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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   2802 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 21, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Anybody seen One Battle After Another? I'm mildly interested but worried the universal acclaim is culture war stuff

What is the frequency of ICE arrests and/or deportations being false positives? (The person is actually legally allowed to be here and ICE has no legitimate business with them but grabs them anyway). How would I ascertain or estimate this information from an unbiased source? People on the left keep complaining about this and I can't tell if they're being genuine or just Motte and Baileying their objection to illegals being arrested and deported. How do I tell if this is a real issue or not?

(I apologize for this being potentially culture war fodder, but figured it didn't belong in the main thread since I don't have actual discussion or commentary of my own to provide, and am more looking for links to external sources rather than you telling me your own potentially biased opinion.)

You're not likely to find any good numbers. The immigration debate is pretty famous for having the government withhold obvious stats and academic researchers not looking into topics that could have results the left is uncomfortable with.

The other problem is how recent this all is. What numbers are eventually available for 2025 likely won't be released until early 2027.

My sense is that actually being deported incorrectly is pretty rare. There is a lot of due process, it's just in the immigration courts instead judicial branch courts. They sort out visa status issues pretty quickly. Things get tied up for years because defendants bring up a lot of long shot defences on humanitarian grounds.

There's probably a decent number of cases where someone is taken in but released in less than 48 hours after their identity is verified.

There's also a "the dog that didn't bark" aspect. If reporters had found a bunch of people improperly held for weeks or deported then they'd be making noise about specific cases. I haven't heard of any.

Also immigration enforcement has been so lax for so long, ICE has tons of low hanging fruit to go after.

The question for the age:

“How would I ascertain or estimate this information from an unbiased source?”

CW or not, it is allowed in the Sunday thread!

I see some people decrying dating apps and saying that you should go meet women in real life.

I'm sympathetic to this argument, because I was far more popular with everyone, including women, in high school, and then absolutely nothing after that. But where would those meeting places be? I'm probably eventually going to get a new job in a new city, and I'll need something to meet people at, but I can't think of anything that would provide an environment like high school, where you could meet a ton of people and let your charm, wit, athletic interest, and good grades be on full display to dozens of people. So, where?

Responding more generally as you seemingly wrote a lot about your life recently here. Specific dating advise is very difficult to give without knowing someone’s social class, personality and appearance. But it’s generally quite important to avoid “over-philosophising” as a guy over sex, women and dating before acquiring some real life experience. You have to build mental models for certain feelings and persons and interactions. Think less, do more, and with time many things that right now you are agonising over will become crystal clear to you.

I met my wife on Tinder for what it is worth. Dating apps are just so popular that they really have all kinds of people, even those you wouldn’t expect to find there. In my opinion ignoring them is just shutting yourself out of what is by-far the largest pool of women, which seems inadvisable if you are trying to meet someone. They are also great for practice

Part 1: Actual Response To Your Question

First, you're thinking far too specifically about "where" to meet women instead of the general "how" strategy. If your total approach is to go to physical spaces that are disproportionately women and then just hang out, your odds of success are low. Women are not fish, there's a lot more to it than a raw numbers game.

The beginning and end of all "game" advice is that heterosexual dating is a sexual marketplace where men's primary (not only) value driver is their social esteem. If you don't have that social esteem / social proof, it almost doesn't matter what you look like. If you're movie star level of handsome, you'll be fine. If you were that, you wouldn't be asking this question in real life.

So your strategy should be "how" based. And that "how" is simple; have a good and dynamic social life. With everyone. Don't just go to Yoga studios to try to pickup chicks. This is anti-social and weird. Don't just play DnD in your buddy's basement. This is anti-social and weird. Don't just post on The Motte and culture war hard discuss issues of the highest importance with the smartest people on earth. This is anti-social and weird. Instead; do all of these things. Can you think of a thing that involves other humans that you enjoy doing? Do it. Then, once you are doing this thing, find ways to build social connections with people. Fast forwarding the tape, eventually you will have a circle of friends who do things and (social things). They will invite you to these things if you aren't anti-social and weird (see above) and, quite often, there will be other people whom you have not yet met at these things. You can repeat the same process to become friends with these new people. Keep repeating this now compounding process! If you do that, with intent and regularity, eventually some of these people will be women. In fact, they will be women you find attractive and fun and interesting and and and.

But now you have what we were seeking in the beginning - social esteem. When people say "Yay! oats_son is here" when you arrive at the thing you are all doing together, the people who don't know you (yet!) will naturally be signaled (memed?) into believing you are a person that causes other people to be happy when you arrive. This is a massive, massive super power.

Part 1 TLDR: Go make friends (male and female) who do things you like to do. Be their friend for an extended period of time.

Part 2: Where I am less snarky, but more directly cranky

Treating dating like a problem to be solved, a system to be designed, an achievement to be unlocked is pretty much a guaranteed route to misery at worst and a particularly perverted version of the hedonic treadmill at best. If you try to setup such a system, you may be successful in "getting laid" and you'll be successful directly in proportion to your anti-social capabilities and the emotional frailty of the other party.

Okay, okay, so you're not a committed pervert, you just want to, ya know, casually date a cool chick or whatever. This is just a less salacious version of the same problem in the first paragraph. Specifically define the desire you have. Is it a need for emotional support? Maybe work on doing that yourself or with the help of a professional (who is also aware of the problem). Involving another human being casually - and under the pretense of romance and possible sex - is a pretty shitty thing to do, don't you think? Perhaps the need is to stave off loneliness. Totally reasonable. Why does this context have to be romantic?

Now let's say you're really in it for life - you're searching for a wife. If this is the case, then take all of my points above about meeting women through your social circle and multiply them by 10. There is nothing more effective than weeding out poor mate matches than a well bonded social circle of people who share a values system. And you not only want this filtering mechanism, you probably need it. Love is a hell of a drug and it clouds our judgement. Having multiple people who can offer you multiple different perspective on your prospective beau while sharing your essential value system is a big freaking deal.

"So you're saying I should let me friends pick my wife for me?" Yup. Preferably your parents and family provided you don't have some sort of horrible relationship with them. But, failing that, yes, your friends (note: I do mean close, good, committed friends here, not your drinking buddies).

Part 3: In which I relent and my inner Bro gives you that sweet sweet dope you crave

  1. Don't go to structured environments with lots of women to try to pick them up. Dance classes, yoga, etc. This is because the people going there are going there on purpose, it wasn't spontaneous or organic. This means they want to do the thing and not have to deal with a guy thinking he's being slick. Instead, go to more broadly social and public events; farmers market (Superbad was right), First Friday Style events, harvest festival things (seasonal). Think of a totally outdoor or large space format that has a lot of different stuff around - booths, restaurants, whatever. The benefit here is that quick and casual conversations are totally fine because they can be quickly exited without hurting anyone's feelings. Example: You see a nice looking lady inspecting, I don't know, artisinal almonds at some booth, you walk up, inspect the almonds for a second and the make a comment in her general direction, "I though the ones with chocolate were as fancy is it got! a har har har har!" If she laughs back, okay start a conversation, if she doesn't (or does the exhale through the nose thing) she can simply drift off. No harm, no foul.

  2. Don't ask for a number, ask for a date. In today's attention economy, it's really hard to get people back to re-focus on you after you've broken contact. The idea that a girl is going to give you her number, be excited when you text (because nobody calls anymore), and then get re-excited enough not to ghost on a date has to be balanced against the fact that she's probably receiving 20+ matches per day if she's on an app and, if not, getting semi-approached by random guys with enough regularity (assuming living in a metro area). If you ask for a date, you'll get, generally, an honest response. "Um, sure!" = "Eh, maybe. I'll probably ghost you!", "Definitely" = "Maybe" , "Yes! I would love that" = Okay, looks like you actually got a date, guy. The point is you're soliciting higher quality information and, therefore, not wasting your time or getting your hopes up. I think it's funny that guys have this image in their mind of slow texting a girl for weeks (!) before asking her out as if she's pining away for him. The connection should be pretty quick and pretty powerful. If it isn't, why bother? Dude, because she's hot! moronic.

  3. Ignore everything in this section and re-read Part 1 again.

I agree with 99% of this, great advice.

Fast forwarding the tape, eventually you will have a circle of friends who do things and (social things).

The fast-forwarded bit is actually really important. Turning people from activity acquaintances into contacts and casual friends is a skill that should be consciously considered and practiced. Become the guy who proactively gets people's contacts, the guy who creates the groupchats, the guy who says "let's do X", the guy who picks the bar when people are vacillating. If you want to go to the next level, become the guy who founds things and runs events (I've had multiple women get very interested in me after watching me in charge of an event, even though there were no-shit movie star handsome guys there too).

If you try to setup such a system, you may be successful in "getting laid" and you'll be successful directly in proportion to your anti-social capabilities and the emotional frailty of the other party.

This is good advice to a new guy who doesn't have the radar, but if you're looking to stay casual you can also just pick the girls who aren't emotionally frail and refrain from sleeping with the ones who are.

Re: Part 3, I just don't believe in those "day game" style meet-cutes at all. They probably work pretty okay if you're confident and play the numbers, but not enough to convince me to broil myself at a summer farmer's market talking to innumerable women in the hope that one is single, into me, and not a pain in the ass when we properly meet. If you want the dark arts to getting laid, it's very simple: find the right bars, learn to stay up till 2am without nuking your sleep cycle, and learn how to stay in a bar till then without getting too drunk (and, obviously, do not take advantage of girls who are way too drunk, you're looking for the ones who are there for the same reason you are). If you don't want to do that, stick to the apps or, I would suggest, serious dating via the social circle you're building.

Yes, you've put to words a lot of concerns I had here. Hitting up people at a farmer's market is not my idea of a good time, and probably not very likely to make anything happen. Who even goes to those kinds of things alone? That's just not how it works. I'm not looking for any casual fun here, I want something serious that ideally turns to marriage, because I'm 28 and not getting any younger. Actually, it would be better if we didn't have sex at all until we were engaged at least, but is there even any place for my sensibilities in today's sexual marketplace? I thought "getting a life" would be my best chances of keeping these values, because I doubt most women on a dating app would be understanding, even if I did get good photos somewhere and they overlooked my Norwood 7. Also yes, I had good friends in high school, but until I started doing sports, I didn't really see them much after school, and even then, I never did anything with them outside of those things.

Actually, it would be better if we didn't have sex at all until we were engaged at least, but is there even any place for my sensibilities in today's sexual marketplace?

Church. That's it. Otherwise you should expect that waiting for engagement/marriage will weird a woman out and make her concerned about your sexual compatibility.

The advice I gave on "getting a life" as a distinct skill that needs to be considered and practiced is the most important thing. Xenophon's Socrates speaks often of the art of making friends (and of making good friends) as the most important of the arts, and he's right. It will serve you with women, but it will also improve everything else about your life. You will get a great deal for yourself out of it, and you'll also get the satisfaction of altruism. Once you let go of your hangups about it being a skill, you can apply yourself to it with the diligence people use to learn to code, and you'll likely find that the people around you are excited to have someone with that skill in their lives. 28 is a fine age to start, you can learn faster than a younger man. But you have to be pragmatic, reflective, and focused on improvement, just as with any other skill.

I appreciate your advice, I just have to comment on the sexual compatibility thing. Where the hell did that line even come from? It feels like an excuse to have a ton of sex before you get married. If you hadn't had any sex before getting married, wouldn't you both just figure it out with each other and there wouldn't be such a thing as compatibility? The modern world is kind of fucked up. I was surprised to learn in high school that even the preppy valedictorian had sucked at least one dick, and this is in a rural area. I'm pretty sure she was religious, too.

I'm gonna necro this a bit (I mean, it's only been a week) to say, as someone in a 10 year relationship getting married in a few months, sexual compatibility is a huge deal. There are people who, after the initial honeymoon phase of a relationship ends (2-8 years or before first kid), will want to have sex 3-5 times a year. There are people who want to have sex once a day. There are people who prefer a more reasonable 3-5 times a week. There are people who are only interested in sex when they are in a good mood and after substantial foreplay. There are people for whom sticking it in is the foreplay. There are people whose sexual interests are dominated by one or more very specific paraphilias. There are people who just don't like sex and are only doing it because they don't want to be alone. There are people who don't give a shit about any of this and enjoy sex but experience no real FOMO or distress when they don't have it for long periods of time.

There are gender distributions to this traits, but none of the groups I mentioned are smaller than 10% of the population. People vary extremely wildly on this dimension. Unless you're one of the take it or leave its, you need to be on the same page about this to have a marriage-length relationship. That doesn't mean having sex before marriage, but it does mean talking about the subject in more detail than a lot of people are comfortable with. "Figure it out with each other" is a strategy that works maybe 50% of the time, and the other 50% either dooms you to eventual divorce or one or both parties perpetually being unsatisfied with whatever compromise you end up with.

I have been doing some more thinking, and I think the "no sex before marriage" thing was predicated on a lot of things: that people got married really early on, that parents could much more closely watch their kids to ensure nothing bad happened, and that they could not easily get divorced. I think evangelical Christianity misses some of the nuances, and unfortunately, male evolutionary psychology also doesn't appreciate that people tend to have more sexual relationships now, on average.

There are people who don't give a shit about any of this and enjoy sex but experience no real FOMO or distress when they don't have it for long periods of time.

Yeah, that probably describes me. Thanks for writing this, helps me feel more normal. I've been thinking about sex a lot more lately now that getting married seems possible for me, but I do still want it to only happen with someone I'm fairly serious with. I just don't know how long I should wait once the relationship starts, or how long the particular woman will tolerate.

At the end of the day, getting married is a leap of trust. Some people figure out they are aligned in values and take the plunge early, trusting in mutual commitment to make it work. Others move as slowly as my fiancee and I did, and the official commitment is just recognition of a trust and commitment that already exists. At the end of the day, all you need to figure out is when you reach the point that you believe the two of you are on the same page about what a life together should look like, and how much you are willing to work and compromise in order to bring that dream into reality. The appropriate timeline for you will be greatly dependent on the potential spouse you are considering. Don't think about when you need to leap into bed as an answer you need to have worked out, but as a chance to build or test that level of trust and communication you need to develop to make a marriage work. If you wait too long and she dips because of it without giving you a chance to fix the issue, well, marriage wouldn't have worked out anyway.

Well, for instance, from a male perspective, some women can orgasm easily, some it's yeoman's work to get them there if they even can. Some women love giving head, some will never enjoy it. Some women have a death-by-dehydration sex drive and some have a big fat zero. I'm sure they have similar questions about us. It might seem nice to say that you'll just figure it out (figuring out a woman in bed is also a skill that can be learned), but you're basically rolling dice on not ending up in an /r/deadbedrooms situation.

Based off the testimony of friends, I do think that religious courtship, where you're expected to be overwhelmingly horny for each other but restrain it out of belief in moral duty, can establish that without going all the way. However, if you're doing it out of hangups over sex, she has a pretty good reason to suspect something might turn out wrong, and women are extremely risk-avoidant in these things for obvious evolutionary and pragmatic reasons.

Where the hell did that line even come from? It feels like an excuse to have a ton of sex before you get married. If you hadn't had any sex before getting married, wouldn't you both just figure it out with each other and there wouldn't be such a thing as compatibility?

There's forms of incompatibility that are just 'figure it out' and whatever you get, you get and that becomes your expectations. There's also forms of incompatibility that have massive mismatches in desire that don't care what each partner's expectations are, or where one partner has such limited desire that it's obvious to anyone who can look at other families and do math, so on. And then there's forms where a couple literally can't have penetrative sex to completion, either because the guy's pushing rope the entire time, the woman's gone to such an extreme level of vaginismus that no level of stretching is going to solve the problem without blood, or one person's only comfortable position is another person's snapped frenulum (you don't want to know).

Worse, there's a reason deadbedrooms is such a horror show, and it's not because I think anyone's going to die from blue balls (blue ovaries?). Even the traditional right-hand rule solution to the biological problem can leave the other partner wildly demoralized, and the bonding that most people get from sexual behavior papers over a lot of things that would be extremely frustrating in a roommate or a long-term guess.

There probably are alternative solutions to this problem, but very few of them are compatible with social conservative interests (even those used historically!), and many of them have other downsides.

N = 1 but I just got married, and we waited until marriage. It definitely happens even now. I am personally acquainted with at least three other couples that were the same.

Caveat: we are all religious though. I don't know if there are non-religious people who would be interested in waiting, but I would think it's very rare at this point.

I'm not religious anymore, but I see the good effects it has, and I also believe that you can probably make yourself believe anything if you give it a try, forgetting about Epicurian trilemmas or God of the gaps writings (as long as we're not into fantasy territory like with Young Earth Creationism). I was raised fundamentalist and the only times I went to church was when I was with other family members, which was like, twice total in my youth, so I would have to adjust to whatever church she went to.

Uh, what are the churches with actual young people?

I didn't meet my wife at church, but I've visited both a PCA Presbyterian church and a Southern Baptist church that had really substantial cohorts of 20somethings. For a while I attended an EFCA church (kind of a small, rather interesting denomination) that had only a handful of young women, but they were, for some reason, all staggeringly beautiful. I did successfully ask one of them out, but the date was kind of lame; but we parted as friends.

A related phenomenon: now that we're married, my wife and I don't have to try to find a church with young people, so we just go to the local church I like best. We are one of four couples below the age of 40; I can think of two eligible single girls there and one young man. It's a bit grim but we're trying to do outreach and things to make young people think it's worth a visit.

The more I think about this, the more extremely conflicted and broken I feel about everything. I was taught to not have sex before marriage, and so even the thought of a blowjob is gross to me, but I was never raised in the church and my family existed almost outside of the community entirely, and then I went and got my liberal education and lost my faith, because I could not longer believe that the earth is 6000 years old, because I could no longer believe that God would damn someone to an eternity of hellfire for being born in the wrong place. When I was 16 I started masturbating and dabbled in watching pornography. I feel like either traditional relationships or liberal ones, I would be very out of place in, and it feels like it's already too late for me. I am also disgusted by the results of liberalism leading to the death of Charlie Kirk. I might have to make a new post tomorrow in Wellness Wednesday about this, but it's obviously going to be super personal and uncomfortable. I now remember one reason why I never dated in high school.

because I could not longer believe that the earth is 6000 years old, because I could no longer believe that God would damn someone to an eternity of hellfire for being born in the wrong place

Man, it's not that hard to find a church that doesn't screw these things up.

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I would be very skeptical that you are more debauched than I was. Even when I decided I didn't want to live that way any more, I still was quite determined not to marry and had no interest in children. By the time I started coming around to the idea, I thought I was too old.

I'm married with kids now, and much, much happier. It is almost certainly not too late for you.

I would by no means tell you to go to church again if that's not something you're interested in; but I would note that at least according to my understanding, there's no expectation of perfection. I've had my own challenges with masturbation and many other things. We confess that we're sinners in every Sunday service, and we do mean it. All of which is to say, I doubt that you're actually too fucked up to succeed in a relationship. Those of us that are in them are very flawed, come from many weird and conflicting backgrounds, and make various compromises. Even the most perfect-seeming trads deal with all kinds of doubts, inner demons, and guilt about things they can't go back and change.

Anyway, you can continue changing and growing. I didn't marry until I was 35, and if I look back on it, I think that's the way that it had to be for it to work out for me. I had to find my own resolutions to some things which felt irreconciliable.

Hope you do post in Wellness Wednesday, will be looking forward to it.

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Haha I like how you've written this. This is good advice. Yes, my question was more about creating a social circle. I haven't had one that isn't digital in a long time. The digital ones go pretty well! People think I'm funny and I have a pretty good amount of social capital, and I've really gotten a lot more confident about talking to random people about whatever the hell I want to talk about or what I think they'd be interested in. But they're all men and they're all around the country and they can't help me. Same for my family. I also live in a rural area that hemorrhages successful young people, and my brother is a loser too, and my mom isn't in any social circles that have any young single women, and my dad's crazy and far away and a loser too, and my grandma is only friends with other old women.

I went on some language learning apps to try to get some practice talking to actual women, and it seems many of the conversational skills transfer over, but there's still a lot I don't know, and there's so much that isn't conveyed that it would be pretty difficult to meet someone and marry them that way. I thought it would be easy, but women apparently don't think coldly about the benefits of American citizenship like a man would, and international college-educated women with interest in languages are similar to American college educated women, in that they don't even know what they want, and marriage isn't even on the radar until later in their lives.

I'll pop in a week late to say he's giving excellent advice up there on the general strategic level. And the only way to get better at the tactical level is to do it, over and over again.

The "Get a friend group and stick with them and build until you start running into attractive single women" is a workable strat, and avoids the main miseries of the current dating market. Pre-screening women before actually investing in them saves much grief.

There's a couple failure modes to avoid:

(1) Selection effects rule everything. Notice if the friends you're hanging out with are 'losers.' If your other friends aren't in relationships, or actively and successfully dating, or at least managing to bring women around to your social gatherings, and its usually just you all hanging out with each other... your hunt is not being served by sticking around. Indeed, its pulling you off course, and you'll get into a bad comfort zone that will be harder to leave the longer you stick around. Worst case these guys sabotage your attempts to find a mate out of jealousy or somesuch.

(2) The opposite problem also arises sometimes. If your male friends actually pair off and get married, the friend group will disintegrate. Its just what happens when a guy gets a serious relationship, can't do as much socialization (doesn't need to either). And I can say that being the sole single dude with a bunch of married or seriously dating guys kinda sucks. And unless those guys are still actively trying to get you hooked up, it will again start to run counter to your goals, since those guys aren't aligned with your goal of socializing with single women.

Basically, you may have to remake the social group a couple times as some members pair off and drop out or it becomes clear that they're dead weight. And unfortunately the longer a group persists, it can tend to be the losers who stick around b/c they can't pair off and they don't have much else going for them. You'll notice they're the ones who ALWAYS show up when you suggest something to do, as they don't have anything better going on, ever.

(3) Once you find someone attractive DO try and get a date relatively quickly and then ask for exclusivity relatively quickly after that because holy cow the friendzone does exist, and you can find yourself there without even knowing it happened. I define it mostly as a relationship position where any attempts to advance it romantically and/or sexually is 'awkward' due to the lack of sexual tension and overfamiliarity with the other person, and yet cutting it off feels inappropriate since neither party has done anything 'objectionable.' And then of course the girl in question might show up with a new BF without much warning and now you're in a pretty tight spot, emotionally speaking.

My only advice on that is definitely try to remain 'mysterious' as well as displaying your value and competence. Don't let a girl ever think she can just call you up and ask for favors, or do 'buddy' things with her (go out shopping, do brunch, binge watch shows without intending to bang), or understand your true motives. You want to remain in a superposition of "I could ask you out at any time/but I don't want to" until YOU make the decision to collapse the waveform.

(4) And a parting thought: If you have a good group of friends, don't ever leave them because of a woman. If both you and she are integrated in the friend group, and you break up (for relatively innocuous reasons), don't just let her have the friends and you move on. SHE will have a much easier time plugging into a new social group, so stand your ground to the extent you are able. And if your bros won't back you in that play, they're probably not your bros (or you did something horrible).

If this sounds like a lot of work, yes. It is. But its generally fun and rewarding and the skills are cross-applicable. It won't rip out parts of your soul like online dating or other rote relationship-seeking strategies.

Wow, this is good advice! I saw some notifications and thought "damn, the AAQC must have brought more attention to this embarrassing thread", but thanks for the input.

I have had friend groups composed of "losers" with no cross-sex appeal, and I also saw possible friendships locally and watched them go by because they were with "losers". I get along with losers, but if I'm going to be friends with losers, they may as well be the most maximally entertaining to me, and I already have maximally entertaining losers (they're not really losers, they just can't really help me) in my online friend groups.

My generalized advice for finding a friend group: learn to fight.

That's your best chance at finding physically fit, socially active, yet potentially nerdy male friends out there. 28 is a fine age to start. That's where I found the core of my current social group.

Online friend groups can be great but you really need to be having gatherings in physical space, where a woman can actually see you in person and you can actually monopolize her attention for a while if you want.

I'm speaking as someone who has had to completely rebuild/reform friend groups like half-a-dozen times over the years, and may have to do so again soon, since most of the dudes in my current group have gotten into stable relationships and... predictably, are putting less time in being social. And the guys who are still around are, unfortunately, the ones who've had bad luck with women.

All that is to say that it will work, but you might have to be the guy who does most of the hard work up front.

I don't know if I mentioned this elsewhere but I'm not looking to date right now because I still have not moved out yet. I got a job and paid off all my debts, but I have not moved out yet. That said, more practice making friends quickly will be helpful, so I will be re-joining the gym soon, both for that and also to lift weights diligently because I gave up learning languages and find that I have a ton of extra time. Also I'm going to be trying both the social connection strategy and the dating app strategy at the same time, because they complement each other.

I don't know if I like the advice to start martial arts. I took Tae Kwon Do from 10 years old to 16 years old. When I was a kid, Tae Kwon Do was simple fun, and you got McDonald's afterwards. But starting at about 15, my brother and I were the only adult males in the class; all the other postpubescent males had quit in the years previous. Whenever we sparred, it was him and me; I discovered the first incidence of male rage in these sparring matches. If I took a direct blow to my (padded) head, or experienced some other minor ass-kicking, I found that I was so angry afterwards that I could not speak, otherwise I would reveal the tears that had involuntarily welled up in my throat. This was how it was in most tournaments. I do not like this feeling. I felt the same feeling playing baseball in my senior year, when I was 18; I never even played catch with anyone before, so it was a sharp learning curve, and I don't think I did poorly in those circumstances, but I failed a lot and continued to misplay for the admittedly pretty bad baseball team, and every time I was the source of a bad inning, I would get very mad. I remember more than one game, we would all get in a circle and take a knee, and my face was involuntarily contorting itself in sheer rage. No tears that time, though.

I dunno. Maybe I'm mature enough to handle it now. I don't get mad at Tarkov or DayZ like I might have, and those fill me with adrenaline. But I do get mad and start shaking due to nerves if I break up my dogs fighting and one of them bites my arm in the chaos, though it doesn't help that I consider their continued fighting to be an unresolved serious issue creating tension in my life.

Dance classes supposedly have a very twisted ratio when it comes to men and women, but I've heard this can vary from location to location.

I'd like to learn myself, but, sadly, the evenings they offer for classes are already filled up.

Personally, I wish there was a local book club where I live; the one I attended a while back before covid was surprisingly fun, but nowadays I'm not willing to drive 50-miles one way to attend such a thing.

I went to a yoga studio for a number of years. Insufferable amount of woo, but worth it for the serious workouts the advanced classes provided. Depending on the studio, they can have plenty of opportunity for chatting with other people before/after classes. If you're already following rules 1 and 2, you'll probably have women approaching you, and it's easy to strike up conversations with the bros since you're the beleaguered minority there.

It's probably a good suggestion, but I find myself quite repulsed by the idea of entering a yoga class. Wouldn't the woman most likely be a vegan or Buddhist or some other kind of weirdo? I dunno about that.

Wouldn't the woman most likely be a vegan or Buddhist or some other kind of weirdo?

This will vary by location, but in my experience the majority of white women with college degrees do yoga and/or pilates. The classes they go to also by and large don't do the hippie breathing/meditating stuff anymore, they've all reduced it down to the flow between more-or-less demanding postures.

You will become notably more attractive to women and up your social vibe if you do yoga/pilates/some other form of posture work. Broader shoulders, an extra inch/half-inch or so of height, not slouching, and just the good vibes of not being in subtle pain all the time from working at a keyboard.

Wouldn't the woman most likely be a vegan or Buddhist or some other kind of weirdo?

Odds are high, but don't forget the rise of right-wing hippies into yoga and alt medicine and all that thanks to covid nonsense. The person you see struggling to keep their eyes from rolling during some woo statements might be on the same page as you.

I find myself quite repulsed by the idea of entering a yoga class.

The one I went to was definitely a "women's space" and my brain reacted accordingly, but in general the teachers wanted more students so they could make more money, and they worked overtime to avoid being sexist because that's mean and icky, so the overall vibe was hilariously schizophrenic and I could find something to amuse myself every time I went. Just about every session could generate a humorous anecdote.

Tennis club. One that balances play time and social time. Lots of opportunities.

There's social time in a tennis club? I took a badminton class in college and there was hardly any talking between anyone, though the games were fun.

Not in the US, so can’t speak to your local experience. But yes, lots of tennis clubs in Europe have social calendars as long as tennis calendars.

(Edit: badminton, squash etc. work too. There’s something about the body movement involved in racket sports that is (a) inclusive - I’ve played against 90-year-olds, (b) not to excessive - so you can chat over a beer or coffee afterwards without being sweaty as hell and (c) a lil bit sexy.)

I really wanted to try tennis, too. I'm already in love with the idea, I'll get started as soon as I move out. Thank you!

Re sweaty as hell, I’m probably wrong about squash - that can work up a heart rate. Good luck with it - it’s an amazing game. (If you’re also a cerebral type, David Foster Wallace’s essays on tennis are well worth seeking out…)

Are there any decent chinesium oura ring knockoffs out there?

I want to dabble in fitness biometric tracking, but I don't really want a smart watch, the ring seems practical but I don't want to spend that much.

Is there a roving gang downvoting all the topics? Why is this at -1 and the Culture War thread at 0? Are we being brigaded or is someone just having fun?

Interestingly, I just noticed that the current Friday fun thread was downvoted for me. I was confused because I didn't deliberately do it, and I undid that. I can only guess that while scrolling I accidentally pressed the down arrow (I browse the motte on my phone). Maybe that's what others are doing and they don't happen to notice after the fact?

I've noticed a while ago that a disproportionate number of my posts have exactly a single -1 , and then whatever number of upvotes, except a small number of posts with zero downvotes and another small number of posts with higher numbers of downvotes (which are usually noticeably more controversial). At the time, I checked out some other posts and noticed a similar pattern. It seems likely to me that there was some kind of downvoting bot/person, but just one. However, looking at posts now the distribution actually seems more natural; Lots of 0 downvotes, a few -1 downvotes, even fewer -X. So maybe it was a fluke, maybe the bot got banned, hard to tell.

Well, it doesn't really matter for our poor robo-janny, and I don't think a handful of negative votes really constitutes brigading. Someone's just being a bitch.

Even back in the reddit days the main thread vote counts were very low. I've always wondered about that too.

Low is normal, who's going to upvote the automatic threads? But negative seems weird.

This seems to be in the wrong thread.

I didn't think it warranted a top-level post in the CW thread as I only intended it as an interesting tidbit. Should I delete?

Well, we try not to be overly zealous in policing thread contents, but it seems like this is more of a CW topic (which is allowed in the Small Questions thread) but it's not really a question. So it looks like basically a really low-effort CW post. I would prefer you put a smidge more effort into making it a conversation starter rather than just "Look at this sneer-fodder."

Fair enough, I'll delete.

I would like advice in case I am laid off this week. My tech company is likely laying off a substantial part of its workforce on Wednesday—rumors are between 10-30% of certain divisions, including mine. While I suspect I am safe because of my relatively low pay and young age, I want to be prepared in case I am affected. I have six months of living expenses in my bank account, not counting unemployment benefits.

My plan if I am laid off (in rough order):

  1. File for unemployment benefits

  2. Re-evaluate my rough budget and cut out any optional expenses (basically left with rent, food, internet, etc)

  3. Update my LinkedIn, including responding to various recruiters messages that have been sitting in my inbox

  4. Update my resume

  5. Start applying for jobs like it's my job. Market appears to be brutal. Any strategies for bypassing automated screenings or similar?

Thoughts? Additions? General advice?

If you have any friends or acquaintances who went off to get jobs in other places, prepare to drop them a line explaining the situation and ask them if they know anyone who’s hiring.

The layoffs happening sound large so it’s not your fault, just cost-cutting. People will likely be sympathetic. Worst comes to the worst, maybe you could band together with some other guys from the same company and try founding a startup.

Thanks. I've started making new connections on LinkedIn in preparation haha.

Cost cutting definitely seems to be the reason, which sucks to hear/see when everyone is on track to get our max bonus payout this year.

Do you know why the company is doing layoffs?

Cost savings seems to be the biggest one. Our 2Q demand was higher than expected but that appears to be because of tariffs, so Q3 and Q4 will likely be tough (in comparison to Q2 and YoY). They've also started pushing AI onto us in hopes of making everyone more efficient.

I have hired 10+ devs in the past few months and interviewed hundreds.

The job market is turning into tinder. We post one small add and get bombarded with a thousand applicants who haven't bothered to read the job description. The applicants are like guys on tinder swiping on thousands of profiles while treating it like a numbers game. The hot women employers are using algorithms to cleanse out most of the applications and rejecting profiles after viewing them for seconds.

My advice is to network as much as possible IRL. This can meet tech meetups but try other venues as well. Try to find people not working in tech and hang out with them. Do not spend time at home. Meet as many people IRL as possible.

As for resumes, I have to go through hundreds of them. I am not going to read through them all in detail. It has to be easy to take a quick glance and for something to catch the reader's eye. As for the competition it is easy to be better than 95%. Assuming you aren't Pakistani with broken english with a tad of frontend experience you are above average.

This is all excellent advice.

This especially:

“Do not spend time at home. Meet as many people IRL as possible.”

This, over any period of time, is high-effort, energy-sapping and will at times make you question your will to live, but if you have an ounce of personability to back up experience and skill, getting out there is exactly the right thing to do.

Noted. I'm definitely worried about getting drowned out in the noise of said swipers. I'll read up on the "application algos" and see what I can do to help get past them. Thanks!

Any strategies for bypassing automated screenings or similar?

Networking. Make a list of your Linkedin contacts and where they work today. If it's something relevant for you, and they know who you are (otherwise why would they be in your Linkedin?), send them a nice message asking for internal referral. Doesn't matter if you haven't talked to them for ages - just say something "we were colleagues once, now I am looking for job, does your company hire? Could there be something you could refer me for?" something like that. Worst thing, they would refuse or ignore and you wasted one email message. Best case, you have a good way around most initial screens.

Also, being fired is super stressful. There's no way around it. Take time to self-care and do whatever helps for you - the gym, walks, music, food, whatever it is - take time to self-care. Financial par is important, but psychological part is no less important.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll probably start adding people on LinkedIn this week in preparation.

And yeah it is! I was very young during the GFC and confused why people were freaking out about losing their jobs—isn't that a good thing? You get to stay at home all day and relax! Now I understand. I can only imagine what it's like to get laid off while having a family to support.

Networking

I don't know how common references are in your field these days, but it'd probably be good to trade non-work contact info with colleagues who would be willing to be references for each other if necessary. It's common to lose access to corporate resources immediately in these situations today, so it might be hard to get the phone number of the guy one desk over who you've worked with daily.

OP: it sucks, I've been through it. Take solace in that it's not about you as a developer, and doesn't reflect on your abilities.

This is a great idea. Thanks!

I should clarify that I'm not a developer, but an equipment and process engineer in a semiconductor fab, so tech-y but not "tech" in the traditional sense. Regardless, thanks for the kind words.

I've heard that's a tough field in terms of work-life balance. There does seem to be a lot of US interest in it of late (I guess I can't speak to the last 6 months), at least moreso than a decade or so back. I wish you the best of luck!

Small question: Is imgur considered good enough for embedding links to images in posts, or are there better alternatives? The forum's image upload appears unsuitable for the task.

Not a question: Comments+View count for all of TheMotte.org's 158 Culture War threads to date.*

*Reliability not guaranteed.

How can there possibly be less views than comments on some of these? I don't get it.

Because, "lies, damned lies, and statistics." Check the right side Y axis.

It's not less in absolute terms. December 19, 2022 is that first red major dip: https://www.themotte.org/post/240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week. For whatever reason (technical probably) it is the only thread to receive <20k (16884) views, but it also received many (1806) comments. The graph is created in a way that is meant to show a relationship between comment:views. This weirdo week breaks an otherwise easy to see relationship. Whether this was a smart way or a good way to go about doing this I leave to the floor.

>he doesn't have his own personal website to which he can upload images
ngmi

Is imgur considered good enough for embedding links to images in posts, or are there better alternatives?

I really like catbox.moe. You can host videos and other file types on it too.

How long does Catbox keep files for? Forever. If you don't want your file to stick around until the heat death of the universe, use Litterbox.

Nice, this is basically why I asked. I use imgur out of ease of use and habit forum posting, but I'm pretty sure they delete them eventually.

Thank you, interesting. The decline hasn’t been as significant as I’d imagined.

Next time I get a hankering I intend to look at unique commenters per thread to see something in the shape of weight of regulars over time. I also have a mild curiosity in word count trends per thread, comment, and top levels.

I think we're now a mature community and the people still here having experienced the journey all the way from the CW threads on /r/SSC are now doomed to be long term regulars for however long this place lasts. It's almost like a regimental association, peut être...

Not just that, the trend seems to be upward since early 2024.

FWIW, I think I arrived here circa early 2024 (maybe a little before). What attracted me and kept me are discussions on culture war topics that went everywhere they needed to do but didn’t descend into farce, acrimony, vilification and hatred.

That's really interesting.

This isn't a question but rather a statement. But I would like to hear what you think.

So I didn’t care for Charlie Kirk, and I’m not Christian (though I think they're pretty cool in general). But the fact that Erika Kirk, his widow, stood up and forgave the man accused of murdering her husband is staggering.

In an era where public life is fueled by score-settling and astounding cruelty this feels like a rare moment of moral progress. It’s counter-cultural in a good way: mercy instead of vengeance.

Here's an article from The Guardian about it

It's especially notable when you compare this act to yesterday’s generation of right-wing Christian political leaders, who would’ve absolutely doubled down on punishment and wrath. Can you imagine, fucking, Hannity, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Falwell or Robertson forgiving someone that murdered their spouse? Yeah right.

And just to remind us of the previous era that needs to finish going the way of the dinosaurs, Trump himself openly said on stage right next to her that he hates his enemies and doesn’t care what Erika just said about what Jesus says about forgiveness.

To see Erika Kirk take the opposite stance, forgiveness, love, mercy, is unexpectedly hopeful. I am appreciating the small bit of moral progress on the Christian right here.

It's cute, but also something of a virtue-signal; Christians will get a huge stiffie over it, and she can rely on others to take her "vengeance" for her (not that she necessarily wants it).

What would it mean to not "forgive"... to proclaim a desire for vengeance? If so, that seems like a much more staggering path. Even after seeing his previous career, Trump's words at the funeral are the ones that are shocking to me, as I have no wish for ill to befall my American political opponents and indeed would like policies that I oppose to prove me wrong by being beneficial. (For one, it costs me money when the economy is bad!) All this to say that I think that you are simultaneously too cynical about basic standards for human behavior and not nearly cynical enough about the extent to which this is a cost-free, potentially calculated position: Erika Kirk doesn't legally really get any say in the punishment already.

It's not cynical from a Christian perspective, to my knowledge of Christianity. You, as a person, are enjoined to forgive on a spiritual level, but that has very little to do with the state executing temporal justice. Executioners in the Middle Ages used to have swords with prayers for the victim's soul engraved on them. A lot of people in this thread seem to be running on some sort of behaviourist model where Christians can't actually believe what they claim to believe, but in my experience they actually often do.

My point is that if Erika Kirk did not genuinely forgive her husband's murderer and inwardly longed for violent vengeance, her taking a public stance either way almost certainly has zero impact on the actual outcome. Indeed, I would argue that there are strong incentives, both social and financial, to take on the forgiveness stance. While I am not doubting her sincerity (and I certainly approve of these incentives' continued existence as a plus for contemporary Christianity), I am not impressed by it.

'Turning the other cheek' is more about breaking cycles of vengeance through forgiveness and not holding a grudge.

In other words her act is more of a call against retaliatory acts of violence against the Left and nothing about absolving the criminal from his need to face Justice.

This might be a small scale question itself but wasn't it about non-resistance to active persecution in the original text?

How did "if someone slaps you turn the other cheek to also be slapped" turn into "oh, I forgive you, but I make no promises for that judge over there or that cop I just called"?

The notion that Christians ought to forgive everyone no matter what is usually defended with Luke 23:34, where Jesus asks God to forgive those involved in his crucifixion (which implies that he himself forgives them). But there’s a problem with this: it’s not actually clear who Jesus is speaking about, whether that’s the Pharisees who have the greater sin involved in the crucifixion, or whether it’s the soldiers just obeying orders, or whether it’s the public who are celebrants of the event. Some scholars believe this only applies to Pilate’s soldiers, who were involved in obeying orders but not the cause of the evil. I think this is reasonable because the utterance occurs in the middle of the description of the soldiers engaged in an action: “there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. And Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ And they cast lots to divide his garments”. If the forgiveness were intended for everyone, it would be more clear to articulate this later in the event where there would be no confusion that he is speaking at large to all gathered.

Pope John Paul II famously advocated for his (failed) assassin to be pardoned. I think he did it to make the religious point beyond doubt, but I believe justice for criminals is something that is pro-social and needs to happen. You can imagine a Christian fanaticist society according to your interpretation and its likely outcomes.

John Paul II advocated for the Turkish failed assassin to be pardoned after he had already spent decades in jail and had a lengthy sentence for previous crimes waiting for him in his home country to which he would immediately be deported. The Spanish failed assassin he did not intervene in the judicial process of, and after his release from prison he became a human rights lawyer and now works for the EU.

Jesus' prescriptions were all about making the aggressor view you as a human, not so much as non-resistance. It's resistance through excessive submission.

You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.

In order:

If someone slaps your right cheek, present them your left cheek. Most people are right handed, so to strike a right cheek they need to use the back of their hand, which denotes an inferior. If you turn your cheek, you are demanding that they slap with the palm of their hand, something that would denote an equal.

Jesus does not say, "Let him beat you up to a pulp."

If anyone sues your for a tunic, let him have your cloak as well. This would leave you naked, which is not allowed. You are shaming the person who sued you for your tunic.

Go the extra mile - you are acting like it was your choice to carry the Roman soldier's gear. The Roman soldier can only force you to carry their gear for one mile, but by going two miles you're shaming them.

The message is - by humbling yourself just the same amount you've already been humbled, you can shame your opponent A Lot.

"I forgive you," is comparatively a small sacrifice next to actually losing her husband. But by saying it she is shaming the killer and everyone knows it.

Regardless of her forgiveness, society has a need to keep dangerous killers off the streets. Even if Erika began advocating for the killer's release, every judge, police officer, etc has a higher duty to keep the killer imprisoned.

The original interpretation of the phrase was to mean 'force your enemy to respect you'.

Scripture is best looked at as if it was a philosophy text, meant to be interpreted in the historical context of the time. A lot of scripture is like this; for example, 'If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles' is often interpreted to mean that Christians should meekly and gladly submit to slavery - ah, no. Law of the time allowed for Roman soldiers to force conscription to carry military equipment, but only for a mile.

Meaning scripture isn't telling you to meekly submit, but instead 'If someone seeks to enslave you, force them to break the law'.

As for why modern interpretation of scripture tends to lean this way... Look, I'm no Historical Biblical Scholar, but I'd have to say there's a horde of reasons with no single golden bullet. I could probably go off on a semi-long, barely incoherent rant about that, really.

I do not think this is a valid interpretation of the text. How do you interpret "Love your enemies" or "pray for those who persecute you"? Where do you see your interpretation being modelled by Jesus or his disciples in the rest of the text? Where do they force their opponents to break the law? Peter cuts an ear off one of the men arresting Jesus; Jesus heals the man on the spot. How does that mesh?

I do not think this is a valid interpretation of the text. How do you interpret "Love your enemies" or "pray for those who persecute you"?

I don't know, I'm not a bibical scholar. I did say my knowledge was limited, and I'd imagine the various translations for the Sermon on the Mount is rife with a whole host of implications; I've heard enough griping about how 'meek' in modern language isn't what Jesus was referring to for his time to eye the modern translation of the bible with skepticism.

Where do you see your interpretation being modelled by Jesus or his disciples in the rest of the text? Where do they force their opponents to break the law?

Well, I don't know. Again, I'm not a bibical scholar. Armed and active resistence displayed in scripture isn't common; most of it is filled with rhetorical brilliance and navigating an unstable political situation.

But that doesn't matter, because in that instance Jesus was arguing for passive resistence, the equivalent of lawfare for the time. Which is smart; going active against a numerical opponent isn't exactly wise...

Peter cuts an ear off one of the men arresting Jesus; Jesus heals the man on the spot. How does that mesh?

Peter was kitted up to strike a roman legionaire sent to arrest a Son of God. (Which god? The romans didn't know.) That implies he was armed and capable; not exactly the image of a pacifist group. As for why the heal, well, you could argue alot of interpretations, depending on how you view things, and I don't consider such that important.

And while not breaking the law, Jesus had no issue resorting to violence as needed, as he did for the money changers, or noting what should be done for those that harm children.

Meaning scripture isn't telling you to meekly submit, but instead 'If someone seeks to enslave you, force them to break the law'.

Striking someone just once isn't a violation of the law?

I was referring to the forced conscriptions Romans could do on civilians.

Key point, they could conscript you for one mile, but anything beyond that was illegal. Hence, 'go with them two miles'.

This is good, no?

Yes, I think it is.

As a culture warrior, this seems like an eminently disadvantageous move. Attempting to lose gracefully when both sides' blood is up and they're out for more of it just means that your side gets plowed under more easily. Specifically, the Left can leverage this as "stop arguing about this, see how the widow takes it, there's the moral authority you must now follow, cease your fighting", and then turn around and promote more violence against the Right, while the Right sends conflicting in-group signals about whether they should fight back or lie down and let themselves get trampled harder.

I'm sorry, but for me the Culture War doesn't become less damaging when the Right just forgives the left for literally murderign their spokespeople. I'm sure the Widow is quite distraught at present, and not obliged to serve my political cause, and perhaps it is the Christian thing to do, but strategically it's downright stupid and, if it does anything at all, will only invite more attacks.

I'm sorry, but for me the Culture War doesn't become less damaging when the Right just forgives the left for literally murderign their spokespeople.

That's fair and completely understandable. I would absolutely not forgive and I would see that the perpetrator paid in full and would desire to personally squeeze the life out of them and I might tell the world.

But I'm also not broadcasting my Christian virtues to the world. It is not my moral-political framework. But it's theirs, and seeing a political figure show actual Christian commitment after decades of listening to hypocrisy from the Christian political right is refreshing! It makes me feel this movement could be a force of actual good and not just a slightly lesser evil!

It's prudent. And healthy. Forgiveness is not primarily for the guilty party to benefit from. It's for your own good. Carrying hate is bad for the body, mind, spirit. You gotta forgive to move on and create space for new love. You don't have to tell the criminal or anyone else you've done it.

Well she just told the whole world.

But the fact that Erika Kirk, his widow, stood up and forgave the man accused of murdering her husband is staggering.

Not nearly. Christians to get a mental hard on from this things. (not saying anything about her sincerity, just that it is in character)

If people give themselves mental hard-ons for doing good things that's... still good right?

Many argue that true virtue is altruistic, which only occurs when the result of your action is bad for you personally.

I am not a Christian and I do not feel qualified to judge what constitutes a moral progress for a Christian. And even less qualified to pass any judgement on the widow and how she deals with the horror that entered her life. But as myself, for my own selfish reasons, I'd like my leaders be more like Trump. Being rewarded in the next life is not enough for me. I am not a Christian saint. I want bad people to be punished in this life, on this Earth, in front of my eyes. That's why we pay enormous money to the structures of government - to ensure things happen as they should here on Earth, not in the next life. Some Christians may not care about it, fine, but I do. And I do not see how mercy and love alone are going to protect me from people who were overjoyed by this murder - and all the previous murders - and already are itching for the next one and preparing the lists of candidates. I do not see any way to kumbaya out of it, sorry. I don't mean of course the right should start mirroring the left and descending to the depths of depravity that bluehairsky personalities are wallowing in. But to feel certain revulsion towards them and to have a plan to seriously address the threat they are presenting is something that I feel appropriate.

I suppose "forgiveness" is not well defined here.

I didn't parse her as saying his killer should go free and live his best material life from this point forward. More like she does not hold hate in her heart towards him nor is pursuing a campaign to punish him with maximum suffering.

A good Christian is not necessarily compelled to stop by he wheels of justice from grinding him to bits if the operators so deem it necessary. I think they very much see the functions of the state as a bit distinct from their religion and something that they needn't overly concern themselves with.

Yes, but somebody needs to make the wheels of justice grind. And for those people, forgiveness may not be the best priority. I agree that those may not be the concern of the widow, but they are certainly a concern for me as a member of the society, which wants the criminals like this murderer ground very thinly.

I see everyone cheering for this but I think it’s not ideal. The right act here is to not forgive, because the offender is not repentant, and you should only forgive if someone recognizes their wrong and wishes earnestly to change. And even then, in such a case, it is still acceptable not to forgive, because the Christian conception of judgment (as in what Christ says) is that we are judged by the judgment we pronounce and measured with the measure we mete out. If you judge correctly, you do not face the same punishment than you demand of another. Loving your enemy, which is obligatory, does not mean eroding justice; you can love your enemy and not forgive, because he isn’t repentant or because he is just too evil. Though regarding this latter thing, you are supposed to always forgive a brother, ie fellow Christians, but this is a specific class of people, not just everyone in the world, and it is still written that they must be repentant. Remember that Jesus didn’t forgive Judas. There are a lot of people that Jesus doesn’t forgive, for much “smaller” infractions per Matthew 25, and they are sent into eternal flames.

It’s good optics, an especially sharp contrast to the gravedancing we saw last week. But it isn’t especially surprising for serious Christians. Pope John Paul II famously forgave the man that shot him, which was especially meaningful as he directly requested (and was granted) a pardon for the assassin. That said, I am too pessimistic to think this will do anything. I think the media landscape is too fragmented. The vast majority of leftists will simply never hear her remarks. And even if they do, echochambers will ensure they are provided with readymade dismissals to avoid ever feeling an unpleasant “are we the baddies?” thought.

I think of Bin Laden’s aphorism that people will prefer the strong horse. Ultimately the left is killing their enemies and celebrating it, that seems like strength to me. Forgiving them feels like a flavor of Trudeau style “if you kill your enemies they win” cuckoldry, which is vaguely repulsive to most. I’m not sure which will prove the more powerful influence

Ultimately the left is killing their enemies and celebrating it, that seems like strength to me.

To a first approximation, anyone can kill anyone. Doing so doesn't meaningfully require strength. Doing so without repercussions, sure, but that's not what happened here.

I don't think this is true. I think most humans are generally unwilling to murder, either out of instinct, moral training, or fear of consequences. Finding someone both willing and able to murder your opposition is, I'd guess, rare.

I agree. That means that strength is not the main bottleneck to murder though.

I guess unless we define strength using the edgelord xianxia "absence of scruples and willingness to do anything to anyone to advance your own interests" definiton.

Does this mean she will ask for clemency at the sentencing hearing? I don't want to say it's easy to say you forgive your husband's murderer at his own funeral, but there aren't actually any negative consequenses for saying that. I suspect that this is virtue signaling.

It's also bad game theory. "The Left" didn't kill Charlie Kirk, but Tyler Robinson DID kill Charlie Kirk. It's okay to retaliate against him specifically.

She has said that she doesn't want input into the sentencing, that she'd rather let the state decide. That's a perfectly valid Christian path, I believe - forgiveness of the soul does not imply foregoing justice in this world. That's how Christian societies remained functional and (reasonably) lawful for millennia.

If you are a regular or semi-regular user of cash in the U.S., how often do you see pre-1996 "small face" $20/50/100 bills?

I hit the ATM recently and got $200, and 8 of the bills were 1990-1995 "small face" $20 bills. That's more of those bills than I've seen combined in the last 5 years. I wonder if someone with a huge stash of older cash finally turned it in (or passed away) and a bunch ended up in that ATM cassette.

I use a fair amount of cash as I make regular purchases that give a discount for it (or more accurately charge a fee for using a card of some sort, but its presented as a cash discount to placate the public.) I've not seen the old bills in a long time. My sister is a district manager for a bank chain and she says the machines they use to intake cash would sort those for return to the treasury for disposal a decade ago.

edit - ive got about 500 in 20s on me now and the oldest one is from 2021.

My sister is a district manager for a bank chain and she says the machines they use to intake cash would sort those for return to the treasury for disposal a decade ago.

Very interesting. I wonder if different bank chains have varying approaches. This is not the first time I've gotten old bills from Chase, but this was by far the largest quantity of them (I once got a Nixon-era $20, which I saved, of course, even though it has no extra value).

I'd say in any given amount of cash I withdraw, I get one maybe 3-4% of the time

How do I into Instagram?

I finally cracked to social pressure and made an instagram. Never had public facing social media before. What are the etiquettes and best practices I should be following? I hear all this stuff about who liked what, who follows who, and I have no experience.

My broader goal here is to build a good social life in the EDM scene and get a raver gf.

There aren't really any social expectations. I have friends on instagram who post ten stories a day, some have like three posts total, some have artposts but never show their face, etc. Don't reveal any more of your privacy than you feel comfortable with.

If you want to post, take cool shots at shows/raves and put them up either as stories, or as posts with a little comment about how great it was. A big part of your hobby is putting on cool spectacles, it's a natural fit. Tagging the organizers or friends who were with you is a nice touch. Play around a little with stories of food, since that's always safe, so you can figure out how to put text, stickers, tags, etc. on them. If you have cool hobbies outside of raves - cooking, hiking, making stuff, whatever, you can also put them on your stories so people know you're a well-rounded person.

For girls, instagram is better than a number if you're not going to immediately try and date them, since they will post stories you can like or comment on, people appreciate getting wholesome little comments or relevant recommendations in their story replies. Just as an example, about a month ago, I met a girl who I'm not trying to date but would like to be friendly with - last week, she posted she was visiting Portland, and I replied to the story and we had a pleasant chat about places to go in the Oregon wine country. If you're /fit/, don't overplay it on your posts, but you can throw up thirst trap stories whenever there's plausible deniability (I often ask buddies to take pictures of me when I'm dancing shirtless for that reason).

One thing you can do to get better connected and make people like you on Instagram is to promote people's stuff. Is someone you know advertising a show, an event, whatever that appeals to you? Put it on your story. Venues will often follow you back if you do this for their stuff. The flipside of this is that Instagram is a great, and in many scenes, the best way to keep up with what public events are happening, so you may find that an unexpected bonus.

My broader goal here is to build a good social life in the EDM scene and get a raver gf.

Go to rave parties, ask for their instagram and dm them. Girls don't care if you have any content on your insta.

Assume you will only get reactions from a handful of friends and then a bunch of strangers who hope that by doing that, you'll follow them and they'll get a boost from that.

So, what are you reading?

Still on G. Kirilenko and L. Korshunova's What is Personality? Also going through some Gramsci essays.

Been diving into the cultivation novel Martial World. Also been reading Compassion and Meditation, thoughts on the relationship between Christianity and Buddhism by an Orthodox priest. It's pretty good so far, nothing ground breaking but I like it.

Just got David Bentley Hart's translation of the New Testament which I'm excited for.

Reaching the final third of Reverend Insanity, @self_made_human please clap.

I found that it is easier to tolerate the "light novel with Chinese characteristics" narration style if I imagine I'm reading a folk tale. The same formulaic language, the same bombastic emotion display (particularly bystanders marveling at someone whipping out particularly strong techniques). Not the kind of tale you'd read to your child at bedside, though. Truly, the profundities of human path are opening up before me.

Claps very hard, it took me 6 months to finish it the first go around, 4 on my second!

I will return to overdosing on copium, on the basis of author interviews from a few years back where Gu Zhen Ren said the story was far from over, he's got a lot more material, and there might be a road map to getting it unbanned and published one day.

I'm liking Martial World. Is Reverend Insanity really that evil? Idk. I want to want to read it but if it's too over the top I don't want to.

I remain convinced that it's Peak Fiction, and certainly in my Top 3 Novels. Go for it dude!

While so far it's been okay that the novel doesn't instantly infodump the entire power scaling system onto the reader, at the moment I'm miffed that despite Fang Yuan being one rank away from venerable, it still wasn't explained what makes the third myriad tribulation so hard that only 10 people ever made it. I wasn't under the impression that those things grew in power exponentially within a single tribulation category, and as far as I understand there were many rank eights who were stuck at two out of three.

I presume you overlooked the fact that not just anybody can even begin the tribulation to become a Venerable. Normally, it takes the support of Heaven's Will and Supreme Grandmaster status in a path. The latter is incredibly rare, remember there were only 3 SGs in Refinement path over 3 million years! The former is a deal-breaker for most, if Heaven/Fate doesn't want you to become a Venerable, you can cross as many Myriad Tribulations as you like without attaining it. If you do, then you keep becoming stronger due to Dao Marks, but even then it's not the same. I think it was some combination of the destruction of fate and the availability of Primordial Domain that let FY, who wasn't supposed to become a Venerable, still manage in the end. Also, the actual final tribulation involves battle against Chaos, which is so difficult that even actual Venerables struggle and survive by a thread each time. Even the normal Myriad Tribulation is shit hard even for the strongest Rank 8s!

At the point I'm at, I think the only thing that was mentioned was that every Venerable was a supreme grandmaster - not that it was a hard requirement to cross into the ninth rank, although in retrospect it would be a reasonable assumption. In particular, I saw the scene of Red Lotus immediately after ascending and I do not recall anything other than the tribulation being mentioned.

Oh dear, my bad, I had thought you had finished the novel entirely. I'm sorry about the spoilers, but they're not that big, and you raised a valid question about why we don't see more Venerables!

Just finishing The Thirteen Gun Salute.

I can see why some Aubrey/Maturin enjoyers favourite some of the later books in the series. Its great to follow Maturin after all of the character growth that he's been through and interacting in pragmatic ways with strange fauna that would never be allowed in the modern world. Knowing something of Indonesian and Malaysian culture, its interesting to see them used as a colonial era set piece for the series' usual political skullduggery.

Its also so strange to see colonial European attitudes towards pederasty and homosexuality in practice. I've got no idea if things were actually like that back then, but its pretty interesting to see it woven into the narrative and used as an attack surface for Maturin's intelligence machinations.

Really happy with my time investment in this series.

RSPCA disclaimer - No Sloths or Orangutans were debauched in the writing of this review or the novel itself. At least as far as I know.. there was this one night time scene in the Buddhist temple that wasn't entirely descriptive of what went on.

Poetic Woods by Ann Blockley, and reading A Wrinkle in Time out loud to my daughter.

I was in a charity shop a few months ago and found two books I wanted to buy, one of which was a collection of Father Brown stories. They had a buy-two-get-the-third-free deal, so on a whim I bought Nell Zink's Doxology despite knowing nothing about it.

It's set in the early 90s in New York and charts three characters who are close friends, one of whom unexpectedly makes it big as an indie rock star while the other two get married and have a baby. It's extremely knowing, all of the characters are annoying and pretentious (none of them even slightly believable) - and yet for all that, entertaining enough that I'm more than a quarter-way through this large-format 400-pager after starting it on Friday.

On Thursday I finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, which I did enjoy a great deal, although not quite as much as Never Let Me Go. Normally when a novel employs an unreliable narrator, it's to set up an elaborate twist ending: I found it interesting here to be used for the comparatively modest goal of conveying the inner life of a character who is so used to repressing the emotions he experiences that he is effectively in denial about doing so. Arguably a deconstruction of the whole "English stiff upper lip" thing, though as I pointed out to herself, earlier this year I read Theodore Darlymple's book Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality, which (as its subtitle unsubtly implies) argues that the pendulum has swung much too far in the opposite direction and now British people are encouraged to engage in flamboyant displays of emotion far more than they should.

Kazuo Ishiguro writes the same story over and over and over again, but he does it well. The servant who believes in their service and doesn't mind that it eats their life up. Klara and the Sun is the same. After reading The Remains of the Day, Klara and the Sun, and Never Let Me Go I realized that I've seen pretty much all he has to say.

On Thursday I finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day,

I found it an enjoyable book, but it also came across as incredibly fake--not necessarily in a bad way, as I don't care if an author is an authentic whatever-he's-writing-about because the whole point of fiction is telling interesting stories, but it was very apparent he was writing about being English as an outsider. I read Remains after reading a long list of English authors when I was trying to get a feel for what 1905-1914 and 1920-30 England was Really Like: Huxley's Crome Yellow, Forster's Room with a View and Howards End, two of Ford's Parade's End books, the 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time by Powell (over a million words and went by in a flash; I look forward to re-reading it), a number of Waugh's novels, and others I'm forgetting right now. Remains is a character study using some English trappings, but after reading so many authors who lived through English society of that era, it doesn't compare.

And coincidentally enough on the topic of English society, I'm about halfway done with the 4th Jeeves omnibus. In some ways, bits of Wodehouse's jokes and characters are wearing out their welcome, but in others, his writing has gotten so much better he went along that some of the sentences are breathtakingly brilliant and funny.

On that note, I'm currently reading Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, and it's very helpful to try and get into the mind of an Englishman from that period - the ways of thinking they brought into and then out of the War.

Started reading the Divine Comedy at the behest of a friend. It's going to be tough reading as I am not really a poetry guy, but I do want to persevere and read one of the most famous works in the literary canon. We'll see how it goes.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. A weird little guy goes on a road trip through ‘50s England while reminiscing on his former employer and colleagues.

I don’t think I got it. Delightful prose, vividly drawn characters, and some excellent scenes…but I just don’t understand how it works as a novel. What was the point? Or was it some sort of metafiction where the lack thereof was, itself, the point? It just didn’t land for me. I enjoyed the process but was left unsatisfied and a little embarrassed.

Up next is C J Cherryh’s Merchanter’s Luck for a change of pace. This feels incredibly “genre” in a good way. Pretty impressed with the economy of prose so far, too. Looking forward to it.

He was in denial about his love for the other servant and hers for him (they could have married and had a happy life, but no); he was in denial about his employer's support for the Nazis. When he finally realized the depth of his sacrifices (see: other servant's love for him), he told himself they were justified because he had given good service to a great man (a stereotypical "blockheaded aristo" who had supported the Nazis along with the abdicator king).

(Looking it up after writing the above: Miss Kenton; Edward VIII.)

Kazuo Ishiguro writes the same story over and over and over again, but he does it well. The servant who believes in their service and doesn't mind that it eats their life up.

It's kind of an anti-novel. You hope for character development, but it doesn't happen. It's more like a series of vignettes.

His other novels do have more development and plot, but never to the point where the main character advocates for themselves.

I found his body of work poignant and depressing.

Up next is C J Cherryh’s Merchanter’s Luck for a change of pace. This feels incredibly “genre” in a good way. Pretty impressed with the economy of prose so far, too. Looking forward to it.

I'd be interested to hear how you liked that, I've got Downbelow Station somewhere in my, "one of these days," stack of books to read.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. It's the kind of book that makes me wish I was fluent in Japanese so that I could read it in its original form.

I love Murakami! Is this your first one? I'm always amazed at how well written they are even in another language.

Yes, essentially. I'll have to check out more of his work and I've been impressed with the translation, too. I've particularly noticed the abbreviated speech of some of the characters and I can't help but think that the translator is mimicking the Japanese tendency towards the same in their speech.

Great book, I wrote a song inspired by it years ago.

Hey I'm reading that too! Good book.

Cool, look forward to hearing your thoughts on it once you've finished, if you're so inclined. I read it once earlier back around the time it came out, and I remember it vaguely but I think I'm definitely enjoying it more the second time around.

Has anyone been following the Unite The Kingdom/Raise The Colors rallies in the UK? Did they pull big numbers (the protesters have an incentive to inflate their numbers, of course, and the establishment has an incentive to deflate them)? Has there been a noticeable shift in the political discourse around them?

As the other posters have said, numbers for the march appear heavily inflated and it wasn't that massive. At the same time, it does seem to represent a noticeable shift. Protests arranged by Tommy Robinson or involving him in some way were lucky to attract thousands in the past, it was always a bit of a joke. Suddenly he's pulling in huge crowds and everything has a veneer of acceptability to it that it didn't in the past.

I doubt it was more than about 200,000. 3 million was obviously laughable. Aerial footage suggests fewer than at some of the largest Gaza protests, which police estimated had ~300k protesters. The largest ever protest in the UK was against the Iraq War, police estimated 750,000 people attended, there was little aerial footage but from some pictures of the route it does appear substantially larger.

Casually following, mostly through osmosis not actively pursuing, I believed the protesters claimed 3mil attendees, the official number is ~110k. The official number has some smart-looking analysis backing it up, the protesters have drone footage that certainly seems to show a lot of people, but frankly I have no idea how to estimate large crowd sizes. My instinct is to believe the smaller number, if only because in almost every protest I can remember ever hearing numbers reported on, the police reported number is usually several times smaller than the protest leadership's claimed number.

the protesters have drone footage that certainly seems to show a lot of people

Not wanting to rain on that parade (which actually happened. The rain I mean), but when I've observed photos or footage from any politically related event it is always taken in a 'just so' way to provide a verisimilitude of larger attendance.

The aerial photos looked like a lot of people, but then consider that Glastonbury Festival is supposed to be 100-200,000 attendees. Using that as a comparison I'd say ~100k is a lot more credible than 1 million, and 3 million (Glastonbury x >10) is total bollocks. Even the anti Iraq war march only claims 1 million.

Re political discourse, there seems to be an ongoing process of the window shifting to encompass more right leaning views and less left leaning/woke views. I'd say it started with the BBC dropping Stonewall in 2021 and the ruling on Maya Forstater's case in the same period. Now it's moving beyond trans scepticism to include anti immigration and the sort of birth rate discourse I've been reading here for years.

Can someone ELI5 how to bet on polymarket from the EU? Preferably while also being able to convert any winnings to cash

First make a Metamask wallet if you don't have one already. Transfer some USDC to your Metamask, then connect to Poly with your wallet. Deposit USDC on Poly. Turn on your VPN, and you're good to trade.

Yeah Polymarket wants liquidity and is not gonna enforce shit beyond the bare minimum of compliance. 'But he told us he was from a legal jurisdiction'

There's certain content -- certain types of gore, certain furry content, etc -- that gives me "the ick".

Sometimes I remember that many people get the same "ick" feeling from anime art in general, particularly the type of anime art that gets criticized as "overly-sexualized".

What are some times when you were reminded of the unbridgeable gap between different modes of perception?

I won't go into examples of the 'ick' factor, but I know it when I see it. And when I come across these visual hazards I let my mind slide past the images and quickly move onto the next piece of content. Its a very helpful self defence measure.

Some Christians believe that demons can actually attack you through various mediums like the above. I'm agnostic, but I definitely don't feel the need to observe and ingest horrible things in some display of bravado.

For icks, I share celluloid_dream's loathing of the rictus-grin-faced youtube promoter. It's not that they're always bad people! But the entire thing looks entirely less human than Reboot-era CGI.

For the other direction... I don't have the same variation-desire most people seem to have, especially around food. Every time I run into someone that makes a decision around not wanting to repeat something they did the day before and liked, it's a bit of a non-sequitur.

For the other direction... I don't have the same variation-desire most people seem to have, especially around food. Every time I run into someone that makes a decision around not wanting to repeat something they did the day before and liked, it's a bit of a non-sequitur.

My wife loves eating the same thing at the same place if she liked it, while my modus operandi (again, parental influence) is "you're on vacation, you have to try as many different things as possible!". We compromise on going to the same place until I complain that I've tried every thing that caught my eye.

Clickbait thumbnails fill me with utter revulsion.

You know the ones. Giant faux-surprised face projected deep into your simian hindbrain, grabbing your eyeballs and therefore your attention without your consent. You might consciously not give any fucks what this annoying soyjak is so startled by, but it does not matter. You will look anyway because there is a face, and faces are important, says millions of years of evolution. What's he looking at? Is something happening? Predator? Mate? Monkey get banana? And the text.. you can't not read the text. It's bold and bright yellow, and all caps, and there's a giantfuckingarrow pointing to it. And an emoji (another face) You are pwned. You cannot unsee it. You can only feel rage and vow not to click on it.

I feel similarly when I find an article that is supposed to be about a subject I'm interested in, only to be presented with an article that is about the author, with the ostensible 'subject' as the backdrop for a largely biographical story. I'm fine with autobiographies if they are explicitly that, but an article that is supposed to be about, say the history of telephone technology, is in fact about the authors trip to a telephone museum, or the crazy encounter she had while researching the subject.

You are pwned. You cannot unsee it. You can only feel rage and vow not to click on it.

This is an excellent way of putting it. Even worse is when the video topic is something I actually do want to see, and then I have to decide if it’s worth the dirty feeling of clicking on it…

Yeah. I feel bad for the video creators who, probably, are making good videos, but are stuck in this equilibrium where they have to use a stupid clickbait thumbnail or else no one will watch them.

I can't say I find my attention hijacked like you describe, but I share your distaste. When I see a channel start making videos with those thumbnails, it's a fast track to the "don't show recommendations from this channel" button. I refuse to engage with anyone who makes thumbnails that stupid.

Watching someone stir up some natto with grated yamaimo and a raw egg, then transport it with sticks into their mouth, the inevitable nebaneba (translation: gooey smelly glop) a demonic tendril connecting the bowl to their lips--well this was enough to make me realize I am in Japan by fluke and this is not supposed to be my destiny. Probably the result of one of those times I "almost" died but actually did die, was given a second chance but spared the memory of the death, and this was enough of a glitch (via interfering with fate) to settle me in a land where people eat the vilest food imaginable with great relish (if not actual relish).

That plus full body tats, piercings of any sort other than the ear, and sometimes, though this bears the sort of explaining I am not ready to attempt at 5:25 am, just looking at a woman I marvel at la difference. Mind you this is only with relatively girly, feminine women (in other words not American). This is not what you're calling "the ick" but there is certainly an unbridgeable gap there. Dress, stockings, painted or otherwise decorated nails, long carefully tended hair, mascara, blush, lipstick, earrings, etc. Not the ick. But a gap of experience. This is not even accounting for the invisible undergarments and whatnot. Anyway yeah it's early.

I've been reading about Japanese food (the one that doesn't get served in Japanese restaurants abroad) and I've come to the conclusion that it's self-inflicted patriotic torture, just like traditional Japanese housing. People eat it only because they grew up eating it and think it makes them more Japanese.

Every culture has dishes like these, but Japan probably has the highest proportion of them among the developed countries. I'd rather turn to the Dutch cuisine than eat oden or zenzai.

I have to disagree strongly on the zenzai. Having a warm, sweet soup on a cold winter day is like a mug of hot cocoa. The toasted mochi on top is like a savory toasted marshmallow.

I'm curious if you just don't like anko in general, what are your thoughts on taiyaki, anpan, and daifuku?

I haven't tried them.

Funnily enough I like oden but not everything in it. It's best in winter after a night of drinking beer with friends. You then drink more beer and eat the oden and eat the daikon radish with a bit of mustard. But you may be onto something.

That plus full body tats, piercings of any sort other than the ear

Yeah for me it's when Mottizens claim that heavy tattoos and facial piercings objectively make a woman unattractive. For me the libidinal effect is something similar to seeing/smelling a perfect crust on a steak. Maybe, as @Earendil would say, I have evolved to digest organisms that would be poisonous to others, and my phenomenology has evolved likewise.

I remember reading an OK Cupid blog post that said exactly this: tattoos and piercings are very divisive, but when they work, they work.

À chacun son gôut as the French say. I make only subjective claims here, mind you. Even natto with okra must be eaten, after all. I am happy there are those who are up to the task.

Plus, there are studies coming out that says nattokinase is great for your blood pressure. Sadly not the case with these girls.

There's certain content -- certain types of gore, certain furry content, etc -- that gives me "the ick".

Sometimes I remember that many people get the same "ick" feeling from anime art in general, particularly the type of anime art that gets criticized as "overly-sexualized".

Does gore or furry content go beyond the ick in making you seethe at its producers and consumers though, like "overly-sexualized" anime art does to some people (predominantly women)?

It extends beyond anime art too, to video game depictions, live action media, even print media descriptions (e.g., /r/menwritingwomen). Male gaze discourse: the haunting fear that some man, somewhere, may be sexualizing a female character—whether through text or on screen, whether animated or live action—without your permission.

Avant-garde art.

I'm a chronic philistine that Just Doesn't Get It, and looking at most of high-brow art made after the turn of the 20th century fills me with a sense of not just indifference, but mild rage.

Every time I step into a modern art gallery or watch an artsy movie I feel like I've become the main character of The Truman Show, with the people making that stuff, critiquing it and respectfully looking at it all engaged in a giant, elaborate troll aimed at convincing me that any of those works are actually good.

I'm not proud of this trait, and I've tried reading up on art, but I just can't reject the evidence of my eyes and ears. I simply can't see it. I'd rather look at anything else – modern imitations of classicist paintings, Kinkade, AI art of big-ttited anime girls – on the wall of that art gallery than a Picasso. Because all of those look much better to my eye than any of Picasso's work.

I imagine that's how a child who got a taste of beer from his dad at a family gathering feels.

You never know what you might like. I considered Western art music to be either boring or contrived until I went to a company training seminar where they mixed practical sessions with various invited guest speakers. One of them was a pianist who talked to us about modern art music. When he played Phrygian Gates by John Adams, my reaction was normal: politely trying to look attentive and respectful of his effort. When he played a few fragments of Steve Reich and Philip Glass during his talk to illustrate something about minimalism, it was as if I was struck by lightning. "This! This is what music sounds like!" I thought and looked around me to see if everyone else was as shocked as I am. Nope, everyone else in the room that I could see was politely trying to look attentive and respectful of his effort.

My MIL (a big lover of art music) looks at me like I have two heads when I listen to music for 18 musicians, but I don't care, I love it.

I'm not proud of this trait

You should be. Modern art fucking sucks.

Avant garde art is all about the meta. It's not about painting an object, it's about exploring the idea of what a painting can be (by making a painting). Ditto music, sculpture, dance, photography, cinema, fashion, design etc etc etc.

The problem in my eyes is that it's experimental and by their nature a lot of experiments fail, but people laud them for their sheer experimental-ness and stop short of judging quality. The number one thing is to do something that nobody has done before and worry about if it's any good later if at all. People neglect that at this point being challenging and shocking is ironically nearly as boring and stale as the sacred cows it once aimed at. We've had an entire century of this. We've even meta'd the meta and had silence-as-music, blank canvas-as-painting, and empty room-as-sculpture. The navel has been well and truly plumbed.

It's funny that you bring up beer because I think that cooking is one area where there's a natural limit on how far the boundaries can be pushed before people literally won't swallow it ("It's rat poison on rusty screws. Go on, try it!"). It's where taste runs up against physiology and not mere cerebral semantics.

ASMR. My wife watches cooking shorts on Facebook and they feature both TikTok editing (which is simply annoying) and ASMR sound, with all the slicing, scraping, sizzling, slurping sounding like it's happening right next to your ear.

She doesn't notice the difference, but I can't stand them. And some people are paying for recordings where they can hear a woman's tongue unstick from her hard palate.

My wife watches cooking shorts on Facebook... slurping sounding like it's happening right next to your ear.

I'd be insanely... cooked... if I were being hazed by a secret society or tortured in interrogation and prolonged exposure to such shorts was part of the torment.

She doesn't notice the difference, but I can't stand them.

This reminds me of a comment in the ACT article on misophonia, where the commenter remarked that the experience is made much worse when others aren't bothered by the same sounds as you are.

Two Kathryns in my life, one who spelled her name Katherine and the other Catherine, provided me with what I can only describe using this ASMR term, which is the only thing that makes me suspect it exists, though probably not the way the depraved, pornhungry sound-gluttons imagine it to exist.

The first Katherine was blonde, pretty in a plain way, and had a brown paper bag during show-and-tell in Mrs. Rice's 1st grade class in 1974. I forget what was in the bag, or what she said, who was there, what I was wearing, or anything else, but I recall that moment I was absolutely entranced by the crackle of the bag and the sound--the lilt, the only true meaning of that word for me--of her voice. I felt a slow fizz at the base of my spine that worked its way up to the back of my neck. It was a bizarre sensation. The closest I can get to describing it is like when the prostate is stimulated during voiding--yeah taking you right out of the beauty of the moment, aren't I? Anyway. The second Catherine was years later, also in school (I feel as if ASMR cannot be brought on, as they keep insisting online, but must be the result of a situation where you're forced to focus on something against your will, like Mr. Drigger's class) and she was also up there talking about something, but in this case there was no paper bag but just her voice, like well water. It's what I think the myths meant, at least partially, in referencing spells in the mouths of certain women. I could have listened to her all day. But this wasn't based in her appearance (she was rather plain as far as it goes) but totally her sound.

Anyway that's my defense of ASMR, but I also don't buy the idea of "eliciting" the sensation via video. That has much the same effect on me as it does on you.

The first Katherine was blonde, pretty in a plain way, and had a brown paper bag during show-and-tell in Mrs. Rice's 1st grade class in 1974.

This is not about ick or ASMR but your story reminds me of a peculiar memory I have. It was late summer in the mid 90s, a few weeks after our confirmation camp (it's a Lutheran thing in some of the Nordic countries). The setting was a "party" (as much as 14-15 year old well behaved kids had a "parties" back in those days anyway) and there was A Girl there. To this day I remember roughly how she looked, her hair, her name and particularly the scent of the perfume she used that day to the extent that on the few times I've smelled that same scent, it's always taken me back to that moment even several decades later. This would otherwise be par the course for an infatuated 14 year old except I wasn't particularly interested in her. She was just an acquaitance I interacted with during the two weeks at the camp and maybe half a dozen times afterwards but for some reason that specific smell has stayed in my memory forever since.

Ah, George is posting about the beautiful women in his life, some things never cha-

The closest I can get to describing it is like when the prostate is stimulated during voiding--yeah taking you right out of the beauty of the moment, aren't I?

And they say you can't be surprised any more as you get older.

I believe A-wooga posting is the phrase.

It's true, but I didn't want to plagiarize such a great bit of description. Perhaps I should, they do say imitation is the highest form of flattery.

The closest I can get to describing it is like when the prostate is stimulated during voiding--yeah taking you right out of the beauty of the moment, aren't I?

I've read Rabelais, so no, you aren't.

I think it's like petting a cat or dog behind the ears. There's a correct cadence/pressure/technique for every animal, and if you hit the sweet spot, they'll slip into a blissful trance and love you forever. Some pets are easy to please. They're happy with any scritch behind the ears. Others are distrustful or tricky, and they don't like it except in very specific circumstances.

Same with humans and ASMR. Some people can fall into ASMR easily and have lots of triggers that work, maybe the whole gamut of YouTube vids. Others maybe only click with very specific voices, or can only do it when they're fully relaxed, or maybe even not at all. Personally, I find it hard to trigger with audio or video alone, but adding a little touch reliably opens that pathway.

and ASMR sound, with all the slicing, scraping, sizzling, slurping sounding like it's happening right next to your ear.

Christ Almighty. When my girlfriend plays that shit, it takes all of my self control to not throw the speaker out the nearest window like a god damned hand grenade.

She doesn't see anything wrong with it. I'm baffled.

Great example.

And some people are paying for recordings where they can hear a woman's tongue unstick from her hard palate.

I don't need to know these things!

I've experienced "low-grade euphoria" observing people doing some task, although rarely. I've experienced frisson from music or speech. I've never seen how ASMR as a media format ties these experiences together or delivers them. The term was apparently coined on a forum in 2007, so it seems more like a cultural memeplex ("brainrot") fueling an industry with paraphilia and fetish branches.

On second thought the Primitive Technology guy could be ASMR adjacent content I've enjoyed.

I've experienced frisson from music or speech. I've never seen how ASMR as a media format ties these experiences together or delivers them.

Neither have I. I know that I can reliably experience frisson by attentively listening to Stairway to Heaven, right around the moment where Page's guitar solo peaks and Plant starts to sing "and as we wind on down the road" is when it hits me. I can even trigger it by thinking about listening to the song. But this has nothing in common with what most people consider ASMR triggers.

One hypothesis is that I have high sensitivity to this kind of stimuli. There are people that are into tickling and find it erotic. Many people find body kisses or balls licking erotic. I find these activities so ticklish that I automatically violently recoil and my wife stopped trying, fearing for the integrity of her nose. But one or two times everything was just right and I could understand how a gentle kiss on the ribcage, just shy of triggering the tickling reflex, can be pleasurable. Just like the right amount of heat in a dish or the right combination of a hot sauna and an ice-cold shower or popping a stubborn, but not too stubborn pimple can be.

So all these people subscribing to ASMR content producers must have an unusually wide gap between the threshold of pleasure and the threshold of disgust/pain, just like these people who blanket their food with cayenne powder or subscribe to /r/popping do.

So all these people subscribing to ASMR content producers must have an unusually wide gap between the threshold of pleasure and the threshold of disgust/pain, just like these people who blanket their food with cayenne powder or subscribe to /r/popping do.

I have similar issues with ticklishness like you described, but I also enjoy ASMR and enjoy blanketing my food with whatever spice I'm into at the moment, so this is probably specific to the stimulus. Never been to /r/popping or know what it's about, but based on context, that sounds disgusting & I'd rather stay away.

I'd say ASMR is as distinctively clear a feeling as frisson, but yeah, definitely two different things caused by practically opposite stimuli. I feel like I've experienced it my whole life, from being in kindergarten and having the librarian read a story to the class, to sometimes when getting haircuts, to even being stuck on the phone with some customer service person taking too long to work through something (clacking away on a keyboard while verbally stalling). So I pretty much knew instantly what youtubers were going for when I started seeing the videos in like ~2012, even with the ridiculous 'asmr' term someone came up with.

My experience was more of assuming everyone else was lying about not understanding it, out of some embarrassment that it was too weird or was somehow sexual. But it does really seem like many people don't get the 'back of the head tingles' feeling. Not sure if that goes for frisson too - are there many people out there who don't get 'chills' from some epic swelling music moment?

Then the asmr videos are trying to inorganically bottle it as a more 'pure cut' for people chasing the dragon, like epic movie trailers have tried to get a few frisson moments down to a science.

I also definitely experience it, although most ASMR videos don't do it for me. I usually encounter it when vaguely sleepy, relaxed, and then a pleasant stimulus happens, like a soft speaking voice (the "being in kindergarten and having the librarian read a story to the class" story seems about right) or a gentle, repetitive noise.

If I do encounter it from an ASMR video, whispering or crinkling does it more than anything else.

ASMR

EWWWW!

That's another of those things that causes instant ctrl-w for me. I'm not bothered by those sounds in the real world since they're only occasional but that entire video format deserves to die a quick but extremely painful death.

I'm not sure what you mean by "different modes of perception" but since I've been watching photography youtubers while being down with the cold, macro photography is one I personally just ran into. Some people love high res closeup photos of insects whereas I get a very strong urge to hit ctrl-W the moment I see a blown up photo of almost any insect.

It's a bit of a problem because I'd like to see if I might like other kinds of macro photography but current enshittified algorithms make it damn near impossible to succesfully search for macro / closeup photography that doesn't feature insects.

I've always felt the way Mulder describes it in War of the Coprophages on the X-files about most insects that are big enough to fully make out their body parts. Zooming accomplishes the same effect.

Mulder: No, no, no. I’m not afraid of them. I hate them. One day, back when I was a kid, I was climbing this tree when I noticed this leaf walking towards me. It took forever for me to realize that it was no leaf.

Scully: A praying mantis?

Mulder: Yeah, I had a praying mantis epiphany and as a result, I screamed. And not, not a girlie scream, but the scream of someone being confronted by some before unknown monster that had no right existing on the same planet I inhabited. ... The mysteries of the natural world were revealed to me that day but instead of being astounded I was repulsed.

I never watched the King Kong remake in theaters, but I caught some of it at some point at a friend's house. Specifically, the dark crevasse with the giant insects.

Years later, there was a copy handy, and I thought, "It couldn't really have been that bad, could it? It's a film, you're a man, it's just an experience like any other... let's give it another try." So I gave it another try.

Nope.

Upon a brief search I realize I recall this episode but not this dialogue. However, I do enjoy the mental image of Mulder needing to clarify the nature of the scream, lest Scully get the ick from his childhood memory—for not even a relatively stoic female FBI agent is immune from the ick. Observant as she is, Scully caught on though, as her next line was: "Mulder... are you sure it wasn't a girly scream?"

Fortunately, Bambi Berenbaum saved the day with her preselection services, overriding any ick induced by triggering Scully's sense of female mate-choice copying.

That being said, I can't relate to Mulder's mantis bigotry. I'm fairly size agnostic when it comes to insects. Stumbling upon a praying mantis IRL would strike me as much more cool than gross or creepy. In contrast, I'd get grossed out by a cockroach of any size, slightly enraged by a mosquito, with a fly somewhere in between. Maybe I'm just an insect racist who hates black and brown insect bodies.

Yeah. It's a "kill it with fire and nuke the entire site from orbit just to be sure" type of feeling.

I have no problem with closeup photos of plants, eyes, amphibians or lizards but as soon as it's insects or arachnids (and probably some arthropods), I nope the hell out.


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