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Not married and not planning to do so at the moment, but I have to enthusiastically third both your and WhiningCoil's sentiments despite not being a member of the married men club: No is the only correct response to this kind of ridiculous female neuroticism when it emerges. If you do not do this half of your life will be spent managing it, trying to work around it, attempting to placate it, and it is never over.
I have female family members like this, and while thankfully (for me) husbands/boyfriends are the first port of call for every issue, when there isn't one they sometimes fall back on virtually any stable male relative that's around to help manage it for them. I've had to deal with low levels of this in multiple points in my life, and I know guys who have succumbed to it in their relationships, and it's like every Victorian henpecked husband trope magnified by ten. It is not a good situation to find oneself in.
Just the poverty and news headlines heuristic, or?
Yeah, that's a big consideration, I would be careful in parts of Western Sydney. Frankly, a non-insignificant part of it is also just me going off vibes; it's generally not hard to tell by sight alone which parts of the city are less friendly or maintained and where you might have a higher risk of being jumped. Some element of common sense in there too. Don't walk down back alleys where your avenues of escape are limited, for example, make sure you have ways to remove yourself from the area if a situation arises. Sometimes I do flout that rule, but it's not hard-and-fast, it's just one element that can be used to evaluate on the spot. It's all pretty ad hoc.
I've been doing this on and off for years now, ever since I moved to Sydney.
Typically I don't carry anything to defend myself, which is maybe not smart - I'm a fairly small guy too so it'd be hard for me to actually physically protect myself if I ever needed to use my fists. I do keep my wits about me and am often prepared to flee the scene if anything occurs (I am reasonably fit, so I do have that going for me), but maybe it's a good idea to bring some means of self-defence just in case.
I'm just inherently not a very fearful or neurotic person. Sydney isn't exceptionally dangerous, and perhaps my threshold for unacceptable risk is a bit skewed because of where I hail from - growing up in a third-world country where one's baseline risk is much higher does things to your risk-aversion. I certainly do have my limits though, there are parts of the city I wouldn't do this in.
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.
Ironically enough, the woke succeeded partially by making this very argument. There was a long tradition in the Frankfurt School of actively trying to undermine liberalism, their explicit rationale being that "liberalism has failed before, therefore it can fail again; and we need to put in [authoritarian system] to maintain social order".
The example they loved to use in all of their writings was the liberal Weimar Republic being usurped by the illiberal Nazi Party, and they used this to argue that the liberal system was obviously insufficient to guard against such abuses. Their claimed solution to this problem was that the information environment needed to be selectively seeded with propaganda "emancipatory" ideas which liberated people from their false consciousness, not terrible oppressive reactionary ones which maintained preexisting power structures and produced things like Nazism. Herbert Marcuse in particular loved using this argument, and it was so successful that it resulted in the domination of all of our major institutions by wokeness. They have become the "hegemonic power structure" they once criticised despite the fact that they are still masquerading as a subversive grassroots movement, their deep will-to-power makes them fail to abide by their own standards and instead suppress any kind of counter-narrative thought which might act as a check and balance to their worst impulses, and I think we both agree this was not a good thing in the slightest.
I'm very aware of the many failure-modes of liberalism - they've been discussed here at length, and I think they have credence. My counter-question is "if we get rid of the woke, what do you propose to replace it with, and if you've discarded liberalism as an idea how do you plan not to fall into the same trap the woke did?" Because there's a real risk of that, and using the fact that authoritarian systems have managed to succeed in some places as a reason for why an illiberal ideology should be introduced is the root of many of the harmful social trends that are occurring today. The woke obviously thought they were doing good - virtually everybody who does harm thinks so. What kind of self-correction mechanism would this new proposed hypothetical system have to prevent false dogmas from going unchallenged? Because while the left's unhinged dogmas are most salient in today's environment, dogmatism is not the exclusive preserve of the left.
Of course, some very doomer part of me does indeed think all this debate is pointless and that people have an inherent bent toward constructing sacred cows and adopting them in a quasi-religious manner, so we're doomed to swing from dogmatic idea to dogmatic idea and the idea of constructing an environment meant to guard against any given ideology's worst tendencies is a utopian abstraction that will never materialise in the long run. As always, the only thing that ultimately matters in this dynamic is making sure you're the one on top.
I don't disagree that your average Place, China is almost certainly going to be more third-world than your average Place, Japan, and there are very real issues there, many of which are a result of the PRC's truly disastrous policies. But considering how many people go to Southeast Asia and absolutely love it, I'm not necessarily sure first world-ness is something people are generally looking for (as tourists, not as inhabitants). People travel en masse to places like Bali despite the fact that "real" Bali isn't something to look forward to; poverty is pretty rife in many parts of the island and Denpasar is packed full of slums. But travelling to Bali has effectively become something of a fashion trend, Bali is the buzzy tourist-friendly place you go to see the good side of Indonesian culture, and you can ignore as much of the mundane or the bad as you want. I grew up in Malaysia, a country people tout as a good place to visit, and what Malaysia is really like isn't necessarily what most tourists experience. In other words, people go to shitholes all the time, ignore the bits they don't want to see, and love it. There's nothing wrong with travelling like that, either; you're not obligated in the slightest to do things that'll make you feel miserable. But I'm not sure if China's third-world nature is the main factor here.
When I talk about finding "bad takes in travel forums", I mean the stuff I've seen is as bad as stumbling upon threads asking why it is that China has seemingly no truly historical sites, just hollow recreations and cash grabs. Then someone else says the Cultural Revolution destroyed absolutely everything in China, then someone else comments down in the thread "You know where the real historic stuff is? Japan." This despite the fact that many Japanese sites are also just recreations and reconstructions; places like Senso-ji or Osaka Castle were rebuilt in concrete in the 20th century. Kinkaku-ji is a new construction, Takkoku no Iwaya in Hiraizumi is a new construction, and so on. The majority of historical sites in Old Kyoto, despite it being spared bombing during WW2, don't predate 1788 due to a fire that ravaged the city. People still travel to these sites in Japan in spite of the fact that much of what's there isn't exactly original, and enjoy it, and that's fine, and of course there are also authentic historic sites in the country (Himeji Castle, Golden Hall of Chuson-ji, etc). But I'm wondering how in the world people forgot that there's an entire ancient walled city, Pingyao, in Shanxi province, that still houses 20,000+ people while retaining all of its traditional architecture and its urban planning from the Ming and Qing dynasties. It is not only the best preserved proper city in China, but all of East Asia. Then there are towns in Anhui like Xidi and Hongcun, which are representative of traditional non-urban settlements in China during the 14th to 20th centuries - many of the buildings there are very old, and a lot of these towns still have traditional economies and clan-based social structures. Then there are the old tea forests and ethnic minority villages of Jingmai Mountain, where the locals still cultivate tea using methods dating back to the 10th century and perform Tea Ancestor ceremonies and festivities. The thought that crosses my mind is disbelief in the vein of "you seriously couldn't find anything to your taste in all of China? What the fuck it's the size of ten countries how is that possible". There are many authentic places where old China can be found, they're just a bit farther out; you can't expect to visit Beijing and get that kind of experience. The CCP sucks, but they don't possess MCU powers; try as they might they can't snap their fingers and make literally thousands of years' worth of rich historical and cultural heritage vanish overnight.
Then there's the example of South Korea, which is basically a first-world economy comparable to Japan at this point (in fact, its GDP per capita overshot Japan a while back, and its self-reported happiness levels are comparable last I checked; granted, they do have an ongoing military draft which certainly isn't ideal). As a tourist I had a great time there, and was surprised at how well maintained it was and how much traditional culture there was. The density of UNESCO sites there is higher than anywhere else in East Asia, and two members of my family (one of whom went on that trip with me) have travelled both to Korea and to Japan, and both preferred Korea. But we were actually almost discouraged from travelling there after coming across many threads which followed the same pattern - invariably, a poster would ask whether they should choose Japan or Korea for an East Asian trip, and almost unanimously the comments on such threads would advocate Japan as a destination, and state South Korea was comparatively boring, soulless, lacking in historical sites and nothing special. Our friends and coworkers who had travelled to both places also offered up the same opinions, and the only reason why we ended up picking Korea as our destination of choice was because said family member had already travelled to Japan before, and wanted something different. Frankly, I'm flabbergasted by people's lukewarm reactions.
In other words, I'm not so sure if Place, Japan is based so much in the actual reality of how Japan is, or is basically a fashion trend driven by Japan's dominance in media and electronics exports for much of the late 20th century. And I like Japan! I think it's a country with a lot to offer. But the way people endorse it over virtually every other East Asian country gets ridiculous sometimes IMO.
I think this is probably the answer in the thread that best captures what I think about this. China does produce a fair bit of good media of its own, it's just that it is exceptionally insular and most of the media that gets made domestically also gets consumed domestically. And once you add some cultural unfamiliarity into the mix as well as a Place, China effect that creates a bit of an aversion to most native Chinese media, virtually none of their media ends up making it into the Western cultural consciousness. It's basically the opposite of Place, Japan.
The funny thing is that our attitudes towards China used to be the opposite of what they are today; Western countries had a fascination with everything Chinese for a long while. Sinophilia basically infected the entire western world throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, to the point where Louis XIV adopted Chinese-style ball attire and ordered the Trianon de Porcelaine to be built on the grounds of Versailles, a building that was meant to emulate the Tower of Nanjing. Chinoiserie spread throughout Europe and hugely influenced the development of the Rococo style. Granted, the influences it included were not limited to Chinese culture, but in the main Chinese styles were the trends Western artists and architects borrowed from when developing their syncretic fusion.
Then the Opium Wars happened, disrupting trade, then after a brief resurgence in interest in Chinese culture, China became a Marxist state and self-mutilated a whole bunch during the Mao era. Meanwhile, the Perry Expedition (initially just meant to secure a safe harbour for America in the Pacific) opened up Japan and the Meiji Restoration propelled it at turbo speed into modernity. And now people seem to view everything Chinese as nothing but authoritarian PRC bullshit, whereas even after the stagnation of Japan's economy people seemingly can't get enough of Japanese culture, both traditional and modern - I mean, look at how many words for snow there are in Japan. And Korea, apart from a number of its pop culture exports, may as well not exist as a country in most people's minds - despite its recent modernisation, there's still this lingering idea of it as an insignificant Asian backwater in all other respects. Korean traditional culture? What is that? What are you even talking about?
It's fascinating to me how these fashion trends evolve overtime, and it seems like people's perceptions are very tenuously linked to the quality of that country's output at best. They reflect geopolitical relations more than they do any kind of impartial evaluation of quality. (It's not just media either, I've been on a bit of an East Asian travel kick recently and have visited some travel forums as a result, and it's this phenomenon on steroids; I could document some of the truly terrible takes I've heard but we'd be here for hours.)
I'm not saying a better firm is common, but would moving after busy season be something you'd be interested in doing? Using your expertise as a Consultant to make more money and do more varied work?
I've considered it before and think it's a good idea, in fact I've been in the process of remodelling my CV in order to apply to other jobs.
The inertia sometimes does feel a bit overwhelming and there's the fact I do like a good amount of my coworkers, which does make it a bit more difficult to leave, but jumping ship is probably the best option. I don't think I could stay in this role for much longer without hollowing out entirely, and in terms of wages many jobs in the same field offer better salaries than mine currently does, so it's a course of action I certainly can't argue with.
Sorry for the late response, could barely get up the energy to respond to these the past few days. I was partially venting, but also did want to crowdsource solutions.
Regarding your suggestion, I think it's probably the best way forward. My firm really doesn't pay much or offer much in the way of career progression because it's a small/medium size firm (albeit one which poached clients from a larger entity when it branched off from them, so it handles a much wider and more complex array of tasks than your typical small accounting firm), so I know I'll eventually have to move anyway if I want a better deal. The longer I stay here the more pigeonholed I'll be. Moving is just not that easy, especially when you actually like some of your coworkers and have grown somewhat fond of them.
Still, I can't argue against the logic of the decision, and I think if I stay here any longer I'll be a shell of myself.
For the record, I wouldn't consider you a leftist and I do enjoy seeing your comments, even if I sometimes disagree with them. I would consider myself generally aligned with classical liberalism as well and am not explicitly pro-Trump. It was never my opinion that the Trump administration would align with me on many or even most issues, and even if he and I do incidentally align on multiple points of contention, my support is primarily down to the fact that I hate his opposition more and want to see their hegemony in the opinion-setting parts of the media and academia wiped out, along with their lobby groups who exert influence over government and society through wholly undemocratic means.
I think there should be room for considered criticism of the Trump administration here, without accruing -2000 downvotes and accusations of being a bad faith troll. I do differ with you in that I don't believe the current changes being wrought are representative of an overcorrection to the right, however, nor do I think the woke have come anywhere close to drawing their last breath, nor do I think the Trump administration is even close to being as bad as the progressives. Their hegemony among the PMC is well-entrenched, and I consider them such a threat to my value system that I am willing to sustain a few short-term blows in order to root them out entirely. Trump might be a correction I don't 100% agree with on every front, but it's a correction that absolutely needs to happen.
You can think that an irritating, sniveling, weak man is responsible for his wife‘s infidelity and his family‘s downfall without making it about all men. ... you have to go along with the world presented in the film, especially if it conforms to reality: and the husband would indeed be expected to be the protector of the family.
This is true, but his critiques have an unambiguously political angle to them, and he also makes it very clear here that his selective assignation of responsibility is not just because of the submissiveness of the man in question, it's also due to his evaluation of the man as responsible for the protection of the family - his gripe is that they are no longer taught to be masculine, and are as a result derelict on that front since they can no longer be a bulwark for their families and societies at large. Further, he often makes it quite clear within his analyses of films that the perceived erosion of the male gender role is a disaster, and upholding it is certainly an element of his own personal philosophy.
Additionally, he notes that the assertiveness the husband lacks has been ‚bred out‘ of men – imo he is more highlighting the contradictory demands society places on men, than blaming them for their failure to fulfill them.
I do think Drinker's critique is meant primarily as a systemic one, and he certainly places a large portion of the blame on society's attempts to undermine these norms and not on the individual man. Still, the fact remains that this is a male gender role he's decided should be enforced. Hell, I do appreciate and agree with some of his points - such as the acknowledgement that traditional masculinity was in fact a social good, but I do hugely disagree with the seemingly unilateral upholding of these gender roles, wherein no role will be enforced upon women at all. I kind of understand why people don’t express these sentiments - the Overton window has shifted such that enforcing a complementary role on women would be political suicide - but it’s still cowardice.
In general, my view is that both mainstream conservatives and feminists are quite similar in this regard (men should protect and provide for women in various ways, without receiving many of the traditional benefits that made that role palatable to them). Conservatives are just moderately better because they enforce that role on men while allowing them to gain a modicum of token respect through it, feminists have only vilification to offer them with the utterly condescending title of "ally" as the carrot on the stick to make them comply.
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.
My job as a tax accountant is killing me with its sheer, soul-crushing boredom and monotony. Starting out it felt much better due to the fact that I actually had to pick up many aspects of the job on my own, but at this point absolutely no part of the job surprises me or challenges me at all, and it's effectively become a huge production line where I optimise for efficiency in tax preparation (sometimes even over the quality of the work, since I've gotten some comments that I should be striving not for perfection but trying to balance that with output). I'm certainly not the fastest employee in the firm in terms of efficiency, but as it stands I'm currently burning through all my jobs faster than people can allocate me new work (our billing/charge-out rate is still so high relative to the amount we actually end up charging the client that there are still write-offs). My managers state they're impressed with my ability to pick up concepts and the high quality of my workpapers, I personally think this is called not being retarded.
I was recently assigned one of the toughest workpapers in the firm. I looked through it. It does not look difficult. They're thinking of making me reviewer on certain jobs because they think I know the job well enough to do a high level review. I should be happy that they feel confident enough about my work to do such a thing, but at the same time every part of the job is an utterly predictable slog. It feels like they're essentially paying me to be the accounting version of a code monkey. Working for even 1 hour makes me feel like I'm being suffocated and I barely recover over the weekends. I keep myself awake through the workday with enough coffee to make my hands shake.
There's also the fact that I feel like people have effectively taken much of my work for granted - there was a time early in my career where I was working on one of the most demanding clients, and helped a superior of mine complete some work that was their responsibility by working until 4am on Friday and coming in on Saturday, just one day before I was supposed to travel for Christmas. That very same year, I effectively got a "Meets Expectations" (a score of 3) on my performance review, and a bonus... of 2% of my already-pretty-low salary. After many experiences like these I no longer care about going above and beyond, but even with that mindset I can't help but be bored to tears with the repetitious and unchallenging nature of my current work. How people can find this in any way rewarding is beyond me. It's fucking obscene.
I guess I should feel lucky I'm not saddled with super long hours (not typically, at least). It's certainly not the worst work out there - most jobs are pretty terrible. But the malaise from this is bleeding into my everyday life.
I think the reality was more like "territorial disputes got violent and that snowballed".
This was essentially what occurred, yes. Democratic Kampuchea and Vietnam initially had an alliance, but the Khmer Rouge harboured a belief that the VCP's goal was to start an Indochinese federation with Vietnam at the helm, so they started purging their own Vietnamese-trained members and attacked Vietnam multiple times in fear of their expansionism. These acts of aggression by Cambodia was what got Vietnam to take action, it was not because Vietnam was so appalled by the behaviour of the Khmer Rouge that they did not believe it could be allowed to stand. Keep in mind also that the VCP did participate in persecutions (though not to the same degree as Kampuchea) and was so hell-bent on collectivising the means of production that they almost let it starve their nation.
In general, with regards to these things it's helpful to assume they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. It's all realpolitik and always has been. Communist nations are often prone to mutual distrust and territorial infighting in spite of the shared ideological well they draw from - another great example is Ethiopia and Somalia. Despite the fact that Somalia is often brought up to take unearned potshots at libertarianism/anarcho-capitalism, if you look at the history Somalia as it is now was actually created by the infighting of two dictatorial communist governments - the Derg (Ethiopia) and the Somali Democratic Republic, governed by Siad Barre. In short Barre attempted to invade Ogaden on the basis that Ethiopian administration of the region was essentially tantamount to an African colonial occupation of a primarily Somali-occupied area, promulgating a war which he couldn't win once the USSR backed Ethiopia. This defeat, coupled with a refugee crisis created by the war and extreme disregard on Barre's end toward the Isaaq people (who were largely the ones who bore the cost of the crisis) was the catalyst that resulted in the blossoming of a full-scale civil war and the complete disintegration of Somalia.
I think the point that Hitler has an unjustifiably outsized reputation as the face of evil isn't unsubstantiated, but a far better example of a communist regime that far outstripped Hitler in terms of proportional body count would probably be Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge at large, who killed approx 25% of their population (among working-age men, the primary targets of the genocide, this figure rises to an astonishing 50-70%; very smart choice to absolutely decimate your main worker base in a primarily subsistence agrarian economy) while having power for less time than the Nazi Party.
They also grabbed infants by their legs and smashed their heads against chankiri trees to stop them from taking revenge after their parents had been killed, practiced Unit 731-like human experimentation including vivisecting people alive and injecting coconut juice into victims' veins, etc. It’s almost comical how exaggeratedly evil they were, and all these factors taken together probably makes them a very strong candidate as the worst regime in history. In this light, the fact that communism has a better reputation than fascism in the current day is beyond ridiculous - McCarthy, ironically enough, really did a great job inoculating them from criticism.
EDIT: Additional, unrelated thought: The Khmer Rouge were highly influenced by French communist schools of thought; many members of the party studied at the Sorbonne. I always wonder how the intelligentsia who promulgated such ideas managed to live with themselves upon seeing the fallout. Frankly, imagining myself in such a situation makes me viscerally understand the appeal of seppuku as a practice.
Different strokes I guess. I'm also not primarily evaluating if the exhibited technical/music theory prowess of the songs in question are particularly impressive - most music isn't particularly rich in complex composition, and mediocre music is inevitably going to represent a large part of Udio's dataset. I consider all of the linked songs to be about on par with a lot of the music that gets released. Instead, I’m evaluating on the basis of “could this be a song that I’d hear out in the wild?”
I'm more interested in including music (notation) and getting music (notation) back.
Ideally, that'd be the goal of a machine learning-driven plugin. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any notation-producing ones worth their salt yet, but I do know that there are a number of very competent plugins which have focused on the generation of sound design.
Grok seems to be schizophrenic when it comes to me. I put in the prompt and asked it to analyse my posts on TheMotte, and asked the question three times. I got Herbert Marcuse the first time (lol), Thomas Sowell the second, and George Orwell on the third go. These are all people with wildly varying politics on opposite ends of the spectrum.
Then I asked it to give me an ancient historical figure and it spit out Thucydides.
Is your plan to refrain from watching on the weekly episode release dates and wait for the whole thing to release before consuming it? Because I actually think that might be a good idea (if you're confident about not stumbling upon spoilers). One of my biggest gripes about this show is the way Apple TV has decided to release it - I find Severance hugely benefits from being able to build momentum through a couple of episodes, and watching episodically is a good bit more disjointed than having an experience where one episode dovetails into the next. I watched S1 in one go and prefer that experience, as opposed to S2 which I'm watching as the episodes are being released.
Honestly, I would probably have DNF'd the first season if I had been forced to consume it episodically. This season, in contrast with the previous, seems like it's trying to mess with your head every episode - the weekly instalments feel much more idea-rich and complete narratively, and I still feel slightly frustrated with having to wait through a week-long break every single time.
I have continued to play around with Udio music generation recently, and the stuff it spits out is... disconcertingly high-quality. Its auto-generated lyrics continue to be truly awful, though, so what I do to circumvent having to rely on Udio lyrics or write my own is to ask it to generate a song in Japanese, a language where the insipidness of the lyrics will be lost on me. It absolutely nails the musical aspects of its generations, though; I often like the musical content far more than I do many actual songs.
There's still some artifacting in its generations, but on the compositional level alone it's begun to ape human-created music so well that I think it clearly passes the musical turing test. If it managed to improve the fidelity of its generations and had a lyric generator that wasn't so trash I can see this being a dangerously addictive superstimulus for me. It's easy to fall into states wherein none of the media out there seems to appeal to you, and with generative machine learning the solution to that kind of malaise becomes "just prompt until the prediction machine spits out something you like". It feels utterly solipsistic and also very tempting at the same time.
Here are a number of funk/jazz fusion generations I got over the past couple of days:
Is it just me or are these generations, musically speaking, genuinely really decent? They're still slightly genericised, but no more so than most music out there, and I was not expecting its generation ability to get this good this fast. Despite the fact that I am not an amateur when it comes to music, I like these, and this is something that makes me think that perhaps my music taste has been irreversibly broken.
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.
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.
This is a fantastic recommendation, and I do want to offer a counter-opinion to the negative reviews of Season 2 below; personally, I'm still enjoying it, about as much as I did Season 1 at this point. I don't really think they could've continued to showcase the daily lives of the severed workers without killing much of the momentum they built up in Season 1, and there's not too much they could've shown in the lives of the severed employees which they already didn't cover. Episode 4's execution was impeccable, despite building up to a reveal that was largely predictable, the way the episode proceeded was deeply uncomfortable. It felt like a horror movie.
One of the bigger gripes I do have with the season so far is that I think the hard narrative cut between Episode 3 and Episode 4 was weird, but the quality of the episodes have been great in my opinion.
I haven't wiped any people from my shots, that wouldn't be an honest depiction of how the trip actually was, after all. SK in general was just shockingly empty and quiet, we visited destinations from dawn to dusk (and sometimes at night, too), and most of them received little foot traffic. No doubt this is in part a consequence of going off-peak, but getting a whole UNESCO-listed royal palace almost entirely to ourselves (Changdeokgung) was an unprecedented and surreal experience I've never had anywhere else. It's right in the historic district of Seoul, too.
So it's often very quiet even around well-known tourist sites. It's possible to go even further off the beaten path and find remarkably isolated corners of South Korea that receive almost no international tourism at all (sometimes even locals seem absent). The country is absolutely littered from top to toe with ancient historical sites that I'm convinced would be a big deal anywhere else, but in SK most of them aren't marketed well. Some of the sites around Gyeongju are so obscure that I only found them by scouring Google Maps or the Korean heritage service, and posting the Hangul into search engines just to obtain more information about them.
If you're lucky, it's sometimes possible to stumble upon them randomly, but in my experience putting in the work to actually seek them out is worth it.
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.
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.
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