SophisticatedHillbilly
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User ID: 1964
SophisticatedHillbilly
3mo ago
This is one of those "you don't hate journalists enough, you think you do but you don't" moments for me honestly. I sometimes forget that I have to retroactively apply my hate for journalism into the past, and this is a good reminder. Journalism as a whole really never was much better, it was just harder to see how bad they were. This is regarding the 1992 article of course.
Not trans, but my own take on it from talking to trans and not-trans-but-considered-it people:
One of the most common precursors to people going trans is an inability to mesh with one's own gender in social settings, especially in group settings. The guy who can't handle male social dynamics and ends up bullied or simply alone. The girl who can't wrap her head around female social games and thus is effectively exiled from female social contact.
I think of one moderately autistic woman I know who struggles very hard with this. Her natural responses in social situations lead her to being pretty inevitably hated by groups of women after enough exposure. This bleeds over into work, and has major negative professional impacts.
When interacting with men, on the other hand, she gets along great. It's not a sexual thing either, just that when she gives direct, blunt responses it's appreciated instead of hated.
I suspect this is why it correlates so strongly with autism. They struggle to fulfill the convoluted and difficult rules of intra-gender social interaction and find the (much looser) rules of cross-gender interaction more welcoming. They then falsely think this means they'd be better at intra-gender interaction as the opposite gender, rather than that they're simply benefiting from easier rules
What would evidence of this look like exactly? I'm not a huge fan of most of the "election was rigged theory" but it seems to me that there's nowhere for any manipulation to blatantly show up if it did happen. The system isn't built to catch it.
Any evidence in favor of it will just show up as more irregularities than usual, each of which is explainable by itself.
SophisticatedHillbilly
6mo ago
I do feel like the place has lost a lot of fire in the last year or so, and especially on leaving reddit. I don't mind so much, but only because in my contrarian nature this has made me more fiery, and I think it has otherwise made it somewhat worse.
I almost feel that there are fewer conventionally successful people around nowadays, but that could just be a case of fewer people mentioning personal details. I'm certainly not helping that figure, however.
Focus has definitely gotten tighter onto whatever issue is popular on X, which saddens me. My favorite posts have always been those from the public defender guy about law, or foreigners about their local issues, or other topics I would never have discovered.
Overall though I'm impressed how things have kept on chugging along. I was worried about total death on moving.
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
10mo 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
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:
- The impression I seem to get from the internet is that lawyers are all miserable alcoholics who wish they had become software engineers. Why would I spend 3 years to become more miserable than I already am?
- Bimodal income distribution. If I can bump up my LSAT a few more points, I have a decent chance of getting into a top school, (especially with AA bonus points) but is it just not worth going at all if I don't manage to pull that? Not super interested in spending 3 years to graduate and then earn $65k.
- Debt. Law school seems unreasonably expensive. I doubt I can get many scholarships if I manage to squeak into a T14 level school, and while my score would likely net me large scholarships at a regional school, that just brings me back to the previous point.
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.)
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
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
4mo ago
Except the comparison point would have to be (welfare state with X GDP and Y demographics) vs (no welfare state with X GDP and Y demographics). Is there even a similar set of states we can compare? Given the impact of demographics and wealth on the type of state that the public builds, is it even possible to have one?
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
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
9mo ago
To take it a step further: I happen to know someone who is either a billionaire or quite close to it (I believe he recently complained that his net worth had fallen just under the billion mark due to some supply chain issue) and is still absolutely not elite in any way. His money is in agriculture, and he is very 'country' in his mannerisms. I do think a world where he'd get to be 'in the room where it happens' would be a better one, but he doesn't act the part of the right sort of person, so he's just wealthy and subject to the whims of the worthless social-gamers.
SophisticatedHillbilly
4mo ago
The only human beings who have consistent principles are those you'd never want to live with or be governed by.
This honestly has not been my experience at all. Those with the strongest principles have consistently been the only people in my life worth keeping around. If someone doesn't have any values that they'll maintain when it's painful, then you're basically dealing with a particularly cunning animal.
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
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
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
9mo ago
Consider two identical twins. The parents force one twin to get good grades, play sports, practice piano, etc. The other twin is completely ignored and follows his base instincts (video games, probably). Unsurprisingly the first twin ends up with better life outcomes,
So I don't disagree with your actual point, but twin studies tend to converge on the idea that these twins will actually have roughly the same life outcomes.
SophisticatedHillbilly
5mo ago
Honestly, does this matter? If it takes 1000 years for a belief system to mature enough to perform well, then that's even more reason to stick to established systems.
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
9mo ago
I've always seen it more as "accept that water runs downhill." Yes, you can pump water uphill, but there is a cost, and it must be done intentionally. Try as you might, you will never be able to get the universe into a state where "water runs uphill or downhill as needed at no cost" is a fundamental law.
People who successfully change things for the better tend to have internalized this. They understand that their actions have tradeoffs, opportunity costs, and that some things, like the past, are unchangeable. Others beat their heads against the brick wall that is reality.
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
Nobel prize winning scientists can't exactly imbue intelligence, which SATs generally measure, nor was he likely taking the time to instill test-taking skills. I don't see why it would.
SophisticatedHillbilly
10mo ago
This is extra true of those murders which, especially in the southeastern US, have little connection to other crime. Most murders there are a personal feud sort of thing, or a "you fucked my girlfriend" sort of thing. Totally expected and seen as very reasonable in local circles. Very different than gang activity, robberies that go wrong, etc.
SophisticatedHillbilly
4mo ago
almost every single one of those people have no qualms about picking up a $100 bill you just dropped
Speak for yourself and your own fucked up community. The people around me have gone a lot further for me than returning a $100, and I trust them deeply.
However, I understand your point, and the majority of the world's population is principle-less and incentive-driven. At the same time, I believe it is morally required to stand against incentives, and I think your way of thinking too often leads to a race-to-the-bottom mindset of "everyone else has no principles and follows incentives so I have to follow incentives too."
If you can resist that slide while maintaining your mindset, then frankly we're mostly in agreement.
I think this may be demonstrating a major disconnect in mindset. Simply put: material prosperity is not a terminal value for most groups of people, and for some may barely be a value at all.
It's like mentioning how the Amish could be more prosperous if only they used modern technology. Of course they could! The explicitly think that's a bad thing, in a way that many valueless post-modernists seem to fail to understand. Have you considered that maybe Palestinians just genuinely feel that being free, impoverished, and Islamic is actually better than less free, wealthy, and progressive? Having actual values beyond "have money" doesn't make them Satanic.
I'm not even pro-Palestine (far, far from it actually,) but this read of them is just so far from any traditional Islamist I've ever met that I had to say something. If you're one of those people with no values beyond "win," don't forget that other people actually have other values, and say hi to Moloch for me.
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