Iconochasm
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User ID: 314
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
3d ago
That's a lot of words to not specify if you've ever spent even 30 seconds considering the rammifications of a sincere belief in a warrior afterlife paradise.
On a very related note, the NYT just walked back their expose on the dramatic starving kid. Apparently they never bothered to check any of the details, just believed what his mother said at face value. In the new reporting he "suffers from a “muscle disorder” for which he receives specialized nutrition and physical therapy." and has “cerebral palsy, hypoxemia, and was born with a serious genetic disorder”.
I think Hamas are terrible and should disappear if at all possible.
And yet you believe everything they say, even though they blatantly lie all the time and have for decades. Good grief man, look at the extreme disparity between those two strawmen you constructed up there.
What I'm reading on here is awfully like all the commentary about problems in red states, with gleeful gloating about "natural disaster/economic crash serves them right for voting for Trump".
No, it's not. Military action you deliberately provoked by acting like Dark Eldar is not "bad luck" now matter how much mindkilled Manichaens want to think it is.
Iconochasm
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4d ago
There is a moral universe of difference between ambushing patrols in the jungle versus using your children as human shields, or holding a gun to the stomachs of your own pregnant women to threaten your enemy into compliance. The latter in particular literally assumes that your enemy is morally superior to you.
Iconochasm
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4d ago
Does Gaza produce anything besides death cultist mouths to feed?
Iconochasm
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4d ago
Wow, it really sounds like that doctor should call for Hamas to surrender. Unconditionally, even. Has he?
Or is he a regular member of his death cult, like the old women in Palestine who weep with joy that their children were killed trying to murder Jews?
I feel like, especially in this community of mostly atheistic high decouplers, that everyone posting on this topic should have to specify if they grasp the concept of what true belief in a warrior's afterlife would entail.
Iconochasm
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5d ago
Not exactly a book club, but as a former precocious and voracious reader, the Great Illustrated Classics served me well at that age. It's classic literature like Jane Eyre or The Red Badge of Courage rewritten to almost exactly that level, but the maturity of the underlying subject matter makes them hit much better than other books for middle schoolers. Excellent mix of volumes for boys or girls, and more than enough to keep the kid busy until she's ready to try (and fail) to read OG Dickens.
And I'm very happy to note that the prices are very reasonable for books these days.
Iconochasm
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8d ago
Nah, there's plenty of more modern stuff the kids like too. Every singer at that concert I took her to was under 30. The kids at her school are into country, of all things, but she likes singers like Megan Maroney, who is also late 20's. And then there's the wierd crossover ones, like Yung Gravy, a 20-something white rapper known for sampling old songs.
And that's without even getting into all the limpid, easy listening rap they know will just make me start ranting about DMX.
In my day our rappers were all hardened criminals, I tell you what.
Iconochasm
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8d ago
My mid-teens daughter collects shirts from bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, Panic and Avril, then mutilates them into exposing her midriff and a shoulder. She periodically threatens to revert to her emo phase.
And my paternal instinct is to make a vague threat over the eye-fucking, but my grounds are uncomfortably shakey. I took her to a concert a while back, and while I think I kept my gaze pretty respectful, I was very aware that the actual women (more early 20's than late teens, but still) in the venue were aesthetically delightful. There's something about watching a young woman dressed in the alt style of his youth snarl to her friends that "It's time for BeatDown Slut Metal!" that inspires a man to want to make ruinous decisions. Would that I were 25 again.
Iconochasm
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12d ago
Not if he's posturing about how ancient and respectable the system is.
And frankly, I doubt he has any real respect for it beyond immediate utility to himself.
Iconochasm
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12d ago
Amazing. If this is the quality of the criticism on offer then it really drives home that ICE under Homan may be the most effective and accurate government agency in American history - if not world history.
Now, I'm not saying that people should look at this situation and update their priors in the direction of "pleas for pity from immigrants are bad faith lies and you should harden your heart against the sin of unworthy mercy". I'm just saying that movement in that direction would be a reasonable Bayesian response IF Burden were not a malicious troll.
Iconochasm
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12d ago
"The fact that I would believe bad things about my enemies proves they're bad" is an UR example of a horrendously bad faith argument. This post was more worthy of a ban than the original.
Iconochasm
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12d ago
Who is "our", Kemosabe? Didn't you show up in the West basically yesterday?
Iconochasm
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12d ago
That's the opposite of what you're being asked to do. Post. Engage. Discuss. But maybe give it a few months before getting into every mod decision.
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12d ago
Yeah, weekends or evenings.
Iconochasm
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12d ago
I've seen this excuse used approximately a thousand times, and look: what if your priors just are wrong here? What if the Democratic party and its surrounding establishment just aren't the all-powerful, almighty band of operators that this theory presumes that they are? What if genuinely is information that they haven't obtained, at least in usable form, until it comes out?
The theory presumes nothing of the sort. But they had control of the executive branch. If Trump has info that he could be hiding for personal reasons, there is no reason to think Biden's people wouldn't have had it too. If anything, the Dems ought to have a much stronger prior for having access because so much of the IC and deep state was supporting them. What possible chain of events could have taken place to make some killshot link between Trump and Epstein available to the Trump admin now, but not to the Biden admin any time in the last four years?
Iconochasm
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12d ago
One thing that needs to be kept in mind on this topic is selection effects. If you're an upper class professional in rich Northern Virginia, the average immigrant you encounter is likely very heavily selected for intelligence, education, and familiarity with American culture.
Lucky.
Since we're dropping anecdotes, I'll share mine as someone who has much more experience with the lower class side of things - quite possibly more than everyone else on the site combined.
My first meaningful experience was working as a laborer in high school for contractor family members. There was a period of time when we were willing to work for Indian small business owners and a reason that is no longer the case. The pattern would go like this: we would get a call about a problem, go to check it out. Give a rough quote, get an agreement, then do the work. Think minor to moderate repair jobs taking 1-3 man-days of work.
At that point we would present an invoice, and the Indian man who owned the place would interpret that as "time to start haggling", with the added bonus that the work was already done, so he had huge leverage to be a totally obstinant asshole. There was just nothing about their approach that my culture would recognize as fair dealing or good faith. On several occasions, family members did go back and destroy the repair work instead of taking an insulting low-ball offer out of sheer, outraged spite.
We soon stopped taking their calls. But when I see certain elements speak negatively of the subcontinent as a culture that celebrates being dishonest scammers and grifters, well...
I also worked alongside a fair number of illegal Hispanics during this time. I don't have particular personal complaints about them, but neither are they precious compared to the median American laborer. There are definitely standouts (Gregorio was double my age and put my ass to shame), but it's more that the far left of their bell curve in drive just never leaves the old country. Their market niche is a willingness to ignore labor laws, OSHA, and building codes. If you want to take a libertarian stance on that, maybe attack the other angle there, instead of importing a class of deliberate lawbreakers.
And in my current job, I deal with tons and tons of immigrants. Dozens every day, from all continents save Antartica. It's hard to give examples without doxing myself, but speaking in very broad generalities...
Imagine being forced to keep an even demeanor while you spend twenty minutes trying (and failing) to explain to a grown woman, using multiple forms of translation software because she does not speak any English, that a circle is different from a square, while she just looks at you sadly and says "no comprendo...". And you never actually get the idea through, you just finally manage to beg her to call a middle-schooler to put on speaker phone, and something the child says in Spanish makes her stop bothering you on that topic.
Then she asks you to help her commit welfare fraud.
That's a bit worse than the median, but it's far from an unrepresentative example. There are better ones, of course, but for every African immigrant who is just respectably middle-class with an accent, there is one who is a paranoid schizophrenic that's invisible to NoVa office workers. Many varieties of Asians seem to be more prone to demanding and Karen-ish behavior than white women - again, while being nearly incomprehensible about it. If the average immigrant you deal with just has a bit of an accent and can quote from The Office, consider that you are experiencing a large selection effect and there are tens of millions of others who cause much more severe cultural friction. Imagine if YOU, Highly Educated Theater Kid, had to deal with cast members from Duck Dynasty every day.
And I have to mention the medical side of things. Having a doctor you struggle to understand is actually extremely stressful. I had to take a kid to a specialist who ended up being Nigerian. The thing is, I genuinely liked the guy. He was charismatic and made a sincere effort to give me thorough explanations. I appreciated the effort. It was mostly wasted though, because I was struggling to make out two words in three.
On another occasion I was assigned to a GP who was an Indian woman. I went in for one physical and it was one of the most demeaning experiences of my life. Refused to make contact, would barely look at me. She ignored my concerns and fixated on a single skin thing that she immediately referred to an associated specialist for a 10 minute outpatient procedure that billed my insurance as a "surgery". I'm sure she is very good at gaming the system to make number go up, but I'm never booking another appointment with someone who considers me an untouchable, and if I could press a button to have her denaturalized and deported I'd hit it twice.
But on the other hand, I don't have terrible stories of violence and drunk driving. I've dealt with plenty of second generation Hispanics and Asians who seem to have assimilated fine (and others who were disasters, but disasters within the expected bounds for mid-00s emo girls).
What I really want is for the cultural friction to go down. I want fewer people I struggle to communicate with. I want fewer people with alien, unpleasant mores. There's this thing I've been seeing a lot of lately from completely unassimilated South/Central American young women. When you ask them a question in English, they don't say "Que?", they do this thing where they jerk their head forwards and jaw upwards at you while making a sound that I can only describe as an "angrily inquisitive grunt". And I'm sure it's just a cultural quirk, but I can't stop my lizard brain from going. I want fewer people with alien ethnic ingroup preferences. Nara said something down thread about opposing identitarianism from the left AND the right, but the identitarianism from the right was "American". Of course things get unpleasant when that's no longer enough to answer the question.
Iconochasm
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16d ago
I am routinely rang up at my local Chinese restaurant by middle-schoolers, who a few years ago were visible hanging out in the back while their dad worked.
Perhaps they just don't work on the books?
Iconochasm
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16d ago
The metaphor is wrong because in the typical understanding, the actions we should take against "invasive species" should be extreme, up to and including eradicating them from the "invaded" area.
The metaphor is specifically telling you not to put yourself in a position where you would have to take extreme measures to remove the invasive species. Have you ever read an account of an adoption gone wrong? In the worst cases, it sounds like the stuff that makes family annihilations seem understandable. And just to get ahead of the obvious criticism, the worst such story I've ever come across involved adopting a pair of Eastern European girls, who proved to be violently uncontrollable wrecking balls on the lives of their adoptive parents.
Iconochasm
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16d ago
I find it impossible to believe that if there were some hint of damning evidence about Trump in Epstein's files that it wouldn't have gotten leaked during either of the last two elections. There is just no conceivable value that the Dem establishment would have held high enough to cause them to refrain.
Much more believable that the juicy parts of the relevant hard drives and data were "accidentally" thrown into an incinerator in 2019.
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16d ago
Iconochasm
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16d ago
Meh. Alex posts a ton of top-levels, and they all have a "working out personal psychodramas" taste to them. At some point meta discussion about those dramas becomes justifiable.
Iconochasm
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16d ago
Hey, you were the guy who had the picture book of the Hobbit for your daughter, right? My niece just caught the bug when my sister read her a bit from a traditional novel version, and I'd like to gift them something like what you described. Any info to point me in the right direction?
Iconochasm
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16d ago
Enjoy, man. Every part of the process is great. Maybe not so much the cup, I guess.
Iconochasm
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20d ago
He's the kind of guy who spent his life regurgitating official stats without a hint of critical thinking, because that's what a good student / smart person does, right? But when he gets pushed back, he shows the black heart of a concentration camp guard, just, you know, impotent and sad.
Like a year and a half ago, he got into it with Steve Sailer on HBD. Sailer was polite, but the pile-ons were like watching a herd of lions toy with a sickly gazelle. And Will just did not seem to have the slightest idea how to actually mount an argument when he had to think for himself instead of just repeating the NYT or government stats and he quickly devolved into Downfall, Hitler-In-The-Bunker tier scitzo-ranting about how everyone who disagreed with him were "vermin" who needed to be "expunged", mixed with plaintive cries begging to know why no one else in his tribe was helping him. Why did he argue against the hordes of darkness alone?
And the hordes just spammed him with lines like "Because they know how this ends" and "NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE YOU, WILL".
He's just kind of the biggest, most easily riled dork on the internet, and he can't help himself but enagage every time.
Iconochasm
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20d ago
I often see right-wingers online virtue signalling about women with tattoos. They'll see a photo of a hot woman who has tattoos and start posting stuff like "eww disgusting" or "why did she ruin her body with that". I am convinced that 99% of these guys would fuck the hot woman without any hesitation if they had a chance, tattoos or not. It's just a big virtue signalling LARP to pretend to other guys that they care more about tattoos than they actually do.
"Ugly" doesn't mean "total deal-breaker". I've been in relationships when the woman got a thing for tats. I didn't care for them, but I wasn't going to end a relationship over it. The associated decline in decision-making quality... not that was something to walk away over.
I took my daughter to a concert this weekend, and there were a ton of women with tattoos. The daughter has been expressing some interest, and I got to point out to how crappy almost all of them looked, even using the "like a toddler slapped stickers all over you" line. We had some good laughs on the way home about some of the... bold fashion choices on display.
Sweeney stands out because she is voluptuous instead of reserved, and has doe eyes instead of an intense, piercing gaze. That latter part is the more important bit. She's the rare Hollywood woman who men look at and assume she wouldn't be a massive bitch in the unlikely event that they ever managed to get her romantic attention.
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