These are great, thanks for writing them up.
Little side story that's kind of relevant, and may or may not interest you, but his post made me think of a very interesting story Sam Hyde told on a live stream years ago (yes, that Sam Hyde, way back before he kind of blew up into some kind of political figure, and was just some absurdist youtuber I followed).
https://youtube.com/watch?v=M2TYjRr-Gps
Kind of long (I'd still recommend watching it), but the basic gist is that he met a crazy guy who claimed his father, a Greek Immigrant, was some sort of genius architect and a big shot in the Pittsburgh mid-century redevelopment scene. Apparently the father bumped elbows with a lot of the city big wigs of the time, and was lead architect on a lot of major projects, but at some point refused to take part in a wife swapping "key" party and was subsequently professionally black-balled. Sam claims the guy had some of his dads old drawings still, including what sounds like original drawings of the Civic Arena. People online think they've traced the dad to being James Mitchell (originally Michalopoulos).
I'm glossing over lots of interesting little details though, like at one point apparently the guy claimed IM Pei being chosen to design what you mentioned, over his dad, was related to some side deal between US steel and China. Also I believe Sam briefly attended Carnegie Mellon, so that might explain why he'd even run into a guy like this.
Obscure forum post with apparently some more details
Could be legit, could be a lot of bullshit. You'd probably be a much better judge than me, but I thought it was interesting enough that I still remember it.
wqnm
4mo ago
I've heard a lot of good things about co-ed social sports leagues in terms of meeting dating prospects. Also helps to pre-select for physically active and generally fit women. Even if you don't meet someone, you'll probably have some fun, and worst case, it's easy to bail.
wqnm
4mo ago
I don't know this guy or anything about this "drama" around him. But spoiling the puzzles of Outer Wilds for yourself, and bypassing the games organic sense of discovery, is really a shame. If this is true, this guy, apparently a big gamer, deprived himself of one of the greatest pure gaming experiences of the last decade, all for some nerd clout. Lame as hell.
wqnm
7mo ago
Musk's been vocal about transparency and even mentioned having a public "leaderboard" for biggest wastes of government money they find; I think this is where the true potential lies. If all they do is maintain that leaderboard publicly, like a Most Wanted List for fiscal conservatives, I think it will help. Even if they have no legal power to cut funding, they can still act as a giant spotlight on some of the more egregious examples, and in turn get some organized public opinion churning on specific cases, which would be plenty useful IMO. Every little bit counts.
wqnm
7mo ago
It’s not super complicated. Dems have been courting them for decades, but apparently in all that time somehow never internalized the fact that Hispanics are Uber-Catholic. You insist on framing abortion as the issue of the election, and this is what you get.
wqnm
9mo ago
Oh nice. FWIW, I actually had a Costanza "Jerk Store" moment soon after posting my comment linked above re Women's Sports, where I realized that I missed the obvious parallels to the Paralympics, and deciding if someone is "disabled enough".
wqnm
9mo ago
Rich is pretty clearly an extant member of the old school, classic internet atheist-libertarian-contrarians (the two things that seem to get his goat the most are organized religion and new-wave mumbo jumbo). If he didn't vote for Ron Paul back in the day I'll eat my hat.
Like someone else mentioned, I definitely get the sense Mike is more woke-averse than he lets on, but smartly hides it or masks it under more innocuous complaints. He is by far the funniest, and a lot of that comes from being clearly unconcerned with being PC. This is even more clear if you have the Patreon and can see the outtakes. Like you said, I definitely wouldn't go so far as to say he's "right wing" though. Probably close to Rich's libertarian, but softer on religion; lapsed catholic vibes.
Jay is the hardest to read. To me he comes across as a truly centrist/apolitical guy who probably hangs around a lot of lefty artistic types, which rubs off on him, but at the same time is too contrarian to really buy into any of it, on either side. He just wants to watch his violent sex-weirdo movies in peace, and dislikes the scolds on either side that might get in the way of this.
Jack and Josh are pretty standard and openly left/liberal. Usually doesn't get in the way of the comedy though. Usually.
I think the big thing about them, and one of the things that makes them great, is Mike and Jay are the rare online content creators that don't appear to be very-online themselves. They seem genuinely and refreshingly ignorant of a lot of the underlying internet culture war BS, outside of where it intersects with a particular movie they may be interested in. It's rare to find such a genuinely apolitcal space online these days, especially with as long as they've been around. Most have either bought into the "woke" framework, or specifically positioned themselves as being "unwoke" and gotten into the right wing grift. Probably helps that they are older, more Gen-X than millennial.
wqnm
10mo ago
Used to listen to NPR everyday in college. Sad to see where they are today, stooping to essentially the political punditry equivalent of CinemaSins.
Short answer: There is no such thing as too much biological advantage in male sports. There is in female sports, because...
it's unfair to have people who don't have that advantage compete against people who do have it. That's the motivation for having some kind of testosterone limit for women's competitions right?
that's the motivation for the entire existence of separate women's competitions at all.
You're making the mistake of trying to look at men's vs women's sports in the same way. They are fundamentally different things.
Is it fair for other men's swimmers to have to compete against Michael Phelps with all his biological advantages? What about Usain Bolt? Are the advantages Khalif might have due to her biology greater than the advantages others have due to their biology?
The crucial difference is, there is no higher level of competition in which Phelps or Bolt can compete. The best male athletes are also simply the best athletes period (looking at raw physical performance*). They aren't only competing against men, they are de facto competing against the entire human race, without qualifier. Their natural advantage is not just against other men, it's against everybody. This is not the case for Khalif; her advantage is against women, and is in fact the very one that led to the creation of separate women's sports in the first place.
The more accurate way of looking at things probably isn't "Men's sports vs Women's sports", it's "Sports" without any qualifiers for biological advantage (this is where all the men compete, and have always competed), vs "Women's Sports" (which has qualifiers). Phelps is (or was) the fastest swimmer on the planet. Katie Ledecky is the fastest swimmer on the planet that has a specific biological disadvantage. This is why discussion about what exactly constitutes an "unfair biological advantage" is 100% fair game for women's sports, and doesn't make sense for men's sports. If there was a woman swimmer who was faster than Phelps, she would get credit as the fastest swimmer in the world, but this only goes one way; the 8th place male swimmer doesn't get "credit" for beating all the women's times.
As an aside, I'll point out that this qualifier for women-only competition is a GREAT thing for sports. The whole reason we can have stories like Katie in our society, and boys and girls all reaping the same great benefits of sport, is because this biological disadvantage was something uncontroversial that everyone understood straightforwardly.
Also, to be clear, my rant here is less about the specifics of this particular situation (I really couldn't care less about boxing), and more about rebutting your conflation of Phelps/Bolt vs women with high T.
*Caveat, there are probably some forms of physical competition in which women have a natural advantage over men, in which case all of this logic still holds.
wqnm
10mo ago
And of course the related:
"Please RSVP" = Please Respond Please (Though the language jump makes it more forgivable I suppose)
wqnm
10mo ago
Eh, I'd say that's unlikely. The amount of direct sway that the actions and memes of the "online right" have on the "median voter", positive or negative, is practically zero; it's easy for us very-online culture warriors to lose sight of sometimes, but these are two different worlds. To the extent that "normie" voters are even aware of the "online right" as an entity, it's from what they occasionally hear filtered through the opinions of "official" channels, where they are/will be portrayed as a bunch of neo-nazi white supremist weirdo ghouls regardless. The racist frog people Kamala-posting isn't going to move the needle.
I can't speak for every one, but my local volunteer fire department also has a small dormitory for the on call firefighters, and they heavily advertise it as free room and board for students attending local colleges. I think you only need to be on call something like 3/4 nights a week to be allowed to live there for the semester. I actually kind of wish I knew about it when I was in college.
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