coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Congrats. Any reason you decided to teach him to nurse rather than to be a doctor?
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
It's the same sort of philosophy employed by Asian tiger moms and the band director from the movie "Whiplash". Never say good job.
The tiger-mom kid who was a violin virtuoso wound up quitting the instrument because of the pressure, which is one argument against a Whiplash-style approach.
Even their top fact check is unadulterated propaganda. “ I think our country right now is in the most dangerous position it’s ever been in” is a statement Trump ties to a plausible future war, as is clear from his speech. A war with China or a Middle Eastern war will affect the economy negatively. NPR ignores this.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
I saw something today from a museum’s instagram page: “landscape painting is inherently violently because it depicts scenes of colonial possession…” these people just suck. The breakdancing Olympian from Australia is symbolic of this: they suck at what they do, they can’t compete, but in their hubris they need to find superiority somehow. And they do it through ideology and tearing down others — especially the paternal ideal that they can’t live up to
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Some mennonites do.
The effectiveness of Kiryas Joel is in its extreme shunning of outsiders, its top-down centralized hierarchy which works extrajudicially, and its extreme ingroup-centrism. No one would want to move in Kiryas Joel because as a gentile you will not have access to any of their communal wealth: the library is in Yiddish and Hebrew, the parties are religion-centered, the schools are all private, the security is private. No one will talk to you. The Hasidic members all know not to “let the world in” and this is enforced through shunning. It was maybe in Lakewood or Kiryas Joel, I forgot which, where a rival teacher set up shot and then had his house burned down. The person who attempted to kill him this way got a sweetheart thanks to Hasidic lobbying. That’s a totally extrajudicial way of enforcing communal norms. And the schools enforce ingroup centrism and hierarchy through the texts and stories. And of course there is tax corruption and the wealthy members subsidize the lives of the poor members.
For Christians to imitate this requires a lot just to get going
In Islam and Hasidim, women can’t sing in public to others. This to me is the real misogyny. Misogyny isn’t telling women to fulfill their biological duty, misogyny is restricting them from fulfilling it. Singing is a biological duty, it is social and sexual expression. This could have something to do with the attacks as an Ariana Grande concert was also targeted.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
The British upper class are Saxon and Norman, who violently invaded the isles and won through conquest. If you’re implying that the brown migrants to the UK are invaders, then just allow for mutual combat.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
The point may be to simply give the person anxiety and stress. This tactic was used by East German and Soviet secret police to inflict psychological harm on targets. They would also secretly enter their apartments and move things around in noticeable ways.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
“Weird” is a word that can completely alienate you from polite social company in one’s youth, and youth was formative for every living adult. When you are considering inviting someone to a party, you would rather pick the whore than the weirdo.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Re: 2, I think there’s a difference between the official DNC strategy of using pure fiction for the purpose of shaming, and a random Republican or Motte-commentator saying something. These seem vastly different to me. Vance, in his VP candidacy speeches (let alone inaugural candidacy speech), did not attempt to slut-shame Kamala. Kamala exchanging sexual favor for political appointment is at least rooted in a real, admitted event in her past involving a 30-year age gap and cushy appointments. Vance’s story is genuine fiction.
Re: 3, I don’t think it is lowstakes at all. A good way to gauge the effectiveness of a political story is whether the story would damage the reputation of someone in a high school. If you had the reputation of “guy who fucked a couch”, would your reputation be damaged? Absolutely. Humans respond very primitively to sexually-shameful stories. The Reddit propaganda machine found this story to be the most important thing to astroturf to the top of the website, and I think this is strong evidence of its persuasive potency. Or consider, if you are a woman at work and your reputation is ”doll dildo Kamala”, because you wrote about using a doll as a dildo and this was a top story when searching your name, would you be hired at a corporate job and respected by peers? Certainly less so, even though it is just an innocuous moment from your youth.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
the Elite Human Capital […] was simply never going to be outmaneuvered by a bunch of fat, drunk, working class louts
Counterpoint: didn’t the IRA cause something to the tune of one billion in damage in a single event? In the middle of London? And that led directly to negotiations. So there’s a history of this happening, although obviously the context and populations are different today.
I still have no idea how serious these protests have been because so much online is junk — is there some authoritative breakdown floating around?
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
The original assertion specified he had intercourse with “an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions”. Extraneous details that we consider difficult to imagine someone making up work to make a story more believable. If Republicans want to humiliate as well as Democrats, the story must contain all necessary elements of a believable, mnemonically sticky story.
Are Republicans shamelessly sexually-humiliating their opponents enough to win this election?
I’ve long held the belief that the opposite of slut-shaming is incel-shaming. A woman's reputation is damaged if she sleeps around, but a man's reputation is damaged if he is deemed a weird incel who can’t get laid. Recently, the Democrats launched a “weird incel" attacking strategy against JD Vance. Tim Walz alluded to a fabricated story about JD Vance fucking a couch in his first speech as VP. This is wholly fabricated: the origin is a twitter user who made up a paragraph from Vance's book, something easily checked. But the meme was astroturfed regardless, and Walz shamelessly referenced it in his first speech. Last night, 5 of the top 10 default posts on Reddit’s /r/All were references to Waltz’s remark.
The strategy is in line with the Democrat push to label Trump “weird”. But it actually seems to cross a line. It is bullying in an especially purified form. It’s the sort of thing you would hear in a middle school, where a bully ostracizes a student by making up a story wholecloth and having his friends repeat it. The bully knows the accusation is false, but the point is to say it confidently and shamelessly where others can hear it and join the ostracizion to protect their reputation. There’s talk about Trump being a “bully”, but nothing he has said has come close to the shameless slander against Vance. Calling Hillary “crooked” is par for the course of political messaging and doesn’t actually impact her reputation. Making fun of McCain for being captured as a PoW also doesn’t really affect McCain’s reputation, and if anything harms Trump’s. Trump usually exaggerates something true, but the attack against Vance is wholly false in origin.
I checked in on the incels over at 4chan to see what were saying about this. And I actually found an insightful analysis:
You can make up literally any random accusation and if enough people in the group either don't like you or just don't want to be left out, they will join in the accusation/mockery no matter how baseless the claim. It only serves to benefit them by being part of the in-group, and obviously feels good to mock someone you dislike or don't care about. You can see this in the democrat "weird" campaign or the "JD Vance fucked a couch" meme. It doesn't matter how juvenile or immaterial the accusation is. It degrades and humiliates the enemy. This effect is particularly common among women and feminine men where it pertains to humiliating enemy men sexually. This wouldn't really matter if it didn't have realized consequences in how people vote or otherwise express their desires and opinions. There are people out there that will actually change their vote or their speech because they don't want to be perceived as "weird' or "creepy", which is the whole point of this type of warfare.
It can also be noted that the attack against Vance has an element of sexual harassment. What would our “cultural elites” (D) say if Republicans went all-in on a story about Kamala Harris violating the intern’s Oval Office laundry machine? Or that she used a priceless piece of White House memorabilia as a dildo without cleaning it off after? This would just be shameless sexual harassment, right? But so is the official DNC strategy against Vance. It’s harassment for the purpose of humiliating someone sexually to change voter perception via shame response.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Anyone have thoughts on the Olympics Last Supper controversy?
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Harris is not Black because she is from the Jamaican slave-owning upper strata. She has nothing in common with the American Black experience which her father has made clear in his writings. When Kamala tried to insinuate that she knows about marijuana because she is Jamaican, her father publicly wrote —
My dear departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics. Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty”
Harris was raised by her mother anyway, who is as far from the median black American experience as you can be. When Trump says “she is not black” to the raucous applause of the largely black audience, he’s speaking (naturally) in a black way, where denying the blackness of a black person because of their personality is common.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
I love low-res, movement-based, high skill-ceiling PvP games. Something about them is so cozy.
I bet the gamer with the most global audience in the world is this CODM player with the tag br0ken. The poorest parts of the world have phones now, but maybe not a computer for Fortnite or League. Going through his comments is a trip: Brazil, Mexico, Philippines, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, Fiji, Sweden…
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
What’s going on in the UK? Foreigner born in UK stabbed three British children, then protests/violence is about all I know. Is the violence actually big or is it being hyped?
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Same happened to me, I just clicked “mark all read”
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
nothing about the affair makes any sense at all.
From the standpoint of “cui bono” it makes sense. Russians willingly swapped Skripal for their own spies. If Russia wants to do spy swaps in the future (like yesterday?) it is in their interest to not kill the spies the swap. It is especially not in their interest to attempt to kill them on foreign soil using neurotoxins that trace back to Russia and few other places, using known FSB members in the vicinity. This harms their relationship with Europe when their geopolitical interest is to cozy up with Germany. Would anyone with a 105iq really think that the UK wouldn’t test this guy for toxins when he dies (or suffers)? Now let’s consider that intelligence agencies are run by 140+ iq realpolitik wizards who are specifically trained in out-of-the-box thinking and a century long tradition of psychological operations. And then let’s factor for “cui bono”. For British intelligence, poisoning Skripal is beneficial in a few ways: it makes Russia off as a pariah state, hence reducing their influence in continental Europe and abroad, and it increases the public’s distaste for Russia, which may be important come an eventual and long-predicted conflict over Ukraine. There is little risk in ever getting caught because the area in which the poisoning occurred is surveilled heavily by British intelligence, and anyone who asks “false flag?” will be ridiculed, let alone given no platform in popular media.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Where I’m from there was a “circle game” where you make the OK symbol on your leg, and if your friend looks at it you get to punch them on the shoulder. Was played middle school through high school (in increasingly ironic ways). I wonder if that’s what this is: some dude knows his school buddy is watching so he pranks them with an old childhood game.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
I looked around online and it appears that San Francisco has no ordinance regarding residential picketing:
San Francisco and Oakland have not restricted residential demonstrations.
Some cities do, though.
Find who the wealthy funders are for the anti-policing politicians. Make tens of thousands of flyers and posters detailing their name and residence and schools of these individuals so that citizens can (legally) protest at those locations. Make sure to detail how much money they have. Then place them mostly in the areas where the homeless are located, providing directions from that location to the locations associated with the donors. Perhaps offer to pay them to protest. Imagine dozens of homeless people protesting outside of a school funded by one of these donors, embarrassing their family name right where the students are picked up, all for a measly $80 a day. On social media, do something similar but attach the phone numbers of all associated companies, so that citizens can (legally) call these entities and express their dissatisfaction at the crime problem in SF. If all of this is done legally (as it must be) then it may be effective and inexpensive. On social media, you can also make an account like “donor spotted”, so that if the donors are at some fancy restaurant, you can wait outside and embarrass them (legally). Imagine if they are with an important client!
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
When I refer to shame the emotion, I'm referring to a sort of sharp painful valence that feels a bit like being stabbed
Perhaps this is shame at its strongest, but there must also be a smaller shame, right? I'm pretty sure smaller shame is just embarrassment. I don’t think embarrassment is typically coded as a "positive emotion". People want to flee being embarrassed. When they talk about their least favorite memories of the week, it will be memories of embarrassment. To me, someone is embarrassed if they leave the bathroom with toilet paper on the bottom of their shoe. Because of this experience, they will double-check their shoes next time, because the shame is mildly painful and memorable. If instead they left the bathroom and entered an important business meeting and embarrassed their team, that transforms into a more serious shame. Sometimes this is colloquially expressed as “being mortified”. This shame may lead them to double-check not just the bottom of their shoes but how they generally approach their appearance and conduct. The shame they feel is the salience that they have damaged their social identity. We can go even stronger: the strongest shame is something like a DUI resulting in a death. This should be an extreme amount of shame that ought to result in a traditional “prayer and fasting”: loss of appetite, no desire to give oneself pleasure, and a natural speaking out and expression of regret and self-hated. But even here, the shame is still instrumental: even a DUI homicide offender should not live in shame in perpetuity, but should have some weeks or months of it and then move on in a forgiven state.
I find the idea funny. Laughable. A vibrant euphoria that feels like a vibrating diaphragm. Then the next thing that happens is I start contemplating what the effects of shouting would be and whether the tradeoffs would be justified in the specific scenario.
Surely this is not an efficient and adapted mindset? This means that if you were bored and wanted a laugh, you would consider ruining the vibe of the classroom. And then you have to do a bunch of mental processes to weigh whether your laugh is worth the negatives. Shame is extremely beneficial in place of this cognitive operation because it immediately induces a social conformity that doesn’t require cognitive operations. Now that’s not always good — sometimes we want to override instinctive shame — but where manners are concerned and where young people are concerned it’s great because it saves our cognitive energy. Imagine if in every social context you had to manually weigh the costs and benefits: do I cut in line here? Do I insult a friend there? Etc. If we have experienced shame before then we know not to do these things without abstract cognition.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
I can’t imagine any scenario of social negative evaluation which does not come with shame, so in my interpretation shame is literally the feeling of negative evaluation by others. It can occur at the micro scale, like if you were to eat a coworker’s lunch because of carelessness, you would feel shame commensurate with how annoying that is for your coworker. If someone didn’t feel shame at that, it would mean that they don’t actually care / haven’t sympathized in their coworker’s inconvenience. An absence of shame means an absence of responsiveness to negative social evaluation. In that sense it’s a necessary part of social learning.
every time I try to shame someone into changing they just get defensive or go into an avoidant spiral
If your friend were talking too loudly in a movie theater, and you told him, he would feel shame (small, briefly), and then correct his behavior, no? That isn’t shaming, but there’s a standard which induces shame. The shame doesn’t last long, but it is memorable so that we remember not to do that thing again. People who don’t feel shame are more liable to repeat social mistakes.
But re: spiraling, I think in some cases shame goes awry and people feel too much shame or feel shame at the wrong thing. Is that kind of what you are referring to? These can be complicated but I don’t know what kind of problem you’re talking about.
The shame emotion itself seems like it can jolt you into realizing you need to change if you didn't know, but it seems unfit for providing sustained motive force towards personal change
If you were to consider shouting out loud at a professor during a lecture, what would you feel? Shame and embarrassment (small shame). That’s actually what prevents you from even considering doing that, though. It’s an instinctive “this is wrong and it’s not even worth thinking about”. It’s not about “living in shame” or anything, which is a disorder. But if promiscuity as an action is negatively evaluated in a culture then it would lead to shame in the person doing it and hence would modify their behavior. An example of this is maybe: in some countries, the age of consent is 18, but in others it is 17. so a 21yo with a 17yo in one country would result in immense shame, but zero shame in a different country. The only difference is the negative evaluation of others, not anything objective.
Feasibility aside, what are the arguments against a culture of widespread euthanasia in the old? I find it an attractive option provided there’s the right cultural infrastructure. I’m thinking something like, “once you cease to be of value to others or once you experience too much pain, you willingly die, which is honorable.” By value to others, I mean that you can no longer relay to the young any worthwhile stories or wisdom, can no longer provide any emotional warmth to others, your redeeming personality traits have decayed, and you have too many costly medical problems. The way in which this occurs is also important. I find euthanasia by injection in a hospital disgusting and barbaric and aesthetically displeasing, whereas something like a speedy decapitation in a beautiful natural environment is preferable, and in fact how Samuraii died and similar to how animals are killed in kosher law.
I’m unpersuaded by the typical religious argument that life is so sacred we cannot take it. We do take it, all the time, in war and executions. I’m unpersuaded that this reduces the dignity of man. This increases the dignity of man, by giving him power over when he dies, and by serving as a reminder that life is about wellbeing and benefit rather than selfish clinging to the flesh and absurd quantitative metrics (“how long you live in days” is a silly metric). There is, with that said, an economic incentive to do this: the money that is spent keeping the old alive is transferred to the young, the living root of life, which has a compound benefit, increasing quality of life and education.
Scott’s fantastic who by very slow decay, and a recent experience involving a distant relative, is what truly motivated my thinking that our culture of death needs reform. Dying is a horrible experience for everyone who witnesses it. Dying itself is not the pain, watching the death slowly is the pain. The amount of psychological stress and pain and burden that my relatives experienced as a relative slowly died was significant and impossible to ignore. Were the death to have occurred one night in sleep, a huge amount of pain would have been avoided. But we can’t will ourselves to die peacefully in sleep. The best we can do is pick when we die, so that we die before we increase the sum total pain in ourselves and others.
I am considering this from the standpoint of “how I would like to die”, not “boo old people”, to be clear. Death is inevitable and mundane. Our hospital culture hyperfixates on continuing life for its own sake and on clinging to life, and this reifies the mistaken impression that personal death is a catastrophe. Were we to truly care about life, we would forget the old (who start to decay well before expiration) and instead focus on the young, the living root of life, and we would focus on increasing their health so that human life flourishes. That’s where life resides. Why take care of an old flower when you could nurture young seedlings? It’s the same life, it is just found in the young and not the old. So, when I imagine the most enjoyable way to die myself, it’s that it occurs right before the worst of age-decay sets in. I have an enjoyable weekend with loved ones, we celebrate living, and then they give me the Marie Antoinette treatment and everything is quite peaceful. It actually doesn’t appear to be stressful or anxious or sad at all, though (we should all hope) there are some loved ones present who will miss my presence.
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