WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2d ago
This place frequently operates on the same principles as most, I don't even know what to call them, "authority worshiping" spaces? Which is to say, it's against the rules to be correct about things before the authorities have updated the correct opinions first.
There was an instance on my local subreddit where after our sloppy pullout from Afghanistan, Biden was recklessly spraying Afghan "refugees" all over local schools. People had concerns over this, and they were widely dismissed as racist. You weren't supposed to recollect how for decades stories had trickled out, even in the papers of record which you are allowed to remember (NYTimes, WaPo, etc), about how our armed forces were revolted at orders from above to turn a blind eye towards their boy love, or "bacha bazi" custom. It was widely reported that our ostensible allies were deeply committed pedarast. I brought this up, another person brought up that boys in another school in Maryland adjacent to the "refugees" had already been raped. Then the whole thread was locked and deleted.
We are still descended from Reddit. You can be correct here at your own peril.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
4d ago
Depends if the government is conspiring to murder you or not.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
4d ago
So I figured out how to finally avoid paying taxes on my insane NVDA gains. Lose my job! Long term capital gains are taxed at 0% up to almost $100,000 of income when you are married filing jointly.
I don't know exactly what happened, but my boss told me the government shut down pushed the small company I work for over the edge. The last 2 months are typically the time of the year we are negotiating another contract with whomever in the DoD to fund next years activities, and I guess that just didn't happen.
It sucks. I worked there 20 years. I've had a reliable income my entire adult life. I haven't kept my resume up to date at all, and I probably interview for shit, not really having kept up with the jargon. But I wasn't particularly attached to my work there, and I don't feel any particular moral outrage about it happening. I get paid out my 188 hours of accrued vacation time and 40 extra hours of severance.
My wife is pregnant. All that church we've been going to finally unblocked whatever apprehension she had about bringing another life into this world. So that adds some stress. Need to get more health insurance ASAP.
I have friends and previous coworkers willing to forward my resume along, and my wife is a former recruiter who's going to help me whip it into shape. I'm on the cusp of having escape velocity "Fuck You" money, but it's a bit premature to YOLO on working just yet. Maybe if it'd been another year and the markets had done great. Maybe 3 or 4 if they'd been just average. But right now feels like the wrong time.
Wish me luck.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
5d ago
Everyone I ever met who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton acted like "wake up and maximize value" true believers. Curiously enough, I recall they also had some sort of gamified employee leveling system not unlike the Federal Goverment's GS. People would gape and gossip about meeting or having lunch with a Level 5 or whatever it was BAH had going on. It drove me nuts.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
5d ago
20 years later, that wasn't really true. People seem to buy into the BS, or at least keep plausible deniability about it, such that you never really know. You can't openly call this out to your acquaintances, because you need rely on them for job referrals.
It wasn't true then either. The entire premise of the movie was that the main character had to be hypnotized into not giving a fuck. Everyone else was trapped in the rat race, disingenuously sucking up to the powers that be for fear of their jobs. It's a large part of why the movie was so cathartic for so many people.
But you also aren't wrong, things have gotten worse by a significant degree. There is less and less space to compartmentalize who you are at work from the rest of you, and so it just becomes you entirely.
And having less to do with the OP, I think COVID killed the cultural relevancy of Office Space. Zoom meetings, email jobs and remote work fundamentally changed office dynamics in a way that finally made the workplace of Office Space feel alien after 20 years in stasis. In some ways I think nature is healing. Remote work is getting less common, more people are being called back into the office. We'll see if the transformative effects of COVID ever wash away. But I'm doubtful.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
5d ago
"I hate my enemies and want them dead" is not an argument.
If you think that's what I'm saying, you are wrong, and if you think that wasn't an argument in revolutionary times, you are wrong twice.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
5d ago
If you want to be more indirect about it ("I really think some of our state leadership should water the tree of liberty"), we are not stupid and we're still going to tell you to knock off the fedposting.
Oh how far we've fallen. From rhetoric you'd see heroic sung in a Disney movie that was required viewing in Elementary School to intolerable hate speech that will get you and everyone around you visited by the feds in a single generation.
But sure, I'm the problem here.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
5d ago
Why does there need to be "prevailing wisdom" here on this topic at all?
I'm not saying what the prevailing wisdom should be, I'm saying what it should not be.
You treat it as a given that we can't just ignore the topic, as something that can't be discussed while maintaining the spirit and purpose of the forum, and perhaps even mean to suggest that enforcing non-discussion is tantamount to complicity with your enemies. The exact same approach has been tried on the other side, with popular glosses like "the personal is political", "silence is violence" and what-not; and look where the discussion norms built around those memes got them.
This is wrong and bad faith and borders on intellectual malpractice. "Silence is violence" as deployed by the left is about compelled speech. I'm asking for free speech, non censorship. Nobody has to have an opinion about their own genocide. But I'm asking for the freedom to discuss it, as well as extra-Democratic ways to survive.
And this is exactly what people mean when they say this place, and it's rules, are too "feminized". The only possibility that can be imagined is consensus. If you disagree, you are trying to change the consensus to a different consensus. Because a consensus must exist. There must be a norm that everyone conforms to. There cannot simply be endless discussion.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
5d ago
There is no winning for anyone if it comes to that. Just violence until both sides are exhausted, or one is annihilated. I can't even speak with confidence which side it would be. But funnily enough, I always remember a line out of a trashy fantasy novel I read once.
"We don't fight to win. We fight so that we don't lose."
The prevailing wisdom here cannot be "Listen, it's just 'rude' not to walk into the ovens. It would get us into trouble with the feds if we talked too openly about non-compliance with their pogroms". Are we really so committed to ensuring everyone cannot even imagine a world where they aren't forfeiting their lives for nothing?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
5d ago
I have to ask, will it ever be considered "rational" to talk about living up to the ideals of the American Founding and watering the tree of liberty? I currently live in a state with my Attorney General elect thinks I and my children should die because we're breeding "little fascist". His top priority is emptying the prisons into my community to see this done. At what point does it become permissible to openly discuss your natural rights to self defense against the state?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
6d ago
I'm curious if this trend will continue moving forward, and we can perhaps have a more honest conversation about immigration and assimilation? We'll see...
No.
I mean, once again, look at the rape gangs in the UK. Despite there being "more open conversation", all that's really happened is the UK is arresting people for having that "more open conversation". Turns out after decades of the UK pleading that they simply lack the state capacity to stop immigration, or the rape of their children on an industrial scale, they somehow found the state capacity to start locking people up for twitter posts. And they'll even let the rapist out of prison to make room for it!
I expect much the same will happen in the US. Congress will do nothing, Judges will stop all executive enforcement, the state and local government is already captured racially/ideologically. In 10 years people will behave like this was always the case. Like if you live in Minnesota, you just should have known better. You know, back when your parents birthed and raised you back in the 1990's and the notion that Minnesota would get conquered by Somalia was nothing but a Buchananite fever dream.
So I finished A Fighting Man of Mars. While I found The Master Mind of Mars rote, boring and tedius in the extreme, A Fighting Man of Mars could easily be my favorite Barsoom novel, and actually a pretty damn good pulp scifi novel period. This one really goes places: Courtship and intrigue in the palaces of Helium, survival against the green hoards of the ancient seabeds, imprisonment in a far off city suspicious of outsiders, escaping ferocious ancient beast, encountering a psychopath, encountering a mad scientist, capturing a borderline magical flier, rescuing and losing the love interest several times a chapter, falling out of love with the bitch, the main character falling in love (predictably) with someone far more worthy. I know that's a run on sentence, but you have to understand I could have summarized the last novel in like 10 words. Really enjoyed that one. I would actually recommend it.
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