Tretiak
5hr ago
Hindsight is always 20/20. But even still, a conflux of suspicious behavior isn’t grounds for arresting someone.
A young, bullied and disenfranchised boy who acquires a gun and writes hateful things online often commonly precedes an actual shooting that takes place. But a young man who gets a gun and writes hateful things online but has no desire to shoot a school up can only be watched and monitored. You can’t convict someone on odd or abnormal behavior.
Tretiak
5hr ago
Calculating how resources are wasted is difficult when the efficacy of how their work is measured is defined by how many terrorist attacks ‘don’t’ happen. It’s a lot like working in the SOC in infosec. There’s no scoreboard for security and so it’s something you don’t see. People think you just sit around all day and doing nothing and ironically on the rare occasion where that happens, those get counted among the most productive days you’ll experience. When you’re hard at work that’s often a bad sign.
Tretiak
5hr ago
Being my favorite holiday, Halloween is probably the best night you could ask for getting away with the “it’s just a prank bro” legal defense. One of the last Halloween occasions I had with my family had a relative of mine getting arrested and later released for bringing along a real (and fortunately empty) shotgun with him while trick or treating solely for the purpose of scaring the kids.
I can’t imagine the difficulty in general of picking out an actual terrorist plot on such an occasion, unless the people in question are incredibly stupid.
Tretiak
1d ago
Why? We remember both MLK and Malcolm X, so I guess we simply have to wait until someone takes a shot at Fuentes to see just how much history rhymes.
Well someone already did show up at his house with a gun, wanting to kill him. But I suppose he’s an appropriate target to the relevant interest groups, so he doesn’t matter that much.
Perhaps Fuentes is the seed crystal for what will be, in 50 years, clearly identifiable as post-progressivism. Or post-post-conservatism, but that's silly.
50 years could contain anything. You can’t even predict what will happen tomorrow. But conservatism is still looked at as a tarnish word the left remains hard at work trying to smear and degrade even further as much as it can. It contaminates virtually everything it touches, including the root of its own traditional philosophy. The liberalism that arose out of the European wars of religion came out of necessity to combat constantly warring identitarian groups with competing divisive and exclusionary outlooks, remains a sound and respectable philosophical opponent of my own political beliefs. It’s still one I regard as wrong but useful lessons can still be gleaned from its failings. The left abandoned its own stance on liberalism a long time ago. If we’re not post-everything already, let’s at least return to the historical and normal vocabulary used to describe our respective positions. Common sense would be a great place to start with things.
and while being gay isn't something I find disqualifying it is something a large portion of his potential base finds disqualifying (if you're curious, check out Kiwi farms - they have impeccably documented the multiple instances of him being caught red-handed browsing gay porn or gazing longingly into the eyes of another man).
Uh. What?
And for the right? The majority of conservative youth are either /pol/ adjacent or had their worldview informed almost entirely by second-hand exposure to /pol/ memes and ideas.
In a way they’re just the new low information voters adopting what’s in vogue in meme format. 2016 was the real watershed moment where it became evident that it’s a force multiplier in battling in the media space. And it was weaponized hilariously.
The information environment on the online, anonymous right is so much more effective at selecting for persuasive memes and ideas than the institutional, pro-Zionist right that whenever there's an even playing field /pol/ wins every single time. I've said before on here that people who are healthy and well-adjusted winners generally don't get involved in antisemitism or other kinds of discrimination because they don't have a need to blame anyone for why they failed - but society has failed so many of these young men that the number of losers has reached critical mass. Even the youth who are actually doing well are growing up in a social context where antisemitism is just a constant fact of life. You are never, ever going to turn a young, radicalised right winger who has grown up on an information diet of /pol/ infographics, Pepe the frog memes and USS Liberty references into a zionist... the only exceptions I've seen of people pulling themselves out of that kind of information environment are cases where they end up trans, and the radical left isn't going to be supporting Israel either.
It’s actually pretty funny. Awhile ago I was looking for a new book to read in what little down time I had after finishing an earlier one and came across this that appeared in my Amazon suggestions. When I went through the preview I was laughing my ass off because of how idiotic most of this stuff sounds, and it instantly reminded me of the Far Right Extremist meme. As something of a moderate fascist myself, it was very funny watching some academic jackass come along and supposedly tell me what it is I actually believe. Chapter 5, “Women and Nonbinary Children,” already taking a page out of the shitlib lexicon right out of the gate. How’s the phrase go? “Surely the enemy has conquered you when you adopt and speak their language.” Apparently being illiberal makes you a Nazi it seems. Nothing could be further from the truth. Always love it when people attempt to pathologize my political beliefs.
We live in a system today where a large number of men aren’t benefitting from the institutions that take from them. And who can blame them? A few of my closest friends are some of the hardest working people I have ever known from childhood and have been high achieving all their life. For almost the last 15 years when they’re off work they go straight home and withdraw into their hobbies and social ties that have remained with them. They barely participate in society anymore unless there’s an outing that involves family or friends and if you ever ask them why you’ll get the same reason from them every single time. “I have no reason to.” Like myself we very much grew up with the mindset that you marry young, get a career and raise a family. At least that was all we ever asked for growing up. That’s what gives their lives meaning. But absent that they see little reason for getting out of bed in the morning.
American society is losing its most productive people at the most productive ages of their lives and things in a hundred different ways are simply demotivating for a lot of men. Otherwise give me your best vanity pitch for why a lot of young men should care about it. Men aren’t going to work to uphold a system they feel is dedicated to tearing them down at every turn. At some point you have to speak their language. I don’t wake up every day and go to work for the “possibility” of getting paid on the hope my boss decides to pay me. I work for the tangible results that are returned to me to be able to live my life. Most communities are being destroyed. Most churches are dying and most men don’t have a realistic opportunity to pursue relationships with others.
But there's no putting the genie back into the bottle. Israel has completely torched their reputation with the youth of both the left wing and the right wing. Nobody on the left gives a single shit about accusations of anti-semitism anymore, because those accusations have been used on people like Ms Rachel. When you tell people that a woman taking care of a young girl that had her legs blown off and giving her a chance to have a real birthday party is actually an antisemite, you don't actually make people think that caring for amputee children is bad - you make people think that an antisemite is a pretty young woman who cares about wounded and disabled children.
People have had Israel fatigue for a long time. I think only now it’s become more socially acceptable for it to seep out in the broader population. The average person’s beef isn’t with Jews or Judaism at all. It’s with Zionism which is the ideological mantle of Israeli government. That can go straight to hell.
I saw that interview as well and was indeed surprised that Tucker had him on. He didn’t really cover anything that Nick hadn’t already brought up in previous interviews. I did get the impression that Tucker was squirming a bit in some of his responses to Nick, almost as if he’s trying to ride both sides of the aisle because he doesn’t want to get hit hard by the political establishment.
I felt I also got dismissed by people here when I brought up Nick in contrast with Charlie Kirk’s assassination. People essentially said Nick doesn’t have much of a base of support outside the groypers, but there’s a massive undercurrent of people sympathetic for wanting to shift the establishment gatekeeping of conservative assumptions to other issues, that’s probably best seen by the viewership numbers his content generates. I don’t have anything quantifiable outside of that. And why should someone? People don’t want to get destroyed in their personal or professional lives if they express sympathies for his views.
I don’t actually think Nick is a racist or an anti-Semite. He’s not someone like ZoomerHistorian (who probably is a racist and anti-Semite) but the kind of views expressed in a book like the one in the video represent a broad segment of populations across the western world who are afraid of saying the kinds of things that someone like Nick is willing to do. And if you look at the character assassination campaign against him, it’s no wonder why.
In the future I predict no one will remember the significant impact someone like Charlie Kirk had over the long run. He simply repeated the same boring, middle of the road mainstream conservatism these token characters with big money support behind them always do. But people will remember the impact Nick had in the political sphere. Whether that turns out to be for better or worse is still to be determined.
I wonder to what extent this is simply because cultures were more effectively separated at the time.
When I was growing up you couldn’t really help it. Culture moved slower then than it does today and even slower the further in time you go back. I’m younger than the typical cohort here and grew up at the intersection of new changes that were rapidly developing but that was still very beholden to my upbringing of the previous generation fortunately, so trendy new influences never pushed me around in the storm of things very much. I was always a very strong willed kid who was proud to have remained stable in a sea of chaos. People tend to look down on others who haven’t changed throughout in their lives. I haven’t changed one bit since I was 16 years old. Very few people would be able to distinguish the me of then and the me of 2025, but for me, refusing to change has been one of the proudest achievements of my life. A handful of good people I knew growing up and today all the worse because they left their good sense behind them to go down roads they shouldn’t have travelled. My foundational roots had already been solidified for good.
The experience of the world back then was also far more local and felt much smaller than it does today. When I was extremely young, if we went 2-3 hours out of our way for a family event, it felt like I was living at the edge of the world without much to explore beyond it. Today the whole world can be knocking on your doorstep, demanding and competing for your attention which leaves a lot of people feeling burnt out on life. I can play the whole social media game if I want but it has no appeal to me and I have little desire for it. I have an enormous love for technology, just none of its popular uses. What’s popular is almost guaranteed to be wrong, per Heinlein’s maxim:
“Does history record any case in which the majority was right?”
Or if you like, the quote often misattributed to Henry Ford:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
People carry around a lot of standard knowledge for the time in which they live but very few have any truly useful insight to impart with others. Coupled with Sturgeon’s Law, nobody has me convinced that I’m missing out on anything here. Not being a narcissist driving everywhere with a selfie stick in the back of my car is more than enough of a win for me. I hope future anthropologists one day can cite that item as the defining characteristic that marked the downfall of American civilization. It’s pathological.
The Internet in its infancy was a kind of refuge for misfits who could connect and talk to each other and do funny things over BBS boards, among other stuff. Cyberspace then was a form of digital dumpster diving for the curious. Nowadays it’s just another form of crass commercialism. Another marked out district for the display of wealth without culture. Just mindless consumerism.
Tretiak
1d ago
Trying to find the political common ground that’s appropriate for discussion often leaves people uninterested. Suppose you’re a person that has what would pass for radical opinions in the current climate. Would you really want to risk discussing that with someone you aren’t sure you’re on that level with, at work?
There’s a great level of comfort and ease I still have with my childhood friends that I just don’t have with professional colleagues. Even among those who’d I’d describe as friends. With the former we can discuss very morbid topics or perhaps even share unpleasant opinions without forgetting that we confidently know that’s not who the other person is because we’ve known them all their lives and have seen every dimension of their personality growing up.
There’s more than just the axes of personal/professional and small/serious. There’s also boring and interesting and that varies widely with people. You can often tell by the level of engagement and whether they’re more reactive or proactive in the discussion as to whether they have an active interest in the topic or it’s just because it’s a “you” thing. General topics are more accessible at the water cooler or lunch table at break but they’re far less interesting than the ones that would get you the side eye from the booth or table next to you that causes that group to get up from the table and relocate elsewhere because you brought up the Khmer Rogue and Cambodian genocide and how it compares to what’s happening in Gaza.
Let’s be honest though. Most men don’t faire very well either in their youth when the hormones first kick in and all they can think about is love and sex. It’s all consuming on a level that is maddening to get ahold of and they shouldn’t be entrusted with too much independent decision making either. It’s practically as intoxicating as trying to rear every young man off cocaine because those changes are essentially are a cocktail of drugs. When the testosterone first hit my body and mind were brimming with a level of energy that was uncontrollable and I felt like I could conquer the world. I was a raging hell storm for others to deal with at times. And while I perform quite well in all spheres today, 16-18 year old me could absolutely run circles around me in 2025; I would be no match for myself then.
I once got into a conversation with a guy who essentially now treats women along the pattern you described. His argument came down to not having a great deal of pity for them because following their demand for emancipation and independence, if women get burned as a consequence of refusing to adhere to men’s hesitation to grant them their rights then that’s ultimately women’s fault because “they did this to themselves.” They quite literally asked for it, according to him. It’s not exactly an easy point to challenge and I’ve essentially made the argument in another context that if women think it’s men’s job to police the behavior of other men so it’s safe for them to walk the streets at night, then they’re obligated to follow men’s rules at the end of the day and do what they’re told. Otherwise, you’re independent. Fend for yourself. If you want to live independently of the group then you in turn are entitled to no benefit from the group. Hang on tightly to the political ticket in your purse because it’s going to be all you have after you’ve spurned everyone in your community with your attitude. I’m not a fool. I’ll stick with the group and my family and friends. Most women have sadly been duped into abandoning those who actually care for them to hitch their wagon to temporary government giveaways by politicians who don’t have a care in the world for them beyond using them for a vote at the ballot box during the next election. That’s why all politicians that aren’t ideologues with an actual vision are philosophical prostitutes who view their constituents as tools for furthering their own career goals only to in turn sell them down the river at a later time. And I will never trust the principles or supposed “ethics” of a prostitute’s embrace. And the fact that they wear a suit and give speeches makes no difference to the point. You can keep your blank ballot.
As oppressive as feminism is to men in it’s political influence, it’s twice as oppressive to women and unfortunately millions of young women out there have absolutely no idea and won’t even see it coming, despite all the indicators being there. It was a bad idea when it was first conceived and it’s been a bad idea since then. Sure some good came out of it but then again the link between smoking and lung cancer was first discovered in Nazi Germany. Along with world ice theory, racist gravity, racial hygiene and other dogshit, so what. Terrible regimes and social movements sometimes produce good things too among a host of bad ideas. Best of luck to them. The Bolshevik’s brought a level of independence to women in the Soviet Union far greater than anything you could’ve imagined that happened in 1st and 2nd wave feminism in the US. And it also brought along Lysenkoism, socialist trees, sexist glaciers and NATO backed mutant space potatoes along with it. They had more than just equality of opportunity but a near complete equity and parity with men when it came to social, political and economic participation. Marriage and divorce was something you could register with the local politburo in a single day and the amount of sexual freedom eclipses what the US had post 1960. After the USSR fell in 91’, millions to women were desperate to rush back to the traditional paradigm prior to the revolution, only now with greater technological assistance in the domestic sphere. They realized it was one of the dumbest things they ever asked for. You’ll see a similar pendulum effect in the US eventually. This stuff has already been tried before.
Tretiak
1d ago
If you consider your husband icky and feel stuck in a marriage, and would prefer to simply get divorced on "grounds" you just don't want to be married anymore, but you can't legally do so because no-fault divorce isn't on the books and your husband has technically not done anything that is grounds for divorce, than yes, I suppose it does feel like a personal problem. It violates your feelings, just like the lack of rape shield laws do. You feel wronged.
This is exactly what’s wrong with today’s social landscape. People I knew just fundamentally had a much more realistic sense of people than those who pass for “adults” in the year 2025.
If you described yourself as being “stuck” in a marriage 25-30 years ago, we ‘all’ knew what that meant. It meant you were in a physically abusive marriage and you needed a way out. Today being “stuck” in a marriage means your husband wanted to have sex with you last week and you don’t feel as attracted to him as you once were. One of these 2 things doesn’t belong.
Adults have this attitude today that life doesn’t involve hardship and making sacrifices. Anything that represents even the slightest inconvenience to you is at liberty to be disregarded because you should just “do what makes you happy.” Well I’m sorry, but that’s ‘life’. Life is about doing a 100 things every single day that you don’t want to do. And while your personal happiness is important, it’s far from the highest value to aspire to and is the least enduring and meaningful when you’re on your deathbed and wondering what you’ve left behind.
Tretiak
1d ago
I don’t actually know how I feel surrounding this. When I was growing up it felt like there was much greater decentralization and separation between culture and politics in the strict sense of the word. Politics and religion were the 2 standard notions that families rarely brought up apart from church attendance, and you certainly didn’t bring them up with your friends and neighbors either. Not because you were afraid to. It just wasn’t important to why we associated with each other. Unless things naturally turned in that direction it was just considered in poor taste to broach the topic. We liked one another on a closer and personal level.
I couldn’t tell you who my parents voted for and they voted at every state, federal and local election. But that’s not because I’m apprehensive about telling others. It’s because nobody in our family knew who voted for who and we didn’t discuss it. Politics never got in the way of our family importance.
Thomas Sowell once said “if you have a lot of social control you don’t need a whole lot of government control.” I see that as the counterpoint to the intermix of the personal and the political. We resolved issues on our own. I don’t remember seeing a single instance of teenage pregnancy until gangs swept through our neighborhood and it didn’t impact us personally. Child support and alimony existed politically but weren’t a thing in our community. Marriages were mostly stable and of those that weren’t the husband and wife generally separated but never divorced.
The simple fact is you can’t substitute politics for community and there is no substitute for good judgment. Politics comes in to address these wherever there’s a disintegration and tear in the cultural fabric.
One thing that’s always struck me in my own life has been the contrast between where I grew up and the Bay Area in California.
At least when I was growing up and through young adulthood my local community was very collectivistic. We all knew each other. Attitudes toward one another were very different than how they are here in the Bay. Very few people who weren’t adults did anything without supervision or at least a stamp of approval by some authority figure. You always deferred to those older than you if the matter rang of something potentially serious and you were generally obedient to what you were told out of respect. The oldest person in the group you always followed and did what they told you when you guys were out. In private you do what your parents tell you. As guys we were taught to love the women close to us and girls were taught to respect the choices and decisions of the men in their lives and do what the men tell you. It wasn’t all rank and file thinking and it didn’t always take but it was a general rule people in the community had an implicit understanding of. Boys still fought with each other here and there. Girls didn’t like being told to go home or do X by their younger brother but they knew they were just looking out for them. Babysitters still did immature and playful things they didn’t tell the local kids parents about that the kids loved. Timmy’s supposed to be in bed by 8:30pm. We stayed up past midnight and made forts in the living room. Timmy’s not supposed to watch that scary movie he desperately wants to see. We watched the scary movie Timmy wasn’t supposed to see. Don’t let Timmy have more than a few sodas. Timmy and I drank the whole box and had to buy more to replace the noticeably missing one in the fridge. But we were generally responsible and we policed each others behavior in the group. There was none of this “you can’t tell me what to do!,” horseshit. You’d end up with some very red ass cheeks if you said something like that. Mothers and grandmothers still washing their sons mouths out with soap is something I can remember. It happened to me when I was very young. We could be very immature and rowdy at times but we knew certain red lines socially you just ‘didn’t’ cross. And there was a loose hierarchy of sorts to things.
There was a general sense of the separation of people by gender. If you were out and about with your friends and someone’s sister or a local girl in your neighborhood happened to join your party, you immediately went to the phone and called their brother/cousin/father/male guardian and told them where you were, that they were with you and you’re hanging out and looking out for them; and you always asked if they had a curfew. You don’t leave suspicion or a lingering sense that you’re messing with someone’s daughter/girlfriend/sister/wife. It wasn’t just the right thing to do but it also cultivated respect from the men in their family. They looked at you as someone they could trust. That’s also something that’s very well known in gang culture which I was also affected by. If one of your boys had to go down ‘that’ side of town, you called up “guy” over there (what they now call “shot callers”) and make sure it’s safe first. Then you go.
When it came to dating people generally met 1 of 3 different ways. Either through peer group, e.g., your brother has a girlfriend who has a friend who has a sister. Or your friend knows so-and-so across the street who knows so-and-so from down the hall at school. They’re going to the movies soon, ask her if she could come along if she has interest in hanging out. Most of the time that type of approach worked. Sometimes it didn’t work out and you didn’t vibe well and they parted amicably. The 2nd way was through church. It was a way for the community to come together of people who otherwise didn’t know each other and have an opportunity to meet and learn about one another. That covered the vast majority of cases. And if they didn’t happen, you usually met later in life through work. But dating by Brownian motion simply wasn’t a thing. It was heavily regulated by religion and peer group. Women weren’t supposed to be too forward with their attitudes and that’s why messages were usually exchanged through a friend as an intermediary. And boys were under constant threat as a way to keep their hormones in check that they not act like a showboating asshole and you always treat them nice and respectfully and get to know their family or there will be hell to pay. With girls you use the carrots, with boys you use the sticks. Harsh discipline happened more often that I thought took place at that time as a young kid, but there were far fewer beatings that took place out of vengeance or retribution because of it.
When it came to jobs networking was always a massive thing and often the best way in. One thing I distinctly remember was if one of your family members or friends put his reputation on the line or vouched for you, there was a ritual that almost ‘all’ of us went through. You were brought into a room and were seriously threatened to overperform and work like ‘hell’ and you ‘never’ make your family or friends look bad. I can remember that happening to me when I first began serious work and I can remember doing it to a couple of others as well several years later. Reputation was a ‘big’ deal. One maxim I remember being taught by an older peer was “if you like your job, you aren’t doing it right then.” Work is easy and doing ‘good’ work is hard. Excellence and a sense of accomplishment is its own reward when standing before your results. We were all taught from a very young age to work and work ‘hard’. ‘Very’ hard. I can recall a few instances where beatings actually happened over letting people down.
There were days I can remember we’d get off from school, casually walk through the door of our friend’s house, walk to the refrigerator and drink out of the milk container and talk to their mother sitting on the couch. You do that shit here you’d get knocked out or have the cops called on you. We were like a large extended family though. To this day even 20 years later, I can walk down the street of certain neighborhoods in some cities and when people see me outside they instantly recognize me and know who I am despite being gone for years. Not here though. I’ve had the cops called me on while sitting in my car, less than 30 seconds away from my house because the dipshit neighbor from across the street doesn’t know this face has been living here within eyesight of him for a decade now.
Eating separately inside a house was something I remember we never did. We all sat together as a family in the dining room and ate and enjoyed each other’s company. Too many people today live together as strangers and I hate that intensely. If I had children of my own I wouldn’t allow that in my house.
I had an Assyrian friend growing up with an ailing mother at the time. My friends and I used to go grocery shopping for her as a group so she didn’t have to. We’d come back with all the receipts and money and she’d invite us to stay and she’d make dinner for us all.
If you ever had a disagreement with a friend or spouse about something or they did something you didn’t like in a public venue or social setting, you ‘never’ rebuked them in front of everybody, interrupted them or otherwise embarrassed them. You always addressed it in private, behind closed doors and matters were usually peacefully resolved.
In interpersonal relationships, one thing I was always taught is you never go to bed angry or upset with your girlfriend or wife. You listen to and never talk over them. You begin each and every morning with a deep hug and support each other through their hardships. You ‘never’ yell or raise your voice to them. Ever. And you ‘never’ call them disparaging names, e.g., bitch, whore, dumb ass, slut, etc. It doesn’t matter if you believe it. You ‘never’ call them that. You take note of the things they’re interested in. Literally. ‘Take notes’. Some of my close friends actually have a private notebook of their wives habits and interests that they began when they were still dating. Likes and dislikes. Places they’ve always wanted to go, etc. They surprise them all the time with things during the holidays and to this day have great and stable marriages among those of us who found a spouse.
When the school year was in session, my older sibling would often stay over at their friend’s house for 1, 2, sometimes 3 days that I can remember. They wouldn’t come home. They’d stay there, do homework together, talk, have fun, go do random stuff in the city and hang with the other kids. My mother knew where they were. I wouldn’t see them for a few days, staying at home myself. But they’d spend the night there and then faithfully walk to school with them the following morning, from their house. That stuff wasn’t uncommon.
In the Bay Area, people are much more hyper individualized and mean spirited than I’m used to. There’s very little in the way of manners or social cohesion. People sometimes think I’m rude in my outward behavior, but what people here don’t realize is more than half the things they do every day I find incredibly rude. On a national level that culture is all but dead but it still exists in pockets elsewhere. People sometimes think I’m odd because of those tendencies that were inculcated in me. Why I go out of my way to help others at work for instance. It’s what I was taught. It’s a collectivist attitude. You care for and support your group and your own people. But it’s a very foreign concept in the Bay Area. But if they’d had the experiences I’ve had and were from the little neck of the woods I came from they’d quickly realize that at least out there, ‘they’re’ the ones that aren’t normal. Not me.
Tretiak
2d ago
That section of the site used to be private until recently and you had to register an account to be able to view it. I was banned after the first comment I made and an admin marked it as “spam.” But it occasionally offers up some funny commentary on things.
Tretiak
2d ago
PMs with friends? I am a person very ill fit for the modern internet - one that feels like reacting to everything you are sent is just common modesty. Namaste, etc. ...I started to see downsides to my approach in about the 100th tiktok/insta clip that my friend finds funny and sends me with no caption and no real relation to us per se. Memes of the olden era at least had a certain relatability(?) to them - haha literally me/us, haha funny word, haha [TOPICAL BLUNDER OF OUTGROUP] - whereas now it's mostly ragebait, some other sort of e-celeb slop, or barely comprehensible Jenga towers of irony best encapsulated by a median Max0r video.
God I know this feeling and it resonates so hard. I used to tell one of my cousin’s I occasionally talk to, one primary difference between us and Gen Z is we grew up with the Internet, they grew up on the Internet. I get sent Instagram reels All. The. Time. And it’s the most unbelievably, mindless, boring ass shit you could possibly watch. It’s the human stimulative equivalent of a lab rat getting a hit of cocaine. Because of that, I never watch anything social media related people send to me.
Very few people understand my sense of humor and even of those that do, fewer still are sympathetic to it. I have a very insulting, smart ass, matter of fact tone of engagement that I have to be careful with in ordinary conversation because it turns a lot of people off.
What little engagement I have on the Internet eventually has people thinking I’m an Internet troll because I deliver my intellectual counterpunches with a note of sarcasm; that leads people to believe I’m replying just to get a rise out of others. I’m not. Your position looks ridiculous because it ‘is’ ridiculous. Irony and sarcasm is a huge part of the way I live my life. I have the faculty of humor. I’m not going to repress that. That’s the twist. Back then we didn’t call that being a “troll,” which is a vastly overused term. A “troll” is someone who’s being edgy solely for the sake of getting a rise out of you. People used to describe people like me more accurately as a “flamer,” not a troll. I’m not a troll my dear. I’m an asshole.
Tretiak
2d ago
Nope; not necessarily. We’re supposed to be shockingly different from each other, and we’re supposed to cause friction with each other; that’s nature working as intended. It takes all kinds to make up the world.
Maybe on a species level but certainly not a civilizational level. It’s far easier for human beings to move in and between social spaces lacking diversity friction. It’s simply an unpleasant fact. Too much homogeneity leads to a monoculture. Too much diversity can’t foster cooperation between individuals.
Tretiak
2d ago
However much you hate journalists, you don't hate journalists enough.
The KiwiFarms.st Articles & News section is the best expositor to date of this idea. Frankly it’s a sigh of relief and restores my faith in humanity to some degree. They tear apart the words of propagandists that pathetically go by the title of “journalist,” and it’s refreshing to see.
Tretiak
4d ago
Damn. Sorry for what happened to you.
A while ago my YouTube feed pointed me something interesting. It struck me because I’ve had the same feeling when I look around at others. Most of us are conscripted into a system that grinds down on us by thinking if don’t submit ourselves to that economic cog in the machine, we’re going to be miserable because of it.
I could quit by job right now and drive about two hours to go back home and work in the agriculture business my extended family has a large footprint in, and be very comfortable making a solid 5 figures every month; insulted from all the bs people deal with working for others. I don’t because I’ve got other plans and life goals I want to pursue that I find more fulfilling and meaningful. Maybe I’m just a dumb ass but I think that’s the better overall approach to take with life.
Tretiak
4d ago
They’d be saying the same thing even if they saw it themselves first hand. They’re too committed to their privileged free riding to part with it at the expense of logic or moral consistency.
That’s more or less the premise of Eliezer’s new book. Haven’t read it yet but nobody knows how to do AI alignment, despite continuing technological advancement. An AI moratorium is not going to happen. Even if governments the world over declared as much, you can remain assured behind closed doors they’re still going full speed ahead.
Tretiak
4d ago
Well the founding fathers for instance were very against direct democracy, which is why they favored a constitutional republic as a kind of government by middle man. They originally wanted to limit political participation to land owners or stakeholders in society. I’m not at all against that way of thinking. And I’ve seen variants of it in today’s world. I’ve seen the young take shots at the old over climate change saying you don’t care about the policies you’re enacting because you’ll be dead long before you see the consequences of it. I’ve seen others say you shouldn’t be allowed to run for office unless you’re married with a certain amount of children. Otherwise how are you going to convince me you have a future stake in society?
The thinking was actually a subplot in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. It was the difference he drew between a citizen and a civilian. A citizen was someone who joined the military and fought for their society and earned his right of full benefit and participation in the community. A civilian was someone who didn’t and had no right. It was actually very controversial when the book came out and Heinlein was called a fascist thinker over it. He was the furthest thing from a fascist though. In his own life he was a libertarian socialist and had very anarchistic sympathies.
Well yeah, I’m sure there’s certainly that too. But at the same time at what point can you honestly declare an event to have never likely happened without some effort made to thwart it? At the very least you’re involved in the surveillance of the activity. The other way is to withdraw from the affair entirely and just hope nothing ever comes of it. Not a way I’d want to govern society however.
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