ThenElection
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User ID: 622
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).
ThenElection
2d 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?
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.)
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
5d ago
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.
ThenElection
7d ago
To the extent we pay attention to man vs bear (which, it seems, will be with us for the foreseeable future), the relevant thing isn't the statistics of attacks or even that women fear men. It's that pretty much everyone seems to be taking the approach that at least one of the man or bear is a major threat.
The reality is that neither is particularly dangerous. So many takes seem to be something like "one will eat me alive, and the other will abduct and torture me for months before killing me," with slightly varying structure depending on the point the speaker is making. But getting in a car wreck on the way to the park or dying of exposure are both more likely causes of death than encountering either a random bear or a random man. And neither cars nor exposure are likely to kill you either. Use appropriate caution wherever you are, and you'll almost certainly be fine.
The hysterical neuroticism involved in the entire exercise on both sides is just a symptom of expressing feelings becoming the dominant political mode thanks to social media. Which can barely be called politics; it's more fashion and gossip than anything else.
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.
That suggests an interesting speculative question: how often have assassins shifted the course of world history toward something they would have preferred, making the assassination "rational" in some sense?
Most of the time, the effect seems to be neutral at best. Princip did nothing for Serbian nationalism. Goatse provided a founding myth for a secular, not Hindu, state. James Earl Ray didn't kill the Civil Rights Movement but birthed a martyr. Charitably, Brutus may have delayed empire for a decade or so. Who knows what Oswald's political opinions were, but it's almost certain that they didn't come to fruition.
The only effective assassination I can really think of is Booth's. He managed to eliminate a politician who was a genuine driving force toward something the "deep state" wasn't particularly interested in, and it made the Reconstruction stillborn, with a new President not particularly interested in tackling a hard problem anyways. It was going to be a hard slog anyways, but he killed it with a bullet.
Maybe there were some Russian anarchists who maybe helped the serfs a bit?
Explicit note for any insane Motteizans (and lurking Feds): even ignoring morality, most of the time assassination seems useless at best and counterproductive at worst.
ThenElection
18d ago
Woman or bear: would you rather have to deal with a bear, or a woman who potentially has no water, food, or gear and needs your help to get to safety? I feel like the latter is more likely to ruin my day in the woods.
It's all just signalling, though; at most 1% would take the bear. Plenty of women go on hikes in the woods and regularly share the space with men without issue or note, and the few who encounter a bear would typically throw a fit over it. I read it as low-key trolling of men more than anything else. (And I have to admit, it's at least a little bit funny to see some men seemingly taking the question at face value and getting testy over something that obviously bears no relation to reality.) It's like someone joking they'd rather have a blind person drive them around than someone from California.
ThenElection
1mo ago
By the same token, if a bunch of different American shows uniformly showed white men as heroes and black men as villainous brutes, with all of those casting decisions happening independently, would that be indicative of some kind of broader societal bias?
ThenElection
1mo ago
For better or worse, DEI identity slop is now considered left wing, and NPR has oodles of that, regardless of whatever other establishment propaganda it peddles.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Men have duties. Women have rights.
It is as it ever will be, and no matter the rational arguments you muster for equal treatment, you will never convince anyone who's bought into this mindset. At best, you'll get a rhetorical concession, before the principle is promptly forgotten when the next discussion comes up.
ThenElection
17d ago
I'm a vegetarian, and I would kill for a nice porterhouse. Although I probably know a couple of vegetarians/vegans who'd probably be upset that they'd lose the moral justification for the defining part of their personality, the large majority would absolutely start eating steak given the chance.
ThenElection
18d ago
ThenElection
1mo ago
You can understand, though, why this would be nuclear-tier propaganda as opposed to something bizarre? If a male is being forced at gunpoint to go to the front while his female counterpart is out partying on Tinder in Germany, is it surprising that the male would find it unfair and be resentful?
ThenElection
1mo ago
I dug up the actual serious report mentioned:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513816303907
It's not the greatest study (surprise, surprise), but not terrible for the field. What gets me is just how warped the Independent and Vice articles are in how they cover it. It's like they saw it and dug through it looking for any one statement or finding that could be twisted into something as ridiculous and inflammatory as possible, ignoring the layers of caveats, dropping mention of findings that contradict their preferred theory, and taking a weak correlation and turning it into a strong causal claim.
Neither link directly to the article, though Vice does to the university press release (which itself commits all the same sins, albeit to a lesser extent). It's a big chain of laundering a somewhat interesting but weak (and contested) correlation into an explosive claim.
The critical mistake here is taking any of this media reporting as reflective of any part of reality, instead of just being fiction written to belittle perceived enemies. The only question is why the media wants to paint having agency as some kind of evil.
Echoing the other respondents, this is just how people react to travelers/tourists; I'm nowhere near as attractive as him and have similar experiences. On my last trip to Mexico City, I made friends with an abuela who treated me to a family dinner in her small one room apartment. She even accommodated my dietary preferences: after telling her I was a vegetarian and didn't eat meat, she happily made a bunch of fish for us to eat (which I did anyway without complaint, because who turns down a delicious home cooked meal?)
ThenElection
1mo ago
Women are the primary victims of war, etc.
ThenElection
10d ago
Putting the “ass” (both of them) in “assassination”.
I like.
I'm not convinced that Teddy changed the trajectory of the regulatory state. This is all speculative, of course, but both Democrats (stagnant in support, admittedly) and a meaningful and growing number of Republicans were anti-corporate in sympathies. Teddy may have been the particular executor of many anti-corporate policies, but had McKinley not been assassinated, would his vision have dominated for the next 20 years? I suspect eventually someone outside of it would have won a Presidential election (perhaps TR himself).
Name any stupid war, and people will always ask why did the countries keep on fighting even though it was obviously to everyone's detriment. Who cares about Alsace-Lorraine or Kashmir, when it would be better for everyone involved if they just quit fighting and focused on the pragmatics of making money and living life in a stable environment?
Then you have Ukraine, and all of a sudden the most important thing in the world is maps from centuries ago or maintaining a precedent for the liberal world order, and everyone rallies around the idea that we must make massive sacrifices for a bit of soil. ("We," in this context, is the kind of we that is mostly composed of young Russian and Ukrainian men, not the person making the statement.)
ThenElection
26d ago
Even on conscription, it's not particularly remarkable: individuals don't necessarily like being conscripted, but can accept/support conscriptions as a legitimate and even necessary component of defense.
Do you have links to this polling? If it shows a majority of draft-age Ukrainian men support conscription as implemented, it would probably shift my view of the conflict.
ThenElection
10d ago
I'm taking a more limited definition of assassination: an individual who attempts to change how he is governed by killing an individual or small group who govern him. I'd say this excludes a government killing domestic opponents (governments can kill on a much grander scale, since they are not the governed but the governors) and soldiers killing other soldiers (two governments sending their governed to kill each other to resolve a dispute).
ThenElection
1mo ago
VoA is, surprisingly, a lot more balanced than most mainstream media (although of course it reflects US priorities). It serves an actual purpose, and to achieve that it can't just be American Pravda.
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?
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