Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
#209, #StandUpLocust, #MurphysFerry, Surah Yunus 10:71
User ID: 2418
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
5mo ago
The criminal justice system is an absolute statistical mess when it comes to making sense of the data.
I remember a number of years ago when the book The New Jim Crow came out, how widely panned it was and popular it became. Not a lot of people know that among criminal justice scholars behind the scenes, it's a textbook case of how not to do criminal justice research. To take an example. Let's compare a young black guy and a young white guy who are guilty of possession of marijuana. If you compare certain profiles in a database you'll see odd things like this white guy got off with community service for a joint and this black guy got 3 years in prison. And some activist will come along and see this and declare "This is evidence of racism!," with no other context given. Here's what actually happened.
When the white guy was pulled over and caught, all he had was a joint on him. When the black guy was pulled over and caught he had a joint on him and also possession of a firearm. The police officer offered to show clemency to him by dropping the gun charge on him in exchange for 3 years in prison on the marijuana charge. So the gun charge disappears from the database. In other words, the police are granting you a tremendous amount of leniency here. Being a young guy, the police don't want to ruin your future and opportunity for growth when there's a gun charge lingering somewhere on your background when a prospective employer looks at you. Incidentally as well, if you live in a blue state with more stringent gun control measures and laws against owning firearms, guess who's often going to suffer disproportionately as a result? Minorities and those living in bad communities who can't escape.
Yes, there are also bad cops. Asshole cops. Racist cops. Some cops are outright evil. I've had my share of interactions with them when I was younger and on the wrong side of the neighborhood. I have had interactions with cops who were such assholes that if I were black guy and the exact same interaction went down, you certainly would've walked away from that situation, thinking the cop was racist. I'm a huge supporter of law enforcement but I know what it's like to also wonder "... are all cops like this?," because police do treat people like shit. But then again, they're often dealing with the worst of society on a daily basis. The good ones unfortunately have to suffer their reputation for what the bad ones do. But the criminal justice system in this country is so fucked up from an analytical standpoint I see little hope at the chance there's going to be substantial reform to it in my lifetime.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
6mo ago
Mark Twain had a useful heuristic to give us on the matter:
“If you don’t read the news you’re uninformed. If you read the news you’re misinformed.”
and while being gay isn't something I find disqualifying it is something a large portion of his potential base finds disqualifying (if you're curious, check out Kiwi farms - they have impeccably documented the multiple instances of him being caught red-handed browsing gay porn or gazing longingly into the eyes of another man).
Uh. What?
And for the right? The majority of conservative youth are either /pol/ adjacent or had their worldview informed almost entirely by second-hand exposure to /pol/ memes and ideas.
In a way they’re just the new low information voters adopting what’s in vogue in meme format. 2016 was the real watershed moment where it became evident that it’s a force multiplier in battling in the media space. And it was weaponized hilariously.
The information environment on the online, anonymous right is so much more effective at selecting for persuasive memes and ideas than the institutional, pro-Zionist right that whenever there's an even playing field /pol/ wins every single time. I've said before on here that people who are healthy and well-adjusted winners generally don't get involved in antisemitism or other kinds of discrimination because they don't have a need to blame anyone for why they failed - but society has failed so many of these young men that the number of losers has reached critical mass. Even the youth who are actually doing well are growing up in a social context where antisemitism is just a constant fact of life. You are never, ever going to turn a young, radicalised right winger who has grown up on an information diet of /pol/ infographics, Pepe the frog memes and USS Liberty references into a zionist... the only exceptions I've seen of people pulling themselves out of that kind of information environment are cases where they end up trans, and the radical left isn't going to be supporting Israel either.
It’s actually pretty funny. Awhile ago I was looking for a new book to read in what little down time I had after finishing an earlier one and came across this that appeared in my Amazon suggestions. When I went through the preview I was laughing my ass off because of how idiotic most of this stuff sounds, and it instantly reminded me of the Far Right Extremist meme. As something of a moderate fascist myself, it was very funny watching some academic jackass come along and supposedly tell me what it is I actually believe. Chapter 5, “Women and Nonbinary Children,” already taking a page out of the shitlib lexicon right out of the gate. How’s the phrase go? “Surely the enemy has conquered you when you adopt and speak their language.” Apparently being illiberal makes you a Nazi it seems. Nothing could be further from the truth. Always love it when people attempt to pathologize my political beliefs.
We live in a system today where a large number of men aren’t benefitting from the institutions that take from them. And who can blame them? A few of my closest friends are some of the hardest working people I have ever known from childhood and have been high achieving all their life. For almost the last 15 years when they’re off work they go straight home and withdraw into their hobbies and social ties that have remained with them. They barely participate in society anymore unless there’s an outing that involves family or friends and if you ever ask them why you’ll get the same reason from them every single time. “I have no reason to.” Like myself we very much grew up with the mindset that you marry young, get a career and raise a family. At least that was all we ever asked for growing up. That’s what gives their lives meaning. But absent that they see little reason for getting out of bed in the morning.
American society is losing its most productive people at the most productive ages of their lives and things in a hundred different ways are simply demotivating for a lot of men. Otherwise give me your best vanity pitch for why a lot of young men should care about it. Men aren’t going to work to uphold a system they feel is dedicated to tearing them down at every turn. At some point you have to speak their language. I don’t wake up every day and go to work for the “possibility” of getting paid on the hope my boss decides to pay me. I work for the tangible results that are returned to me to be able to live my life. Most communities are being destroyed. Most churches are dying and most men don’t have a realistic opportunity to pursue relationships with others.
But there's no putting the genie back into the bottle. Israel has completely torched their reputation with the youth of both the left wing and the right wing. Nobody on the left gives a single shit about accusations of anti-semitism anymore, because those accusations have been used on people like Ms Rachel. When you tell people that a woman taking care of a young girl that had her legs blown off and giving her a chance to have a real birthday party is actually an antisemite, you don't actually make people think that caring for amputee children is bad - you make people think that an antisemite is a pretty young woman who cares about wounded and disabled children.
People have had Israel fatigue for a long time. I think only now it’s become more socially acceptable for it to seep out in the broader population. The average person’s beef isn’t with Jews or Judaism at all. It’s with Zionism which is the ideological mantle of Israeli government. That can go straight to hell.
If you consider your husband icky and feel stuck in a marriage, and would prefer to simply get divorced on "grounds" you just don't want to be married anymore, but you can't legally do so because no-fault divorce isn't on the books and your husband has technically not done anything that is grounds for divorce, than yes, I suppose it does feel like a personal problem. It violates your feelings, just like the lack of rape shield laws do. You feel wronged.
This is exactly what’s wrong with today’s social landscape. People I knew just fundamentally had a much more realistic sense of people than those who pass for “adults” in the year 2025.
If you described yourself as being “stuck” in a marriage 25-30 years ago, we ‘all’ knew what that meant. It meant you were in a physically abusive marriage and you needed a way out. Today being “stuck” in a marriage means your husband wanted to have sex with you last week and you don’t feel as attracted to him as you once were. One of these 2 things doesn’t belong.
Adults have this attitude today that life doesn’t involve hardship and making sacrifices. Anything that represents even the slightest inconvenience to you is at liberty to be disregarded because you should just “do what makes you happy.” Well I’m sorry, but that’s ‘life’. Life is about doing 100 things every single day that you don’t want to do. And while your personal happiness is important, it’s far from the highest value to aspire to and is the least enduring and meaningful when you’re on your deathbed and wondering what you’ve left behind.
Put five 30-60 year old out of touch midwits in a room and tell them to brainstorm a solution. By 'solution,' what you actually mean is some vaguely pro-social program you can announce to make it seem like you're doing something - the question of whether the problem can be solved never comes up. Also unmentioned are the question of whether the framing of the problem is useful, or even whether the problem exists in the first place. The metric of success is the amount of positive attention generated divided by the cost of the program - or likes/dollar, if you prefer.
I suspect the reason why this is the case has nothing to do with people not being able to imagine a solution. The obvious ones on the table would get them ran out of the room with the tiki torches if any of them dared to say what it was, because it's antithetical to the progressive agenda.
Progressives can't forward a solution to the problem because they don't have a sensible take on gender in the first place. It reminds me of Thomas Sowell's axiom, "Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good." If the benchmark to judge a successful solution to the problem hangs on whether or not it makes people happy, then you're never going to able to come to a resolution. Most of life is about making your way in the world, doing a thousand things every day that you don't want to do. Tate is a misogynist and a moron in my opinion, but his side of the aisle can field better male role models than almost anything the left can provide.
What are Tate's young followers often drawn to about his message? "Subjugate the bitches, keep them in the kitchen, get that paper and work them muscles out." And it isn't just his message they like. A lot of young men can 'relate' to that message, experientially.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
8mo ago
I stopped listening to Ezra Klein ever since he appeared on Sam Harris’ podcast and looked like a complete moron.
Trump is a hiccup in our democracy. Until there comes a hard and fast dismantling of institutions, you can’t license the claim that he’s an authoritarian when the same system you approve of has also put all the candidates you’re palatable to in the same seat Trump is in right now.
Reminds me of the joke, "it takes a woman to fake an orgasm, but it takes a man to fake an entire relationship."
Men will often complain that being a good person and a gentleman doesn't earn them any points or favors with the ladies, despite being raised with the understanding that good and ethical conduct correlates with your interpersonal and professional success in different spheres of life. It's a shocking revelation to most of them when they learn that not only is that not true, all too often, the exact 'opposite' of that was true. The Halo effect is a real thing. Innate physical attraction and social sophistication that comes off as authentic will color all aspects of another person's interpretation of your external behavior independently of the content of your actions. Confidence for example 'enhances' attraction. It doesn't 'create' it. Thinking the opposite is true is just the intangible equivalent of mentally putting lipstick on a pig, and people can see that in your outward expressions and behavior. Confidence won't bring you attractiveness or sophistication if you don't have it from the get go, and acting confident in the absence of that doesn't make someone confident. You simply look like a pompous moron lacking self-awareness.
"Someone once asked who I was to a colleague of mine upon seeing I was going to be doing a upcoming presentation and he said he's like Tony Stark without the fortune or the suit, and the guy replied isn’t Tony Stark without the fortune or the suit, just some asshole?" - Scott Aaronson
Women on the other hand don't understand that sex isn't some kind of vending machine where you give it to a man and a relationship is expected to fall out of that. Women have sex for many more different reasons than men do, but the only valid one to be concerned with is where there's some kind of mutual attraction between both parties, otherwise it's a letdown when women give it away, only for them not to have gotten out of the act what they were trying to manipulate their partner into doing by giving it away in the first place. Mutual attraction on the other hand, satisfies both parties. If it's one-sided it's going to be dysfunctional in all likelihood. A woman who plays hard to get is hard to want. If they don’t reciprocate a similar level of interest that you do, then they’re not interested. Yes means yes. No means no. “Maybe,” is also no. Don’t keep trying if she doesn’t show interest, or excitement or enthusiasm for you; and you’re not a backup plan for her to keep you confused and waiting in the wings to see if it works out with the other man she’s talking to.
You don’t pique a man’s interest by playing games and introducing challenges to his life, his life is hard enough. You show your interest by being forward, removing obstacles and making his life easier. Most women in my experience have absolutely no idea how to attract and keep a man. They do the exact opposite of what they should be doing by 180 degrees.
Reddit lost it's catch as an organic community and later a free speech platform years ago. For at least a decade or thereabout, the site's been heavily botted, manipulated, and driven itself into self-referential echo chambers that cater to low-effort content. The things that made Reddit interesting in a strong sense of the word, are always destined to be things that don't scale up very well, but that you only find in smaller and decentralized communities. Those echo chambers are already floating by into places like Lemmy. I know, because I wasn't even there a week before a site admin banned me.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
8mo ago
Not only was Kirk not far-right but the far-right hated him more than the far-left does.
For some reason this comment reminds me very much of Jaron Lanier’s contrast between God and humans.
What you describe was also a major theme of the later Dune books. Namely that conflict and struggle was an inherent part of not just what humans are, but what animates our lives and gives us meaning and fulfillment. The lack of that was what led ultimately into the ensuing dark ages where space travel no longer happened.
I used to have this uneasy feeling I could never shake as a kid, about nomadic societies. How they were always moving from once place to another to satisfy their needs. But it wasn’t simply to change with the seasons so you could grow your crops and maintain the tribe. They were moving from place to place seeking meaning and a way to scratch that cognitive itch; in the same way people today can get up and move at a moment’s notice as if they’re running away from their problems, but never being able to escape them completely. I think America is a very unsettled society. And the more obstacles we remove and problems we solve, doesn’t just remove the obstacles we have with nature and the problems we have in society. It removes those obstacles that are necessary to keep that existential void at bay, in humanity.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
8mo ago
"Charlie Kirk once said gun rights are worth the cost of a few shooting deaths. Kinda funny now huh? I wonder if he's changed his mind."
That implies thinking that if only you had appropriate gun control measures in place, the same thing wouldn't have happened. Yeah, I get the irony of it all. But as someone that didn't like Charlie Kirk at all, he wasn't being inconsistent here.
People often forget that video games as an avenue for storytelling is a fairly recent thing in the full analysis of its history. John Carmack (one of the co-creators of the original Doom) once said: “… story in a video game is like story in a porn movie. You assume it’s there somewhere in the background but it’s not primarily why you watch it…”
I never thought Halo had a great story - I thought it was boring at best; but it was most definitely fun playing when it originally came out. And when it spawned off Rooster Teeth and the creation of Red vs. Blue, its capacity for storytelling expanded into other areas.
Childhood favorites of mine like MK2 on the Sega Genesis were iconic for the blood and violence every physically energetic young boy could exact on his opponent. Steve Ritchie had one of the greatest in-game voices ever performed for a video game. He was actually a legend in the pinball scene who once said he regretted playing the voice of Shao Kahn; because he would go to pinball events and conferences and nobody in the Q&A ever wanted to ask him about pinball stuff; fans of his came because they always wanted to ask him about the voice of Shao Kahn. I think overtime he came to accept it with a smile and just go with the flow.
The laws and courts are increasingly taking the position that the optimal number of minors on the Internet is zero.
This is a position that if you told me I would've adopted 15 years ago, I'd have called you crazy. But I've increasingly come over to that side of the aisle.
Growing up in a family that always worked closely in infosec, I was always much closer than the average person to understanding the ways in which your life can be negatively impacted by tech. Over the years I've become much more taken up with the thinking of people like Michael Bazzell and some of his prescriptions for minimizing your digital footprint. I was never one of those privacy absolutist types, but I've never bought in completely to the appeal of things like social media. People I know 'always' send me Instagram feeds, YouTube videos and all the digital eye candy horseshit all the time. "Hey cousin, watch this!," "Hey dude, check this out...," "Yo Tre, look at this and tell me what you think...;" and I always skip right over it and never view it. I don't like this kind of social voyeurism into everyone else's lives, it always seemed to play to people's vanity and negative impulses and empowered people to invade the cracks in the lives of others. It’s creepy as hell.
Personal liberty is always awesome until the bill comes due. It's not a philosophical abstraction, it's a real concrete phenomenon. Everyone will always tell you they love the idea, except for the moments where they really have to live with it. And then of course a decade out after the event, someone will come along and tell you "the game is rigged," because new regulations prevent retail investors from exercising their full autonomy on the platform to engage in high risk trades. So then regulations get relaxed, a dozen more people shoot themselves in the head and you're back to square one again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Am I the only one who finds this line of thinking incredibly dumb?
No. I’ve essentially thought the same thing forever.
I think it was Mike Huckabee who said when he was on the debate stage years ago, “… the military isn’t a social experiment. The military’s job is to kill people and break things…”
When you’re a society as affluent as the US is, you can afford to have your head deep in your own ass and believe all kinds of absurd nonsense like this when you have no real problems to deal with. People in third world countries don’t have time for this shit, so they get real logical and straight laced about the correct attitudes much easier when their daily bread and way of life is under threat.
I used to sometimes teeter around a bit in how I should view this. On the one hand they should be kept out of combat roles. On the other hand, if you’re stupid enough to sign up for the front lines, natural selection will fix the problem for you by eliminating people who think this way and it’ll strengthen future generations with less of those people anyway. So long-term it’s a win/win. Nature will beat you over the head with the correct answer whether you like it or not.
Militarily women have no business being a front line soldier. That’s a suicidal death sentence.
No, I know exactly what he’s talking about with the world of the 90’s feeling smaller. I grew up with that too, although changes were happening rapidly at the time as well. I can remember when we’d advanced beyond the ARPANET, which the Internet was still a handful of sites on a 56k dial up modem that disconnects every 6 hours and nobody could call your home rotary telephone while you were on it. I can remember a peer telling me when my friends and I started first becoming interested in girls, “… women and malls go together like warez and a T3 connection, my nigga…” AskJeeves, Geocities, an endlessly buffering embedded RealPlayer video that takes 1 hour to play a 2 minute clip. Number Munchers in school and Descent/Myst DOS/PC games at home. If you wanted the answer to a question and you couldn’t find it, you had to consult your home encyclopedia (which a lot of us had) or go to the library. There was no looking it up on Wikipedia. Life was still mostly lived outside though. I remember building a clubhouse with my sibling and father, endless adventures and being outside hanging with friends all over the place.
Goldeneye was the first Bond movie I ever saw and I still regard it as the best one. It’s the only Bond movie where I regard the villain to have won. Alec Trevelyan was the real hero if you paid attention to his story in the movie.
Not everyone that looks back to the past has nostalgia on the mind. There are things that are objectively better about 2025 than 1995, but childhood is not one of them.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
6mo ago
Words lose their original meanings quickly when you’re operating with ulterior motives like Ben is here. Calling someone else a coward for platforming a person with views you deem abhorrent when you’re the person who refuses to debate him is… an interesting inversion of the English language.
Frankly I’m stunned that Ezra has ‘any’ audience at all. It’s even more concerning to me I live in a locality that’s colored by the mentality of his type of thinking. I understand the backdrop people like him are coming from, but he is a ‘horrible’ advocate for the cause. Sam could’ve had a much more sensible discussion about this with someone like Shaun. Ezra is too psychologically fragile and had a hard time stomaching and keeping down what he was hearing. He is not the guy for practically any subject out there.
There is absolutely no reason why it is possible to perform painless heart surgery but not painless execution.
One to the back of the head should suffice. You don't have to tell them it's coming either. I suppose the only real objection is that it's somehow undignified to execute someone that way. Despite the fact that convicted murderers gave up that mantle with the direction in life they chose for themselves. Or I suppose a medical ethicist would throw up their hands at that point and claim that's outside the purview of their expertise.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
23d ago
George Halvorson is the best person I know to consult on the state of the healthcare industry today. One of the major cost drivers for things is simply ordinary price inflation, believe it or not.
Whenever I think of the associated costs in healthcare, the complexities surrounding it are so daunting that it always brings me back to 2016 when Hillary and Bernie were running for the democratic ticket and why there’s so much bad data on this.
Back when Bernie Sanders was running for president, I don’t know how many people remember this but there was an infamous “Yale” study that come out during that period, which was a paper that supposedly showed how his plan could effectively nationalize large portions of healthcare as a whole, making things cheaper and more efficient for everybody.
Then I did a little bit of digging, and it became very clear to me that nobody read beyond the headline. Go into any hospital and walk into the insurance department and ask the person there, “What would happen to your hospital if you were reimbursed only at the Medicare rates?” The answer is always “Oh that’s simple. We would have to shutdown the hospital.
The author of that study simply took the Medicare reimbursement rates and applied them across the entire healthcare industry as a whole, which is grossly inaccurate because private insurance cross subsidizes Medicare to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars each year. This goes away under Medicare for all and the Yale study simply ignored that fact.
You nailed it. That's exactly the problem. For someone to step in and begin regulating social behaviors or rolling back norms to generations prior, that would amount to "telling them how to live their lives." They're not ready to have this conversation. The kind of solution they want to this problem is the kind of solution that would prevent them from having a voice at all in the first place. The only time you'll ever be able to blame me for the way I am as a man is when I'm making choices on your behalf. Otherwise, this is on you. You're the one making the choice. I've never been for unbridled freedom in the case of either gender, but what's an occasional problem for every other man has become an epidemic for woman writ large and there's only one group of people responsible steering the ship.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
30d ago
… The power to tax and regulate is the power to destroy...
You saw that happen with dispensaries in California after weed became legal. Once the state went in on the industry it started over regulating the hell out of the market such that some resellers were left scratching their heads and wondering if they should go back to the underground market for dealing since it was less burdensome and more profitable.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
6mo ago
Sounds to me like he was also a comedian if he really said all that.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
6mo ago
The left will continue its endless parade of condescending “play nice” politics until they get their feet held to the fire of the consequences of what ask for. Until people pay a price for being wrong there’s little reason to stop treating America as a national Ken and Barbie household where we can all sit together and sing kumbaya.
Out in the world, most people are on their phone when I’m walking on the sidewalk or driving in traffic.
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