aldomilyar
2d ago
I've always felt asses are more fundamentally meritocratic than breasts for similar reasons, though the whole 'gigantic asses' thing kinda circled back the other way.
aldomilyar
2d ago
I'm currently parenting my kids in first world Asia (which is a way better deal especially for child-rearing), partly due to my parents being in my home country's equivalent of Florida and therefore being of limited help during childrearing. So chicken and the egg I guess
aldomilyar
3d ago
I agree there should be more viewpoint diversity, but trying to inject it back into the academic ecosystem that's evolved is difficult especially when there's now paths like Substack to just kind of sidestep the academy.
Yes it'd be great if a large chunk of 'academic debate' didn't devolve into 'My opinion has been peer reviewed by people with the same opinion as me who have myriad soft and hard incentives to clump together, THEREFORE IT IS FACT' but that ship has long sailed into its own bellybutton.
aldomilyar
3d ago
Especially these days when it's increasingly normalized to teleport off into the Everglades or onto a cruise instead of remaining part of the household fabric.
aldomilyar
4d ago
Kneebar's pretty idiot proof but hard to get in the current meta.
aldomilyar
8d ago
I feel like optimization culture has pushed into hobbies, though. There's way more concern around 'performing' at even casual activities
aldomilyar
8d ago
Also the impulse to add professional/monetary incentives to everything mean that the second you stop heading upwards in the rankings it's kind of depressing.
I was a pretty good Rugby player growing up, got into the professional academy system and ultimately washed out at 20. I then stopped playing Rugby since just kinda hanging around being an amateur felt depressing as hell. This trend's happened a lot with the guys who went through the process, compared to previous generations where really the entire 'pinnacle' of the sport for the vast majority of people was just playing for the suburb's best team and a career would be ping-ponging between grades for 10-15 years until injury or life got in the way.
aldomilyar
8d ago
Yeah I'm the same with Jiujitsu. I've been doing it long enough that I'm generally able to compete with the vast majority of people, but I've just never particularly enjoyed watching instructionals. Especially filthy leglockers. Would I be better on the aggregate if I mainlined John Danaher, probably, but I just don't care for it and as I'm not realistically on any professional trajectory does it matter?
aldomilyar
8d ago
People keep welcoming White South Africans various places despite being anti-apartheid, though I guess it's been a few decades.
aldomilyar
9d ago
Sorry they would emulate the great economic and wellbeing successes of Syria, Jordan, Egypt etcetera.
aldomilyar
9d ago
You're acting like the immediate reaction to October 7th wasn't shock and revulsion. I'm saying if Arabic countries drew blood from Israel in any meaningful way this would all just spin up back the other way. I don't think the West is Oikophobic, the West is loserphillic.
aldomilyar
9d ago
Large portion of Christians? The Gaza Christian population is about a tenth of a percent (potentially something to do with how the locals have historically treated members of other religions). Israel's population is about a sixth Islamic, who for the most part live in conditions a bit worse than the Jews but still rich, affluent, educated and healthy compared to the rest of the Middle East.
aldomilyar
9d ago
Yeah. Having lived up in Darwin for a year I'd love to see how the Israelis would have approached certain local issues compared to the Australians, plus that's genuinely a super high potential piece of land that could have led to a prosperous and strong state.
aldomilyar
9d ago
The lives of peaceful Israeli Arabs are on average some of the best in the region (especially if you take out all of the 'oh we have oil and support a 10%-citizen population with infinite money cheat'), peace deals have been offered previously, the best case scenario for independent Palestine is Lebanon 2: Electric Boogaloo. Any semi-rational person is surrendering.
aldomilyar
9d ago
I don't have a particularly strong view on the conflict but I do feel that the Israelis have a far greater chance of establishing and running a functional state than the other side.
aldomilyar
9d ago
Israels behaviour has taught a sizeable portion of goyim what jewish mindset is and that the jewish view on this is fundamentally incompatible with a western mindset. The winning Palestinian strategy is to show the world what a bunch of religious fundamentalists on the west bank are actually like
Doesn't this go immediately in reverse if there's any meaningful Muslim success. Like at the moment it's just very child-level oppressor/oppressed stuff from the majority of Western audiences, but if the boot was on the proverbial other foot it would be even uglier.
aldomilyar
9d ago
I feel like within 24 hours of the first meaningful strike against Israel by a local belligerent the whole artifice would just spin up in reverse at which point Israelis were the oppressed not the oppressors and the current Western Palestinian Aficionados would just reverse their judgements.
aldomilyar
12d ago
They're definitely mutually intelligible but I hear a lot of comments from Malaysian Mandarin speakers that they find Mainlanders tricky to understand/phrasing things differently and vice-versa. Part of it's the Malaysian chinese vocabulary picking up a lot of loanwords from English/Malay/dialect
aldomilyar
12d ago
I live in Malaysia, my wife's family is a good study in that roughly half of her uncles and aunties are Singaporean and the other half are Malaysian Chinese. In my experience, the Malaysian family is first-language Chinese with passable English and Malay plus some dialect (albeit essentially a sliding scale of dialect versus English with each ensuing generation). The Singaporean family is about the same at the generation of my wife's parents, though for context they were about 18-19 at the time of Singapore leaving the federation and the younger generations are 90% English with some spoken Chinese but functionally illiterate.
According to them, the main difference is that in Malaysia the schooling system allows for private schools to be conducted in Chinese which is the only practical way to get literate in Chinese since even the majority of ethnic Chinese Malaysians will be functionally illiterate in Chinese characters. Also there's been a pretty large divergence between Malaysian Chinese (Largely spun off of southern Hokkien/Teochew/Cantonese/Hakka speakers who have remained in touch with mainland trends via the cultural sinosphere) and Mainland-Chinese, even when speaking Mandarin. Malay's an afterthought used for interacting with the government as it's essentially been replaced as lingua franca in Malaysia by English for anybody under the age of 30.
My wife's grandmother is in her mid 70s, she's illiterate despite being a fairly successful small business owner who's since retired to be a landlady and only speaks Hokkien (Possibly Malay but there's also a cultural distaste amongst Chinese when it comes to speaking the language outside of purely utilitarian purposes). Yet understands spoken Cantonese, Mandarin and Malay. Cantonese since it was dominant culturally in entertainment for a few decades, Mandarin though it only really entered Malaysia by the time she was middle-aged and Malay since one must occasionally acknowledge the landlords.
aldomilyar
14d ago
I've seen people stating they essentially believe Bridgerton's portrait of the period is racially correct, even if they acknowledge that the queen figure doesn't exist.
aldomilyar
14d ago
I think it's a combination of a few things
- These modifications largely only go one way in modern culture. There'll be Black Blitz sufferers, but there will be no White characters in an equivalent tale about Africa 500 years ago
- A lot of people are staggeringly ignorant and take this sort of thing at face value, promoting this sort of 'eternal present day' mindset in which it becomes impossible to think rationally about historical topics since you're essentially imagining the current level of affluence and racial integration to have extended back forever. I've met people who genuinely think Bridgerton is a historical tale.
aldomilyar
15d ago
I have always enjoyed the critique of Red Dead Redemption 2 along the lines of 'bunch of outlaws and brigands happen to hold perfectly progressive 21st century views on gender, race, consent etcetera'
aldomilyar
15d ago
Yeah but recent immigrants are very literally mobile towards wherever suits them and know the right buttons to press in terms of media representation. Where was this hypothetical black American conscript going to bail off to? Europe was a complete mess at the time, people were fundamentally far less mobile.
aldomilyar
15d ago
The 'Japanese people didn't differentiate between blue and green and different cultures have sat the border at different places therefore Hot Pink and Cerulean are the same color' argument comes up surprisingly often.
I enjoy Gattaca but I also agree that 'Key member of a long spaceflight being at significant risk of heart failure' is something that'd disqualify you right now without looking at your genetic code. The plot would probably feel better if it were pure genemod-bias at play.
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