non_radical_centrist
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User ID: 1327
non_radical_centrist
11mo ago
The problem is quite frankly there is no perfect formula for asking out a girl. Every girl is different after all. What would flatter one girl would get another to want to call the cops. I can share my experience and what's worked with me though.
First, you should identify what you want and what you're willing to do. Think about whether you want a hook up or whether it'd leave you disgusted with yourself. Whether you're willing to be 50 and single or if you'd happily marry a sub-optimal partner as long as they shared your most important values. You might be wrong about guessing what you really want until you try, but it's better than going in totally blind. In my opinion it's a good thing to go on dates even with women you're not super attracted to, because the cost of one evening and paying for dinner is small compared the experience gained at socializing and the potential opportunity to unexpectedly connect.
The next step is to get on the big dating apps. Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, and maybe a more niche one like Christian Mingle if you fit the demographic. Make a profile with nice pictures and a bio. I've read the advice "Be unique! Stand out with something silly!" but in my own personal experience making my profile as inoffensive but flattering as possible works best. Like every profile, in my experience it does not actually lower your elo, and takes much less time and energy than trying to determine whether you're attracted to someone who 99% will not match you anyway. When messaging first, comment on something in their profile or pictures. Expect to carry the conversation for the first bit. Ask for their social media at the first good opportunity, or as a casual hail mary if the convo is dying. Ask them to meet up for a movie or dinner or whatever you like to do at the next good opportunity. Don't bother playing games/hard to get. Don't necessarily respond the second they do if they're spacing out their messages, being that available can make people go "oh I kinda want to keep talking to him but I don't want a whole conversation right now, so I best not message because he's going to respond immediately". Waiting 15 minutes to 1 hour is fine. If they ghost you or are really dragging out their messages(24 hours+ between messages) they are not interested and you can stop wasting time on them. Even if they say they're interested, they are not actually.
That approach has gotten me a few dates and less wasted energy, ultimately no one I really liked, but still a big step up from where I was before learning all that.
If you're willing to work out at the gym and get sexy, that's an even bigger advantage, but personally I've always found that difficult.
non_radical_centrist
11mo ago
Seems like a hook up app that's aiming at the demographic of non-MLM queers, bdsm types, and threesomes. I'm sure they view themselves as emotionally mature and "better" at sexual encounters, but don't most demographics? Ultimately that app just looks like FetLife for the modern age
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
It might be a good idea to download MtG: Arena and play a few games digitally before investing much money in physical decks, to decide if you still like it
non_radical_centrist
15d ago
I read the Origins of Woke by Richard Hanania a couple weeks ago. I was going to write a more in depth review covering more sections, but got bored after writing my thought process about how employers aren't allowed to use discriminatory tests and never got around to writing more, so I'll post what I did write.
Let’s all people have a factor that you can represent numerically how good they will be at a job. Let’s call it the m, for mystery, because exactly what will make someone good at a job- e.g knowledge, skill, conscientiousness, etc. can be very difficult to measure, and knowing how important proportionally each sub-factor is to the final m factor or even what every sub-factor maybe is also very difficult. But, we can still try to estimate someone’s m. If you have a job that largely involves lifting heavy boxes and moving them around, you can get a decent estimate by having a candidate try to lift a heavy box- if they fall, they almost certainly have low m for that job, and if they succeed with ease, they’ll likely have a high m for that job. If you have a CEO position for a large multinational corporation, you can like at a candidate’s previous job experience- if they’ve previously been in charge of a corporation that hit records profits during their tenure, they’ll likely have high m. If while previously in charge of a corporation, it went from high profits to bankruptcy, or they’ve only ever held a job as a janitor, you can guess that they’d have low m for the position.
We can say with confidence that on average, black people have lower m than white people for most jobs. Whether this is because of genetics, culture, discrimination, or something else isn’t relevant to this discussion, because this discussion isn’t about increasing their m, just about what are fair hiring practices. In 1964, when the Civil Rights Act passed, both Congress and the general population of America overwhelmingly wanted two things: For black people to not be actively discriminated against, but also for people to be able to still select the best employees for a job, even if all the best employees were white. But what is “discrimination”? That’s a surprisingly hard question to answer.
Let’s say an employer has 1000 job candidates, and needs to select 100 to fill a newly created job. The employer wants to get the 100 employees with the highest m- he is unlikely to succeed perfectly, but he still wants to get as close as he can. If the employer asked all potential job candidates to fill out a brief questionnaire as the first stage of the application process, and one of the questions was “Are you black?”, and then the employer threw out every single application where someone answered “Yes”, the average m in the remaining pool would likely be higher, although he also would’ve likely tossed some candidates who did belong in the final pool. Whether it’s a good idea from the employer’s perspective may vary- maybe the employer really has no good ideas on how to figure out which candidates have higher m, and his next step will just be to randomly select 100 candidates from the remaining pool, in which case he’ll have done better in terms of average m score than if he didn’t purge black candidates.
But, I think almost everyone would agree that purging black applications like that is discrimination, in the letter of the ACR, in the spirit of what Congress intended it, and that the majority of Americans don’t want to see that sort of candidate selection happen, not from government employers and not from private employers either. The government would tell any employer that tried to do that something like, “Stop that, rework your hiring practices so that you’re actually more directly testing for m, and not just discriminating against blacks”.
So the employer goes back to the drawing board, and comes up with another test. He will take a pencil, and slide it into the hair of a candidate. After releasing, if the pencil falls out of the hair, the candidate proceeds to the next stage, if it stays in, the candidate is removed from selection. That’s the Apartheid South African Pencil test, and in practice that’d basically be the same as the previous test, although it’s hypothetically possible some black people would pass and some white people would fail. Or maybe the employer tries to be slightly less blatant, and instead does a swimming test(black have worse buoyancy than white people). Unless the job actually involves swimming in some way, I think most people would still agree that such a test is discriminatory, not actually measuring m in any way, at least not more than a generic fitness test does, and would only have predictive power in job performance because it’s managing to exclude blacks.
The employer now comes up with a fourth test. It will be a straightforward algebra exam, the sort you’d see in a 10th grade math course. If the job does not involve algebra in any way, like it’s a job moving boxes around, or maybe it’s a cashier job at a retailer, or even a more high class job like a lawyer that doesn’t really involve math, then this test will also disproportionately fail black candidates, who tend to be worse at algebra. But, is it actually discriminatory? Where the previous tests only would have any predictive power for job performance in so far as they measured whether or not someone’s black, and black people on average did worse at the job, the algebra test might have real predictive power, because it’s not just measuring algebra skill, it’s also measuring general intelligence, and general intelligence would be a major component of m for almost any job.
Whether the test is actually discriminatory now comes down to whether “general intelligence” is real, and also that if it is real, can it be measured by an algebra test? I don’t think that question, in the absence of formal studies, has an obvious answer. I think reasonable people could very easily come to believe that algebra skill is divorced from other intellectual tasks like public speaking, literacy, chess skill, etc. My understanding of the literature is that that is not true- that there is a general intelligence, and skill at all intellectual tasks are relatively closely correlated. And that that general intelligence is also closely correlated with job performance in pretty much every job. But, reasonable judges who aren’t good at parsing scientific studies themselves can be convinced that general intelligence does not work like that.
Richard Hanania, in The Origin’s of Woke, writes that judges and bureaucrats expanding the definition of discrimination to also include tests that really measure future job performance is one of the key origins of wokeness. I wouldn’t disagree. Where I do disagree with him is that I don’t think it’s easily possible to permit real skill tests but ban actually discriminatory test, because they can look very similar. Ultimately I don’t disagree with his conclusion that the laws should be altered to allow for discrimination though, because I think where in the 60’s the Civil Rights Act may have been needed to prevent employers doing discrimination along the lines of a Pencil Test for employees like how the American people wanted, today the vast majority of Americans are no longer anti-black racist, despite what many on the left think. I think you could remove a lot of anti-discrimination protections, and unlike in the 60’s, a combination of few people today being actually racist and non-governmental social pressure to keep the real racists in line will prevent the sort of racism Americans hate.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
I think it was just a joke about calling Cornell Engineering students so dumb that they're a vulnerable group. Obviously a joke because they're of course still quite smart, just not as smart as other top programs like MIT engineering.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I think, but I'm not certain, that most men are like you, though of course everyone virtue signals that they have absolutely no physical attraction to anyone significantly younger than them. But if you're worse at hiding it, which is probably likely since I don't think themotte posters are known for their social skills, then it would go badly for you.
Something I'm looking into to you might find useful is getting some compTIA certificates and going into tech support/network security.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I'm a bit more sympathetic to women than that meme portrays because they do have to deal with more stalkers and risk of violence if they choose a partner poorly, but ultimately I do agree with it. If she has reasonable standards, she should not have very much trouble finding a partner at all. Her problem almost certainly isn't that she just hasn't yet met a good man who exists just over the horizon, it's that her idea of a good man doesn't exist/are so rare they're able to land higher value women than her.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
Is it just me, or is verbal debate as a method of determining which side is correct extremely over rated? It's fine as a spectator sport, but it's only a couple steps ahead of honor duels with blades to determine who's actually right. You can't check your opponent's source mid-debate if you're unfamiliar with it but suspicious it's of dubious quality, if you have a slip of a tongue or misphrase something you look like an idiot even if you're actually correct, the time limits are often too short to properly explain your point. In some debates, like ones in presidential elections, people will often interrupt and speak over each other.
The much more obvious alternative is to have written debates, like on a forum similar to this one, where you go back and forth replying with your opponent and having time to properly research and think out your arguments. I know the reason this isn't done is because it's much less entertaining, and that a lot of people probably don't have the patience to read 4000 dull words about economics or racism or whatever, but I'm still kind of surprised it's not like common knowledge that it'd be a better alternative.
For reference: https://twitter.com/incunabula/status/1434803410902167552
I think a couple different things factor into it. The most important aspect is that European languages use an alphabet with discrete letters, which is relatively uncommon compared to languages like Chinese that use glyphs, or Arabic that uses cursive. This means that Europeans have the easiest time using printing presses, which are required for speedy scientific advancement. Human scientific knowledge exploded shortly after the invention of the printing press. In 1450, things weren't vastly more impressive than a lot of things you'd find in like 50 BCE. There were definitely some new inventions, and gun powder weapons changed up warfare a lot, but really things weren't too different considering 1500 years had passed. Then over the next couple hundred years, before you even get to the industrial revolution, you had people like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Leonardo da Vinci, etc. Hell this [https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/scientists-at-a-glance/627228](list of greatest ever scientists) I looked up to give myself a few more examples has ends "ancient times" at the 1500s; something clearly happened to speed up science and I think it's obviously the printing press. And that scientific advantage let them achieve the industrial revolution and dominate everywhere in the 1800s.
Secondly, for why the West in particular is most influential than say Russia, I think it is just that the West, being the in the west, was able to colonize the Americas more easily. Obviously the Americas will be strongly influenced by the countries that colonized them. Then doubling up on that, Eastern Europe and then China basically crippled itself when it "chose" communism in the 20th century, communism with the benefit of hindsight being just an objectively worse system than capitalism.
HBD stuff may play into it too, but honestly I think some aliens could've dropped into aboriginal Australia in the 1200s and gene edited every human to have 20 extra IQ points and things wouldn't be too vastly different today in terms of geopolitics if they weren't able to have a discrete alphabet and printing press.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I think of all the decisions a parent has over their child's life, circumcision is a relatively small one. Parents have the power to completely fuck over their children without it remotely qualifying as anything illegal or even justifiable to have the child taken away. The only way for the world to function is for society to assume parents have their biological children's best interests at heart, which they do 99% of the time. If parents think, "I predict my child would want to be circumcised as an adult", I think they should be allowed to go through with it, because the evidence is strong that adult circumcision greatly reduces sexually pleasure, where as the evidence that circumcision as a baby reduces sexual pleasure is weak.
There are other benefits to foreskin removal as well, like hygiene and having effects on preventing STD spread. Enough that I don't think not being circumcised is overwhelmingly better, even if on net it's probably better.
In conclusion, I think hospitals should tell parents "Are you sure you want circumcision? Here are a lot of the negative effects", and if the parents say yes anyways, it happens.
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
I think you underestimate the amount of support Hamas has among the regular Gazans. And the groups that are more popular than Hamas are usually other Islamic terrorist groups. And underestimate how much those regular Gazans hate Israel and would be uncooperative in the concentration camps, they wouldn't just be passively grateful for food and shelter, they'd be getting into fights. And those fights would be terrible PR- "Israeli soldiers beat civilian in concentration camp!", regardless about any context of if the guy needed to be beat down.
non_radical_centrist
2mo ago
Do you have any personal opinions about whether whether this was a fair ruling, Ashlael? I have little knowledge about law and can't even begin to determine how fair this case was for myself. The sources I would normally use to determine an opinion, like a synthesis of Wikipedia, liberal subreddits, conservative subreddits, and themotte comments, are all varying so much from each other and not really directly addressing each other's points that I can't come to a conclusion. But I do generally greatly respect your analysis as insightful and not particularly biased.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
I think the issue with that is often luxury products are actually marginally better than the defaults, and I don't think the state could consistently make actually good products. It's one thing to pay $10k for a watch that's 1% better than a $500 watch, it's another to pay $10k for a watch that's 1% worse
non_radical_centrist
5mo ago
There is some minor diversity like some of the senior officers and ladies maids improbably being black, but I didn’t think it was really a ‘woke’ picture.
I don't think that was particularly unlikely at all, France had a number of black mixed race people in it, including in the upper class. For example the famous author Alexandre Dumas' father was mixed race and a French general.
Personally I didn't like the movie, it really did feel like it made a buffoon out of Napoleon, who got cuckolded and is very insecure about his success. I would've preferred that it either double down on being a period piece romcom, or to have been properly about Napoleon's battles and conquests, instead of being a weird romance interspersed with battle scenes.
non_radical_centrist
11mo ago
They want both traditional social cohesiveness but also cowboy individualism.
As long as everyone in the society is the exact same, everyone is free to individually do the exact same stuff
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
Lots of people clearly like his comedy, see: his show selling out. There's no such thing as a comedian who's universally popular. The only fair way to measure how funny someone is is to look at some combined metric of a) the number of people that like them, and b) the amplitude(passion?) of how much people who like them like them. Being able to sell out a large venue is an objective measure they score decently on both metrics.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I think there are different levels of communities. Yes, what existed a couple hundred years ago, or today still in rural villages disconnected from globalism, are much more connected and interreliant communities. Every person knows every single other person in their community like how I know my own close family. Maybe we should have a different word for that sort of thing than what we use for fandoms. But community is a sliding scale. Is a 1930s rural American town of a couple thousand where everyone goes to one of five churches a community, if it's not literally everyone knowing literally everyone personally? Was my highschool graduating year of ~400 people, where everyone knew about half the class personally and would do reasonable favours for each other but not go as far to help them build a new house a community? Where do you draw the line before getting to fandom? Especially since some portions of fandoms do get pretty close, there are lots of stories of people meeting and getting married through a fandom.
On another level, I think moving away from the death penalty may have degraded communities. You can worry less about whether strangers are trustworthy if you know untrustworthy strangers get executed and thus aren't around anymore. But also degrading communities morally necessitate the removal of the death penalty. It's one thing for a group of people who've known a criminal since they were a baby to say "yeah that person needs to be killed, it's sad but the best option here, they simply are a danger to keep in the community". It's another thing for a jury of strangers to say "yeah that person needs to be killed, even though all we know about them is what these two very biased lawyers have seen fit to show us".
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I used to, and I sometimes still do if I'm feeling very bored/desperate. But out of probably around ~20 girls I've flirted with online on dating apps and other sources, if they ghost once, never once will they actually show up to a date, even if they still express interest and say "Yeah I'd like to go on a date sometime soon!".
non_radical_centrist
22d ago
Neoliberals were strip mining the economy and the labor market
Neoliberals embraced deregulation and austerity because Keynesian economics and large amounts of the economy being state owned or heavily regulated lead to the stagflation of the 70s.
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
People have been protesting Israel and calling them genocidal basically every year since 1947, with only small breaks during the periods of hours to days when the Arabs start a military offense and briefly look like they have the upper hand before getting their asses handed to them.
non_radical_centrist
2mo ago
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Self-immolation draws attention. It's like tossing soup on a painting that's protected by glass. It doesn't do anything by itself, but it draws attention to the issue. It may also inspire comrades to action that does actually have impacts, like voting.
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We have soldiers who'd do that because the military is a very large place with lots of people. It's against the rules for soldiers to make political statements, especially ones that dramatic in uniform, but when you're the single largest employer in the USA, some of your employees will be mentally ill and break the rules.
non_radical_centrist
2mo ago
At the end of the day though, that's how New York chose to write its law and it's being implemented as intended. It was entirely in Trump's power to avoid this outcome by simply not lying. So as far as I'm concerned, he fucked around and found out. Tough bikkies.
The other concern I've seen and that I share is that it's just him being prosecuted for this. That this sort of fraud is very common and normally isn't enforced. It'd be like if they also prosecuted him for adultery, which is Class B misdemeanor in New York.
I'm not that sympathetic to him, I agree with your sentiment that he fucked around and found out, but I am pretty concerned about this setting a bad precedent of trumping up charges against political opponents.
Also, do you have a substack or twitter or anything with more writing I could follow?
People turned "trigger discipline" into dogma, and then into cliche, and the fact is that if you are comfortable around guns, having your finger inside the trigger carries no significant risk of an accidental discharge.
It's very low cost to have trigger discipline, and very high cost if something does go wrong because you don't. It might be an insignificant risk, but why take the risk at all? If nothing else, the competent people using trigger discipline so the incompetent people follow along too is a good idea. Because I guarantee you if there was a policy of "You're only allowed to have your finger inside the trigger if you're comfortable with guns", you'd see a ton of people who aren't comfortable but want to pretend they are putting their finger inside.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
I just finished the Kyoshi novels which are official media in the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe. They're more at the 14-18yo maturity level, with sexual tension but not actually sex and people getting stabbed to death, compared to the show which was a more standard children's cartoon violence. I really enjoyed the first half of the first book, but after that it became a bit of a slog. I think I had two major issues with it. First, it felt like it was pretending to be a morally grey serious book akin to Game of Thrones where lots of the villains make good points and the heroes are forced to do bad deeds for the greater good. But the protagonist never really does anything that bad- she just kills a few extremely dangerous criminals/war lords in self-defense that she wouldn't have been able to bring in peacefully, and those criminals more than deserved death anyways. And the antagonists try to justify their actions claiming that they're just killing even worse bandits and are the only things upholding order, but they're far too needlessly cruel and violent for them to really have much moral justification.
The second issue I have with it is related and is that Kyoshi always felt incredibly guilty about having killed some of the antagonists and she'd always be beating herself up over it in the narration. But again, she really didn't do anything wrong, so the guilt just annoyed me instead of making me care more about her. I had a very similar issue with the web novel The Practical Guide to Evil as well. This stands opposed to the show Bojack Horseman, where the protagonist also is constantly feeling guilty over his past actions, but is also an actually shitty person, so it makes me sympathize with him instead of just rolling my eyes.
A third more more minor issue I had was that the spirit world never felt as mystical and otherworldly as it did in the original show. Instead it was more like a place that just contained some evil monsters and was travelled to with extreme adversity. It was similar to Legend of Korra in that way. As opposed to the original show, where spirits cared about their narrow interests like a forest, or the balance between moon and ocean, or protecting knowledge, or trying to steal people's faces, and didn't care about the rest of humanity beyond what they were the spirit of.
The original show was superb but I feel like that magic's never been recaptured in any media since, although I haven't read many of the comics.
Do they really need that dumb level faked audio to convince people they’re innocent if they’re really innocent? I would think it’d just hurt their credibility
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