freemcflurry
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User ID: 106
freemcflurry
1mo ago
Dissident right
freemcflurry
1mo ago
OkCupid was really good back in the day. It was the golden age of online dating where it was mainstream enough to draw a crowd but hadn't yet been completely optimized for revenue. I got at least a couple of in person dates a week from it and eventually met my wife there. I see those graphs where people have thousands of swipes, dozens of messages and a handful of dates and it's just depressing.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
I'm not following. The difference between white schools and black schools is the people that go there.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
Will we reach a point where slavery is far enough in the past that blacks and whites will be the same then? People have been predicting that for a long time. When do you expect the process to be complete?
freemcflurry
1mo ago
Move a Finn to America and within 5 years he'll fit in. When he has kids you won't be able to tell them apart from anybody else. Move a black person to America and 400 years later they're culture is still wildly divergent and they have different outcomes from white Americans on every measure you could think of.
Anyway I think you're overestimating how much in common you have with black people. Try sending your kid to a 90% black school and ask them how easy it is to fit in because everyone eats peanut butter.
With Europeans you have deep similarities and superficial differences, with other races you have deep differences and superficial similarity.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
It's ironic that, after so many years of dismissing conspiracy theories, the government is telling us that the Russians are shooting energy beams at their brains. Maybe they could wear tinfoil hats to protect themselves.
If you work for the CIA or State Department and ever experience fatigue or headaches there is now a huge financial incentive to blame the Russians for it:
the Biden Administration signed into law the Havana Act, which provides six-figure compensation for confirmed victims of AHIs.
Lenzi, his wife, son, and daughter, were all medevaced from Guangzhou, China in early June 2018 after they each failed brain injury tests. According to Lenzi, he and his family have been compensated by the U.S. government with “more than a million dollars because of our diagnosed traumatic brain injuries” in a combination of civil litigation settlements and Havana Act payments.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
I was being snarky trying to portray the mindset of the type of people who put off kids to pursue mundane careers, but I should have been clearer. I don't think working in HR is better or more important than being a parent.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
Reminds me of a passage from one of Tolkien's letters to his son:
No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial. Too few are told that – even those brought up ‘in the Church’. Those outside seem seldom to have heard it. When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along. Someone whom they might indeed very profitably have married, if only –. Hence divorce, to provide the ‘if only’. And of course they are as a rule quite right: they did make a mistake. Only a very wise man at the end of his life could make a sound judgement concerning whom, amongst the total possible chances, he ought most profitably to have married! Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
One problem is that a job doesn't just provide money, it provides social status. Being a stay at home mom is just dull, repetitive drudgery but working in HR for $40k/yr is an exciting and challenging Career. Paying women to stay at home and have kids won't be enough if they'll be more respected for working a job. There needs to be a cultural change that makes having kids high status. I doubt there's a western government in existence that has the will and ability to make that happen though, maybe not a government anywhere given that Japan/China/Korea are doing even worse.
Another problem is that don't just want people to have kids, you want the right people to have kids. In the US we get a $2k/yr tax credit per child. That's a negligible amount of money if you're middle class and up so it really only incentivizes the poor. I'd prefer a deduction instead of a credit and make the amounts much, much higher so that a single income family with kids can have more or less the same lifestyle as a DINK family.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
I agree. I think I'll be fine until retirement but I worry what it's going to be like when my kid grows up. The best path forward is to either get a government job and stay there for life or go into a field where the government limits competition via licensure, like medicine, the skilled trades or law. For everything else there are so many immigrants that you're going to be left fighting for scraps with the entire population of Asia and Africa like the Canadians are doing now.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
Seems like the simplest solution would just be to stop making it illegal to buy drugs from abroad. Then if drug companies tried to jack up prices in the US we'd just buy them from the Germans for a much smaller markup. I didn't have insurance coverage in college and ordered a drug I needed from a sketchy online pharmacy in Canada for around 1/4 the price that I would pay in the US. The disadvantage was the risk that it would get stopped at customs and confiscated, but that's an entirely self inflicted problem.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
They also aren't eating homemade cornbread and fried chicken every day. My bet is that beer, soda and french fries have a lot more to do with it than regional cuisine.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
The Voting Rights Act puts all sorts of restrictions on how elections are run.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
But the cable networks are still there and there are a half dozen big streaming services to choose from as well. Plus no yearly contracts, you can subscribe for a couple months and then switch when you're bored. This is way better for consumers than the cable days.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
Started construction in 2016 with a budget of $50 million, delays caused construction to drag into 2019 (?) with a cost of $100 million and now we have to leave. That was money well spent.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
Most Conservative Christians do particularly like Jews, though the feeling isn't mutual. I don't think many people really cared about Muslims either way until 9/11, but the Republicans' support for Israel predates that by quite a lot as I understand it.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
The UAW was really bad though. It doesn't matter how well you design a car if the workers hide bottles in the door panels as a joke. Management and engineering had plenty of flaws but the UAW also deserves some of the blame.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
It would be one thing if the auto industry was dying a natural death and Trump wanted to prolong it with tariffs. But that's not all that's going on, the Biden administration is actively trying to kill the industry by effectively outlawing gas cars. The EPA issued regulations that would force 60% of new car sales to be electric by 2030*. That's billions of dollars in capital investment not just for the Big 3 but also for their suppliers and for foreign brands with facilities in the US that will all go up in smoke based on a whim of the EPA. One advantage they have over China is experience in working with gas cars and with their existing capital. They aren't losing in a fair competition where consumers decided they want electric cars, they're losing because of regulations that target US manufacturers but not their Chinese competitors.
So it's not just about Trump passing tariffs to protect Detroit. Biden is shutting down one of America's largest industries by fiat and Trump can stop that from happening, at least temporarily.
*There are rumors that the EPA is going to push that target back a little bit but while it's easy to rewrite the regulations every few months it's not easy to reverse decisions to invest in factories that take years to build.
For nice, liveable midwestern towns I would put Madison IN, Granville OH and Bardstown KY as examples. Not saying they beat western Europe for the small town lifestyle, but I think they'd be perfectly fine places to live. The problem isn't so much that they look like Mordor it's just that they have no real economy or job opportunities beyond providing services for retirees to spend their social security on, stuff like insurance agent, nurse at the local clinic, auto mechanic etc. I assume that's probably similar in Europe but idk.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
If a midwestern town is homogenous it's for the same reason that rural areas are homogenous anywhere in the western world: they are poor and isolated enough that migrants don't want to move there. The great cities that midwesterners built (St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago etc.) have been handed over to outsiders where they now have some of the highest murder rates in the developed world.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
Lindybeige did a sword vs spear test and the longer reach won most of the time. The swords did better when they bumrushed the spear but most of them, even though they were play weapons, were too scared to do that and stood back looking for an opening until they got popped in the face. There's a few youtube videos of the exact knife vs sword scenario and my takeaway is that, like most fights, the more aggressive one wins. If you dodge or block at all you've lost the initiative and you're done for.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
The Age of Discovery was started by the Spanish and Portuguese who didn't lose against Islam but had actually just completed the Reconquista by destroying the Emirate of Granada
freemcflurry
1mo ago
4chan isn't cool but it has been influential. A lot of the memes (in a broader sense than just image macros) that end up on Reddit or Facebook started on 4chan.
I don't know, Wikipedia at least says that the US pressured Germany to accept gastarbeiters from Turkey:
The first guest workers were recruited from European nations. However, Turkey pressured West Germany to admit its citizens as guest workers. Theodor Blank, Secretary of State for Employment, opposed such agreements. He held the opinion that the cultural gap between Germany and Turkey would be too large and also held the opinion that Germany didn't need any more laborers because there were enough unemployed people living in the poorer regions of Germany who could fill these vacancies. The United States, however, put some political pressure on Germany, wanting to stabilize and create goodwill from a potential ally. West Germany and Turkey reached an agreement in 1961.
The source is in German so I can't follow it up, though I do remember seeing this asserted in other places over the years.
Technically that was in 1961 and not the 1950s and the Turks aren't "third world" but if true it would support the core claim that the US intentionally tried to push diversity on its puppet states via the mass importation of non-western people.
She's majoring in Kinesiology according to LinkedIn. No idea if that's rigorous or not.
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