erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
RE: The Watch Thread, I wear a Casio W800H. I picked it over the more iconic F91W because it tells you the date as well as the time, and it was only $10 more, which I figured was negligible amortized over the battery's 10-year lifespan. What does that say about me?
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
From "I Am A New Atheist, And I Repent":
One of my core beliefs was that humanity is better off without religion. Religion introduces error and dogma unnecessarily. It appropriates human’s need for community and diverts it for its own ends. It hijacks emotional drives to steer people into atrocities. In summary, it always siphons off value to preserve itself, provides nothing of value in the best case scenario, and in most cases actively degrades humanity.
One of the reasons I thought this is because I truely and deeply believed my generation’s Big Lie. That lie being that All People Are (Roughly) The Same. “All Men Are Created Equal” taken to the extreme. There were many simple, obvious facts of reality that I discovered in my 30s that genuinely shocked me, because I had so fully believed this Lie. It would be like a Christian expecting Jesus to take the wheel of their car when they let go, and being honestly, deeply shocked when the car crashes. I still think this Lie is Noble, and there is some value to it… but ultimately, like all lies, it is destructive. I plan to write more about this Lie and my relationship to it in a future post.
This is important, because *I* didn’t need religion. To me, it provided nothing of value. I understood morality and why other people matter. I found it important to understand the most accurate model of reality possible, unfettered by convenient falsehoods (haha, see previous paragraph). I was self-motivated, socially isolated, and highly Open/Novelty-seeking. Religion was simply a thing that was wrong, and that often served as a handicap.
Since Everyone Is (Roughly) The Same, this must be the case universally. Anyone who thought that religion was net-positive in any case was a victim of religious brainwashing. They’d been deluded, lied to, or violently suppressed, into clinging to humanity’s most destructive parasite. It was my duty to help them break free.
I was so, so very wrong.
It turns out people are different. Shockingly different, in some cases. There are large segments of the population that need what religion provides. Their psychology is vastly different from my own, and they cannot live without the sort of totalitarian guidance that religions provide.
I would not have believed this if someone told it to me, no matter how much supporting evidence they threw at me. Even six or seven years ago I wouldn’t have believed them. I would have to see people freed from religion, drown for years, and then finally create a new religion from whole cloth to supplant the old one, to believe this. I would have to see it with my own eyes, happening in real time.
Over the past few years I watched a new religion born. A secular religion, which doesn’t have the dead-easy failure mode of requiring belief in a sky-fairy. But, since it was created in America, with strong Christian roots, it has all the trappings of Christianity.
Original sin
Essentialism
Repentance and confession
Manichean good/evil dichotomy
Focus on martyrdom and victimhood
Salvation dispensed by the church and needing constant reaffirmation
Even worse, since it is a new religion that is being seized as a lifeline by people who’ve been spiritually drowning for over a decade, it is full of fiery zealots. All conflicts are recast as spiritual struggles focused around the original sin. Like the puritans, they can harbor no dissent in their midst. Everyone must be equally zealous and on their side, or they are on the side of evil. Any price is worth paying to save a soul from evil.
When the scales fell from my eyes and I finally realized what had happened, I felt true crushing failure. Not because I had failed in my objective. Tradition religion is less relevant than ever. The New Atheists won. But in winning, having not realized how different others are, we left a massive religion-vacuum in society. We laid the groundwork for a new religion. One that had been purged of the greatest weaknesses of traditional religions, and with a dense underbrush of religion-starved kindling to tear into.
Nobody cares about making the kids of the underclass all IQ 120 at minimum, because they're still going to live in crappy single-parent homes in crime-riddled shitholes and go to schools where metal detectors and armed security guards are needed because the little darlings shoot each other
No they won't. That's what an IQ of 120 means. "A ghetto/barrio/alternative name for low-class-hell-hole isn’t a physical location, its people." Poor areas are not awful because of tragic dirt; they are awful because they are filled with stupid, violent, impulsive people.
(A surprising amount of people don't seem to realize this; they talk about good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods as if rich people used their wealth to hog all the good real-state where shootings and robberies and rapes and so on don't happen, as if those were natural phenomenon like lighting bolts rather than something caused by the people who actually live in those neighborhoods; likewise, complains about disparities in funding, as if schools in rich areas were taking advantage of a gold mine they unfairly took over rather than taxing the economic surplus produced by superior human capital)
Education doesn't do shit because trying to teach algebra to a boy with an IQ of 85 is a waste of time. Increasing his IQ to ONE HUNDRED AND FUCKING TWENTY would be the biggest improvement in the human condition since the industrial revolution.
Even if they start materially poorer, you have eliminated all the dysfunction. College students also live in material poverty, but they have much better lives, because they are smart and hard-working and nonviolent. "If you take the exact same facilities and you fill them with inner city gang members, drug addicts, ex-convicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, and single mothers, you get a housing project."
And just like college students, after a while those 120 IQ kids will start accumulating capital and lifting themselves out of poverty. It's much easier to follow the Success Sequence when you have the intelligence of an undergrad.
Yes, they will still be below elite kids who got uplifted to an IQ of 140, but that's relative poverty, not absolute poverty. Caring about that is the politics of envy. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's." It's societal poison.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
The success sequence is not a tool for avoiding social isolation; it just averts poverty. Are you poor? If not, it did its job.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
In humans, good traits are correlated. Beautiful people tend to be smarter. Smarter people tend to be harder working. And so on. It would be amazing if selecting for high-IQ embryos did not also select for high-IQ correlates.
He had this absolutely mind-blowing ten-post sequence on gender, sex, etc. It was his best work until "Meditations on Moloch".
@Lepidus already mentioned Scott's redpilling stint in Haiti.
A few more, from #ThingsIWillRegretWriting: "Stuff", "Libya", and "I believe the correct term is 'straw individual'".
Finally, a personal favorite on school and teacher incentives.
The woke oppose each and every anti-criminal policy because they believe, correctly, that such measures will have a disparate impact on blacks. It's a doublethink situation similar to Dreher's Law Of Merited Impossibility, except instead of "it will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it" it's "blacks are not more criminal than average, and if you support any tough-on-crimes policy you are a racist because criminals are disproportionately black."
As Covfefe Anon says, "The Woke Are More Correct Than The Mainstream".
Every woman says "no". That's the most basic of shit tests. In order for a man to become romantically/sexually successful, he needs to learn to differentiate between a fake "no" and a real "no" and power through the former.
If people actually took the feminist line about how "no means no" seriously, nobody would ever have sex, because that is simply not how women work.
It's not exactly an invitation for sex. It's an invitation to move to an isolated place where sex might plausibly happen. It's the next step in escalating the flirting dance. By agreeing to go back to a man's room for coffee, a girl is not necessarily saying "I will have sex with you", but rather "I am open to the possibility of having sex with you if you play your cards right."
The coffee is just an excuse. It could just as easily be "do you want to come to my place to watch Netflix?" or "do you want to go back to my room to see my marble collection?" Conversely, nobody thinks that "do you want to grab a coffee at Starbucks?" is going to lead to public sex on the Starbucks bar. The move from a public space to a private space is the key.
It just has to be plausibly deniable so that the girl can tell herself (and her friends, and her family, and her boyfriend/husband...) that she really didn't mean to sleep with the guy, but it "just happened". It's a way to get past her anti-slut defense. Otherwise, there is too much common knowledge.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
From "The Fourth Meditation On Creepiness" by Scott Alexander:
Imagine two Soviet spies in the Cold War US who have to get in contact with one another. The KGB forgot to give them a silly code phrase like "the wombat feeds at midnight" so they've got to figure it out on their own. The Americans know these two spies are trying to get in contact, so if one were to just ask random people "Are you a Soviet spy?" the Americans could quickly guess that the asker was a spy and arrest him.
You are one of the two spies, and you spot someone who you're about 50% sure is your colleague. How do you confirm they are also a spy with the lowest possible risk of getting arrested?
I bet there's some fancy cryptographic solution here, but my intuitive strategy would be as follows:
Me: Excuse me, sir, do you know any good borscht restaurants around here?
Other Spy: Ah, borscht. I love borscht!
Me: I hear Russian borscht is the best. Have you ever had any?
Other Spy: Yes, I was in Moscow once many years ago, before the war.
Me: Really? Have you ever been to [street the KGB headquarters is on?]
Other Spy: All the time! That's my favorite street! I used to talk to [name of KGB head] a lot.
Me: I am a Soviet spy. Are you one too?
Other Spy: Yes.
You would be immediately under suspicion if you asked patriotic Americans "Are you a Soviet spy?", since they would then know you were probably the other spy yourself. So instead you lead up with a question that seems innocuous to an American who's not thinking about spying, but to a Soviet who is specifically looking for another spy is sorta kinda suggestive of Russia. The other spy can't just say "Ah, I understand your code, I too am a spy" because then he might blow his cover to an American who was just looking for some good borscht. So he says something that slightly escalates the Russianness. You can't just blow your cover now, because you're still not sure he's not just an American who appreciates a good plate of borscht himself, so you escalate the Russianness slightly further. In other words, you start off with a conversation that could happen by coincidence, decrease the chance of coincidence a little bit at each exchange only once you get the signal from the other, and eventually the conversation becomes one that couldn't possibly happen by coincidence and you know he's the other spy.
When I was much younger and more terrified of women, this was exactly the route I would take. I didn't want to know if she was my fellow spy, I wanted to know if she liked me. I can't just ask, or I might end up as the next Julius Rosenberg. So instead - maybe we're sitting next to each other, so I move a little closer to her. If she moves a little closer to me, or does anything that could be interpreted in my feverishly optimistic brain as resembling this, then maybe I touch my leg against hers. If she touches her leg against me, maybe I rest my arm against her shoulder. If she rests her arm against my shoulder, I smile at her. If she smiles at me, then I ask for her hand in marriage.
One can also do this verbally. It would pain me to even type out the conversation, but I assure you it's still pretty awkward.
And when this doesn't work, sometimes if the other person just looks super Russian it's tempting to worry you've miscalibrated your subtlety ("Man, what if this guy just really hates borscht? Maybe I should call him Comrade and see what happens?) and try something else.
And okay, this is all super creepy, and I know that now, and I'm sorry for doing it, and I won't do it again.
(by the way, the one time this worked I was so flabbergasted and confused I completely forgot to ask for her hand in marriage. In case you haven't figured it out from this latest series of blog posts, I'm kind of an idiot.)
But let me try to explain (not justify, mind you) why this might seem like a thing someone should do.
I had a friend a few years ago, let's call her Alice. I asked Alice out on a date. She said she wanted to keep being friends. This went well. No, really. It actually went well.
Alice moved to another state, and a little while afterwards I went to visit her for a week. I worried if it might be creepy if I asked her to cuddle after she had said she wanted to be friends, but eventually I asked her anyway, and she said that was great and she loved cuddling and had been pretty desperate for someone to cuddle with.
We cuddled all week, but I was super super careful not to touch her breasts or any other part of her body that might be interpreted as outside the spirit of friendly platonic cuddling. On the last day she basically grabbed my hands and put them on her breasts and told me that she really liked having her breasts touched and obviously I was never going to get around to asking her of my own initiative.
And, being male, I thought Darnit, I could have been doing that the last six days!
And on the train home I was thinking about this, and I tried to figure out if there was something I could have done differently, and I decided that there is literally no non-creepy way to say "Excuse me, do you mind if I place my hands on your breasts?" Try it. I dare you to construct a non-creepy version of that sentence.
(as an aside, the existence of the non-threatening and socially acceptable word "cuddle" is super helpful. Before I learned that word I just never cuddled anyone, there is no non-creepy way to say "Excuse me, do you mind if I touch and stroke your body?")
Putting your hands on someone's breasts without asking them is a much worse offense than asking "Excuse me, do you mind if I place my hands on your breasts?". But, someone who actually puts their hands on someone else's breasts without asking them is likely to get swatted away and get a "Go away, creep!" and then the issue will probably never be spoken of again. If there were a rumor at my high school that some guy had put his hands on some girl's breasts, it would die down in a week, two weeks tops. On the other hand, someone who goes up to a girl and asks "Excuse me, do you mind if I place my hands on your breasts?" becomes a creepiness legend. If there were a rumor at my high school that some guy had asked a girl for permission to put his hands on her breasts, then that rumor would pass down from upperclassmen to lowerclassmen through the generations, and a thousand years from now when the high school exists only in cyberspace the disembodied transhuman freshmen would still be giggling to one another about it.
The same is true of the creepy Soviet-spy escalating thing. Is it creepy and horrible? Yes. Is it so utterly non-juicy that it would never make a good rumor? Also yes. So the more terrified a guy is of asking "Would you like to go out?" or "Would you like to cuddle?" or even "May I put my hands on your breasts?", the more likely he is to try creepiness instead. On the other hand, the day you can ask consent without any fear of reprisal or shaming is the day that men give a huge sigh of relief and just ask out the women they like without going through the whole creepiness rigamarole which honestly is pretty stressful for us too.
This is why I keep stressing that creepiness comes from male weakness rather than male privilege. If there were no risk of getting arrested, then the Soviet spy wouldn't ask silly questions about borscht. If there were no risk of being pilloried as a horrible creepy person for asking out a person "above your station", then creepy high school me wouldn't have sat uncomfortably close to girls in the hopes that this would prompt them to spontaneously show interest.
Me and some others tried to speak up. The jannies censored our comments.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
Obligatory link to Gwern's outstanding review of McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War:
It’s not well-known, but one of the most consistent long-term sponsors of research into intelligence has been the US military. This is because, contrary to lay wisdom that ‘IQ only measures how well you do on a test’ or book-learning, cognitive ability predicts performance in all occupations down to the simplest manual labor; this might seem surprising, but there are a lot of ways to screw up a simple job and cause losses outside one’s area. For example, aiming and pointing a rifle, or throwing a grenade, might seem like a simple task, but it’s also easy to screw up by pointing at the wrong point, requires fast reflexes (reflexes are one of the most consistent correlations with intelligence), memory for procedures like stripping, the ability to read ammo box labels or orders (as one Marine drill instructor noted), and ‘common sense’ like not indulging in ‘practical jokes’ by tossing grenades at one’s comrades and forgetting to remove the fuse - common sense is not so common, as the saying goes. Such men were not even useful cannon fodder, as they were as much a danger to the men around them as themselves (never mind the enemy), and jammed up the system. (A particularly striking non-Vietnam example is the case of one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever, the Port Chicago disaster which killed 320 people - any complex disaster like that has many causes, of course, but one of them was simply that the explosives were being handled by the dregs of the Navy - not even bottom decile, but bottom duo-decile (had to look that one up), and other stations kept raiding it for anyone competent.)
Gregory’s book collates stories about what happened when the US military was forced to ignore these facts it knew perfectly well in the service of Robert McNamara & Lyndon Johnson’s “Project 100,000” idea to kill two birds with one stone by drafting recruits who were developmentally disabled, unhealthy, evil, or just too dumb to be conscripted previously: it would provide the warm bodies needed for Vietnam, and use the military to educate the least fortunate and give them a leg up as part of the Great Society’s faith in education to eliminate individual differences and refute the idea that intelligence is real.
It did not go well.
Maybe women now do have ridiculous standards. But so do men.
Women's marriage standards are "six feet, six figures, six inches." Men's marriage standards are "teenage virgin". These are not the same. Every woman was a teenage virgin once (modulo the few who got broken in as lolis). Most men never meet the three sixes. There isn't a possible world where most women get what they want (becoming the exclusive wife of a top man); there is a possible world where most men get what they want, and we lived in it from the abolition of polygamy until the sexual revolution.
Those are preferences, not standards. Yes, obviously, every man would prefer a 10/10 supermodel with huge tits who will act like a lady in the streets and a whore in the sheets and never ask for commitment (or, better yet, two of them), but most are perfectly happy to marry the 6/10 girl next door as long as she is still young and virginal. Whereas women would rather be booty call #3 on Chad's phonebook than marry an average beta provider nice guy, and spend their teens and twenties doing just that.
From "The Archetypal Modern Woman" by Free Notherner:
So, in a nutshell, Tracy Clark-Flory is the the stereotypical, nay, archetypical, modern woman. She fucks uncountable alphas, ignoring the beta who likes her, throughout her years of youth and prettiness. She realizes how empty it all is, but only once the wall approaches and the good times are coming to an end, so she uses the last of her fading feminine charms to husband-up the barely tolerable beta.
And from The Dreaded Jim's Gab:
The reason women are marrying late is that as they lose their looks and their eggs dry up, they fall off the bottom of mister one in thirty’s booty call list, then they fall off the bottom of mister one in twenty’s booty call list, then they fall off the bottom of mister one in ten’s booty call list, then they will reluctantly marry mister average, and hate him for it.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
What's the point of subsidizing the reproduction of the underclass? Even if you can do it, those people don't work, don't create value, don't pay taxes, etc. They survive by parasitizing the wealth created by the actually productive classes in the form of crime, welfare, and prison.
It's like that joke about selling at a loss but making it up on volume. For society, each kid of a high school dropout single mother and a deadbeat baby daddy is a liability, not an asset. You are just accelerating the collapse.
Well in a modern society male protection isn't particularly necessary
Of course it is; it's just socialized. Who provides protection for women in modern society? Cops and soldiers. Who are those? Men. How do they get paid? Taxes. Who produces most taxable income? Men.
In other words, men are still providing protection for women, but now we do it collectively rather than individually, and we don't get any benefit out of it.
Same thing with women's so-called economic independence, which is heavily reliant on welfare, alimony, child support, affirmative action quotas, and anti-discrimination laws. Working men are still supporting women, but now we don't get anything in return.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
From "Biological Leninism" by Spandrell:
In Communist countries pedigree was very important. You couldn't get far in the party if you had any little kulak, noble or landowner ancestry. Only peasants and workers were trusted. Why? Because only peasants and workers could be trusted to be loyal. Rich people, or people with the inborn traits which lead to being rich, will always have status in any natural society. They will always do alright. That's why they can't be trusted; the stakes are never high for them. If anything they'd rather have more freedom to realize their talents. People of peasant stock though, they came from the dregs of society. They know very well that all they have was given to them by the party. And so they will be loyal to the death, because they know it, if the Communist regime falls, their status will fall as fast as a hammer in a well. And the same goes for everyone else, especially those ethnic minorities.
Ethnics were tricky though, because they always had a gambit which could increase their status even further: independence. Which is why both Russia and China soon after consolidating the regime started to crack down on ethnics. Stalin famously purged Jews from the Politburo, used WW2 to restore most of the Tsar's territory, and run such a Russia-centered state that to this day people in Kyrgyzstan speak Russian. The same in China, a little known fact of the Cultural Revolution was the huge, bloody purge in Mongolia and the destruction of many temples in Tibet. After that was done with, the Communist party became this strong, stable and smooth machine. The Soviet economy of course worked like shit, and that eventually resulted in the collapse of the system. But as China has shown, central planning is orthogonal to Leninist politics. China, of course, had to know. It had been running a centralized bureaucracy for thousands of years. Leninism was just completing the system.
So again, the genius of Leninism was in building a ruling class from scratch and making it cohesive by explicitly choosing people from low-status groups, ensuring they would be loyal to the party given they had much to lose. It worked so well it was the marvel of the intellectual classes of the whole world for a hundred years.
Meanwhile, what was the West doing? The West, that diehard enemy of worldwide Communism, led by the United States. What has been the American response to Leninism? Look around you. Read Vox. Put on TV. Ok, that's enough. Who is high status in the West today? Women. Homosexuals. Transexuals. Muslims. Blacks. There's even movements propping up disabled and fat people. What Progressivism is running is hyper Leninism. Biological Leninism.
When Communism took over Russia and China, those were still very poor, semi-traditional societies. Plenty of semi-starved peasants around. So you could run a Leninist party just on class resentments. "Never forget class-struggle", Mao liked to say. "Never forget you used to be a serf and you're not one now thanks to me", he meant.
In the West, though, by 1945, when peace and order was enforced by the United States, the economy had improved to the point where class-struggle just didn't work as a generator of loyalty. Life was good, the proletariat could all afford a car and even vacations. Traditional society was dead, the old status-ladders based on family pedigree and land-based wealth were also dead. The West in 1960 was a wealthy, industrial meritocratic society, where status was based on one's talent, productivity and natural ability to schmooze oneself into the ruling class.
Of course liberal politics kept being a mess. No cohesion in a ruling class which has no good incentive to stick to each other. But of course the incentive is still out there. A cohesive ruling class can monopolize power and extract rents from the whole society forever. The ghost of Lenin is always there. And so the arrow of history kept bending in Lenin's direction. The West started to build up a Leninist power structure. Not overtly, not as a conscious plan. It just worked that way because the incentives were out there for everyone to see, and so slowly we got it. Biological Leninism. That's the nature of the Cathedral.
If you live in a free society, and your status is determined by your natural performance; then it follows that to build a cohesive Leninist ruling class you need to recruit those who have natural low-status. In any society, men have higher performance than women. They are stronger, they work harder, they have a higher variance, which means a fatter right tail in all traits (more geniuses); and they have the incentive to perform what the natural mating market provides. That's the patriarchy for you. Now I don't want to overstress the biology part here. It's not the fact that all men are better workers than women. In a patriarchy there's plenty of unearned status for men. But that's how it works: the core of society is the natural performance of men; those men will naturally build a society which benefits them as men; some men free-ride on that, some women get a bad deal. Lots of structural inertia there. But the core is real.
To get to the point: in 1960 we had a white men patriarchy. That was perfectly natural. Every society with a substantial proportion of white men will end up being ruled by a cabal of white men. Much of its biology; part of it is also social capital, good cultural practices accumulated since the 15th century. White men just run stuff better. They are natural high-status. But again, nature makes for messy politics. There is no social value on acknowledging truth: everybody can see that. The signaling value is in lies. In the unnatural. As Moldbug put it:
in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.
Or as the Chinese put it, point deer, make horse.
The point again is, that you can't run a tight, cohesive ruling class with white men. They don't need to be loyal. They'll do ok anyway. A much easier way to run an obedient, loyal party is to recruit everyone else. Women. Blacks. Gays. Muslims. Transexuals. Pedophiles. Those people may be very high performers individually, but in a natural society ruled by its core of high performers, i.e. a white patriarchy, they wouldn't have very high status. So if you promise them high status for being loyal to you; you bet they're gonna join your team. They have much to gain, little to lose. The Coalition of the Fringes, Sailer calls it. It's worse than that really. It's the coalition of everyone who would lose status the better society were run. It's the coalition of the bad. Literal Kakistocracy.
There's a reason why there's so many evil fat women in government. Where else would they be if government didn't want them? They have nothing going on for them, except their membership in the Democratic party machine. The party gives them all they have, the same way the Communist party had given everything to that average peasant kid who became a middling bureaucrat in Moscow. And don't even get me started with hostile Muslims or Transexuals. Those people used to be expelled or taken into asylums, pre-1960. Which is why American Progressivism likes them so much. The little these people have depends completely on the Left's patronage. There's a devil's bargain there: the more naturally repulsive someone else, the more valuable it is as a party member, as its loyalty will be all the stronger. This is of course what's behind Larry Auster's First Law of minority relations: the worse a group behaves, the more the Left likes it.
This is also why the Left today is the same Left that was into Soviet Communism back in the day. What they approve of today would scandalize any 1920s Leftist. Even 1950s Leftist. But it's all the same thing, following the same incentives: how to build a cohesive ruling class to monopolize state power. It used to be class struggle. Now it's gender-struggle and ethnic struggle. Ethnic struggle works in America because immigrants have no territorial power base, unlike in Russia or China. So the old game of giving status to low-status minorities works better than ever. It works even better, unlike Lenin's Russia, America has now access to every single minority on earth. Which is why the American left is busy importing as many Somalis as they can. The lowest performing minority on earth. Just perfect.
In 2022's Batman, there is a scene where a gang of white men attacks an Asian man and tries to pressure a new member into beating him up. The recruit is a young black man, the only nonwhite person in the group, who clearly does not want to do this and resists the temptation of these bad men. This is not an outlier for the movie, as every villain is very deliberately cast as a white man. This scene is especially egregious though because it is deliberately set up to reference to the stories of violence against Asian people in New York and other American cities. If you recall, this violence was also blamed on white supremacy despite the demographics of the majority of the perpetrators.
One of my biggest redpilling moments was when I learned that the tale of Epic Beard Man, which I had greatly enjoyed online in video and in meme form, had been adapted into movie called Bad Ass. Only, instead of a black thug harassing and attacking a poor old white man until he was forced to defend himself, the studio changed so that the bad guys were a pair of neo-Nazi skinheads.
I sure started paying a lot more attention to which demographic controls Hollywood after that.
(Which statistic also explains why there are OVER NINE THOUSAND holocaust films but only one Holodomor film).
Meanwhile, normies don't even understand that movies are not intended to be a faithful representation of reality, let alone that they are actually propaganda. If you talk to 100 IQ people about films like The Untouchables and Gladiator it becomes clear that they don't think of them as fiction, but as documentaries, and are surprised to learn that the things they saw onscreen bear only a very loose resemblance to reality.
(Not that documentaries are always much better, but at least they pretend to care about the truth; meanwhile, a movie like Alexander feels perfectly justified in condensing three major battles into a single engagement for no other reason than that the narrative structure of the film doesn't have room for three major battles against the Persians).
Making things worse, normies just don't watch old movies, so all the preconceptions and biases they bear come from The Current Year. Perhaps, much like C.S. Lewis recommended the reading of old books, we should recommend the watching of old films. As Eliezer Yudkowsky said in "Eutopia is Scary":
Movies that were made in say the 40s or 50s, seem much more alien—to me—than modern movies allegedly set hundreds of years in the future, or in different universes. Watch a movie from 1950 and you may see a man slapping a woman. Doesn’t happen a lot in Lord of the Rings, does it?
(But that's hard to do when so many old movies are not easily available; I have a theory that the real reason behind perpetual rabid copyright expansion and piracy crackdowns is to prevent old material from competing against the Cathedral's contemporary brainwashing).
I'd like to conclude by recommending a great thread over at CultureWarRoundup about the misconceptions that the popular Netflix miniseries, The Queen's Gambit, is sure to promote among the general public.
Am I being too utopian in wishing for a world where "I'm not interested in the 'with benefits' part, but sure! let's be friends! I'd love to hang out with you and go to a movie or have lunch together at times!" is acceptable for both parties? That men and women really could be friends, even if the possibility of sex is not on the table? That the guy won't disappear if there isn't the chance of getting laid so all the stuff about "I like you, let's be friends" is bullshit, and the woman isn't perceived as "I want a beta orbiter" if she just wants to go to movies and out for meals with the guy?
There are only so many hours in a day, there is only so much money in your going out budget, only so much memory in your brain, only so much energy in an introvert, only so much room in your monkeysphere. Social relationships take active time and effort to maintain; if not maintained, decay to nothingness. Hence, Dunbar's Number. Every female friend a guy has is one less male friend.
If there's no chance of sex, inside or outside a relationship [1], this is a very bad trade. As a man, men are more likely to share your interests, more likely to help you in times of trouble, more likely to have similar experiences from which to give you useful advice, more enjoyable to hang out with, and infinitely less likely to take advantage of your sexual attraction towards them.
I assure you, there is not man on this Earth whose idea of a good time is taking you shopping for a makeover, eating out with you at an overpriced restaurant, helping you move all your shit to your new apartment, listening to you whine about how it's not about the nail, and, worst of all for a guy who is attracted to you, hugging and comforting you while you cry about what an asshole Chad is for pumping and dumping you [2]. Those are things that men do for their wives girlfriends, or for girls that they hope will become their wives and girlfriends; they are the costs of a romantic relationship, not the benefits.
What are the benefits? Sex.
Pretend that you went in to work tomorrow and your boss announced that, effective immediately, he would no longer be providing you with a salary; that he is not interested in a financial relationship with you, but that he hopes you will continue to come to work anyway because he provides you with a challenging environment, a structured schedule, a place to socialize with your co-workers, a meaning to your life, something to put on your resume, and free coffee. What would your reaction be?
If you have any pride and dignity at all, your response will be "fuck you, pay me."
It is the same mistake Sam the barista makes in Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Unspeakable Bargains", which we previously discussed on r/TheMotte. When a girl asks a guy to be her friendzoned beta orbiter, or when a guy asks a girl to be his NSA fuck buddy, they are both committing the equivalent of your boss asking you to work without pay.
So why are there so many beta orbiters? Why are there so many girls getting pumped and dumped by Chad? For the same reason people take unpaid internships. There is a serious power imbalance in the market, and desperate people will accept degrading conditions for the chance to get ahead.
There are at least five females for ever Chad, and at least four beta males for every female. A guy will become a beta orbiter for the chance that the archetypal modern woman will condescend to marry him once she hits the wall and falls off the bottom of Chad's booty call list. And a woman will sleep with Chad because Chad has four other girls on his booty call list and is not going to put up with any "no sex until marriage" nonsense (also, because romance novels and movies have brainwashed her into thinking that there is something unique and magical about her pussy that will cause Chad to settle down and commit even though he has pumped and dumped two dozen girls just like her in the past). If women were willing to walk away from Chad, they would have to settle for Mr. Average. And women would rather fuck a dog than an average-looking beta provider.
[1] And this is a distinction that really needs to be emphasized. When women complain about how their male friends have a sexual interest in them, they often frame it in the worst possible terms, as if the guy just wanted to use her body once or twice and then never see her again. Whereas a sexual interest in your female friend could just as easily be "I am in love with that woman. I want to marry her; I want her to be the mother of my children." Either way, he gets accused of pretending to be her friend when he asks her out. But, for men, being friends with a woman seems like a perfectly reasonable first step. Need to be trained out of that behavior.
[2] Kind of like this scene of My Little Pony where Spike comforts Rarity after she finds out Trenderhoof likes Applejack, except in the real world, Rarity would be crying about how Trenderhoof ghosted her after she gave up her virginity to him, then a week later she saw him going out with Applejack. Spike's relationship with Rarity is a textbook example of a friendzoned beta orbiter. As usual, early Friendship is Magic is surprisingly based.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
My hotel has a pride flag flying next to the American flag and the state flag. Definitely makes me feel worse about working there; it's like I'm under occupation.
Why go through the trouble of designing your test so that only X% of students can answer 90% of the questions when you can just hand out the test as is and set the threshold for an A at the Xth percentile of correct responses? It's a lot easier that way; tons of college professors do it. Even some of the teachers in my high school did it. Just give an overly difficult test and set the boundaries for each grade at whatever fraction of the class you want to have that grade (you can't do this with an overly easy test because students and parents WILL complain if a 93% turns into a C, but nobody is going to make a fuss about a 73% becoming an A).
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