ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
No bio...
User ID: 1012
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
12hr ago
Relevant passage from The Great Divorce, spoken by Lewis's spiritual guide:
“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
12hr ago
I think it's a great source to quickly get up to speed on any given hobby or subculture's memes.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
12hr ago
There are two types of people you will never convince:
- Those who believe they have a vested interest in this not being seen as a conspiracy
- Hardcore "nothing ever happens" people
I really think that, if Epstein were not apparently connected to intelligence, powerful people in government, and were not Jewish, nearly zero people would argue that he killed himself. There are simply too many "coincidences." But there are people who like the political status quo (or at least despise the upstarts trying to disrupt the status quo), and there are other people who perceive the emphasis on Epstein's Jewishness/Mossad connections as dangerous to themselves (I have sympathy for this second group).
I don't know what to make of the "nothing ever happens" people. I have a friend like this, and I gave up talking to them about anything a long time ago. Any time I bring up some current event, I get some variation of
- "Eh, it'll blow over and everyone will forget in a month."
- "Actually it's always been like that."
- "I don't think that will actually change much."
- "I dunno, that sounds too far-fetched to be true."
- "I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. I can see both sides."
It's closely related to the "enlightened centrism" meme. These sorts of folks are not "arguing to understand."
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
16hr ago
Regarding fuddlore and similar, there's a certain type of person who loves to repeat these sorts of shibboleths regardless of whether they're true. They're a cheap way to signal that you're part of the ingroup and get credibility. Reddit seems to attract these sorts of people since all you have to do is mindlessly paste the fuddlore (bonus points if you add some passive aggression or irony) and you'll be showered in karma.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1d ago
Wait until you get to the endgame: pickled sausages. Pure lard, vinegar, and salt, absolutely nothing redeeming and absolutely delicious. Bonus points if they come out firecracker red.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2d ago
- <1 km
- 3km
- 1km, apples
- 5km (not Amtrak)
- 4 km (local equivalent)
- 220km
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
3d ago
Even as a tattoo hater, I have to admit that this is pretty neat.
I remember suddenly hearing the verb "judge" a lot in high school from girls. "She was judging me!" "You're being really judgy!" etc. and I was baffled by the usage. My internal reaction was something like... uh, yes? Everyone's judging everyone about everything all the time? Subconsciously most of the time, even? I understood that the girls were not trying to stop others from "judging" per se (since presumably they themselves often made knee-jerk and subconscious judgements about others) -- they simply wanted immunity from criticism about their choices (bad boyfriend, questionable fashion, low status friends, etc). I remember feeling unconvinced by their appeals against "judging" but at the time I couldn't put my finger on why. Nor could anyone else, so it was an effective tactic to immediately shut down any criticism (cf. "you're being inappropriate").
Americans are taught from a young age that we "shouldn't judge a book by its cover," that we should "judge by the content of their character," that we "ought to walk a mile in their shoes," and so on. This stems from a belief in an obscure nameless virtue that's not quite captured by the term "tolerance." The best name for it I've seen (sadly from a writer whose name I cannot remember) is "indiscriminateness." It's not enough to tolerate your neighbors weird facial piercings/taste in movies/cooking/religion -- to simply let them enjoy those things without trying to stop them -- no, you must pretend (and strive to actual believe) that you can't even see a qualitative difference at all between Christianity/Islam, Michael Bay/Ingmar Bergman, natural look/septum piercings, etc. I think that "indiscriminateness" as a virtue is the fruit of Americans' extreme fixation on egalitarianism and discomfort with any sort of hierarchy or authority.
So what is it "okay" to judge? Everything, I suppose. You cannot stop other people from judging you, at best you can just shame them into lying and saying they're not (which sounds like a worse outcome to me -- now you don't even know who looks down on you!).
If you want to get a hideous septum piercing or dye your hair some ludicrous color, please weigh whatever benefit you'd get from that action against the negativity you'll get from others (comments, mockery, rejected job applications) and then, make your decision and own that decision.
To directly answer your questions:
How much should you judge people? All the time. Unless you've been living alone on a desert island you've met a lot for people, so you have tons of data to use. It would be foolish not to use it. Your brain is designed to due exactly that sort of thing (pattern recognition).
On what should you judge them by? Any characteristics for which you have data.
Is there something you think it's wrong to judge people for? No, with some exceptions for leniency on people who have Seen Some Shit (e.g. abuse victims, war fighters/survivors, mentally ill people).
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
5d ago
This is it. After the (imaginary) authoritarian socialcon revolution, I'll let my kids roam free in our safe, crime free neighborhood, I'll let them attend public schools without fear of them absorbing enemy propaganda. I'll work a normal middle class drone job (like I do now). I just want to be free to live my small traditional peasant life and raise my family among the same. I don't want to be a warlord or a artist. I just want to grill.
"14 heartbreaking photos that will make you say fuck having laws and borders and shit"
I have no idea why you're still allowed to post here. You seem like one of those posters who is good at just barely toeing the line to avoid getting permabanned.
Your schtick is writing in a smug, antagonistic way to try to rile up the wignats (who sadly always take the bait). You claim to be a rich Pakistani or something who lives in the UK and despises the native English people which is so on the nose for the place that I honestly think you're probably just some leftist troll getting your kicks here. I would actually like to read the opinions of a rich Pakistani who immigrated to the UK and hasn't really assimilated for whatever reasons, but you only seem to post to try to start flamewars.
The mods apparently won't ban you for being intentionally irritating and disingenuous. I wish other posters would stop feeding you.
On a different note, credit where credit's due. You've got some mad trolling skills. You know exactly which buttons to push on the userbase here. Easily one of the most effective trolls this site has seen. Trolling is a art, after all. Hat tip.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
9d ago
FWIW I thought it was quite interesting and a useful window into the impact of immigration on American towns outside the most affluent.
Y'know, your comment helped me clarify a thought I've had. It seems that there are several different beliefs that often get confused for one another because they are only subtly different.
- Liberalism: reject tribalism, embrace equality and "color-blindness," let's put aside our differences to get rich and live and in peace (classical /old-school liberals)
- Identitarianism: embrace tribalism, take from others and give to your own, by hook or by crook (e.g. ethnocentric immigrants, Black nationalists):
- Anti-White Identitarianism: Same as above, except your tribe prioritizes taking from whites first (mostly because it's easy pickin's, but also something something oppression). There's the Progressive variant that adds the rest of the intersectional totem pole under whites
so far, do familiar. But then
- Pro-Republic Liberal Identitarianism (there has to be a better name): embrace tribalism, (but reluctantly and only as a means to RETVRN to limited liberalism, not as an end in itself) because liberalism can only function as a fine-tuning knob on a cohesive society, not as a combat arena for rival incompatible cultures duking it out for supremacy.
Did I miss any?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
10d ago
I wouldn't describe the immigrants I know as being "given" much beyond the opportunity to immigrate to the U.S. That's significant!, but they worked their ass off to climb from their poor neighborhoods to Fairfax County. I also don't think my family is perceived as the "outgroup" in any meaningful sense that affects our well-being.
It's great that you don't feel any ill effects from this because you can apparently afford to live in NOVA. I briefly considered moving back to NOVA to send my kids to a very specific and unique school I once attended, but real estate is so outrageous that even with my pretty decent tech salary we would be mortgage-poor if we tried. I visited my old neighborhood -- a nice middle to upper middle class neighborhood -- and it is now apparently entirely Indian/Pakistani/Arab, each driveway has a bunch of cars so presumably the houses are packed with people, and our local grocery store now looks like a halal bazaar. Even if I could afford to live there, I don't think I would, because I don't think me and my (nonwhite!) American family would fit in anymore.
If we hadn't had have massive immigration, there would be less pressure on real estate and housing (fewer people, lower cultural acceptance of people packing in like sardines and paying insane rent/mortgages) and thus a higher standard of living for existing Americans, and my neighborhood would still be recognizably American instead of some Indian/Middle Eastern colony. It's easy to be shielded from this sort of thing when you apparently make enough money to live comfortably in NOVA -- you're probably surrounded by other very affluent people who have integrated well.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
14d ago
I would be considered a conservative Catholic, probably a borderline or "light" tradcath. I'm personally quite against the closed religious communities you describe. My plan is to move to a conservative area to live around people who share my religion and philosophy and to influence my surrounding community to make it increasingly hospitable to those who share my beliefs. For institutions that are simply too rotten, I will support setting up parallel institutions, but whenever possible I will for example vote for a hardcore tradcath public school board (and contribute to Catholic after school programs) instead of working to found new Catholic schools from scratch. As has been pointed out many times here and elsewhere, closed-off religious communities are able to exist only due to the benign neglect of the Eye of Sauron's. Concentrating your people in a single place and in unsanctioned institutions leaves them vulnerable to dispersal and reeducation by carpetbaggers. But if your religion is simply woven into the background culture of the area and infused into its public institutions, it's a lot harder to suppress. The religious should emulate Dearborn or the Free State Project, not the Mennonites. Entryism is the way.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
14d ago
I have a half-formed thought about this. There are certain simple ideas whose implications are so profound and perspective-shifting that they essentially colonize a person's entire mind. I stress that these are simple ideas -- Christianity and classical liberalism are profound sets of ideas, but they are too complex for the average person to immediately filter everything in their lives through them. Simpler ideas are different, though -- it's easy to filter everything you experience or hear about through simple ideas like "the invisible oppression of the white man/Jew/etc is keeping good people down" or "the end times are nigh" or "the NAP is all that matters" or "the scientific method is the only valid source of knowledge" or "all social problems is rooted in class struggle" whatever.
I think that fixation on a single idea like this is actually a very mild form of mental illness, even the generally "respectable" ideas I included above (harcore libertarianism, communism, scientism). People get stuck on an idea and it becomes their entire, 1-dimensional universe. G.K.Chesteron has a great passage on this:
The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
14d ago
You are mistaken, pushing is the answer
we are here to protect you
please go stand by the stairs
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
20d ago
Sometimes I just feel something needs saying, and I guess I just have to live with it whenever I give in.
This is basically the only reason I post. Well, this and alcohol.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
20d ago
When I did keto for a bit after having a fairly crappy diet, the initial cravings were intense, especially sugar cravings. I felt "alert" all the time and almost uncomfortably energetic. A sort of pre-conscious craving for junk food and carbs would ebb and flow during the day, and when it was at its worst it was hard to do anything else (usually just for <10 minutes). The closest feeling I've had is feeling incredibly horny as a teenager, though even that was only maybe one-quarter the intensity, more of a distraction or nuisance than a debilitating condition. And I wasn't even that fat, my BMI was like 25.5 and I just wanted to lose 5-10 pounds. I imagine it's much worse when you're losing much more and eating much less.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
22d ago
In an ideal world where I have enough guys, I far prefer the script or custom tooling because, as you point out, it's whitebox and easy to fix and customize. But that's not usually the case, plus as a manager I have to play departmental politics. It's much better to be able to blame GCP than to have fingers pointed at scripts that we wrote (sometimes unjustly!) when we have a huge backlog and no time to fix them. I'm looking forward to changing companies, if you can't tell.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
23d ago
Re. mysqldump, that's what we did last time we had to do this, but I was hoping there was a less manual way. You can do automate anything with enough scripts and DevOps duct tape, but I try to take zero maintenance options whenever I can because I have to scale my meager team and hiring is rough now (because our budget is shit).
Re. the security team, the tech details matter less than the perception. They're more of a compliance team than a security team. Such is life outside of Silicon Valley, sadly.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
23d ago
I've pretty much given up on asking for troubleshooting help or other non-subjective feedback for this very reason. Even for scripting, it sometimes invents command switches that don't exist or that only work on certain OSes which means I need to correct it 5 times before I get a working script. And then, it often favors complex, messy, and difficult to maintain solutions over simple, elegant ones. Just about the only tech task LLMs are good for at this point is parsing stack traces or weird error messages. They're pretty handy for that.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
23d ago
Not a bad suggestion, luckily for me I don't really read much Reddit outside of niche subreddits that are devoid of politics. Reddit takes are too boring to even hate-read. I've also been able to quit 4chan this year for the same reason, it's complete braindead noise now.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
23d ago
Here's a normal X link for people who want one.
but a lot of the terminally online right-wing personalities don't look very different that the terminally online left-wing to me.
Like who? Lomez and Raw Egg Nationalist got doxxed and they look like normal dudes.
I get something new out of The Abolition of Man and The Great Divorce each time I read them.
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