thejdizzler
22d ago
You are totally talking past what I wrote. The individual advice works, I don't disagree. All of these things will help find a romantic partner. The problem is it doesn't fix the larger issue of why these things have to be said in the first place: in the past 50-30 (but really the last 10), the whole landscape of dating and relationships has imploded. Self maxing isn't going to fix this.
Where do I refer to myself a single time in this post? I haven't had the most success with dating, but I'm not an incel. I've basically said in other posts that the most actionable things to do align with what this guy is saying (car, diet, not being a doormat). Me playing the system this way is not going to fix the fact that the system is broken.
As far as the last part goes, I could not disagree more strongly. Yes individuals did great things, but they were only able to do those things because of the presence of continually enforced social norms surrounding gender roles and expectations. The farmer and factory worker of the 1880s worked hard to provide for his family. We were able to win the civil war and the first and second world wars because we had competent social systems (at the family level and beyond) that have since vanished. Dating is only one part of this.
thejdizzler
22d ago
I'm not saying that the individual shouldn't do the things he mentions. They will work. The problem is expecting this to resolve the crisis on a larger scale. The system is broken, gaming it won't magically fix things.
thejdizzler
22d ago
Probably true, as long as we remember that is the case for both genders not just dudes. Girls can easily obtain instagram orbiters or read things like Fourth Wing that push those buttons without putting in effort.
thejdizzler
22d ago
Guaranteed monogamy is also one of the few ways that actually produces stable societies. You mess with it at your peril.
thejdizzler
22d ago
I know the dating crisis has been done to death on this forum, but I want to talk about it perhaps from a slightly different angle than previous posters; that of the collapse of the ability to make collective decisions/sacrifices. Various self-improvement substackers seem to be populating the majority of my feed these days, and one, Get Better Soon had a post yesterday about how to attract women. Although much of the post is the standard dress better, be fit, be more interesting shtick, one thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was Get Better Soon's insistence that you had to be making at least $70k to be thinking about having a girlfriend, as well as living by yourself and preferably owning your own house/car. Now the median income in the US in $60k, and even controlling for the fact that men out-earn women, Get Better Soon is effectively saying here that more than 50% of men in the US are undateable. This no longer sounds like a problem that can be fixed merely through self-improvement.
Now I'm not saying that the advice I see from this guy is necessarily unhelpful for the individual: you will have more success if you earn more, aren't fat, and can hold a conversation. And historically some self-improvement was necessary to have for example, land to support your wife and future family. But we've rapidly gone from a situation in which pretty much everyone, including the ugly, mean, and poor bottom 50% of society could expect to get married, to a world where maybe that will happen to 20% of the population, and most of those people should expect to get divorced. The system is broken and pretending that individual actions can fix it is, frankly, delusional.
It's not just dating, I kind of see this with everything. We used to be able to take effective collective action as a country. Things like ballooning government debt, government incompetence, rapid urban decay, and breakdown in communities are relatively new phenomena that have popped up in the last twenty to fifty years. Aurelian loves to talk about how much the civil service and government in general have decayed in the UK (and France I think) since the end of the Cold War, and lays a lot of the blame at the feet of the focus on individual outcomes. I'm not sure if he has the causality the right way round, but it seems clear to me that we can no longer really effectively do things as a society. The inability to form lasting romantic and family attachments is only part of that.
thejdizzler
24d ago
I would argue that we crossed the threshold into really bad a long long time ago. Probably around the time of the serious adoption of instagram/Facebook's algorithm change. Many would place this date as 2012, right around when the smart phone went mainstream. AI wouldn't be as serious of problem if you didn't have it in your pocket 24/7.
thejdizzler
25d ago
I've been reading What hath God Wrought (Oxford History of the US from 1815-1848) and one thing I'm finding quite confusing is the animosity towards the Federalist Party in most of the country? What did this party stand for, and why did it become so hated outside of New England?
thejdizzler
29d ago
I think I'm putting dating on pause at least for a few months but probably until I finish my PhD. I'm finding I'd much rather train or spend time with friends (or making new friends) than go on a date with a stranger that probably won't go anywhere. Of course at some point I do need to focus on dating: I think finding someone to spend the rest of my life with is important. But I think things will go easier when I earn more money, have clearer work/life boundaries, and in an era of my life where I don't want to train as much.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I am really enjoying What Hath so far. I'm only a few chapters in, but I like how he is framing the whole period in terms of a transportation/communication revolution. Also enjoying his take on Jackson as a bully. McPherson is awesome, as you've surely seen me post about before. The only other two I've tried are The Republic for Which it Stands and The Glorious Cause. I found the first 5-6 chapters of the first one really really good (dealing with Western expansion/Reconstruction), but have been getting bogged down in the social history that follows those chapters. The second book is overwritten, at least in the first few chapters. I'd like to revisit them both quite soon though. Soft goal for this year is to read all of Oxford US history books that have come out so far.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
What hath God Wrought: history of the US from 1815-1848. Also still slogging through Way of Kings.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I think you should stop taking this guy so seriously. He has good advice in some areas of life (financial independence, internet use), but he is a hack in many other areas. For example, he claims that you don't need to learn a ton of vocabulary to be fluent in language and also that he is fluent in Spanish and French just from learning Latin. The first of these is not true, and he should know better as a someone who claims to be a linguist. The second seems to be really improbable: I'd have to hear him speak Spanish to believe it. I'm sure this is true with other areas of his "expertise" that I have less experience with.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Flame of Frenzy in Elden Ring.
Yep. It's the same conclusion that I've come to. Lots of vegans will shoot back with "you wouldn't buy something made with slave labor" or "it's not okay to beat your wife just a little bit". The former is funny because all of us do in fact buy things made with slave (or quasi-slave labor). The second is true, but if I was the wife in question I'd much rather a little light spanking than being beat by a crowbar. It's this same false equivalence and purity culture (you eat oysters so you're equivalent to a guy who eats steak twice a day) in veganism which is so contrary to the actual goals of the movement (get people to eat less meat so less animals suffer and die on factory farms).
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I don't eat diary or eggs though. Looks like there's a name for this. Ostrovegan?
thejdizzler
1mo ago
They have about as much sense perception as a tree: their single sensory nerve is to open and close the valve that allows them to filter feed. Nutritionally they fill a gap in my diet (Taurine, Iron, Omega-3s, B12), and I live in Maryland so they're cheap and tasty
thejdizzler
1mo ago
As perhaps one of the few resident vegans (although many vegans wouldn't consider me vegan because I eat oysters and honey) on this forum, I think this stuff is insane and is why we've had little to no progress in growing the movement or in meaningfully reducing animal suffering that we cause. Things like animal welfare restrictions that make factory farms impractical are broadly popular (although would require people to eat less meat). Nope, instead we have to focus on utilitarian suffering min-maxing which leads to crazy conclusions like those mentioned above (banning pets, GMOing predators to herbivores, being concerned about exploiting earthworm labor).
I still have an intuitive belief in a lot of what veganism stands for. I don't like how animals are treated, even on non-factory farms, and I don't like the idea of killing a conscious being for what basically amounts to taste pleasure. Yet as a movement, or at least how it's practiced right now, veganism can never work. Nutritionally it's become clear to me that eating shellfish/fish is straight better than being on a strict vegan diet. Ethically, the emphasis on not eating/exploiting kingdom Animalia, when things like oysters have just as little sense perception as plants makes no sense, not to mention the failure to admit that there are gradations of intelligence/sense perception that should cause us to feel differently about cephalopod or mammalian suffering say, compared to that of arthropods. Practically, people don't like being scolded, and that's what a lot of vegans end up doing when it comes time to do activism. You can prevent a lot more animal suffering by teaching all your friends to cook more plant-rich meals than by converting one person to veganism and alienating everyone else.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I have quite a few Joe Abercrombie books to read still.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I will probably do most of the trail (planning a ten mile run). Just have hill repeats in my plan and thought it would be cool to understand a little more what Pickett's charge is like.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Goals for last month went okay. Did my chore spreadsheet successfully, read about 3k pages, saved over 50% (due to an unexpected bonus) and swam and ran what I was supposed to. Did not stay fap free or meditate at all. This month I want to focus more on processes/habits and less on deliverables.
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Figure out triggers of masturbation/porn use and try and cut the problem off at its root. Masturbation may not be all that bad, but I think my perception of women/the ability to relate to the opposite sex has been messed up, and despite ~5 years of trying, I've never kicked this bad habit.
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Be more social. Have social activities planned on at least 3/4 weeknights and one weekend night
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Do one thing at a time. Multitasking is an illusion that hurts both productivity and causes anxiety.
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Replace the default bored or stressed activity of scrolling with either doing nothing (preferred), or reading an easy fiction/pop sci book.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
This July 4 thinking of renting a car and driving up to Gettysburg to do a run on the battlefield. Hopefully if I go early enough won't run into too many re-enacters. Hoping to do some hill repeats up cemetery ridge and little roundtop.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
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Right, hindsight is 20/20. Much of the upper south didn't even secede until after Sumter, so it was by no means a sure thing. I'm thinking of a lot of the rhetoric of the firebrands from states like South Carolina who seemed to want to secede in the 1850s even when things were going well. But these people were ideologies who can't be expected to seriously plan things. The actual talent in the confederacy (Davis, Stephens, Lee, etc.) all seemed to have been caught a little off guard by secession. And like others point out, this is also making assumptions about what kind of war we know that the civil war was, rather than the war that people thought it was going to be. Although there had been examples of total war (end of the Napoleonic wars, and the Crimean War) in the recent past, the mindset of the ruling class was very much that of limited war, which the south could have won.
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Totally agreed. Jackson's legendary performance in the valley and at second Manassas is offset by his terrible performance during the seven days, and the extremely high casualty rate of his division. Longstreet is a general I'd like to learn more about: I know he was vital during second Manassas, and seemed to see a lot of the problems with Lee's plan at Gettysburg, but I don't know much about his performance at Chattanooga, or about his time in the Republican Party after the war.
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It's not only the casualty rates, but the enlistment rates largely don't reflect the rich man's war, poor man's fight either. I don't have the statistics on the top of my head, but MacPherson states that the only group that was actually underrepresented in the army was unskilled labor (and also immigrants interestingly enough in the North). The South did have some weird exceptions to this (the overseer exemption from the draft for example), but even in the South, the planter class was at least proportionally represented in the army. Some planters, like Wade Hampton, spent significant amounts of their own money furnishing entire brigades for the army.
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This is true.
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Agreed that Hood had to do something, but his tactics in these battles were sorely lacking. That whole army might have been much more useful opposing Sherman's March to the Sea or something. Also good point about the Trans-Mississippi: most of Texas was completely unconquered, and after the disaster of the Red River campaign, most of Western Louisiana was safe too.
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I'll have to check this out! I'm currently going through Bruce Catton's trilogy, and a book about the battle of Fredericksburg in particular.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Just finished my fourth annual reread of Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, which is perhaps the best one volume history book about the civil war ever written. Some random thoughts from my reread below.
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It seemed like the war was coming long before 1860. At least the South seemed ready to leave the union in the 1850s. So why was there no preparation for this war in terms of stockpiling weapons, encouraging military training/enlistment in the US army? Maybe these things would have been too obvious, but at least pro-secessionist leaders could have encouraged things like the strategic localization of ammunition factories, diversification of agriculture away from cotton, and investment in railroads. Nope, instead we have cope about how feminine mechanized labor is, and how the only real work is overseeing a plantation. This society deserved to lose.
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I think Lee is overrated. He managed to win a ton of really impressive tactical victories, but never seemed to effectively follow these up to destroy the enemy army, which is what all the tactics is supposed to be in service of. In fact, Lee's tactics ended up shredding his army much more than his opponents, and he arguably only won because of northern inability to deal with taking casualties, especially under General McClellan.
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It's interesting how much the rich man's war, poor man's fight theme seems not to be true, in contrast to most modern wars I can think of. It seems like a general on one side or the other dies in almost every engagement (Albert Sidney Johnston, Stonewall Jackson, James McPherson, to name a few off the top of my head). In fact, generals were something like 50% more likely to die than privates, which is a wild statistic.
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Struck by the respectful treatment of Army of Northern Virginia by Grant/Chamberlein upon Lee's surrender. Yes, the South fought for a horrible cause, but still can respect the valor, leadership, and conduct of people you really strongly disagree with. Perhaps an argument against tearing down confederate monuments/renaming forts. You don't beat a man when he's down. Modern politicians could learn a thing or two from this.
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Insane levels of delusion by Southern leadership in Late 1864/1865. How did Hood think that assaulting breastworks head-on was going to work in Franklin/Nashville? How did Davis think the government was going to continue the war after the fall of Richmond?
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Cool to see how much of the technology of this war would presage WW1. Importance of rail lines and logistics to Northern victory. Also shift to destruction of ability to wage war/armies rather than necessarily capturing territory. Arguably this started with Napoleon too.
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I'm getting loads out of revisiting this book every year. Figures and battles are becoming a lot clearer in my mind, and I think I can start to talk about a lot of the issues of the time with nuance and perspective.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I'm immediately skeptical of this whole thing because they are using DUOLINGO of all things for language learning. You're much better off doing something like dreaming Spanish + Anki and/or paying a talented SL teacher to do comprehensible input for younger kids then add in YouTube/Graded readers. Duolingo is okay I guess for the really basic stages of language learning, but it quickly veers off into territory that is IMO not useful (way too many reps of vocabulary that undermines the spaced repetition, forced translation, early output). I've learned far more Spanish (and even Italian) through reading+Anki then I ever learned doing Dutch Duolingo.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I'm an apple chud unfortunately. I have cold turkey on my computer which works great, but phone is another issue. I seem to always be able to get around the controls.
I have two roommates. Everyone in the Bay Area has like 7. Get Better Soon is a bit out of it IMO.
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