erwgv3g34
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User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
6hr ago
The Dreaded Jim is pretty much the most right-wing blogger on the internet. Many of the controversial positions that are now considered inside the Overton window of The Motte, such as HBD and the disaster of the sexual revolution, were first popularized through his blog.
He is legendary for his bluntness, explaining in ten words what others do in ten thousand, sort of like an anti-Moldbug. Readers who are not scared off get redpilled twice as fast as by any other source.
Jim has been doing this for a very long time; the original blog dates back to 2005, the original website to 2002, and you can find mentions of his name on Usenet archives going back to the 90's.
His actual pseudonym is James A. Donald, or Jim for short, but Scott called him The Dreaded Jim once, and it stuck.
I was reading through some of The Dreaded Jim's archives, and I saw that he recommended a film called Kick-Ass. So I took a look, and... where has this movie been all my life?
Everything is great. The writing is great. The action is great. The music is great. This is the best Hollywood action movie I have seen since The Matrix.
The film is bold and unapologetic, working hard to earn its R rating; characters get shot, stabbed, crushed, and burned. The dialogue pulls no punches, mixing wit and profanity without ever coming across as overly edgy or performative.
My new waifu, Hit-Girl, is easily the best character in the movie; watching her mow down a hallway full of mooks to the tune of "Bad Reputation" is a delight. And that's after she infiltrates the bad guy's base by dressing up like a loli schoolgirl; I had no idea Americans could be so cultured!
The only problem is that the MC, Kick-Ass, is not nearly as awesome as Hit-Girl and Big Daddy, but that's alright; he can be the Ishmael to the latter's Ahab. And, unlike so many spineless MCs, he continually grows as a character; by the end of the film, he has gradudated from using a "gay-looking taser", as Hit-Girl rightly calls it, to dual wielding miniguns while flying on a jetpack.
I just don't understand why Roger Ebert didn't like it.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
No? Ren'Py is easy to use; if you can get a degree in physics from Caltech, you should have no problem learning it. Or, if you absolutely can't manage that, you can use Twine, which is so easy, a purple-haired Tumblrina can do it.
As for art skills, come on, it's The Year of Our Lord 2025; that's what AI is for. Try Fooocus, locally if you have a GPU, or on Colab if you don't. Or farm free credits from Civitai and use that.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
It wasn't even that. It was a weird phrase that feminists seized as a Schelling point for hating Romney; the rationalizations for why the phrase was offensive came later.
From "Why I defend scoundrels, part 2" by Scott Alexander:
My complaint about feminism - and all the other isms - isn't any kind of object-level complaint like that at all. On the object-level I think they're pretty okay. It's that they have a tendency to really love their group hate-fests, and they make sure to hold them with a halo over their heads.
The last time I mentioned this, people criticized me for making vague claims. So today I'll be more specific. Mitt Romney. Binders full of women. My facebook feed. Twelve posts about it (and I don't have all that many Facebook friends). Five of those twelve included the word "misogynist". One included the phrase "giant d-bag". Then I go on Reddit, where the phrases are more like "condescending prick", "ego so twisted he starts believing his own bullshit", and "I can't see how any self-respecting woman could ever think of voting for him." Plus a link to http://bindersfullofwomen.tumblr.com/, because someone was enjoying the hatefest so much they though it would benefit from an entire website.
And what was interesting was that one of these comments ended up spawning a thread where someone defended Romney. It went something like this: "Isn't 'binders full of X' a relatively common phrase?" "Oh, it wasn't the binders that offended me, per se. It was his statement that women only care about flexible working hours." "Well, he didn't say women only cared about, just that it was a special care of women. And surveys show this to be totally true." "But it was that he was getting into this at all, when the question was about pay equity." "But Obama arguably departed even further from the question, talking about free contraception, and no one criticized him." "Well, maybe you're right, but it was incredibly stupid of Romney to phrase his comments in a way that could be interpreted as offensive, and I'm still not convinced there aren't some offensive feelings lurking under the surface."
Notice how incredibly scary this thought pattern is. You express this burning intense hatred for a guy you don't really know based on one remark. When someone demonstrates that this is irrational, you say "Well, okay, but I was still right to hate him because of this totally different thing he did." And then when someone demonstrates there's no basis for hating him, "Well, I can still hate him, because it's still his fault for being so stupid as to say something I misinterpreted."
And from "Why I specifically defend the scoundrel Mitt Romney", idem:
As promised in the previous post, here are the reasons why I think the firestorm over Romney's "binders full of women" remark is an example of people having way too much fun calling "misogyny!" as an excuse to pursue a group hatefest rather than of actual misogyny:
(disclaimer: I got an absentee ballot and have already voted for Obama. I dislike Mitt Romney, just not for this specific reason.)
1. It was offensive for Romney to use the phrase "binders full of women".
I can't Google "binders full of women" or even "binders full of people" directly because it's all references to Romney.
But "folders full of people" gets 9 Google hits of people using it in totally reasonable contexts, like "I had a few file folders full of people who signed up to help this year". One Outlook user says "Up until now i have grouped them in folders of up to 100 people and now have 22 folders full of people."
"Lists full of people" gives 9040 results, including wait lists full of people, email lists full of people, and targeted leads lists full of people.
"Files full of people" gives 5510 results, including "files full of people who are glad they bought travel insurance", "files full of people whose save lists were corrupted", and "files full of people affected by the problem".
Even more specific forms get results, for example a police station that has "files full of suspects", and four different marketing groups that have "files full of customers" plus three that have "folders full" of them.
Ignoring the "full", "folders of customers" has 3560 results; "folders of men" has 220, "folders of people" has a whopping 13300 (and yes, I checked the first few pages, most of them are folders containing people, not folders belonging to people.)
But of course as soon as Mitt Romney says it, it's because he thinks women are inhuman objects who are worthy of being stored in binders. Or something. I want to be charitable, but the only person who explained their objection to the phrase used the phrasing in the last sentence. So I don't know.
If you're on the phone with a sales representative, and she offers you a catalog of her store's products, and you say "You ignorant piece of crap! It's not a catalog of the store's products! It's a catalog containing information about the store's products! You're such a worthless idiot!" then congratulations, you can self-consistently get upset with Romney for using the same synecdoche. If you would be utterly appalled by the thought of acting that way to the sales representative, but you posted something snarky on your Facebook about how Romney was a misogynist, you have deeper problems.
The problem with "online" is that you are competing against every third-worlder with a cellphone on the planet, most of whom are willing to work for pennies, plus AI. Add in the lack of skills and that makes it hopeless.
Well, almost. Some creative endeavors are still on the table. You could try your hand at writing an online serial (see previous discussion), or you could make an adult visual novel (sex sells).
Let's take a look at some of the most popular anime of all time. We will note the age of the main character, since that is usually the age of the target audience.
- Dragon Ball. Goku is 12.
- Naruto. Naruto is 12.
- One Piece. Luffy is 17.
- My Hero Academia. Deku is 15.
- Pokémon. Ash/Satoshi is 10.
- Digimon. Tai(chi) is 11.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! Yugi is 16.
- Fullmetal Alchemist. Ed is 15.
- Attack on Titan. Eren is 15.
- Sailor Moon. Usagi/Serena is 14.
This is definitely an older demographic than that of My Little Pony. Most anime is aimed at teenagers, not little kids. And they are not sugar bowls; characters die horribly in all of these shows (except Pokémon). But they still manage to impart uplifting moral messages and present positive role models for both boys and girls.
Requiem for a Blogger
I’ve heard it said that you truly begin to feel old when one day you realize that the world you were raised to live in doesn’t really exist anymore. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that you start feeling it the first time you tell a younger person about a world that you remember clearly, but that they have never seen for themselves.
--AntiDem, "Wonders In The Darkness"
I recently learned that The Anti-Democracy Activist, AntiDem for short, or AnnoDomini as he styled himself in his later years, has died.
I don't idolize actors or singers the way normies do; it means nothing to me that Val Kilmer or Ozzy Osbourne passed away earlier this year. But I do idolize thinkers, and this death hit me harder than usual.
I have been reading AntiDem for over a decade. He was among my top influences; one of my intellectual fathers, alongside Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, Bryan Caplan, and The Dreaded Jim. His writing was beautiful, poetic, and evocative without ever veering into purple prose or melodrama. He was specially good at telling stories, whether they came from his own life, such as his conversion to Christianity and his disappointment with a unicorn, his encounters with other interesting people, such as his memoir of crossplayer Peter Brown and his summary of drinks with his friend Psycho Dish, or a historical tale used as the lead in to some larger political point, such as his account of the Christmas Bullet and his telling of the doomed airline passenger.
AntiDem was a man of faith, and his religious convictions frequently informed his column. In "Down And Out In Christania", he imagined what a truly biblical approach to the welfare state might look like, while in "Femboy and I", his Christian love and compassion for the sinner manifested themselves even as he never stopped hating the sin. This aspect of his writing was especially transformative to me, coming as I did from the New Atheist tradition that held all religion to be primitive nonsense; AntiDem never converted me, but he helped me see that there was much wisdom in the faith of my ancestors.
AntiDem was also an old-school otaku, from back in the day when waifus came in VHS tapes. He had a knack for combining his love of Japanese animation with his culture war positions to create memorable posts, such as "On Homosexuality And Uranus" or "Miyazaki And Human Space". I was already a weeb when I found him, but his knowledge and experience helped to foment my growth and appreciation for the artform. I learned about the precursor to the three-episode rule from "In Which I Determine Whether Friendship Really Is Magic" and I still find myself quoting his explanation for the appeal of anime.
Now I know what he felt when he said goodbye to Rush Limbaugh.
I will miss you, old friend. Thank you. Farewell. Megadittoes.
Again, this is a widespread practice that has been going on for a very long time. Officers in the British army used to literally buy their commissions. Officers in the Roman army (above the rank of centurion, who were basically the equivalent of modern noncommissioned officers) were political appointees and political office holders.
There has never been an army where the officer class has been made up of promoted grunts; they always come from a higher social class than the men and start their careers as officers. And armies are the most ruthlessly selected of all human institutions; any that fail to perform are literally killed off by their rivals. That makes the officer-enlisted dichotomy one hell of a Chesterton's fence; I don't know why it works, but it does.
Oh, fuck, is that why he stopped updating? I've been reading him for a decade!
He joins Lawrence Auster among the ranks of greats whose words continue to inspire from beyond the grave.
F
I've lived almost 50 years - less than some, more than some. I've been all over the world, and seen some incredible things. New Years' Eve in Times Square. Halloween in Salem. Sunrise over Mt. Fuji. Sunset at the Sultan's Palace in Istanbul. Midnight on the Las Vegas Strip. I've stood in a pack of buffalo in the South Dakota Badlands. I've touched the Sea Lions at Fisherman's Wharf. I've had a pint of bitter in Dublin, a glass of saké in the alleys of Shinjuku, and a sip of moonshine in the hills of Tennessee. I've flown First Class in the top deck of a 747, and solo in a Cessna 172 in the black of night over the Florida Keys. I've loved some wonderful people, and been loved by them. I've made my peace with God.
Let them come. I'm ready.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
There was some great intersectionality between the alt right of the 2010s and Friendship is Magic. Apart from /mlpol/ and My Nationalist Pony, you also had things like The Dreaded Jim's "Rabid Puppies and My Little Pony" and AntiDem's "In Which I Determine Whether Friendship Really Is Magic" as well as his three part review of Friendship is Optimal. And I think "Just An Assistant" might have been a stealth neoreactionary story. All while Breitbart was reporting on Ted Cruz's favorite pony and wondering which little horse Trump could pick in response.
Good times.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
Do people actually want to be told "I don't know"? My guess is that, much like managers prefer optimistic timelines that turn out to be wrong over accurate, pessimistic timelines, people would rather get a wrong answer than no answer, especially if they can't tell that the answer is wrong. Unless you give specific instructions to the contrary to the Indians doing RLHF and train them in the methods of rationality, you are going to get hallucinations.
Most people have no idea what actual war crimes are. They think any random fucked up thing that happens in a war is a war crime. Real war crimes are defined by the Hague and Geneva conventions. They are things like "fighting out of uniform" and "pretending to surrender" (e.g., Gabi's destruction of the armored train in Attack on Titan is definitely a war crime; she should have gotten hanged for that, along with her commander for authorizing it, but they won, so they just killed the witnesses and called it a day).
erwgv3g34
7d ago
And don’t get me started about Nazifurs and the 4chan creation Aryanne the white supremacist My Little Pony.
Christian/Neoreactionary Sunset Shimmer was better.
erwgv3g34
7d ago
This is what TVTropes calls the Fleeting Demographic Rule. It's not limited to comic books; you can find examples in any medium aimed at children.
I know embarrassingly little about the military, but don't officers typically start out as soldiers?
No. Officers and enlisted (both are soldiers) are two completely separate, parallel career tracks. Officers are the middle-class track; they require a college degree and usually start at 22. Enlisted are the working-class track, and usually start at 18. All officers outrank all enlisted (in theory, anyway; in practice, only a very stupid lieutenant would try to boss around a senior enlisted, who would quickly have a word with a higher-ranking officer to put the kid in his place). A small number of officers (referred to as mustangs) start out as enlisted, but that's rare.
Heinlein takes a shot at this system in Starship Troopers:
The Commandant continued: "That’s the Moment of Truth, gentlemen. Regrettably there is no method known to military science to tell a real officer from a glib imitation with pips on his shoulders, other than through ordeal by fire. Real ones come through — or die gallantly; imitations crack up.
"Sometimes, in cracking up, the misfits die. But the tragedy lies in the loss of others... good men, sergeants and corporals and privates, whose only lack is fatal bad fortune in finding themselves under the command of an incompetent.
"We try to avoid this. First is our unbreakable rule that every candidate must be a trained trooper, blooded under fire, a veteran of combat drops. No other army in history has stuck to this rule, although some came close. Most great military schools of the past — Saint Cyr, West Point, Sandhurst, Colorado Springs didn’t even pretend to follow it; they accepted civilian boys, trained them, commissioned them, sent them out with no battle experience to command men... and sometimes discovered too late that this smart young ‘officer’ was a fool, a poltroon, or a hysteric.
"At least we have no misfits of those sorts. We know you are good soldiers — brave and skilled, proved in battle else you would not be here. We know that your intelligence and education meet acceptable minimums. With this to start on, we eliminate as many as possible of the not-quite-competent — get them quickly back in ranks before we spoil good cap troopers by forcing them beyond their abilities. The course is very hard — because what will be expected of you later is still harder.
"In time we have a small group whose chances look fairly good. The major criterion left untested is one we cannot test here; that undefinable something which is the difference between a leader in battle... and one who merely has the earmarks but not the vocation. So we field-test for it
"Gentlemen! — you have reached that point. Are you ready to take the oath?"
But every military in the world uses a similar structure, so there must be something to recommend it.
erwgv3g34
12d ago
I always thought that was a punishment sphere.
C. S. Lewis doesn't count; that was back when everyone was Christian, or at least Jewish. Even Jerry Pournelle was towards the tail-end of that era. A science fiction author being Christian doesn't really become remarkable until after the New Atheism of the 2000's.
erwgv3g34
12d ago
Mormon cosmology might have something to do with it.
erwgv3g34
13d ago
She just has to avoid failing; she wins by default. It's completely different from a man, who can be nice, safe, reliable, and still end up completely overlooked.
There is a reason Fluttershy is the most popular of the mane six. Butterscotch would have ended up FA.
erwgv3g34
13d ago
Big Fat Liar (2002). Surprisingly good for a kid's film; the "Hungry Like the Wolf" pool scene is very memorable, as is the "I Wish" warehouse montage, and, of course, the "Right Here, Right Now" helicopter ride. And, yes, very 2000's; right up there with Shrek (2001) and Digimon: The Movie (2000).
Your best bet is to go indie. If you absolutely must attempt traditional publishing, skip the agents and try submitting directly to Baen.
But, seriously, go indie.
Trad publishing would be hard enough if you were willing to play the idpol game, because you'd be competing with all the other people who are also willing to play the idpol game, and trad publishing is a tournament market where a few well-connected authors make it big and everyone else waits tables. But the fact that you are not willing to play makes it hopeless.
You are like a student applying to Harvard on the strength of his SAT and AP scores, unwilling to do extracurriculars or networking because that's not what education should be about, refusing to disclose his URM status and without a legacy family member to vouch for him; it's not going to work.
I see from the sibling comments that you don't want to publish serially. That's not ideal (you are leaving money on the table), but not quite a dealbreaker; while serial publishing on Royal Road or similar supported through Patreon is the usual way to fund a work in progress, once it is finished the standard practice is to delete the free copy and put it on Kindle Unlimited, so you can just jump straight to that.
And I also see that your goal is to make enough money to quit your job. As you correctly note, if an online novel gets popular enough it will eventually be acquired by a trad publisher anyway. If not, it is very unlikely that it would have ever gotten traditionally published in the first place, or that it would have paid back its advance if it had. None of those self-published guys you see at your local's writer groups would have made it big if they had tried trad publishing instead of online publishing; they would have just failed.
If you are serious about this, you have to commit one way or the other. Make a desperate all out effort to get traditionally published, including ticking the idpol boxes, and understand that you will most likely fail anyway. Or put all your effort into being an indie author, including adapting your writing to the serial format, and understand that you will most likely end up as a midlister doing his own marketing and outreach and never making as much money as you are currently making in a well-renumerated job.
And if neither of those are acceptable to you, just quit now, before you waste any more time on this.
And I see what you mean about them appealing to a "male romance fan" but- well, does it not strike you that there is a large overlap between the male protagonists of those stories and the generic, uninteresting, personality-less girl being mocked in that /r/romance_for_men cartoon?
Yes, of course. That's why we call them MC; because they are so interchangeable that we can't even remember their names. They are "boring, indecisive schlubs whose only identifiable personality traits are vague kindness and an inhuman ability to put up with abuse", as Nornagest put it. These stories are named after the love interest, not the protagonist, because she is the one who is actually unique and interesting.
I bailed because the male protagonist, Yuu, is so annoyingly... well, non-masculine. Unassertive, cringing, insecure, less smart, less confident, and less cool than his girlfriend... I kept wondering "What does she see in him?" But you have made me realize I was seeing it from the wrong angle, as a story appealing to women (who I guess in Japan find an unthreatening submissive softboi a turn-on?) But no, it's appealing to men
I thought that was obvious? There is nothing in Shikimori to appeal to a woman; it is very clearly a male fantasy. Women in Japan, like women everywhere, are attracted to tall, rich, dominant assholes, and if you read Japanese media that is aimed at women, that is exactly what you get.
But no, it's appealing to men- or more specifically, to boys who feel insecure and unmasculine and unable to compete in traditionally masculine ways, but want to imagine the cute, smart but devoted and affectionate girl will still fall in love with them.
...
And this is perhaps why "romance for men" doesn't appeal to me much. I am hardly a "manly man" who wants to go out and conquer kingdoms, but I guess I am a traditional enough man that I want to see men working, striving, struggling, and earning their rewards. A guy who offers no apparent distinction but has women falling on his dick anyway is not a fantasy for me, it's a mystery.
Don't you think that's a little harsh?
Yes, in the real world, Komi would have friendzoned Tadano as soon as she started making progress on communicating, then dated a popular fuckboy. Nagatoro would have become attracted to an artist who had already drawn lots of girls naked, like a Japanese version of Titanic, instead of becoming Senpai's muse and helping him achieve his full potential. "Women don't care about a mans struggles, they wait at the finish line and fuck the winners", as Richard Cooper said.
What romance for men sell is precisely the impossible fantasy of a world where this doesn't happen. Is it wrong to want to escape the domaine de la lutte for thirty minutes at a time, if only in our imaginations?
Have you read Haruki Murakami?
Nope, sorry; never even heard of this dude.
Boys would have to overcome the stigma of reading "romance" and, let's be honest, a story like I have described, where an ordinary boy wins the love and affection of a hot girl out of his league, would be scorned and mocked across social media and booktock, and become loser-coded.
A good salesman can come up with a marketing strategy to overcome any stigma, like calling G.I. Joe dolls "action figures", or rebranding minivans as SUVs. As for getting trashed on social media, well, yes, any story that appeals to men is going to have to make its peace with that, as is any man who wants to read something that he enjoys.
This is unfair and untrue. Jim very much does see a distinction between right and wrong. In his recent "Genocide", for example, you can see that he differentiates between legitimate genocide, when a defeated group refuses to stop fighting, and illegitimate genocide, such as the Tutsis in Rwanda, which was committed "for utterly trivial, wicked, evil, and frivolous reasons".
Similarly, in his earlier "How to Genocide Inferior Kinds in a Properly Christian Manner", he argues that you cannot just kill savages and take their stuff, because that undermines the high trust equilibrium of strong property rights that makes civilization great. Instead, he recommends legitimately purchasing the land and tempting them into committing unspeakable crimes, and then killing them and taking their stuff.
The beauty of this approach is that it will only work if the savages are genuinely inferior; an intelligent people will not sell their land for immediate consumption goods, the way a modern ghetto dweller will take out a payday loan to buy Air Jordans or a PS5, and an honorable people will not react to losing out on the deal by waging war against the folks that purchased the land, the way that same ghetto dweller will burn down the pawn shop for predatory lending. Thus, their destruction is legitimized by their own wicked natures.
This is a recurring theme in Jim's writing, explaining goodness in terms of game theory and material consequences. As he notes, this ends up to a large extent rederiving traditional Christian morality; risen killer apes and fallen angels are basically the same, so it doesn't really matter if you get your ethics from Darwin or from Jesus.
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