coffee_enjoyer
☕️
No bio...
User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
That’s because Italian Americans are their own unique ethnos with their own unique culture. But if you were some Irish American living amongst Italian Americans your whole life, you would never say you were ethnically Italian, you would say you were an ethnic Irishman who was culturally Italian. In America, someone might say they are culturally Italian and refer to Italian Americans. This change is similar to how the ancestors of modern Italians would be aghast that they speak modern Italian instead of their regional tongue.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
My theory is that the hangover is due to alcohol’s effect on dopamine and serotonin, not its effect on the body. Its effect on the liver is negligible for one time use. Small-scale liver damage does not usually result in hangover-like feelings, otherwise people would get hangovers from eating fried food or tons of sugar.
So if it’s serotonin and dopamine getting all excited, there’s not much you can do except cognitive rest while your brain re-ups and re-sensitizes and stuff. Replace my words with desired scientific jargon.
You can produce serotonin in the brain by having 20g-50g of pure carbohydrate (98+), without fat or protein within four hour window, if you are non-diabetic. This would be fruit, sugar, or honey and not much else. Higher carb diet is associated with healthier dopamine than higher protein diet, and so is intermittent fasting (I think). And exercise is good for dopamine system.
But yeah I doubt there’s any real short-term cure. The high of alcohol will necessarily lead to a low.
Ban porn, subsidize prostitutes: a modest defense of whoring
The popular view is that masturbating to porn is fine, and using the services of prostitutes is not so fine. Porn is not a poor man’s prostitute, but instead a cleaner acceptable method of sexual satisfaction. You might joke with a friend, like Markiplier on the Logan Paul podcast, that you gave up porn because the two-hour wank sessions got old. Were Markiplier to say he recently gave up prostitutes, which he had been using for a decade, the conversation would have taken a somber tone. Yet for most of Western history, this moral calculation was inverted. Masturbation was seen as worse vice than than the vice girl. Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Voltaire, and Richard Wagner all thought the solitary vice more dangerous than the sex worker. Why would this be?
We don’t need to get too bogged down in the historical miscellany and theological glosses. For starters, our ancestors noted that fucking a woman is more natural than fucking a hand. But this was not haughty naturalistic phallicy. This is complex. Due to the nature of human habit and memory, obtaining satisfaction from a woman promotes and orients a man’s sexuality toward women, and not oneself. Let’s flesh this out. On the first level, once you’ve completed the intended act with the harlot, a memory is formed in which all preceding sensations cue for satisfaction of the urge. There’s [urge -> satisfaction from woman], but we can go deeper. There’s [urge -> WOMAN -> satisfaction from woman], with all the sensations of a woman encoding sexual satisfaction: pheromones, tone of voice, clothing, mannerisms, and importantly socializing with a woman, implicating your social personality and hers. This works to develop a craving associated with all the sensations of women, increasing the desire for the company of real women and the formation of relationships and marriages. There is one more social benefit, which is that the [dressing up -> traveling -> paying] is more prosocial than opening a tab on a laptop, and associating sex with money is great salience on the value of money.
If sex were the Milky Way and the earth were a wife, prostitutes would be Venus and porn would be Pluto. It’s very far away, and it’s not even a planet.
But the argument is yet to reach its climax. Prostitutes are seen as dirty, and this again betrays our modern misunderstanding of psychology. Going out, away from your home and work, to purge your desire with a woman is a way to keep your home and work life free from the cognitive “stain” of sex, because the whole sexiness is entrenched in its own unique context. The home and office, and the home office, are clean of memories and cues of intercourse — you have ejaculated these cues far away from your “pure” life. There’s no risk of Toobin-ing all over your keyboard after a zoom meeting, because your computer has no cues related to sex. Instead, your conception of sex is caught up in a web of strong cues, all of which are related to real life women.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Prostitution will never have the benefits that it had in earlier eras, where sex with peers was rare before marriage and men would travel weeks on end. I’d say the ideal is longterm monogamy, but per statistics many men are not having sex at all. So encouraging prostitute visitations is genuinely better for them (and society) than porn habits.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Agree on your dangers of simping (great point). I disagree however on the danger of “transactional sexuality”. Ideally, sure, a man and woman would come together because they have found value in each other that is higher than money and all that the dollar represents. Their personalities entwine beautifully, conversations roll off the tongue, and their experiences couple each others. But where I disagree is that (1) many prostitutes and courtesans in history were sought after for these very properties, geishas in Japan or Tyrion’s fantastical whore in GoT, and (2) I don’t actually see prostitution as dangerously more transactional than 21st century intercourse, or maybe history’s intercourse. Purchasing the right apartment, haircut, dentist, photographer, car and clothes will ensure matches. Back in the day, it was inheriting the right title or deed. Sex for resources is a tale as old as time.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
I explained why porn is worse for a human than seeing a prostitute, and why prostitution is in prosocial in its orientation. So I wouldn’t say my title is mistitled at all. I wasn’t going to go into the history of prostitute regulation or scholastic theology. If porn is bad and prostitutes are better, I advocate banning porn and subsidizing prostitution. It would be awesome if the RS subreddit made this point often, but I don’t think I’ve seen it, if you can link me that would be cool.
I can’t dispute your personal lived experience, but I do wonder if you’re an outlier. “The same pathways in my brain were firing as the ones that do when I beat it to porn” is extremely improbable given the unique cues associated prostitution. The lack of intimacy is one reason why prostitution is not identical to real intercourse, but this doesn’t supersede the numerous reasons why it is closer than porn. Living in a society where, I think it’s 30% of men haven’f had sex in a year, doesn’t afford us with the counter argument of “just find a gf bro”. Ideally everyone would be in longterm relationships and yet historically cultures saw fit to introduce regulated prostitution.
Re: cleaner, we’re talking about psychological cleanliness involving cues. A girlfriend is a living breathing psychological cue for sex. She doesn’t exist on a tab in your computer. While sure, your bed would associated with sex (with your girlfriend), that still retains more psychological “purity of space” than having porn in the same browser that you work on. The question is what we’re associating together. Associating being alone and the internet with sexual gratification is worse than either a prostitute or having a significant other.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
I'm not sold on the idea that working as a sex worker in a regulated industry is significantly worse for mental health than other low status occupations, especially given the amount of money earned. If you consider someone who works in hospice care, and while this isn't a low status job per se, it's psychologically grueling, stressful, and disgusting. Additionally, we shouldn't imagine the worst case of prostitution in a defense of the oldest profession, we should instead imagine a case that can be reasonably actionable with regulation. Like if someone wants to bring back coal mining, we shouldn't imagine the worst case of 19th century coal mining, we should imagine an industry with regulation an safeguards.
There are many women who already sell their bodies on Twitch, Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter, and OnlyFans. Sex work entails more risk, even when regulated, absolutely, but the psychological act of selling one's body is not different here.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
That is a property of a girlfriend but not the only property of a girlfriend.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money: New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years but are unaccountable to outside oversight.
The New York Times has an expose on how ultra-orthodox Jews in NYC are funneling billions in public money for use in their yeshivas. Students are barely taught how to read and write in English (as an example, one couldn't spell "America") and the state requirements are effectively optional or used as a study hall.
The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.
Only nine schools in the state had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level in 2019, the last year for which full data was available. All of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.
The boys’ schools cram in secular studies only after a full day of religious lessons. Most offer reading and math just four days a week, often for 90 minutes a day, and only for children between the ages of 8 and 12. Some discourage further secular study at home. “No English books whatsoever,” one school’s rule book warns.
Their leaders, the grand rabbis, wield significant power, and breaking the rules they set can carry serious consequences. That point was underscored by the more than 50 current Hasidic community members who spoke to The Times only on condition of anonymity, for fear of being exiled and barred from seeing family and friends.
Another former teacher provided hundreds of pages of work sheets from the past five years that showed that 12-year-olds — in their last year of English instruction — could not spell words like “cold” and “America.”
Tax dollars are not supposed to go toward religious education. But public agencies pay private schools to comply with government mandates and manage social services. Hasidic boys’ yeshivas, like other private schools, access dozens of such programs, collecting money that subsidizes their theological curriculum. The Times identified dozens of federal, state and local programs and analyzed how much they have given to yeshivas, looking most closely at the last year before the pandemic. The analysis showed that New York’s Hasidic boys’ schools received more than $375 million from the government in that period [...] they appear to get more government funding on average than other private schools in the state, including other religious schools, the analysis found. The city voucher program that helps low-income families pay for child care now sends nearly a third of its total assistance to Hasidic neighborhoods
This might come as a shock to those who have no experience with Williamsburg, Monroe, Kiryas Joel, or Monsey in the NY tristate area. There is what can be described as a Hasidic Jewish mafia, that violates norms and laws to obtain hegemony, while siphoning resources from the surrounding communities. Towns are genuinely afraid of encroachment by the Hasids, because they move in en masse and quickly obtain town leadership positions and school board positions. They usually vote to reduce all extra funding, like extra-curricular funding for public schools, because their children only attend yeshivas. They label their homes as temples and don't legally marry their wives to reduce their taxes. Towns in subjected areas will purposely reduce sidewalks or veto funding for sidewalks in order to deter Hasids from moving in. Usually they will have a non-Hasidic lawyers go door to door asking to buy property with cash. They are involved in coordinated welfare schemes yet somehow get sweetheart plea deals of no jail time. Kiryas Joel was once the poorest place in all of America, and yet they have their own private security force that follows non-Hasids in SUVs if you drive through their estates, they have an enormous temple and their own state-funded maternity clinic on site and are able to obtain a unique 30 million dollar water aqueduct project.
I'm happy that the NYT is doing solid journalism on this. I kind of gripe with portraying the young as victims and bringing up the Holocaust, but it is what it is. In my mind, the Hasidic power structure is a legitimate problem that needs to be made sense of, because if there is all this corruption at just 200k members, well, in 60 years it will be 1,600,000. They will comprise a majority of America's Jewish community in a few decades.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
I think if non-Hasids tried to copy their playbook, the government would crush them, using every trick in the book, including mass media propaganda campaigns. The Hasids are special because they are run like a fascist micro-nation, yet they have the appearance of the caricature victim of fascism, and play off of religious protections. It's a confluence of factors that allow the Hasids to occupy their uniquely powerful position. I cannot imagine Christians getting away with anything like this, for instance, and it's remarkable that for all the discussion on fascism and religious extremist, no one is overly concerned with a religiously extremist fascist micro-nation in the Big Apple. The Amish, which is the closest Christian equivalent I can think of, do not utilize as much social resources as the Hasids, and are also in the middle of nowhere.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
A single article for an issue that has been blazing for much more than a decade, does not qualify as "overly concerned", when the article focuses on the victimhood of the defecting group. The actual instantiation of a religiously extremist fascist micro-nation does not command one one-thousandth of the attention in mass media as would be expected. The article is largely free from language implication religious extremism and fascism. This is a far cry from the dramatizations of "Christian nationalism" that Biden et al want you to be concerned about.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
They prefer walkable neighborhoods and on the Sabbath they can’t drive. They can be driven on the Sabbath but they need someone out of the community to do the driving, so it’s a hassle to move into a town with no sidewalks.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
I have never heard of this. Honestly this deserves its own post or an email to the NYT. Very alarming.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
True, and I do hope the NYT continues this investigative path. All props to the NYT for this great piece.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
I’m thinking the self defense claim is boosted by activist owners who want to bolster support for gun ownership on a survey. There is simply no chance that 44% of black gun owners have used their gun in self defense.
However I see no reason to lie about AR ownership, and this makes me happy because AR ownership is double-plus bad in the eyes of gun restrictionists. So, all those AR owners are making a statement 100% opposed to the propaganda about the AR, just by continuing to own them.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Audiences appear 2 to want shows with characters that look like them. If this is true, which data suggests, then the inclusion of diverse characters necessarily makes shows less enjoyable for the majority. There are obvious exceptions to this rule like Squid Game, which many people found enjoyable despite featuring mostly mono-ethnic protagonists (and stereotypical, poorly written white villains who appear for ~20 minutes). There’s also K-Dramas, which many white women adore.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
What's the most fun way to play chess? I don't want to play to get better, I want to play for fun. Trying to get better strikes me as a waste of time, unless of course you have fun getting better.
I'm surprised there's no website that models itself after the coffeehouses of old. Pre-computer chess was deeply social, or so I imagine. Imagine chess with lobbies like you find in COD or Counterstrike. Would be a blast, maybe it exists and I can't find it.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
The data suggests that diverse castings reduce majority audience viewership, whether you’re looking at the bachelorette or WWE vs AEW. Although I can’t find data on which shows have the highest percent white viewership, my guess is that it would be modern family and Big Bang theory. Most watched by black audience is Tyler Perry’s tv show at 88% Black, likely a huge chunk of the 12% are spouses
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Edge case 1 implicates retributive versus rehabilitative philosophies of justice. A person can believe the proper course for obtaining the most social good is “fuck em” rather than persuasion, if they hold a retributivist philosophy regarding social infractions. Punishing defectors involves dispensing justice, involving just desert claims, etc. For instance, if someone killed an innocent woman, many would want that person executed even if you show them a detailed spreadsheet proving that he can be rehabilitated and increase sum total good marginally via tax revenue. I agree, and while the philosophical underpinnings are weak (compared to the unique but similar deterence theories of execution), I think it boils down to that I instinctually feel good as a biological organism knowing that the person has been executed, and this biological emotion is valuable in itself, as I’m sure it’s valuable to the crows that kill defecting crows and leave their carcass out for all to see.
Sort of a tangent. But my point is that they could still want to improve society, they just believe that the defecting out-group is so defective that punishing them is a good in itself for retribution’s sake.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
jumbled thoughts
-
Music is strongest for the young, as you get older its emotional strength reduces, just as other emotions reduce in potency.
-
Music is in some sense charged from everyday experience and auditory phenomena. Its patterns are an arrangement of real life phenomena. As you listen to more music without re-experiencing its charging antecedents, the music will refer to fewer emotionally charged experiences.
-
As you listen to a song more and more, it’s surprise reduces, and emotional potency is associated with surprise.
-
Your tastes may have just evolved. I find a lot of music to be garbage that I enjoyed in my teens, not because I can’t see its allure, but the allure is toward an emotional state that I no longer consider beneficial. At the same time, I experience intense emotions listening to religious music.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
In the US, the white male suicide rate has increased, as has the addiction rate. Certain populations have lower suicide rates and usually these populations hold to older conceptions of masculinity, for instance Black American males have lower suicide rate and significantly higher rates of esteem (as well as narcissism). The male suicide rate in a place like Germany is complicated by Turkish and other Muslim groups having a lower suicide rate. Turks and migrants in Germany have a significantly lower participation in the economy, migrants especially but even Turks who have been in Germany for decades have a 3x higher unemployment rate. The complaint i hear is "why do the migrant men hang out on the street instead of working". Men are also less likely to talk about mental health, and therapy is female-coded so I don't think we can just look at UK referrals (it's essentially how many women talk to each other outside therapy).
Of course, in a world with increasingly easy distractions, I don't think suicide is even a good method for looking at whether "masculinity is in crisis". Many more of the hikkomori in Japan would have committed suicide 20 or 30 years ago. The rise in JBP and the ideas often talked about by Joe Rogan show widespread agreement among a large sample size that there are problems re: masculinity
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Tyler Durden is in the archetype of the Redditor (consuming and browsing and collecting, in Tyler's case Ikea magazines, vicarious enjoyment of life mediated through magazines), with a nice loft and stable career, but he felt unfulfilled from this. First he became addicted to the emotional catharses from feminine-coded support groups, which helped but lead to craving more and more. He found greater relief and enjoyment from participating in a risky thrill-seeking masculine community, which was fight club. There's nothing fatalistic about Tyler Durden until toward the middle-end, with villain Tyler Durden going overboard trying to destroy consumer-capitalist society (which I think is a silly plot tie in which isn't really why people are watching the movie or reading the book). Per the author, "bookstores were full of books like The Joy Luck Club and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and How to Make an American Quilt. These were all novels that presented a social model for women to be together. But there was no novel that presented a new social model for men to share their lives."
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
-
Martha’s Vineyard is one of the wealthier places in the US, why would you think they would be less capable of dealing with illegals than a small border town?
-
You can’t kidnap illegal immigrants in Florida to send elsewhere, but you can apprehend them at the border and send them places. They require a court case in Florida.
-
Surely the shelter size of Martha’s Vineyard is immaterial when it is 45 minutes from the mainland. Does the wealthiest part of Massachusetts not allocate for illegal immigrants?
-
No one was manipulated because they were offered a flight to Massachusetts and arrived there. You are upset that an illegal immigrant had to spend x hours in MV before MA proper picked them up on a boat. Or you’re upset that MV kept some overnight as their own publicity stunt. All in all, I care about the citizens whose quality of life is significantly worsened from illegals, not the illegals who had a momentary blip on their desired trip to MA and got to spend some time in beautiful MV.
-
They are not our countrymen by definition. YOU should treat our countrymen better instead of literal illegal border-invaders over your own fellow citizen.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
That’s incorrect. MV is a liberal stronghold where the wealthy Dem donors vacation. That’s why MV was chosen.
This is interesting. In my conversations, everyone I’ve talked to uses ethnicity to mean a sub-race delineated by common genes. But looking online in dictionaries and articles, the definition says something else: a social and cultural construct. This might be one of those instances where the definition in popular use is not the definition you find in dictionaries. At least I think this is true in Northeastern USA.
More options
Context Copy link