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I would also add the Joseon Dynasty to that list, seeing that it lasted for 505 years (1392 to 1897) and was probably the most technocratic, bureaucratic state in East Asia with a lot of checks on royal power. Kings were expected to answer to the public whenever a disaster occurred, issuing formal requests for critique, and early on in Joseon history an oral petition system for grievances was established - a drum was placed in front of the royal palace to be struck if someone had a complaint, and this allowed ordinary illiterate citizens to personally appeal to the king once other forms of redress had failed. The lowest class (nobi) were allowed maternity and paternity leave, and there was even a society for the disabled, the myeongtongsi. There was a system of three offices specifically meant to police the kings and the officials for corruption and inefficiency, and often they gained more power than the monarchy itself. A lot of technology and advancement was invented during Joseon as well, the most famous of those being Hangul, but "[i]n the first half of the 15th century, around 62 major accomplishments were made in various scientific fields. Of these, 29 came from Korea alone compared to 5 from China and 28 from the rest of the world". It certainly fits the definition of a Korean golden age.
With regards to China, you're missing out on the obvious Zhou Dynasty, which lasted for a mind-boggling 790 years (1046 BC to 256 BC) with an impressive level of imperial continuity. Though this depends on how you define "golden age" since the Zhou kings had lost much power by the Warring States period.
EDIT: added more
The primary thing for me personally is that most of it is just being in your ship and watching the world move past. You're not really getting to explore the country you're visiting in any significant way, you're just getting little glimpses of it from the deck while it glides through the water. Though I suppose that is the appeal; to passively see the country without having to put in too much effort of your own - trying to make it through a foreign and unfamiliar place can be rather daunting.
But even that's part of the experience of travel IMO, the ability to get lost in the back alleys of some city or wander the trails of some national park and find all kinds of special hidden things you otherwise wouldn't have seen is a big attraction to me. I've long dreamed about driving west into the Australian outback with no clear plan and no destination in mind and just holing up in towns along the way, though that seems unlikely to materialise in the near future. It's a very stirring idea that lurks somewhere deep in my subconscious for no particular reason. Some nights I get a barely-controllable urge to walk blindly and directionlessly until my legs can't carry me any further.
I do understand why not everyone wants this kind of thing for every holiday though, sometimes the goal is primarily one of relaxation (as valid a reason as any other), so the explanation holds up well. I just think it comes down to the fact that I'm more likely to find things monotonous than your average person.
This has nothing to do with wellness, but as a Southeast Asian, I need to urgently talk about all the war crimes Adam Ragusea committed against pad thai in this video:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=puHSU9ZaZPY
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too much sugar in recipe
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advocates using worcestershire sauce in pad thai
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puts soy sauce in pad thai
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puts ketchup in pad thai
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puts ginger in pad thai
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snaps rice noodles in half
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boils rice noodles instead of soaking in warm water
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uses what looks like extra virgin olive oil to cook everything
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no tofu
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puts green onions and cilantro in the dish (the only herb that goes into pad thai is garlic chives)
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uses fresh chili instead of dried chili flakes
Every step is wrong. Every step. This is the first time I've come across a recipe of his I actually know something about and he fucks up everywhere.
I can't believe a certain orange-shirted YouTuber hasn't reviewed this yet, honestly.
Your sense of suspicion at all these competing narratives reminds me of my own experiences, though perhaps my upbringing was even more atypical. I grew up in Malaysia and came into contact with many parts of the culture there, but was raised by parents who'd spent time in Britain and who homeschooled me in a very different environment than most other people would ever experience. I knew people who were staunchly Christian and prayed often to the Lord, de facto Taoists who actively made offerings to spirits and arranged their homes in line with feng shui geomantic principles, staunch atheists that somehow still clung to hints of superstition here and there, and so on. When I was sixteen, I moved to Australia (where I now live) and interacted with yet another cultural milieu.
A consequence of this strange muddled background is that I notice I don't really feel kinship with any way of thinking and virtually never identify with any major group or subculture, so there's this persistent tendency for me to feel like an alien wherever I go. I travel for fun a lot and come into contact with a lot of people from different cultural backgrounds, and it often seems like the way they mentally structure and interpret the world are completely incongruent with each other.
Anyway, reality (at least from our perspective) isn't so much an elephant as it is a Necker cube. There are two possible 3d interpretations of this cube, but we can't see both views at once since the interpretations are so diametrically opposed to each other that it's impossible to maintain both orientations in our minds at once. Yes, there is the problem of the Elephant, where different people come across different information about the world and draw different conclusions about it on that basis, but even when everyone agrees on the fundamental factual points of contention there is inevitably going to be subjectivity in how one puts them together and fits them into an internal narrative of the world.
Oftentimes we don't have direct access to seemingly simple things like cause and effect (insert quote about how all science is actually just correlation here) and even the same data points can lead to wildly different understandings of the world depending on the system interpreting them. At this point we can model quantum phenomena very well but what it actually implies is untestable and completely beyond us. So much of what we know about reality lies on the surface of a black box. We don't and perhaps will never have direct access to many aspects of how things work, and until that happens I suspect it will be like the Necker cube: analysing a 3d object through the lens of a 2d plane, and debating how it's actually oriented. There is a capital-T Truth out there, but whether that's accessible to us or not is another question.
That's before we can even get into things like moral outlook, which... well that's a crapshoot. Hume's is-ought problem still remains intractable today. I seriously doubt an AGI would be able to synthesise many aspects of worldview together as a result; there will always be big Unknowns (in more domains than people think, IMO) where all we can do is gesticulate at an answer.
I'm in a similar position of being glad that he's here providing a differing viewpoint, but come on, a couple of days?
Really, I'm not. Progressives like these actively drag down the standard of discourse in this forum with their shit-flinging (this applies to other people of varying political stripes too, but the OP here seems to be one of the worst and most prolific offenders in this forum as of late).
I'm willing to engage with other left of centre people who participate here and even say I appreciate their participation in spite of our ideological differences, but this ain't it. It's such obvious bait that it barely even warrants attention from me - I basically look at a post of his, roll my eyes and move on. Even Darwin wasn't this consistently terrible, in spite of his penchant for doubling down on transparently incorrect statements. This on the other hand is an utterly vapid waste of time, there's barely even anything to counter: it's badly-written fanfiction that builds up to the ultimate reveal of "A MAGA said something ick, checkmate rightists".
It’s like the difference sending a thoughtful thank you note and signing a card and having someone else sign the card for you.
I don't think that's an adequate comparison - in a context where people often straight-up use preexisting art for album covers, it's more like the difference between copying a stock message from the internet for a thank-you card and having someone else compose the message for you. I don't think it requires autism to believe they're both pretty much equivalent.
Tell me honestly: Am I boned?
I've worked in a small Australian tax accounting firm for 1.5 years. Every single time I ask for feedback on my performance people state that my work quality is very good and that I'm responsible; I was recently given one of the most complex jobs in the firm and I had my manager state in my last one-on-one review that she was impressed I was able to complete it with relatively few review points. In spite of this, I always get a score of 3 (meets expectations) when I'm being rated.
In addition, I often blow internal budgeted time on clients. For context I am badly, chronically burned out and have a tendency to collapse after every workday - it was particularly bad in Nov-Dec24 when a family member died, and the excess of writeoffs from this period has resulted in me getting a job review on a specific client to which I booked most of my billable time. I am not looking forward to that review. Lately I also find management being a little colder to me and I'm not sure if that's because we're nearing the busy season or if they actually have an issue but aren't willing to say anything. Everything about this feels so disconcertingly fake and I'd prefer people be direct with me; I would not like to get fired without much prior foreshadowing.
The final aspect that makes me paranoid is that they're introducing a new staff member tomorrow. I've been killing myself with anxiety for the past month or so and I can't really tell if there's something to this, or if I'm just psyching myself out.
those elements were just the icing on the cake of its nonsensical plot, illogical characters, bizarre dialogue and its creator's misogynistic, narcissistic worldview
I see this crop up every now and then in discussions about the film, and this evaluation of The Room isn't particularly coherent unless you consider virtually all movies that depict women behaving badly and doing things like "lying to hurt people" as misogynistic. Yes, Lisa is obviously the antagonist and is portrayed in a bad light, having an irredeemable female villain isn't enough to declare a film as advocating hatred of women. Is Gone Girl misogynistic? In addition, many films involve a female protagonist taking revenge on the man/men who victimised her (The Invisible Man, I Spit On Your Grave, etc, to name a few); people seem to have zero problems with those despite these films having far more negative portrayals of men than any kind of "problematic" female portrayal.
It's a terrible film, but its "misogyny" is not one of the reasons why.
So I am reading Paul Klee's notebooks, texts which hugely shaped the modernist Bauhaus approach to design and architecture during their attempts to bring all the arts under one umbrella. These texts are held to be as important for modern art as da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance.
Here is how the notebooks begin:
"Chaos as an antithesis is not complete and utter chaos, but a locally determined concept relating to the concept of the cosmos. Utter chaos can never be put on a scale, but will remain forever unweighable and unmeaurable. It can be Nothing or a dormant Something, death or birth, according to the dominance of will or lack of will, of willing or not willing. The pictorial symbol for this non-concept is the point that is really not a point, the mathematical point. The nowhere-existent something or the somewhere-existent nothing is a non-conceptual concept of freedom from opposition. If we express it in terms of the perceptible (as though drawing up a balance sheet of chaos), we arrive at the concept grey, at the fateful point between coming-into-being and passing-away: the grey point. The point is grey because it is neither white nor black or because it is white and black at the same time. It is grey because it is neither up nor down or because it is both up and down. It is grey because it is a non-dimensional point, a point between the dimensions."
"The cosmogenetic moment is at hand. The establishment of a point in chaos, which, concentrated in principle, can only be grey, lends this point a concentric character of the primordial. The order thus created radiates from it in all directions. When central importance is given to a point: this is the cosmogenetic moment. To this occurrence corresponds the idea of every sort of beginning (e.g. procreation) or better still, the concept of the egg."
This absolute tripe goes on for two whole volumes spanning 2,500 pages, and was turned into lectures for Bauhauslers.
almost all Ugandan women and girls (95%) had experienced physical or sexual violence, or both, by partners or non-partners since the age of 15
Sorry for hijacking your thread, but I'm always confused when I see the use and misuse of these types of violence against women and girls sources to prove things about patriarchy. Firstly, you're citing a UN Women-funded source, which is an organisation that is known to be hilariously politically biased, and secondly because it's only providing statistics for women. In countries like Uganda, statistics that "95% of [X population] have experienced violence since the age of 15" aren't gonna be hard to find because these countries are dangerous places in general, and presenting them without any comparative data for the relative rates for other groups really don't prove anything about the level of Male Dominance in the country.
Furthermore, in the VAWG source you're using:
"Appendix table 3.3a shows that overall, more than half of the women (56%), have experienced both physical and sexual violence or either physical or sexual violence perpetuated by their partners. Physical violence was relatively higher (45%) compared to sexual violence (36%)."
But,
"Sometimes husbands/partners perpetrate violence as a response/copying strategy to their wives’ behavior. In the VAWG survey, women were themselves asked if they ever initiated physical violence against their husbands/ partners under any circumstances within the 12 months preceding the survey. Figure 3.10 indicates that of the women who had reported violence in the past one year only 14% had never initiated physical violence against their partners, while 62% had done so once or twice, 20% had initiated several times and four percent initiated most of the time."
Going just off their self-reports, which you would expect to be comparatively favourable to the women doing the self-reporting, 86% of the women who were abused were violent to their partner themselves at some point during the past year. In other words, most partner violence captured in the survey is actually likely to be mutual abuse of some form, not unilateral male-on-female, and this should be ringing some bells in your head that the women-only statistics you're being presented do not represent the whole picture. They have also said they had a questionnaire on violence against men at some point, but for some strange, unfathomable reason the statistics on violence against men are not presented here whatsoever.
Also note that hundreds upon hundreds of studies demonstrate that women are as likely or more likely to perpetrate partner violence than men, and many of these studies demonstrate that gender symmetry in partner violence persists as a finding even when you look internationally. "almost one-third of the female as well as male students physically assaulted a dating partner in the previous 12 months, and ... the most frequent pattern was bidirectional, i.e., both were violent, followed by “female-only” violence. Violence by only the male partner was the least frequent pattern according to both male and female participants." This is consistent with results from Jordan, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, and so on, all "patriarchal" countries by WEIRD definitions. Israeli women are more likely to escalate aggression, both verbal and physical, in a partner context than men are. This is a finding that has been repeatedly supported: "Women’s escalatory tendencies toward their spouses (M 52.36, SD 5.86) were found to be higher than were men’s escalatory tendencies toward their spouses (M 51.87, SD 5.69)." So to not study male partner-violence victimisation in Uganda before concluding the presence of male dominance is questionable, but from a brief review there seems to be quite few Uganda-specific studies that are conducted in a way which allows direct comparison of partner violence victimisation between the sexes. Though that's not surprising.
Funnily enough, the focus on VAWG in that report, if anything, suggests to me that people might be more sensitive to violence against women and girls than they are men and boys.
24% of women in 2022 reported that their husband or partner had multiple sexual partners while in 2023 ... 34% of men reported having sex with a person who was neither their wife or lived with them.
This source re infidelity has the very same issue - the quote you've provided here "24% of women in 2022 reported that their husband or partner had multiple sexual partners while in 2023 ... 34% of men reported having sex with a person who was neither their wife or lived with them" doesn't provide any countersources for women, and in addition while it's not hard to imagine that male infidelity might be more tolerated in cultures that allow polygyny, there are also other sides to the bargain in these cultures which often aren't represented properly.
For example, Baumeister's view on the differential penalties regarding adultery attempts to nuance this view. Looking at differential penalities for adultery (which he asserts was common throughout history), his perspective is that sex is a female resource that women gatekeep, and men give women resources in exchange for sex. In line with this view, the woman's contribution to the marriage is sex, and the man's contribution to the marriage is resources. Thus female infidelity is more of a violation of the social contract than male infidelity is.
Baumeister goes on to summarise the results of a cross-cultural study of marital dissolution by Betzig. "[W]hen only one gender’s infidelity was sufficient grounds for divorce, it was far more often the woman’s (54 cultures) than the man’s (2 cultures). ... These patterns reflect the assumption that sex is something the woman provides the man rather than vice versa. ... In contrast, women but not men were permitted to divorce a partner on the grounds of failing to provide other resources, including money, housing, food, and clothing. (The only exception was that in one culture, failure to provide food was a cause for a man to divorce his wife.) Thus, the woman’s obligation to provide sex appears balanced against the man’s obligation to provide resources for support."
His perspective is that there are reciprocalities in traditional marriage that have been ignored, and that authors rarely cite male obligation (the greater obligation of men to provide resources in the marriage, which is his main contribution to the woman) in order to balance their analysis of the sexual double standard (the greater obligation of women to provide sex and to not give away her main contribution to the man). By erasing half the story, it's very easy to paint a picture of oppression of women, and most people generally do not adequately address the larger social context in which this supposed "double standard" often operates in.
Finally, I would like to note that polygyny isn't all beneficial to men either. What polygyny does do is create a very large reproductive skew among men, and it's impossible to argue that male reproduction is not effectively controlled too in highly polygynous systems. In fact I'd go as far as to say a polygynous society controls the reproduction of unsuccessful men and not the reproduction of women, since it allows successful men to deprive their male competitors of opportunities. In their paper "Why Monogamy?" Kanazawa and Still propose a female power theory of marriage practices, hypothesising that polygyny arises when women have more power in a society with high inequalities of wealth among men. Using data obtained from political science and sociology indexes, they demonstrated that societies with more resource inequality among men were more polygynous. Additionally, they found that, controlling for economic development and sex ratio, when there is greater resource equality among men, societies with more female power and choice have more monogamy; but when there are greater resource inequalities, higher levels of female power are accompanied by higher levels of polygyny. Accordingly, the incidence of polygyny may indicate female choice rather than male choice and cannot be assumed to benefit men over women.
Sorry again - I just feel like Western commentators, in general, badly misunderstand other countries on this front.
EDIT: fixed a number
I’ve done some good jobs and gotten lucky draws here and there, but that doesn’t mean that I’m good at my job. Good would mean fixing the hard calls.
Fuck sake, are you me? This is exactly how I feel about how I'm performing in my job (am a disaffected tax accountant). No matter how much smoke people blow up my ass I can't think of myself as performing particularly well. It's also supremely boring, and I am probably performing at about 30% of my actual capabilities at the moment because of that. "The quality of your work is good, and your self learning skills are impressive" no, no they're not, either you're lying or your standards are just nonexistent.
In my last performance review I ended up letting slip how monotonous much of the work was to me. My managers seemed fairly defensive about that fact, and one of them said she had never been bored at the job. The amount of sheer disbelief I felt at that statement was so immense she may as well basically have said "It is not normal to sneeze. I never sneeze."
Anyway, I have nothing to offer outside of my commiseration and maybe it helps there's another Mottizen largely in the same boat. Being stuck in a job that wears you down isn't fun. For my part, I'm also aspiring towards finding other work, and trying to automate my job with Python and seeing how far it gets me.
It's the tail-end of summer in Australia, and the weather in Sydney has cooled down significantly from the January highs. During this time of year, I start doing something I don't bother to attempt in the sweltering summer heat: I walk around my neighbourhood. This is something I do whenever I feel stuck or trapped in some way. Usually I do it at night, under the cover of darkness - hardly anybody is around at that time, and there's a refreshing crispness to the night air once the transition into the shoulder seasons begins.
In the daytime, walking in Sydney almost feels fatiguing to me, with the crowds and the harsh, direct sunlight. The city is another universe entirely once the sun goes down, after the streets empty out and the shops close. In fact, the shopfronts and offices look far more enticing to me when they're not trying to look inviting - instead of bustling supermarkets and convenience stores, there are darkened halls filled with rows and rows of vacant aisles, instead of offices there are these yawning chambers filled with desks and blacked-out computers, still lit, tantalisingly evocative in their emptiness. Often, I look through these big glass panes, wishing I could enter so I could sit silently in these dim rooms and hallways. Places like that evoke a deep longing and emptiness, and despite the fact that it's not a feeling people seem to seek out I can't help but be drawn to them sometimes.
Doing these walks at night is also a heightened experience, at least compared with walking during the day. I think part of the reason for this is because they're fairly unsettling, which doesn't sound desirable, but that discomfort is something that throws the whole experience into stark relief and helps clear the mind; the apprehension of immediate physical threat often shakes one out of that sense of mundanity and complacency that bleeds into everyday life. Fear of the dark has been imprinted into every single inch of our neural circuitry, and most of our hominid ancestors were certainly not apex predators; for much of our evolutionary history an isolated individual would have been easy pickings for sabre-toothed cats and Pachycrocuta hyenas. Even in an urban environment every single dark corner and rustle in the bushes triggers a fear response, and I find the heightened sensations almost addictive in a way.
Sometimes, the fear is caused by an actual threat. Statistically speaking my neighbourhood is relatively safe, but there are points where walking around at night has gotten dicey; probably the most unsettling experience I've had was a time when I ran into a group of people - one woman, two men - who seemed a little... off. As soon as they saw me, the woman walked right up to me, and began to ask me a barrage of questions. At first the questions were innocuous, she'd ask "Why are you out this late? What are you doing out here?", but they quickly escalated. Eventually I was being asked "What's in your bag? Do you have a gun in there?", all while the the two men were slowly advancing from the back. I turned around and began to walk away, and heard them following me. I felt almost giddy once I escaped into the safety of my apartment building.
There's a specific spot in my neighbourhood I stop at virtually every time I go on night walks. One of the apartment buildings near me has a recess which extends upwards for about twelve floors or so, and when you stand inside there and and look up, you can see towering walls of glass and concrete on all sides, all glowing with warm light. The sky, from here, seems almost as if it's receding into the distance; it's a small keyhole of blackness that looks impossibly distant from this vantage point. I wouldn't say it's a remotely good or even competent piece of architecture, the building is quite alienating, but I keep returning partially because it doesn't seem like something that should exist - it almost feels like a scene from a Gmod map transplanted straight into my neighbourhood. It doesn't feel like a real place.
These walks put me in strange moods. Sometimes I get the urge to follow in the footsteps of a Holden Ringer or Anton Nootenboom and walk in one direction, with just a backpack or trolley for my belongings, and only stopping to sleep or to rest. It would be so easy for me to walk west, and in a very short span of time, I'd exit my neighbourhood and cross into the suburbs. Eventually I'd leave the Sydney urban sprawl entirely, travel across the spectacular mountains and canyons and eucalypt forests of the Great Dividing Range, and enter the sprawling western plains. These lush farms would give way to cattle ranches, and the ground would slowly turn ruddy under my feet, red earth stretching far into the distance as storms gathered on the horizon. And I would keep walking, right into the charred centre of the continent, past dunes and mesas and large swaths of beautiful jump-up country, and when the towns eventually became too dispersed for me to feasibly travel them I'd divert my route southwards, to more populated areas of the country, until I could walk west again. I'd walk, and walk, and walk, until I wore myself out, until there was no more ground to cover, until I finally reached the sparkling shores of the Indian Ocean.
Often I think about - and romanticise - the lives of premodern merchants travelling the sea routes of the Maritime Silk Road. Unlike its overland counterpart, where merchants usually traded in a singular local area they specialised in and goods travelled the whole length of the Silk Road only by changing hands many times, a merchant travelling the Maritime Silk Road could travel a very long section of the trade route in one go. It connected societies as disparate as Persia, Java and China, and at its most northerly extent the route went all the way to Korea and Japan. Undoubtedly this was an unenviable and dangerous job, and they'd be vulnerable to a whole litany of risks ranging from storms to piracy during these long, lonely months spent at sea. But there is something exceptionally evocative about a life spent moving around constantly; much of your contact with the world would be the ocean, and your fragmented contact with human societies would consist of these brief vignettes of far-flung lands with cultures and traditions completely alien to yours. You'd be placeless, constantly moving, seeing things most people would never get to experience in one lifetime.
Such an experience is increasingly less common nowadays. The convenience of modern travel makes it easier to get around, but in an odd way, it also makes the world smaller and less interesting. Yes, the world has slowly become more homogenised due to how interconnected everything is, but part of it is also inherent to the mode of travel we use now. Travelling from Colombo to Guangzhou no longer requires you to sail into Southeast Asia and navigate around the Straits of Malacca, stopping at port towns all the while to restock and refuel; instead now you have the opportunity to travel straight from point A to point B, missing everything in between and depriving you of many valuable experiences you wouldn't have otherwise sought out yourself. I enjoy having the ability to shortcut between destinations as much as the next person, but I also deeply feel that something has been lost; it's a specific type of experience that many premodern couriers and merchants would have had, but is alien even to many modern travellers. The endless wastes in between your destinations are worth seeing to some extent, even if just to give you a visceral appreciation of how big and empty much of the world actually is, and sometimes there are things of value to be found in them.
I think there's a deep-seated need in me to roam, and as strange as it sounds, taking walks late at night satisfies that specific brand of wanderlust just a little bit. You're taking in a view of your city that isn't necessarily meant to be experienced by people, and you're not doing anything or going anywhere; you're walking just for its own sake. The very fact that there's not that much to do at all recontextualises your environment and makes it the sight in and of itself, and granted you don't always find something truly interesting, but when you do it pops even more because of the context in which you found it.
Perhaps, over the weekend, I'll take the train to the CBD in the early hours of the morning, and just walk around.
I realise this is a month-old post, but I haven't been super active on this forum for a while and have only come across it now.
This segment is united with progressives in maintaining that Women are Wonderful, and are more than happy to punish and vilify men for women’s coffee moments. Men aren’t entitled to anything from women, but men as a whole should subsidize women, and any given man should be ready to launch himself into action like a zombie from World War Z to serve as a meatshield for any random woman in distress. Instead of thot-patrolling girls and young women, they’d rather blame boys and men. Instead of reducing the freedom of girls and women as a tradeoff to increase the protections afforded to girls and women, they’d rather keep or increase female freedom, increase female protections, and reduce both the freedom and protections afforded to boys and men. See, for example, the excommunication of Trevor Bauer—who as the result of false rape accusations—got relegated from the Los Angeles Dodgers to the Yokohama DeNA BayStars and now wears a red hat as a scarlet letter for the Diablos Rojos del México.
This is one of the most exceptional examples of an ideological horseshoe in existence today, and I notice such opinions plaguing conservative forums (including this one) as much as I do progressive ones. Recently I watched a video by the conservative reviewer Critical Drinker about the American remake of the Danish-Dutch film "Speak No Evil". He correctly identifies it as missing the point of the original, but his interpretation on the original film diverges heavily from mine. The original film follows a family who are targeted by another couple with a history of serial-killing, it's effectively a satire of over-politeness in culture - the family lets the other couple victimise them due to the fact that they're too worried about stepping on toes despite the increasing amount of red flags showing up. Drinker's opinion, however, is that everything that happens in it is the father's fault. He failed to provide for his family properly due to his declining career, he failed to satisfy his wife's needs and made his poor wife have an affair with another man, he failed to be a Chad who would act as a bulwark for his own family against the offending couple, and so on. Here we see a brief outline of Drinker's expectations for men, and it's quite far-reaching - the entire burden of his family's wellbeing falls on him and him alone, and everything that happens is his responsibility. I've watched a number of his other videos as well, and if you're curious if he has a similar list of onerous roles he would expect women to fill, he does not. He effectively upholds the role of man as unquestioning protector and provider, but makes it such that they will receive nothing substantial in return from women for doing so.
It's quite clear that many mainstream conservatives seem to enjoy selectively invoking gender roles and sexual dimorphism only when it could justify further benefits for women. They'll selectively absolve the woman of all responsibility and place all fault on the man when these poor darlings are "pumped and dumped" and taken advantage of and supposedly manipulated into sex acts that get retroactively interpreted as predatory once the outcomes of the sex don't result in what they want. They will put out pieces of special pleading explaining how women's more delicate sensibilities justifies them being treated more lightly when dealing with them in multiple contexts, sexual, professional and so on. The same people who pull such shenanigans will generally not acknowledge that women's lack of agency and weak constitutions should ever affect how they get treated when they are in the running for leadership roles or positions which require one to take on a huge amount of responsibility. The acknowledgement that "men and women are not the same" only ever gets used to exclusively benefit women.
This kind of thing is everywhere and it's really hard not to notice it once you're aware of it. I distinctly remember seeing a comment under one of my posts here which basically said "Actually, male pedophilia is more damaging than female pedophilia", an assumption made with not a shred of support provided for it, and it is in contradiction with some quantitative and qualitative research showing the effects are actually very similar regardless of sex of perpetrator (you can find some studies I collected on this general topic here). There are so many more examples I can bring up, including but not limited to things like sex-differential treatment of infanticidal mothers and fathers "she was sympathetic and distraught and hormonal, she had no true free will or agency in the matter and Regretted It, he was a horrible abuser who deserves to be put in jail forever" (this despite the fact that men do experience postpartum depression, and despite the fact that even in its absence literally everyone is puppeteered by their hormones all the time yet it doesn't seem to nullify their agency in virtually every other situation when their biochemistry pushes them to commit crimes), etc.
I sincerely did not realise the sexes are only different in ways which justify special and preferential treatment for women. The sheer amount of Women-Are-Wonderful in virtually every political camp is quite ridiculous, and it's one of the many things that have made me skew further from the right as time goes on - over the years I've realised that mainstream conservatives and feminists exhibit many similarities on gender issues.
Trying to manage end-of-year job burnout at the moment.
I'm pretty exhausted and can barely even bring myself to competently write this comment, let alone work on clients' returns. I've been making an oddly large amount of stupid errors recently, which isn't really common for me; I'm generally known for having a fairly high quality of work, and often catch other people's mistakes rather than the other way around. My job has a very production-line quality to it; there is always another job, and the goal is to get the greatest amount of client work done with a high accuracy and in the shortest amount of time.
This failure to focus is... quite bad, considering that my job is one that requires a pretty large amount of sustained concentration - for every client I handle, I receive on average like forty different financial docs, each containing disparate pieces of info about their financial situation. I get provided with a gigantic corpus of tax legislation and accounting best practices (the former, especially, can get indecipherably complex) and have to identify which laws and guidelines to apply. There’s a lot of info missing often, and the gaps necessarily have to be filled in with some assumptions. My job is to receive incomplete and poorly arranged info from the client, decipher how to treat it based on a knotty, vague, conflicting tax code, and transform it into something comprehensible. When you're burned out, this appears almost insurmountable, paralysing to the extreme, and doing it quickly doesn't seem possible.
That level of concentration is really hard to maintain day after day for a sustained period of time; the job is monotonous and taxing at the same time (as much work in such fields is, to be fair). This funk has been slowly settling in throughout the entire year, but it's begun to really hit me after rushing out a bunch of urgent client work last week, and I've gotten into a pretty big slump. Even after work I can barely focus on anything I care about, and it feels almost like my brain is buffering whenever I try to concentrate at all. I find myself staring passively at my screen a lot, I've done that multiple times now writing this embarrassingly short comment.
This fucking sucks. Any advice for how to force your brain to hard reset over Christmas break? I'd very much like this feeling not to carry on to the new year, I don't think a whole year of running on fumes would be particularly healthy.
There are tons of great games that already exist sure, there aren't necessarily tons of great games that align with a given person's preferences (and no, you don't have to be really into hentai to feel this way). I say this as someone who is not very interested in a large portion of the much-heralded games out there - there's an extreme deficit of games I would personally want to play. Everything that comes out of the AAA sphere may as well be slop as far as I'm concerned, since the approach that most large studios take when they construct games is basically diametrically opposed to mine. The increased output stemming from the democratisation of game development may well have resulted in an increase in low-effort content and a decrease in the average quality of games released, but the larger amount of content overall and the greater amount of indie games that are a product of one person's idiosyncratic vision has resulted in me finding far more games I enjoy. Arguably 100% of my favourite games only exist because of this process of democratisation, and I can't help but feel the same about the usage of AI tools to speed game production up and democratise it even further. I do not care at all about how the art was made; I only care about its ability to convey the intent of the developer behind it.
I once attempted to make a game on my own due to being unable to find anything I personally thought was interesting - making the art and animation was one of the most time-consuming parts for me since it is not my speciality, and I eventually had to resort to using preexisting photos and assets which I put through a heavy dithering effect and intense colour-grading in order to shorten development time. It would have been so much easier if I had done so in an era where AI tools were available to me. There's a shit ton of games made by inexperienced/time-poor developers with interesting ideas but where the stock assets are very visible; perhaps the existence of generative AI will reduce their incidence and encourage further creation.
I'm not too concerned about being drowned in low quality games; if one would prefer to avoid encountering slop entirely, there are many mechanisms that facilitate content curation and their importance and prominence will only increase as time goes on. It's not as if people are being forced to scroll through every shitty game that's been spewed out by an unknown developer in order to find something they like, that's a caricature that doesn't reflect the reality of how most people discover content; they typically find games through curation mechanisms like forums, review sites or recommendations by friends. Pointing to all the low quality content and wringing one's hands about the unimaginable horrors of All The Slop falls flat to me, since even in an overcrowded environment you can still effectively limit the scope of your search to a subset of media that's most likely to appeal to you.
I would say they're not mirror images; namely, that 19th century patriarchal paternalism was far more consistent and reciprocal than things are today. Sure, men were the heads of the household with some legal power like owning the property that came into the marriage and being able to enter into contracts, but that came with a corresponding responsibility - husbands had a legal responsibility to support their wives and any children born out of the marriage, and what was considered "necessaries" for a wife (and kids) was dependent on socioeconomic status. So a rich man could not simply leave his wife in rags, feed her gruel and claim she was technically being supported. The courts would not accept this.
The next thing to note is that the husband, along with taking ownership of all of his wife's property, also took responsibility for all of her debts before marriage. Husbands continued to be responsible for all family debts contracted after marriage as well. A wife could also buy necessaries on her husband's credit (this was called the law of agency), and had the ability to act as her husband's agent. This is important because it means all debt contracted on behalf of the family's maintenance (whether made by the husband or the wife) was held to be the husband's debt. And defaulting on the debt meant he could go to jail. In the 18th/19th centuries, the vast majority of imprisoned debtors in England and Wales were men (all estimates of the sex ratios of imprisoned debtors are over 90% male), and it is likely that coverture was a very big reason why.
Now? The male end of the responsibility is still being socially upheld under a veneer of female helplessness and victimisation, and at the same time, women are equally as capable as men and all of that agitprop distinctly non-agentic framing that emphasises their need for special protections shouldn't impact your evaluations of their suitability for leadership positions that require one to exercise agency. You don't want to be a misogynist, do you?
Perhaps I'm missing something but are you talking about Insite? Because that was the first such sanctioned facility in all of North America, and AIUI how that went was somewhat different: Insite was started in 2003 as part of a three-year pilot study, with a special exception to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act applying to it so it could function as a safe injection site. The exception was slated to expire in 2006, but it was granted yet another three-year extension so more research could be conducted. Health minister Tony Clement eventually stated there was a lack of health benefits and denied it yet another extension, meaning Insite would close, but a constitutional challenge was brought by the operators and proponents of the facility.
The case eventually reached the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled that the benefits for already-existing users were clear and that failing to extend the exception would violate the rights of its clients as outlined by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, specifically the Section 7 rights to not be deprived of life, liberty or security in accord with the “principles of fundamental justice”. Note that the Court did not establish a positive right to safe injection sites, but did make it so that once InSite was established, depriving its users of that benefit would be a violation of their s7 rights. Because of that ruling, BC is now obligated to continue exempting Insite.
Case in question is Canada (AG) v PHS Community Services Society.
I currently live in Sydney and have for years, in general my opinion on it is quite positive. Unsurprisingly, the natural setting (specifically the harbour and the nearby Blue Mountains) is its main selling point. I'd say Australia is one of the best countries in the world you can visit for natural sights, I was surprised at how spectacular and genuinely untouched the whole continent is.
There's a ridiculous amount of wildlife in close proximity to Sydney. Kangaroos and wallabies and many colourful species of birds like rainbow lorikeets and sulphur-crested cockatoos are common sights. There are large colonies of flying foxes in Centennial Park, and you can sometimes see whales breaching off the coast during migration season. Combine that with nice weather, historic architecture like the Queen Victoria Building and Museum station, well-maintained infrastructure and transport, and you've got a city I like a lot.
Of course there are also many things I miss about Malaysia which simply don't exist elsewhere, most of which are documented above, and I can't say I don't get antsy and nostalgic sometimes.
IIRC, there is a properly drafted plot from start to end, or so I've heard. This isn't a Lost scenario where the writers basically write themselves into corners they can't satisfactorily resolve.
That being said, the quality of the show is going to heavily depend on how they handle the overarching mystery.
problem_redditor
4mo ago
Just from this alone, you would probably enjoy what they're doing in S2 far more. Most of S1 is setup, whereas S2 dives into far more of the lingering questions that were set up in previous episodes (and in doing so creates more questions than before). The pacing feels much faster in this one, significantly so, and several things have already happened within the first couple episodes of the season that I only expected to happen in the season finale.
I won't say they never string the audience along with plot points, but there's certainly a lot more moving parts in this season than in the deliberately slow pacing of the previous one.
Didn't expect my random travel post about South Korea to appear here - I was just spitballing about a place I enjoyed a lot, but I appreciate that people thought it was interesting enough to nominate.
I do have some photos of the trip which were not included in the initial post. Here's a link to them. Frankly I hesitated from uploading them initially because I was skeevy about how amateurish they look, but perhaps they help provide some context for what the trip was like.
This is a depressing answer, but as the hardest of hard materialist/physicalist atheists, I don't have anything to soften the blow. I can't convince myself of there being any observable meaning or purpose to human life, some metaphysical telos behind everything that would impart order onto it all. I think life is pure, unadulterated chaos, a blur of noise and fury that mindlessly hammers away at you until it all finally stops. My death will have meant nothing at all when it happens, and the world will go on without me.
How I find comfort in my inevitable death is the fact that I already feel tired, even at the age of 23. Somehow I have become ridiculously jaded, and I don't particularly find a lot of value in things that make other people happy. I've become deeply cynical of the idea of effecting any meaningful change on the world, which is part of the reason for my slow withdrawal from political discussion on TheMotte and elsewhere. So much is out of your control, and things that once were cause for joy begin to lose meaning as you go on. Celebrations, for example. Birthdays feel... annoying, frankly. Christmas and New Year and every other holiday custom are chores to participate in. Days repeat, over and over and over again, you're anchored down by a million life obligations that keep you in some mildly uncomfortable local minima that requires a lot of activation energy to escape, and regardless of how much you try to take comfort in the small things you can't avoid the fact that your life is running on an endless loop.
It's not that there's absolutely nothing to feel grateful about. But the longer you live, the more fed up you get with the entire thing. Sometimes I look at photos of myself as a kid, running down a hill or feeding koi in a pond, and that doesn’t even feel like me anymore. It almost feels like a memory from another life, one where the days were longer and the sun was brighter. These days already seem impossibly distant and out of reach, and I wonder what would happen if I added 1000 years on to that. Every finite physical system has information-storage limits (see: Bekenstein bounds), and the limits of memory exist far below that. How long would it take for me to forget my childhood completely? How tired and jaded would I get seeing empires rise and fall, people slipping into the same failure-modes over and over again; what happens when I experience everything there is to experience?
This isn't to say that death is a desirable condition - for most people, it's unwanted and it comes far too soon. But at the same time endless life would be an interminable, inescapable hell, and I can't think of any condition where that wouldn't be the case unless I, myself, changed via genetic modification or augmentation sometime far in the hypothetical future - at which point, I would have been thoroughly ship-of-theuseused, and I wouldn't be me anymore. Somehow, that makes me feel better about eventually not existing someday.
So, work is really stressing me out right now.
For context, I'm a junior tax accountant, and I recently had some client work delegated to me for a client experiencing some financial struggles. Aside from preparing their business activity statements and income tax returns and so on, one of the tasks delegated to me was to add a small amount owed to their pre-existing payment plan with the ATO (Australian Taxation Office), where the client is supposed to pay off a tax debt in monthly instalments. I called the ATO on the tax agent line, and was informed that I needed to cancel the previous payment plan and renegotiate a new one. Because of some past defaults on the client's end, we were incapable of setting up a payment plan via the tax agent portal, and had to call via phone.
I informed my superior of this fact, who then gave me the go-ahead to re-negotiate the payment plan with the ATO. Note, my superior has worked on this client for longer, and has a more detailed knowledge of their financial situation than I do. I have also never negotiated a payment plan with the ATO before (they have), and was not provided any context regarding how to deal with them. So I pretty much do as I'm directed, and attempt to set up the new payment plan, but the ATO refuses to provide assent to establishing any new payment plan because they are unsure of the client's ability to make the payments on said payment plan. At this point, the original payment plan has also been cancelled, so the client no longer has their original deal either despite the fact that it was previously agreed on.
Dealing with the ATO is a bit like dealing with a little autocrat where the rules of the game are entirely determined by them. When you're dealing with most creditors you typically negotiate the cancellation of the old arrangement and the formation of the new one at the same time, and sign off on it all at once as a legally binding contract. With the ATO, the very process of renegotiating the terms of your plan has the distinct possibility of leaving you stranded, with zero recourse to any agreement at all. It’s not a negotiation between parties, it’s a rent-seeking coalition that has the power to unilaterally decide whether or not to grant you clemency, and whose leniency (or lack thereof) heavily depend on how their revenue collection targets have been set. The issue is not so much that they're severe on taxpayers as much as it does that they're fundamentally unpredictable and unaccountable, leaving people in a perpetual state of uncertainty regarding what one should expect from them.
Eventually, the client pays the original debt they want to add to their payment plan, but their original payment plan is also cancelled so they have a larger tax debt to pay off. And at this point, I'm wondering how much responsibility for this entire shitshow can be hung on me. I've kept my organisation in the loop throughout, and I've taken a huge amount of screenshots of Teams chats specifically showing that I informed my superiors of the requirement to cancel the prior plan and was still instructed to set up the new payment. I still feel some level of responsibility for the entire thing, despite the fact that I was basically doing exactly what people in my organisation had asked me to do, and have zero control over my client's financial decisions or the ATO's dictates.
Honestly panicking a little bit. It often feels like much of the work that more senior accountants don't want to do gets unceremoniously offloaded onto me even when I have limited experience doing the work, I'm given little to no guidance as to how to do it, and I'm left in a potentially precarious position when things go wrong.
That said, look at the AAA gaming scene over the last 5 and what developers are left that haven't devolved into slop mills pushing out incomplete, buggy, soulless games? Nintendo, From Soft, maybe CD Projekt depending on how charitable you want to be towards Cyberpunk.
This is certainly true and it is why I unironically Only Play Indie Games. I grew up in a time where Newgrounds games were becoming increasingly popular, and as a result have always had a bent towards the more idiosyncratic styles of small teams and individual creators. And as high-quality tools to create games have slowly become more democratised and readily available over the years, there has been less and less reason for me to turn towards AAA studios for... anything, really. You can now find really well refined games coming out of independent studios now without any of the soulless, manicured, decision-by-committee feel that AAA titles tend to have. Indie games have always been able to pursue more distilled and targeted visions as they are usually geared towards smaller consumer niches, instead of aiming for wide appeal, and in addition the small size of their operations allow for less compromise.
Does Nintendo stack up favourably to many other AAA studios? Yeah, but considering the absolute disappointment that is the AAA gaming scene in general I'd argue that's not saying much.
Top level posts really should have more effort put into them, but yeah it also squares with my own experience. The most fervent liberals I have seen in real life are the white boomers/Gen Xers in my organisation, who are so intent on their commitment to progressive ideology that they will wax lyrical about representation in their organisation and complain about how Trump is a slippery slope towards dictatorship every two weeks in front of the entire office (as a matter of fact, at the time of writing this I have just got off work after being forced to sit through one such diatribe).
Their viewpoints are so ridiculously canalised they can't even entertain how anybody in the organisation could ever possibly disagree with them on good-faith grounds. To them, it's just Being A Good Person, and the fact that the majority of America voted for Literally Hitler isn't something they can reconcile. They need a form of validation to cushion their own sense of self, and the establishment news media is there to provide them a comforting blanket that can shield them from the ugly realisation that they failed to win hearts and minds, that they are out of touch with what matters to the majority of people.
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