Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
All alliterations are accidental.
User ID: 83
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
4mo ago
Hate to pile on, but as others have said - if this is overwhelming evidence, then you simply longed to be overwhelmed.
If this violates the leave-the-internet-at-the-door rule, please say so and I'll happily delete. I'm posting in spite of it because it seems relevant, but it's n=1 so no sweat if the rule comes first.
So I just got banned from my favorite Battletech discord server for very politely disagreeing (in fact, for saying no more than that I respectfully disagreed) with very severe new anti-anti-lgbt rules that even made having anything joke-like in your global pronoun field a bannable offense. Following this I was told that it was not acceptable to call for the annihilation of groups of people and that I shouldn't be a shithead, but that it was of course permissible to politely state one's opinion. I invoked that principle and stated that the language involved in the matter seemed excessively dramatic and directed at strawmen besides. I was called a troll and banned within seconds.
I'm getting similar vibes here that I got when I politely declined vaccination and suddenly half my family turned on me as if I were planning murder. People I presumed to be reasonable overtuning their reactions to benign disagreement. Other places just don't play by Motte rules.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
11mo ago
His post may have been shitty, but the literary critique of Hlynka taking too long to make a simple point is not entirely off the mark.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
I somehow managed to get out of a major months-long slump. Still not sure how. Salient aspects below, but most of them may be cause or effect and I don't know which.
-
Winter ended. It's warmer and less dark. Switching time zones is annoying, but I do appreciate summer time. I probably do get a major case of the SADs (Seasonal Affective Disorder) in winter, not that I'd ever go to anyone who might diagnose me. But psychospeak aside, I hate winter. I hate the cold and the dark and the denuded trees and the grey skies and the soggy ground and the feeble sun and the shortness of the days. I can get comfy at home, but it still feels like some kind of half-hearted afterlife with the best parts of living gone and not coming back for many months. It's still too cold to go swimming or cycling, but I'm planning to go on as long a hike as my busted knees will take to take in the springtime sights as soon as there's a sunny weekend.
-
Had some modest but tangible successes at work. It's been a slog before, and I'm still not doing anything praiseworthy, but right now I'm managing without needing to rope in others to help me out. Maybe I just lucked out and picked some easy tasks for once, but it's nice either way.
-
Managed to fix up my own codebase. I was immured by bugs of my own making from having been too sloppy, overambitious or just plain distracted in the past. Couldn't do anything without it falling apart thanks to the shamefully low level of code quality. Just about everything failed one way or another. I considered scrapping some features, quarantining others until I might fix them, and simplifying the rest until I might manage. I considered just trashing it all and starting over. I considered trashing it all and never starting over. Instead I sat myself down and did the only right thing - wrote tests. Wrote a lot of tests. There are still large swathes of code that are unusable right now, and it does take me serious effort, but it bears fruit. Bugs are getting fixed. Functionality is restored. And I even manage to add some new things and see them work out.
-
Marriage is much more harmonious. I get along better with the wife and we even managed to talk about some difficult topics without it devolving into pointless arguments. Wife has more patience for the child. Child is much more agreeable than she was a few months ago. We went on a trip and had a good time. Nice.
-
Successfully extricated myself from work-from-home for once and spent a day in the office. It was productive and I got a lot of workplace socializing done. The 4-hour commute sucks, but once in a while it's absolutely worth it. I try to make it once in a week, but so far I've been held up. I hope to get there again soon, maybe spend a night, get in a few hours of exercise and even meet some old friends.
-
Finished playing Cyberpunk 2077. See https://www.themotte.org/post/449/friday-fun-thread-for-april-14/88260?context=8#context . Mostly when I play games it's just to unwind, or to challenge myself, and I have a hard time justifying the waste of time. This one, for once, actually had me along for the ride purely for the story. I normally scoff at storytelling in video games - stories in games universally suck, why not just read a book instead? - but in this one case I'm convinced that it was actually well-served by its format. I'm still thinking about it days later. Still listening to related music (https://youtube.com/watch?v=p4cqqUUfy3A). Maybe I'm just impressionable, but somehow it's been a good impression and I feel that playing this game has somehow done me good.
None of my fundamental life problems are fixed, but somehow in spite of them it's going ever-so-slightly uphill right now. If it really is seasonal, then I hope very much that I manage to get as much as possible out of this season, and to prepare as well as possible for what comes after.
Apparently we recently had an honest-to-god serial old-people-killer very near our home in the absolute nowhere of rural Germany. Seems he was active over several years, and a suspect has been caught a few weeks ago. My old grandparents then had an extra bolt installed in their front door, which they used to have unlocked during the day.
Guns are, for self-defense or home-defense purposes, banned in Germany. Families are atomized.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
Increasing TFR by 0.3 in a Western country means approaching something like stable demographics; it's hardly an idealization of the ever-climbing population count.
Kindness and Truth being different terminal values seems like a bit of a Motte to me, where the Bailey is "be as unkind as I feel like being". Introducing yourself via a link to your substack, and in fact introducing yourself at all, also smells to me of an above-average sense of self-importance for a participant on the motte. That, or you're just fishing for clicks.
But
-
I may be wrong, my impression may be off. Maybe I'm being uncharitable.
-
You may still be an acceptable poster.
Since you already made a profile, what do you have to lose by just participating?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
Edit: As an aside, arguments that the US is "destroying" the German economy are pretty far-fetched. Some very high volume, high energy, relatively low margin industrial activity is partially shifting to the US, but it doesn't constitute a substantial portion of the German economy. Germany isn't going to be impoverished by 2030, and I doubt it will be substantially poorer relative to the US than it is today.
There certainly is a lot of screaming here. It's still somewhat subdued because we're not even used to having to scream in this way, but it feels like there's cause for it. Most working-age Germans never experienced such events, and our national character together with the media and politics are all-too-eager to pile on the hysterics for various political and psychological ends. Hard to say whether it's justified on the object level, but with enough pessimism it may well end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy to some extent.
That said, as an aside to your aside, I really want to make a top-level post about how German politicians and press knew months in advance and with great certainty that there would be terrible protests and riots this winter, and that something needed to be done about those deplorables.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
I have a pretty major dog in this fight, but I think you're being somewhat uncharitable here. I observe the dynamics @DaseinudstriesLtd describes IRL. They are obviously not universal to women, there being exceptions and the whole thing being on a gradient rather than binary as always, but it's certainly an existing and very noticeable trend in which women come to believe that they naturally deserve better than they manage to work or negotiate for, in ways that would make any man seem ridiculous.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
No submission statement, not reading.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
Just don't wear the damn shirt. Doesn't seem very complicated. You already know that you don't want to and the consequences are insignificant either way, so you may as well be true to yourself.
I wish to point out that while the German greens in general are indeed increasingly crazy, their far-reaching popular, institutional and media support nonwithstanding, this particular poster is specifically targeted at the wokest quarter of the wokest city in the woke country of Germany and not, or at least not yet, representative of the party and its supporters as a whole.
More generally, I don't think these kinds of short-termist progressives - liberals in your parlance - really have a coherent vision of a world they wish to bring into being. They have a catalogue of good and bad things, and when they wish to depict their utopia they simply cram a bunch of the good ones into a picture and call it a day because that's literally all they have the tools for.
Conservatives have a natural aesthetic advantage here - the world they idealize, or at least one close it, has actually existed and can be displayed as it was.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
While some of what you say may be correct, I feel the need to temper your enthusiasm.
German society had numerous problems in the 1920s. It was shaken up by the effects of industrialization, urbanization, unification and democracy, and even more badly so the first world war and the following economic crises. The country was very troubled and not at all self-sufficient. What the national socialists turned the country into in the 30s and 40s wasn't much better. Some problems were solved, yes, and maybe it even was the nazis' doing, but what they made of Germany wasn't a lasting high-trust society but a totalitarian shithole that steadily degraded its social capital - by replacing Germany's formerly durable culture with the artificial crackpot pseudo-culture invented by party ideologues, by pouring ever-more resources and manpower into military endeavors (one can make the case that this was justified, given the Bolschewist threat, but frankly I think a large degree of doubt is merited here), and finally by ruining what was left of the country's international standing and plunging it into the war that almost destroyed it at the time by the after-effects of which are slowly destroying it now.
For all that I know many at the time may have fought for the country proper, or against bolshevism, but on the whole the fight was corrupted in means and in goals and led to the worst possible outcome short of an actual Nazi victory, because let us recall for a moment that the people in power at the time weren't sagacious guardians of Germany's heritage and future but a bunch of unhinged gangsters high on their own supplies of ideology and drugs and intent on transforming Germany from a real country with a real society populated by real human beings into some nightmare caricature. They might have coasted for some time on the industry of the people and the military heritage of Prussia, but Nazi administrative competence was, frankly, not much to boast of. I have no doubts that whatever social and economic capital Germany had at the time, the political leadership would not have failed to destroy it in due time.
So, yes, I guess they wouldn't have suffered the cultural decay that comes with Stalinism or Capitalism...but instead we would've seen a third flavor of cultural self-destruction.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
7mo ago
So you think TX should be forced to host immigrants that it does not desire, whereas CA should not be forced to do the same even though it desires immigrants?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
10mo ago
A male friend recently gave me the dating advice that what's important in a partner is that they are "naturally happy", which struck me as a hilariously insufficient and condescending criterion, better suited to choosing a puppy.
That is excellent advice and well-worth blasting from the rooftops with megaphones. Could've saved me decades of trouble if I were amenable to advice.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
11mo ago
I must echo what @functor wrote below.
We are officially in a "technical recession". I don't know what that means, but I guess it's not good.
From my perspective the crisis is proceeding pretty much exactly as predicted. I earn more than the median or average salary in Germany, I live in the supposedly cheap countryside, I gave up all expensive hobbies and so did my wife, and yet I struggle to feed a family of three. Absolutely everything is expensive. Wages are barely creeping up, while inflation eats all that and more.
I invite you to look at the graph in https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Verdienste/Realloehne-Nettoverdienste/_inhalt.html .
Look at how the good red line rarely goes over the bad black line. Then look at the vast gulf that opened between them in the last few years. That's wages versus prices.
Looking at energy prices, I can't find a neat graph in what little time my patience gives me, but those are going up, too. Meanwhile politics announced plans to fix energy prices for various industries - now is that just lobbyism at work, or is that actually a somehow necessary act? And if the latter, is that because there is no energy crisis and everything's fine and renewables are doing a good enough job?
If there is no crisis, then fine, I guess everything just continues to look like one from the ground but we Germans are known to be unjustified doomsayers. Damn my lying eyes.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
Rationalist aren't 100% rational. They're slightly more rational than average. And they didn't get there because of the consequentialist advantages of rationalism, but because their thinking abilities are their individual greatest strength, and they try to lean into that by emphasizing the importance of reason in whatever socially approved context they find themselves in. In the progressive western world, the nominally most important context is "saving the world", so that's the basket they try to place their eggs in.
In other words, rationalists like all humans are primarily social animals, but they're also relatively socially awkward, and their reasoning abilities are what they try to compensate with. Given the many dysfunctions of their society, all their reasoning will rarely amount to more than dysfunctional results.
That's my take, anyways.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
I normally browse the motte by looking at the recent comments and going through context from there. But for the last 15 hours, it seems there was nothing but this topic. Can someone lay out why a dating ad is so interesting to people?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
Did you miss the part where I'd already had covid by the time the vaccines became available?
Apart from that, you might consume other news than me, but I keep hearing that vaccines do little to stop the spread of the disease and are in fact mostly if not entirely meant to reduce the effect of the disease on the one vaccinated. I.e., entirely a matter of one's own nose. I suppose you have heard differently. Have you also heard that natural immunity does not work?
I agree. As far as I can see we are at present predominantly right-wing. It's the thousand witches scenario many expected.
This place needs disagreement to work, so this situation isn't healthy.
I'd like to say my thanks to any leftists, centrists and contracontrarians who stick around us anyways; the Motte needs them and given current trends needs a few more of them.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
6mo ago
Please excuse the following rambling.
The way I see it this goes back to the cold war, when Israel was a proxy for the West and the muslim countries were getting cozy with the soviets. Now, regardless of whether it was actual soviet manipulation or just an organic development, somehow Western youths and students ended up getting on board the anti-imperialist, socialist and pro-soviet train, and backing palestine over israel is just part and parcel of that. And while elements of the far-left, especially in Germany, have been pro-israel probably as an outgrowth of being anti-nazi and thus anti-antisemitic, the majority still gets their geopolitics from ye olde colde warre thinking. Add to that the timeless but boosted-in-modernity fixation on promoting the interests of the weak and oppressed, and the degraded cultural immune system of the West that's no longer able to defend itself against leftist narratives which leads to increasingly drastic purity spirals in leftism as well as the marginalization of other lines of thinking that leave this kind of leftism in control of most discourse and media, and there you go, the youth and the students and many of those who have some sort of platform to speak from are now pro-palestinian by default, and even if they'd like to denounce what hamas are doing they can't without betraying their side in the culture war.
Now, the German left very quickly shut up and toed the line to support Israel, since you cannot be anti-zionist in this country without putting yourself dangerously close to the nazi area, but America doesn't have quite the same mechanisms in place, so your youth and students can fully enjoy their ideology.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
10mo ago
You don't have children, do you?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
10mo ago
I'm om vacation and too busy to read newspapers, so I can't add anything at present, but I greatly enjoy these windows into regions I normally ignore entirely.
Top-level comment or post, whichever it is, please keep it up!
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
Yea. "Why are you afraid of them?" is a frequently-posed rhetorical question.
Yeah, I'd call it uglier. The scene in the painting looks mundane, not pretty but simply normal because it depicts a real situation in a real place, realistically. The scene in the poster is an illustration of an imaginary ideological utopia, so ugly that it needs to be stylicized in order to avoid reactions of disgust.
More options
Context Copy link