bolido_sentimental
No bio...
User ID: 205
When I was 14, George W. Bush was president. I don't know about the average, but there was a definitely a phase around the time American Idiot came out where it seemed like all anyone in my high school was doing was dunking on W. And this was in Tennessee.
This could definitely have been my personal bubble though. In 2004, I didn't know what a "bubble" was.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
On Free Association vs. Exclusion, or: can white people just do stuff together?
Yesterday I went to church. I would estimate that there are about 150 people at my church. There are exactly three people of color there:
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One black teenaged girl, who I believe is the adoptive daughter of a white couple there.
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One old guy called Antonio, who I think came from Argentina a long time ago.
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A Hispanic woman who is the wife of an old white guy.
The demographics of this church are, basically, the demographics of the immediately surrounding neighborhoods and of this demonination nationally: the people who go there go there because A.) they live close by and B.) they think the EFCA has good teachings to offer about God, the world etc. Everyone comes there of their own free will; all are explicitly welcome. We have never turned anyone away - I am one of the greeters and I try to take seriously my responsibility to make anyone that arrives feel welcome.
Still, when thinking about this, something apparent to me is that this church has no racial diversity. Are we under a moral obligation to try and change that?
If we are: why is that? How did we incur it? Is it not enough to be welcoming, do we need to actively change our demographic composition? What if, as seems to be the case, there are hardly any non-white people that want to come to our church?
If we are not: why is that? Other voluntary organizations come under pressure to diversify, all the time - see "knitting too white," "hiking too white," etc. Would our church not qualify because it's too small? Because it isn't a business? Because we do not have any status to award? Because we have no social media presence?
There is a black church less than four miles away - I cannot imagine them ever coming under pressure to diversify, even though they have the same level of diversity as my church does. Why should that be? I can already think of the Conflict Theory explanation - but what would the Mistake Theory explanation for that be?
I guess what I'm wondering about or driving at is, as my title indicates - is there any limiting principle to the drive for making groupings reflect the population distribution of the country as a whole? Are there organizations for which it would be unreasonable to ask this - or are there simply only organizations whose undiversity hasn't been noticed? I'm not asking this out of any animosity towards any racial group; we would really just like for everyone to come to our church. I just find myself wondering why similar bodies, who didn't choose their racial composition at all, nevertheless come under criticism for that, and some don't.
bolido_sentimental
6mo ago
I asked a girl out on Saturday, and she said yes. I have a girlfriend now. I met her at a local meeting of baseball fans about three months ago; we started hanging out one-on-one at the end of August. We got to know each other and things developed organically. Last night we went to Ikea, and then came home and played with my cat. It was wonderful.
To be honest, "lucky and fairly determined" may be exactly right. I'd been single for three years prior to this. There were about five girls I tried to make something happen with in the meantime, and it didn't work out - I either got a first date that didn't lead anywhere, or they turned me down outright.
The determination part comes in in two areas: one, you have to be determined enough to keep going. It definitely hurt when one girl that I'd crushed on for probably six or eight months rejected me in the spring. But you have to have a thick hide, and you have to decide to bounce back and try again.
Furthermore: you have to be determined to keep examining yourself and working on your shortcomings. Like: my celebrity lookalike is probably Mike Myers (Austin Powers). I'm a funny-looking dude. But I have to find a way to be appealing to women anyway. I try to do that by being a joy to be around. I laugh an smile a lot. I try to find the good in everything. I can be a reliable and capable problem-solver when I need to. I think there are many archetypes you could utilize in making yourself "someone others want to be with," but you have to follow through on one of them enough that you yourself start to believe in it. I genuinely self-believe that I can make any interaction with someone end with them thinking, "That was a blast, I hope I can see him again." But I wasn't born like that. I had to cause myself to be that person.
The luck part is definitely in A.) Meeting a real option and B.) Getting the genetic lottery outcomes that give you a chance. With A.), as many Mottizens have noted, meeting people is hard. It's work. You have to grind and go to all the stuff you may not want to go to. Somebody recently posted about how you need to self-delude yourself into enjoying some things, and that's right on. With B.), yeah, I got lucky in many ways, to be an eligible partner at all. I don't have Down syndrome. I'm a normal height. I have a nice build that's enabled me to create an acceptable physique. I try not to take those things for granted.
Anyway dude. You always make me want to respond to you because you bring up "being worthy." I don't even know what that means. I've never been to war, or hiked more than 10 miles in temperate landscapes. My moral history is extremely dubious. I am truly, truly just some asshole. I'm not even hot, you're probably better-looking than me. But human beings want to be with each other! If you can try and be someone that other people want to be with, why couldn't it be you? Have you ever considered what you can do to make someone happy? Not everyone is out for what they can get - not everyone chooses defect! I promise you that. There really are girls who want to choose cooperate.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
I was surprised to see in /r/dankchristianmemes, a heavily upvoted thread about wanting traditional hymns, but not wanting "conservative/far-right ideals" in the church. All the comments are about how great it is that mainline Protestant denominations are affirming of all kinds of alternative lifestyles.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dankchristianmemes/comments/11i1mit/is_it_too_much_to_ask_for_both/
Honestly this really made me think. On Reddit, the gun people are leftist, the Christians are leftist, etc. etc. I spend so much time on Reddit that it makes me think leftism has literally taken over everything. Then I went to church this morning and realized there's an entire big population of people who don't use Reddit, have never heard of Reddit, and who still exist across the whole spectrum of political belief.
I need to get off of Reddit.
bolido_sentimental
8mo ago
Strongly doubt it occurs to them. Almost definitionally, people in underclasses work in jobs that do not ask for resumes. I did a lot of those jobs when I was younger, and met a lot of people who, I am pretty sure, went their whole lives and will die having never made a resume.
This is one non-HBD reason that is often given for why big gaps persist across generations. Those people never meet or interact with anyone who can model the actions that result in middle- or higher class lives.
The way it worked for me was like this:
- You go to your local staffing agency in the nearby strip mall. Every town I've ever lived in has several of them.
- You fill out some forms they give you, which include what type of work you can do. For me this was just, "labor."
- They call you in a day or two and say "XYZ Corp. needs some material handlers starting this Tuesday. They're paying $14.50 an hour and there's mandatory overtime. The shift is 2:30 to 11:00 PM. Stop by here before then and we'll give you your badge and show you the safety video."
- You go and do that, and then on Tuesday you start working at XYZ Corp.
Depending on the company, they might hire you on to their own paper after 90 days or 6 months or whatever. Or you might stay on the staffing agency's paper indefinitely. I supported myself all through my early 20s doing jobs like this.
The actual work consisted of such tasks as:
- Taking boxes from a conveyor belt and loading them into a truck.
- Unloading things, from a truck, and placing them onto a conveyor belt.
- Taking objects from a conveyor belt, and putting them into boxes.
- Inspecting bottles of mouthwash on an assembly line, and doing weighing and cap tests once an hour.
- Digging holes.
- Watching a moving belt of electronics recycling stuff and picking out trash.
- Assembling books-on-tape packages.
- Loading big metal components (I genuinely don't know what they were) into this machine that would put a liquid coating on them.
I met many people whose entire working lives consisted of these jobs. I almost was one myself. I remember reading Slate Star Codex on my phone in the break rooms of these places, lol. There was never a resume involved. A lot of times these dudes also knew about casual work on the side. I still remember my buddy Luis, who every Saturday morning at like 5:00 AM would send me a text that was just an address and a work task. "8737 Maple Avenue. Fence posts. Eighty dollars." He would always be pissed off at me at our next actual work shift if I didn't show up.
I do concede that if, when you're at that level of the economic ladder, you decide to go and work for, e.g., Kroger or T.J. Maxx or some other significant corporation, yes, they may ask you for a resume. I actually remember consciously thinking about what the options were: you could work in a call center, you could go do fast food, you could work retail, or you could take a factory/labor job. I hated talking to people in a "customer service" kind of way, so for me the choice was always obvious.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
The fact that Afroman lives in Adams County, Ohio is the craziest part of this to me. That's literally Amish country. Many miles from anything.
Miller's Bakery out there has one of the largest selections of jams and jellies that I've ever seen anywhere.
bolido_sentimental
30d ago
I am currently reading this book. My very brief first thought was: I wish that she spent some time talking about the effects of therapy culture on adults. She does briefly, obliquely address this, but mainly to state that adults, having reached the age of majority, can make themselves crazier with excessive therapy if they want to.
Of course that's true, but I would've liked to see a greater exploration of the vastly-increased importance placed on therapy in recent years, the latent assumption that everyone needs it, its replacement of other social positions in people's lives, etc. Some of Shrier's research in the book is generalizable to that, but much of it isn't.
bolido_sentimental
7mo ago
Right, there's also the tennis player Ashleigh Barty. She had an indigenous great-grandmother, and so via this 1/8th connection she became the "National Indigenous Tennis Ambassador for Tennis Australia." "I'm a very proud Indigenous woman and I think that for me taking on this role is something very close to my heart. I'm very excited," she said about this.
bolido_sentimental
1mo 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
5mo 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
1yr 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
6mo 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
10mo 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
1yr 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
4mo ago
Praying for him, honestly. He's still young enough to grow out of his weird ideas if he just avoids dying.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
Network engineer with Cisco certs here, AMA if you want to. Some bullet points I would offer:
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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.
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Devs do make fun of us.
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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.)
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I have loads of time to shitpost. The only problem is I'm not very good at it.
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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
10mo 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.
bolido_sentimental
1mo 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
2mo ago
I sometimes wonder if we've fallen below a critical mass of insightful commenters. If nothing else, the CWRs certainly have just a lower quantity of comments - threads from 2022 usually exceeded 2500.
As a lurker who mainly reads the Motte during breaks at work, I am not helping in any way.
bolido_sentimental
6mo ago
Does anyone have experience with "fear of childbirth"?
I've met several women in the last few years who have indicated that they don't intend to have children, and have cited this as the primary reason why - a dread of the actual physical process of childbearing and giving birth. This isn't something I remember hearing or reading about prior to the last few years. Is this an emergent phenomenon, or one which is increasing? Or is it just one which was never inside my bubble? Is it transient, or treatable? Do women commonly try to cure or overcome it, or is it perhaps a cover for other reasons?
I don't mean this question judgmentally. Everyone has the right to use their body as they think best. Just trying to gain insight.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
That feels accurate for sure. In those days, in the place I lived, it felt like all the non-Baptists (including me) were being dominated by the Baptists, and we probably were pushing back against that.
Plus a lot of my friends were really into Korn. I'm not sure anyone does that except to be contrary.
I just had the realization that maybe I, a middle-class man, could be having lots of kids (a desire of mine) if I would just go meet a nice working-class girl; and that I've maybe subconsciously been trying to "date up" this whole time. I am a fool!
(This is actually not sarcasm.)
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