-plan-purge-civil-service/374842/
Third, a trump term would distract my political enemies and forestall whatever terrible agenda they are planning to implement. The dystopian liberal democratic order is coming for all of us in the west no matter what at this point. I’ll take four more years of wailing and grinding of teeth from the establishment as a nice sideshow in the meantime.
Rex
2mo ago
I've seen people make the argument that the liberal ideology is universalist. Its not enough for California to totally conform to leftist ideology - the whole country must conform. Better yet, the whole world. I dont know how to square this with cultural relativism, but now that I think about it, that's not something you hear a whole lot about these days despite the fact that I recall it being a big part of the political conversation from the left about 20 years ago. The universalism of the left does ring true to me. It seems to me that they cannot tolerate pockets of red tribe anywhere they might exist.
Rex
9mo ago
I had a very different take on this. Oppenheimer from almost the first minute is shown as murderous, arrogant, a philanderer, and ethically questionable if not an outright monster that is more focused on his own accomplishments than the the implications of his project. I dont know how anyone could leave the movie thinking he was a good man. There were no good men or women in the entire movie.
Rex
1mo ago
I just bought a new PC after not having one for nearly 10 years. I went sort of nuts getting games: Total War: Rome; Dyson Sphere; Ultrakill; Satisfactory, Elden Ring, EU4, Monster Hunter World; Trails of Cold Steel 3 (difficulty mod); Cyberpunk; Witcher 3; and a few others I cant even remember. Kerbal space program too. Its my first go round with that and its not too bad. I wish the career mode had just a little bit more...production? I dont know, it seems like the edges are unsanded.
Noting has really drawn me in. My go to at the moment is Elden Ring, im maybe half way through a replay on that in advance of the DLC coming. I was really hoping Dragons Dogma 2 was going to be good since I really loved DDDA, but it seems to be a bust. I;ll wait till the DLC comes out and hopefully they get a hard mode.
As an adult, I really need complexity or extreme difficulty in games. Stellaris is really evergreen for me and I havent done a campaign in a while. I might download a new version with all the DLCs and give it another go. That game can really suck me in.
Rex
11mo ago
I’d like it too. I spent two week in Bulgaria about ten years ago. I pal’d around with a local who was my age. Mid 20s. He gave me some insight into how people feel about politics. Typical ex soviet stuff. I spent my time in Stara Zagora. Great beer!
Rex
11mo ago
I’ve been rereading the Alaistair Reynolds Revelation Space series. One of my fav sci fi series. Started back in 2002 or so and been going strong for 20 years.
The author has somehow not been wrapped up in culture war nonsense. He typically has a decent balance of men and women protagonists and has flown under their radar. Even his latest book theirs a sequence that I can’t tell if he’s endorsing some obscure culture war talking points or taking the piss on them.
It’s on the harder side of sci fi, but not really. More of a expansive future history series. It’s right up my ally.
All audiobooks are free on Tokybook.com
As an aside, I really love Yandex.com. If you have an adblocker and a moderate amount of internet street smarts, you can find pretty much anything.
Rex
6mo ago
You are right about the Republican Party and perhaps even the Republican base (depending on how you define that). It would have described me 10 years ago when I considered myself a republican.
I don’t know if that is true of Republican voters though. I vote Republican out of necessity but loathe the party. I suspect you comments do not ring true to a significant portion of the MAGA voters out there. My parents will never give up on loving Israel. 60 years of propaganda is extremely sticky. Myself, my peers. There is no mystical allegiance there. They’re shitty allies and a waste of money.
Rex
11mo ago
It was created by a very interesting person: Mike White. He first came on my radar as a contestant on Survivor and I found him extremely annoying, if not a good character for the show. Very gay. Very catty. Very California. He was a minor celebrity, with a few big Hollywood writing credits under his belt. Best known for School of Rock.
I stumbled across first season of WL by accident and was completely hooked. I’ve watched some of Mike Whites back catalogue and I now think he’s a complete genius. He created an old HBO show, Englightened, starring Laura Dern. I loathe Laura Dern but found the show terrific. MW has this ability to take the piss out of the mainstream American leftists, while having just enough plausible deniability to not get himself in trouble. His whole look and style probabaly help with it since on the surface he fits right in.
He was recently a guest on the Perfume Nationalist podcast and basically confirmed my whole theory here. He seems to really dislike the culture he writes about and has some very controversial takes on orthodox California liberal thinking. It’s also like the only Perfume Nationalist show that’s paywalled and I imagine that was a MW request to limit listeners and keep a low profile.
If youre a mike white fan and want to watch a really weird indie movie go rent Chuck and Buck on Amazon. It’s his first movie credit. I can’t believe he got another job after that.
This is okay with me. A motivated fight against the deep state, even if it’s fruitless, is what I want. Trump had some plan late in his presidency to reclassify thousands if not tens of thousands of government employees to contractors so that they could be more easily separated. If this is the only thing he accomplishes the whole thing will be worth it. Fighting traditional conservative battles is not going to change the direction of this country.
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