coffee_enjoyer
☕️
No bio...
User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
My favorite reply from a relative: “this is the first time I wish Trump leaned further right”. Comedy knows no political aisle
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
As the owner of Twitter Elon now does get to decide that, or at least influence it, which is why his propaganda edit has 77 million views.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Brahmins had power in India, And Kamala is Brahmin. Just from what I’ve read about the corporate world online, the stereotype of Indians (as opposed to East Asians) is that they are better at the social games which lead to promotions. Whereas East Asians historically had a test that guaranteed promotions, perhaps Indian culture relied more on social quid pro quo?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Are they going to try a George Floyd-like psyop to increase Democrat favorability like in 2020? They could do it from the perspective of Blacks, Indians, or Women. I can see something like a fraternity being falsely accused of raping an Indian woman, I can see Stop Asian Hate rearing its head again but the head being browner than before… I don’t know if bodycam footage of a black criminal will be as persuasive as it was in 2020. In New Jersey we had anonymous flyers show up that were anti-Indian but likely issued by Indians, maybe something like that will happen. So many different vantage points.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
There are many studies on it, not one. I’ll have to dig up the one I am referring to.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
I’ve read of the greatest predictors of criminality is having a sustained abnormally low heart rate during a stress-inducing task. If this is the case you may be able to ameliorate a chunk of criminality with anxiogenic substances (caffeine)
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Did anyone do that in 2016-2019? I don’t recall a tech leader publicly showing that they are on Trump’s side then.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
“Old and tired easily” describes Winston Churchill taking naps but executing his job well. It doesn’t describe Joe Biden, who is clearly far from the cognitive functioning of previous years, forgetting the names of his own appointees, barely able to walk on his own undirected.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Under normal conditions the President disagrees with and fires cabinet appointees. Bush disagreed with Rumsfeld in 2006, replacing him; Obama fired Chuck Hagel; Trump forced Sessions and Tillerson to resign.
Biden is a unique case of someone who is clearly cognitively out of it, who cannot reasonably disagee with his appointees, and is likely completely controlled by them.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Why is there no attention or reporting on the shadow executive branch? If Biden is mentally checked out, then the country is currently run by his most important appointments. These appointments are influencing Biden to stay in the race, and they have not made public statements against him or performed costly signals of resignation. Right now Biden’s most influential puppeteers are —
-
Anthony Blinken, Department of State
-
Jeff Zients, Chief of Staff
-
Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense
-
Janet Yellen, treasury
-
Alejandro Mayorkas, Homeland Security
I remember thinking to myself four years ago, “who really controls Biden? Is it the DNC leadership or is it his advisors?” The present situation tells us that it’s his advisors who have the controlling share in the Biden Admin. But why is no one talking about this? It seems like a waste of time to event care about the temporarily vivified corpse of Joe. Shouldn’t we be directing all of our attention and questions to the advisors controlling him?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Fixed. Just a silly link from a recent comedy episode (the Shane Gillis Trump impersonation is insane, though)
Tech workers can be very wealthy and dress like shit. Poor people can be very poor but look wealthy, either through knockoffs or through ill-advised purchases. While physical attire isn’t being judged, the workers are probably checking your social cues to gauge level of wealth. You can tell the difference between a tech worker and a hillbilly even if they both wear cargo shorts.
don't use dress, appearance, and presentation as a basic credit check kind of way
at the commercial mall. Various subcultures still judge your appearance. From youth subcultures to finance. People dress better at industry conferences and on instagram. The mall is just no longer a place where any social encounter of value transpires. It’s a dead third space.
in theory be arrested or sued in small claims but in practice I've never even heard of such a thing
This does happen. Maybe not in San Francisco or NYC I guess, but elsewhere the restaurant will send the video of your car to the police who will charge you.
indicates high trust
I think it indicates a breakdown in predictable attire signaling. There’s just tons of wealthy people who don’t dress up. They can be billionaires and they won’t dress up. There can be people who dress up but waste the attendant’s time. And then of course there’s the prospect that the wealthy person you’ve turned away for looking poor goes to the news or your manager or Twitter. I wouldn’t say it indicates high trust, but alienation from a useful common language of socioeconomic signaling.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
That is not the same thing for a variety of reasons. No one was applauding the attempt; Pelosi is not equivalent to a leading presidential candidate; the gay lover conspiracy was based on the men apparently knowing knowing each other and standing side by side when police arrived
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Super informative!
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
If you wanted to make a foldable keyboard which merely stored keystrokes (the text you type) and nothing more, with no screen attached, in other words genuinely just a foldable keyboard, how thin could you make this? Could you make it so thin that it folds in your pocket?
Is this that poster who makes ambiguous posts related to white nationalism and we can’t tell what his motivation is, and then they delete their account? Why don’t you just plainly state your motivation. Then people will reply at length and in good faith. No, you didn’t go from making a teary-eyed post about your parents to reading an Amren article. I genuinely can’t tell in which direction you are trying to persuade people. If you’re trying to shill people into reading Amren there are better ways; if you are trying to argue against white nationalism, why don’t you do that without the subterfuge and fibbing? If you are some activist or whatever who hates where nationalism you can just post that and be honest, that would be an acceptable post and then there could be a debate.
Your sources do not say what you think they say. What you call “path to citizenship” actually says “path for some illegal immigrants”. (Well yeah, did he graduate from MIT or something?). Your anti-immigration point mixes up legal and illegal migration, and the increase is anti-legal migration is complex and multifaceted. Being sympathetic to illegal immigrants is totally irrelevant to any policy, you can be sympathetic to those who must be punished because justice demands it. Then you ignore compounded demographic change when you mention the “low” level of illegal migration.
In practice, I just don't think most Americans want to separate from their neighbors and friends to create a white ethnostate
The more serious question is whether a reasonable white American who is fully informed on the matter would agree with such a proposal. If you show a reasonable white American (1) global demographic trends, (2) the views of their ancestors, (3) crime data, (4) genetic differences, what would they say then? The unique problem today is that if trends continue, white people will simply die out as a population with any global influence. If you tell a white person that only white people are going to be replaced in the countries they founded, whereas Africa remains African and Asia remains Asian, what would the say? They have a strong evolutionary instinct as a mammal to not want their unique genetic group to be replaced by foreigners. That’s a primitively persuasive political argument, we can literally imagine Hunter Gatherers being motivated by the same concern. At an evolutionary level, knowing that your group is going to be replaced saps motivation to do anything. There is no longer a reason to live or build anything permanent or useful, knowing that it will be handed over to other groups and your own progeny will be replaced.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Checking out the front page of various news sites, it’s noteworthy that the headlines deny Trump the honor of being grazed by a bullet or having survived a clear assassination attempt.
-
NYT: “Trump safe after shooting at rally”; “One spectator is dead after chaos at event in Pennsylvania”
-
CNN: “Trump shooting being investigated as assassination attempt”;
-
MSNBC: “Trump safe after shots fired at Pennsylvania rally”
-
FoxNews: “Trump rally shooter was killed by secret service counter sniper team, source says”
-
Googling Trump and finding first headline: “Trump safe after being rushed off rally stage when shots fired; gunman and audience member dead”
What’s up with this? The headline is clearly, “Trump survives assassination attempt”, the vastly more important subject of the event. I would write, “Bullet pierces Trump’s ear in failed assassination attempt”, because this includes the important information of the bullet’s proximity. The clear, plainly visible assassination attempt is 100x more important than that a shooting merely transpired at an event in Pennsylvania. This is also the most attention-grabbing title, so the news has an incentive to report this way. The bias is boundless…
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Trump raising his fist in the air and speaking to the crowd after being shot through the ear with a bullet is a genuinely legendary moment in American history, however you feel about him.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Anyone know of a list of words by their population-level familiarity? For instance, % Americans who know what a rollercoaster is, a snowshoe, a thermos.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
If studies found that adults were making continually poorer decisions year after year, and that by 2030 half of all adults chronically made poor decisions, and this was ever-increasing, then I would look for non-volitional factors at play. Lead poisoning? Something involving early life? Something involving complex social-environmental reinforcement mechanisms? That’s what I would begin to look at. Do Americans today lack willpower relative to Americans in 1980 or did other things change? You could have bought lots of pastries and sugar and candy as early as the 1920s, when few were obese. Milk was cheap and highly caloric, alcohol plentiful.
Hunger is different from a typical rational decision. When people are very hungry they will resort to cannibalism and murder, which proves this. Alright, so somewhere between “quite famished” and “eating my crewmate” we may have the polyphagia of the obese. I agree with your (1) and (2), my disagreement is: (A) the problem stems from how their body non-willfully reacts to the cues of food, with enhanced hunger and decreased inhibitory control, versus (B) they really ought to want to be skinny more. We already have evidence of (A) in other cases, like certain drug treatments reliably increasing appetite and increasing weight gain despite not affecting their willpower.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
If willpower as a behavioral control mechanism can apply to very sophisticated longterm social goals (like running Amazon, being George Foreman) then we should expect that it would be applied where the costs and benefits are especially salient, your weight. Their ability to control their will should apply to food, even if that is a “skill” that must be practiced. Musk and Foreman are good at practicing skills, right? And common sense tells us they have noticed their obesity. Or how about the recent photo of Bronze Age Pervert, the one who praises self control and a beautiful body? Yet all these people are fat. This needs to be explained and not “it’s Just So stories all the way down”ed.
There is also no experience that will reliably make people honest […]
I disagree with that. I think social environment and social learning can improve upon that
Keeping yourself away from drugs and slot machines is also function of willpower
Sure. We should also imprison for life the satanists who make money off of online phone-based gambling. Then send their children and grandchildren to a remote island. Where they can —
consistently eat less
And therein lies the 250kcal BBQ dry rub. Yes, they eat. Why are they compelled to eat more than their expenditure when others are not?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
The bulk of fat people do not want to be fat. Being fat is a #1 deterrent in a relationship, it reduces respect between peers, it harms health and reduces activity levels. And this is well-known. So the willpower theory doesn’t make sense in light of just how many fat people there are who otherwise practice willpower throughout their life.
temporarily restricting your caloric intake does not permanently change your weight. This is well known
Implying willpower, it would. It’s a 30-day intensive practice of delaying gratification according to an external timeline with serious feedback. That’s practice. So we can deduct another point off the scale of willpower theory. At a population level, a month of serious willpower practice every year does not affect weight. But we should expect it would, given that most fat people do want to lose weight, and they just practiced that skill for a month.
Permanent weight loss requires permanently changing your CICO equation
Fat people are aware that they need to eat less to lose weight. This cannot be accomplished for the reason we are trying to determine.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
If someone has capable willpower in many areas of life but still finds himself fat then we should consider whether being fat is mostly unrelated to willpower. They have excellent willpower in many domains but not in this one. So either we are now alleging domain-specific willpower, or the concept of willpower is nonsensical altogether. If there is domain-specific willpower regarding exercise, why are former military service members fat? If there is domain-specific willpower regarding dieting, then why is it that the 30-day yearly Ramadan fast does not result in sustained weight loss?
So neither intensive physical regimens nor intensive fasting regimens affect weight loss in large scale populations. We are left with motivation, but as I’ve written, it doesn’t appear that there is any experience an obese human can have that will reliably result in weight loss, given just how many bad experiences they have. Now you note —
Shame
but fat people are already shamed explicitly and implicitly. They are shamed more today implicitly than in the past, with social media giving them a peer ranking of their popularity and male interest where it is plainly obvious that their weight is a deciding factor. If you are fat in school you will get comments. Re: China, China’s obesity is increasing. But Chinese Americans also have genetically lower obesity rates.
perhaps the best way to incentivize people to be a healthy weight is to shame them for being fat
Well it’s very important to determine whether obesity is a generally volitional health state before we launch our campaign to shame half the population. That’s why this topic is important actually. If the willpower theory is unevidenced then we want to focus our efforts somewhere else — not on hating fat people but perhaps hating the ultrawealthy who sell poison in stores. Perhaps it is the department of education for making schools too sedentary. Perhaps it is neighborhood designers. Perhaps it is feminism. Perhaps these are damned and the fats are the victims?
Apart from microbiome, some other hypotheses I wonder about are —
-
Poor or insufficient breastfeeding, already associated with obesity
-
accidentally reinforcement of food at an early age through conversation, snacking, social / comfort associations
-
the de-reinforcement of physical activity due to a loss in communal dancing, physical play in kids, and destinations which can only be reached by long walks
-
A divine curse placed on our stock because of the way we treat livestock, taking the form of metabolic and DNA changes we aren’t familiar with yet
that doesn't change the fundamental question, which is "is [willpower]>[forces against]".
It does in the sense that I am alleging “forces against” are of exclusive importance and “willpower” is of negligible importance (on a population scale). We can measure the former but I don’t know any attempt to measure the latter. Do we see that fat people with similar intelligences and backgrounds perform worse on typical willpower tasks? I don’t recall reading this. It would be a big finding if so.
If willpower can be summed up as anything which is in our control, frankly it’s the felt salience of death and the patient hope in deliverance from that death. That’s the experience of the morbidly obese, though. Every trip to doctor is memento mori along with a hopeful plan and a page about resources to help them. So… what exactly are we talking about when we talk about willpower, if it doesn’t spring out of such experiences? At this point we are now talking about such an internal source of willpower that the most serious real life experiences don’t result in it, I do feel we are just impugning the souls of these people at this point. Like: no brush with death can save them, no hopeful lecture can save them, no inspiring figure can save tnem — they are damned. I am not comfortable saying that. Are we saying that these morbidly obese people have never cried tears of desire for salvation and at the worst case scenario attempted to kill themselves out of shame? How is that not a “highly motivated” state of willpower?
Meanwhile in my own personal experiences, here I am with the willpower of a sloth, but I have never been overweight — my body wants to fidget and pace frequently. It is non-volitional. After making my parent comment I went and got a burger and fries after fasting in the morning because I wasn’t hungry. Willpower doesn’t factor in at all here, just “forces out of my control”. What caused my body to like movement and not like eating frequently? An early life experience, something in my microbiome, genes? It’s definitely not willpower.
That was quick. For posterity’s sake: theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/22/biden-sonya-massey-police-killing-video + https://www.wcia.com/news/sonya-massey-should-be-alive-today-president-biden-speaks-out-on-death-of-springfield-woman-killed-by-deputy/amp/
More options
Context Copy link