BahRamYou
21hr ago
The theme song from Neon Genesis Evangelion, "Cruel Angel's Thesis" always sounded like that to me. Enough so that I get low-key annoyed when people play it in a casual setting.
BahRamYou
23hr ago
In Korea, it's pretty simple, they wanted to prevent the collapse of DPRK and maintain a defensive buffer at a minimum, eliminate South Korea as a stretch goal, and they succeeded in their minimal goals.
A more cynical answer is that, in 1950, Mao and the PRC was saddled with an alarmingly large number of veteran soldiers left over from Nationalist China. They were of highly questionable loyalty (having fought the last 10 years against the PRC) and the PRC government couldn't afford to pay them, being desparately poor at that time. So by launching them into a spectacularly bloody war against a foreign country, he managed to both eliminate them in a cost-effective way and boost his own popularity by riding a wave of nationalism.
BahRamYou
6d ago
BahRamYou
7d ago
In my opinion, self_made is a textbook narcissist who only writes to puff up his own ego. I also skim all his posts and I think it's regrettable that he's a mod here.
BahRamYou
7d ago
I think that this sort of person- "I spent the maximum money for the latest and greatest GPU, and therefore I will buy the latest AAA games, regardless of how stupid they are-" is going to becoming a vanishingly rare part of the market. See also: "Guy who buys a new car every year" and "Guy who goes to Vegas every year."
BahRamYou
7d ago
I think the issue is that making games- especially big, prizewinning, AAA games- is inherently an artistic endeavor. And that attracts artist-types who are the most likely to be woke. Sure, the coders, testers, QA folks, etc might be chuds, but the ones making the creative decisions are highly susceptible to wokeness. It's not even about making money, they're just doing what they think is right. It's the same reason that Hollywood movies are so woke.
On the other hand, it kind of doesn't matter. There's so many games already made that no human can play them all in a lifetime. The technology has plateued so that new ones aren't any better than old ones- in fact with the RAM and GPU shortage, newer computers might actually be worse than old ones. We can easily immerse ourselves in old chud-made entertainment forever.
BahRamYou
8d ago
Re: Patrick O'Brian and what to read after you finish Aubrey-Maturin, I recently read Beat to Quarters, the first-published Hornblower novel. It's okay, definitely not as fun as O'Brian. There's a sort of dynamic where Hornblower is internally tortured by self-doubt but externally distant, steely, and always right that annoys me a bit and vaguely reminds me of certain animes.
I read those books when I was about 12. I loved them at the time, perfect for a tween boy. But yes, in retrospect Hornblower is very much a Mary Sue and they're not nearly as sophisticated as the Aubrey-Maturin novels. It's more interesting to me that he was also literally working for the British Ministry of Information at the time, writing propaganda, so I wonder how much of the series was influenced by that.
I think The African Queen is his best book for adults. It has an interesting setting that you don't see much (African riverine warfare, circa 1914) and more realistically flawed characters.
BahRamYou
9d ago
Lots of pictures of Bill Clinton in there. So far no smoking gun that he actually did anything illegal but... he really did seem to be there a lot, and often posing next to women of questionable age.
BahRamYou
10d ago
We are not going to see mass unemployment, even if a few sectors end up being impacted. Smaller organizations are more nimble and able to react to changes while having similar access to AI as large corporations, this benefits small players.
We're headed for a dystopia where any sort of middle-class thinking man's job becomes either automated or massively difficult to get because of productivity gains. The rest of us will be needed for manual labor since AI is apparently still quite bad at handling physical objects in the real world.
BahRamYou
11d ago
It's what Paul Krugman called "An insurance company with an army". So outside medicare, medicaid, social security, defense, and interest payments, there's just not much left to cut. All those individual fed programs that sound suspicious like "covid subsidies" just don't amount to much in the grand scheme of things.
BahRamYou
12d ago
My impression is that the federal government is actually reasonably efficient, at least in the sense that the money goes to the thing it's labelled for, which is why DOGE failed. What we really need is 50+ DOGEs for every state and local government, that's where the real waste is. See for example: the latest scandal with food benefits in Minnesota.
BahRamYou
12d ago
Yeah that's weird. It's like they're combining a far-left and far-right criticism of Israel. Maybe it's something like:
- the person self-identifies as racist/antisemitic and [Holocaust Denial or Colonial State]
- not self-identifies that way, but [Holocaust Denial and Colonial State]
Either way seems like they're trying to brand leftist anti-Israeli types as being right-wing anti-Semites
BahRamYou
12d ago
It depends on each individual's personality I think, but I do believe that most humans have a genuine human need to do something useful. Standing around at some make-work job isn't it. Maybe the ladies at the DMV can convince themselves that they're doing something useful by insisting on 12 levels of paperwork. Maybe the people in 3rd world stores are just happy to be getting paid (although I suspect that they're also needed to be there just in case for emergencities or to show strength). Maybe the people in DEI initiatives at Google have convinced themselves that they're truly doing something more important than making money.
For me, there was a time when I was working at a longstanding bureaucratic company which suddenly announced layoffs and reorganization. It was done in a rush, and left me essentially with no boss and no real job responsibilities. At first I thought "sweet, I get paid for nothing!" But after a while it genuinely started to wear on me. It was like a weird ironic punishment.
is he supposed to live the rest of his life off of cash pre-dropped in secure locations in Madagascar? Otherwise he'd get caught as soon as he tried to use an ATM, no?
BahRamYou
13d ago
I think you'll find that it's quite easy for the IRS to take your tax money. They don't even need to win a trial, they can just take it directly from your bank with a tax lien and force you to contest it. Unless you're talking about money laundering, but then that's a lot more complicated and a serious felony.
BahRamYou
13d ago
If it helps, I do think that there's a lot of angry underemployed highly skilled men floating around right now, just waiting for a chance to do something. Trump is old and there's no clear successor, so there's a big power vacuum right now. X is a great organizational space. It feels like we've got the chance to do something now. I just don't know what.
BahRamYou
13d ago
well, part of my post was that generic White people don't do this, at least not in modern times. Do you disagree with that? It's also laid out in the article linked in the comment above yours. The older White guys in management positions are patting themselves on the back for "doing their part" by hiring other ethnicities over their own. And there is no "White person church."
BahRamYou
13d ago
It's interesting that, throughout your (well-written) essay, you consistently refer to Jews as being an entirely separate ethnic group from Whites. This is not how they're treated in mainstream discourse, or in most Jewish writing. Officially it's a religion, not an ethnic group, but generally they're seen as a type of White people, at least in modern mainstream western society. (Other societies of course had different rules)
My opinion is that Jews are a sort of "Schrodinger's race" in modern American society. Sometimes they're a separate ethnic group, sometimes they're not. Conviently, it seems to go back and forth depending on whichever interpretation is the best for them. When it's time for the special ethnic groups to get their own special recognition, they of course deserve deep honor and respect for their unique history and culture- they're not one of those shitty bland stale whites who have no culture. But when it comes to break out statistics by ethnic group, they usually blend in with the general "white" category. It would make organizations like the Ivy League or Big Finance look absolutely ridiculous if they had to disclose how importunately higher they were hiring Jews than any other ethnic group.
My opinion is that... it's a bit of both. To some extent, it's like you say, they just have high IQ because of HBD reasons. I also think that, some extent, they have a great culture which emphasizes education and family in a very positive way. I admire and respect their accomplishments.
On the other hand... they are also clearly a culture that "takes care of their own, first" and is not shy to throw elbows when necessary. In medieval Europe, that meant taking on the niche of moneylenders when that was a major religious taboo for everyone else, and pretending not to understand why that made them hated. In modern Israel, it means taking advantage of the war in Gaza to accelerate land grabs in the West Bank, which seems to have no end accept to take all Palestinian land and create a Jewish ethno-state. In the US, it means families network together at synagogues, then use extreme measures to help each other get into prestigious colleges and high-paying jobs. That is not just "having a higher IQ," that's pure cronyism and nepotism.
As a generic White person, I feel like my people were taken advantage of in our naivety and gullibility. It's time for us to wake up and embrace ethnic tribalism just like everyone else is. Seeing the numbers for how disproportionately Jewish some of the more important job sectors are should ring massive alarm bells in everyone else.
BahRamYou
13d ago
That's a fantastic article, thanks for sharing.
It really does feel like an inflection point was crossed then- there was always affirmative action and PC stuff, but suddenly a huge cohort of people in power were aggressively pushing queer women of color at the expense of white males. You might say "this won't affect you if you don't work in the liberal arts" but it does, because it then affects all culture everywhere. And yes, for a long time it was like we couldn't talk about it for fear of retribution. Hell, it's telling that all of his sources still want to stay anonymous, even when they've moved on to other industries. It must have been a huge effort to find any real data and sources for all this stuff.
It's funny. They always said that they "wanted to start a national conversation about diversity." Well, now they're getting it... I just don't think it's the one they wanted. I feel like there's a sea change where even the most clueless white guys are starting to wake up and realize that woke liberals are a danger to them. And we're all becoming hyper-conscious of our race in a way that would have been unimaginable to me as a 90s kid.
BahRamYou
19d ago
Not untrue, but how many years one spends as a teenager? 4 years from 14 to 18 perhaps?
Well, the literal mathematical answer would be from the second you turn 13 until just the second you turn 20. So 7 years. Almost half their life at that point, and more than half of the years they actually remember.
A less literal answer is that it's all the years when an adolescent is expected to have adult-type responsibilities, but without adult-type privileges. So roughly from age 10-18, although the exact age range depends on the person and their situation. But the exact ages don't matter, we see the same pattern play out again and again and again- an adolescent is stuck living in an environment that's profoundly bad for them. It's kind of odd to me that so many parents say "I'm moving to the suburbs for the sake of my children," but don't seem to care at all about what it does to their older children.
But hey, I'm an adult single male, so no one give a shit what I think. Let the soccer moms rule society.
BahRamYou
19d ago
Nope. Utterly, totally fucking wrong. A big part of why I like cities, as a straight man, is that the dating scene is better. Good luck with your OLD apps in the exurbs though.
BahRamYou
19d ago
yeah? where do you live, where it's a 30 minute drive to the opera house, live theater, and art gallery, or any other sort of cultural scene, but you can still buy a large suburban home for cheap? are you a time traveler from the 1950s?
It's not like these answers are mutually exclusive. Both can be true.
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