guajalote
9d ago
Biggest piece of advice is to control the dose. It's like alcohol. If I pound six shots in a row I'm probably going to throw up and feel like shit the next day. If I drink two glasses of wine over the course of four hours I'm going to feel great and have no ill effects. Unsurprisingly weed works the same way.
If I overdo it and get anxious then I practice mindfulness. I find it's easier to do this because you know the anxiety isn't "real" so you can sort of go "I know why I'm feeling this way, I'm just going to accept it and observe it instead of fighting it." I feel practicing mindfulness in this way has helped me manage anxiety better when sober as well.
guajalote
14d ago
I think the left's increasing tendency to exclude contrasting arguments seriously hurts their ability to hold their own on a heterogenous platform, whether or not they are right.
I think this hits the nail square on the head. For example, I think there are some good arguments against strong HBD based on evolutionary biology, but you never hear those kinds of arguments articulated by people on the left because it would require them to actually listen to the pro-HBD arguments and think carefully about them, which most are not willing to do.
guajalote
25d ago
Varg
Likely a reference to this guy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varg_Vikernes
Blue Pill, Red Pill, Black Pill
I think you're defining these terms too narrowly by tying them to gender and dating discourse. They are broad concepts that can apply to many things.
Blue Pill is idealism; believing the world works the way it's "supposed to." A person who is blue pilled about US politics might say "Politicians make decisions based on what they believe is in the best interest of the nation. Therefore the best way to accomplish our political goals is to explain why those goals are in the nation's best interest."
Red Pill is realism; seeing the way things actually work and trying to exploit those realities to accomplish your goals. A person who is red pilled about US politics might say "Politicians are human beings who make decisions based on self-interest. Therefore the best way to accomplish our political goals is to make sure accomplishing those goals is personally beneficial to the right politicians."
Black Pill is pessimism or nihilism; seeing the way things actually work and realizing that you cannot achieve your goals as long as things continue working that way. A person who is black pilled about US politics might say "Politicians are human beings who make decisions based on self-interest. Many powerful interest groups realize this and accomplish their goals by dumping large amounts of money into politics. Our political project will never be able to match the level of resources that our opposition has, therefore we have no hope of persuading politicians to agree with us and we shouldn't even waste our time trying."
guajalote
18d ago
Another possibility is that "non-restrictive states" have been ahead of the curve on documenting anti-LGBT bullying for many years or decades, whereas the "restrictive states" were behind the curve but recently started catching up due to increased nationwide awareness of the issue. So the sharp rise in reported rates in restrictive states could also be related to a change in reporting.
guajalote
18d ago
Pride doesn't, or at least needn't, depend on your position relative to other people. English is a widely spoken language that doesn't require any special intelligence to learn. I learned it effortlessly as a child. But someone who becomes fluent in English as an adult put in a lot of work and has something to be proud of. To someone who is learning to ski, getting down a black diamond run for the first time without falling is a major accomplishment worthy of pride. Someone who skis regularly might do ten black diamond runs in a day and think nothing of it.
guajalote
21d ago
So the right answer must contain vanilla, because it's the "normal" combo with those topings. We are also told choc chips are "commonly" paired with mint, whereas whipped cream is "sometimes" paired with coffee. I suppose "commonly" is meant to indicate a stronger affinity than "sometimes," so I guess the right answer is vanilla-mint? I'm not sure I'd say this answer is obvious, though, as I'm having a read a lot into your specific choice of words.
Also, this answer may not translate over to whatever [redacted] is, in particular if there's any kind of interaction term between the flavors. For example, if the toppings are meant to be symptoms a patient is exhibiting and flavors are meant to be drugs one might administer for those symptoms, I would imagine the answer might be different because you'd need to take into account drug interactions. Similarly if the toppings are economic indicators and the flavors are government policies, it's the same issue where two policies can interact in non-trivial ways.
guajalote
2mo ago
I predict if her numbers continue to climb, he's gonna mention her daughter's married to a black guy. Way too tempting for a guy like Trump.
I think it's very unlikely he will do this, simply because neither Trump nor most of his supporters care about this. I think you are making the same mistake as the media by assuming "Nimra" is a racist dogwhistle. It's not, it's serving a different set of purposes:
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It calls attention to the fact that she doesn't use her real name, which makes her seem fake and insecure.
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Like all Trump nicknames, it's a power play. If you can give someone a nickname and make it stick, it reveals a kind of power you have over them. And I think it's clear that Haley could not do the same to Trump in reverse -- all prior attempts at nicknames (Drumpf, Cheeto, etc.) have failed to stick.
guajalote
18d ago
My point is that it's based on one's own situation, not others. You gave an example in your post of a depressed person doing basic tasks. Another example might be someone who had a stroke learning how to move their right index finger, something almost everyone can do. It is worthy of pride because it's an accomplishment for that person. By contrast, doing something that almost no one can do may not be worthy of pride. If Usain Bolt runs a race faster than 99% of the population could, he still may be quite disappointed with his time and feel no pride at all.
guajalote
4mo ago
But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable.
The narrative will be: "why did anyone ever care about this shit?"
Think about the big protestant/Catholic culture war that waged in Europe in the 1600s, which was extremely bloody and widely agreed by its participants to be a big deal and today people (even devout Catholics and protestants) largely look back with bewilderment on that time period and have a hard time understanding what the big deal was. People were getting burned for saying the consecrated host is just a cracker. Today, Catholics still believe in transubstantiation but most have a hard time understanding why anyone would be punished (let alone killed) for holding a contrary view.
When talking about current culture war issues, it's hard for us to imagine how they could become irrelevant to the point that future generations would be baffled that anyone ever cared. But that's how people would have felt in the 1600s; it was a literal battle for immortal souls, how could this battle ever become irrelevant? Yet it did. I think our current battles will eventually suffer the same fate.
guajalote
1mo ago
"By your logic" isn't a claim about what the other person thinks or believes, it's a claim about what the structure of their argument logically implies. If polygamy is bound to die out because its practitioners fail to reproduce, then the same reasoning should generalize to other analogous situations. If it doesn't generalize, that implies the claim being made is either wrong or insufficiently precise.
guajalote
1mo ago
Houston deals with them quite effectively, though not very ruthlessly. Housing is affordable so the homelessness rate is low to begin with. And every few months the police dismantle the homeless encampments and their residents are forced into free government housing.
guajalote
4mo ago
I think you are conflating two issues that are mostly unrelated. Housing costs are probably being driven up slightly by increased demand due to immigration, but the effect is tiny compared to the supply-side problems caused by excessive red tape that makes housing expensive and difficult to build. The population of Houston, Texas is about 20% foreign-born immigrants, yet housing is extremely affordable because there is no zoning, no rent controls, and few regulatory hoops to jump through if you want to build housing.
Nobody worries about immigrants buying up all the food, or all the cars, or all the cell phones. If demand goes up, the economy will just produce more of these things to meet demand. It doesn't make sense to worry about immigrants buying up all the housing either, unless there's a problem on the supply side that makes it impossible to meet demand. Fix the supply side problem if you want to fix the housing problem.
guajalote
1mo ago
Music is about producing a spirit in a person, a social emotional-behavioral orientation. Music can produce approximately any emotional space, from the felt sense of eeriness, to grief, even to tones that connote honor, duty, profundity, you name it. We do not need to prove how it does this, as we all agree it does this.
I don't think we all agree it does this, at least not in the way you seem to claim. Music can temporarily evoke an emotion, in much the way a movie can, but the idea that music changes people's actual beliefs or actions seems like a very strong and unsubstantiated claim.
I enjoy Excitable Boy by Warren Zevon and Maxwell's Silver Hammer by the Beatles. Both songs basically celebrate deranged serial killers. Neither has made me want to kill anyone to even the slightest degree.
guajalote
2mo ago
Maybe if there is another financial crisis or 911 there may be an amendment to ensure that there are minimal delays for stimulus or other action for exigent circumstances.
This is one of the most horrifying amendments I can imagine. If there's ever a constitutional clause that grants broad emergency powers to the executive, the president will find an excuse to declare a "state of emergency" from which we will never again emerge. We would still be in a "state of emergency" from Covid if such a clause existed.
My interest in continuing this conversation is waning given your unwillingness to present even a shred of evidence to substantiate your rather strong claims.
It seems to me that all your arguments are fundamentally the same arguments that people in the 60s advanced as evidence of the Beatles corrupting the youth. Run for Your Life is a song about beating or killing a woman for infidelity, written and sung by John Lennon who literally beat his wife. Got to Get you Into My Life and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds are about how great LSD is. Many Harrison songs promote Hinduism like My Sweet Lord. Polythene Pam promotes drag and crossdressing. Not to mention the countless songs that promote premarital sex.
The Beatles were as high-status and looked up to by teenagers as any band in history, arguably far more so than any hip hop act ever. You haven't given any principled reasons why your critique of hip hop wouldn't apply equally to the Beatles. By your logic they clearly and unironically promoted abusing women, doing drugs, leaving Christianity, and wearing drag. Other than wearing drag, these were all things members of the Beatles actually did and unironically supported in their own lives. Clearly you would agree that Beatles songs are harmful if even only 1% of the fans are more likely to do drugs after hearing a literal ode to drug use by their literal idols.
you’re a kid in the ghetto, and you see a guy getting respect and women and money and later learn he runs a gang, will this make you more likely to join a gang? Common sense says yes, and hip hop is merely the packaging of this experience into a commodity to be sold to those outside the ghetto.
Do you have any evidence of people "outside the ghetto" joining gangs because of hip hop? Even one anecdote? It strikes me as exceedingly unlikely.
Well I suppose it’s funny to know that he is still successfully trolling after all these decades.
The Manson murderers literally wrote "Helter Skelter" and "Piggies" in blood on the walls. You're saying that was trolling?
If Charlie doesn't care when Bob screws up, why would he care if you screw up due to Bob? Why are you "forced to answer" if Bob isn't? Is this an office politics situation where Charlie and Bob are friends or something?
Why would the following not work:
- Bob breaks a tool and there's no documentation.
- This negatively impacts your tools.
- Manager asks you "why are your tools fucking up?"
- You respond: "That's because of this thing Bob broke over here. He has no documentation for it, but I've alerted him to the problem. As soon as he fixes it my tools will work great. In the mean time I just have to wait for Bob to fix it."
- Manager: "You fix it."
- You: "No, that's Bob's tool and there's no documentation."
guajalote
1mo ago
Could you explain the exact procedure? Maybe I didn't read your original post carefully enough, but it wasn't clear to me exactly what you were doing. What is the dose/timing/delivery method, etc? How do you avoid just consuming the nicotine and not doing the housework?
guajalote
1mo ago
The likelihood of a quantum system collapsing into a given state is rigorously mathematically specified by the wavefunction. If a will or agent was making a "choice," we wouldn't expect those choices to perfectly obey the wave function. It's like spinning a roulette wheel or rolling dice - just because we don't know the outcome in advance doesn't mean any free will is involved.
guajalote
4mo ago
In my experience, things like low housing costs and a robust economy are far more conducive to poor people's standard of living than a robust wellfare state. Houston, for example, has a homelessness rate of around 30 people per 100k residents. The country of Canada has an average homelessness rate of at least 90 per 100k residents, with cities often much higher than that; for example in Toronto the rate seems to be in excess of 322 per 100k.
So while I would agree that Canada is more "concerned" about poor people, it's not at all clear to me that Canada is actually providing a better standard of living for poor people.
guajalote
4mo ago
I admit that there are areas where my model breaks down - my Steam library can't really be considered physical, it barely touches the physical world excepting that CPUs and GPUs are needed to make use of it.
I think your model breaks down all over the place. Obviously raw materials are not irrelevant, but they represent a tiny fraction of the wealth of a modern developed economy.
Go dig up a shovelful of dirt in your backyard. That dirt contains most of the raw materials needed to build a CPU. But there are many, many orders of magnitude difference between the value of that dirt and the value of a CPU. Almost all that value comes from intangible things:
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The knowledge and time of skilled electrical engineers and chemists figuring out how to design and fabricate CPUs.
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The university system that educated them and provided the foundational knowledge they built upon.
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A legal system that enables companies to enter into and enforce contracts with one another in a reliable way
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Systems of IP protection that incentivize R&D expenditures in CPU development.
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Consistent law enforcement and property rights that allow companies to invest billions of dollars in semiconductor fabrication equipment without worrying a government or criminal organization will take it away from them.
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Financial institutions that will lend money to these companies if they don't have billions of dollars sitting around to build semiconductor fabs.
On and on. It's intangibles (almost) all the way down.
Healthcare is about using physical goods like surgical equipment and drugs.
Like CPUs, surgical equipment and drugs are mostly made out of cheap-as-fuck raw materials that are then synthesized into useful things. It's engineers, chemists, biologists, lawyers, etc. that make it possible for this stuff to exist. And of course much of healthcare is made up of other sorts of intangibles, like medical training. Surgical equipment isn't of much use without surgeons.
Yes, you need to have ways for savings and loans to be allocated - but savings and loans are just claims on real goods.
You act like this is trivial, but it's not. There exist countries in the world today where you can't trust banks to hold your savings and the average person can't get loans because the economy is too unstable and risky. These are the so-called "shithole" countries, and they're shitholes not because of a lack of natural resources but because of a lack of the kinds of intangible goods I've been talking about.
guajalote
5mo ago
In my experience most high-level US politicians have an unreal level of charm in person that is almost impossible to fully describe unless you've experienced it firsthand. I've met several politicians who I intensely disliked from afar, only to find myself instantly charmed by them in person. Never met Clinton, but he probably takes this to another level.
guajalote
1mo ago
There is an element of behavior and not just emotion because dance is universal.
The fact that certain types of music promotes certain types of dancing does not imply that it promotes specific types of behavior off the dance floor. You haven't provided any evidence of this and it certainly contradicts my experiences.
So when you pair pro-drug visual media/lyricism with a low-impulse rhythm, that’s a recipe for immorality.
You claim this based on what evidence? It sounds like in your worldview music is almost a hypnotizing force, something that changes people subconsciously, but then you contradict yourself with statements like:
That’s because you have the social intelligence to understand that the Beatles are not extolling murder. The music behind the lyrics is upbeat and devoid of anger. The juxtaposition was chosen to make a humorous and interesting song.
It sounds like you think Maxwell's Silver Hammer is fine because if you intellectually analyze it you realize it's not pro-murder. But if it's just a hypnotic or automatic response to lyrics + rhythm, why should this matter? I can tell a just-so story about how pairing an "upbeat and devoid of anger" melody with lyrics about serial killing actually conditions people to thinking killing isn't a big deal. But that story would have as little evidentiary basis as yours does.
Also you seem to be claiming that if Paul McCartney turned out to be a serial killer, and stated that Maxwell was meant unironically, this would transform it from a "good" song to a "bad" one?
I should probably also note that Charles Mansion credited Beatles songs as inspiring his murders. How do you square that with your claims?
This is why you might hear a phrase and suddenly remember a song, or might have a song stuck in your head due to some emotional problem you are dealing with.
Any evidence for this claim? In my experience the songs that get stuck in my head are random and have no connection with my emotional state.
guajalote
5mo ago
I think your sister's stated explanations are simply an attempt to rationalize her feelings. They're not a description of her actual underlying reasoning.
I think for a lot of everyday liberals who haven't thought carefully about this stuff, the reasoning goes like this: trans/NB people are oppressed, and oppressed people are good and virtuous. Therefore if someone (in my estimation) is not good and virtuous, then they are not "really" trans/NB.
You see this a lot. When a trans person is in the news doing something bad, then they're not really trans, they're faking it. Similarly, if a member of an oppressed minority group doesn't hold the right opinions or vote the right way, they're self-hating or not "really" an authentic member of their race, etc.
guajalote
4mo ago
They believe it’s important to explain their reasoning to their kids.
I think it's really valuable to explain your reasoning to your kid whenever possible. My parents did to me all the time. However, they made it clear that my obligation to obey them was not contingent upon my agreement with their reasoning.
I think in the US we've managed to find this balance with cigarettes. Smoking is perfectly legal, but banned in most places where non-smokers would be forced to encounter it and advertising is highly restricted. I am a big fan of weed but I see no reason why anyone would need to consume it publicly nor any reason why we need to tolerate garish advertising for it.
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