clo
9mo ago
GK Chesterton.
Orthodoxy/The Everlasting Man are both chewable even if you've got no sympathy or openness to his arguments and consider him a memetic infohazard.
clo
9mo ago
Well, then - since we espouse equity, let's see if any government will fund initiatives to lower women's job satisfaction, a goal I consider eminently more achievable by a government than improving men's job satisfaction.
clo
1yr ago
G-Shock metal square with negative display and the rubber strap: got some adapters and I've currently got this on a distressed leather strap. Love this thing even if the adapters make the lug-to-lug massive. Probably the best G-shock overall short of the MR-G square monstrosities that sort of lose the idea of what it means to be a G-shock, although the G-shock octagon is probably an easier rec these days.
Straum Opphav Damascus: was charmed by this microbrand, the dial is something else.
Casio fanboy pick: Casio Oceanus OCW-3000, probably one of my favorite watches ever. Pretty much every watch should offer a version in titanium, polished and finished to this standard. Bought this when the yen cratered this year. I also had the Cachalot for a bit before reselling it (heavy discount), it's essentially a nicer bigboy MR-G with sexier finishing.
Seiko Sharp Edged Presage Aisumi Blue openheart: I go back and forth on this, I feel like I should own at least one Seiko but I feel like I'm just not making a connection to this watch as pretty as it is. In an attempt to like it I bought the official Seiko bracelet and stuck it on to replace the awful leather strap, but it got even heavier and as a result I like it less and less.
Lorier Neptune IV (date): found out about this literally the day before the drop. Pictures do not do it justice, for something this price it's an absolute steal. The acrylic crystal was a tough sell at first but it really does look nicer and warmer, with thicker distortion and a warmer look, even though it means I have to buff out scratches every month.
Currently looking at adding a Speedmaster to the collection but can't decide on which one. Also, despise Rolex enough to consider buying a superclone. I've been treated worse as a customer in a Rolex AD than when buying just about anything in existence.
clo
4mo ago
While I am not sure about the main body of your argument, I think that you are incredibly wrong on the China AI prediction and drastically wrong on the oil prediction. I've got skin in the game and am quite long on oil futures, specifically exploration and drilling. Whether you like it or not, fossil fuels are currently the lifeblood of civilization and we do not have any appreciable replacements - even if it could conceivably replace energy needs, which it won't, especially given the modernization, buildout and investment in Mexico, India, and a growing second world, hydrocarbons are used to make goddamn everything from aspirin to solar panels. The current dip in oil prices and subsequent resurgence of unsteadiness in the ME is caused more by US fracking than anything else, making them energy-independent and less interested in ME politics as a result. The smarter players in the ME know this and have tried their best to diversify their economies with mixed results, or alternatively are looking to allow countries to purchase oil in currencies other than USD (it was barely covered in the news but the UAE agreed to let China purchase oil with RMB recently).
China is already suffering because of a massive deficit in professional or service jobs. AI will make that worse. It's not an instability problem - the Party can levy pretty much everything under the sun to make sure they stay in power - but their internal governance, domestic market and stock market is quite weak and will take at least six to eight years to recover, let alone supercede their growth for the last decade. Their foreign policy is the wild card: it depends entirely on BRICS and how that shakes out. BRICS is considered a joke or a threat depending on who you talk to, the truth is probably somewhere in between. None of the BRICS nation really trust or like each other, they just want to form an alternative non-American power bloc in case America decides they don't like them all that much one day after a change in presidency.
I also think that progressive/liberal blue America is an opposition based party. They are anti-Israel because team Red is nominally pro-Israel and support for Israel has been the unstated government line for decades. Given that Team Blue is more about stomping Team Red into the dirt and laughing as they die of opioids and despair than it is about anything else, I think that their care-o-meter about Israel is entirely limited to the extent that Team Red is for it.
clo
6mo ago
Why are you shocked? Support for Israel is Team Red-coded in America.
American political theater is so polarized Blue team in America could ritualistically eat babies and people still wouldn't vote for Team Red.
clo
1yr ago
My mistake. I assumed you were making a request in good faith. I won't make that mistake again.
clo
1yr ago
You may want to read TLP's dissertation on the subject, whether you agree with it or not. Beware, following this guy down the rabbit hole may be infohazardous.
When they say, "it's a woman's choice" what they mean is "it's not a man's choice, it is thoroughly stupid to wear make up just for men, the only acceptable reason is if you do it for yourself, if it makes you feel better about yourself."
Let me offer a contrary position, unpalatable but worth considering: the only appropriate time to wear make up is to look attractive to men. Or women, depending on which genitals you want to lick, hopefully it's both. "Ugh, women are not objects." Then why are you painting them? I'm not saying you have to look good for men, I'm saying that if wearing makeup not for men makes you feel better about yourself, you don't have a strong self, and no, yelling won't change this. Everyone knows you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, now you're saying the cover of the book influences how the book feels about itself?
I am not doubting that in fact you do feel better about yourself, I am saying that that fact is both pathological and totally on purpose. Since this cognitive trick does help you feel better about yourself, by all means go ahead, but at what point will you stop pressuring other women to go along with it? When will you stop "requiring" it, like when you say, "oh, she's so pretty even without makeup" as if the default was makeup?
clo
1mo ago
The reason why is irrelevant. There could be any number of reasons, from cheaper labor to less regulations to quality differences to productivity reasons. But governments are made up of people, and people who are incentivized not to let things fail are obviously going to work in service of those claims.
The Chinese factory example is apt. If you are a western nation, can you compete with that workforce, notoriously selective regulation and an ability to simply make as much as the market can absorb? Well, sure, you could. What's stopping you, aside from, well - the people in your country? (Cf. American Factory)
The other side of the Bretton Woods financial coin making money fungible across national boundaries: if you don't have some sort of protectionism in place, your economy will see significant cash outflows to foreign countries. This is hugely beneficial to countries that are primarily export based, as the US was post-WW2... and not so much in the other direction.
clo
1mo ago
Mercantilism never left and is in fact in use today in many sectors, with distorting effects on the market. The various more upmarket civilizational stacks existed on top of it, not displacing it entirely.
I'm not a hardcore libertarian or staunch believer in the free market, but it's trivial to understand that countries will naturally protect their own market when they believe they are noncompetitive.
Fair accusations, but I believe nobody has consistent principles. Having consistent principles is not socially or evolutionarily advantageous in the long run. To navigate a world where power changes hands constantly, fluid principles are a necessary precondition for survival for those without power.
As mentioned, banning drunk driving is an attempt at modification of unwanted behavior. There is also self-preservation strategy; drunk drivers are a hazard to anyone who has to use the street.
And post-COVID I'm not sure anyone believes the FDA is non-politicized anymore. Today, the FDA picks winners and losers w.r.t. the pharmaceutical industry.
Just my two cents, because the movie is weird in a way that I'm not quite sure the directors intended. Disclaimer: I enjoyed the film but I think everyone is misreading it, mostly because of the charisma of the two lead actors and their performances.
The Space Odyssey cold open of the children smashing their baby dolls in response to the appearance of Barbie should have clued people off, really. Barbie and Ken are not characters, despite the movie trying to make a gimmick of her ending up in the real world and fish-out-of-water comedy sequences. They don't make sense as characters, and the fact that they have any internal coherence at all is a necessary function for the main narrative thrust of the movie.
The tension in the movie is caused by the fact that Barbie and Ken are amalgams of ideas. Ken is the idea of men as accessories to women. The dramatic tension comes from how that idea is trying to reconcile itself with the idea that men could be fine on their own. This is why people reacted to his arc: they read it as a metaphor for women's liberation, because it's clearly meant to be played this way (even if the bro-patriarchy is an idea that was given to him from outside sources).
The cold open is Mattel saying to the little girls, "you didn't know what you wanted until we told it to you. Before us, toys told you that you could be mothers. After Barbie, toys told you that you could be anything." There's an arrogance to it, in claiming that Barbie is defining an aspirational idea of women. The fact that the movie seems incredibly defensive about this is not an accident - the feminists waged war against the pink toy aisle for years, with Barbie being the main culprit, and a quick Google will dredge up articles from as late as 2013 with mothers asking if it was actively harmful to be buying their girls Barbie dolls.
And then comes The Monologue - an impassioned delivery by America Ferrera playing the mom, who shows the movie's hand. It's a tour de force of bitching, a finely aged whine that complains about the incredibly contradictory and difficult values of what it means to be a woman today. It doesn't make any sense unless you understand that Barbie is supposed to be representative of women. This is why Barbie's neurosis comes from anyway; as an plastic avatar of female identity sold by Mattel(tm), she doesn't know who or what she is anymore because the contradictory demands of modern women and what they're supposed to be are messed up. This breaks the Barbies out of their brainwashing, something I didn't get until I realized it's because they've accepted the contradiction: it's okay if women don't know what they're supposed to be.
(Of course, the monologue truly shoots itself in the foot with the line "I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us." The possibility of, just, well, learning to deal with not being liked doesn't seem to occur. Except for a toy, being liked is everything. A little known fact: Barbie started as 'Lillie', a doll of a sex symbol/gold digger from a German comic.)
One other interesting anecdote: the musical theme of Kendom is "Push" by Matchbox Twenty, a song accused by feminists of popularizing misogynist lyrics. To the point where the songwriter had to explain that it had actually been written about an emotionally abusive girlfriend.
Another: the movie's veneration of Ruth Handler, an opportunist, perennial grifter, liar who avoided personal responsibility at every turn and was indicted on conspiracy charges.
clo
9mo ago
I will defend Battleship to the death. That movie is more entertaining than it has any right to be, even with the moronic aliens and their questionable capabilities.
One of the most impressive things I've ever seen in cinema: torturing into existence the sequence of events that evoked the experience depicted on the cover of board games of Battleship. With aliens.
clo
1yr ago
That utopia can be achieved, on earth, by human hands.
If this is the end state, immanentizing the eschaton, etc. Nothing is off the table. Most disagreements seem to be on the method.
clo
2mo ago
Truth in and of itself is never a good reason to talk about something. There are many facts nobody wants to discuss.
This sticks in my craw a fair bit because this is who, whom all over again. The truth will set you free, but point deer make horse is an easy way to tell who is on your side and who isn't.
In both his examples, the truth is not the problem - it's the very short men, women's sexual preferences, the severely handicapped, society, and resources that matter instead. You can crow in the streets all day about the emperor having no clothes, but that doesn't make him not the emperor, and if he can execute you and yours at will, you'd be damn certain that pretty much only the suicidal would say the quiet part out loud.
Not to disparage your comprehension skills, but the points he's making are fairly simple:
Even if the research is spot on, what can be done?
This is not new, here's a study from 1994 that has similarly ugly conclusions, but there is no will to do anything about it.
The conclusions of the research were not unanticipated. In fact the motives behind the results have been understood for centuries.
Power is demonstrated by the ability to make outcomes that hurt people you don't like look like they occur naturally.
To solve the problem people need to admit they were wrong. They would rather keep searching for a solution that doesn't exist, rather than admit that the research shows what they think is unfavorable (in this case, black criminals prey on whites, and this has a direct correlation with white flight).
You can come up with all the facts you want, but there is no way around the problem that people understand the will to power.
clo
3mo ago
As a neutral observer who just thinks it's fun to watch women destroy each other, the existence of TERFs strikes me as intuitively obvious.
If "what is a woman" is a fight worth fighting, women who have fought to advance the causes and benefits of women will see their work undone. They see what power they (believe) they've wrested from the men slipping through their factory-broken, labor-calloused fingers disintegrating, and they don't like it.
If even New-Labour-Government-neutered, "wizards invented magic to disintegrate their own shit" JK has figured it out, the midwits who haven't are really in for a rude awakening.
clo
30d ago
I disagree so strongly with you and your point is so alien to me that I don't think it's possible we can have any realistic dialogue.
To quote a discussion further up the thread: what is the purpose of the game? Why is it a game? What comprises a game? What is the purpose of gameplay? To me, a game must have win state and lose state. Otherwise, it's not a video game. Otherwise you would have to expand the definition of 'gameplay' to include the act of turning a page in a book or hitting play on a media player for a movie. Winning has meaning because losing matters.
Have you ever interacted with a child and handed them something for free? Expecting them to value it at all is a joke. Make them earn something, something nontrivial, and they will treat it like a treasured heirloom.
The dialogue between the game designer and the player is the point of the game. You seem to be under the impression that the reason games are designed to be hard is to weed out players. I don't think any game designer thinks like this, especially as they are subject to financial incentives that explicitly want the game to find the widest possible audience.
This is because it's incentivized.
It's beneficial for business that capital, and labor, is fungible anywhere. Something something give me control of a something something money supply, and I care not who makes the laws, to that effect.
Place-rooted culture is a competitive weakness in a post Bretton Woods international order. Over time, of course the elite of this order would have no loyalty to place. They can move and spend their money anywhere they want.
clo
6mo ago
I think if you advocate genocide in a hot take you need to justify your bona fides. ie you should have murdered someone, or been a war veteran, or had your family murdered or something.
Agreed, definitely! I would therefore advocate for using this framework, and logic, to permanently silence Americans off the entire internet. The amount of ignorance demonstrated by citizens of the global hegemon is a massive net fail and the foreign policy conducted as a aggregate of and on behalf of that ignorance is, in my opinion, worth kneecapping an American with a shotgun and taking away their internet access every time they say anything about anything they know nothing about and have never experienced.
Luckily, or unluckily, we don't live in a world where people's feet are held to the fire every time they say anything stupid, so people can continue to spout their hot takes as they wish.
clo
1yr ago
I think you finally managed to get at the core disagreement.
The tradcon doesn't need - or want to - convince the people in modern urban life. To them, it is self-evident that modern urban life does not work.
If you are convinced that modern urban life works, then complaining of its difficulty and the rigors of how hard it is to make it in modern urban life is not going to change any minds. It will in fact convince tradcons of their position.
This is the most incredible thing I've ever read. I'm kind of amazed by it, honestly. Amazed and impressed.
I'm sorry because this really isn't the place to make assertions without evidence, but I don't believe you. I think you are a liar, and if people were this coldly utilitarian about their community, let alone their country, civilization might be at genuine risk of breaking down and the hardcore red-tribers who believe civilization is constantly inches from the precipice are not full of hyperbole and hot air.
To clarify, it's not the fact that you see the benefit in doing as you claim that impresses me so. It's the fact that you think not doing so is rational and pragmatic. The borders, rules, abstract nations of distinctions between nations and ethnic groups on any sort of ideological level that you claim to not respect are the very same rules that draw lines between you and others.
The house metaphor is overused, tired, but still apt. Do you respect fences, doors, barriers? Do you not understand, as a self-avowed rational actor, that if you show that living in this manner is possible for you, then others will realize the same thing and apply the same lack of respect to your fences, doors, and barriers?
And again, as a self-avowed rational actor, you are willing to say this out loud? Are you insane? In your own words, while you understand the benefits of America's relatively strong rule of law, you feel no obligation whatsoever to America as a legal entity? You realize that what you are claiming is that that you like it when the laws govern others to your benefit but don't intend on following the same laws. Leaving all questions of morality aside, I struggle to believe you genuinely think this is a position with any pragmatic value at all.
So I don't believe you. I do not believe you are a pragmatic or rational actor, I believe you are reveling in taking advantage of a system designed to benefit you while caring nothing for its maintenance, under the belief that this is rational and logical behavior. Do so at your own peril, there's enough people who do the same already, but crowing about it makes other people who maintain the system you benefit from and contribute nothing to feel like maintaining the system less every day.
Again, I am making assertions without evidence, but I am willing to make a guess that you do not have offspring. If I am wrong and you are not a liar, and you genuinely hold this opinion, I wonder if you have any goodwill for those who carry your genes into the world and have to live in the countries - yes, countries! - of the future.
To wit - I never thought I'd see the day where ignoring the phrase "don't shit where you eat" is treated as a rational belief.
clo
1yr ago
Because the idea that a low status male thinks he has a chance with her implies she is low status.
clo
12d ago
Life is a competition. You don't have to win, but you have to recognize that you are in it. The hardest thing to accept is that just because other people win simply by existing is not proof you can do the same.
Invest in yourself and in experiences, not things. Travel widely. Listen more than you speak.
People are terrible and great simultaneously. Don't let either one stop you from seeing the other half.
clo
26d ago
If you can joke about it, and people get the joke, maybe you should reconsider your priors for 'manifestly untrue'.
I think this is kind of a weird take as I played the hell out of the starship troopers FPS and most gunfights in that game are also extremely close, although it is possible to engage enemies at range with one or two gun variants.
Helldivers 2 has pretty bad gun balance issues and a flawed armor system, that's it. And fighting bots is an entirely different experience than fighting bugs that just rush or ambush leap you, bots can often snipe you crossmap with extremely accurate rockets.
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