Tanista
1yr ago
because you need to got so many details right and the audience is far more astute than just shareholders or other employees
The audience may have more aggregate wisdom but that doesn't necessarily mean much: I know some stuff about programming but, when I listen to Last Week Tonight talking about Turkmenistan, I have no idea how right or wrong they are. But I like (or liked) John Oliver so it feels more trustworthy.
Which is why the sort of shamelessness Jim Cramer (to use 2rafa's example) has might be useful. You can't fool all of the people, but you can fool some of them a lot of the time. If you simply refuse to take responsibility for being wrong you probably last longer by not popping the confidence of the people who are sticking with you compared to a more intellectually honest person.
The gulf monarchies have also produced Islamist petrostates that are at least much better than Libya or Iran.
There is a massive "being an enemy of America is not good for your health" confounding factor here though right?
Is the first episode very different?
Things swerve a lot in the show (as I said the writers can't decide on a plot) so the plot may be different from what the pilot led you to expect but the core nature of the show (the family dynamic, the comedy) doesn't really change.
If certain plotlines (or even guest/recurring stars) in the pilot turned you off then there's a chance they might just disappear into the ether. But if it's the core characters themselves...
Trump punishing and gutting establishment GOP leadership would do wonders for the rightwing and the GOP. Trump won because he saw a winning hand on the ground on a bunch of issues which were wildly popular but which both political parties were doing nothing about, e.g., Trade, Immigration, Wars. He was able to win because the GOP had been talking about those things-ish, for years and have done nothing at all to make them more in line with their voterbase.
He barely won. And, as others have said in this thread, it was arguably the case that any Republican candidate had an advantage on the ballot at the time.
Trump absolutely blazed a new trail.
But, truth is, we don't know how a neolib, "we love migrants now" (this was the suggested shift in the GOP's 2012 post-mortem iirc) would have done.
People can hold their nose and vote party line. Look at the Democrats; a lot of people prefer someone like Bernie but I think Trump putting three judges on the Court has broken a lot of sore loser/third party-adventurism.
Fundamentally, the scary thing about Trump is that he behaves as if American elections are kayfabe on top of an underlying system of raw power politics, and his supporters love him for it.
It's pretty strange to see so much discussion here about why liberals hate Trump - a lot of "sore loser" theory - without Democrats or progressives pushing back on why they think he's particularly norm-breaking.
It actually makes me worry about the skew of this site and if we left a lot of left-wingers back on Reddit.
It's not just that "Trump wasn't supposed to win". He violated a lot of norms - not just red and blue norms like unconditional support for the nominee - starting with not releasing his taxes and escalating to things like playing footsie with not acknowledging the outcome of the election.
THIS was the particular red rag that was theoretically avoidable by a generic GOP candidate (as opposed to being anti-immigration - or rather: anti-some immigration)
There is obviously a thing where liberals (this can be of the left AND right variety - especially if you look at Europe) conflate their particular politics with democracy and freedom as such - which is how things like populism, Brexit, being anti-immigrant all end up being marked as "dangerous" or threats to freedom - but, in this case, Trump tied the connection himself.
We don't even need to look at the lib reaction - look at some of Tucker's leaked texts from the Dominion case if you think this reaction is purely lib derangement at a "blue collar billionaire".
Tanista
1yr ago
Guys who take the black pill genuinely do believe what they say, they aren't merely making excuses to avoid overhauling their lifestyle and routines.
It wouldn't be a good coping mechanism if people didn't sincerely cling to it. I'm not sold that it's just an empirical judgment and not a result of the fact that trying to dig oneself out requiring high investment and being more than a little demoralizing.
To put it another way: if you see fat activists who've "taken the blackpill" that weight is just genetic and there's nothing they could have done would you trust this as a mere reasonable response to the data?
What "data" would one even be looking for? All of it would be some survey of word usage in media, or of public opinion polling.
I imagine it'd be a lot of that*, just not one particular chart/source.
I imagine timing would be important. The most obvious counterpoint I can think of is other stuff happened that led to more wokeness (e.g. Trayvon Martin's death - which is closer to the dip)
The question would be then seeing if any of those events match The Charts' dip better than OWS' moment in the sun.
EDIT: Unless we had whistleblowers in campaigns and newsrooms at the time, who backed the strong claim by saying they saw the edicts come down.
He's just also an asshole, whose idea of disagreement with people is just turning the "be a dick" dial up to 11.
I think @Fruck is looking at this from today's perspective with "SJWs" having the whip hand and making more and more deranged claims. So the assholishness of people like Dawkins and Amazing Atheist seem less important.
But they were assholes at the time and it mattered. There's "good" assholes - i.e. anally nitpicking expert types who don't care to "read the room" which is good. But there's also the "asshole"' in the more colloquial sense. Atheism had both, sometimes in the same person.
I recall AmazingAtheist engaging with Anita Sarkeesian before she was (in)famous and, instead of just "destroying her with facts and logic", going on a tangent about how she was broken because she was fidgeting. Even then, it seemed a bit fucked to me.
It's also worth remembering that Watson was actually relatively toned down compared to the absurd SA claims being made today, and the reaction was OTT and mocking. Watch the video, it's actually a relatively offhand thing and there was context; she stated that she had spoken about not liking this sort of thing in the conference which adds a point in her favor.
... All of you except for the one man who didn't really grasp, I think, what I was saying on the panel, because, at the bar later that night — actually at four in the morning, we were at the hotel bar, four a.m. I said I've had enough guys, I'm exhausted, going to bed, so I walked to the elevator, and a man got on the elevator with me and said "Don't take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I would like to talk more, would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?" Um, just a word to the wise here, guys, don't do that. I don't really know how else to explain that this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I'll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at four a.m., in a hotel elevator with you, just you, and I, don't invite me back to your hotel room right after I've finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualise me in that manner.
This wasn't a general puritanical thing like today. Nor did she try to humiliate him by naming like the recent video of a woman getting mad at a gym "creep" for staring. She explicitly says she had made her preferences clear here.
Then people like Dawkins jumped on it in an assholish way and this led to the other side responding (I can see how this was seen as male nerd rage and entitlement) and it became way bigger than it ever should have been.
Tanista
1yr ago
Mainly, to project conventional power elsewhere.
They had troops in Europe, where it almost certainly would have gone nuclear.
Tanista
1yr ago
The intent seems to be to put constraints on the scale of sexual success of men, in a way that is never analogously applied to women.
I suppose the constraint was applied by biology: women have less reason to go for maximal competition because they have a limited number of potential total offspring. Men do not.
Tanista
1yr ago
It certainly helped that Christianity was compatible with the existing Greco-Roman monogamous approach, but Christianity didn't introduce it.
I'm kind of sleepy and I feel like I'm going full circle from my original post so I've kind of lost the thread here on the bone of contention tbh. I never said it invented social monogamy, more that it did promulgate sexual monogamy as an ideal though. Men weren't expected to be monogamous or even necessarily exclusively focus on women* beforehand. That's why Paul uses a constructed phrase of something like "husband of one wife" or "one-man wife"
Islam has a more restrained version of the same thing; it is formally socially and sexually polygamous and men weren't expected to be monogamous. But it closes access to women who "your right hand does not possess".
* Though you'd avoid well off Roman boys and other high class people if you knew what was good for you.
Russia's primary money maker is exporting fuel and other natural resources. The parts of its industrial sector that rely on Western inputs are going to suffer from sanctions or, worse, be made unproductive.
Not a great environment.
He might have actually have been independently wealthy (though I'm suspicious of this - he speaks like a rapper in some ways) but it would have been through illicit activities like pimping or pseudo-illicit ones (since it just collapses into pimping) like running a webcamming business.
Tanista
1yr ago
Extremely hard disagree. I very much hope that general adherence to social norms is not used as a criterion of judgement by actual criminal trial judges.
Except that is literally the opposite of my claim: that courts may need to be held to a higher standard to achieve important social goods, but this doesn't mean that we're all obligated to do the same.
Basically the same argument for why "innocent until proven guilty" can be an asinine response. For a recent example, see Kevin O'Leary's apology tour on FTX and crypto.
Tanista
1yr ago
I was joking. Canada has long wait times for specialist care and I don't think things have improved since Covid.
What's your bed like?
Pretty generic shitty twin tbh. I don't really notice it as uncomfortable anymore but maybe I'm desensitized.
I find melatonin very helpful. If you were taking a larger dose, consider a small one. It may be more effective and less hangovery (see SSC).
Thanks, will try that on the weekend!
My cpap took ages to get used to. A lot of fiddling with settings, trying different masks, etc.
I actually really like the mask I have now, finally. Took switching to a full face mask but it's far less annoying and I can get more than an hour on it, which was the situation before. I have another sleep study in 2045 (thanks Canada!) so I'll see if we can upgrade to another machine after that.
The loser men placating themselves with porn (which is the demographic that I think would be most interested in sex toys) seem to be those who are mainly interested in companionship. The incel phenomenon is the extreme version of this.
This is what the "cleaned up" incels say. Because they understand that alternate stories aren't favorable so they make sure to frame their needs in a way that's quite palatable to a feminist society: it's all about companionship and so on.
Instead of admitting that the stronger male sex drive is its own incentive. Not the only incentive. But to deny that it plays a role...I don't find credible for neurotypical men.
It's like how no liberal Muslim with a hijab who makes it on TV ever uses the explicit Islamic justification for it (women should be covered in order to avoid sexual harassment) because it's obviously disfavored by liberals. So they make sure to couch it in the language of freedom that liberals do like. Liberals return the favor by credulous repeating their apologetics and carefully not looking at the elements of Islam that may be..."problematic" - same thing happening with incels now.
As a member of that "loser" demographic, I am 100% skeptical and won't take them at their word. Men who suck at dealing with women are more likely to be socially inept and anxious and thus unwilling to take even the minor risk to sleep with prostitutes, let alone seriously pursue casual sex. That doesn't mean that they don't want sex for its own sake. They just know it won't happen. So slave morality mandates some virtuous-sounding justification
That's all I think is at play, besides pandering.
As Bill Burr put it: there's nothing special about Tiger Woods (if anything many celebrities are surprisingly restrained). A random guy (incel in this case) at Home Depot has the same desire for casual sex. But he has no opportunity cause he's low status.
Funnily enough, the "patriarchal old geezer" (direct quote - LOL) added that 'he was not in favor of women having children at a young age because "a woman has to mature into a mother"'.
I think he's earnest, it's only that he has an idea of "young age" in this case that is probably radically different from that of his liberal critics.
Or traditionalism is dead because even the right wingers won't vocally defend the easiest way to get back to the high birth-rate world they want.
Tanista
1yr ago
Yeah, the elliptical is definitely more friendly towards easing off than the treadmill. Will try to mix things up.
Tanista
1yr ago
What kind of cardio are you doing?
Elliptical. I would say maybe...moderate intensity on average? Enough to be out of somewhat out of breath (my fitness is at the floor) but not balls-to-the-wall, stitch-in-my-side.
I'm imagining us entering into a weird low-level equilibrium trap where the psychological differences remain but a combination of tech and laws (which already exist) make it so that we can't distinguish.
It's...going to be bad for everyone, like a form of societal face-blindness. We'd know people are doing things but we have no way to drill down on the group responsible.
Well..maybe not everyone. It really simplifies the DEI drive to find "women" for any job predominantly favored by men.
Didn't TJ Holmes also lose his job after a similar affair around the same period?
Hm...
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