ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
5d ago
Bay Area housing is expensive because its workers tend to be far more economically productive than most areas in the US.
Reason not to be reactionary: it allows me to live in the Bay Area, with the alternative being stuck in the same shithole podunk town where I grew up and the only nightlife after 9PM is hanging out at the local Walmart.
ThenElection
4d ago
Yes, please.
ThenElection
3d ago
Women have always been the social sinews that held together relatively atomized men; they've always been heavily politically engaged, even during the brief period where men had the vote and they did not. From prohibition to the Satanic ritual abuse panic to 1970s bussing opposition to the defeat of the ERA, they provided the nexus around which politics was organized. Note that these weren't uniformly or even mostly left-coded movements: if you want a movement of any kind, you need women.
ThenElection
3d ago
Recently, the Guardian doxxed Lom3z, the right-wing author best known for What is the Longhouse, based on an unwise registration of a linkable LLC name. As Ahmari points out, he's "an erstwhile Bernie-ish bro who at some point snapped, or became disaffected with the millennial left, and shifted rightward." An MFA holder who was a lecturer at UCI (not tenure track, of course) for a decade, of an unsurprising "off-white" background.
What I'm confused about: why is this a story at all? Presumably, the main effects of this are to make him unemployable and perhaps cause some interpersonal issues. What is a random reader expected to do? Unless you happen to employ him, seemingly nothing. The exposé does detail his sins, which includes publishing ponderous Yarvin tomes and obscure works by Russian White counter-revolutionaries.
And yet it is a story, and a story that gets me emotionally invested, so I suppose my question should really be less why is this a story and more why do I consider this a story? As much as I like the longhouse concept, it's hard to consider Lom3z or his biography at all important; he could die tomorrow, and no one aside from his loved ones would notice.
I think what gets me is that there's simultaneously an appropriation of victimhood (evil bad guy publishes anonymous essay causing evilness!) combined with an inquisitorial zeal to punish, and apparently the power to do exactly that. I just don't see how someone can have both these traits simultaneously, and yet it's depressingly common. I guess I see the doxxing as a distillation of the current zeitgeist of exceptional purity, and that's something to point to when thinking about it.
Another question: what happened to Ahmari? I recall him being on the outs for theoconnery, but now he's publishing snark in the New Statesman about other right-wing writers. Did something change, or did he have some kind of beef with Lom3z?
One option might be currency directly: if the Ukrainian state ends up destroyed, presumably the hryvnia will be of lower value. So you could potentially sell a UAH/RUB (or UAH/anything; probably USD or EUR would be better) pair. Spreads there are likely large.
You could look at European companies and see which ones have been heavily impacted by sanctions on Russian gas and may significantly benefit once the sanctions are lifted (though that's more of a bet on a quicker end to the war than consensus opinion, not on a particular victor).
COVERED ALGORITHM.—The term “covered algorithm” means a computational process, including one derived from machine learning, statistics, or other data processing or artificial intelligence techniques, that makes a decision or facilitates human decision- making by using covered data, which includes determining the provision of products or services or ranking, ordering, promoting, recommending, amplifying, or similarly determining the delivery or display of information to an individual.
I wonder how that would apply to dating apps; would they now be required to design algorithms such that an Asian man, black woman, or trans woman all get equivalent number of matches to their privileged counterparts? Or is that not discrimination?
ThenElection
3d ago
young men will go crying and waving every bloody progressive-cause shirt to simp, but they are making a mistake.
My misspent youth, alas. Note to readers: reading Judith Butler and bell hooks does not, in fact, make women any more likely to date you. (Someone here will doubtlessly point out this is obvious, but when the women around you all suggest that the solution to dating woes is to Be More Feminist and Read Woman Authors, it's easy for a naive kid to get confused.)
Just gotta know the right people and right sketchy warehouses to go to.
The point, though, was about the complete lack of anything to do in most parts of the US, not about how Bay Area nightlife compares to NYC and LA.
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