clo
1yr ago
the Chinese may be the only people in the world who are completely unable to comprehend the basic human impulses of sympathy or gratitude toward other people.
My two cents probably means nothing to you, but Townsend should have traveled more. There are things in a large plurality of non-western cultures that would have horrified him. Although I am willing to bet that China does it at greater scale simply on a pure numbers perspective.
clo
7d 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
1mo ago
Pokemon Unbound deserves all the accolades it gets. The game is so expansive, feature-rich and high quality that it begs the question what Game Freak have been doing all this time.
Enderal, for Skyrim. A passion project made by lunatics.
I hear some buzz about Dark Souls Archthrones recently.
clo
1mo ago
Good riddance. I have been reading Hlynka for years and while he had a lot to contribute and had a viewpoint very underrepresented and definitely worth having on this place, he got worse and worse as time went on.
The rule that I think is most important for this forum is listed immediately underneath "be kind". Make your point reasonably clear and plain.
The thing that I despise the most about this place is the weaselly nature of some posters on an anonymous forum on the internet. What is the point of implying something or putting words into other people's mouths? Hlynka went from contributing viewpoints and arguments to making poorly veiled sneers at other people, accusing them of believing things that they say they don't believe. In the worst cases, this came across as propping up the weakest version of opposing arguments and gaslighting behavior in the extreme. I lost count of how many times I saw him say something to the extent of "you say you believe one thing, but you actually believe another, I can tell." He should have the intelligence to know when he is being baited, and the ability to separate the bait from the true believers.
What are you supposed to say when he implies someone is an an anti-semite in response to a fairly well-reasoned argument about, I don't know, HBD? (To hell with the HBD argument, by the way, it's the same fights over and over.) Whether they're an anti-semite or not, the point of this place is to address the fucking argument instead of doing a snarky driveby. Who does he think he's convincing? If the person is a genuine anti-semite who believes in Jewish space lasers and Zionist control over America, what the fuck is the point of implying someone's an anti-semite out the sides of your mouth? Is it intended to make people discredit the argument because of who's making the argument? In which case, that behavior is well enough represented outside this place and I don't want to see any more of it.
The thing is, I don't know what he hated more, the people who baited him or the true believers he found abhorrent.
clo
1mo ago
It's not an euphemism for the rejection of individual justice and individual merit. When people reject individual justice and individual merit, they do so on the basis of it producing unequal outcomes, not because those differences exist.
As opposed to arguments as soldiers, surely if your soldiers as soldiers all belong from similar genetic stock, it would be beneficial to any militaristic society to make sure that your genetic stock of troops would be stronger, faster, smarter, and harder than any other. Similarly, your doctors, scientists, you would want to be significantly more intelligent etc.
HBD awareness is currently deeply unpopular amongst the general population. There was a time when it was not, and it was considered both fashionable and critically important to the future of a nation to guard one's genetic pool against undesirable elements. The unpopularity comes from the sectarian and ethnic demographics of the United States as well as the historical atrocities performed by those who believed themselves stewards of what was considered genetically more desirable. Evolution doesn't care who it kills, it just kills, and those that don't die get to carry on.
The strife comes from the issue that no human being is psychologically or otherwise adapted to being told that they are inferior, and that inferiority comes from something that they cannot change. They act out. They cause damage. And if they don't, they descend into learned helplessness.
clo
1mo ago
"We should consider the amount of harm done to unrelated parties before we consider banning a practice."
I don't think this has ever been anyone's position in the history of getting things banned by a government. A far more consistent way of understanding bans is that they are used as a way of hurting or disadvantaging people that they don't like, or social engineering attempts at removing undesirable behaviors.
People don't give a shit about harm, and when they do at all, it's often the point to maximize harm to the outgroup.
My understanding of why gay marriage was legalized is that it was a power and institutional flex by the ascendant progressive left as a way of hurting their outgroup, the religious right. They saw an opportunity to stamp on some faces after the religious right was used as a political force by Bush 2 to win his elections, and they did it. Had it been any other issue they could have hurt their political opponents on, they would have done it. Gay marriage was an easy low hanging fruit because it had little to no short term economic costs, there was little political capital used in getting it passed if you worked in a heavily urban area, it stimulated a lot of fervor in the voting base, and it expanded the marriage/divorce lawyer clientele.
clo
6mo ago
I think you are, unfortunately, very naive about the human condition.
People who strongly update their priors, beliefs, and are open to admitting that they are wrong tend to not make it very far socially, in elite circles, local or international politics.
clo
1yr ago
4R Single Barrel is the best readily available bourbon imo, I try and never run out of that stuff. The Wild Turkey offerings are also good value as a daily sipper and rarely run afoul of the collector/flipper mania.
I can also give high, high marks to Redbreast's cask strength offering and the Lustau edition, Lustau in particular is excellent for getting people who don't like whiskey into whiskey as there's no need to fight the drink as is common for most hard liquors.
Decent to good scotch kind of starts at the $100 mark, but scotch is my preferred tipple. It's just so much more interesting than bourbon; I can pick apart a small amount of scotch for hours. Bourbon I end up drinking too fast because I look for more in the glass than is generally there.
Scotch I enjoy neat with a small splash of water depending on the proof. Bourbon, I occasionally like a small rock or two, as the hazmat proofs are generally cheaper than scotch even if they're harder to come by.
clo
21d ago
If you can joke about it, and people get the joke, maybe you should reconsider your priors for 'manifestly untrue'.
clo
25d 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
1mo ago
You'd get less pushback if you said this out loud. Especially since nothing about this argument you think is so difficult for people to understand is not regularly discussed on this forum and the limits of utilitarianism are commonly understood even by the people who espouse it depending on their utility functions.
Stop going after specific people and go after arguments. This passive-aggressive bullshit is something I expect from Americans, but as someone who tells us all frequently about how he is a member of the warrior caste, your snide jabs and thinly veiled sneers are irritating in the extreme. If you want a fight on the internet, you can get one quite easily without having to resort to these sneers where you pretend to hold yourself privy to some secret of the universe all the stupid rationalists don't get. Nothing is new under the sun, not least of which the things you think other people don't get or haven't considered.
I spoke plainly, before the server reset, about fighting ecological x-risk and climate change by nuking India, and by attachment, any other nation with significant growth potential, with the express goal of making sure that no country ever industrialized again. I was pilloried and given mod warnings, but I was still allowed to express my opinion.
By comparison, "cui bono" is barely even an argument. If you want to speak plainly, then you tell us. You tell us who benefits, and then we can see if that's true in the long or short term. Personally, I have little faith in the ability of anyone at all to plan for long term outcomes, especially if the outcomes are distributed over other people.
clo
2mo ago
This is not unique to modern western democracy, nor are powerful Jews the only one taking advantage of the hierarchy of everything. You are describing power. Power has not changed in thousands of years.
clo
4mo ago
Exceptional steelman of trigger warnings.
I finally understand. They're more easily understood as a way of gimping everyone else to make the triggered person feel more powerful.
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
11mo ago
I think the truth is somewhere in between.
There are unique advantages and drawbacks to both, but if you are a credible and accredited scientist working in a high-value field such as medicine or AI, I would say the US still offers more money and opportunities. Quality of life is, in both countries, exceptionally dependent on where you go. There are places in both the US and China that I would not want to ever visit, or even pass by, without a heavily armed personal escort that would suffer no repercussions for shooting bystanders.
People is a tossup. I think in America the variance is higher, it's a culture and society that says one thing and does another and lionizes exceptionalism of all sorts. China tends to squash everyone down into the same paste by design.
Food is again, exceptionally dependent on where you go.
I definitely do think the attitude towards foreigners has gotten significantly worse in China over the last decade and a half. 2013 China and 2023 China are, for foreigners, quite different.
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.
clo
1mo ago
I don't understand this example. Are you implying that a sane authoritarian government would exert their power to ban the burning of hydrocarbons for heating or cooking?
How is that in any way sane, especially if they don't have the power to stop other countries from doing it? Unless you are advocating for this sane authoritarian government invading all the others and maintaining this ban through force of arms, in which case it makes more sense, but still a fair ways away from 'sane'. Doing so would require the development and manufacture of weapons at scale, which unfortunately requires large amounts of hydrocarbons.
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.
Everybody wants competent, effective air traffic controllers.
I know we do our best to not typical-mind around here, but goddamn, when it's staring you right in the face and they are telling you exactly what they think, to deny it in this manner is like watching someone deny the walls they're walking into. From the suit alone and the tireless, documented efforts of the NBCFAE, it's clear that the competency and effectiveness of air traffic controllers mattered less than if they were African-American or not.
I remember TracingWoodgrains' attempt to try and start an offshoot of The Motte he believed needed to exist with "less of a right-wing slant". I remember thinking that the attempt was idealistic, misguided and naive at the time. It's nice to know that he hasn't changed that much. I wish him all the best, but when the leopards eat his face I won't be at all surprised.
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 "Iām 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.
I dispute your first point. The white liberal is still motivated by status seeking and dominance, but within their own ingroup. They are seeking status and dominance amongst other white liberals. They're not surrounded by non-whites and they see those people as powerless, what's the loss in status? As far as they're concerned, non-whites aren't even at the table, and they don't engage with them anyway so what's the point.
You can see this same phenomenon among Catholic flagellates who see it as a demonstration of piety and it was called out as status-seeking behavior among Jews in the Bible (Matt 6:2 - "when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so they may be seen by men").
White liberals self-select. Go to any woke convention or conference and it's as white as the driven snow - this is especially ironic when comparing to the rainbow of diversity seen at /pol/ meetups.
Men more than women are motivated by the pursuit of dominance, true. But social dominance is, and has been, historically the arena of women.
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