crushedoranges
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User ID: 111
crushedoranges
9mo ago
I recently (and by recently, I mean two weeks ago) started water fasting, and to displace the constant feelings of food cravings I started watching food-related videos, most notably: TLC's 600lb Life. It is extraordinarily trashy TV, but illuminating.
Before I describe the negative observations, here's the positive ones: A) All of the successful patients had a good attitude to begin with (they wanted to lose the weight, and were willing to commit) B) They followed the doctor's instructions (important.) C) They had friends and family who were supportive and were generally affable individuals to begin with (likeable!)
As a representative slice of the people who get really, really fat, they're about 5% of the population. The rest that follows is the generalizations of everyone else.
Now. For the hot takes:
THE OBESE ARE IGNORANT
Do you remember the much-maligned food pyramid from your health classes, the one that put way too many grain carbs at the bottom? At the very least, it puts vegetables on the second tier, and fast food at the very tippy top. And these people don't even know that. The very concept of CICO they stubbornly defy. They don't seem to know anything about basic nutrition that even a kid would know. And it's not like they're getting fat off good cuisine, either. (A fat gourmand with a diverse palette would be, at the very least, a good friend to have to ask for recommendations.) They're just eating fast-food slop paid by their welfare checks. And speaking of...
THE OBESE ARE ENTITLED
There is a certain childlike narcissism that accompanies each and every one of these patients, that demands the world bend around them: that they should be fed, bathed, and cared after without giving anything back in return. They frequently manipulate their family members and spouses to look after them, hand and foot, even their children. They're rude and throw tantrums, and their ignorance only strengthens their stubbornness. (They even disagree with their own doctor, a man they're self-selected to seek out!) They continue their bad eating habits - even in the hospital itself! - and have food snuck in for them to eat. This inevitably leads to...
THE OBESE ARE STUPID
In wrestling, where the tiers are segmented by weight class, in order to hit the weight limits, athletes often go to extraordinarily lengths to temporarily lose 5-10 pounds before weigh-in to get as much of an advantage as they can. In the show, in order to qualify for bariatric surgery, patients need to lose a certain amount of weight so that it is safe for them to go into surgery. Now, admittedly, going to 1200 calorie diet when you're used to 10k+ is pretty hard, but even going to 5,000 - twice the amount of a healthy adult - would guarantee weight loss without significant dietary changes, other than portions.
Do they do this? Of course not.
In fact, I'm pretty sure they don't even weigh themselves beforehand. It's always a surprise and a shock when - surprise of surprises - that eating the same amount as you did before would maintain it. (In fact, some of them even gained weight.) The tantrums, the lies, the threats - all are laid bare before the uncaring measure of the livestock scale.
Of course they don't get the surgery. And they're always left wondering why, the poor buggers.
So, in conclusion, I have come into belief that you should judge people for being obese. Not to say that all fat people are ignorant, entitled, and stupid. But they definitely have at least one of these traits, and should be avoided at all costs.
Since no one has posted yet, I figured that instead of culture war ephemera, we can indulge in a bit of a discussion on first principles.
The axioms of the liberal west (namely, private property and individual rights) have the emergent property of inequality, for the following reasons.
A) Man is possessed of inalienable rights (let's assume that Locke is correct.) of life, liberty, and private property.
B) He has the right to improve what nature provides (so as long as he does not impunge on the commons.) Therefore.
C) He has the freedom to enjoy the benefits of his good decisions, and endure his bad ones.
But...
A) Men are not born with equal talent and ability. Therefore
B) The choices they make with their capital are not equally wise. Over time...
C) Men are not born into equal prosperity and circumstance, compounding with the effects of A.
This statement seems trivially true. Everyone knows someone in their lives who makes smart decisions with their money and someone who makes dumb decisions with them. But the very notion that this over time will lead to a hierarchal and oligarchic character of their society is viscerally offensive to many. The reaction to this dilemma is the underlying problem of all modern political ideologies.
The communists see it as a bad thing. (Obviously.) They want a non-hierarchal society with no capitalists. But in this endeavor they have historically failed, creating new hierarchies and new party oligarchs with control over state industries. And it is not clear that collective bodies are better or wiser at allocating capital: real-world performance says no.
The fascists see it as a good thing. In this, they are at least consistent with their own ideology. But in terms of performance, it has also been a non-winner, inflicting great amounts of human misery on the species before collapsing under the strain of expansionist wars. Fully metabolizing the inequality of man doesn't seem to lead to good results either.
A canny reader may go, 'ah, but you haven't mentioned liberalism! are you an enlightened centrist?' I'm sorry to say, but no. Liberalism is strategically ambiguous: or, in other words, it pretends that the problem doesn't exist. By patching up the most obvious inequalities with welfare programs and other forms of redistributionism, the proponents of liberalism can carry on with the pretense of equality married to a free market system. But because they are ideologically restricted by private property and individual rights, they can only work on the margins, and never truly solve the problem of equality.
Perhaps if we lived in the boundaries of ethnic nation-states, it wouldn't be a problem, but we live in the age of bourgeoise republics, bohemian in character. What that means is that political equality is converging on economic equality, and vis versa. Beside the obvious assabiyah problems this creates, it also perpetuates the seed of fascism and communism by perpetuating the critique of the liberal society. The hypocrisy and self-contradiction creates a constant fear of revolution in its ruling classes, which only increases the hypocrisy until the liberals are too weak and enervated to present a proper opposition to their illiberal enemies.
Rather than blaming the evilness on illusory phantoms as certain explanatory narratives do (CRT, globalists, da joos) it seems clear that the notion of natural rights itself is the cause of it all. Nature is many things, but it is not equal. What is the solution, then? Do we change the natural condition of man and refine our species successor, or do we return to obedience to supernatural emanations of God?
I don't know. I like natural rights. I like having them. But I can't justify keeping them.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Scott says something dumb about ordo amoris
Even knowing what he is talking about and his moral principles behind saying such a thing, he comes off as dumb. I've never agreed with Scott with everything (particularly his polyamorist leanings) but I think that this is the final breaking with SSC and myself. Rationalism is a train that I've ridden for ten years, and now I am finally getting off. Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism' is stupid and is ultimately a suicidal worldview: or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.
Seventy years pro-life activists have called their opponents baby-killers and it did not swerve their opposition's resolve by one inch.
Conservatives, particularly MAGA conservatives, must harden their hearts as such. In the coming months and years, there will be no end to the wailing. They will beg you in the name that all that is decent and humane to give them the one exception and save many lives. The rationalist crowd will come to you with spreadsheets and lives per dollar and give logical arguments to save lives. You will be constantly bombarded with propaganda designed to psyop you to support the return of the old status quo.
Put on your biggest smile and say no. That's your cross to bear. Resist the temptation to give in, and to be seen as 'one of the good ones'. Mercy and compassion are the luxuries of the victor, and you have not won yet. This is but the first of many battles in a long war. If your opponents say that your proposals will cost millions of lives, say to them: "Billions." And do what you intended to do, and do it so throughly and completely that it does not have to be done again. Embrace the virtue of Lycurgus and destroy what you must to save what you can.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
No man, no problem.
Here's my modest proposal: have homelessness be punishable by the death penalty.
The liberals will be outraged, but anyone who can't get a stranger to house them, even under the impending threat of death, is obviously an individual who has completely and utterly exhausted the patience of society and is committing a slow form of suicide. If they don't care about their own lives, then why should we?
Housing is expensive, and giving it to the most useless members of our society is counterproductive. Bullets are cheap.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Let me take the neutral ground and say that GamerGate wasn't the precipitating event, but it was pivotal insomuch as videogames were (and still are) a universal hobby of young men. And when confronted with the blunt and obvious truth of Noticing the blue-hairs ruin everything, one could either go down the trail of Noticing everything else or sticking your head in the sand and saying it's a good thing. The 4chan/Resetra divergence, the chud/woke speciation.
It was the universal radicalizing event of the generation, and even those who were normie enough to not care were inculcated with the memes (on both the left and right.) No one questions the cultural impact of music or movies. Video games as a medium are larger than both combined. At some point, video games transitioned from being influenced by political trends to making them. Comparing the financial success of chudgames vs wokegames has become a tribal sport.
Which is to say... if someone plays a piece of media for thousands of hours, having it consume every waking moment of their lives, of course it would effect their political values. New Atheism and BLM are dead and gone but people are still mad that they got rid of Tracer's ass wiggle. I think you're just disconnected with what young men back then and now consider important.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
I know this is a tangent to what you're really talking about, but I have to say something about crypto. In short, there is a very short list of people less trustworthy than the Argentine government: the people who advocate for cryptocurrency are amongst them. The sort of people who hold a morbid fascination with the misery and suffering of others to further the adoption of their internet funcoins in the off chance they can offload their bags onto desperate people is profoundly evil.
Crypto is not a good store of value, or a currency. And anyone who says that it is you should be very wary of.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
I mean, to be fair, no taxes on tips acknowledges a de facto reality: who reports their tips in their tax returns? Enforcement would be impossible. As a handout to Nevada, it makes sense politically.
Harris's proposed policies make Trump look like the king of austerity. Considering how spendthrift he is, that's an accomplishment.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Judith Butler is putting an unbounded demand for empathy as default and defining everything else as cruelty. You can't get it with me anymore. I can see the transparent attempt at manipulation. I didn't want to be a cruel person, but if I want anything for myself I have to be. Empathy requires reciprocal return. Why should I care for people who hate me and want to see me destroyed?
crushedoranges
12d ago
I'm sorry, this is where I break with libertarians. What exactly do you think gives courts and contracts their teeth? Violence and kidnapping. Or sovereignty, as it is more commonly known. A monopoly on violence.
Suppose me and a few hundred thousand people came together and formed a corporation with salaried employees with the duties of ruling over contractual disputes, dealing with petty crime, and all issues related to security, and everyone involved agreed to defer to this body in binding arbitration and forgo their right to banditry and warlordism.
That corporation is a state. Congratulations, you've recreated statism with extra steps.
Libertarians aren't prophets in the wilderness screaming about the injustice of collective violence. Yes, it is worth killing people and imprisoning people over. People for thousands of years have valued law and order over the Hobbsian war of all against all and people are greatly relieved to have left the tribal experience of feuds and wergild.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
At this point, I don't even think that there is a geopolitical goal in supporting Ukraine, but a reflexive conservatism regarding the liberal project. Putin violated the post-Cold War consensus, eroded the Liberal International Order, and he Must Be Punished (even if it would be against the national interest.) The Europeans had 25 years to keep peace on the continent and failed. They failed in the Yugoslav wars and they're failing in Ukraine now.
Even if you accept the claim that respecting the sovereignity and territorial integrity of states is an end in of itself, the time to do that was in 2008, with Georgia, and 2014, with Crimea. Or heck, 1998, with Kosovo. The Russians have never forgiven NATO for supporting a seperatist state within their sphereling, and is happy to pay them the wages of hypocrisy.
But even with all this, I am still pro-West, because Putin is not a realist actor, but a map-painter, who justifies atrocities with dusty history books. He's not pushing back against NATO's expansion in his sphere, but reclaiming historical clays. Motivations are important in geopolitics, and irrational actors shouldn't be tolerated.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
No, it wouldn't have, because the other SSRs wanted independence, and to keep them all in would have required a incredible amount of bloodshed that no Russian leader was capable or willing to do at the time. The Soviets were poor and backwards and would have fell ever further behind if they remained Communist. Think how poor Russians are now, and imagine them - even poorer - stuck with technologies from the 1970s: an international pariah from all the ethnics they'd have to messily put down with the army.
Could they have staggered along, like a North Korea or a Cuba? Maybe. But it would have destroyed the Russian people completely and utterly.
You misunderstand: it's not DEI for conservatives, but ensuring that there's at least one witch in every panel and body of importance. There doesn't need to be parity, or quotas, or anything like that. Just the minority report. If you don't consent to the witch, then you're not really in favor of academic freedom: you're a monoculture of our enemies that needs to be blown up and you certainly don't need tax dollars that are paid by witches. If even the smallest of token concessions are impossible to negotiate, it's time to start indiscriminately nuking civilian targets.
After all, it's Hogwarts: School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and not Harvard: School of Progcraft and Libbery.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
You flatter me. I have a sophist's love of rhetoric: but if politics is serious - if it is about human life - then it should be taken seriously. I find it less moral to equivocate, to pretend that there is a difference between 'save some lives' and 'save all'. Removing the room for argument is the only way to reduce the size of government otherwise you are merely a ratchet on Leviathan's appetite.
crushedoranges
5d ago
Let me demonstrate how irritating you're being.
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Sam Brinton."
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Anthony Weiner."
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Jasmine Crockett."
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask AOC."
You are not strawmanning. You are weakmanning. You are not giving your political opposition the benefit of the doubt. I have a whole list of leftist politicians, intellectuals, and academics that have said embarrassing and stupid things I'd like you to defend, if you'd care to play at this particular joust.
crushedoranges
2mo ago
Scott is a Democrat partisan now. He used to have useful insights, but then they got him, first by attacking his reputation, and then his Californian social circle has naturally limited the scope of acceptable opinions that he can hold. Of course he prefers to salvage institutions captured by the left. All of his friends live there.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
I've made my position clear in other posts quite recently, but the problem is that centralization is orders of magnitude more efficient than decentralized solutions, and technology increasingly pushes in favor of it. I've written some speculative science fiction on the matter. The larger the system, the more data it pushes, the more it can feed its machine learning algorithms. Giving up on the holy grail of machine learning just means that someone else will make a leaner and meaner finance transaction-bot, that will reduce fees to infinitesimal slivers and process a year's worth of financial transactions in an afternoon.
Given crypto's abysmally slow transaction speed (and the dubiousness of the solutions proposed to fix that) it's not competitive now, much less with whatever fintech comes from the next generation of money robots.
So long as crypto interacts with the conventional finance system, it will always be at a disadvantage. It is playing a game that it will always lose because the US dollar is backed by the world's hegemonic superpower and crypto is not. The fact that the majority of its current user base sees their hopes and fears rise and fall on its USD value will always make it less than it could potentially be.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
This is an unfair argument.
Take Kiwi Farms, for example. You could extend your argument you make, smugly saying: 'make your own payment processor, make your own DNS, make your own web-host.' The left extends controls over previously neutral institutions and you say 'why not make your own?' Why not make your own laws, your own bank, your own country? Your own autonomous sovereignty, right-wingers?
Imagine my face: it is a chiseled, manly expression, saying YES.
All culture war issues are essentially coup-complete ones now because of the left's influence over the government and the media. If you want to keep the globohomo out of your Battletech: you must first overthrow the US government.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
The fact that TracingWoodgrains doesn't fully come over to the right because of this and doggedly is determined to stay in the principled center makes me completely unsympathetic. So as far as I'm concerned, they're stuck between the icky chuds like me who know it's a problem but have aesthetically unpleasant views and the other kind of people who stick their heads in the sand in the face of overwhelming evidence. People who will bald-facedly lie even when you bring the smoldering gun, the receipt, and a signed confession are bad people.
And despite all of this... they are more aligned with the latter kind of people then the former.
I will make a prediction now: TW will still be hacking at this ten years from now, doing their enlightened centrist gig, making no progress. Because the liberals they are trying to convince don't really exist: they are trying to persuade a species of extinct men who could be swayed by reason and good faith.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
So as far as I can tell, Russia is losing this war, as it is almost a year later and they have failed to complete their objectives in forcing Ukraine back into their sphere of influence or secured territorial integrity. All observers assumed Russia would swiftly win this war, but their armies and industry are in such a shambles that they are unable to defeat the Ukrainians in the field and are reduced to terror bombing with artillery and missiles.
Against an inferior foe which they (according to Serge) have destroyed multiple times over. How could you not have great gains against a numerically and qualitatively inferior foe?
Does this sound like the strength of a great power to you?
The 'attritional strategy', so as far as I know, is a cope. There was no grand plan to grind the Ukranian resolve to fight through manpower and material because that would be planning for defeat, and even worse, planning for defeat against an inferior power. Now Russia is isolated and scraping the bottom of the barrel for allies while the entirety of the Western military-industrial complex is pumping every available resource into the country.
The Soviets, with their empire, couldn't match the American spend on military, much less all of NATO. How can the Russian Federation - a faded, declining power in comparison - hope to match a richer, larger version of the alliance? So as long as the Ukrainians want to fight, they will have the latest and greatest in NATO arms. The only hope for the Russians was to win early and decisively. If Serge's narrative is for a long war then there really is no hope of victory left - one that is worth throwing away the last of the Russian youth and prosperity.
crushedoranges
29d ago
If we decided immigration policy based on what aesthetically looked good to liberals, we'd have open borders.
I'm reminded of the meme of 'Top Twelve Images That Will Make You Go Fuck Having Borders And Laws', roughly paraphrased, with a picture of a crying brown crudely drawn in fake news article. If you give into emotional blackmail, then every illegal will cry and sob as they're yanked to the border. No one ever goes 'it's a fair cop, guv' and gamely goes back to South America with a cheeky, roguish grin. We're not playing cops and robbers. This is real life.
What you are getting now is the compromise between open borders and putting up guards on the Berlin Wall and ordering them to shoot to kill.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Jesus Christ. Zelenskyy, all you had to do was eat your humble pie and suck up to Trump for an hour or two. Macron and Starmer have been working day and night to coax him back. All for nothing!
crushedoranges
3mo ago
Look, I'm a supporter of free speech as much as anybody but I'm not going to run into the buzzsaw that is the Jewish lobby. People who have been calling my fellow travellers anti-semitic nazis for years - decades, even - suddenly need my help? I'm not a fan of the Jewish lobby in the current Trump administration but neither am I a fan of the pro-Palestinians. Perhaps conservatives would be more concerned about freedom of thought in the academia if there were any left in the university institutions. I gain nothing by standing on principle and lose nothing by standing out of the way. I don't need to take a side in this conflict: there are more than enough domestic windwills to shake a lance at.
I'd link to the XCKD comic about free speech and its consequences, but everyone here probably has seen it already.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
The woke live in the paradoxical confluence of complete confidence in the state's power to bring about their wishes while living in constant culture struggle against its enforcers. It's like being a sovereign citizen, but sometimes saying the right gibberish does make things happen. Just because in the West authority has become completely abstracted from force doesn't mean that the authority's power no longer requires it. The demos has great power that yet sleeps, yet.
If laws are passed that make people criminal, perhaps more people should be criminals: if you're the kind of person who wants to possess a gun you're already an enemy of the state: the bureaucracy just hasn't caught up with you yet.
Trump shot during rally.
The biggest news. The biggest! It literally just happened. I don't know what to say. Commentary beggars one's belief. I apologize for the brevity of this post, but the implications of it are mind-boggling. Political violence has escalated (perhaps, degenerated) into new levels of unforeseen disaster. What do you Americans think?
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