bolido_sentimental
No bio...
User ID: 205
https://odh.ohio.gov/know-our-programs/breastfeeding
We still have "mothers" in Ohio, for now. Almost reminds me of a warrant canary: when the state websites no longer use the word "mother," you know they've been got to.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
This was the right choice, given what he was doing to discussions. It's been years since he was a genuine contributor, rather than a drive-by "you're wrong but I won't explain why" poster.
He was much better back in the Reddit days.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
I have also noticed this on the webpage of my county's public library system. I go to that website constantly to manage hold requests - basically without exception I access it at least once a week. There are always pictures of people on the front page. In five years, I have only ever seen one white man there: it was Walter Isaacson, who was speaking at a special event hosted by the library.
At this moment it is a picture of a black man and a mixed-race child.
If there's something interesting about this, it's that the phenomenon you're describing exists beyond ad agencies.
I have an extremely ordinary and common name, so much so that in my not-large high school graduating class there was a guy with the same (first and last) name as me. I have known people of multiple races with this same first + last name combination.
I often feel like this is kinda nice. Nobody can prejudge me very effectively from my name alone, they have to evaluate me on other traits. And I'm a little bit harder to Google, there are so many results which are not me.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
The thrift store near where my mom lives always has a ton of golf clubs available. I have long considered putting a bag together out of them. What would be the next step? What's the very first thing you need to do in order to start?
Like - when I took up tennis as a kid, I got a buddy, two racquets, and some balls, and we went to a local court when it was deserted and hacked around all day until we started figuring it out. I don't wanna go take up room on the golf course when I have no idea how to hit the ball straight.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
it's very hard to stay single in America if you're white, middle class, and not obese.
I just have a rare talent for it, lol.
In all seriousness, I am in a long romantic cold spell that temporally matches up exactly with when I started working from home permanently during Covid. I have not managed to successfully adapt my life such that I am meeting people IRL at the same rate I used to. There are lots of viable solutions to this, but my job is difficult and tiring and makes me want to stay home. I may be displaying a revealed preference here.
Still - I have indeed dated women from social strata above mine, and they did not want to settle down with me. I did not make the appropriate connection before. (Bearing in mind of course that I may just not be that cool, and they found they could genuinely do better.) Especially because I grew up in a working-class milieu myself, you would think I could get along very well with a girl I met at the local dirt track, if I would only go there myself. And I'm not looking down on people like that. It is not as though my existence in this other social class has brought me any exceptional happiness.
date outside your race
This is good advice. Perhaps this is something everyone simply already knows, but when I have done this, I have been surprised at the extent to which it feels just the same as dating within your race.
bolido_sentimental
10mo ago
I so agree with this. Teachers told me that schools were underfunded, and I believed them. I had not yet learned about how incentives drive what people think and say. I also uncritically believed that more/better education = smarter/more effective and thoughtful people; and I also didn't think about American public education as it is done, having any directional political valence.
To be honest, I just don't know how this could be measured.
To be more specific about my feelings: I thought that Democrats winning the election would reduce the amount of grievance media generated by the left. I guess my thought process was: "We have had four years of loud, grating Orange Man Bad/white nationalism is the greatest threat to our country content. Well, now Orange Man is out, you have achieved what you wanted - we can all move on to something else, right?"
I did not realize the full extent, at that time, to which the media cycle is driven by generating fear and upset, and how little interest there is in the truth; nor did I realize to what extent many people take what the media tells them to be truth, without questioning it.
I suppose I actually agree with you - I think the war is less hot; but I also feel like @The_Nybbler was vindicated too many times, and the world continued to get worse.
I live nearby and can say, in support of your first point: Springfield, Ohio was already totally fucked, and therefore it's a great place to put migrants. It is a quintessential Rust Belt city that was hollowed out by deindustrialization; it is a satellite of Dayton, which is even worse off.
This is happening much more widely even than what is reported on. Down the street from me, the village of Lockland was gutted by the closure of the original Stearns & Foster mattress factory in the early 2000s (along with many industrial closures for decades prior, and even the closure of the original Miami & Erie Canal in the 1910s... Lockland is a hard-luck place); it is now being resettled by Mauritanians, with the enthusiastic support of local NGOs.
I guess for the record, Mauritanians that I have met have been nice to me personally, and I am not aware of them making particular problems for everyone; but it is also true that they have concentrated in one neighborhood and turned it into Little Mauritania. I suppose it's better than the building sitting empty as they had done previously; but I wish that my own culture had simply stayed there and built new things after the factories closed, instead of decamping to distant commuter towns like Mason. Easy for me to say, I suppose.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
This is fascinating. I wonder what the scope or reach of this movement is. I'd never heard of it.
I did NaNoWriMo for about ten years, and was the organizer of it in my city for two. When I started as a 20-year-old, I had no idea what it took to write a novel. By the end of my time doing it, I had "won" multiple times and knew that I could sustain big projects as long as it took to finish.
NaNoWriMo, as an exercise, is one of the best things I've ever done for my creative life. There's just no substitute for getting words on paper. 90% of it may be trash, but the 10% where you're really feeling it and it turns out well, it's extremely fulfilling and motivating.
I eventually concluded I had gotten all I could out of it. The community aspect of it is effectively moribund now. In 2020 and 2021, NaNoWriMo HQ forbade official in-person meetings, regardless of whatever local Covid regulations were. Additionally as you can imagine, as a San Francisco-based organization, their official messaging has become extremely woke in recent years. NaNoWriMo is the prime personal example from my own life of entryists making something much worse than it was at inception. Still, every city is different and you may meet some interesting people. A core aspect of NaNoWriMo is "write-ins," where you gather with other WriMos and grind out word count in a coffee shop or something. It's a nice accountability feature.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
A major implication of this is that, even if you are able to provide perfect equality of opportunity, groups will still have different outcomes because of their differing inherent ability. As a result, for example, cognitively-demanding (and high-status, high-compensation) professions will never reflect the distribution of groups in society; instead they would be occupied mostly by members of groups with higher ability. The alternative to this is to weigh the scales: to hire based on some attribute other than merit alone, which many find to be unfair.
And these "good" professions are just one example - you would expect to see this phenomenon in every area of human endeavor where ability comes into play.
bolido_sentimental
10mo ago
Just by the by: when I bought the car I have now, it had pretty dark tinted windows. I drove it like that for a while, and then took it to a tint shop to get the tint removed. The tint guy thought I was nuts, but seriously - I could not see what I was doing. Driving at night was impossible.
Since that experience, I keep a large distance from cars I see on the road with heavy window tint. My sense is that only can they not really see, but they are not drivers who are choosing to optimize for safety by any means either. Anyway I think it's a good law, and I wish it were enforced.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
Praying for him, honestly. He's still young enough to grow out of his weird ideas if he just avoids dying.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
Network engineer with Cisco certs here, AMA if you want to. Some bullet points I would offer:
-
A lot of my friends are devs and, if anything, it's a little surprising how little we each know about each other's fields. I don't know how to code, except for some bash/PowerShell scripting that I use in my job. They don't know how data gets from their computer to anywhere else. Our working days look very different. There certainly are engineers out there who have strong expertise in both areas, but in real life I very rarely meet them. My best friend is a dev and he wouldn't have a clue how to do my work. Of course, being a dev, he's a smart guy and he'd figure it out eventually.
-
Devs do make fun of us.
-
I think software development is more recommended both A.) Because it's easier to access the higher-paying jobs in it and B.) Because it's more extensible to other areas. Network engineering will not help you do data science, for instance. (Not that I'm saying network engineering doesn't pay well, especially if you take it as far as you can. I'm four or five years in and have had six-figure offers, and will probably take one of them this year; and I live in the Midwest. The CCIEs that I know have fabulous amounts of money.)
-
I have loads of time to shitpost. The only problem is I'm not very good at it.
-
I really do like network engineering for its own sake, and I'd encourage you to investigate it more. My work has a good amount of "Aha!!!" moments where we take something from not-working to working, and it feels good.
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
I didn't really appreciate what he did when I was a young adult. I was a real whiz kid in school, and it seemed a shame not to use the scholarships and get out into the world that way. In hindsight I might have chosen differently, and now I have a whole mid-level career's worth of sunk cost that would make it probably too challenging to switch.
I think he'd be more than happy to sell all his stuff and his book of business in a few years for a nominal cost, if he knew the right person to take it over; but he's quite solitary and prefers to work alone, so it's unfortunately possible that his knowledge will die with him. Maybe I'll talk to him about trying to find an apprentice.
bolido_sentimental
8mo ago
People keep talking to me about "civil war" and "post-election violence" and so on. Are any of you preparing for that in any particular way?
I can't really envision anybody messing with things in my inner-ring suburb, or my dumpy little house in particular, but who knows, I guess. I could sit on my porch with my shotgun but I'd just feel like a tool.
bolido_sentimental
11mo ago
You made me curious, and I did a search for: "What happened to black family stability?"
"The original, often controversial, research presented in this book links marital decline to a pivotal drop in the pool of marriageable black males. Increased joblessness has robbed many black men of their economic viability, rendering them not only less desirable as mates, but also less inclined to take on the responsibility of marriage. Higher death rates resulting from disease, poor health care, and violent crime, as well as evergrowing incarceration rates, have further depleted the male population."
From the abstract of a 1995 book, The Decline in Marriage Among African Americans.
https://www.russellsage.org/publications/decline-marriage-among-african-americans-1
Is there a way to Make Black Men Economically Viable Again?
bolido_sentimental
11mo ago
That's really overstating it. I play golf by myself because I just like golfing. Tons of people take golf seriously for its own sake.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
It depends on what you want out of life, really.
I lived in Iksan, Jeollabuk-do for a while, and played on an amateur soccer team. The other players were all middle-aged guys who worked in various trades or for small manufacturing companies.
They seemed happy with their lives. Iksan has plenty of places to like... have a grillout and drink soju, or whatever you want to do. It's not a high-status place, and I'm sure strivers would find it miserable. But the world is not made up entirely of strivers. Some people just want to raise their kids, and play soccer with the boys on the weekend. I guess the user you mentioned would not be satisfied with that life.
I also spent time in other large cities there: Daejeon, Jeonju, Busan, Incheon and some others. But not enough to grasp the differences. They were all, you know... large. If you need to be surrounded by a million people, those are places you can do that.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
I think a major motivation there is that, for people who have kids, there is a portion of the trans activists who will directly try to influence your kids in their direction; if you are unlucky, your kid could suffer serious consequences. It's one of the aspects of the culture war that has the potential for the most direct, severe personal impact, even if the absolute odds may not be that high. I would be against it even if it were a rightist point.
By contrast, nobody's trying to secretly circumcise the kids. (Or if they are, they're doing an incredible job keeping it secret.)
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
Right, what you're describing here are major elements of the pro-HBD position. Most people on this forum, including myself, agree with you about this.
Be sure to consider as well the nature of the opposing viewpoint. Many people strongly value what they consider as fairness. The idea that some people are disadvantaged in life, through no fault of their own but only through an accident of their birth, strikes them as being unfair. I agree that it is unfair, though it's unfair on a sort of cosmic level, not in a way that should affect who becomes a neurosurgeon for instance.
But there is a worthwhile question to consider in it, one which I think Freddie DeBoer touches on at times: if there is a group of people who are natively less intelligent, does that mean they are destined to have worse lives? Is it right that they should have worse lives? It is important to bear in mind that intelligence is not equal to humanity. I can understand why, when you see one group of people having lives which appear to be worse in many areas, one would feel called upon to try and help that situation and correct it. But as you can see in the real world, when this desire is also motivated by false premises, it can lead to injustice too.
Adding a second reply here, because I had an interesting CW-ish experience over the weekend.
One of my church's book clubs read Trials of the Earth: The True Story of a Pioneer Woman this month, and yesterday we had the discussion at the church. As you can probably imagine, apart from me - a 35-year-old man - the book clubs consists exclusively of women aged 50 to 90.
Anyway, I enjoyed that book immensely. It is the autobiography of a white woman called Mary Hamilton, who lived in the Mississippi Delta around the turn of the 20th century; she married a timber man named Frank, and worked ridiculously hard her whole life to keep her family alive and fed, surviving natural disasters and the early deaths of four children. They lived on the very edge of civilization, mostly in wild country, far even from any neighbors. I absolutely couldn't put the book down. Every page brought either a new threat to life, or the practice of a cultural custom that has now just about faded out of memory. I would recommend it unreservedly to anyone with an interest in the real business of how the American continent was settled, or in how ordinary people lived outside of cities, just over 100 years ago.
Now, Mary Hamilton does relate a number of encounters with black people. The descendants of slaves, freed some 50 years prior to the story, were building up their own lives in Mississippi and Arkansas, where Mary spends much of the book. She honestly describes black criminals and black nurses, neighbors and scoundrels, men, women and children, young and elderly; she relates good ones and evil ones, she talks about racial conflicts that occasionally would spring up, and she transcibes their patterns of speech as she heard them. She does use the N-word and many variants thereof, but in an entirely natural way that reflects how they were referred to at that time, in that place As far as I could see, Mary Hamilton had no special racial prejudice, but neither was she a particular supporter of black improvement or uplifting. She was simply focused on keeping her family alive.
In the book club, we were asked to give a 1-10 rating of the book. I gave it an honest 10 - too generous perhaps, I admit it's not an utter classic of all-time, but that's how much I enjoyed reading it, definitely. But the woman next to me would go no higher than 6. She said, "Every time [Hamilton] started talking about black people, I cringed. There was an incident where there was a black convict who escaped from the prison, and the police chased him down and beat on him, and I just couldn't stand that. I don't like to think about that. I loved the hard-working pioneer spirit stuff, but I kept cringing and cringing when she would use the N-word, or write the way they talked where they sound all ignorant."
I said, "I wouldn't say that I found that completely enjoyable, but I felt like reading it enhanced my understanding of life in those days. I wouldn't want those parts to be cut out." She responded that she wouldn't want to recommend the book to black people she knew because of those passages; and that furthermore, she didn't watch the news because she didn't want to know about bad things that are happening.
A lively discussion ensued on this topic generally, and to my surprise I think more of the women had my view, than that of my interlocutor. But still, I had never heard someone express that so directly before: that if it's bad, they don't want to be aware of it; and if it portrays black people badly, they don't want to read it. I have a little bit of sympathy for the first point - the world can produce negativity longer than you can remain sane if you have unlimited empathy, and maybe it's healthier not to dwell on that stuff. For the second, though, I got the sense that she felt it was "punching down" to portray poor blacks as they really lived around 1900; and I just find that nuts. I believe there is a strain in our culture that want to see all minorities as wise and saintly people we should look up to, instead of being complex people, some of whom are smart, some stupid, some evil, some virtuous. It results in a highly inaccurate understanding of the world.
bolido_sentimental
10mo ago
How do you cope with the idea that you or your loved ones might not go gently?
I've been thinking about this topic a lot recently. My fiancee basically lost her entire 20s having to be a stay-home caretaker for her grandmother, who had (and has) Alzheimer's. While she frames it as a choice that she was happy to make, from talking to her family, I really get the impression that she was basically the one who was sacrificed so that nobody else would have to address the situation. Honestly - I think it's an atrocity, and I can't listen to her talk about those years without boiling up with anger.
I love my parents, and when they get to that point, I want them to be safe and well cared-for; however, I'm not going to value their wellbeing above the wellbeing of the other members of my family. I grasp that there will be sacrifices to make, but the rest of us deserve a chance to live too. Furthermore, I don't see that any of the adults on either side of my family are making the appropriate preparations for their old age, and I intend to defend my nuclear family from potential consequences of this.
I am aware that my attitude about this is very hard and negative these days, and it may soften with time. I can't say I have a specific plan. I try to cultivate my material prosperity and physical strength all the time, because I think I will end up needing them.
I can't think of how to phrase this, but: does anyone know of a good source or place where I can read about the black American lower class? In terms of their daily lives, aspirations for the future, hobbies, etc. I don't know where to find anything that's not a hagiography from the left, or Sailer-style noticing. It seems like, apart from social media, it is the least-represented, least-analyzed group online.
I know that for such topics as the fentanyl crisis, there was a big genre of think-pieces in which journalists went among the white lower class and asked them, "Why do you do what you do? How do you think this happened?" and so on. I'm not aware of anything similar where black people, who are not middle-class aspirants or celebrities etc., are asked, "What's going on? Why do you like this and not that? How do you feel about Policy X? What do you think AI is gonna do to the economy, or to your own job prospects?" and so on.
I get some exposure to this by talking to my next door neighbor, but he, specifically, always steers the conversation towards trying to buy my spare car; and I'm not ready to sell it yet, so I just go inside lol.
More options
Context Copy link