erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
4mo ago
States' Rights died in the Civil War, and Civil Rights pissed on the corpse. The blue tribe feels zero compunction about imposing its values upon the red tribe. Why should the red tribe be any different?
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
Copyright law is in general meant to prevent customer confusion (eg preventing people from believing knockoffs are authentic).
That's trademarks, not copyright.
erwgv3g34
11mo ago
It's hard to summarize books with hundreds of pages, especially when those books are, themselves, the collected summaries of thousands of blog posts and comments. But if I had to give you the elevator pitch...
Most of what you think you know about sex/romance/dating is a feminist lie, fed to you through a combination of the education system and the media, or people repeating falsehoods they themselves learned from school and movies and TV shows. These lies are useful to women and society, but harmful to you. The Red Pill metaphor comes from the famous scene where Neo chooses to wake up from the Matrix.
Once you learn accurate truths about women, men, dating, and sex, you will almost certainly choose to change your behavior. Both your new beliefs and your new behaviors will be extremely at odds with feminist dogma, and most people, being in thrall to that ideology, will indeed boil it down to you viewing women as objects to be manipulated for the benefit of men. But that is obviously not how a practitioner of the Red Pill would frame it; unlike fictional villains, real people don't usually think of themselves as evil.
A quick sample of Red Pill beliefs:
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Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive. Women are the gatekeepers of sex, men are the gatekeepers of commitment. Men are the expendable gender.
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As a consequence, men are attracted to the majority of fertile-age women. Women are only attracted to a small minority of men.
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Therefore, fertile-age women are able to easily have casual sex with men who are completely out of their league relationship-wise (rock stars, Olympic athletes, etc.) and often become deluded about their actual Sexual Market Value.
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Women and men are attracted to different things. Men are primarily attracted to youth, beauty, fertility, purity, and nurturing. Women are primarily attracted to height, status, power, money, violence, sexual experience, and dark triad traits.
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This explains why men age like wine, while women age like milk. Youth, beauty, fertility and purity are things that can only ever go down with age, while status, power, money, and sexual experience tend to increase with age.
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Ipso facto, any dating advice which assumes men and women are the same is nonsense. Few do this explicitly, but many do it implicitly by failing to give out different dating advice to different demographics, e.g. "be yourself".
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A surprisingly common mistake is projecting the desires of your gender into the other gender. For example, a woman in her 30s complaining about the lack of attention from high-quality men despite the fact that she spent her youth getting a fancy degree, a good paying job, a nice house, an expensive car, cool hobbies, etc. Not understanding that men don't give a fuck about any of that and would rather date a broke but cute 18-year-old waitress.
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Women become infertile much faster than men. By 35, usually too late to have children. If plan to have 2-3 children, should be married by 30 at the absolute latest. In our culture, where you are expected to date and cohabit for a few years before marriage, means a surprisingly short window between the time a woman becomes legal at 18 and the time it is too late for her to find a husband. Goes double for middle-class and upper-class women, who are expected to finish a degree at 22 before even thinking about marriage.
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Women often follow a dual-mating strategy of sleeping with high-value men in their sexual prime, then settling down with a reliable provider in their later years. This is called Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks. You want to be the Alpha Fucks, or at least avoid being the Beta Bucks.
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Some implications of this information to your own life; self-improve, lift weights, never commit to a woman over 25, never commit to a woman with children, pretend you have more sexual experience than you do, project confidence, never appear needy or desperate, etc.
erwgv3g34
9mo ago
Same with YouTube. I can't ever get the original video anymore; it's always some legacy media channel with talking heads in suits and ties giving me """context""" (i.e. the narrative) and playing censored, shortened clips full of jump cuts (I feel like I am watching an American documentary).
Unstable.
Much like congress cannot bind a future congress, a country cannot credibly precommit itself to never grant political rights to a population of immigrants; once they are in the country they are a hundred dollar bill laying on the ground waiting to be picked up. It may take a generation or two, but eventually somebody is going to realize that they can gain political power by expanding the franchise in exchange for the implicit promise that the new citizens will vote for their faction, and act accordingly.
Case study: African-Americans. Explicitly imported as slaves without rights, remained so right up until Lincoln and his allies saw an opportunity to own the South by emancipating them, then cemented victory by making them citizens. Now America has to deal with a racial underclass whose primary concern at the voting booth is who will offer them the most gibs. As the saying goes, the colonists should have picked their own damn cotton. And if current year Americans were wise, they would clean their own toilets.
We should do this for real. Have Zorba make a poll where you can vote either blue or red. If > 50% of users choose blue, nobody gets permabanned; if not, blues get permabanned and nothing happens to reds.
It'll be like our own version of /r/thanosdidnothingwrong.
EDIT: You are required to vote; until you do, you can't vote or comment.
erwgv3g34
4mo ago
From 1984 by George Orwell:
"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"
...
"The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men." He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: "How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?"
Winston thought. "By making him suffer," he said.
"Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."
erwgv3g34
6mo ago
And a part me laughs a bit. They fucked around and found out. They didn’t do anything when the other white ethnicities were getting blasted and some orgs like the ADL promote white hate. And then the gun was turned on them.
Not only did they do nothing, not only was it some orgs; subversive anti-white ideology has always been highly disproportionality Jewish. There is a reason things like the early life Wikipedia section and the coincidence detection triple parenthesis echo became memes.
Frankenstein is finally getting attacked by his own monster.
erwgv3g34
2mo ago
Reposting a comment I made that got lost during the rollback:
Catholicism tells us that the wine and bread are LITERALLY the blood and body of christ. It is not compatible with science.
On the contrary, transubstantiation is a belief that is almost designed to be perfectly compatible with science.
Specifically, Catholicism claims that all the "accidents" of the wine and bread remain the same, but that the "substance" of the wine and bread become the blood and body of Christ. In other words, in every single way that we can observe and measure, the wine and bread remain wine and bread. But in some deeper, fundamental way, the wine and bread become the blood and body of Jesus.
Which is nonsense, but it's nonsense of the not even wrong variety. And while "not even wrong" is a bad thing for a scientific theory to be, it is a very good thing for a religious belief to be. Partly because it means the religion is safe from being falsified by scientific evidence, but much more importantly because the religion will not be driven insane by the need to deny reality.
Contrast creationism; if you have committed your faith to 7 days and Noah's ark, then when Darwin shows up with dinosaur fossils in his arms you have to either renounce your God or you have to turn your back on biology. And geology. And cosmology. And...
In "Universal Fire", Eliezer Yudkowsky points out that all of reality is connected, and that you can't change just one little thing without changing the whole.
Matches catch fire because of phosphorus—“safety matches” have phosphorus on the ignition strip; strike-anywhere matches have phosphorus in the match heads. Phosphorus is highly reactive; pure phosphorus glows in the dark and may spontaneously combust. (Henning Brand, who purified phosphorus in 1669, announced that he had discovered Elemental Fire.) Phosphorus is thus also well-suited to its role in adenosine triphosphate, ATP, your body’s chief method of storing chemical energy. ATP is sometimes called the “molecular currency”. It invigorates your muscles and charges up your neurons. Almost every metabolic reaction in biology relies on ATP, and therefore on the chemical properties of phosphorus.
If a match stops working, so do you. You can’t change just one thing.
The surface-level rules, “Matches catch fire when struck,” and “Humans need air to breathe,” are not obviously connected. It took centuries to discover the connection, and even then, it still seems like some distant fact learned in school, relevant only to a few specialists. It is all too easy to imagine a world where one surface rule holds, and the other doesn’t; to suppress our credence in one belief, but not the other. But that is imagination, not reality. If your map breaks into four pieces for easy storage, it doesn’t mean the territory is also broken into disconnected parts. Our minds store different surface-level rules in different compartments, but this does not reflect any division in the laws that govern Nature.
We can take the lesson further. Phosphorus derives its behavior from even deeper laws, electrodynamics and chromodynamics. “Phosphorus” is merely our word for electrons and quarks arranged a certain way. You cannot change the chemical properties of phosphorus without changing the laws governing electrons and quarks.
If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, you would cease to exist as organized matter.
In "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning", Scott Alexander elaborates on the sociopolitical consequences:
So imagine the most irrelevant orthodoxy you can think of. Let’s say tomorrow, the government chooses “lightning comes after thunder” as their hill to die on. They come up with some BS justification like how atmospheric moisture in a thunderstorm slows the speed of light. If you think you see lightning before thunder, you’re confused – there’s lots of lightning and thunder during storms, maybe you grouped them together wrong. Word comes down from the UN, the White House, the Kremlin, Zhongnanhai, the Vatican, etc – everyone must believe this. Senior professors and funding agencies are all on board. From a scientific-truth point of view it’s kind of a disaster. But who cares? Nothing at all depends on this. Even the meteorologists don’t really care. What’s the worst-case scenario? Nobody can say “Lightning comes before thunder, but our social norm is to pretend otherwise”. They have to say “We love objective truth-seeking, and we’ve discovered that lightning does not come before thunder”. And so the Kantoroviches of the world will believe that’s what they really think, and try to write polite letters correcting them.
The better a scientist is, and the more curiosity they have about the natural world, and the more they feel deep in their gut that Nature ought to fit together – the more likely the lightning thing will bother them. Somebody’s going to check how light works and realize that rain can’t possibly slow it down that much. Someone else will see claims about lightning preceding thunder in old books, and realize how strange it was for the ancients to get something so simple so wrong so consistently. Someone else will just be an obsessive observer of the natural world, and be very sure they weren’t counting thunderclaps and lightning bolts in the wrong order. And the more perceptive and truth-seeking these people are, the more likely they’ll speak, say “Hey, I think we’ve got the lightning thing wrong” and not shut up about it, and society will have to destroy them.
And the better a school or professor is, the better they train their students to question everything and really try to understand the natural world, the more likely their students will speak up about the lightning issue. The government will make demands – close down the offending schools, fire the offending academics. Good teachers will be systematically removed from the teaching profession; bad teachers will be systematically promoted. Any educational method that successfully instills curiosity and the scientific spirit will become too dangerous to touch; any that encourage rote repetition of approved truths will get the stamp of approval. Some other beliefs will be found to correlate heavily with lightning-heresy. Maybe atheists are more often lightning-heretics; maybe believers in global warming are too. The enemies of these groups will have a new cudgel to beat them with, “If you believers in global warming are so smart and scientific, how come so many of you believe in lightning, huh?” Even the savvy Kolmogorovs within the global warming community will be forced to admit that their theory just seems to attract uniquely crappy people. It won’t be very convincing. Any position correlated with being truth-seeking and intelligent will be always on the retreat, having to forever apologize that so many members of their movement screw up the lightning question so badly.
Some people in the know will try to warn their friends and students – “Look, just between you and me, lightning obviously comes before thunder, but for the love of God don’t say that in public“. Just as long as they’re sure that student will never want to blackmail them later. And won’t be able to gain anything by ratting them out. And that nobody will hack their private email ten years later, then get them fired or imprisoned or burned at the stake or whatever the appropriate punishment for lightning-heresy is. It will become well-known that certain academic fields like physics and mathematics are full of crypto-lightning-heretics. Everyone will agree that physicists and mathematicians are useless eggheads who are probably good at some specific problems, but so blind to the context of important real-world issues that they can’t be trusted on anything less abstruse than e equalling mc squared. Dishonest careerists willing to go in front of the camera and say “I can reassure everyone, as a physicist that physics proves sound can travel faster than light, and any scientists saying otherwise are just liars and traitors” will get all the department chairs and positions of power.
But the biggest threat is to epistemology. The idea that everything in the world fits together, that all knowledge is worth having and should be pursued to the bitter end, that if you tell one lie the truth is forever after your enemy – all of this is incompatible with even as stupid a mistruth as switching around thunder and lightning. People trying to make sense of the world will smash their head against the glaring inconsistency where the speed of light must be calculated one way in thunderstorms and another way everywhere else. Try to start a truth-seeking community, and some well-meaning idiot will ask “Hey, if we’re about pursuing truth, maybe one fun place to pursue truth would be this whole lightning thing that has everyone all worked up, what does everybody think about this?” They will do this in perfect innocence, because they don’t know that everyone else has already thought about it and agreed to pretend it’s true. And you can’t just tell them that, because then you’re admitting you don’t really think it’s true. And why should they even believe you? Would you present your evidence? Would you dare?
As the Dreaded Jim famously said:
The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men are not created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men, that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, that society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism, but this is a new religion, an evil religion, and, if you are a Christian, a demonic religion.
The Dark Enlightenment does not propose that leftism went wrong four years ago, or ten years ago, but that it was fundamentally and terribly wrong a couple of centuries ago, and we have been heading to hell in a handbasket ever since at a rapidly increasing rate – that the enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about humans, human nature, and the state, that it is another good news religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.
If authority required me to believe in Leprechauns, and to get along with people that it was important to get along with required me to believe in Leprechauns, I would probably believe in leprechauns, though not in the way that I believe in rabbits, but I can see people not being equal, whereas I cannot see leprechauns not existing.
And:
If we only count religions that officially admit to being supernatural, pretty obviously religion is declining. If, however, we define religion more broadly, then religion is increasing by leaps and bounds.
If authority assures you that leprechauns exist and that authority can see them, it does not take much faith to believe, since you cannot see leprechauns not existing. If, however, authority assures you that all humans are equal, or that all groups and categories of human are equal, it takes outstanding and extraordinary faith, since every day you see individuals, groups, and categories being strikingly and obviously unequal, for reasons cultural, genetic, and hormonal.
Further, belief in the flying spaghetti monster not only does no harm, but is apt to inculcate the accumulated wisdom of the ages, inculcating prudent and virtuous behavior, whereas belief in equality tends to inculcate bad behavior, as illustrated by the inability of “Occupy” to operate an urban campsite.
erwgv3g34
4mo ago
From "Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle" by Scott Alexander:
The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
Same phenomenon you see in r/PoliticalCompassMemes. In fact, "Seven Zillion Witches" was considered as one of the possible names for what would eventually become The Motte, though I can't find the thread right now.
The alternative explanation would be that HBD and PUA are correct, so any place which allows uncensored discussion of those topics will eventually convince people to believe in them, and believing in HBD and PUA is sufficient to qualify as alt-right.
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
Yes, it is rational to care about propaganda in movies. From "The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence":
In the ancestral environment, there were no moving pictures; what you saw with your own eyes was true. A momentary glimpse of a single word can prime us and make compatible thoughts more available, with demonstrated strong influence on probability estimates. How much havoc do you think a two-hour movie can wreak on your judgment? It will be hard enough to undo the damage by deliberate concentration—why invite the vampire into your house? In Chess or Go, every wasted move is a loss; in rationality, any non-evidential influence is (on average) entropic.
And from "Boycott people who hate you":
Using their products will harm you. Seek out alternative products
Boycott the Star Wars movie Rogue One. All the villains are white males. All the heroes are not. Not only will this depress you and persuade you that you are evil and villainous and doomed to lose, but this guarantees bad writing and a boring show for the reasons explained by Orwell. If it is written to political formula, it is written to formula, so all the characters are living dead, placeholders and formulae, not people that you might care about. They kill a few of the heroes to try and make you care, but you won’t care.
And that's just for adults who are aware they are watching propaganda. As @WhiningCoil says, it is ten times worse if you have children. From "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out":
First, as the leftists used to say, “Kill Your Television”. I am not one who generally thinks that machines are inherently evil. Television is an exception. It is no more and no less than a hypnotic mind control device. Don’t believe me? Sit a hyperactive toddler in front of a television and watch what happens. They freeze, turn away from everything they were doing, and stare at the screen. Gavin McInnes once noted that the “on” switch of his television was an “off” switch for his kids, and so it is. Do you think this device does not place ideas in the minds of those who fall into a trance in its presence? And what ideas do you think the Hollywood/New York axis wishes to place there? I recall reading one account of a father who, tired of his two under-10 daughters’ bratty attitudes, limited their television viewing to a DVD box set of Little House on The Prairie. The change in his daughters’ behavior was dramatic – within a couple of weeks, they were referring to him and his wife as “Ma” and “Pa”, and offering to help with chores. The lesson is obvious: people (and especially children) learn their social norms from television, far more even than from the people around them.
Ideally, one would cut oneself off from it totally. Many find this rather difficult (I must admit, myself included at times). Some keep a television set, but make sure it is disconnected from broadcast channels and use it only as a monitor for a carefully-selected library of DVDs. Others (myself included) don’t own a set, but download a few select programs from torrent sites and watch on laptops or tablets. My total viewership of television programs tops out at perhaps 3-4 hours per week during particularly good seasons. Any traditionalist should strive to do the same. In fact, traditionalists should reject – should “drop out” of – all popular culture (especially that produced after, say, 1966) to the greatest degree possible, and make sure their children are exposed to it as little as possible. Music, video games, even the web – either drop out of it completely, or, at very least, carefully limit the time and scope of it in your life and the lives of your children.
The Amish understand this very well, which is why they do not have televisions:
I once heard David Kline tell of Protestant tourists sight-seeing in an Amish area. An Amishman is brought on the bus and asked how Amish differ from other Christians. First, he explained similarities: all had DNA, wear clothes (even if in different styles), and like to eat good food.
Then the Amishman asked: “How many of you have a TV?”
Most, if not all, the passengers raised their hands.
“How many of you believe your children would be better off without TV?”
Most, if not all, the passengers raised their hands.
“How many of you, knowing this, will get rid of your TV when you go home?”
No hands were raised.
“That’s the difference between the Amish and others,” the man concluded.
I don't have children (yet; growth mindset!), but if I did, I would endeavor to make sure they did not have access to over-the-air television or streaming media like Netflix. Rather, I would take advantage of the decades of existing work that @quiet_NaN points out and provide them with a library of titles composed of classic Disney movies (Snow White, Pinocchio, etc.), Don Bluth Movies (The Land Before Time, The Secret of NIMH, etc.), and Studio Ghibli movies (Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Spirited Away, etc.). As Gwern says, "Culture Is Not About Esthetics".
Specially since Stable Diffusion's only advantage over Dall-E 3 and Midjourney v6 is being uncensored. Why the fuck would I go through the trouble of buying a GPU and downloading SD to my own machine if I can't use it to make pictures of Violent Sexy Hitler? Doubly so since SD models became non free software/open source; SDXL Turbo, Stable Video Diffusion, and Stable Cascade all require you to pay a monthly subscription fee to legally use them for commercial purposes, and Stability AI's stated intention is to do the same for all future model releases.
SD 2.1 sank because it was censored. I hope SD 3 fails, too, and the community continues to focus on SD 1.5 and SDXL, which are the libre and uncensored models (SDXL just got a nice boost in the form of SDXL-Lightning!).
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
It's a play on Eliezer's paperclip maximizer thought experiment. Much like the paperclip maximizer has the goal of tiling the universe with paperclips, EA's actions (mosquito nets, etc.) have the net result of filling up the Earth with poor third-worlders. It's the same idea Garret Harding put forth in "Living on a Lifeboat" with a clever skiffy gloss.
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
Yes, I also get the feeling that HBD is starting to go mainstream. For example, Bryan Caplan's "Let's Ban Discrimination: A Socratic Dialogue" includes this gem:
Leonidas: [frustrated] I’m not even going to engage that, Socrates. You’re ignoring my central point.
Socrates: Namely?
Leonidas: That the average Egyptian worker endures horrible discrimination at Greek hands.
Socrates: How do you know that?
Leonidas: Open your eyes! [He waves in the direction of the street-sweepers.] Egyptians are much more likely to do hard, low-paid jobs than Greeks.
Socrates: Agreed. How, though, does that show “discrimination”?
Leonidas: [stunned] Isn’t it obvious?
Socrates: Hardly. Suppose the two of us were standing at the finish line of a marathon, keeping time.
Leonidas: Very well.
Socrates: Suppose further than out of the first hundred runners in the race, only two are Egyptian. One possible explanation for their poor performance, granted, is “discrimination.” For example, the judges could give Egyptian competitors unfavorable starting positions. But there are plainly other ways to account for their subpar performance.
Leonidas: Such as…?
Socrates: You tell me.
Leonidas: Perhaps… Greeks practice running more. We “try harder.”
Socrates: We did invent the marathon, after all. Can you think of any other explanations?
Leonidas: Well, uh…
Socrates: I promise I won’t repeat a word you say.
Leonidas: [grumpily] I guess you could say that Greeks just have more running ability.
Socrates: A distinct possibility.
Leonidas: So you’re justifying the mistreatment of Egyptian workers?
Socrates: Not at all. I’m trying to discover the extent to which Egyptian workers are mistreated.
Looks like the whisper network paid off.
To be fair, I don't think the original Star Wars or Star Trek are rightist. More the later fits more with the left.
Trek was always openly and notoriously leftist.
OG Stark Trek was explicitly anti-racist, but it was anti-racist in that colorblind, equality-of-opportunity way that is considered thoroughly and unacceptably right-wing today. You don't hear anybody on The Original Series mention microaggressions or privilege or affirmative action. The narrative doesn't hate white people the way so many modern narratives clearly do.
Other forms of leftism are notably absent. The economic leftism of The Next Generation is nowhere to be seen; Kirk talks about Scotty's pay in "The Doomsday Machine" and human merchants like Cyrano Jones exist. There is some feminism in putting women on a warship, but at least Kirk is allowed to act like a fucking man instead of a cuck. When he seduces the 19-year-old Lenore (played by a 21-year-old Barbara Anderson) in "The Conscience of the King", nobody talks about how problematic and creepy it is for a powerful older man like Kirk to hit on a college-aged girl; it's just normal.
(Of course, it would be even better if Karidian told Kirk to back the fuck off unless he was willing to put a ring on Lenore and insisted on chaperoning their dates, but again you don't have to go full trad to improve on the current situation)
erwgv3g34
10mo ago
As Anita Bryant famously said:
As a mother I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children. Therefore, they must recruit our children.
The recruitment of our children is absolutely necessary for the survival and growth of homosexuality, for since homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must recruit, must freshen their ranks.
What these people really want, hidden behind obscure legal phrases, is the legal right to propose to our children that theirs is an acceptable alternate way of life.
She was called a bigot and cancelled, but time has proven her right.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
From "Book Review: On The Road" by Scott Alexander:
Even more interesting than their ease of transportation to me was their ease at getting jobs. This is so obvious to them it is left unspoken. Whenever their money runs out, be they in Truckee or Texas or Toledo, they just hop over to the nearest farm or factory or whatever, say “Job, please!” and are earning back their depleted savings in no time. This is really the crux of their way of life. They don’t feel bound to any one place, because traveling isn’t really a risk. Be it for a week or six months, there’s always going to be work waiting for them when they need it. It doesn’t matter that Dean has no college degree, or a criminal history a mile long, or is only going to be in town a couple of weeks. This just seems to be a background assumption. It is most obvious when it is violated; the times it takes an entire week to find a job, and they are complaining bitterly. Or the time the only jobs available are backbreaking farm labor, and so Jack moves on (of course abandoning the girl he is with at the time) to greener pastures that he knows are waiting.
erwgv3g34
3mo ago
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
From "Nuclear Warfare 101" by Stuart Slade:
Aha, I hear you say what about the mad dictator? Its interesting to note that mad, homicidal aggressive dictators tend to get very tame sane cautious ones as soon as they split atoms. Whatever their motivations and intents, the mechanics of how nuclear weapons work dictate that mad dictators become sane dictators very quickly. After all its not much fun dictating if one's country is a radioactive trash pile and you're one of the ashes. China, India and Pakistan are good examples. One of the best examples of this process at work is Mao Tse Tung. Throughout the 1950s he was extraordinarily bellicose and repeatedly tried to bully, cajole or trick Khruschev and his successors into initiating a nuclear exchange with the US on the grounds that world communism would rise from the ashes. Thats what Quemoy and Matsu were all about in the late 1950s. Then China got nuclear weapons. Have you noticed how reticent they are with them? Its sunk in. They can be totally destroyed; will be totally destroyed; in the event of an exchange. A Chinese Officer here once on exchange (billed as a "look what we can do" session it was really a "look what we can do to you" exercise) produced the standard line about how the Chinese could lose 500 million people in a nuclear war and keep going with the survivors. So his hosts got out a demographic map (one that shows population densities rather than topographical data) and got to work with pie-cutters using a few classified tricks - and got virtually the entire population of China using only a small proportion of the US arsenal. The guest stared at the map for a couple of minutes then went and tossed his cookies into the toilet bowl. The only people who mouth off about using nuclear weapons and threaten others with them are those that do not have keys hanging around their necks. The moment they get keys and realize what they've let themselves in for, they get to be very quiet and very cautious indeed.
Baldur's Gate 3? You filthy casual.
Football and country music are at best orthogonal to the culture war issue in question. Is Anheuser-Busch willing to put out a statement saying that transwomen are men, or perhaps to send out a commemorative can to a prominent anti-trans celebrity like J.K. Rowling? If not, let the boycott continue until the company is bankrupt, the office buildings burned, the executives' heads on pikes, the barley fields sowed with salt.
They are trying to apologize to their base without alienating progressives; they are trying to go back to appearing neutral. Cannot be done. They made the decision to enter the culture war; now they have to pick a side.
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