SophisticatedHillbilly
No bio...
User ID: 1964
SophisticatedHillbilly
6mo ago
I believe this applies to me. I have gone from: highly introverted (and I mean never spoke unless spoken to, never attended a single social event, etc) to extremely extroverted (arranging the social events, and being a hub of my social circle instead of a spoke.) The shift was part gradual, part lurching, and quite difficult. The largest shifts were when I joined an improv troupe, acted in a play, and began going dancing at clubs. No drugs, no alcohol, nothing of the sort was involved.
Basically I think the crux of it was forcing myself to do things that were completely contrary to my nature for an extended period of time (constantly for months). Eventually the nature gave out and adapted to the situations it was forced into. Any extended period where I went without social contact resulted in me getting reset very quickly. It has to be maintained for years to stick.
After a couple years with basically 0 days without extended social contact, something flipped in me and I actually enjoy it now.
Why did I do this? I deeply believe that wide social connection would cure effectively every social ailment of the postmodern era, and was determined to make my own little piece of the world a bit better. It has largely worked, though the work never stops. Such is the nature of good things.
SophisticatedHillbilly
2mo ago
🙄 🤓.
SophisticatedHillbilly
3mo ago
That means that anywhere from 5% to 30% of children born to completely average parents are equal to a member of the upper class. Given the massive population difference, it won't take long in any system with significant upward mobility and low downward mobility for the upper class to be heavily comprised of underperforming children-of-statistical-anomolies.
Bloodlines are great ways to discriminate, but only after multiple generations succeeding in a row. High social downward mobility is a must.
SophisticatedHillbilly
6mo ago
Yes, far too many rightists try to ascribe to "Jewish control" what is actually just firm ideological control. The media isn't controlled by shadowy forces as much as it is just staffed top-to-bottom with die-hard true believers in American Progressivism.
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
My position would be somewhere along the lines of: "If there is no way to evaluate the factor being considered directly, then discrimination based on proxies is acceptable. Voluntary proxies (like dress) are preferable to innate proxies (like race)."
Say redheads have an unusually high chance to spontaneously combust, and I don't want to hire them in my explosives factory. If I can measure an individual's combustibility, then discrimination against redheads is pointless and nefarious. If I can't, then yeah, sorry redheads.
Given that we can measure Big-5 personality traits and IQ in mere hours at most, effectively all proxies (race, education, class, wealth etc) are unacceptable nowadays, though they were fine before.
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
Not sure how what this says about your overall thesis, but the "live fast, die young" car-guy/street-racing scene is still around in the Southwest at least, speaking from somewhat recent experience. They just have a basically non-existent online presence (outside of the occasional Instagram post), and are primarily made up of 14-25 year-old mostly Hispanic and black men. Heavy criminal elements, but what do you expect from a subculture whose "thing" is literally illegal. It also maintains a decent but smaller presence in some rural areas, mostly among Hispanics and Amerindians. Cars varied heavily, but each cultural group seems to have their favorite styles, whether that be speedy ricers or bouncing Caddilacs.
Just because all of us here are too internet-rotted to find them doesn't mean they aren't out there doing their thing. They don't usually show up at the car shows (even the ones that have no restrictions on the cars) because those are lame and don't tolerate the sort of insanity that the streets do. If you can't have a bunch of hot drunk women ride on top of your car while you burn donuts in a lot while 20 others do the same, is it even a car meet? If your car never leaves the ground, are you even racing?
The fact that it's mostly non-whites doing the real car-stuff is interesting to me though. The general draining of independence/gumption/wherewithal/determination/spirit inflicted by post-modernity really seems to have hit white people the worst (I mean just look at suicide rates.) At this point it's almost exclusively non-whites that I see out there doing the ballsy stuff, outside of a few old-timers that haven't lost the spark.
P.S. For anyone who gets the chance, flying down the road at 120+ MPH in the middle of the night in a shitbox knowing that you WILL die if you do the slightest thing wrong (or get unlucky) is an incredible experience and I 10/10 would recommend. This also goes for having your brakes go out on a steep downhill slope and knowing that you just have to ride your way down a mountain gradually gaining speed until you reach the bottom.
SophisticatedHillbilly
3mo ago
Yes, but only from my own personal exposure. No writings on it would have been convincing to me.
Me and groups of up to 6 people all experiencing the same things, both together and separately, convinced me.
I am content for such things to remain not well understood, however.
SophisticatedHillbilly
6mo ago
Don't underestimate the ability of a broken government to get in the way though. The government offices being empty doesn't mean buildings get built without approval, it merely means that nothing can be approved at all, so nothing will be built. The enforcement wing is sadly usually the last to break, so it can continue preventing action long after it has lost the capability to allow it.
SophisticatedHillbilly
5mo ago
None, short of murder, violence that causes permanent or long-term physical harm, or selling them into slavery.
The breadth of parenting options should basically range from "take them to the drag show" to "don't even let them look at a person of the other gender"
This is a case where I actually genuinely believe that "Everyone gets to follow their own values" is actually legitimately superior to "everyone adheres to my values." I have parenting methods that I think are best. But those are methods for parenting MY children, made of MY genes. If everyone did them it would probably be a disaster.
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
Things like this always make we wonder how much Republicans could drive policy by just adopting the opposite view of what they want as their stance. How many fewer dollars sent to Ukraine if the right demanded aid to Ukraine right at the start? Mostly just a silly thought, but the effect is so strong that sometimes I wonder.
SophisticatedHillbilly
4mo ago
Not sure what meets @Questionmark's definition of "really furious, anxious progressive think piece," but there are a few I've seen around the net in the last week or so:
"The Case That Could Destroy the Government" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/securities-and-exchange-commission-v-jarkesy-supreme-court/676059/
Then there's this one, which originally had the title "A new Supreme Court case threatens to sow chaos throughout the federal government" https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/5/2/23706535/supreme-court-chevron-deference-loper-bright-raimondo
Then there's another Vox masterpiece: "The Supreme Court seeks a middle path between following the law and blowing up the government" https://www.vox.com/scotus/2023/11/29/23980966/supreme-court-sec-jarkesy-administrative-law-judges
And more or less every respectable news outlet had some opinion piece along the lines of Washington Post's "A conservative court intent on arrogating power unto itself" https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/01/supreme-court-administrative-state/
For comparison, Reuter's most recent headline on the topic is "US Supreme Court signals it could limit SEC in-house enforcement," though I do think that undersells it somewhat.
SophisticatedHillbilly
6mo ago
I think you're short on what I would call Tier 2 social events, and heavy on Tier 1 events.
Tier 1 events are things like the Meetups where people would have to make a conscious effort to seek them out, or have minimal opportunity for extended social or physical interaction. Women don't usually attend these (relative to men at least) unless they're extremely female-oriented activities, or are an opportunity to show off (think dancing/clubs/bars)
Tier 2 social events are things like house-parties where you have to be invited by either the host or someone else who was invited. As you can expect, single women tend to get invited to things more than single men, so it creates a good ratio. The purpose of Tier 1 events is to make friends to invite you to Tier 2 events. Parties, formal events etc. This is where the "make female friends" advice comes in, but really just "make friends that are either female or sexually/romantically/socially successful is probably more accurate.
Typically, all social networks are comprised of interconnected social Hub People, each of who is a center of a social circle comprised of Spoke People who are connected to the rest of the group (other than 1 or 2 people) through the Hub. If you've ever met one of those guys who just seems to know everybody everywhere, that's a Hub. If you aren't a Hub, then you have to find one.
P.s. (I suppose there's probably a distinct Tier 3 sort of event, like a sex party or orgy, where you more or less know you're going to be sexually involved, but I've never participated in such things.)
SophisticatedHillbilly
8mo ago
Only a blackpill if you for some reason have no respect for strength or power, which would be odd given how important they've been for all of history.
SophisticatedHillbilly
8mo ago
where a lot of politically-charged matters have been started getting shoved through local direct democracy options, usually by a mix of obfuscating terminology and absolutely massive direct spending advocacy,
Having worked on paid local referendum campaigns, this is underselling both points.
- When circulating petitions, we were actively told to lie to make the petition more palatable to whoever we spoke to, even implying that the bill did the exact opposite of what it actually said. I didn't do this, and I'd even just outright say "Oh, you don't want to sign this then" if it seemed they didn't support what it was, but others were all-in on the numbers game.
- Petitioners were being paid $50/hour to circulate petitions. I don't want to think about how much money was sloshing around that campaign.
SophisticatedHillbilly
6mo ago
Honestly I don't believe this entirely. The issue of try-try-try again-pass is real yes, but as Brexit shows it's an advantage inherent to the "Anti-Status-Quo" stance rather than inherently an advantage for progressives.
The problem is that conservatives believe you can just rest on your laurels and do nothing whatsoever to uphold your beliefs beyond voting, while progressives understand that to win you have to fight for your beliefs every single day. If conservatives tried half as hard to ban gay marriage as the progressives did to legalize it, it would be illegal.
Progressives collectively throw hundreds of billions of dollars towards their social goals, have numerous people whose entire lives and careers are dedicated to furthering the cause (many of whom abandoned more profitable avenues to do so) and have millions more who make art, put the values into their work, make public displays of loyalty, etc. Conservatives aren't even in the same ballpark of effort and commitment.
The sole exception would of course be Christian Evangelicals, who do all the same things progressives do to to actually attempt to win. And would you look at that, they did in fact get Roe v Wade overturned! Turns out conservatives can win if they actually care and put their money where their mouth is!
SophisticatedHillbilly
8mo ago
The existence of said whiplash likely would have prevented the centralization. Less reason to invest in growing the power of the central authority of your opponent actually gets to use the power once in awhile.
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
From my experience working in a job where the use of the quotes feature was vital: Google will randomly and without warning place users into experimental variations of their features as a form of A/B testing. If you get placed in the "Google prioritizes words in quotes" user bucket and not the "Google demands exact string match of words in quote" bucket, your search won't turn up the exact results and you're just out of luck.
I managed to escalate this issue quite high into Google support at one point, and the above was more or less everything they told me. Was quite stressful when I needed the exact match for my job.
SophisticatedHillbilly
4mo ago
I don't assume you're going around trusting people that easily with things that important to you. Or am I speaking too soon? What's your social security number? I didn't think so.
There are many people that I do in fact share sensitive information with. Those people are not you. I'm sorry if you have no one trustworthy in your life. I have many such people, who are trustworthy because of their commitment to principle.
I fully agree that most people are not principled. I do not expect them to be, but I do not think being principle-less is any more acceptable because the majority of people do it. I am happy to simply prune my own social circle of those I see lacking in principle. Even having done so, I am left with a much, much larger circle than the average person anyway.
The whole point of having principles is that by being unmoved by incentives, you open the possibility of changing the incentives themselves. If enough people hold that lying is evil, then you push the cost-benefit balance away from lying. To follow incentives, or design with them in mind, is to cede the power of incentive-setting to those who won't budge.
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
Yeah, expected outcome is absurd in this circumstance. Should someone who is 1% likely to have committed a crime have to serve 1% of the sentence? No, they're either guilty or innocent, and the whole point of the system is to find that out. It is admittedly broken at the moment, but only because we need somewhere around 10X the number of judges/clerks/courtrooms/prosecutors/defenders/bailiffs/police etc that we currently have. Not sure why no one ever seems interested in growing the infrastructure to match the population, but so it goes.
SophisticatedHillbilly
5mo ago
Same, and it bothered me a bit because I was like "I don't even remember interacting with them! What could it mean?"
SophisticatedHillbilly
5mo ago
Additionally, part of it for me is the expense breakdown and where the cuts have to be made. There are several unavoidable expenses, and a very small field of adjustable expenses. As such, all tightening of the belt has to be done out of a very small portion of the overall budget.
Heating, and gas cannot be adjusted. I already use them as little as possible, and any further reduction would be stupid and harmful. Any increase in heating or gas costs then, has to be cut out of something else. Hard goods (furniture, dishware, clothing, appliances etc) likewise cannot be adjusted, as I pay nothing for them (hooray Facebook Marketplace!)
Food and other consumables can be adjusted, but only by dropping in quality noticably. Because this is my only flex point, it is where almost all of the change in standard of living occurs. Say my overall spending power drops by 10%. That's not a lot, but this category makes up only 20% of my spending, and is the only area where change can occur, so I have to take a very large hit to the quality of consumables just to break even. This hurts a lot. Eating cheaper makes me feel worse, noticably, both physically and emotionally.
I think many experience a similar effect. If only 10% of your budget is discretionary spending and your real purchasing power drops by 10%, you now have no discretionary spending money at all. That is a massive hit to quality of life. Straight from "well I work a lot but I get fun outings and the occasional vacation," all the way to "I literally just work to live to continue working."
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
Additionally, many who would report themselves as paycheck-to-paycheck have assets and are saving money. A friend of mine describes himself as such while putting 30% of his money into an investment account each check. To him, that money does not count because it is not available for spending (by his self imposed rules).
SophisticatedHillbilly
6mo ago
How confident are you the pollster isn't compiling a list of political enemies? What do you gain by answering honestly? If the answer to the first question is "less than 100%" and the answer to the second is "Nothing," why would you ever answer honestly? It just seems like the obviously wrong decision (for non-Kantians, at least.)
SophisticatedHillbilly
6mo ago
I'm massively in favor of restricting genocide to only include killing and mass prevention of reproduction, but do you have a suggestion for what to call the cultural equivalent?
If tomorrow the Taliban broke into my house, forced me to learn Arabic, stop eating pork or drinking alcohol, changed how my workday is structured, altered the system of government I live under, and prevented me from living with my girlfriend prior to marriage, none of that is genocide but is definitely A Big Deal and I would like a word for it being applied to my entire society collectively. Culturcide is decent but a bit ugly.
Can any resident lawyers here provide some insights on the decision to attend law school? I have a mostly-worthless journalism degree that I somewhat aimlessly (though debtlessly) acquired with a 3.0 GPA, and have over the last year suddenly become highly motivated and interested in getting my life on track (Late, I know!). Feel trapped in a cycle of working poorly-paying jobs related to my major and I'm looking for something that will open some doors for myself after spending years passing them by.
I'm smart, and I'm pulling ~175 on practice LSATs, and I have enough outside interest in legal affairs to read state-level court rulings on my own time, but I'm on the fence about the whole thing.
Primary concerns are:
It doesn't seem like a bad option, but in some sense only because I can't think of a better one with the hole I've dug myself into.
(For anyone who remembers by months-old post about mining, that is still progressing slowly. I'm able to consistently make small batches of metal from ore now, but upscaling it requires a minimum $50,000 equipment investment, and I have nowhere near that amount of money on hand. Ore from one location in particular is producing some sort of steel-like metal that is unbelievably hard and surprisingly light. High vanadium content is probably a factor, but there's a lot of other stuff in it. A supermagnet-producer took interest in some tests that demonstrate dense concentrations of neodymium, but again lost interest when it came to quantity caps.)
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